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January 2025

URGENT: Express Your Opinion

If you are interested in current affairs, call your US Representative and both your U.S. Senators and express your opinion vigorously, in your own words.

The easiest way to do this is with the 5calls app, available for both iPhone and Android. You don’t have to look up who these people are, or their phone numbers... you don’t even have to dial the number, just push a button. The scripts are lovely, but scripted calls are discounted. Just be SURE they know you are a constituent (leave Name and address) and that you have an authentic opinion.

You won’t get through. All the voicemail boxes are full and there aren’t enough people to answer the calls; the U.S. Senate phone system has been receiving around 1,600 calls each minute, compared to the usual 40 calls per minute. So the act of calling itself has some impact—all senators must pay attention to a phenomenon this big.

Here’s something Five Calls won’t tell you, but I think is a good idea. Senators (and for that matter, reps) have constituent offices back in the area they represent. Most of those offices still have some room in their voicemail boxes. Let’s fill them up!


To Move or Not To Move, That is the Question (Part 2)

(Last week I wrote about one piece of Edwin Diamond’s advice)

The other piece of excellent advice was, “now is the time in your life to do something crazy. When I was 24 I had a wife and two daughters. You are single, and should be footloose and fancy free.” “Just do it,” he said at a time when that that wasn’t yet an advertising meme.

If ever a single person in their 20s asks me for advice about a crazy move, I’m going to tell them exactly what Edwin told me. It was one of the best pieces of advice I ever got; after I lost that girlfriend, I met my wife, meaning the move to San Francisco was one of the best decisions I ever made.

That, and the career advice version of “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.” Your employer may offer you the world to stay, but in the end, you may end up with a handful of dust.


Egg Laying Mammals

In the item Things I Didn’t Know, I said the platypus is the only egg-laying mammal. Beth Karpf pointed out at least one exception that she saw in Australia; she also saw platypuses (yes, that is the preferred plural). “Correction on egg laying mammals – the platypus is not the only one.  There are also the echidnas (there are 4 species of echidnas).”


Unknown Unknowns In Programming (1)

I just read a great joke about unknown unknowns and how it is impossible to test for them in programming. It comes from Gabriel Guerra's blog antithesis.

A Quality Assurance (QA) engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999999999 beers. Orders an anteater. Orders -1 beers. Orders an anteater in a beer. Orders a ueicbksjdhd. The first real customer walks in and asks for a light. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.

This old joke illustrates a fundamental challenge in testing software: testing is limited by the developer’s knowledge and imagination. How do you test for the unknown unknowns, scenarios you can’t even imagine? Even the best developers can’t think of everything. Would eight test cases have saved everyone at the bar? How about 100?

As the fire in the bar demonstrates, catastrophic failures in software are rarely caused by (expected) interactions. We’ve all already seen examples in the wild, like the Heartbleed bug which affected the OpenSSL library, so we all know they’re out there – but how do we uncover them?


When is a Cover Not A Cover?

When, it turns out, the online music services serve up a series of Catch-22 clauses, which make it impossible to post the cover if both singers are  anonymous and the lyricist is the same. So, the cover of You’re The Only Woman Man Enough To Bask In My Love, performed by a talented American folk singer, is called That Girl Was You, after a line in the song. Confusing? You bet. Want to hear two lovely versions on YouTube and Spotify? Check the Only Woman Disambiguation page


GIGO for the 21st Century

We of a certain age will remember Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO) a crucial reminder in the early days of electronic computers that the machine’s results depend on it’s inputs. Here’s the equivalent for the 21st century, from a Substack columnist:

“The quality of your outputs can only ever reach the ceiling of your inputs.”
--Jasmine Sun

Kind of like significant digits, which I learned in high school. "You result can only have as many places to the right of the decimal as your least accurate measurement." Any more places, and you're just fooling yourself.


Neal Vitale Reviews: Emilia Pérez  ****

This review was written prior to the emergence of the controversy surrounding actor Karla Sofía Gascón. Clever, engaging, energetic, and surprising - that is Emelia Pérez. This is the story of a Mexican cartel leader transitioning his gender, if not his personality. In the vein of La La Land, the cast bursts into song to carry along the story - at times, it feels more like a stage musical than a film. Three excellent performances anchor Emelia Pérez - Karla Sofía Gascón in the title role, Zoe Saldana as the lawyer who facilitates her change, and Selena Gomez as Pérez's "widow." There are criticisms of the film in the media for its characterizations of Mexicans and trans people - and even for some of its spoken Spanish - but I found it very deserving of its critical accolades and awards.