Some Blog Site

Some thoughts on the novel coronavirus AKA COVID-19.

• What happened to versions 1 through 18 of COVID? Is this like WD-40 where the first 39 versions didn’t work?
• Why is everyone stockpiling toilet paper for a respiratory disease? I’ll try to stay ahead of the game for the next disease outbreak, and if it has gastrointestinal symptoms then I’m going to stockpile Kleenex and Puffs Plus.
• I saw a news story on how restaurants are being affected because people with whatever symptoms were not being allowed to work. That should have been the case already. It seems that COVID-19 is making people behave (regarding personal health at least) the way they should have been anyway. I don’t want someone with a fever handling my food whether it’s coronavirus or the plain old flu.
• Restricting travel to control the spread of coronavirus is like inching your way into a cold pool. You know you’re eventually going to get wet, and all you’re doing is prolonging the inevitable. Ok, bad analogy – stop going into the pool instead.
• All the explanations about how much travel affects one’s carbon footprint were not really being heeded. A couple months of coronavirus has impacted people’s travel plans a lot more than years’ worth of global-warming policies and recommendations.
• I got a COVID-19 email from my bank. I thought the privacy notices were a waste, but if every company I do business with is going to send me not only privacy policies but also personal hygiene tips to avoid viruses, that will be an even bigger waste.
• Dear Politician, if you are going to enact a ban on public gatherings, you must also provide an exit strategy for the ban. Otherwise, I must conclude you are just making a power grab and taking advantage of fear and uncertainty. By “exit strategy” I mean how will we know when things are good again? You can’t ban public gathering and sporting events forever. So what is the indication? When you say so? I want an objective measurement instead.

My opinion, in case you’re wondering, is that our current reaction to the coronavirus is not sustainable. Business and travel must get back to normal eventually (although this has furthered my resolve never to go on a large cruise ship). The virus will spread and won’t be contained, and it will end up either being something everyone has to live with (like the existing cold and flu season) or enough people will get immunity and it will taper off.

My worry is that if this is how the country reacts to an easily-preventable and relatively mild disease, how bad is going to be if there’s something really bad? I can’t imagine the social and political disorder that something with worse symptoms or a higher mortality rate would bring.

And yes, I know the 19 from COVID-19 refers to the year 2019.

Also, I was going to make a image that showed 19 different crows and jays and ravens with the caption of Corvid-19, but several people have already done that so I skipped it.

The First Law of Bagels:
No matter where you start eating your bagel, the last bite will be the only part that was touching the garlic-onion bagel.

If someone brings in bagels to work, it’s usually in a bag and it’s the variety pack of bagels. I’ll pick something like a blueberry bagel, and it tastes nice and blueberry-y until the last bite. Obviously, my blueberry bagel has been resting against other bagels in its trip from the bagel store to out office. Most parts of my bagel had apparently been touching plain bagels, except there’s always that very fragrant (and whatever the word is for taste equivalent of fragrant) bagel in the bunch. And it’s taste is incompatible with that of the blueberry bagel.

Regardless of which part of the bagel I choose to eat first, the last bite is the one that has the most of the off-putting taste. I’d like to end my bagel-eating with just the flavor I chose, but it rarely works that way.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that no one really likes to go to the SOS (or the DMV for those of you who are not Michiganders – it’s the Secretary of State). And for many years that was true.

Then in our previous administration we got someone in charge of the SOS who actually made an improvement. She brought the SOS up to modern times by allowing people to get in line via their phones, and to get updates via phones.

No more waiting at the government building! Check in online, and you only needed to head over to the SOS when they sent you a text. I could spend those 3 hours in line at work doing something rather than sitting in a hard plastic chair doing nothing. It was the best thing the SOS office had done in my lifetime.

But what about the internet? Surely being able to renew things online was a much larger accomplishment? Nope, and here’s why: they let you do things online that you could already do by mail. So it’s just a faster way of doing things remotely, but those things were already available to do remotely. The internet didn’t really change the things for which you had to go to the branch office. The online check-in changes the branch office experience.

They’re trying to help by adding more self-serve kiosks in more places like local stores. But those kiosks also don’t do things that you can’t already do online or by mail. Having SOS kiosks in every store across Michigan won’t put a dent in the wait times at the SOS office.

What they need to do, in addition to being able to use one’s cell number to wait in line of course, is to expand the things that can be done online. Every so many years, your license plate becomes invalid and you need to go in to get a new plate, instead of renewing online. Why? No one knows. And there must be other things that can be added to the online services.

What happened to the MI-Timeline? Why can’t I check in online anymore for the SOS? Why does it take so long to get an appointment? Good questions, and I can’t answer them. But you can help change the answer by going to the change.org petition to bring back the check in line online option.

