Test Pattern

Early dark makes a middle-aged grump sleepy. Back tomorrow.

Victim of Variety

People who've grown up entirely in what Casey Kasem used to call "the rock era," dating from when "Rock Around the Clock" hit #1 in 1955, have a lot of music backed up in their minds. Even if we listened to only one particular genre we live in a world with rock and pop music playing as a soundtrack at every clothing and grocery store and inside every mall. It was a major part of almost every movie and television show.

Which just means that when one of those songs from somewhere during our lives turns into an earworm, there's no telling where it might come from. Recently, I've had on heavy rotation three songs that have nothing to do with each other -- two have explanations but one I can't figure.

The version of Oingo Boingo's "Dead Man's Party" from an April 1987 concert gets a lot of play around Halloween and it's pretty irresistibly catchy. So when it made an appearance a couple of weeks ago in its usual holiday mode I found myself "pressing play" on the YouTube clip three or four times a day.

Jon Landau once tabbed a hard-working New Jersey rocker as the "future of rock and roll" and it wasn't John Lyon. Although as "Southside Johnny" and backed by the Asbury Jukes he toiled in the same clubs and venues as Bruce Springsteen and his E-Streeters, lightning never struck for him. But in the early 80s video era, programmers hungry for the next Bruce rolled the dice on Southside, promoting his single "New Romeo" and giving it a funny video with the singer as a sad sack running into a now-famous former girlfriend and her entourage. The band ditched "Asbury" from its name for this album, "In the Heat," and allowed some more modern sensibilities to undergird its solid soul sound, which makes the single more listenable than some of the cookie-cutter material from earlier efforts. It never made the charts, but it's been stuck in my head ever since I found an old mixtape that had the single on it and checked it out on Ye Olde Tube as well.

But prefab 80s rockers Night Ranger and their 1984 single "When You Close Your Eyes?" I got nothing, except maybe it was all over the radio that year and so it's planted firm in some neuron or another that was unfortunately missed in the Great Friar Brain Cell Die-Off of 1986-1992. I'm pretty sure 20-year-old me is disgusted at the results.

The problem, of course, is that the YouTube algorithm keys up Survivor's "Can't Hold Back" right after Night Ranger and now I've got another one stuck in there.

Literacy

At Quanta, John Pavlus writes about a new "artificial intelligence" program called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) that regularly scores better than human beings on a particular kind of reading comprehension test.

The test measures how well a reader -- whether he, she or it -- comprehends material they have just taken onboard. It sounds a lot like some of the old Standard Reading Assessment tests I remember from school, only without the crutch of the multiple choice sorter. You could usually bet that if there were four possible answers that two of them were so obviously wrong it was funny, a third might sound OK but clearly showed some fatal flaw and the fourth was not just a right answer but the only possible right answer when the test-taker fired up more than two or three neurons.

Anyway, some old AI programs did really badly on the test, but it turns out that BERT regularly chalks up an 80 or 80 plus (kudos to Quanta for making the scientists in the illustration all resembled Sesame Street's Bert, by the way).

Some linguists and other scientists, though, think that BERT and similar problems "understand" what they read a lot less than they have just figured out some shortcut tricks that get to the right answer without knowing how or why it is right. It could be, for example, that my method of solving a multiplication problem featuring two three-digit numbers without a calculator or paper -- what's commonly called a wild-ass guess, for the curious -- will give me the right answer in that particular time. But it doesn't mean that I solved the problem. It just means that in this particular case my shortcut worked.

Although I found the article and the discussion very interesting, I think the headline hints at the reason it's ultimately moot and probably will be for the foreseeable future. It reads: "Machines Beat Humans on a Reading Test. But Do They Understand?"

Because if the AI was going to read like a person does, then the question would be something more like, "But Are They Inspired?" Because that's one of the things that reading can do. Leaving all the testing, algorithms, programs and shortcuts aside -- along with the nagging little reminder that the programs were created by people, not by themselves -- and that seems like a bar that it'll take BERT awhile to clear.

Shuffle Paw Change

At Bored Panda, you can find the results of a photo project by husband-and-wife photo team Kelly Pratt and Ian Kreidich -- 40 pics of ballet dancers posing with dogs. The duo frequently work with the Saint Louis Ballet and other dancers around the country and brought that expertise to the shots.

I'm hard pressed to say whether I like better the shots where the dogs seem to want to join in the dancing fun, leaping in mid-air like the dancers themselves, or the ones where they're just being ordinarily doggy and sniffing the face of the human who leans over to them. And there's a couple where Fido has that "WTH?" look at the strange contortions the two-legged critters are making. I pretty much like them all, and this has quickly become one of my favorite dance photography collections by anyone not named Lois Greenfield.

Highs and Lows

Eric Thomson's Commonwealth universe spans several centuries, and he has sets of novels in different eras of human expansion through the galaxy. Captain Siobhan Dunmoore's time includes the war with the fierce Shrehari -- a group of intimidating space warriors who aren't too much unlike the Klingons of Star Trek. By the time of When the Guns Roar, the sixth book of Dunmoore and her crew, the war is going well for the humans and poorly for the Shrehari. The latter, plagued by the problems associated with weak leadership and a corrupt bureaucracy, keep rotating their best commanders to retirement or worse and elevating incompetent people with good connections.

