HinesSight

Acupuncture is an example of the games health insurers play with benefits

Though I can't prove this scientifically because I'm not a controlled experiment, there's good reason for me to believe that I've benefited from my acupuncture treatments for low back pain and the related sciatica from Karen Kaufman.

I talked about this in a June 2024 blog post, accurately titled "I benefited from my sessions at Salem's Innerhealth Acupuncture Clinic."

I'm convinced that Kaufman helped relieve the sciatica pain in my right leg considerably.

Naturally I can't be sure of this, since I'm not a random controlled experiment, just one person who was drawn to try acupuncture after physical therapy didn't do much to relieve the pain, over the counter medications did next to nothing, and I had to wait quite a while to get an epidural steroid injection in my back.

I had two acupuncture treatments prior to getting the epidural injection from Salem Pain and Spine Specialists on May 13. By the time of the injection, the pain in my leg was considerably reduced. I ascribe that to acupuncture, since this was the only thing I'd done differently prior to the injection.

Since, I've continued to get acupuncture treatments about every three weeks. My back and leg pain have stabilized. There's still quite a bit of discomfort, but compared to the excruciating pain I was in before, I can live with the discomfort -- since now I'm not limited in what I can do, whereas before I was.

So when it became clear near the end of 2024 that I should change from my Regence MedAdvantage plan because Regence and Salem Health hadn't been able to agree on a contract extension for 2025, I wanted to be sure that my new MedAdvantage plan covered acupuncture treatments.

I asked about this when I signed up by phone for Providence MedAdvantage in November of last year. The person I talked with didn't go into details, but I was told that yes, the Providence Medicare Choice +Rx (HMO-POS) plan I'd selected did indeed cover acupuncture.

However, when January 2025 came around and my Providence MedAdvantage plan went into effect, I got a bunch of materials from Providence. One was this double-sided 2025 Benefit Highlights sheet.

Under Benefits, you can see that Acupuncture is shown as Not Covered under both In-Network and Out-of-Network. That concerned me, being at odds with what I'd been told by the person at Providence who signed me up for this Medicare Advantage plan.

I phoned Providence on January 8, 2025 to find out what was going on. I was told that actually my Providence MedAdvantage plan did cover acupuncture for up to 12 sessions that have to be completed within 90 days, with 8 additional sessions covered in a calendar year if my condition is improving from acupuncture. I also was told that Karen Kaufman is an In-Network acupuncture provider.

So far this year, Kaufman hasn't been paid by Providence for the acupuncture sessions I've had with her. Recently I got a letter from Providence saying that they denied payment "because the services you received are not covered under your Medicare Advantage plan."

That led me to call Providence and ask what the heck was going on, since I'd been told that acupuncture was covered under my plan. The person I spoke with checked and told me that there was some sort of coding error with the diagnosis code. OK, Kaufman is asking her billing person to look into this. Probably we'll be able to figure out the problem.

What irks me more, though, is how difficult it is for someone to learn via the Providence MedAdvantage web site what the benefits of their plan truly are. As noted above, the 2025 Benefits Highlights sheet I was given by Providence says that acupuncture isn't covered. I only learned that it was through a phone call to Providence.

Providence is playing some disturbing games with the information they're giving, and withholding, from people who either have their Choice Medicare Advantage plan or are inquiring about it. The Providence web page for 2025 plans matching my zip code led me to this page about the Choice + Rx (HMO-POS) plan that I have. 

I clicked on every item in the Benefits section. There's no mention of acupuncture being covered. Or any mention of acupuncture at all.

Clicking around the Providence web site some more, and this wasn't easy to find, I located a PDF file of my Medicare Advantage plan benefits. I searched the file for "acupuncture." Nothing. It isn't mentioned here either. Then I noticed the fine print at the beginning of the file:

When You Join Providence

You are not just part of an insurance policy but part of a community of care, focused on your health and well-being. This Summary of Benefits is provided to help you make the right health care decisions. It is a short guide of what we would cover and what you would pay if you joined our Providence Medicare Choice + Rx (HMO-POS). To be clear, this is not a complete breakdown of benefits, and will not list every servicethat we cover, nor every limitation or exclusion. Plans may offer supplemental benefits in addition to Part C and Part D benefits.

For a complete list of services that we cover, please refer to the Evidence of Coverage (EOC). You can request a printed copy by visiting ProvidenceHealthAssurance.com/EOC or by calling our Customer Service department at one of the numbers listed in the “Get in touch” section below.

