Monica

An open letter to our governor (against a 1000-character limit on the state web site):

Dear Governor Shapiro,

As you are surely aware as a fellow Jew, the spring primary is April 23, the first day of Passover, a day on which observant Jews cannot participate in the election. The PA government has been talking for months about moving the date, but nothing has happened. Is there anything you can do to help? Disenfranchising Jewish voters is hurtful, especially in the presence of antisemitic candidates. It's also bad publicity for our state. Several other states have already corrected this problem, but we have not.

You might say "vote by mail instead", but the last time I attempted to do so, Allegheny County sent me a spoiled ballot and there was no provision for correcting it. I had to go to the poll on election day anyway and then vote provisionally. That made me feel very marginalized. My vote did not count because of a printing error and county offices that did not answer repeated phone calls. If it happens on Passover, I lose my vote.

Please fix this. Thank you.

--

I am aware that the legislature, not the governor, controls this, but navigating the PA legislature is a challenge and the governor should be able to push, if he hears from enough people that something matters. I thought this problem had been solved a month or two ago, but it turns out that the two houses of the legislature disagree over how to fix it. :-(

We recently visited Living Treasures Animal Park, right off the PA Turnpike. It's nearby for us, but we'd never heard of it until we got a recommendation. It's a family-run cross between a small zoo and a petting zoo, with care for the animals being a top priority.

They have typical domesticated animals that kids (and others) can interact with. I call this first one "pet me!" and the second one "feed me!":

They also have some more exotic animals, like wallabies and bison, and some you definitely shouldn't treat as interactive, like brown bears and alligators. (According to their web site, their alligators winter in Florida.) Visitors can feed many of the animals; they sell appropriate feed, and exhibits are labelled with what you can feed them. For most animals they provide a chute (and a few can eat out of your hand); for the small primates they had a bucket on a rope with pulleys, so you could deposit food, send it over, and watch them take it. We didn't do any feeding ourselves, but there were some families there with kids who were very much enjoying this.

They had some miniature horses, which I've seen pictures of but haven't seen "live" before. They're proportioned differently from full-size horses and also from ponies. (They do pony rides for the kids, by the way.)

The enclosures were large and well-maintained, and the animals always had an "escape hatch". (And thus, there were some we didn't see, which is fine.) Even in late morning, those that wanted it found shade.

There was also a large pond with ducks, geese, and two black swans. I took this picture at maximum zoom with no other adjustments. Yes, the water really was that color -- never did find out what plant life was doing that.

This was shared with me in the form of screen shots (so, hard to read), but then I found the link to where it happened on Reddit (in a "legal advice" channel). I thought my readers might enjoy this.

Original post, two months ago, which has a note from moderators saying they've verified the story:

[oregon] I accidentally created an army of crow body guards. Am I liable if my murder attempts murder? (Personal Injury)

To make a long story short, im a late 20 something living in portland oregon. I had a pretty intense emo/goth phase as a tween that i thought i had grown out of.

A couple months ago, i was watching a nature program on our local station about crows. The program mentioned that if you feed and befriend them, crows will bring you small gifts. My emo phase came back full force and i figured that i was furloughed and had lots of time- so why not make some crow friends.

My plan worked a little too well and the resident 5 crows in my neighborhood have turned into an army 15 strong. At first my neighbors didnt mind and enjoyed it. They're mostly elderly and most were in a bird watching club anyway. They thought the fact that i had crows following me around whenever i go outside was funny.

Lately, the crows have started defending me. My neighbor came over for a socially distanced chat (me on my porch her in my yard) and the crows started dive bombing her. They would not stop until she left my yard.

They didnt make physical contact with her, but they got very close.

Am i liable if these crows injure someone since i fed them? I obviously cant control the crows. I would rather them not attack my neighbors. But since i technically created this nuisance, could i be financially on the hook for any injuries?

To be clear, they're not agressive 100% of the time. If just the neighbors are out they are friendly normal crows. They only get aggressive when someone gets close to me or my property.

