Another user manual written by the lawyers:

I've often joked that user manuals are written by lawyers. They are full of wondrous wisdom such as "Do not place your head in the oven while it is hot." You know what I mean. Well, I just bought a pair of swim goggles, and here we go again! This is an exact quote from the instructions:

This product is intended for use during swimming. Do not sue the product for any other purpose.
Sigh ...

Nothing to Hide:

Daniel J. Solove has published an interesting paper on the web called 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy. Taking a scholarly approach, establishes a rather formal basis for the idea of what it means to “have something to hide.” We're all familiar with situations where a politician excuses abuses of privacy by, say, the FBI or NSA, saying “I've got nothing to hide, and neither do you, unless you're a criminal.” Solove argues that such people are in fact unfairly defining what it means to keep information private, and he develops many scenarios in which an entirely upright person might suffer severely at the hands of a government that is misusing data he would prefer to hide. One of his most memorable ideas is the Kafka argument, that citizens suffer when governments act upon private data they have about us – whether accurate or not – and we have no access to their deliberations or decisions.

If someone ever tells me that he has “nothing to hide,” I plan to ask him for his credit card numbers, his social security number, his email login and password, and how much money he possesses and earns. I'm sure he'll have nothing to hide. But while reading the Solove article, a simple generalization occurred to me, and I think it's important in this discussion:

I have nothing to hide from my faceless federal government. I have nothing to hide from any big company. But I do have much to hide from almost any PERSON I can think of. Show me a human being who works for the government, or for some credit card company, who might have access to all my financial records, and I greatly do not want that person to misuse my data to pay off his or her own debts. I have nothing to hide as long as human beings are not involved.

But we must all realize that, today, people are involved. That's especially true with regard to data collected by our government agencies, which have terrible track records when it comes to securing data bases. We all have something to hide, because otherwise, real people will have too much access to us.

We're living in the Descriptive Century:

Every century until the 21st has been a prescriptive century, that is, a century in which people talked and wrote about how we should behave, rather than how we do behave. The revolution started, I think, with the novel, which accepted society's norms while showing how people tiptoed outside them. The revolution continued in the 19th century with photography. Real pictures of our Civil War battlefields and victims began to force us to discuss, to mention, to accept, more of the true face of humanity. The revolution continued in the 20th century, and every big step has caused a furor; this is, after all, a revolution. The Kinsey Report forced us to begin to look at homosexuality, and sex out of wedlock, in more realistic ways; although in retrospect, the Kinsey report appears to have been more prescriptive than it claimed to be.

Today, one of the great signs of the turning tide is the tendency of our youth, to put what we oldsters call incriminating evidence on their websites. Over and over we counsel people NOT to put anything on the web that might ever keep them from getting a job. We warn them: that stuff will be online forever! But they don't care, because they sense that they are living in the Descriptive Century.

Web searches, frank blogs, sophisticated statistical analyses applied to the web, frank social sites, chat groups for Nazis, hackers and terrorists: they're all leading us in one direction, to the time when we will have to accept the way people ARE, because the evidence is all around us, rather than how we would like them to be.

I'm certain I'm right about all this, but I doubt it's a good thing. Until recently, most of us have hemmed in our aspirations with a desire to measure up to many standards of behavior. In the Descriptive Century, those standards will lose their force to reality. Some day, religions and systems of ethics will become strong enough to enforce standards of desirable conduct again. But before that happens, there might be decades of what we oldsters will call immoral lawlessness.

Have fun, everybody!

Please be Kind. (??)

I've joined a web site, Critters, that helps writers of Fantasy, Horror and Sci Fi to improve their writing. Writers submit short stories or book excerpts, and other writers, or people who just like to critique, point out everything imaginably wrong with the writing. The site is well thought out, and partly automated in good ways. It has an excellent policy about keeping the writings “secret” within the website, so that submitted items do not escape to the wild. They even have procedures for critiquing entire books. And the quality of criticism can be extremely high.

I'm facsinated by their diplomacy policy. (This policy is public at the site, here's a link to it.) They require all critiques to be couched in polite language, as nonthreatening as possible. And they enforce this policy, it's easy for you to flag anyone who sends you undiplomatic comments. They clearly do not want critiques to say something like this: Who ever told you that you could write? Your story is full of misused words, you'll never learn how to manage English. And you call that a story? Your characters are a bunch of idiots, just like you, I suspect. And so on...

