Indy Digest: Dec. 1, 2022
In today’s Digest intro, we’re going to take a day off from talking about plagues and hate, and instead, we’re going to talk about a silly mystery.
It all started one evening a week and a half ago, when Matt King, the Independent’s primary art/music scribe, sent me a Facebook message. “I used an AI to generate a piece of art for my surf band playing at the Tamale Festival, and you showed up,” he wrote.
Some background: There are some apps/websites where you can type in a phrase or a sentence, and the “artificial intelligence” in the app/site will create, within seconds, a piece of art. John Oliver has had some fun with these on Last Week Tonight, recently airing a segment about a site which had created art showing him having a romantic relationship with a cabbage.
One example is dream.ai. It’s one of the easier sites to use, because you can type in a phrase and get art without going through the trouble of setting up an account. I just went there and typed in “cranky newspaper editor” and picked the “paint” style, and this is what it produced:
Sure. Why not.
Anyway … Matt’s band, the Salton City Surf Club, is playing at the Indio International Tamale Festival this weekend. He decided to use dream.ai to create a poster promoting the gig … and this is what it spit out:
My friends … as much as I’d like to say otherwise, that is a terrifyingly accurate likeness of yours truly; the hubby and some of my closest friends agree. (“That’s a wow,” one of them said upon seeing it.) The hair is red rather than blond or grey (my beard, sigh), and the glasses are more CHiPs-era Erik Estrada than 2022 Jimmy Boegle… but yikes, that looks like me.
I thought there had to be some explanation for this. Perhaps Matt put in something about the Independent in his search terms? Or maybe he included some other thing that would lead the AI to find some online image of me?
Nope. “I literally put ‘surfer eating a tamale,'” Matt said.
While I have been known to enjoy a tamale or three on occasion, I have never, ever set foot on a surf board. I am not what most people would consider “athletic.” (Just ask my softball teammates.) I have dislocated both of my elbows in falls while doing very ho-hum things–my left elbow when my shoe got caught in a water-main access hole as I crossed a street, and my right elbow when my dress shoe got caught on a stair during an event I was hosting. I shudder to think what body part(s) I would dislocate, or break, or otherwise destroy if I tried to surf.
I was stumped, so I asked Matt and some of the aforementioned closest friends if they had any ideas how this could have happened. In response, one friend requested a poster-size version of the image, while another said, referring to how I looked in the image: “Well you have had days like that if we’re being honest!” Aren’t my friends helpful? #sarcasm
Meanwhile, Matt simply said: “The robot artists know your likeness.”
Great. Now I am confused AND terrified.
—Jimmy Boegle
From the Independent
The Venue Report, December 2022: Cheap Trick, Harry Connick Jr., Squirrel Nut Zippers—and More!
By Matt King
December 1st, 2022
A survey of some of December’s top entertainment offerings in the Coachella Valley and beyond.
Caesar Cervisia: O’Caine’s Irish Pub in Rancho Mirage Has an Irish Beer Selection Unparalleled in the Coachella Valley
By Brett Newton
November 29th, 2022
O’Caine’s Irish Pub in Rancho Mirage has an amazing selection of Irish beer—and a whole lot more.
December Astronomy: The Month Brings the Start of Winter—and an Evening Planet Extravaganza!
By Robert Victor
November 30th, 2022
A preview of the nighttime skies in December 2022.
The Indy Endorsement: The Cannelloni at Palmina by Puglia
By Jimmy Boegle
November 29th, 2022
The flavor of the sauce on Palmina by Puglia’s cannelloni had so much depth and nuance.
The Weekly Independent Comics Page for Dec. 1, 2022!
By Staff
December 1st, 2022
Topics found on this week’s comics page include helmets, fast food, goat cheese, local TV news—and more!
More News
• And now for the plague news: Local wastewater testing shows virus levels for the three respiratory diseases running amok in the U.S. may be leveling off—at very, very high levels. Palm Springs testing shows SARS-CoV-2 levels last week were, on average, more or less unchanged from the week before (though one of the two readings was the highest we’ve seen in months.).
