humanist + humorist

“Drag and drop the colors in each row to arrange them by hue color. Click ‘Score My Test’ to review results.” (Along with all the other factors that play into it, “how much you work with colors on screens” has to be a big one. Fellow digital artists with perfect scores, represent.)

2016: “In a nondescript building in West Roxbury, over 1 million of Boston’s most precious artifacts sit untouched in rows of white, acid-free boxes. There are cannonballs from the 18th century, clay pipes embellished with the British crown, 17th century chamberpots, perfectly intact Chinese porcelain plates, and 7,500-year-old Native American spearheads. Most of the artifacts (about two-thirds) have never been properly sorted.”

2019: “I’m looking for either Anna Stumps or Alice Lee — two research assistants who have spent the past day and a half shepherding me through facial-recognition tests to determine whether I will get into a training program for face-blind people. One is blond, the other brunette, but I don’t quite remember what either of them looks like. I sit on the floor — there are no chairs — and beam a warm smile at every young, long-haired woman who passes by. One of them eyeballs me warily. I wonder how many other people I’ve creeped out.”

February 2022: “In accordance with his family’s wishes and the patient’s Do-Not-Resuscitate status, the doctors did not attempt any further treatment and the man soon passed away. Because the EEG machine kept running through the man’s last minutes of life, though, the doctors had a unique set of data on their hands.”

February 2021: “Nastaʿlīq, after all, is a nightmare to code. It moves right to left, like all Arabic scripts, but also slopes downward: the longer the word, the steeper the slope. The shape of each letter changes, depending on the letter that comes before and after; in a 39-letter alphabet, there are thousands of permutations.” The quest to adapt Urdu into functional fonts that actually convey the script.

August 2023: “The design was no longer ad hoc for a specific project, said Campbell. “It was letter by letter, so we could have this new font to use at our discretion for anything.” Representing a language in a typeface is a communal effort. For four years, Warburton and the Musqueam language department passed suggestions to Tiro Typeworks, a digital type foundry, to design.”

August 7: “Call it the Hollywood-labor-organizing version of Avengers Assemble! On the heels of more than a year’s worth of damning disclosures around Marvel Studios’ systematic overworking and underpayment of visual-effects workers on its blockbuster movies and streaming series, VFX crews at Marvel have finally petitioned to demand union recognition from the studio.”

September 14: “The one thing in our contract the DC lawyers can’t contest, or reinterpret to their own benefit, is that I am the sole owner of the intellectual property. I can sell it or give it away to whomever I want. I chose to give it away to everyone. If I couldn’t prevent Fables from falling into bad hands, at least this is a way I can arrange that it also falls into many good hands.” Fables is now in the public domain!

Artwork by neural nets:

“New hot meme for webcomic artists: upload one of your comic pages to Have I Been Trained, link to the first 4 webcomics (not drawn by you) that AI registers as similar to yours!” (Can I make this a thing? I’m gonna try.)

“I read 19 comics with AI-generated artwork, all of which I downloaded or read for free online. In addition to the question of quality, I wanted to answer a few other questions: Do these comics share common characteristics? How about the creators? Are traditional comic creators getting something valuable from these tools?” A cool, thoughtful article about what people can produce using AI as a tool (and what limits they have to work around).

“Here is where it gets interesting. If I use the same prompt and add “Amazing awesome and epic”, the picture gets noticeably better. “Oh,” goes the neural net, “you wanted a GOOD picture”.” Rebloggable-on-Tumblr version of that AI art post from July 2021.

Writing by neural nets:

“I pulled a letter from the Savage Love inbox—something, low, slow, and over-the-plate—went to the ChatGPT website (www.openai.com), and asked ChatGPT to “answer this question in the style of Dan Savage’s advice column.” So, can the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot really do a better job giving sex advice than I do? We’re about to find out.” [archive link]

My favorite part of that one: the AI gives basically the same answer to both questions. It registers “this is a relationship help question,” and then it outputs Generic Relationship Advice — with a few brief details of the specific question pasted in, Mad Libs style — for both.

“A close examination of the work produced by CNET‘s AI makes it seem less like a sophisticated text generator and more like an automated plagiarism machine, casually pumping out pilfered work that would get a human journalist fired.” Computers are great at taking an existing sentence and automatically replacing some of the words with synonyms. But you need a human to come up with the sentence first.

These AIs are trained with text auto-scraped from all over the internet…so, how can you keep it from presenting unsuspecting users with the find-and-replaced version of, oh let’s say, somebody’s graphic noncon Joker/Robin fanfic? Pay a bunch of humans in Kenya less than $2/hour to manually flag all the noncon Joker/Robin fanfic, obviously.

