Selfie

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
- Carl Sagan

30th anniversary of Voyager 1's picture of earth from the orbit of Saturn. My thanks to Earth Sky for covering this event.

2/1

My planned posts for the month of February:

1. If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else. - Booker T. Washington
2. Each of you, as an individual, must pick your own goals. Listen to others, but do not become a blind follower. -Thurgood Marshall
3. Each person must live their life as a model for others. - Rosa Parks
4. I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying. - Michael Jordan
5. Just don’t give up what you’re trying to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong. - Ella Fitzgerald
6. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. - Barak Obama
7. I swear to the Lord I still can’t see why democracy means everybody but me. - Langston Hughes
8. I changed what I could, and what I couldn't, I endured. - Dorothy Vaughn
9. Diversity is not about how we differ. Diversity is about embracing one another’s uniqueness. - Ola Joseph
10. Have a vision of excellence, a dream of success, and work like hell. - Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook
11. In order to succeed, you have to do well and perform well. Don't do less and accept less. Put in the time and complete the task. You want to be a contributing member to every group you are part of. - Jeanette Epps
12. My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu
13. If the only time you think of me as a scientist is during Black History Month, then I must not be doing my job as a scientist. - Neil deGrasse Tyson
14. I'm always interested in learning something new. - Katherine Johnson
15. Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life. - Jackie Robinson
16. If you don’t have confidence, you’ll always find a way not to win. - Carl Lewis
17. Never be limited by other people's imaginations. - Dr. Mae Jemison
18. Life has two rules: number 1, never quit! Number 2, always remember rule number one. - Duke Ellington
19. Every time you state what you want or believe, you’re the first to hear it. It’s a message to both you and others about what you think is possible. Don’t put a ceiling on yourself. - Oprah Winfrey
20. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. - James Baldwin
21. The greatest challenge that I faced in becoming a neurosurgeon was believing it was possible. - Alexa Canady
22. You are your best thing. - Toni Morrison
23. A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination. - Nelson Mandela
24. Whatever we believe about ourselves and our ability comes true for us. - Susan L. Taylor
25. More and more, when I single out the person out who inspired me most, I go back to my grandfather. - James Earl Jones
26. We all require and want respect, man or woman, black or white. It’s our basic human right. - Aretha Franklin
27. Have a vision. Be demanding. - Colin Powell
28. My success and failures make me who I am. - Janet Emerson Bashen
29. The time is always right to do what is right. - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thanks to Parade for publishing this web site. It made the task of finding these quotes much easier.
My fav is #22.

To Mick!

In Color - Jamey Johnson

I said, grandpa what's this picture here
It's all black and white, it ain't real clear
Is that you there? He said yeah, I was 11

Times were tough back in '35
That's me and uncle Joe just tryin' to survive
A cotton farm in a great depression

If it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just tryin' to save each other
You should've seen it in color

Oh, and this one here was taken over seas
In the middle of hell in 1943
In the winter time you can almost see my breath

That was my tail gunner ole Johnny Magee
He was a high school teacher from New Orleans
And he had my back right through the day we left

If it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just tryin' to save each other
You should've seen it in color

A picture's worth a thousand words
But you can't see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should've seen it in color

This one is my favorite one
This is me and grandma in the summer sun
All dressed up, the day we said our vows

You can't tell it here but it was hot that June
And that rose was red and her eyes were blue
And just look at that smile, I was so proud
That's the story of my life right there in black and white

And if it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just tryin' to save each other
You should've seen it in color

A pictures worth a thousand words
But you cant see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should have seen it in color
You should have seen it in color

Yeah, a pictures worth a thousand words
But you cant see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should have seen it in color

Context:

My nephew, Mike Scheider, did a cover of this song at Celebrations in Robinson Twp., PA on 1/11/2020 - the first anniversary of his father's passing. Mike changed the month to July, which was the anniversary month for his parents, Mick and Dorothy Scheider. 

I well up every time I think of this moment, because, to a large extent, I did see it "in color."

The Starfish Story

A favorite of mine.

Original Story by Loren Eisley

One day a man was walking along the beach, when he noticed a boy hurriedly picking up and gently throwing things into the ocean.

Approaching the boy, he asked, “Young man, what are you doing?”

The boy replied, “Throwing starfish back into the ocean. The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them back, they’ll die.”

The man laughed to himself and said, “Don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish? You can’t make any difference!”

After listening politely, the boy bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it into the surf. Then, smiling at the man, he said …

“I made a difference to that one.”

