Umbilicus Mundi: Fluctuations in My Quantum Vacuum
Short comments that are not worthy of a full article in another section, yet for some strange reason I want to hang onto the thoughts.
Turkey
Each year's Thanksgiving Holiday renews our experience of turkey. Yesterday was just the gang-of-four, meaning me, Glenda, one of her son, and his girlfriend. One of the good things about having a successful restauranteur as a stepson is that Brad knows what to do at all steps of the way in the kitchen. They arrived about 12:30, left about 8:30, and the kitchen was spotless when they departed. He can wash dishes while four pots bubble happily on the cooktop.
I love watching him work; it is not just that someone else is working, but his complete visualization of what needs to be done and in what order is a testament to professionalism. The turkey meat, as much as I dislike it, is neatly stacked in containers where it will age until we decide that we are really truly not going to eat it [ IOW, after a week in the fridge followed by six months in the freezer ], and then it will be fed to the starving raccoons who live in the open hillside between us and the James River. The bones have been made into stock from which Glenda will make her legendary "chicken" soup.
Our guests brought with them Cards Against Humanity, which is not a bad way to spend time while food cooks in the oven or composts in our bellies. My turn came around to read a question that had to do with Hannah Montana, and my pop-culture-klutz-ness came to fore. Because of the chaos of three people talking at once explaining Hannah to me, I came away with the idea that Hannah Montana was a nom du guerre or other sobriquet of Miley Cyrus, the white woman who claimed to have invented the twerk one hundred years after it was observed in Brazil.
At the end of the meal, Glenda did her Jewish grandmother thing and tried to send home fifty or six pounds of turkey with our guests. "Well, Ma, I don't really like turkey." He turned to his girlfriend. "I don't either," she said.
My hope for Beef Wellington next year experienced an Easter-like resurrection.
28 November 2014
Two surgeries in one week
Monday's (13th) surgery went well. I am the first owner in central Virginia of the Spine Wave STAXX, and my doc was able to jack apart my completely slammed into each other vertebrae. My screw count was holding steady at 24. Everything seemed to be staying in place. But then ...
There were no sirens, no huddled nurses sneaking a final smoke in the rainy and dark streets outside the E.R., but Thursday afternoon's surgery was a lot of what the movies show of urgent/emergency exploratory surgery. Other surgeries were shuffled to other start times, my doc marshaled his team, and I got entirely prepped in just a few minutes. My horizontal impression of it was that it was very clean and efficient, and I heard not one person say "Hey, what do I do now?" Surgery turns out to have been the correct decision; the hematoma would have turned me into a paraplegic in another day. It was 200cc.
So now I am resting at home. After a week, they were sick of my face around the hospital so I was sent home with one of my two "pumps." I have a piece of flexible metal semi-glued to my back, and the pump evacuates the air from between this metallic bandage and me. The bandage covers staples, another layer of tissue cover stitches, which cover the inner layer over the spine. It is as comfortable as it sounds, but the pump itself is about the size of an iPhone in one of those rugged cases. After the bandage and pump are removed on 5 November (I hope we are not waiting on the results of the election to do this?), I will have something more of a timeline for recovery.
Between the two surgeries, I was down for 8.5 hours, which is a long time. Things are cloudy, and I am forgetful. I adapted Leonard Shelby's strategy except for superseding tattoos and skin with ink and paper. Now I can't find the notepads. When I get back to work at University of Richmond I will have a walking stick until April: Citizen Cane.
Until the 5th of November, I am not only staying at home, but indoors! No slips, no falls, no infections, no kissing and hugging of relatives. Ebola, my ass. The refinished porch looks great from inside the living room window. I take pills every two hours. I have been transfused, but I am still anemic. I have been absorbing the morphine equivalent of 1mg/hour by IV since 8AM on the 13th. I hurt. My lips, cheeks and tongue look I have Hansen's Disease. I find little pieces of tape stuck to me here and there, only to realize that it is just loosely held skin. Bundled up in the full back brace and holding my pump with its thread-like cable in one hand, it looks like a Sinn Féin bomber has come to Richmond. It amazes me that the body can survive such things.
The World Series has come along at the right time if I can only stay awake. Our family has quit bringing over food, and I am down eight pounds since the 13th --- so someone is either eating it or discarding it.
My granddaughter wrote me a very nice card with some of her drawings of herself in a hospital bed to wish me a ``really fun surgery.'' Baby, this is it.
