Daily Chit Chat Showing 1,501-1,550 of 1,626

[David]

Did you try the Queens Public Library? I have an out of state library card from them as well as Brooklyn

[Jim]

Thanks, David. That's exactly what I did. 10K more books for the same price, too. A few years ago when I looked, searches for out-of-state lending weren't very productive. This time I stumbled across a great article that listed a bunch here:
https://www.9thstreetbooks.com/how-to...

[David]

Thanks for the list, Jim. I'll be sorry to lose access to the Brooklyn Public Library when my card expires next year, as that library is by far the one I have used the most.

[Jim]

'tis the season for weird weather. In 2013 we had winds that were strong enough to knock over the wooden locker I built on the back porch. It weighs 300 lbs or so, but was slammed so hard against the house that it bounced off & fell on its face.

This year it's the cold. Yesterday hit a high of 48F degrees & this morning at 4am it was -1 degree with a couple of inches of very powdery snow. The high today is supposed to be 5F, but it warms up a bit after that. Single digits the next 2 nights, but around 20 during the day. By next Friday it’s looking like 60 for the high & 50 for the low that night. Mother Nature is off her meds!

[Rosemarie]

We're having weird weather in Canada too. There's a winter storm warning for later today but right now it's mild and raining. We had a horrible ice storm in 2013 the day after Christmas. I hope we get snow instead of ice, and not too much of it.
Do you get a lot of snow where you live, Jim?

[Jim]

We usually don't have much snow. We'll get a few inches, but it's usually gone in a few days, thankfully.

[Oleksandr]

Here in Ukraine, the weather is rather warm for a winter, right now +2 C (+36 F) in Kyiv, which is a great deterrent from rocket strikes - it is widely believed that the next massive launch will be when the temperature falls in order to cause havoc in infrastructure - most cities have centralized heating and preventing its operation can cause freezing of water and breaking of pipes. Finally something good from the global warming :)

[Rosemarie]

I hope it stays warm there!

[Oleksandr]

Rosemarie wrote: "I hope it stays warm there!"

Thanks!

[Leo]

stay safe, Oleksandr

[Bionic Jean]

And from me too!

[Oleksandr]

Bionic Jean wrote: "And from me too!"

Leo wrote: "stay safe, Oleksandr"

Thanks, I'll try

[Papaphilly]

Merry Christmas to all and may all be blessed this season with family, friends and good cheer.

[Rosemarie]

Thank you! And to you as well, Papaphilly!

[Jim]

If you use LastPass, you need to change all your passwords & might want to ditch it for another password manager. They really screwed up by not letting everyone know immediately about the severity & scope of this breach. Way back in August, they knew hackers got in & they mentioned it, but recently it's come out that their entire database was copied.

Wired did a good article explaining the mess & I heartily agree with the last paragraph.
https://www.wired.com/story/lastpass-...

[Jim]

Newspaper predictions from 1923 about what 2023 would be like.
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/02/114656...

Lots of flying cars & electricity beamed through the air, but also other interesting ideas. It's really interesting where they didn't think big enough.

[Oleksandr]

Jim wrote: "Newspaper predictions from 1923 about what 2023 would be like."

Interesting. A side note, from what I understand, trying to guess a century ahead is a relatively recent phenomenon, no 18th or first half of 19th-century newspapers played with it, while it was quite popular in the 1940s-50s

[Jim]

That is interesting, Oleksandr. I wonder if it was because technology wasn't seen as changing our lives so fast. That makes Twain's Yankee even more unique.

[Oleksandr]

Jim wrote: "That is interesting, Oleksandr. I wonder if it was because technology wasn't seen as changing our lives so fast. That makes Twain's Yankee even more unique."

I guess Yankee works partially in the tradition of adventure novels of the time, where daring white explorers meet 'savage' locals, showing them the superiority of tech

[Jim]

Oleksandr wrote: "I guess Yankee works parti..."

That's not my take on it at all. Hank just thought his tech was superior, but society wasn't ready for it so it was just chaotic & wound up failing. The book worked for me because it puts such things into perspective.

