GILL'S 89TH LAW

"Cows may come and cows may go, but bull goes on forever." - Tom Gill, sometime in 2017.

LAW'S LAW

Experience is a hard teacher, because she gives the test first and the lesson afterward.  
-Vernon Law,  Major League Baseball pitcher

NELSON'S OBSERVATION

The early bird gets the worm, 

but the second mouse gets the cheese.

- Willie Nelson

DePAUL'S ADMONITION

"The past is another country, and there's no guarantee of cordial diplomatic relations."  
- Elizabeth DePaul, in Robert Charles Wilson's novel Last Year, p. 167.

McLEAN'S EXPLANATION

"A global pandemic is a reasonably satisfactory reason to expect a different level of productivity."- Craig McLean, Assistant Administrator of NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, in a memo to employees on 3/28/2020. [From a social media post by Leslie Hartten]

Life During Wartime- Pandemic Edition

For the last several weeks, for what should be obvious reasons, the song "Life During Wartime" by Talking Heads- what is widely considered an early New Wave/funk-rock classic- has been playing in my mind.

I've come up with my own new set of lyrics to it, to match our present crisis.  Submitted for your consideration.

Life During Wartime

Music and lyrics by David Byrne et al.: new lyrics by Tom Gill, 3/22/2020

Heard of a van that is loaded with facemasks,
Packed up and ready to go
Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway,
A place where nobody knows

The city’s quiet, the roads deserted,
I'm getting used to it now
Lived in a brownstone, lived in a ghetto,
I've heard they’ve all been locked down

This ain't no party, this ain't no nightclub,
This ain't no fooling around
Too close for dancing, or lovey dovey,
I’m social distancing now

They got some test kits, they swabbed my nostrils
Hope for an answer some day
I got exposed at a couple of places,
You better just stay away.

Down at the Costco, the trucks are loading,
the Charmin big mega roll
I sleep at my jobsite, I work remotely,
I might not ever leave home

This ain't no party, sure ain’t no spring break,
This ain't no fooling around
There ain’t no South By, or no March Madness,
Ain’t got no time for that now

Heard about Wuhan? Heard of that cruise ship?
How many cases today?
You oughta know not to open the window
Somebody sneeze on you there

I got some groceries, some sanitizer,
To last til April or May
But I ain't got no Netflix, ain’t got no Kindle,
Ain't got no X-box to play

Why stay in college? Why go to night school?
Gonna be all taught online
Can't tweet on Twitter, can't send no email,
I ain't got time for that now

State parks are roadblocked, trouble at trailheads,
Trying to keep away crowds
We’re jogging fire roads, we're jumping fencelines,
I know that that ain't allowed

We dress in PJs, we dress like hazmats,
Forego the suit and the tie
I’ve missed my haircuts, so many times now,
I don't know what I look like!

You make me shiver, I feel some fever,
I’d better self-quarantine
Don't get exhausted, is that you coughing?
You might have Covid-19

Bricked all my notebooks, what good’s my Chromebook?
They won't help me survive
My chest is tightening, getting pneumonia,
it tells me I’m still alive

KELLY'S BARREL OBSERVATION

"Empty barrels make the most noise."  
Ascribed for many years as a "Swedish proverb" or "Yiddish insult."  Used multiple times by White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly, as in press briefing on 10/19/17 and in a statement made to Fox News on 9/12/2017.

POWELL'S ADVICE

"Tell me what you know.  Then tell me what you don't know. Then tell me what you think. Always distinguish which is which."- Colin Powell

SHATNER'S LAW

"There's only one problem flying by the seat of your pants.  Sometimes you end up naked." -William Shatner, in TV GUIDE , August 22, 2016

BOND'S LAW

"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action."- James Bond, in GOLDFINGER.

BLOOM'S OBSERVATION

"The greatest invention of humans is peace. The concept of peace has never occurred to bacteria. It's never occurred to chimpanzees. But it has occurred to human beings."- Author Howard Bloom

KNOX'S OBSERVATION and STILLMAN'S ADDENDUM

"Spoiled fruit does not improve with age."- John Knox, Professor, University of Georgia.