21 October 2014
My Bleeding Heart
Sliver was a mediocre 1993 movie with Sharon Stone doing what Sharon Stone does in the world of acting. It is art based on a good enough idea, but with miserable execution. When the credits roll, you wish that for the past two hours you had done something else instead.
In the case of Sliver, the manager of an apartment building ``likes to watch,’’ as they say. The problem is that he likes to watch everyone, and he likes to watch them all the time. He sees a few things that he likes (Sharon Stone in the shower), but eventually he sees quite a few things he doesn’t like at all. "If I know something is amiss, am I morally bound to take action even though I will be exposed as a slimeball?" --- it could be the plot of a good movie, but this is Sliver not a good movie.
Like everyone else in my line of work, I spent yesterday morning patching the Heartbleed Bug in SSL, and I had a chance to think about the implications during my 18 minute commute to the university. It is said that the bug had been in most of the code around the Internet for two years.
We are now beginning to see how Edward Snowdon might have been telling the truth: the NSA is (or was) able to catch all the traffic on the Internet at will. Their motto could simply be ``We like to watch.''
Of course, the interception of the traffic is still the easy part; decrypting it in time to take action on the information is difficult. And that is what Heartbleed was about. No one has ever doubted that the decryption was possible, only that if it takes very long to do, then the window of opportunity for action will have slammed shut on your aching fingers.
So now we know of one back door. There must be more. The endgame of surveillance is voyeurism, and voyeurism is its own reward.
9 April 2014
The Oxford Comma meets Kibbeh, Hype, and Nonsense
Just yesterday, Andy -- my friend of at least ten years now -- and I were talking about nutritional hype. You may know what I mean, a phenomenon that I first heard satirized in The Simpsons. In one episode, Marge picks up a box of nutmeg about the size in which you would expect to find laundry detergent, turns to Homer and says, ``Look Homey. It's imported.'' As is all nutmeg. And all peanut butter is cholesterol free. The only nuts with cholesterol come from animals.
I know about the various diseases of the digestive systems that cause their sufferers to have difficulty with gluten, a protein found in many grains. Gluten is the stuff that makes bread stretch and hold the air pockets -- and as you can see from the picture to the left, aspirin has none of it.
The concern about aspirin is a little misplaced: there are only 325mgs of aspirin in an aspirin tablet, and as each tablet is 90% aspirin, there could be at most 32.5mg of gluten per tablet. Average daily intake of gluten is thought to be somewhere around 13000mg per day, meaning that if aspirin suddenly developed gluten, you would need to consume 360 tablets to make the team.
This morning I flipped through random stories in The Guardian while I had my coffee. One headline said Gluten-free lamb, butternut squash and cinnamon kibbeh recipe, and that alone was enough to get me to read it. I do like lamb. I do like butternut squash; as far as I am concerned it is at the top of the must-eat list of vegetables. And I'm OK with most uses of cinnamon, and if there is a little in kibbeh, surely it is good. What really drew my not-yet-caffienated eyes were the first three words:
Gluten. Free. Lamb.
At last we have found a way to market lamb to all the eaters-come-lately who haven't liked it or perhaps think it is somehow bad for you. Gluten-free. Why didn't I think of it myself? The author apparently meant to have 'gluten-free' at the beginning of the sentence modify the noun 'recipe' at the end of it, or perhaps the 'kibbeh' in the penultimate position. The Oxford comma, known to eat shoots and leaves, got in the way.
I have never been to Lebanon, but all the kibbeh I have had is fairly light on the grain element, about like non-aspirin tables are light on aspirin. Nonetheless, the author's recipe substitutes quinoa for the wheat, and this is how the freeness from gluten is derived. I wonder how much kibbeh one would have to eat before the amount of gluten was at all significant? I have noted that kibbeh is undeniably filling.
2 April 2014
Vaccines and Agile Programming
There is a recent (7 March 2014) article about the difficulties of changing the minds of anti-vaccine crowd. To summarize the article and the study, 1800 parents were divided into four groups to receive four different pro-vaccine messages:
- information explaining the lack of evidence that MMR causes autism
- information about the dangers of vaccine-preventable diseases;
- images of children who had diseases that could have been prevented with vaccines
- a dramatic narrative about an infant who almost died of measles.