[Oleksandr]

Jim wrote: "That's not my take on it at all. Hank just thought his tech was superior, but society wasn't ready "

He hasn't really tried to spread the tech, more making laughs of Merlin and other charlatans. Yes, making stainless steel was beyond them, but the hygiene and a lot of other stuff weren't and he didn't really push to adopt it. I guess we can continue in the relevant thread, it was our monthly read recently

[Ed]

Jim wrote: "That is interesting, Oleksandr. I wonder if it was because technology wasn't seen as changing our lives so fast. That makes Twain's Yankee even more unique."

Yankee was 1899, thus second half of 19th century. People at that time were already starting to think the future would be different from their present. Olexsandr had said, and I think I agree, that this would be rare in the first half of 19th century.

[Jim]

MIT Technology Review released their annual list of 10 breakthrough technologies to watch for 2023. Some have been around a while such as CRISPR, but they're hitting new heights. Others, like AI art, are just emerging & are shaking up the world. It's really hard to imagine just how revolutionary some of these are going to be.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023...

[Jim]

A "current" canard (for about the past 30 years) uncritically tossed around, is that we live in a world of extreme technonological change. I assert that my grandmother, 1900-1970, saw far greater change than I, 1958-2023. Mere changes in communications and computing hold no candle to electric power, indoor plumbing, central-heating, antibiotics, mechanical transport (airplanes, automobiles), and an actual revolution in communications (radio and TV) not mere improvements

By 1923, all the above, except TV, sulfa, and pennicilin had been developed. "High-flying" predictions were the product of true innovation.

[Oleksandr]

Jim wrote: "A "current" canard (for about the past 30 years) uncritically tossed around, is that we live in a world of extreme technonological change."

I guess extremeness is a multifaceted thing, so hard to measure. Say, we in a decade have a new industry of phone apps, or a shift to paper to ebooks or audio affected me personally quite profoundly - I started reading English books buying them from ebay, but it was still very expensive. Now I just got a membership in a few US libraries and purchased almost no books

[Jim]

Jim wrote: "A "current" canard (for about the past 30 years) uncritically tossed around, is that we live in a world of extreme technonological change. I assert that my grandmother, 1900-1970, saw far greater c..."

You make a good point. Everything you listed were huge from a civilization level. We're about the same age & this was a point I made in the eulogy for one of my grandmothers, but I agree with Olkesandr that it's tough to measure. It's dependent on the lifestyle & many of the changes aren't really felt until decades later.

As late as the 1970s, we used to go weeks without electric which meant no running water & it was just a hassle, not really a big deal. We didn't have them in most of the barns, anyway. Their lack just added to the chore list, since we had the old systems in place: lanterns, buckets by the spring, & an old outhouse. I remember one grandmother saying how much they meant to her living in a walkup in Brooklyn, though. The place apparently devolved into a nasty mess very quickly.

The drugs you mentioned along with advances in sciences & transportation have changed the world dramatically simply because of the numbers of us living today. There were about 2 billion people in the 1920s, 3 billion in 1960, & about 8 billion today. A lot more of those folks are old, too.

Tech has fueled some of the social changes that really hit their stride in our time & shook the world. Women got the right to vote in our grandparents' time, but we got The Pill during ours, a much bigger deal IMO. Homosexuality changed from a shameful mental disease to normalcy. ('Normalcy' isn't the word I'm looking for, but it's early. It's not worthy of comment anymore while a lobotomy seemed like a reasonable solution about the time I was born.)

A disconnect from reality seems to be taking place now due to the flood of media & the ease of life. Kids don't get out & use their imaginations the way we used to. Too few get beat up doing slightly stupid things & grow up to be idiots who will eat a Tide Pod. People worry in herds about relatively minor issues blowing mole hills into mountains. I don't think there's enough hardship in life left so they have to manufacture it.

[Peter]

Huh. Plenty of hardship to go around in the poor 2/3 of the world! Although there, too, things have gotten a lot better. Unless you're a Uiyughr in western China, or a minority tribe in Burma/Myanmar, or an uppity woman in theocratic Iran or Saudi Arabia . . . The list goes on, and on, and on. Why people keep showing up at our southern border. And in fact, this country has a shortage of people willing to do hard "menial" work.

