So, How's That "Super Intelligence" Going?

     Gizmodo, 21 hours ago: "The FAA Is Rolling Out Its AI Air Traffic Tool Nationwide."
     FAA, 3:54 p.m.: Nationwide ground stop.  "All departing traffic should remain groundstopped until further notice." In other words, no end in sight.

     Microsoft, busily implementing AI, suffered a huge outage yesterday through today in many of its web-delivered services.

     At Microsoft, armies of technicians and engineers dug in and have largely got the services functioning again.  FAA has fewer people -- there's your lean, "running the government like a business" approach, in this case Earl's Discount Variety, where they have only one clerk on duty at a time, who also stocks shelves -- but I have no doubt they've got everyone with a clue hard at work solving the problem and they will eventually succeed.  Sorry about your vacation and that critical overnight air express shipment!

     There seems to be a common thread here, and you can expect more of it.  "A.I" as it presently exists is not up to doing critical tasks.  Hey, maybe it will be, some day.  It's pretty convincing to a lot of people right now.  But when put to the test, it keeps collapsing like air-whipped bullshit on a hot summer's day, so maybe -- just maybe -- we might want to wait and keep on playing with it in applications where it doesn't gum up great swathes of email or endanger air travel, air travelers, and all us people on the ground under airplane routes?  Or, I guess, we can wait until it really screws up and manages to kill a bunch of people, and live with the reaction.

     Oh mighty Googly AI, what is the "Butlerian Jihad?"

     Update: Here and elsewhere, some skeptics have said AI is unlikely to have been the cause of the FAA ground stop.  Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy's statement is incoherent, pointing to outdated "analog communications systems" causing "data network overloads."  The most generous reading of this patent nonsense is that their links between ATC centers and radio transmission/reception sites* are presently using voice-over-IP, which is a relatively straightforward replacement for dedicated analog lines, and that the VOIP system shares the same (presumably secure and in some way isolated) data network as all the rest of the FAA comms -- radar info, the (originally) teletype system for notices to pilots, routing and scheduling comms and so on.  What might overload this?  As it happens, VOIP data usage is pretty steady; silence fills about as many bits as conversation.  The other data is likewise consistent.  The NOTAM system is busy and gets more so for spicy weather or high-traffic periods, but it's plain text, low bandwidth.  The ACARS system that texts with plane crews is a similarly light load.

     Hey, you know what would overload those data networks?  Starting up a big, fat, interconnected AI that is intended to sort out optimum traffic routings on the fly, and has to keep communicating internally as it shuffles things around!  It's a problem in the same class as playing chess with itself, a known heavy burn of computational horsepower, and high traffic if the information about the pieces on the board is scattered across an entire continent and constantly changing.

     I stand by my theory: managers pushed to get the shiny new AI claptrap up and running, and it ate up the available bandwidth and then started crowding out all the other traffic, crashing their nationwide network before anyone caught on.  VOIP would have been the next-largest user of bandwidth and got hit the hardest.  There's almost certainly not going to be any one place where some team of geeks gets a real-time visualization of the total network traffic, so it may have gummed up and been restarted more than once before they realized they were hosed, gave up and started trying to get the things they broke working again.
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* With a very few exceptions for ACARS, the military (UHF) plus long-haul stuff (HF) over oceans and in the outback, aviation comms are line-of-sight amplitude-modulated VHF voice in one band stuck in between the high end of FM broadcasting and TV channel 7, using essentially the same system no matter where you fly. "Line of sight" can be a very long way when one end of the link is way, way up there where airliners fly, but it's not infinite and there's a whole network of ground stations bristling with antennas, variously used by various flavors of air traffic control.  It is indeed complex, and yes, it can go very wrong if changes are made incautiously.

Happy Birthday, Doc Savage

     Or so Kenneth Robeson wrote: "An old notebook...entry: 'This thing started November 12, 1932.'"

     That gets a little complicated, given that "Robeson" never existed.  He was a house name at pulp publishers Street & Smith.  Lester Dent, who came close to being a Doc Savage character in real life,* wrote most of the stories. Dent, publisher Henry W. Ralston and editor John L. Nanovic came up with the character, his backstory and his associates, and presumably one of them made the actual notebook entry.

