An Institute of Learning

I had forgotten, until it happened, that Monday was actually a pretty important day in local news: the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is under new ownership. Six months ago, the National Labor Relations Board found that the family company that owned the paper had bargained in bad faith over the terms of employees' health insurance. The union that had been on strike for three years went back to work. Ownership's response to the decision was to announce the closing of the paper for May. (To me this felt classically like the rich kid grabbing up his toys and storming home because he can't stand having to play nicely with others.) Well, the idea of a metro area the size of Pittsburgh not having a daily newspaper was horrifying all around, but there didn't seem to be any obvious answer to that problem. Finally, just last month, it was announced that the Post-Gazette would be sold almost entirely intact to a non-profit organization out of Baltimore that started a newspaper there a couple of years ago.

With Monday as the official change-over date, I found afterwards that Sunday's opinion section was largely given over to farewell messages from the outgoing editorial staff (viz. the editorial board collectively and Brandon McGinley, Adriana Ramirez, and David Shribman individually). It seems that this new Venetoulis Institute, as a non-profit, neither endorses candidates for office nor advocates for policy positions. The first part of this I understand as standard procedure for a 501(c)(3) organization, but the second half seems to go needlessly far. I donate monthly to quite a number of non-profits that advocate for policy positions all the time: it's exactly why I donate to them. A major newspaper that doesn't carefully weigh in on important public topics is missing part of its job.

Except that the Post-Gazette is still apparently going to have opinion columnists, just not off in their own section of the paper...? Here's Brandon McGinley again, datelined Monday itself, announcing the start of a new series that promises to provide political commentary and policy analysis, ha ha. So perhaps we're going to be OK after all. Either way, I'm really glad that I don't have to cancel my subscription or find another main source of local news. Having the PG operated by a journalism-specific non-profit is worlds better than having the paper sold to unfeeling private equity or a profit-squeezing billionaire — or, you know, shut down altogether! I hope it lasts and does really well.

The other roller coaster we've been on recently has been the weather. We're definitely getting April and May out of order. Last month was the warmest April we've ever had on record in Pittsburgh. I find eight or nine days (i.e. 30 percent of them) in the official data where the high temperature exceeded the 90th percentile for the day. But this summer-like warmth has been interspersed with notable frosts and freezes, especially away from the heat of the city, and this month we're looking at a seriously colder than normal trend. The airport shows two days in April and (so far) four out of eight in May when the overnight low fell below the 10th percentile.

Apparently this pattern is wreaking havoc with fruit crops all over the state, not to mention my own yardwork and that pesky little weather station that I keep behind my right eye. Every time I think I should be hardening off my tomato seedlings to plant out in the garden, I find idiotic temperatures like 2°C creeping around our upcoming forecast. Nothing's growing. Nor have I been able to make good progress on my several other outdoor projects, thanks to the combination of cold and rain and other work to do. The last straw was when I had a double-dip migraine during the first part of the week, which effectively kept me from wanting to do anything at all. Perhaps that's also playing into my sense of overall lethargy, though, that goes beyond the weather. We'll get to that next time.

Here's a fun little Pittsburgh weather factoid. Around 7 p.m. on New Year's Day, the temperature fell below 0°C; it hasn't been above since. I mention this now, 10 days later, because it's just possible that our streak ends tomorrow: the current forecast is for exactly 0°, with 2° to follow for Monday. For me this sub-zero stretch is reassuring more than anything else, since it's supposed to be cold during the middle of winter. The season is much easier to enjoy when it's not bouncing all around like a crazed superball. On the other hand, a quick check of the data also reveals that this kind of persistent freezing is actually not all that common. Since I've lived in Pittsburgh, we've had a 10-day stretch of below-zero temperatures on only six other occasions:

• Jan. 20 to 30, 2022 — I called it "properly snowy again" on the 24th.


• Dec. 25, 2017, to Jan. 7, 2018 — Well-remembered in my mind now, and well-documented at the time, as the 12 Days of Freezing (actually 14).