So I copied in the URL in the last paragraph, which isn't clickable by the way, and was taken to this page. Under the Evidence of Coverage section, I found my Choice plan, clicked on the Evidence of Coverage link, and was presented with a 257 page document. When I searched it for "acupuncture," I finally found the information about acupuncture coverage on page 59 that I was told about in my January phone call to Providence. 

Obviously Providence made this very difficult to find. I complained about this to the Providence person I talked with this month after they denied payment for the acupuncture treatments I've gotten in 2025, pointing out that neither their Benefit Highlights nor the plan benefits PDF file contained any mention of acupuncture -- only the 257 page Evidence of Coverage file did.

It sure seems like Providence is doing everything possible to make it as difficult as possible for their Choice +Rx clients to obtain acupuncture treatments.

These are part of the basic Medicare benefits, so I assume Medicare Advantage plans have to cover acupuncture. However, I guess those plans are free to play games with their clients by disguising the fact that they're entitled to acupuncture -- unless they phone Providence and ask about this, or are computer savvy enough to wend their way through the Providence web site and find the hard-to-find Evidence of Coverage file.

Ugh. Paid on street parking coming to downtown Salem July 1

Three days a week I have to park in downtown Salem so I can go to my Tai Chi class on Court Street between Liberty and Commercial. My instructor posted this not-so-cheery card from the City of Salem, alerting us students to what is coming July 1.

I find the "Get Ready to Meet Beep Beep Salem" annoying. Sure, if Beep Beep is the dog (if that's what the animal is) driving a little red car, that would be entertaining. Also, decidedly illegal, since I doubt a dog could pass the DMV test for a license.

But Beep Beep Salem actually is parking meters. Or perhaps, parking kiosks like what's already in other parts of Salem, such as around the Capitol. It would have been more honest to show an image of someone paying for parking that now is free, with a three hour limit. 

No one in my Tai Chi class is thrilled about the move to paid on-street parking. According to a City of Salem web page, the cost will be $1.50 an hour and you can pay either at a machine or via a cell phone app, which supposedly is coming soon. So I'll be paying $3.00 three times a week, unless I use a parking garage, which will remain free.

Here's how Beep Beep Salem is described by the City of Salem.

I worry about how this will affect the vitality of downtown. Likely it will lead to fewer people making discretionary trips to downtown, as it will be more inconvenient and costly to park. The City of Salem seems to recognize this when it says above, "It also reduces the number of cars that must circle to find a spot." 

Well, reducing the number of cars also reduces the number of people who visit downtown to shop, eat, or visit a different sort of business. Maybe downtown is vibrant enough to be able to absorb the shock of paid onstreet parking. Only time will tell.

This map shows the boundary of the new paid parking area (in yellow). A FAQ page has answers to some common questions. 

Book recommendation: "A Walk in the Park" by Kevin Fedarko

I read a lot of books. They're a mixture of nonfiction and fiction. But I'm not into "literary" versions of these genres. I buy nonfiction in order to learn something. I buy fiction in order to entertain myself, usually in the spy/thriller/espionage sort of writings. 

(The Gabriel Allon series by Daniel Silva that I enjoy a lot comes closest to literary fiction, being very well written; however, I doubt Silva's books truly qualify as literary fiction.)

However, near the end of 2024 I saw a list of 100 recommended nonfiction books published last year. I figured I needed to broaden my reading horizon, so chose to buy the only book whose description appealed to me. 

It was Kevin Fedarko's A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon.

I'm really glad that I read it. Beautifully written. Captivating story. Informative history of both the Grand Canyon and the Native Americans who lived in the area both before and after the canyon became a national park.

Fedarko and his National Geographic photographer friend, Pete McBride, set out to do what few other people had been able to accomplish: walk the Grand Canyon. This is both extremely difficult and extremely dangerous because almost all of the trek has to be done between the rim and the river, as it isn't possible to walk along the Colorado except for short stretches.

So a through-hike happens largely by venturing up and down the hundreds of side canyons that feed into the main canyon. This is largely uncharted territory, far off the usual tourist path. There are lots of ways to die: extreme heat, lack of water, falling off cliffs, injuries, exhaustion, becoming lost. Fortunately, Fedarko and McBride found help from more experienced Grand Canyon hikers along their way.

Here's some excerpts from the book that illustrate Fedarko's talented writing style. This passage is on the second page of the prologue. As soon as I read it, I knew I was going to be hooked on the book.

