With the election and the holidays approaching, you may be experiencing some conflicts with family and friends when the conversation turns to Covid. It has been a hard year for all of us, whether we are under extreme lockdown or just trying to get our kids through the school day. This post will hopefully provide some pointers on how to cope. If only things were as easy as that infamous Monty Python sketch. 

When I was seeing my own conflicts over the pandemic, I first thought to bring in a professional mediator. I’ve known June Jacobson for close to 20 years. We first met under very difficult circumstances: I was getting divorced and my (now) ex-wife and I had decided to try her rather than both hire our own lawyers. Our sessions with her didn’t work out, but June and I remained in occasional contact.

June continues to work almost exclusively with mediation for divorcing couples and has had several families who have come to her explicitly about resolving their Covid issues. Certainly Covid has changed the nature of her consultations. “Everything is happening online,” she told me in a recent call. “While it is true that people don’t have to travel, they may not have a home environment that can be private enough, especially if they have kids or other family members living with them. Spouses who are still living together sometimes have to share the same computer screen, which can require close physical proximity that may not feel comfortable or safe.”

This lack of compartmentalization has accelerated some issues with divorcing couples and these times are trying ones for couples that are nearing the end of their marriages. “More people want to get divorced now that they have been incarcerated with their spouse all this time.”  Still, the basics of mediation haven’t changed. “Usually, when a couple first comes in to see me, they need a shared agenda and a common plan. I use some tools from therapy to help with listening to each person’s point of view, and try to facilitate communication and contribute to mutual understanding.” She has a wide spectrum of training, including social work and legal degrees. “What makes mediation successful is that there are usually overriding values that enable a couple to come to the table to reach a mutually acceptable outcome. We try to focus on the future, not get stuck in the past with trying to agree on a narrative of the history of their relationship. My job is to be non-judgmental about this historical context, to understand and respect their realities, and sometimes to hold alternative versions of reality from each partner in mind.”

Part of the Covid contention is that people start out from wildly differing fact bases. Then stir in a few conspiracy theories and what you have is truly a failure to communicate. Covid has certainly made things harder for families that have to run their businesses and schools and day care all out of a house that is maybe severely space-constrained and ill-designed for these multiple purposes.

While I was talking to June, I read this NYT article by Charlie Warzel about coping with difficult family discussions. Warzel has several tips on how to interact with your family members with Covid contention:

• Give people an understanding of their information environment
• Create a bit of common ground and lay the foundation to explore how unproven conspiracy theories differ from reality
• Fact-checking is valuable but don’t count on it to change someone’s beliefs
• Don’t debate these issues on Facebook
• Don’t be a scold — be gentle, compassionate and patient
• Know when to walk away and try another day.

These gambits sound good in theory, but in the real world it is hard to implement them in practice. But I want to end this post on a lighter note, so I will leave you with one last link, to a clip from Lewis Black’s latest comedy routine, where he touches on this contention. The clip is NSFW but very funny. Almost as funny as the Pythons’ bit.

At first glance, the plot line of this book seems tired: part clash of the clones, part “Total Recall” memory conflicts, part retread sci-fi mystery. But as you get drawn into the book, which concerns a pharma marketing exec who volunteers for an illegal cloning experiment, replacing himself with a clone for a year, you find out it is quite original and intriguing. The clone — and his body double who is locked away — are both carefully observed, although not as carefully as the scientists think. By the time you reach the end, you’ll have thoroughly enjoyed this book, and the combination of sci-fi and mystery is a nice balance. Highly recommended and I might have to rewatch the original Total Recall just to savor some of those memories, wholesale.

Here is an excerpt from the new Jane Gilmartin novel.