The Metamorphosis of Halloween

The Metamorphosis of Halloween

Wendy and I had only been in our new home for a month when Halloween arrived. We were both hoping for a lot of children, so we spent some time filling sixty bags with "penny candy" – suckers, pixie sticks, sweet-tarts, and gum, plus a Halloween themed plastic ring. The candies were placed in a cauldron shaped bucket next to the door so that we could grab them easily as kids arrived.

The main door was open so we could see the children as they approached. This worked well for the neighbor children and the babies that were out before sunset. Once the sun went down, I took on a different tactic. I decided to pull put an old Halloween mask that I had – it fit over your head and came with armor over the shoulder. The face was sunken, and the lips were threaded with twine. I was pretty scary looking and I thought that this would do the trick on some of the older trick-or-treaters. We accentuated the haunted house by shutting off all of the lights inside the house except for the porch light and the interior light behind the front door.

I heard the doorbell ring and I looked out the peephole. There were three kids and two adults. I grabbed five candy bags and slowly opened the door, saying in the deepest Sam-Elliott voice that I had, "Happy Halloween!!!" The adults were taken aback and the kids got wide-eyed – just the effect I wanted. I then said in a normal voice, "I suppose you want some candy..." They nodded and I handed the bags to the parents and one into each child's bag. This continued and I mastered my "scare" over the next five or six groups of kids.

Then another group came. I didn't look out – I just grabbed four bags of candy. As I was billowing "Happy Halloween," I heard the shriek of a very young girl who was dashing away from the front door and across my front lawn, dropping candy and bits of her costume as she ran. Her dad was in the driveway and he exclaimed, "Man, that's a good one!" I apologized profusely to him and I took off the mask and started picking up the bits that the little girl dropped during her escape. I was mortified. I took off the mask for the evening and sat on the porch, handing out candy bags until we ran out. I vowed that night that I would not "scare" on Halloween again.

Fast forward about ten years – Wendy and I are sitting on the porch handing out our 120 bags of candy to the kids. Two small kids approach with a taller teen girl, the dad was standing in the driveway. We handed each of the children a bag of candy and the teen girl asked us, "do you know who I am?" She wasn't in a costume, so I was perplexed by the question. "Do I know you," I asked. Then the girl relayed that she was the little girl that I scared that night. I told her that I have never scared anyone since and that I was very sorry and that she could have all of our candies if she wanted. She said that since being scared by me that she had purposefully skipped our home on Halloween, but that she felt old enough and brave enough to come up this time. We gave her hugs and candy, and shook her dad's hand, and met her mom as well.

I could add a witty moral to this story, but I'll put it another way: because of my selfishness, a child was afraid of me and our house. Sometimes, as an adult, we don't perceive the power that we can wield, especially the power we can wield over children. I grew up a lot on that Halloween.

Misc Lists

Two Laws:

1. Love God.
2. Love your neighbor.

Prayers:

1. Please
2. Thank you
3. You are welcome

Courtesy:

1. Please
2. Thank you
3. You are welcome

US Navy Six-Step troubleshooting method:

1. Symptom Recognition
2. Symptom Elaboration
3. List probable faulty functions
4. Localize the faulty function
5. Localize the faulty component
6. Failure Analysis

The Fire Triangle:

1. Oxygen
2. Fuel
3. Heat

The Project Management Triangle:

1. Time
2. Quality
3. Money

Progression to Autonomous Control:

1. Measure
2. Manage
3. Automate

DMAIC (from Six-sigma)

1. Define
2. Measure
3. Analyze
4. Improve
5. Control

Empathy Map

1. Said
2. Did 
3. Thought
4. Felt

The Propensities of Management:

1. Financial
2. Technical
3. Charismatic

The Three P's (Steve Scheider):

1. Patience
2. Persistence
3. Perseverance

The Three C's (Zig Ziglar):

1. Choice
2. Chance
3. Change

AAA (Security):

1. Authentication
2. Authorization
3. Accounting

AAA (Testing):

1. Arrange
2. Act
3. Assert

My favorite guitarists:

1. B. B. King
2. Francisco Tarrega
3. Django Reinhardt
4. Paco de Lucia
5. Tommy Tedesco
6. Joe Pass
7. Carlos Santana
8. Jeff Beck
9. Jimi Hendrix
10. Stevie Ray Vaughan
11. Duane Allman
12. Robert Fripp
13. Neal Schon
14. David Gilmour
15. Steve Howe
16. George Harrison
17. Ronnie Wood
18. Phil Manzanera
19. Al DiMeola
20. Jimmy Page
21. Robben Ford

Things that you must give in order to receive:

1. Trust
2. Respect
3. Friendship
4. Communication
5. Empathy

Expectations of my students:

