Arwa Mahdawi introduced me to a new term, or maybe a new concept: “AI vegans,” which is to say, people whose attitude and actions in relationship to so-called “AI” parallels the way vegans deal with animal products.
Mahdawi cited an article by a professor who directs online education at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, David Joyner – someone who’s clearly not a tech-phobe.
I like this concept quite a lot. While I am not vegan, I respect the vegan approach, and often think that they’re likely right on all points, especially with respect to the effect on the environment.
The criticisms by the “AI vegans” go like this:
“AI” is immoral and unethical – particularly because the materials used to develop it were stolen from people (including me and others here in the Treehouse).
Using “AI” is bad for your health – recent studies have shown harm to the critical thinking faculties of those who use a lot of chatbots to do their intellectual work for them.
The “AI” industry is very destructive to the environment, requiring massive amounts of water and electricity – which includes building new coal and other fossil fuel powered power plants despite the fact that we’re at the tipping point for renewables.
Those ideas directly parallel the vegan attitude toward animal products. I’d add a fourth one: Most “AI” products being sold don’t work very well. This is particularly true of writing programs, but also true of many of the ones aimed at employers who want to fire their workers.
I do my damnedest to avoid any use of “AI.” I try to disable it in writing programs – it gets in my way – and I’ve reached the point where I assume any feel-good story on social media is “AI” generated. I suspect it’s in the spell-check programs now, because they don’t work as well as they used to. I’m sure it’s in the grammar programs, but since I don’t use that crap – my command of grammar is certainly better than any fucking programmer’s, much less “AI’s” – I don’t worry about those.
I hope the “AI vegan” movement catches on, because this slop is out of control.
We keep being told that some chatbot can pass the multiple guess part of the bar exam with flying colors. As someone who has taken that exam, I don’t find that difficult to believe. A bot that has incorporated previous tests and other prep materials for that exam or any similar exam can probably do a great job on it, especially since the bots can’t think and are only making the statistical best guess in any situation.
I mean, the biggest problem with multiple guess exams – yeah, I know they’re technically called multiple choice and probably have some fancy new name these days that I’m not familiar with since thank all that’s holy I haven’t had to take one in years, but you know what I mean by multiple guess – is that they don’t reward thinking.
Despite the fact that every time I’m faced with four choices for an answer I always want to go with a fifth one, I used to be pretty good at those tests. I had a gut understanding of them. I do not think this is one of my best traits, though it was useful. Continue reading “Becoming an “AI Vegan””…
Imagine that you own a small, 20-acre farm in California’s Central Valley. You and your family have cultivated this land for decades, but drought, increasing costs and decreasing water availability are making each year more difficult.
Now imagine that a solar-electricity developer approaches you and presents three options:
You can lease the developer 10 acres of otherwise productive cropland, on which the developer will build an array of solar panels and sell electricity to the local power company.
You can select 1 or 2 acres of your land on which to build and operate your own solar array, using some electricity for your farm and selling the rest to the utility.
Or you can keep going as you have been, hoping your farm can somehow survive.
Thousands of farmers across the country, including in the Central Valley, are choosing one of the first two options. A 2022 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that roughly 117,000 U.S. farm operations have some type of solar device. Our own work has identified over 6,500 solar arrays currently located on U.S. farmland.
Our study of nearly 1,000 solar arrays built on 10,000 acres of the Central Valley over the past two decades found that solar power and farming are complementing each other in farmers’ business operations. As a result, farmers are making and saving more money while using less water – helping them keep their land and livelihood.
A hotter, drier and more built-up future
Perhaps nowhere in the U.S. is farmland more valuable or more productive than California’s Central Valley. The region grows a vast array of crops, including nearly all of the nation’s production of almonds, olives and sweet rice. Using less than 1% of all farmland in the country, the Central Valley supplies a quarter of the nation’s food, including 40% of its fruits, nuts and other fresh foods.
The food, fuel and fiber that these farms produce are a bedrock of the nation’s economy, food system and way of life.
But decades of intense cultivation, urban development and climate change are squeezing farmers. Water is limited, and getting more so: A state law passed in 2014 requires farmers to further reduce their water usage by the mid-2040s.
The trade-offs of installing solar on agricultural land
When the solar arrays we studied were installed, California state solar energy policy and incentives gave farm landowners new ways to diversify their income by either leasing their land for solar arrays or building their own.
