Barbara Allen/Barbry Ellen/Tecumseh Valley

I was listening to Meg Baird Sing "Barbry Ellen" (about 3½ minutes into the link below) when I was struck by the similarity of her version with Townes Van Zandt's "Tecumseh Valley". Her treatment of "Sweet William on his death bed lay
For love of Barbara Allen.
reminds me of Tecumseh Valley's
"The name she gave was Caroline
Daughter of a miner"
I'll pester one of the music instructors when school is back in session to see if I'm close.

Second Worst Interview on NPR

Michel Martin's interview with former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was the second worst interview I've heard in the 31 years I've been listening to NPR.  (The worst interview was Daniel Zwerdling's interview with Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture.)

Martin should have asked Gonzales how it was that he could recall events now when he couldn't even remember if he was wearing underwear when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee 9 years ago.  At the hearing Gonzales said ""I cannot recall..." or "I don't recall" over 70 times.

Absolutely appalling.

Covert hard Drive Noise

https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.03431

The quick an dirty: using malware and no speakers, researchers could force air-gapped computers - computers logically and physically disconnected from the Internet - to generate audio signals at "effective bit rate of 180 bits/minute (10,800 bits/hour) and a distance of up to two meters (six feet)."  The signal could be received by a computer, smartphone, etc.

That's nice, but at 180 bits/minute that works out to ~23 characters a minute, assuming ASCII encoding.  That might work for a password hack which may be all one needs.  

It might be just the push some organization will need to move to SSDs because the hack wprks by generating a specific audio frequencies by controlling the movements of the HDD's actuator arm. Digital Information can be modulated over the acoustic signals.  No actuator arm no signal.

Our security guy replied to my note about DiskFiltration by saying that a lot of this stuff was coming from last week's BlackHat conference. 

We Survive a Swarm of Teenagers or Give Me Girls Every Time

An adjunct instructor was contacted about creating a field trip for a summer camp for disadvantaged middle and high school students.  Before you could say, "Whoa!" I was up to my eyeballs recruiting faculty to participate and then introducing the faculty to the adjunct so they'd read her (the adjunct's email) or put a face to a voice.

My bit of business was a piece of cake: show them how to create a program in Alice to do the following:

.
Not terribly exciting, but it would be the first programming experience for a lot of the kids.  The program could be used to explain how making intelligent decisions concerning logic would enable the same code to work regardless of how the bunny was positioned relative to the chicken.

What could go wrong?  Well for starters, a power outage a few weeks before made about half the PCs unable to login.  The software wasn't working on half the remaining PCs.  And, ever the good sole I had the Computer Center create special single use accounts in the room I was going to use and the computer lab for another presenter.  (The special accounts allowed the students to login, access the web, but not create files on network drives.)

Two former students agreed to demonstrate resonant frequencies.  We were pretty sure that the kids had never heard of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and they'd be impressed to learn that engineers had to design buildings so that the structures didn't shake apart.  One later had her work schedule changed so it was down to one student.

I tried to use a web cam to allow a whole room to see what was happening on a shaker table.  I needed a long video cable, but the cable sent over didn't have the right pinning, but we managed to survive.  I was told the students were impressed that their minders were impressed.

I did my due diligence: checking out PCs in my room and the room used by another presenter and filing more than 2 dozen help desk tickets.  Because it was summer and the usual tech guy was on vacation, the Computer Center was in some turmoil as the Center's least favorite director was canned earlier in the week, I was rescued by some daring-do not described here lest some unnamed forces react badly.  (Murky I know, but, trust me, it's better that way.)

On the day of I got a shock when I found an instructor reading his Wall Street Journal in the room where I expected to make a presentation to about 40 kids 3 times.   It went like this:

"Hey Mike, what are you doing here?"
"What do you mean what am I doing here?  This is where I teach my class."

Uh-oh!  Scheduling conflict.  I don't think it was my doing, but definitely now my problem.  After some consultation, pleading, and abasement.  Mike agreed to hold his class next door and I would be out of his usually scheduled room in time for his students to use the computers.

