Silicon Valley Redneck

The most astonishing headline of the morning so far

ECB sticks to easy money pledge despite better growth

Golly, who could have foreseen that?  Super Mario Draghster continuing to dump €s into the financial system in perpetuity?  Let me show you my shocked face 😐.

Still getting things sideways

Fredrik deBoer warns of the potential for terrible things to happen to the university system.  Among them:

Passing harsh restrictions on campus groups and how they can organize?

Which is already being proposed at Hahvahd.

Thing is: deBoer is assuming it's the Republicans who will impose these restrictions, presumably because of the riots.  The actual proposal is coming from the Left, inside the Academy, because, as the feller said, nothing outside the State.

Wake up, dude.  Collectivist ideology always goes full totalitarian, sooner or later.

Imagine, if you will...

Maybe the solution to the Unicorn Problem is to have the right sort of imagination?  Or to remember the dark side of the ancient myths?

Watching Michael Munger's talk on the problem in question, I got to the point where he calls upon the audience to visualize a unicorn.  A cute white horsie with a shiny horn, right?

Nope.  I come up with Heather Alexander's Black Unicorn.  I do not want to conjure one of those to solve all my problems!

And, getting back to the second half of my first paragraph?  In the old myths, favors granted by Powers always come with a price.  And some favors come with too high a price.

We've forgotten the dark fairy tales of old; now, when a Power grants a favor, the people all live happily ever after, and never lose their souls.  It doesn't work that way.  Powers are not benevolent.  At best, they're neutral: forces of Nature, such as gravity, combustion, nuclear fusion, and quantum mechanics are utterly impartial, have no will nor incentives of their own, and are subject to consistent (at the macro scale) rules.  Those that seek to take or give power above or beyond the Laws?  Not to be trusted even a little bit.

Let's see, now... from Munger, I bounced to Heather Alexander, Babylon 5, Cat Faber, and Kipling.  Eclectic enough for a quick post?  Those just kinda sprang to mind; I'm too lazy to look up real classic myths and fairy tales for further illustration.  And I didn't feel like dragging in Goethe and von Weber.

Afterthought:  When did fairy tales all get rewritten to have happy endings, anyway?  That's not something we can blame on Gramsci, is it?  Or... maybe the timeframe is right.  Did Gramsci, or one of his disciples, whisper in Disney's ear?  If you want to undermine a culture, erasing the cautionary tales for children seems like an important step.

"Resolution of No Confidence" WTaF?

Seems the MP from Memphis has introduced a Resolution of No Confidence in the House of Commons.  Should it pass, PM Trump will automatically be removed from office and replaced by someone from the other party, or perhaps someone supported by a coalition of parties.

...Wait a minute...

That's not how any of this works.  Before 1776, maybe.  Now, no.

I hope this is just more idiotic posturing, and not part of an actual attempt by the minority party to seize control.  But it does fit in alarmingly with the slow-motion-coup-d'etat motif.

Look, it's got three settings!

At last, the world gets a Doctor with etheric beam locators!  For the first time EVAH!!!!

As noted here:

The timelord of Doctor Who, a man since 1963, will be portrayed by a woman – actress Jodie Whittaker – for the first time.

Except!  See here.  Joanna Lumley played the Doctor in The Curse of Fatal Death.  For about as long as Edmund Blackadder was King of England, true, but she did play the doctor.

Also at El Reg: the phrase "James Bond low-point Die Another Day".  The Bond franchise has had so many low points; how do you choose one?

I still think she sounded better in the original German.

Seems La Sarsouracen just gave a speech at some college or other, to great adulation.

Much going on and on about how horrible the Trump Administration is, anecdotally speaking.  Lots of "we've been hearing about" things that, well, maybe they haven't actually happened, but we've been hearing about them from the hysterical anti-Trump crowd.

Oddly enough, one of these grievances is the rollback of LGBT rights... uh, right.  I'm sure that area would be so much better under sharia.

She's not, quite, inciting imminent lawless behavior - but she sure as heck is priming the audience for insurrection.  Enough of this propaganda - and the propaganda being pumped forth non-stop by "The Resistance" - and war becomes unavoidable.

