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From Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (Ben Rich), regarding programmers in the early 1980s:

A year after the stealth fighter became operational, two computer wizards who worked in our threat analysis section came to me with a fascinating proposition: “Ben, why don’t we make the stealth fighter automated from takeoff to attack and return? We can plan the entire mission on computers, transfer it onto a cassette that the pilot loads into his onboard computers, that will route him to the target and back and leave all the driving to us.” To my amazement they actually developed this automated program in only 120 days and at a cost of only $2.5 million. It was so advanced over any other program that the Air Force bought it for use in all their attack airplanes. At the heart of the system were two powerful computers that detailed every aspect of a mission, upgraded with the latest satellite-acquired intelligence so that the plan routes a pilot around the most dangerous enemy radar and missile locations. When the cassette was loaded into the airplane’s system, it permitted “hands-off” flying through all turning points, altitude changes, and airspeed adjustments. Incredibly, the computer program actually turned the fighter at certain angles to maximize its stealthiness to the ground at dangerous moments during a mission, when it would be in range of enemy missiles, and got the pilot over his target after a thousand-mile trip with split-second precision.

It took us about two years to really perfect this system, aided by the nightly training flights at Tonopah. The computerized auto-system was so effective that on a typical training flight pilots were targeting particular apartments in a Cleveland high-rise or a boathouse at the edge of some remote Wisconsin lake and scoring perfect simulated strikes.

Compare the $1+ billion spent on healthcare.gov!

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“Consumer Reports trashes Tesla’s ‘flawed’ Model X” means that Tesla won’t be getting a lot of 7-year-old Camry trade-ins!

It seems that the review is consistent with my own: “Smug, Rich Bastard for a Weekend (Tesla X review)”

Related:

• Bill Burr on the subject of guys who drive practical cars (the Mercury Tracer is mentioned about 7 minutes in)

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Ian McEwan is an interesting novelist and his latest, Nutshell, is worth reading. The narrator is an in-utero baby who writes about his experience:

So here I am, upside down in a woman.

In the middle of a long, quiet night I might give my mother a sharp kick. She’ll wake, become insomniac, reach for the radio. Cruel sport, I know, but we are both better informed by the morning

I like to share a glass with my mother. You may never have experienced, or you will have forgotten, a good burgundy (her favourite) or a good Sancerre (also her favourite) decanted through a healthy placenta. Even before the wine arrives—tonight, a Jean-Max Roger Sancerre—at the sound of a drawn cork, I feel it on my face like the caress of a summer breeze. I know that alcohol will lower my intelligence. It lowers everybody’s intelligence. But oh, a joyous, blushful Pinot Noir, or a gooseberried Sauvignon, sets me turning and tumbling across my secret sea, reeling off the walls of my castle, the bouncy castle that is my home. Or so it did when I had more space. Now I take my pleasures sedately, and by the second glass my speculations bloom with that licence whose name is poetry. My thoughts unspool in well-sprung pentameters, end-stopped and run-on lines in pleasing variation. But she never takes a third, and it wounds me. “I have to think of baby,” I hear her say as she covers her glass with a priggish hand. That’s when I have it in mind to reach for my oily cord, as one might a velvet rope in a well-staffed country house, and pull sharply for service. What ho! Another round here for us friends!

The mom is having sex with her husband’s brother and, under English divorce law, can’t find an obvious way to get hold of the $10 million marital home in London due to the fact that it was in her potential defendant’s family prior to the (brief) marriage.

I don’t want to spoil the novel by revealing too much more other than the mom is determined to get the cash! But I recommend that you read the book.

 

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Worth reading: a New Yorker story about a guy named Edward Garry who was convicted of killing a retired NYPD detective.

Some excerpts:

The murder of a former cop electrified the Forty-seventh Precinct. The next morning, phones rang constantly as Potter’s former colleagues called in for updates. The N.Y.P.D. threw all its resources behind the investigation, putting some forty officers, including Forcelli, on the case. (For most murders, two was the norm.)

Eyewitnesses’ descriptions of the perpetrators varied: two male Hispanics; two male Hispanics and a woman with bleached-blond hair; two male Hispanics and a black male; four male Hispanics; two black males. Descriptions of the getaway car included a dark-blue Oldsmobile Delta 88, a black van, a light-blue four-door, and a black Ford Escort hatchback.

At around sixteen, [Edward Garry] dropped out of high school, joined a gang, and began selling drugs to pay for Dr. Martens and nights at Manhattan clubs. He was arrested a few times and spent a year on Rikers Island. Because of these arrests, Garry’s mug shot was in police files, and it was among those shown to Vargas and Garcia because Garry matched their descriptions of a Hispanic man (his mother is Puerto Rican).

