Even back when I was studying Latin, it was tagged a “dead” language. But, really—death is as death does. And here are some bons mots as Caesar, Catullus and Cicero never spoke them.
But middle and high school students are reviving Latin in a big way. There is a host of Latin Olympics and Certamen around the country, where kids come together to declaim and discuss the lingua franca of the Imperium.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
Or as we say in the old country: America—gonif!
Friday, March 27, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
AIG exec resigns (sort of)
These days it’s almost always a toss-up as to whether to write about AIG or Octomom. Their stories just never seem to end, & every time you turn the page thinking, “well that can’t be topped,” something even more egregious pops out at you.
But today I’ll let Nadya Suleman firing her nannies because they’re spies for Child Services go & focus on AIG Financial Products exec Jake DeSantis’ resignation.
Which he proffered on the Op-Ed page of the NY Times on Tuesday.
DeSantis—like so many of the erstwhile masters of the universe these days—is in serious danger of leaving Gucci marks on his lower lip. He had nothing to do with the failures of his division that laid the company & the world economy low; he should therefore be allowed to keep his bonus because it’s a contractual obligation, etc.
Well, first of all—I’m sure he shared in the triumph when the division & the company were riding high, even if it wasn’t directly his doing. It’s the nature of corporate life that this sort of thing gets shared. You don't get to pick & choose (any more) whether you get credit or blame for your unit’s success or failure.
Second—AIG has plenty of contractual obligations that it’s buried with a fleet of bulldozers of exigency; why should bonus payouts be set aside from all those abrogations?
What I love is his claim that, “Many of the employees have, in the past six months, turned down job offers from more stable employers, based on A.I.G.’s assurances that the contracts would be honored.”
Where, exactly, would those “more stable employers” be? Any company not making massive layoffs so far is figuring out how/when to do so. Shuffling your feet in the dirt & whining that you could go anywhere really rings hollow these days. Even in the high-flying world of…whatever it is they do there.
DeSantis says he’s keeping the bonus, but donating the entire after-tax amount of $742K to “organizations that are helping people who are suffering from the global downturn.”
Unnamed, but whatever.
He hastens to add, “This is not a tax-deduction gimmick”.
Maybe, but whatever.
Dunno whether he’s started making the rounds of the talk shows yet, but you can pretty much bet that’s in the cards.
DeSantis tosses out one Parthian shot, wishing Ed Liddy, AIG CEO, "success" in repaying the billions in loans from the feds & "luck with the continued unwinding of the company's diverse businesses". He assures Liddy (& NYT readers) that he'll "continue over the short term to help make sure no balls are dropped"—so he's submitting a sort of open-ended resignation. But, he continues, "after what's happened this past week I can't remain much longer—there is too much bad blood."
This brings to mind Oliver Cromwell's admonishment to the Long Parliament:
"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."
But today I’ll let Nadya Suleman firing her nannies because they’re spies for Child Services go & focus on AIG Financial Products exec Jake DeSantis’ resignation.
Which he proffered on the Op-Ed page of the NY Times on Tuesday.
DeSantis—like so many of the erstwhile masters of the universe these days—is in serious danger of leaving Gucci marks on his lower lip. He had nothing to do with the failures of his division that laid the company & the world economy low; he should therefore be allowed to keep his bonus because it’s a contractual obligation, etc.
Well, first of all—I’m sure he shared in the triumph when the division & the company were riding high, even if it wasn’t directly his doing. It’s the nature of corporate life that this sort of thing gets shared. You don't get to pick & choose (any more) whether you get credit or blame for your unit’s success or failure.
Second—AIG has plenty of contractual obligations that it’s buried with a fleet of bulldozers of exigency; why should bonus payouts be set aside from all those abrogations?
What I love is his claim that, “Many of the employees have, in the past six months, turned down job offers from more stable employers, based on A.I.G.’s assurances that the contracts would be honored.”
