Chapbook

[sasha]

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

Winter sunrise on fresh snow... something about the morning light - no humidity or haze to diffuse it - cold, clean, pure, undiluted, unhazed by humidity... shadows clearly defined, long, curving, accentuating the underlying topography... a sense of near-revelation, of almost comprehending the lay of the land... of, of... I don't know... je ne sais qoui...

Wild edibles... blueberries discovered on a hike, or black raspberries, or hobblebush berries, or the occasional stand of orange shelf fungus, so freshly sprouted it's still creamy and slightly acidic...

Toads... so full of themselves, yet adorably ridiculous - slow, ungainly, uglier than plaid bell-bottoms. What's not to love? I used to keep each season's first in a terrarium, feeding them mealworms by hand. No matter how often I did, I'd reflexively jump when they snatched the squirming gift from my fingers. Until I overfed one to death, not realizing that they'd never had the need to evolve the sensation that tells us it's time to push away from the table. Now I let them be - but can't resist picking them up, misshapen warty brown plums that make me laugh, even if they do pee in my hand.

Wordplay... a trait shared by my closest childhood friends. Jonny Morris & I used to entertain one another on the schoolbus by couching the blandest of statements in the loftiest, most stilted language our prepubescent vocabularies would allow: "It appears that the likelihood of an aqueous meteorological event has significantly diminished from previous estimates." (Looks like a nice day after all)... Next time around, I'd consider a career in linguistics.

Mathematics... How do you communicate a passion that no one else shares? How do you convey the baffled astonishment, the shivery sense of Epiphany a 13-year old might feel as a mysterious, graceful curve emerges from the homely arithmetic progression he was plotting, a feeling like approaching some magnificent mist-enshrouded structure? How do you describe the spiritual rush of discovering that the dance of stars and planets fall out of a single differential equation? How do you express the delight, the tickle of pleasure learning the reason behind the Birthday Paradox, the power and simplicity of the method of least-squares, the evolution of everyday phenomena driven by random stochastic processes? How? Maybe you can't. Maybe it's too personal, like expecting a Normal to get the same tingle you do from a particularly obscure musical passage. It doesn't lessen its ethereal, other-worldly beauty. But sometimes it does get a bit lonely...

The woods... a magical place... humbling, a place where your money, your athletic prowess, your good looks & fashion sense, your political influence, mean NOTHING... yet welcoming, an interconnected web of Life of which you're a tiny part, a cog in an enormous machine of infinite complexity defying comprehension... the best we can do is put some little part of it under our microscopes so we can say, YES! that gear definitely rotates that cam, whose maximum excursion is 7 millimeters, and seems to activate that pushrod... and if we're really good at it, we can dig down a little deeper, and say that the cam & camshaft seem to made of the same alloy... and maybe we can even tell you that the ore was quarried somewhere in the Ruhr region of Germany, and smelted with the same process as the cam shaft - that its crystalline structure is the result of slow cooling from a high temperature somewhere above the molten metal's 2nd glass transition point...

But don't ask what the machine does, because we haven't the faintest clue. We're too small to grasp the big picture... and I find accepting that reality to be oddly comforting. That as small and insignificant as I might be, I'm a component of something much bigger that on rare occasions has afforded me a teasing glimpse under the edge of the tent at the inscrutable Vastness beyond...

[saw]

wonderful musings
well written and heartfelt
a perfect chapbook entry
keep it up...

