Words of the Weasel Part XIV

"The aircraft was on final approach to Heathrow from Beijing when an uncommanded power reduction occurred in both engines."
We used to call that engine failure.
The aircraft augered in 984 feet short of the runway. Gotta watch them uncommanded power reductions.

Blame Shifting

On the radio (NHPR) this morning. The terrible Belgian train accident is blamed on lack of new technology automatic train brakes.
Wow!
Brakes won't save you in a head on collision. Something went wrong and put two trains on the the same track going opposite directions. A signal failed, an engineer ran a red signal, a dispatcher gave the wrong orders, or a turnout was thrown the wrong way. Once that happens you have two trains barreling right at each other. It takes a mile or more to stop a train, automatic brakes or no automatic brakes. The engineers cannot see that far ahead ahead. Blam.
The radio story went on to quote various Europeans pointing fingers at each other. The Belgians blamed the EU for failure to standardize automatic brake requirements. The EU blamed the Belgians for not installing automatic brakes anyhow. Money was mentioned, like 200,000 Euros per train and 25,000 Euros per mile of track.
This story is a smoke screen behind which the true culprits are escaping.

Archival Quality (photographic)

My fiftieth high school reunion is coming up this year. Old classmates are agitating for photos. So I though I might look thru my pile of slide trays, looking for high school photos.
Step 1. Fix the slide projector. A beefy Basch & Lomb at least 50 years old itself. At least it is fixable, it all came apart, with ordinary hand tools, and with a liberal anointment of 3-in-1 oil it started to cycle the slides in and out. The slide advance electric switch was broken and no replacement available. But there is a plug for a remote control switch. I made a remote control switch from scratch, and had a working projector. Good thing I had a lathe, bandsaw, drill press and radial arm saw in the basement, I used them all for this little DIY project.
Step 2. Try to read the labels on the slide trays. That didn't work. What ever it was had faded over the years and was unreadable. Note to self. Use black India ink to label anything you care about. Damn felt tips fade in less than five years.
Step 3. Show the slides. Got some real oldies here. Recognized the old family house that we moved out of in 1957. Shots inside the ski chalet that I am currently retired too. Some shots of relatives, now deceased.
Step 4. Agonize over the generally low quality of the slides. Out of focus, under exposed, over exposed. My low end point&shoot digital makes much better pictures.
I wonder if the digital photos will be viewable fifty years from now>

Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenburg

Cool story about software development at a silicon valley startup. Mitch Kapor, the man who created Lotus 1-2-3 years ago, decided to do another killer app. Rented office space, small team of experienced programmers, self financed by Mitch. The author, who is not a software guy, hung around the operation for it's first three years and wrote a book about it.
Software development hasn't changed much. Three years into the project and they had little to show for it, despite all the experience on the team, leadership by a silicon valley legend, and a booming economy.
Rosenburg gives a good layman's account of the various fads in software engineering, going back to the 1960's. Each new fad was supposed to create great software on time and on budget. Well, that hasn't happened yet.
The project was to create a super personal information manager that would hold contact information, to-do lists, appointments, photographs, and anything else, keep the home computer updated with the work computer, allow sharing with everyone and anyone, and perhaps travel faster than light as well.
Rosenburg, a non programmer, doesn't understand what specifications are for. He mentions that the project lacks specs. He doesn't understand that a spec is a trial run at the real program. If the programmer cannot explain what he is doing to other humans in his native tongue, he won't be able to explain it to a non sentient computer using a complex programming language. And, specs allow the others on the project to know what the program is going to do, and if it will fit into the rest of the project.
This project didn't understand "the minimum working set". Until code is running, you have nothing. To get the code running, you select the absolute minimum amount of code needed to make the program do something, even if something isn't very much. Get the minimum working set running and then add in the rest of the project, piece by piece. This project did "release" early versions, but it was a pro forma activity, the early releases crashed continuously and didn't do anything.
Anyhow, good to learn that software development hasn't changed since I retired.

NHPR spins the gambling focus group

NHPR did a piece on the gambling focus groups this morning. Their spin is pro gambling, and they implied that all the good citizens attending the focus group were pro gambling too. Or at least not anti gambling.
That's not the way it was at the Littleton focus group. The attendees were luke warm at best and mostly hostile to more gambling.
All the news that fits we print...

Another Spending Cut

The Security and Exchange Commission was created after Great Depression 1.0 with a mission to regulate the stock market and prevent Great Depression 2.0. Remember that Great Depression 1.0 was triggered by the stock market crash of 1929. The Roosevelt administration wanted a watchdog agency to prevent practices like margin selling that had toppled the market in 1929.
Same agency is still in business, with a $1 billion dollar budget. They failed to prevent Great Depression 2.0. Clearly they are a waste of money. Let's shut them down and apply that $1 billion to deficit reduction.

Gaming Gambling focus group

At the invitation of a friend, I went out to the Littleton Area Learning Center, actually the old Littleton Coin Co building, out Union St past LaHoute's. There were maybe 25 people, including a number of political folk of my acquaintance. Under the guidance of facilitators, we discussed increasing legal gambling in NH. There is some legal betting at the racetrack, the discussion was about increasing it, opening Vegas style casinos, and allowing slot machines. After a whole day of gently facilitated discussion, the sense of the meeting was this. The downside of legal gambling, such as changing the tone of NH to a Las Vegas tone, facilitating compulsive gamblers into ruining themselves, the tacky nature of casinos, casino people and casino customers, far outweighed the possibility of increased public revenue from casino taxes. The projected revenue wasn't very big, and we assumed the projections were optimistic. Real world revenue will likely be less than projected.
Under the gentle facilitation, we never quite wrote all this down. Presumably the facilitators will write things up to suit themselves afterward. The whole thing was done by UNH people with state funding, maybe $30K of funding. They bought coffee and donuts and a sandwich lunch. It was an interesting day, but as a method of determining public policy it's kinda flaky. The UNH people have a free hand interpreting what was said, the people attending were by no means a representative group of citizens, we were all political people with various agenda's. Many of us started the session with a fairly neutral viewpoint and by the end of the session we had a much more negative viewpoint about legalizing more gambling.
Interesting euphemisms turned up. It's "gaming" not "gambling". It's "video gaming terminal" rather than slot machine. It's "racino" rather than race track.
For those more interested, Senate Bill 489 (SB498) is before the NH senate right now and can be seen online with a bit of googling.