Blog/March 2017/Mar 3rd

March 3rd

Lots to talk about this week. Get a cup of coffee and relax!

As mentioned last week, Sarah went off on a European vacation with her boyfriend. They went to Prague (in the Czech Republic, formerly known as Czechoslovakia, formerly known as part of various empires, etc…). She reports that the Czechs smoke much more than Israelis do and that they look and sound Russian. We’ll have more to report when she returns next week.

To celebrate our independence, Esther and I took an evening off and went to visit our nephew Chaim and his wife Ariel and their rapidly growing boy Netzach. I predict that the tyke is going to be huge — mark my words!

After visiting with the youngsters, the two of us went for a dinner-and-movie date. We enjoyed a pretty good dinner. Then we saw Hidden Figures, which is an interesting story about the “colored computers” at NASA in the early 1960’s. Of course, the movie title is a clever play on words: the “computers” were black women, so they were “hidden” away because of the segregation at the time. They were mathematicians, who worked with figures. And being women, they had figures. Clever. But in Hebrew, the title was "מאחורי המספרים" — “Behind the Numbers”, which is neither clever nor a particularly apt translation. Anyway, the movie was well done — and even family-friendly (talk about a rarity!) — and we enjoyed it.

When my girls were little, we used to watch “Bill Nye the Science Guy”. It was a nice introduction to science for kids, and Bill Nye was somewhat entertaining. But in the ensuing years, the guy’s turned into an insufferably pompous and intolerant ass. Given that he’s an engineer and not a scientist, his purporting to “represent the scientific community” reeks just a bit of elitist hubris. In any case, this week he got taken down by Tucker Carlson. I almost felt sorry for him.

Jew Haiku:

Insignificant
Your feelings do not matter
Reality bites

On the topic of the insignificance of feelings: this week a group of “witches” cast a spell on Trump. No, I swear I’m not making that up. The idea was (is, actually — it’s an ongoing “magick” project) to prevent Trump from causing any harm. While that’s a worthy goal, one might question the efficacy of casting “magic spells” to achieve it.

And of course, this week Trump addressed a joint session of Congress. Even some of his fiercest critics thought his speech was powerfully delivered. If you follow Scott Adams at all, you know he’s been talking about Trump as a “master persuader”, and the various tactics such a person would use. This is his take on the speech. Maybe the witches helped improve Trump’s speechifying. Here’s Ben Shapiro’s take.

As I’ve mentioned many times, I dislike Trump. But I do admire his ability to disarm his opponents. If you view the video of the speech, you’ll see that there are many moments where Congress is applauding something or other; quite often, in response to statements which should be bipartisan. But the Democrats by and large sat on their hands, painting themselves as the Party of the Spoiled Brats. The “optics” for them were really, really bad. Trump successfully maneuvered the Dems into looking like unpatriotic turds.

I’m further put in mind of Scott Adams’ take on how Trump could work to dispel the whole meme of “he’s literally Hitler” that’s been making the rounds. Adams said that if someone thinks you’re Hitler, there’s not a lot you can do, because anything you do is just proof of your nefarious hitleriness. So he says that the “master persuader approach” would be to make some outrageous statement, such as “I want to deport all illegal immigrants”. The people who think you’re Hitler will be confirmed in their view that that’s who you are. But then you actually do something much more moderate and reasonable, like ask for just deporting the criminals among the immigrants. And so on for the rest of your extreme statements: one by one, you show people that you’re not Hitler, and their cognitive dissonance will eventually cause them to drop that opinion of you.

All that said, what I see is another big-spending President who will further exacerbate the national debt with his “infrastructure” projects. I see another President who leads by Executive Orders. Yes, Bush the Second and Barack the First both did that; but that’s not an excuse to continue that sad saga. It’s long past time to roll-back the power of the Presidency.

Last week I told you about a practical vulnerability in the “SHA1 hash” used by a lot of software. I told you it wasn’t an immediate threat; well, I was wrong. Just a few days later, people intentionally poisoned a project’s source-code repository using the products of that vulnerability research. As noted cryptographer Bruce Schneier repeatedly states, “attacks only get better, they don’t get worse”. He might add: they get rolled out much more quickly once discovered, as well.

Esther relates an “only in Israel” story: yesterday she was driving to the store. On the way, a tow-truck was preparing to tow a car, but the road was narrow and the tow-truck blocked the road. So Esther sat there in traffic (she was the first behind the truck). Cars started piling up behind her, and within a few minutes the horns started blaring. A few minutes after that, people started getting out of their cars to yell at each other. As this was going on, the tow-truck finished up and pulled out. Esther pulled out directly after it. She looked back and saw that the people behind her were still “stuck in traffic”, yelling and screaming at each other instead of moving. Honestly, I don’t think that’s “only in Israel”, but it would never happen in Seattle.

We were both working all week. Tax season’s approaching, so Esther’s got plenty to do. I’ve been busy with my contract work and with trying to get a new release of 8th finished up. We’re both looking forward to a quiet shabbat!

This shabbat Sarah’s not with us, we’re invited out for dinner, and we’re having guests for lunch, including Dinah and her fiancé Shlomo! It all balances out in the end. We’ll serve:
baked chicken, baked brisket, roasted rosemary potatoes, steamed broccoli, onion quiche, various salatim, and fruit or something.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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