• Jan. 5 to 14, 2011 — Looks like I was too absorbed by my upcoming thesis proposal to make any specific weather-related comment.


• Dec. 13 to 28, 2010 — Ditto: my mind was full of the thesis proposal and holiday travel during this longest cold stretch.


• Jan. 2 to 13, 2010 — Five of us "braved the frozen slopes of Pittsburgh" for a snow- and icicle-filled urban hike on the 10th.


• Jan. 29 to Feb. 11, 2007 — "That just means it won't melt on the way home," "The weather has been the topic of conversation around here for the past few days," and "Yesterday it was above freezing for the first time in more than a week, and it felt like spring."

Check this space in January 2028 or 2029 for the next installation, I guess!

The weather news out of Los Angeles this week is much less amusing. I've been astonished by the pictures and videos appearing in The New York Times for the past several days. Such incredible destruction almost defies feeling — these are scenes we've come to associate more with places like Basra or Aleppo or Dnipro or Gaza than with a major American cosmopolitan city. I myself have hiked in the hills of Griffith Park and sat on the beach at Santa Monica, not too far from the scenes of the Sunset and Palisades fires. As an intellectual comparison of scale, The Times says the total area burned is now larger than the city limits of San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Boston, or Miami. But I'm finding the images of even one neighborhood or one property totally reduced to ashes much more striking.

Long delayed, but it's finally here! In this post we're going to re-visit the LABSE embeddings (i.e. mappings into some high-dimensional "semantic" space) that I created for each of this journal's 64,000 or so sentences. Last time, we tried exploring the embedding space a bit by picking out random sentences and looking at the other sentences closest by. Today, a natural extension to that line of thinking: let's cluster the whole set of sentences and see what kind of higher-level groups emerge.

( Setup and procedure )

( Example clusters )

( Analysis and thoughts )

One of the truisms of modern life: to be alive is to experience tech problems. If the reverse is also true, then my vital signs from yesterday must be very strong indeed!

This is to say that I wanted to write a little Python script that would take a string and write out a LaTeX table showing that string's byte-by-byte representation in a character encoding of your choice. To do this, I ended up having to copy seven different object libraries from one directory to another on my desktop. I wanted put my script in a Git repository that I run out of my old home directory at CMU, you see, and it turns out that the CMU UNIX servers are now only accessible via VPN. My download of the required VPN client didn't seem to come with all the libraries it really needed; meanwhile, the copies that I found already on my system were locked away in Ubuntu's horrid new "Snap" structure, where the VPN client wasn't looking for them. Once I had my connection to CMU working, for good measure I also made a misconfiguration in my Git repo that needed further troubleshooting.

So, you know, an average sort of Thursday afternoon in the tech world... These are the kind of ever-deepening slogs I totally don't miss having to do on a tight deadline as part of a real job! So much time and effort spent on getting set up to work, to the point that you run out of hours for the work itself.

Another benefit of being unemployed today: when Kayak Pittsburgh has a last-minute 25 percent discount, you can go out and get it. Apparently it's some kind of organizational hedge against bad weather. I heard someone at the rental tent explaining that this particular discount code comes up whenever the chance of rain is above 50 percent. Certainly it got me to spend $30 at a time when I would have otherwise wasted the entire afternoon flopping listlessly at home, unsure of whether to go biking or catch up on necessary yardwork or sit inside reading a book or watch another random YouTube video, etc. Instead I booked a two-hour kayak rental from Sharpsburg starting at 4:00.

I had just enough time to kayak down to 40th Street and back, which feels reasonable but not particularly fast in a hard shell. For some reason I felt like I was having a really hard time steering the boat efficiently. It didn't seem like it was the fault of the wind, so maybe because I hadn't been back in a rental kayak for two years? The paddle is notably longer than the one I'm now used to; I expect the heavier, lengthier boat responds differently as well. Aside from that internal trouble, it was a pleasantly quiet day on the water — choppy from the wind, but not much boat traffic. I did come home unusually wet from splashing myself, even after the half-hour bike ride to nominally dry off.

