Turing test beaten

Out of idle curiosity, I searched for "wood charles" via Google. Even with the quotes in place, it persisted in showing lots of links to Charles Wood or Wood, Charles. We didn't show up anywhere on the first three pages.

But, if you search for "wood charles" idiots ... Ha, ha!  We're at the top of the list! The IPO is planned for next week.

The world on mushrooms

Maybe it's just the cold. Maybe my expectations of rationality in world affairs are miscalibrated.  Maybe I need to get out more. Here are some stories, gathered from just this morning's news,  that make me feel as though the rest of humanity is insane or I am. Judge for yourself.

• Brussels mayor's shorts stolen: in a story headlined "Brussels mayor's signed undies stolen from bar", UPI reports that the aforesaid unmentionables were ripped off from a bar's Museum of Underpants. The bar is owned, by the way, by an anarchist and film maker.
• Parrot runs for office in Belarus: And then withdraws from the election because the office in question wasn't "... very prestigious."
• Mandela statue has rabbit in ear:  So someone responsible for the creation of a statue honoring the late Nelson Mandela "carved" a rabbit in one ear.  Of the statue. Not their own.
• Russia Lib Dem pol advises Obama to divorce: He says Michelle is a distraction.
• Shrimp mayo Doritos: Get 'em while they're weird. But only until March 17. Japan. What else can I say?
• Glenn Beck sorry: Well, he didn't actually say he was sorry for "tearing the country apart." Actually, he seems to be a bit proud of it. Hubris in place, cue nemesis.
• Photos of pigs censored:  By the NYT. In Malaysia. Because it is "... a Muslim country."  Not the whole pig, apparently, just the faces. The faces?!?
• Captain and Tennille divorcing: Shocking. I didn't know they were still alive, but even so ... shocking.

Oh, and some singer -- Beebo or something like that -- was arrested for drag racing his Lamborghini against a Ferrari, in the street, while intoxicated, at 4 AM. In Miami.

Also, note the nice job I did of tagging this post.  You won't see that kind of metadata on Fox News.

America: Love it or leave it

It's not often that I manage to find something positive to say about the GOP, here in Michigan. But I want to take this opportunity to thank Dave Agema, our Republican National Committeeman. His candid expressions of opinion have allowed me to cross off one item on my life list.  His assertion that the Russian policies regarding LBGT rights are "common sense" will let me do something that I've waited decades to do. Ever since the Seventies, I've wanted to say to a social conservative:

Hey, punk. If you don't like it here, move to Russia!

 

And while you're at it, stop off in the UK, look up a guy named David Silvester, and take him with you.

The back stories, if you haven't seen them:

Agema
Silvester

Chicago, land of enlightenment

Put out that E cigarette. Can't "smoke" it in here. Chicago has or is about to ban the silly things in much the same way as traditional tobacco methodology.  Alas, poor hipsters, used car salesmen, and lost-generation wannabes; you'll have to find another way to be cool.  I'm going to send our fine governmental officials a note suggesting that we follow suit, either at the state or municipal level.

And while I'm being cranky about health topics, did you know that you should budget roughly $325 a year, per child, for treatment of earaches? Costs the US just shy of 3 billion a year.  Remarkably detailed if somewhat brief article here. Clearly, this is the fault of ObamaCare or possibly Justin Bieber.  Either way, we should ban it. I mean them. Children, that is. Or just their ears.

Desparate Media Fooled Again

It appears that the execution of the North Korean CFO (Chief Fascism Officer) and Uncle of  Kim Jong Un was not as barbaric as it has been painted. The story that he was thrown to a pack of starved dogs while other officials were forced to watch seems to have originated with a Chinese Onion wannabe humor website. A North Korean spokesman told reporters that he was absolutely not fed to dogs.

