Microsoft was just granted a patent on creating a conversational chat bot of a specific person. The chat bot’s personality would apparently be based on images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages and more personal information. The Independent claims Microsoft Patent Shows Plans to Revive Dead Loved Ones as Chat bots. Seances would take on new life, but it could also prevent someone from moving on. I leave it to the psychologists as to whether this would be a good thing or bad thing.

I like the daily comic strip Frazz. The main character is a young man who is a janitor at the elementary school that he went to as a child. He gets along with teachers and kids talk to him about questions they don’t want to ask an authority figure. There are also lots of strips involving kids talking to their teachers. It is a bit of homage to Calvin and Hobbes, with a little less snark.

As far as I can tell, Ghana is getting hammered by Brexit. Huh? What? Yes, 40% of Ghana’s banana crop is sold to the UK. Now that the UK is no longer part of the EU and therefore the trade agreement which would have applied no longer exists, Ghana’s bananas are subject to tariffs on import. One UK importer indicated it was 20k pounds a week in increased tariffs, not counting the additional red tape.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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”.

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).