The minority party is laying the groundwork for a coup d'etat.  This is very bad indeed.

Regarding the tactics for dealing with carnivorous dinosaurs

Spotted here:

However even [Usain] Bolt could not have out-run a velociraptor, who would have been one of the fastest dinosaurs with the ability to run at 34 mph.

This raises the question of why one would be trying to outrun a velociraptor, which was basically a carnivorous turkey.  I wouldn't expect them to taste very good, and surely there would be easier prey around.  I guess some people just like fast food.

Seriously: you don't run from a predator.  You may run to a place of safety, if you can get there before the predator does.  Otherwise, and especially if the predator is smaller'n you?  Don't be the mouse.  Stand your ground.  Make yourself look big.  Roar.  Attack!  Your inability to outrun the critter only works out to your advantage if you're the one doing the chasing.

Exception: running from slow-moving predators is fine.  Zombie, gelatinous cube, Venus flytrap, alligator on land: those, you can outrun.  Or, y'know, just not get too close to them in the first place, which is a good idea in general.

Additional: Some people are intimidated by aggressive critters, and will flee in terror even from a regular non-carnivorous turkey.  This is not the way to cement one's place at the top of the food chain.

Also, there's no need to apply the intimidation tactics mentioned above to a non-threatening critter.  If it's acting playful or inquisitive, and it's not a species noted for attacks on humans, maybe you can make friends with it.  If it's big enough to be potentially dangerous, and it's not unambiguously friendly, just keep your distance and don't bother it.  Bison are not your friends; remain on the other side of the fence from them.

Some things eventually get fixed.

That fiddly detail I mentioned, about Google Finance factoring a completely bogus price for AABA into the "technology" index?

They fixed it yesterday morning, over a week after I'd happened to notice it.  Seems to have a retroactive effect on the history of the "technology" thing, too, as the history chart isn't showing the inflated value that led me to wonder what was being factored in.

And it's abundantly obvious that Google's index isn't handled the way an index obviously ought to be handled.

The obvious way: at any given moment, you add up the weighted current values of the components to get the current value of the index; to get the change, you subtract the close-of-business value from the last trading day.  Simple, aside from choosing the components and the weighting.

Google's way: there's no current value.  There's just the instantaneous percentage change, calculated by, presumably, some sort of weighted average of the percentage changes of the components.  So if the elf responsible for maintaining, say, the spreadsheet cell for Swedish Pop Group BAAB dances the third verse of the Schmëerskåhøvên and gets turned into a cat, leaving that cell showing an eternal +134.78% change, the index will always calculate out to having a strong positive change that's not grounded in reality.

...Not that I fancy that there's any possible way that Google might benefit financially from having a "technology" index stuck in strong-positive-gain territory for several days.

And now that the calculation is fixed, the inflated happy +1.5%-or-so daily change Never Happened.

Phone call from the IRS

Joy got one of those.  Some guy with an Indian accent, being very non-specific about what she's supposedly accused of.

Now she's trying to figure out how to convert it to a conference call with the FBI.

Update: Awww.  He hung up before she got through to a live person.

Probably overseas, anyway, and certainly not using a phone number that can be tied to him.

Opportunity, for someone

Summer plans, having already slipped by a few months for other reasons, now have an additional constraint: travel to East Tennessee around the third week of August this year seems implausible.

I've been hearing that hotels are booked solid with eclipse-watchers, and that rooms in private homes are renting for multiple thousands of dollars a night right around that time.

And yet...

I just checked.  There are still plenty of plausible-looking, under-$75K, multi-bedroom houses on the market in that area, if you don't insist on having a hugely oversized lot.

So!  Someone with a pile of working capital burning a hole in his pocket could buy a house or three, rent out rooms for a few nights at whatever the market will bear, and then sell the houses on at fire-sale prices, and come out ahead.

Well, maybe.  I haven't confirmed room-rental rates for that part of the space-time continuum, and I don't have that kind of cash on hand anyway. Besides which, I'm still here in California.

But it does seem odd that people with money aren't playing that game... or even buying houses just for their own temporary use.  If they were, surely the supply would be depleted by now.

Does crazy have a limit?

