Our Constitution

Last week a women in Florida was found not guilty of murdering her daughter, and today a  baseball player had his trial dismissed because the prosecution showed the jury a film clip the judge had earlier ruled to be inadmissible. In both cases I’ve heard people complain that the individual was “obviously guilty” and they are upset at what they see as a miscarriage of justice.

I disagree.

The laws of our country say that everyone is innocent until proven guilty and that in the absence of proof the accused must go free. In the Florida case it appears that the prosecution had little more than circumstantial evidence to present, in fact they could not even specify the cause of death. While I personally feel the mother is an individual I could nether trust or like the fact remains that the state was unable to prove to 12 jurors that she had done the crime she was charged with.

In the case of the ball player that was charged with lying to Congress the judge had specifically said that a particular film clip could not be introduced as evidence yet the prosecution showed it to the jury anyway. The judge could easily have dismissed the case with prejudice but instead chose to stop the trial and order a future rehearing.

In both cases the decision was based on the Constitution that provides each of us a fair hearing if we are accused of a crime. And I would much rather have an occasional miscreant walk free than further weaken the very document that describes and enforces the rule of law we live under.

I'm Back

I stopped blogging the past few days for a very good reason. My Lady was able to come home for 5 days and I wanted and needed to focus on her and make her visit as enjoyable as possible. I leave it to her to tell you if I was successful, but I know that the time went by all too fast and the parting when she went back to the North West was bitter sweet.

I learned (as I had anticipated) that my cleaning standards are not up to her standards and that I have to do a better job of finding dust bunnies and related items of wifely concerns. Being a well trained husband I used the wise man’s response of “Yes Dear” and promised to do better in the future. But there were lots of moments of just holding hands, offering my troth and reveling in her being home.

Time went by much too rapidly and the house is a lot more lonely, even the pets realize she is away and they are trying to adjust to her absence by reminding me that I need to give them big meals and lots of treats. As a Gaffer however I have a reputation to uphold and I remind them in turn that I’ve got opposable thumbs and know how to use the can opener.

Sunshine

Summer in Kansas is usually bright, hot and dry but the weather gods have lately been bringing us lots of humid weather from the Gulf of Mexico. The farmers have bee appreciative since it looks like we have a very good crop season because of the humidity and the high water table from the winter snow pack.

The annual flooding that follows winter is exceptionally bad this year and the towns and farmers in the river flood plains are getting hammered. I’ve been on deployment with FEMA after flood events in both the northern and southern parts of the Mississippi River basin My experience is that, generally speaking the people in the upper Midwest are resilient and every time a levee is breached the dry out and keep looking on the bright side.  There are few complaints about FEMA or the Corp of Engineers and lots of planning already in place to improve the existing flood control plans.

Because of the humid weather I have limited my outdoor time to early morn or late evening but the last three days have been spectacularly dry because of a high pressure area bring dry mountain air to the region. With the lower air humidity even temperatures in the 80’s and 90’s are pleasant and taking a morning walk is just fun.

Is this an educational idea?

I know that educational loans are usually large and often difficult to repay and that many times the borrower is seriously delinquent in making payment, but when a loan is delinquent there are many ways for the lending agency to recoup the money. But the U.S. Department of Education has really stretched logic with its collection tactics.

A fellow in California came downstairs in his shorts when a heavily armed SWAT type team staged an early morning rain. The guy was allegedly grabbed by the neck and led outside on his front lawn where he was handcuffed and detained. The raiders also woke his three young children, aged 11, 7 and three and held them in a local police car for about six hours while they searched the house.

The reason they were there was the raid was staged by a Dept. of Education Team and was based on a search warrant that was allegedly issued by the Department. They were looking for evidence concerning the ex wife who is delinquent on her education loans.

With all the civil and legal procedures available for collecting a debt I find it hard to believe that an educational loan requires a dynamic entry, particularly when the subject of the search is not a resident. The law describes a wide range of remedy but to my knowledge armed raiders are not included in the list.

Programming Logic (?)

