Trendlist: Althouse

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Althouse

Am I the last person to realize that voicemail is dead?
"Public Health Madison and Dane County announced Tuesday that after the expiration of the current COVID-19 public health order, no new ones would be issued."
Sunrise.
"Hospital admissions linked to obesity in England topped one million for the first time last year, according to NHS figures."
"What accounts for the growing number of octogenarians and beyond who are accomplished and still accomplishing?"
"Politics is the great generalizer... and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other..."
Sacha Baron Cohen — "not hot as himself, by the way" — confronts his cancel-worthy alter egos...
More of this morning's luscious sunrise.

Am I the last person to realize that voicemail is dead?

Posted: 18 May 2021 01:39 PM PDT

It bothered me to see this on my new iPhone:

If I touch "Call Voicemail," it just tells me I haven't set up voicemail, and there's nowhere to go to set it up. I researched it on line, saw some tips and followed them, without success, and called my service provider and spent half an hour in a very boring and fruitless conversation.

I moved on to considering what am I really missing. I don't like when something doesn't work, even if I'm not using it, but am I using it? When's the last time I got voicemail that mattered? My one real use of voicemail is as the place where calls go because I've turned "silence unknown callers" on. If anyone not on my contacts list calls me, I won't hear the call, but they can leave a message. Now, they can't. They hear that I don't have voicemail. Is that a problem... or am I better off?

I trying googling "no one uses voicemail anymore" and got over 3 million hits — mainly from 6 or 7 years ago. A more recent article is "Leaving a voicemail is rude...":

"There's absolutely no purpose for voicemails in the modern age... You have no idea what to expect from them, they could go on for minutes, you might have to reach for a pen to jot down some information, and it's super inefficient and inconvenient."

And isn't the call itself rude? Not only should you text if your call isn't picked up. You should text before you call. It's too late in the history of technology to be calling people who aren't going to pick up for you, so why should these people be coddled with access to voicemail?

So I'm ready to say voicemail is dead. Just get the corpse icon off the phone app, though, because I feel uneasy around things that feel broken.

"Public Health Madison and Dane County announced Tuesday that after the expiration of the current COVID-19 public health order, no new ones would be issued."

Posted: 18 May 2021 10:52 AM PDT

So even though Dane County is one of the most-vaccinated counties in the U.S., we need to wait until June 2nd. They can't just put out a new order and free us from the restriction? Like the old order deserves to live out its life unmolested?

Sunrise.

Posted: 18 May 2021 09:18 AM PDT

"Hospital admissions linked to obesity in England topped one million for the first time last year, according to NHS figures."

Posted: 18 May 2021 11:32 AM PDT

The London Times reports. Look at the trend (click to enlarge and clarify):

The article says that 27% of men and 29% of women in England are obese. But that's a lot less than in the United States. 36.5% of Americans are obese. — 40.4% of women and 35% of men.

I don't know the number of hospital admissions in the U.S. that are "linked to obesity," and I don't have a chart showing the 10-year trend. I should look harder, but I am seeing "78% of COVID-19 patients hospitalized in the US overweight or obese, CDC finds."

AND: Actually, that 78% figure isn't so alarming if you consider that 69% of Americans are overweight or obese. That's only 9 percentage points more than random.

"What accounts for the growing number of octogenarians and beyond who are accomplished and still accomplishing?"

Posted: 18 May 2021 07:03 AM PDT

Asks Jane Brody in "A Birthday Milestone: Turning 80!" (NYT).

The article doesn't really answer the question, not any better than you'd answer it on your own: Maintain your physical and mental well being so you can continue accomplishing, and also get yourself into some line of accomplishment that's intrinsically motivating. Brody names some famous people who are still productive in their field after the age of 80 (but fails to mention Bob Dylan, who's about to turn 80).

Here's a little text from the end of the article, about regrets (which is really a different topic!):

Have I any regrets? I regret taking French instead of Spanish in high school and I keep trying to learn the latter, a far more practical language, on my own. I regret that I never learned to speed-read; whether for work or leisure, I read slowly, as if everything in print is a complex scientific text. Although I'd visited all seven continents before I turned 50, I never got to see the orangutans in their native Borneo or the gorillas in Rwanda. But I'm content now to see them up close on public television....

