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.

Do you enjoy being creeped out?

Then you might enjoy reading this New York Magazine interview with Antonin Scalia. It is terrifying that this idiot-savant is actually on the supreme court, given his stated belief that the devil is "a real person", and that "Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history."

He knows the law and parts of the Constitution (but not, until recently, the Ninth Amendment, according to him), and the rest of his knowledge comes from The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, oh, and he listens to the radio. He says in one place that he hunts and fishes with people from Louisiana, and in another place that the people he knows don't say the F-word. And he accused the interviewer of being out of touch with mainstream America. You can't make this stuff up; I wish I was.

Tonight on TRU TV: Top 10 Dumbest Populations

It is -- or was -- a major world power. Its name is synonymous with cultural development. It was a key driver of the Industrial Revolution. For a time, it was the world's policeman. Today, it's a sad shambles, its economy in disarray and its youth actually dumber than its adults. That's right, horrifyingly, the young people are less clueful WRT reading and math than their elders, bucking a long, long trend. And its two leading political parties jumped at the chance to blame each other for it.

Which country? You might say, "The US, of course." You might say that, and you'd be wrong with a capital WR. It's the motherland, the United Kingdom. Its kids are morons, comparatively speaking. At least according to this BBC story. Take it with a grain of salt; it is, after all, the BBC, a paragon of take-no-chances journalism. But they sound pretty confident of their data, and the response of Labour and the Conservatives (there ought to be an emoticon for two fingers, pointing at each other, but if there is, I can't find it) is so US-like that our House and Senate are considering a lawsuit for patent infringement.

Duh, Britannia, Britannia can't spell "waves".

Meanwhile, another country, tired of dealing with opposition in a civilized, democratic way, has simply decided to jail the wilder ones. Where is this crackdown taking place? Egypt? Syria? Texas? No, this week anyway, it's in the birthplace of democracy, Greece, where they're rounding up the neo-nazis and charging them with, um, things. Admittedly, one of them probably did murder a critic of their crypto-populist viewpoint, but still ... Aristotle did not return phone calls, asking for comment.

I keep promising myself not to start the day by reading the news, but I can't seem to break the habit. Here at home (where we're apparently striving to take the idiot honors back from the UK), a group of at least two and possibly more truck drivers are planning their own shutdown of the government by driving at the speed limit around the beltway (presumably in their trucks). One faction says they're going to "arrest" any lawmakers they can find who aren't upholding the constitution; another faction says "Nuh uh!" That's why I say there are at least two of these concerned citizens. Except in extraordinary circumstances, you have to have at least one person to make up a faction, per Federal regulations.

And because this isn't Greece (or Egypt or Syria), they probably won't just be spike-stripped, tased, dragged out of their Kenworths, and summarily shot. And because the Air Force is on shutdown (or it isn't -- not exactly clear), they can't finish their program of phasing out the A-10 ground attack planes and turning them over to local police forces for traffic control. Pity.

---

2013 10 11: Update on the trucker thing. Faction one now says it was all a "hoax" to get media attention, and he probably isn't going, himself.

Quick, while the government's shut down

So I carry a small plastic dongle that opens and closes my garage door. So far, it's basically done just that. You push a button, it transmits a radio signal to the door opener, and there you go.

Last night, we went out and got take-out for dinner. Coming home, I was riding in the passenger's seat and holding the food on my lap. As we drove up to the house, I fumbled around for my opener (which is on a carabiner, clipped to my belt, along with all my other keys). Pushed the button, no result. Again, nothing. Linda dug out her opener and the door opened. "Dammit" I thought, "battery's dead." Nope. Once we were inside, mine worked fine.

This morning, heading out for coffee, it worked properly again.

So, while everybody in DC is otherwise engaged, I'm going to send DARPA a proposal for research into ground and formed and sliced lamb, wrapped in pita bread, as a security material and general radio signal blocker. If all goes well in phase one, phase two will involve surrounding the Pentagon with bunkers of gyros sandwiches.

A third little mystery

Due to being one of the annoying people who send him mail, I'm now on Governor Snyder's email list. This week, he sent me a messzage that said, in part:

“Unlike Washington, we found a way in Michigan to get our fiscal house in order. We've balanced our budget three years in a row, eliminated a $1.5 billion deficit and have saved over $500 million in our rainy day fund. We did it by setting politics aside, planning ahead, and solving one problem after another with relentless positive action."


I am putting together a FOIA request for all documents related to what the Governor's been smoking.

Another of life's mysteries

So we got together with some people I went to college with. The weird thing was, I wasn't a decade older than any of them!