Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Conspiracy Klutzes

     I have said it before: I do not so much mind the notion that some secret cabal or camarilla is running the world from their secret headquarters in Zurich or Duluth.

     What I mind is that they do such a lousy job of it.  If the Hidden Rulers Of Everything were even a little bit on the ball, there'd be intercontinental ballistic passenger rockets, robot valets and a luxury hotel on the Moon -- with, of course, a totally secret members-only club where the HROE could hang out, paneled in Lunar diamonds and the scalps of their enemies.  For their convenience, there'd be air-droppable, solar-powered cellular telephone hubs (tapped, of course, by the HROE) and scalable, air-droppable power plants in both atomic and solar, with a sideline in wind and ocean-thermal versions, all built under patents the HROE control, in HROE-owned factories.  They'd desalinate seawater and (being greedy plutocrats) sell it to the thirsty at prices that'd keep them alive to come back to buy more, day after day after day.

     But they don't.  We have none of these things  -- and neither do they.  If there are secret rulers of the world, they're idiots.  Clods.  They could be plundering an entire solar system and living off the fat of the land behind high walls, supporting bread, circuses and streetcar lines to placate the masses out of petty cash.

     We need a better line of hidden despots.  The ones we have -- if we do -- suck at the job. They sow only panic and reap only famine, poverty and failure.  I'm starting to think they just might be imaginary.

Monday, October 30, 2017

The Good Old American Jury-Rig?

     A good many Americans pride themselves on their ability to make do -- even if you have to come up with a terrible kludge, you go ahead and get the job done, right?  And it's as American as apple pie!  We're can-do people!

     Except, you see, while we're good at that, darned good at it, so are a lot of other people.  Oh, it's not quite the same.  Every culture has its own flavor, and yet it's always a similar dish.  Our linguistic neighbors, the Brits, just bodge something together and muddle through; over in India, the quick fix or improvised solution is a jugaad, and they're so good at it that there's an entire class of junk-based utility vehicles and a management technique both known as jugaad. The French put on their thinking caps and apply "System D," and hack not just technological systems but socioeconomic ones was well.  The Germans have "Trick 17" and the frugal German-speakers in Switzerland have saved up and made it "Trick 77," while the Finns think "Trick 3" is handier.

     And so on.  The human race is a clever bunch -- and one of the things we're most clever about is getting by.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Mission To Zyxx? Yes!

     I'm three episodes in.  It's an interesting podcast -- improv science-fiction comedy, with a basic setup that's been done just about often enough to make a good foundation for comedy: the evil Galactic Monarchy has been overthrown by the way less-evil Federated Alliance -- or is it the Allied Federation? -- in what is totally not a lateral move.  They're sending diplomatic missions everywhere and scraping the bottom of the barrel for diplomats.  The Zyxx region has probably not been a very safe place to send ambassadors, at least none of them have ever been heard from again, and now a very assorted and perhaps less-than-qualified crew is being sent there to try again....

     Not for the kids.  Clever and funny.  Mission To Zyxx.

Saturday, October 28, 2017

It's A Chilly Morning

     I had a left-over potato, evicted from the beef stew last night on account of carbs -- wait, beef stew?  Yes, this:
      Beef stew with oxtail, beef shank, Italian sausage and stew beef, along with a couple of nice fat turnips, carrots, celery, onion, a few cherry tomatoes, some fresh mushrooms and a very little banana pepper for zing.  A store-bought crusty roll on the side.

     But back to breakfast: here's this huge baking potato that needs to be used or towed out to sea and sunk, and wouldn't that be a waste?

     Also, it's kind of cold in the house, what with the change in the weather, cheapskate landlady and all.

     So: four slices of bacon, anointed with smoked Spanish paprika and rubbed sage, fried.

     One double-fist-sized baking potato, sliced very thin and fried in a mixture of paprika-sage bacon fat, garlic-ginger stir-fry oil and tasty olive oil, with some "bread-dipping" Mediterranean spice mix dusted over.  Even with a 16" skillet, this takes time -- and warms the place up.

     A few cherry tomatoes, split and fried and eggs to match, and there you have it: Serious Breakfast!  Tamara even declared a "cheat day" and had six or seven (this is cheating?) chips.  There'd be photos but it didn't last all that long.

Friday, October 27, 2017

Sometimes You're Just Mommy (And Don't Realize It)

     Even without children, even no more domestic than I am--

     I was rattling around the kitchen last night, irked and short-tempered;  Tam and I had planned on going somewhere for dinner but it has dawned on the tower crew that there is very bad weather incoming (possibly as early as noon today) and they worked aloft until sundown and chased the very tail end of civil twilight out the gate; so I got home late, having stopped at the corner grocer on the way home and stocked up for dinner and the next morning's breakfast, or so I had thought.

     In the freezer, there was a little left-over beef stew and I thought I had a can of relatively low-carb French Country Vegetable Soup to eke it out, but no, what I had was Beef And Barley (ironically, lower in carbs) and it simply wouldn't do.

     Tam was conciliatory: "Look, there's enough there for one.  You have that, and I'll fend for myself."

     I was still annoyed.  She's been away the better part of a month and it turns out a big part of my self-image is being able to, you know, feed the various creatures under my roof: cats, Tamaras, and so on.  Cooking and serving a meal is soothing.  Not being able to, even when the "cooking" is no more than reheating leftovers and opening a can is frustrating.

     Having the cats come to me to be served breakfast (they're quite insistent) and snuggle up to me whenever I relax is soothing, too.  I'm definitely a "mommy" to the cats.

     I made an omelette this morning.  "Sweet" Italian sausage, mushrooms, a Poblano pepper, a few Kalamata olives and some Manchego cheese. Tam was just retreating to her couch as I was getting up (a night-owl to begin with, she's been out West and hasn't readjusted to Eastern time), but she said she'd be up for breakfast, so I've saved her a portion.