Garcia and Vargas both picked him again. The officers were relieved to have solved a high-profile case so quickly, though they didn’t have a confession, any physical evidence connecting Garry to the crime, or any information placing him near Irene’s the night of the murder. “Back then, identification was like the gold standard,” Forcelli told me. “If you could get a non-crackhead, non-prostitute witness to I.D., it’s, like, whoa.”

The jury found Garry guilty of second-degree murder, and he received a sentence of twenty-five years to life.

Forcelli had begun to have serious doubts about the work he was doing at the N.Y.P.D. He hated having to abandon an investigation the moment an arrest was made. “A lot of facts come out after the arrest,” he told me. He preferred the methods of federal agents, who didn’t consider their cases closed until pleas were entered or trials took place, and applied to join the A.T.F.

[about another case] He alerted the prosecutors, and was shocked to find them uninterested. “We’re telling the Bronx D.A.’s office this, and it’s ‘Too fucking bad,’ ” he said. He interviewed Glynn, who was in prison for another crime, and succeeded in getting him to admit that he was the killer. He arrested him on the spot—an unorthodox move, given that prosecutors were planning to put another man on trial. As a result of Forcelli’s action, prosecutors dropped the case against Little, but Forcelli was outraged at the carelessness with which the case had been handled. A simple records search showed that an eyewitness who had given crucial testimony against Little had been in prison at the time of the murder. “You wonder how hard some people really look,” Forcelli said.

post-conviction claims mostly fail, because courts usually limit appeals to those arising from procedural mistakes, and make it hard to introduce new exonerating evidence.

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My Thanksgiving debrief, based on hosting dinners for about 12 adults on both Thursday and Saturday (two different groups!).

The path to turkey perfection proved to be spatchcocking the 13 lb. turkey, arranging it sort of flat sideways on a regular roasting pan. Then use the “AutoSteam” mode on the Kitchenaid oven at 350 degrees for about 1.75 hours. It turned out that the thighs cooked faster than the (thicker) breast and the turkey was ready (no microwaving required!) when the thermometer plunged deep into the breast read 165. Thanks to the kitchen sink hookup (“steam”), there was no dryness.

The first microaggression was committed against me by a young Chinese-American guest on Thursday. She said that her family likes to have Chinese hot pot on Thanksgiving. Then, apparently acting on the assumption that a stupid white man wouldn’t know what this was, she proceed to explain the concept of Chinese hot pot. Presumably she was emboldened by the Donald Trump victory.

The second microaggression was committed by me on Saturday. I asked a guest to carve the turkey due to the fact that she is a medical doctor and would therefore have had to go through a surgery rotation. She happens to be Korean-American. When reaching into the knife block I bypassed the traditional French chef knife shapes and said “Perhaps you’d be more comfortable with the Santoku knife.”

We were concerned about having one table big enough for everyone. The children are a little too young for a grown-up/kid split. It occurred to me to divide up the group along political lines, e.g., have a table for Hillary supporters and one for the haters. It was quickly pointed out that nobody in the Boston area would be willing to incur social ostracism by going on record as a Trump supporter and therefore the tables should be marked “Deep Despair Over Hillary’s Loss” and “Merely Heartbroken.”

In an apparently misguided attempt at humor I noted that we were going to be serving bagels and suggested that, if people wanted to bring something, they could bring turkey to put on the bagels. An MIT graduate took this literally and she showed up with a Tupperware-style container of leftover turkey.

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Follow-up to “Touring the Mediocrity Factory (meeting with principal of rich suburban public school)“…

I went to a parent-teacher organization (“PTO,” an upgrade from the former “PTA”?) meeting at the Happy Valley public school (“Happy Valley” is a rich suburb west of Boston).

Two principals spoke. One, a former performing arts teacher, handles K-4 and the other grades 5-8. The headline topic was a “school improvement plan.” I had been told that it would be about academics, so I showed up to learn what plans were being made to prepare our kids for a globalized world. Would there be a shift to topic-based learning, for example, as apparently is happening in Finland? (Washington Post)

The principals opened by saying that their #1 goal is “behavioral and emotional. We’ve spent more than a year getting to Happy Valley Cares Values.” This is apparently analogous to a corporate mission statement. The principals explained that lessons will be taught in every class using the Values, especially about conflict. The K-4 principal added: “Nobody wants it and yet it is part of our everyday life. I feel like if you’re bad that means you’re not good and that’s not true.” Now that the values statement (not to be confused with a mission statement) was drafted, could the principals move on to academics? The answer was “no” because the values statement was budgeted as a 2-year project, but really should be “a 5-year cycle” (not to be confused with a 5 year plan).

