Headline of an article by Adrienne Matei in the Guardian:"Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real." And the sub-heading: "If everything feels broken but strangely normal, the Soviet-era concept of hypernormalization can help." And more: "First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening. The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation."
Having a word for it doesn't necessarily help. I agree that action is the only antidote to apocalypic gloom: “We are in a period now when it’s absolutely essential to protest,” says Hartmann, citing the Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth, who argues that just 3.5% of a population engaging in peaceful protest can hold back authoritarian movements."

On a happier note in micro world, Mary ForceOfNature Leaming is pushing work forward on reclaiming trails in town. I walked the Bikeway and the Fairgrounds Loop on this first sunny day in a while. Trails are such good places for thinking and calming. And full of interesting things that need their picture taken. We plan to add an archway to the Bikeway trail entrance on Main Street. The Fairgrounds Loop has been reblazed but still needs work. In order to do a Sandy Stream Loop (see, it names itself) that goes up Connor Mill Trail, turns at the bridge on 139 and comes down the other side joining the Fairground Loop and then the Bikeway, it looks like we just need permission from two or three landowners. On the Bikeway, the library plans to install a permanent story walk that changes seasonally. The next generation is stepping up to make town better, and the state has a ton of money to give out for trail projects. There will be grantwriting.

If Saturday had been a slice of pie, it would have been a tall mixed berry thing with ripples of fudge and nuts and unexpected pockets of cardamon with a subplot of rhubarb and the occasional zing of bitters. It was a book and plant sale with an overlapping UBR clean up the campus event, recurring deputy drama across the street (sheriff dept truck with cool logo "Compassion, Integrity, Teamwork"), and a walk on trails including the freshly chainsawed-by-Emily Fairgrounds Loop. So much all at one time and it all worked. Add the dock getting put in, the approval of a $6K grant, the explosion of creative 8647 memes, and the start of the MurderBot series for the total picture.

Today we bought pink poppy plants to put in Maggie's Garden which library volunteers are refurbishing. Maggie Wilcox was a Cornell-trained botanist who taught at Unity College and also served as a selectman. Her garden at the community center was her Master Gardener's project. It was designed to bloom all season and it heavily favored pink. I took a thousand pictures of the poppies she planted there, like these from June 2008. Maggie died in 2010; leaving the town office, her VW Bug left the road, swerved into the Field of Dreams, and came to rest in some bushes.

This nice ground stuff is slowly taking over our leachfield hill and it's the right tool for the job. Doesn't need mowing and makes flowers in the spring. Invasive, non-native says Melissa. Like humans say I.

It is all about the new pope this week, an American who took the name Leo the Fourteenth. He must be the right choice because all the awful people hate him. The best thing about him is the New Orleans creole connection. His ancestors immigrated from Haiti and settled in the 7th ward.

The AI book gave me a vocabulary about the subject that I can now use for further reading about it. The book deals with bias in facial recognition systems so the datasets in question here contain images of human faces. AI in general is about algorithms for pattern recognition using big datasets. Computing speed and dataset size are what is making AI systems possible now. In our discussion of the book, we felt that it was too much about her on one hand, but telling her investigative journey was also what made the subject accessible and included teaching us about academic mentoring and networking and the involvement of big tech companies. Some quotes from the book:

...quintessential master’s thesis should be aesthetic enough to be in a museum and impactful enough to lead to the creation of a start-up, while also making a meaningful technical contribution via a new method of doing something or some other innovation.
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Default settings are not neutral.
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creative learning is supported by four p’s: projects, passion, peers, and play.
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Hard fun is what’s happening when we willingly take on difficult subjects, or work through mundane tasks, because we’re working on projects that impassion and excite us.
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intersectionality—or analyzing across multiple axes of identity
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The benchmarks themselves masked potential bias because they lacked representation.
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the past dwells in our data.
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Power shadows are cast when the biases or systemic exclusion of a society are reflected in the data.
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This is what is meant by the term sociotechnical research, which emphasizes that you cannot study machines created to analyze humans without also considering the social conditions and power relations involved.
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ecosystem of datasets, distributed data processing systems offered by big tech companies, and unwitting generators of data that fuel the system: us.
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Feminist scholars have long pointed out how Western ways of knowing, shaped by patriarchy, attempt to erase the standpoint of the observer, taking a godlike, omniscient, and detached view. However, our standpoint, where we are positioned in society, and our cultural and social experiences shape how we share and interpret our observations.
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Decision-making power is ultimately what defines ground truth. Human decisions are subjective.
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The classification system erases the existence of those groups not included in it.
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In computer vision that uses machine learning, what machines are being exposed to is gender presentation, how an individual performs their gender in the way they dress, style their hair, and more.
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For machine learning models data is destiny, because the data provides the model with the representation of the world as curated by the makers of the system.