There was an obvious trade-off: Turning land used for crops to land used for solar usually means losing agricultural production. We estimated that over the 25-year life of the solar arrays, this land would have produced enough food to feed 86,000 people a year, assuming they eat 2,000 calories a day.
There was an obvious benefit, too, of clean energy: These arrays produced enough renewable electricity to power 470,000 U.S. households every year.
But the result we were hoping to identify and measure was the economic effect of shifting that land from agricultural farming to solar farming. We found that farmers who installed solar were dramatically better off than those who did not.
They were better off in two ways, the first being financially. All the farmers, whether they owned their own arrays or leased their land to others, saved money on seeds, fertilizer and other costs associated with growing and harvesting crops. They also earned money from leasing the land, offsetting farm energy bills, and selling their excess electricity.
Farmers who owned their own arrays had to pay for the panels, equipment and installation, and maintenance. But even after covering those costs, their savings and earnings added up to US$50,000 per acre of profits every year, 25 times the amount they would have earned by planting that acre.
Farmers who leased their land made much less money but still avoided costs for irrigation water and operations on that part of their farm, gaining $1,100 per acre per year – with no up-front costs.
The farmers also conserved water, which in turn supported compliance with the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act water use reduction requirements. Most of the solar arrays were installed on land that had previously been irrigated. We calculated that turning off irrigation on this land saved enough water every year to supply about 27 million people with drinking water or irrigate 7,500 acres of orchards. Following solar array installation, some farmers also fallowed surrounding land, perhaps enabled by the new stable income stream, which further reduced water use.
Irrigation is key to cropland productivity in California’s Central Valley. Covering some land with solar panels eliminates the need for irrigation of that area, saving water for other uses elsewhere. Citizen of the Planet/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Changes to food and energy production
Farmers in the Central Valley and elsewhere are now cultivating both food and energy. This shift can offer long-term security for farmland owners, particularly for those who install and run their own arrays.
Recent estimates suggest that converting between 1.1% and 2.4% of the country’s farmland to solar arrays would, along with other clean energy sources, generate enough electricity to eliminate the nation’s need for fossil fuel power plants.
Though many crops are part of a global market that can adjust to changes in supply, losing this farmland could affect the availability of some crops. Fortunately, farmers and landowners are finding new ways to protect farmland and food security while supporting clean energy.
Farms are much more than the land they occupy and the goods they produce. Farms are run by people with families, whose well-being depends on essential and variable resources such as water, fertilizer, fuel, electricity and crop sales. Farmers often borrow money during the planting season in hopes of making enough at harvest time to pay off the debt and keep a little profit.
Installing solar on their land can give farmers a diversified income, help them save water, and reduce the risk of bad years. That can make solar an asset to farming, not a threat to the food supply.
My neighbors frequently comment on my walking, though most of what I do is walk around the neighborhood or to some stores. It’s not exciting most of the time, though I do see little things in people’s yards – there’s someone on Emerald making miniature houses and putting them at the edge of their yard. They even have addresses.
My walking is a combination of exercise and mind-clearing and errand-running, but it is an important part of my life. There are days when getting my steps in is my biggest accomplishment.
Walking and reading about walking demonstrate one of the biggest flaws in the large language models and other machine learning software that’s being marketed as “AI”: it can’t walk. All it “knows” about walking comes from ingesting books like Solnit’s, which means it can probably associate walking with pilgrimages and Wordsworth and desert hikes.
But it has no idea what any of that actually means. I can read about Solnit joining a pilgrimage in northern New Mexico and think about that region – which I’ve visited – and what it feels like if you don’t have the right shoes for a hike.
And I can also follow her sidetrack about the man who has painted the stations of the cross on his old Cadilac and go off on a tangent in my mind about low riders and guys with well-kept old cars who play booming music and the boys I went to high school with who souped up ‘57 Chevys and cruised around the drive-in.
In one section discussing promenades in Mexico and other Spanish-influenced places, she connects the walking version with car cruising, because walking begats other things, even if people like me do a lot of walking because we are so damn tired of car culture.
“AI” gets none of that, because it can’t walk and it can’t smell and it can’t see and it can’t hear and it can’t touch and actually it can’t even read; it just sorts words and images.
