Grown-ups were creepy when I was 12

When I was middle-school-aged, at the end of the 1960s, a couple of things about the culture of adults of my parents' generation struck me as disconcerting.

The first was their fascination with cigarettes. They told us sternly not to smoke, but they smoked. Why wouldn't they practice what they preached? Why would anybody want to smell like that? Why would a decent person make another person breathe the stuff? And we were surrounded by advertisements telling us to smoke, interspersed with PSAs telling us not to. Back then, you couldn't look at a magazine or newspaper or watch TV without being bombarded.

My own impression was that smoking was about to go profoundly out of fashion. And it did. In high school it was obvious that the more successful students did not smoke. In college, in the mid-1970s, I noticed a strange split: science majors did not smoke, but humanities majors did, apparently under the impression that majoring in art or English prevents lung cancer, or more likely, that "a poet must suffer." There was a widespread belief that artists, poets, and musicians were supposed to be deficient human beings, mildly self-destructive.

When my generation got old enough to manage businesses, we got smoke-free indoor air.

The second creepy thing was their music and its fascination with failure and, in particular, divorce. In my little town, the people I knew listened to one of two radio stations, the top-40 one for teenagers and the country-music station for the middle-aged. Country hits of the time were often, to my sensibilities, nauseating. Two that I remember were "Take a letter, Maria" and "Right or left at Oak Street", the first about a man leaving his unfaithful wife, and the second about a man deliberating whether to abandon his wife and children, mostly out of boredom. (I have linked to the lyrics, not the music, so you can skim them quickly.)

When I was in college, someone defended this kind of music to me as "the reality of life." I don't know if I said, but I definitely thought, "Changing a messy diaper is reality, too, but we don't make songs about it."

How my newly widowed mother could stand to hear this stuff, I don't know, but she stuck with the country radio station. Besides divorce songs, there were plenty of songs about drunkenness and various kind of failure.

I am not surprised at all that in the early 1970s, "country rock" or "soft rock" (which, perhaps, wasn't really rock music, but needed a name) pulled out of "country music" altogether and — keeping up the tradition of singing understandable songs accompanied by guitars — delivered much more creative and uplifting fare. There were objections when artists like John Denver (1975) received Country Music Association awards, since they weren't considered "country" enough.

Looking at statistics, I see that the end of the 1960s was when the divorce rate really started to spike upward (though it went much higher later). My impression at the time was that there was a cohort of middle-aged adults who had gotten married very young and then, after seeing more of the world, wanted to go shopping again in middle age. Divorce may have been their shiny new toy.

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Lost 1970s technology rediscovered and utilized

How do you re-cap a Coke bottle? I've recently developed a taste for Mexican Coke, which comes in bottles. It's easier on my digestion (no fructose) and tastes better. But I usually have only half a bottle at a time. Re-sealing it to retain its fizz is a challenge.

I tried several kinds of silicone caps, but they all pop off in the refrigerator overnight as carbon dioxide builds up.

Back in the 1970s, we had these snap-on caps, and after a search on eBay, I was able to find some. They're called "Fizz-Whiz" and are quite collectible because many of them have advertising printed on them. That leads to a ready eBay market, and I was lucky enough to find some with no collector appeal.

This is a press-and-snap gadget, actually patented (see the patent here). I remember from the 1970s that it works — never pops off the bottle. To my delight, these 50-year-old new-old-stock caps were still in good condition; the silicone rubber had not crumbled, though it did need some cleaning.

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A meta-political remark

Missing from today's political discourse is the notion of persuading people who do not already agree with you.

Making people hate you is no substitute for persuading them.

Cheering your side and booing the other does not persuade anyone.

Dramatic protest gestures are likely to make the other side think you are unreasonable or malicious. That is not what you want.

Before making any political statement (in words or actions), ask yourself: How will this change other people's thinking, and who are the people I'm wanting to change?

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Eclipse of the moon (finished pictures)

Further to the preliminary picture I posted the other day, here is my full set of pictures of the lunar eclipse of March 13-14. What was I waiting for? Mainly, color calibration. I worked out accurate color calibration for my camera (by comparing pictures of the uneclipsed moon to the known color temperature of the moon) and built it into a PixInsight process icons. Then I was in a position to deliver all the pictures with the same color balance so that the subtle and somewhat unpredictable colors of the eclipse would be rendered accurately.

