Before the Parade Passes By

       My wife and I had just finished watching (again) Sweet Home Alabama with Reece Witherspoon; if you haven't seen it, the movie from the early 2000s still holds up as an old-fashioned yarn, a glance back at small towns and the good ol' days of family values and long-held traditions (and unfortunately, prejudices).  So it was ironic that as I finished walking my dog, my own town's parade was getting ready: streets were blocked, police cars were redirecting traffic, bands and song girls were practicing their marching routines, and people who had set chairs aside from the night before were already arriving with their children and lining them up.  I couldn't help but think back to the last time I even saw a parade.  And certainly there are the big ones --the Pasadena Rose Parade and the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade with "floats" going down Manhattan.  But a small town parade these days seems rare.  It takes a lot to put on a parade, from decorating the floats (and not having everything fly off the truck as you're moving them into position) to outfitting the marchers, to organizing the usual dignitaries of mayor and fire chief and prom queens who will wave at you as happily as if they were part of Mardi Gras festives throwing candy...and all without the fear of a bullet flying by.  

      Ah, the good ol' days, when such things were not only possible but annual events.  So it was a bit of a surprise to read the recent polls that showed that among swing voters, preserving democracy was last on their list of things that mattered to them, according to the Democratic polling group, Blueprint.  Wait, last??   Now my city isn't quite the small segregated town of Pigeon Hole that appears in Sweet Home Alabama, but people here did leave chairs and tents out the entire night without fear that they might all be gone come morning.  Truth be told, the people are pretty honest here.  Money accidentally left in self-checkout stands is usually turned in (my wife once left $40 in the "cash back" bin and called an hour later to find that someone had turned it in to a cashier).  So this sight of me seeing youthful faces on both sides of the parade, both those in the parade and those watching it, brought back more than a few memories.  The song about the parade "passing by" comes from the elaborate version of an old-fashioned but grandiose parade staged for the film, Hello Dolly with Barbara Streisand (a trivia note: in her autobiography, Streisand remarked that Walter Matthau was difficult to act with, he telling her, "I'm an actor; you're a singer.").  But the song's lyrics --Before the parade passes by, I've had enough of life just passing by, with the rest of them, with the best of them...I wanna feel my heart coming alive again-- can take on many meanings.  Grab life before it all passes by, as elaborate as it may or may not be.  

     Beyond parades and drafts and veterans coming home to a welcoming public, there was a "respect" around the country back then, not only for parents and teachers but for the police and those meant to protect us.  As one example, take this story of a hijacking aboard Ethiopian Flight 708 bound from its capital to the city of Paris in 1972.  As recounted in Narritively, professor Roderick Hilsinger encountered not one, but six hijackers onboard: As the first hijacker turned to address the passengers, Hilfiger saw a flash of movement in the next row.  It was the man the hijacker had shot; not only was he alive, but he, too, was holding a gun.  No sooner had the hijacker begun speaking than the man leaped up and shot him.  Hilfiger, belatedly realized what was happening: There are security guards aboard this flight!...Now a security guard ran up from the back or the plane and shot the second hijacker, the one holding the grenade...The grenade expended most of its force downward through the cabin floor.  But while the pressure hull wasn't breached, the blast severed the controls to the rudder and the horizontal stabilizer trim, and disabled one of the jet's inboard engines.  Remarkably, the explosion and the airplane's plunge had barely paused the gun battle.  Struck by a security guard's bullet, one hijacker had fallen at the feet of a trio of bird-watchers, Rodney Searight and his companions Duncan and Biddy MacIntosh.  At a loss for what to do, the elderly birders placed their feet on the hijacker to prevent him from getting up.  A security guard ran up, knelt by the man, and pumped several more bullets into him for good measure.

