Michael A. Covington    Michael A. Covington, Ph.D.
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Your what really turned blue? (Hoaxes)

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2024
March
12

Four years of COVID

Four years ago yesterday was America's "last normal day," the day the COVID cancellations and lockdowns started, the day our lives (indeed, the world's lives) changed irreversibly. I put March 11, 2020, on a level with September 11, 2001, and December 7, 1941.

Here are charts of the case rate and death rate in Georgia, whose statistics resemble those of the whole country. These are from the Georgia Department of Public Health and, as I've done before, I edited the case rate chart to take out a false spike from a data reporting problem in April, 2022.

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You see the regular January-February and August-September spikes. I had COVID in February 2024 (very late in the game, after several vaccinations) and, probably, also in September 2021 (without a positive test, but my sense of smell was damaged, a classic COVID symptom). Thanks to vaccinations, I was not seriously ill either time, just inconvenienced.

As I've said before, I'm sad that we lost so much of our regular routine. For the first time since middle school, I got accustomed to spending whole days at home. I've had unprecedented success in my work, but at the same time, I miss the old days, and too much of pre-COVID life isn't coming back.

As I've said repeatedly, Melody and I miss the casual contact with familiar people at work and church and even in stores and restaurants, people we did not know well enough to seek out socially, but who were stable parts of our lives. The old routine is gone; there has been a lot of turnover of restaurants and businesses; and it's almost as if the whole town had been replaced around us.

But part of the change is us — we just don't get out as much as we used to. And part of that comes from the success of my consulting activities and more efficient use of time.

I am very sad that some of my friends died of COVID. I am also sad that some of them lost their rationality; one went fully into QAnon; a few others became blowhards, trying to force me to agree with their non-expert opinions and not listen to real experts.

In my research on schizophrenia, some years back, I noticed (but did not study scientifically) an important difference between rational thinking and delusion-prone thinking: Everyone can consider strange possibilities, but delusion-prone people can't let go of them.

Or to put it another way, rational people can abandon a guess once they see that it doesn't fit the evidence. Was the COVID lockdown an evil government's way of oppressing us? I could imagine such a thing happening, but I could also see that it didn't fit the observable facts at all. Delusion-prone conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, couldn't let go of the idea once they had thought of it. Its emotional appeal made it impossible to test rationally. And suddenly it became fashionable to be delusion-prone.

I think this overall loss of rationality is one of the things that led to the insurrection of January 6, 2021.


By the way, have you noticed drab post-COVID decor? It seems all the buildings are being painted cream-colored, gray, black, and maybe white or very deep purple. The vivid colors of the 1970s and the earth tones of the 1980s seem to be going away as fast as people can replace them. The change even extends to people's clothing.

I am told that in the 1920s, most 19th-century wooden houses were painted white, giving the impression (certainly clear to me as a child in the 1960s) that they had always been that way. This is similar.

2024
March
9

"Swans on the Lake," by John Thompson

When I was in high school, I started piano lessons, but due to family circumstances I had to stop after about, I think, 3 lessons.

Because I was an older beginner and had already been playing the piano with one hand to some extent, the teacher started with the Grade 1 book but didn't take me through every song. Instead, she chose to start at a song that seemed to be at about the right level.

It was indeed a pretty song, considering how simple it is, and it demonstrates the tune being passed back and forth between the right and left hands. I never forgot the tune. I think this was actually the only song I played as part of the lessons.

Two days ago I found it online, and yesterday I managed to play it on our little electronic keyboard. Not perfectly on the first try, of course. But here's a proper performance of it by a teacher:

I'm hearing from plenty of other people who got piano lessons in their childhood (which I did not) and who fondly remember this song.

This is not the first case of a piano teaching example being fondly remembered as a piece of music in its own right. The Bach/Petzold Minuet in G is probably the most famous (and is one of my favorite pieces of music).

2024
March
7

Your what really turned blue?

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A familiar hoax is going around Facebook again. The people who spread it must not even read the things they're posting, or they'd balk at the strange sentence "Mine really turned blue" in this one.

The next time I see one, I'm going to reply: "I see that a scammer has tricked you into posting lies." Because that's what is happening.

I got an unexpectedly helpful response from someone who saw my Facebook posting about this. She said, "I was almost taken in because it looked so convincing."

Well, here's a basic adult life skill: You can't tell whether something is true by whether it "looks convincing." You have to check against facts from other sources!

2024
March
5

Twenty years

I've just started a new month in the Daily Notebook for the 241st time, still doing it by editing raw HTML. The Daily Notebook has been going for 20 years; it started on March 3, 2004. It's not the longest-running blog in the world, but it's one of the longer-lived ones.

In these busy times, I didn't get to write an entry on the exact 20th anniversary. Nor did I mark yesterday, March 4, as the 50th anniversary of a well-remembered celebration of Exelaunei Day (an inside joke among Greek scholars) at The University of Georgia in 1974. Professors Nethercut and Best are no longer with us, but I remember.

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