This meme courtesy of Nicky Mee

Stephan Pastis’ Pearls Before Swine comic strip has made brilliant humorous use of the pie chart lately. I admire a cartoonist who finds a template and uses it frequently on days when inspiration is otherwise hard to come by.

There is a whole art/science called wayfinding. One branch is creation of signage that actually helps people get where they’re going.

I learned of this from a fantastic article in the New Yorker magazine years ago. I agree with the author that the world’s  worst signage is in  New York City at Pennsylvania station.

Some places get it right, some places get it wrong. For example, many “you are here” signs are incomprehensible. Among things that really help are  color coding,  and signs along the way that reassure you you’re going in the correct direction. Consistency helps too.

I am near a giant campus where the buildings are all named and the street signs all refer only to the building number. You will never find the Sierra building unless you know it is building six. The conversion table is on one sign in the middle of nowhere and there are no signs pointing to that sign.

Would it have killed them to make street signs that said building six (Sierra)? Bigger signs, yes. More clarity, yes.  Makes you wonder what their priorities are.

Mind and Body

Here is a surprise bonus! This essay is the length of an entire column!

Normally I would put it on a separate page and point at it, but I didn’t feel a pointer was sufficient. Maybe you wouldn’t click on it. If you’re reading this, you’re the kind of person that stays after a movie to see the post-credit scenes. You’ve read down past the “end of column” notice. This is your reward.

Any lingering doubts I had about the mind/body connection were obliterated this week. I have seen a miracle, if a miracle is an amazing event coming out of nowhere. Not divine intervention, just a miracle.

For weeks, I have been having severe leg pain that was idiopathic: no known cause. The pain was not debilitating, but it ticked the first box on a Kaiser doctor’s checklist: “Does this interfere with daily activities?” Yes it did; it was a pain in the neck, except it was in my leg.

The situation was bad enough that my family was suggesting expensive in-home physical therapy (because of my well-known laxity in doing PT). I was using a walking stick. I avoided long walks and curbs.

I have been seeing my trainer Barry weekly for 30 years. Because he knows what he is doing, we start each session with a chat about how things are going. I call this my talk therapy time. The length varies, usually five or 10 minutes. Last week it was 30 minutes, and we talked mostly about my leg.

I cannot tell you for the life of me exactly what we discussed. All I can say is that I made a few quite small changes in my daily routine at his suggestion. Nothing onerous. His talk had apparently seeped into my subconscious, and convinced me that my problem was solvable.

This is the miracle part. Not PT, just changing my mind and adding a few simple new routines. The pain diminished every day. Four days later, it was essentially gone. No more walking stick.

I am sure I took Barry’s advice physically, but I think his most important advice was mental. He convinced me the problem was easily solvable. That turned out to be correct. Because we changed my mind as well as my body.

I know this is trite. It will seem trite to you until it happens to you. If you can’t accomplish the mental feat, find a trusted professional who can.

One trusted professional who can is my chiropractor, Dr. Jason Wong. Good advice, good adjustments. He and his brother have helped me get over my lifetime suspicion of chiropractic. I’m a believer.

And I am also a believer in assisted stretching. There is a chain called StretchLab; I’ve been going to the Lafayette branch for a year. What they do works. I’ve enjoyed everyone who stretched me, but particularly Arissa who moved away, and Quincy was still there. Stretching reduces pain. Yes I could do most of these stretches by myself, but I don’t except I do when manipulated by someone else.

The miracle shouldn’t have surprised me. For years, I saw an MD whom I referred to as my alternative medical provider, to distinguish him from my Kaiser doctors. I spent more time talking to him than I had talking to any other doctor: 15 to 30 minutes per session. Usually, longer than the treatment itself.

He practiced something called Health Medicine: treating the whole person. Amazingly, he laid it all out to me in my first session, and I didn’t take it in until my last.

He said to me, directly, “If I had a bowl of pills on this table labeled ‘placebo’ and gave you one, you would get better.” As a gift for his retirement, I bought him a large bowl labeled “placebo.”