Where, exactly, would those “more stable employers” be? Any company not making massive layoffs so far is figuring out how/when to do so. Shuffling your feet in the dirt & whining that you could go anywhere really rings hollow these days. Even in the high-flying world of…whatever it is they do there.
DeSantis says he’s keeping the bonus, but donating the entire after-tax amount of $742K to “organizations that are helping people who are suffering from the global downturn.”
Unnamed, but whatever.
He hastens to add, “This is not a tax-deduction gimmick”.
Maybe, but whatever.
Dunno whether he’s started making the rounds of the talk shows yet, but you can pretty much bet that’s in the cards.
DeSantis tosses out one Parthian shot, wishing Ed Liddy, AIG CEO, "success" in repaying the billions in loans from the feds & "luck with the continued unwinding of the company's diverse businesses". He assures Liddy (& NYT readers) that he'll "continue over the short term to help make sure no balls are dropped"—so he's submitting a sort of open-ended resignation. But, he continues, "after what's happened this past week I can't remain much longer—there is too much bad blood."
This brings to mind Oliver Cromwell's admonishment to the Long Parliament:
"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
AIG redux (again)
Word on the street is that some of the bonus recipients at AIG’s Financial Products group have decided to give back some or all of the cash—to the tune of $50M.
Nowhere close to the $165M they received, but, like the 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, I guess it’s a start.
But I’m betting it wasn’t the masters of the universe doing a Spike Lee. It must have had something to do with the bus tour of AIG executives’ homes in Connecticut by activists over the weekend. That's got to give them & their neighbors the jim-jams.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner & Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke are also proposing that the government take a much firmer hand in taking over & winding down non-bank financial institutions that get themselves into AIG-like economic trouble.
For those of you out there shuddering at the thought of Big Brother telling you what you’re going to do with the money you cadge out of the taxpaying public: thank your buddies at AIG, who demonstrated beyond a shred of doubt that the industry can’t organize its way out of a fiscal paper bag.
You know it’s bad when you're willing to take the chance that a federal bureaucracy can do a better job than business itself.
Nowhere close to the $165M they received, but, like the 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, I guess it’s a start.
But I’m betting it wasn’t the masters of the universe doing a Spike Lee. It must have had something to do with the bus tour of AIG executives’ homes in Connecticut by activists over the weekend. That's got to give them & their neighbors the jim-jams.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner & Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke are also proposing that the government take a much firmer hand in taking over & winding down non-bank financial institutions that get themselves into AIG-like economic trouble.
For those of you out there shuddering at the thought of Big Brother telling you what you’re going to do with the money you cadge out of the taxpaying public: thank your buddies at AIG, who demonstrated beyond a shred of doubt that the industry can’t organize its way out of a fiscal paper bag.
You know it’s bad when you're willing to take the chance that a federal bureaucracy can do a better job than business itself.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Powder puff programming
Today being Ada Lovelace Day, I pledged to write about a woman in technology who inspires admiration. I immediately seized on Admiral Grace Hopper as the ideal subject, particularly as Ada Lovelace, only legitimate child of Lord Byron, is often described as the “first programmer” of computational devices, since she developed programs for Charles Babbage’s early mechanical computers.
Hopper is indeed the spiritual heir to Lovelace—a woman who was able to apply focus and drive to a variety of problems. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College with a degree in mathematics and physics in 1928—an era when this was considerably rarer than it is now. Her graduate work was at Yale and she was teaching math at Vassar when the US entered World War II.
She volunteered for the Navy Reserve in 1943 and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at the Harvard Computation Lab. Here she began her career in computing, working with Howard H. Aiken on the Mark I computer. She wanted to transfer to the regular Navy at the end of the war, but was refused because she was 38, so she remained at Harvard &and in the reserves.
In 1949 Hopper joined the company eventually to be known as Remington Rand and was key to the development of the UNIVAC I. She focused on compiler work; COBOL being the eventual output. She believed that computer programs could be written in a language more like English than the machine languages then being used—imagine what a huge leap forward that was.
