Travel Day

I’m on my way to Stuttgart, to speak at IT-DEFENSE, 2019 on the topic of “metrics, the quest for meaning.” Things may be spotty here for a week; it depends on my energy level.

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Caring About The Workers

Last week, I used a tow strap (I keep it in my truck bag in the back of my truck) and my big Chevy Tahoe to pull a UPS truck out of a ditch. You know, the standard UPS package car – big, brown, GMC service chassis with a Grumman aluminum body with dual rear wheels. I know GMC makes 4×4 drive-trains for those things; they’re not that much more expensive, either. I would sort of expect that each UPS motor-pool would have a couple 4×4 and the rest rigged for highway driving.

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A Guest In the Forge! – 1

A friend of mine told me that she had a friend who said he’d kill for a chance to make a damascus knife. I was in an expansive mood, and said, “well, he could come up for a couple days and I’ll walk him through it.” That’s how that happened. Fortunately, Maat is a cool guy, young and energetic, and he made it up here right before the ice set in on my driveway.

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Hmmm… A Slow-Moving Freeze

My furnace died last friday, and the tech came out, replaced a bunch of filters and the jet, bled some gunky-looking oil out of the line, and everything was fine. As he was leaving he said, “I’m going to put a call in for a fuel drop because your tank is at about 1/10.”

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Generalizing Behavior Between Species – Part 1

Observe the dog; it enjoys bacon. We might be able to conclude that a wolf would enjoy bacon, too. But “might” is the key word, there – can we really? I’d say it’s highly likely, but that’s based on my knowing other things already about wolves and dogs – namely that they are omnivores.

Why, then, might I run a complex and abusive experiment to determine if dogs like bacon? That would be a waste of time, right?

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