[sasha]

thanks

sometimes I veer towards lecturing... I try not to, but enthusiasm is apt to override judgement... just be thankful I don't have a chalkboard

[saw]

hey roy....thought you might appreiate this;

https://medium.com/the-knowledge-of-lau ... cad7786c79

[sasha]

One of my favorites:

A biologist, a physicist, and a mathematician see a man and a woman enter an empty house across the street. Nine months later, they see the couple emerge carrying a baby. The biologist concludes that the couple has reproduced. The physicist dismisses the observation as experimental error. The mathematician surmises that if someone were to enter the house now, it would again be empty. (rimshot)

[saw]

how do you get an engineer to do something you want them to do ?



ans. Tell them it's "impossible"

[sasha]

 
You might be an engineer if...
... you've ever used duct tape or coat hangers for anything other than taping ducts or hanging coats
... you enjoy catching the technical inaccuracies in sci-fi movies
... you've owned a calculator without an "=" sign, and know what "RPN" stands for
... you spend an hour debating the expected outcome of an experiment that takes 5 minutes to run
... you have a drawer full of cables & power cords from electronics thrown out years ago
... you've got technical charts & "xkcd" webcomics pinned to your workstation wall
... you need a checklist to turn on your TV
... you've destroyed at least one device taking it apart just to see how it worked
... you still have a secret stash of "Dilbert" comics
... you have no idea what a "down" is in football, or what constitutes an "error" in baseball, but can quote extensively from any Monty Python movie


( I score a respectable 9 out of 10, and substituting "sound system" for "tv" in #7 gives me a perfect score. )

[saw]

very respectable
like popeye used to say
I yam what I yam

[sasha]

 
Eliot was right

April. It can't make up its mind whether it's winter or spring, and routinely offers up generous portions of both, promising sun and warmth and green one day, then inflicting more cold, more wet, and continued gray the next. On a hike this past weekend, I heard not only wood frogs, but peepers. Yesterday it snowed - not enough to cover the ground or slick the roads, but just enough to remind us that it ain't over 'til it's over. It was actually quite beautiful once the sun came out, like a touch of frosting on the fir trees - but not beautiful enough to compel anyone to cry, "Oh don't go, stay a bit longer!" Instead we smile, murmur "Yes, yes, lovely indeed" while handing it its hat and helping it one with its coat and reaching past to open the door for it. You've had your turn, Winter. Now get lost.

This is also when income taxes loom into view, like icebergs on the horizon. For the last 5-10 years, I've been filing 3 returns every April: my mother's as well as my own. New Hampshire has no state income tax, but Massachusetts - where Mom lived - does. There's never been a problem having returns go directly into her account until now. But now that she's no longer living, I need to justify what they've done unquestioningly for the past decade. Besides an additional form (1310, in case you're wondering), I need to present a court document authorizing me to accept the refund on her behalf. I'm sure there'd be no additional forms needed should the money happen to be flowing in the other direction. This pretty much made e-filing impossible; so I printed out all of her finished forms, filled out a 1310 (by hand - long story), and stuffed them into an envelope along with my Power of Attorney. In a fit of vengeful pique, I also included all the IRS worksheets and a copy of last year's SSA Representative Payee report, which proves I'd been granted access to her SS payments as well. You want paperwork, Assholes, here's some paperwork. Bon Appetit.

And it's my birth month, which, here in New Hampshire, means "Time to get your car registered and inspected." Registration's easy - a trip to the town hall and a playful flirtation with the assistant town clerk. Inspection can be a bit more problematic - last year I hit a water-filled pothole that was a lot deeper than it looked, and it cost me a mud shield. That and a set of 4 new tires ran to just under $1000, and I was grateful my 2015 Honda had cost me so little. I registered it yesterday, and just made an appointment for this year's inspection. We shall see.

So, April. For me, it's a month filled with appointments and deadlines set by others, when personal projects come to a halt, like a schoolbus sitting at a railroad crossing waiting for the Boston & Maine to rumble through one car at time. But I can see sunrise through the kitchen window without leaning all the way across the sink, and once up it casts shadows in my bedroom. Before too much longer it'll be in my eyes when I awaken.

Patience...

[sasha]

 
Eliot was right

April. It can't make up its mind whether it's winter or spring, and routinely offers up generous portions of both, promising sun and warmth and green one day, then inflicting more cold, more wet, and continued gray the next. .... You've had your turn, Winter. Now get lost.