Now I've worked in commercial environments where I've had to bear the brunt of incredibly rough criticism. And I've seen people go off the deep end when their work is objectively criticized. It seems to me that diplomacy is not the answer. The answer is to develop a tough skin, which enables you to benefit from ANY criticism. If I'm being critiqued, I need to figure out what bothered the critiquer and decide whether to do anything about it. I need to separate out any ad hominem aspect of the attack, and decide what's wrong. Something may really be wrong!

For example, let's imagine a conversation:
“Donald, you idiot! You left the fuel rod engaged.”
Donald says nothing.
“Donald, you total idiot! We're gong to have a meltdown. Disengage the fuel rods!”
Donald says nothing.
“Donald, please, I'm not sure about this, but it looks to me like we may have forgotten to disengage the fuel rods. Could you take a look?”
Donald replies, “Well, since you're finally being polite, I'll check it out.”
Seconds have been lost ...

It's too bad that for many people, diplomacy is the only answer.

Backing Up isn't always hard to do:

I keep my most precious computer files on one of those tiny, removable flash memories. This is the least reliable type of memory on the computers I use. The memory can get lost, can be stolen, or it can just stop working. So I'm really motivated to back it up. Wherever I am, I might copy the flash memory onto a PC. See how this works? I'm not backing up a PC, I'm using PCs as backup devices!

Please Press the Button (2)!

Last March 16th I blogged about an idea I had: you're hurrying to an elevator and you see someone walking past it, so you call to them to press the button for you. I've never had the nerve to do that. But I did open a new vista today. I asked someone who was getting OFF an elevator to hold it for me. I'm sure I couldn't possibly do that unless I knew the other person pretty well.

An amazing baseball game:

On June 24, 2007, the Mets played Oakland in New York. I started watching this game in the top of the ninth. There were two out, nobody on base, and Oakland trailed the Mets 10 to 2. After scanning the scoresheet, I realized that this was one of the most exciting moments in baseball that I had ever experienced, and I rooted for Oakland to score. Sadly, they made out and the game ended.

Had they scored, this would have been an incredibly rare game, because exactly one of the teams would have scored in every inning. The ninth was the only inning in which no runs crossed the plate. Oakland scored in the fifth and sixth innings, and the Mets scored in all the rest -- until that fateful ninth. I don't know how rare such a game is, but I've been keeping my eye out for such a game for at least twenty years. (My uncle Rob, a more devoted baseball fan than I, says he has seen games where teams score every inning. These involve a lot of one-run innings, and are called "picket fence" games because of the way the scoreboard looks.)

Locker Room Men:

I recently joined a health club with a lap pool and lots of wonderful exercise machines. The men's locker room has nine shower stalls. One of these has an adjustable hand-held shower -- far and away my favorite -- and the other eight only have fixed, overhead showers. You might think that I would rarely get my favorite stall, but usually it is empty, even though three or four of the other showers are usually in use. Some of the men here may never have experienced the pleasaure of a hand-held, but most of them, I think, prefer the privacy of the other shower stalls.

The hand-held stall has a thin cloth shower curtain that does not quite cover the opening, and if you try, you can see through it. All the other stalls have frosted glass doors. So apparently most men at this club want their privacy while showering.

But that does't mean they are shy about their nakedness. About half of the men drape themselves carefully at all times, but the other half wander about the locker room naked. Some of them finish their showers and come out of their shower stalls naked. I've concluded that most men do not want anyone to see them naked, precisely when they are showering; but I can't imagine why.

New York City left a bad taste in my mouth:

I'm driving into Manhattan for a class, and parking is expensive. I paid $26 the first time. The second time, I parked at a meter that takes old-fashioned quarters on Columbus at 62nd street. There were 14 minutes on the meter. I added four more quarters to run the total up to 54 minutes. When I returned to my car, I had a ticket, written EIGHT minutes after I had put my quarters in the meter. Now I believe in Mayor Bloomberg's Congestion plan, but this is ridiculous. The meter seemed to be working, so either a policeman ignored the time I had on it, or he was incredibly careless.

The parking ticket cost $65. I could not see how it might be worth my time and effort to contest it, epecially since I live out of town. In fact, I thought that the crime I was ticketed for was actually DWJ (Driving While Jersey) since the cars at all the other meters had NY plates. From now on, I regard parking at a meter in NYC as strictly for chumps.

I'm going to take a break, see you about July 15.

I'm going to take a break. I expect to have something interesting to post around mid-July. Enjoy the spring! (Or whatever season, wherever you are.)