During the entire length of my treatment, he waved his hands and his technology and I felt better. During my last visit, he showed me the technology had all just been Dumbo’s feather, delivered elaborately because that was what I expected, as someone who is scientist-adjacent.

A room full of electronics and diagnostic equipment, whirring fans and blinking lights, convinced me I was receiving state-of-the-art medical care. Turns out I was—between my ears.

He was giving me seemingly technological treatment that was the more complicated (and expensive looking) equivalent of a placebo. And it worked. Because I desperately wanted it to. Because if it is costly looking, it must be better.

During our last session, he asked me, “Why do you think this works?” I didn’t have the answer then but I do now.

Too late for you; he retired. But I needed to close this discussion by describing my course of therapy with him. You should be so lucky. As I put it in my Yelp review, “The world needs fewer doctors with “A”s in biology and more with “A”s in empathy.

Read more about this in a very thoughtful LinkedIn post.

AI engines are, “In too many cases… simply hallucinatory lunacy generators,” says Tom Wark, author of Tom Wark’s Fermentation Substack. He was helped to this conclusion when Google's AI Just Made Up a Supreme Court Decision in lurid detail. The case it cited, New York Wine & Grape Products Association v. Heastie (2019) simply does not exist. And certainly wasn’t decided 7-2 (or 6-3) by the Supreme Court.

I found about this from my friend Clark Smith, a winemaker and musician who reads the blog.

His take: “I don’t share the general excitement about AI. It can certainly improve the writing of people with no writing training or talent. This would not include you and me.

“For example it generally knows how to spell. This is offset by its propensity to hallucinate.”

My nephew Paul is working on a term project. He put all my love song lyrics into an AI engine, and asked it to render them in the style of Cole Porter or Stephen Sondheim. Here are the results. Clearly the AI lost interest after a few lines and only did a few of the 10 songs. Is the AI better than I am? It certainly has less skin in the game…

Clark looked at the AI output and wrote, “I wouldn’t call the AI any sort of improvement. Your lyrics… are at least concise and without pointless blather. You speak from the heart. AI can’t fake that. As you say, you have skin in the game, and it shows.”

Dick Tracy used to be a big deal on the comics pages; like Batman, he frequently relied on gadgets. My favorite was the two-way wrist radio. Wherever he is, I imagine Chester Gould has a smile on his face every time he sees someone using an Iwatch to take a phone call.

During the 1960s, an attempt was made to duplicate the wrist radio, using a CB radio. No Bluetooth, so a wire ran down your sleeve. It just wasn’t the same.

While we’re on the subject, one of my professors (I think he was EE) discussed the Star Trek Communicator (the original show had only been off the air for a year or two).

“Saying someone’s name and reaching them instantly? Ridiculous. The radio gear would be larger than the device they use, and the computer power required to make the connection and do the voice recognition would be enormous. Impossible.”

I dearly wish I could remember his name. I wonder what he thinks when he asks Siri on his IWatch to dial his wife.

[READ THIS!] Who cares, you may say, I haven’t had a copper phone line in years. Do you ride in elevators? Have a monitored burglar alarm at home or work? Buzz people up from the front door of your apartment building? Use a credit card in stores? Is your heart monitored? God Forbid, do you have a fax machine? Ready or not, here it comes. Do nothing, and in a few years there will be trouble.

This country, indeed, the world, has been well served by telephone service over copper wires for more than 147 years, but all that will end soon. I never thought I’d kiss copper farewell; there are MANY good reasons to keep a landline (know as Plain Old Telephone service or POTS) but they are clearly doomed. See this intelligent and balanced discussion of the copper sunset.

Britain will turn off all its landlines (an event known as PSTN Sunset) during 2025. AT&T has asked for a U.S. PSTN sunset, but the FCC hasn’t authorized one yet―although in August of 2022, the FCC did say that US Telecom companies needn’t provide new copper landline services anymore. What Telcos are not required to do, they won’t do.

The problems of copperpocalypse will be enormous and expensive. For example: phones in elevators will cease to work on Sunset Day. As will most burglar alarms and fax lines (hello 1985; they’re big in the healthcare business).

