Those of you working in corporate land may be familiar with the concept of “document retention”, a type of policy that dictates orderly retention and destruction of company documents over time. It is sheer genius.
Why would companies have such policies? On the positive side, it’s not a bad idea to formally classify one’s documents to see what’s what. If nothing else, it may help assign official owners for them who can find them for you. On the negative side, it helps companies sweep dirty laundry under the carpet, by zapping materials that may prove embarrassing or legally threatening if discovered years later. But where is the genius?
First, there is the sublime euphemism of a “retention” policy that dictates destruction: it’s like the “firemen” of Fahrenheit 451 whose job is to start fires rather than putting them out. (Some companies aren’t quite so richly blessed with irony, and call it instead a “document management policy”.)
Second, consider what happens if litigation begins and a company is given discovery orders. These are a legal mechanism to accelerate the disposition of a case by obliging an organization to turn over documents to the other side. With a document destruction policy in place, a company can claim that they don’t have the problematic materials, thereby avoiding supplying potentially incriminating evidence to their adversary.
Third, consider what would happen to an employee who may become aware of naughty goings-on within a company, and may anticipate a future need for an unpurged archive. She might hang on privately to copies of things beyond the official deletion schedule. But how to use them, should whistle-blowing time ever come? Since abiding by the retention/deletion policy was probably a condition of employment, so she will be fired for going public in any way. Plus I gather fired whistle-blowers don’t have great prospects for employment elsewhere.
Last, what if she decides to publish the materials discreetly, for example by anonymous posting to the net? While this might be embarrassing to the company in the press, there may be little legal utility to doing so, since anonymously posted materials have little legal evidentiary weight. Without a chain of custody, no one willing to publically stand up for their authenticity, the documents would likely not be admissible.
So there’s the genius: by merely enacting this policy, a company can effectively make its past crimes disappear, even if employees don’t actually follow the policy! The costs are too high to disobey publically, and the benefits too small to disobey privately.
By the way, the above discussion is not related to my employer, whose new document management policy seems pretty above-board. It simply reminded me of others not so well-intentioned.
A 1970s era slow cooker, plus a few ingredients haphazardly mingled at nightfall, can occasionally result in a most sumptuous breakfast. Last night was such a night.
Since I don’t like following recipes, all my cooking / baking creations turn into one-offs. The quality is inconsistent, ranging from the okay to the oh-wow. Just to break with tradition, here is the list of ingredients for my superstar stew from last night:
- 2lb stewing beef cubes
- one 10oz can of beef soup base
- a handful of paprika and garlic powder, and other minor spices
- one tomato
- one 28oz can of tomatoes
- 3 large carrots
- 2 cooking onions
- 5 medium potatoes
All non-animal non-mineral content was cut into little bite-sized bits, and layered in the order above. By next morning, the smell in the house was so good, that even our pair of air filters couldn’t remove it. Other times, the balance of moisture (meats and fruits) and drying agents (potatoes) makes the concoction imperfect: crunchy semi-cooked tomatoes, or an outright dilute soup. But not this time. Yummmm!
I play the same game with my cheesecake attempts. One out of five is totally awesome, and the rest are merely okay. The right balance between standard and improvised ingredients, plus baking technique, are all deliberate variables. The good ones, huge as they are, unfortunately don’t last long enough to be shared with friends, and spoil our enjoyment of lesser restaurant desserts.
The little brat is a study of opposites.
He is hungry, but is not willing to eat. He’s sleepy, but won’t settle down. He wants to play, but gets bored right away. He doesn’t want a diaper change, but is “ripe”. He’s crying but will smile suddenly. He doesn’t want his nails cut, but will scratch himself silly with them. He screams if he’s put down, then he screams if he is picked up again. He doesn’t want to eat, but will take a whole meal if pressed. He doesn’t want to get dressed, but loves being outside.
Maybe once his corpus callosum is fully developed, he will not be of two minds so often.
I propose a new game, which may be played with the whole family.
The setting: your own living room.
The time: whenever news are on: local 6 o’clock ones work well since they try to be so heartwarmingly sensationalistic
The players: one to unlimited, child to adult
The rules: Listen to the newscast. Get ready when an intrepid reporter covers a subject such as toys, sports, equipment, foods, other activities, which may have a hazardous outcome and might have some governmental supervision. The reporter will invariably complain that “there are no regulations” to prevent a deadly outcome such as tobaggoning into a tree, eating five hundred cupcakes, a small car that might explode if hit with a fuel truck, a leaky basement that may cave in and bury babies, a drug causing horrible side-effects if mixed with gin, a school with only three thousand smoke alarms. Then, as the reporter concludes that “unless ‘the government’ steps in …”, yell “IT’S A DEATHTRAP!“ before she does.