ETA: TL;DR- I have turned into Moira Rose, queen of the crows. My inadvertent crow army has gotten aggressive towards others. If they hurt someone could i be held liable?

ETA PT II: I did not train these birds to attack. Also thank you for all of your awards. Im glad my stupid decisions bring you joy. Please consider donating that money to your local Audubon society instead

There's a followup, posted yesterday with a positive outcome:

So to make a long story short, i called our local Audubon society. They didn't think feeding the crows was bad and suggested that the neighbors also start feeding them so they essentially became better socialized.

The plan worked and the crows are now a beloved part of the community. There have been no recent dive bombings.

Most amazingly, the crows may have legitimately saved my neighbor. Our city had a pretty big ice and snow event recently. Like i said in my last post, most of my neighbors are older. One of my neighbors was walking down his steep driveway, slipped, and couldnt get back up.

The crows started going ballistic and were making more noise than we have ever heard. A different neighbor went outside to see what was up and found the gentleman in his driveway. Neighbor is mostly ok! Just some serious bruises.

Needless to say the crows have been getting some high value food since then.

Thanks for all the help on my original post. It blew up way more than i was expecting and i thought you guys would enjoy an update.

A few days ago I was musing elsewhere about some online elections. Specifically, Stack Exchange has been running elections to replace all the moderators who have quit, and it's highlighting some weaknesses in their election scheme. Ranked voting is much better than "first past the post" but you still have to put the right checks in place.

If your election system uses ranked voting, think about how voters can reject candidates. The Hugo awards have "no award" as an automatic candidate in each category and you rank all candidates. My local SCA group lets you mark candidates as not acceptable and any who get 35% NA are removed, which gives the voters a veto when needed. Systems in which you pick N candidates lack this safety check.

"Cast N votes" doesn't let you distinguish between "this candidate is ok but not in my top N" and "I oppose this candidate". And even if you allow "not acceptable" marks on candidates (like my SCA group), you still need to allow ranking those candidates so voters can express "the clueless candidate before the evil one". If I recall correctly, my SCA group gets that part wrong; if you vote "not acceptable" you can't also rank the candidate, so you can't express degrees of unacceptability. If your goal is to deter NA votes that's a positive; if your goal is to elect people who are broadly acceptable then it's a negative.

Stack Exchange uses "cast three ranked votes" and now allows uncontested elections, so the only way for a community to reject a candidate is to round up more candidates. Because Stack Exchange royally screwed some things up with its communities, recently there have been newly-elected moderators who'd only been users for a few months. A candidate in one election is largely inactive (and said so).

The new and mostly-inactive users might be fine people, but in the past the bar was higher -- moderators were expected to have been regular, positive contributors for a while. Desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess; SE has lost a ton of mods in the last year for good reasons that still apply, but they don't want to admit there's anything wrong. So it's important to them to have bodies in seats.

Every voting system has flaws. When choosing, you need to decide which flaws are ok, which you actually prefer, and which must be prevented. Ranking all candidates, allowing an NA mark or "no award", and applying an threshold is more expressive than "rank N" but also carries more voter burden. Too complex? Depends on the characteristics of the electorate and the importance of the results, I guess.

Codidact isn't going to mandate a particular election scheme for its communities. Nothing is baked into the software, and on the network we host ourselves, our policy is that our communities can choose their moderators in any way they choose so long as the method produces unambiguous results that can be audited. (That's because any disputes are going to be escalated to us, so we'd better know how to fairly adjudicate them.) But even though our communities can choose how to choose, we should probably plan on offering some sort of facilitated options -- we can run election type X or Y for you, or y'all can do something else. Not every community wants to build its own system, after all; we shouldn't make them. I think we're a ways away from moderator elections yet (our communities are in start-up mode), so there's time to talk with our participants about what makes sense.

Dani gave me a large, heavy package.

