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.

Howard

Howard was a student of mine in a college chemistry class. A few years later I met him by chance at supermarket. "Howard," I asked, "have your grown? You seem taller than when you were in my class."

"No," he replied, "I've been this height ever since you knew me." He added, "I think instructors look down on students." It is a pun worth remembering.

It turned out he was in computers. A comparison of our earnings motivated me to look into switching careers. Howard moved on from computers, but that's what I've been doing for about 30 years.

Later, he became my broker. His only problem was that he didn't treat me like my mother. Howard used broker speech whereas my mother would say, "Sell it you damn fool."

It may not seem funny now, but when we couldn't get into a van Gogh exhibit, Howard suggested that we threaten to cut off our ears unless they let us in. We laughed ourselves silly. We laughed even harder as we walked up Fifth Avenue as mothers yanked their children out of the path of the two giddy lunatics.

I miss him.

Farewell Steve Post

Steve Post, a legendary, wry, long-time morning personality on WNYC-FM, died yesterday, Sunday.

A self-described curmudgeon, I found his sour, irreverent comments on the news appealing.  When reading press releases about accidents at the Indian Point nuclear power plant he might conclude "Authorities claim - all together now - no significant release of radiation".

Once, as part of a group invitation to broadcasters, he got to meet with Richard Nixon.  A non-disclosure agreement prevented him from discussing the specifics, but he was able to say, "I've never seen a man more uncomfortable in his own skin."  It was an illuminating description.

His last show, carried this tagline: "The No Show is a showcase for the idiosyncratic views and humor of Steve Post, a world-class curmudgeon whose irreverence and iconoclasm have entertained audiences and appalled radio station managers for four decades.sm have entertained audiences and appalled radio station managers for four decades."

Of course, fund raising could never be the same without his emotional breakdown during on-air fund drives.

He appealed to me in part because he claimed to live a life of not so quiet desperation

Amazon's profits

The headline "Why Amazon is Losing $410 to $810 Million this Quarter" led me to an article in SupplyChain247 with the image shown below.

 It took a third look before I found the line on the baseline to see how trivial Amazon's profits were.  I remembered advice given by Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation.  After confessing that he hadn't known what the word entrepreneur meant he said that the people who were willing to finance a young business were old.  They expected the business to showprofits during the time they had left on earth.

Times seem to have changed.  Profitless businesses are given sky-rocketing valuations.  Olsen is long gone now.  DEC was purchased by Hewlett Packard.  He'd probably be as mystified as I am by the money and services available today.

Bookshelf Porn

An article in the April 25, NY Times Magazine, "On Their Death Bed, Physical Books Have Finally Become Sexy" by Mireille Silcoff mentioned the web site bookshelfporn.com. which consists of pictures of books and book shelves.

Links from that site lead to tumblr.com ("I Have Bookworms"), a Zurich hotel's library, and book art.  It isn't clear how to get the books from the top tier from the hotel's library.  (A more fastidious person might wonder about dusting them, but it was an afterthought for me.)

The sight of all the the books makes my heart skip a beat and then there's the twinge of sadness for the knowledge that I'll never be able to read even the good ones.

Most of the images are from book stores and libraries, but there are occasional images from private homes.  The crux of the Times article was that physical books were now perceived as a status symbol to be displayed as backdrops in advertising layouts or demonstrations of culture in shelter magazines.

There's so much to say about the non-reading culture, those who don't want to read.  I think I get an insight when I visit a home where the books devoted to religious piety, promoting "perfect health", or "food porn". I have no interest in reading them.  Is that the non-reader's attitude to all books?

All the world's a stage ...

I stumbled across an old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon which seems to have gotten it right: life is obviously unrehearsed and everyone is ad-libbing their lines.  Sometimes, when watching a movie, I'll respond to a character's question by saying that if they read the script they'd know what was happening.

Trailer Park Investment Vehicles

Today, Yahoo Finance's Nicole Goodkind interviewed Anthony Effinger, the author of a forthcoming article, "Double Wide Returns", for Bloomberg Markets.  Describing trailer parks as “a supply and demand curve that’s super attractive to investors”  Effinger pointed out the demand is created by the shrinking middle class: "people with bad credit and criminal histories who are often unable to rent or buy homes."