• Down in Indio, the Valley Sanitary District is testing for SARS-CoV-2, RSV and the flu, and all those levels in recent tests have been pretty flat:
• Sort of related: Elon Musk’s Twitter has stopped banning accounts and tweets that spread misinformation about COVID-19. A professor of information systems, writing for The Conversation, says allowing such misinformation poses a grave public health risk: “In the absence of strong content moderation policies on Twitter, algorithmic content curation and recommendation are likely to boost the spread of misinformation by increasing echo chamber effects, for example, exacerbating partisan differences in exposure to content. Algorithmic bias in recommendation systems could also further accentuate global healthcare disparities and racial disparities in vaccine uptake. There is evidence that some less-regulated platforms … may amplify the impact of unreliable sources and increase COVID-19 misinformation. There is also evidence that the misinformation ecosystem can lure people who are on social media platforms that invest in content moderation to accept misinformation that originates on less moderated platforms. The danger then is that not only will there be greater anti-vaccine discourse on Twitter, but that such toxic speech can spill over into other online platforms that may be investing in combating medical misinformation.“
• CNBC is examining how much of an impact long COVID is having on the economy … and the numbers are huge: “All told, long COVID is a $3.7 trillion drag on the U.S. economy—about 17% of our nation’s pre-pandemic economic output, said David Cutler, an economist at Harvard University. The aggregate cost rivals that of the Great Recession, Cutler wrote in a July report. Cutler revised the $3.7 trillion total upward by $1.1 trillion from an initial report in October 2020, due to the ‘greater prevalence of long COVID than we had guessed at the time.’ Even that revised estimate is conservative: It is based on the 80.5 million confirmed U.S. COVID cases at the time of the analysis, and doesn’t account for future caseloads. Higher medical spending accounts for $528 billion of the total. But lost earnings and reduced quality of life are other sinister trickle-down effects, which respectively cost Americans $997 billion and $2.2 trillion.”
• Today has been one of the worst days I have ever seen for media layoffs. Gannett—the parent company of The Desert Sun—was in the process of laying off 6 percent of its workforce. CNN yesterday and today made massive cuts, while The Washington Post announced it was shutting down its Pulitzer Prize-winning magazine, and NPR is cutting budgets, resulting in a hiring freeze. ABC and NBC are expected to soon layoff some people, too. This is all very bad for journalism.
• OK, let’s now conclude with three news stories that all contain some GOOD news. First up: Our partners at CalMatters looked at the 2022 wildfire season, which has so far been milder than anyone predicted: “As California emerges from its ‘peak’ wildfire season, the state has managed to avoid its recent plague of catastrophic wildfires. So far in 2022, the fewest acres have burned since 2019. State Emergency Services Director Mark Ghilarducci said California had ‘a bit of luck’ with weather this summer. Although enduring yet another drought year, much of the state was spared the worst of the heat and dryness that can spark fires. And in some instances, well-timed rain came to the rescue. Cal Fire officials also attribute some of the mild wildfire season to their emphasis on clearing away vegetation that fuels fires. Cal Fire Chief Joe Tyler said the $2.8 billion spent in the last two years on forest management made a difference, with the work ‘moderat(ing) fires approaching communities.’”
• For the first time in decades, some sexually active gay and bisexual men may soon be able to donate blood. CBS News says: “Research backed by the Food and Drug Administration ‘will likely support’ ending a blanket ban on blood donations from sexually active gay men, the agency said Wednesday. The move would mark a significant reversal of a measure aimed at curbing the spread of HIV that experts and activists have long criticized as overly broad and misguided. Current federal rules prohibit blood banks from collecting donations from men who have had sex with men within the last three months. An alternative approach researched in the FDA-funded ADVANCE study tested out relying on questionnaires to screen donors, instead of broad ‘time-based deferrals.’ ‘Although we do not have a specific timeline for when our analysis will be complete, the agency believes the initial data from the study, taken in the context of other data available from blood surveillance in the U.S. and in other countries, will likely support a policy transition to individual risk-based donor screening questions for reducing the risk of HIV transmission,’ the FDA’s Carly Kempler said in a statement.”
• And finally … the first phase of a study on an HIV vaccine is showing encouraging results. CNN reports: “An experimental HIV vaccine has been found to induce broadly neutralizing antibodies among a small group of volunteers in a Phase 1 study. The findings suggest that a two-dose regimen of the vaccine, given eight weeks apart, can elicit immune responses against the human immunodeficiency virus. The clinical trial results, published Thursday on World AIDS Day in the journal Science, establish ‘clinical proof of concept’ in support of developing boosting regimens to induce immune responses against HIV infection, for which there is no cure and which can cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, known as AIDS. The vaccine, called eOD-GT8 60mer, had a ‘favorable safety profile’ and induced broadly neutralizing antibodies in 97%, or all but one, of the 36 recipients, according to the researchers from Scripps Research, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, the National Institutes of Health and other institutions in the United States and Sweden.”
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