Temper Tantrums?

 

Growin’ Up

The flag of piracy flew from my mast
My sails were set wing to wing

I had a jukebox graduate for first mate

She couldn't sail but she sure could sing

I pushed the B-52 and bombed em with the blues

With my gear set stubborn on standing

I broke all the rules, strafed my old high school

Never once gave thought to landing, no

I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd

But when they said come down I threw up

Ooh-ooh growin' up

Don’t throw up! Grow up!

In Peter Pan, the Broadway musical at least, growing up doesn’t sound very appealing.  Growing up means going to school, not to learn the wisdom of the group and how to learn to discern truth on your own, but to learn how to be a parrot and recite some silly rules.  Growing up means shouldering burdens with a worried air, instead of being proud to contribute.  Growing up means pinching pennies and not being generous.  Growing up is awfuller than all the awful things that ever were.

If we want people to grow up, since growing up is inevitable, then growing up better not mean that is beneath the dignity of climbing a tree.  Growing up should be the home of joy and liberty.  Then no one has to run away, or be banished.  No on should ever say that say they won’t grow up. Stop acting like a toddler.  So there!

MAGA?

 

She Used to be Mine

She is messy but she's kind
She is lonely most of the time
She is all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie
She is gone but she used to be mine

What is important is not what used to be, but will be.

Time marches on. Don’t look back, they might be gaining on you. The arrow of time moves forward. Looking back may be pleasant, but we can never revisit the past. Things just don’t work that way. My Wayback machine is on the fritz.  My Tardis is kaput.  1.21 gigawatts! What was I thinking?

The Russian Federation might think that Ukraine was once part of the Russian Empire and should be again.  Russia was an Empire from 1721 to 1917.  Ukraine was independent in 1917, which prompted the Bolsheviks to conquer Ukraine.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian-Soviet_War  . The Soviet Union may have endured for almost 100 years, but that is so yesterday. Get over it Putin.

There is nothing sadder than a former high school athlete who is trying to return to his glory days.  The glory days have passed us by (in the wink of a young girl’s eye?).  We can, and should, apply lessons that we learned in the past, but one of those lessons that we should have learned from the past is that we should not try to make the present, much less the future, look exactly like the past. Don’t Make American Great Again.  Make America Great in the Future.

Primaries and General Elections

 

I Am An Illusion

Wrong step
We got off track
We need someone to help us get back now
Worn thin
Awful state I was in
I believe they were fooling me
Now I'm down
I am down
But I'm not real anymore
I am an illusion 

The problem is that in an election, we need to trust that someone is real, not an illusion 

George Santos won his general election because he won his Republican primary. Donald Trump is the favorite to win the Republican primaries for President in 2024 and did win the Republican primaries in 2016. In 2020, many real Republicans retired rather than facing the challenge of being primaried. Those that did run WERE primaried, but in many cases those that won their Republican primary lost the general election. It sounds like the primary system alone is not working to identify the best candidate for the People. 

The Republican primary seems to automatically confer the Republican endorsement. In fairness, the Democratic primaries seem to mean the same. Under the primary system, endorsement does not mean that the candidate has been vetted and is to be trusted. https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2021/04/ranked-choice-voting.html 

If there are only two parties, it would be preferable if the general elections had the possibility of four candidates, the winner of each party’s primary and the endorsed candidate of each party. The winner of the primary could be, and hopefully would be, the winner of the primary. But if that winner was NOT the endorsed candidate of the political party (assuming that endorsement meant something), then there is the possibility of more than two candidates from each party. Then ranked choice voting would mean something.

 

Understanding

 

Hotel California

On a dark desert highway
Cool whip in my hair
Warm smell of colitas
Rising up through the air

Er…, aren’t the correct lyrics “cool wind in my hair”

As long as there has been language, there is the chance to misunderstand that language.  The late, great Gilda Radner had a recurring sketch on misunderstanding on Saturday Night Live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZLeaSWY37I.  and made “Never Mind” a catchphrase.  I was raised in Rhode Island, maybe the capital of misunderstanding, whose very name is due to a misunderstanding.  The full name of the state, which dates back to colonial times, is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.  Rhode Island technically only refers to what the indigenous people called Aquidneck Island, where the city of Newport is located.  A Dutch explorer called it "Roodt Eylandt" because of the red clay lining the shore and the early settlers though he said that  was because it looked like the Greek Island of Rhodes.  Of course those same early settlers though that the Indigenous Tribal village of Montaup was the tribe trying to say “Mount Hope”, which is that region’s name today and may be responsible for the state motto, “Hope”.  We are losing many of these misunderstandings which gave rise to regional slang (the national name for the sub is replacing that of Philadelphia’s “Hoagie”, (the sandwich originally eaten for lunch on Hog Island), or Rhode Island's “Grinders”, (a cold lunch meat sandwich on an Italian Roll, which your teeth needed to grind).  But as long as there is language there will be the opportunity to misunderstand language.  Thus the ancient Romans worshipped Father Jupiter, which the Greeks would call Zeus Pater.  The French claim no credit for French Fries, so the French were only amused, not offended, when Americans started calling them Freedom Fries.

