The fascinating story of Wubi

Those of us who use the English alphabet take for granted the QWERTY keyboard on our computers. But what about people who use other alphabets? Do they need their own keyboards? This problem becomes particularly acute with languages like Chinese that uses more than 70,000 characters that are symbolic representation of the objects, that are pictures rather than words made up of an alphabet.

In an utterly fascinating episode of Radiolab, the show discusses the crisis faced by China in the 1980s when it was becoming clear that computers were the way of the future and that their written language could not be represented on the limited QWERTY keyboard. Since China had ambitions of being a major player in the scientific and technological revolution that would be driven by computers, they had to adapt to the constraints of the computer keyboard. It appeared that they might have to abandon the written form of the language that had endured for thousands of years and had formed such an integral part of its culture, something that horrified many people. An entire institute was even set up to develop new forms of the written language.
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The looming vaccine challenge

Now that vaccines for covid-19 are on the horizon, the next challenge will be to get enough people to take it. It seems that roughly 60% is the minimum number of people who should have immunity to the disease for herd immunity to take effect. Since the vaccines are about 90% effective, that means about 70% of the population needs to get it to achieve herd immunity. But getting to that number is not going to be easy. Surveys suggest that for various reasons, about 30% of Americans are what is called ‘vaccine hesitant’ and likely will not take it. That means that we will barely make the required threshold even if everyone who is not opposed to vaccines gets it. The 30% is greater than the hardcore anti-vaxxers who oppose giving vaccines to their children.
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Tipping and sexual harassment during the pandemic

I have railed before against the practice of tipping because it seems like a relic of a feudal age and reinforces the power differential between the tipper and the tippee. In the US, restaurant and other hospitality workers can be paid far less than the minimum wage, as low as $2.13 per hour, using the argument that they augment that absurd wage with tips. I have argued that it would be better to pay them a living wage, pass the cost on to the customer through higher prices, and abolish tipping altogether. But some customers want to retain tipping for the very reason that I dislike it, because it gives them power over the person serving them, enabling them to reward and punish.
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Are we in danger of creating a loony singularity?

I read this report that the QAnon people and the antivaxxers are finding common cause, as a result of QAnon advocates targeting the anti-vaxxer social media pages to gain a wider audience.

QAnon rhetoric has been seeping into anti-vax pages all over social media in recent months. Devoted adherents of the conspiracy theory have weathered tech giants’ sweeping crackdowns by infiltrating other communities that exist on the platforms, then poisoning them with disinformation. This has transformed the large ecosystem of anti-vax communities online into radicalization pipelines for QAnon.

“The purpose of vaccination is to literally slaughter the population and dumb everyone down and render them helpless,” Larry Cook, the creator of “Stop Mandatory Vaccination,” warned in his final Facebook Live video. “It is a global plan to literally enslave every human on the planet.”

Over Cook’s right shoulder was an image of the American flag atop the QAnon slogan, #WWG1WGA. Over his left was the letter Q, decorated in stars and stripes. Comments poured in from viewers thanking him for “awakening” them to the “truth.”

So now we have two groups that are immune to science and reason seeming to come together. What happens if other groups that also have crackpot beliefs, such as those who think that it was massive fraud in the election that caused Trump’s loss, climate change deniers, and those who are awaiting the second coming of Jesus and hoping for a war in the Middle East to fulfill that prophecy, also join forces with them?

Will that result in some kind of critical loony mass that tears apart the fabric of reality and creates a loony singularity that sucks in everything and everyone?

The Swiss cheese metaphor for covid-19 precautions

Now that Trump is a lame duck, the. Centers for Disease Control seems to have become more activist and not looking over its shoulder to see if he approves of their recommendations. In the light of record hospitalizations, they have issued the four basic preventative measures that all of us can take, including for the first time asking people to wear masks at all times whenever they leave their homes, moving away from Trump’s ambivalent attitudes to mask-wearing and moving closer to Joe Biden’s stance on it.

* Wear a mask.
* Wash your hands.
* Avoid crowds.
* Stay 6 feet from people who don’t live with you.