The second topic concerned what the principals characterized as the teachers “taking a tremendous risk.” At a previous coffee with the principal, I had learned that a teacher essentially cannot be fired even if he or she does almost nothing. Was the “tremendous risk” then something like hanging out the side of a helicopter hovering-out-of-ground-effect to maintain a high-voltage power line? The “tremendous risk” and “huge undertaking” turned out to be that, twice per week, students, possibly from different classes within the same grade, would be organized into groups by ability and then taught, e.g., math, for 45 minutes.

Was this the end of risk-taking by teachers? The principal for grades 5-8 said that it was not due to the issue of kids not being sufficiently sheltered from news and cultural events (e.g., the Trumpenfuhrer addressing the Reichstag). It wasn’t explained what teachers were going to do about this, but we were assured that it was “really really hard.

Kids stressed out? The good news is that there is a “wellness teacher”.

The principals explained that they “want to look at homework in a 360-degree way. This is work we are going to take on as a school council (parents and teachers/admins together).” It turned out that a full 360-degree view wasn’t necessary because there was a single overriding factor of concern to the K-4 principal: the time homework prep and grading would take for teachers. This was consistent with a parent’s point that, while the middle school teachers said that students should do homework, they don’t bother to check even whether or not it is turned in: “they let their assistants check twice per week.” Her child was inferring from this that homework was not in fact important.

One parent asked “how much do you want us helping them?” The Grades 5-8 school principal said that she never did homework with her child. “I just pay [the town after-school program]. I don’t want to get anywhere near homework.” It wasn’t explained why she parks the kids in the after-school program if her job is substantially over when school gets out. But perhaps the principal must work longer hours than teachers? A parent volunteered that the $15/hour young people who staff the after-school program can’t really help kids with homework. The principal responded with “that’s what I am finding out.”

It was the same answer when a parent asked about a “flipped classroom.” The principals said that it was working well for one teacher but nobody else has adopted it because it is too much work (for the teacher). It was’t explained what the extra work was. Do teachers have to record themselves giving a lecture? Or do they just have to assemble a playlist of lectures for students to watch and then discuss in class?

A parent from Sweden suggested that comparative religion be taught. The principals said that the Massachusetts curriculum mandates this starting in 7th grade. The Grades 5-8 principal said that she was worried about preserving family values if the school teaches something. A mother then suggested that “we can teach tolerance in second grade more than substance of religion.” (maybe borrow curriculum from the Cambridge Public Schools where they have a full-time diversity and tolerance program that the Tsarnaev brothers attended?) It turns out that we can’t, actually, because “sadly these days education is driven by accountability,” responded the Grades 5-8 principal.

A mother asked if parents could sit in on some of the math lectures to learn how problems are supposed to be solve. She offered that her husband was completely useless. The K-4 principal sympathized that she is “a recovered math phobe” but expressed pride that she was recently able to help a second grader with a math problem (see The Smartest Kids in the World regarding a Calculus-free guy who “figured the best way to become a [football] coach was to become a [high school] math teacher.”)

The above meeting was held the day after the Trumpenfuhrer’s election and the PTO head closed it by saying that “the last 24 hours show that conversation is more important than ever.”

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Here’s a photo of Mindy the Crippler, taken with the iPhone 7 Plus in “portrait” mode:

What do folks think? This is straight from the camera with no corrections. Fairly crummy indoor light. I like how the puppy’s eye is sharp.

[Separately, note that, as in the movie Spinal Tap, this was not taken with my iPhone 7 Plus. You can’t dust for JPEGs.]

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After the latest batch of 10-minute visits with the pediatrician I am wondering why people seek to become primary care doctors. We are told that in the good old days, at least in movies, the primary care doc was a respected member of the community who knew every family. Visits with patients included catching up on family news and potentially discussions of wider topics. Today, however, the primary care doc sees so many patients per hour that he or she surely cannot learn that much about the typical family. One of the things that I like about being a flight instructor is getting to know someone through 100+ hours of interaction through a rating (might be only 50 hours of actual flying time). This pleasure would appear to be denied to a typical American family doctor.

Maybe this is already happening, but if you’re just going to see patients in short little glimpses why not become a specialist and make 2-4X the salary?

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All That Man Is by David Szalay doesn’t offer a lot of great choices for men. There aren’t a lot of great jobs and, when you get older, employers probably will find you superfluous. Here’s a guy from England who moves to Croatia and lives off the rent from his house in England:

And when they asked Murray what the fuck he was doing, he said, ‘I’m just taking it easy. Enjoying life.’ ‘Where you doing that then?’ the Pig said. ‘Croatian Riviera,’ Murray answered. ‘I’m semi-retired,’ he told them. ‘Semi-retired? What’s that mean?’ ‘Means no one’ll give him a job,’ Rainey quipped, adding an empty to the many on the table and turning his head towards the bar.