This is an emotional issue for me, as I started phone hacking in high school, providing touchtone service at my house, free, before it was free and legal on my phone exchange. I was then privileged to work on a real phone system at MIT. I have maintained an avid interest in telephony ever since. I owned a cellphone when they were still an automobile accessory that took up all the space between the two front seats, or the size of a brick or briefcase.

Just as copper wasn’t designed for data, the Internet was not designed for voice. Internet phone service, Voice Over IP (VOIP), is crap. But cellphones aren’t always a viable alternative. For example, there are numerous pockets in hilly Orinda with essentially zero cellphone service from any provider… 25 miles from downtown San Francisco.

The headline refers to the Year 2000 bug (Y2K), when all the computer programs storing two-digit dates would think that Jan. 1, 1900 was the day after Dec. 31, 1999. The apocalypse was projected, but didn’t occur because everyone was so scared they fixed the problem in advance.

The same thing could (and I hope will) be true when copperpacolypse occurs in the United States. We’ve got a few years at most. Of course this doesn’t affect 90% of my readers directly, since they gave up copper a long time ago. But if you have a burglar alarm, a fax machine or a heart monitor, it will affect you. If you’re stuck in an elevator, it very well could lengthen your stay. If you’re attacked in a college parking lot, those lovely kiosks may well be useless.

AT&T doesn’t care. The firm’s unofficial motto is: “We’re the phone company. We don’t care because we don’t have to.”

Farewell incandescent lightbulb; it’s been a great 178 years. Yes, you read that correctly. Thomas Edison, the P.T. Barnum of electricity, patented the lightbulb in 1880, but as with almost all of his inventions, he stood on the shoulders of giants. The first such light bulbs were created in 1845. We credit Edison, as with most of his discoveries, because he improved and popularized work mostly done by others. And we credit Edison because he had a great PR machine and never hesitated to take credit for anything that happened while he was in the room.

Incandescent bulbs produce more heat than light, and burn about four times as much energy for the same amount of light as LEDs. Don’t like LED or fluorescent light? Get used to it buddy. It’s too late to stock up on old fashioned bulbs.

Labor derailed the U.S. transition to the metric system in 1975 for fear jobs would be off-shored as a result of a common measurement system. How well that worked, and we’re still stuck with pounds and feet (as are Liberia and Myanmar). Somehow, no one managed to derail the death of the incandescent bulb.

Yes, we are going to pry the last space heater/lightbulb from your warm, overcharged fingers. OK technically not: there are no lightbulb police. No one is going to take your soon-to-be-burned-out lightbulbs out of your home or business: but from now on, your only choice after the imminent heat death of your light bulbs will be LEDs or fluorescents (Am I Blue?). And you may have to turn the furnace up 

It’s time to consider giving up flying. It would be nice if it were possible to do that entirely, but autos, buses and trains are not practical means of transportation in many cases.

Flying leaves a terrible carbon footprint. One nonstop round trip from San Francisco to New York releases about a metric ton of carbon per passenger. I was reminded of this (which I already knew, approximately):

Yes, it’s possible to give up flying for the climate. These are the Bay Area residents who’ve done it

The BBC has created a handy chart of relative impact of travel methods, in the relatively unhelpful units of grams per kilometer per passenger. To convert to pounds/mile divide the grams by 454 and multiply the km by 1.2.

Did I win the genetic lottery, or the sperm/egg dance? I am not sure which, but I am eternally grateful for what I got and didn’t get at the instant of my conception. I got wit, intelligence and charm―mostly from my mother’s Irish side, and from the Celts who almost certainly bred with the Schindlers of St. Galen. I did NOT get alcoholism and depression―mostly from my dad’s Swiss side. I did get the dicky ticker that sent my mom’s dad to his grave at 54, but lucked out from having been born a half-century later, so that I can be protected by my pacemaker/defibrillator. I apparently dodged my maternal grandmother’s glaucoma; “You’re almost 70. If you don’t have it by now, you’re not likely to develop it,” my optometrist said this week.

Talk about being born on third base! And I, for one, never mistook that for hitting a triple.