Immoral vs Illegal

This distinction between immoral and illegal is getting to be quite troubling, but also, unfortunately, quite pertinent. We've all heard one politician or business leader or another say "I have broken no laws", without necessarily denying whatever immoral atrocity they've been accused of committing. A recent example: On CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, Michael Reagan first postulated that this whole investigation into the Trump campaign's alleged collusion with the Russians was a political witch hunt, and then followed that up with something like "even if the Trump campaign did collude with the Russians, what law did they break?" This left Don Lemon stupefied, as he patently did not know. His best response, when asked again, was something like "people go to jail for collusion all the time", as if to say that the verb itself is illegal, like two 3rd graders colluding to pool their lunch money together to buy one of those big chocolate chip cookies in the cafeteria (god I loved those cookies) could actually go to jail for engaging in the act of an illegal verb. I am disappointed on two fronts: (1) the guest's attempt to mitigate the immorality of the alleged collusion by relying the legality of same, and (2) the fact that the host, who I am taking to be representative of the press at large, has been talking about this topic for months, while not being quite sure as to the legal implications of it. One person is trying to sell us a false equivalence, and the other is trying to sell us the news. Either way, it seems like both of them are lacking some foundation. 

The Darker Side of Analog-Digital Convergence

I performed the ultimate computer science move on my Ford Focus today: My radio stopped working. so, at a Red light, I turned the car off, started it up and, voila, the radio worked again. I don't know why and I venture a guess that Ford would not know why, but there you have it. Coincidentally, as I drove off, there was a story on NPR about how Farmers are now having to jailbreak their tractors to perform repairs that they have otherwise been doing in the past, but are now precluded from doing by John Deere, as only authorized dealers have a USB key loaded up with the right software to unlock the system for repairs and testing. This blending of analog and digital worlds is disconcerted. What if the zipper on my pants encounters a buffer overflow error when I have to pee? Will I suffer a personal buffer overflow? ;-)

Baby Poop

I have been trying to figure how to describe the new brand of poop that Nicholas has been selling over here. When we first brought him home he was producing a winter formulation: diesel. Then, he quickly, if not prematurely, switched over to a summer formulation: gasoline. Now that we are entering the festive months of Primavera, he has switched over to a more appropriate formulation: Pesto (I can just taste that fresh basil, pine nuts and parmesan!) How can I describe this new version of poop? I imagine a closed-circuit video of me strolling along a crowed subway platform in NYC. I pause, look around, and slowly pull out a zip lock bag with what appears to be a dirty diaper in it. I slowly slip on a small gas mask and goggles, then open the bag and let the diaper slip behind a trash can. I walk away calmly but expediently. 5 minutes later, would be passengers start collapsing, with foam coming out of their mouths :-/

Support Not Illumination

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The other night on NPR's Intelligence Squared, a modern day marvel of civil debate that I highly recommend, someone quoted Andrew Lang (1884-1912), albeit incorrectly attributing the quote to Mark Twain, as a caution against relying too heavily on statistics. Lang stated that we should use "statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts – for support rather than for illumination." This concept can and should be extended to the modern day combination of big data, AI and algorithms, though by the time the virtuous cycle of ingesting, analyzing and automating through algorithms has been created, the analogy has gone way beyond lampposts to the very sidewalk under our feet, which gives us great confidence and comfort as we stroll along said sidewalk, until a 1970 Buick Skylark comes careening off the road and runs us over ;-)

AT&T's Workforce 2020

I am duly impressed by AT&T’s Workforce 2020, wherein the Company identified the skills it needed to compete in the future, and created a blueprint for sourcing them ***internally*** This entailed collapsing 250+ traditional roles into 80 more integrated future roles, and clarifying to employees that they had first dibs on those roles, provided that they spent their own time (sometimes money) to acquire the skills for same. This is a brilliant strategy, because hiring for skills in an age where technology evolves so rapidly would be futile, and engaging in traditional training and skills development would be prohibitive. It also aligns with the idea that we are all responsible for our skills and careers, and companies can only provide and environment to for us to exercise that responsibility, nothing more. In the long run, this type of approach might return us to the so-called 'golden age' of employment, where you could potentially spend your entire career with a single company, because the internal ecosystem within the [sufficiently large] company will approximate the external market in terms of creative-destruction and related opportunities for advancement. 

The Inner Clock

My hierarchy of priorities in the gym are encapsulated in the following acronym: PFRW. This is an easy acronym for me to remember, as I work out at Planet Fitness and used 'rw' quite a bit as a UNIX admin in the 1990s (good old 'chmod'). The acronym stands for Pace, Form, Reps and Weight. In other words, keep to a pace, favor form over reps and favor reps over weight. I typically keep to a 2 minute pace, 5 sets and 16 reps to adhere to my golden rule of NOT ... GETTING ... HURT! I used to count to 60 between sets, as a form of meditation, but I found that using a timer allowed for a better form of meditation, devoid of the constant question of whether or not I was counting at a uniform pace. There are occasions when I keep to a 1 minute pace to accommodate a left then right strategy for a particular exercise, and this is when I discovered something: I inherently get ready for the next set within 1-2 seconds of my timer going off, without any internal counting or other form of awareness. I just get set, and the timer goes off. If I try to count or be aware of the passage of time, then I inevitably get ready too early or too late. If I don't try, then I am right on time. This reminds me of a scene from a wonderful moving called Infinity, starring Matthew Broderick as Richard Feynman: While he was a teenager, he was on his front porch jumping up and down and periodically checking his watch to see if he was keeping pace with time - in reality, to see if his sense of time kept pace with the universe. Of course, seconds are arbitrary units of time, but the passage of time itself may not be arbitrary at all, and our minds may very well be in tune with the pace of the universe in a way that that is intuitive if we listen to it, and disrupted if we try to control it. This 'listening' versus 'controlling' is not a theme that is limited to pace, so I suspect that there are a lot of areas that might benefit from letting go and listening, versus holding on and controlling. One's inner clock benefits from the external, objective clock to gauge accuracy, so applying this to other areas might be a bit more complex, unless one lets go of accuracy altogether, and that might be the real insight here.

Karma

Two of the more telling Sanskrit translations for Karma are 'action' and 'effect', with a third less useful translation being 'fate'. Action and effect are very much in line with the Karmic notion of cause and effect, but I think we do ourselves a great disservice when we cast this as fate and view all of the causes as occurring in our previous lives, and, as a result, view all of the effects in our current life as predestined. It would be much more useful to understand Karma as a way of knowing what your life is going to look like in the future by examining your thoughts, behaviors and actions today. This is as opposed to examining your circumstances today, which are, by definition, a result of your thoughts, behaviors and actions from yesterday, and, therefore, not a predictor of your circumstances tomorrow. There are many ways to change your thoughts - meditation, introspection, motivation, education - but this is where it starts, and then behavior follows, and then informed action, and then circumstances change, not magically and not by some action in a previous life, but by our actions in this life.