A Chance of Tornadoes

Today is going to be a bad weather day in Maryville, according to the weather forecast. We are at a 10% chance for bad weather, and there may even be tornadoes in the mix. Tornadoes? It’s almost November!

Photo by Ralph W. lambrecht on Pexels.com

I guess some people call tornadoes ‘cyclones’; pretty much the same thing. A severely hazardous storm typified by a wind vortex. The standard operating procedure for a tornado is to go to the basement, for presumably the walls in the basement don’t collapse on you. There’s also less danger of being hit by flying glass. If you don’t have a basement, choose an internal room on the first floor without windows, which is often a bathroom.

I remember life before extremely accurate weather forecasting. We generally didn’t know a tornado was passing by until the tornado showed up, and then the civil defense warning would be broadcast on our tv. Then the siren would go off (this was usually the siren summoning our volunteer firefighters to an incident.)

Today, we have a fire siren in town to warn us if a tornado is imminent. But we also have our weather forecasts, our phones and the watch/warning system. We can prepare a day in advance; I know the expected time for severe storms and I can plan accordingly.

It’s interesting to look at today and reminisce about how life has changed. I guess that makes me an old person (*sigh*).

Coffee in the Morning

I wake up to the best coffee in town. We buy green (unroasted) beans, and my husband roasts them. Today’s are fresh-roasted, having been roasted the previous afternoon. We have a fancy coffee machine that we bought used (because we’re cheap) and so our coffee is better than any cup we could get in town.

This is not to mean all of our coffee is excellent. Sometimes a bad bean gets through, and the coffee for the morning tastes like potatoes or wet swamp. (This happens so very seldom, only once or twice in my recollection, and we’ve been doing this for over 10 years). Sometimes we don’t roast dark enough, and the coffee tastes green (again, this happens very seldom). More often, we find that a coffee, although good, not quite to our tastes. For this, we have invented our coffee rating system:

Grandma has rejected this coffee.
Grandma drinks this kind of coffee.
Grandma should be drinking this coffee.
Grandma called, and she wants you to bring a dime bag so she can groove over this coffee.

In other words, 3 is a high recommendation and four is a really high recommendation, if you know what I mean.

We like big flavorful coffees over here. Not the kind you get at the grocery store, and seldom the kind you get at a coffeehouse (coffeehouses’ coffee often tastes sour because of overextracting or being held too long). Today’s coffee has a lingering sweet aftertaste, like rice syrup and molasses. No complaints here.

So I’m done with my coffee and rather caffeinated for the day. Which I really need, because it’s a Monday.

Basic Personal Finance

Daily writing prompt

What’s something you believe everyone should know.

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I believe everyone should take a basic personal finance course.

What topics should the personal finance class cover? Budgeting, decision-making, banking choices, the earning of interest, credit use, and consumer insurance. Investing can wait, although a basic class in that might also be welcome.

The sellers of financial services don’t have our best interests in mind. Banks can offer accounts with quickly compounding penalties for overdrawn accounts, and other hidden fees. Lenders can be predatory, with high interest rates and other fine print. Insurance agents sometimes offer life insurance policies that are more suited to make money for the company than serving the consumer.

Every consumer should be an informed consumer. It’s the only way to navigate the financial services market and win.

A NaNo Alternative?

I am looking forward to starting the new book. There is hope for me and writing.

I’m trying to find a substitute for NaNo, as I will not be doing it this year because of their stance on AI. So far, the only thing I have found is in French, which will not happen, as my French is negligible. I need to find a word count motivator that doesn’t cost me any money.

I did a search on the Internet and found a few. The one I decided to use was MyWriteClub, which is a simple word count tracker. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles and community of NaNo, but it is a word count tracker. The one problem with it is that, when I made my account and goal, it made me start it today instead of November 1. So I guess I’m writing today.

Me and Automobiles

Daily writing prompt

What’s something most people don’t know about you?

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One thing that people don’t know about me is my relationship to cars and driving. I learned how to drive rather late in my life (age 32). This is not usual for the US where a driver’s license at sixteen is a rite of passage.

