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.

How lost luggage led to living in the moment - 11 September 2023

Recounting great travel experiences with a friend, I was recently reminded of our trip to Patagonia.  We flew a US domestic carrier to Miami, then connected with a South American carrier to Santiago, Chile.  From Santiago, we flew to Punta Arenas, Chile.  Sadly, our checked baggage was not there to meet us.  We enlisted the help of our group's guide to sort out the issues.  He spoke with the airline on the phone and was able to assure us that our luggage had been found and would be forwarded to meet us in two days' time.  This did not happen, but we were promised the luggage had been found and would be sent to us the next day.  The precise details escape me, but we were daily promised that our luggage was being sent to us the next day - for the next two weeks.  Anticipating this as a possibility, we stopped to buy emergency clothing in Punta Arenas and members of our traveling group shared spare clothing with us.  We still have some of that clothing and we remain grateful for the huge show of support within the group.

While packing, I made a few last-minute decisions about which items to put in checked baggage and which to put in carry-on.  Most of the decisions worked out fine, but there was one key decision that I botched.  Innocently assuming that our checked bags would show up, I put my camera in carry-on but I put my spare batteries and charger in the checked bag.  Big mistake.  

You will quickly note that I had but one charged battery for a two-week trip in the wilderness of Patagonia, covering large swathes of Chile and Argentina.  Under normal circumstances (unlimited battery for my camera), I would have taken hundreds of photos, perhaps thousands.  Instead, I perforce measured photo opportunities carefully, working to stretch out battery life to cover as much of the trip as I could.  We spent most nights in small towns with hotels, where I scoured the shops looking for a Nikon battery charger.  You might think such items would be commonplace given the major presence of Nikon in the photo industry and our physical location immersed in photographic opportunities.  Not so.  I found all sorts of chargers for all sorts of cameras, but no chargers for mainline Nikon products until the last day of our wilderness trip.  I found a "universal charger" that worked as needed and was finally able to charge batteries.  Relief washed over me, but we only had a day or two left of the trip.

You could say the lesson I learned was to put the camera AND charger into the carry-on luggage, and you would be right.  But I learned a greater lesson on the trail.

I learned to look around me in the moment rather than through the viewfinder.  This led to greater enjoyment and deeper experience in the wilderness of Patagonia.  I do not regret the lack of a charger nor the shortage of photos.  I did miss some great opportunities as I counted metaphorical electrons, but my experiences were all the greater for the lack of a charger.

Our luggage?  Well, it finally did arrive to meet us in Buenos Aires and it was with us through a week of travels in Neuquen Province (highly recommended).  It seems the luggage had never left Miami, it had been set aside, and when they finally found it, they shipped it directly to Buenos Aires to wait for us.  The charger and all the clothes that we did not need were finally delivered and we carried them for the rest of the trip through Neuquen.  Note that Patagonia is much colder than Buenos Aires and Neuquen, so the winter clothes in our luggage were just dead weight.

So the unhappy accident of stashing the charger and batteries in the misdirected luggage proved to be a happy accident that allowed me to more fully experience Patagonia.

Photos: December 2012 - January 2013, Chile and Argentina

BC is Burning - 19 Aug 2023

Overnight, it started to cheap in. As the sun rose, a Smokey layer formed and consolidated in the mountains above Squamish and started to spread over Howe Sound. Throughout the day, the Smokey layer firmed and lowered to the point that there was a hint of smoke aroma in the air. You would not notice it except that the sweet and salty smell of the sea has been replaced with the inland smells.

The fires are not here. There has been a fire ban for a month and people are careful to honor the ban. This is coming from fires hundreds of miles away near Kelowna in the interior, near Lake Okanagan. There may be contributing fires in Washington and Idaho, but the main fires are interior BC.

The color of the light has an obvious golden tone that has intensified to orange by sunset. The photo shows the morning view.

