Author: Lisa

Something In Common

There have been a couple of recent articles that highlight how very similar the opposition party’s view of Trump and Obama actually are (although the articles seek to highlight the hypocrisy of objecting to behavior in which you engaged just last year). To some degree, I understand — if I think my position on an issue is the only good, upstanding, moral, godly position … there’s no compromising, the other side is not only WRONG but an immoral force looking to corrupt others. And it’s a logical conclusion that the figurehead of the immoral force is going to be vilified. I didn’t really understand it with Clinton – right-leaning friends acted like the chap had personally offended them. But it’s something that made sense to me with Bush 43. Invading a foreign country on flimsy evidence (that turned out to be wrong) was offensive to me. Maybe not immediately personal as I couldn’t be drafted … but friends getting called back into service because of linguistic skills or SIGINT training is personal. Wasting the country’s money, farther destabilizing a region … and doing so in my name was offensive. Trying to privatize social security was personally offensive (and created my retirement plan of “if social security actually pays out, there’s extra mad money for you”) and impersonally offensive (the government program enacted due in no small part due to the Great Depression and associated stock market collapse was going to allow people to invest money in the stock market because you could make more money that way?!? Seriously, consult big huge event that led to the program in the first place. Then repeat your idea.). I tried to keep this in mind when Obama encountered the immovable Republican congress. No, I don’t understand why getting rid of preexisting condition exceptions is controversial – and I understand why no for-profit business is going to be willing to operate if they have to cover your sudden (and expensive) illness but you don’t have to buy their coverage until you get your diagnosis. And I really don’t get why Republicans who advocated for a lot of the components of the plan suddenly deemed it anathema … except that the figurehead of the opposition is so vile that anything they support must be somehow wrong.

And now those same people think left-wing opponents treat Trump cruelly, use parliamentary machinations to block vital legislation … the people who did exactly that to Obama … don’t see it as the same thing because it IS different to them. A bit like vilifying Pol Pot and then vilifying Mother Theresa. One of them deserves it.

A friend of mine had a thread on Facebook denouncing moral relativism … but moral relativism is what you need to address these situations. Yes, your morals say X is completely wrong. But someone else’s morals say X is the only reasonable course of action … and neither set of morals are wrong. They are just different. Maybe the hope is that the opposing party will just run out of members and lose power forever. Doesn’t seem likely. The alternative is that we have a government vacillating between positions as different parties are elected. There would essentially be a set of laws enacted on day 1 for Republicans that gets completely supplanted with an alternate set of laws enacted on day 1 for Democrats. Long term business planning would be neigh impossible — who knows which set of laws will be in place two years from now! You’d have to develop a business that could comply with either or two different business plans. Even managing your own home would get silly — I want to install solar, but I need to wait until the Democrats come back into office so financial incentives are restored. Want to buy a big gas guzzling vehicle? Better wait until the Republicans are back to suspend fleet fuel economy requirements.

And if we’re going to have a set of laws that essentially ignores the minority (remember majority rule, minority rights … won’t have that anymore) … then we should go farther than what this silly compromise stuff has given us. In R terms, our SS contributions will go into stock funds. Then in D terms, we’ll be buying government bonds. During R terms, you’ll get vouchers and pick whatever school you are willing to drive your kid over to. During D terms, anyone who didn’t pick (a) their local district or (b) a private school they can afford anyway will transfer their kid to the local district. Reductio ad absurdum.

Don’t Talk To Strangers

It was 68 degrees, and I took Anya to the beach by a local lake to build sand castles. Three different kids, with three different families, wandered up to us and started playing. I said ‘hi’ to each one, and got a funny look. Each kid spent around fifteen minutes playing with us without saying a word. It was really strange. Until I heard the horrified mother admonishing her kid as they walked away: “you know not to talk to strangers, what were you doing?”. Here’s a guess – he wasn’t talking to strangers. Playing with, yes. Walking around on the beach with, yes. But he dutifully avoided talking.

Kids process language literally. It’s funny, sometimes, what Anya doesn’t get because figurative and abstract reasoning are not well developed in four year old kids. I’ve heard the don’t get into a car with a stranger / don’t talk to strangers/ STRANGER DANGER!!!! through most of its evolution from perfectly reasonable advice (seriously, don’t GO somewhere with a stranger. I remember trying to convey this to friends when I was at University – go to a club, meet a cute guy, don’t go somewhere alone with him. It isn’t like this is advice merely for young kids.) to absolute paranoia (kid lost in the woods who spent his time hiding from the strange people who had volunteered to search the woods looking for the missing child). Until yesterday, it never occurred to me how children process these messages (and I’m not talking about the whole “living in fear of seven billion people” thing that’s got to have psychological ramifications).

I don’t know how we’ll convey an appropriate level of caution to Anya – “don’t go anywhere with a stranger” is a good first step. Especially now that most people carry cell phones – know your phone number and have them call us. Don’t go anywhere, we’ll come to you.

 

Maple Sugar Season Update

Strange day. The high here was 68 degrees, and we spent an hour playing in the sand at a beach. Not your normal February activity in these parts.

We got a LOT of sap today – and we only managed to collect the front half of the property. Thirteen trees with fifteen taps yielded thirty eight gallons of sap. Tomorrow, we’ll check the sycamore (hasn’t produced much sap to date, but here’s hoping), two hickories (same story), and ten more maple trees. Lots of boiling ahead, and it looks like it might freeze Sunday night to extend the sap run during the first part of next week.

