According to the MIT Media Lab,  false stories travel up to 20 times faster than true ones. The AP moved a load of codswallop for newspapers of August 8. Someone on the General Desk should have stopped it… if they knew the news agency was committing a journalistic felony. Preventing such errors is what editors are for. Gasoline at $4.14 over Labor Day is NOWHERE NEAR the most expensive figure ever. When you inflate the 2012 figure of $3.82, it is $5.56, the only comparison that makes sense. Gas would have needed to be a buck and a half higher per gallon to actually be the highest.

It’s very simple, as explained here:

Dollar Figures: Meaningless, Useless And Misleading If Not Inflated

I’d never thought of this; I just wanted to make sure there was some adjustment when comparing prices. S.M. Oliva of Computer Chronicles Revisited wrote me that “one of my pet peeves is people who discuss historic computer prices ‘adjusted for inflation’ without accounting for differences in capacity.

For example, I’ll hear a retro computing channel on YouTube say something like, “The original Macintosh cost $2,500 at launch, which adjusted for inflation would be $8,000 today!” Sure, except that today nobody would actually buy a computer with 128K of memory and a 5-inch monochrome screen to use in productive work.”

Roads are not flat. There is a crown in the middle and they slope down to each side so water does not pool.

For centuries, stages were “raked,” which is to say they sloped towards the audience to make it easier to see action at the rear of the stage. After hundreds of years, someone noticed the rake made sets fall down and required sawed off legs on chairs. So the rake has fallen out of style.

For much of the 20^th century, the ground floor in a movie house was flat, because it was cheap. Some began to rake the seats, a gradual slope up to the back. Most modern cinemas have what is called stadium seating (after the sporting venues), with a more pronounced rise.

It is a well-known phenomenon that, if you tell a story often enough, you remember the story better than the actual event. Related is the common occurrence that you think you remember something cute you did as a child, but eventually come to realize that what you remember is being told (over and over) about the cute thing. In my case, the adult version is the day in 1971 when my friend Kenneth Pogran drew Arpanet. You know, like Bob Ross. Could Ken have explained packets to me? And routing around damage? That’s the way I recall it. But when you tell a story often enough (I have been dining out on this story for a half century), the story begins to substitute for the actual memory.

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.