384. Now with COVID

 

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COVID finally catches up with me 

Day 795 of pandemic/340 since semi-return to normal - 5/20/2022

I am sitting at the long tables at the Bank Cafe for the first time since the pandemic started. This is because I need to charge my phone and backup battery and I can’t find a convenient wall outlet. Normally I do this at home, but I’ve had my phone on the energy saving setting and it managed to slip below 70% charge without my noticing. I kind of like this phone setting, all I don’t have is easy access to the flashlight and Google search. But I don’t see that it really saves that much. I expected the % left to stay nearly unchanged for days, which has not been the case. I will continue to try it over the weekend while I’m working, but may just return to the normal setting next week.

Recently I’ve been sitting in the lower level of the Bank Cafe, where the bathrooms are. It’s convenient for bathroom access and there tend to be fewer people down there since it’s been off limits for most of the past two years. And there are some comfortable chairs and sofas there as well. Still, it is underground and it is nice sitting up at ground level now and being able to see the street activity out the windows. 

Today the first Boeing Starliner is docking with the ISS. This is an unmanned mission to test all the equipment. Boeing has not looked good running this program. SpaceX looks so much better by comparison. Though landing the ships on land rather than at sea should be an improvement. I hope in time SpaceX will be able to do the rocket assisted landings they wanted. Maybe if Boeing screws up a few more times, NASA will fund that.

There’s a wonderful collection of videos about Classic American cars from the ‘50s and ‘60s called Charles Phoenix Joyride. Depending on the make and model, the peak of American car design was somewhere between 1955 and 1962. Probably. Curiously, the same cars preserved in Cuba by very strange economic forces. Of course these automobiles are also horrible in almost every other way. They are dangerous to the occupants and gas guzzlers. Still, lovely to look at. I’m surprised the MAGA crowd hasn’t built some propaganda around them, it would at least resonate with people of my age cohort -- people born between 1945 and 1965. Even I can wax nostalgic about that period: The foods I ate at the time that I couldn’t eat now. The good times prior to the bad times that followed. When we were naive enough to think well of our political leaders like Eisenhower and JFK. Of course it helps that at the time I didn’t know any people of color or people who were not at least trying to pass for heterosexual. And we will ignore the lead in the paint and gasoline and the radiation in the air and snow. Or the pollution in the rivers (where we would never go).

Still, it is amazing to find cars that are over 65 years old still looking so damn good.

5/23/2022

Just last night I saw an episode of Joyride featuring a ‘57 Bel Air, such a beauty.

This past weekend was Himalayan Fair in Berkeley’s Live Oak Park. So Berkeley. So difficult to get the vendors to understand the trash rules. After working a full shift on Saturday I was proclaiming two of the vendors the worst, most clueless I had ever seen. I only worked a half shift at the end of the day on Sunday, but I had already reconsidered. Yes, they were as bad as I thought, but, when you consider the situation from their perspective, we were like the priest of some really strange religious cult arbitrarily deciding what items go in which of the arbitrarily colored containers. One item even changed from day to day as it was called to our attention that the plates were “wax coated” and therefore landfill instead of compost. (And then this was corrected again so we went back to putting them in compost.) This is why I have “CHILL” written at the top of my Greening reminder list that I review before I leave the house.

Still, diapers in recycling and latex gloves and aluminum containers in compost makes no sense to me. But I’m sure they just see our three bins as festively colored.

The crew chief at the end of the day made what I considered “questionable” decisions about closing down stations serving the vendors sooner than I would have. I did make sure he was the one who had to deal with the consequences, though that meant I wasn’t around to see that. Saying the vendors should bring their end of the event trash to us is one thing, stopping them from just leaving it at the closest park trash can is another. If there is a next time, I can now remind him of what happened here.

Still it was nice to do this event again after the pandemic hiatus. Even if it does mean a 10 block walk back to Bart on the way home. (That actually isn’t true, or at least on Saturday there was a bus I could have taken had I waited for it. On Sunday I walked anyway because of a stunning waitress I had happened to notice on my walk the previous evening. There’s a fair amount of outdoor restaurant activity on Shattuck on the north side of University. Nice to see.

Because I wasn’t starting work until 4pm on Sunday, I decided to come a bit early and have lunch in Berkeley. I had done The Butcher’s Son deli last time, so this time I ate at Ike’s. Had a wonderful sandwich, though the bread was practically a dessert. I asked if they offered it as a wrap -- as Subway does -- but they don’t. A pity.

