I know: I've been awfully errant. I apologize, and I do thank those of you who have reached out to touch base and ensure that no calamity has befallen me and mine. To run the risk of a Jinx or a Voodoo curse, we are all fine.
Everyone in my house other than me has been sick; most have had a cough that would wake the dead and that has persisted for about a month now. That made for close to no sleep for a week or so, and lots of antibiotics in the house between sinus infections, pneumonia, and general bronchial unease (a rampant issue in this house). This too: my beautiful wife's grandmother, *this* close (mere weeks away) to her 100th birthday, has been in the hospital for a couple of weeks. She is on her last leg now...time is not her ally these days. She rather literally popped a gasket: high blood pressure caused a bleed in her brain. It's all pretty much down hill from there, if you're 100 years old.
We are, at the end of the day, however, fine. The sun rises and sets, and there is relative peace in our house, if not tranquility.
I have been taking copious bloggable notes and fully intend to visit them anon and get back to these writings.
In the meantime, I wanted to wish all of you a happy Thanksgiving. This is one of my favorite holidays of the year. This, and Christmas. Not to mention December 8, which is National Brownie Day (believe it or not). Brownies are among the most perfect treats, and I have long held that they should be made in the old ice trays - the ones that were aluminum. Brownies should have all edges; it ought to be a law.
Another thing that ought to be brownie law: Never, ever, ever...put any kind of nut in a brownie. Chocolate chips are ok (in fact they're better than ok...they're yummy and not bad), but under penalty of brownie death: no frickin' nuts.
I intend today to undo much of the waist-melting that I've been striving at over the last couple of years, and I intend to enjoy doing so as much as possible. I hope you join me in my assault on skinny today. Tomorrow we can get back to the grind, should we be driven to it, or should we desire, but today: eat, drink, and be merry!
Happy Thanksgiving!
About Me
- SarcasticTestGuy
- I'm a life-long New Englander, father of 4 challenging kids (I know: I'm supposed to say "wonderful", but while that'd be true, technically speaking, it'd also be misleading), and fortunate husband to my favorite wife of more than 20 years. I've got over 20 years experience breaking things as a test engineer, quality engineer, reliability engineer, and most recently (and most enjoyably) a Product Safety / EMC Compliance Engineer. In the photo, I'm on the left.
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Saturday, October 20, 2012
CyberJerks
Today, as I looked to my reading, I stopped by The Feathered Nest to find out what my friend Delores had to say. Today, she wanted to talk on cyber bullying.
I thought I'd ramble on the thoughts that Delores provoked.
Bullying, naturally, has been around since the dawn of time. Literally, I'm willing to bet. Many of us have been targets of it, and few of us will admit to being the perpetrator. But the face of bullying has changed, it seems.
When I was a kid, my bullies looked like one of two images:
Either this guy (image from 20th Century Fox):
Or this guy (found on an un-credited site...sorry!)
For contrast, I didn't start growing until I was around 20. Going into high school I weighed about 70 lbs and stood around 4'10". By the end of high school, I was a lot closer to 6', and weighed in just shy of 140 lbs. I had beefed up significantly. I was certainly a target!
Two basic rules of the bully back in that day:
1) They were physically HUGE, and targeted smaller folks or chubby folks who didn't have a following;
b) They were cowards who traveled in packs
These were, of course, rules of thumb. There were deviations from these stereotypes. Well, from the first one. I never found a bully who wasn't a coward and did all of their bullying with a handful of people of low fiber at their back.
The profile of the bully has changed though. They're still cowards, but now they do most of their bullying over the internet. My sense is that today, many of these bullies are female, whereas in my day, they were mostly male.
The results seem to have changed too. "Back then", a bullied kid might come home with torn clothes, or a black eye, bloody nose...whatever. Bullying often promoted a physical contest (one that was exceedingly one-sided). The old piece of conventional wisdom was that once you stood up to the bully, he would no longer bother with you. This wasn't always true, but it was true a significant portion of the time.
Today, there's no safe haven, really. You can't go home, or go on vacation. It isn't the case that you'll be out of contact with the idiots for the summer, and when you get back to school you'll find that you'd changed over the summer and were now bigger than your tormentor was. Today, over the internet, it's business as usual 24/7/365.
AND, the things that kids allow themselves to say to each other over the net is unbelievable. I think in large part because of the lack of today's personal nature of bullying, and the absence of the intimate relationship.
I'm reminded of a quote:
In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man.
I thought I'd ramble on the thoughts that Delores provoked.
