Degrees of knowing

There isn’t always a binary yes/no answer to the question “Do you know so-and-so?” Rather, there is a continuous range of correct responses to this question, ranging from 0.0 to 1.0.

There are people I’ve known all my life, and others that I have known for decades. In the latter category there are some people I knew for decades but then completely lost touch with.

Can I actually claim to know those people? Or do I really just know a younger version of them — a version that in a sense no longer exists? In any case, I don’t think that kind of “knowing” rises all the way up to 1.0.

Then there are the people I know only from professional conferences, or as friends of friends. They know who I am, and I know who they are, but there are vast swaths of information that we don’t know about one another.

And after that are people I’ve met only once. Maybe we had a conversation which stuck in my mind. That is a kind of knowing, but much nearer to 0.0 than to 1.0.

Finally there are the people with whom I have shared some sort of social situation, but with whom I’ve had at most a brief and meaningless conversation. If they are famous, my fragile ego might be tempted to say “I’ve met so-and o.”

But wouldn’t really be honest. On that superficial level I’ve met a lot of famous people. But I seriously doubt that they have the faintest idea who I am.

And I’ve noticed that of the people whom I really know (nearer to a 1.0 than a 0.0) who happen to be famous, I tend to forget entirely that they are famous. Which is probably a good thing.

Happy Birthday Doug Engelbart

Douglas Carl Engelbart would have been 100 years old today. One of the towering giants of computer science, he was, essentially, the father of user interface research.

But more than that, Engelbart believed in humans as toolmakers. Specifically, he said that as we continue to evolve our computer technology, we are in essence evolving ourselves.

Since computational capability evolves exponentially, this means that in this modern era, we possess the opportunity to evolve exponentially as a species. And he personally invented many of the new computer tools that could make that possible.

After witnessing so much recent stupidity on our national stage, it’s nice, for a change, to think about somebody who was actually intelligent.

On the other hand

On the other hand, as we learned in today’s news, maybe they are just really incompetent fools. Let us hope.

I love the fact that the official W.H. explanation for its decision to rescinding the memo was “dishonest media coverage.” Let that sink in for moment.

Essentially, the W.H. just said that if some news outlet badmouths a policy, that is sufficient reason for the W.H. to reverse that policy. Rule by sound bite.

It’s as though the entire lot of them are still stuck in third grade.

The memo

If you want to convert a democracy into a dictatorship, a good place to start is by grabbing power that doesn’t belong to you. The reasonable people in the room may be too confused to effectively stop you.

The Constitution of the United States is very explicit about impoundment of funds allocated by Congress. The President does not have the power to simply refuse to spend that money. Those funds do not belong to the executive branch. They belong to Congress.

Here’s an analogy: Suppose you put money into a bank. You know that it’s your money, not the bank’s money. But suppose the bank says “Sorry, but we’d prefer to keep this money. Go away.” Would you be ok with that?

That’s effectively what the January 27 memo is saying. Somebody is claiming ownership of something that belongs to someone else.

I believe the term for that is “criminal activity.”

Different devices

Sometimes an interactive program I wrote for my computer won’t quite run right on my phone. Or else it will run, but not the way I expected.

And sometimes something that worked great on my phone won’t seem quite right on my computer. Or maybe a program runs just fine on both my phone and my computer, but not on my multitouch tablet.

So I tweak and adjust things. And not just the technology underneath but also the design of the user interface.

Because the way you use your mouse or touchpad on your computer isn’t really the same as the way you use your stylus and fingers on a tablet. And neither is the same as the way you interact with your phone.

And when you’re working on a VR/XR headset, that’s yet again a whole other thing.

Trying to get the same essential capability working across all of these different devices is always a learning experience. And at the end of the day, learning experiences are good.

Hypothetical speaking

Hypothetically speaking, suppose that somebody with no qualifications whatsoever is appointed to head a major branch of the U.S. government. Suppose further that the people who actually make things work in that branch are extremely intelligent, highly skilled, and have worked hard for decades to prove their worth as they moved up through the ranks.

What should those people do when confronted with a new boss who has no idea what is going on, and most likely doesn’t have the capacity to learn? Should they all find a way to gracefully work around the useless person at the top, while saying nice things to him to make him feel good?

Of course all of this would be much more worrisome if that branch of the government happened to be responsible for the security of our nation in the event of a military attack.

Hypothetically speaking.

Retired names

There are a few names that have become so notorious, so identified with a particular individual in history, that they are effectively retired. You really can’t use them anymore.

One of those names is Adolf. Another is Elvis. Can you name the others?

Lucy

I finally watched Luc Besson’s film Lucy, and it did not disappoint. It was as trippy and fast paced and visually stunning as we have come to expect from Luc Besson.

Besson takes the premise of “We only use 10% of our brain. What would happen if we used 100%?” to create a very silly fantasy. But then again, it is a very entertaining silly fantasy.

That 10% theory has long been debunked, but in any case you could argue that a film like this isn’t really science fiction — it just uses the trappings of science to create a fun and wacky fantasy. Which leads me to a question:

Is it really “Science Fiction” if you’re being shown a straight-out fantasy that is just using the trappings of science? Or is it something else?

By that token, are the “Star Wars” movies actually science fiction? Or are they really swords and sorcery dressed up in science fiction costumes? After all, a large part of the appeal of the Star Wars universe is that it has powerful wizards (both good and evil, just like Gandalf and Sauron), and that there are a lot of on-screen sword fights (they are called lightsabers, but we all know what they really are).

I guess we could just call such films “Science Fantasy”. But I suppose that would take away the fun that we are all having playing make-believe.

Notes on an insane clown show

This morning someone emailed me about how disastrous this all is — and we were still only three days in! So this morning I replied with the following email, probably to maintain my sanity as much as anything else:

My take is that it’s going to be just two years of idiocy before this nonsense ends. The Republicans barely have a majority in the House, which is way short of what they would need to stop a filibuster, so they can’t ram through anything too destructive.

The executive orders that are in direct defiance of settled law and the Constitution probably won’t make it through even this supreme court, but we will see.

Once voters feel the pain in their pocketbooks of not being able to get goods and services and deliveries and products that they have come to take for granted, the Republicans just won’t have the votes to retain a majority in 2026.

The Creep doesn’t have any skills other than bullying people into buying snake oil, so when it all starts coming apart, he’s not going to be able to do anything about it.

Meanwhile, we’re all just going to have to watch this insane clown show play out.

Braunhemden

I know that the muskrat is trying to trim government spending for his new pal, but it looks as though his pal just made that more difficult.

Let’s do the math. Roughly 1500 rioters are now free again, and eager to pick up where they left off.

Every one of them is now going to need a brown shirt, and somebody will need to pay for that. At a time when even eggs are too expensive, 1500 brown shirts will not come cheap.

Even worse, each of those brown shirts is going to need a matching brown tie, for historical accuracy.

Poor muskrat — your cost cutting efforts just got more difficult. On the other hand, you now have 1500 people who would be happy to learn your snazzy new salute.