Okay, I went to MIT back in the 60s-70s. I have no politics. Nobody pays me anymore. Frankly, I think anyone who says they can measure 11 millimeters of global sea-level change over twenty years (1992-2012) is totally full of it.

Outside the British Museum in London is a plex donation box. All the pound & euro coins drop to the bottom and the box appears to be entirely filled with US dollars. I overheard a little boy ask his dad what they were. He answered without editorial. Weird moment, for sure.

Visit Detroit.

I’m a poll worker in Ohio where this kind of bs will be in play. Guaranteed. You can bet that if I hear the word “recalibration” I will be taking photos. Recalibration, for the uninitiated, is a “smokescreen word”. Most notably, it arises in DUI cases where someone who is not supposed to be caught (e.g., a judge) needs an out. It usually works the other way, however, screwing the innocent. Utility meters also, particularly in urban areas, are routinely recalibrated to benefit certain individuals. IMHO, voting machines should NEVER be recalibrated in the field.

Get a job you are totally unqualified for. This is easier than it sounds. You will need both: a competent accomplice to provide a list of buzzwords and the ability to lie casually. Of course, you will need “experience”. This is easy to pretend. Creating a fake company is just a matter of a $25 cellphone and $10 activation, the drug-dealer special. Soon you will have a paycheck. Lease a car and apartment that you could not possibly afford without this job. Get a high-maintenance girlfriend. You will learn programming.

I remember exactly when it happened for me. It was right after my first kid was born. In the parking lot of the supermarket where I had gone to buy diapers, I said to myself, “This is just like the scene [in some forgotten movie] where the guy goes out to buy diapers.” Then I realized that this entertainment-ephemera was merely conceptual but buying diapers was real. So I went in, bought diapers, brought the diapers home and quit hacking (for the most part).

Microsoft killed the Start button because it was an embarrassment. What other machine is turned-off by pressing Start?

turning a research budget into food. First instance I know of was around 1970: testing the black stuff on a grilled steak for carcinogenicity.

You might catch someone breaking into your house.

Today the Web. Tomorrow the Cloud. This problem has lots of room to grow.

Mark-to-Market has a pretty horrible, if generally unknown, history. The American FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) had decreed mark-to-market not long before the 2008 global liquidity collapse. The old rule was that assets were kept on the books at cost, until sold or depreciated away. For the most part, in even a slightly inflationary world, this left assets undervalued and income under-reported.

Under mark-to-market, things went swimmingly for a while. Everyone got a boost to earnings, which lifted stock prices.

To understand what happened next, an understanding of Systems Dynamics is helpful. Created by Jay Forrester at MIT in the 1950s, SD models systems in terms of feedback - which comes in two basic flavors.

          Negative - where a deviation in one direction is countered with a correction in the opposite direction. If you drift to the left, you steer to the right.
          Positive - the response to a deviation is to pile on increasingly more of the same, such as neutrons in a fission bomb.

Then came the disasterous deviation, the reduction in confidence in sub-prime mortgages and their price. Under Mark-to-Market, the asset-reduction had to be taken even though the securities hadn't been sold. Mark-to-Market kicked off a downward spiral in asset values. Banks, because of capitalization requirements, started dumping mortgage-backed securities, driving the values down even more, necessitating more dumping of everything, e.g., corporate bonds, and on and on.

[Note: the FASB did a study of mark-to-market after the fact, absolved themselves of responsibility and quietly neutered it.]

Now, how bad an idea is Mark-to-Market Taxation? If it passes, buy canned goods.

NASA is going to die. Cold Fusion is like Steve Jobs in Switzerland.

I wrote a program for a software company (cannot name) that automated much of the documentation process. It took specs and replaced the future tense with the present tense as a first rough-cut. Most of it was pretty simple, actually. "X will load Y into Z" became "X loads Y into Z". The programmers actually enjoyed correcting the sometimes garbled English. Most importantly, it sped the process up 5x. I named the program "The Defuturizor" after ... well, if you can't figure that out, perhaps you should be defuturized.

Karma. In the early 1990s, MS blew Lotus 1-2-3 out of the sky with Excel by including a "translation" program that worked about as well as a blender with the top off. Funny to hear MS squak now that Google is giving them a taste of the same stinky shaft.

Al Qaeda recruited an Art Major and told her. "Go shoot the President of the United States!" She bought a camera.
Al Qaeda recruited a Music Major and asked. "Do you know how to blow up a bridge?" He replied, "No, but if you hum a few bars I can fake it."
Al Qaeda recruited a Psychology Major and said "Destroy the Evil One!" He shot himself.
Al Qaeda recruited an English Major and told her. "We need a whopper!" She said, "Do you want fries with that?"
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