It was an interesting experience because the kids showed up late because they'd walked over instead of coming over by bus.

The girls were great.  The followed instructions, raised hands when they had questions, and responded to questions.  The guys?  The ability to make the chicken cackle seemed irresistible to many.

It was gratifying.  One young woman wanted to know if she could have me as her teacher if she came to my college.  I should have said, "I'd love to have you."  I'm not used to dealing with kids.  What I said instead was, "If you come here you'd have to register for my course."  Bureaucratic.  I should be ashamed of myself.

On the other hand, a couple, including one of their minders, asked how they could get the software.  I gave all the info to the adjunct who got me into this and let her pass it along.

All students survived.  All equipment remained intact and in place.  From my point of view: Success!

I imagine that it might become a yearly summer event.  If so I'd be boring the students if I reused the same demonstration.  It might be cool though to have students send a signal over the web to activate a a piston to push something over an edge.  Shouldn't that appeal to the nihilism of grade school kids?

Trump and the Jerk Pride Movement

Donald Trump, the gift that keeps on giving.

When David Letterman, the former host of the Late Night Show, heard that Donald Trump decided to enter the presidential race he moaned that he had retired too early.

Trump has truly been an inspiration for pundits to sharpen their wit.

Patricia Nelson Limerick, faculty director and chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, co author of "The Frontier in American Culture", called Trump the standard-bearer for the currently booming “Jerk Pride Movement”  (www.denverpost.com/2015/12/18/limerick-jerk-studies-101/).

Her research, dating back many years established that the consensus of people who dealt with the public (waiters, hotel clerks, cab drivers, etc) was that 15% of the public were jerks.

Quoting from the article,

Trump should be understood as the standard-bearer for the currently booming “Jerk Pride Movement,” in which the Fifteen Percent stride vigorously out of the closet and present themselves to the world, shouting out wildly over-generalized, destructive, and polarizing sentiments and then, still shouting, congratulating themselves for their impressive forthrightness.

Because Limerick claims that her “research” showed the percentage of jerks in the population is 15% she was surprised that a cab driver put the number at only 5%.   Five percent,” he repeated. “But they move around a lot.”

Thinking this could be the basis of a serious question in a research methods class (sociology, psychology, marketing, analytics, etc.)  I forwarded the information to several profs in those areas.

Yes, it’s part of a joke, but assuming that the cab driver were correct, that the true number is 5%, what other error other than exceptionally poor math skills, double counting, or really poor sampling technique would explain the discrepancy?

Flotsam from 2014

I discovered some mail and papers from 2014.  There were some medical bills, since paid, some phone numbers without associated names, some jokes which must have come from "Prairie Home Companion" on the back of an old final exam, and notes on the back of a quarterly statement from an annuity.

The annuity:

I remembered calling the annuity to find out what a "non-qualified annuity" was.  The guy I reached seemed delighted to enthusiastically explain everything in great detail.  I knew I had just become just-like-everyone-else because I couldn't follow him.

It is not supposed to be that way.  Maybe I was tired, It means that I should call again and this time record some definitive answers to some simple questions.  If I only knew what those simple questions might be.

The jokes:

"Cross-country skiing is easier in a small country."

"Go for the juggler."  (The punch line for a number of related jokes: "What should you if attacked by a mob of clowns?" and "How do you kill a circus?")

"What is all dressed up and no place to go?"  A Unitarian corpse.

A classic chemistry joke:

"I've lost an electron!"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."

And this, a joke many women have found funny:

Q: What is the difference between a married man and a dead man?
A: When you're dead you don't wish you were married."

Stumbled Across Two Books About Wine and Drink

Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer's Tour of France (2013) by Kermit Lynch.  I read a bit here and there.  Lynch is a charming writer to whom I'm now grateful for the Billat-Savarin description of the two features which distinguish man from beast: 1) Fear of the future and 2) Desire for fermented liquors 

Notes on a Cellar-Book ((2008) by George Saintsbury and Thomas Pinney  According to the notation, Saintsbury was a gifted and prolific writer.  I stumbled around online and found this quote from his critical introduction to Gibbons: ""There were some things—not many—which he did not and could not know; but almost everything that there was for him to know he knew."  That seems to be the type of praise every critic would want.