Twitter shitter - 16 Aug 2023

Absent from Blogger for a while, a couple recent events have forced me back to record the progress of Twitter-X as it swirls ever downward.

Earlier this week, it was announced that Twitter-X had resisted federal supoena efforts to obtain information about Trump's tweets-xeets.  This was evidently an effort by Elon Musk to protect TFG from Jack Smith's investigations.  

Also earlier this week, it was announced that the Twitter-X URL shortener (t.co or something similar) was injecting delays of 5 seconds when redirecting to sites that were not in Elon Musk's good graces, including newspapers that had reported unflatteringly about Elon.  Shortly after this was documented and reported, the delay went away.

And just today, it was reported that a podcaster and professor at NYU, Scott Galloway, had been locked out of his Twitter-X account after he released a podcast unflattering to Elon Musk.  Evidently Galloway said something about unsubstantiated (inflated) range quotes from Tesla.

The only conclusion is that Elon Musk is a thin-skinned adolescent-minded twerp.

Photo is of blackberries coming into ripeness.

https://gizmodo.com/scott-galloway-locked-out-twitter-musk-1850743635  

Wormholes, psychadelic drugs, and a dryer - 16 July 2023

 Well, this looks interesting.   

July 17 at 9am ET, a new web-only series by Steven Soderbergh called Command-Z premieres in which Michael Cera leads a team using a wormhole in a washing machine to alter the present by traveling back in time.

https://extension765.com/blogs/soderblog/command-z

Is it time to unretire? - 15 July 2023

Retirement is a gift.  No, really.  If you are healthy and wealthy enough, retirement is a great thing.  I can see there is a definite down-side for those who cannot afford to retire, but my only regret is that I did not try a half-time work schedule before I retired.  

Now we find that the universe might be older than conventionally thought.  Rather than 13.7 billion years of universal evolution, it may be as old as 26.7 billion years.  Fortunately, the age is added to the early years of the universe (to allow galaxies to form).

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-age-universe-billion-years-previously.html

Trouble in AI Land - 13 July 2023

Forgetting.  As I understand the European data rules, one has the right to be forgotten.  At first, this sounds odd.  Although it can be abused, it makes sense when you think of it.  If a mistaken or outrageous screed about you gets injected into the Internet, you should have the right to get it removed - to be forgotten.  Now think about AI engines.  

Similar to search engines, AI engines today will crawl the web looking for input materials.  No single AI company can generate the vast amount of input data needed for AI training, so they pretty much are left with crawling the web.  The information they find is incorporated into the training models and used in the "predictive" part when the AI model generates output.  It is likely that somewhere in the depths of ChatGPT that there is a copy of Moby Dick, Shakespeare, and your master's thesis, all wrapped up in "the model" and existing as a latent copy of your work.  

Now, suppose you wish for your thesis to be forgotten, removed from the Internet, relegated to nothingness.  You can get the data pulled from a search engine, but how does one get data pulled from an AI model?  The developers do not know how information is incorporated into the model (whle they know in vague terms, "the algorithm", they cannot trace any particular data item into the model).  I suppose they would have to retrain using the old input dataset but without your work, and that would be very expensive.  Training is often the most expensive part of developing an AI model.

To emphasize this problem, there is already a lawsuit by someone who claims that their copyrighted material has been included in an AI model without their consent (ref. Sarah Silverman).

So the AI folks are in a pickle.  

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/13/ai_models_forgotten_data/?td=rt-3a

Yevgeny Prigozhin turns away from Moscow - 25 June 2023

Ending his quest to take on Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin has ordered his Wagner Group to stop their advance on Moscow.  Lukashenko of Belarus claims he has negotiated a peace between Prigozhin and Putin such that Prigozhin will go to Belarus and Putin will drop the charges of rebellion.

I am not involved in diplomacy, but I do not think this is the end.  Putin will return to Moscow and restore his reign, but Prigozhin is not to be found.  No one knows where he is and he has not commented on the (supposed) agreement.  I have two predictions, one for Prigozhin and one for Putin.

