Annular Eclipse - 14 Oct 2023

Swinging across North America today is an annular eclipse.  The path of the shadow enters the US west coast in Oregon and swoops southwest toward Texas.  Seattle is somewhere in the 80-90% range, yeilding a crescent partial eclipse.  If the weather were better, we might have gone southward to see it, but overcast and raining was the forcast, and that is what we got overnight with partial clearing in the morning.  Clearing enough to see some of the eclipse.

The photo shows the peak of the eclipse as projected onto our driveway.  The mechanics of this effect are complex.  The driveway is unusually reflective from the overnight rain.  There is a small maple tree in the copse of woods that produces an array of pinholes.  The same effect is not seen in other areas where only evergreens (trees with needles) or rhododendrons are growing.  Finally, one needs to be standing in just the right place to see the crescents.  When standing off to the side or too far back, one sees just a blur of light and no crescents.

Excel and Big Decisions - 13 October 2023

Friday the Thirteenth is famous for its association with bad luck.  That makes today a fitting day to explore the use of Excel in corporations.

In a recent report, mistakes in Excel programming caused major, embarassing errors in hiring doctors in the UK (reference at the end).  The headline screams "Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'" and the sub-head explains that "Mangled mismatch of formats, macros, and VLOOKUP practice hits wannabe anesthetists".  Although this particular failure is significant to those affected, there is a larger problem that affects us all.  We start from two facts.

One.  Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are nearly impossible to debug, thus they contain numerous errors.

Two.  Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are used to make key decisions in nearly all businesses and institutions.

When we combine these, it is easy to see that key decisions in business and institutions are made based on bad data.  These include billion-dollar decisions as well as smaller decisions in hiring and promotion.  I spent years building budget and planning spreadsheets on behalf of my boss, often working with another, more skilled Excel practitioner and budgetmaster (hi, Nick!).  After many, many errors, we taught each other to put debug checks into our spreadsheets.  Not only did we sum across the matrix, but we summed down the matrix and compared the results.  As one example, we would build large matrices of spending or staffing numbers, and if the result of sum-across did not equal the result of sum-down, a cell in the sheet would turn red with a warning.  We were careful to cut-and-paste links rather then values, so that if the original values changed, the links would update.  (This cut-and-paste is a manual operation, so it was subject to errors, but we tried.)  These sheets would be used to create plans for hiring of staff and interns for the coming year, a critical decision that could cause us to fail to me business objectives if the numbers were wrong.  If our budget was too low, we might lack the staff necessary to do the work; if our budget were too high, we would overspend (and no one ever got Executive sympathy for overspending).  

In this particular report (from The Register), some bad hiring decisions were made for doctors in the UK, but we all know that mergers and acquisitions are decided based on Excel calculations.  M&A can be measured in billions of dollars.

To be fair, Excel, itself, is not the direct cause of the problem.  Excel is merely doing what the programmers are telling it to do.  Excel will happily sum 11 months of costs and report the sum to a reader expecting to see 12 months of costs.  And so on.  The fault is that Excel is not designed to allow programmers to detect and fix errors.  Further, most of the "programmers" are business people, not trained computer programmers, and so they lack many of the programming disciplines required to produce reliable, usable code (Excel macros, in this case).  

To fix this problem, Microsoft needs to add checking and debugging features to Excel and the Excel programming community needs to learn to use them.  I do not expect this to happen any time soon.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/12/excel_anesthetist_recruitment_blunder/?td=rt-3a

Trials - 3 October 2023

Trials and court cases seem to be the mark of our times.  Today is the start of Sam Bankman-Fried's trial for the FTX debacle and yesterday was the start of the penalties phase of Donald J. Trump's trial for real estate fraud in New York.  Defendants along with Donald are Don, Jr., and Eric.  No one has explained how Ivanka (or Jared) escaped, but they do not seem to be on the indictments.  

I have long enjoyed a podcast called All the President's Lawyers with Ken White and Josh Barro.  That podcast ended about a year ago and morphed into Serious Trouble, in part because Trump's legal problems had metastasized far beyond Trump himself.  

It is a comment on our founding fathers that they assumed that actors on the political stage would have some sort of values and a sense of decency.  Others have fractured that assumption, but Trump has blown it into dust.  Teapot Dome, Watergate, and other scandals have rocked the United States, but none of them compare to the constant, flagrant scandals of Trump.  The fact that some 40% of the US voting population cannot see his criminality, fraud, and deceipt is something that astounds me.  In any other country, he would be forgotten (e.g., Boris Johnson) or gone (e.g., your favorite revolution).  Somehow, Trump combines deceipt and fraud with deep white nationalism and misogyny, yet retaining his base of supporters.  SMH.

During these trying times (no apologies), the USA has depended on a trustworthy judicial system.  I refer here specifically to courts and judges.  Unfortunately, Trump and the Republicans have spent years - decades - installing incompetent, biased, and corrupt judges throughout the federal judicial system, enough of these such that the judicial system is losing its trustworthyness.  If you have any doubts, look at Thomas and Alito on the US Supreme Court; if doubts remain, look at the rest of the recent appointments such as Kavanaugh and note that Roberts is no shining example of anything, himself. 

My point is that democracy needs to be strengthened against attacks by political, financial, and judicial hacks.