My mind has many nooks and crannies ... like an english muffin
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.
Case Nightmare Orange
· ☕ 435  words politics  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
Suppose, in some far off land, there lived a president and his inner circle who had gaslit themselves into believing that an election had been stolen rather than lost. That somehow or other the opposition who couldn’t organize themselves out of a paper bag had convinced the deep state and all the judges and republican owned voting machine manufacturers to change just the presidential votes. Now suppose my post about Your Brain on Grievances has some validity and they decide on one more attempt to retain power when the Congress goes to count the votes.
The Spreadable Butter Assumptions
· ☕ 322  words life  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
You would think after all the years we’ve been married that we would know each other’s little ways and preferences. That is by and large true, but the spreadable butter question had never come up before. Taking a step back, we normally use some type of easily spreadable margarine and real butter is for cooking and special occasions. Just prior to the COVID mandated cocooning, we had been watching the Great British Bake Off and Shirley started baking a couple times a week in the afternoon.
Your Brain on Grievances
· ☕ 1249  words politics life  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
There is an interesting article on Politico about Grievance Addiction focusing on Donald Trump. The author is James Kimmel, Jr., a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale Med School and he notes that “your brain on grievances looks a lot like your brain on drugs. In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.”
Where is Canada?
· ☕ 321  words geography  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
It might seem like a silly question, but where is Canada? I mean, when you ask the intertubes for the latitude and longitude of the geographic center of Canada, you get really different answers. Maps of the World says that Canada’s latitude and longitude is 60° 00' N and 95° 00' W. If I drop that into Google maps, I get a point on the line between Manitoba and Nunavut about 5 miles west of Hudson Bay.
An Honest 2020 Christmas Medley
· ☕ 124  words life  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
Back to less serious stuff. Malinda just put up a highly enjoyable parody mashup of Christmas songs sung from the standpoint of both her optimistic and pessimistic sides looking at 2020. She also has done this for 2019 and 2018. She has two channels on youtube. The first, Translator Fails she runs various things through Google translate into multiple languages and back until it makes absolutely no sense. The second, just entitled Malinda is both more personal and has more original stuff.
Talking Past Each Other We Are
· ☕ 1608  words politics  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
I was reading a discussion on social media about a request for a book recommendation and, after awhile, thought maybe I should be diagramming arguments. The request was for science fiction book recommendations from a conservative, non-libertarian view. The person submitting the request specifically asked for books where “the central tenets of conservatism - tradition, hierarchy and authority - are working for humanity; where tradition is used to help, guide and comfort people rather than cynically used as a tool to keep people down.
Senator Tillis, I Don't Understand
· ☕ 310  words politics  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
Senator Thom Tillis is angry that Twitter is not sending a witness to an Anti-Piracy hearing he is holding in December. Setting aside the question of why the Senator is actually holding a hearing in December, I’m puzzled why the Senator thinks Twitter is a giant avenue of piracy. Lies and deceit, yes, but piracy? The Senator’s letter to Twitter claims that “[Twitter] continues to host and permit rampant infringement of music files on its platform” and that it hasn’t taken any “meaningful steps to address the scale of the problem.
Microsoft Patents Recording and Scoring Meetings on Body Language
· ☕ 294  words work  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
Ok, the title is just slightly over the top because Microsoft filed for the patents back in July but the filings just became public; it doesn’t have them yet. BBC News So apparently there would be sensors which “could” record, which invitees actually attend a meeting attendees body language and facial expressions amount of time each participant spent contributing to the meeting speech patterns “consistent with boredom and fatigue” This information would be combined with other factors such as how efficient the meeting was, emotional sentiment expressed by participants and how comfortable the environment was into an overall quality score.