Perspective

As it is only just starting, perhaps not, but the forecast indicates we may be in for another week similar to this one. Not that bad temperature-wise, but possibly more snow. It’s early yet …

People can get somewhat crazy when there’s more than a couple of inches of snow in the forecast. Currently they are predicting just over 12 inches between late Wednesday and early Friday. From the reaction of people in the store you’d think they were expecting to be stuck at home for a couple of weeks. (Not totally impossible – that happened during the Blizzard of 1978 – but that was a lot more than a mere foot of snow.)

Bear in mind, some of the early forecasts were for 2-4 feet of snow and 35 mph (60 kph) winds. That would be a real mess. But a foot of snow and 20 mph winds? That’s not so bad. But even if the original forecast had been correct, all the roads would certainly have been cleared by Monday at the latest, even the more remote ones out in the county. Here in town? 2 days at most.

I’m supposed to be off tomorrow, though if people are as crazy as today the store will call me to come help. I’ll keep you updated throughout the next couple of days at least. (Yes, we sold all the milk, eggs and bread we had in the store today.)

Time was gift cards were a great Christmas gift. Now? Well, let me tell you …

For Christmas this year, my brother got me one of those $50 Visa gift cards. Usable anywhere Visa is accepted – in the U.S. that is, but I’m sure there’s some small shops and cafes that don’t want to deal with cards. So good idea, right? Depends …

I didn’t try to use it right away, I was trying to think of something I’d want as a gift to spend it on. I mean, if you’re spending it on something you would have bought anyway, then it’s not really something special. So about 10 days later I make up my mind, but the card doesn’t work. I try again a few days later, same thing. So I go back and find the materials that came with the card to see what I can find out.

They list a website that you can check your balance and even transaction history on, I go there and see the card has not $50 but $1 on it. Someone cloned the card (created a card with the same data on its magnetic stripe) and spent the other $49 at a Target in California.

My brother’s guess is that someone in the store copied the information and sold it online. Sorry, only the cashier can see the number on the card (at least, unless my brother was a complete idiot and bought one with the tab removed) and can he surreptitiously write that down while you’re standing in line? Okay, either of those amount to “My brother is an idiot”, but there’s a third possibility.

You remember that website you can use to check your balance? If someone has a general idea what range of numbers are used on these cards, they could simply try guessing numbers until they find one that works. For you and me probably not a good strategy – after some number of tries they’d ban your IP so you couldn’t try more – but if you happen to have a botnet you could have 1000 different computers each try 20 different numbers for you (or whatever number is small enough not to get banned) and eventually find one. Or if their security is bad, someone hacked their system and got the number that way, or an employee sold it … all amounts to the same thing.

Store/merchant gift cards wouldn’t be so much of a target since they are only good at that store (not that it is hard to find a Walmart or McDonald’s anywhere, but that’s still only 1/1000th of the places a Visa gift card is valid at). And if you actually have to check the balance in the store rather than online, then they couldn’t brute force the numbers like I described above (even if having such a website is a major convenience for users).

Of course, what they really need is something harder to clone. A chipped card or at least something with additional numbers not used on the website … that is, the card has 16 digits and the website also requires the 3 digit security code, but if the stripe had some extra digits you couldn’t see on the website that would make it harder. That’s why regular cards do have a chip. Until these gift cards do have better security, I’d say you’re better off just giving cash.

I don’t really get sick, so I guess it’s not really a surprise.

A friend of mine had been hiding out, trying to avoid COVID-19 (under doctor’s orders). Still, she got it from her granddaughter when they came for Christmas. I saw her a few days later – she sounded terrible but didn’t want to see the doctor (I’ve never understood why people are afraid of doctors). She tells me her granddaughter called her back the next day, but somehow I had to call her to find out. By then I already knew.

Mind you, all I had was a cough, runny nose, and a weird headache. I’m used to sinus headaches – while I get them regularly I don’t take medicine. I’ve found that if I relax certain muscles it causes my sinuses to drain and the headache goes away. This was different – it was in the sides of my head. I’ve decided since that it must be related to the swelling of the brain COVID causes. I didn’t know it then, I just knew it was a weird headache so I must be coming down with something – and in this year we all could guess what.

So here I am, a week later and not supposed to go anywhere. And all the rest of it? Well, no, that’s really all the symptoms I’ve had. I did get tested so I know my first guess was correct, but as far as it goes if I hadn’t said anything I could have gone to work and done my job. No nausea, vomiting, difficulty breathing, none of this sleeping 14 hours a day I’ve heard from several sources; I’m not even certain I had a fever of 100F (I was actually low the day I got tested, but I might have had one Monday – or not).

Almost another week to go on my quarantine. Needless to say bored, but I’m trying to do this right.

Something of a historical nature today.

When I was a kid in school, multiple choice tests were popular. I presume they still are just because they are so easy to grade – either you selected the right answer or you didn’t. They even had electronic “scantron” systems that could grade it for you. Yet when I was teaching later I never used them…

It was common for kids to refer to them as “multiple guess tests”. Me, I generally didn’t guess. I had the highest IQ my small local school had ever seen and at one point I’d read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica; if I had to guess no one there knew the answer.

But I did say “generally”. With my IQ, the school wanted me to participate in every contest they could find, even as a sophomore (grade 10 if you don’t use that term for high school). Of course the ACT, SAT and PSAT, but even ASVAB (armed services vocational aptitude battery), National High School Math Exam (twice, as a sophomore and a junior) and anything else they could.