I'm losing my taste for whimsy:

There's more than a little whimsy in this blog. All my life I've been a voracious consumer of whimsy. But recently I've been losing my taste for it. And not because I'm getting older! I'm really sorry about this loss of interest, because I've stopped enjoying several podcasts that fed my taste for the whimsical. Here's what happened:

I've been trying to write some fiction. Being rather bad at it, I've also been reading books on how to write fiction. These books stress, among other things, the importance of understanding WHY you are writing something. What's your purpose? What's your goal? What are you trying to say? Why are you saying it like that? Does the reader have a chance of understanding the answers to these questions? These questions are a lot tougher for the fiction writer than for non-fiction, I think. In non-fiction it's routine to answer these questions loudly, clearly, and repetitively.

I didn't take these concerns seriously when I first read about them. But I was dutiful. Off and on I would ask myself, Why am I writing this book? What am I trying to say? After four long months, I got the answers to these questions. The effect, on me and my writing, was astonishing. So now I really believe that a writer ought to know the answers, or at least some good answers, to these questions.

So now -- it's inevitable -- I ask the same questions of every fiction I read or hear. If I can't discern the answers, I get really turned off. Whimsy fares badly in this respect. You might say (and you would be wrong!) that the great goal of whimsy is not to be about anything. Well a lot of whimsy seems that way, and that's not good enough for me any more.

I'll leave you wiith a counter example of sorts. I attended a lecture by Eugene Ionesco, playwright of many savagely whimsical plays. During the Q&A, he was asked to explain the meaning of La Leçon, one of his typically weird creations. He refused, saying (in french, I'm paraphrasing) "When I wrote that play, I tried to say something as well as I possibly could. I could not say that as well by trying to explain it." So there's one example of the creator insisting that his whimsy had meaning. When it doesn't, when it's just there for the sake of silliness, it's bread without salt; pancakes without maple syrup; a canary without a mine; a tractor without a woman; a sim without an ile; a smile without a face, a whimsy without me reading it.

Two-way communications, the low-tech way:

A company called Tiger News delivers two newspapers to our home every morning. They are a reliable service, able to meet our flexible requirements when we're away from home. We like them, although they are hard to communicate with. They have a phone number that reaches an answering machine. When the machine is “on” it rings about seven times before picking up, long enough to weed out a few over-eager callers. But the machine is only on a few hours each morning after delivery time. Mostly, when you call, it rings twenty times and then says “the machine is off” and hangs up. Now I understand this rather poor method of communication. Newspaper delivery is a low-overhead business, and anything Tiger News wants to do to keep their costs down is probably okay with me.

But this morning I really wanted to leave a message, because they delivered only one paper, not two. I called, and the phone rang and rang. “Aha,” I said to myself, they've turned their machine off, because they are expecting to get hundreds of calls about the missing paper. That paper must have come to them too late to deliver on time; I'll just wait. And an hour later, the other paper turned up. So I consider that their answering machine managed to have a useful dialog with me, even though it really didn't say anything.

Headlights Off:

If you see an empty car parked with its headlights on, chances are the car will be locked. This is not an applcation of Murphy's Law, but rather an aspect of human kindness. If the car had not been locked, someone, seeing the car before you did, would have reached in and turned the lights off.

I was thinking of this recently, when I returned to my totally unlocked car to find I'd left the headlights on. Everybody, where were you?

Now THAT's a flaky Pie Crust!

Many years ago my wife learned to bake superb pie crusts. She went through a difficult training phase, in which I sampled each pie to determine whether it was as flaky as my mother's pie crusts. Finally I announced my satisfaction; surely this last pie crust was as deliciously flaky as any of my mother's.

A few weeks later we ate at my parents' home, and my mother served a pie. My wife couldn't help noticing that my mother made crusts in an entirely different way - mom's were grainy, not the slightest bit flaky at all. It's a wonder I have any credibility left. When I think of all those delicious pies my wife baked, I can't believe I deserved any of them.

In the Ethnic Aisle:

In order to shop efficiently, you've got to learn how your giant supermarket organizes its stock. For instance, most supers have an “Ethic” aisle, and of course they all put different foods there. Now it seems to me that every supermarket I've ever shopped in gets one food wrong: Maple syrup belongs in the Ethnic aisle.

If you really appreciate this food; if you've ever wandered through that region in the Northeast where they sell it by the gallon; then you ought to know what I mean. I'm just saying.

