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Thoughts VIII

A. If you try to squeeze too much blood from a turnip, you'll end up with a truly pissed off turnip.

B. If what you crave most in life is politics, you will surely receive it.

C. What is the most resilient substance on earth?  Kids.  It seems that no matter how terrible the parenting, many kids grow up just fine.  There is a counterpart for good parenting.

D. I like the dawn - the dawn of a bright day.  I think because dawn is a state of becoming.  It is fleeting and changing and harbors good things to come.   From Marcus Aurelius (121-186 AD) we have "Each day provides its own gifts."

E. Ok, you have a piece of bread.  You want to make toast.  For my toaster, it takes about three minutes, golden brown and tasty.  The question is at what point does the bread become toast.  Certainly before the three minutes elapse, but certainly now right away.  But when?  

F. We can count - better than ever - but are rapidly forgetting what to count and why, what is worth counting and why.   We are generating exabytes of data and handing it over to data mining programs hoping for a fortuitous discovery - a magic bullet. 

 G. Much of what we have today we owe to science.  We have become dependent upon science, almost as a drug, to fix problems and chart our course.  Enter the pseudo-scientist, armed with models and statistics and promoting personal models of reality with proofs irrefutable to all except experts.  The proofs accepted, diluting the true proofs, there is created an emotional dependency.  It is addictive and is slowly poisoning us all. 

H. Remember this: We can have big bad data,  which is ominous.  We can also have bad big data, which is disastrous - not the stuff dreams are made of but cesspools of garbage from which serious decisions will be derived. 

I. Many people that use PowerPoint presentations have neither power nor a point.
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