While the humans have their own problems with people promoted beyond their competence, they've had the luxury of some significant wins and have taken advantage of the way the Shrehari underestimated them when the war began. Dunmoore and her disguised battle cruiser Iolanthe have brought about several of those victories -- enough that the Admiralty wants her brought into a larger squadron to dislodge Shrehari invaders from systems they captured at the start of the war. Dunmoore chafes at the restrictions the chain of command places on her and the way inexperienced but ambitious officers want to ride her people's hard work to their own promotion. Meanwhile, the disgraced Shrehari commander Brakal retires to his people's equivalent of the House of Lords and works to make his government accept reality: Continued war against the hairless apes of Earth will bring destruction and defeat his Empire may not survive.

He may or may not have intended to do so, but Thomson makes the Brakal segments much more interesting than those with his series protagonist. He's structured most of the Dunmoore books as mysteries that the captain and her crew must solve before they bring their real enemies to battle but doesn't follow that model here. Several plot threads of Dunmoore's part of the book wrap up abruptly and rather clumsily, especially when compared with the charismatic Brakal's race against time to bring about his bloodless coup and save his people. In fact, those segments are actually the strength of the book and make Guns a good entry of this series and a fun read.

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The rise of electronic publishing has let Jack Reacher creator Lee Child branch out a bit from his one-per-year schedule of Reacher novels. A handful of short stories and novellas, freed from the need to find themselves homes between the covers of printed books, have come out in digital format and let Child put out some quick and punchy -- pun intended -- stories about his wandering knight errant that couldn't sustain a full novel. About a third of the way into Blue Moon, a reader could be forgiven for wondering if it should have been one as well.

Reacher, on a Greyhound approaching an unnamed Midwestern city, spots an older man with a large amount of money in his pocket who's being targeted by a potential mugger. Being Reacher, he moves to thwart the crime and finds himself drawn into the circle of trouble being experienced by Aaron and Maria Shevick, an elderly couple enmeshed in a vicious world of loan sharks, warring criminal gangs, unethical computer entrepreneurs and soulless bureaucrats. Though the rival Ukrainian and Albanian criminal gangs have extensive numbers of thugs and guns on their side -- and don't even realize the Shevicks are caught up in their fight -- they'll learn that Reacher is never worth fighting against.

Child has dumped some clunkers in this 24-book series, but rarely has he crossed the line into, well, boring. We spend several chapters learning what exact problem the Shevicks face -- several more than we need to, with the couple themselves drawing the matter out with an unexplained reluctance that disappears with no more reason than it existed. The generic city that Child creates, unidentified so he can make it match the characteristics he needs for his story, feels flat and unreal. While the final battles with the different groups of bad guys come off with Child's usual panache, the buildup meanders and winds confusingly, offering repeated sequences that don't help clarify just where we are on our path to the endgame.

Blue Moon doesn't read like a novella or short story stuffed to make a full novel, but it does give the clear impression that it would improve immensely if it dumped about half of its length. It's not objectively lousy like Tripwire, Bad Luck and Trouble and Nothing to Lose, but it's most definitely meh. If the Reacher books were all summoned to give accounts of themselves and defend the series, Blue Moon is the one that would say, "The Jack Reacher series is one with a long tradition of existence to its readers" and then stop, at a loss to offer much more than that.

Intriguing

If your commencement speaker is Kurt Vonnegut, you will get some weird input. As this item at Kottke notes, he let the class of '78 at Fredonia State College in on his theory that there are not four seasons but six.

In between the autumn of September and October Vonnegut places a season he calls "locking," made up of November and December. Even though all of November and the first two thirds of December are technically autumn, they don't really feel like September and October. Then we have winter in January and February, followed by "unlocking" in March and April. Those months have traditionally been considered part of spring, but their ability to spin up bitter cold and nasty storms means they don't feel very springy.

I think he was onto something; and of course seasons are kind of arbitrary anyway. Remember that below the equator they are the exact opposite of those above the equator. So the "dead of winter" may be January or February up here, but it's July or August when you go south. And the different regions of the world have different seasonal impacts anyway. In some parts, you have only wet and dry, and they don't necessarily match with any lineup of spring, summer, winter and fall.

However you label it, I hate cold, gray and damp. And while I readily acknowledge that leaves losing their chlorophyll and displaying other colors can be a vivid and amazing sight, the problem is that the colors are a lie. They do not represent bright life, they only disguise approaching death. At least winter is honest about it.

Country United!

Today, the United States can finally begin to be of one mind about politics, as the last remaining person in the country who thought Beto O'Rourke would be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020 finally realized that would not happen.

In other news, new areas of agreement appear to be nearing as more people in the campaign of Senator Kamala Harris begin to discover she will not be the nominee either.

Unfortunately, the fantasy that former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can be president, though fitfully and painfully laid to rest in 2016, seems to have regained some traction amongst certain deluded individuals.