Bouncing Venetian Blinds:

When you walk, does your head stay perfectly level with the ground? Not likely. So your eyes must be bobbing up and down. But the view you see before you is stable. Pretty clever brains, eh? I had the unsettling experience of walking towards a large window covered with open Venetian blinds. From a distance, the outdoor view through the blinds bobbed up and down alarmingly at each step, giving me an urge to walk more gently. At some point I got close enough and the outside view stabilized. Instead the blinds seemed to bounce up and down.

Salvidore Dali, The Youngest Child Prodigy ever:

BoingBoing has a reference today to a video clip of Salvidor Dali on the old TV show, What's My Line. Dali was a great self-promoter, and he was wonderful to watch in those days. His rather primitive grasp of English hardly slowed him down. I saw an interview of him on TV (with Mike Douglas perhaps?) in which the interviewer noted that Dali was, like many great artists, a child prodigy. He mentioned the ages at which a few greats like Mozart had first showed their talent, and then asked Dali, “As a child prodigy, how old were you when you showed signs of greatness?” Dali's response was the most awesome example of “thinking outside the box” that I've ever heard. Here's what he said: “Before Born.”

The essence of consulting:

A friend, Bernie Riskin, once described the essence of being a software consultant.
You go to a new company.
They hand you: a dead rat.
Then they say, "It's almost finished."

In the past, when I started a new consulting job, my wife would ask me, "Did they give you a dead rat?"

Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and my Dad:

Beethoven’s third symphony, the Eroica, used to be my favorite Beethoven symphony. It was my favorite piece of music when I was about twelve. But I’ve rarely listened to it since my dad died, twenty-four years ago.

When I was young my father sometimes went away from home on business trips. He might be away one or two nights. We missed him. I missed him, my brother missed him, and we both knew that our mom especially missed him. One time he was on his way home from an overnight trip. He was coming in to LaGuardia by plane, and then he would somehow get to the Long Island Railroad, and take a taxi for the last short leg of his trip, from Lynbrook RR station to home. We didn’t know if his plane was on time or where exactly he was. There were no cell phones, and no inexpensive way to check flight times. Distance phone calls were expensive, my father would economize by not calling, he would just come home.

We knew he was on his way, and we worried our mother asking when he would arrive. Of course she had no idea. So I said, “I’ll play Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, maybe he’ll be home before it ends.” I had borrowed a recording of this symphony from the public library, a great fat album of about eight fragile 78 records. I played almost the whole symphony. The last movement is a wondrous set of variations, culminating in the great “augmentation,” where the theme is played, very grandly, at half speed. Dad walked into the house during the augmentation, the climax of the symphony.

About eight months later, dad was coming home from an overnight trip again, and we had no idea when he would arrive. I wanted him to be home soon, so I put on my new 33 1/3rd recording of Beethoven’s Eroica. Dad walked into the house during the augmentation, again!

I still have that fine recording of the Eroica, I could play it any time I want, but, well, you know …

When to use the Bathroom:

You're in a hurry. To the mall, to an appointment, to visit relatives or friends; you're running late. So the great question raises its head: Shall I use the bathroom before the trip or after I get there?

I used to think that this was an interesting question, open to debate regarding such issues as bathroom quality, politeness in using the facilities elsewhere, etc. But today I got the ironclad answer to this question, at least for all trips involving a car: Use the bathroom BEFORE you get the flat tire.

What if the word "Lottery" signified Spam?

I've gotten a lot of spam about winning lotteries. I bet you have too. Today I wondered why ANY emails with the word "lottery" sneak through spam filters. Isn't "lottery" a near certain tipoff that the email is spam?

So I imagined myself a programmer at a company that writes email spam filters. I want to write a rule to say that any email with the word "lottery" will go into the spam box, not the inbox. Now what will happen if I filter out an email about somebody ACTUALLY, TRULY winning a lottery, such that the recipient never finds out until it's too late, and never collects million$ of dollar$. I'll be in hiding for the rest of my life, that's what. I'd rather be Salman Rushdie than write a spam "lottery" filter.

Sugar: Regular, Bland and Low Sodium.

Merwick, the rehabilitation center of Princeton Hospital, serves sugar in little packets. Some of these are regular, but some of the sugar packets say “bland” or “low sodium” on them. Please let me explain:

For convenience in serving meals, the standard condiments come in sets of four attached packets. The regular packet set is: sugar, sugar, pepper, salt. But for some patients there are bland sets: sugar, sugar, sugar, salt. The word BLAND appears on each of the four packets, you can't miss it if you're a harried nurse's aid handing out meals. There are also packet sets of sugar, sugar, sugar, pepper. These are all labeled LOW SODIUM, of course.

