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I’ve heard or read about the term “herd immunity” with regard to vaccinations. The concept is that once enough people (a large enough percentage) are vaccinated against a certain disease, then that disease can’t spread freely because there aren’t enough hosts. It kind of dies out naturally because there is no place hospitable. Any new member of the community is then safe from the disease just because no one else will have the disease.

I’m trying figure out the opposite effect. What if everyone is infected with something and any new members of the community are not safe? Plague? Epidemic? That’s how I feel about social media.

I’m not on Facechat, but enough people who know me are on Facechat, so anyone can still learn about me through Facechat. Same thing for Instabook and Snapgram.

How can I avoid appearing on social media when everyone around me is infected? It’s nearly impossible unless I avoid people.

I just finished reading a compilation of short stories by a certain author who is listed as O. Henry. No, actually, The Gift of the Magi was not one of the 68 stories in this particular compilation.

I found I liked his writing style better than I had anticipated. I had to break up reading the book over a couple weeks though, because reading too many short stories in one sitting got tedious.

Here are my favorites in this collection (simply called “Selected Stories” and compiled by Guy Davenport, but with O. Henry listed as the author of course):

There were some other good stories too, but those are they that stood out.

He had three main settings that he liked to use: New York City, Texas, and the South. A nice variety. And for some reason he seemed fond of Ann Arbor, Michigan – he mentioned it in more than one story.

He wrote his stories shortly after the time when Little House on the Prairie was set, but his stories seem more modern. Probably because they included more cities and trains and even cars.

Also interesting to note is that O. Henry to the Civil war is like us to the Vietnam war – about 40 years after. But everyone was familiar with it and everyone knew someone who had been in the war as a lot of them were still alive. So he wrote about slaves somewhat. Of course they were now freed, but their roles in his stories reflected how their lives were back then – still mostly servant-type roles. And he used several different terms to describe them, some of which are quaint and others of which would not go over well today.

O. Henry seemed sympathetic to the working-class girls and unfavorable toward the factory owners who paid them so little. And he really did not like national bank examiners.

A number of his stories focused on children finding their long-lost parents or vice-versa, so that got a little formulaic after a while – well of course this lady is going to be his daughter he thought died years ago.

But for the most part the stories were engaging enough that they were interesting to read even though you know how they’ll turn out.

We had spring once. It was about 70 degrees and sunny for a day or two.

That was last week.

Now we have ice and snow. Not sure how the plants are going to like it, but this is how they look.

Some tulips:

These should be daffodils soon.

Well, they’re daffodils now, just not quite blooming yet. I meant they should be blooming soon.

And a Japanese maple tree.

I think this one is my favorite, for the coated-in-ice photos.

There are some things that everyone just knows, like tetanus is caused by rusty metal and planes can fly because of the Bernoulli principle. And of course everyone knows that the wisdom of crowds means that a bunch of people who agree on a topic must be right.

Not so fast though.

I learned something recently about the supposed wisdom of crowds. The book that started all this – by James Surowiecki – highlighted that phrase but the concept is a little more nuanced. Crowds are not wise because they are a large group of people, rather, crowds are wise because (or more correctly, if) the individuals bring unique information.

Consensus is useful if all parties have arrived at the conclusion independently, using their own methods and data sets. If everyone looks at the same data, you don’t have a wise crowd – you have a crowd of average intelligence.

I’ve noticed a disconnect between the standard practice of brushing one’s teeth before going to bed and the standard recommendation from dentists to brush one’s teeth after meals.

I never paid much attention to it, but I was trying to eat a little healthier and I became aware that I was tempted to snack in the evenings. What I found is that by brushing my teeth after dinner, rather than waiting until bedtime, provided enough of a mental barrier to prevent the temptation.

I know that I could have easily just brushed my teeth again later, but the psychology of “I already brushed my teeth” was good enough for me. Your mileage may vary.

I am amused and perplexed by people who like to dance. I am not one of those people. And I think it’s presumptive of those who are dancy to think that everyone else must be.

My main example of this is the saying “Dance like no one is watching.” I’ve seen it on T shirts and on internet motivational posters. They assume that everyone secretly likes to dance and is held back by the fear of what people will think.

I don’t dance, whether I am by myself or in public. See me standing still? – that is how I dance when no one is watching.

My wife showed me a video that she found via social media. It was a plea for internet access for all students, something like bridging the digital divide. It’s a good intent, but a bad way to reach the goal.

The goal, I presume, is better education for lower-income children. Their plan (whoever “they” was) is more computers and internet. Before I get into that, though, let me describe the video.

There were two tables of several students each. The tables were separated by a sheet or screen so the two groups couldn’t see each other. One moderator read a question aloud and the first table to answer correctly would get a point.

One table had laptops and internet, whereas the other table had encyclopedias. The results were, of course, dramatic. The moderator would read a question, and a couple of seconds later the laptop table would shout their answer. The video would then show the annoyed faces of the encyclopedia table. Another question, and another answer from the laptop table, followed by dismay from the encyclopedia table. Question, answer, frustration.

Then they removed the screen from between the two tables and the encyclopedia table was relieved to see it was a setup with the other table being given an advantage.

The video then had someone give an impassioned speech on how students can’t learn if they don’t have the internet.

My response: they’re going down the wrong road.

Sure, the internet lets you look up things quicker. But the goal of the people behind this video is presumably not quicker answers to trivia. I’m also going to presume their goal is not simply more funding either. Rather, I will give them the benefit of the doubt and say their goal is better education, with the goal of better education being to improve the lives of disadvantaged kids.

The kids who got the questions right – what did they learn? How much processing did their brains do? It seemed to me like they were plugging in a question and spitting out an answer. I did not see how the learning was happening.

If this were a homework assignment, and one group had encyclopedias at home and one group had the internet, the encyclopedia group would have taken longer to complete the assignment, but their education would have advanced by that amount.

Learning is like most everything else in life – you get out of it what you put into it. If there is little effort required to produce the answers needed, then there was little learning involved. No pain, no gain – only we are talking about mental muscles instead of physical muscles.

That is not to say that we should make homework more difficult than necessary, but if the goal is learning then the process should involve thinking. Plus some memorization, but that’s another topic.