I was different. Behind the wheel of a car, I was a hazard. Among the things I managed in driver’s ed: stopping in the middle of the railroad tracks to check for trains, butting the car into a snow drift in an otherwise empty parking lot, and making a 180-degree turn into a parking lot when all I intended was to turn the corner. Needless to say, I did not get my driver’s license in high school.

I took drivers’ ed again, and that time got through it. I didn’t, however, get my driver’s license because my parents were too scared to take me to the testing facility to get tested. I didn’t blame them. Eventually, when I had taken a break from college, I got the license but never drove on it, and my skills extincted. It didn’t help that I got hit by a car in my late 20’s, breaking my leg and resulting in a bar in my left tibia to hold it together.

When I was in college and grad school, I lived in a city with excellent public transit, so I didn’t miss having a car. It wasn’t until I lived in Oneonta, New York, my first teaching job, that I felt the pinch of not being able to drive. Oneonta was a rural town in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, and there was an arts scene in the area — all spread out from Oneonta to West Kortright to Delhi to Franklin. Only accessible with a car.

I took driver’s ed with the best person I could have found, a laid-back man named Lee Fisher. He taught adults how to drive, and thus he knew how to deal with people who struggled to drive. It turned out that, when I drove, all the little pieces of driving wanted to happen in my head all at once. Think of all the actions needed for a right-hand turn: slowing down, activating the turn signal, braking at the stop sign, looking both way, accelerating slowly while turning the wheel, straightening the wheel … my mind couldn’t sort them in order. I learned to drive by reciting all the moves in order just before doing them. When I no longer needed to say them out loud, I went to get my driver’s license, and succeeded.

I didn’t let those skills extinct, instead getting myself a car to drive. I made a lot of mistakes, had a couple accidents, and spent a couple years in the assigned risk pool with expensive insurance coverage. But I got used to driving.

I have never become an excellent driver. I balk at interstate driving, although I can and will do it if necessary. But driving is a part of my life now.

Not Brands, but Reference Groups

Daily writing prompt

What brands do you associate with?

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I don’t associate with any commercial brands, but I do associate with what this question is getting at.

I don’t believe people associate directly with brands, except perhaps with trucks — there are “Chevy people” and “Ford people” in the US, and a few deranged “Tesla bros”. People associate with reference groups, which they use to identify themselves as a part of. This is something I learned in a consumer behavior class many, MANY years ago.

Bangkok, Thailand – April 16, 2022 : Stanley of pink stainless steel thermos travel mug to keep the drink warm or cold. Stanley Go Vacuum Bottle 12.5 OZ

Reference groups can be associative — “I am a member of this group”. For example, one of my reference groups is “college professor”, which makes me prone to buying gas-efficient vehicles and Starbucks coffee. Reference groups can be dissociative — “I would not be caught dead being a member of this group”. I am vehemently not a member of the reference group that listens to Kid Rock and drinks Budweiser beer. Last, they can be aspirational — “I would like to be a member of that group.” I would like to be a member of the upscale ecologically conscious consumer who has a home composter and a butterfly garden landscaped by someone else.

We buy brands because of their association with reference groups, because we want to be a member of that reference group. We refuse to buy certain things from our dissociative reference groups. We don’t so much say “I’m a Ford person” — unless we’re talking about trucks, and even then, we buy them largely based on our perceptions of who’s in that group. I will excuse myself to drink my home-roasted coffee, which marks me as part of the aspirational group “coffee snobs” now.

Testing my Theory

I have a theory that posting at 8 AM on a Tuesday morning (Central Daylight Time, UTC +5) will yield very few hits. I’m testing it here.

In the app Loomly, the app can tell you which times are optimal for posting to each platform. It’s a strategy I use for determining when to post. Not always, but often. Loomly does not connect to WordPress, so it’s not useful for determining times.

Another thing is that WordPress has a more world-wide spread. I have readers on occasion from India, Cameroon, the UK, many other African nations, Bangladesh … This is not the case on other platforms. What is the optimal time for these places?

So consider this a test. Let’s see if I get even my normal amount of visitors.

A Useful Topic

Daily writing prompt

Which topics would you like to be more informed about?