The winner: The person who predicts and beats other players to the intrepid reporter’s punchline the most times.
Where oh where is that part of the brain that detects inconsistencies?
I am a rather argumentative type of person. That is, I’m eager to start an argument when I hear a proper trigger. The nature of a suitable trigger is special: hearing a claim that is internally inconsistent, illogically constructed, contradicting her earlier unretracted statement, or based on evidence that I or even the speaker knows are false. The trigger may fire even if there is no one to argue with, like coming across advertisements that lie, or news articles, or activists’ web sites.
This trigger is so powerful and consistent that there must be some unit of the brain dedicated to the reflex. It must be physiological in nature, since it automatically forms one’s lips in the shape of “… but”, and accompanies it with an offended anxiety. Note that this trigger doesn’t seem to fire simply for a material disagreement based merely on different facts or value judgements, but more for situations where the speaker herself ought to know better.
While this hypothetical unit is probably present in all people, it is strangely impotent in many of them. Many people simply accept the absurdities of daily life, the typical dishonesty of people trying to eke power over or money from you. Maybe they recognize them, but deem them inoffensive or insignificant. Maybe they judge it dangerous to actively resist. It seems like this non-response is quick and thorough enough that it too may have a dedicated brain area.
Or maybe this second organ is a more highly evolved defensive “keep-your-mouth-shut” mechanism that we perpetual critics somehow lack. Oops.
The City of Toronto Diversity Management staff, among their other important and valuable work, somehow find time to produce some fine motivational posters.
These are pasted to bus shelters and (fittingly?) on garbage receptacles. Today we present these impostor posters, based upon their fantabulous gallery, which you might first peruse. Then click on the thumbnails below, you silly person.
After a few hours’ aviating this morning, I listened to Q107 for some rousing music for the drive to work. During a break between songs, they interjected some recorded listener feedback, in this case responding to another listener who complained that school/child sports are sometimes taxpayer funded. I had to give my head a shake at the logic of the responders.
There was one guy who said “…it will keep them off the streets…”, implying that it is not individual parents’ responsibility to control the whereabouts of children, but rather that of anonymous mass of taxpayers. I haven’t worked out in my head a clear chain of reasoning to justify my intuition that taxpayer funded compulsory education is morally suspect for similar reasons.
There was another who went on a flight of fancy: “…you never know, maybe these kids will one day end up in the olympics, and become role models to all kids…”. This gentleperson lacks sense of proportion. The number of kids who will make it into any olympic event (should a decrease in corruption and funds keep the IOC alive) is miniscule. The amount of money spent entertaining all those kids in the mean time is not miniscule, and is diluted to near-nothing on a per-olympician basis.
Then there was the genius who opined that “…without sports, the kids will turn to crime, and that’s worse…”. This is a classic argument put forward by those who wish to fund various dregs of society, or those who read Dickens’ “Great Expectations” a little too literally. Unfortunately it is the very definition of promoting racketeering: the act of threatening violence unless money is given. This activity is usually ascribed to the mob, but the genius doesn’t see the literal correspondence.
A few hours’ computer time was needed to regenerate all my public picture archives yesterday. Now the images from the morning flight look larger and sharper. One of them even made it to my favorites page.
Ever since the first few days home, Eric has received regular baths. In order to entertain myself during this chore, I’ve been naughty in trying to teach him to splash. I whacked the water with his arms, repeating the word “splash”. Well, he finally learned. Within seconds of being put into his now-nightly hot tub, his legs (!) sometimes go wild, and a huge grin makes a convivial visit upon his visage. It’s another sign of his little brain starting to light up.
I had a near miss today.
How near? Probably a foot or two of air between big yellow monster and another car.
I was in the middle of an intersection, attempting to turn left, waiting for a gap in the opposing flow. Sure enough, there is a nice gap, except for one car in his left lane, approaching the intersection. What luck! He is slowing down and signalling to his left! That means the way is clear for me to make a left turn now, and we would pass harmlessly on the right. The foot goes on the throttle, and big yellow monster starts to move.
