So, trying to keep myself from fixating on the political news, I asked DuckDuckGo for suggestions on random websites. One of the suggestions was from lifewire that claimed “cool websites to look at when bored”. It claimed “Whether you need to kill some time or you’re in the mood to laugh, learn, or be inspired, this list of cool sites is all you need.” It was a typical list with “what we like” and “what we don’t like”.

Today I woke up at either 6:10 am or 5:10 am depending on whether I was looking at a clock that automatically reset itself for the end of daylight savings time in the US. I remember writing a song 20 years ago about the hassle of resetting all the digital clocks in the house. You had to hold down buttons and some of them didn’t go backwards or get faster, so you had to wait while it slowly advanced 23 hours.

I’m trying to stay away from taxes on this blog, but I was just asked again whether Biden’s tax plan would bring back manufacturing jobs to the US. I’m always a little disappointed when someone asks this question and particularly disappointed if that person is in the Federal government. It indicates that the person asking the question is so fixated on “taxes” that they have not stopped to think about all the other aspects and will be spectacularly unsuccessful.

This blog is eclectic because I can get sidetracked by lots of different things. Yesterday was the origin of the word “scientist”. Today it is data sourcing and analysis. WARNING: This is a data analysis rat hole expedition. Someone made a comment to me that police were the 22nd most dangerous job in the US which triggered some recollection in my brain that I had seen a report where they were 16th.

There is general agreement that the word “scientist” was coined by William Whewell (May 24, 1794 - March 6, 1866), a carpenter’s son who won a scholarship to Trinity College and eventually became the Master of Trinity College. He was a polymath and John Herschel described him as “… a more wonderful variety and amount of knowledge in almost every department of human inquiry was perhaps never in the same interval of time accumulated by any man.

Facebook, one of the leading practitioners of surveillance capitalism, has apparently threatened New York University researchers for tracking Facebook’s political ads. The NYU researchers built a tool that allows 6,500 volunteers to keep track of what ads Facebook is showing them. The legal theory behind Facebook' threat is that Facebook’s terms of service say that you cannot use automated bulk collection of data from its platform and this tool constitutes automated bulk collection.

The 2014 Nebula Award winner for best science fiction novel was Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. It was interesting (sometimes pleasantly, sometimes horrifyingly) to watch reactions to the use of pronouns in the book. The main character and narrator natively speaks a language that doesn’t make gender distinctions in pronouns. (Finnish and Hungarian are similar in this respect). English, of course, does have gendered pronouns so to get the point across, the author has the narrator using feminine pronouns throughout the book except in dialog.

The “Treaty of Westphalia” aka “Peace of Westphalia” is the combination of treaties signed in October 1648 in Osnabruck and Munster ending the Thirty Years War which had killed eight million people, including 30% of the population of what is now Germany. To give an idea of how complicated the political situation was, there were 109 different delegations represented. Some sources claim the peace conference had thousands of ancillary diplomats and support staff who needed housing and food despite the famine all around them caused by the war.

Think of a generic picture of a philosopher. When I did, I came up with a picture of a bearded old white guy. Now why do they have so many razors if so many of them have beards? All of the following rules of thumb are intended to reduce the explanations you should have to think about. “Occam’s razor” says that simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complicated explanations.

One of the many cultural differences between the US and Europe seems to be that Americans don’t trust the government collecting data about themselves but seem to find it acceptable that companies collect data and Europe seems to be the reverse. The American idea becomes an exercise in futility as soon as you understand that the government buys data from companies if it can’t collect the data directly. But what about other geographies and what data is getting collected about you anyway?

Warning: Very Long Post and Very Deep Rabbit Hole about something that doesn’t really matter. Elon Musk has publicly said that we’re most likely in a simulation. Before we get into anything, please note that this is a hypothesis, not a theory. What is the Simulation Hypothesis? The super simple description of the idea that the universe could be a simulation is you assume unlimited computing power and God/aliens create a sufficiently complex version of the Matrix, Inception, Minecraft or the Sims and we are just the characters running around inside a computer program.

UPDATE: Apparently a judge has blocked the order. See USA Today The President reportedly signed an executive order banning diversity training in federal agencies, the military, federal contrators and grant recipients. I use the word “reportedly” because you can read the literal words of the order differently depending on your philosophical persuasion. Executive Order 13950 bars the military, federal contractors and federal grant recipients from teaching “divisive concepts”. OK, what are “divisive concepts”?

Have you ever heard somebody say something that you think is so incorrect that, to use physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s phrase “Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!” — “That is not only not right, it is not even wrong!”? As a result you see it as your duty to jump in to correct them. I am as guilty of that as anyone - why else this blog.