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The prompt asks, ‘Which topics would you like to be more informed about?’ I can think of one topic I’ve perused Wikipedia about. I have never studied it in greater detail but would love to learn about it.

The topic is molecular biology. I am fascinated because we came from single-celled organisms way back in the primordial soup days; our cells have organelles that mimic the productive functions of our most basic organs. I keep forgetting the organelles’ names except for the mitochrondia, the powerhouse of the cell. That’s memorable for me because of all the things that could go wrong there and cause genetic diseases.

(See this picture? I don’t know all the parts.)

I would love to know molecular biology at least at a basic level; I don’t know if I’d go as far as the ATP cycle (which I vaguely remember from a nutrition test at the undergraduate level) but just remembering the parts of a cell and knowing how they work. DNA would be a pleasant bonus.

Knowing molecular biology will change nothing in my life. I do not need it for my vocation (associate professor of human services) or my avocation (writing). In fact, I don’t need to know for any reason except for my curiosity. But that’s enough.

A Lack of Pattern

I’m trying to analyze which posts of mine are most successful — prompted posts? My own ideas? Short posts? Long post? Personal posts? Posts about writing? I have come to the conclusion that I can’t predict what will get me more viewers.

I’ve always thought prompted posts performed better than non-prompted posts, long posts better than shorter posts, and posts about writing better than personal posts.

Yesterday, a short prompted post about what personality traits I disliked — with no title — performed better than any post I’ve had in the past couple weeks. This is expected because the prompted posts appear to get more circulation. Yet I’ve had other prompted posts only get as many likes as one I’ve written without a prompt.

My best performing post of all time had to do with my wedding anniversary. Other posts (even about birthdays) have gotten little attention.

There seems to be a randomness to what plays well and what does not, which means I’m learning nothing about how to improve my traffic.

NaNoWriMo and Generative AI

The controversy in the writing world currently is that the NaNoWriMo organization has issued a statement not only supporting use of generative AI in its events, but dismissing opposing viewpoints as ‘ableist’ and ‘classist’.

To understand the impact of this, let me start with NaNoWriMo. This organization sponsors a world-wide writing festival every November which encourages people to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. Admittedly, 50k is somewhat short for today’s expectations of a novel, but it’s 50k more than most people feel they can write. In 2020, 383,064 people participated in NaNoWriMo, the latest statistic available (Wikiwrimo, 2024). For full disclosure, I have participated in NaNoWriMo for several years.

The issue with generative AI is more complicated. Not all AI is generative AI; that is, not all AI is used to generate or create content. The fear of writers is that generative AI creates content, and it creates it from the materials it’s been trained on, which are existing works. This goes beyond analyzing patterns in grammar use and spelling (which I would argue are acceptable) into creative aspects. In other words, training generative AI is mass plagiarism of ideas without crediting sources. An entity like NaNoWriMo supporting mass plagiarism of ideas seems antithetical to its principles.

In addition, artists and writers fear being replaced by the much cheaper generative AI. The quality of generative AI is not as good as the actual creations of human beings; but if generative AI takes over in commercial outlets, the public will become inured to lower quality. The loss of revenue to real live writers will become the loss of creativity to the wider world.

To address NaNoWriMo’s charge that opposing their approval of generative AI is classist and ableist, it is classist and ableist to assume that people with disabilities or of underrepresented social classes would need to use generative AI to compete in the marketplace of ideas. I suspect that the issue here is a lack of distinction between AI used to proofread and suggest grammar (such as in ProWritingAid, one of their sponsors) and the AI that creates entire segments or whole stories. I see a big difference between supporting a tool for improving form and a system for writing content. If this is NaNoWriMo’s dilemma, then they need to do some soul-searching and make a clear ethical statement as to where the line gets drawn between composition tools and content creation.

This is where I am in my ethical processing of the issue, that use of AI for translation, proofreading, or grammar correction is not at the same level as AI to generate ideas and content. The former is predicated on objective rules; the other on skimming subjective creative works. My struggle to define what is permissable is the struggle of the entire society in dealing with AI.

Wikiwrimo (2024). NaNoWriMo statistics. Available: https://www.wikiwrimo.org/wiki/NaNoWriMo_statistics#cite_note-3 [September 3, 2024].