It may be useful for some things – though not enough things to be worth all the money being thrown at it – but it is never going to be an intelligence. Continue reading “Walking and “AI””…
In it she discussed the incredible damage the DOGE (pronounced dodgy) minions are doing across our government at the behest of Elon Musk — firing employees, cancelling funds already appropriated and approved, and pulling together data that has been carefully kept separate to protect our privacy.
She also pointed out:
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggests Musk’s faith in his AI company is at least part of what’s behind the administration’s devastating cuts to biomedical research. Those who believe in a future centered around AI believe that it will be far more effective than human research scientists, so cutting actual research is efficient. At the same time, Marshall suggests, tech oligarchs find the years-long timelines of actual research and the demands of scientists on peer reviews and careful study frustrating, as they want to put their ideas into practice quickly.
And she added:
If the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is an example of what it looks like when a tech oligarch tries to run a government agency, it’s a cautionary tale. Under Trump the FAA has become entangled with Musk’s SpaceX space technology company and its subsidiary Starlink satellite company, and it appears that the American people are being used to make Musk’s dream come true.
While I’ve been saying from the beginning that the damage done by the dodgy minions has to stop and while I’ve been ranting about the idiocy of so-called AI for some time, I’ve been keeping my worries about what the broligarchs in general might do to us all somewhat separate from my fears about what the grifter’s administration is doing to government.
But reading that post from Dr. Richardson reminded me that it’s all part of the same problem.
There are many terrible things being done to our government and to our people by what Rebecca Solnit calls the Stupid Coup. The nonsense at the FAA is an example of attacking parts of the government for the financial benefit of the person doing the attacking.
But there are also a lot of terrible things being done by those broligarchs to whom most of us are merely NPCs. The faith in so-called AI goes far beyond Musk, and the effort to shove it down our throats is happening everywhere, not just in the government. Continue reading “Watch What You Read at Bedtime”…
The latest scandal to hit the science fiction community is the revelation that the people putting on WorldCon in Seattle are using ChatGPT to vet proposed panelists. Given that a large number of people who want to be on panels are published authors who are part of the class actions against the companies making these over-hyped LLM products, the amount of outrage was completely predictable.
A number of us also pointed out that the information produced by these programs is very often wrong, since they make things up because they are basically word prediction devices. As a person who is not famous and who has a common Anglo name, I shudder to think what so-called “AI” would produce about me.
But the biggest problem I see with “AI” – outside of the environmental costs, the error rate, and the use of materials without permission to create it – is that they keep trying to sell it to do things it doesn’t do well, instead of keeping it for the few things it actually can do. Of course, there’s not a lot of money to be made from those few things, especially when you factor in the costs.
We’re at the point in tech where new things are not going to change the product that much, no matter what the hype says. Exponential growth cannot last forever. If you don’t believe me, look up the grains of rice on a chessboard story.
I’ve been thinking a lot about all the ways people are trying to use “AI” or even older forms of tech to get rid of workers and the more I think about it, the more disastrous it looks.
We don’t need more tech doing stuff; we need more people doing stuff.
It’s not just “AI”. Just try to call your bank or your doctor, or, god help us all, Social Security or the IRS (now made worse by the Dodgy Minions). When we have issues, we need people – real people, who understand what we’re calling about and can solve our problems.
The “chat” feature on a website doesn’t cut it and an “AI” enabled chat feature is probably worse in that it might well make up an answer instead of just not knowing what to do.
I’ve been thinking of health care in particular. I’ve heard a lot of talk about how LLMs can read radiology films better than radiologists, in that they don’t get bored or distracted, so they can point to any things that look out of the ordinary in reference to the kind of films they were trained on.
But of course, what they’re really doing is flagging the problems for a radiologist to look at. They don’t replace the expert; they help them do their job. It’s probably useful, but it isn’t going to make radiology any cheaper, because you still need the person to look carefully at the films.
Back in the late 1990s, when we were all getting used to email and setting up websites and googling was so new it wasn’t a verb yet, the business pages of our newspapers were full of stories that went something like this:
The internet is fun, but how is anyone going to make money off of that?
Fast forward twenty-fiveish years and we have been overwhelmed by the answer: capitalism. Turns out the internet wasn’t immune to being taken over by people who were more interested in short-term profit than in making cool stuff that worked and was useful to people.