• • The UIs are just awful for the streaming services. Maybe we got used to the cable UIs over time — which wasn’t anything to crow about. YouTubeTV has the best interface, but it is the best of a bad lot. The problem is those change-resistors that I mentioned above. And it doesn’t help matters that you don’t usually have a keyboard to navigate these UIs. While it is nice that the new Google TV and some of the other devices (Like the sticks from Roku and Amazon) come with a remote, this isn’t enough.
  •  If you have a mixed collection of different TV vintages, you are probably going to be switching between the web UI and the TV app UI, which will further confound the change-resistors in your family. Exhibit A is Netflix: their web UI has been perfected over a longer time than any of their app UIs, and despite all the code development, both of them are still less than satisfying.
  • The app collection for your TV is disappointing. This isn’t like getting apps on Google Play or iTunes app stores. You are stuck with whatever is available for your particular generation of TV. I got a new TV last year, which is great for that TV, but unless you plan on upgrading all your home’s TVs you won’t be happy with the older vintage apps available.
  • One of the bigger downfalls of the streaming services is being able to easily rewind and fast forward (including through commercials). Uverse (and just about every cable TV provider) makes this easy. Every streaming service makes this a lot harder, and in some cases you can’t skip the ads (unless you buy a premium package, and then that just lets you skip some of the ads). One of the reasons why we record our favorite programs is being able to skip ALL the ads. I also found that the time of day that you watch will determine how many ads get inserted into your programming streams.

• You need to read the fine print. Some of the streaming services have extra charges for multiple users or multiple TVs or multiple devices, to remove some of the ads, or to add additional capacity for recording your shows. A small subset of the various Hulu “add-ons” are shown in the screencap at left.
• Finally, the TV apps don’t easily maintain channel states after the TV is turned off. When I am watching channel 5 on any of my TVs — smart or not — if I turn it off and then back on, it stays on channel 5. This is not necessarily so with the apps. With my smartest and newest Samsung TV in my living room, there is a setting on the menu that I found after much poking around to enable this. But it was purely by persistence that I found it.

So I went back to Uverse over the weekend. It was an interesting experiment, and I appreciate my wife being patient as I messed around.

While my days of being in engineering school are in the paleolithic era, I do remember a fondness for cheat sheets, especially when it came time to cram for exams. I was recently reminded of this while watching a movie about NASA’s mission control doings during the Apollo era. On the screen flashed the following handwritten cheat sheet, to be used when one of the spacecraft computers was showing a particular alarm code. I believe it was compiled by Jack Garman.

This struck me as fortuitous — as some of you might remember, when the Eagle lunar module from Apollo 11 was making its descent to the surface of the moon, it had set off a 1202 error code. The engineers had experienced this code in previous simulations, and within seconds were able to tell Armstrong and Aldrin to just ignore it and carry on: the code indicated that the computer was being overwhelmed with inputs. Given that computer had the processing power of today’s coffee pots (1 MHz processor with 150 kb of RAM), it wasn’t a show-shopper.

But it also struck me as somewhat amusing too. Here is NASA, spending billions of dollars inventing all this technology, and the success and failure of the first moon landing came down to some engineer putting this one-pager together that saved the day. Garman had memorized these error codes and was able to quickly respond to the flight controllers that the landing could continue.

If you want to read more about the circumstances around the moon landing, check out what I wrote about in 2009. There are some links to interesting web pages that show simulators for the guidance computers and also a real-time video and audio of the entire mission.

If you want to see some good examples of the cheat sheet genre, Peter Nikilow has collected hundreds of them on his Pinterest account. If you have your own favorites, put a link in the comments and say what makes it so.

Nineteen years ago, I taught a high school computer networking class for ten boys. It was my first time in a classroom, which had a live network and Internet connection using a bunch of Windows 95 computers, hard wired via Ethernet. We had some fun times with the class, which lasted all year, and I am still in touch with many of the students today. I can’t imagine trying to teach a class like that via Zoom, but that isn’t why I am writing about the experience.

