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Most of these posts were originally posted somewhere else and link to the originals. While this blog is not set up for comments, the original locations generally are, and I welcome comments there. Sorry for the inconvenience.

This year's garden

2023-05-17 from Dreamwidth

Tags: Food, Life

This year I am attempting to grow (in containers):

Roma tomatoes
slicing cucumbers (it was labelled as a "bush" and good for containers)
red bell peppers
orange "lunchbox" pepper
basil
chives
mint

I have a few more smaller pots, should I come across or think of anything else I want. Last year I had lots of herbs, and found that aside from basil I wasn't keeping up with them fresh and so dried a lot. I want more vegetables anyway, but many of them require more space than a container can provide.

I hope that whatever was eating my cherry tomatoes last year is not as fond of Roma.

The TOL murderer, capital punishment, and rabbinic law

2023-05-07 from Dreamwidth

Tags: Judaism, Reflections

Yesterday's torah portion, Emor, includes one of the "life for life" (death penalty for murder) passages. Locally, the trial for the murderer in the attack at Tree of Life in 2018 has just gotten started. We had a small discussion of the death penalty through that lens.

Many of the victims' families wanted the state to accept the murderer's offer to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison. Some family members pressed for the death penalty. I don't know how prosecutors decide these things, but they decided to have a capital trial instead of accepting the plea.

The systems around the death penalty in the US are badly broken in many ways ranging from injustice to impracticality. Through the lens of civil law and current judicial practice, I personally would prefer that they do the closest legal thing to dropping the guy into an oubliette, keeping him out of circulation while denying the opportunity for grandstanding and martyrdom. Through the lens of Jewish law, however, something struck me yesterday.

The rabbis of the mishna and talmud (in tractate Sanhedrin) were uncomfortable with the death penalty the torah calls for, so they nerfed it. It's very hard to qualify for the death penalty under rabbinic law. In addition to the requirements for eyewitnesses (who themselves face the death penalty for perjury), people must have warned the person beforehand that he was about to commit a capital offense, and he needs to acknowledge that warning. How likely is that? I used to wonder if anybody ever actually did that.

"Screw your optics, I'm going in". That's what the murderer posted on a site where he and others had been discussing the "problem" with Jews.

I don't know what else is in the transcript from that site; I haven't seen it. It sounds like people tried to stop him. Along with everything else -- his social-media activity, the obvious premeditation, the eyewitnesses to the murders, the lack of regret afterward -- it kind of sounds like the talmud's requirements might have been met. It's not a slam-dunk under rabbinic law, but if Jewish law rather than US law were governing this case, it strikes me that this could actually be the rare case that would qualify for the death penalty. And I'd be fine with that.

That's not vengeance talking, though this case is also personal to me (friends, not family). I can support the rabbinic rules for capital cases, theoretical as they seem, because of their many protections and focus on being careful. Example: did you know that a unanimous vote for capital conviction is overturned? Because if nobody had doubts, maybe the judges didn't look hard enough for factors in the accused's favor.

Avian socializing in the 21st century

2023-04-26 from Dreamwidth

Tags: Science, Tech

How nifty!

Parrots are social creatures. However, most pet parrots are singletons. They get lonely and sometimes that leads to destructive behavior.

From the Smithsonian:

Once the birds had learned how to initiate video interactions, the second phase of the experiment could begin. In this “open call” period, the 15 participating birds could make calls freely; they also got to choose which bird to dial up. Over the next two months, pet parrots made 147 deliberate video calls to other birds. [...]

For starters, they found that the parrots took advantage of the opportunity to call one another, and they typically stayed on the call for the maximum time allowed during the experiment. They also seemed to understand that another live bird was on the other side of the screen, not a recorded bird, researchers say. Some of the parrots learned new skills from their virtual companions, including flying, foraging and how to make new sounds. [...]

The birds forged strong friendships, which researchers measured by how frequently they chose to call the same individual. Parrots who initiated the highest number of video calls also received the most calls, which suggests a “reciprocal dynamic similar to human socialization,” per the statement.