     Doc went on to hundreds of pulp-magazine adventures, a string of paperback reprints a generation later (when I found them), fan stories, new stories, incorporation into Philip Joe Farmer's "Wold Newton" family tree of fictional heroes, villains and superheroes, even more reprints and a remarkably awful George Pal film.

     And he may have had a real-world antecedent: Colonel Richard Henry Savage -- 19th-Century U. S. military officer, adventurer, world traveler and author of popular adventure and mystery novels. Or perhaps Colonel Savage was the model for Doc's father, Clark Savage, Sr. 
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* Originally a telegrapher, he went on to become a private pilot, ham radio operator, amateur sailor on the high seas with his own boat, world traveler, pioneer of commercial aerial photography and inveterate gadgeteer.  Among other things.

Home, Sick

     I'm in Day Two of a cold that has me home and sleeping a lot.  I have named it "Tamaritis," in honor of the first known patient.  (She says she has no idea where it came from.  Possibly elfshot, or a gladhanding candidate for political office, which amounts to the same thing,)

     It is some kind of a respiratory bug.  Hers settled in her lungs.  Mine's gone after my sinuses so far, with some of my usual inner-ear symptoms like dizziness, disorientation and a decided tilt to either the universe or me, depending on one's point of view.  A constant for both of us is utterly vile chills, the kind of creeping coldness that nothing seems to mitigate.  It seems to search out the infected person's weak points.

     I have continued with salt-water gargles when my throat gets scratchy, honey-sweetened hot lemonade* (I used up all the lime concentrate and the honey's getting low) coffee† and chicken soup.  There's a microwave-pouch version of the latter that's pretty good.  Tonight is Trash Night, so I shall endeavor to persevere in doing my part by cleaning out the fridge and changing a couple of litter boxes.  You would not want me operating a motor vehicle at present.  I'm having a tough enough time navigating on my own two feet.
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* And not, I hasten to point out, hot-honey sweetened lemonade.  Who knows, it might help, but I shall put off that experiment until I think I really, really need it.
 
† No known therapeutic value but I wouldn't want to do without it.

It's Veteran's Day

     It's a day to remember the living, the people -- mostly regular working Joes and Janes -- who go and do the hard, often dull, occasionally dangerous jobs in the country's armed forces.

     Today is a day originally marked over a century ago by the people who thought they had just finished a horrific war that would end wars, a war that left scars twisting across Europe that in places have still not healed, and may not for centuries yet to come.

     What they did not know is that their war would be followed by others, even worse.  By a century of war.

     We're in a new century now, and war persists.  It chews up and spits out the people who put on their country's uniform, for long hours and low pay.  Spare them a thought.  Give them your thanks.  Their job is to stem the tide, to confront the horror and drudgery so that you and I don't have to.  It is a gift beyond price.

I Still Don't Trust The Future

     The recent impeachment effort is one of the reasons I'm unsure how much change we're going to see when Congress turns over in January like pond water.

     There were enough House Democrats in Washington and enough Republicans playing hooky that had they bothered to show up, they could have carried a vote to impeach Secretary of Defense Hegseth.

     On the other hand, there are not -- and will not be -- sufficient votes in the current Senate to actually oust the guy.  Nope; the Senate would have cleared their slates, shoved the furniture around to set up for the big event, made sure the Secretary and whatever legal counsel he had -- possibly Attorney General Todd Blanche himself -- were set up with carafes of water and coffee, comfy chairs and microphones, etc., let Senators do a little chastising of their opposite numbers, let the Dems chide the impeachee and the GOPpers congratulate him, broken for lunch, come back, held a vote finding him not guilty and been done in time for a nice supper, maybe even drinks before.  What's the point?  Setting a few more of my tax dollars on fire?

     They can run the process after the first of the year and maybe have a whisper of a chance of success, if the majority can find a handful of Senate Republicans minded to play along.  By then, the new minority party will have a better idea who they want to blame, and it might be him.

     This is all the old familiar song and dance, and if if I wanted to watch the same-old same-old done to perfection, I would have changed the channel to Bugs Bunny, who's got more panache and can carry a tune (Oh, that Mel Blanc and his successors and uncredited peers!).

     The Fed.gov has got a long way to go to earn my trust, no matter who's turning the crank.  I'm more inclined to let the Democrats finish their audition -- but make no mistake, it's indeed an audition.  I sure hope they've rehearsed!