Intellectual Arrogance:

Intellectual Arrogance is the sin of looking down -- way down -- on those less intelligent than yourself. I can think of few sins that so quickly visit punishment on those who practice it. Being intellectually arrogant is akin to locking yourself in a cage. My extended family really believed in Intellectual Arrogance and raised me to be a slavish adherent. I was violently cured when I was eighteen, and I've enjoyed life a lot more ever since. Please let me tell you about it.

I had my first job as a camp counselor, the summer I was eighteen. It was a large, well-run camp. Our unit, one of eight, had sixteen bunks, each with eight to ten campers and two counselors. Each dozen counselors had a counselor-counselor who monitored our work and offered advice. There were nearly a hundred counselors my age at this camp, so even if I was choosy, I was going to have lots of friends. Except that I didn't, because none of them was smart enough for me. I could be civil, but it was hard not to look down on them.

For about a week I enjoyed the feeling that I was the smart one in a sea of dummies. For the next three weeks I was miserable. But having plenty of undisturbed time to observe everyone else, I started to notice that most people have strikingly fine qualities. There are so many incredibly different ways that people can be good at something, or simply very worthwhile, or very enjoyable, and being clever or intellectually quick is just one of the many. I unlocked my cage and started enjoying the people around me.

The rest of the summer was fun.

The Slippery Slope of First Amendment Rights:

Although our constitution says Congress shall make “no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” the courts quickly found commonsense exceptions, suggesting that it must be okay to pile up the exceptions ad libitum, forever, for whatever reason. (“Fire!” she said in the crowded theater.) I regard these exceptions as a terrible slippery slope; they inure us to the principle, which is to keep speech legally free. (Many, many exceptions have been loaded upon us recently, many in the name of stopping "terrorism.") We have an astounding free-speech war being waged on the web right now, and the first sad thing about it is that some lawyers will have to volunteer their skills for thousands of hours to take this case all the way to the Supreme Court, where it could go either way. The case of course, is the right of web sites that publish a sixteen digit number to be subject to criminal and civil prosecution according to the Digital Milleniuim Copyright Act, in order to protect the profits of a few large entertainment companies. Congress should have known better than to pass a law that so obviously, so clearly, conflicted with free speech rights, but so many laws have done that already, what was one more?

We now know that the DMCA allows movie producers to OWN integers and prevent anyone from mentioning them. How silly is this? Well that law protects anyone who creates and encrypts a work of art. Go to Ed Felton’s Website, Freedom to Tinker, where he tells you how to take ownership of an integer and give it to your mother on mother’s day. All you have to do is encrypt a little Haiku, and the DMCA then protects the code you used as an encryption. Felton suggests that you encrypt lots of numbers, so let’s take over ownership of the natural numbers!

Now frankly, I think it’s important to own some of the smaller, more useful numbers. Here’s love poem I wrote to my wonderful wife. I encrypted it with the number ZERO, and now it looks like this:


0.


Now I’ll admit that’s poor encryption, but the DMCA protects both good and bad coding; it even protected the atrocious and easily hacked encoding that SONY used on its CDs last year.

I’d like to leave you with one last, sensible point of view: When the 16 digit number that the MPAA wants to block appears on thousands of protesting web sites, it is protected by another aspect of the first amendment, and I hope the Supreme Court agrees with me. The US court of appeals has already recognized that utilizing the DMCA raises hard-to-call First Amendment issues, but this one is a doozy: The appearance of this code on many protesting websites has all the appearance of a movement, and is clearly protected “Political Speech”.

Would you (11) open an Email with this Subject?

Would you open an Email with this Subject?

• Some momentum news?
  
• Is your arm readjusting?
  
• Sounds boring doesn't it?
  
• dirt of our dank
  
• As typescript go wattle
  

And would you open an email from:

• raunchiest r. educator?
  
• Peck U. Strangulation?
  
• Anus Deshayes?

Full Motion Video:

I'm a great fan of this podcast: The Daily Giz Wiz. Dick DeBartolo and Leo LaPorte schmooze and are often hilarious. (They once deadpanned a long, improvised conversation about how the show is entirely scripted in advance.) I do not expect to buy most of the gadgets they describe, but this one is special for me: the Roadmaster Rear Deck Scrolling Digital Message System (Giz Wiz Show 271). This gadget enables you to post messages on your car's rear window for the driver behind you to read. I've long wanted a device like this, at least so I could post "Don't Tailgate," or "Gee, I'm Sorry!" Best of all, I imagined the first joke that's specific to this new medium. I expected Dick to read my joke on a podcast, but -- so far -- no luck. Here's my joke message:

My Other Car Has Full Motion Video.