The article links to this ACM paper. Yes, ACM-CHI, meaning it's from a technical conference not an animal-behavior conference. (Also, I guess this stretches the boundaries of the 'H' in CHI, which stands for Computer-Human Interaction, or at least did the last time I attended that conference.)

Seasons

2023-04-24 from Dreamwidth

Tags: Humor, Life

Making the rounds (I saw it here). Applies to Pittsburgh too:

Chicago actually has 12 seasons:
- Winter
- Fool's Spring
- Second Winter
- Spring of Deception
- Third Winter
- (you are here)
- The Pollening
- Actual Spring
- Summer
- Hell's Front Porch
- False Fall
- Second Summer
- Actual Fall

Frogs

2023-03-20 from Dreamwidth

Tags: Judaism

Somebody said today is World Frog Day (who knew? not I!), and with Pesach coming up soon that led to some discussion of the second plague, and somebody linked to a passage in the talmud about it and I have questions:

Rabbi Akiva says: It was one frog, and it spawned and filled the entire land of Egypt with frogs. Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya said to him: Akiva, what are you doing occupying yourself with the study of aggada (stories)? This is not your field of expertise. [...] Rather, the verse is to be understood as follows: It was one frog; it whistled to the other frogs, and they all came after it. (Sanhedrin 67b)

(Convention: the parts in bold are in the original text; the rest is editorial elucidation. The talmud's discussions are often quite compact.)

If I'm reading this correctly, Rabbi Elazar's objection to Rabbi Akiva's statement isn't the claim that there was one frog that then produced more. Rabbi Elazar is fine with the "one original frog" idea. No, he's disputing how the other frogs got there; Akiva says the first frog spawned them, while Elazar says it summoned them.

Rashi elaborates Elazar's complaint: Akiva should refrain from stories about frogs and focus on more serious stuff, like laws of plagues and afflictions, that Akiva actually knows something about. Which makes me wonder what any of them are saying about Elazar's knowledge, since it's apparently ok for Elazar to talk about this stuff. This is Elazar ben Azariah, who at the age of 18 was miraculously given white hair overnight so that the other sages would take him seriously as (briefly) the head of the Sanhedrin. It's not like he's some nobody who doesn't know more "serious" stuff and is only equipped for stories.

What a peculiar passage.

And also: world frog day? Really? (Search engines produce hits. And I found it on a list on Wikipedia, for what that's worth.)

Free to good home: Pennsic house or parts thereof

2023-03-01 from Dreamwidth

Tags: SCA

Please share a link to this post with any SCA (etc) or tiny-homes people you think might be interested.

I have a house on a flatbed trailer. It lives at Cooper's Lake in western PA, where Pennsic is held. When I set out to build it, I first got Dave Cooper's approval of the plans so there would be no issues with using and storing it there. All was good. But times have changed, there are new people with new business interests running Cooper's Lake now, and many of the "old" trailers, including mine, have been evicted. In my case, my trailer has to be gone after Pennsic 50, this August.

The trailer is not road-legal; it's only been driven on Cooper roads for the last 20 years. Legality aside, I doubt the trailer would be safe at real road speeds. (The campground has bumpy dirt roads and traffic moves at 5-10MPH.) It's not practical for me to disassemble the house and rebuild a smaller version of it to take to and from Pennsic every year: I don't have the storage, the towing vehicle, or the fortitude. I don't think I'll go to enough more Pennsics to justify all those costs.

Perhaps you have those things, and interest? Or perhaps there are parts you can use?

Parts of the house are in good to very good condition and could perhaps be reused for a different building project. The roof was new in 2019, put on a month before I got the eviction notice (sob). It's made of ABS pipe, cut to look like tiles, and it does a good job of both protecting and cooling the house. I can talk more about its construction. The loft floor is made of 2x4 tongue-and-groove whitewood and, being interior, has not been exposed to the elements. The doors are in good shape (you probably want to refinish them). Some other lumber can probably be reused for the right project.