"That is a fabrication of the Western savage-barbarian conspiracy. The filthy traitor was executed in the manner laid down by our laws. He was marinated overnight in lite soy sauce, and then offered to a woodchuck, but as the woodchuck declined to participate, we shot him. The woodchuck. Then we shot the traitor, too, sort of as an afterthought."

The US State Department refused to comment, but an official at the Department of Agriculture cast doubt on that version of the facts, noting that the export of woodchucks to North Korea has been under embargo since 2011.

Meanwhile, news sources in Michigan were running Korean developments on the Internet equivalent of page six, since "Top News" feeds were occupied with snowstorm pictures and warnings from Governor Snyder about using caution when driving in twelve feet of snow and/or running with scissors.

Dumb Will Find A Way

So there hasn't been a lot of traffic here lately, mostly because the Wood-Charles staff have been writing other things, in other media. (For extra credit, what's wrong with the following:

vector vList {0,1,2,3,4};
for (int i = 0 ; i <= vList.size() ; i++) 
{ 
      vList.push_back(i); 
}

Show your work.)

Anyway, for those who weren't paying attention, 2013 was the year in which, to paraphrase Trevor Rabin, Dumb Will Find A Way. Viz:

• So the evil state wants to keep you from killing yourself and those around you? The Obama-Pelosi conspiracy is gradually outlawing cigarettes? Nice try, Bloomberg-NannyState-Fascists! We can fix this! E-cigarettes! You can still fool yourself into believing that you look like Humphrey Bogart. You can still lean casually on the bar and ... what? But it's not a real cigarette! It's not even tobacco! I'm not "smoking"! All right, so how about this one? Looks nothing like a cigarette, Okay? I admit, it does look like I'm sucking on a flashlight, but still ... Dumb found a way, at least for a while.
  
• All right, all right. Grump. So we can't give ourselves lung cancer any more. We're losing our freedoms every day. But I know! Skin cancer! Tanning salons! We can expose our pasty white carcasses to artificially harmful rays! Hell, even in Florida there're 1261 melanoma shoppes. Big growth industry. Hint: invest in pharma stocks now. Dumb found a way.
  
• Meanwhile, Comrades, here in Soviet Uni ... I mean, Russia, is big problem. We got nasty country, nasty government, nasty terrorist persons. We host the 2014 Olympics, but many degenerate hooligans refuse to come. What to do? Ah, is brilliant! We arrest punk band, Greenpeace counter-revolutionaries, random gay persons. Then, to show how modern and enlightened is Russia, we let them go! Dumb is find way!
  
• One third of Americans claim not to believe in evolution. Enough said.
  
• Colonial chickens come home to roost! In perhaps the ultimate manner, France is being reminded of just how good an idea it was to have colonies in Saharan Africa, that is, French boys are being killed in an effort to fix their grandparents' mistakes. Alors, l'an dernier, I could not find ze Central African Republic on ze map. Maintenant, Je suis buried there. Dumb eventually found a way.
  
• At least in the CAR, the conflict is between people of two more or less different religions. Elsewhere (South Sudan, Syria, Iraq, etc.), people of the same faith, albeit different sects thereof, are killing each other with everything from modern artillery to machetes. Of course, the actual reason isn't simple bigotry, it's a scramble for what small amounts of power, money, and food are still left on the table, but it's more convenient to say "There go the (insert sect here)! Get 'em!" Post-colonial Dumb continues to find a way.
  
• If you're a small frog in a comparatively medium-sized pond and you have little in the way of ethics and brains, you're at risk. The gateway drug of local politics can lead you to all kinds of disastrous situations. If you're not careful who you hang out with, you might become Mayor! All over North America, big-city mayors are stumbling (sometimes literally) into difficulties, while the morons who voted for them cheer them on. Beds at Marion Barry House are at a premium. In Detroit, Toronto, San Diego ... dumb got found out.
  