A rich Russian businessman is defrauded of most of his wealth. His wife leaves him after it becomes clear that, under UK divorce law, she can take the houses and most of the cash. He’s left with nothing to do:

‘No,’ Aleksandr says. He has never had a hobby – in his Who’s Who entry, he had listed his ‘interests’ as ‘wealth’ and ‘power’.

Guys who go down the responsible family-man route are freighted down with mind-numbing tasks:

Yes, Macintyre has several kids. No wonder he seemed so threadbare and fed up. So tetchy. Some little house somewhere in outer London, full of stuff. Full of noise. He and his wife at each other’s throats. Too worn out to fuck. Who wants it?

On Saturday, though, he was short-tempered. Last week, in high winds, a substantial piece of chimney fell off the house – stove in someone’s new Nissan Qashqai which was parked in front. An insurance nightmare. Miranda had been on the phone all week to the insurers, without much to show for it. Just to sort out the chimney, even that seemed problematic. He spent most of Saturday in the low bed under the sloping roof, peering at small print on a tablet screen, furious at having to spend his time on it. So many overheads these days, that’s the thing. Mortgage. School fees. Laima’s salary – the Lithuanian nanny.

What would be described in the U.S. as rape/sexual assault is portrayed by the victim in a favorable manner:

[a 40-year-old hostess in Czech Republic] starts to tell them about how she lost her virginity with a swimming coach, in a hostel in Italy, when she was fifteen. ‘He was older than me,’ she says. ‘That was nice, you know.’ Simon sits with hunched shoulders, not seeming to hear, smoking. ‘It is nice, first time, with someone older,’ she says to him.

(Wikipedia says the age of consent is 15 in the Czech Republic and 14 in Italy so this wasn’t criminal.)

The book is kind of dark and not exactly action-filled, but I think it deserves your attention if you’re in a serious mood.

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“Perils of Climate Change Could Swamp Coastal Real Estate” is a NYT story that looks at the question I asked seven months ago: Are markets so inefficient that global warming isn’t being priced properly?

Buried in the article is one possible explanation: taxpayer-subsidized flood insurance…

Roy and Carol Baker, who now live in Sarasota, Fla., recalled trying for several months to sell their home in nearby Siesta Key in 2014. Interested buyers kept backing out of the purchase when they found out that the annual flood insurance premium was roughly $7,000, they said.

This experience will become more common, economists say, as the federal government shifts away from subsidizing flood insurance rates to get premiums closer to reflecting the true market cost of the risk.

….

To make matters worse, the National Flood Insurance Program is more than $20 billion in debt. After several major coastal storms, Congress tried to fix the program, passing a law in 2012 requiring that insurance premiums be recalculated to accurately reflect risk. Coastal homeowners rebelled, arguing that the legislation made insurance unaffordable, and in 2014 Congress repealed parts of the law.

George Kasimos, a real estate expert in Toms River, N.J., said homeowners had good reason to react. “A homeowner may be approved for a $300,000 mortgage with a $3,000 a year flood insurance premium,” he said, but the same person’s loan application would most likely be rejected with a $10,000 flood insurance premium. As insurance prices rise, some home purchases will become cash only, squeezing more middle-class and lower-income buyers out of the market.

It would seem that, since you can’t buy flood insurance on a long-term basis, a beach house could become worthless overnight (federal insurance rate goes from 1 percent of house value up to 30 percent). Yet wouldn’t we expect this risk to be priced in, assuming that sea level rise is imminent? Why would anyone pay more than about 10 years of rental value for a house right on the beach? Or maybe it is and the $8 million houses in Ft. Lauderdale that I saw would actually be worth $25 million if not for the climate risk and flood insurance rate change risk?

[WSJ responded to this article: “Shoreline Gentry Are Fake Climate Victims”…

Only in the second half of a 3,099-word opus is the truth not so much revealed as hinted. Halting and piecemeal reform of the federal flood-insurance subsidy program that has so benefited wealthy seaside homeowners is why beach-front housing prices are being reset.

Estimates vary, but sea levels may have risen at two millimeters a year over the past century. Meanwhile, tidal cycles along the U.S. east coast range from 11 feet every day (in Boston) to two feet (parts of Florida). On top of this, a “notable surge event” can produce a storm surge of seven to 23 feet, according to a federal list of 10 hurricanes over the past 70 years.

… When Teddy Roosevelt built his Sagamore Hill on Long Island, he did so a quarter mile from shore at an elevation of 115 feet not because he disdained proximity to the beach or was precociously worried about climate change. The federal government did not stand ready with taxpayer money to defray his risk. … A FEMA study from several years ago found that fully a quarter of coastal dwellings are liable to be destroyed over a 50-year period.

]

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