daily 03/15/2016

• Pocket

  • “My bully is a man to reckon with,” I reckoned.
  • “I remember our dads both having to pick us up at the same time because we’d been fighting again,” he said. “Neither of them angry, just disappointed, and how much worse their disappointment was, compared to their anger.”

• Pocket

  • “Ever gone a week without a rationalization?”
  • As for learning on the job, Henry Kissinger wrote that high office “consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered.”

• uncategorized

  • More recently, SCOTUS held that finding a parent in civil contempt and jailing them for failure to pay child support without first checking to see if that parent can actually pay is violation of due process.

• Researchers say FAA is really overblowing risk posed by small drones | Ars Technica

  • Drones weighing more than 250 grams (a little more than half a pound) will have to be registered with the FAA, and there are restrictions on where they can be flown.
  • But an investigation last year by the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) found that of the 764 near-miss incidents with drones recorded by the FAA, only 27 of them—3.5 percent—actually were near misses.
  • “On average, only 3 percent of reported small-bird strikes ever result in damage, compared to 39 percent of large-bird strikes,” Dourado and Hammond reported. “Given the voluntary nature of strike reporting, the true percentage of strikes causing damage is probably much lower, as strikes that do not cause damage can be either missed or underreported.”

  • Birds spend much more time in the air than consumer drones, which have a short battery life. Birds also don’t necessarily avoid areas where airplanes are apt to hit them. Based on usage statistics, compared with bird behavior, the researchers estimated that for every 100,000 hours of flight time for drones weighing up to 2 kilograms, there would be 0.00000612 collisions causing damage to aircraft. “Or to put it another way,” the pair wrote, “one damaging incident will occur no more than every 1.87 million years of 2kg UAS flight time.”

     

    And the frequency of injuries caused by drone collisions, they estimated, would be another two orders of magnitude smaller—happening once every 1.87 million years of operation. “This appears to be an acceptable risk to the airspace,” they concluded.

• Excel Waterfall Charts (Bridge Charts) – Peltier Tech Blog

  • Waterfall charts are commonly used in business to show how a value changes from one state to another through a series of intermediate changes.
  • Waterfall charts are often called bridge charts, because a waterfall chart shows a bridge connecting its endpoints. A simple waterfall chart is shown below:
  • The first approach most people try is to use a floating column chart, that is, a stacked column chart with the bottom column in the stack hidden to make the others float.
  • This tutorial shows how to create waterfall charts in Excel, including the specialized data layout needed, and the detailed combination of chart series and chart types required. This manual process takes time, can be prone to error, and soon becomes tedious. If you want to add data labels, tedium increases.

• Waterfall – Peltier Tech Charts for Excel – Documentation

  • Making Waterfall Charts

• Why Captain America: The First Avenger Is Unlike Any Other Marvel Movie

  • But The First Avenger still stands out for me because it really did something that none of the Marvel movies have really done, something that resonates as Captain America as a character celebrates his 75th anniversary this month.
  • The First Avenger embraced its comic book history, rooted in the Golden and Silver Ages of comics, in a way no other Marvel movie really has. That’s not to say that the others have been unfaithful—they’ve taken the spirit of those stories and modernized them, as in Thor or Iron Man. Or in the case of Guardians, taken the basic premise and built something with its own, crazy tone.

• Former cyber czar says NSA could crack the San Bernadino shooter’s phone — arstechnica.com

  • He told National Public Radio’s David Greene today that “encryption and privacy are larger issues than fighting terrorism,” taking issue with the FBI’s attempts to compel Apple’s assistance.
  • Clarke added that if he was still at the White House, he would have told FBI Director James Comey to “call Ft. Meade, and the NSA would have solved this problem…Every expert I know believes that NSA can crack this phone.” But the FBI wasn’t seeking that help, he said, because “they just want the precedent.”
    • Thugs.
  • “Compelling them to write code. And the courts have ruled in the past that computer code is speech.”
  • Within the US government, we decided long ago that there are limits in what we’re going to do in the war against terrorism.”
  • Clarke noted that Comey and the Justice Department were not getting support in their case from the defense and intelligence communities.
  • “The FBI director [Comey] is exaggerating the need for this, and the Attorney General [Loretta Lynch] is letting him get away with it.”

• My PC Upgraded To Windows 10 Without Asking, Then Immediately Broke

  • • This is how I want it to work.
  • I was on a much-needed staycation last week, a chance to recharge my batteries. What I didn’t anticipate was spending half a day trying to figure out how Windows 10 got installed on my PC and why it broke everything.
  • “You’ve been signed in with a temporary profile,” read an error message.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.