[Papaphilly]

Personally I think there only two inventions in the last 100 years that truly matter. The internet and the truly greatest invention, sliced bread. The internet is easy, the entire worlds information placed at a fingertip to anyone.

As for sliced bread, why do you think everything gets compared to it?...8^)

[Peter]

Papaphilly wrote: "Personally I think there only two inventions in the last 100 years that truly matter. The internet and the truly greatest invention, sliced bread. The internet is easy, the entire worlds informatio..."

Well, it's a little older than a century, but widespread use of electricity is right up there. As well as widespread use of automobiles, also about a century old. Commercial airliners a bit younger. So those might be my picks for the biggies of the past century.

[Steven]

Sliced bread? What’s so great about sliced bread? Well, I’m sure George Carlin would have something to say about sliced bread. As a matter of fact, he already did. You have a bread, slice it!

[Jim]

I've been working on our family genealogy. My paternal great grandfather started the project for that side of the family in the 1930s. He wrote it all down using a pencil in a composition book. He never completed it, but it was a really good start. I transcribed the book in the 1990s & an aunt on the maternal side gathered the info for the maternal side. I bought Family Tree Maker into which I put all the relevant info. (That software, version 4, still works on my Win 10 PC!)

I didn't keep updating it over the years, so I worked on that first & realized how much information had been lost when my paternal uncle passed in 2010 so now I've created some Word documents listing those folks I knew with anecdotes & pictures to flesh them out for later generations. It's taking a lot of time & showing some big gaps in my knowledge of the family which has been a good excuse to contact my cousins.

[Rosemarie]

My husband is really into genealogy-it's fascinating(for a while).
You need to have a good eye for details.
It's nice to have a good reason to contact family, Jim.

[Oleksandr]

Jim wrote: "I've been working on our family genealogy. ."

That's great! I've started recently digging in the matter as well. There have been several attempts before but they fizzled out due to different reasons. Sent DNA samples to MyHeritage and made a great leap with FamilySearch - just last year they put a lot of scanned church books from my region online, so I dug to 1800s by my father's side. I suggest checking FamilySearch if you haven't yet!

[Peter]

Good luck to all three of you!
My family has pretty good info on the heritage of my mother's side: they were (variably) prosperous French planters in early-day French Louisiana, from a family that continues to be semi-prominent in France. The Pochés. Not that they are well known or anything. One of my sisters casually looked up some Pochés while visiting France; none she met knew anything about the New World family branch. My mother's mother married a German. It didn't work out.

My Dad's family, poor dirt farmers in SC and then north Louisiana, we know little about. But my same genealogist sister just came across a pamphlet put together by a Tillman great-aunt. She's copying it and sending out copies. Perhaps this will confirm the rumored Cherokee ancestor from the SC days? I'm guessing not, as Indians were very much looked down on in the old days.

Incidentally, I grew up in Oklahoma, so I knew some enrolled Cherokees. Not including me or Elizabeth 'Pocahontas' Warren! All of my acquaintances could pass for standard White Americans. Which was their idea then, to keep their culture and land by intermarrying and blending in. Didn't work, sadly, between the implacable Pres. Jackson and greedy local Anglos. Sad chapter in American history! Oklahoma ended up better off....

[Jim]

It's great that more of the old genealogical info is going on line & that people are sharing their family trees. It's made for some interesting conversations for me over the years. Back when I started this, the LDS was the main source. I'm not too interested in taking our trees back any further, though. It's a lot of work for some information that's fairly meaningless to me.

It's interesting how uneven my knowledge of our family history is. One branch of my wife's family, Coe, has been traced back to the 1300s in England while her mother's paternity is questionable. Marg's mother was the only brown-eyed brunette in a blue-eyed, blond family of Swedes. Apparently about 15% of us don't have the fathers we think we do & that statistic holds steady across numerous cultures & times.