I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Resent the Waste of Time

I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens at a local library. It stirred memories:

• A friend and I paid $1 each to see Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. As the movie played we'd whisper to each other: "99¢",  "98¢", until Sean Connery appeared to kick the value from 45¢ to 50¢
• Then there was my father's voice, "Who wrote this crap?"

The film brought to mind that old, snarky comment: "The dialog was so wooden as to constitute a fire hazard."  The dialog would have been right at home on title cards.

The First Order's got technology to destroy multiple planets with a super-duper weapon, but don't have video surveillance of their own installation.  Maybe it's a fixer-up film:  Hollywood makes the film and viewers can amuse themselves patching plot holes.   Sorry guys, I have stuff to do I real life.

The incomprehensible is just perfect

The mud line on the Doonesbury strip quoted James Parker's piece in the November 3rd Book Review section on Donald Trump's opinions (www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/books/review/is-legitimate-satire-necessarily-directed-at-the-powerful.html):

Trump’s opinions — which I don’t believe are ­really opinions at all, but random clots and thrombi of rhetorical ectoplasm gathered from the ether with high-end paranormal pooper-scoopers.

Much like Ball's description of Trump as a gap in the space-time continuum, the statement forms a nice companion or parallel to the phenominon of the Trump campaign.

I look forward to the Iowa vote to see how reality as represented by physical votes matches the polls and surveys.  If a sizeable percentage of Republican voters believe that the President is a Muslim and a smaller, but statistically signiicant percentage of adults, still believe that Obama was born in Kenya it is hard to make a reasonable prediction.

I see only two courses of action: relax and laugh or relax and cry.

Flesh-colored gap in the space-time continuum

An item on Doonesbury's Mud Line sent me to the Atlantic website to read Molly Ball's August 13, 2015 article "Donald Trump and the Search for the Republican Soul" (www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/donald-trump-and-the-search-for-the-republican-soul/401192/).  A good article, main memorable by the a great quip,  flesh-colored gap in the space-time continuum."

Credit is hereby given to Ms Ball.

Donald Trump, God's gift to comedians, is a true phenomenon.  (David Letterman lamented having left his late night talk show 2 weeks before the Donald announced his candidacy.)  Rational beings, in my belief, would regard Trump as an exceptionally wealth clown with a surprising limited vocabulary worth of a few chortle-inducing sideshow.

That he isn't, or because he's been the front-runner in the polls for the Republican nomination for President, (polls show have him as the front runner with 32% of likely Republican voters) makes me wonder if all this noise is because no voting has yet taken place.  I look forward to the primaries where levers get pulled.  (Metaphors may be changing.  Voting may be when pen meets paper.)

There was a recent piece on WNYC radio this morning in which a magazine author (didn't get the names and can't find it on their web site) argued that Trump was a failure as a businessman.  The argument was that had Trump put the $40 million he inherited in 1974 into the general stock market (equivalent of an S&P market index fund) he would have more money than he has with all his business dealings.

My simple check is that the author is wrong.  In 1974 the S&P was in the mid 80's to the mid-90's.  The high for this year was 2063.  A hypothetical standard investment would have increased a shade under 24 times.  So $40 million times 24 is $960 million.  Not a trivial sum, but not a billion which now seems to be the benchmark for serious money.

Action and Reaction in the Real World

Physics at the Newtonian level is pretty simple: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  (I imagine a rising chorus of objections from students dealing with Stokes Law, coefficients in the Starling equation, or multi-body interaction problems.  I acknowledge them, but beg their indulgence.)

It is far less simple when dealing with people.

When the Ashley Madison website was hacked (www.ashleymadison.com "The Original Extramarital Affairs Site") the personal information of 37 million users was posted to the Internet. (For the kids out there that's a three and a seven followed by six zeroes.  Other reports put the number at 32 million.  Even for China that's a lot of people.)  Some of the email addresses were from government sites prompting some to fear that the information could be used not just for the usual blackmail and social embarrassment, but to compromise security .