Coming after my run yesterday, that's two solid days in a row of non-gym cross-training, or some kind of fancy term like that. If my old physical adage is coming true again, that I can only be good at one pursuit at a time, my body seems to have decided that the pursuit this year is running. It's been many, many years since my progress has been this easy. Last week I found a 10.4-km course that starts and ends at a city parking kiosk, which allows me the chance to time my run to the minute level if I assume that all the kiosk clocks are centrally synchronized. My first result at this distance was 59 ± 1 minutes — a fair 15 percent slower than I was a decade ago, but not as painfully slow as I was afraid I might be. Yesterday I ran the same route again in 57 ± 1 minutes, after a low- to mid-effort to go faster. No real knee trouble so far. It seems pretty clear that I've got the requisite distance for the Great Race already, and I have something like eight weeks to work further on the speed.

Time out today for a little book review, since I just finished reading "The Great Depression: A Diary" last night and wanted to jot down some notes about it before I forget. At a high level, this book does exactly what it says on the tin: it contains "personal notes on the panic of 1929" as written down by Youngstown lawyer Benjamin Roth starting in June 1931. Roth meant to publish his journal during retirement, though he died in 1978 without getting around to it. The text was finally put out in 2009 — under the auspices of Roth's son and with a good sprinkling of editor's notes by a modern financial columnist — as a sort of topical tie-in to the then-in-progress Great Recession.

So we've got a 37-year-old professional, a journal, an interesting historical period, and a Northeast Ohio setting. Sounds like the kind of book I would like! Indeed, I found it quite an interesting read. Roth's entries are frequently brief and occasional, such that we're able to move through an entire turbulent decade (June 5, 1931, to December 31, 1941) in a very readable 252 pages. The only downside to this economy is that Roth tends to arrive at the same few conclusions over and over again; such thoughts are understandably months or years apart for the writer, but irritatingly mere minutes apart for the reader. Several times I wanted to yell at the page: "Yes, I know your preferred investment advice... Yes, I know you're worried about inflation..."

On the other hand, what really shines through in the quick movement of time is just how uncertain life in the '30s must have felt. It's so relatable to our modern era. I mean, here's a guy of essentially my own age, embarking with an outwardly brave face to delve into study in order to make sense of the insanity around him, only to be beset by recurring doubts when the insane world continues to get weirder in new and disturbing ways.

Did somebody besides me just now say "pandemic"? Although Roth's diary deals primarily with troubled economics, and it was was published at a time when we were facing a modern financial parallel, I can't read it today without comparing Roth's notes to my COVID experiences during the past four years. I am instantly reminded of my own journal posts from March 2020, not October 2008. And though the causes and events may be different, I can't help but shove a bookmark into the spine at a particularly apt passage. A 45-year-old Roth, writing in mid-September 1939 days after German tanks rolled into Poland, laments: "For 10 years I have longed for normalcy but it does not seem so destined. My generation has already lived thru war, boom and panic but evidently we still have some excitement ahead of us." Us too, my friend; us too.

I had forgotten it was Statistics Day until I woke up this morning, saw the date on my computer, and thought "There's something about October 24..." Yes, 8:00 brain, there is. Today my online journal is old enough to legally drink in Ontario. For better or for worse, it seems like it's not just this morning that I was scatter-brained: I just spent 30 or 40 minutes copy/pasting posts into my OpenOffice document and counting them up, because apparently I hadn't been doing that for the past six months!

Anyway, with my sprawling 19-year text now onto the 1889th page, I have the honor to present to you my annual recap of just how sprawling this journaling effort has become. I'm sticking with the new approach to counting words that I settled on last year, though I am not going back to verify or re-compute any prior year's data beyond what I did last October. New numbers are therefore confined to the bottom two rows of the table. One thing that will never change: statistics don't include this post!

