Author: Steve

 

I’ve got this one source for tracking the Coronavirus.  I’ve been using it all year.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMre6IAAAiU

 

While you’re on that site, graphics scroll past.  I pick out the one that shows total infections for the U.S.  It can be a little tedious to catch, but if I collect it every time I visit, it gives me a consistent perspective.  This site used to show the highest eight countries on the first chart, then all the remaining most-infected countries on the following charts.  After a while, the U.S. headed so far off on its own scale, we were losing the detail for the other countries, so they devoted the entire first chart to the U.S., then showed all the other countries on different charts with different scales.  The ones for all the other countries look like this:

 

2 – 8.

Brazil is the star of the show on this page.

 

9 – 15.

 

16 – 24.

 

These charts show the 24 countries with the highest number of Coronavirus cases, except almost every time I look now, the chart for the U.S. is blank, like this.

 

At first, I thought I might have just caught the site loading data so it showed nothing, but that’s not it; it happens way too often for the U.S. screen, and never happens to any other pages.  I can still find the U.S. chart to copy once in a while, but it is getting much harder to catch.  I’m not normally one to wander down the conspiracy path, but this is quite the coincidence; the one chart we can’t see is the one that best illustrates our condition.  It seems almost as if someone doesn’t want us seeing that data…

 

 

Observational learning in chimpanzees and children.  I watched a program about this years ago and it’s still in my head.  I thought it was going to be about whether a kid or a chimp would be better at the challenge.  There was a black box.  They taught both the chimp and the kids a sequence of pulling levers and sliding switches to get a reward out of the black box.  Both the kids and the chimp got proficient.

 

The kicker came when they unveiled the black box and it was made of see-through plexiglass.  They ran the experiment again.  It became obvious when the box was transparent that every one of the steps except the last didn’t really do anything.  All the subject had to do was skip to the end and pull that last lever and get the reward.  The surprising thing was that the chimp figured that out right away and went straight for the reward, but the kids went on performing all the now obviously unnecessary steps.

 

To me, it seemed that the chimp was smarter in that situation than the kids, and that’s what they were trying to demonstrate, but the researchers concluded something entirely different.  The researchers showed that learning was so important to the kids that they would continue to do what they were taught, even if it didn’t make sense in that instance.  Humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even if later they figure out that what they learned doesn’t make immediate sense.  The chimp, on the other hand, didn’t value accumulated learning, and only performed tasks that were appropriate to the situation at hand.  The chimp discarded the learning as soon as it saw the learning wasn’t productive; and that’s a giant difference between chimps and humans.  Humans pass along accumulated knowledge for complex situations and that body of knowledge grows with each generation.  Chimps, not so much.  The quickest road there isn’t necessarily what gets you the farthest.

 

 

I decided to slow cook some food on the grill instead of the smoker.  Food from the smoker is fine, it doesn’t need to be any better than that, but sometimes I like to change things up.  I’ve mastered the technique on the grill.  I know how to set it and how long each step of the process will take.

 

So Friday, on goes the food; on goes the timer.  First check in an hour and wow, this is cooking fast.  I slowed the cooker down as much as I could, but by the end of two hours I was way ahead of where I should be.  It was supposed to cook for five hours.  I pulled it at three and it was overdone and dry.  What the heck happened?

 

Ambient temperature.  It was hot; blazing 100 degree hot.  And sunny.  Not a cloud in the sky.  Before I even lit the fire, with the lid closed, in the full sun, it was probably 150 degrees inside the grill.  Usually grilling is a matter of applying a lot of heat to food.  This time, with the lid closed, the heat was already there.  The least amount of heat I could apply was too much.

 

There won’t be any cooler weather here for the rest of the summer.  For the next time I’m going to slow cook on the grill with the lid closed, I’ve backed the Mazda part way out of the car port and I’ve rolled the grill into that spot in front of it.  From now on, I’ll be grilling in the shade.

 

 

We’re cruising along, safe in The Valley.  Hardly anybody else in the country even knows we’re down here.  Sheltering in place for the pandemic, but no real problem, just a few hundred cases.

 

Lately though, we’ve been hearing more about it.  And yesterday, we get a reverse 911 Emergency Public Safety Alert on our telephones, like when there is a child abduction or severe weather coming.

 

Hospitals are at capacity!  They’re already shipping sick people to other parts of Texas because there is nowhere left to put them here.  Soon the rest of Texas might be full as well.  Houston already is.  It was risky to go out before.  We’re even less likely to go anywhere now.

 

 

Meanwhile, a smokin hot fourth of July! 

 

 

We’ll enjoy it from our air conditioning.  Enjoy safely everybody!

 

We just made our hummingbirds’ lives a little easier.  We trimmed the Firebush.  It was getting so big we couldn’t walk past it in our little yard, so I cut back about a third of it.  There are still plenty of flowers all over the top, but way less for the little birds to remember.  The little birdbrains can remember every feeder along their migration route and even recognize individual people who refill the feeders too.  Maybe as we welcome back the flood of hummingbirds in the fall on their migration south to Central America, some of them will be glad to see us as well.