Day 799/344 - 5/24/2022 

Day of first COVID symptoms. Wouldn’t test positive until 5/26. Was probably infected 5/20-5/21. Damn close to 800 days since the pandemic began. 

5/24/22

Just woke up from an adventure movie of a dream with a plot I couldn’t begin to describe and a large cast and, right at the end, music by CCR. Looked at the time and it had been just about 90 minutes since I went to bed.

5/27/22

My standard pasta dish that doesn’t change from year to year but has changed almost entirely over 40 years. Only the broccoli remains.

5/30/22

Difficulty of managing post-covid!!! How long am I contagious? What can I do and what should I not do?

5/31/22

Finally sitting outside at Another Cafe. I was going to offer to switch seats with two guys who joined me here so I would be down wind. Glad I didn’t as they seem to be sicker than I am.

Another has a very good croissant. Now I’m going for my first uphill walk and then -- very quickly -- to the market for some essentials. 

Ran into information suggesting that I may not have been contagious last Monday and Tuesday like I feared. That’s assuming the vaccine did what it is supposed to do. And it looks like there’s a chance I could test negative before the weekend.

6/6/22

My first day out of isolation after twelve days in my apartment. Got a veggie breakfast croissant which I ate at home and now I’m sitting at the Bank Cafe with a chocolate croissant and my iced tea. I didn’t bring my personal cup, but I’m pretty sure I’m clean now after two negative tests. And my temp is down to 96F again, too.

Now I’m wondering exactly how much safer am I than before given all the different variants out there? Probably better but it’s not like I can start licking everything.

Day 820/8 days post-COVID - 6/14/2022

Today I made it back to the Pork Store for the first time since I came down with COVID. I’m happy to say my nose and taste buds are still working fine. In fact, I noticed that my favorite waitress was wearing a scent that I swear I remember from the ‘50s. So over 60 years ago, but I would swear it was a scent for little girls. It came in some sort of kit for girls pretending to be grown ups... something like the doctor kits I vaguely remember from the period. Maybe it’s been repackaged for adults?

6/21/2022

Post-covid life is more of a challenge than you would think. On the one hand I survived and everything worked out the way it was supposed to. But now I really want to relax -- after all, what are the odds of my catching it twice in a month! But then I just read in the NYT that the currently most prevalent variant doesn’t give much protection for the next two variants that are now spreading. Not that I have any idea which variant I had. And even if I did know, it wouldn’t help because I also don’t know which variants I could be exposed to in the future... or right now.

This past weekend I worked a North Beach street festival for the first time. I thought it was the Columbus Day event cleverly shifted to another month to avoid the push-back against all that Columbus represents. But I did a little more research and discovered this was an entirely different event and that -- “Italian Heritage Parade” -- event is still scheduled for the usual time. So I was wrong, but I think they would have been smarter doing what I was thinking.

I started out on Saturday with my mask on, but quickly gave up. For one thing I hadn’t used my anti-fogging spray -- turns out that is still necessary even when it’s warm -- and not many other people were and it was outdoors and not that crowded and I just finished isolating for over a week so give me a break. Anyway, I seem to have survived. 

6/23/2022 

And for an odd coda to my weekend: I’m sitting at Caffe Grecco enjoying a compensatory cookie and iced tea after picking up the latest check and crazy letter from the mentally ill woman in my building. So strange to be back in this block after spending so much of the last weekend working here. While we had one day of mid-90sF on Tuesday, it is now back to our usual weather, clear blue sky here, though I can hear the fog horns that signal there is a tongue of fog coming in through the Golden Gate. Every time I am forced to come over here to sign for a letter I didn’t catch at home, I give myself some kind of neighborhood treat. Last time it was an eclair from Victoria Bakery. This should be the last time, but if it happens again I may get an actual meal.

Quantum philosophy

6/29/2022

Over breakfast this morning at the Pork Store I was thinking about Free Will vs Determinism and quantum physics (quantum uncertainty and the collapse of the wave function) and how thoroughly the Ancient Greeks covered this material.

The Stoics hold my view of Determinism while the Epicureans managed to nail the uncertainty of quantum reality that can open the door to Free Will. Meanwhile Homer and the tragedians point out the consequences of Hard Determinism in the story of Cassandra who can actually see the future, which means there’s nothing she can do to change it.

It seems to me that one alternative to the Many Worlds approach to the Present moving into the Future, is a collapsing wave functions view. The future is an endless series of wave functions that collapse as we come to them. This is not inherently either Deterministic or allowing Free Will, but it does seem to allow for the possibility of Free Will. 