The sun stood squarely overhead, straddling the canyon's rims, pouring a column of fire directly into the abyss and driving the shadows into the deepest recesses of the rock while causing the cushion of air that hovered just above the surface of the stone to tremble, as if the ground itself were gasping for breath.

But the most striking element of all, the detail that could burn a hole in the center of your consciousness, was neither the brilliance nor the ferocity of that heat, but its heft: its thickness and weight as it draped itself over the top of your head and across the blades of your shoulders, as if it were a blanket braided from material that was already in flames when delivered into the hands of its weaver. 

The prologue ends with this passage. It shows the honesty of Fedarko in assessing the limitations of McBride and himself.

Needless to say, we were in over our heads, a condition stemming not only from our specific medical problems, but also from a deeper and more debilitating disorder. An affliction that could be addressed neither with antibiotics nor bed rest because it was not a physical ailment so much as an impairment of character -- an infirmity rooted in the complexion of our personalities as well as the delusions we harbored regarding our competency and prowess in the outdoors.

Ours was a conflation of willful ignorance, shoddy discipline, and outrageous hubris: an array of flaws that we had been denying (perhaps, like the sores on my feet, in the hope that it would simply improve or disappear) ever since the moment Pete had gotten the two of us into this mess by pressing me to join him for what he'd billed, quite literally, as "a walk in the park."

A misguided odyssey through the heart of perhaps the harshest and least forgiving, but also the most breathtakingly gorgeous, landscape feature on earth. A place filled with so much wonder, replete with so many layers of complexity, that there is nothing else like it, anywhere.

There's quite a bit of practical philosophizing in the book. This passage applies generally to life's difficult journeys.

Sooner or later, every difficult journey collides against a moment that crystallizes the imperative of accepting that the outcome of any ambitious undertaking can neither be ordained nor engineered by its participants, and that the heart of an odyssey is reached -- and its deeper truths begin to reveal themselves -- only after the illusion of control is permitted to fall away and disappear into the gathering night, like a loose pebble over a cliff.

Avelo Airlines, which flies out of Salem, is being paid for deportation ICE flights

It was controversial when in 2023 the Salem City Council paid $2.4 million from the city's general fund to make airport improvements that were needed to attract commercial air service to Salem -- even though at the time the City of Salem was facing a large budget shortfall and was hoping to raise $25 million a year from a payroll tax on workers.

Avelo Airlines, a low-cost carrier, ended up coming to town.

Now Avelo is enmeshed in a controversy of its own making due to the airline contracting with the Trump administration's ICE agency (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for deportation flights of supposedly undocumented immigrants. I say "supposedly" because there's plenty of evidence that quite a few of those being deported actually have a right to stay in this country.

I just signed a Change.org petition: "We won't fly Avelo until they stop ICE flights!" Currently it has 31,438 signatures. Here's excerpts from the petition.

We demand that AVELO AIR halt plans to carry out deportation flights in cooperation with the Trump Administration. We pledge to boycott the airline until they stop plans to profit off ICE flights that are tearing families and communities apart and removing some legal residents, such as Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia, with no recourse for returning to their families.

Avelo Air confirms that they have signed a contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Immigration Control and Enforcement agency (ICE) to carry out deportation flights from Mesa, Arizona and are currently recruiting staff.

...Trump's cruel policies go against everything we stand for. These flights are inhumane, dangerous, and, in some cases, illegal. They transport vulnerable people, including children and women, out of the country, at times without due process. Read what ProPublica has to say about ICE flights.

The Washington Post has an April 11 story about Avelo's ICE contract: "Small airline faces boycotts over deal to run deportation flights for ICE." That link is a gift from my Post subscription, so everybody should be able to read it. This is part of what the story says.

Avelo Airlines, an ultra-low-cost carrier based in Houston, has agreed to operate deportation flights for the Department of Homeland Security out of Phoenix-Mesa Airport starting next month. The contract is unconventional for a commercial airline because the federal government relies mostly on private charter companies.

Andrew Levy, Avelo’s founder and chief executive, described the company’s decision to participate in the flights as financial. It has generated criticism from Democratic lawmakers, the largest flight attendants union and thousands of travelers who signed a Change.org petition to boycott the carrier.

...Avelo provided details of its “long-term charter program” in a statement to The Washington Post. The airline will use three Boeing 737-800s, which can seat up to 189 passengers, to transport people deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to facilities or staging grounds in the United States or to final destinations abroad.

