My mind has many nooks and crannies ... like an english muffin
Amanda Gorman - Inaugural Poem - The Hill We Climb
· ☕ 796  words politics life poetry  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
I thought I would just put Amanda Gorman’s Inauguration Poem “The Hill We Climb” here. I have no idea where line breaks should be. Note to self - there are poetry readings on Youtube, but check out the ones by the poet, not by actors reading the poetry. Do poets do poetry readings on Zoom? “Mr President, Dr Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr Emhoff, Americans and the world: when day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
Is Media Emotionally Abusing its Viewers?
· ☕ 80  words politics  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
Someone on Reddit made a comment about fear driving the extreme ends of the political spectrum and that the media drives that fear because it creates addiction and keeps their viewers/listeners and enables their market. That leads me to the question of whether the media (at least at the extremes) could be viewed as emotionally abusing their viewers or listeners. Thoughts? As usual, feel free to disagree using this contact link.
Business Plans For Space Pirates
· ☕ 366  words science fiction  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
Have you ever really thought about the business plan for space pirates or smugglers as portrayed in science fiction? Upfront investment, maintenance, and expected revenue and variability of the expected revenue are the first things that come to mind. We have to assume really high value, small size items that can be transported. Let’s call it unobtainium. We also have to assume technology is not only discovered, but becomes relatively inexpensive and can be handled by small groups.
Character
· ☕ 296  words life 4/4 

Early early draft. Sometimes you drop nuance and need to be heavy handed. This song is a bit unusual in that it starts with an accidental.

The Earth is Spinning Faster
· ☕ 405  words science  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
For quite a while now, the earth’s rotation has been slowing just slightly. This year, it sped up. July 19 last year was the shortest day ever was recorded — it was 1.4602 milliseconds shorter than the standard. No one is sure why. If you think of an ice skater, they spin faster if they pull in their arms to preserve angular momentum. The earth doesn’t have arms, but in theory the same thing could happen if global warming means enough water in the mountains has melted down to the sea or if heavy material in the mantle has subsided towards the core.
Unity Requires Shared Reality
· ☕ 700  words politics  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
I spent my career finding ways to thread through conflicting laws and priorities in multiple countries. Once you found a way to thread through the conflicts, you could pull it together in a way that made sense and reduce the conflicts. The most difficult situations were when governments were intentionally writing rules that favored their national interests and penalized other countries' businesses. Sometimes the public and private rhetoric was different. This generally happened only when you had achieved a respectful relationship with the government officials - they still wouldn’t change their positions, but they would admit to the politics involved rather than the logic.
Hanlon's Razor and Useful Idiots
· ☕ 1423  words politics  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
While lots of social media focused on videos of individual Capitol Police being “friendly” to the rioters I want to focus on Capitol Police leadership. If you might recall, I mentioned “Hanlon’s Razor” in an earlier post. Hanlon’s razor says that you should never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence or stupidity. I also mentioned that malice is often assumed to be someone being out to get you, but more often the person is just out for themselves and you are collateral damage (roadkill).
Children's Crusade or Bay of Pigs or ???
· ☕ 429  words politics  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
President Trump told attendees at the political rally earlier in the day to “take back our country”. Rudy Giuliani told the same crowd at the rally “If we are wrong, we will be made fools of, but if we’re right a lot of them will go to jail. So let’s have trial by combat.trial by combat” and is now condemning the assault on the Capitol as shameful. I’ve been watching interviews of reporters who talked to the mob that rushed the Capitol yesterday.
What Can I Say?
· ☕ 752  words politics  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
Ok. My December 20 post Case Nightmare Orange was wrong. It considered whether President Trump might try to use Homeland Security forces to disrupt the Congressional certification of the Electoral College results. There was, however, a distinct lack of police manpower to deal with protests that everyone saw coming. Looking at this video, there was no way those four police officers could deal with that mob. It didn’t look like much more manpower than normal around the Capitol building.
When are Aphorisms Profound or Trite?
· ☕ 971  words life  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
I was helping a friend with some data analysis which included a file of roughly 500k quotes collected from the internet. Looking at the “quotes”, I thought a dismaying number were trite aphorisms from motivational speakers/writers and religious feelgood writers. I began to wonder why are sayings I consider “trite” obviously not “trite” to enough people that there is a market? Actually, I seem to be misusing the word “trite”. The dictionary indicates that trite means “not evoking interest because of overuse or repetition”.
Happy? Brexit UK - Now About the Paperwork
· ☕ 626  words politics  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
So today the initial transition period for the UK leaving the EU is over and the next stage of transition periods begin. Since the UK government did sod all to actually prepare, at 11PM on Dec 31 the government issued notices saying, among other things, that shipments from Great Britain to Northern Ireland don’t need export paperwork for another 12 months (because no one knows what the paperwork should look like).
Universal Lithium Shortage
· ☕ 315  words space  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
Did you know the entire universe seems to be short on lithium? Astronomers actually refer to it as the Cosmological Lithium Problem. The current standard model of the Big Bang theory (not the tv show) matches up with observations about (a) microwave background radiation (b) cosmic expansion as measured by light from distant supernovae and (c) primordial abundances of hydrogen and helium. There is a bit of an issue with (c) however.
Practicing the Little Lies
· ☕ 756  words life  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
Ars Technica published an article on Christmas Day (yesterday) entitled Children’s Belief in Santa is more Nuanced than you Think. The story talks about studies showing that children have hierarchies of belief, with individual figures falling categories like: “Real Person”, “Virtually Real”, “Cultural Figures”, “Ambiguous Figures” and finally “Fictional Figures”. So, like so many things, there is no binary on/off, but rather a spectrum between “real” and “nonreal”. One of the studies argued that three factors influence children’s belief and placement of the figures in the spectrum: Testimony (being told about the figure), indirect evidence (which included rituals like leaving milk and cookies for Santa or hunting for Easter Bunny eggs, and direct evidence like visiting Santa in the mall.