There are problems of course.  Home meth labs and the occasional visit from a SWAT team can add to the excitement of the investment.

A comment by Mariner calls for a bumper sticker: "Paperless office to cardboard box homes in less than two decades. I am America (and so can you!)"

Stunned Again By Ignorance

In my computer science class I was trying to make an analogy between the way a computer monitor displays color and the famous painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat.

There was something about their response, or more accurately their non-response.  I asked them to raise their hands if they'd seen the picture before.  None had.

It was not just an analogy wasted.  It was a smack in the face making manifest the complaint that art education is suffering.

The painting should be famous.  How had they managed to not see it?

I wrote to a number of friends who were unsympathetic.  One replied that it was something which was going to happen more frequently as I got older.  I understand people not knowing my obscure references, but "La Grande Jatte" is supposed to be famous enough to be the source of inspiration for the musical, Sunday in the Park with George.

It should be something to motivate me to become an activist, but I look at the exams to be graded, lessons to be prepared, and I despair.

A few days later I picked up a pre-publication copy of Intel Trinity, How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company By Michael S. Malone.  There was a description in the first chapter of  a set piece in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California: an older engineer enthusiastically explaining the details of an obsolete piece of hardware to a bored looking younger engineer.  I wondered whether it would be an accurate description of my fate.

I'm not an engineer, but I've been fascinated by old technology.  While the specific technology may be irrelevant to today's economy, the lessons learned in the development, marketing, and life span are important: either for relevance or as a cautionary tale.

Faced with a class of students expecting to create the next great app I mention Ronald Wayne, the almost unknown third founder of Apple who gave up his share to Jobs and Wozniak for a few thousand dollars.  While the other two were just kids, he was a businessman with a wife, kids, and mortgage ("The whole catastrophe" -Zorba the Greek) who'd already suffered one business loss.  While the two Stevers had little to lose he had dependents.

I point out to the students that as great as their ideas may be, getting others to join in may be obstructed by something as simple as the need for someone to feed a family.  You may quote me: "It is easier for a family to starve than an individual."

A Sentimental Education

The NY Times February 9th Book Review contained a section entitled, "A Sentimental Education" which contained reflections of a dozen writers on what books taught them about love.

I was struck by Mary Bly's analysis of "Romeo and Juliet":

As the play opens, Romeo is transfixed by his ability to play with language and desperately looking for an object of devotion. He greets Juliet with the first line of a quatrain — “If I profane with my unworthiest hand” — and the two proceed to build a sonnet together, first alternating stanzas, then lines. As Juliet conforms to Romeo’s rhyme scheme, the subject veers from chaste devotion to passion. They must listen intently in order to construct shared rhymes, and Shakespeare punctuates their final couplet with a kiss.

 I doubt I would ever realize that myself.

The same issue had a review of Edmund White's "Inside a Pearl" in which White described himself as "too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer".  The reviewer notes that the reference is to tobacco and alcohol, not "good  meals or sexual encounters, even after being told that he was H.I.V. positive".

Eating sushi off the body of a model in a bikini is politically incorrect.

Who knew?  Hey, you can't make this stuff up.

I went looking after a Madam & Eve weekend cartoon depicted a selfie of someone holding sushi in chopsticks in his right hand and a picture of a young woman with sushi rolls in the background.  I quick web search turned up an article on the British Telegraph date stamped 6:34PM GMT 31 Jan 2011 (www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8293895/South-Africas-ANC-deplores-sushi-on-models-after-scandal.html):

 

A quote without comment is the best:

A statement on Monday from the African National Congress secretary general Gwede Mantashe is unequivocal: "This act is anti-ANC and antirevolutionary. This act is defamatory, insensitive and undermining of woman's integrity."

The statement has a whiff of Stalinist denunciation of ________________ (fill in the blank).  One ideologue  would denounce another for not recognizing the insidious capitalist, counter-revolutionary evil inherent in, say, flossing.

