Some weeks back, I set up a dashboard of San Francisco COVID-19 data. It showed data that was already available elsewhere, but zoomed in near the low end of the graph. I wanted a graph that I could glance at to see if rates were low enough for me to do non-essential things inside with other people. The charts at plague.wtf and the SF Chronicle Corona Virus Tracker had charts, but zoomed out far enough such that you had to squint and/or do math to figure out whether it was worth the risk to eat inside a restaurant.

So I set up a dashboard with a zoomed-in chart; the chart has a line in the middle with some safe-ish numbers. The chart shows values up to 2x the safe levels. Today, it hit an interesting milestone.

[graph with three lines: red (New Cases), magenta (Test positivity), and green (Wastewater); all the numbers are so high they're off the chart]

Today, all the numbers the dashboard tracks are off the charts, over 2x safe levels. Silver lining: now I can track these numbers at plague.wtf or SF Chronicle without squinting.

(People who are good at reading charts might wonder: Those numbers were off the chart as of a few days ago; why only blog about it now? It takes a few days between the time those numbers are measured and then make it to state agencies and then to public online places my program can read. So…the numbers have been off the charts for a while, but I only got to see it this morning.)

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2022-12-05T16:59:58.064365

rephrased Phraser word+phrase lists

I updated the scored word and phrase lists over at the phraser page, using data from a recent copies of Wikipedia and other wikis.

Soon after I updated them, I saw that my over-enthusiastic tool that guesses at the spacing of crossword puzzle dictionaries had messed up; thinking that "pre examines" and "sniffing ly" are each two-word phrases. That'll be fixed… next year, along with several more pre- and -ly words.

Uhm, yeah, I guess there's not a big difference between these lists and those I got when I was tinkering with this stuff back in September. But I'm in the habit of refreshing these in the weeks before Mystery Hunt, and without our habits what are we but beasts of chaos?

[Geordi La Forge meme. Geordi rejects: Unfashionably obsolete September phrases. Geordi respects: Fresh lovely December phrases]

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2022-12-04T17:27:41.932227

You can use the Give2SF program to donate your private $$ to San Francisco's public services. You direct your funds to different pieces of the government. E.g., you can direct some to "COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund", some to "Disaster Recovery Fund". Only one of these Funds is associated with a particular person, "Mayor's Fund for the Homeless."

Meanwhile, articles like "Scathing allegations against Mayor Breed and city in lawsuit filed over treatment of the homeless" remind us that our Mayor appreciates it when city workers illegally trash homeless peoples' stuff.

I'm visualizing the Venn diagram of people who want to use Give2SF to give to a fund for homeless people; intersected with the people who want our Mayor to have money to, uhm, handle the homeless people problem her way. If you want to visualize it, please see the attached file "non-intersecting-circles.jpg."

[image: two scrawled non-intersecting circles]

I gotta think that fund could get more funders if they took the "Mayor's" out of the name.

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2022-12-03T23:11:30.999178

Democratic Primary, a.k.a. Shooting Themselves in the Foot

You may recall a couple of years back I blogged about "electability," specifically, if a USA political party wants to pick an electable candidate, they should listen to voters in states that are median party lean. E.g., don't ask California voters: they're in a liberal echo chamber and will tell you some damned hippie is most electable; but then the rest of the nation will reject that hippie. And don't ask the Wyoming voters: they're in a reactionary echo chamber and will tell you some billionaire trust fund baby is most electable; but then the rest of the nation will reject that baby. Instead, ask the voters from the battleground states. If some candidate appeals to the middle-of-the-road Pennsylvanians, they've got a decent chance with the rest of the country.

So I got excited when I saw the Democrats had voted to move their first Presidential Primary election away from (too right-wing) Iowa. Then I saw they'd voted to move that first primary to South Carolina… even further away from the median, towards the nutjob end of the right wing. The news says the Democrats wanted a state with a large African-American population% to make sure those voices were heard… and Georgia was right there; higher A.A. population %, battleground state, just an all-around great choice.

Oh well. I'm not sure I'd know how to react to an American political party that was nominating appealing candidates nowadays.