All these tech people boasting they’ve developed an AI that can replace human creatives (or are on the verge of developing one, please give them millions of dollars to finish the job) — dig a little deeper and you’ll find they’re just reinventing the Mechanical Turk with extra layers.

September 30: “Alabama is shrinking under the onslaught of Covid-19, its chief medical officer said, as deaths in the state outnumber births for the very first time.”

October 4: “18% of health care workers have quit their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, while another 12% have been laid off. Among health care workers who have kept their jobs during the pandemic, 31% have considered leaving.”

October 7: “…the model projected the risk of reinfection under endemic conditions — in which everybody has either been infected by or vaccinated against the virus. In these conditions, unvaccinated individuals should expect to be reinfected with COVID-19 every 16 to 17 months on average.”

October 21: “A WHO paper on Thursday estimated that out of the world’s 135 million health staff, “between 80,000 to 180,000 health and care workers could have died from Covid-19 in the period between January 2020 to May 2021”.”

October 25: “Sixty-eight years later, an iron lung is still keeping Lillard alive — she sleeps in it every night. While many people who had polio or post-polio syndrome either weaned themselves off the machines or switched to another form of ventilator, Lillard never did.”

The legacy of polio — and of its vaccines. (It is amazing how this went from “a constant, overwhelming threat” to “a nearly-eradicated nonissue” in, what, a generation or two?)

October 27: “It’s true that of all members of our population, 5–11 year-olds actually have the lowest risk of hospitalization due to COVID-19 according to COVID-NET data published in the MMWR. However, even if you look at this fact, based on historical estimates, COVID-19 would be the 8th leading cause of death in this age group.”

Children are at low risk, but they’re not at no risk.

“As far as the vaccine, with the pediatric dose, there are 0.06 mg tromethamine and 0.4 mg tromethamine hydrochloride. [The generic product warning antivaxxers are up in arms about] describes a 500 mL solution of tromethamine containing, in total, 18 g of tromethamine (3.6 g per 100 mL), or 60,000 times as much tromethamine.”

So if the Secret Nefarious Medical Cabal snuck this into the vaccine formula to prevent Secret Undisclosed Heart Problems…they skipped the step where they tell us to give every kid 60,000 doses.

Non-COVID-related bonus:

“Unwanted, intrusive visual memories are a core feature of stress- and trauma-related clinical disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) […] even once intrusive memories have been laid down, playing a visually-demanding computer game after reactivating the memories may reduce their occurrence over time.”

In other words, if you or someone you know get caught up in a traumatic event? Once they’re safe, have the survivor get out their phone and play Tetris for a while. It’ll make a long-term difference.

Antivaxxer aunt posted a bunch of signs from protests she says she supports, and they all look like this:

Other rallies have signs that take stands — “Black Lives Matter,” “Justice for George Floyd,” “Gay Rights Are Human Rights,” “End Anti-Trans Discrimination.” These are just “Freedom! Freedom is good! Please assume without question that everyone here agrees perfectly with me about what we need to be Free from.”

Gotta wonder what % of the group says afterward “look how many of us aren’t into any CRAZY stuff, we just agree Big Pharma is faking everything” and what % says “look how many of us agree a secret cabal is kidnapping children to get high by snorting their ground-up bones.”

(…did you know that’s not a parody? Do you know that’s actual, totally-earnest QAnon lore? Was your mind as blown by that as mine was?)

---

In TWIV #720 (starts around 51:17), Paul Offit told a story that I’ve been meaning to write down.

So his wife’s a pediatrician. A 4-month-old comes into her office for a vaccination…and the kid has a seizure.

Child gets rushed to the hospital. Is diagnosed with a seizure disorder. Ends up having a chronic neurological condition. Offit doesn’t say what it was called, but the important part is — only a few years later, the child dies from it. They were 5.

And this is the kind of story antivaxxers love to tell as Proof that Vaccines are Harmful and Evil —

except —

the vaccination hadn‘t happened yet.

The seizure hit before the child got any shots. Like — moments before. “The doctor was drawing the vaccine into the syringe” before. And obviously they didn’t finish — when a baby is having a seizure, you get them the hell to a hospital, now! General preventative care can wait.

And Offit points out that if the timing had been five minutes different — if the appointment was a bit earlier, if the office moved a bit faster, maybe if the parents hit a few more green lights on the way there — the parents would’ve blamed the shots for all of it.

And who could talk them out of it? If you spent years trying to care for a child with a terrifying deadly disease, and the symptoms all started moments after a vaccine — how would anybody convince you that that was a coincidence?

Except here’s a case that was just as vanishingly unlikely, that we know was a coincidence.

It’s absolutely wild. One-in-a-million doesn’t even come close. If you wrote it in a novel, people would dunk you to the end of time for trying to make a serious point with such a transparent, exaggerated, anvilicious setup.

