Tony K's Blog

The lightning strike was close by. We could see that it had hit one of the boats just down the dock from ours. Phew. It wasn't a direct hit we said from the dry comfort of a nearby restaurant. But things happened. In the days after the strike, several electronic systems on the boat were not working properly. Autopilot was out and the sound system was sketchy, Wind instruments worked intermittently. VHF radio worked, but could not read the GPS signal. The helm digital displays (IS40) worked intermittently. Although pretty competent with computers and networks generally, I had never done any work with a boat network. Work was busy, so we had the boat dealer's mechanic take a look at it.  His conclusion was that there was a problem with the chart plotter. We weren't really interested in buying a new chart plotter, but if that was the problem...  On the word of the mechanic, we were able to get a partial refund under warranty from Simrad. We even upgraded to the next size chart...

Tucker Carlson demonstrates once again that he is a hack . He is first, claiming that Democrats are saying Trump deserved to catch COVID, which may be true in some cases, but in a very limited way. Then he says this is like blaming a woman who dresses provocatively for being raped. Victim blaming is a difficult subject because two things can be true at the same time. The woman dressed provocatively, walking in a bad neighborhood is being foolish or naive at best. At the same time, many other people walk in that neighborhood all the time, there are laws that punish people who assault others, and there are police patrolling the street.  A presumption of safety is naive, but our human and societal values say that she SHOULD be safe to walk in that neighborhood. Now look at COVID. We have been warned for months of the imprudence of not distancing and using a mask. We would like to be able to assume that we can do otherwise, but COVID is not human. It doesn't follow human laws. NOr can ...

The FBI, CIA, NSA, the special counsel, and the Republican-controlled senate have all stated that Russia meddled in our elections in 2016 to benefit Trump. They all agree that the Russians are at it again. On top of it, the intelligence community is unanimous that white supremacist terror groups pose a clear danger. So logically, supporters of the president have re-evaluated their position and decided to vote American. Uh uh. Instead, the president is focusing on a group of African Americans with a clear grievance. Who held protests after a horrific murder as being enemies of the state and planning a coup. This is the same president who tried to sow fear about caravans of brown people invading our nation. He claimed it was such a dire threat that he called out the military. Of course, there was no threat, but you believed him. If you believed the invasion was real, and you believe that BLM is a dangerous insurrection movement, you are choosing to believe the single man, who surrounded ...

I have alienated most of my right-leaning friends, now I’ll work on the other side. I’m a bipartisan kind of guy.   Let’s talk climate change, specifically wildfire. We all agree that for wildfires to burn hot, spread, and be destructive you need to have fuel as well as generally warm and dry conditions. This is why there are seldom wildfires in the desert. Although conditions are hot and dry, there is little fuel, because it is hot and dry. The fuel needed for a wildfire never reaches a critical mass. So let’s look at the recent fires in California. People make a case that they are driven by climate change/global warming. I believe there is some truth in that. The August lightning storms that came through California were unusual. I have never seen that kind of weather in summer in California. Of course, if you attribute a weather event to climate change, it is disingenuous to say that other weather events are only weather—such as unseasonable snowstorms. If you do, you have an unf...

Several weeks ago the CDC announced some new COVID statistics. They said that of all the 190k or so COVID deaths only 9500 did not ha e co-morbidities. The Trump administration and apologists have jumped on this claiming that COVID is a hoax and that Trump did great, etc. The first obvious issue has to do with death attribution. Let’s say some dude has a heart attack calls an ambulance and dies after they reach the emergency room. They do their post-Mortem stuff and discover that he also had controlled diabetes. What did he die of? Of course a heart attack. The apologists are effectively claiming it wasn’t the heart attack. Get over it. "Hospitals are slapping COVID onto as many cases as they can so they can make more money" is another thing I’m still hearing. First, is this actually a thing? Do hospitals get extra for treating COVID? Second, doing so is a crime. It’s called fraud. The poor sucker who writes COVID on the car crams victim death certificate has committed a crim...

Some thoughts about war strategy in Clash of Clans Clan wars pit an equal number of players from two teams against each other over 24 hours. Each player may attack twice--once on two different players. For an attack, a player may be awarded 0, 1, 2, or 3 stars. 0. When the player neither beats the town hall nor achieves 50% damage. 1. When the attacker either beats the town hall or achieves 50% damage. 2. When the attacker destroys the town hall and achieves over 50% damage, but not total annihilation. 3. Total destruction of the defender. A team gets points only for the max stars achieved against each defender. So if one player gets two stars and the next attacker gets 1 star on the same player, the team is awarded 2 stars. For descriptive purposes, when I talk about player 1 it is the most powerful person on a team. Higher numbers are progressively weaker players. Strategy During War Given this structure, it is possible for only the top half of the players to attack ...

Ranked Choice (RC) vs Instant Runoff (IRV) vs Approval RC and IRV are technically different. RC is a way of expressing preference, IRV is a method of tabulating votes from RC ballots. This is an important distinction. IRV, which seems pretty good can solve one problem (e.g. Gore v Bush) but introduce others. Technically IRV is nonmonotonic. That is, a shift of public opinion toward a candidate can cause that candidate to lose, and a shift of public opinion away from a candidate can cause that candidate to win. A different and probably superior method is one called Condorcet. It eliminates most of the IRV issues but introduces a few other, but less likely, issues. IRV is to Condorcet as single elimination is to round robin. Superior to both of them is Approval voting, in which you select all candidates that would be acceptable to you. It’s simple to tabulate and does not have the issues of either IRV or Condorcet. There’s a  website that has wonderful graphics of how the...