He cleaned out a substantial part of my Amazon wishlist. :-) Many of them are used, which is just fine as far as I'm concerned. A book should not have to languish unloved when someone else is eager to give it the attention it deserves.

Woot!

No supermoon here; the Pittsburgh sky is a giant snow-cloud. I'll just have to wait to see others' pictures.

While today's snow is not the first snow of the season, it was the first snow on a weekday during commuting hours. The roads were fine; other drivers were the usual beginning-of-season challenge. Ah, winter.

Message from landlord: "In accordance with city ordinance blah blah, we will be conducting a mandatory evacuation drill on $date at 10AM."

Implied message from landlord: "Unless you particularly want to walk down 43 flights of stairs, that might be a good day to make other plans."

Unknown: whether the latter was intended -- fewer people in the building means fewer people who can mess up a compliance-check, after all. Though this would have been more plausible if they'd called it for 8AM rather than 10.

On a tangent, I wonder how people with mobility impairments get out of office buildings during alarms. There's no job-related reason I couldn't have a coworker in a wheelchair, after all, so somebody must have thought this through. (Please let somebody have thought that through...) Do they keep an elevator in service in that case (even though elevators are normally disabled during fire alarms), or is the floor warden responsible for rounding up people to carry the person downstairs, or what?

One morning back in June a police officer stopped me, said I hadn't stopped "long enough" at a stop sign (he didn't say I ran it), and gave me a ticket. He also told me that he was being ultra-picky because there had been complaints in the neighborhood, he didn't think highly of his current assignment, and if I were to plead "not guilty" he wouldn't show up in traffic court unless specifically ordered to. O...kay. Not how I particularly wanted to spend a couple hours, but my unblemished record and exaggerated fees were at stake, so I did that. (Traffic tickets are kind of like phone bills, apparently -- $20 or so base cost plus $100 or more in fees...)

My hearing was this morning and, as expected, was successful. Most hearings took about a minute: the clerk tells the judge what the charge is, the judge says "talk to me" after swearing you in, you tell your story, and he either says "ok" or "no" and sends you on your way. I didn't say anything about what the officer had told me, of course; I merely said (honestly) that I had stopped, that the officer had an obstructed view (he was on a narrow side street behind another car, with buildings going almost to the street), and that I've never had a moving violation in (mumble) years of driving. That was sufficient.

What was interesting were the cases that weren't so straightforward. These were generally the ones that people brought lawyers for. These included:

• A charge of driving on a suspended license. There was a quiet, heated exchange, and after the judge ruled the defendant guilty I heard his lawyer say "I need to talk to you right now". Sounds like somebody wasn't completely straight with his counsel...
• A charge of an illegal turn (admitted) with an add-on of reckless endangerment. The lawyer argued that the latter requires intent and this wasn't intentional; the defendant hadn't seen the sign -- and also, this would carry six points. The judge asked the police officer if he was ok with that, there was a huddle, and the officer agreed.
• Aside: that police officer stayed there for three cases in a row all at that same intersection. I couldn't tell if they were on the same day, but I assume so. (Locals: a no-left-turn sign at the five-way intersection on Blvd of the Allies.)
• One defendant said it was his car but he wasn't the driver. The officer said something like "I always process these the same day; either he has a twin out there or it was him". The judge asked him how confident he was on a scale of 1-10; he said 8. Guilty. (I have no idea what "process" means here.) Since no mention was made of a driver's license having been shown, I suspect this was a case where the driver didn't stop and the ticket was issued based on the plates.
• One defendant was initially stopped for an expired inspection sticker, which led to the discovery that he was driving on a suspended license. The defendant said he had borrowed the car from a friend and who thinks to check the stickers? (I can sympathize for that part, though not the suspended-license part.) The police officer took a hard line with him, saying that it's his responsibility as a driver to check these things. There was then a discussion I couldn't hear, and I think he was found guilty on all counts. (Aside: how can they even read those stickers on moving cars? They're not big. Are they relying on cameras with zoom or something?)
• A feeble, elderly man who, on being asked how he pled, launched into a long, fairly-incoherent babble about how he's a good driver and not like those reckless kids and blah blah blah, and he's 93 years old and knows how to drive -- and never actually answered the question or said what happened during his traffic stop. The judge just said "ok" and sent him away. Were I that guy, I might have considered paying the ticket by mail even if I wasn't guilty, because the alternative might risk too much scrutiny -- though, demonstrably, his approach can work.