The morning headlines proclaim that even more people have been identified as having been present in the infamous meeting last year between Donald the Junior and that unregistered Russian agent who'd been allowed into the country under some sort of special dispensation.

The shocking news is that Little Donny lied about who was there!!!  Which maybe he did; at this point, I'm not at all clear on who said exactly what.  The news coverage is far from helpful in this regard.

But, for a clandestine initial meeting to explore the possibility of making corrupt deals?  The ever-increasing head count makes that seem less plausible, not more.  For such a meeting, surely you want to send a single, reliable agent.  Maybe even one who speaks the same language as your target.

By next week, I expect to be hearing that the meeting was also attended by the entire Leningradskaya Oblast Regional Ping-Pong League and a commercial fisherman from Kaliningrad who speaks fluent Lithuanian but no English.

Cultural barriers to success

Commentary here about the David Brooks sandwich-shop anecdote (which kinda struck a chord with me, given my decidedly downmarket tastes and my reaction to occasional exposure to fancy French restaurants).

A couple of things jumped out at me.

One person who works with youth there told the newspaper that those inner-city kids suffer from a devastating poverty of imagination as well. Most of them had never been outside of their north Baton Rouge neighborhoods, and didn’t know what life was like elsewhere. If I recall the story correctly, the woman interviewed made the point that these kids were so culturally deprived that they couldn’t imagine that there was any other way to live.

Which seems very odd, in the Age of Television.  Nobody there had a TV set?  Everything on the TV was so far outside their experience as to be entirely unrelatable?  (Not that anything on TV has any connection to how normal people, of any social class outside Hollywood and/or NYC, actually live.)

As Alan mused in conversation last night, tribal and cultural identities can be so strong in people that they cancel out every other value. In this space before, I’ve mentioned an astrophysics PhD student I once met at the University of Cambridge. She came from a coal miner’s family. I told her that her family must be so proud of her accomplishment. No, she said, suddenly feeling downcast. They are ashamed of it, because they see it as my betraying them.

Or: it's not so much that Jews and Asians are ever-so-much smarter than everybody else, as that their cultures encourage learning and upward mobility.  See also: the religious backgrounds of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Thing about culture is, it's not hard-coded in your genes.  Change is possible.  The bad news is, childhood culture can become very-nearly-destiny awfully early in life, so improving the lot of the downtrodden masses is a multi-generational undertaking.

Also, "improving the lot of the downtrodden masses" is a dangerous project, likely to be led by those who fervently believe that they alone are qualified to define improving, and that extreme measures are justified in reshaping humanity to the desired form.

Still, perhaps there are some voluntary, non-coercive things that individuals and private organizations could do to expose youngsters to the idea that there are other ways to live?

Putting Humpty Dumpty in charge of the dictionary

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.

I have a dim recollection, from some decades back, of the time the headologists declared that homosexuality was no longer to be considered a mental illness.

Instead, there was a brand-new mental illness called, if memory serves, sexual identity disorder, defined so broadly as to sweep up anyone not conforming to strict 1950s prime-time television gender-role standards.

And now?  Vogon magazine thinks that a celebrity couple engaging in some minor wardrobe-swapping is an example of gender fluidity.  Whatever the smeg that's supposed to be.

Is this completely nuts, or am I just not Wookiee enough?

Unwinding with some lame old TV

UFO - remember it?  Produced in 1970; set in 1980.  The women's uniform for Moon duty involves a purple wig.

Lame writing, in many respects.  Live-action characters who ought to have been supermarionated.

I got things out of sequence, and watched episode 3 before episode 1.  In the opening credits, I noticed that Straker is a commander.  Huh.  I thought I remembered him being a colonel.  Well, whatever.  Either way, he ought to have picked up much better personnel skills than he exhibits on the show.

This evening, I find episode 1.  Straker is introduced to the Minister-of-whatever as a colonel.

Apparently, somewhere between this first introduction and the opening credits of episode 3, he gets demoted and reassigned to the Navy?

Anyway!  It's fun to see how things were to have been in the futuristic world of 1980, even if all the characters do have to behave stupidly to make the stories happen.  (Where would we be if people heeded warning signs, steered clear of abandoned-looking castles, didn't go down to dark basements to see what happened to their friends, and generally acted like they had a bit of sense?)