I thought speed-reading was a hoax. And I think it's best to leave the great apes alone. I'm put off by the elaborate fakery of traveling to Borneo/Rwanda in pursuit of an authentic encounter with orangutans/gorillas.

And is Spanish a "more practical language" than French? French is as practical to French-speaking people as Spanish is to Spanish-speaking people, I would imagine. I think she doesn't mean Spanish is a "more practical language" but that someone living in America will find it more practical to know Spanish than to know French. One reason for slow reading is that people writing in their first language are not taking the trouble to think about what they are writing.

ADDED: My line of accomplishment is blogging, and I find it continually intrinsically motivating. So though I'm only 70, let me offer some different advice about remaining active while aging. You don't have to keep powering along in the career you chose for yourself decades ago. You can discover something within or adjacent to it that is more purely what inspires you and brings you flow. Then retire and do exactly that. I called blogging a line of "accomplishment," but I'm no longer oriented toward accomplishing anything. I live in the day. A day lived now is as good as a day lived anywhere else in the string of days that is your life. What does it matter how close to the end of the line it is?

ALSO: From the Wikipedia article "Speed Reading," here's a photo captioned "Jimmy Carter and his daughter Amy participate in a speed reading course":

Do you think they are speed reading? The speed-reading craze got started with President Kennedy. Was he really speed-reading? Skim a few articles on the subject and I think you'll quickly get the main idea: People who claim to speed read are skimming. To read, you have to read all the words in order. You don't have to read. You can go way more quickly by skipping a lot of the words. But even skimming the articles on the subject, you should know you're bullshitting if you call that reading and claim to be "speed reading."

AND: Here's an article by Timothy Noah at Slate, "The 1,000-Word Dash/College-educated people who fret they read too slow should relax. Nobody reads much faster than 400 words per minute":

Studies show that people who read at or above the college level all read at about the same speed when they read for pleasure.... When you factor out the amount of time spent thinking through complex and unfamiliar concepts—a rarity when people read for pleasure—reading is an appallingly mechanical process. You look at a word or several words. This is called a "fixation," and it takes about .25 seconds on average. You move your eye to the next word or group of words. This is called a "saccade," and it takes up to about .1 seconds on average. After this is repeated once or twice, you pause to comprehend the phrase you just looked at. That takes roughly 0.3 to 0.5 seconds on average. Add all these fixations and saccades and comprehension pauses together and you end up with about 95 percent of all college-level readers reading between 200 and 400 words per minute, according to Keith Rayner, a psycholinguist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The majority of these college-level readers reads about 300 words per minute....

John F. Kennedy was said to read 1,200 words per minute. The speed-reading huckster Evelyn Wood claimed that a professor boasted of consuming more than 2,500 words per minute "with outstanding recall and comprehension."... (Speed-reading courses teach skimming, not reading, though most won't admit that.)...

"Politics is the great generalizer... and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other..."

Posted: 18 May 2021 05:23 AM PDT

"... they are in an antagonistic relationship. To politics, literature is decadent, soft, irrelevant, boring, wrongheaded, dull, something that makes no sense and that really oughtn't to be. Why? Because the particularizing impulse is literature. How can you be an artist and renounce the nuance? But how can you be a politician and allow the nuance? As an artist the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify. Even should you choose to write in the simplest way, à la Hemingway, the task remains to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in. Otherwise you produce propaganda, if not for a political party, a political movement, then stupid propaganda for life itself—for life as it might itself prefer to be publicized.... Generalizing suffering: there is Communism. Particularizing suffering: there is literature."

From "I Married a Communist" by Philip Roth.

Sacha Baron Cohen — "not hot as himself, by the way" — confronts his cancel-worthy alter egos...

Posted: 18 May 2021 04:19 AM PDT

... as he accepts a "comedic genius" award:

"Thank you MTV; to the millions of fans out there who voted for me, I salute you. This is yours, I'd be nothing without you. I'm so humbled by this. I'm just a human being creating complex nuanced characters — sophisticated tools to expose …"/"Did somebody say they want me to expose my sophisticated tool?"

More of this morning's luscious sunrise.

Posted: 17 May 2021 06:49 PM PDT