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Too Much To Do

     Didn't get any really good pictures yesterday.  Today, I have another CAT scan early in the morning, followed by a busy day, so, well, I'll try to post something interesting tomorrow.

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

In Haste

     Much to do this morning.  I'll see about taking some pictures.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Yes, It's Fall

     Cold and wet, as Indiana sometimes is at this time of year, but I can at least hope the pollen and other allergy-inducing this will be greatly reduced.  The amaryllis has come inside for the year, to spend the cold months in the basement (and will need to be trimmed back) and if things dry up again by the weekend, it will be time to return to gathering up the leaves.

     And I still need to buy Halloween candy! Time not only flies, it's supersonic.

Monday, October 23, 2017

Autumn Is Here

     Overnight, it turned chilly, rainy and gray outside.  Well, not quite gray yet; that will have to wait on the sunrise in a half-hour or so.

     I'm still kind of yeechy with back pain and on tenterhooks for worse.  Still, I will take this constant and relatively low-level pain (along with waking frequently because of drinking a lot of fluids) over the far worse alternative.  Back to the doctor later today and I'll see what she has to say.

     The weather is probably going to interfere with the outside work I have been supervising (for very low levels of supervision).  Where to report today -- the main facility or the usually unstaffed North Campus -- remains an open question and probably will until I hear from the workers.

Sunday, October 22, 2017

Well, That Went Well

     Wait, it didn't.  A lot of hurting and drinking of water and so on.  But I have stuff to do that I didn't get done yesterday  and it needs to be done today.

Saturday, October 21, 2017

Ouchesday

     My back hurts (kidney stones).  My head hurts.  I had big plans but I'm going back to bed.

     --I have figured out that "classic" Far Edge starships (1950 through 1980 or so) look like a cross between submarines and Rocky Jones spaceships on the inside.

Friday, October 20, 2017

"Gentlemen Do Not Read One Another's Mail:" A Biography

     Like hell they don't, when the "gentlemen" involved are the governments of countries--

     But they didn't use to, or not much, for the very simple reason that they were rarely able to get at one another's mail.  Letters in a courier's pouch, slips of paper carried by a pigeon: needles in a haystack and worse, they're extraordinarily difficult to intercept without revealing that they have been intercepted.  Technology began to change that.  Wired telegraphy is difficult (but not impossible) to tap with 19th-Century technology but it is inherently insecure; operators can be bribed, trash rifled through for carelessly discarded messages, sharp eyes and ears in the office can read messages from the wire as easily as reading over someone's shoulder....  And then came radio, nearly as open as shouting from the rooftops: suddenly, the "gentlemen" might as well be throwing their letters through each other's transoms!* 

     They were not, however, writing them in plain text.  Codes and ciphers were the thing, and so was decoding them, or trying to.

     In the First World War, the United States barely had a cryptological effort.  The military did what they could, eventually resulting in Herbert O.Yardley's "Black Chamber," MI-8, but well before he was up and running, they had to turn to civilian help.  (I will note Yardley was a Hoosier.  This may be significant.)

     Enter Riverbank Laboratories (still around today: same location, but they pursued another of the lab's interests.  And the original building would hardly be out of place in a spy film!).  Enter eccentric millionaire George Fabyan, his eccentric (but by no means unshared) belief that Francis Bacon was the real author of Shakespeare's works, and the eccentric theory that this information was somehow encrypted in the earliest printed versions of Shakespeare.  And to decode that, a millionaire needs a staff of cryptologists working in his private labs on his private estate.

     It's a story right out of a--  I was going to write, "pulp magazine," but it's too wild for that.   It's straight out a dime novel.  Picture an estate sprawling along and across the Fox River near Geneva, Illinois, complete with a home remodeled by Frank Lloyd Wright, a Dutch windmill grinding grain, a private zoo, a Japanese garden, a Roman swimming pool on a island in the river; picture over a hundred people working on various projects that had struck Fabyan's fancy, from acoustical levitation to improved grains, from trench design to cast-concrete art.  Picture it not in a book or film, but in real life.

     Bacon having written Shakespeare was a bust; the "biliteral code" theorist on Fabyan's payroll was, it seems, self-deceived.  But the cryptology effort had attracted other talented people and among them were geneticist William F. Friedman and Elizebeth (yes, with three e's) Smith, the latter of Huntington, Indiana.†  When WW I --The Great War -- began roaring through Europe, the government turned to Colonel Fabyan.  Fabyan turned to his staff; specifically, to Smith and Friedman.

     Smith was the scholar of language, Friedman the analyst -- but between them, technique and skills developed rapidly; before the war was over, they had not only decoded huge numbers of messages but written a series of booklets that still comprise an introductory course to cryptanalysis, a science they named and were instrumental in developing.

     As inevitably as in, well, a dime novel, the two fell in love and married--  And after the Great War ended, they fled Riverbank: Fabyan was still an eccentric millionaire, with all that entails, and had been intercepting Washington's job offers to the two of them for quite some time.

     The two of them went from strength to strength and adventure to adventure after that -- helping to catch rumrunners, aiding in the efforts to crack Japanese codes, and so on.  I'm in the midst of reading a fascinating biography of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, and it's still the stuff of spy novels -- only better.  It happened; she and William really did these things.
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* I'm not going to explain what a "transom" is.  I have lived in a building that had transoms, and they can be a very great relief in summer's heat and winter's stuffiness, a lost grace note. Unless you have neighbors who frequently cook cabbage.

† I keep running into Hoosier cryptologists and spies. Are we a state of geeky romantics?  And is it related to why are there so many Hoosier comedians, as well?