Year	Period	Days	Entries	Words	Days/entry	Words/entry	Words/day
1	2004-05	366	188	102,436	1.95	545	280
2	2005-06	365	220	114,814	1.66	522	315
3	2006-07	364	179	82,638	2.03	462	227
4	2007-08	366	128	56,181	2.86	439	154
5	2008-09	365	114	74,605	3.20	654	204
6	2009-10	365	136	92,012	2.68	677	252
7	2010-11	365	118	73,348	3.09	622	201
8	2011-12	366	100	66,408	3.66	664	181
9	2012-13	365	93	60,366	3.92	649	165
10	2013-14	365	88	67,667	4.15	769	185
11	2014-15	365	85	74,322	4.29	874	204
12	2015-16	366	87	69,019	4.21	793	189
13	2016-17	365	95	75,975	3.84	800	208
14	2017-18	365	73	65,013	5.00	891	178
15	2018-19	365	54	49,650	6.76	919	136
16	2019-20	366	118	91,456	3.10	775	250
17	2020-21	365	114	82,625	3.20	725	226
18	2021-22	365	80	62,973	4.56	787	173
19	2022-23	365	101	79,843	3.61	791	219
All	2004-23	6939	2171	1,441,351	3.20	664	208

Kind of a mixed year, right? My own private guess — based on the limited information I allow myself to access in order to make it — was that I'd written 85,000 words in 100 posts. I was thinking that this year was roughly on par with either 2016-17 or 2020-21 in terms of total volume. It absolutely is, in terms of both post count and word count, so I'm not sure why I tricked myself into predicting a larger number of words than either of those other two had. Anyway, it's nice to be posting a little more often again compared to last year; on the other hand, my habitual inability to control the post length has run unchecked again. That's obviously the fault of those massive travel logs from August and September. Perhaps that makes it even more important to thank my Dreamwidth audience (currently 21 active accounts) for following along with my exploits during another trip around the sun!

I have no particular plans for this journal's upcoming year, other than to keep writing it. It's been ages since I've run playful textual analysis or explicitly asked for content suggestions as part of my annual checkpoint. (Of course, feel free to send in any ideas if you have a particular request!) Some kind of grand jubilee probably ought to take place a year from now, when we hit the big 2-0. Until then, stay tuned for the usual mix of middle-aged gripes, activity reports, vague work updates, yardwork concerns, husband dates, and the odd social outing. After all, as it said on side of the semi truck that was delivering windows across the street this morning, "Life is for living!"

I just counted that I have 77 open browser tabs, so I really need to process some of the ones whose sole purpose is to remind me to write about them.

Several weeks ago, Owen sent me an absolutely incredible song-and-dance video advertisement for the Montreal metro system. They definitely don't make public transit commercials anymore the way they used to in 1976! I don't know how many total viewings I spent laughing over this thing — first over the visuals, then over as many of the lyrics as I could understand, and finaly over the rest of the words as revealed by the YouTube closed captions. The close translation of "Il fait beau dans le métro" would be "The weather's nice in the subway"; in this instance I prefer the more general "It's nice in the subway," as the song ultimately turns into a broader set of pro-transit gushings.

As befits such a rare piece of silliness, the '70s advertisement has taken on a life of its own on the modern Internet. Among many others, there's a straightforward imitation from 2012 and a 2010 parody ("It's hot in the subway") protesting the lack of air conditioning. Some inventive rhyming and good imagery there: the original second line "Everyone's cheerful; everyone's heart is in the sun" turns into "Everyone's hot; everyone's sweating down to their toes."

Previous users of the Montreal system may recognize that the start and the end of the song refer musically to the three-note progression of sounds you hear on the trains as the engine gets moving. I remember this property well from my first visit to the city in 2002. It's a great little Easter egg, though maybe not as subtle as it would have been when I was riding: French Wikipedia says that they're now officially using those tones inside the train as the "door is closing" signal. There's a cool audio clip of both side by side, along with some explanation if you read the accompanying paragraph.

Daylight Savings Time is lingering in the national news this week, quite beyond its usual temporary visit from the act of actually setting our clocks forward eight days ago. The Senate passed a bill by an amazingly bipartisan margin to keep us on this accelerated time zone year round. While both the House and the president seemed supremely non-committal, everyone else has felt free to chime in and keep the fight going over whether year-round DST is the right answer, or whether it should instead be year-round standard time or some kind of individual or business-level free-for-all.