I used my Celestron 8 EdgeHD with f/7 compressor and Altair 26C camera. This was overkill for photographing the moon — it is a setup normally used for advanced deep-sky work — but it did give me good pictures.

The uneclipsed moon at 0233 UTC:

In favor of light mode

"Dark mode" in Windows software, especially editors and software development tools, became fashionable a few years ago, and many of us adopted it (or were given it by default) with the vague belief that it's easier on the eyes.

Well... maybe, maybe not.

My own experience, confirmed by some recent online commentary whose source I can't remember, is that:

(1) In light mode, your pupils contract, which makes your eyes focus better.

(2) Light mode is better at overcoming glare on the screen.

If you find light mode hard to read, check that your font is bold enough. Some software is foolish enough to put gray type on white, which is obviously a bad idea; don't go for that. Some software offers a "light high contrast" mode, which is even better.

Why did dark mode become fashionable? Perhaps because it seems to have been part of Linux culture for a long time, and partly, perhaps, out of nostalgia for 1980s computer terminals.

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SOLVED: FireCapture slow or hanging with multi-megapixel cameras

Until today, I was not able to use my favorite planetary imaging software, FireCapture (free), with my new ToupTek G3M678C 8-megapixel astronomical video camera.

To be precise, FireCapture worked tolerably well if I selected a rather small region of interest (ROI) in the picture, but if I tried to either preview or record the whole frame, or even a quarter of it, the frame rate plummeted, and video input sometimes hung completely.

Today Torsten Edelmann, the developer of FireCapture, solved the problem for me. It had to do with deBayering (color-decoding) methods.

I had chosen VNG deBayering, which is too slow when the image is large — it can bring FireCapture to a complete halt with an 8-megapixel image. Any other deBayering method is fast enough, and the problem goes away; I recommend Bilinear.

Change deBayering methods with the pull-down menu indicated by the arrow here. And note that deBayering is only for the image you view on your screen; the actual video recording (.SER file) is un-deBayered unless you make a special setting (on that menu) to record in RGB24, which is not recommended.

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Raspberry Pi Pico temperature-humidity sensor with PC interface

Here's a gadget I designed and built for two reasons.

First, I wanted my desktop computer to be able to tell me the temperature and humidity in my home office, so that I would notice failures of the air conditioning or heating even if I hadn't been in the office for a few days. Some years ago I had some photographic supplies ruined (it was that long ago!), and one of my computers overheated, when the air conditioning was out for a few days without my knowing it. Not any more. The computer e-mails me a disk space report twice a day; now that report includes temperature and humidity.

(You can of course use this gadget without connecting it to a PC; just connect it to any USB power source. It takes 5 volts at about 20 mA.)

Second, I wanted to get acquainted with the Raspberry Pi Pico, a $4 dual-core computer (yes, you heard that right) which, unlike the regular Raspberry Pi, is designed to be used as a microcontroller without an operating system. There are several sets of firmware you can program into it, but I chose MicroPython, which makes the Pico run Python the way the earliest home computers ran BASIC; it boots up into the Python interpreter. Of course, once you've written your program, you can make it auto-start when the Pico is powered up, which is what you normally want a microcontroller to do.

For the first time, I'm distributing this project via GitHub rather than my web site. Just go to github.com/mcovington/RPiPico-TempHumiditySensor and click on the green "Code" button to download the whole thing in a ZIP file, or click on the PDF README file to read more about it.

Just for now, I'm also making the ZIP file available right here. But the version that is on GitHub will get updated if and when there are updates.

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Total eclipse of the moon

Last night I was able to arrange my schedule and obligations so that I could stay up very late to photograph the total lunar eclipse (maximum around 3 a.m.).

The two Monty Hall Problems

I think the infamous Monty Hall Problem is actually two different mathematical problems, which is why people disagree about it bitterly, and why even the great Paul Erdős got it "wrong."

The problem is about a game show (hosted by Monty Hall). In front of you are three doors. The prize (a car) is behind one of them; goats are behind the other two.

You pick a door.

Monty opens one of the other doors, revealing a goat.

He then asks you if you want to switch from your original choice to the other unopened door. Should you?

The obvious answer to many people, including great mathematicians, is that it doesn't matter, because your switching does not affect the chance of the car being behind any particular door. Switching neither helps or harms your chances.

But they're wrong. It's always better to switch. Here is why.