For Prigozhin, I predict a defenestration.  Wherever he shows up, it will be at the foot of a tall building with many windows.  It may have happened already or it may happen six months from now, but he will show up dead or show up not at all.  Putin will express regrets.

For Putin, I predict replacement.  He has been shown as weak and cowardly (fleeing to one's hideout is not a signal of bravery).  One way or the other, Putin will be deposed, probably by the end of 2023.  Some new gangster will take his place, and although I cannot guess who it will be, it will not be Prigozhin.

Time will tell. The situation is changing rapidly and reports are squirrelly.  

Prigozin's Wagner Division invades Russia - 24 June 2023

Noting the event, the mercenary Wagner Group has left Ukraine to invade Russia.  A column is moving toward Moscow.  Putin has fled to his stronghold.  Senior government ministers are leaving (one has flown to Turkiye).  The Wagner groups in Venezula and Syria are unstable and may be leaving soon for Russia, leaving al-Assad and other dictators with reduced support.

It seems unlikely that Prigozin will unseat Putin, however one of them will not survive this.  Furthermore, it is predicted that this is only the first wave and that Putin will succumb to a second, third, or fourth wave.

Ukraine seems happy.

Just putting this post here as an historical marker so that we can remember how it started.  Or should I say, how it ended?

US Supreme Court faces a legacy of self-redemption or of corruption - 23 June 2023

SCOTUS, the Supreme Court Of The United States, has faced some recent tests.  No, I am not referring to the infamous confirmation shows for the last 2-3 justices, but rather to the recent relevations about Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito.

Clarence Thomas had rambunctious hearings when he was nominated.  Anita Hill came forward with shocking allegations that would have derailed any other nominee, but Clarence Thomas cruised on to confirmation.  I do not remember Sam Alito's confirmation hearings, but I suspect he was better coached and trained such that the hearings went more smoothly.  The most recent three,  Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, and Brett M. Kavanaugh, were a sorry bunch, both through their own antics and with contributions from Senator Mitch McConnell as supported by the Republican members of the Senate.  These are old news.

In the last month or so, journalists have uncovered allegations (being formal here - just allegations) that Thomas has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of "gifts" from a Republican billionaire named (ironicaly) Crow.  Crow took Thomas and his wife on all-expenses-paid junkets around the world and bought the birthplace home of Thomas - and gave Thomas' mother free rent to live there.  Is this bad?  Yes, but Thomas failed to report these gifts even though he is required by law to report such gifts.  More recently, he was given a window to restate and refile his attestation paperwork, and he has blown through the deadline.  

While Thomas is redoing his paperwork, journalists have uncovered similar allegations (being formal here - just allegations) that Alito has accepted thousands and thousands of dollars of gifts, including an infamous salmon fishing trip to Alaska, none of which he reported as required.  Alito claims some wordplay that exempts him from reporting requirements, claiming an trip in a private jet is some sort of infrastructure?  It is hard to explain his position because it is stupid.  

Both Alito and Thomas offer explanations that the law is complex.  If true, then they are not qualified for their current positions and honorable people would resign.  If we assume that they are smart enough on the law to hold their jobs as the ultimate arbiters of the law in the US, that SCOTUS gig, then they are disengenuous and honorable people would resign, again.  It is quite clear that honor, impartiality, and the appearance of impartiality mean more about theatrics than actual compliance to Alito and Thomas.  Even if the allegations of corruption are merely appearances and not actual corruption, these two men have failed.

Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., has a choice: he can redeem SCOTUS, impose ethics standards, and evict Alito and Thomas based on severe ethical lapses, or the Chief Justice can continue to oversee and overlook corruption on SCOTUS.  It strikes me that this is not a difficult choice, but the fact that Roberts continues to dither suggests that he is willing to tolerate severe ethical failures, making him a co-conspirator of the failings.