Someone called Peter Coy capped off this madness in The New York Times today, with a blithely carefree column called "I Think I Just Solved Daylight Saving Time" — which is just asking for your over-confident opinion to be shot down instantly, isn't it? Personally, my thinking had led me to the exact opposite conclusion: I don't believe this "problem," such as it is, is solveable in any kind of a consistent way.

Communities on the eastern side of a time zone, for example, may be biased towards wanting the daylight later, so the sun doesn't set at 4:11 p.m. like it does in Boston. People in Grand Rapids, meanwhile, probably prefer to shift the sun earlier because they have to wait for it as late as 8:22 a.m. In Miami the length of daylight only varies by a little more than three hours over the course of the year, and there's never less than 10½ hours of it: there's not a real problem for Daylight Savings Time to fix in tropical locales. A Seattle December gives a scant ration of 8½ hours of light while June floods you with 16: at these limits, the DST question is again pretty irrelevant because it won't change what you see out the window at the beginning and end of your day anyway. Besides, beyond any regional geography, there are always going to be individually early-shifted and late-shifted people everywhere, each clamoring for the permanent solution the other group hates.

I guess this is where Peter Coy comes in, with his idea that we should each decide how, when, and if to change our own schedules across the year. Employees should just get their companies, in this nirvana, to kick operating hours around as the seasons change. "For example, if school starts later in the winter, that would prevent working parents from getting to the office at the usual hour," he claims, with momentary sanity. "In the past that would have been a career killer. Now, for many, it's business as usual." This is clearly the view of someone who's never had to work hourly. Does he really expect that anyone with a service job could get, say, Walmart to play made-to-order calendar Tetris? And if it did happen, and your in-person job started at 8 a.m. in September but 9 a.m. in February — with kids' school schedules that may or may not match depending on the school system's own ideas, not to mention your co-worker's family who lives in the next school district over — is that not just an even worse version of the current "disrupt your routine twice a year" approach that we all profess to hate?

So yeah, any of these "better" plans being proposed really just feel to me like a personal-preference question of "better for who?" In my ideal version of the world, I would probably take year-round DST pretty easily. It'd put our latest Pittsburgh sunrise at 8:43 a.m., which is a bit borderline but still only around the time I'd be having breakfast. No sunset earlier than 5:53 p.m. would be a nice boost to my late-shifted self to make it feel less like I was at work hours and hours into the winter night. I also don't have a big problem with the current system, which I've lived with for 38 years and after all was probably designed for the population centers of the Northeast such as I now inhabit. But if you have even the ghost of an idea of taking away my summer evenings via year-round standard time, making the sun rise at dang 4:49 in the morning — which is straight-up the middle of the night — I'll pitch incessant ruddy fits and have to start sleeping in a cave. That is not the kind of prospect that leads to rational discourse.

There seems to be no end to the number of small daily life experiences that have been messed up by the pandemic. I'm thinking especially of the so-called staffing shortage this evening. When it comes to face-to-face service jobs, my read on the situation is that companies laid off huge numbers of their employees during the shutdowns and periods of reduced demand last year, and now they have to get a whole new crew of people back again. Meanwhile, the people who are at a loose end from being let go — and even those who have been continuously employed — are of course re-evaluating along with everyone else what they really want their lives to consist of these days, according to various dimensions. That all adds up to our continued state of scrambling and shuffling.

Sometimes it feels like stepping into an alternate universe. Most of the workers at my gym were different, when I came back again in May, from who I remembered seeing pre-pandemic. At my dentist's office in June, the receptionist and the hygenist who'd taken care of me for years were both gone. In this version of the world, our late-night grocery option is Whole Foods — which just proves what a topsy-turvy reality we're in right now. This setup can't be meant to last the ages: we'll all go bankrupt in short order. But Aldi's is still closing at 8 p.m. (an hour early) and Giant Eagle at 9:00 (three hours off), leaving the local bastion of upper-crust professional hipster food with a solid monopoly over the "Dang, we're out of yogurt" crowd until the now-generous hour of 10 p.m.