Update: Dick DeBartolo read my letter on episode 305 of the Daily Giz Wiz. And it sounds like Leo Laporte didn't get the joke.)

Beautiful Popcorn Flower

Spring is really beautiful, flowers and flowering trees everywhere. We have new grass in the front of our front yard: sparse, elegant three-inch bright green blades. Among them are little bursts of white that look lovely from our windows. These pretty white blooms will last awhile, because they are packing popcorn that our garbage man strewed on our lawn during the last pickup.

These white "flowers" don't look quite as pretty closeup, but from thirty feet away, they're better than white crocuses.

How would you like to look at the religious symbols that the VA approves for gravestones?

How would you like to take a look at the religious symbols that the VA approves for headstones and grave markers? Doesn't sound too appealing, does it? I did recently, and I think it's a remarkable thing to experience. It won't take you long, there are 39 at the moment. Please, try it out. Click here.

17th Century, Meet 21st Century:

I've been making some hospital visits lately, and using a somewhat bulky portable PC on the hospital's Guest network. Hospital rooms are crowded, and there's that all-too-frequent moment when I have to unwind myself out of a chair, but only after figuring out what to do temporarily with the laptop that's in my way.

Today I did much better. You know those tray tables they have in every hospital, adjustable in height? Well the victim patient isn't always using the tray table. I raised it to its highest height, about four feet, lined it up against the wall, and stood before it, happily mousing and typing. I found it easy to just stop and move away as needed, and it was just as easy to step up to the high table and resume computering. Many physical therapists will tell you that standing decently is better for you than sitting, anyway. And in the distant past, white collar workers used to do just as I did, standing at a high desk to do their accounts. I felt much in touch with the past, and quite comfortable.

Great Troubleshooting:

Early in my software career I was given the task of maintining the home-grown oprating system for a company that provided computer services to many companies. Our computers tended to crash every two to four hours. The most important part of my job was to analyze these crashes fast, try to see what caused them, and get the computers up again. Every minute was critical in terms of lost income and customer dissatisfaction.

Sixteen months later I left that assignment for another one at the same company. When I left, the computers stayed up at least eight days at a time without crashing. In those sixteen months I had done other assignments, but I had spent hours and hours reading the operating system code, looking for problems, verifying and fixing them. This was a rare, highly productive experience, and until a few days ago I thought it was primarily my cleverness and stick-to-itiveness that yielded such rich rewards..

But suddenly, I knew better.

I owed my great success to the company's willingness to give me months to find bugs they never imagined they had. They never worried that they might waste the next month, while I found nothing of value to fix. In the modern computer world, I think such an attitude is unthinkable. Imagine my manager telling the VP of operations she wants to let me keep looking for OS problems for another two months.
"To do what?"
"Maybe he'll find an impoortant reliability problem."
"What problem? I bet the only thing is, our disk drives are lousy. Tell him to write a Ruby development environment instead."
"Let him look, you'll never know if there's another big bug in the OS unless he finds it."
"Tell me what he's going to find that 's worth eight weeks of his salary."
"I don't know."

And that's how it would go. But the company I worked for in 1969 was different. They had no idea how to control money.They ran up debts at a startling rate. They had dozens of different ways to waste money, I was just static in the overall noise. So I was left alone to make their basic product reliable. Lucky me.

A formal Experiment:

When I was twelve, my father took me to a science fair at a local college. One event was held in a large hall, about fifteen seats wide and maybe forty seats deep. The room’s floor angled up so that those in the back could see well. We sat in the front, where the ceiling was high above us.

The college students giving this experiment explained that they were going to show how you ignite iron filings from a relatively cool flame. They had a large flower pot with, they explained, iron filings and sulphur powder. They would use an ordinary match to light a magnesium fuse. The fuse would then light the iron and sulphur, and those would burn together.

They did this. An awesome, dense, yellow cloud ascended from the pot to the ceiling and drifted to the back of the room. As it approached the back, those in the back quickly exited the room. The cloud began to fill the whole room, and the awful rotten egg smell drove us all out; not, however before we looked around for the jokester experimenters. They were nowhere to be found.

That part of the science building was closed off for the rest of the evening.