Coronavirus hurts Silicon Valley caterers and event businesses
Salvador Rodriguez at CNBC:
Performers, food caterers, event planners, venue owners, models, DJs and others that rely on the tech industry are now staring at blank calendars with no idea of when they will be able to return to their livelihoods.
For much of the last 20 years I went to one or two industry events a month, mostly in San Francisco, the Bay Area and Las Vegas. I can’t imagine they’ll be among the first things to return when sheltering in place lifts.
Today is looking like it was not a great day to cut down on coffee. Tomorrow is not looking great for that either. 
I think we’ll go out to brunch today at DZ Akins, an excellent kosher-style deli just a few minutes drive way. It’s often crowded on Sunday; in a truly wonderful American fashion, this Jewish restaurant fills up when churches let out. But it’s worth waiting for a table.
The weather looks gray, but not rainy, which makes it a good day to visit Balboa Park and check out the museums. San Diego has some excellent museums, surprisingly so for a surfer/tourism town. Again, the park is usually crowded on Sunday and it’s hard to find parking, but worth the trouble.
Jack Butler at the National Review calls Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series a “comforting technocratic fable."
I loved the Foundation Trilogy when I was a boy. I listened to the audiobook of “Foundation” recently and was not moved to continue on. It doesn’t hold up.
Lately I am inclined to see the heroes of that series as badly misguided. Another writer might have even called them villains.
One of the fundamental problems with the premise of the series is that it assumes that human beings don’t have free will.
Asimov was by training a scientist. He was a Ph.D. in chemistry. And one of the fundamental lessons of that science comes from the study of the behavior of fluids. Liquids and gases. Individual molecules behave randomly and are completely unpredictable. An individual molecule in a liquid or gas might move in any direction at any time. There’s no way of knowing.
But if you put trillions of molecules of fluid together, they become completely predictable. Water flows downhill.
Asimov presumed the same thing for human behavior. Individual humans are completely unpredictable. Even billions of humans, the population of the Earth, cannot be predicted. But if you assume the entire GALAXY is settled by humans, billions of Earths, with a population in the TRILLIONS, you have a population that is completely predictable.
That’s the made-up science of psychohistory in Foundation.
But it doesn’t exist. And it would be terrible if it DID exist. As Cory Doctorow points out, if you could know the future for certain, what would be the reason to get out of bed in the morning? Particularly if the future is BAD. If you’re a Jew in Europe and it’s 1928 and you can predict the future with certainty, do you even want to be alive at that point?
That’s one of the problems with the Foundation Trilogy.
The other problem is alluded to in Butler’s description of the series as “technocratic.” Asimov gives us a choice between two lousy forms of government: An empire – in other words, a hereditary dictatorship, like North Korea or Saudi Arabia. Or government by bureaucrats. We never encounter a planet governed by a democratic government with a robust civil service that serves the will of the people. Nope.
Indeed, when I look back on science fiction from that period, I see a lot of galactic empires presented as benevolent, and other forms of benevolent dictatorships. You have to wait until Star Trek until you get something truly resembling representative democracy.
And the OTHER problem with the Foundation Trilogy is that it’s just plain old-fashioned. The prose and storytelling style has not aged well. The characters are flat and one-dimensional, and the action takes place offscreen and is described in dialogue.
Nonetheless, when I revisited the first novel recently, I did find charm in the retro-future vision. When Asimov imagines someone from the outer planets visiting the Galactic capital of Trantor, we see Asimov himself: A leading individual in one of the golden times and places of American history, immigrant New York from around the turn of the century to the 1950s. Jews and Italians fled hard lives in the old country and became Americans, and helped build America. My own parents grew up in that milieu; if I had a time machine it’s one of the times and places I would most like to visit.
And the Foundation Trilogy WAS among my favorite books when I was a kid. If I identify problems with it now, that doesn’t take away from my enjoyment then.
Nor does it take away from my admiration for Asimov, who was and is one of my heroes. He was far from a perfect person in his life, but who is?
As Alec Nevala-Lee writes in his recent book “Astounding," a history of science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s (recommended), when Asimov conceived Foundation, he was a teen-ager in New York, reading about the news of the Nazis rolling over Europe, and threatening America, with the Holocaust killing people just like himself, his family and friends. He dreamed of a world where he could somehow find assurance that everything was going to be ok.
Julie and I are both easily annoyed today. I came into her office to tell her about something that was annoying me, and before I could say a word she went into telling me about something that was annoying her. That annoyed the hell out of me.
I hope she is not annoyed by my posting this.
