Lord of the Rings

 

Into the West

Why do you weep?
What are these tears upon your face?
Soon you will see
All of your fears will pass away
Safe in my arms
You're only sleeping!

But you can dream while you are sleeping.

I will admit to being a Lord of the Rings, LOTR, nerd.  One of the consequences of the COVID pandemic is that I have not able to get to the local public library and checkout out the LOTR trilogy for a read.  Before I went all Marie Kondo, and threw them out, I had a had a well-worn box set of the three books that I would reread often.

My three favorite characters in the LOTR are Samwise Gamgee, Treebeard, and the shield maiden Eowyn.  Upon reflection, I realize that these characters embody the three attributes that I have proposed as being important for understanding Human Behavior.        
 https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2021/05/framework-for-human-behavior-ii.html

Eowyn is, doh, a shieldmaiden, and is thus NOT supposed to go into battle.  However she disguises herself, rides into battle with the men of Rohan, and it is she (and the likewise insignificant Hobbit Merry), who kills the Witch-King of Angmar and avenges King Théoden of Rohan, because she is a woman and NOT a Man.  Talk about never Excluding anyone!

Treebeard, Fangorn, is much to the Hobbits’ dismay, the opposite of hasty. He wants to discover the Truth after careful deliberation and debate.  But once he knows the Truth, watch out!

Samwise Gamgee, the loyal companion of Frodo, takes on the burden of carrying the Ring when he thinks Frodo has been killed, but surrenders the Ring when he discovers, much to his relief, that Frodo is alive.  Sam is the ultimate System Optimalist, who thinks of the group and NOT himself.  “It must be often so, when things are in danger, someone has to give them up,  lose them, so that others may keep them”.

Those who believed in excluding others; who did NOT believe in the Truth; and were User Optimalists who thought of themselves and NOT the group; were primarily defeated in the US general election on November 8^th.  I would like to think that the majority of voters, even those who are not LOTR fans, agreed with Tolkien.  I wish them good dreams.

Automatic

 

If I Only Had A Brain

I would not be just a nothin'
My head all full of stuffin'
My heart all full of pain.
I would dance and be merry,
Life would be a ding-a-derry,
If I only had a brain.

USING a brain beats HAVING a brain.

With all of the brouhaha about Artificial Intelligence, too often it is forgotten that this is just using a computer to execute a program. Unless the computer, the input data, and the formula in the program is correct, being able to execute it quickly or effortlessly, is NOT necessarily intelligent. It is NOT using the brain that you already have.

Grace Hopper, of the “It's Easier To Ask Forgiveness Than It Is To Get Permission” fame, recorded the first computer bug in 1947. The error was a hardware failure caused by a moth in the computer.

On Black Monday, October 19, 1987, the stock market plunged (the S&P 500 dropped nearly 10% in a single trading day) as computerized trading programs caused a market crash that could NOT be tracked to any other fundamental problems.

In 1998, the Mars Climate Orbiter was destroyed upon entering Mars' orbit at the wrong angle because the navigation team had entered calculations in the Imperial system (feet and pounds) and the program expected data in the metric system (meters and grams).

In 1999, global panic resulted when it was realized that the storage of only the last two numbers of a year,  e.g. 99 instead of 1999, might result in numerous computer errors.

In 2012, the Gangnam Style video broke YouTube because the maximum views allowed was stored as a 32-bit integer, which has a maximum of 2,147,483,647, and the number of views exceeded this.

In computer science, there is a phrase, GIGO, which means Garbage In, Garbage Out. This is true if the garbage is a hardware failure, an error in the input data, or a flaw in the program code. The important thing is to get the correct answer. Getting an answer quickly and cheaply, but getting the wrong answer is NOT using your brain.

Making something automatic when you are using the wrong formula in the code, is only getting to the wrong answer faster and more easily. The US Congress made the reapportionment of House seats after the decennial census automatic and an imbalance, e.g. between California and Wyoming seats per voter, is the consequence. John Taylor wanted to make the Federal Reserve Bank’s prime interest rate automatic but thankfully Congress did not make this mandatory. To err is human. But if you make an error, you are supposed to learn from that error, not replicate your mistake automatically.

Lauren Bobert III

Ding-dong! The Witch is Dead

Ding-dong! The Witch is dead
Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!
Ding-dong! The Wicked Witch is dead
Wake up you sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed
Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead
She's gone where the goblins go
Below, below, below
Yo-ho, let's open up and sing and ring the bells out
Ding-dong's the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low
Let them know the Wicked Witch is dead! 

Is Lauren Boebert finally DEAD !

Her electoral race  has not yet been called, but regardless of whether she wins or loses, the “angertainment” that Lauren Boebert represented hopefully is dead.  That Laruen Boebert has come as close as she has to losing a safe seat in Congress shows that many Republican voters  have finally realized that she is a “rINO, a republican In Name Only”.  

