A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
“Toilets Clogged, Plane Passengers Asked to Urinate in Bags” (NBC) will amuse those of you who fly in light piston-powered aircraft…
[It is tough to believe that one diaper in one toilet was enough to disable this critical system!]
Full post, including comments“Alexander Ciccolo to get 20 years for terror plot, assault” (Berkshire Eagle) is about a young Massachusetts man who converted to Islam and aspired to wage, but did not actually wage, jihad.
He couldn’t finish high school, but supposedly he was going to accomplish his terrorist goals: “he dropped out of school in the 11th grade and worked fast-food and roofing jobs after that, had once been a peace advocate, having taken part in a peace walk around Lake Ontario, organized by the Grafton Peace Pagoda, located off Route 2 in Petersburgh, N.Y., in July and August 2012.”
He only got close to his goals because the U.S. govenrment helped him: “On July 4, 2015, he accepted a small cache of weapons from an informant cooperating with the FBI and who had been in contact with Ciccolo beginning in June 2015”
He did not grow up in a two-parent home: “He came to the attention of authorities after his estranged father, a Boston Police captain, alerted them to his son’s stated interest in supporting the work of the terror group. … Ciccolo’s mother and stepfather attended the hearing…” (The child was the subject of significant litigation in Massachusetts family court. From ABC News:
Ciccolo had missed so many days of school the Wareham School Department filed what is known in Massachusetts as a CHINS – or Child In Need of Services – complaint to the Department of Social Services which opened an investigation into his mother, who had full custody.
The entire time his father, who was rising in the ranks of the Boston Police Department, desperately petitioned the court to let Alexander live with him, his new wife, and his stepchildren in Needham, an upscale Boston suburb, rather than with his ex-wife, Shelley Reardon, who refused, he claimed in court records, to have Alexander evaluated by mental health professionals.
“He [Robert] seeks this change because the child’s mother…who presently has primary physical custody of the child has in the past verbally agreed to allow the child to be evaluated but without exception has subsequently refused to allow such evaluations to proceed,” Ciccolo’s lawyer wrote in an emergency motion that petitioned a court to give him full custody of Alexander. “At present mother… has threatened legal action against father if initiates” psychological treatment.
The contentious divorce between Robert Ciccolo and Reardon, who split after 10 years of marriage when Alexander was five, are a glimpse into their only son’s long history of behavioral problems and mental illness that culminated with him coming “under the sway of ISIS,” as a young adult, prosecutors said at his first court appearance on July 14. He changed his name to Abu Ali al Amriki 18 months ago and opened a Facebook account where he posted a picture of a dead American soldier along with “Thank you Islamic State! Now we don’t have to deal with these kafir [non believer] back in America.”
).
He doesn’t seem like great neighbor, but does it make sense to put him away for 20 years given that he didn’t do much besides dream? What else could we have done with this troubled young person that would have kept us safe in case he did ever become capable enough to realize his dreams (without government assistance)?
Full post, including commentsFolks: Weather permitting, I’m heading down to New York on Thursday, September 13 to hear Brian Keating present a lecture on cosmology and his interesting book for laypeople, Losing the Nobel Prize. The lecture is free and at the National Museum of Mathematics (5th Avenue and 26th; registration link). Refreshments (and conversation amongst ourselves) at 6:15 pm. Lecture at 7. I would love to get together with readers. If that doesn’t work, maybe coffee on Friday morning? Happy also to meet at Teterboro on Thursday morning or Friday around noon.
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Full post, including commentsBack in 2017 I did some analysis for an inter-partes review ( IPR2017-00886) at the U.S. Patent Office. The patent in question, 7,480,694, covers a way to make a slide show of web pages. The decision was recently issued and I thought that readers might be interested to see it. (All of the documents in any IPR are public, incidentally, and available for free download via the Web.)
Full post, including commentsI recently attended a wedding of two best friends from high school. They met on their first day of high school… in 1975. In a society with strong social pressure to marry it seems likely that they’d have gotten married shortly after completing high school or college, presumably to the most compatible person they’d identified at that time. As members of the Me Generation, however, they were entitled to pursue a search for self-actualization with no time limit, including a search for the ideal partner. As it happened in this case, the 40-year delay didn’t result in finding anyone more compatible than they’d already identified in high school.
Would they have been happier if they could have spent their core adult years together? Married at an age when it was still biologically possible to have children?
Musicologists say that Mozart did better work because he operated within constraints established by Haydn. Is it possible that Americans would do better with a few more constraints?
[Scorecard on the two most recent weddings that I’ve attended, both within the last couple of years… One wedding was in Paris. The couple remains together. One was in Massachusetts. The wife sued the husband a year later.]
Separately, this wedding was held at a Colorado ski resort, with events at 10,200′ and 9,400′ above sea level. At least one third of the guests who had flown in from sea level were suffering from altitude sickness (not me, though; I spent three nights in Denver before heading up to nosebleed territory).
Full post, including commentsAt Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture) we talked to a 55-year-old MIT graduate who’d been fired from his engineering job (he mentioned this in the context of a multi-week cross-country trip with kids in a light airplane; he said that he was glad that he didn’t cancel the trip after he’d been fired). His camp site was organized as well as a typical Hilton hotel.