The researchers discovered that ``None of the interventions increased parental intent to vaccinate a future child. Refuting claims of an MMR/autism link successfully reduced misperceptions that vaccines cause autism but nonetheless decreased intent to vaccinate among parents who had the least favorable vaccine attitudes. In addition, images of sick children increased expressed belief in a vaccine/autism link and a dramatic narrative about an infant in danger increased self-reported belief in serious vaccine side effects.''
Yesterday at lunch I went walking with my friend Seth. Seth has been getting over a bruised forehead he acquired from his former employer, and now that he has stopped beating his head against the keyboard he is beginning to feel a lot better about things. Like the anti-vaccine crowd, no amount of evidence convinces the skeptics of the value of high quality software development practices. Based on the failure of the arguments for better practices, we must be going about it the wrong way.
Instead of making our argument, and like Seth, most of us wind up voting with our feet after some point; we give up and we move on. I have. Seth is starting a new job with a company where good development hygiene was in place when the company was founded a few years ago. As Seth has found, and supported by an unscientific sampling of the people I know, instead of making material progress toward better software development, most organizations are adopting Agile.
Agile is not a change in development practices --- it is new vocabulary. From the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for Agile (retrieved on 18 March 2014), we see one of the outstanding amalgamations of nouns in all of software development:
Agile software development is a group of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. It is a conceptual framework that promotes foreseen tight iterations throughout the development cycle.
Who can argue with that? Agile is lite, natural, organic, 99% free of meaning, and quite possibly free-range. I really can imagine nothing as improbable as solutions that ``evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.'' Perhaps the article is humor. Perhaps as Bjarne Stroustrup says, if you are going to do buzzword oriented programming, you need a strongly hyped language.
In the case of biological science and statistics, and in the case of basic software development, the language is not very sexy. There is no way to make science easy, but fantasy helps you feel better while you make no progress.
At least Agile only endangers your mental health.
18 March 2014
Mob rule
A few days ago a video of a town meeting held by The Honorable Jim Bridenstine began making the rounds. The official response was good.
``A public figure cannot control what people say in open meetings. I obviously did not condone and I do not approve of grossly inappropriate language. It is outrageous that irresponsible parties would attribute another person's reckless remarks to me.
It would have been more obvious if he had said something at the time, and he could have skipped the effort of a press release.
Congressman Bridenstine appears to protest that he has become a victim of his own excess. Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, he is shocked, shocked to find out that anyone would think he had anything to do with creating the environment in which members of his district felt at ease making such statements. These are his winnings.
Coincidentally I spent January reading A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel's historical novel set in the execution frenzy of the French Revolution. ``Heads are gonna roll 'round here,'' was a familiar cry, although I am sure it sounded more threatening in French. Georges-Jacques Danton and Maximilien de Robespierre were young attorneys. Camille Desmoulins was a young journalist whose specialty was stirring the pot for the other two, often by organizing a type of town meeting held in the streets of Paris. It was called the mob.
The mob was a collection of under-employed, under-educated, disenfranchised
Parisians who were first upset with the price of Danton and Desmoulins lost their heads on 5 April 1794. It was
their former friend Robespierre who endorsed the proposal that they
were unsuitable to continue to breathe air. Danton was accused of
taking money from the British and having lived overseas --- not being
French enough, I suppose, although I do not think anyone accused him of
being Desmoulins suffered the consequences of similar accusations, and
much as Representative Bridenstine stated, Desmoulins was surprised at
the result of his own mob-baiting: ``I could never have believed that men
could be so ferocious and so unjust.''
Yes, well, people are that way, and if he had read his Machiavelli
he might have avoided the surprise by stumbling across the statement
``Love endures by a bond that men, being scoundrels, are free to break.''
Robespierre rediscovered this truth for himself a few weeks later on
28 July 1794. The mob got his head, too.
9 February 2014
Silent Ringer
My holiday gift to the world is a silent ringer. As more companies ignore the penalties of the Do-Not-Call list, I have taken matters into my own phone. This link will give you what you need. It is a 115KB file containing 15 seconds of near silence. It is a recording of a very silent concert hall just before the performance begins.
To use it (on your iPhone, of course), just load it into the ringers section of iTunes, and sync it to your phone. Then create an entry in your phone book named something obvious such as ``Do Not Answer.'' Edit the entry and assign ``silence'' as the ringtone. As more annoying calls come in, just choose to assign them to the existing contact.
Works wonders.
