Missing Connection

As I was going to be away from home on business and there was a major snowstorm in the forecast, my wife wanted to make sure she had all the backups she needed. We long ago put in a generator that covers us when the power goes out, meaning water from our well and lights for our rooms are covered. We had also installed an extender for our mobile phones linked to the internet, as we live in a fringy cell zone. We had plenty of oil in the tank for heat and hot water. And our shelves had lots of food of all types. Other than being prevented from getting out, some bad weather would be more of an inconvenience than anything else. 

Indeed, when the snow came it proved to be just that. Our usual guy plowed her out, and she shoveled the walks. The power did wink on and off, but never enough for the genny to kick in. We kept in touch and talked about any other adjustments she had to make, the biggest being whether to turn on the wires that line the roof edge so the gutters didn't freeze up. Then I got a text from her that seemed strange: the power had gone on and off, but the phones hadn't come back on. We've had this happen many times, but it always came back after a short spell. I assumed she was being an alarmist. Give it a minute, I wrote back, it'll reset like always. Nope, she wrote back, I know the drill, it has happened before, and this is different. All has been out for more than 15 minutes, well beyond the normal timeframe. Phone is out, TV is out, internet is out. Fifteen long minutes.

I tapped into our account from my hotel, and had the system run a test. It came up blank: no connection to our system. I tried a few more diagnostics. Dead end. After a few more pings, it appeared that the power fluctuations had fried our system, and a technician would have to come out and repair it. First appointment: two days later.

Like many over the past few years we have slowly linked more and more of our infrastructure to the internet. Our phone lines had long ago migrated from copper wires to IP (internet protocol) systems. Our entertainment, both TV and radio, had gone from rabbit ears and transistor radios to streaming services for video and audio. And of course our connection to what used to be called the World Wide Web had become a daily, if not hourly, if not moment-by-moment source for shopping, communication, business, social interaction... the list goes on. The fiber that ran from the box outside our dining room to the central station was quite literally our link to everything outside our home.

The good news was that my wife was in no danger. She had heat, water, lights and food. She had books, crossword puzzles and a daily newspaper to read. Once the roads got plowed she was able to go to meetings, stores and other activities. The world kept spinning, and she was still a part of it.

But as I said, we live in a fringy cell phone area. That meant that when in our house her cell phone, her only connection beyond our four walls, only worked in some parts, while others were dead zones. And not just for streaming or googling or cruising the net, but for calls and texts. Especially at night, when there was no one (namely me) to chat with, if she was in one of those areas, she was as cut off as if she was on a desert island. Nothing to watch, nothing to listen to, no one to talk with. Let me be clear: my wife is very competent and capable. But she will say that you don't know just how dependent you get until you are cut off from it all. And in this case "all" was really "all."  

Thankfully, the tech showed up as scheduled two days later. There was a brief moment of concern when he looked at the system we had and, because of its age, wasn't sure he could fix it. He got on the phone and reached out to some fellow repairmen, and figured out a solution. It took more than an hour, but eventually all was reconnected, tested and working as it should. (Side note: In the "what about me?" department I was VERY happy that HE was indeed needed, and it wasn't something that I could have fixed simply by unplugging a cord and plugging it back in. Then I would have felt even worse that she had to deal with this alone.)

Yes, we are once again connected, but my wife's experience showed that it is both a blessing and a curse. It enables us to reach far beyond our physical borders with an ease that is unimaginable. But it is a fragile thread that, if severed, isolates us as never before. And unfortunately, not that we want to, there is no putting that genie back in the bottle.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is trying to figure out backups for his backups. His column appears weekly via email and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/ and https://marcwollin.substack.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

What Did You Call Me?

 Have a kid, and you can name it whatever you want. Bill? Jaden? Bugsy? Cleopatra? No one is going to tell you not to, though some may gently (or perhaps more assertively) prod you if you try for something more creative or more associative or more, well, off the mainstream. One wonders if Mrs. Knowles was told, "Well, sure, Beyoncé SOUNDS cool, but won't the other kids make fun of her? Did you consider Belinda? It starts with 'B' also." Mom held her ground, and the rest is history.

Those same concerns don't exist if you name a pet, be it a cat or a goldfish or a lizard. In that case, you can call it anything you want because there's no peer pressure nor downside risk in its development. Whether your pooch is called Spot or Milo or Badger, or your bird is known as Tweety or Buttercup or Hootie, its life will be just fine. No one implies anything from its moniker, and even if they do, who cares?

While the same freedom exists for inanimate objects, there is a little more caution. When naming a hurricane, forecasters steer clear of names from prior killer storms. Consumer products, be they cars or phones, are based mostly on marketing considerations, selecting ID's that elicit positive reactions in the given group. A Ford Mustang sounds like it goes fast, and a Samsung Galaxy sounds like it connects you to the world. That said, if you wanted to call the car the Hypermobile or Sally, or the phone the Whizbanger or Tyrone, no one would stop you. You might be laughed at, but that's your problem.