More from that parlor game: Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

unique_name_123 gave me: computer, spirituality, laurel, rules, games, travel, artichoke.

( Read more... )

Come Thursday I will have read torah four times in three weeks. Fortunately none of the portions were new to me (Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur afternoon, Shabbat during Sukkot, and coming up, creation for Simchat Torah). And I led a good chunk of a service on Yom Kippur, which was nifty but of course required prep.

There has been a great deal of cat-herding surrounding the congregational web site, publicity for an upcoming Shabbat dinner (or rather, the lack of same when it was expected), committee and board meetings, etc.

I'm glad to report that we've had some respite from the rain; I've been able to eat in the sukkah four times so far. The new christmas sukkah lights are working out ok (previous ones were failing).

And, of course, work and household stuff demand their usual attention.

This stretch of fall is hectic, but we're coming into the home stretch now. Sorry if I've seemed to be ignoring anybody.

Google Maps almost failed me this morning. That's never happened before. Those "M" guys used to get things wrong so much that I couldn't rely on them at all; they even managed to leave out a major state road once, telling me that I could exit the interstate and get onto such-and-such road that was miles and miles away. And those "Y" guys led me on some merry romps a couple times. But Google Maps had always given me what I needed with a smile and useful photos besides.

This morning I had to run an errand in Wilkinsburg before work. I don't particularly know the wilds of Wilkinsburg, but it's not the land of unnamed dirt roads or anything like that. I was a little surprised that Google's directions didn't actually have me turn onto the street named in the address, but a street number of "xxx02" is likely to be at a corner, so that seemed ok. So, armed with directions and Street View of the key intersections I didn't already know (Street View has made my life so much easier in this land of sometimes-inadequate road signs), I headed off... and at the end of the directions found myself at the end of a road facing an iron gate. Oops.

So I called my destination, told them where I was, and asked how to recover. How far was I from such-and-such road? Sorry, not from around here -- never heard of such-and-such road. Ok, I should go back to other-such-and-such road and... wait, never encountered that one on my way here. We went back and forth a couple times and I said I guessed I was going to have to reschedule and get better directions. I repeated what I had said at the beginning of the conversation: I was at the end of such-and-such road facing an iron gate with an "authorized personnel only" sign and no other markings.

Wait, the guy said, is it a blue sign? Yup. Could I see a white building beyond the gate? Yup. He told me to wait. A couple minutes later somebody came to open the back gate so I could drive in. Weird!

So it worked out in the end (costing me 10 minutes or so), but it was very puzzling.

Thanks for all the good wishes, everybody. I will be seeing my doctor tomorrow morning to get checked out. Today's aches and pains were pronounced but not as bad as I had feared, fortunately. But I am learning more about which muscles are involved in seemingly-innocuous activities. :-)

Tonight we tried and failed to find the place the car was towed to so Dani could get everything out of the trunk, glove box, etc (and retrieve the remote control for the garage door). He will seek clarification tomorrow. (The insurance adjuster hasn't ruled on it yet, but we suspect we know how that's going to turn out.)

This afternoon I was in a meeting when someone else said the room was shaking. I hadn't noticed but did after she pointed it out. I figured it was a large truck rumbling by outside; she said it felt like an earthquake ("but smaller", I said). Who knew that a magnitude-5.0 earthquake on the border of Ontario and Quebec could be felt in Pittsburgh?

The coworker, it turns out, used to live practically on top of the San Andreas fault and is sensitized.