She went on to pioneer the implementation of standards for testing systems and components. In the 1980s her tests were assumed by what’s now the National institute of Standards & Technology (NIST).
Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve as a Commander in 1966, but was recalled to active duty—this process occurred twice. She finally retired permanently (and involuntarily) in 1986, with a ceremony held in Boston on the USS Constitution. At that time she was the oldest officer in the USN.
Hopper is indeed the spiritual heir to Lovelace—a woman who was able to apply focus and drive to a variety of problems. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College with a degree in mathematics and physics in 1928—an era when this was considerably rarer than it is now. Her graduate work was at Yale and she was teaching math at Vassar when the US entered World War II.
She volunteered for the Navy Reserve in 1943 and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at the Harvard Computation Lab. Here she began her career in computing, working with Howard H. Aiken on the Mark I computer. She wanted to transfer to the regular Navy at the end of the war, but was refused because she was 38, so she remained at Harvard &and in the reserves.
In 1949 Hopper joined the company eventually to be known as Remington Rand and was key to the development of the UNIVAC I. She focused on compiler work; COBOL being the eventual output. She believed that computer programs could be written in a language more like English than the machine languages then being used—imagine what a huge leap forward that was.
She went on to pioneer the implementation of standards for testing systems and components. In the 1980s her tests were assumed by what’s now the National institute of Standards & Technology (NIST).
Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve as a Commander in 1966, but was recalled to active duty—this process occurred twice. She finally retired permanently (and involuntarily) in 1986, with a ceremony held in Boston on the USS Constitution. At that time she was the oldest officer in the USN.
DEC then hired her as senior consultant, a position she held until her death in 1992. Her focus there was lecturing on the early days of computers and methods computer hardware and software companies could use to make life easier on users.
You can pretty well bet that—whatever your frustrations with your PC, your mobile phone, or any piece of equipment that has computer components—it works a lot better that it would have had Grace Hopper not been the computing pioneer she was, and for so many decades.
Working on a Mark II computer at Harvard, a moth stuck in a relay was interfering with operation. Hopper referred to its removal as “debugging”, a term that is vital to any software development project. That moth is in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, if you care to check it out.
You can pretty well bet that—whatever your frustrations with your PC, your mobile phone, or any piece of equipment that has computer components—it works a lot better that it would have had Grace Hopper not been the computing pioneer she was, and for so many decades.
Working on a Mark II computer at Harvard, a moth stuck in a relay was interfering with operation. Hopper referred to its removal as “debugging”, a term that is vital to any software development project. That moth is in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, if you care to check it out.
Also, if you’ve ever followed the aphorism that it’s better to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission, that’s been attributed to Hopper.
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is an annual conference focused on the research and career interests of women in the field. This year’s will be held in Tucson in September. I’ve put it on my calendar because—although not a programmer or analyst—I think my career has been shaped by Hopper’s philosophy, so it’s worthwhile.
I think my favorite quote from her is, “I believe in having an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.”
You go, girl!
Monday, March 23, 2009
Spring is sprung
I’ve found something that does adhere to schedule here in the PNW—it’s a rare enough occurrence that I feel obliged to remark upon it.
It’s been so long since I’ve heard the dawn chorus of birds around here, I’d forgot that there were birds. Even though I see them around, especially after putting out food for them.
However, first thing Saturday morning—yes, the day after the vernal equinox—they chirped in the sunrise, wet though it was. Although there’s been no change in temperature, evidently the bird community knows its duty & takes pride in discharging it.
It’s heartening to find that, in the midst of service providers who can’t be bothered, at least the beaked & feathered set is right on time.
It’s been so long since I’ve heard the dawn chorus of birds around here, I’d forgot that there were birds. Even though I see them around, especially after putting out food for them.
However, first thing Saturday morning—yes, the day after the vernal equinox—they chirped in the sunrise, wet though it was. Although there’s been no change in temperature, evidently the bird community knows its duty & takes pride in discharging it.
It’s heartening to find that, in the midst of service providers who can’t be bothered, at least the beaked & feathered set is right on time.