     Around four this morning, I woke from a realistic dream in which I'd been out working in the front yard of Roseholme Cottage, the neighborhood looking even more haggard than it usually does this time of year, trees going bare, the vacant homes dark, the smashed house to the south a little more dilapidated, plumes of smoke rising in the distance, angled by the breeze.  A dark flying thing came burbling down from high in the gray and cloudy sky, small straight wings, big front tapering back to the tail, getting bigger and heading right for me!  I looked at it a little too long, figured it to hit to the south and ran around to the north side of house, yelling for Tam to take cover.  I curled up against the foundation as the drone missile impacted some distance away with a muted noise, shutting my eyes and wishing I'd told my parents I loved them more often.  The light got very bright red-yellow-orange even through my eyelids and I thought, "Is this really it? The fighting wasn't that bad! I wasn't supposed to end this way!" And then I woke up.

     Yeah, ask me how I feel about the future.  My subconscious knows. 

Like Fish Flopping On The Dock

     My Dad was an avid fisherman -- he liked the quiet.  He liked being in nature.  And he liked fresh-caught fish.  (Just about ruined my palate for anything but!)

     But it wasn't all Zen-like stillness and delicious aftermath.  You catch a fish and take it out of the water, the creature is desperate to get back to where it belongs.  It flops and thrashes around in this new, strange environment, trying to get traction, trying to move productively, trying to survive.

     Say hello to this strange period of legislative overlap, in which the departing Representatives and Senators try to get in their parting shots, while the incoming class tries to find their bearings and talks about their ambitious plans, which have yet to meet the slow gears and millstones of government.

     Like fish out of water, all that action can be unsettling.  Where's it all going?  Will dinner escape?

     It's a good time to step back and just watch.  There's not a lot to be done.  We voted.  You can call or write your Congresscritters, but the old ones aren't much minded to listen and the new ones can't do anything yet.  They're all going to do just whatever they're going to do, and there's a lot of be learned from paying attention.  How do they act when largely unconstrained by consequences?  What do they plan when their future still looks unlimited?

     They'll tell you who they are, if you look and listen.  My Dad could read the riverbanks, the shape and the shadows and the flow of the stream, and have a pretty good idea of what was in there before he baited the hook.  Our elected legislators are often more transparent than an Indiana waterway, and it can be surprising what bait they'll lunge at. 

Suspicious Urgency

     It's not even a "suspicion."  It's confirmed.  The Governor of Texas has long had sweepingly broad emergency powers, and they're been invoked often in last decade or more.  Push the correct magic button and the Lone Star Governor can rule by decree, with a scope and finality that leaves our current President's ultra-Wilsonian approach to Chief Executive power in the shade.

     During the long, cozy Republican trifecta in that state, this level of control has not received a lot of pushback -- a squabble between the city of Austin and the state over COVID-19 restriction during the pandemic and in 2022, a single, solitary Republican state legislator trying to get traction for a bill that would limit the Governor's emergency powers to something more similar to those in the other 49 states.

     He hasn't gotten anywhere.

     And then -- Then Texas went and elected a Democratic Governor.  And filled all the other top jobs on the state's executive branch with Dems, too.  Now Texas House Representative Brian Harrison's old bill is back and he's getting headlines, calling for a special session of their legislature to ensure that Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa does not inherit "what are, in effect, nearly all the powers of a dictator," before they lose control.  Ooga-booga!

     It didn't bother him so much over the past four years that he kept after his original bill, but now...!

     I've got no problem with legislators not wanting the Executive to go all Il Duce.  I'm less sympathetic when their level of concern varies depending on which side is holding the scepter and orb.  The Founders and Framers understood the danger of unchecked Executive power and they took steps to keep it reined in.  One of the jobs of legislators and judges is to ensure those reins remain in place, despite Party bonds or personal friendship.  They, ahem, have not been doing anything like an adequate job of it for quite some time, and one of the clearest lessons to be taken from the most recent election is that they'd better get back on task -- and it would play a lot better if it didn't look like a hasty partisan hack-job.

A Cross-Grained People

     I'm still thinking about the recent elections.  They have restored my faith -- not in the essential goodness of the American people, at least half of whom have below-average ethics and morals, but in our cussedness.