Without loss of generality, suppose you chose door 1. (You can account for other choices by renumbering the doors and doing the same reasoning again.)

The car has a 1/3 chance of being behind door 1, a 1/3 chance of being behind door 2, and a 1/3 chance of being behind door 3.

Consider now the cases:

Car behind door 1
  The host opens either of the remaining doors
    You do not switch — YOU WIN.
    You switch to the unopened one — YOU LOSE.
Car behind door 2
  The host can open only door 3
    You do not switch — YOU LOSE.
    You switch to door 2 — YOU WIN.
Car behind door 3
  The host can open only door 2
    You do not switch — YOU LOSE.
    You switch to door 3 — YOU WIN.

Crucially, in 2 of the 3 equally probable cases, you win by switching.

Why is this so, and why don't people see it?

Because when Monty opens a door, he is giving you some information about where the car is. He chose that door because he knew in advance that the car was not behind it.

Putting it as simply as possible: Two thirds of the time, the car is behind a door you did not choose. In those cases, Monty is going to tell you which door to switch to.

I think the real difficulty is that some people take this to be a different problem in which the original solution (that it doesn't matter whether you switch) would be correct.

In that problem, after you've made a choice, a door opens randomly and reveals a goat.

That is much more like the situations we are taught to deal with in probability class, and more generally in science. We have to be very alert to coincidences that don't actually tell us anything.

In the proper Monty Hall problem, though, Monty has hidden knowledge of where the car is, and he can't help revealing some of it when he chooses a door to open.

If that is not yet obvious, consider a variation suggested by columnist Marilyn Vos Savant: There are 1000 doors, not just three. You choose door 1, and Monty then opens 998 more doors, all revealing goats, leaving just one door closed. Hasn't he told you rather loudly that the car is behind that one door? Unless by some small chance it is behind the door you already chose.

See this article by Steven Pinker, which led me to write this.

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Jupiter with two satellites

I got the telescope out on the evening of the 11th (12th Universal Time) and imaged Jupiter high in the sky, with two of its satellites.

I think I'm going to adopt Galileo's preference (which has also been the preference of many other astronomers) and call the four largest satellites I, II, III, and IV, rather than Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Looking up the mythological origin of the names, Zeus was at best an unfaithful husband, maybe a child abuser in some versions of the myths, and Galileo's distaste for these names may have been for the same reason as mine.

Note that the picture shows some surface detail on satellite III, the largest. In fact, the picture was processed in two parts, with a de-ringing filter applied to Jupiter (to clean up the sharp sunlit edge) but not the satellites (where it would cause detail to be lost). Celestron 8 EdgeHD at f/10, ToupTek 678 camera, best 50% of about 5000 video frames.

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Mars, with map

The same evening, with the same equipment and a similar technique, I also captured Mars. Alongside it you see a map generated with WinJupOS to show what you're looking at.

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Subtle colors of the moon

I finished the evening by imaging several areas of the moon using the full field of the 678 sensor. Each of these is a stack of 2000 frames of video, which is excessive — each video file came out to 33 gigabytes, and it took all night to copy them. I should have done about 100 frames.

Anyhow, here they are, reduced from original size. Notice the subtle colors. These are color images with the saturation slightly increased. The surface of the moon alternates from slightly bluish to slightly reddish. Enjoy!

An anachronistic dream

I had a dream earlier this week that left me feeling immensely old.

I dreamed (very realistically) that (in the present time, this month) I saw a student in the UGA Science Library and momentarily mistook her for a graduate student I knew slightly, and said hello, then realized the mistake and apologized for it.

Simple enough; like many of my dreams, it was boring and realistic. Could have happened any day when I was more active at UGA.

But as I woke up I realized that although the girl in the library was fictitious, the graduate student was a real person — in the dream she was quite clearly identified, with blond hair and her name on a stack of computer printouts — a passing acquaintance from the computer center in my student days, 50 years ago. Half a century!

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Is COVID over yet?

Five years ago today was The Last Normal Day, on the evening of which things started shutting down for COVID.

COVID is still here, and we were still getting data on it until Trump cut the funding, although, thankfully, severe cases are now uncommon. Most of us have had COVID several times.

[Update:] This COVID data site is apparently still updating, though running 2 weeks behind, which may be inherent in how it collects its data. Not everything has been defunded.