This is an even deeper situation than enshittification. Ed Zitron calls it the Rot Economy and he discusses it in great detail here. (Very long and very worth reading.)
So these days we have constant updates that break things, apps that limit your rights in a way that using regular web browsers does not, and devices intended to steal our attention by constantly intruding.
I remain amused by the idea that the young folks are digital natives because they’ve grown up with cell phones and tablets. What they’ve grown up with are devices that have set us up for the worst excesses of so-called AI, ones that supposedly think for you, only they can’t actually think, so they approximate.
And because those young folks are not also raised with the knowledge of how things work, they don’t always recognize the many errors. Plus they assume – because it’s true of everything they use – that everything will glitch all the time.
As I’ve said before, it’s absurd to lump Boomers, who have been using computers for 40 years and include a large number of people who built their own or wrote their own software, with their parents and grandparents who were approaching retirement years in the 1980s and 90s and didn’t have to learn to use this stuff for work.
I may not be great at Discord, Slack, and online meeting multitasking – in fact, I suck at all of those – but I am very good at recognizing when I’m being bamboozled. And a large amount of what’s going on in the digital world is, in fact, bamboozlement.
There’s an ongoing narrative that the only people who truly understand modern tech are the young. “They grew up with it,” people say. “They’re digital natives.”
They’ve been saying that for a long time now and it has been applied to every new-fangled invention, not just computers or smartphones. I mean, it was a thing with VCRs back when folks were still deciding between VHS and Betamax.
While I’m sure some kid whose mom stuck an iPad or smartphone in their hands to keep them occupied so she could have some peace and quiet is faster than I am at figuring out how new tech works, I don’t think this means they are more suited for making decisions about where tech is going.
The folks you really need to ask about digital tech are us Boomer and Gen-X types who dove into it when personal computers first showed up on the scene, plus the Millennials who came along shortly afterwards when computers were being used everywhere.
I got my first computer in 1983, which is more than 40 years ago. And I’ve been online since the mid-1990s, which is getting close to 30 years ago.
I’m not a techie and getting my Kaypro II was the last time I came anywhere close to being an early adopter. But I’ve been dealing with this stuff for more than half my life.
I watched the Internet become something back in the day when everyone was asking “but how will we make money out of it?” Then I watched the capitalists take over Silicon Valley. Now I’m watching the enshittification process.
Which is to say that I saw the genuine creative process that made the early years of the internet so exciting and now I’m seeing how that can be destroyed. Continue reading “Listen to Old People About Tech”…
I jay-walk in almost any city I’ve been t0: I’m a New Yorker, I think it’s inborn. I’ve jaywalked in Paris and London and Helsinki, San Francisco and Boston and Chicago–sensibly, because I’m not a stupid New Yorker. There are the streets you dart across, and the ones you look at and think, Oh, Hell no.
But I do not jay-walk in Los Angeles. This is not just because I don’t know another city that is as car-centric as LA, but because the city isn’t physically set up for walking, let alone jay-walking. As I write this I’m in LA, visiting my aunt. Most days, unless it’s pouring down buckets, I like to get out of the house and take a walk. My aunt’s house is at the base of a hill, and about a block away from one of the ubiquitous freeways. Logically, I’d prefer to walk up the hill–except that for many blocks there are no sidewalks, and I have an unreasoning prejudice about walking in the middle of the street in a town where some drivers do not acknowledge the existence of speed limits. So even if it means strolling down Sepulveda Boulevard–a long, uninteresting road that parallels and is largely overshadowed by I-405, I choose to walk where there are sidewalks.
LA does not make this easy. Yesterday I struck out from my aunt’s house and, rather than marching determinedly down Sepulveda southbound (which is not only uninteresting, but largely unpopulated except by the people driving by) I decided to walk toward Barrington Avenue and a small shopping area a little less than a mile from the house. A nice stroll (with, as it turned out, a cup of coffee and a brownie at the end of it). To do this, I had to cross the interstate via an underpass at Church Street. Fine. The crosswalk dictated that I cross on the southern side of the street. So I crossed and kept on walking under the interstate. Unfortunately, on the other side of the underpass the sidewalk (to which I had been directed by the necessity of crossing Sepulveda on that side) stopped. There was a well-worn dirt path, but no sidewalk. And crossing to the other side of the street, where there is a sidewalk, was rendered inadvisable by the fact that the street is curved, with lousy visibility, and people tear up and down it on their way to and from the I-405 exit/onramp. So I stayed on the dirt path until I reached a traffic light (just before the aforementioned exit/onramp) when I was able to cross to the other side of Church, and a sidewalk.
