Winter 2021 computer catchup

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 28, 2021

When I last wrote about my computer, in October, I had just decided to put off reformatting the hard drive. That fairly radical step was recommended by an Apple Store technician, who had determined that certain mysterious software processes on my mid-2015 13-inch MacBook Pro were using up a big chunk of processing power. That seemed to be the reason why the machine was running extremely hot, a phenomenon that I first noticed in the spring.

My plan back in October was to wipe the hard drive when I was ready to upgrade from macOS 10.15, also known as macOS Catalina, to macOS 11. The newest Macintosh operating system, also called macOS Big Sur, was released in mid-November after having been announced in June.

Covid-19 diary: Part 25

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 27, 2021

There are clear signs that on a national level, the novel coronavirus pandemic is beginning to ease. This may largely be due to the fact that the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s holidays are behind us — holidays that, thanks to ill-advised celebrations, helped make December the month with the biggest number of new cases, with 6.4 million, and January the deadliest month, with 95,249 fatalities.

Now, however, we’re seeing currently strong indications of decline. Through the first 26 days of February, the United States averaged 88,064.6 new daily Covid-19 infections, far behind December 2020 (206,811.3), January 2021 (199,766.4) and even November 2020 (146,891.5). Average daily new deaths remain high, at 2,653.2, which is second only to January’s rate of 3,072.6. However, by Friday, Feb. 26, rolling week new daily Covid-19 deaths had fallen to 2,101.6, a drop of 37.3 percent from the all-time peak of 3,351.7 on Jan. 12.

Hospitalizations are down even farther: February has seen an average of 70,581.8 daily Covid-19 patients receiving treatment in facilities, which ranks fourth behind January 2021 (120,763.0), December 2020 (111,850.0) and November 2020 (72,297.8). As of Friday, hospitalizations stood at 51,116, having declined 60.2 percent from the high-water mark of 132,474 on Jan. 6.

Saying farewell to Lucky

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 26, 2021

My parent had the family dog euthanized on Thursday evening.

Lucky the yellow Labrador retriever was 13 years old. She was beautiful and sweet but aging. Heart trouble necessitated an overnight stay at the veterinarian’s office in April, and she was increasingly having difficulty using the stairs and jumping onto chairs and couches and beds. Part of the problem was that her paws had gone smooth, but she definitely had other issues. My parent and I both knew that Lucky might not reach her 14th birthday on Halloween.

I don’t know the details of yesterday’s events. My parent called me a little before 6 p.m. but didn’t leave a message. I didn’t see a notification about the call until after the fact; I was out walking, and the Bluetooth earbuds I was using had run out of power. When I got home around 6:15 or 6:20, I put my phone down and took a shower and got into clean clothes. I didn’t pick my phone up again until about 10 minutes to 7, when I saw that there had been multiple calls from my parent.

Isaac Asimov hops from one world to another in his boundary-challenging 1972 novel ‘The Gods Themselves’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 25, 2021

Although American author Isaac Asimov is one of the most prolific writers in history, he didn’t devote all of his time to writing science fiction. He published several nonfiction books on a variety of topics, including literature and science. Some of the latter volumes derived from the monthly science column that Asimov wrote for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1958 until 1991, the year before his death at age 72.

It may not be a coincidence that Asimov’s production of new fiction, especially novel-length works, slowed to a trickle in 1958. That was when the young-adult adventure novel Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn was published — by my count the author’s 21st (!!!) novel in only eight years. A number of reprints and anthologies followed, but Asimov’s next full-length work of fiction, Fantastic Voyage, wouldn’t appear until 1966. This was a movie novelization based on a script produced by four writers.

The author’s next fully original novel arrived six years later with the publication of The Gods Themselves in 1972. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy calls this a stand-alone volume, although I see no reason why the book wouldn’t work as a prequel to the Robots-Empire-Foundation universe that Asimov crafted throughout his career.

Short takes: ‘Projet-M’ and ‘5th Passenger’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 25, 2021

Eric Piccoli’s 2014 movie, Projet-M, centers on four astronauts who have volunteered to spend nearly three years aboard a Québécois Space Agency station in orbit around Earth. The goal of Projet-M is to prove that a crew can weather the travails of a voyage to Europa, the moon of Jupiter, where ambitious Québec science bureaucrats seem to hope to mine water for a crowded, resource-impoverished Earth of the near future. (The movie posits a time where the province has evidently gained independence from Canada.)

Vincent Kohler (Jean-Nicolas Verreault), the second person to set foot on Mars, is the cool and competent leader who holds the crew together. But while the other three may lack Kohler’s experience, they’re pretty solid themselves. True, the youngest two members, engineers Jonathan Laforest (Julien Deschamps Jolin) and Justine Roberval (Nadia Essadiqi), are a little hot-headed, and are also sleeping with each other, while science officer Andrea Sakedaris (Julie Perreault) has had an affair with Xavier Cozic (Ted Pluviose), the ground-based mission designer.

