Author: tychay

light writing, word loving, ❤ coding

A little about WaterField

Gary Waterfield:

Subject: Thanks for finding us!

Congratulations on being part of an exclusive group of people who own a San Francisco-made WaterField product. You might see another one— at an airport, a café in Florence, or a business meeting in Austin.  The best cases in the world attract some of the best and most diverse people in the world and we are glad to have you be part of our community. 

All our bags and cases are made by the most skilled sewing team in San Francisco. Please keep in touch and let us know what else we can do for you.

BTW, how did you bump into us? 

Thanks again,
Gary Waterfield

Continue reading about Waterfield bags after the jump

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Photos of your mom

My aunt started an e-mail thread in my family. I’ll include excerpts here periodically.

I am cleaning the house of more pictures — so many. In the album Grandma Omma left, I found some pictures your mom. I will send another email of your mom and dad’s wedding that you probably have seen already.

Teresa so young

My mom, like her father before her, loved science. She started in physical chemistry like her father but her heart condition caused by rheumatic fever led her to work in biophysics studying the neural network of the heart and heart arrhythmias.

Continue reading about and seeing more photos after the jump

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What “Store” means

My father often calls Apple Store, “the Apple company”, so it with some amusement that I read MacRumors’s rare case of good reporting where they show a lot of evidence that Apple is in the process of dropping the “store” moniker from their Apple Store locations.

The next day, John Gruber linked to it and added:

The “Store” branding only made sense when the concept was novel. Now that Apple’s stores are well established, it makes sense to drop the “Store”. Think about the brands that are Apple’s peers in retail. No one goes to the Tiffany Store or Gucci Store, they just go to Tiffany or Gucci.

This is a classic example of taking good reporting and diminishing it with thoughtless punditry and fanboyism—it must be a good move because Apple did it. In the end, the reader is left worse off than if the link was provided without comment.

Continue reading some critical thinking about the meaning of “Stores” in stores after the jump

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The Apostles Query

Saw this on my feed the other day:

Beautiful queries

“Just wrote the most complex SQL statement I have ever written. It won’t scale, but it’s so beautiful. :)”

Cal’s query brought tears to my eyes. When a finch landed on it, I saw it pivot. It was deeply religious…

START TRANSACTION;

I believe in Codd, the Father Almighty,
CREATE‘r of OLTP and OLAP;

and in MySQL, His PRIMARY KEY, our INDEX:
Which was established by the DB driver,
born of the Open Source;
suffered under Larry Ellison,
was TRUNCATE’d, DELETE’d and was DROP’d.
It INSERT’d INTO NULL;
ON DATEDIFF = 3, It TRIGGER’d again FROM HEAP;
It RAISE()ed into non-TEMP, RIGHT JOIN’d with Codd the Father Almighty;
from thence It shall come to SELECT FROM the relational and non-relational.

I believe in the DB driver,
the Fourth Normal Form,
the relations of tables,
the ROLLBACK of failed transactions,
the RESTORE from logical backups,
and the persistence of storage.

COMMIT;

Next up: Ave MariaDB.

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When statistics say the opposite

This article shows how discussions of political statsitics is in the dark ages. Here is the relevant graph:

Both polls, released on Sunday, showed Mr. Trump in worse shape than he had been a month ago… Despite his woes, not all the results of the new polls were heartening for Mrs. Clinton. The Journal-NBC survey found that her lead essentially disappears when candidates from the Green Party and Libertarian Party are included. She essentially tied Mr. Trump, with 39 percent to his 38 percent. Together, third-party candidates grabbed 16 percent of the support.

Actually, that’s even worse news for Trump than polls showing that Clinton has opened up her lead. To understand this, let’s look at the conservative WSJ-NBC News poll mentioned.

That poll has Clinton at 46% and Trump at 43%, a three point lead nationally. This is one of the most conservative two way polls out there as aggregate polling (which includes three way polling) has her ahead by 6.8%, so we can see the understandable Republican bias in a Wall Street Journal poll. But even taking that into account, we see a 11% undecided/non-reporting account so the real question that all the early reporting needs to answer given how well known both candidates are is: which way is are these huge number of non-reporters going to break?

What the three way race shows is a window into these undecideds. It says right now Clinton has the larger number of holdouts than Trump: about ~60% of these people would rather vote for her than Trump, making her lead much bigger than the numbers are showing.

It reminds me when people say stupid things like, “It’s okay to vote for a third party in a blue state” when studies have conclusively shown that the best way to push policies in a direction is with a bigger margin of victory because the more competitive the election, the more moderate the politician’s position irrespective of incumbency or how “fixed” their candidate position seems.

In other words, if Bernie Sanders really wanted the outcomes he espouses, he’d be endorsing Hillary and pushing hard for a large electoral win, because that, more than anything, would give President Clinton the freedom to move to the left. Instead, he acts in direct opposition to his stated outcomes and pushes her toward the middle.

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Everything is a remix

Hitler, in addition to his oratorical and organizing abilities, has another positive asset—he is a man of the “common people”…
But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch messes of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.
—The New York Times, November 21, 1922

Stephen E. Ambrose’s supposed thesis of Band of Brothers was that American citizen solders were better than the Germans because uniquely “American” autonomy and attitudes in lower officer corp gave them battlefield superiority due to flexibility in tactics and decision-making. This thesis is refuted in the same book by fact that it mentions that after soldiers were in combat for more than six months, they started to fall apart. The Germans, by this point, had been at war for six years.

