Seven very useful words in research

I was meeting with colleagues today about a research project. We’ve just recently started getting our first experimental results.

The meeting was largely do decide what we should do next. We could go in many directions, but we had to focus and choose one.

There is always a temptation to immediately go large based on that first early data, to gather lots more data, to instrument up in grand style. But we realized that this would be a mistake.

If you try to figure out too many things at once, it not only takes a lot of time and effort, but you also end up creating more opportunities for confusion and error.

So we decided we would run some modest benchmark tests to figure out how much we could trust those first measurements. The results of those benchmarks will tell us how much of what we have so far is actual signal, and how much is just noise.

At the meeting, here is how I ended up describing the next thing we need to figure out: “What the hell are we looking at?”

Just from a practical perspective, I think those are seven very useful words in research.

“Not yet.”

Today I became curious about one of my favorite poems, Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas. So I read up on it on-line.

I learned lots of things. For one thing, I learned that the poem is formally a “villanelle” – a 19-line rhyming poem with five ABA stanzas followed by one ABAA stanza, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeated multiple times.

I also learned that Thomas wrote it to his dying father in 1947. Also that his father, who taught English literature in Wales, managed to hang on to life until 1951.

I also learned that the poem was not actually published until 1952. Now that I know all these things, I am not likely to forget them.

The reason I am mentioning this is that it is quite possible that some day that entire process of “reading up on it” will take place entirely in people’s heads, in a matter of moments, due to forthcoming advances in AI and other technologies. It will be the real-life version of Trinity in The Matrix learning to fly that helicopter.

I am not sure that this will be a good thing. After that transition, we may need to redefine what we mean by “learning”, and we may need to say goodbye to this slower paced reality, where you actually need to look something up to learn about it.

Am I ready for that brave new world of the future? To quote Trinity, “Not yet.”

American Herstory

Upon this day in history, all men got the vote
Alas, the women landed in a very different boat
And so for many years that simply was the way things were
All was given unto him, and all denied to her
Universal suffrage for men, the whole darned lot
While universal suffering was all the women got

$2500

Amazon laid off about 14,000 employees in October 2025. Then they laid off about another 16,000 employees a few days ago – on January 28, 2026.

That’s a total of about 30,000 people who no longer have a job. Or health benefits, or maybe a future, given the current state of the U.S. economy.

But it wasn’t a total waste. With all of the money they saved, Amazon was able to spend the $75,000,000 needed to buy the rights and promote a documentary about a Slovenian woman.

So that film cost Amazon only $2500 for each person who is now out of work. A real bargain, when you think about it.

Happy 101

Doug Englebart’s having a birthday today.
He just turned 101, by the way.
He invented some pretty cool things, like the mouse,
That helped bring the modern age into your house.
If that age were base two he would be only five
And then I am sure he would still be alive.
Or even base six – then he’d be thirty seven,
And most likely he’d still be here, not in heaven.

Bad movie / bad theater

Having experienced both, I have come to this sad conclusion that bad theater is worse than a bad movie.

Theater is an opportunity for people to connect with performers right here and now on this planet. That is far more precious than anything else.

The opportunity to make theater is sacred, When you get that opportunity, you shouldn’t blow it by just going through the motions.

The umbrella scene

I just saw Hamnet, which I highly recommend. Seeing Emily Watson on screen, in a film produced by Steven Spielberg, gave me flashbacks to Minority Report.

In particular, I started thinking about one of my favorite scenes in any movie. It’s the scene where the character played by Emily Watson, who has precognition, is leading the character played by Tom Cruise to safety as they are being chased by the bad guys.

He looks bewildered, but she, being a Precog, knows exactly where to go next to evade capture. At one point she tells him to grab a large umbrella. He just looks at her, with a confused look on his face. Why would they need an umbrella?

But then she starts to panic, thinking maybe he won’t do what she says, and he senses her urgency. So at the last moment he grabs the umbrella and opens it – just in time. At that moment, the bad guys are passing overhead. Because of the open umbrella, they are unable to see our heroes, who manage to get away.

What I love about this scene is that it feels like Spielberg telling us what it’s like to make a movie. The director knows exactly what is going to happen, yet his job is to make us feel the suspense and uncertainty of an unknown outcome.

In a sense, this scene is Spielberg giving us a glimpse into what it is like to be Spielberg.

The loss of faith moment

Democrats have not yet completely recovered from the moment when they lost faith in their standard bearer. That was on June 27, 2024, when Joe Biden couldn’t get out a coherent sentence during the presidential debate.

The bizarre and fact-challenged ramblings of his opponent seemed almost normal in comparison. We all know what happened next.

I wonder whether the murder of Alex Pretti will have a similar effect, if not on Republicans, then on the independent swing voters who will determine the results of the 2026 midterms. The Republican standard bearer has always lied, but this was a different kind of lie.

We all saw an American citizen who we could plainly see was holding only a cellphone shot 10 times in the back. Our president asserted that the victim was a crazed gun-waving assassin, responsible for his own brutal murder.

That lie was an insult of a different order to the intelligence of American voters. Will this be the moment when the political right finally loses faith in its standard bearer?

I certainly hope so, for all of our sakes.