But everything is pretty much smooth sailing, even if the celebration gets a little out of hand after an automated probe relays word that fresh water has been found on Europa.

After journeying where no man had gone before, a Dutch expedition becomes stranded in the Arctic in Andrea Pitzer’s new history, ‘Icebound’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 24, 2021

Pity the sailors of the late 16th century. Although one’s latitude could be established somewhat easily by measuring the sun’s position at noon and comparing it to seasonal charts, there was no reliable way for those on the open sea to determine how far east or west they were relative to a fixed point.

This was, naturally, a handicap to would-be explorers. But it wasn’t the only challenge facing men like William Barents, a Dutchman who was determined to sail to China via a northern route. Like others before him who had contemplated polar travel, the navigator had determined that those who ventured far enough north would come to a temperate, sunny land. This jaunty misconception, paired with the fledgling Dutch nation’s desire to exploit trading opportunities in the Far East, helped Barents win funding for three different expeditions that sailed in 1594, 1595 and 1596.

Barents’ ships never reached China, in part because the hospitable Far North he envisioned was a fiction. Instead, the explorer and his compatriots encountered frigid waters that were choked with ice for much of the year. The hazardous region featured little on-land game but was stalked by polar bears. These speedy predators boasted thick fur, powerful muscles and heavy bones, making them resistant to the clumsy firearms of the era.

Vignette: Monday walk with temporarily stuck car

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 23, 2021

Author’s note: The initial version of this post placed the events depicted therein on Tuesday. I blame pandemic brain. MEM

Some fierce rainstorms lashed Durham on Monday, but the heaviest clouds moved on and the skies were clearing when I headed out in the afternoon to get some exercise. I walked north on Broad Street and crossed the Interstate 85 overpass before turning right. I cut through some residential roads and walked east on Leon Street, passing Brogden Middle School on my way to North Duke Street.

I missed the light and wound up walking backwards and forwards on the sidewalk until it changed again. There were cars to my left and a small cemetery to my right, but I didn’t see much of either because my glasses were fogging badly. I usually wear a KN95 mask when I walk for exercise in Durham — I typically wear cloth masks when I exercise by my parent’s house — and this was no exception.

(I have found that taping the top of masks to one’s face and/or using antifogging wipes help keep spectacles from getting misty. However, I don’t like taping and I want to preserve the wipes, which come 30 to a $10 pack, so on this afternoon I just suffered.)

I crossed Duke and turned right, going downhill until I got to Ruby Street, a residential road running parallel to the interstate’s north shore. Then I turned left and followed Ruby until it ended at Northgate Street. I turned left and then right again where Northgate T-boned Glendale Avenue. I traced Glendale east and south where it borders Northgate Park. I turned right again at Chamberlin, a short road that describes the northern bound of Club Elementary School, before taking another right where it terminated at the southern end of Northgate Street.

Short takes: ‘The Ministry for the Future,’ ‘Death’s End’ and ‘One by One’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 14, 2021

Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 publication, The Ministry for the Future, might be a science fiction novel. It has various characters who interact with each other and the world over a number of years from the early 2020s through the 2040s or so. The author describes his characters’ thoughts, conversations and actions. The people in the book battle with nature — or more to the point, a planetary ecosystem that has been badly affected by humanity’s late industrial period. The characters also come into conflict with other individuals and with society and the complicated mechanisms that it has instituted to prevent the upsetting of a status quo that favors the wealthy and powerful at the expense of most everything else.

In these ways, The Ministry for the Future very much satisfies the conventions of traditional long-form literary fiction. But Robinson’s book is also an environmental manifesto. It suggests a path that will lead us from where we stand today, on the brink of disastrous, irreversible climate change, to a sustainable future.

The book opens with a harrowing chapter in which a young American aid worker named Frank May experiences a heat wave in a small- to medium-sized city in India. A situation that is mildly worrisome one morning becomes extremely hazardous after the power fails.

Vignette: The fallen man

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 9, 2021

A bunch of snow got dumped on the Northeast from the night of Sunday, Jan. 31, through early Tuesday, Feb. 2. I was staying with my parent; at least a foot came down over the area. This was cause for a fair amount of shoveling, but my parent’s property was in pretty good shape by mid-day Tuesday.

That afternoon, I set out for an hour-long walk. As I was nearing my turnaround point, I came across something that vexed me.

My route took me to a T-intersection. Right where the two streets met, on the far side of the unevenly plowed asphalt, I saw a young boy running around a very snowy front yard and a less snowy driveway. The child was anywhere from 5 to 10 years old; I was too distant, and moving too quickly, to estimate his age more accurately than that.