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s incredulity over the Trump lawsuit

In a 5-3 vote, the Wisconsin Supreme Court yesterday threw out yet another Trump legal challenge to the election. Such actions by courts around the country have become so routine as to be hardly worth noting, though if one is counting, there have been 46 such losses by Trump and his allies.

What I want to highlight is the incredulous tone of the majority opinion issued by justice Brian Hagedorn of both the merits of the challenge and the asked for remedy.

The Wisconsin Voters Alliance and a group of Wisconsin voters bring a petition for an original action raising a variety of questions about the operation of the November 3, 2020 presidential election. Some of these legal issues may, under other circumstances, be subject to further judicial consideration. But the real stunner here is the sought-after remedy. We are invited to invalidate the entire presidential election in Wisconsin by declaring it “null”—yes, the whole thing. And there’s more. We should, we are told, enjoin the Wisconsin Elections Commission from certifying the election so that Wisconsin’s presidential electors can be chosen by the legislature instead, and then compel the Governor to certify those electors. At least no one can accuse the petitioners of timidity.

Such a move would appear to be unprecedented in American history. One might expect that this solemn request would be paired with evidence of serious errors tied to a substantial and demonstrated set of illegal votes. Instead, the evidentiary support rests almost entirely on the unsworn expert report of a former campaign employee that offers statistical estimates based on call center samples and social media research.

This petition falls far short of the kind of compelling evidence and legal support we would undoubtedly need to countenance the court-ordered disenfranchisement of every Wisconsin voter. The petition does not even justify the exercise of our original jurisdiction.
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Comparing the Biden and Obama administrations

Comparing the Biden and Obama administrations

It was inevitable that people would compare the Biden administration to Obama’s to address the question as to whether the Biden presidency was merely going to be a third Obama term. While there are undoubtedly going to be great similarities (they are both solid members of the Democratic Party establishment after all), one way to measure the degree of closeness is to compare appointees made so far. Ryan Grim has made such a careful person-by-person comparison and concludes that although Biden is no progressive, his choices are more progressive than Obama’s, and that he has created a bit more distance from the Robert-Rubin/Goldman Sachs/Wall Street wing of the Democratic party.
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Fun times at the Michigan hearings

In case you were not aware, Rudy Giuliani is still pushing to overturn the Michigan results and there were hearings in the Republican-controlled state legislature for four hours on Wednesday where he brought in witnesses who alleged widespread fraud. One of them was someone named Melissa Carone who said that she worked as a contractor for Dominion Voting Systems, the company that manufactured the voting machines and that has been accused by Trump lawyers of working in cahoots with Hugo Chavez (who died in 2013) and the CIA to electronically switch Trump votes to Biden votes as part of their plan to turn the world Communist. Or something like that. It is hard to keep up.
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Let the pardon sales begin!

In an extraordinary development, it appears that there’s an investigation by the justice department into allegations that people have been trying to bribe pardons for themselves from Trump.

An alleged “bribery for pardon” scheme at the White House is under investigation by the justice department, according to a court filing unsealed on Tuesday.

The heavily redacted document does not name Donald Trump or other individuals and leaves many unanswered questions, but comes amid media reports that the US president is considering sweeping pardons before he leaves office next month.

It shows that the justice department investigation alleges that an individual offered “a substantial political contribution in exchange for a presidential pardon or reprieve of sentence”.

Two individuals acted improperly as lobbyists to secure the pardon in the “bribery-for-pardon schemes”, as the document puts it. The names are blacked out.
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Wear the damn masks!

After a dip in the numbers for the Thanksgiving weekend (numbers tend to drop during holidays, possibly because people postpone going to see doctors and hospitals may delay reporting their data), the number of hospitalizations and deaths came roaring back.

Hospitalizations topped 100,000 for the first time and the daily number of deaths reached 2,733, just slightly below the peak of 2,769 reached back on May 7th. This rise is too soon after the holidays to have been caused by all the travel and getting together for the holiday. That grim reckoning is coming in a week or two.
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