What worries me about this state of affairs — aside from fancy cardboard-wrapped imported organic non-BST grass-fed yogurt with psyllium husk or avocado toast on the side, at $1.89 per newly reduced serving size, I mean — is that it seems rather difficult to reverse. Pittsburgh has already been shockingly bad at supporting all-night anything. It was already close to impossible to get proper dinner after 10 p.m. even pre-pandemic. If the grocery stores and my gym keep enjoying how much money they save on wages and benefits by locking the doors at 9, I'm not sure if we'll ever have the momentum to open them back up again. One of the reasons why we live in cities is to have amenities close and convenient when we need them; I'm correspondingly a little extra put out whenever I discover an area where that isn't true.

"Statistics Day, Statistics Day. You shout 'No way! It's Statistics Day?'" It is. Greg's Online Journal turns 17 years old tonight — on par now with the lifespan of your high-school seniors — so for the 17th time I'm taking a moment to add up the total number of posts and words I've contributed to this old thing year by year. The new numbers for the past 365 days appear down at the bottom of the table below. As always, they cover up through and including yesterday's post, but not today's.

Year	Period	Days	Entries	Words	Days/entry	Words/entry	Words/day
1	2004-05	366	188	102,621	1.95	546	280
2	2005-06	365	220	116,725	1.66	531	320
3	2006-07	364	179	83,463	2.03	466	229
4	2007-08	366	128	57,380	2.86	448	157
5	2008-09	365	114	74,612	3.20	654	204
6	2009-10	365	136	90,289	2.68	664	247
7	2010-11	365	118	73,629	3.09	624	202
8	2011-12	366	100	65,970	3.66	660	180
9	2012-13	365	93	60,629	3.92	652	166
10	2013-14	365	88	67,900	4.15	772	186
11	2014-15	365	85	74,566	4.29	877	204
12	2015-16	366	87	69,259	4.21	796	189
13	2016-17	365	95	72,623	3.84	764	199
14	2017-18	365	73	65,013	5.00	891	178
15	2018-19	365	54	49,650	6.76	919	136
16	2019-20	366	118	91,456	3.10	775	250
17	2020-21	365	114	82,625	3.20	725	226
All	2004-21	6209	1990	1,298,041	3.12	652	209

Well, there it is! The 2020-21 writing year turned out to be rather better than I thought. Before counting up, my private guess was that I'd managed about 72,000 words in 90 entries. (This was by taking 2016-17 as a baseline, because it seemed to have generated HTML at very much the same pace as I saw for this year, with some adjustment to the post count because I really didn't expect that I had succeeded in reducing the length of my entries at all.) Instead we have favorable results in all categories: actually 82,625 words in 114 entries, with a nicely reduced average length.

In fact it's essentially the same number of posts as the year before, which is probably the biggest surprise to me. My feeling is that the pandemic itself and my resulting altered lifestyle is still leading me to write more than the 50,000- or 60,000-word lean years... but certainly not as much as I put down during the spring and summer of 2020, when the rapidly changing situation and the mental shock of it all generated a lot of text. This year, July and August contained between them only 10 posts, for example. But we are still not looking quite like Year 5 either, which equals the latest Year 17 in post count but came with commendable — though certainly depression-influenced — brevity.

Seeing the running post totals of 1876 (last year) and 1990 (this year), I can't help but instinctively interpret these figures as years. This has happened to me many times before with SVN commit IDs, our team's issue tracker at work, etc. It seems to take hold somewhere around the mid-1700s and fall away again during the mid-2000s. So today I'm mentally mixing my journal stats up with Ulysses S. Grant and not-quite my brother. I see I've also got to stay on high alert about a month from now, when I'm expected to write this journal's 2000th post; it would be a shame to miss that! Otherwise, we'll check in on this stuff again in another year, when my journal will be old enough to vote.