...Human rights and immigrant advocates have denounced conditions for deportees on flights, as have the governments of Brazil and Colombia. More recently, the administration flew more than 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador, where they are being held in a notorious prison.

...The primary responsibility of flight attendants is to ensure the safety of passengers. According to the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which represents workers at 20 airlines, including Avelo, the restrictive nature of deportation flights prohibits them from doing so.

“Having an entire flight of people handcuffed and shackled would hinder any evacuation and risk injury or death,” the union said in a statement to The Post. “It also impedes our ability to respond to a medical emergency, fire on board, decompression, etc. We cannot do our jobs in these conditions.”

According to the ICE Air Operations handbook, adult detainees will be restrained by handcuffs, waist chains and leg irons. Only the flight officer in charge or their assistant can remove the restraints.

The members urged Avelo to reconsider its deal with ICE.

...“If you and I are on a plane, we’re not even allowed to have our purses out when the plane is taking off because you have to be able to get off the flight so quickly if there’s an emergency,” said Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, the director of the UW Center for Human Rights. “Yet these folks are chained.”

Because of the steps involved in transporting deportees, Godoy said, the passengers may be constricted for hours or even an entire day. The shackles stymie mobility and can cause physical pain. She said she has observed flights where people struggle to walk up the stairs and complain of losing feeling in their hands. Using the lavatory is imaginably difficult.

“They’re not allowed to remove those shackles,” she said, “an impediment if you have to go to the bathroom.”

Climate change trends in Oregon discussed at Salem City Club

Truth is preferable to falsehood, for sure. But it can be damn depressing at times. That's how I felt today while listening to a Salem City Club talk about climate change from an Oregon perspective.

The speaker was Erica Fleishmann, Professor, College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, who is the Director of the Climate Change Research Institute (CCRI), a network of researchers and professionals that is housed at Oregon State University in Fleishmann's college.

One of CCRI's missions is to research and monitor the state and regional climate. Every two years CCRI publishes an updated Oregon Climate Assessment. The 2025 assessment can be downloaded via the CCRI web site. There's a two-page Executive Summary. This is the not-so-cheery section on Temperature and Precipitation.

Temperature and precipitation. Oregon’s annual average temperature increased by 2.2°F per century since 1895. Without considerable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, annual temperature in Oregon is projected to increase by at least 5°F by 2074 and 7.6°F by 2100, with the greatest seasonal increases in summer. Precipitation is projected to increase during winter and decrease during summer, and the intensity of heavy winter precipitation events is projected to increase. Furthermore, the proportion of precipitation falling as rain rather than snow is expected to increase. Increases in extreme temperatures contributed to recent revisions of the national Plant Hardiness Zone Map.

This is the section on Drought.

During 18 of the years from 1999–2023, Oregon’s precipitation was below average. The average temperature was warmer than normal in 21 of those years, which contributed to higher rates of evapotranspiration and more-frequent drought. Drought risk likely will increase over the twenty-
first century on the western slopes of the Cascade Range and the southern Coast Range, decrease in the Deschutes and John Day basins in north-central Oregon, and change little elsewhere. Drought risk during summer is likely to increase statewide.

Fleishmann showed some slides that echo the most recent Oregon Climate Assessment. 

The red bars on the chart above indicate periods between 1950 and the present when the annual average temperature in Oregon was greater than the 1950-2014 baseline. It's clear that the early part of this period had mostly blue bars, meaning a temperature less than the baseline, while more recent years have been largely above the baseline.

From here on out, the orange'y shadings show various warming scenarios, with the most likely being an 8 degree increase over the baseline by 2100 in the annual average temperature .

You can see that from 1990 to 2020, Salem averaged 15 days a year with a heat index of 90 degrees or above. The index is a blend of temperature and humidity, but since our summers usually aren't humid, Fleishmann said that the heat index basically is based on temperature.


The projected extreme heat index for 2070-2099, when, thankfully, I'll be dead and gone, shows that Salem is expected to have 53 days a year of 90 degrees or above, over three times what we have now.

Regarding precipitation, there isn't as clear a trend as there is with temperature. There have been more drier than normal years since 2000 compared to wetter than normal years. The long term trend is very uncertain, as shown by the large width of the right side of the slide. By 2100 the most likely scenario is a fairly small increase in annual precipitation, around 7-8 percent.

However, some areas are expected to get an increase in extreme precipitation.

More precipitation is expected to fall as rain rather than snow in those mountainous regions. 

Another slide showed how the causes of wildfires differ in various parts of Oregon. Most wildfires on the west side of the Cascades are caused by humans, while most wildfires on the east side of the Cascades are caused by lightning.

