Back Again

As usual, it’s been months - largely due to fiddling with local setup and not recreating the local emacs environment for this blog. The ssl cert was about to expire, so after renewing it just now it seemed like it was time to get online for a short while.

Been Geeking Around

Last year I got a vm on vultr, installed free-bsd and pointed the consultingsmiths.com domain at it. I messed with it for a while, made a few posts, and then Life intervened and I let it go.

Friendly Fire

My Grandma Smith would say (or at least I think I remember her saying) “The paper holds still and you can write anything you want on it.”

Memorial Day, 2024

This post isn’t about Memorial Day as Memorial Day, either as the current iteration of Decoration Day (which I remember as taking place on May 30th) to honor those who fell in the American Civil War and subsequent wars, or about Memorial Day as a Federal long-weekend holiday. There’s certainly lots to say about the first, and in time I may well have plenty to say, but not today. And regarding the long-weekend holiday, I was a self-employed consultant for so long that I used to lose track of those Mondays off (the self-employed don’t really get days off) and was always suggesting that we next meet on such-and-such a date to the shock and amusement of the Feds that I worked with, “But that’s such-and-such a Day!”

Algorithms

A little self-disclosure…

Smarts

“You’re not smart enough to tell me how to live.”—Kathy Shaidle

Expertise

“Nobody is an expert on the future.”—Matt Linderman

Improvisation

“Great improvisers are like priests. They are thinking only of their God.”—Stéphane Grappelli

Habit

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, it’s a habit.”—Aristotle

Sex and Science

“Science is a lot like sex. Sometimes something useful comes of it, but that’s not the reason we’re doing it.”—Richard Feynman

Commas

“The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath.”—Elizabeth Clarkson Zwart

Trust

“It is to me a new and consolatory proof that wherever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”—Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, January 8, 1789

Research

“If academic research is not devoted to finding the truth, it is a form of propaganda, and not necessarily to be preferred to other forms, much cheaper and perhaps more persuasive.”—Conrad Russell (Academic Freedom, London: Routledge. 1993)

Data

“If they do that with marks and grades, should they be trusted with experimental data?”—Harry Erwin, PhD

Proof

“You can prove anything if you make up your data.”—Jerry Pournelle

Fallacy

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”—G.K. Chesterton