So has America recovered? Not entirely. We get out of the house less — I think that's true of everybody — and local shopping has substantially been replaced by Amazon and by curbside pickups, particularly of groceries. These are convenient for Melody, who has trouble walking, but I have less of a sense of place and geography that I used to, simply because I spend a lot less time going to specific places to do specific things. Working remotely by computer also contributes to that.

I am feeling a distinct lack of face-to-face social life and don't quite know what to do about it. As relatively shy people, Melody and I rely more on congenial crowds (which were abundant in college) than on specific, arranged visits with particular people. We're aware we lost a lot of connections.

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What everybody misunderstands about Social Security

[Updated repeatedly. I thank Mike Gay and other Facebook correspondents for useful information.]

Most Americans, including quite a few of our politicians, are seriously mistaken about how Social Security works. Please let me try to clear a few things up. I'm writing this so I can refer to it later.

(1) "Entitlement" does not mean "unearned giveaway."

Whenever anybody says "Social Security is not an entitlement," they're showing they don't know what the word means.

In the budget, an entitlement is not something unearned or undeserved. It is something promised to a set of people — it is not a spending project that can be cancelled.

Veterans' pensions are entitlements. So are Social Security payments. So is anything else that is promised to people who meet certain criteria. That is what the word means.

(2) Your Social Security payments are not saved up to be paid back to you.

Somehow, everybody gets it into their head that Social Security is an individual retirement account. It is not. It is a pay-as-you-go pension program, where the payments are funded by the taxes coming in at the time.

Your benefits do depend on how much you paid in, and your account is a record of how much you paid in. But your payments are not set aside for you (in a bank vault, in an investment, or whatever). They are just remembered, and the government is obligated to make payments to you later, based on them.

You wouldn't be any better off if your payments were saved up for you. The only thing the government could do is invest them — in something that promises to pay them back — and that promise is what you already have.

(3) Social Security is not about to vanish due to "running out of money."

Social Security is funded by its own tax (FICA, SECA) and is entirely outside the federal budget. For a long time, income exceeded expenses and was stored in the Social Security Trust Fund. As the population has aged, that is no longer the case, and the Trust Fund is declining.

Even if the Trust Fund becomes completely empty, Social Security will still have tax income.

The obvious solution is to slightly increase the taxes, or slightly reduce the benefits (by setting later retirement ages for people who came into the system later), and those are obvious, common-sense things to do. If nothing else is done, the benefits will be reduced about 20%, but Social Security will not go out of business; it will be funded only by tax income.

The amount of the taxes has been adjusted in the past and can be adjusted again. The retirement age probably should be raised somewhat. There is also the possibility of lowering administrative costs. We are not tied forever to the existing Trust Fund with its current rate of income and outgo.

On the changes needed to make Social Security remain able to pay at current levels, see the Trustees' Report, especially the bottom of page 5 and the top of page 6 of the PDF.

(3) There's a good reason Social Security isn't invested in the stock market.

By law, the Social Security Trust Fund has to be invested in U.S. Treasury bonds.

Why? To keep another Great Depression from wiping it out.

Social Security isn't designed to compete with IRAs or other private-sector investments. (You should have an IRA!) Social Security is designed to be less risky and backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. Does anybody remember what was going on just before Social Security Started? Yes... the Great Depression. If you had had an IRA then, you would have lost it all.

The point of Social Security is that the government makes a commitment to keep you from starving no matter what the economy does.

(4) Life expectancies and populations are shifting, and we can't deny it.

To put it bluntly, one reason Social Security did so well, financially, in its early decades is that a lot of people died before turning 65, and collected nothing after having paid in. U.S. life expectancy from birth was about 60 in 1935 and is now about 80.

I don't think we want to go back to dying before 65. We have to shift toward retiring later, instead.

But I do not think we want to increase the Social Security retirement age to 80. If we did, we could put taxes back to what they were in the 1930s and do fine. If we agree, as a society, that the retirement age should be a lot less than the average age of death, then we are committed to paying Social Security taxes comparable to what we have now, or a little higher.

Social Security was designed as a safety net for people who are getting to be too old to work, and who would, in earlier times, slowly die of malnutrition (often unrecognized) as they became unable to afford necessities. Social Security was not designed to be a full retirement plan. For that, you need your own investments.

(5) Social Security is not need-based. (SSI is.)

