Democratic Presidential Debate, late July version

I watched both nights.  Fell asleep during the second night.  First night, Warren and the Bern, was amusing to watch, but I don't think any of 'em said anything that will win them votes.   And they all said a lot of things that turn voters like me off.  Government run health care, higher taxes, the Hiawatha life style (Green New Deal) open borders. 

Democrats want to kill American's health care

Most Americans get their health care thru their company or thru their union.  It's provided by private insurance companies.  It's good stuff.  I had company health care for better than 40 years.  It paid to deliver my three children, paid for the wife's back problems, paid for yearly physicals.  I am still in decent health in my seventies.  Most US citizens feel the same way.
   Last night we had the Democrats calling to abolish this decent health care system and throw us all onto the tender mercies of a government health plan.  Do we want to give up very decent private health insurance for the likes of the VA, or Obamacare?  I think not.

Massive leak of customer data caused by "mis configurated firewall"???

Hmm.  Capitol One?  Firewall?  Did they have their customer database machine[s] on the internet??  Exposed to every hacker in the entire world?   Did they flunk computer security 101?  Can the American surplus of unemployed lawyers sue them down to their socks?
Basic rule.  Machines holding critical data should never be connected to the internet. Or the phone network, or anything else.   They should be kept in a locked room, with the number of key holders restricted as much as possible.  Three is about right.  They must be backed up to optical disk once a week, and the backups stored off site, in case of fire.  (or flood, had that happen once)  Windows machines are swiss cheese, important data should be kept on anything more secure, and every thing ever manufactured is more secure than Windows.  Use Apple, use Linux use anything but Windows. Know that bad guys can stick a flash drive into a USB port and download every byte off the hard drive[s] onto the flash drive in a few minutes.  Hands off too.
  I hope these yo-yos get sued into oblivion. 

The Social Security Scammer called again

This pitch starts off telling me my social security number will be trashed somehow.  And asks me to call back at another number.  They called me yesterday and again today.  I hung up both times.  US guvmint operations don't telephone, they send letters. 

Advice to the class of 2023, frosh this fall

That's you frosh entering college this fall.  College is fun and parties. I enjoyed it all immensely.  It's also serious stuff.  We are talking serious money for a 4 year bachelor's degree, like $100K, which either your parents put up, or you take out US guvmint loans for.   If you take out guvmint loans, know that you are stuck with the payments, declaring bankruptcy doesn't get you out of paying them off.  You are stuck.
   First thing you need to decide that you are gonna graduate, on time, no matter what.  If you give up and flunk out before getting your degree, all the money spent is wasted, you don't get squat for it, but you still have to pay off your student loans.
   Second thing you need to decide is what you want to do to make a living after you graduate.  You have to make a living somehow.  You will spend much of the rest of your life after college making a living. Best to find something that you like to do.  Selling used cars or waiting tables can get old, fast.  At this stage of your life you may not have a clue.  Talk to your parents, talk to your family, talk to friends, do some reading of biographies.  You need to have something in mind by Christmas freshman year.  Given you have chosen a career field, pick a college major that makes you employable in your chosen field.  Colleges and universities offer many majors that are totally worthless in the job market.  Avoid any major with "studies" in the name.  Gender studies, black studies, environmental studies. Avoid art history, sociology, archeology, and political science. Nobody hires graduates in those majors.
   Think about STEM majors.  Those are valued in the job market.  For you kids entering high school, be aware that STEM majors require integral calculus.  The subject matter is taught using calculus and if you don't have your calculus, the courses won't meant anything to you.  Figure you have to take integral calculus freshman year.  To do which, you have to have taken trigonometry and algebra in high school.  A high school course in geometry is extremely helpful, although not mandatory.  Plan your high school courses accordingly.
  Finally, beware, colleges have all sorts of obscure graduation requirements.  You have to have so many credits in a bunch of strange subjects.  If you lack ALL the required credits you don't graduate with your class.  Get a current copy (last year's copy may be obsolete) of the college catalog and research all the credits needed to graduate in your major.  At my school engineering majors needed 15% more credits to graduate than education majors.  Make a spreadsheet and print it out.  Bring it to your appointment with your college counselor.  Ask him if it is correct.  Remember that counselors have about 100 other students to counsel, and papers to grade and classes to prepare for, and don't have much time to help you.  Plus they see their mission as recruiting more students to their academic departments.  Listen to counselors but don't trust them much.

That Mueller hearing yesterday

I watched it with maybe just one eye.  The hearing  was long, very long.  Each congresscritter in two committees got 5 minutes to question Mueller or just make speeches.  The Democrats would read aloud from the 400 odd page Mueller report and get Mueller to agree with it.  This served to get points from the report before the public.  Few people have bothered to read the Mueller report.  I haven't and I don't plan to.  It is too long, written in lawyer's gobble de gook which can mean almost anything depending upon who is reading it.
   Republicans seized on inconsistencies in the report and grilled Mueller about them.  Mueller did not look good answering.  In one case he admitted ignorance of the Steele Dossier, which has been headline news for months.
   A lot of talk about "obstruction of justice".  Early in the report they state that there is no evidence of "collusion" between the Trump campaign and bad guys.  If there is no crime, how can there be obstruction of justice?  That was never explained.  

Looking for Global Warming.

NASA at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)  has posted their temperature data base.  It goes back to the invention of the thermometer back in the later 1600's.  I downloaded the whole thing some years ago.  The records were fixed length, 80 bytes long, no separators like comma's.  Clearly showing their origin on IBM punch cards.  I last used punch cards on a Raytheon job in back 1972.
  I wrote a C program to convert the ancient data format into something modern that Excel could read.  I plotted number of records vs date.  As expected, there are few records from the late 1600's.  The number grows over the years to a million or so.  Then in the early 1980's, a great weeding out happened, and the number of records per year drops to a third of its peak in 1980.  You have to wonder which reporting stations were dropped, with no explanation.  Where I live, it is 5 degrees cooler in summer and 5 degrees warmer in winter than it is down at the bottom of three mile hill in the village.  If a Franconia Notch reporting station was axed, it would increase global warming.  If a Franconia village reporting station, only three miles away, was axed it lower global warming.  When they axed two thirds of the reporting stations I wonder which ones got the axe.  The warmer stations or the colder stations? 
  Next I plotted the reported temperature data going back to the beginning in the late 1600's.  GISS furnished two data sets, a raw data set and a "corrected" data set.  The raw data set plotted out properly, a smooth line, obviously real data.  The "corrected" data set had a problem starting around 1860.  Data before 1860 was obviously bad, it had vertical jumps, bumps and discontinuities.  Just looking at the plot I could tell that something in the "corrected" data was wrong.
  So,  working with just the raw data, I  subtracted the average temperature from each year's temperature, yielding temperature rise or fall going all the way back the the late 1600s.  Temperature rise peaked back in 1990 and has been flat ever since.
   I believe in things you can measure, far more than I do computer models.