I mean it, Winter. You might think it's funny what you did last night, covering the ground, my car, everything, under another inch of snow. Ha ha. Now listen up: CUT THE SHIT. BEAT IT. You've sung your song, given your grand soliloquy, taken your bows. Now get off the stage and let the lady take hers.

PLEASE.

[sasha]

Spin the Wheel... Toss a Coin... Pick a Card... or...

Optimization is a common problem in engineering, manufacturing, economics... any endeavor requiring the expenditure of resources - which is most of them. Everyone wants the biggest bang for their buck. Imagine a manufacturer who relies on several regional suppliers to provide the materials needed to meet its own customer demands; and suppose the operations director needs to conduct a quality audit, requiring her to visit each in person. She would like to do this in one trip get it done as quickly as possible. In what order must she visit them to minimize the total distance she needs to travel?

The most obvious way to answer this of course is to calculate the total distance of each possible itinerary and choose the smallest. If there are only two facilities to visit - let's call them A and B - then there are only two possible routes: home-to-A-to-B-to-home; or home-to-B-to-A-to-home. Pick the shorter. Done.

This always works - but it's rarely feasible. When there are three facilities - A, B, & C - there are six possible routes taking you to all three (all beginning & ending at home): ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA. If there are 4 facilities, there are 24. I won't bother listing them. In general, if there are N suppliers to visit, there are N x (N-1) x (N-2) x (N-3)...3 x 2 x1 ways to do it, a number called N-factorial, designated N!. This number grows very quickly as N increases. There are 120 ways to visit 5 places, and 720 to visit 6. If our director has 10 audits to conduct, she must determine which of nearly 4 million possible routes will cost her the least in gas or air fare. She might as well toss a coin each time before moving on to the next.

There isn't enough computer horsepower in the world to brute-force a solution to some real-world optimization problems, but many years ago I came across a clever technique that comes close. It doesn't pretend to guarantee the best possible solution, but promises to get you somewhere near it. It's called Simulated Annealing, after the way that the atoms within the crystalline structure of a heated metal spontaneously settle into the state of lowest energy as they cool.

Like most numerical optimization algorithms, it requires a bit of guesswork to get started - you must release the bloodhound near where you last saw the fugitive. The software then tries different arrangements by any of a number of schemes, and recalculates, remembering which scheme gave the best result, and proceeding from it each time. But not always - sometimes the best way to summit a mountain isn't to go relentlessly Up. Sometimes you can find a better path if you go Down a bit first. And this is what Simulated Annealing does - it sometimes resets its "best guess" to one that's actually WORSE than the best it's found so far, with the idea that maybe from there it can find an even better way. And it often does. I used the idea to write a program for the best way to backup my data files using the fewest number of floppy disks (which should tell you how long ago this was). It did a good job - not significantly better than the scheme I'd originally come up with, and at the expense of a lot more code, but an intriguing proof of concept. And one should never underestimate the "coolness" factor, either.

[sasha]

Empty Vessels

Corporatespeak! BoardRoomese, Organizationish - the lingo of middle management, verbal affectations adopted to identify themselves to one another, the secret handshake distinguishing the Movers and Shakers from the Doers and Builders. It's a learned behavior. The young bucks fresh out of business school are eager to attract the attention of those already in power, and start mimicking their speech patterns as a way to say "Listen to me! I'm one of you!" And it can work in both directions. The youngsters just hatched out of the nest were exposed to it while in the egg. But many of the oldsters may fear they’ve lost some of their sheen. Stellar performance got them here; adequate mediocrity has kept them there, and they're running out of answers to their superiors’ questions of “What have you done for me lately?” They might view the arrival of fresh troops as a potential threat, and consider it wise to pick up enough of the current Wall Street jive in order to appear less out-of-touch. We staff menials who hear it know we are in the presence of either A) an ambitious young brave hungering for authority, or B) an uneasy graybeard feeling his own slip away.

