election, pundit, trivia, widows

Monday’ish Wednesdays

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Why did today feel like a Monday all day? It just had that feel. Started off cool and damp from the melt of yesterdays snow flurry. Then warmed up and turned a bit windy. For some reason it just felt like a Monday all day long.

The walk down to the radio station for the weekly show was uneventful and the report of yesterdays council meeting was short and to the point. Only a few items on the agenda. The trivia question was surprisingly hard for people to guess in spite of the numerous hints we gave. The question was: “10% of men have never done this, what is it?” The answer is in the first comment.

This afternoon was a disaster of sorts. I had an abrasion on my leg start bleeding again and it wouldn’t stop so I could put on long pants to go to a meeting. Nothing like a little squishy blood in your sock to make the day complete! It was just a little nick, but it had that annoying drip … drip … drip persistence at a time when I was already in a hurry.

In other news, I finally got my wife’s old laptop at least partially resurrected from the dead. Even as I write this, the poor beast is doing a backup of all it’s contents to one of my servers. That way if it heads to the land of the dead again, we’ll at least have all the information from it in an accessible form. I suspect that it is more than just one problem with this machine, so the current revival may not be one for the long run. I had forgotten just how painful Windows 98 was to work with and network. Guess I have just gotten to used to XP, Linux, and Solaris. It did remind of the old days of Windows 95 and even {*gasp*} Windows 3.x. I may actually be one of the few people willing to admit that saw and even attempted to use a copy of Windows 1.x back in the 80’s. Now that really lets you know you’re getting old.

Off to prepare for my chance to be a pundit tomorrow. What *will be* the implications of the elections results. It will be interesting because this area is one of the few in Colorado that voted overwhelmingly for McCain and Schaeffer. Almost everywhere else went for the Democratic candidates of Obama and Udall. (It is amusing that blogger’s spell checker thinks Obama is wrong, but has no suggestions of a better word. Is blogger a closet Republican?) Ta-ta.

dentist, meeting, tooth, veteran's day

YAVD

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Given that I am a science wonk and computer nerd, I couldn’t resist using an acronym for my title. Just in case you wonder, Yet Another Veteran’s Day (YAVD). It was a bit strange to see city employees out and about as I went to the store this morning. The city takes Veteran’s Day as a holiday, but there aren’t a lot of other businesses that do so.

I was out and about today for my delayed dental appointment . Looks like I will be getting a crown put on the broken tooth. Not too surprising given that the tooth had a filling so old that the tooth enamel was eroding around it. One of the hazards of getting older. Unfortunately, over the next few years there are several other teeth that will probably reach the same state.

In line with being a computer nerd, I find the technology of dentistry amusing. First there were the computers in every examining room and electronic practice management tools, then there were digital x-rays shown on the computer and filed electronically with the patients records, and finally the fiber optic “in the mouth” camera to show what is going on and the problem areas. It gives the dentist a chance to see things from a different angle and the patient a chance to understand what the dentist is talking about. How long before they have one attached to all the instruments? How long after that before robots akin to the surgical robots now coming into use start doing the actual dentistry? Enough about the foibles of dentistry and teeth.

There is a city council meeting tonight in spite of it being a city holiday. The scheduling question came before the council several weeks ago as we could move the meeting forward or back a day, but the decision was made to hold the meeting on Tuesday as normal. We made the decision in an interesting manner – we asked the veteran’s on the council their desire and they were unanimously in favor of holding the meeting as regularly scheduled. There was a general feeling that democratic government was one of the reasons veterans had served. So we will honor their wishes on the day that we honor them.

Off to the meeting I go …

Halliburton, patent

Abuse of the System

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I don’t know about you, but I tend to keep an eye on the technical news. Every once in a while, something passes by that I have a hard time believing. Today is one of those days. Of course, it involves everyone’s second most favorite villain (only because Microsoft won that race long ago). Without further ado, I give you the Halliburton of the day as reported in Slashdot :

Halliburton, the company many folks know as Dick Cheney’s previous employer, has apparently taken an interest in methods of patent trolling. In fact, according to Techdirt, the company has applied for a patent on patent trolling. Specifically, it’s applied for a patent on the process of finding a company that protected an invention via trade secret, figuring out what that secret is, patenting it … and then suing the original company.



So there you have it. A patent designed to raid other people’s patentable stuff and then legally rape them with their own tools. What I have begun referring to as a Halliburton.