Added: Can't they patrol the sky around headquarters with some sort of regular airplanes, instead of using that one-and-only submarine-launched airplane of theirs?

And what's more: The premise in episode 1 is that humans have just developed technology that could potentially enable them to detect flying saucers approaching faster than light, and that it has to be protected, lest the aliens destroy it before it can be deployed.  All right, then.  But then Moonbase and SID are tracking incoming opponents at 8 times the speed of light, without the new technology.  So not only is there not good continuity across episodes, there's not even a semblance of continuity within this one episode.  Maybe all the alien-tracking stuff was from a stock script written for generic episodes with all the tech in place?

And!  Why, comes the time to launch the sub-launched fighter plane, do they have the short countdown-by-seconds and then call "launch stations" and start running through pre-launch checks?  Since when is the droopy nose of an SST a heat shield, to be employed at low speeds?  If you capture an injured alien of unknown species, how do you know it's in critical condition?  Besides which, shouldn't the special medical team looking after such an alien be composed of veterinarians, who at least have some experience with a variety of species?

But wait, there's more!  With all those colonels in the organization, shouldn't there be at least a brigadier or something riding herd on them?

And... if the aliens get a bomb mostly assembled, but someone steals the detonator and misplaces it for ten years, why can't the aliens just ship in a replacement detonator instead of waiting around for a clue as to the whereabouts of the original?

Isn't it remarkably convenient that the aliens never seem to send more than three saucers on any given mission?  And that, for a massive sneak attack on Moonbase, they send only one?  And, when the interceptors go after a single saucer, it always seems to take all three of their missiles to get it?

All the valuable mineral deposits on the Moon were mined between 1970 and 1980?

When you think radio interference is coming from a nearby installation, instead of using any of the standard transmitter-hunt procedures (standard at least since WWII!), you send an emissary over with no test equipment?

If your standard landing procedure involves control by a remote computer, shouldn't there be a standard procedure in place for dealing with loss of communication during landing?

Why do Moon-based interceptors make turbine sounds?

If you find that tactically-important information, such as the timing of a plan, has been sent via an insufficiently-secure channel, and there's still time before the plan is to go into effect, does it not make sense to send an update via the proper, secure channel, and leave any adversary who'd intercepted the first message chasing ghosts?

On the positive side, the show did handle race a lot better than the Trek Franchise.  Characters of Ethnicity are just people, not exaggerated stereotypes like on Trek.  ("We need a half-Klingon, half-Vulcan foundling raised by mysterious beings of pure energy, acting out all three of the cultures hard-coded in his DNA!  And any crew member with a trace of Aztec ancestry must surely revert to type, in a totally unprofessional manner!")

Cont'd: If you suspect a colleague of being a dangerous lunatic who's already tried to kill you, the best thing to do is to confront him with your suspicions, privately, in his home.  If you suspect that he's being controlled by aliens via radio, don't bother taking along, say, a conductive-mesh blanket to throw over him.

Why are all the ethnic-meals signs on the automat in English?  (How would you say "Horn & Hardart" in Chinese, anyway?)

Random thought: Would you rather have a doctor played by Hugh Laurie, or one who sounds like Peter Lorre?

And in conclusion: I haven't watched all the episodes this time around, but I decided to watch the final episode before quitting.

One of those persistent problems with scale-model F/X is water.  It never moves right, nor do the things that float on it.  Something about viscosity and surface tension not scaling, maybe?  Anyway, these things inevitably come out looking lame.

If you're lurking beneath the surface of the ocean, attacking surface ships, why would the mode of attack involve launching a missile that flies over the target and zaps the deck with an energy weapon?  Wouldn't you rather do the zapping from below, so's to make holes in the hull, below the waterline?

Hm.  Seeing someone important(-ish) in a place where he definitely isn't.  Wonder what effect a transistor radio would have on him.

Aliens use Earth-style cassette recorders?  Don't tell me it's to stay in character as the humans they're impersonating; carrying around a cassette recorder is itself out of character.  How are they going to infiltrate HQ, anyway, when they can't speak Human?  If the plan doesn't involve infiltrating HQ, why bother changing their appearance, practicing in the dummy control room, and so on?