Among the names was Josh Duggar, the oldest child on the cable channel reality television show, "19 Kids and Counting".  The show focused on the Duggar family, devout Christians who don't practice birth control and whose children follow strict courtship rules.  He's had some documented problems in the past with "inappropriate behavior" when he was younger.  In all the hoopla when that was revealed I don't recall discussions of the fact that he apparently confessed to his parents and accepted responsibility.  I always expect evasion and denial before admission, but that didn't seem to be the case.

Although it'll be some time living down his handle, "josh_the_man", but I'm indebted to him for this quote:

"As I am learning the hard way, we have the freedom to choose to our actions, but we do not get to choose our consequences." (http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/20/us/josh-duggar-ashley-madison)

So, speak and die

For years I've been trying to find the quote.  I couldn't remember the speaker's name, only that the translation was powerful.  I found the reference to Tahar Djaout in a review of “The Meursault Investigation” by Kamel Daoud in the June 8, 2015 NY Times:

There are several translations.  In the quote in the review was:

Silence is death And if you say nothing you die, And if you speak you die. So speak and die. 

If you speak, you die. If you do not speak, you die. So, speak and die. ( izquotes.com/author/tahar-djaout)

I remember the quote as If you speak, they will kill you.  If you do not speak, they will kill you. So, speak and die.

To quote from the wikipedia entry for Tahar Djaout:

He was assassinated by the Armed Islamic Group because of his support of secularism and opposition to what he considered fanaticism. He was attacked on May 26, 1993, as he was leaving his home in Bainem, Algeria. He died on June 2, after lying in a coma for a week.

“Le silence, c’est la mort, et toi, si tu te tais, tu meurs. Et si tu parles, tu meurs. Alors dis et meurs.” - (http://www.algerie-focus.com/blog/2015/01/quand-tahar-djaout-symbolise-le-courage-face-aux-terrorisme-aux-yeux-des-journalistes-francais/)

Another Sign of the End Times

Before I realized that they no longer existed, I used to misquote Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2, 71–78, "First kill all proofreaders."  When I see things like this on May 27, 2015, I despair.

Most programs have spell checkers.  Is it possible that "familiy" is a term of art in the music/entertainment industry?  No.  I don't think so.

More likely those who write the content are as oblivious as me, ignoring whatever marks indicate a misspelling.  A number of links to the full article have the same error, although the article itself has family spelled correctly.

AppInventor Hands-on Exam

At the end of each semester I give a hands-on exam, which, among other things, allows the students to demonstrate that they can actually write an app using AppInventor.  It is difficult to know if the homework assignments were done by the student or someone else.

In fairness it must be said that a hands-on exam is fairly stressful, but I do provide sample problems for practice.  From half a dozen apps a student has to choose one.  Within minutes I can tell who will do well: their level of anxiety drops.  I can almost hear them think, oh this is like the other one, but with some differences.

I've come to expect that there will be a few students who'll rip through the exam about as fast as I can.  Then there are a whole bunch who struggle a bit, but eventually get it.  And then their are the others who were in class with their eyes open, but apparently didn't get it, didn't come for help, and don't get it, whatever that "it" might be.

Some will rip through the exam about as fast as I can.  There will be a group which struggles and eventually get something close to right.  And then there will be the others who were in class, with their eyes open, and don't seem to have a clue.

The students had to send me their app as an attachment in email.  The timestamps says it all.  Look at the gap after 3:56:

I try to have the students show me their app prior to submitting in case they overlooked a requirement or were on the wrong track.  I've found it useless to have them call me over if they don't understand the problem.  Those who don't understand the problem either don't realize that they're misinterpreting the instructions or they're in the sad contingent who're just waiting for a respectable time to leave.

There was one student, bored while waiting for me to give her app a once over, spent the time enhancing her app.  The requirements for the app she chose only ask that she create an app which would allow the user to choose a club and display the name of the club and the maximum occupancy.  The "listpicker" looked normal.

