Viewing profile — essayist

Way before bots/LLM, I disciplined myself (most of the time) to write email with "in brief" at the top, followed by "Details". "In brief: Can you bring a dozen brownies to the noon…

It's 1996 or so. The web is new. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) at the US Department of Transportation collects ontime arrival data for all the major airlines, by fl…

Kelly writes: The truth is that cultivating a thousand true fans is time consuming, sometimes nerve racking, and not for everyone. Done well (and why not do it well?) it can become…

The Washington Post says the police killed 413 unarmed people from 1/1/2015 through 7/16/2021, about 63/year. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

Kids, a story from the Old Days, c.1981. DRI (since absorbed into McGraw Hill) had EPS, an advanced economic/financial analysis scripting language, provided via timesharing (mainfr…

I can choose to see (or not) that the prisoner being walked down the street is shackled. And maybe there are some good reasons for choosing not to see. But it seems the beginning o…

I'm old enough to have been a timesharing programmer (when a 32k->64k working memory increase seemed like limitless abundance). The company I worked for offered very expensive time…

I'll recommend Imago training [1] to any and all couples. It's reflective listening on steroids and was transformational for us. The basic process starts w/reflective listening, th…

My mother's favorite actor, singing a song whose German lyrics include "a ship isn't designed just to lie in the harbor; it needs to sail out to the open sea", and other more scand…

If I created a Zoom meeting with the trainees, and shared my screen and computer audio running my training video, would I have the same experience? Phrased in terms of Zoom since I…

How did the Chinese approach increase "long term risks of reinfection"?

This is part of the reason that it can take so long to comprehend a genuinely innovative new technology: it doesn't win the game that's being played -- it plays a different game en…

Peter Senge brought your first point to life for me: The Wright brothers proved that powered flight was possible, but the McDonnel Douglas DC3, introduced in 1935, ushered in the e…

The scissor effect can't apply to an individual. And I suppose if most everyone falls on one side of the question, even with lots of passion, there's no scissor. But I'm arguing (S…

I'm with you. We see in this discussion that it's difficult even to raise some potential scissors as examples without a lot of commenters falling into them. SSC's point is not "X i…

"Scissors just are." I think this is profound. I wrote a few minutes ago that scissors generate passion and tunnel vision, and you've stated that more elegantly. If you fallen into…

Yes, and a lot of commenters are falling into the scissor, metaphorically, arguing that your analogy to the Dreyfuss case is wrong because, damn it, Dreyfuss was {innocent, guilty}…

I worked on a site supporting voter calls in 2004. There was no sanity checking of the usernames people proposed, so we had gems like leading spaces and multiple embedded spaces in…

FAA and NTSB have had to deal with this for decades. Aviation safety has steadily improved, because they were, generally, forward-looking. Not so much "who do we blame?" but "what …

Kevin Drum has tracked this in detail. He wrote this in 2018: "It’s important to emphasize that the lead-crime hypothesis doesn’t claim that lead is solely responsible for crime. I…

If you're in/near Washington, DC, come to my wife's class. Free to students, paid for by DC government: http://watercolordc.com/

In the 1980's, the CTO I worked for (indirectly) met with me a couple of times on the high priority project I was leading. The second time, as I left his office, I saw the cover of…

My mother came to live with us in the early stages of dementia. She had a laptop and was competent browsing the web, so she stumbled onto a pay-for-your-horoscope site, but fumbled…

Cool. Minibug- as you get to the lower items on the menu, the explanatory help popup moves down as well, and so the help for the items nearer the bottom gets truncated. https://pas…