I would be sad to trash all this if there's someone who can make use of it and who can come collect it in August. I'm not looking for money; I want to reduce waste.

If you're interested, please get in touch -- click through to the Dreamwidth post for some contact options or use the "contact" link on this site or use any other path you know to reach me.

A few pictures: Read more…

Pixel fail: followup

2023-02-26 from Dreamwidth

Tags: Tech

The replacement phone arrived Wednesday (faster than they said, good). I'd already done a manual backup on top of the automatic one, but migration from one phone to another of the exact same type and OS version is easier: connect them via a cable and wait. Basic data transfer happened within an hour, though it took a few hours for apps to get installed and Chrome was being especially finicky for some reason.

My settings were almost all there; I expected to have to do more manual configuration (including re-laying out the icons where I wanted them). Nope, that was all fine. I had to set up each individual app again, though; sometimes that was just a matter of logging in (for example, Tusky or Authy), but sometimes it required redoing everything (email client for my non-Gmail accounts). Chrome had a weird bug where tabs didn't work (!) but the update ("new version available", it kept saying) would hang; after a few reboots it sorted itself out.

There was a feeling of trepidation as I kept asking myself "are you sure you have everything you need?" before doing the factory reset on the old phone, but I finally did that today. It started doing the flashing-display thing during the reset, so I just left it for a while. The documentation says a factory reset can take an hour, so after a couple hours I power-cycled to see where it was.

I was greeted by the "new phone" setup screen, so that worked.

And then it started flashing again. Ha.

Yes, support person, I was right: that's a hardware problem. After another power-cycle (so I could see what I was doing) I shut it down and boxed it up, and tomorrow I will take it to FedEx.

The replacement they sent me was marked as "refurbished", but they are holding the price of a new phone against my credit card, which feels wrong. It's only a problem if the package doesn't arrive in time (which is why I will hand it to a human at FedEx and get a proper receipt), but it's still sleazy. And yes, if they were to charge the card they would add shipping charges, so it's not to offset that.

I've never had to make a warranty claim on a phone before, so I don't know how my experience with Google compares to what I would have had with other vendors. It's something I should try to find out before I buy my next phone, which I hope will be several years from now.

Bagels

2023-02-23 from Fediverse

Tags: Life, Food

I asked my spouse to pick up a couple bagels and he came back with this and I had no idea this was even a thing. Very festive; no idea what the bakers had in mind.

Image without description

Description: Two colorful bagels, one sliced open to reveal swirls of red/orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. The outside of the other is mainly green and orange.

Section 230

2023-02-20 from Dreamwidth

Tags: Online Communities, Society, Tech

The Supreme Court will soon hear a case that -- according to most articles I've read -- could upend "Section 230", the law that protects Internet platforms from consequences of user-contributed content. For example, if you post something on Facebook and there's some legal problem with you, that falls on you, as the author, and not on Facebook, who merely hosted it. This law was written in the days of CompuServe and AOL, when message boards and the like were the dominant Internet discourse. While there's a significant difference between these platforms and the phone company -- that is, platforms can alter or delete content -- this still feels like basically the "common carrier" argument. This makes sense to me: you're responsible for your words; the place you happened to post it in public isn't.

Osewalrus has written a lot about Section 230 over the years -- he explains this stuff better and way more authoritatively than I do. (Errors are mine, credit is his, opinions are mine.)

When platforms moderate content things get more complicated, and I'm seeing a lot of framing of the current case that's rooted in this difference. From what I understand, that aspect is irrelevant, and unless the Supreme Court is going to be an activist court that legislates, hosting user-contributed content shouldn't be in danger. But we live in the highly-polarized US of 2023 with politically-motivated judges, so this isn't at all a safe bet.

The reason none of that should matter is that the case the court is hearing, Gonzales vs. Google, isn't about content per se. It's about the recommendation algorithm, Google's choice to promote objectionable content. This is not passive hosting. That should matter.

The key part of Section 230 says:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)).