Egads! The opposing driver appears to change his mind: suddenly stops its left turn signal, and actually accelerates into the intersection, where big yellow car is now crossing his lane. I see this, can hardly believe it, and instantly floor the throttle. The rear of big yellow car misses the oncoming car by only a few dozen inches.
I replay the scene in my mind several times over the next few minutes. If the cars made contact, I am sure that I would be assigned some liability. Without video or alert witnesses, I can hardly prove that the person sent misleading signals, or that he accelerated. The cops are bound to consider the active left turner at fault. And yet, what I did still seems reasonable: I merely didn’t entertain sufficient paranoia.
I hear that there really exists a group of people who supplement their income by engineering deliberate car accidents, then suing for settlements. I wonder if I (nearly) ran into one such miscreant fuck. Well, maybe not, but it still feels nice to have said that.
Two fully qualified pilots in the front can work well together, or it can be worse than having a “back-seat driver” right next to you.
Commercial aviation almost universally relies on two-pilot operations for safety. These pilots are trained to work together well, to ritualistically cross-check each other, to share some of the workload.
In the recreational part of general aviation however, pilots are trained to work alone. For someone to earn an instrument rating on a complex aircraft, they must be capable of swallowing a firehose spew of work, including concurrent simulated emergencies and instrument approaches. To cope, people develop routines about what to do when, how. There is rarely excess intellect for improvising a workable routine during a flight examination.
But what to do then when, as luck should have it, two private pilots share a cockpit? Since pilots are social animals and love to show off their toys, it’s not uncommon to go fly together. I generally try to bring along another pilot for GXRP, as a favour of providing loggable twin-engined experience for them. But since neither of us is generally given any formal training for two-pilot routines, it can get clumsy.
For example, the pilot “not flying” (with free hands) may feel an urge to be helpful during a flight, doing work associated with checklists slightly ahead of the pilot flying. This can include things like changing engine power settings, navigational instruments, flipping through maps and books. While indeed these can be helpful, they will disrupt the flying pilot’s situational awareness when they come as a surprise.
There is a worse problem. If a flight proceeds with a mushy sense of who is in charge of what, there can be aspects where neither pilot is in charge of something important. For example, during a flight this evening, both I and another pilot twice missed a crucial aspect of an instrument approach (timing the final approach leg), which happened partly because we were both reviewing and advising each other about what bits to do next. Neither of us felt in complete charge.
This kind of thing has also happened to me earlier, in flight training. One particularly assertive instructor in the right seat made a habit of supplying continuous corrective advice during challenging portions. Realizing that he was monitoring the situation closer than I could, I no longer felt responsible for the outcome, so I relaxed back to a shrunken level of awareness, making ever more mistakes in a vicious circle. It took many flights to finally put my finger on the problem and put it into words during debriefing. It turned out that we did not fly together much after that.
This sort of problem can be solved by talking about the issue ahead of the flight, and agreeing on a work division scheme, then sticking to it throughout the flight.
One simple scheme I like is having the pilot flying direct the other pilot to do certain specific tasks like “tune this radio to that frequency”, or “find this page in the instrument approach book” or “handle all air traffic radio traffic”, or even just “monitor my performance”. The pilot flying maintains control over the situation by driving (in a literal as well as a figurative sense) the entire progress of the flight. He is in charge of scheduling, making decisions, exercising responsibility. Initiative from the pilot not flying would be restricted to asking “would you like me to do X?”, if doing X soon sounds appropriate.
Another simple scheme is to let the pilot not flying take overall responsibility, treating the pilot flying only as a glorified autopilot. This might be the safest way, since simply keeping the aircraft under positive control can take quite some effort at times. and is of the highest priority. Assigning a person to this task only is likely to ensure that it gets done right.
She died in 1990. One can reasonably consider anyone in such a long-duration brain-dead vegetative state as already dead: no more human than a ghost, an echo, a chimera. Let her shell of a body join her mind wherever it is. See the fascinating legal & medical history.. This is perhaps going too far.
Yesterday, another report was released by one of the groups investigating the UN “oil-for-food” corruption fiasco. The response of the news media was sadly funny.
CNN reports “the committee is expected to clear […] Kofi Annan of conflicts of interest”. Historically trustworthy news-junkie Jeff Hutchison on CTV reads off his teleprompter that Kofi Annan is “found innocent” of corruption charges. I’m sure the Associated Press will find another way to say “Poor Kofi! Another unfairly accused black man!”