Then there're drugs. It's especially noticeable these days as we are awash in ads for a whole new class of pharmaceuticals that are aimed at weight loss. Unlike other products, the names of those compounds have to follow very strict guidelines. Two different organizations have to weigh in (no pun intended) and approve the names of the underlying generic - the United States Adopted Names (USAN) Council and the World Health Organization (WHO) INN Programme. The goal is that regardless of where someone is located, patients and health care professionals will be able to safely communicate about the medications in question.

In the process a number of rules must be followed. There must be two syllables in the beginning, so that it's easier to tell one from another. Certain letters have to be avoided, as they don't exist in every alphabet. You also can't use marketing terminology (best, fast, strong) nor medical terms, so that it doesn't imply that a drug is only associated with one condition. All of that cuts out names like SkinnyEstU or Size-4-Ever or WowzaWaist.

Once the cut is made on the generic side, a company can come up with their own brand name to sell under their label. Again they have to factor in intrinsic meaning and linguistics and trademarks. But it's also about market research and focus groups and emotional hooks and connections. They start with hundreds of possibilities and winnow that list down until they have a winner. 

With all the restrictions in place, that usually means that the word they come up for a name isn't really a word at all. It's more about onomatopoeia, where the sound of the word itself creates the impression they are trying to achieve. For example, the name of the ED med Viagra is meant to imply virality, while the name of the sleeping pill Restoril is meant to convey restoration. 

Which makes you wonder about Ozempic and Saxenda and their brethren. Copyrightable? Sure. Conforms to the rules and regulations? Absolutely. But convey positive associations? Questionable at best. At least to me, Mounjaro brings to mind a very big hill in the Alps, not the image one would think of as positive for one looking to decrease their size. Wegovy sounds like a sixties-era psychedelic compound. Some observers have offered up that one of the newest, Zepbound, sounds like an off-brand bus line, a 70's cover band or even an intergalactic pogo stick. 

Shakespeare invented numerous words, such as bedroom, invitation and fashionable, which were likely strange to the locals at first, but eventually become commonplace. In that same vein, thermos, velcro and even google were unique when introduced, but have since won widespread acceptance and gone beyond product names to become part of our everyday speech. Only time will tell if after some future Thanksgiving dinner you say, "Wow, I ate too much. Gotta go on an ozempic tomorrow." 

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Marc Wollin of Bedford wonders why people in commercials taking prescriptions seem to be having so much fun. His column appears weekly via email and online at substack.com, http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

South of the Border

When we were looking for a place to escape for a week in January, the suggestions came from all corners. Caribbean! Always nice, but we're not really beach people. Europe! Always interesting, but we wanted some warmth, and were unlikely to find that over there. Florida! Always, uh, what? At the risk of offending too many friends and acquaintances there, let's just move on.

Our wish list for a getaway was as it always was. We like to tour, see museums and shops, be able to walk and explore, eat in great restaurants with interesting food, and hopefully do it without too many crowds.  Rather than spend most of our time traveling, we enjoy setting up shop in a central place, taking day trips out as opposed to packing up and moving every night or two. And it had to be someplace accessible on our own: nothing against a tour, but we like to plan our own wanderings and set our own schedule as much as we can.

Our kids, who are experienced travelers, had suggested other places they have been that they thought fit the bill. That's how we wound up in Berlin a few years ago, and it didn't disappoint. So when they encouraged us to head to Mexico City, we did some homework. It checked all our boxes, though when we mentioned the possibility to others, the caution flags went up. "Dangerous" some said. "Polluted" was another refrain. And of course "stomach issues" was a not uncommon reaction. We appreciated the feedback and considered it all. But in the end, we waved aside those well-meaning concerns, and booked a flight to Ciudad de México, or as it's known, CDMX. And we were very glad we did.

More populous than New York, more area than Delhi, more elevation than Denver, Mexico City is a huge sprawling urban landscape with all the trappings of that wherever you are in the world. Depending on where you are standing, it is old and new, dense and spacious, dangerous and safe, serene and exhilarating, exciting and boring, often at the same. As with any city, your impressions are of your own making, and we made the most of it.

By some counts a city with more museums than Paris, there is art and culture everywhere, if not spread out. The Museo Soumaya is reminiscent of the Guggenheim with a collection that spans continents and centuries, while the National Museum of Anthropology is exhaustive in its showcasing of the Maya and Aztec cultures. There are extensive ruins and breathtaking pyramids, soaring architecture and classic buildings. On a smaller scale are spaces dedicated to the works of such well-known names as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, while homes and spaces designed by architect Luis Barragán are intimate and elegant. 

Go on a weekend, and the market scene is overwhelming. There are established ones that run every day, but it seems as though Saturday and Sunday multiply those exponentially. Every other street or park has an art show or farmers market or souvenir stand set up. And if you go to neighborhoods like Coyoacán you can walk in and out of stalls and displays for hours on end.

