The Erickson Report, Page 3: Noted in Passing

The Erickson Report, Page 3: Noted in Passing

Now we move on to Noted in Passing, where we spend a minute or two on items that are just interesting or which deserve more coverge than we have time for but which we can't let pass without mention.

First up, some good news in the form of one more little step : As of January 1, New Hampshire residents who don't identify as either male or female can have their driver's licenses indicate their sex as X instead of M or F.

At the same time, even as acceptance increases, there is still much ground to be gained, as can be seen in the fact that the United Methodist Church, the nation’s third-largest religious denomination, is expected to split, spinning off a "traditionalist" denomination as a home for the too-many church leaders and members who, even at this late date, refuse to accept same-sex marriage and refuse the ordination to LGBTQ clergy.

The plan is expected to be approved at the church's worldwide conference in May.

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Meanwhile, on January 3, the American Dialect Society held its 30th annual “Word of the Year” vote, which this year also included a vote for “Word of the Decade.”

The winning word of the decade was "they," particularly as it applies to and is referenced by, people with nonbinary gender identities but also because of its increasing use and acceptance in referring to a single person of unknown gender.

Pronouns, along with conjunctions and prepositions, are generally considered a “closed class” - a group of words whose number rarely grows and whose meanings rarely change. So having "they" have an expanded meaning and use was a real treat for linguists.

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This is kind of interesting: Tens of thousands of parking meters, thousands of cash registers, and even at least one video game are among computerized systems that have fallen foul of a computer glitch related to the notorious Y2K, or millennium, bug. Known, appropriately enough, as the Y2020 bug, it's a long-lurking side effect of attempts to avoid the Y2K bug.

Both bugs stem from the way computers store dates. To save memory, many older systems express years using two numbers - such as 98 for 1998. The Y2K bug was a fear that when the year rolled over to 2000, computers would treat it as 1900, rather than 2000.

Programmers wanting to avoid the Y2K bug had two broad options: entirely rewrite their code, or adopt a quick fix called “windowing,” which would treat all dates from 00 to 20 as being from the 2000s, rather than the 1900s. An estimated 80 per cent of computers fixed in 1999 used this quicker, cheaper option - but all it did was kick the problem down the road.

Coders chose 1920 to 2020 as the standard window because of the significance of the midpoint, 1970. Many programming languages and systems handle dates and times as measured by seconds since January 1, 1970, a method known as Unix time or "epoch time." It's seen as a standard because of the widespread use of Unix in various industries.

The idea was that these windowed systems would be outmoded and replaced by the time 2020 arrived - which was the same thing the programmers of the 1960s thought about the year 2000.

Those systems that used the quick fix have now reached the end of that window, and have rolled back to 1920 with the attending glitches.

Fixes have been issued but exactly how long these will last is unknown, as companies haven’t disclosed details about them. If the window has simply been pushed back again, the error may well crop up again.

And there's another date storage problem, one which faces us in the year 2038. The issue again stems from Unix’s epoch time: The data is stored as a 32-bit integer, which will run out of capacity at 3:14 am on January 19, 2038.

Something to look forward to.

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Now we come to a trio of things that I won't do more on at least now because frankly they hurt my heart.

Monday, January 6: A 5.8 magnitude earthquake hits Puerto Rico.
Tuesday, January 7: A 6.4 magnitude earthquake hits Puerto Rico; it's the largest one in a century.
Three hours later: An aftershock of 6.0 magnitude hits
Saturday, January 11: A 5.9 magnitude earthquake hits Puerto Rico

Hundreds of millions in damage, at least one dead, hundreds losing their homes, thousands in shelters, hundreds of thousands more without power.

And don't forget, Puerto Rico is still waiting for $18B in federal aid for relief and repair work related to the disasters of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017.

Next: An outbreak of measles in the Democratic Republic of the Congo which began early last year has lead - so far - to over 6,000 dead and a total of an estimated 310,000 cases. The death toll was more than double that from a concurrent outbreak of Ebola.

This past year saw a huge measles outbreak across the planet. Madagascar saw over 1,200 people die. Places like Somalia, Ukraine, Brazil, and Bangladesh reported thousands of cases.

Here in the US we also had an outbreak of measles. While the numbers were smaller - nearly 1300 cases and no deaths - it was still the worst outbreak since 2000, when measles had been declared by the WHO to have been eliminated in the US.

And yet we still have these idiot anti-vaxxers spewing their bullshit about vaccines. It really hurts my heart.

And if you're still not depressed, here's number three: The active Taal Volcano in the Philippines violently erupted on January 12, launching ash and steam several km into the atmosphere and causing ash to fall in surrounding heavily populated areas.

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology raised the status of the Taal Volcano to Alert Level 4, indicating a strong likelihood of more violent eruptions within the next couple of days. The agency is calling for everyone within 14km - a little less than 9 miles - from the volcano to evacuate. That's about 500,000 people.

Taal is located about 70 km, about 45 miles, south of Manila.

Oh, and by the way, in case you'd forgotten: Australia is still on fire.

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Finally, to cheer myself up a bit, here's something I find interesting and in fact rather encouraging.

Benjamin Bergen is a Professor of Cognitive Science at UCal San Diego. Every fall since 2010, he has surveyed about 100 undergraduates in his introductory language class, asking them how offensive various words are.

What he has found is that among young adults today, vulgarities of various sorts are significantly less offensive than they were thought to be back in 1972, when George Carlin did his now-famous routine about the "seven dirty words you can't say on television."

At the same time, various slurs are found considerably more offensive. So various vulgarities that used to generate gasps of shock are now met with a shrug while various racial, ethnic, sexual, and other sorts of slurs that used to be part of everyday conversation are now found offensive.

I find that to be a very good thing.