God Save SCOTUS,

Deeper and Deeper into Stupidity - 22 June 2023

Money does not make you happier, more attractive, or healthier and now we have a demonstration that money makes you stupider.  Elon Musk (once the richest man in the world) and Mark Zuckerberg (another multibillionaire) lead some of the world's most well-known companies.  In theory, they earned their wealth by the sweat of their brow in an ultracompetitive high-tech marketplace.  (Personally, I do not think they "earned" their wealth and it is not the result of their superior products, but these are topics for another day.)  

According to press reports, Musk and Zuck have agreed to a fight.  Yep, you read that right - the headline reads

Mark Zuckerberg Says He's Down to Fight Elon Musk in a Cage Match

 reference - https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-twitter-meta-cage-match-fight-1850563649

It is hard for me to believe that these two guys could get more stupid.  They are trolling at Trumpian levels of stupidity.  I hope they do not hurt each other, but I hope they learn serious lessons.  Let me correct that: I hope the viewers of this debacle learn serious lessons.  Musk and Zuck are beyond learning.  

#birdbrains

ChatGPT AI replacing workers - 2June 2023

Reports are being published of actual workers being replaced by ChatGPT and other AI bots. Long predicted, this seems to be happening to real people in real jobs. The Washington Post reports that Copywriters and social media writers are the first up against the wall. Although the immediate burden falls upon the frontline workers and writers, this is a gross failure of management. Again, we see the bean counters are running the companies and the consumers and workers pay the price. This is a failure of management because, as we well know, chatbots are routinely wrong, they make up content, and what they produce is of very low quality (in the sense of writing quality). The article even states clearly that the chatbots “hallucinate”, meaning that they lie. In essence, the managers deciding to dump the humans are admitting that marketing, including much of social media, is a liar’s craft.

In Henry VI, Part 2, Shakespeare says, “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers”, but maybe we should look at marketing managers and social media influencers first.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/chatgpt-took-their-jobs-now-they-walk-dogs-and-fix-air-conditioners/ar-AA1c23Tf

I am not even remotely sympathetic - 25 May 2023

The founder of the Oath Keepers extremist group was sentenced [today] to 18 years in prison for orchestrating a weekslong plot that culminated in his followers attacking the U.S. Capitol in a bid to keep President Joe Biden out of the White House after the 2020 election.

It was one of the most consequential cases brought by the Justice Department, which has sought to prove that the riot by right-wing extremists like the Oath Keepers was not a spur-of-the-moment protest but the culmination of weeks of plotting to overturn Biden's election victory.

Reported by ABC News.

Smoke has passed - 21 May 2023

Earlier this week, we had smoke in metro-Seattle that came from the forest fires in British Columbia.  At this writing, winds have blown the smoke to the interior, to central Washington, and cleared the air around Seattle and the Salish Sea.

If you look closely at the photo, there is a golden haze in the air, almost like a tint from an artist's brush.  This should set off alarms as those rhodies should be white, not off-white, and the evergreens should be a richer green and not be that brownish.  Smoke in the air.  This is early in the season for fires to be this big.  And the fires in Alberta are worse than those in BC; the BC fires just happen to be close to the border.  Not a good sign for 2023.

Trouble, right here in River City - 21 May 2023

Far from troubles made up in the mind of a con artist, I have been having technology troubles for the last couple weeks.  About the first of May, there was a Mac OS patch that was distributed.  Now, I need to be clear that I can only claim correlation and I am not asserting causation, but my add-on disk failed at this time.  I use a USB "sidecar" disk because I have far more photo and music data than will fit on the SSD integral to my MacBook Pro.  For a while, I used an outboard 2 Tby drive, then I upgraded to a 4 Tby drive.  After the patch, the outboard drive became unreadable.  I struggled with this for a while and finally decided to rely on Time Machine backups.

I reformatted the outboard drive.  Fortunately, I had just upgraded my Time Machine drive so that I could back up both the integral and the outboard drives.  I thought myself lucky and then I started up Time Machine to recover the contents.  It worked well for a while, then Time Machine complained that the outboard drive was case-insensitive and I was trying to restore Mac Photos files with mixed case. 