One of those contests was called the Junior Engineering Technical Society test. You could actually take two subjects – of course I was taking Math as one. The other … for reasons of not having anyone else who wanted to take it in that subject they suggested I take it in Physics, though actually Physics was a senior level class at that school and I was a junior. I had been exceptional in General Science 2 years earlier and I liked books about physics, so I figured it couldn’t be too bad, right?

Well, the contest in this region was held at BGSU on a Saturday, and the Math test was first. I felt pretty good about that one, though my school didn’t have any Advanced Placement courses so I wasn’t really spectacular. I got done in time and did good, that’s about it.

Physics … turns out I had no idea how to do most of the questions. While I understood the concepts, I didn’t have the formulas to compute the answers they wanted. Well, I wasn’t going to sit there for 2 hours just to leave the test blank, so I started looking for patterns in the answers.

Years later I actually had classes in designing multiple choice tests. The idea is to have 3 or 4 reasonable answers (answers you might get if you made some small error in the computations) and then one or two “distractors”. I didn’t actually know it at the time of this test, though it was pretty easy to spot. They’d have answers that were multiples of each other – one twice the other, one with a different exponent (of course they were in scientific notation) … so it made sense to pick the one that had the most common exponent with the most common decimal part. Of course they weren’t all like that – there was one where they were trying to see if you could figure out what units the answer should be in, for example. I did know that – I could tell the question required an answer that was a volume and only one answer had the right units.

Needless to say, since I wasn’t doing any of the calculations I actually got done first. Anything that I didn’t have a clue on I guessed, so nothing was blank, but I couldn’t say at the time how I did.

There was a break for lunch then they announced the winners. I wasn’t mentioned in the Math results – I wasn’t in the top 3; that’s all I know there. Physics … turns out I was second. I knew nothing at all about the subject, and only one person did better.

There are books and even short classes in “test taking”, obviously I’d figured it out on my own from all the other tests I’d taken before that. Though also obviously after that I had no respect for multiple choice tests at all.

I’m sure everyone’s heard by now. Most of you probably know more about it than I do, as I don’t watch TV or read the papers.

Last Saturday, a gunman entered the Cielo Vista mall in El Paso, Texas. When all was said and done he had killed 20 people and injured 26 more. They found a 4 page rant online attributed to the shooter, seems he thought the Mexicans were taking over the country and decided to do something about it. Though note, last I heard the hosting company had taken down the site (8Chan), but I’m sure every newspaper in the world probably has a copy somewhere. And for the record, it is not so much that he posted it there as that people there were supporting it.

But honestly, all this is old hat. How many other shootings or bombings have there been targeting Jews or blacks or whatever other group you choose? Too many of course. So how is this any different?

Well, the difference for me is that it is actually someplace I used to live. I’ve been through Denver once on vacation, but not long enough to say I actually know the place. But I spent 5 years in El Paso. Mind you I was closer to the Sunland Park mall – Cielo Vista was on the far side of the Davis Mountains from me. I think I visited that mall exactly twice in my 5 years, though I did buy a duster there on clearance that I was rather fond of.

My first observation was that the shooter was not from El Paso. When 80% of the town is Hispanic (not Mexican – they were born here) it’s a little hard to hate Hispanics. And of course, you can’t tell the natives from the real Mexicans unless you see the license plate on their car. The people from Juarez just across the river drove like crazy people always running red lights; the ones from further in Mexico were more careful drivers.

My next observation is that Cielo Vista is about as far from the border as you can get and still be in El Paso. I could actually see the border and the river. They were on the other side of the mountains from it. If he was looking for people actually from Mexico, he was in the wrong place.

But then again, he wasn’t looking for that anyway. He should know by now that acts of violence only result in people ridiculing your ideas, not giving them any serious consideration. Really it’s all about his own ego and nothing else.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a conservative. I am in favor of securing our borders – that wasn’t even a strange sentiment in El Paso. And I’m talking about 20 years ago, when Clinton was in office. We were talking about the border “wall” that long ago. I have no use for his segregationist ideas, though if he wants to live somewhere where Hispanics won’t bother him I’m sure he could. I doubt he’d find many in Death Valley, for example.

You’ll have to forgive me, I’m just “processing”. That’s pop psych for saying trying to figure out how I really feel, deep down. Besides the general overall disgust with crazy idiots who resort to violence, of course

I just don’t understand people these days …

As I was leaving today, I saw an ambulance just outside the front door, then a police car pulled up. I glanced around but didn’t see any accident. Whatever it was, I didn’t think I could help and didn’t want to get in the way (and definitely wasn’t a witness to whatever happened), so I headed for my car. On my way there, the cart pusher told me what he’d seen – two cars had parked next to each other, the people got out and argued over something, then as one turned to walk away the other started hitting her. (Apparently both were women.)

I don’t know what it was about, but it is hard for me to imagine that violence was warranted in that situation. And the cart pusher described it as “Awesome”? Not a word I would use.

The media and politicians are constantly talking about “gun violence”. Terrible as things like school shootings are, I can’t say that violence in general is a good thing. Nobody got shot today, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. But do you think there’ll be even 20 people around here saying that tomorrow? You think there’ll be that many people who even care? That is what is wrong with society today.