The results didn't.  I can honestly say that I enjoyed grading here app and gaving her full credit.

omeone ay to l

Rent in Ecuador's Eden For $600 or Less

I've amused myself looking at overseas retirement offerings.  Retirement means older people and older people mean preoccupations in this approximate order:

1. Cost of living
2. Language and and expat community
3. Availability of health care
4. Transportation (more important as they get older)

Right behind those seems to be life style things: golf, swimming, sailing, potential for extra income

Considering my lack of life style, disinterest in golf, swimming, sailing, talking to people, and going anywhere, my first concern is Internet speed.  (This will probably change as I race toward my dotage.  Of course, if my legs aren't the first thing to go I might never realize that I can't talk to anyone and my health is already in the toilet.)

Just a short while ago, intrigued by International Living's come-on, "Rent in Ecuador's Eden For $600 or Less":

In fact, when the Ecuadorian tourism bureau decided to market the country as "The Land of Eternal Spring," I'm convinced it had Vilcabamba in mind. With temperature highs averaging between 74 F and 79 F and lows never dropping below the mid-50s F, it's tough for me to imagine a more ideal climate.

an online search and several links later my browser got to http://www.vilcabamba-hotel.com.

This caught my eye.

I can see where this would give Jewish retirees pause. Put the 3 words "gas" and "showers" and "Jews" together and all sorts of warning bells go off.   "Gas showers" probably means gas heated showers, but you can see how if might give pause to those of a certain religion.

A click on the VILCANET link produced a blank page for about a minute.  Maybe I hit them just as they were experiencing a DDOS, but Ecuador's Eden will need upgraded communication services before it's worthy of the name.

All Systems Are Normal

I tried to reach an email account at 1and1.com when my browser was redirected to the page you see below:

They had finished some system maintenance and updates were being propagated to the various servers.  It was obvious that not all the servers had gotten updated hence the incorrect message.  My preference would be a John Oliver rant with a happy face with a nail in its eye, which, let's face it, is a more appropriate visual than a white check mark on a green circle.

I've been through this too many times to be more than disgruntled.  I will note, if only to myself, that this is typical of support and help desks.  I seem to stumble over more errors at work than the average bear.  A ticket will be automatically opened when email is sent and closed because research is being done or the problem has been reported to a vendor or supplier, not when the problem is resolved.

The stats look good.  The real question is who, if anyone, is being fooled?

Ted Cruz will run

As they say you can't make this up:

To quote from the story:

While in New Hampshire, Cruz told voters his daughter, Caroline, had given him permission to join the presidential race in the hopes that the family puppy would get to play on the White House lawn instead of near their Houston high-rise condo. 

 "If you win, that means Snowflake will finally get a backyard to pee in," Cruz said his daughter told him. 

Somewhat later:

In a recent Associated Press interview, he said he wants to counter the "caricatures" of the right as "stupid," ''evil" or "crazy."

I always thought Cruz was a very smart guy who realized that he could make a lot of money from conservative people who had money to give.  There was nothing in his own actions to counter the caricature of evil or cynical attributes of the right.

As flag burning was ruled a right under free speech, I guess the argument can be made that his daughter will be asserting her free speech rights on government property.

I can't quite see the bumper sticker, but I wait with breathless anticipation.  For the time being I'll have to be content with: "Ted Cruz, the first person and only Republican presidential candidate is already in last place."

Spocking Fives and Dick Nixon Stamp

Proof that the Canadians have a sense of humor is documented by “Spocking fives” described as "a fine Canadian tradition that involves etching the beloved Vulcan’s profile over Canada’s seventh prime minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier on the five-dollar banknote." (qz.com/353488/canadians-spock-their-banknotes-to-honor-leonard-nimoy/)

It brought to mind a cherished memory of  the Nixon stamp.   Some would add to the postmark (below left) or one could purchase special envelopes with a place for he Nixon stamp (below right).  Legend has it that sales of the Nixon stamp surged in response to the envelope. 

According to a contemporaneous report in the LA Times (articles.latimes.com/1995-07-09/news/mn-21870_1_nixon-stamp) 10,000 envelopes were sold in a month.