A Republican is some one who is supposed to believe in the republic outlined in the constitution.  She clearly believes that a powerful leader should make decisions for the group, which is an authoritarian form of government NOT the republic of the Constitution.  

A Republican believes that all of the People, as decibed in the Constitution, are included, not just white Christians. 

She may still eventually squeak by and win her seat but for the good of the US, let’s  hope that the “angertainment” and the position she represents, is, as they say in the song. “She's not only merely dead She's really most sincerely dead”

Election Results

 

Hallelujah

Maybe there's a God above
As for me all I ever seemed to learn from love
Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
Yeah but it's not a complaint that you hear tonight
It's not the laughter of someone who claims to have seen the light
No it's cold and it's ever a lonely Hallelujah

Hallelujah!

The election in Pennsylvania has demonstrated that that the voters in that state have learned that love is not shooting at someone who outdrew you.  Hallelujah!!!! 

The elections in Florida and Texas show that the voters in those states still think that they still have to shoot first and ask questions later.  "What The World Needs Now (Is Love Sweet Love)"!

As to Arizona and Georgia?  Only time will tell!

Bad Behavior

 

It’s A Shame

It's a shame, the way you mess around with your man
It's a shame the way you hurt me
It's a shame, the way you mess around with your man
I'm sitting all alone, by the telephone
Waiting for your call, when you don't call at all

Have you no shame!

At the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, lawyer Joseph Welch replied with a question to Sen. Joseph McCarthy , “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”.  This was largely a rhetorical question directed at the audience of those hearings, the American people.  In his heart, I am sure that Mr. Welch knew the answer to his question, that Senator McCarthy had no sense of decency.  But the comment was directed to the American people, not to Senator McCarthy.

When we shame someone, it is not necessarily to get the behavior of the immediate offender to change.  It would be nice, but it is not expected.  What is expected is that the people have let it be know that they have a sense of decency and that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated by others in the future.  Shame is the expression by the group of what they will not reward, even if the recipient of the shame has no shame.  It is like the trial and punishment for murder.  The trial and punishment will NOT bring the dead  back.  The possibility of trial and punishment did not prevent this murder.  But that there is a trial and punishment might deter the next murder.  Sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine won't necessarily get Russia out of Ukraine.  But they might keep Russia from invading Finland, India from invading Kashmir,  China from invading Taiwan, etc.  The punishment didn't prevent the current crime, but it hopefully changes the calculus for future crimes.  Shame is not about the past. It is about the future.

Election Workers

 To Sir, with Love

If you wanted the sky

I would write across the sky in letters

That would soar a thousand feet high

"To sir, with love"

To all of the election workers, with love!

It has been a hard two years for election workers.  These mostly part-time, underpaid, temporary or volunteer employees have shown their love of country by staffing the voting process despite hateful texts, emails, voicemails, and threats of violence.

 From those of us who voted early, those of us who voted by mail,  those of us who voted on election day.  To those who let the process be smooth and who will ensure that our ballots are counted,  Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.  Your country owes you a big debt of gratitude regardless of the results.

Twitter II

 

I Won’t Dance

I know that music leads the way to romance
So if I hold you in my arms, I won't dance
I won't dance, don't ask me
I won't dance, don't ask me
I won't dance, madame with you
My heart won't let my feet do things that they want to do 

I won’t Tweet, don’t ask me!

It is very amusing to watch the panic of the Twitter users that are trying to find a new home now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter and enacted policies that some users find distasteful. My favorite line was from Tom Bergeron who said “Hello, I Musk be going.” This was a Groucho Marx reference for the Gen Z-er’s in the crowd. Leaving Twitter has become the new moving to Canada. Because Elon Musk has taken Twitter private,  even those controls of a publicly traded corporation such as shareholder votes are not available.

Social media companies such as Twitter are an interesting economic class. They are not private goods which are rival, i.e. priced; and exclusive, can not be used by anyone else while they are being used. Twitter posts seem to be free, unpriced, and the whole point of Twitter posts is that they are the opposite of exclusive.  They can be read by anyone who is following the Twitter user. From the perspective of the user it is free, but from the perspective of Twitter it is not free. The information of those users is sold by Twitter to advertisers. To the users, buyers, they are a common resource, like clean water, while to Twitter, the seller, it is a private monopoly, like cable TV. However the value to the advertisers is the number of users. If the users vanish, the value to those advertisers also vanishes. Elon Musk may eventually discover that he paid $44 billion for a company that has no Tweeters and thus no value.

I was not a Twitter shareholder and I was not a Twitter user. While I may be dismayed by the demise of print newspapers, you young Padawans do not despair. Just as there was Usenet, before MySpace, before Twitter, somewhere there will be a new home. Follow away.