Social Security benefits depend on how much you paid in, and at what age you started to receive them, not on your financial need. Many Social Security recipients also get SSI (Supplemental Security Income), which is need-based assistance funded outside of Social Security though administered with it.

Also, Social Security benefits can be reduced if you start them before full retirement age and have substantial income. That is to discourage people from starting them too early. But if you are at or above full retirement age, earning money will not "cost you your Social Security." Far from it — as you continue to pay FICA taxes, your Social Security benefits will increase due to your income.

[Added:]

(6) Social Security has not been "stolen" or "plundered" or "borrowed" and spent for other purposes.

Rumors of this kind seem to have been circulating forever. One version is that LBJ "borrowed" Social Security money to fund the Vietnam War.

The fact is that there has never been a change in the separation of Social Security money from the rest of the federal budget. However, Social Security was reported as part of the total budget for a number of years when Social Security was doing well and the rest of the budget wasn't. For more about that, see this web page at the Social Security Administration.

Social Security money is already "borrowed by" the Treasury in the sense that it is invested in Treasury bonds. A bond is a loan. When you buy a bond, you are lending money to the Treasury, and they can spend it on other things, but they have to pay it back. This is true whether I buy a savings bond or the Social Security Trust Fund buys a huge amount of bonds. It doesn't make sense to complain that when you lend money to someone, they use it. What matters is getting it back.

(7) Social Security is not in danger due to inept management.

A common talking point among radio commentators is that Social Security is so ineptly managed that it is about to lose all its money and be done away with.

Sometimes they tie this to the fact that, viewed as an investment, Social Security does not perform as well as stocks and bonds.

I see no reason to suppose Social Security is seriously mismanaged. The Trustees do their jobs and issue reports. Radio commentators apparently do not read the reports.

I've explained already that Social Security is not intended to compete with stocks and bonds. It is intended to be immune to things like stock market crashes.

I've already explained that Social Security is not intended to be a full retirement plan or even to compete with retirement plans. It is a social insurance system, which is why it's called Social Security rather than Retirement. It provides a useful part of a retired person's income and protects them from poverty. (And protects the rest of us from their poverty. It's why you don't have to take Grandma into your home or organize charity drives for old people.) It was never intended to replace a person's whole salary.

It is easy for politicians and commentators to stir up panic with half-truths about Social Security. Many of them do not understand the full truth themselves.

It is also unreasonable to want the changes in life expectancy and population to have no effect. You're not likely to be dead at 65. That's why 65-year-olds can't expect to be supported in style by payments made by their peers who didn't live that long. The system needs readjusting and will always need readjusting. Don't panic — but do advocate good management.

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The strange, unfair history of women's credit

Happy Women's History Month! But anybody who remembers the 1970s will notice something wrong with a meme that is circulating widely...

If women couldn't get credit cards before 1974, how did my widowed mother get them? Or Melody, who was then a high-school student and had a store credit card?

The answer is that the meme contains a half-truth. Some banks wouldn't issue credit cards to married women without their husbands' involvement, partly because of concern about property laws and the husbands' obligation.

But that's not all of it. Before 1974, it was legal to use sex, race, color, religion, national origin, and marital status as criteria for denying credit. Also (I am told) pregnancy, family size, and maybe number of teeth or tattoos (I haven't confirmed those last two).

The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 fixed that.

That is also why credit scores were invented. Bankers wanted some kind of measure that absolutely excluded criteria that were illegal to use. About all they were left with was previous repayment history, and that's how we got F.I.C.O. and Vantage.

The trouble with, credit scores still favor people who have gotten credit in the past. Even rich people are at a disadvantage if they haven't borrowed money in the past. People who couldn't get credit in the past still have trouble getting it later. Credit scoring, as presently practiced, makes past discrimination cast a long shadow.

For some years I have been working on a new kind of credit scoring based on actual ability to pay — cash flow, income versus outgo — rather than history of past borrowing. This has been my main project since retiring from UGA. It is called FormFree RIKI and is starting to reach the market. It should make the world of credit a good bit fairer.

One last point. I don't recommend spreading that meme because it has no credibility with anyone who remembers women with credit cards in the early 1970s. Promoting a good cause with misinformation is, in my humble opinion, wrong. Be accurate.

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Monoceros, brightened up

Look back at the picture of a star field in Monoceros that I shared last month. Now look at this. It's the same picture, processed differently to bring out fainter nebulae and star clouds.