Thom Zajac, publisher of the Santa Cruz Comic News, a cartoon newspaper, was quoted as saying "Buy soon, because according to the post office, you won't have Dick Nixon to lick around anymore."

As of this post, the envelopes are offered on eBay for $2 each.

"The crack of the bat on Vine Street"

I give my Intro Computer Science class an essay assignment on web indexing based on a chapter in the book, 9 Algorithms That Changed the Future (ISBN 978-0-691-15819-8).  One of the questions they have to answer is why indexing is based on words instead of phrases.

There are a number of different explanations.  The one which now stands out for me is that the user may be searching for the wrong phrase.

That's exactly what happened to me.  There was a lovely Randy Newman song on van Dyke Parks debut Song Cycle (1967) album which I thought contained the line, "The crack of the bat on Vine Street".  A web search failed to find the reference in the first 3 pages.

I remembered the lyrics as written in the subject because I distinctly remember the crack of a baseball bat accompanying the word "bat".  When I finally tracked down the song it turns out that I mis-heard the lyric.

You can hear it yourself on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxOVjZW6U-k).  Because songs merge into one another Vine Street itself begins at about 50 seconds into the youtube video with the lyric in question starting about 2:54.

I clipped the segment of the song from youtube.  The "bat" in the lyric that I remembered as "The crack of the bat on Vine Street" was actually "back beat".  The word "beat" was partially obscured by the sound of the crack of the bat sound effect about 18 seconds in on the clip below.

Twilight Zone at the Emergency Room

I dropped a friend at the hospital emergency room yesterday, parked the car off site, and (cue Twilight Zone music) couldn't find her anywhere.  I'll skip the details, but you can imagine them better than I can describe them as I wandered through the emergency room asking if anyone had seen her.  Two checks on the hospital's computer showed no trace, nobody seemed to have seen her, and a call to her cell phone went directly to voice mail.

The rational explanation was that I was a little too fast and probability had its way with me.  My friend had not been entered in the system the first two times I asked and a shuffling of personnel moved everyone who'd seen her (two guards, 2 clerks, and a couple of medical techs) to other areas.

It took about 10 minutes, but the clerk who'd walked my friend from the waiting area said oh, yes, she remembered, and wearing a visitor's badge with the number of the examining roomI located her.

I spent the rest of the evening reading some old trade rags and the current Law Technology News (now Legaltech News, LTN) I'd brought along.

The best part of the evening was finding a tidbit which reminded me about Matthew Kluger, who, as a lawyer at 3 big name law firms used his computer access to improve his fortunes to the tune of $37M through insider trading (dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/two-charged-in-insider-trading-scheme-tied-to-law-firms/).  In some cases all he needed to do was see the names of the files to be tipped off to potential M&A action.  This little factoid will make its way into future discussions of meta data.

The wait also included listening to a guy who may have been a Vietnam vet yell about being disrespected, spied on, taken advantage of, ignored, abused, and frustrated that nobody wanted to know the truth.  I walked over to take a look.  He appeared to be short guy about 5'6 - 5'7" lying on a gurney with a female attendant keeping his eye on him.  He also seemed to be a subject of fascination to another guy who was handcuffed to a gurney with a few cops standing in close proximity.

I would like to say something snarky, but it doesn't seem appropriate.

Oh, my friend, nothing seemed to be wrong and she checked herself out.  She seems fine today.

I know some abuse the emergency rooms, but I remember an incident from many years ago when I was a grad student.  One of the electronic techs wasn't feeling well one day.  The guy with whom he car pooled suggested that he go to the emergency room, but the tech said no.  The tech's wife found him face down dead when she got home.

Several times since I've said to people, go to the emergency room.  Some people may laugh at you for being alarmed but I will not be one of them.  I took my own advice one snowy day.  After an initial examination for an unusual chest pain I spent several hours in the waiting room.  All I can remember is watching a Matlock rerun until they told me that it appeared to be nothing.

And so, dear diary, that was yesterday's excitement.