One of the more memorable moments was when some of the kids posted my picture on HotOrNot.com, a new website that just celebrated its 20th anniversary and got some mention in Mashable here. I would urge you to read the entire story, even if you are in a stable relationship and don’t have any use for dating or matching sites. The story notes the many places where HotOrNot was ahead of its time, and lay the foundation for many of the web technologies we have come to know and love today. For example, the site connected online and offline social interaction in new and useful ways. Now we take this kind of connection for granted. Some other ground-breaking things:

• Gamified ratings of each participant’s photo, now enshrined in Likes and up-votes across all the social media platforms.
• Word-of-mouth traction: traffic doubled every few hours in its first weeks. In the piece there is this charming story about how UC Berkeley engineers figured out the extra traffic was coming from one of their servers that had been connected without approval on the campus network.
• They very quickly put in place a subscription model and became cash-positive by using auto-renewing subscriptions. That was a rarity then but now is so commonplace that you would be hard-pressed to find a website that doesn’t do this.
• Outlandish promotional billboards. They put up one with the two founders mostly naked, strategically covered by their laptops with low scores. The founders were nerds, after all. This is way before Oracle and numerous other tech companies used similar tactics, not to mention every airport ad ever used by a tech vendor. Remember airport ads?
• Something not seen currently were a series of anti-bullying measures, include great take-down response time if someone complained about their photo. It has taken many tech companies far too long to figure this out.
• A real tagline: keeping the site “fun, clean and real.” Unlike other taglines (don’t be evil, say), they actually meant it and ran their company accordingly.
• Eliminate needless clicks: when it was first conceived, there was a “click to submit” button. That was eliminated.
• Virtual goods purchased through real money, typically with Western currencies that could retain their buying power if they lived in other parts of the world. Now we have Bitcoin.Not sure that is progress.
• Mutual opt-in messaging, a precursor to many what many subscription and dating  sites do, and the model behind Twitter’s DMs.
• Inclusive dating to the same-sex world. While not as inclusive as today’s alphabet soup of non-binary genders, it was still innovative in moving beyond hetero norms.
• Speaking of gender, HoN also had several female managers way before it became a cause. Again, this has taken way too long to implement.

I am not a big fan of conspiracy theories. As my wife has suggested, this practical reason makes more sense to me: the number of folks that have to be in on the secret have to be a very large number. It is far easier to just explain the “theory” as baloney.

Let’s talk about one of the biggest conspiracies sweeping the world right now, QAnon. Its adherents are a very scary bunch. It has gotten so popular that now they have hijacked what were normally causes for good, such as using  the #SaveTheChildren hashtag (as explained by the NY Times) to organize and recruit new members. They are so popular that a software development conference with a similar name has received registrations from people who can’t code. Last summer the FBI identified QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat, linking the group to the Tree of Life shooter.

“QAnon is a baseless internet conspiracy theory whose followers believe that a cabal of Satan-worshipping Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and billionaires runs the world while engaging in pedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children,” wrote The Guardian in a post earlier this summer. If you recall the whole PizzaGate fiasco a few years ago, that was their heretofore most infamous moment. (You can find references to that on your own.)

I will give you a lay of their landscape, and assure you that my hyperlinks go to legit sources that hopefully won’t amplify their messages of hate. And they have nothing to do with the delightful musical referenced in this image here.

Their membership, from various accounts, appears to be catching on. There are dozens of Republican congressional and local races with avowed QAnon supporters, including a couple running in safe districts that will most likely get elected. That is pretty depressing. One reason for their popularity is social media, which makes it easy for potential members to find like-minded individuals in their area to connect with. Facebook banned many QAnon groups in mid-August. When Twitter took similar action in July, it limited reposting features for approximately 150,000 accounts and banned more than 7,000 accounts outright.

But here’s the problem: banning this reprehensible speech isn’t the best solution. Unlike the “shouting fire in a crowded theater” (not that any theater right now is even close to crowded), these groups aren’t so easily silenced or adjudicated in a courtroom. The problem with an outright ban is that this almost always encourages the QAnon supporters to find other places to post their garbage and attract new followers. What is needed is to leave the original post (usually a video) and attach a piece debunking their claims. What Twitter did was to also downrank the Tweet and preventing any reposting. “This creates one location that can be used to offer debunking content, both as a pre-roll on the video and in the recommended next videos,” says Renee Diresta here. She goes into more detail in a Wired piece where she documents the path that many conspiracy adherents take, calling them Cult 2.0. She writes, “The social platforms are still behaving as if they don’t understand the dynamics at play.”.

Sadly, our cancel culture has made the problem worse. We need to operate with a more granular mindset if we want to prevent these hate groups from spreading. It is too bad that Facebook can’t seem to figure this out.