If nothing else, this can be the a great political trivia question, e.g., in which country has eating sushi been denounced as counter-revolutionary.  (There may be a significant difference between "antirevolutionary" and "counter-revolutionary" but I don't give a rip.)

A time line of the scandal can be found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danny-groner/south-africas-sushi-scand_b_816724.html.

Greece: Prison Escapee Vows to Fight Again

They say quote without comment (from the NY Times 01/21/2014):

A leftist Greek guerrilla who walked away from a prison while on furlough this month announced his return to terrorism on Monday. ...Mr. Xiros, 55, was serving multiple life terms at the Korydallos Prison near Athens for a series of attacks carried out by the group, chiefly against Greek, British and American business and political targets over nearly three decades. He has been at large since failing to return from a nine-day furlough that began on Jan. 1. 

-/www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/world/europe/greece-prison-escapee-vows-to-fight-again.html

Can you imagine someone in an America jail going on a nine-day furlough after being sentenced to multiple life terms?   Oh those wacky Greeks!  What a bunch of kidders.

His online manifesto  (“Once again I have taken the decision to thunder the guerrilla rifle against those who stole our lives and sold our dreams for a profit”) is not likely to encourage the investment that Greece seems to need.  It's OK to ignore me: I'm  not an economist.

Keith Richard's School of Optimism

"I always look at life as a syringe half-full."

Credit should be give to Amy Dickenson on the January 18^th broadast of National Public Radio quiz show “Wait, Wait ... Don’t Tell Me!”.  In checking her names I found a NY Times article about her marriage to a childhood friend which included this:

She kept those thoughts to herself until March, when the couple visited New York. As they walked by the church designed by Mr. Schickel’s great-grandfather, he asked where she saw the relationship going. “She was silent for about a minute — completely silent,” Mr. Schickel said. “Then she said: ‘I’m sorry. I want to get married.’”  

Mr. Schickel needed no apology. He proposed on the spot.

The passage should serve as inspiration for an adult romantic comedy.

You won't need no camel

"You won't need no camel, oh no, when I take you for a ride."  Just loved Maria Muldaur's rendition on youtube:

It's a great song by a woman any guy would be proud to have her call him her man.  Whatever she lacked in purity of voice was more than compensated for with emotion.
I remember her from the Jim Kweskin Jug Band all those years ago and her rendition of I'm a Woman from her LP isn't bad either (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDs-7I3NElE&html5=1).  She had an endearing tick of quickly nodding before each stanza.  You can see it the youtube video Kate and Anna McGarrigle with Maria Muldaur: The Work Song (1984)
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGvq2Wl4Zvc)

Perhaps I'm sentimental about a Greenwhich Village kid from the folk era (or as Dave Van Ronk termed it, "The Great Folk Scare").  You can see her describe her accidental career on the LivingLegendsMusic videos (www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-bDEZ4RX38&list=PLsf7UsLoHI7-sGsSq2lTVq78vAVQbeckS)

James Lee Stanley

The other night I chanced across an interview of Peter Tork (of Monkees fame) who mentioned a friend of his, James Lee Stanley, and what Tork considered one of JLS's sense of humor:

Since food has replaced sex in my life I can't even get into my own pants.

In one of JLS's videos (Vicki Abelson's Women Who Write, Big Sur, 8/25/12) as part of giving the audience liberty to do what they wanted with videos of his performance he said:

Should you begin to make serious money selling copies of my shows would you please contact Beechwood Recording Studios in Los Angeles California and tell them how you did it.  Because they don't know.

After a comment about his career being in the witness protection program he offered a line which I'm sure many will be able to use:

If my wife hadn't worn bangs I would have seen the 666 on her forehead.

I'm sure he's a fine song smith, but his song's didn't appeal to me. 

I like his banter though.  In another video he describes being inspired by Carlos Santana, a lid of marijuana, and a medical-pharmacological encyclopedia to write the first genuine Latin Boogie in 2,000 years, most of the words stemming from the Latin and coming from the encyclopedia.