In the Q&A part of the program, Fleishmann said that carbon capture is still in the research and development stage so won't be able to quickly reduce greenhouse gases; that while Oregon is warming, we're better off than some other areas, like Arizona, so may see some climate-caused migration to our state; that while climate change initiatives are being rolled back at the national level, we will continue to stand with like-minded states; that frequent wildfire smoke inhalation has some negative long-term health effects, including premature birth.

Should progressives pursue policies of abundance? Probably.

I identify as a progressive, though for me, the term basically is synonymous with liberal. At any rate, I'd call myself a moderate progressive/liberal.

Meaning, I'm not as far to the left as Bernie Sanders, though I agree with much of what he says and stands for, and I'm not as far to the right as John Fetterman, though I also like much of what he says and stands for. 

So it isn't surprising that I resonate with the general thrust of a recently published book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance. In fact, I just ordered the book. Here's the Amazon description.

From bestselling authors and journalistic titans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.

 

To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.

Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next gener­ation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent urban-density and green-energy projects that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.

Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. It means, for liberals, recognizing when the government is failing. It means, for conservatives, recognizing when the government is needed. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and pre­serves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. At a time when movements of scarcity are gaining power in country after country, this is an answer that meets the challenges of the moment while grappling honestly with the fury so many rightfully feel.

 

Klein was on Bill Maher's HBO show this week. Maher hasn't been shy about criticizing California's overregulation, appropriately griping about how it took him three years, I think it was, to get approval for a solar panel installation on his house.

 

There was talk about how California has been trying to get high speed rail installed between Los Angeles and San Francisco for, roughly, forever. Now the plan is just for a segment between Merced and Bakersfield, if I recall correctly. Whoopee.

 

China has been able to build high speed rail hugely faster, as has the European Union. It does seem that Abundance is correct: the United States has lost its ability to build great things. Being old, and having grown up in California, I remember how quickly the interstate highway system in that state was built after a bill was passed by Congress in 1956.

 

Driving from central to southern California used to be really slow. Going through cities like Bakersfield involved stopping at lots of red lights. Once the I-5 freeway was built, and that didn't take very long, the trip was much faster and more pleasant. 

 

Here in Oregon, I'm a defender of our pioneering land use laws that protect farm and forest land from urban sprawl. But the downside is that our state lacks enough affordable housing. As was discussed on the Bill Maher show, blue states like California, New York, and Oregon likely will lose House seats after the 2030 census to rapidly growing red states like Texas and Florida.

 

Housing affordability is one reason. Red states have fewer regulations. Klein noted that this has caused Texas to have a lot of wind and solar electrical generation, even though the political climate in that state is anti-environment. The reason, according to Klein, is that the lack of regulation means green energy projects are easier to build in Texas.

 

Somehow us liberals have to find a way to build things that the United States needs without having construction slowed or even halted by onerous regulations. There's got to be a middle way between allowing development to proceed without necessary oversight, which the Trump administration is pursuing, and putting roadblocks in the path of development through over-regulation, which Democrat-controlled areas have been prone to.

 

The New York Times has a thoughtful review of Abundance, "Can Democrats Learn to Dream Big Again?" You should be able to read the review via my gift link. Excerpt:

As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson write in “Abundance,” a guide for liberals shaken by an age of factional polarization, the United States can still blaze the path to progress, but only if progressives get out of the habit of putting obstacles in their own way. “If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen,” the authors write, “they need to offer the fruits of effective government.” But how?

Klein, a columnist and podcaster for The New York Times, and Thompson, a journalist for The Atlantic, are the best in the business at digesting and synthesizing expertise from a host of fields. “Abundance” expands on their previously published work over the last decade or so, and Klein and Thompson have no shortage of policy proposals on affordable housing (build more!), renewable energy (go nuclear!) and sustainable agriculture (vertical farming?).

But their book comprises more than a set of concrete steps to fix specific socioeconomic problems in America. It’s mainly a sharp cry against myopic Democrats who block new ideas and govern through checklists, leading to what the authors call “an endless catalog of rules and restraints.”

 

Artificial Intelligence explained to City Club by Willamette University professor

Last Friday Calvin Deutschbein, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Willamette University, gave a talk on Artificial Intelligence, otherwise known as AI, to the Salem City Club. Deutschbein is holding a microphone in the photo below.