Serial Port Sniffer

We use a Wink hub to communicate with our ZigBee devices – scripts on the OpenHAB server make web calls over to the Wink hub to set bulb levels. Works great on outbound communication to the bulbs, but it is not real-time bi-directional (i.e. if a bulb level is changed elsewhere, OpenHAB would need to poll and get the new value). Doesn’t matter for the GE Link bulbs because there isn’t another way they get set beyond dropping and returning power (which turns the bulb on at 100%), but we cannot use the Wink hub to communicate with interactive devices — unlock the door manually and OpenHAB has no idea the light should be turned on until the next polling cycle. And polling is a lot of extra overhead – check every device every minute 24×7. And it’s slow – hit the polling cycle wrong and it takes a minute from unlocking the garage door before the light turns on.

Had the idea of monitoring data that moves across the serial interfaces and use a script to communicate real-time inbound changes over to OpenHAB. Watching the serial interface, we get lots of cryptic traffic from socat:

socat -x /dev/SerialPort,raw,echo=0,crnl PTY,link=/dev/ttyV1,raw,echo=0,crnl

Do you know …

Having a commonly recognized accent often leads to hearing similar illogical thread: Oh, you are from over-yonder-place. Do you know so-and-so. The polite response (“no, I do not”) does nothing to dissuade the asker. I suspect most people want to answer “no, I don’t bloody know David Beckham. There are fifty three million people in bloody England. You’re from Atlanta, do you know Usher?” Which might better get the point across that it is statistically unlikely that I’d know any individual from a country none the less a fairly famous one who, I imagine, has a fairly exclusive social circle.

Evidently it isn’t just accents that prompt this nonsensical assumption. Trump’s press conference today:

Black journalist: “Will you meet with the Congressional Black Caucus?”

Trump: “I would. You want to set up the meeting? Are they friends of yours?”

And he probably thought he was being nice in acquiescing to the meeting. I wish the reporter had responded with a terribly rude and likely honest answer: “No, they aren’t friends of mine. But, as a decently well informed citizen, I am aware of their existence and wanted to know if you planned to meet with them.”

Maple Sugar Season Update

We are about done boiling off sap from the first run — good timing, too, since it looks like we’re going to have a week or so of really warm weather (should be a good sap flow) followed by a freeze at the end of the month – extending the sugaring season into March.

We pulled the hallow ice cap from most of our buckets, so the sap started slightly concentrated. We’ve condensed about 39 gallons of sap to 2.5 gallons of not-quite-syrup. It will sit in the pan overnight to cool; tomorrow, we’ll filter it and transfer it into a pot. We will finish the syrup indoors.

Legal Precedent

This may set an interesting precedent:

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2017/0213/Bowe-Bergdahl-lawyers-say-Trump-s-comments-mean-he-cannot-get-a-fair-trial

Not quite the same as saying the preconceived notions broadcast by the now-CiC of the military branch means it would be impossible to achieve a just result from a military tribunal … but extrapolating a little can any minority get a fair trial in an executive branch run by Trump? Can a woman?

Dodd Frank Rollback & Regulatory Costs

I heard a statistic today that JP Morgan has over 43,000 regulatory and compliance employees — for every four employees doing other ‘stuff’, there’s a regulatory guy. I don’t know who all counts as an employee engaged in banking business (does an HR person count?) or as a regulatory employee (one hour a year doing something related to federal regulations qualifies you?) but I’m willing to take the statement on its face. I don’t necessarily see that as a failing in regulations as a failure in automation.

Healthy Preschool Valentines Party Snack

I made the heart cut-out PBJ sandwiches – with no peanut butter. Or jelly. But the same idea — you need two heart-shaped cookie cutters. The pair I have leaves about 1/2″ between the two cutters.

We made our own strawberry compote – a pound of strawberries sprinkled with one tablespoon of tapioca powder (to thicken the sauce). This was heated on low until the strawberries got mushy and the tapioca started to thicken. I used an immersion blender to create a smooth sauce, then refrigerated it for a few hours to allow the tapioca to set.

We used two different loaves of bread — a white bread and a whole wheat with sunflower seeds. Use the large cookie cutter and cut out 2 hearts for each sandwich you are making (e.g. we have eighteen people in the class so cut thirty six large hearts). In half of the hearts, center the smaller cookie cutter and punch out the center.

To assemble, take an uncut heart. Spread with ‘butter’ of your choice — we used sunflower butter because the school forbids nuts of any sort. Then spread with strawberry compote. Top with a cut-out heart.

Instead of pre-staging all of the components, Anya helped me make them. She cut one large heart, and while she cut a second heart, I got it spread with butter and compote. As she cut another heart (the back of the next sandwich), I took the one she just made, stamped out the centre, and put it on top. Anya removed the small heart from the cookie cutter, then got her big cookie cutter and started all over again.

You now have a little heart shaped sandwich with a red heart in the middle.

Gain of function

It says something about the Trump administration that they can lift the moratorium on government funding of gain of function research and it doesn’t make headlines. There’s hypothetical benefit to making known viruses deadlier — more readily transmitted, deadlier, survive longer outside the body — but there’s non-hypothetical risk. And not just the thriller movie plot where someone smuggles a sample out of the lab to infect the millions of passengers a day on the Underground. Time will tell, and hopefully I’m wrong … but my tax dollars going to make a worse Ebola (or whatever) isn’t on my happy list.