I made a living for a good many years working as an analyst in several data centers. As an analyst it was my job to translate the needs of the customer into simple words and phrases that the programmers translated into computer code so the customer could get the information he wanted in the format he needed. While it was often a chore getting the customer to understand that some of their dreams were not achievable I generally had a much harder time getting the programmer to understand just what needed to be done. As a rule programmers are bright, articulate, eager and without a shred of common sense. Without exception they always thought that the code they produced was sufficient to answer all needs and that others (such as myself) had no business questioning their logic.

Over the years I developed a pretty good skill set in adapting the programmer’s zeal to real world situations and giving the customer a product that answered their need and didn’t obscure the reason for getting there. Now retired from the data world I recently ran across a brilliant illustration of an analysts failure to communicate and control and a programmers need to write “brilliant code”.

One of my email accounts, run by a national company, was hijacked by a spammer who proceeded to make my life “interesting” for several weeks. After attempting lots of hopeful solutions I went through my email provider and asked them to block my account until the issue was resolved. Notice that I had to go through my email account because the provider does not offer any phone numbers to call.

Now that my account is blocked when I try to access the email account I’m directed to a screen that explains the account is blocked and that they will send an access number to an alternate email account. The issue is that the alternate account is one that I had over 10 years ago and dropped about two moves ago and there is no way to change the alternate address, I also have no idea how they got it but that’s a side issue. As of right now it’s a perfect closed loop situation, create a screen that could contain incorrect information and fail to provide an escape route when the screen proves to be a dead end for the customer!

Next week I’ll block out a full day to call corporate and talk my way down the hierarchy until I find someone who can break me free. All because some programmer thought of an elegant way to help the customer and an analyst failed to spot a dead end in the making. Wish me well…it might be some time before I resurface.

Worms and other low life

Blogging was put on an involuntary hold when I checked my email a few days ago and found a full basket of error messages. In my wandering through the internet I had picked of a computer worm that hijacked my system and started sending spam in my name.

Words can’t express my feelings, but the neighbors tell me the atmosphere around the house was colored a deep blue. Finding the culprit and correcting the problem took more time, energy, and money than I wanted to spend. But it looks like the issue has been resolved.

If I can ever find the scalawag that did this (and I doubt that I ever will) they will find that the 7 levels of Muslim Hell are not deep enough to hide in. Regular blogging will resume shortly.

Unintended Consequences

I’ve had several opportunities to visit the Corning Glass Museum and have enjoyed and learned every time I visited. Of course the highlight of the tour is the walkthrough of the Steuben glass production line where you can see high quality, and very expensive, objects of art being hand blown and engraved. On one occasion I was startled to watch an engraver finishing up an elaborate bowl when he stopped, called a supervisor over to talk about the bowl. After a short discussion the boss took the bow, walked over to a barrel and smashed the piece. I later found out that the bowl was a special design and would have cost (in 1950’s dollars) over $10,000. But art overcame finances and they started over again because of a slight flaw in the glass.

Most people don’t think of Corning as being in the ranks of crime fighting companies, but when it sold its Pyrex brand of glass cookware to World Kitchen in 1999 the company accidentally made the manufacture of crack cocaine a poster child for the law of unintended consequences.

Ordinary glass shatters when it’s heated too quickly. If you pour something hot in a standard glass the inside expands faster than the outside and the resulting stress cracks the glass. Pyrex, which was made of borosilicate glass solved this problem by altering the atomic structure of the glass. Because of the boron the structure of the glass remains the same size regardless of the temperature. 

When World Kitchen took over the Pyrex brand, it started making more products out of pre-stressed soda-lime glass instead of borosilicate. With pre-stressed, or tempered, glass, the surface is under compression from forces inside the glass. It is stronger than borosilicate glass, but when it’s heated, it still expands as much as ordinary glass does. It doesn’t shatter immediately, because the expansion first acts only to release some of the built-in stress.

The lowlifes that cook crack cocaine found out the hard way that Pyrex shatters when they try to produce their product and now they have to make do with metal utensils (that rust and contaminate) or break into the local high school and steal the lab equipment. I don’t know if this has cut down on the manufacture of crack, but anything that makes it more difficult to produce is ok by me.