In case you're curious, here's a table of states with 538-estimated partisan lean and electoral college votes.

right- wingness rank	elec. votes (sum)	elec votes (this state)	partisan lean	state
1	3	3	-49.86651	Wyoming
2	6	3	-37.06978	North Dakota
3	13	7	-36.86855	Oklahoma
4	17	4	-36.79051	Idaho
5	22	5	-35.57757	West Virginia
6	25	3	-32.0032	South Dakota
7	31	6	-31.50176	Arkansas
8	42	11	-29.205	Tennessee
9	51	9	-29.17974	Alabama
10	59	8	-27.18871	Kentucky
11	65	6	-26.28323	Utah
12	70	5	-24.75097	Nebraska
13	76	6	-21.07362	Kansas
14	86	10	-20.98018	Missouri
15	94	8	-20.39682	Louisiana
16	105	11	-20.25634	Indiana
17	108	3	-19.90665	Montana
18	114	6	-19.78266	Mississippi
19	123	9	-18.26597	South Carolina
20	126	3	-14.6111	Alaska
21	164	38	-12.90278	Texas
22	182	18	-12.10644	Ohio
23	188	6	-9.611277	Iowa
24	217	29	-7.396878	Florida
25	233	16	-7.357549	Georgia
26	244	11	-7.171309	Arizona
27	259	15	-4.815506	North Carolina
28	269	10	-3.839976	Wisconsin
29	289	20	-2.96776	Pennsylvania
30	295	6	-2.59005	Nevada
31	311	16	-1.175974	Michigan
32	315	4	0.5663683	New Hampshire
33	325	10	1.995261	Minnesota
34	338	13	3.601613	Virginia
35	342	4	4.379831	Maine
36	351	9	6.750234	Colorado
37	356	5	7.150143	New Mexico
38	363	7	10.60454	Oregon
39	377	14	11.34622	New Jersey
40	384	7	12.14592	Connecticut
41	396	12	12.43839	Washington
42	416	20	13.20919	Illinois
43	419	3	13.92317	Delaware
44	448	29	19.90219	New York
45	452	4	23.66751	Rhode Island
46	507	55	25.74527	California
47	517	10	26.2639	Maryland
48	520	3	27.77973	Vermont
49	524	4	31.81241	Hawaii
50	535	11	32.67723	Massachusetts
51	538	3	68.32358	District of Columbia

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2022-12-03T13:53:27.884180

When I walked through Golden Gate Park, the carnies were setting up Jingle All the Way, also known as the San Francisco tree lighting ceremony and official lighting up of the Entwined artificial tree thingies. [photo: cotton candy stand and rides setting up on a gray day]

[photo: cotton candy stand and rides setting up on a gray day]

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2022-12-01T23:05:00.012269

image with meme-referencing text Don't ever talk to me or my son ever again. The picture shows two toys modeled on the Go programming language gopher mascot, one big and one small

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2022-11-30T20:59:07.107783

Did you ever find out about a new-to-you API and immediately know what you wanted to use it for?

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2022-11-30T05:24:54.635886

In theory, the "Mumbled Artist's Instructions" puzzles were a challenge to figure out some absurd thing an AI had tried to draw. Reverse-engineering an AI is a fun challenge.

But it turns out AI is not good at drawing absurd things. It draws unguessable nonsense when I was hoping for guessable nonsense. So for the past several weeks, I've been manually adding elements to the AI-generated art. That is much less satisfying.

This week, I was determined to use fully-AI-generated art. If one set of absurd punny "instructions" didn't yield something guessable, I'd try another set of instructions, no compromise. So I tried a bunch of things and… none of them yielded anything comprehensible.

I give up. I give up on this whole puzzle gimmick. As consolation, please enjoy these pictures allegedly of

ball dixie (Baltic Sea)
bullet surprise (Pulitzer Prize)
florid estate (Florida State)
rid lease caught (Ridley Scott)

[image: ball dixie, which looks something like a minimalist steamshovel made from plastic toys]

[image: bullet surprise, except it looks more like a can of spraypaint falling out of a malformed box]

[image: florid estate, which looks like a Miami mansion with a nice garden out front. I don't think I'd go so far as to call it 'florid' though]

[image: rid lease caught, which looks someone holding up a fish they caught; no sign of a rid lease]

Is it weird that the "florid estate" picture looks like it's in Florida (with palm trees) but doesn't have a lot of flowers? Does the AI not know the difference between "florid" and "Florida"?

Anyhow, good news, artists: your jobs are still safe from AI.

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2022-11-28T15:29:56.514529

Every so often, you stumble upon something that reminds you how much more is going on in San Francisco than you know about.

[screen shot of a Swarm check in at the Golden Gate Park horseshoe pitch. Description reads "Folks are burning sage and dancing, dressed in (I guess?) some Native American ceremonial garb."]

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2022-11-27T16:53:48.133763

Looks like that Entwined light-up art installation is coming back to the Peacock Meadow in San Francisco (as has been noted elsewhere).

[photo: behind a chain link fence and traffic cones, a pile of plasticky-looking dendrite forms to be assembled into some light-up trees. A sign reads "pardon our mess"]

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2022-11-25T13:30:02.581767