     Those were the no-excuses times of Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, and Tom Laughlin, all of whom paved the way for the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone; it was also a time of unions, and workers going out on strike.  "On strike, shut it down," was a somewhat common refrain back then, people in solidarity seeking better pay and better working conditions as monopolies ruled the day: phone companies, car companies, airlines, and banks.  But you rarely hear the word "strike" anymore, at least among the masses.  Going on strike is scary these days, at least scarier than it was in the days of Norma Rae.  Unions then were tough, and union bosses even tougher (and often much more corrupt: think Jimmy Hoffa, whose body has yet to be found). Here's what Gillian Anderson and Jennifer Nadel had to say in their book, We: The United States is alone among developed nations in not providing paid maternity or parental leave across all its states -- the other two in the world are Papua New Guinea and Oman.  That leaves nearly one in four American women returning to work within two weeks or less of having a baby.  About half of those women were back to work in under a week....Caring professions such as teaching and nursing, traditionally dominated by women, pay far lower salaries than careers that contribute far less to society but are dominated by men.  And although Western economies would collapse without it, the work of caregivers isn't factored into the GDP at all.  In the United Kingdom, caregivers (mainly women) would cost the country l119 billion of they had to be paid for -- that's three times the defense budget.  The Canadian government has estimated the value of unpaid caring contributes over 30 percent to the country's GDP.  Imagine what would happen if we all went on strike!

      Which brings me to another strike, the recent flawed update by CrowdStrike that crippled many of today's mega-industries.  As reported by Laura DeNardis, director of the Center for Digital Ethics:  Because so many core systems in society rely upon CrowdStrike, the outage was widespread and disruptive across critical sectors: flights canceled, medical procedures delayed or canceled and many other routine societal systems affected...The 8.5 million Windows devices that Microsoft estimated as affected by the CrowdStrike update error represented less than 1% of Windows devices.  So why was the outage so widespread?  The organizations that operate critical societal infrastructure are the very institutions that implement cybersecurity services such as those provided by CrowdStrike.  Every crucial sector uses specialized cybersecurity services — agriculture, airlines, banking, energy, government, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and more.  These were the sectors affected by the outage...one takeaway from this incident is how disruptive an actual malicious and widespread cyberattack could be.  This incident affected a small number of computers relative to connected devices around the world.  CrowdStrike employees identified the problem quickly and transparently communicated to the world that this was not a cyberattack but an update error. 

     So how could a single page of code do so much damage in the sense of crippling banks and hospitals, and stranding airline passengers (even Microsoft suffered an attack on its Azure systems recently; reported TechRadar: Following an initial rollout of a fix across the Asia Pacific and European networks, a global rollout took place and the issue appeared too be under control around eight hours after the initial reports).  And did you happen to catch that figure, the one that forced Delta Air Lines to cancel or delay nearly 10,000 flights?  The affected computers of those industries represented less than one percent of the computers using Windows.  So what IS Crowdstrike and what does it do?  With my limited knowledge, here's my version: picture yourself comfortable with getting an update on your laptop from Windows or Apple  and then discovering that their "update" crashed your system.  Only picture yourself now as a major hospital or an airline which used the Microsoft system which was updated by Crowdstrike (Delta is now reconsidering its dependence on Microsoft's systems).  It's sort of like that.  For us at home, Norton or McAfee becomes our personal CrowdStrike, a "gatekeeper" service meant to keep out malware or viruses.  But let me again remind everyone that 1) while I try and research things as best I can, I am nowhere near an authoritative "expert" of anything, especially when it comes to today's computers and software; and 2) much of today's technology is going way over my head, and quickly!  Case in point, the recent interview in Wired of Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvadia. Throughout the interview I was struck by two things: his quote that Moore's Law was no more (his quote: If you look at the way Nvidia's technology has moved, classically there was Moore's law doubling every couple of years.  Well, in the course of the last 10 years, we've advanced AI by about a million times.), and his constant reference to transformers.  What the heck were transformers?  I grew up in a time when transformers were only related to electrical gear (and later became a popular movie series).  But what were they in today's lingo?   So I looked it up and immediately -- as in immediately-- got Gemini's (Google's AI assistant) answer: Transformers are a type of neural network architecture in artificial intelligence (AI) that can automatically change an input sequence into an output sequence.  They do this by tracking relationships and learning context within sequential data, such as words in a sentence.  Transformers are often used in natural language processing (NLP) to translate text and speech, or answer user questions.  Transformers use self-attention mechanisms to focus on different parts of the input text during each processing step.  They also use positional encodings to understand the order of words in a sentence, since they don't process data sequentially.  What??  But here's one thing to think about regarding AI; wrote The Conversation, data centers in Virginia now require 25% of that state's electricity (and while Ireland lures outside investment, data centers there now take up 20% of the entire country's electricity.  Briefly stated, AI requires ten times the amount of energy compared to other data such as a Google search.*

