February 12

 The weather people predict another dry and mild day today but over next week they expect a return to more wintery conditions for a day going back to almost springlike weather.

This was the first article I saw this morning. It doesn't really surprise me that COVID is still hitting elderly people harder than other age groups. We still see masks everyone and then--usually on older people or younger ones who have some medical condition that makes them susceptible. COVID seems to be settlinig into a pattern similar to other respiratory diseases and affecting the elderly most. I just looked up the mortality rate by age for flu and pneumonia and they show the same pattern. If Medicare continues to cover the vaccine we will continue to get the updated boosters when we get the yearly flu shots.

Johns Hopkins is shutting down its COVID Tracker site. The virus is settling into a "new normal" and normal doesn't need to be tracked. I remember going to the site often during the height of the pandemic out of curiosity more than anything else. I made our own masks (double and then triple layer of tight woven cotton) early on. We got the initial sequence and the boosters since then. Since we don't rally like crowds we chose the time when we went out before COVID and continued the pattern after.

I wondered, while listening to the commentary covering the second unknown arial object and its downing, if these are new phenomena or if we simply hadn't noticed them before. A couple of the commenters asked the question but had no answers. Another cited an expert source (forgot who or if the source was named) that most of our detection systems are designed for fast objects like jet airplanes and missiles and so might have missed slow moving objects of any kind.

Naked Capitalism posted a piece on ChatGPT (and my extension its imitators and possible competitors). I have heard it mentioned on a couple of news discussions. That show focused on the concerns of educators who have to deal with students using the program to write their assignments. The story brought back memories of a year I spent teaching Western Civ at a community college. I gave a take home final which included an essay. As I graded one of the essays I had a moment of deja vu. I quickly found another essay I had read only a few minutes before and which had large identical segments. It didn't take me long on line to find the article the two used (and plagiarized) for their essay. I highlighted the passages on their essays and on copies of the original I attached when I returned the tests and gave them an F for the final. Luckily for them they had done well enough over the semester to pass the course though the head of the department suggested that I might not want to be that hard on them because I hadn't included anything on plagiarism in my syllabus. I hadn't thought that was necessary since this was college not grade school. The article I linked above covers other concerns: the use of intellectual property without the permission of the owner and without attribution, the inability of authors to protect their work, and the violation of privacy. The politicians world wide have been interested in reigning in and to varying extents controlling Big Tech.

UPDATE: the death tally in the Turkiye - Syria earthquake now stands a 32K. Closing in on the most lethal quake in recent history--1939. OOPS  34K now of which 28K are in Turkiye.

NBC News posted this story on our own "climate refugees." I will let you read most of the statistics. Just think--we had about 18 weather events that caused $1billion or more (sometimes much more). Total costs $165.5 billion or about .6% of the U.S. GDP. Also 3+ million displaced --12% for 6 months and 16% who didn't return to their former homes.