An interesting side note was who the American servicemen found it easiest to relate to: not the English they trained and fought with, nor the French or the Dutch they freed at Normandy and Arnhem, but the German soldiers they fought at Bastogne and who surrendered to them at Berchtesgaden.

In the end, the real lesson of that book is a far deeper one: when Easy Company rolled into Dachau concentration camp, they were staring at a human horror that none of us are above because we are no different then our enemies.

Someone recently tweeted that if you ever wondered what you would do in 1930’s Germany, now you get to find out.

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About gerrymandering

I was surprised that the betting markets had the Democratic Party with a 19% chance of retaking Congress. To do so, they would have to flip nearly 50 seats!

In the modern era, the Republicans have pulled this off twice (1994, 2010), while the Democrats have only reached this number in 1974 (Watergate scandal). That’s because wave elections of the magnitude needed usually occur only in midterm years when the sitting president has an ebb in popularity and the Republican party is stronger voting patterns during midterms.

Perhaps an interesting way to look at the current situation is: right now the Republicans have their largest House majority since just before the stock market crash kicked off the Great Depression.

The challenge of flipping that seems insurmountable in an electorate as polarized as this one.

The press has mostly been focused on Donald Trump dragging down the ticket and Paul Ryan’s attempt to dance with him. So the articles focusing on the chances of the House flipping have actually decreased from previous years because the conventional wisdom is the only incumbents who actually are at risk are Republican U.S. senators in blue or battleground states like (Illinois, Wisconsin, New Hampshire), and (Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio).

But the betting markets are capturing something the press isn’t: a wave is a wave is a wave, and this year is looking to be a Democratic wave due to raw demographics, being a presidential election year, and Donald Trump. This is compounded by the fact that strategically the Trump campaign is planning on funding and running its logistics by piggybacking off the Republican National Committee. This exacerbates the problem because: 1) it siphons funds and resources from congressional elections to the general; 2) battleground states are ones with large electoral vote counts and have no correlation with contested districts; and 3) the Republicans have increasingly depended financially on large donors via Citizen’s United and outsourced most of the voter outreach and research to third party organizations, so neither the money, nor the knowledge for the republicans is actually in the RNC.

By giving 5-to-1 odds, the markets are saying, “Yeah, it’s going to be a wave, but that’s not enough. But hey, we could always be wrong!” My instincts say it should be closer to 25% than 19% — akin to saying, “It’s possible the wave will be big enough, but it’s still far more likely it’ll take another election year for this wave to crest.”

That’s because I think betting markets have not (yet? ever?) correctly priced in the non-linear impact of gerrymandering. Right now everyone is saying that gerrymandering favors the Republicans. This is certainly true: through gerrymandering, Republican state houses in 2010 has acted as a deep red firewall against a Democratic demographic wave and districts are more partisan than ever because of it. Evidence certainly backs the power of gerrymandering up as, nationally, there were more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republican ones in 2012 and 2014, and yet the Republican party gained seats.

Continue reading about the double-edged sword of gerrymandering after the jump

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Dungeons and Dragons: Only a game?

When we were looking for a some coffee for Marie near Mendocino, we drove by a gamestore, and I had an urge which comes up every couple years to start playing Dungeons and Dragons again. We’ll see how that goes. If you start seeing more posts about D&D, then this time it finally stuck.

A couple days ago, I went to a high school friend’s birthday party. I hadn’t seen him in 12 years almost to the day, but we started to talk about our times being nerds playing RPGs and not giving a crap about it, when he pulled out a copy of a pamplet he and K— were given back then in the 80’s. It was titled, “Dungeons and Dragons: Only a game?”

For those who don’t know, this sort of conspiracy theory started with James Dallas Egbert III in 1979 and reached its peak in the mid-80’s with the B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) and a 60 Minutes episode my mom told me about. Thankfully, I started playing D&D two years before William Dear manufactured the conspiracy theory out of whole cloth, so I didn’t have much explaining to do by then, but there was enough a hysteria to clue me in to how the political and religious extremists operate today with nearly everything.

In any case, hide your kids, hide your wife, cuz D&D be Satanin’ errbody out there. Without further ado, here is the the text of the pamphlet in full (PDF scan):

Continue reading the D&D pamphlet after the jump

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Aged to perfection

Eight years ago, at a party, a friend asked me who I preferred for the Democratic nomination. I said, “Barack Obama.”

“What about Hillary?” she asked, clearly bummed.

“She’s great too, and if she wins, I’d be proud to cast my vote for her to become the first female President of the United States.”

Looks like I’ll get my chance.

I wonder what my friend is thinking right now. To all you die-hard Hillary-supporters: sure, it was an eight-plus year wait, but it’ll have been worth it.

Continue reading adendums after the jump

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My peoples lack a clue

My Facebook feed has lit of with people on both sides of the Peter Theil/Gawker revelation, but that’s because I personally know many of the people involved and have lived and worked in a tech bubble for the last 16 years.

Sadly, Half of them need to venture out of it for a bit to understand why this is an issue to the other 99.9%.

In the meantime, I guess this means I to be posting about how I work in the salt mines with a six figure salary, how the homeless need to get out of MY city, or something… Because here in the bubble, I’m the one that is “out-of-touch.”

(Hint: all the links above are to articles about Silicon Valley that are/were among the most-emailed articles in the New York Times at the time. Half my friends clearly misunderstand why they proved so popular.)

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