     Okay, so even if Crowdstrike is a gatekeeper of sorts designed to keep out malicious bots and malware for businesses and industries (again, as Norton, McAfee and others do for home users) maybe the real issue is that we, as in all of us, are growing dependent on just a few, or maybe even a single, player.  Take bananas, for instance (stay with me here).  Wrote The Guardian, there are 1000 varieties of bananas and we eat just one, the Cavendish...and it may be about to disappear, wrote a report from Science Direct.  Another story from the BBC had this to say about the fungus TR4: ...known as Panama Disease, it is a fungus that has been rampaging through banana farms for the past 30 years.  But within the last decade the epidemic has suddenly accelerated, spreading from Asia to Australia, the Middle East, Africa and more recently Latin America, where the majority of the bananas shipped to supermarkets in the global north come from.  To date it is now in more than 20 countries, prompting fears of a “banana pandemic” and shortages of the world’s favorite fruit...The reason TR4 is so deadly is because, just like Covid-19, it spreads by “stealth transmission”, albeit on different timescales.  A diseased plant will look healthy for up to a year before it shows the tell-tale signs of stained yellow, wilting leaves.  In other words, by the time you spot it, it is too late, the disease will likely have already spread via spores in the soil on boots, plants, machines or animals...At the moment the Cavendish bananas are grown on a vast monoculture, meaning not just TR4 but all diseases spread fast.  During one growing season, bananas can be sprayed with fungicides from 40 to 80 times.  So all of that begs the question, why aren't we trying different types of bananas?  The varieties sound pretty tasty as the article noted: For example, Dwarf Red, that tastes a little like raspberries, Lady Fingers, that are smaller and sweeter than Cavendish, or Blue Java, that tastes like vanilla ice-cream.  The bananas are not only delicious but will help create a diverse kind of farming more resilient to disease.  Chickens, apples, chickpeas, even corn is in the same boat, wrote Grist.  Almost 50 percent of those systems are made up of just four crops: wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans.  Disease is commonplace -- globally, $30 billion worth of food is lost to pathogens every year...The bigger the farm, the more serious the disease problems, at least in the case of a pathogen called Potato virus Y, which leads to low potato yields. 

      Phew, all this depressing talk of crop disease; time for a shot of tequila, except, agave is in the same boat.  Wait, agave?  Okay, tequila is made from a certain type of agave (by law) and differs from the agave used to make mezcal.  And there are 166 different species of agave, wrote Difford's (what??).   But the popularity and the surge in demand for mezcal may lead to its doom as mega-corporations and even cartels look to cash in on the slow-growing crop.  Wrote a piece in Bloomberg: An agave plant blooms just once in its life, slowly storing sugars in its heart for 6 to 30 years, depending on the species, in preparation for one massive act of reproduction.  When its ready, it sends up a towering flower stalk, called a quiote, that looks like the Jolly Green Giant's asparagus.  The flowers that unfurl gush nectar as an offering to the bats that cross-pollinate the agaves while feeding.  The act exhausts the reserves of the plant, which dies after flowering.  Unfortunately, that initial appearance of the quiote is when the plant is killed and its heart taken.  No flowers, no bats, no pollination for future plants.  Or cactus.  Or birds.  As the article put it, the desert dies (agave is one of the few plants that grows with little need for irrigation).  