Also, I think maybe I picked the wrong historical event during which to reduce coffee consumption.
Private equity is using the pandemic to loot public health facilities, such as hospitals and medical clinics. One example: Firing medical professionals who speak out about unsafe working conditions - Cory Doctorow
LA landlord threatens to evict 300 tenants if they don’t pay rent in full, in violation fo state and local emergency tenant protections. Landlord uses cc instead of bcc, helping tenants organize a web strike. Whoops - Cory Doctorow
Supercut of Fox News hosts insisting coronavirus is no cause concern, a Democratic/MSM conspiracy, etc. Not “ha-ha-weird, nor ha-ha-funny. It’s more ha-ha-Exhibit-A-for-a-future-war-crimes-tribunal” - Cory Doctorow
What did people do before toilet paper?
The ancient Romans wiped their butts with a “tersorium,” a stick with a vinegar- or salt-water-soaked sponge attached, although these may have been used to clean the latrine rather than the person.
Other ancient cultures used small stones, rags on sticks, spatulas, and – for scholars – manuscripts. Yen Chih-Thui, a sixth century AD scholar, said he didn’t dare wipe himself “on the names of sages.”
The Chinese imperial family was using mass produced rice-paper-based toilet paper by 1393.
Inventor Joseph Gayetty introduced the first mass-produced TP in the west in 1857; it was called “J.C. Gayetty’s Medicated Paper for the Water Closet” because they knew how to do product names back then.
By Erin Blakemore at National Geographic.
One month ago today I went to the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club general meeting with a hundred or so of my closest friends. Following that, a small group of us had a light dinner and drinks at Hooley’s
This is a historic event for two reasons: It was the-second-to-last time I spent a lot of time in close proximity to a lot of people, prior to COVID-19 ramping up. The last time was as few days later, when Julie and I went out to brunch. A few days after that: Lockdown!
Since then, it’s just been social distancing.
The other reason this dinner is historic is I sat immediately next to someone who later got sick with COVID-19. We were packed onto that table so he and I were very close, nearly bumping elbows. He later spent a harrowing week or two in the ICU unit. He’s recovering at home now – thank goodness.
Fortunately for my and Julie’s peace of mind, I found out about this gentleman’s hospitalization more than two weeks after the dinner, well past the incubation period for myself and Julie. So we’re safe. Probably. I’m trying not to think about how little science actually knows about the spread of coronavirus, and whether that two-week figure might be simply be wrong.
Lots of things I’m not thinking about right now. I am becoming excellent at compartmentalization – part of me plans and prepares for the worst and part of me just tries to live life as normally as I can, working and spending time with Julie and reading my books and walking the dog and not thinking about the awful things that might happen. Nearly certainly will happen to so many people.
BTW, I realize this is extraordinarily self-centered – here’s this guy in the ICU and I’m all whew glad that wasn’t too stressful for me. I’m prepared to mount a LarryDavidian defense of my thinking.
Earthquake. About 50 minutes ago. Just a minor one, no damage or injury that I’m aware of. But it’s the biggest earthquake we’ve felt in a long time. Maybe ever.
Because life needed to get more interesting.
Help me with a thought experiment here. Those of you who identify as Republican or conservative: What are the values you hold most dear? What should our national priorities be? What should be government’s goals?
If you fell into a deep slumber and woke up in the United States 50 years from now what would you hope it would be like? Assume a cultural and political renaissance where everybody comes around to realize that your beliefs were best after all.
And how well do you think the Trump administration and present-day Republicans are doing?
Aside to my liberal/Democrat/progressive friends and family: Just sit on your hands on this one please. Let’s keep our mouths shut and learn some things.
From Google News a few seconds ago.
Republicans and Democrats perceive parallel universes with completely different realities now. But there is only one real world.
Researchers are building nearly microscopic robots, made from living cells, that live in petri dishes
Meet the Xenobots, Virtual Creatures Brought to Life
Xenobots are designed to roboticists using algorithmic evolution in computer simulations.
Joshua Sokol at The New York Times:
Xenobots with a fork- or snowplow-like appendage in the front can sweep up loose particles (in a petri dish) overnight, depositing them in a pile. Some use legs, of a sort, to shuffle around on the floor of the dish. Others swim, using beating cilia, or link up blobby appendages and circle each other a few times before heading off in separate directions….
[Researchers crafted] virtual worlds that would reward particular behaviors by the clumps of repurposed frog. Take walking: First an algorithm produced many random body designs; some just sat there, others rocked or waddled forward. Then the algorithm let the best of the walkers procreate into the next generation; from these, another generation was produced, and so on, each one improving on the best designs. Another simulation, aimed at finding designs that could carry an object, became crowded with bagel-like bodies that had evolved a central cavity to hold things."
