Janus speaks

My Dad died last April. He'd been in assisted living for over a year, since his second stroke, leaving my Mom living alone in the house she grew up in.

I've been providing handyman care for them over the past 10 years, as they got older and lifting, climbing and driving, especially at night, became problematic. I would take them out for dinner once a week, just to get them out of the house for a long walk through a mall. I'd run errands, water the plants on the tops of the hutch, drive them to doctor's appointments, and bring by whichever of their grandsons was in town at the time.

After Dad moved out of the house my trips became more frequent. Mom would skip meals because she was too tired to fix anything. My sister came in from Michigan regularly and would cook up and freeze 3 dozen ready-to-nuke small dinners. These accumulated in the fridge and freezer.

This fall, Mom decided that she couldn't manage alone any longer. Quickly and decisively she moved into the nicest assisted living facility in the Cities, a top-floor apartment with all day sunlight pouring in, a sun room and a spare room she turned into a music room/office so she could continue teaching.

Thanksgiving was held at my niece's home. The long drive out and back, plus the four hours of the event, completely wasted Mom. Learning from experience, I planned Christmas to be at Mom's apartment, fewer people and a shorter celebration. I, my sister and husband, two of my sons brought over some decorations, snacks, treats (Mom loves candy and blueberries, so when I found blueberry-flavor coated chocolates, I knew they were perfect). It was a good Christmas and we left when Mom started to tire.

Now, it's New Year's Eve and we look forward and back, and probably to the sides as well, trying to make sense of it all. Maybe next year.

Here's a thought (an old one)

It's not a blog if you don't link, so here is Pandagon, noting that it would be helpful if there were some sort of mechanism to translate legislative language into English, for more comprehensible public consumption.

A similar thought occurred to me a while back, and I spent some time looking into automated processes that might convert convoluted legalese into a grammar tree. It turns out to be not only harder than it sounds, but much harder.

Whether you call it Human Language Technologies, or Natural Language Processing, it has proven to be an intractable problem in automation. While it would be nice to toss 1300 pages of omnibus spending bill into the hopper and have a credible analysis spit out the faucet, that level of performance is a way off. But wouldn't it be nice to at least be presented with a simplified English version, something that, say, removed all the double and triple negatives, placing them into a straightforward sentence that is more easily understood -- by humans at least, if not machines?

Something to think about. Some more.