     Some years back, or m,ore like some decades back, one or the other party had got themselves a Federal trifecta, and many of the more voluble Senators and Congressthings on the winning side were going on chat shows and talking about a "permanent majority."  Even back then, my immediate reaction was, 
"Nuh-unh."  It doesn't work that way.  Never has, never will.  Oh, sometimes one party holds the upper hand for a good long time, but it doesn't last.  There's a war or an economic downturn or some fundamental change elsewhere in society, and politics gets shaken up.

     The guys who wrote the U. S. Constitution were not perfect men and neither was the document they produced (and they knew it.  Why do you think it's got the amendment process written right in?).  But they read history.  They knew that human nature remains constant, but governments change.  They tried to write around the worst ways of changing but they knew it would happen.  And as people go, Americans are a cantankerous, ornery lot.  We're perverse and uncooperative.  We like to blame the people we voted in to run things, and to vote them out if things aren't going as we'd like.  There's been a lot of back and forth about our 15-bean assortment of a culture, one side saying our diversity is our strength, the other saying our unity is our strength, but both statements are true and the real source of our strength is that we don't fall into line well; we're fractious and taken as a whole, we're very willing to take the bull (or the BS) by the horns and change course.

     I'd about given up.  It looked to me like the bully-boys were going to ride high, wide and mighty until they'd driven the whole shebang over a cliff.  They still might, but the electorate did their best to head it off last Tuesday, whooping and hollering and waving a big bandanna.  We've taken some damage, bit we just might get through this and get back to normal for awhile.

     At least, until next time.  But I'm believing there will be a next time, that the pendulum will keep on swinging, and that's a relief.

Interesting Times

     We're in for some interesting months, I think.  Chaos is threatening to break out among the GOP, from the #2 seat in the party organization challenging the Chairman (both of them the President's choices for their jobs, as is traditional) to Susie Wile's departure and Stephen Miller's elevation.  Miller is not much for details and building consensus, and with a wide-open Presidential primary less than two years away, expect a lot of churn in the Cabinet.

     Meanwhile, the Dems are in the position of a car-chasing dog that has unexpectedly caught several.  Theirs is the more fractious party, and the details-and-consensus job is even more important.

     We're going to have two years of divided government for certain, and while I think a government with one foot stuck in a bucket and bag over its head governs best, and there's a whole lot of rancor all around, they are all going to have to learn how to work and play well together in order to accomplish the essential tasks.  At this point, the two big parties barely agree on just which items are essential and I suspect they'll find out by screwing up before they're able to move forward.  I very much doubt the current President will add much to that effort -- that duck's not just lame, he's seriously irked, and preoccupied with constructing monuments to himself.

     In the meantime, a lot of rocks will get flipped over and a lot of pale, squirming things will feel the light of day.  I think that's for the best, too, and it's one reason the parties in power do change: voters start to suspect the grift, graft and surreptitiously crossed palms are building up excessively, and we count on each party to keep an eye on the other.   Both of them like to talk about "historic mandates" when they come out on top but it's more like a cat barfing up a hairball.

     It's been awhile since the muck was turned over, so try not to be too surprised by what floats to the surface.

The Cold Caught Me

     Tam's been fighting an atypical cold for several days, one that started with chills and fatigue, and settled in her lungs.  I've been doing my best to treat her while avoiding it: healthy meals and "hot toddies" of limeade sweetened with wildflower honey,* the best and least-processed kind I could find, for both of us.  And saltwater gargles for me when I wake up with a scratchy throat.  (I'm not real fond of those, but they seem to work.)

     I woke up with chills in the small hours this morning, and about enough energy to wrestle a noodle if it wasn't especially ambitious or al dente.†  I called in sick and have been taking it easy, still hoping to mitigate symptoms.  After the summer of back trouble, I don't have the reserves I once had.  Managed to rustle up some breakfast for lunch and I'll try to get an early start on Trash Night -- I'm not going to be at my quickest with that chore.
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* This is an old folk remedy, but what's in it will do you no harm and might help: plenty of Vitamin C and mildly antiseptic citric acid in the lime juice, while the honey is both soothing and a mild topical antibiotic.   Best made double strength, with boiling water to dissolve all the honey, then diluted and cooled with room temperature or chilled water.  I make two cups at a time in a Pyrex measuring cup, by eye and experience -- enough honey to cover the bottom easily, enough lime juice concentrate to cover that or a bit more, then a cup of boiling water and vigorous stirring before cooling it down with another cup of water. 
 