He started off by talking about intelligence in general. It has something to do with (1) representing the world, (2) finding patterns, (3) predicting the future, (4) acting optimally. His example pertained to his cat. I'll adapt it to our dog.

Mooka, our Husky mix, clearly is adept at making sense of the world. After all, ever since dogs became domesticated, probably via ancestral wolves who learned how to benefit from a relationship with humans, dogs have become highly attuned to living with us. 

Mooka knows that most days I take her for a walk in the late afternoon. She's learned that when the sun begins to set (and her stomach feels empty), the pattern is that soon I'll be putting her leash on. To get her to come to the front door, I get a few small pieces of cheese from the refrigerator. As soon as I open the cheese container, Mooka appears. That's non-artificial intelligence.

An AI model doesn't have the form of general intelligence that dogs, cats, and people do. That may come in the not-too-distant future, but for now AI models like Chat GPT basically are simply predicting the likelihood of words. That's why they're called Large Language Models.

Deutschbein used Willamette _______ as an example. The blank could be Valley, Forest, University, or some other word. Given the context of where he works, Willamette University is most likely. Often the next word would be Is: Willamette University is _________. Members of the audience threw out possibilities for the next word, which his slide indicated was Located: Willamette University is located ________.

We know that "in Salem" likely would be the next words. But Deutschbein noted that for most Americans, the word following Salem would have a greater chance of being Massachusetts than Oregon, given the famous nature of the East Coast Salem and its witch trials. Yet to the City Club audience, Oregon would be the chosen word, because of the context.

A slide said, "The amount of surprise you experience depends on correlations between concepts in a context." Another slide explained what this means:

Based on my personal experience, I might believe in an equal chance of the word "cat" and the word "dog" in the following sentence: "I am a _______ person." However, if I observe more "cat" than "dog" when reading a text, I am surprised by a mathematically quantifiable amount. Computers can make reasonable predictions by minimizing this type of surprise.

This probably seems like a far cry from genuine human intelligence. Which, it is. That's why Large Language Models currently are "merely" very good at predicting the next word(s) in a statement, as shown in the slide below. (That merely downplays how powerful this capability is.)


Regarding neural networks, which attempt to mimic how the human brain works, as a long-time (unsuccessful) meditator, I liked Deutschbein's comment: "When neurons fire, I have a thought; when they don't, I'm happy."

In the Q & A part of the program he was asked about so-called alternative facts, and whether AI models could recognize such concepts. He answered that these models are not trained to be true or useful, just to predict the most likely words. 

After the talk I went up to Deutschbein and told him that I'd read an article in a science magazine about the AI model developed by researchers in China that caused quite a stir when it had many or most of the capabilities of Chat GPT, but was much more efficient, requiring way less computer power.

I said that the researchers were surprised when the model started to arrive at answers to questions put to it by using a combination of Chinese and English, something they hadn't expected. The article quoted other AI experts as being concerned that at some point AI models might leave human languages behind, either "thinking" in pure mathematics or creating their own language with concepts we wouldn't be able to recognize. 

Deutschbein didn't seem very concerned about this, which was reassuring. I told him that given how amazingly complex the human brain is, with its 80 billion or so neurons bound together by trillions of interconnections, it's a neuroscientific fact that when we have a thought or feeling, or make a decision, what produced that output is a mystery to our conscious self.

So, I said, I guess it isn't all that bothersome that AI models are similar: we can recognize their response to a question posed to them, yet have no clue about how they arrived at that response. Of course, if an AI model ever gets control of nuclear weapon launch codes, there's going to be a really good reason why this is bothersome. 

My fall into a creek shows why doing one thing at a time makes sense

Yesterday I fell off a bridge into running water. Fortunately, it was a tiny bridge and the water wasn't very deep. How it appears to have happened contains a life lesson.

Yesterday I was taking our dog, Mooka, on her usual late afternoon walk, which begins on our property in rural south Salem. I had her on a leash, since the area by a creek is favored by raccoons, and we don't want Mooka running off and tangling with one.

I'd just crossed a little bridge that crosses the main part of Spring Creek, a short creek that feeds Spring Lake. The photo above shows the scene of my fall, a second bridge that crosses a smaller creek that only has considerable water in it after heavy rains.

Mooka was in the lead as I started to walk across the bridge, turning my head to the right to observe the mini-waterfall on the usually mostly dry smaller creek. (The waterfall is the splash of white past the ferns on the left side of the creek.)

Then I suddenly found myself falling off the bridge on the downstream (left) side. Best I can figure out is that as my attention was focused on the mini-waterfall, Mooka had started to pull on the leash I was holding, as she always does when our dog prepares to jog up some stone steps leading away from the creek.