But sometimes, in medicine, in health, in real life, that’s just how it is.

And it’s not a “totally happened to my friend’s cousin’s barber!” urban legend. It’s from a specific doctor. You can listen to — or watch the video version of — a source, as told by her specific husband.

It's the one from Johns Hopkins University, for anyone who wants a good site to check in with. There's also good detailed graphs -- scroll down for links to all the options -- on this page by Worldometers.org. Other options: Links to a variety of COVID-19 maps & visuals.

Happy/reassuring/uplifting links:

Lockdown Omens, written by GNeil and performed by Sheen and Tennant -- in which Crowley isn't setting a bad example and Aziraphale is catching up on his reading.

April 22: What masks don't help with, what they're very good at, and why it makes a difference if you wear them: a lengthy and detailed breakdown.

May 4: "Staff working in a care home in France have kept their residents safe by locking down with them for 47 days and nights to wait out the coronavirus storm." And it worked -- not one of them died.

All the other virus links:

April 10: "A doctor who has been testing the homeless in downtown Miami for COVID-19, the deadly infection associated with the coronavirus, said he was handcuffed by police outside his Miami home Friday morning — for no reason that he can discern — while he was placing old boxes on the curbside for pickup."

April 24: Virus sweeps through Bible Belt evangelicals who won't stay home. "Bishop Gerald Glenn, founder and leader since 1995 of the New Deliverance Evangelistic Church in Chesterfield, Virginia, was the first black chaplain of the town's police. He had vowed to continue preaching 'unless I'm in jail or the hospital' before his death from coronavirus earlier this month."

April 28: "These numbers are preliminary because death certificates take time to be processed and collected, [...] In Connecticut, for example, where reported coronavirus deaths are high, the C.D.C. statistics include zero reported deaths from any cause since Feb. 1, because of reporting lags." And even with that -- the death counts are way up in places that are (a) hard-hit and (b) have numbers starting to come in. Like 120% of normal in MA, and 325% of normal in NYC.

May 7: "It’s not that the bathroom poses a more serious coronavirus risk than anything else you’re doing. (Workplace consultants believe the bottleneck on the return to downtown offices will be elevators.) But it does serve as a reminder that what we’re really talking about, when we talk about density as a factor in disease transmission, is particular spaces that a number of people have to share."

May 8: "I ended up in an isolation room in the antechamber of the intensive care department. You’re tired, so you’re resigned to your fate. You completely surrender to the nursing staff. You live in a routine from syringe to infusion and you hope you make it. I am usually quite proactive in the way I operate, but here I was 100% patient." A virologist's infection story.

May 9 (NYT): "Dr. Bright was largely sidelined by personal disputes with Dr. Kadlec and his aides, some of which long predated the coronavirus, the documents suggest. By the time the pandemic arrived in force, the relationship between them had become toxic, with Dr. Bright increasingly left out of key decisions. His ideas about battling the threat 'were met with skepticism,' the complaint says, 'and were clearly not welcome.'" Hey look, it's the scientist from the first act of Every Disaster Movie Ever.

May 10: "People disregarded a rule to order an hour before pickup and demanded their ice cream anyway, he wrote on [the Polar Cave Ice Cream Parlour's' Facebook page. Customers took out their anger at delays on overwhelmed employees, including a teenage girl who quit, he said."

I'm watching the recordings of Eurovisions past...and 2015 opens with a montage of "people in all different home countries making long-distance connections with each other" that, if you're anything like me, will mean all of a sudden you need a minute, you've got something in your eyes.



A set of productive, helpful, or at least generally non-awful links:

Folding@home lets you donate your computer's spare processing power to disease-fighting research. Since March 10, that includes simulations to design potential treatments for COVID-19.

If the program gives you any trouble or doesn't pick up much to do, try World Community Grid, actively working on AIDS, tuberculosis, childhood cancer, and more. That's the one I've been running on-and-off for more than a decade. (Full disclosure, it's a referral link....but the only thing I get out of it is a 50x50px image to commemorate how many people I've referred.)

And if you have money to spare, Doctors Without Borders is one of the organizations that will make good use of it.

"History’s Deadliest Viruses Illustrated to Scale." (Illustration.)

Finally, some personal posts about people's medical experiences. Not an endorsement of specific treatments, just a recommendation to read them, and decide if any of it would be personally helpful for you to explore further.

"The important thing to note here is that lysine is not immune-system-boosting in the vague 'we hope it does something but we aren't sure what' way of many herbs; lysine, as an amino acid, is a basic building block for immune cells, particularly antibodies."

"I've been seeing a lot of people who don't normally worry about lung complexities ask questions about it, and my lungs are also going through their change of season crankiness, so now seems a really good time to write up some notes about things I've found helpful."