At the next intersection, at Sunset, I needed to turn west. However, having had it demonstrated to me that sidewalks are not a given, I looked west on Sunset and realized that the sidewalk on my side of the street was only there for another 100 feet or so. Okay, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice? That’s curiously biased city planning. So I crossed Sunset (which is a six-lane monster–you can bet I waited patiently for the light), turned right, and continued onward until I reached South Barrington Avenue, where the shops I was heading toward beckoned.
I will note that there are many single-family dwellings–classy, multi-car, expensive houses on either side of Sunset. On the southern side, where I was walking, there was a sidewalk. On the northern side: no sidewalk. The houses all had handsome gates and fences which fronted on brief, probably very expensive expanses of lawn, then the curb, then the insanity that is Sunset Boulevard. In my imagination, if I had decided to despoil the lawns in my stroll it would have been looked on with disfavor and maybe a call to 9-1-1. Lack of sidewalk says “stay away”. I don’t know why the houses on the west side of the street have a sidewalk (which runs along the handsome gates and fences, and sometimes even briefer expanses of lawn). Perhaps the west side lost the toss. The sidewalks have accessibility cuts for wheelchairs, because they are required by Federal Law. But I don’t think anyone imagines that people are actually using them.
Waaaay back in the 1970s I spent six months in LA, and even tho’ I had a car, sometimes I opted to take a walk. In those days walking was less thought of even than now–at least twice when I took a walk someone pulled over to ask if my car had broken down. I felt like I had arrived in the Bradbury story “The Pedestrian.” I began to suspect that if I had been in the runner’s regalia of the time (which included spandex leggings and a sweatband, and Nope) I might have been comprehensible. But just walking? Too weird.
In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Eddie Valiant (played by the late, wonderful Bob Hoskins) says, “Who needs a car when we got the best transportation system in the world?” The transportation system he’s talking about were the streetcars–the Red Car (regional) and Yellow Car (local) systems–which was “the most extensive urban rail transit system in America, if not the world,” according to historian Colin Marshall. My mother and my aunt, who grew up in LA, doubtless knew the streetcars well. In seeking the quote above, I found a brief history of the Pacific Electric Railway system and how it came to dwindle and die. Short answer: it wasn’t Judge Doom with a nefarious noir-ish plot to dismantle the streetcar system and profit from “Eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena!” As elsewhere in America, people liked cars, liked the freedom they gave, and as soon as they could afford to, they drove rather than use the streetcars. The Red Car went out of business in the early 60s. The LA Metro System, which combines subway and buses, has come to replace some part of it, as people came to understand the ecological and economic costs of driving everywhere.
But you still need a way to get to the Metro. And until LA invests in sidewalks that exist reliably on both sides of the street, that’s going to be a challenge.
Modern life requires workarounds. Under the principle of Murphy’s law – whatever can go wrong will – there are many situations where having more than one way to do something will save your butt.
This is also an argument for redundancy, or, as I like to put it, using both a belt and suspenders. That may be an outdated metaphor – I’m not sure anyone uses suspenders to hold up their pants these days – but I’ve always liked it.
Both workarounds and belts and suspenders are at the heart of the way I deal with tech, but they can also apply to other things. I use workarounds when I cook, for example — if we’re out of one thing, I use something else.
Earlier this week, I needed to make granola. I like an easy cold cereal for breakfast, but it’s hard to find ones made from whole grains with very little sugar and a lot of nuts, so I make my own. My preference is to make it with mixed rolled grains — wheat, barley, oats, rye — but I have been known to make it with just barley.
We can usually get one or the other in bulk at a health food store, but my backup is Bob’s Red Mill 5-Grain hot cereal. However, we haven’t been to the health food store lately and our local store’s been out of the 5-Grain for two weeks.