I won't be taking any genetic tests like 23&Me since it varies in reliability, especially in the interpretation of the results. Also, we don't have decent consumer protection laws in place. The data is shared & sold all over the place which could be bad in the future. For instance, insurance companies in the future might mine my genome to raise the health or life insurance rates of my progeny. Of course, some of the sharing is good since it's feeding meta studies. Some of those are quite good & I could see that outweighing my objections. The trouble is, there's just no reliable way to tell where the data is going.

[Oleksandr]

to the 1300s?! Quite solid, my deepest so far to the 1780s and even there it is questionable - the person with the same name migrated to the region my later ancestor appears, but the name is common and the surname less so but far from unique. My other roots are to the early 1900s, no deeper so far.

I know the dangers of supplying genetic info, but I decided that it isn't such a problem in my case due to a number of reasons

[Jim]

Oleksandr wrote: "to the 1300s?! Quite solid, my deepest so far to the 1780s and even there it is questionable - the person with the same name migrated to the region my later ancestor appears, but the name is common..."

Apparently a Coe that landed in NY was some sort of influential Puritan, so the pros went after his ancestors & wrote a book about it. My wife's grandfather was a direct descendent of his. And it does get murky in the 1300s since surnames were a new thing then. There are either 2 or 3 guys in that century. If 3, one would have had to be about 13 when he fathered a child.

Most of my tree peters out in the 1800s. There's a MacLachlan that we don't know the first name of in the 1790s. We know the wife's name & that they got married, but no one has managed to get past that.

Anyway, it's fairly meaningless to me. I don't feel any connection to folks that far away in time.

[Oleksandr]

Jim wrote: "Anyway, it's fairly meaningless to me. I don't feel any connection to folks that far away in time..."

I don't feel a deep connection as well but these records are of great interest as glimpses of rural [so far all my 19th-century ancestors are] like that they often re-married within a year and quite often less if their partner died - it wasn't about love, but keeping the family with lots of underage kids

[Peter]

Jim wrote:
"Apparently about 15% of us don't have the fathers we think we do & that statistic holds steady across numerous cultures & times."

Interesting. My youngest sister, who looks quite different from the rest of us (the only blonde), always joked about that possibility. She was born at a time when my Dad was traveling a lot for work. Maybe Mom got lonely?

[Oleksandr]

Peter wrote: "Jim wrote:
"Apparently about 15% of us don't have the fathers we think we do & that statistic holds steady across numerous cultures & times."

Interesting. "

While I don't dispute the figure - after all even Chimpanzees as researchers found out have much more diverse parenthood than their strict hierarchy suggests. However, I assume that quite different offspring can be just from a random combination of genes of the same two parents

[Ed]

Jim wrote: "... Anyway, it's fairly meaningless to me. I don't feel any connection to folks that far away in time ..."

Same here. It is interesting in a way, but that is all.

We have some pretty solid evidence of ancestors in the US before the 1700s. That was a surprise.

There are some trees from relatives that link back much further, but I don't trust them. That relies on every one of the parent relationships being determined correctly, which seems unlikely over large times.

Anyhow, there are some interesting things. There is a y-dna study for people with my last name. (Surprisingly, one of the largest such studies.) And it firmly reveals that I really do have the expected Y chromosome.

Comparing my DNA to people living in various countries shows that almost 100% comes from one single country. My ancestors didn't like to mix it up, apparently.

One of my ancestors in the early US had, at the time of his death, 92 known descendants.

My sister likes to track family backwards and forwards. So she tries to keep track of 10th cousins 20 times removed, etc. I see no point. Everyone is related at some level.

When I signed up for Ancetry dot com (five or more years ago?) I started with just my parents and grandparents names and filled in quite a bit by myself. That caused someone from the company to call me personally to get my story. Maybe they wanted to use me for advertising? If so, they were disappointed to learn that I didn't really care about the results, and anyway my sister already had some handed-down trees.

[Ed]

One interesting thing was looking at old census reports. It is interesting how the questions they asked changed over the years.