But note:

"Spoiled fruit does not improve with age, but sometimes it can turn out to be the base of some powerful liquor."- Robert Stillman

LITTLEWOOD'S LAW VIA McRANEY

"So much happens to us on a daily basis, that we have a million experiences about every 35 days. The idea that something is a one-in-a-million experience means also that it's a once-a-month occurrence."

- David McRaney, author of the book "You Are Not So Smart."  Professor John Edensor Littlewood of Cambridge University decided to apply cold mathematical reasoning to the concept back in 1955.

He assumed that a miracle is a one-in-a-million event. He also surmised the average human will witness one event per second during the eight hours each day when they are fully "alert".

This mean you will witness a million events roughly every 35 days - and the law of averages says one of these will be "miraculous".

Yes, it's little more than a maths joke - and Littlewood did far more - and more important work - in his career until his death at 92 in 1977.

The volume in which its contained - a Mathematicians' Miscellany - is in fact a spritely little book uncovering the fun and occasional wisdom of life gleamed from studying maths at Trinity College, Cambridge.

ARCHER'S ADVICE

"Why put something off until tomorrow, when you can get away with not doing it at all?" - David Allen Archer, December 10, 2014

CALAHAN'S ADVICE

Advice to live by from Patrick Calahan, see his thread on Twitter: 
https://twitter.com/padraig2112/status/979439970107600896

It includes:
If you're simplifying a complex problem, you're likely doing it wrong.
If you're building a complex solution to a simple problem, you're probably also doing it wrong.

If you think you've wrapped your head around a complex problem, you're probably wrong or you're building a solution that already exists.  Go find the one that exists first.  If it's good, use that.  If it's bad, figuring out why it is bad will inform you about the problem domain.

Building things is fun. Building things so that someone else can understand them is hard and not fun. If you are having only fun building things, you're probably building something that other people won't or can't use.  That may be a cool thing, but in practical terms it is junk.

If you are managing some group of people and there is a common problem that only one person can fix, one of three things is true: you are a bad manager, you have an employee who built something only they can understand, which makes them a bad team player, or both.

Everybody is wrong some of the time.  The better you are at something, the less likely it is that you are wrong at any given point, and the probable severity of the wrongness is reduced.

Any group of people who are all experts is less likely to have a group version of the previous problem.  However, when they are collectively wrong, they are likely to be badly wrong.  This is why sanity-checking is important.

Everything you build has to be maintained.  If you don't pay attention to maintenance costs, you are creating a problem for somebody else (also you are bad and you should feel bad.)


"Fast, cheap, and good.  Pick two." is a very common rule of thumb in IT.  What is less common is the acknowledgement that usually focusing on "fast" and "cheap" is often the better idea because everything in IT has an end-date of usefulness.

ELEANOR'S ADMONITION

"It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan."- Attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt

BEHRMAN'S LAW

"Texting is a brilliant way to miscommunicate how you feel, and misinterpret what other people mean."- Stanley Behrman

https://twitter.com/stanleybehrman/status/387458377875337216?s=20

SILVER'S FIFTH LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS

"Twitter always goes for disarray. That’s like the 5th law of thermodynamics." - Nate Silver

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/scaramucci-goes-off-the-record/

WILLIS'S LAW

“What can’t possibly happen, happens. And what should be happening, doesn’t. There’s no middle ground.” - Songwriter Allee Willis, who passed away on Christmas Eve 2019:
Allee Willis, ‘September’ and ‘Friends’ Theme Songwriter, Dead at 72

Gazzaniga's Law

"There's nothing worse than a motivated brick." 
- Matt Gazzaniga, the father of cognitive neuroscience, in regard to persons who are highly motivated but have no talent, stated during a radio interview with Ian Punnett on December 10, 2011.