24 December 2013
Computer science in the news ... sort of
I do my share of reading in Politico; after all, I live only one hundred miles from the center of the political action. This morning there was a write up about a very un-political story, namely the arrest of a Congressional aide. The phrasing of one sentence snagged my attention:
The court document states the video had the ``exact same hash value as a file offered for download on Oct. 5, 2013 from Loskarn's IP address.''
I work in computer science and I do not find all that many of my peers who really understand much about hashing. And so I wonder how many people think that if the hash value differed by one bit or a few bits out of 128 or 256 that the video in question might be similar?
There is nothing untrue about the statement in Politico, but the inclusion of the word ``exact'' indicates that the quoted source probably does not understand the significance of a hash value match.
13 December 2013
One last thought about SUVs
Based on potholes alone, Richmond probably led the mid-Atlantic States in the number of shovel-ready projects. As gas prices rose over the past decade, I am sure that the potholes convinced a number of people to retain their SUVs just to get around. But . . .
Driving behind SUVs I have noticed an inverse relationship between the willingness of the driver to bounce merrily over railroad tracks or potholes and the size of their vehicles. Drivers of ordinary sedans will go right over the railroad tracks without fear, make sharp turns over two-inch differences in the pavement found at the entrances to parking lots, and not worry too much about the small potholes.
SUVs tend to slow to a crawl as they make sharp turns into a parking lot, almost as if their drivers fear their vehicles will fall over. It is hard for me to imagine that a Ford Expedition with 20 inch wheels can even feel if the lip of the concrete is present. Their drivers approach the grade crossings at railroad tracks so slowly that I sometimes wonder if they will clear the tracks before the next train comes along to wipe them out.
22 November 2013
Taming the habanero
After a lot of lightweight kitchen science, I have been able to mitigate the heat of the habanero. Here in Virginia, they do not ripen until the last of the growing season, which means that it is only recently that I harvested around a gallon of fruit.
The process is much simpler than the pages of Internet instructions would suggest. Other than the peppers, you need only have
- a razor sharp small knife.
- cheap vodka.
- Platex gloves that come up to the elbows.
- a non-porous cutting surface.
The toxic fumes are less if the peppers are frozen.
Do the obvious thing first: cut open the pepper, and discard the seeds and the placenta. I found it much quicker to slice out the "ribs" rather than trying to filet them off the wall of the pepper.
Now run the thumb of the glove along the inside of the pepper slightly smashing the inside so that the capsacin is liberated as a noxious slippery oil.
I cut each pepper into the natural 3 or 4 pieces, depending on how many ribs were removed, and dropped them in a jar of vodka. They were comfortably packed, but not generally jammed onto each other. A pint of vodka will do a half gallon of peppers.
Dump the vodka after 90 minutes to two hours, depending on how much of the heat you want to wash away. Three hours will completely neutralize the peppers. Give the peppers a quick rinse, and spread them on a towel to dry.
Put a little straight dish washing detergent on the gloves before you take them off, and make hand washing motions.
18 November 2013
The Gospel According to Don
I love my Dons. Don Julio. Don Ilych Ramírez Sánchez, Don Vito Corleone. Most of all Don Knuth.
After twenty something years, I finally ordered a new box set of 1 through 4A. I think it will be a while before 4B is out, and my 1 and 2 (not so much 3) are falling apart. My 1 is in fact the second copy of that book that I have had. I gave my old books to a friend (rubber bands to hold them together included) in the hope that they will provide him with the same education they have given me.
They look good here in my office. I only have two other dead-tree books: The TCP/IP Guide and Compiler Design in C. They have both been read cover to cover as well, but my big Apple display is using them as a footstool until I find something of equal height. The fact that I only have six books after 35 years on the job points to a truth from the Gospel According to Fred, "Amid a wash of paper, a small number of documents become the critical points around which every project's management revolves."
8 October 2013
Irrational fears
It is about six and a half miles from my house to work. To the extent that it is both possible and practical, I avoid the arteries and veins through which most of the traffic squeezes like white corpuscles to the 9 to 5 wound.
Tailgaters abound. I have noticed that the same drivers who will follow two tons of metal at a distance of a few feet, will swerve out of the lane to avoid an errant drop of water from a roadside sprinker. And as I discovered today, they will back off to avoid the overspray from my windshield wipers.
1 October 2013
© 2019 George Flanagin
Updated 2017-02-23T20:04:52+00:00