As with his songs, the concept seemed better than the execution.

A Memorable Semester

On the day after Christmas, as I drove up to the Comp Sci building emeritus prof Dr. I  drove over to ask how the semester went.

Although a dozen things contented for comment, I chose the word "memorable".

At the end of Christmas day I was able to congratulate myself for not whining on and on about the semester's frustration.  Not a single word.  There wasn't much opportunity.  Nobody asked, hey how was your semester and I didn't prompt the question by asking, "Doesn't anyone want to hear how my semester went?"

Today I told the prof that only one student in my Computer Architecture recognized the name Linus as belonging to Linus Torvald and not Linus from Charlie Brown.  He shook his head and said, "Yeah, they don't know history."

Linus Torvald	Linus van Pelt

I wondered about it during the semester. Was it important? It is unlikely that their lives would be saved, when challenged in a dark alley to identify the person who originated the Linux operating system, but it might be something which would come up in a technical interview. Being unable to identify the person responsible for one of the seismic shifts in computing would be a serious mark on an applicants escutcheon.

Given the opportunity, the next time I teach the class I will probably have a 50 question trivia quiz worth a total of 5 point toward the final just to expose them to tribal legends of Computer Science. Most people with a computer can identify Steve Jobs, but the geeks should recognize "The Woz".  Those students with dreams of entrepreneurship and dreams of entrancing venture capitalists should certainly know the name, Ronald Wayne.  Anyone involved in computer graphics should recognize the name of Playboy’s Miss November 1972, Lena Sjööblom .

Looking For Book Storage Ideas

Here's what my searches netted.

I'm not particularly enamored of pebble beaches, but this could be my dream vacation site:(http://www.lalibreriaimmaginaria.it/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/1112.jpg):

This vista evoked contradictory reactions: attraction to the books and repulsion at the bare space.  The seating might be comfortable, but I'd feel too exposed for comfort. (www.lalibreriaimmaginaria.it/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/335450_10150629348599517_169723374516_11932632_1944801617_o.jpg)

I could imagine sleeping here, although I don't see where I would get my reading light at night. That might be  a light visible on the lower surface of the shelf above the pillows.  It reminds me of the reading lights in airplanes.  My preferences are for a tensor lamp or an old swing arm drafting lamp.  (www.lalibreriaimmaginaria.it/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/335450_10150629348599517_169723374516_11932632_1944801617_o.jpg)

And this floor to ceiling books is the type of interior vista I like, except I'd be concerned about the cost of heating and the wasted space.  On the other hand I'd like to rise to the challenge of filling the space.

I Don't Need Drugs

I was reading the comments to an NPR story, "Comedian Faces His Addictions To Food And Alcohol" about comedian Jamie Kilstein (http://www.npr.org/2013/10/20/236950670/comedian-faces-his-addictions-to-food-and-alcohol) when I came across Jim Fetter's comment about addiction: 

"Well the alcohol I don't understand, because I never could acquire a taste for something that would operate my automobile."

I hadn't thought of it that way.  My usual response to the question as to why I don't drink is one of the following:

1. Drinking is for grown-ups.
2. It all tastes like Nyquil to me.
3. I never acquired a taste for it.
4. I'm too cheap.
5. I make money being the designated driver.

Now I can add that I try not to imbibe anything flammable.

I don't need drugs or alcohol.  My brain is addled enough.  (My neighbor and I have a standing joke.  In response to one of us saying something loopy, the other will pretend to examine the speaker's eyes, shrug and say, "Dunno.  The pupils aren't dilated.)

As an undergraduate I lived with the hippies and associated with the drug users.  I can honestly say that I didn't use drugs but I got to share their paranoia.

Some time in grad school I realized that I'd distanced myself from the scene when it dawned on me that I didn't recognize the names of the drugs being tossed about.  Not only that, I didn't want to know.  A fellow grad student claimed to have stopped smoking pot because he didn't have any free time.  And, if he had the free time, he said, he had other stuff which needed doing anyway.  (Life's a bummer.)