I have been through the process of applying for a “process” patent. I cannot believe this kind of abuse of the patent system will acceptable to the intellectual property community. The USPTO may very well grant the patent, but I hope that the legal battles involved in enforcement would favor the original trade secret organization. I understand that protection of an invention via trade secret is open to loss by disclosure. Not only losing the crown jewel, but having to pay royalties to a raider who used this process for using your own crown jewel just seems wrong.


What do you think?

coincidence effect, subjective validation, XXX effect

The XXX Effect

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My wife and I often joke about the XXX effect (where XXX is our last name). For years, it has seemed that we can arrive at any store or event and the premises are nearly deserted. But, and this is a big but, within seconds of our arrival there is a crowd and or line behind us. Thus the XXX effect is where we arrive and the crowds follow. Given that we have a rather common last name, it could be cited as an instance of keeping up with the XXX’s.

There is a second more ominous XXX effect that seems to follow us as well. If an important event in our life happens in a building, the building is not long for this world. For example, the hospital where I was born was torn down and the site is now an apartment building,  the grade school I attended was torn down years ago and city hall now sits on the property, the school I attended for junior high was torn down and the site is now occupied by an industrial building, the chapel of the church where we were married burned down shortly after our ceremony, etc. The list goes on and on. We tell people not to suggest that we have any important event in their building. After all you know what could happen.

All the cited instances of XXX effects are examples of the coincidence effect in action. You will note that my narrative left out all the events that didn’t fall into the pattern I expostulated. The coincidence effect is also known as subjective validation . Stripped of some of the psychobabble, it simply means that one’s personal beliefs lead to the attribution of a relationship between two or more events even when careful scientific examination shows no relationship.

Much so called “paranormal phenomena” is the result of such attribution. I have often felt bad for serious psychoscientists because they invariably get cornered by people convinced that subjective validation has disclosed the secrets of the universe to them. It can be very hard to change a persons beliefs, even in the face of hard evidence to the contrary. It can be even harder to show them how their own beliefs lead to a bias in interpretation of the facts. It can make party conversation interesting, but it has never been shown to illuminate any new great truth. Oh well. That’s probably why I am a physical scientist at heart.

battle, cleaning, oven

The Battle of the Flaming Oven

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I finally broke down and cleaned the oven today. Well, to be honest I sort of had to.  And to be more honest, it was closer to genocide than cleaning. It was a long story …

On Wednesday I almost lost the battle with the keeper of the oven door. He demanded the password before he would let me fully open the door. Unfortunately, they had changed the password since the last time I had used the oven. I was ready to give up and forgo making my casserole, but …

Along came this nice fellow and blabbed the new password. Then they had to let me in to bake my casserole. (I think he knew that my casserole was going to bubble over and leave the oven floor covered in all sorts of new detritus.)

Unfortunately, after a day or so, the detritus on the oven floor started to grow and breed some pretty funky creatures. They started chanting and demanding food in loud voices. They were even keeping Molly the dog and I awake at night.


This was the local gang leader. He seemed to exercise a deep and dark control over the rest of the mutants inhabiting the oven floor. Note the natural camouflage. He blended right in with spillage coating the oven floor. He (or maybe she) never communicated directly with me, but instead sent his/her lawyer/mouthpiece to yell at me.

This was his mouthpiece.  One of the better arguments in favor of adaptive evolution and lawyers.

Yesterday I finally demanded to be taken to their leader. I really didn’t have a choice. When I opened the oven door, I found a group of the mutant beasties dancing round a large fire on the oven floor. It’s really hard to cook a pizza over an open flame like that. Besides, it smelled really bad.

This handsome fellow took me by the ear and pulled my head to the back of the oven to talk to the queen of the mutants. She informed me that my repeated attempts to destroy her little kingdom by turning on the heat in the oven had to stop or it was going to be all out war.

The queen and I discussed the situation for a bit. She was adamant that I quit turning on the heat and wanted guaranteed delivery of new food supplies. I stuck to my demands to allow the cooking of  my pizza pie. I was saving my demand to cut the chanting off at midnight for the final phase of negotiations. We were at a stand still. It looked like the only hope of peaceful coexistence was to call in an outside negotiator. So I asked Molly the dog to step in and suggest a solution. Molly was unable to achieve a breakthrough. Molly started barking and running in circles and the queen declared war on me.

I felt fully justified in pulling up the door shields and locking the oven door. Then I set the timers and left for a few hours. When I returned, all that was left was a fine coating of gray ash. Thus ended the battle of the flaming oven. Sometimes mass genocide is the only way.

It seems lonely today without the background chanting. Even Molly looks quizzically at the oven from time to time. Maybe she is seeing ghosts.

Things Done Right