Present Needs

 Recently while I was putting together pharmacology lectures, I decided that it would be cool to use Maslow's hierarchy of needs as a reference point for what need different pharmacological products were addressing. I still feel that this is a valid approach. It's helpful to explain how an antibiotic is different from an antidepressant. There was one class which I found to be problematic: analgesics, and, more specifically, opiates. One can't help but ponder whether or not pain is in fact, the fifth vital sign, or not. Historically, opiates were used for major surgery such as amputation up until the late 1800s. It's hard to even think of this type of operation without some form.of anesthesia or analgesics. 

The Trolling Test

 It seems appropriate that we adapt our expectations of conversational AI to the most salient problems of our current times. In this vein, I would say that the “trolling test” is the most appropriate test of a conversational AI bvo

bot’s. effectiveness. Instead of evaluating these programs in isolation, why not include a real=-world trial, making use of a public service such as Twitter?

Deep Tracks

 In the old days before the Internet, there was a sort of tyranny of mainstream entertainment which users today haven't yet experienced. Water cooler conversations would be limited to Seinfeld, which was a really good show, however, there were much worse ones such as Friends, and my point is, there just wasn't the option to go into depth on some other random form of entertainment which you had stumbled across since the 'other guy' would not have heard of it and would just walk away instead. That lead to a sort of lame public commons of media consumption, in which many people watched shows that they found mediocre, simply so that they could be prepared for such water cooler conversations, media references, and just generally being 'in the know'. There were, of course, always those folks who eschewed such pedestrian content and instead retreated into their 'deep tracks', consuming their own favorite media forms. They were the hipsters before the hipsters, also known as nerds, geeks, etc. Now there isn't any need because... there's a proverbial subreddit for that. How long will this 'golden age of television' last? With media companies getting bigger, have our butts been glued back into our couches once again? Are the laugh tracks coming back? Will deep tracks go back to being the domain of the esoteric once again?

COVID is over?

 That’s the official story, but what does it really mean? Well, it’s kind of like Game of Thrones— it’s not the ending we wanted, but at least it’s over… at least until the prequel comes out. 

Slow down

Who really knows where it’s all going? So far we aren’t even close to a million years, which makes us less than 1% as successful as the dinosaurs who we’re always using as a cautionary tale. If our civilization is truly winding to its end then what has it all meant? What will future archeologists think when they One Day dig up our bones? Well at least we made some interesting creations.

Turkey

I've never been a fan of this bird. I doubt I'm alone in this belief. I think I'm now at a point in my life where I can freely admit this with some amount of objectivity. It's an OK meat, but it just isn't that great. Chicken is genuinely a good meat. It can be quite flavorful and it picks up other flavors well. Turkey has it's own flavor. It's big. It's nostalgic, but it's always there.

Mongolia

 Recently the approach to History in the US educational system has been in the news. I think one important point has been missed here; the teaching of history has never been an exercise in adulation. It's absurd to think that the representation of a period or culture in a History curriculum is related to its current-day status. In fact, the opposite is often true. As a prime example, Mongolia is not currently a world superpower, but it once was. This is why we all learn about it in High School. The cultural influence from its brief period in the lime light continue to echo through to the present day and it's therefore thought to be an important subject for which people out to be generally familiar.

The Important Things

These days I find that it's hard to keep perspective on what's really important in the life of the average consumer. On one hand, we have a lot more stuff than I ever thought we would at this point in history, and a lot of it is pretty useful... and pretty cool! The Internet delivers communication and entertainment services, cell phones are amazing, Amazon delivers products for incredibly cheap prices and helpfully recommends knockoffs that are even cheaper. As consumers, we have access to more stuff of higher quality than we ever would have in the pre-Internet era. At the same time, we're losing some important things, including community, opportunity and privacy. The opportunity to go into business for yourself in your own local community may be closing, as large businesses gradually solve the problem of how to most efficiently extract money from communities on a global scale, leveraging economies of scale and subsidies from large investors. As we keep trading away more of our freedom, it's starting to become more apparent that this is a dubious bargain. You have to wonder what's going to be left when the next generation comes along, and whether they will even understand what they've missed.

Masks

I'm not letting the October go by without taking the opportunity to wear some spooky Haloween masks. I ordered a set from Amazon. Assuming we're still in quaranteen in November and beyond, I guess I'll just be 'that guy'.

We don't need any more Gs

Let's face it, we have too many Gs in our world these days. Wifi comes in 2G,5G and now 6G, which all refer to GHz. Phones come in 3G, 4G and now 5G, which refer to 'Generation'. If you work in the world of Genomics like me, then you end up dealing with Gigabases and, often, Gigabytes, which are yet more Gs. I think that IEEE needs to impose a worldwide moratorium on the use of Gs in technology names. It's getting to be a bit much. 

On a serious note, it's hard to find a legitimate need for 5G in the consumer market of 2021. Typical demonstrations feature a tech blogger standing next to a telephone pole, downloading a movie in just 1 minute over 5G. It's impressive and also pointless. I have never had a problem streaming movies over Netflix on my phone directly using 5MBPS of bandwidth. On the rare occasion that I actually need to download a movie or show to my phone because I anticipate some sort of (ironic) gap in the global blanket of Internet connectivity while I'm traveling, etc., I have no problem taking the 2 minutes+ required to do so. For more legitimate scenarios like conference calls, I also have no problem with using 4G or just dialing in using my good old fashion voice connection for audio. If someone like me has no need for 5G then why on earth would anyone else need it?

Why, also, would cell phone companies want to foist 5G on naive consumers, convincing them that they really need gigabit data connections on their phones (when most of us don't even have this at home)? I think the answer to this, as with most new technologies these days, probably has to do with consumer data collection. To greatly simplify things, 5G adoption will basically flatten the consumer Internet topology, which is currently complicated by the widespread use of things like WIFI access points, often employing NAT routing and causing consumers to annoyingly change their IP from time to time, making it more difficult for companies to continuously track them over time. In the future, there will be no need for such technologies as each one of our devices will be capable of directly connecting to the gigabit-delivering 5G access point on our corner, leaving a single, traceable identifier for each consumer device. We will gradually find our new TVs, tablets, laptops and phones bypassing our home networks entirely, routing traffic straight to our ISP, who will helpfully monitor our browsing habits through the uninterrupted high-resolution click stream from each of our devices to deliver the content (and, more importantly, ads) which we have shown ourselves to be interested in. This is the real value of 5G technology.