January 15

 Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Temperature is -8 and will not get out of single positive digits today. Not going anywhere. The Weather Channel has a reporter in Mississippi and they are also cold with snow/sleet.

Found on MSN this morning. Another power company's gas storage/transport operation failed over the weekend as the huge area it serves is suffering through brutal winter conditions. A couple of points interest me. First, the recognition that the U.S. has aging utility infrastructures. I put that last in plural because we don't have a single, unified system. Perhaps that is a good thing. Just imagine a nationwide outage rather than more local, though large, one. Second, though the Federal Government approved an expansion of the system no new infrastructure has been built because there is a battle over how the money should be spent. Some want more investment in so-called "green" technologies opposed to those who want an expansion of current infrastructure. In the mean time nothing at all gets done.

I found an interesting opinion piece on Boston Globe this morning. (No I don't subscribe but I do sometimes get such things and can sometimes read part of the article.) The piece "We are all plagiarists now" looks at the increasingly difficult problem of defining exactly what is plagiarism. The author cites another writer who tested a popular A.I. program for detecting plagiarism with one of his own articles. It resulted in a 7% probability that he had lifted some phrase from another author. He realized that he had never read the article in question which was posted on a site he had never visited. Then he checked out a passage from the Book of Job and found that God was a plagiarist. The program labeled as plagiarism future uses of the original material.

Green Prophet put out an article on how to tell "real" honey from processed or adulterated honey and explains why you should care. For years, since the first articles about "fake" honey appeared, we have bought honey from local sources. It costs a bit more but worth it. We do the same for maple syrup.

I am still digesting this post by Lambert Strether on Naked Capitalism. I can see about half and am doing my usual "yeeeees, but..." dance for the rest.

Evidently the COVID tests many people turn to if they suspect they might have the virus aren't as reliable as they once were. People test at the first appearance of symptoms and get a negative reading only to take a second test a few days later which comes back positive. The experts say that it is taking longer after infection for a person to test positive. Here is the link.