Bullying, naturally, has been around since the dawn of time. Literally, I'm willing to bet. Many of us have been targets of it, and few of us will admit to being the perpetrator. But the face of bullying has changed, it seems.
When I was a kid, my bullies looked like one of two images:
Either this guy (image from 20th Century Fox):
Or this guy (found on an un-credited site...sorry!)For contrast, I didn't start growing until I was around 20. Going into high school I weighed about 70 lbs and stood around 4'10". By the end of high school, I was a lot closer to 6', and weighed in just shy of 140 lbs. I had beefed up significantly. I was certainly a target!
Two basic rules of the bully back in that day:
1) They were physically HUGE, and targeted smaller folks or chubby folks who didn't have a following;
b) They were cowards who traveled in packs
These were, of course, rules of thumb. There were deviations from these stereotypes. Well, from the first one. I never found a bully who wasn't a coward and did all of their bullying with a handful of people of low fiber at their back.
The profile of the bully has changed though. They're still cowards, but now they do most of their bullying over the internet. My sense is that today, many of these bullies are female, whereas in my day, they were mostly male.
The results seem to have changed too. "Back then", a bullied kid might come home with torn clothes, or a black eye, bloody nose...whatever. Bullying often promoted a physical contest (one that was exceedingly one-sided). The old piece of conventional wisdom was that once you stood up to the bully, he would no longer bother with you. This wasn't always true, but it was true a significant portion of the time.
Today, there's no safe haven, really. You can't go home, or go on vacation. It isn't the case that you'll be out of contact with the idiots for the summer, and when you get back to school you'll find that you'd changed over the summer and were now bigger than your tormentor was. Today, over the internet, it's business as usual 24/7/365.
AND, the things that kids allow themselves to say to each other over the net is unbelievable. I think in large part because of the lack of today's personal nature of bullying, and the absence of the intimate relationship.
I'm reminded of a quote:
In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man.
~Alfred Hitchcock
If your bully is in your face, they can see the reaction of their words. In fact, that's what yesterday's bully was feeding off of. They could also see when they had crossed a line, though. When the rage flared in their target, or when the victim finally did snap and attacked. The act of bullying was a messy affair.
That feedback loop doesn't exist with cyber bullying. Today it's a cleaner thing to bully someone, and I think that this emboldens today's bully to heighten their callous behavior while at the same time not affording the victim what might be considered a legitimate outlet for the rage that is being sowed within them.
Bullies have never picked on other bullies. They don't pick on kids who kick puppies. They pick on the perceived weaker members of society.
The cowards are far more cowardly today than they were yesterday. Today, they don't even have the courage to face their victim. They weave their web of evil without ever affording their victim any true opportunity to respond. Remember that victims are often people who would not naturally engage in such toxic behavior (from my experience this is the case), so responses are somewhat rare, and don't carry the toxicity of the attack. And at the same time: the bully doesn't get any feedback, and really can't appreciate what a messy thing it is that they're doing. They've got no cause-and-effect until they hear that someone committed suicide.
I'm not arguing the yesterday's bully was a kinder, more gentle bully than today's, but the whole dynamic is different today than it was yesterday, and I think that these differences might be a big part of the reason that it seems like today, bullying results in suicides while yesterday it resulted in bloody noses. Of course, perhaps there were many suicides yesterday than we have heretofore been aware of...maybe we're just more aware of the suicides today?
I'd be interested to know how a bully feels when they hear that their victim has committed suicide because of the bullying? I wonder if they feel anything? For the rest of their lives?
If your bully is in your face, they can see the reaction of their words. In fact, that's what yesterday's bully was feeding off of. They could also see when they had crossed a line, though. When the rage flared in their target, or when the victim finally did snap and attacked. The act of bullying was a messy affair.
That feedback loop doesn't exist with cyber bullying. Today it's a cleaner thing to bully someone, and I think that this emboldens today's bully to heighten their callous behavior while at the same time not affording the victim what might be considered a legitimate outlet for the rage that is being sowed within them.
Bullies have never picked on other bullies. They don't pick on kids who kick puppies. They pick on the perceived weaker members of society.
The cowards are far more cowardly today than they were yesterday. Today, they don't even have the courage to face their victim. They weave their web of evil without ever affording their victim any true opportunity to respond. Remember that victims are often people who would not naturally engage in such toxic behavior (from my experience this is the case), so responses are somewhat rare, and don't carry the toxicity of the attack. And at the same time: the bully doesn't get any feedback, and really can't appreciate what a messy thing it is that they're doing. They've got no cause-and-effect until they hear that someone committed suicide.