Eventually, robots like these could “sweep ocean microplastics into a larger, collectible ball,” “deliver drugs to a specific tumor,” or “scrape plaque from the walls of our arteries…. "
“[W]hatever their intended purpose, their bodies would be designed not by an engineer but by a simulacrum of real evolution built to encourage the right behavior in the target environment.”
Ethicists see possible problems.
A long and pointless post about coffee
Just before the lockdown went in place in California, I had brunch with Julie at Farmer’s Table. The coffee was excellent, so much so that I asked the waitress about it. She said they got the coffee from a place in Barrio Logan (and now I see on Google there is more than one coffee place in Barrio Logan. I think Cafe Virtuoso was the one she said.)
I asked the waitress what equipment they use to make the coffee, and she said just a restaurant coffee machine. Not a fancy pourover. Just a drip coffee machine.
So I remembered that and a while later I was Googling about coffee, and came across an article – which I now cannot locate – about how baristas make coffee for themselves, at home. One of the respondents said he used a Mr. Coffee. Just a Mr. Coffee.
And that intrigued me because the Aeropress, which is how I’ve been making coffee for a couple of years, is a bit more fuss than I like in the morning. Same for a French press. And with a Mr. Coffee you assemble the ingredients, press a button and you’ve got coffee a few minutes later.
I thought about that for a couple of weeks and priced a Mr. Coffee on Amazon and it was $22 for a four-cup version. I discussed it with Julie and we said sure why not and I ordered.
While I was waiting for the delivery, I read the reviews – really should have done that before I ordered, right? I had just looked at the overall rating. But now that I read the reviews, I saw that the four-cup machine didn’t actually make four cups. Mr. Coffee measures a cup at 5 ounces. WTF, I thought to myself. That’s 20 ounces of coffee. I like to have about 24 ounces in the morning. Three cups. Three real cups.
Plus, I realized that, although Julie and I make coffee separately, the reason we do it is because the Aeropress only makes three cups, and even that is pushing it. However, if we had a drip machine I could make coffee for both of us in the morning.
So I’d bought the wrong size.
Or had I? Yesterday, I thought to myself that three cups of coffee is really too much. The caffeine doesn’t bother me (or I don’t think it does – I do sometimes have trouble sleeping, but I do not attribute that to coffee. I attribute that to the world, which was a troubling place even before COVID-19). However, I just don’t enjoy that third cup as much as the first two. Plus, drinking three cups of coffee takes a lot of time. That doesn’t matter when I’m just working at my desk, but it’s annoying when I want to be out and about in the morning and I have to wait to finish my morning caffeine fix.
So fine, I said to myself. I’ll cut down to two cups. And Julie said she’s fine making her own coffee in the morning. So we decided to keep the four-cup Mr. Coffee.
But wait, there’s more to this.
Last night I remembered something. We have a third spigot on our kitchen sink. We have the normal hot and cold, and a third one that dispenses even hotter water, for coffee and tea. And that spigot dispenses water at the perfect temperature for brewing with the Aeropress.
Except I remembered that a few weeks ago I accidentally splashed myself with the spigot and it didn’t hurt. And I said to myself at the time, that should have hurt more. I wonder if the spigot is set hot enough? And I promptly forgot.
I mentioned this to Julie last night and she said she runs the water a few seconds before filling the Aeropress. She waits until she sees steam coming up. I said I used to do that too – why on Earth did I stop? No idea.
So I decided to make myself one more Aeropress this morning before I try the Mr. Coffee tomorrow, just to have a proper baseline for comparison. I made a three-cup pressing this morning because I only got about five hours' sleep last night. I don’t know if I taste much difference in the flavor but it’s hotter than it has been, which I like.
I may make a two-cup batch in the Aeropress tomorrow, just to be comparing like amounts with the Aeropress and Mr. Coffee.
If you’re not nice to the barista, you’ll get decaf.
11 Behind-the-Counter Secrets of Baristas - Shaunacy Ferro at Mental Floss
I’ve been troubled by insomnia for months, but just last night I was thinking how glad I was that I hadn’t had a bout in weeks. Been sleeping soundly every night. Thank goodness for that, I thought last night.
You’ll totally guess what happened!
ME (grocery shopping while wearing mask, consults shopping list app on iPhone)
MY iPHONE’S FACIAL RECOGNITION: “Who the hell are you?”
repeat several dozen times