Tag: Metrology
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Not just the religious pope
Comment seen on substack. = = = = = START QUOTE: Here’s a semi-annual reminder to all my Northern Hemisphere comrades (the North Wind People): we live under the tyranny of a calendar designed by a Mediterranean pope—a man who probably thought of “winter” as the time to bring a warmer linen shirt to the…
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Correction Line Road
Musing about rectangular vs polar views of the world led to an old memory. Once in the 80s I visited a friend who had moved to the country near Dodge City. He lived on Correction Line Road. The name has nothing to do with jails. It has everything to do with the Louisiana Purchase and…
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Stop and think.
Social Security is one of the FEW parts of government that works well. Medicare also works well, entirely unlike most private “health” “insurers”. THEREFORE Elon is trying to destroy it. He hates things that function, especially if they’re not pumping all of their money into his pocket. He claims that his “auditors” have found “tens…
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Magnificent observation!
The Full Press podcast includes Tara Henley, Peter Menzies and Harrison Lowman. All three are hardass realists about journalism, holding no hope for renewal or reform. Around 17 minutes in this episode, Henley gives one MAGNIFICENT rule. TRUTH SHOULD BE REPLICABLE. Best observation on journalism I’ve ever heard, and the FIRST time I’ve heard a…
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Cute leftover
I was looking at the Weather Bureau’s average charts, trying to see how far below normal this week is. Noticed a quaint leftover of ancient mainframe programming practices akin to Y2K. Feb 29 is missing this year but present in leap years, so the form has to mark N/A in some way. It incorrectly fills…
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Counterintuitive
Pew has a counterintuitive survey about news influencers. The result: ‘News Influencers’ are a lot more balanced than we think. Most of them treated Harris and Trump evenly. The specifically partisan Influencers do fit our stereotype, but partisans are NOT the majority of Influencers. Pew defines a News Influencer as one person, not representing an…
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Firm rule until 2016
Media are noting that Tesla fans are disillusioned with their perfect car and its perfect cult leader. Shouldn’t be a surprise. Getting involved in unnecessary disputes was ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS strictly forbidden by ALL rules of persuasion and salesmanship and advertising, from the New Testament to Dale Carnegie to Duane Jones. Boost the advantages of…
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We weren’t always stupid
I was skimming through some 1966 RCA periodicals at American Radio Library just for jollies. RCA was demonstrating a fancy time and temperature screen generated by one of those newfangled Electric Brains: Ping! That’s KHQ in Spokane! Nah, impossible. The last time I watched broadcast TV was 2010. They couldn’t have been using the same…
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Amazingly good
Trudeau’s response to Trump’s pointless lunacy is pretty damn good. He starts with a history of Canada and US working on the same side in wars and crises. He actually understated Canada’s WW2 contribution, since Canada started fighting a year earlier. Then he talks about the shared economy, missing the earlier period when Canada was…
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Happy WWV New Year!
Since the 1960s I’ve always tried to mark the new year by catching the actual time on WWV. Shortwave reception in Spokane is poor, so I’ve failed to hear WWV in recent years. Tonight it came in loud and clear on 10 MC! I’ll call this a sign for a BETTER year with BETTER reception…
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Mean vs median
A classic case… Some literary type on Substack stated as a fact that the average person reads 12 books per year. Others came in fast to give the real fact: the normal or typical person reads 1, maybe 2. The literary type was using mean, which is always pulled up by outliers like literary types…
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STOP THIS SHIT.
Media is abuzz with the “mystery” of UFOs over New Jersey. Even the fake “independent” commentators, like Saagar, are getting into the act. Our Martian hasn’t been around for a while. He dropped in to give one message: STOP IT! You’re ruining your own reputation for independence! A drone is not a UFO by fucking…
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What’s the opposite?
I was reading the list of today’s official Days. One of them is Dewey Decimal Day. In my sleepless haze I thought of decimal as the metric opposite of English or Imperial. Well, what’s the English version? LC. It’s based on a set of 21 letters, and then an irregular group of lettered subsets under…
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Goddamn it.
Stupidest statement of the week, which unfortunately encapsulates the views of all experts and economists and media: “The economy is objectively great but subjectively horrible.” Platonism has infected all of our “experts” and academicians. Objective means PHYSICAL REALITY. Subjective means OPINIONS and VIEWPOINTS. Math is NOT physical reality. Math is a VIEWPOINT. And official statistics…
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When metrology mattered
Reading about the IOOF led to this, but it’s not really related to the IOOF. One article in an Odd Fellows journal around 1920 mentioned Roger Babson as an economist who was in sync with the principles of Mutual Benefit Societies. I looked up Babson and found one of his books, which starts oddly enough…
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