So this week I made it with rolled oats. (No one is ever out of rolled oats, near as I can tell.) It makes very little difference in taste, though it doesn’t give me the perfect mix of grains I want for good health (barley is very good for you). Still, it will do and it’s still way better than the commercial brands.
Workarounds are often imperfect, but in a lot of cases, perfection isn’t worth all the extra effort.
A typical workaround in tech is saving documents as rtf if you need to be able to open them in different word processing programs. Or emailing them to yourself in addition to saving them. Or even printing things out just to be on the safe side. I save my taxes on the computer, but I also keep a print copy.
Another is having multiple browsers available because one of them won’t work for some things you try to do. For some reason, I can’t pay one of my health insurance bills in Firefox, but I can in Safari. That’s the sort of thing I mean.
Making extra copies and having multiple browsers are both redundant, but that’s where the belt and suspenders point comes in. It’s a lot easier than spending hours trying to find something that should be saved online but isn’t or even more hours figuring out what’s causing the problem. Redundancy can be very useful. Continue reading “Workarounds, With Belts and Suspenders”…
My aunt was in the hospital for a few days (nothing major, except when you’re pushing 98 everything is major)). To a one, the staff at the hospital were wonderful–competent, kind, empathetic, and sometimes, funny. But a lot of the time my aunt was dozing off–hospital life not being a thrill a minute, even with your favorite niece on premises–and I found myself looking at all the things.
I’ve always been fascinated by medical technology, but particularly the small stuff: the clips that hold IV bags in place but also serve to gather up the tentacles of tubing so that the patient and staff aren’t constantly tying themselves in knots; the plastic sheet with straps that slides easily over the bed, so that a patient can be moved easily and with less stress on her and her caregivers; the astonishing doohickey that the hospital uses to help move mostly-bedbound patients to a recliner or wheelchair; the contraption that helps my recuperating daughter pull her socks on without bending in medically unadvisable ways. None of these things are going to make history, but they make the lives of people who are sick or disabled, and the lives of their caregivers a little easier.
It pleases me to think that there are people out there who spend their days coming up with these gadgets. Probably some of them were invented by caregivers or people who work in hospitals. My father, who was a volunteer Emergency Medical Tech for twenty years, was one of those folks. At the time each ambulance had reusable medical-grade splint. If the splint was used during a call, they had to wait until the patient had been stabilized and the splint had been cleaned and disinfected before they could use it again. In a community with a number of ski-slopes and lots of winter sports, more than one broken limb in an afternoon was not exactly unheard of. So my father (who was an artist, industrial designer, and unstoppable tinkerer) came up with a lightweight, inexpensive disposable splint. He patented it and found a manufacturer to license it, and he split the proceeds with the ambulance squad. That was 30 years ago, and I suspect that Dad’s splint has been rendered quaint by subsequent inventions. Even so.
When I used to give platelets I was the weirdo who asked the phlebotomist all sorts of questions about the bits and pieces of tech that were used, not only to test my blood for iron before I gave lots of it away, but to make the process easier for the technician and more pleasant for the blood source (which would be me). Not least of which is that stretchy mesh bandage that comes in a rainbow array of colors. “What color would you like today? Purple? Green? Neon pink?”
There are downsides, of course. Most of these things are meant to be used once, which means that they are small, probably relatively cheap, and made of plastic. I worry about the sheer amount of plastic that is added to an already-overburdened planet in the name of doing health-related things safely and easily, without the need for sterilization and re-use. I would be a little leery of, say, compostable plastics used for things like IV tubing or test tubes. Maybe for some of the comfort- and transportation-devices? I don’t know if any of the hospital-use plastics are recycled, but it would make me very happy to know that they were. And the Big Plastic Things (like the iMove patient mover chair I linked to above) are durable equipment, meant for many uses, and at the end of their lives could be recycled.
I want–I applaud–all the clever gizmos that busy minds can devise to be used and improved and to make our lives better. I also want, because having it all is my watchword, for those things to leave as little trace as possible for the next generations. It’s only fair.
My aunt was in the hospital for a few days (nothing major, except when you’re pushing 98 everything is major)). To a one, the staff at the hospital were wonderful–competent, kind, empathetic, and sometimes, funny. But a lot of the time my aunt was dozing off–hospital life not being a thrill a minute, even with your favorite niece on premises–and I found myself looking at all the things.