The form is linguistically notable for its windily pompous sentence structure. If two words will suffice, then five are better. Instead of saying "Let's stick to what we're good at," their pathological need to appear erudite instead vomits out "let's focus on leveraging our core competencies to better fuel our growth initiatives." Much better. Another fine example, one I actually heard in the wild, was uttered by a site director urging manufacturing to be more diligent about meeting quality standards, declaring that "a proactive stance should have positive implications for our scrap portfolio." Pure poetry - sonorous and overflowing with so many syllables it must be more professional than a simple declaration that we should stop making crap. This lyrical recitation earned him the right to wear the miter of leadership for at least another fiscal quarter.

Another key feature is the recasting of nouns into verbs. For example, "leverage", "pilot", "cascade", and "transition" have all been dragooned into serving two masters, as both nouns and verbs. Ize-ing is another popular sport – "incentive" begets "incentivize", "priority" begets "prioritize", and "synergy" begets "synergize". One might say they've all been "verbized”.

And speaking of sports - athletic metaphors abound. They're the necktie set's equivalent of the pack howl, a communal activity serving to create a sense of solidarity even though everyone really knows it's every man for himself. A marketing coup "hit it out of the park" or "slapped it into the net". Contract negotiations are "stalled at the 3-yard line". To try a different approach is to “pivot”, to do nothing for a while is to “punt”. And lest one get the impression that it’s all rah-rah, yay us, let’s not forget that “It’s in your court now” really means “not my problem".

Certain words and phrases carry totemic power, and should become part of one's working vocabulary. A few useful phrases to remember are "good story", "value-added", "true to plan", "capacity constrained", and "to your point". Besides the many verbized nouns, one would be well-advised to become familiar with "facilitate", "harmonize", "metrics", and especially "opportunity". This last is a multi-tool serving a variety of purposes. "Promising business opportunity!" can be a rallying cry; "growth opportunity" is often deployed during performance evaluations, especially to render a negative review more palatable; and whenever a member of the "Leadership Team" is terminated. He's never "fired" or even "dismissed" - he's left the Company to "pursue other opportunities". ("And we wish him well in his future endeavors.")

Of all these curious constructions, I must admit to a particular loathing for “webinar”, a clumsy portmanteau of "web-based" and "seminar". I find this chimera so unwieldly & repellent that I cringe even writing it. It's been my privilege to have attended a few, and the activity is every bit as ludicrous as the word. I've never known one to go without a technical hitch. The last one I attended was a campfire singalong for recently laid-off older workers, or so I gathered from the slides, because neither I nor the presenter could get the sound to work.

It's all so nudge-nudge wink-wink and blatantly self-conscious that it would be funny if it weren't so embarrassingly pathetic – the nervous patois of frightened, callow young white men cautiously sniffing the butts and licking the lips of their predatory elders.

At the end of the day, we must admit that this dissertation is only a 30.000-ft view focused solely on the low-hanging fruit. For a more granular deep dive, one must circle back for a drill-down. Going forward, after due diligence, best practices urge us to break down silos to better facilitate those actionables on the critical path towards a paradigm shift.

The key take away is, it is what it is.

[mnaz]

So true. God I hate stuff like "in your court." Gotta retire soon and GTFO. Also, I need to look up the word "dragoon."

[sasha]

As far as I know, it means to conscript, perhaps unwillingly. I've never looked it up, but that's what I've assumed from context. I hope it's right.

Yeah, business jargon sets my teeth on edge, too. We certainly had our own engineering vocab - end milling, diffraction limited, thread pitch, binary search, infant mortality - but they defined specific items or procedures, and weren't deployed simply to demonstrate solidarity, just to convey information. And they rarely came in & out of fashion. Kind of a gray area, I suppose. ("gray area" = jargon?)...

[mnaz]

Yes, that seems right. I first ran across "dragoon" when I visited mountains called the Dragoon Mountains in southeastern Arizona. Where Cochise had his stronghold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragoon_Mountains