[Cyberyeti]

 shyams, on 2015-September-20, 11:09, said:

The Solheim Cup incident today was in poor taste.

Without seeing the video, I felt that Europe had to be at fault for insisting that the hole was not conceded. Even if a player insists on using the rulebook, their captain could easily have intervened and set it right.

Atrocious stuff....

It may go back to a previous incident from several years back where a European was in a bunker while the Americans were further away but on the green. The European thought she'd been told by the Americans to play (as is normal in strokeplay), and chipped in. The Americans then said they were further away and it was their shot, voiding the European chip in and making her play it again.

[blackshoe]

Several years back. I guess the Klingons are right: revenge is a dish best served cold.

[mike777]

I just watched the very anti catholic 6o minutes...basically they made the pope look tired


I hope we see the same anti religion vs muslims or non religious


If you think God is a joke fair enough

[Cyberyeti]

 blackshoe, on 2015-September-20, 22:29, said:

Several years back. I guess the Klingons are right: revenge is a dish best served cold.

Not sure, but I suspect the European captain was playing in the previous one.

[y66]

Nice comeback Suzann!

[Winstonm]

The Adams Family should have had a schizophrenic uncle who thought he was a pumpkin farmer who later became a doctor. They could have called him Pumpkin Patch Adams.

[y66]

The pope has landed here in DC. Viva il papa! #followfrancis

[Al_U_Card]

Only if he hands over Ratzinger to the international warrant.
Fat chance.

[y66]

Looks like a good start ...


Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

[y66]

My wife and I visited Petoskey in June a few years back. What a beautiful part of the world. Did not know about the Hemingway connection.

[y66]

In the getting one's sh*t together department: DC has figured out how to turn poop into power with a little help from our Norwegian friends.

[y66]

From an interview with Deborah Davis about her trip by car across the U.S. which she made while writing a book about Andy Warhol's trip by car across the U.S.

Quote

You write about Jack Rittenhouse’s guide to Route 66, which was the first guidebook to the highway. Did Warhol follow it? Did you?

It didn’t turn up in Warhol’s artifacts so I doubt it. I thought Rittenhouse was amazing. I loved his rule of the road that says you should stop at the roadside cafes where the most trucks are parked out front because you can be certain to find a good cup of coffee.

Did you follow that rule?

Absolutely. That was how we found the Midpoint Diner [in Adrian, Tex.], where we had breakfast. Steinbeck said breakfast was the best American meal when you’re on the road. He’s absolutely right. It’s all about beginnings, a new day, a new stretch of the highway.

What surprised you?

There were no Americans on Route 66. It was all foreigners. They’ve all come to see the quintessential America. They’re all looking for America, but Americans aren’t. I think it should be mandatory that everyone drive cross-country. Even though every city has a Starbucks and the big towns are alike, you still get those glimpses of something more authentic. You really experience America.

Where would you like to go again?

Pittsburgh. It was the most amazing city. It is both polished and scarred. It has a cultural center that you get from having Carnegie this and Carnegie that. The food scene is enough to keep you fat and happy. And you have the Andy Warhol Museum. It’s an incredible combination.

[y66]

The Cubs rookie Kyle Schwarber after his leadoff home run in the seventh inning, his second homer of the series, gave Chicago an insurance run. Credit David Banks/Getty Images

Quote

CHICAGO — The Chicago Cubs played nearly 100 full seasons at their cozy North Side home without a day like this. From Three Finger Brown to Hack Wilson, Phil Cavarretta to Ernie Banks, Ryne Sandberg to Sammy Sosa, they had never clinched a postseason series at Wrigley Field.

That changed on Tuesday, when a band of upstarts slew their biggest rival and barged into the National League Championship Series. The Cubs used three home runs and eight pitchers to eliminate the St. Louis Cardinals, 6-4, in Game 4 of this division series. More.

[y66]

You know about net neutrality. Meet grid neutrality.

Quote

The electricity grid is in the beginning stages of a fateful evolution.

For a century or so, the model for the grid has been "hub and spoke" — electricity has been generated in large central power plants and spilled through wires into customer buildings. It works like water flowing downhill through canals and channels into basins; the basins are passive recipients, and the water only flows one way.