My personal view of Determinism is not as hard as the Cassandra story -- or any other story in which people can predict the future -- but I think the degree of uncertainty considering exactly how the next wave function will collapse is very limited. Similar to the uncertainty of very stable substances that will eventually undergo a change but probably not for a billion years or so.

347. The Rainbow Comes and Goes

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The Rainbow Comes and Goes

by Anderson Cooper & Gloria Vanderbilt
Harper 2016


This is not one of those books that resonates on a personal level. Nothing about Gloria’s childhood reminds me of my own... except perhaps being put in the position of deciding who you want to stay with as parent. And fortunately I was a few important years older and had the sense to not give a straight answer.

Also, I have to say that the lives of the wealthy (and the gentry) aren’t encouraging when it comes to thinking about Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI.) It’s true that the options for women at this time were unfairly limited, but it’s not like men come out looking much better. Or that’s my impression. Though is P.G. Wodehouse really the best model for economic ideas? Perhaps not. Though if GMI could be expected to produce something on the order of "The Crime Wave at Blandings" on any kind of a regular basis I guess I would have to vote for it.

P108-109 AND we’re back to free will vs determinism. How surprising that Gloria and I are on the same page here. I would not have guessed that.

Actually, re-reading the passage again, I see that we don't actually agree at all, or not completely. She says, "...but I do believe in a mysterious force secretly in charge of our destiny, enabling us to make life bearable and keep moving even when times are tough. The end will turn out as it was always meant to be. Yes, from the beginning, we have nothing to do but wait.

"Our choices are preset from the beginning. Whatever direction a person's life goes in was destined. It was meant to happen in precisely that way, although we do not as yet know why."

I noticed the determinism and somehow managed to ignore the phrases in bold that argue for a guiding force. As philosophy I find this less than compelling, but it is interesting in showing how someone like this thinks -- that her successes are destined so all she has to do is get to work. 

P160 “But I really got the power to leave Stokowski only when I met Frank Sinatra.” Now it sounds like she’s just making shit up. Though this is still so consistent with her lack of self-esteem. I was glad that she finally cut off her mother, even if that was mostly Stokowski.

It is interesting -- not to say appalling -- the way such a damaged young woman seems to have been like catnip to so many men. Her first husband might as well have been a pimp, but the famous men that followed were in their own way just as bad. I would love to have been able to ask her what she thought of Lydia in P&P -- she mentions reading this during her first marriage. Gloria is like a cross between Lydia Bennett and The Bolter. First you think less of the men who woo her and then you start to pity them.


P246 It strikes me now, reading this about how children always blame themselves for their parent’s divorces and deaths and other failures, that I never was subject to this. I didn’t understand what was wrong with my parents, but I never thought it had anything to do with me. And this isn’t to say I was oblivious or unaffected -- I’m surprised I didn’t have ulcers or other serious complications. I just wanted them to stop, or else for me to get away from them. Which seems very like me, and not entirely a good thing.

And that's really all I have to say about this book. It was interesting enough, but gave me surprisingly little to think about. I do wish I could have asked Gloria about Lydia and The Bolter.

133. Necessitarianism

Previous - 132. George Eliot

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George Eliot (and George Henry Lewes)

p33 [Eliot's words, but Lehrer seems to think they express Lewes ideas] ...insisted that the brain would always be a mystery, "for too complex is its unity." Positivists may proselytize their bleak vision, Lewes wrote, but "not thinking man will imagine anything is explained by this. Life and being remain as inaccessible as ever." If nothing else, freedom is a necessary result of our ignorance.

..."Necessitarianism," [Footnote: a synonym for determinism... the theory holds that human actions are "necessitated" by antecedent causes over which we have no control.] Eliot wrote, "I hate the ugly word." Eliot had read Maxwell on molecules... and she knew that nothing in life could be perfectly predicted. To make her point, Eliot began Daniel Deronda with a depiction of human beings as imagined by Laplace. The setting is a hazy and dark casino full of sullen people... These gamblers are totally powerless, dependent on the dealer to mete out their random hands. They passively accept whichever cards they are dealt. Their fortune is determined by the callous laws of statistics.

p34 ...As soon as Eliot introduces this mechanical view of life, she begins deconstructing its silly simplicities... "Like dice in mid-air," Gwendolen is an unknown. Her mysteriousness immediately steals Daniel's attention; she transcends the depressing atmosphere of the casino. Unlike the gamblers, who do nothing but wait for chance to shape their fate, Gwendolen seems free...