Another member of our merry band works at one of the world’s largest HR consulting firms. Asked “How could someone so qualified and so obviously competent be fired?” the HR expert responded “stale, pale, and male.”
Happy Labor Day to all of the young replacements!
Full post, including comments“The Gender Divide in Preschoolers’ Closets” (nytimes) has a subtitle explicitly referring to #MeToo:
I buy my daughter boys’ pants because even in an age of female fighter pilots and #MeToo, boys’ clothes are largely designed to be practical, while girls’ are designed to be pretty.
In a paragraph adjacent to “#MeToo” the following sentence:
I scoured the internet for girls’ pants with capacious pockets and reinforced knees, and found maddeningly few options.
A close reading of the article makes it clear that the author writes “girl” to mean “young children who happen to be female,” but the reader who skims and parses “girl” as “a young unmarried woman” (Merriam-Webster definition #3) may be a little shocked that “pants with reinforced knees for young unmarried women at work” is the latest demand from self-described gender equality advocates.
The editors are too busy reviewing each others’ old tweets to look for stuff like this?
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From an Atlantic magazine article on an analysis of the database of an online dating site:
Bruch and her colleagues analyzed thousands of messages exchanged on a “popular, free online-dating service” between more than 186,000 straight men and women. They looked only at four metro areas—New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle—and only at messages from January 2014.
The key, Bruch said, is that “persistence pays off.”
In the study, men’s desirability peaks at age 50. But women’s desirability starts high at age 18 and falls throughout their lifespan.
Across all four cities, men tended to use less positive language when messaging more desirable women. They may have stumbled upon this strategy through trial and error because “in all four cities, men experience slightly lower reply rates when they write more positively worded messages.”
“The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1504 messages during the period of observation,” the study says. This is “equivalent to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month.” Yikes.
The last part is what seems to suggest an opportunity for software. Wouldn’t that young lady be a lot better off if she had a robot to screen out and/or reply to these 1504 monthly messages? Or at least highlight the ones to which she should consider replying?
Related:
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“Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Affirmative Action Win Justice Dept. Support” (nytimes) is kind of interesting for the reader comments. Now that Trump is against Harvard, most readers are confident that Harvard is in the right (see Inside Higher Ed for some data on just how much higher Asians have to score in order to get into Harvard, roughly 400 points higher than the most desired racial group).
Some of the readers want the current system of race-based admissions torn down in favor of family income-based. They want Harvard to give preference to children of low-income families. But if you read
the take-away is that Harvard’s best statistical chance of turning out a group of highly successful graduates is to select from children of highly successful parents (where “highly successful” need not be “rich” but probably isn’t “low income”). In other words, to preserve its prestige Harvard should actually select preferentially from high-income families and/or families where parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents are highly accomplished.
How about a straight sort on standardized test results? Wouldn’t the class then be almost all folks from foreign countries? The U.S. does not have a monopoly on smart English speakers who are willing to study for a test. This would really get the NY Times readers upset. Quite a few of the comments are of the form “Asians are not creative or especially intelligent; they just cram for exams because their parents make them. Therefore a university with mostly Asian students would never be an interesting learning environment.” (I’ve noticed this attitude among elderly Hillary voters. One reason why they support an infinite expansion of U.S. government spending is that they think that the U.S. has a monopoly on creativity and therefore an entitlement to high economic growth rates. The Chinese can build stuff, but they can never invent stuff (your typical 80-year-old is apparently not aware of DJI!).)
One idea: Accept some age diversity (right now the passionate diversity advocates insist that everyone starting at Harvard be 18 or 19) and insist that anyone who wants to come to Harvard has to accomplish something in the real world. Harvard already has a lot of students coming after a gap year. So if someone is going to study English literature, that applicant needs to get some stuff published and positively reviewed. If someone is going to be a nerd, that applicant has to develop something that gets adopted and used. If someone is going to be a scientist, that applicant has to work in a lab and get the mature scientist to say “This person did useful work.” Mix that in with a minimum standardized test score and now there is a class full of people who can actually do stuff, albeit maybe the age shifts from 18-19 up to 19-21.
[Olin College of Engineering (higher median SAT score than MIT, last I checked) does something slightly related. Applicants come to the school for a weekend and work on projects so that faculty can get a sense for their real-world capability. Admission is partly based on performance during that weekend.]
Readers: What should Harvard do if the court system orders the school to tear down its race-based admissions process?
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Full post, including commentsThe other day I bought a watermelon at a small supermarket in Cambridge. The market used to give away super thin plastic bags so I was about to ask for the melon to be double-bagged. The clerk then pulled out a bag that was at least as thick as a “contractor” garbage bag for disposing of 2×4 fragments. Probably 25-50X as much plastic went into the new-style bag as had gone into the old one. What changed? The city has made it illegal for merchants to give away bags. They have to charge 10 cents for each bag by law. Apparently this grocery store doesn’t want to be seen as ripping consumers off so they have laid in a stock of the world’s thickest and strongest plastic bags. Unless at least 95 percent of customers actually bring their own bags to the store, then, the effect of the law will be to increase the use of plastic.
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