Why can't anyone on this show shoot straight?

When is history not history?

When it's in the database of some on-line service.

Just looked at the local real-estate map, as I do every so often, to see if anything nearby has come on the market, and at what price.

Zillow is showing a lowball Guesstimate for my house.  Like, $80K less than a few days ago.  WTF?

Look at the Guesstimate history chart thingy.  No sudden drop.  It's always been this low.

Which it, y'know, hasn't, but since it's always been bits in Zillow's computer and not ink on published paper, good luck proving anything.  Computer databeese are so handy!  There's no need for physical memory holes; just change the way a figure is calculated or displayed, and history will follow.

It's not the whole neighborhood, nor just my house.  The house to the west has dropped by almost exactly the same amount.  Two doors down has dropped by a little, as has next door to the east.  Hm.  Others are up, and some others are down.  Perhaps "last remodel year" is suddenly a much larger factor than it was last week?  So "Guesstimate history" is not a history of the Guesstimate, but a reconstruction of what the Guesstimate would have been using the current formula?  (And meanwhile people keep telling me that Zillow's numbers for this area are - or, rather were, before the sudden drop - unrealistically low.  And there's yet another massive business development in the works nearby, which should shortly be driving up local housing demand.)

 

Meanwhile, Google Finance's "technology" index is still being calculated based on AABA's last price being $123.47, up 134.78%.  That the illusory change seems to be keeping the index permanently in positive-change territory says something about how the calculations are done, and it's not something good.

That International Woman of Mystery...

... gets mysteriouser and mysteriouser.

We've recently learned that Natasha Fatale Natalia Veselnitskaya was apparently in the U.S. under some highly unusual arrangement with the Obama Administration when she met with Trump Junior.

Looking at these two stories, I note something interesting.

From the first story:

A few days after her meeting at Trump Tower, Natalia Veselnitskaya was seated in the front row of a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing behind Obama's ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul.

From the second:

They described Veselnitskaya, who does not speak English, as a mysterious and shadowy figure.

Er.

If she doesn't speak English, what was the point of sitting through that hearing?

Maybe one of these stories is wrong?  Maybe she speaks perfect English, but plays the "No spikka da Inglish" bit to keep people off their guard?  Was she just there to be seen?  If so, why?

For extra credit: Try to fit any or all of this - especially the circumstances of Veselnitskaya's presence in the U.S. - with this bit of speculation by Leslie Fish.  Who is in league with whom, here?  Keep in mind that the Russians have a vested interest in weakening the U.S., so the current anti-Trump circus is every bit as much in their interest as a Hillary win followed by scandals (Rosatom, pipeline lobbying, and whatnot) would have been.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that all prominent politicians, of all nations, are seriously compromised, and that the intelligence services of the world have dirt on the lot of them.  Trump, in common with some of the shocking upstart politicians now cropping up in Europe, has the advantage that everyone already assumes he's a scoundrel and a grifter, so it'd be quite a challenge to alienate his base.

Update: More detailed suspicion here.

Ah, television.

Attention, documentary makers!

Repeat after me: a voltmeter is not a tricorder.

Signs and portents

I just saw these words, presented in this order as the description of an actual product offered for sale: "Bluetooth-Enabled Smart Fork".

How many regular dumb forks can you buy for sixty bucks?

And... I didn't look too hard, but at a casual glance, I'm not seeing a matching spoon.  So the "keeps you from eating too fast" feature doesn't apply to soup, ice cream, granola, berries in cream, etc., and of course it does nothing at all about one's rate of consumption of burgers, sausages in buns, pizza, fried chicken, or BBQ armadillo on a stick.

What's more, I think I prefer to use utensils that don't enable blue teeth.  (Or am I thinking of bluetooth-enabling utensils?)

Not quite understanding the rules, here.

So there's this series of scandals involving the Trump family, Jeff Sessions, and others; the latest shocking revelation is that Donald the Younger, during the campaign, met with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have dirt on the political opposition but who turned out to be using that as a pretext for a meeting to try to discuss policy matters.