The reality is a little less simple. Read the fivish pages of conclusion in the report (link given above). All it says that there was not enough evidence to prove that Kofi Annan knew of his own son’s hiring by that Swiss inspection company. (It would be a blatant conflict of interest to contract work to a company that at the same time happens to hire the chief’s son.)
And why is there not enough evidence? Well, there is a small matter of records shredding, carried out by Kofi Annan’s secretary, over several months after the investigation had already begun. Plus even the report questions the credibility of father & son, who met on multiple occasions around the time of the suspect contract, yet claim that they never talked about Annan-the-younger getting a job there.
So obviously there is stink in the air down in New York, and the absence of clear proof of guilt should not be reported as a clearing of name or attestation of innocence. Maybe this fluffy way of thinking comes from a similar misunderstanding regarding the legal system’s “presumption of innocence”: that someone found “not guilty” by the courts must be considered innocent by everyone else. That simply does not follow.
If I see someone steal or kill, but courts aren’t persuaded enough to put him away, there’s no way I would change my mind, invite the guy over for dinner, apologize for the misunderstanding, and offer my daughter’s hand.
Microsoft has kindly agreed to subsidize a competitor’s office-space rent, by purchasing advertising space on the lobby elevator doors of the building containing Red Hat’s Toronto office. Gee, thanks guys! Please consider urinal cake ads too!
Whoa, nellie, the procedure I’ve been taught for recovery from wing stalls in multi-engine airplanes is all wrong!
In single-engine aircraft, the normal procedure for stall recovery is bumping the nose down, then immediately applying full engine power. This minimizes the amount of time the aircraft is flying too slowly for the wings to keep it up. I recall being taught to do the same thing on the Aztec, and that’s how I’ve done practice stalls ever since.
Reading a set of reports made me rethink the issue. Consider what happens if, early during the stall recovery, one of the engines quits. The airspeed is still low, one engine producing full power, the other is windmilling: a recipe for loss of control due to asymmetric thrust, possibly resulting in an unrecoverable spin.
The proper practice stall recovery procedure in twins makes airspeed control far more important than in singles. One still pushes the nose over first, but instead of applying power right away, one has to let the aircraft dive long enough to exceed Vmc (80 mph in the Aztec). Only after that point is it safe to open up both throttles and recover from the dive / loss of altitude.
If one encounters an unintentional stall at a low altitude, then one has to decide instantly which is the worse evil. I expect pilots to accept the risk of an engine-failure-induced spin in this situation and add power as soon as possible to arrest the stall/descent. This is another of those interesting “no-win” corners of the flight condition envelope where operating twins involves instant decision making.
This reminds me of a mistake I’ve often committed while practicing one-engine-inoperative maneuvers in the airplane: lack of sufficient airspeed. There is an ideal speed Vyse (100 mph) marked right on the gauge for climbing with one engine, which is about 70% of the typical one-engine cruise speed. Even when there is no need to climb, for some reason I sometimes slow down to that speed. Worse, I accomplish that by reducing power on the good engine, wasting a perfectly good energy resource in a time of (simulated or real) emergency. It’s as if I imagine that Vyse was the proper speed for all single-engine operations.
It turns out that the Aztec climbs nicely even at a speed well above Vyse, so even for climbs this low a speed is not necessary. Going even slower can cause so much drag (because of the high angle of attack) that the airplane can’t climb at all. So really Vyse should better be considered a minimum speed, with a faster speed preferred. If this requires higher power on the good engine, so be it: pour it on.
Learning about flying seems neverending.
For a few erroneous minutes, Entertainment Tonight found itself running on our television. Then it struck me: I’ve seen this before.
What’s “this”? The silly inanity, the total irrelevance to adult life, showing the worst of America. And where have I seen it before? On Jerry Springer!
The parallels are breathtaking. Both types of shows feature people who look like freaks, behave like freaks, and are role models to other freaks.
| ET | JS |
| Paris Hilton and her sex life and Jane Fonda’s threesomes | little Jimmy with the septuplet fathers |
| some with public relationship troubles | some with relationship troubles made public |
| people gloating the presence or absence of plastic surgery | people who desperately need some |
| starlets who believe they are role models (to whom??) | weirdos whose virtual clones “star” on consecutive shows |
| run-ins with drug and alcohol addictions | run-ins with drug and alcohol addictions |
| people who believe they are important | people thinking they are important by being on TV |
They are two sides of the same coin. They are both utterly titillating to watch. Both leave me shaking my head, wondering how all the intellect was sucked out of the studios that produce and the living rooms that consume this stuff.