Food? It seems as though there are stalls on every corner. Some are beyond tiny, no more than a basket on a bike. Others are more established with umbrellas and tables. While foreign stomachs should proceed with caution, locals obviously tolerate it better than gringos, as evidenced by the fact that almost every vendor has some customers, and many have lines down the block. That said, when a cart on a street corner in Roma Norte has so many customers and such a reputation that Conde Nast Traveler has a review of "Jenni the Quesadilla Lady," you can probably roll the dice with some confidence. We did and it was delicious.

While the street food is ubiquitous, the fine dining options are also impressive. With spaces, menus and prices that would be right at home in Brooklyn or Tribeca, these places generally marry other cuisines with Mexican staples and spices. And so you get Entremar with its butterflied snapper painted with red and green chillies, Rosetta with its white mole with fermented carrots, and Meroma with its orecchiette with chillies. The guava pastry at Panadería Rosetta may be as good as any in Paris. And it was my wife who researched the five best ice cream places in town, resulting in stops for the cinnamon roll helado at Casa Morganna, as well as the chocolate mint at Cometa. Twice. 

Beyond that, the people were friendly, the weather perfect and landscapes varied. Lots of parks and fountains, so much so that one of our favorite pastimes was just sitting and people watching. In our travels we found one street that looked like a modern business center, another an old colonial town, another a bohemian neighborhood. The Condesa neighborhood where we stayed was green and leafy and filled with people walking dogs, jogging, shopping and eating well into the evening. It was perhaps one of the nicest urban neighborhoods we've ever been in.

Of course, every city has its issues, and CDMX is no exception. But if you treat it with the smarts that come with touring any strange place, you will likely not just be fine, but uncover a few gems as well. When we returned, a friend who was from CDMX asked to see my pictures and hear the highlights. I shared them, as well some of the places and restaurants we had been it. While he enjoyed it all, his final comment was the most telling, "Thank you for being interested in the best parts of our country and culture... because it's not normally that way!" Most of grew up assimilating a very Euro-centric focus. This was a reminder that there is a very cosmopolitan destination not across the sea, but just south of the border.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford loves to see new places. His column appears weekly via email and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

I Am He

I have not checked off a box that affirms I am not a robot. I have not picked out which photos contain buses. I have not read and retyped a sequence of squiggly letters. And yet, because of two obscure statistical measures, you can rest assured that this is me. That's because according to an analysis of this writing, and let me quote here so I get it right, "There is a 0% probability this text was entirely written by AI. This text is most likely to be written by a human." And that be me.

One of the great challenges of our times is and will be determining what is real and what is not. It used to be fairly easy, as the underlying systems to generate text, pictures and speech were not that sophisticated, and fakes were obvious. It was like justice and innocence: we presumed it was human generated until proven otherwise. But with the advent of generative artificial intelligence and the popularization and easy access to tools like ChatGPT and Bard, the balance has shifted. While you assume that what you are seeing is real, you now generally look at everything with at least a healthy dose of suspicion.

The question becomes how to determine what is created by machines versus by people. Researchers are working on ways of validating the end product, enabling viewers to verify that an actual person was the creator, and that what they are presenting is real as opposed to manufactured. For sure that will become more of an issue in the future as the systems get more powerful and the fakes get better. But at least for now, there are a number of "tells" that give away the answer if you are willing to look. 

With pictures, there are several. If you look closely, you will likely see little artifacts: a misshapen ear, an odd arrangement of hair, a strange reflection. That's because the composites are created by taking segments of unrelated images and recombining them, and it's not always so seamless. Backgrounds can be blurry, but so blurry that when you look closely you see they really are not comprised of anything other than shapes and colors. And because real life is filled with imperfections, anything that looks too smooth is likely to be fake, or just a Kardashian.

With writing there are similar tests. The two markers that pop up used to be obscure statistical measurements, but have been repurposed to tell a real Hemingway from a fake Ernest. The first, called perplexity, is "a measure of uncertainty in the value of a sample from a discrete probability distribution." In plain speak, that means how likely are you to be able to guess the next word in a sentence. A low incidence indicates it might be more machine generated vs by a person. And then there's burstiness, which is defined as "the intermittent increases and decreases in activity or frequency of an event." In terms of writing, it means using or not using a word or term in "bursts." Humans generally do it, machines generally do not. 

For both pictures and words, detection programs exist to help screen for the aforementioned anomalies. Drop an image into AIorNot.com, and it will render a judgment as to real or fake. Run your text through GPTZero, and it will analyze it and give you a thumbs up or down as to machine or human. As an experiment, I ran several recent columns through the program, and got the reported results. It's worth noting that while a number of the metrics it calculated for my stuff were very middle of the road, my burstiness measure, on a scale of 0 to 100, was between 250 and 400. Ain't no machine gonna wield words like this human, for better or worse.

And so I come to you as flesh and blood, and I have the data to back me up. That said, there is a caveat. Remember the second part of that initial analysis? "This text is most likely to be written by a human." A little hedging going on there. After all, as has been noted elsewhere, the odds of being murdered by a chicken are extremely low, but never zero. So note that qualifier "most likely." However you can rest assured that, like the Beatles sang, I am he. You'll just have to trust me on this one.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford swears he writes every word herein himself. His column appears weekly via email and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.