• Finally, we offer this transcript of a meeting. "Okay, Mr. Rodman, now, when Hillary ... I mean, the Democrats ... win in 2016, we think you have a good shot at a State Department post. Ambassador or something. But you need some international credentials. Something to show you can go abroad and deal with foreign governments and leaders. Have we got a concept for you!" Dumb appears to be finding a way.
  

One of your editor's resolutions for the new year is to post more of this mean-spirited, sarcastic rubbish that I you know and love. We'll see how it comes out.

WRT Georgetown, the Packard Plant, et al

Yesterday, all this rubble seemed so far away.
Now it looks as though it's here to stay.
I told you so, just yesterday.

Yesterday, this was such an easy game to play.
They'll buy anything you say,
As long as they think you can pay.

Suddenly, I'm not worth half of what I used to be.
There's a shadow hanging over me.
Yes, I believe: insolvency.

Why they wouldn't loan I don't know, they wouldn't say.
My business plan was nuts, I'm a putz,
Now I can't pay.

Yesterday, I was as big as Bobby Flay.
Now I'm popular as curds and whey.
Oh, I believe I'll slip away.

One of those things you keep revisiting

When I was a software development manager, one of my annoying little ways was to draw my engineers' attention to the Therac-25 disaster, periodically. Therac-25 was an early and horrifying example of why you can't just let people hack software together without a process of some kind.

This happened back in the mid- to late-Eighties. Essentially, a Canadian company that made radiation therapy machines allowed all the control software to be developed by a single engineer. That person alone made decisions on code reuse, new development, and testing. In fact, he or she did most of the testing. The work was done in PDP-11 assembly language, running on a proprietary operating system. People died. The link above will give you the standard write-up on the problem, done by independent software engineering authorities.

It probably won't take thirty years for the launch of the Affordable Care Act infrastructure to become a standard and almost equally horrifying example of why extensive and elaborate processes aren't even remotely a guarantee of software quality, either.

I think I'm going to stop admitting that I worked in the industry at all. If anyone asks, I spent 33 years driving a garbage truck.

This is getting monotonous

So this McConnell guy is unstoppable, apparently. Not content with hacking out mystery stories, now he's got a business book out there! What does he know about business? Monkey business, maybe. Here's what he claims:

People fear Carnegie Mellon's CMMI models because they think they're just a big, prescriptive way of imposing the waterfall development method on everybody. Wrong. In this book, I argue that what CMMI is (or can be used as) is a big compendium of common sense things to do, and you do them to avoid trouble. You can be as agile as you like, and there's nothing that says you have to get appraised at some specific level. You can benefit just by treating CMMI as a checklist: Do we do this at all? Could we be doing it better? Or just differently?

This volume is about the overall starting point: three process areas that all start with "Organizational", and consequently are known as the Os. The plan is to have at least one more book, probably more than that, all looking at what CMMI calls for and asking the question, "If we don't do this, what could go wrong"?

Anyway, you can read it on a Kindle device or on almost anything else (PCs, Macs, Android devices, iPhones and iPads ... Amazon gives away free reader software). Oh, and McConnell says he might consider print versions, too. No promises there. That stuff costs money!

Have a look in your medicine cabinet

Consider this: the FDA says that "...only products intended solely for self-limiting disease conditions amenable to self-diagnosis (of symptoms) and treatment may be marketed over the counter (OTC)."

So unless a condition is a) going to go away of its own accord (is self-limiting) and is something you can diagnose and treat successfully yourself, companies can't sell their nostrums over the counter. Or to put it another way, while it's conceivable that a homeopathic treatment might make something go away or get better more quickly, whatever disease or condition it's marketed for has to be one that will just kill itself off anyway.

The FDA also says "The labeling for those products offered for OTC retail sale must bear at least one major OTC indication for use ...", meaning that "You'll feel better!" or "Increase your quality of life!" don't cut it. The labeling has to tell you why you might actually want to participate in a large collective hallucination take the product.

Recently, the FDA has had to send warning letters to at least six homeopathic marketers, reminding them of this.