I stopped at this point because we had some traveling to do.  When I got back, I tried to restore again and got the same error from Time Machine.  I bit the bullet and re-reformated the drive to be case-sensitive.  OK, should be solved.  Unfortunately, by this time, it had been about two weeks since the original failure, and Time Machine no longer has backups that are pre-failure.  I have tried repeatedly over the last week, and I just cannot get Time Machine to cough up a pre-failure copy of the outboard drive.

I have been in a bit of denial, but cold truth is cold truth.  I was starting to think about how I could restore files from my off-site backup.  You have a three-level backup strategy, right?  A primary, a local backup, and a remote backup, yes?  Well, I do.  I have lost files before and I plan never to do it again.  Then I had a flash of insight.  I had replaced the 2 Tby outboard drive with a 4 Tby outboard drive toward the end of 2022, and I still have the old 2 Tby outboard drive.  It is not a whole backup, but it is better than dragging 2 Tby from my off-site backups.  

I am now in the process of copying over from the 2 Tby outboard drive to the 4 Tby outboard drive.  When that is done, I shall start recovering the last six months of data.  I am very annoyed at Apple, but I have a plan that I think will work.

Photo: we are in the midst of the rhodedendron season.

Travel to the Following States is Restricted - 9 May 2023

The headlines get ever worse.  Texas and Florida have been States of Concern for over a year.  Florida recently achieved Do Not Travel status when the legislature - led by the so-called governor - passed an unrestricted-carry law for firearms.  No license required, no safety training required, no background check required.  Texas achieved Do Not Travel with their string of (endless?) mass shootings, including the most recent shootings by a white supremecist in a shopping center.  

Today, Louisiana achieves Do Not Travel status with the shooting of a small girl who was playing hide-and-seek, straying into the neighbor's yard.  The neighbor promptly shot her.  Fortunately, she survived, but rampant firearms are not a joke.

I will not travel to or spend money in Texas, Florida, or Louisana until the state leaders demonstrate that they value life.

Cat photo for soothing purposes.

https://people.com/crime/louisiana-homeowner-accused-shooting-14-year-old-girl-in-the-back-of-head/

Amazon.com Hiring and Recent Revelations - 22 March 2023

According to news reports, internal documents obtained from Amazon show that they hired too many people.  Not as in "planned hiring was too high" but rather "unapproved hiring was too high".  From the article:

Amazon Web Services posted 24,988 job openings in 2022, but the department was only approved to recruit for 7,798 positions. The document addresses Amazon’s lack of governance as an issue that led to the disconnect between job listings and open positions.

When I worked at Amazon (circa 2000), this was generally true:  there were few, if any, business controls in place.  I did not see it at the time (having been raised in corporations that routinely imposed controls and audits for budgets, hiring, travel, and the like), so I did not exploit it, but it was obvious even then that there were really no controls.  I have always been astounded at the success of Amazon given the internal workings of the company.  On the other hand, recent examples like Credit Suisse and Silicon Valley Bank make me wonder if it is more a case of all-companies-all-the-time.

Source: https://gizmodo.com/amazon-layoffs-andy-jassy-amazon-web-services-aws-1850251481 

Another clip from the article:

After Amazon announced another round of layoffs affecting 9,000 employees earlier this week, a leaked document from inside the company revealed that listing too many job openings and subsequently over-hiring in some departments may have been a part of the problem.

A leaked document obtained by Insider reveals that Amazon put hiring power in the hands of managers, and that the company had little oversight on the hiring process until 2022. This apparently led managers to recruit and hire more employees than they were approved to.

New Application of AI Technology - 21 March 2023

Applying AI technology to analyze banks and prevent blow-outs would be a useful application of Silicon Valley technology.  I wonder why the wizards of Silicon Valley overlooked this self-protective opportunity.