1. be Prompt
2. be Present
3. be Prepared

SOLID Principles:

1. Single-responsibility 
2. Open-closed 
3. Liskov substitution
4. Interface segregation
5. Dependency inversion

Gang of Four:

1. Creational:
1. Abstract factory
2. Builder
3. Factory
4. Prototype
5. Singleton
2. Structural
1. Adapter
2. Bridge
3. Composite
4. Decorator
5. Facade
6. Flyweight
7. Proxy
3. Behavioral
1. Chain of responsibility
2. Command
3. Interpreter
4. Iterator
5. Mediator
6. Memento
7. Observer
8. State
9. Strategy
10. Template method
11. Visitor

Karp's 21 NP-complete problems

1. Satisfiability
2. 0-1 Integer programming
3. Clique
4. Set packing
5. Vertex cover
6. Set covering
7. Feedback node set
8. Feedback arc set
9. Directed Hamilton circuit
10. Undirected Hamilton circuit
11. Satisfiability with at most three literals per clause
12. Chromatic number
13. Clique cover
14. Exact cover
15. Hitting set
16. Steiner tree
17. 3-dimensional matching
18. Knapsack
19. Job sequencing
20. Partition
21. Max cut

ACID (computer science)

1. Atomicity
2. Consistency
3. Isolation
4. Durability

BASE (computer science)

1. Basically available
2. Soft state
3. Eventually consistent

SALT (computer science - #1)

1. Sequential
2. Agreed
3. Ledgered
4. Tamper-resistent

SALT (computer science - #2)

1. Symetric
2. Admin-free
3. Ledgered
4. Time-consensual

Scientific Method:

1. Observe
2. Question
3. Hypothesize
4. Predict
5. Test
6. Analyze
7. Replicate
8. Review (Externally)
9. Share

Newtonian Mechanics:

1. Object in motion
2. F = ma
3. Action produces equal and opposite reaction

Thermodynamics:

1. Conservation of energy
2. Entropy of a bounded system always increases
3. Entropy of a bound system approaches a constant as temperature approaches absolute zero

Maxwell Equations (electrodynamics):

1. Gauss' Law: 
2. Gauss' Law for magnetism: 
3. Faraday's Law: 
4. Ampere's circuital Law: 

Maxwell Relations (thermodynamics):

1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 

• where:
• F - Helmholtz Free Energy
• G - Gibbs Free Energy
• H - Enthalpy
• P - Pressure
• S - Entropy
• T - Temperature
• U - Internal Energy
• V - Volume

Conservation Laws:

1. Conservation of mass-energy.
2. Conservation of linear momentum.
3. Conservation of angular momentum.
4. Charge, parity, and time reversal symmetry.
5. Conservation of electric charge.
6. Conservation of color charge.
7. Conservation of weak isospin.
8. Conservation of probability.

Computing C's:

1. Concurrency
2. Coherence
3. Coupling
4. Cohesion
5. Consistency
6. Composition

Exposure Control:

1. Time
2. Distance
3. Shielding

Principals of design:

1. When using a pencil, remember that the other end is an eraser.
2. Remember to use the eraser.

The Five (Help stop coronavirus)

1. Hands (wash them often)
2. Elbow (cough into it)
3. Face (don't touch it)
4. Space (keep a safe distance)
5. Home (Stay if you can)

General Laws

1. Murphy's Law (anything that can go wrong will go wrong).
2. Parkinson's Law (work expands to fill the time allocated for its completion).
3. Maslow's Law (if all you have is a hammer, then everything is a nail).
4. Conway's Law (organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure).
5. Englebart's Law (the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential).
6. Hick-Hyman Law (increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmicly).
7. Goodhart's Law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure).
8. Drucker's Law (if one thing goes wrong, everything else will, and at the same time).

Computer Science Laws

1. Moore's Law (the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years).
2. Linus' Law (given enough eyes, all bugs are obvious).
3. Brook's Law (adding manpower to a late software project makes it later).
4. Grosch's Law (computer performance increases as the square of the cost).