[Jim]

Oleksandr wrote: "...However, I assume that quite different offspring can be just from a random combination of genes of the same two parents"

I don't understand all the science behind the 15% figure of cuckolded male parents, but I believe it is solid. In the case of my mother-in-law, there's no way blond, blue-eyed parents can have a baby with brown hair & eyes. They just don't have the genes for it & mutations to account for it are highly unlikely. She did a lot of work with the black community & an affair would easily account for her looks, though.

One genetic study was done using Jewish records, but they were suddenly cut off when this data emerged. Apparently it has a big impact on their politics, family relations, & such. Their attitude explains some of the extreme measures our ancestors took to insure paternity.

Interesting stuff, Ed. I don't suppose those tests also do the female equivalent, mitochondrial DNA testing, do they?

[Ed]

X chromosome from mother gets mixed up so a woman gets half from mother and half from father. So it doesn't work the same as chr Y testing which is direct from father.

Mitochondrial DNA comes direct from mother (in almost all cases) but it evolves slowly so lots of people have very similar chr M.

[Ed]

I lost internet for about an hour. I was *terrified* I might have to live without it all night!

[Peter]

Ed wrote: "I lost internet for about an hour. I was *terrified* I might have to live without it all night!"

Heh. We were without internet for a full 24 hours, and even lost our cell-phone service for several hours, during one of out big winter storms a couple weeks ago. No phone or internet with active flood warnings was scary! Why dropping the land line might not have been the best idea. Of course a tree can still fall on the lines....
Amazingly, for that storm the electric stayed on for all but a few minutes! Major blessing. Gets cold pretty fast with no heat! But plenty of good books on hand, and we're on high ground, so no worries. Lots of fallen crap to pick up -- even more as the spring windstorms move into high gear!

LOTS of storm damage to roads etc. still to repair! Even our branch library was closed for a week when a dormant mud slide started moving their way. Bummer. Calif coastal life in/near the mountains gets *interesting* in the wet years! Good flowers starting. I'd link one but, you know, "protection of our members." Feh.

[Jim]

Ed wrote: "X chromosome from mother gets mixed up so a woman gets half from mother and half from father. So it doesn't work the same as chr Y testing which is direct from father.

Mitochondrial DNA comes dire..."

I know. Mitochondria only have a few dozen genes. That's why I phrased the question the way I did. So I take it the answer is "no".

Your assertion about relations farther back in time is well taken. I keep seeing people being amazed by the proliferation of Genghis Kahn's DNA or how many are related to European royalty. I think Dawkins covers that in one of his books & shows how likely it really is & why.

[Rosemarie]

Our landline used to work when the power went out, but not any more. We still have it since it's a lot easier than depending on cell phones and having just one number where we both can be reached.

[Jim]

AIs are now narrating audiobooks.
https://www.digitaljournal.com/life/a...

That's really bad news for narrators & consumers will miss some great performances. At least in the short term, no AI is going to be able to match the best human narrator. On the bright side, even more books will be available in audio. It probably won't be long before people will be able to create their own audiobooks on demand.

I've been a fan of audiobooks since I listened to them on LP. There were very few with almost no portability. Cassette tapes were a big step forward, although there were some serious problems with them. They were too expensive to buy, so I'd get them from the library. Those could be dirty & might get sucked into the tape deck, both would stop all listening for that drive. Getting the right side inserted while driving could be an issue & the number of tapes could be daunting. Titles were still very limited.

The digital age has been a real boon. I couldn't listen to many of Librivox's early recordings, but now many are of professional quality. Library remote lending is fantastic & a LOT more titles are available. Still, I have a lot of text files I'd like to listen to. I'd really appreciate being able to turn some of the longer magazine articles into audiobooks.

Being able to tune the narrator would be great. Generally, I like listening to deeper voiced narrators. I can hear them better & find them more soothing. The ability to have male & female narration for characters would be great, too. Otherwise excellent narration is often almost ruined by voicing the opposite sex.

[Oleksandr]

I've used text-to-voice software before the current AI craze and I definitely prefer human narrators. Maybe because I listen at 1.5x - 2x speeds it is a world of difference