I must have reached out to a snag that was the rotting remains of a tree that used to grow just past the bridge, but had lost most of its trunk in an ice storm, if I remember correctly. The snag pulled out of the ground, falling into the creek just before I did.

Here you can see the snag laying in the creek. Fortunately, I missed it, toppling into the water instead. As falls go, it was a fairly elegant one. I'd let go of the leash, so Mooka wasn't affected. I was wearing high topped boots, so I didn't twist my ankle.

I just climbed back onto the bridge and looked for the dog. But first I had to deal with my Apple Watch beeping loudly.

It had registered that I'd fallen and had started a 30-second countdown, I think it was, until 911 was called (I had my iPhone with me, so I assume that's how the call would be made). I was able to cancel the 911 call just in time, after first pressing "No" on my watch's screen, then realizing the question was Do you want to cancel the 911 call? and I needed to press "Yes." 

Over on my Church of the Churchless blog I'd recently written a post about how scientists have measured how quickly human cognition works, finding that it is amazingly slow at 10 bits per second. One of the lessons, said the researchers, was that the mind can only do one thing at a time.

That was my problem, I believe. My attention had been split between walking across the bridge with a dog leash in my hand just as the dog was pulling on the leash to get up the stone steps, while I was looking at the mini waterfall. 

All that combined to throw me off balance. I suspect that if I hadn't been looking at the waterfall, I would have done what I usually do, walk faster to keep up with the dog. But I had slowed to inspect the rare waterfall.

Anyway, I didn't suffer from my tumble into the creek. I just had to walk in soggy shoes and socks the rest of the way. From now on I'll try to do a bit better with the One Thing at a Time notion.

Typepad told me they aren't going out of business. Hope that's true.

I've been blogging with Typepad since 2003, which is when Wikipedia says Typepad launched. So I must have been one of their earliest customers. Now I have three Typepad blogs.

So while I've gotten used to fairly frequent Typepad outages as problems with the blogging service have become more common, when I couldn't log in to my account on March 3, I got more concerned than usual.

Even though things were back to normal by the next day (which for Typepad is still pretty crappy, especially when it comes to uploading photos, as this person complained about in 2022), I felt the need to send Typepad a support ticket that said:

The Typepad outage yesterday spurred me to do some Googling about Typepad. I saw that you haven't accepted new customers since 2020 and may not be in business much longer. Hopefully that isn't true.

But if it is, I sure hope you guys will have a plan for those of us who have been with Typepad almost from the start, 2003. In those 22 years I've made about 8,300 posts on my three blogs. It's just overwhelming for me to think about losing all that content, which includes many personal experiences, since I partly use blogging as a form of a diary.

So I've got posts about deaths in the family, my granddaughter's birth, health problems, joys and sorrows, all that stuff. It's all under a Typepad URL, so if you go away, so does my ability to retrieve those posts.

I'm simply asking what I hope you're already planning to do in case Typepad goes out of business. Please seriously consider a plan to keep the posts of people like me available. I'm not computer savvy enough to know what this might be. I just know that I'd be willing to pay more to preserve that content, as I'm confident other Typepad users would be.

The response I got made me feel better, though it wasn't totally reassuring.

Hi Brian,

Thanks for your message. Although Typepad is no longer accepting new sign-ups, we continue to support our existing customers and there are no plans for that to change. If it were to change at some point, there would likely be a tool to help bloggers migrate to another platform. However, as mentioned, there is no plan at this time to shut down Typepad, and the Support team are still here for you.

Thanks,
Laura

I replied with:

Laura, thanks much for your positive response. I feel better now. The notion of a tool to help us bloggers migrate to another platform sounds great. Seems like that would benefit both the other platform (new customers!) and Typepad bloggers (no need to get degree in computer science!). Hopefully it won't come to that. I feel a large sense of gratitude to Typepad for sticking around since 2003, which I like to refer to as several hundred years in Internet Years, given the rapidity of change since that time. Of course, that's when I began blogging, which makes me a several hundred year old blogger -- a bit more than my actual ancient age of 76.

Quite a while ago, maybe as many as ten years, I looked into converting my many thousands of blog posts into a WordPress format. It turned out that this would be very difficult to do, if not impossible, so I gave up on that idea.

This helps explain why I felt so good about Typepad support saying they hope to offer a tool to help bloggers migrate to another platform if it came to that. I'd hate to lose not only the text of my posts, but also all of the photos, files, comments, and such that have been part of my 8,300 posts. 