† Man, being bit by a noodle is the worst!

That'll Leave A Mark

     I woke up this morning to discover the GOP had received significant chastisement at the ballot box, in ways and places I had not expected.  Scare ads about wokeness, "communism" (socialism, which you are free to loathe, is not communism, despite decades of mostly Soviet Russian propaganda blurring that line; will you please go read some history?) and a tiny minority within a tiny minority* did not stampede voters away from Democrats and towards Republicans.  High fuel prices, high grocery prices (etc.) and an unpopular war appeared to motivate voters, as did grabbing and deporting people's coworkers, friends and relatives: it turns out that stuff annoys folks a whole lot.  Plain talk about corruption and good governance helped the victors.

     Politicians of both parties need to get out of their tight-knit, self-congratulatory circles and go talk to people.  Some of the most stunning and decisive upsets were by candidates who got out and listened to voters -- all of the voters -- in their state or district, and then spoke about how they would address the issues that they learned mattered.  What they go on to do (or even attempt) will tell the tale, and could turn an election win into a lasting legacy.

     Vindictive fanatics and blinkered ideologues lost last night and pragmatic politicians won.  If the 2026 winners govern as pragmatically as they campaigned, they can do a lot of good.  If they're another pack of empty, slick-talking suits and Party hacks, voters can boot them out, same as they just did the last set.

     Nobody should take this outcome for granted.  This is not a time to relax, hold hands and sing songs.  Come the swearings-in, it will be time to get down to work.
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* The unsuccessful 1970s tennis player, a weightlifter guy and a handful of student athletes notwithstanding, the overlap between transpeople and active sports participants is unsurprisingly minuscule.  This is a non-issue, best left to the various bodies that regulate their respective sports.  People that don't like it can form their own particular softball leagues, precisely as all sorts of Americans have been doing since time immemorial.  "What would I do if accosted by a hairy weirdo in the locker room?"  Pepper-spray them, just as I would any credible threat.  And if there's an earthquake -- a far more likely occurrence -- I'll run outside, away from buildings.  Grow the hell up and stop whining that the entire world must be Nerfed for your comfort.

I Voted

      Tam and I went and did it, colds notwithstanding (hers is way worse -- mine is still tentative, which is good, since Amazon screwed up the delivery of cold supplies that was supposed to happen tonight*).  There wasn't much of a line at our usual polling place† but there was a good crowd and people were arriving steadily.

     As I write this, tonight looks like at least a mild drubbing for the Republicans, who have earned it fair and square.  Control of the Senate is still undecided, but whoever gets it is not going to have the kind of majority that will let them do just anything.  This should (it won't) calm the doomsayers on either side.

     And it looks like Indiana, in a largely rural U.S. House district, has replaced by-no-means-a-maverick Republican Victoria Spartz with gay Democrat J. D. Ford (who looks more like the guy who arrives to repair your furnace than a man with a Bachelors in PolySci and Criminal Justice and a Masters in Education).  He's highly qualified and ran a good campaign, but her non-support of Ukraine despite being from there was a big negative.

     There's a lesson to be learned from this election and I hope both big parties are taking notes.  It's a lot more than just "Orange man bad" and they had all better dig in and wise up -- and stop lining their own pockets while the voters get the short and nasty end.
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* An absolute cock-up and one that ensures the next time I feel lousy, I will drive to the drugstore for cough syrup, Dayquil and kosher salt like I used to.  They claimed it was out for delivery, and then suddenly said, "oopsie!" and moved the arrival to 24 hours later.  Amazon has just about enshittified themselves into irrelevance and I'm sorry to see it, but hey, it's their company to wreck.  Next!
 
† Marion County is a "vote anywhere" county but we've been favoring a pretty little Lutheran church a couple of bus stops away.  Even when there's been a longer line, the crowd is nice and it moves briskly.  They don't have free coffee like the giant Methodist church on Illinois St., but it's easier to get to and even if we drive, the parking's good.