      We tend to just accept that if the "big guys" tell us to click the box that says "accept the conditions," there's little need to read through the pages and pages of legal jargon (some sites don't let you proceed unless you DO accept such terms).  But today's world is rife with hackers ready to pounce on any erroneous link clicked; indeed, the Crowdstrike panic had hackers quickly offering "authorized" fixes which placed more malware into already broken systems.  And in another over-my-head story, the internet is apparently not that difficult to disrupt.  Imagine crippling the likes of The New York Times, Amazon, Spotify, Reddit, Netflix, and many more...even Fox News and the BBC.  Said the story in Wired: "Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the internet," [Bruce] Schneier, one of the most highly respected voices in the cybersecurity community, had warned.  He described how an unknown force appeared to be repeatedly barraging this key infrastructure with relentless waves of malicious traffic at a scale that had never been seen before.  "These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down.  We don't know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation-state.  China or Russia would be my first guess.  If turned out to be 3 teenagers doing it for fun.  But the teens, apparently without thinking through the consequences, then released the coding onto the Dark Web.

      One or two internet servers, one or two mega-conglomerates that sweep up everything from grocery stores to vet clinics and nursing homes, one or two pharmaceutical companies that dominate what goes into our bodies, one or two major banking institutions, and on and on.  Sure, there are dozens or hundreds of smaller competitors but to the "big guys," they don't really mean much.  Just picture the competition to Google or Amazon, Apple or Meta (Facebook), Microsoft or Nvidia.  Wrote Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect, such monopolies: ...had a supernormal run-up in the stock prices because they have supernormal profits.  And they have supernormal profits because of their monopoly power.  Ownership of the shares of these companies is also highly concentrated.  Just four investors hauled in $491 billion last year from the stock run-up.  Ownership in stocks as a whole reflects the wealth inequality of the society, with the richest 1 percent owing 54 percent of all stocks.  The stock market gains of 2023 made them about $5 trillion richer.  Now my head really hurts...

      So to bring it back down to our earth, I turn back to physics and the book by Matt Strassler (mentioned in an earlier post): Take a plastic bottle, fill it with distilled water, and put it in the freezer.  After an hour or two, carefully look at the container.  You may find that despite having dropped below freezing temperature, the water is still liquid.  Slow and patient cooling of pure water can lead to a surprising outcome.  It can fall well below the temperature when ice normally forms and yet remain liquid, as though it had slept right through its freeze appointment.  Scientists say that the water is supercooled.  But if you want it to stay liquid, be quiet!  Otherwise, tap the bottle or drop a grain of salt into the water.  A sufficient disturbance rouses the water from its nap, and then --presto!-- somewhere a tiny ice crystal forms, and in the blink of an eye, the crystal grows, its edge a wall of doom sweeping through the water until the entire container is frozen.  A mini-universe, swiftly transfigured.  Is it possible that the universe itself is supercooled and potentially subject to a transformative wall of doom?  Scientists have long speculated about the possibility.  But recent research has confirmed the existence of something capable to causing this type of catatrohpe -- an apocalypse that no life could survive.  That something is the Higgs field. (it's still way beyond me)

     As far as we know, we only have one life, one home, one planet, and one chance to watch our own parade go by.  In his book A Guide to the Good Life,  William B. Irvine opened with this: What do you want out of life?  You might answer this question by saying that you want a caring spouse, a good job, and a nice house, but these are really just some of the things you want in life...Why is it important to have such a philosophy?  Because without one, there is a danger that you will mislive -- that despite all of your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life.  There is, in other words, a danger that when you are on your deathbed, you will look back and realize that you wasted your one chance at living.  Instead of spending your life pursuing something genuinely valuable, you squandered it because you allowed yourself to be distracted by the various baubles life has to offer.  As my wife always advises, just be kind.  And as a friend told me, follow the advice of the old Italian proverb that simply says, "If you can't live longer, live deeper."   So pull up a seat and enjoy the parade.  We may only have one universe, and it may be a fragile one.  But the parade of our life is still going on...don't let it pass you by.    

*Here's how the NY Times put it about the increased demand for electricity: Many power companies were already struggling to keep the lights on, especially during extreme weather, and say the strain on grids will only increase.  Peak demand in the summer is projected to grow by 38,000 megawatts nationwide in the next five years, according to an analysis by the consulting firm Grid Strategies, which is like adding another California to the grid...The rise of artificial intelligence is poised to accelerate that trend: By 2030, electricity demand at U.S. data centers could triple, using as much power as 40 million homes, according to Boston Consulting Group...Utilities also note that data centers and factories need power 24 hours a day, something wind and solar can’t do alone.