So, um.  I guess it's illegal for a U.S. citizen to communicate with a foreign national?  Must be something to do with the Logan Act, eh?

And this seems to extend, now, to government officials; if a President, Senator, or even Ambassador meets with a foreigner, or is seen attending a social event at which a foreigner is present, this is an impeachable offense?

I guess there's nothing for it, then, but to expel all foreign nationals, close all the embassies, and seal the borders.  Our nation's precious bodily fluids are at stake!

Afterthought:  Story idea!  Only makes sense this week, and I'm not going to try to write it, but here's the general concept.

Assume, if you will, that the events of The Maltese Falcon took place around 1930, and not in 1949.  Since the bird had [spoiler alert!] turned out to be a fake, and there's been no word that Gutman had found the real one in Constantinople, Sam Spade has been sort of keeping an ear to the ground on the subject of bird statuettes, and it's generally known that he might have an interest in such things.

It's now 1940.

Spade has been working for Hiram Johnson's re-election committee, not that there's much work to be done considering the feebleness of the opposition.  Still, having a hard-boiled detective on staff makes sense, just in case.

One day, Spade is approached by a moderately well known individual of rather questionable repute, who claims to know someone of even more questionable repute, who claims to know the sister of someone on the staff of a high-ranking Nazi, who knows where the real Maltese Falcon is - and that there's a chance to snatch it before Hitler gets his hands on it!

Spade meets with the three, and learns that all are more or less who they claim to be, but that the story about the bird is likely false, and that it was all a ruse to gain an audience with someone who knows the Senator, in hopes of influencing him in matters of foreign policy (his isolationism being, from the German perspective, a good start).  Spade leads them on a bit, makes no concrete promises, receives nothing of value, and walks off into the sunset.

Question: At the end of the story, whom shall we hang, and for what crime?

Python, again

Yeah, I could probably use it.

And it's already widely used in test/measurement/automation programming, by those who just can't learn to "program" in hieroglyphics.

But... I still really don't like the syntax.  Indentation-sensitivity is a serious pain, as is the spaces-not-tabs convention.  Combining the two?  Trying to make sure that a statement is starting on the same column as one 37 lines up in the file?  Argh.

So, still dithering between Python and Ruby.

If I stick with Ruby, the local GUI probably reverts to GTK+, for which the Ruby bindings still seem to be actively maintained (and maybe the API is more stable now than it was a few years ago), and I have some existing Ruby/GTK+ library code for this general sort of GUI-building.

Or maybe I ditch the local GUI entirely, and just have a browser-based interface.

Ruby has no multiple inheritance, but I'm not sure that would really turn out to be useful for my purposes anyway.

And I can always use the Python USBTMC library, which Alex Forencich has released under a very-open-source license, as a model for both known quirks and handling various bus features that I hadn't gotten around to yet, and then watch his change log for updates (as well as passing along any quirks I discover, of course).

Not that I should really be working on this right now anyway; there are higher-priority matters demanding my attention.

Update: Still distracted by this.  Looks like Ruby's mixin mechanism is a better match for what I want to do than multiple inheritance anyway.  So... probably back to doing my framework/drivers/classes in Ruby.  Since supporting a browser-based interface will be more or less mandatory, the local GUI can take a back seat to that (and the structure will have to be based on a remote interface, possibly passing JSON objects back and forth, asynchronously, over a TCP socket).

In the Ruby world, I have a working, if incomplete, proof-of-concept for USBTMC via libusb.  I think there's a cross-platform serial-port library (there's also one I wrote, but it's quick-dirty-and-lame).  There's TCP support.  In the unlikely event that I dig up an actual HP-IB card for talking to the older scope, spectrum analyzer, and other classics, well, I'll find some way of dealing with that when the need arises.  (I'm also pondering the possibility of just programming a zippy-fast MCU to act as a single-device USBTMC-to-real-488 bridge; 12 Mbit/s USB is a decent match for the old 1 Mbyte/s parallel bus, and a Cortex M0 could easily deal with the protocol.)

But now 'tis time to set such distractions aside and attend to more pressing matters.  Maybe getting the hardware off my desk will help.