I'm not arguing the yesterday's bully was a kinder, more gentle bully than today's, but the whole dynamic is different today than it was yesterday, and I think that these differences might be a big part of the reason that it seems like today, bullying results in suicides while yesterday it resulted in bloody noses. Of course, perhaps there were many suicides yesterday than we have heretofore been aware of...maybe we're just more aware of the suicides today?
I'd be interested to know how a bully feels when they hear that their victim has committed suicide because of the bullying? I wonder if they feel anything? For the rest of their lives?
Sunday, October 14, 2012
The Fallible Nature of Mnemonics
Do you make use of mnemonics to learn things? Do you remember My Dear Aunt Sally from algebra? This mnemonic is supposed to help us remember the order of mathematical operations: Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. Since I was in school, they've changed this to "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" to include Parentheses and Exponents.
"Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain" ring any bells? This phrase is supposed to help us remember the colors of the rainbow (and their order): Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.
"Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain" ring any bells? This phrase is supposed to help us remember the colors of the rainbow (and their order): Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.
The more sociopathic among you might better recognize "Run Over Your Granny Because It's Violent"
Young Electrical Engineers are taught (or so I'm told) that "Bill Brown Realized Only Yesterday Good Boys Value Good Work" to help them remember the color coding of electronic resistors, which utilize a sequence of colored bands around the component, and the order of the colored bands will tell you what the numerical resistance value is. The colors, in order, are Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Gray, White.
Older Electrical Engineers were taught a different phrase: "Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly." We all wanted to know where Violet lived, naturally.
Mnemonics have probably been around since mankind was still in its proverbial diapers, and they certainly have their value; I have made as many for myself that were helpful as I did that were not.
To wit:
I have a pair of nieces who are twins. They are not identical twins, but are fraternal (or, I suppose, sororal). Like many twin sets these days, their parents named the first born with a name that begins with "A" and the second born a name that begins with "B".
Despite their being very, very different from each other, I was unable to get a handle on which was which until they were about 8 years old. How stupid am I, eh? I decided at one point that I could use a nice, easy mnemonic for this.
Baby B has blue eyes! B = Blue, and also = Bertha! Easy!
But not for me...Baby A has brown eyes, and B also = Brown. So, does Bertha have Brown or Blue eyes? No idea.
Did I go instead with A = Andrea and also Azure? Does Andrea in fact have Azure eyes? ugh...I could screw up a nap!
When my beautiful wife sent me for Plain yogurt, I got in trouble for coming home with Vanilla. Doesn't Plain = Vanilla? Isn't the phrase "Plan, vanilla wrapper"? This one I screwed up for years...do I get Plain, or Vanilla?
Am I the only one who screws up mnemonics?
Young Electrical Engineers are taught (or so I'm told) that "Bill Brown Realized Only Yesterday Good Boys Value Good Work" to help them remember the color coding of electronic resistors, which utilize a sequence of colored bands around the component, and the order of the colored bands will tell you what the numerical resistance value is. The colors, in order, are Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Gray, White.
Older Electrical Engineers were taught a different phrase: "Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly." We all wanted to know where Violet lived, naturally.
Mnemonics have probably been around since mankind was still in its proverbial diapers, and they certainly have their value; I have made as many for myself that were helpful as I did that were not.
To wit:
I have a pair of nieces who are twins. They are not identical twins, but are fraternal (or, I suppose, sororal). Like many twin sets these days, their parents named the first born with a name that begins with "A" and the second born a name that begins with "B".
Despite their being very, very different from each other, I was unable to get a handle on which was which until they were about 8 years old. How stupid am I, eh? I decided at one point that I could use a nice, easy mnemonic for this.
Baby B has blue eyes! B = Blue, and also = Bertha! Easy!
But not for me...Baby A has brown eyes, and B also = Brown. So, does Bertha have Brown or Blue eyes? No idea.
Did I go instead with A = Andrea and also Azure? Does Andrea in fact have Azure eyes? ugh...I could screw up a nap!
When my beautiful wife sent me for Plain yogurt, I got in trouble for coming home with Vanilla. Doesn't Plain = Vanilla? Isn't the phrase "Plan, vanilla wrapper"? This one I screwed up for years...do I get Plain, or Vanilla?
Am I the only one who screws up mnemonics?
Friday, October 12, 2012
Just a quick drop-in to share something new (to me):
A new planet that could be 33% diamond! <----It's a link!
Just cool...that's all.
A new planet that could be 33% diamond! <----It's a link!
Just cool...that's all.
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