Engineering Design

1. Analysis
2. Synthesis
3. Evaluation

Design Thinking

1. Empathize
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test

Kanban (classic)

1. To do
2. In progress
3. Completed

Kanban (metaphysical)

1. Dreams
2. Miracles
3. Reality

Forms of government (by power structure)

1. Anarchy
2. Confederation
3. Federation
4. Unitary state

Forms of government (by power source)

1. Autocracy
1. Civilian dictatorship
2. Military Dictatorship
2. Democracy
1. Demarchy
2. Direct democracy
3. Electocracy
4. Liberal democracy
5. Liquid democracy
6. Representative democracy
7. Social democracy
8. Soviet democracy
9. Totalitarian democracy
3. Oligarchy
1. Aristocracy
2. Ergatocracy
3. Geniocracy
4. Kratercracy
5. Kritarchy
6. Meritocracy
7. Netocracy
8. Noocracy
9. Plutocracy
10. Particracy
11. Stratocracy
12. Technocracy
13. Theocracy
14. Timocracy

Forms of government (by power ideology)

1. Constitutional
2. Monarchy
1. Absolute monarchy
2. Constitutional monarchy
3. Crowned republic
4. Elective monarchy
3. Republic
1. Constitutional republic
2. Democratic republic
3. Federal republic
4. Islamic republic
5. Parliamentary republic
6. Presidential republic
7. People's republic

Forms of government (by socio-economic attributes)

1. Anarchism
2. Capitalism
3. Colonialism
4. Communism
5. Despotism
6. Distributism
7. Feudalism
8. Minarchism
9. Monarchism
10. Republicanism
11. Socialism
12. Totalitarianism
13. Tribalism

Forms of government (by geo-cultural attributes)

1. National government
2. City-State
3. Commune
4. Intergovernmental organizations
5. World government

Macroeconomic Objectives

1. Economic growth
2. Low inflation
3. Low unemployment
4. Satisfactory balance of payments
5. Low government borrowing
6. Stable exchange rate
7. Minimize inequality
8. Protect environment

My Bosses

1. Abhay Agnihotri: Pricewaterhouse Coopers
2. Amith Pakittiri: Pricewaterhouse Coopers
3. Michael Caruso: Bloomin Brands
4. Astrid Issacs: Bloomin Brands
5. Brian Nipper: Bloomin Brands
6. Marcia Frash: Bloomin Brands
7. Bryan Hooper: Bloomin Brands
8. Will Crevier: Bloomin Brands
9. Joe McClung: Bloomin Brands
10. Sean Herrin: Bloomin Brands
11. Mark Wasserman: Bloomin Brands
12. Zac Adams: Robert Half (contract to Westpoint Underwriters)
13. Mike Moentor: Disys (contract to American Express)
14. Wayne Edwards: Auburn University Montgomery (contract to Department of Human Services, State of Alabama)
15. Ron Moody: South University (as Adjunct Professor)
16. Tommy Harris: Administrative Office of the Courts, State of Alabama
17. Jon Baumann: International Paper
18. Mel Dove: International Paper
19. Dave Williams: Honeywell IAC
20. Jukka Klemmentila: Ahlstrom Automation
21. George Underwood: Paul Lippke GmbH
22. ?: CR Bard
23. Bill Elsner: US Navy - NSRF Yokosuka
24. Bob Cunningham:, ETC US Navy - USS Mt. Vernon
25. Dennis Kuntz, ETC: US Navy - USS Mt. Vernon
26. Paul Smith, ETC: US Navy - USS Haddock
27. Michael Thompson, ET1: US Navy - Nuclear Power Training Unit
28. Bob Warnock: US Navy - Nuclear Power School
29. ?: US Navy - ET A School
30. ?: US Navy - Basic Electricity and Electronics
31. Bob Grazzi, RM1 (Seal): US Navy - Recruit Training Command, San Diego, CA
32. ?: Italian Restaurant in Woodbury, MN
33. ?: Mister Donut in Oakland area of Pittsburgh, PA
34. ?: Paint Warehouse in East Liberty area of Pittsburgh, PA
35. Shelby Stewman: Federal GS and ES data at Carnegie-Mellon University
36. ?: Pizza Place in Tartan Grill at Carnegie-Mellon University
37. ?: Tartan Grill at Carnegie-Mellon University
38. Paul Brophy: Associated Hardware in Noble Manor area of Pittsburgh, PA
39. ?: Post-Gazette newspapers in Sheridan area of Pittsburgh, PA

Wizard of Oz

All I really need to know I learned from “The Wizard of Oz”

Imagination can take you anywhere - even over the rainbow.◾️Sometimes you have to leave home to find it. ◾️Follow the Yellow Brick Road - but always be ready for a detour. ◾️Faith, hope and love can work wonders, but ruby slippers can’t hurt either. ◾️When friends stick together, they can work miracles. ◾️Having the courage to ask for what you want is half the battle. ◾️“Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable.” ◾️The grass is always greener on the other side of the rainbow. ◾️All you need is right there inside of you. ◾️Keep home in your heart and you can always return to it. ◾️When you go out into the world, remember: stand up for yourself, but always be kind to the little guys.