Bemused

To my amazement, I have actually gotten some comments on this blog. I did not expect that. And what's even more amazing, they were positive comments. They didn't tell me that I am not all that lucid, or that I write about things that are so boring as to make dust look captivating, or things that No One Cares About, Jack.

I am grateful to these people, because, truth to tell, I don't think that most people would find what I write all that interesting. I like to think about a lot of different things, but my thinking is pretty shallow, most of the time. Terrorism Bad. Chocolate Good. That sort of thing isn't deep, like you find in lots of other blogs. What's that saying about the Mississippi (and then there's the joke about the little kid who said he knew how to SPELL Mississippi, he just didn't know when to stop), that its a mile wide and an inch deep? I think sometimes that that's a good description of my range of interests. I like lots of things, but I don't tend to go very deep on them. Like the character said in Robert Parker's novels, I know more things that won't make you money....

Here's an obscure example. In my job, I deal with people who need to set up computing environments (man, does that sound stodgy), like setting up a new mainframe and all of the associated software. In the last go-round, one of the groups had a problem. They were trying to make software that used to run on one machine, and read from a database there, run on another machine but still read from that same database. To do this, they used a function called DDF, or Distributed Data Facility. Well, this jewel didn't work as advertised. It was way slow. So, with the calm, professional demeanor that we always exhibit, we went into panic mode alpha. Could it be this? Maybe its that? What about -- the soda machine? Could it be the soda machine?

No, it wasn't the soda machine.

As my little part, I started reading about how this communication is supposed to work, to see if I could figure out if we'd done something wrong in setting it up. This got me into reading about how you set it up, and what the pieces of software do, how they talk to each other, all of this. And I was really enjoying this -- to the point that when they came and said hey, we found the problem, you can stop now, I was disappointed. Because I was enjoying reading about this stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with me, or what I do for a living. It was just fun stuff.

That's what I like to do -- find something and learn something about it. But it has to be something that isn't relevant to what I do. Like Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes, said, Its only fun if someone isn't making you do it. So I know what the M in M&Ms stands for. I know what a curtain wall is, and what the Bundle of His is. I know that in a Minuteman launch center, you don't 'press the red button', you turn the key. I know how a bar code works (well, kind of), and what Bernoulli's Principle has to do with airplanes. I know what an algorithm is. Stuff like that. And that's the kind of thing I like to write about, too.

Enough navel gazing. I was reading an article about the US Presidential election, the other day, and was startled to read that 'many undecided voters are going to wait until the day of voting to decide who they'll vote for. They'll use a heuristic to decide." Heuristic? I know what a heuristic is -- so do you; its a rule of thumb, more or less -- but to see the word in print in a newspaper was as flabbergasting as if they'd said 'They'll flip a coin, and of course the odds are not, exactly, fifty-fifty, though they are very, very close.' It was a literate, accurate phrase. I'm not used to seeing that in the newspaper. I did wonder what the heuristics used would be, though. Well, Laura Bush is a charming person, but Teresa Kerry seems a bit tough; I'll vote for Laura, I mean, George. Democrats are for the little guy, Republicans are for the big guy; I'm a little guy, so I'll support the Democrats, and vote for Kerry. Hmm... Somewhere, some probably has this stuff figured out, and uses the subliminal and not-so-subliminal images in their ads.

How many red ties, white shirts, and blue suits do these guys have, anyway?



1) Mars and Murray. The company was founded by Forrest Mars and Bruce Murray.
2) Window wall. Used in a building where the support comes mostly from the core, where the elevators and such are.
3) Heart muscle that transmits 'electrical' impulses between nodes.
4) One big key for the commander, one small key for the deputy. On my mark, three, two, one, turn, light on, light off, missile away.
5) Binary code, with white/black being 1/0. Position matters.
6) The shape of the wing, seen edge on, makes the air flow slower on the bottom, where it's flat, than on the top, where it's curved. The slower air has more pressure, which generates lift. Though I did once see an old Army Air Corps writeup of an accident which listed the crash cause as 'insufficient lift in the air'.
7) It's what you get when the former vice-president dances. (Sorry.)

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