The paperwork isn't done

So Congressional democrats are saying on TV this morning, regarding the men and women Trump has picked for his administration.  And who need "advice and consent" of the Senate. 
   Of course, the paperwork is never done.  Bureaucrats and Congresscritters  always invent more paperwork.  Was I a democrat, I'd be inventing new paperwork to slow things down and new hoops to jump thru. 

The reproducibility crisis in science

American scientists pour forth a formidable Niagara of scientific papers every year.  Generous federal research money, grants, and the pressure on university professors to publish or perish, help to increase the flow of papers.
  Unfortunately, a high percentage of this flood of papers, cannot be reproduced.  When other scientists attempt to obtain the same results in their lab,  they cannot do it.  The results claimed in the paper simply cannot be reproduced by others. In science, if  the results cannot be reproduced, they must be considered quackery. Not science but B***S***. 
   I experienced the reproducibility problem myself some years ago.  Working on a new medical device product, I consulted the literature looking for ways to do what we needed to do.  I found one, it did what we needed, and I coded it up.  And it worked.  It's just that it didn't work as well as the author claimed.  In fact my realization of the process was exactly 50% low.  The author had claimed twice the performance I was able to obtain in our lab.  Eventually I telephoned the author to ask him for advice.  After a few minutes of conversation, the author somewhat sheepishly admitted that he had left out a factor in his computations, and yes, the algorithm only worked at half the claimed performance.  Damn.  After wasting a good deal of time, I would have done better using the standard Huffman coding algorithm. 
    And, just the other day, the Wall St Journal ran an op ed claiming that all the important medical advances have been made by privately funded research at the big drug companies.  National Institute of Health funding, although ample, had not produced anything of clinical use. 
   Somebody ought to do a study of the effectiveness of federally funded research.  Go back a lot of years.  Tot up the amount of money spent, the number of papers published, and the number of products based on one of the papers that actually made it to market. 

Words of the Weasel Part 50

"Anti-Zionism".  Lefties use this word to describe their feelings about Israel.  But in the real world, it means the same as antisemitism.  Nobody wants to admit to antisemitism in this day and age, so they thunk up a new word that they hope isn't as offensive, while still meaning antisemitism. 

Shed a tear for Sears Roebuck

The Wall St Journal reports that Sears is selling its Craftsman brand of tools to Stanley/Black & Decker.  And Sears is selling off a bunch of stores, both Kmart and Sears, and borrowing wads of money.  Sounds like poor old Sears Roebuck is not long for this world.  Too bad.  Way back when, (1950's) Sears was the biggest US retailer, with good big stores in every town and every mall.  Back in the day, Sears was best known  as a hardware store, Craftsman tools and Kenmore kitchen appliances.  As a young hot rodder in the the 50's,  when I had a  1/2" drive Craftsman socket set and sets of Craftsman wrenches (open end, box end and combination) I was set in the tool department.  Craftsman was a good as you could get, with the famous "You break it and we will replace it free" guarantee.  In my home shop today, most of my tools, hand and power, are still Craftsman, many of them still running happily  and going on 50 years old.
  Dunno what happened to Sears to sink it so deep.  I suppose a lot of Walmart's and Target's  and Lowes' and Home Depot's growth has been at Sears expense.  Sears used to sell nothing but house brands, Craftsman,m Diehard, and Kenmore being as well regarded as anything on the market, with J.C. Higgins, Silvertone,  Homart, and Dunlap being not so great.  Sears used to give a lot of floor space to clothing, but I never remember Sears clothing being all that cool. 
   Somewhere I suppose there is a business book describing how Sears went down the drain, but I  haven't seen it.
   

Cyber Hacking Congressional Hearing.

It was carried live on Fox News.  We had Sen John McCain, Whatshisface Director of National Intelligence and a cast of 1000's.  After three hours, nobody had said anything important, or even in real English.  They all agreed that we need more cyber security without ever mentioning Windows, the OS with  a big "Hack Me" sign taped on its back.  Thanks Micro$oft. 
   And we have Obamacare forcing doctors to computerize patient's medical records so that they can be hacked more easily.

Right to Work will bring jobs to NH

Now that NH has a Republican governor to sign a right-to-work law, maybe we could pass one.  Why do we care?  Simple.  No Right to Work, no corporate investment.  No factories, warehouses, ternimals, help centers, nothing.  If the state isn't right to work, companies go elsewhere.  NH needs investment to create jobs.  Every June, we see all our new high school and college graduates leave the state to find decent paying work.   I'll grant that NH has a low unemployment rate, but that's largely because the unemployed, being hard working New Hampsters, leave the state to find work, rather that drawing welfare.
    To create jobs, we need someone, corporations mostly, to build factories and other facilities.  And we need to attract corporations to expand in NH.  If we passed right to work, we would be the ONLY right to work state for 500 miles in every direction.  There has got to be companies that need a facility in the Northeast.  If NH was right to work, all those facilities would be built in NH. 

Disappointment: Museum of the American Indian

The Smithsonian opened this one a while ago, but it's still pretty new in my book.  The building architecture is strange, no style known to me, does not suggest any sort of Indian architecture, an odd colored yellow stone facing, a fine location right on the Mall. 
   Collections were mediocre to poor.  The Inca floor had only a few nondescript earth colored pots.  A lot of stuff from the twentieth century.  Dating was vague.  The older things were all dated 1432-1547.  The modern stuff was mostly dated 1960-2000.  You would think they could date things more closely than +/- fifty years.  And the curators flunk spelling.  They spell Inca with a K.  Consistently.
   And it's pretty political for a museum.  As everyone knows, there are a lot of Indian groups with grievances against the white man.  A lot of such groups had posters or even whole displays supporting their points of view.  Your tax dollars at work.