Misheard song lyrics can be a particular source of amusement. In addition to the one misquoted above, I have a particular problem understanding the singing of John Fogarty of Creedence Clearwater Revival.  I remember proudly singing “There’s a Bathroom on the Right” when the correct lyrics were “There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise”; or “Cinemascope Perfect” when the correct lyrics were ”Sinister Purpose”.  One of my college roommates was amazed when he learned that when he was saying "It’s a dogie dog world” he was actually saying “It’s a dog eat dog world”.  As long as there is understanding, there will be misunderstanding.  Ask someone “Why A Duck?”

Hourglasses

 

Days of Our Lives

“Like sands through the hourglass,
so are the days of our lives,”
said the voice of Macdonald Carey,
welcoming viewers to the
“Days of Our Lives” soap opera
as a large hourglass appeared on the TV screen.

What if our universe is also an hourglass.

First some digressions. MacDonald Carey was a Hollywood star. His participation in a soap opera legitimized that soap opera to my late mother. Consequently she could approve of, and watch, those “stories.”  She was less than amused when her children started watching another soap opera, Dark Shadows, starring another Hollywood star, Joan Bennett. But it was not until last year when I listened to the Love is a Crime podcast that I understood why she thought there was difference in Hollywood stardom that was not tainted by scandal.

An hourglass has a small point through which the grains of sand pass. The shape of the hourglass is a hyperboloid, with a extremely  narrow passage in the middle. The shape of the hourglass on either side of its mid point is very similar to the early inflation in the universe after the Big Bang.  This is why I am proposing that not only is the shape of the universe hyperbolic, but that the universe in which we exist is only one side of that hourglass and is separated from the other side of the hourglass by the Big Bang. But the Arrow of Time is such that you can’t move from one side of the hourglass to the other without upsetting everything and turning it all over. Thus go the days of our lives.

Free Will

 

Jesus Met the Woman at the Well

She said, "This man, this man, He must be the prophet"
She said, "This man, this man, He must be the prophet"
She said, "This man, this man, He must be the prophet"
"He done told me everything I've ever done."

And that ain’t the half of it.

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.

At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.  When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

The Gospel of John, Chapter 8, Verses 1 through 11.

In other words, Jesus will not condemn us for our choices, but does hopes that we make the correct choices.  So I guess that Jesus is Pro-Choice, not only as it is currently used, but also in a larger context?

It is a tradition in my family to watch a Charlie Brown Christmas each year.  To paraphrase Linus in that show, “And that is what Free Will is all about Charlie Brown”.  God does not condemn us. God condemns certain choices.  And we alone make those choices. Thus if there is any condemning, we are condemning ourselves.

Consulting

 

Fugue for Tinhorns

I got the horse right here,
The name is Paul Revere,
And here's a guy that says if the weather's clear,
Can do,
Can do,
This guy says the horse can do

That guy is me.

The lyrics above are from Guys and Dolls and were sung by the racetrack touts, including Nicely-Nicely. For all of my public and private career, I realize that I am no different than a tout. A tout tries to make a prediction about the outcome of a random event. Ethical touts will use whatever information and methods are available to give their customers an edge in knowing the outcome before the event. Unethical touts will tell their customers what they themselves don’t believe and those touts may tell conflicting stories to different customers of the same event, in hopes of one of them being the winning side.

I have been a traffic modeler for most of my life. Like a racetrack tout, I have been trying to beat the odds and make predictions. But I hope that I never lose sight of the fact that they are only predictions. When I forecast a trip table, forecast mode share, or forecast volumes on a link, I am not guaranteeing an outcome. All of the methods in these predictions are based on identifying the most probable outcome among many, not the only outcome that will happen.

There are contests in which there are only a limited number of outcomes, for example Tic‑Tac‑Toe. By analyzing all these outcomes, it is possible to see what future outcomes can result from each current outcome. If you play first in Tic-Tac-Toe, then you may have a winning strategy on each play.  However, the player playing second can always make a play in response that forces a draw. Thus it is possible to develop a book on each play that will lead to at least a draw. Unless the opposing player makes a mistake and does not make their best move, it is impossible to win at Tic Tac Toe.  It is possible to memorize that “book” of best plays. Because the number of plays is limited, it is even possible to train a chicken to play Tic-Tac-Toe. (If a chicken makes a mistake, then it is eaten and won’t play again. Fortunately for them, politicians don’t taste very good).  The book in Checkers is larger but it does exist. The book in Chess is even larger and is incomplete at present. A Rubik’s Cube has 43,003,274,489,856,000 positions, only one of which is the winning position. And yet there are people who have memorized the best way to get from any position to the winning position, such that there are contests of how fast you can ‘solve” a Rubik’s Cube (the current record is 3.47 seconds).

The challenge of traffic modeling is that there is not yet a complete book on how to get to a winning solution. Until then, like Nicely-Nicely, I will keep touting customers on ways to beat the odds.