The court can rule against Google without affecting this clause at all. The decision shouldn't be about whether Google is the "publisher" or "speaker". Rather, in this case Google is the advertiser, and Section 230 doesn't appear to cover promotion at all.

I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not especially knowledgeable about Section 230. I'm a regular person on the Internet with concerns about the proper placement of accountability. Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others choose to promote user-contributed content, while platforms like Dreamwidth, Mastodon, and many forums merely present content in the order in which it arrives. That should matter. Will it? No idea.

Moderation is orthogonal. Platform owners should be able to remove content they do not want to host, just like the owner of a physical bulletin board can. In a just world, they would share culpability only if objectionable content was brought to their attention and they did not act. At that point they've said it's ok, as opposed to saying nothing at all because nobody can read everything on a platform of even moderate size. This is how I understand the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to work, and the same principle should apply. In a just world, as I said, which isn't the world we live in. (I, or rather my job title, am a registered agent for DMCA claims, and I have to respond to claims I receive.)

I really hope that the court, even a US court in 2023, focuses on the key points and doesn't use this case to muck with things not related to the case at hand.

Pixel fail

2023-02-20 from Dreamwidth

Tags: Tech

I got my Pixel 5A in March of last year. So, fortunately, it is still in its warranty period.

This is the weirdest failure I have heard of. Yesterday, I took my phone out of my pocket, woke it up, and was greeted by a flashing screen. What it was flashing was a screen full of "snow", like what you get on a TV that's tuned to a station that's not broadcasting, but static -- the whole screen was flashing but the snow wasn't moving around. Hmm, very odd. As I tried to shut it down gracefully I could see that the "underlying" image was responding to me -- there were the usual buttons for "restart", "shut down", and whatever else -- but so fleeting that I couldn't catch them with my finger or read them. On to the hard reboot via the power button.

I Googled this but did not find answers.

I hoped it was a one-time glitch, but I wouldn't be writing this post if it were. Almost every time, but not every single time, since then, recovering from "sleep" mode gets me not the usual desktop but this flashing thing from which I can only hard-reboot. Rebooted about 20 times yesterday.

After the first reboot I had a new notification of a pending OS update, so I applied that. No change. I uninstalled the app I most recently installed, which should have been safe but it's basic troubleshooting. No change. I had, I think on Friday, gotten a batch of miscellaneous app updates, but I don't see a way to review exactly what now. But also, it wasn't right before this behavior. None of that was; that app (from my bank) was sometime last week.

Off to chat support I went. The agent I spoke with told me both that it's a software problem and that I would need to take it to their designated repair place for a hardware repair (for which you must first do a system reset); I asked her to reconcile those two things but she didn't. I pushed back on the repair place, noting that earlier in the warranty period I'd had a problem for which they said that was the solution, but the place couldn't help me and was kind of rude about it and it never got fixed. I asked if the software problem was something I could fix but her script didn't have any info about that. I said in that case, since it's under warranty, I want to exchange it, and I know they have a scheme where they send you the new phone (with a hold on your credit card), you migrate to it and send back the old one, and they release the hold. After I sent her a video of the behavior (an adventure of its own, as she was assuming I could do that from my phone and share it and I was like "uh, this is a video taken with my partner's iPhone and no it's not in my photo gallery and I need to upload or email it to you"), she collected some information from me and came back a few minutes later to say something like "good news, it's under warranty" (I knew that), and then gave me instructions for mailing back the phone and then they'd send me a new one, "or if you like, we could do" (exactly what I'd just asked for). Yeah that, I said.

Meanwhile, I installed Authy on my tablet lest the phone become completely unusable, because I wouldn't want to be locked out of anything that requires two-factor authentication. Today I noticed a seeming pattern where the phone would be fine so long as it was active, and if I set it on the desk next to me I could then wake it up but if I put it in my pocket we'd be back to the snow. This is, uh, the same pocket position I always use. But then the snow thing happened while I was using the phone, so apparently it's not that either. I am mystified.

It's going to be an aggravating several days, methinks.