Eliot creates Gwendolen to remind us that human freedom is innate, for we are the equation without a set answer. We solve ourselves. [Footnote: ...being free also makes us accountable for our behavior. One of Eliot's main problems with social physics was that it denied humanity moral agency... If social physics made us callus, then art might make us compassionate.]

Before we get into Darwin, I have to reflect on "Necessitarianism." I think there's a difference between a social physics that lets you calculate and predict the behavior of individuals, and the lack of cause and effect in our behavior. It's interesting that Eliot used a casino as a setting, as games of chance are one place where there is a kind of freedom. If you make your life decisions on the basis of flipping coins or rolling dice, then they would be free -- though you would not be, except insofar as you occasionally refused to follow the decisions of random chance.

Otherwise, your decisions are based on who you are and can't be other than what they are. You must make the decisions that are natural for you. What sense does it make to insist that you are free to make decisions that are not the decisions necessitated by your character? 

I've now read ahead, and, sad to say, this chapter does not go to the quantum uncertainty place I was hoping for. You know what that means... One could view decisions as existing in superposition. Up until the instant you decide, a multitude of decisions exist as possibilities. You can either stay on the train, looking at Verona, or get off and experience Verona directly. The probability waveform (nonsense but it sounds interesting) only collapses when the train rolls out of the station. And yet there's a reason you stayed in your seat. Still (to reassert the position that Maxwell represents in this chapter and that Bohr and the Copenhagen Interpretation represents in quantum mechanics), even though there's a "reason" for Sebald staying in his seat, you could only have described the probability of his staying on or getting off the train, no matter how much information you had. 

I may be having my cake and eating it too, but I think this position supports cause and effect (which tends to lead to Determinism) while leaving a quantum of freedom. Though maybe not "freewill."

...while positivists believed that the chaos of life was only a facade, that beneath everything lay the foundation of physical order, Darwinism said that randomness was a fact of nature. In many ways, randomness was the fact of nature... [Footnote: Darwin acknowledged the deep chanciness at the heart of natural selection... Darwin constantly asserts that variations are "undirected" and "occur in no determinate way."] Life progressed because of disorder, not despite it. The theologian's problem -- the question of why nature contained so much suffering and contingency -- became Darwin's solution. [So Voltaire wasn't a Darwinian.]

p35 The bracing embrace of chance was what attracted Eliot to Darwin. Here was a narrative that was itself unknowable, since it was guided by random variation... Unlike Herbert Spencer, who believed that Darwin's theory of evolution could solve every biological mystery (natural selection was the new social physics), Eliot believed that Darwin only deepened the mystery... Because evolution has no purpose or plan -- it is merely the sum of its accumulated mistakes -- our biology remains impenetrable...
...

p37 In her intricate plots, Eliot wanted to demonstrate how the outside and the inside, our will and our fate, are in fact inextricably entangled. "Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending," Eliot confesses in Middlemarch. Our situation provides the raw material out of which we make our way, and while it is important "never to beat and bruise one's wings against the inevitable," it is always possible "to throw the whole force of one's soul towards the achievement of some possible better." You can always change your life.
...

p42 ...The mind is never beyond redemption, for no environment can extinguish neurogenesis. As long as we are alive, important parts of the brain are dividing. The brain is not marble, it is clay, and our clay never hardens.
...

p43 ...while freedom remains an abstract idea, neurogenesis is celular evidence that we evolved to never stop evolving. Eliot was right; to be alive is to be ceaselessly beginning. As she wrote in Middlemarch, the "mind [is] as active as phosphorus." Since we each start every day with a slightly new brain, neurogenesis ensures that we are never done with our changes. In the constant turmoil of our cells -- in the irrepressible plasticity of our brains -- we find our freedom.

Voltaire - more English visitors to Ferney

John Moore and Douglas Hamilton (Eighth Duke of Hamilton), July 1772

The Duke, Mr. Mallet, and I am to sup and stay all night sometime this week with Voltaire, his vivacity and spirit is amazing; he is writing and publishing every day; and I do believe he is not without hopes that the Christian religion will die before him'.
...

The most piercing eyes I ever beheld are those of Voltaire, now in his eightieth year. His whole countenance is expressive of genius, observation, and extreme sensibility.

In the morning he has a look of anxiety and discontent; but this gradually wears off, and after dinner he seems cheerful...

Next - 134. Neural plasticity