How the mighty are fallen from earlier glory: in the 1990ies, CNN was the scrappy, creative underdog in the TV news business. No name anchors and reporters, bare-bones no-frills sets, go anywhere, cover anything reporters and camera crews. In the first Gulf War, they were Johnny-on-the spot and the news source to watch for war developments, if my memory serves. And now, some knowledgeable commenters and bloggers wonder openly if the only reason that CNN’s viewership isn’t crashing more steeply than has been reported is because of the channels’ ubiquity at airports and other public venues. Once upon a golden time, it seemed only logical for the owners/managers of airports and the like to have contracts with CNN, and no one objected much because it was CNN, a responsible and political neutral source of news.
Crime and Punishment
Saving (Restoring) Free-Range Childhood
Kerry McDonald: The Value of a Self-Directed Summer for Kids.
Autonomy and choice are central to a self-directed summer, in contrast to the control and regimentation that define so many children’s days all year round. Parents from all socio-economic backgrounds face mounting pressure to have their children’s summer days filled with structured, and often expensive, enrichment activities; but poorer parents may confront the most coercion.
RTWT. See also my related post Six Hundred Million Years in K-12.
The term “free-range kids” was originated, AFAIK, by Lenore Skenazy, who has a blog with that name.
Movie Considerations & The Highwaymen
After reading a couple of favorable reviews of The Highwaymen at blogs that I am usually given to trust, I took a flyer on watching the movie streaming video, of course, on my home computer. I can count the number of movies that I have made a deliberate effort to see in a theater over the last couple of years on the fingers of one hand and … well, wow. Just wow. Kevin Costner isn’t any Kenneth Branagh, or even a John Wayne but he can act, especially given an intelligent and nuanced script, spare and understated direction, and production values not dependent on flashy special effects. Woody Harrelson may personally be nuttier than squirrel poop but he also can act. Like Jimmy Stewart did before them they are better and more interesting playing older, more grizzled characters then they were as smooth-faced young studs. So The Highwaymen is a retelling of the hunt for and final ambush of gangsters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, glamorized beyond practically all recognition in the 1968 movie.
The 737 MAX and the Death of MIL-STD-499A SYSTEM ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT
One of the life experiences that comes with being a three decade veteran of military procurement is you have been around long enough to know where all the important bodies are buried — case in point, the Boeing 737 MAX. What we are seeing in the two recent 737 MAX crashes is the the 20 year accumulation of professional toxic waste and decay in Boeing management that came with the first Clinton Administration’s cancellation of MIL-STD-499A SYSTEM ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT.
I was e-mailed a link today to this Daily Kos post on the 737 MAX :
Did Boeing ignore basic SW engineering principles?
Thursday March 21, 2019 · 8:34 AM CDT
and this passage just jumped out:
A few software engineering principles:
- Software engineering 101: validate your inputs.
- Software engineering 201: when something goes wrong, provide useful data to the human.
- Software engineering 301: for life-critical decisions, avoid single point of failure.
Until today, I had thought that aviation was *good* at software engineering. But my faith is shaken by the New York Times description today of what went wrong with the Boeing 737 MAX.
The above passes my professional “Bozo Test” of whether the poster knows what he is taking about regards software development. He does.
This is where that “military procurement life experience” I mentioned comes in. The timing of the development of the 737 MAX MCAS software was roughly 20 years after the Clinton Administration cancelled the majority of Mil-Specs in the mid-1990’s and in particular the one for system engineering management.
See:
MIL-STD-499A (NOTICE 1), MILITARY STANDARD: SYSTEM ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT (27 FEB 1995) [NO S/S DOCUMENT]., MIL-STD-499A (USAF), dated 1 May 1974, is hereby canceled without replacement.
Peak Stupid
No, I don’t think will ever reach Peak Stupid; just as we will probably never reach Peak Oil, either since there appears to be an inexhaustible supply of the former, and more of the latter than the gloom’n’doom crowd apparently thought. But Deity on a Trisket, the farrago of Stupid on display just this past week is just plain mind-blowing. And I read a lot of history, so it’s not a total surprise to me that individually and en masse, humans are capable of the spectacularly moronic; things like Tulip Mania in 17th century Holland, pursuance of the Flat Earth theory after trips into space, and the Billy Jack movie series, not to mention the whole disco era in general.
So the Jussie Smallett supposed hate-crime on the below-freezing streets of Chicago on the coldest day of the year thus far (hey, it’s only February, I am confident that the remaining ten months of 2019 will bring us ever more bountiful levels of stupidity) has fallen completely apart much as the intelligent and logical portion of the blogosphere had predicted upon being made aware of the specifics. Yes, a planned with an astounding level of stupidity even for an actor hate crime, intended to leverage a pay raise, and garner oodles of that sweet, sweet milk of sympathy for a victim. And the National Establishment Mainstream fell for it, hook, line, sinker and whatever else in an appealing sob story, not to mention quantities of gullible media celebrities, and gullible political celebrities. Oopsie. The most decent of them appear to have the nous to be resoundingly pissed with Mr. Smolett over how their sympathies were exploited. The indecent are lying low and doubtless waiting for the next shiny, flashy supposed hate crime to bubble up to the top of that pond of scum which appears to be our national thought leaders. Live and learn, people there exists a long, long, long history of faked hate crimes. The most recent of which happened not two weeks previously, with the Covington Catholic students. Memories are short in the National Establishment Media gene pool; measured in hours, I would guess. Possibly this is a variety of genetic defect.