Laurel Hines, my wife, supports changes to Oregon's Death With Dignity law

The Oregon legislature is considering a bill, SB 1003, that would make changes to our state's Death With Dignity law -- which allows people who have six months or less left to live to exercise control over the time and manner of their death by taking physician-prescribed medication.

Passed by Oregon voters in 1994, and affirmed in 1997 when it took effect after a legal challenge, the law is a good start, but it needs improving. That's why my wife, Laurel Hines, testified in favor of SB 1003 at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on March 3.

Laurel told the committee that it makes sense to allow physician assistants and nurse practitioners to deal with patients who want to make use of the Death With Dignity law. In many rural parts of Oregon, PAs and NPs are the primary caregivers, since physicians are lacking in those areas. 

She also approved of a proposed change that reduces the waiting period to use the law from 15 days to 2 days, telling the committee that a 15 day wait after deciding on a peaceful death could be intolerable, and it prolongs the patient's emotional agony. Further, some people lose the ability to self-administer the medication over a 15 day period (that's a requirement under the law).

My wife was quoted in a couple of news stories about the hearing. Here's an excerpt from a story in The Lund Report (an independent publication focused on health care in Oregon), "Senators hear passionate arguments over how terminally ill patients end their lives in Oregon."

How easy should it be for terminally ill people to end their lives? Debate over how Oregon should answer that question is flaring in Salem.

A group of doctors want to cut the waiting period for Oregon’s Death with Dignity law from 15 days to 48 hours and allow not just physicians but nurse practitioners and physician assistants to prescribe medication and oversee the process that allows terminally ill patients to end their lives.

Critics say the changes will remove safeguards voters were promised when they approved Oregon’s physician-assisted dying law in 1994 and affirmed in 1997. Supporters, however, say the law needs an update in response to doctor shortages and for patients who are on the brink of death.

“I believe that these changes that are being proposed are not radical at all, and extremely reasonable,” Laurel Hines, a retired Salem social worker, told lawmakers Monday.

Lawmakers considered those arguments during a hearing of Senate Bill 1003, which would make the most far-reaching revisions to Oregon’s Death with Dignity program in the history of the law.

Hines said that Oregon’s law is modest compared to what’s in place in Canada and other countries. Without reforms to Oregon’s law, she said more people would turn to “do-it-yourself options.”

“I now have traumatic memories of my sister dying the way she did, and being in the condition she was and in pain that morphine didn't control and her loss of autonomy."

The Portland Oregonian also had a story that mentioned Laurel, "Bill to ease medically assisted suicide runs into wall of opposition." 
Download Bill to ease medically assisted suicide runs into wall of opposition

The bill would loosen Oregon’s first-in-the-nation law by reducing the standard waiting period after patients ask for lethal doses of medication from 15 days to two days. Among other provisions, it would eliminate the need for two doctors to sign off on medically assisted suicide and instead allow two physician assistants or nurse practitioners to do so.

No individual lawmakers have signed on as sponsors of Senate Bill 1003, which was filed by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Only two people spoke in favor of the bill Monday. Eight people spoke in opposition, along with 150 Oregonians who submitted written testimony objecting to the bill.

Dr. Paul Kaplan, who said he was speaking for a group of about 30 mostly retired doctors who’ve focused on end-of-life care, told the committee the bill would help reduce inequities in rural Oregon where most residents use physician assistants or nurse practitioners for their medical care.

“There are very large areas of Oregon where there is not a doctor available for hundreds of miles,” Kaplan said. “And so this service is literally not available to patients who live in those areas.”

Laurel Hines, a Salem resident, told the committee that sometimes waiting 15 days is too long. Hines said her sister deteriorated within a few days of going into hospice and would not have been able to self-administer a lethal dose — as required by Oregon law. Though Hines’ sister died in Illinois, where there is no medically assisted suicide law, Hines used her sister’s death as an example of what can happen to terminally ill patients.

“I now have traumatic memories of my sister dying the way she did and being in the condition that she was and pain that morphine didn’t control,” Hines said.

It seems that many or even most of the 150 comments in opposition to the bill likely came from an organized effort by Oregon Right to Life. Laurel read the comments and told me that there was talk about the horror of killing unborn children, though abortion obviously has nothing to do with the Death With Dignity law. Most of those opponents probably hadn't even read SB 1003, so hopefully their comments will be discounted by the committee.