Why does God allow evil? Why does evil exist in the world?

Those are some questions that are a good combination of philosophy and theology.

I like to answer them with a different branch of study – physics.

The question of why evil exists is framed wrong, because evil does not exist – just like cold and dark do not exist.

“But!” you may protest, “I can see and feel darkness and coldness, so how can you say they don’t exist?”

Cold and dark are just the terms we have for lack of heat and lack of light. They do not actually exist as things in and of themselves. If they existed, you could produce them. No one can produce cold, and no one can produce dark.

If you could produce dark, you could make a flashdark that would “shine” a shadow wherever you pointed it.
If you could produce cold, you could make a refrigerator that would not have a heat byproduct.

Remember, refrigerators and air conditioners don’t make cold, they just transfer heat. That’s why the other side of it blows hot air – that’s the heat removed from the inside.

Also, if you could produce cold, there would be no absolute zero – you could always add more cold to make the temperature go down further.
There is also an absolute dark, with no light. But you can always add more light to make something brighter, and you can always add more heat to make something hotter.

That’s because light and heat are the things that do exist.

Evil doesn’t exist, it’s just the term we have for a lack of good. As a Christian, I would adjust that sentence to say “lack of God” because He is the source of goodness. If you disagree, then you’ll have to clarify where goodness comes from. If you don’t believe in God, then you should not be asking the question about evil because there is no fundamental right and wrong. “Evil” in that case can just be rephrased as “deviation from the cultural norms”.

Trying to find out what is causing the evil is like trying to find out what’s causing a room to be dark. There is no source of darkness; the solution is to bring in some light. If there’s too much evil somewhere, the solution is to bring in God.

Of course, the analogy breaks down at some point, so don’t take it too far. And this does not cover the discussion of “Why does God let bad things happen?”

I wrote this song for Detroit Lions fans, but there’s nothing in it that’s particular to Detroit. You could change the subtitle and the logo and apply it to any sports team that is inept.

That was not the whole song, but the ending part didn’t really have any changes. What else can you do with this:
Are you out there?
Do you know me?
Can you help me?
Can you show me?

Where are you going?
Don’t leave me alone
How do I follow you
Into the end zone?

Here are the full lyrics, in case you have trouble with the image:

I can hear you, but I won’t
Some strive for greatness, while others don’t
There’s a thousand reasons I should go about my game
And ignore your whispers which I wish would go away
oh oh oh

Where are you going?
Don’t leave me alone
How do I follow you
Into the end zone?

What is the point behind Title IX?

I know the original purpose of it – to prohibit discrimination in education. Not just athletics, but all aspects of education to ensure that girls get the same opportunities as boys. The public usually hears about it only with regard to athletics and scholarships for college though.

But in today’s society, there should be a conflict. More and more males are declaring themselves to be female and are allowed to compete against females.

I sense an opportunity for some college to test the waters of loophole.

For example, you may have heard of a college which has cut male scholarships because they need to maintain similar numbers in male and female scholarships, in order to comply with Title IX. What is to stop the college from persuading half the males to declare themselves female and thus eliminate the hassle of Title IX?

Do they even need to be female? What if they declare themselves to be non-male? Does that count? So many options nowadays.

The root of having different sports leagues/teams for men and women is that men and women are different in their physical development. Certainly there are outliers for specific accomplishments, but in general men are faster and stronger and better at whatever else makes up sporting events (as evidenced by the world/Olympic records for such events). If one is to argue that gender differences are cultural or societal and not biological, then one should also argue there should not be separate male and female sports. And one would also have to explain how such cultural limitations are worldwide and so consistent.

Also, if one agrees that we should now reconstruct the physical world to match what someone’s brain thinks it should be, rather than the other way around, does that mean psychiatry as a profession is on its way out?

Also also, bonus points goes to the university that attempts the aforementioned Title IX loophole if they also change their name from University to Diversity. Such as the Diversity of Minnesota or something.

Common knowledge says that before Columbus, people thought the world was flat. I think that’s a bad generalization.

Consider what the Bible says in Psalm 103:12 “As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.”

I have heard that explained a number of times as a good description of an infinite distance – no matter how far east you go, you’ll never be west. Unlike north and south – if you head north, eventually you end up going south, and vice-versa.

And that all makes sense, we can picture that on a globe.

Of course, like all analogies there is a weakness. If your sins go west and you go east, you’ll end up meeting when you circle around. But as far as your direction goes, if you go east you’ll always go east.

But that description and that explanation means that people in the Bible (that Psalm was probably written around 1000 BC, so 2500 years before Columbus) knew the earth was a globe and that north and south were the poles.

I think we need to give people of the past more credit. And the Bible too.