In the grid of the future, electricity will behave less like water and more like information. Everyone will consume it, produce it, store it, and share it. The customers at the ends of the wires will become active participants — producer/consumers, or "prosumers," in the awful jargon — and hub-and-spoke will give way to a multidirectional network.

In short, the grid will become less like a public water system and more like the internet, a networked platform upon which all sorts of innovations and markets can grow.

[y66]

The new normal: An Engineering Theory of the Volkswagen Scandal

Quote

In a powerful book about the disintegration, immediately after launch, of the Challenger space shuttle, which killed seven astronauts in January of 1986, the sociologist Diane Vaughan described a phenomenon inside engineering organizations that she called the “normalization of deviance.” In such cultures, she argued, there can be a tendency to slowly and progressively create rationales that justify ever-riskier behaviors. Starting in 1983, the Challenger shuttle had been through nine successful launches, in progressively lower ambient temperatures, across the years. Each time the launch team got away with a lower-temperature launch, Vaughan argued, engineers noted the deviance, then decided it wasn’t sufficiently different from what they had done before to constitute a problem. They effectively declared the mildly abnormal normal, making deviant behavior acceptable, right up until the moment when, after the shuttle launched on a particularly cold Florida morning in 1986, its O-rings failed catastrophically and the ship broke apart.

We are, by now, used to seeing greed as the primary driver of corporate scandals. In the wake of Enron and the mortgage fraud that led to the financial crisis, the great surprise of the Volkswagen scandal may prove to be that the malfeasance could have arisen systemically, without the direct involvement of anyone higher up (or the involvement of mortgage traders, for that matter). It is still possible, of course, that we will learn that the engineers were under orders from management to beat the tests by any means necessary, but based on what we now know, that seems implausible. It’s more likely that the scandal is the product of an engineering organization that evolved its technologies in a way that subtly and stealthily, even organically, subverted the rules. Volkswagen is promising to release a fix for its software soon; fixing its entire operation may leave it wishing it could merely fire a few mortgage traders.

My theory is that the engineers' managers optimistically committed to meet specs and dates which, early on, seemed aggressive but achievable. This is pretty typical for engineering projects, especially projects with super smart guys who are not in the habit of thinking a lot about what can go wrong. A year or so away from the start manufacture date, it becomes clear that emission specs can't be met without compromising fuel efficiency and performance and something has to give: emissions or fuel efficiency or performance or target dates. The managers probably had a meeting and someone suggested a temporary software solution (no doubt described as trivial to implement and switch off later) to buy the hardware guys another year or so and someone, probably the hardware project manager, under tremendous pressure, caved. You can't blame this on engineers. That's the fastest way to destroy an organization. Every manager worth his or her salt knows this.

[y66]

Is this the best cookbook review ever? Or this one? See you in Argentina amigos.

[Zelandakh]

 helene_t, on 2015-September-17, 07:00, said:

So my answer would likely depend on who the poller is and which other questions they asked me.

Just like Bernard!

[y66]

Strange dream: I visited Winstonm's apartment. There was a completed manuscript on the desk in his office the size of a ream of typing paper wrapped in dark blue paper and string with a note saying something like 2/1 Notes from the BBO Forum. Maybe that's a sign I need to spend more time on the bridge part of this forum. Sorry to say I did not get to meet Winston. I have no idea how I got in. I don't recall ever dreaming about this forum before.

[Winstonm]

 y66, on 2015-November-08, 08:55, said:

Strange dream: I visited Winstonm's apartment. There was a completed manuscript on the desk in his office the size of a ream of typing paper wrapped in dark blue paper and string with a note saying something like 2/1 Notes from the BBO Forum. Maybe that's a sign I need to spend more time on the bridge part of this forum. Sorry to say I did not get to meet Winston. I have no idea how I got in. I don't recall ever dreaming about this forum before.

Last night I had the strangest dream I never had before
I dreamed the world had all agreed to play two-over-one

[Aberlour10]

 Winstonm, on 2015-November-08, 11:29, said:

Last night I had the strangest dream I never had before
I dreamed the world had all agreed to play two-over-one

Thanks God the world did not choose Strong Pass. That would be a really bizzare dream. a one from the Apocalypse Now series