Kipling's Insight: Worth Considering

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

 

If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master;

If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;

 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

 

A Graveyard in NH in the Fall

 

Failing Intelligence

 The current Administration seems to have more leaks than the Titanic. The leaks often reveal highly classified information. The Jerusalem Post seems to be one of the few outlets reporting the most recent fiasco. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, once called Defense Mapping Agency, prepared a report, highly classified detailing Israel's military assets and where they are. Great if you are Hammas, Iran et al. Then it got leaked. 

As the JP notes:

 The United States is investigating the leak of a pair of highly classified intelligence documents describing Israel’s preparations for a retaliatory strike on Iran, House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Sunday. “The leak is very concerning,” said Johnson who is a Republican from Louisiana. The documents appear to have been prepared by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, describing US interpretations of Israeli Air Force and Navy planning based on satellite imagery from October 15-16. They began circulating last week on the Telegram messaging app. Israel has been planning a response to a ballistic missile barrage carried out by Iran on October 1, its second direct attack on Israel in six months. Israel has intensified its offensive in Gaza and Lebanon, days after the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

 No wonder no one trusts Washington. These are targeting data. Targeting all of Israels military assets. Will anyone be found? Not with the current folks down there. Who is the real adversary. These reports, when I dealt with the DMA, were highly classified and tracked. Releasing one meant being able by markings to determine the source. However today with the privileged youth, anyone can do anything. Moreover, this news item was never in the sacred NY Times. 

The famous statement, "We are the Government and we are here to help you" has new meaning with the new brands of Government workers! You don't win a war with these people.

Reliable Service?

 As the NY Times noted today after a deadly NJT crash:

New Jersey Transit has been plagued with infrastructure issues for years, but especially struggled this spring and summer to provide reliable service to customers. A spate of failures caused delays during morning and evening commutes in May and June.

 I took the train in today and what was to be a 52 min ride ended up being 93 minutes. At least we got there. But there was the collapsing Penn Station, trash, construction, no exits, crowded stairways and the mess goes on. NJT could not meet a schedule if their lives depended upon it, and it seems it does. This is the classic Government employee syndrome play local. Add Amtrak on top and you have New York City becomes one of the worst cities in the world! Trash, scaffolds lasting 40+ years, threatening motor bikes and unreliable transportation. This does not include crime and corruption. And no one cares!

Curtains and Blinds

 I can determine the genetic makeup of a wide variety of cancers, I can write the greatest set of equations, I can hybridize the most beautiful daylilies but damned if I can remove blinds! Each blind has a different mechanism to place it on the wall, and the mechanism is hidden in some weird place. Underneath, at the end, by a screw, a flip lever, etc. The designers must have an abject hatred for the poor folks trying to hang them or clean them. Design principles are no longer enshrined in any fashion, it is a free range set of viscous designed frustrating the consumer with delight!

These Folks are really Incompetent!

 Again our nemesis at Microsoft is crashing millions of computers destroying billions of hours of human productivity. As PC World notes:

Microsoft is having a bad month. Not long after the Windows 11 24H2 update began rolling out, the issues have just been piling on. At first it was drivers crashing PCs and mouse cursors disappearing. Then it was tons of undeletable data left behind after updating. Some users are even running into dead internet connections and network issues. Then came Patch Tuesday on October 8, where we got two updates that primarily address security vulnerabilities: update KB5044284 for users on Windows 11 24H2 and update KB5044285 for users on older versions Windows 11 23H2 and Windows 11 22H2. Some users are also reporting that Windows Update gets stuck in the update process at 40 percent, while others say that their updates get stuck somewhere between 90 and 95 percent. After waiting several minutes without progress, Windows undoes the update and try again.

 When will this stop! Have they no shame?

 

Cancer, Target Proteins and Therapeutics

 We have posted an interesting Tech Note on methods to deal therapeutically with prostate cancer. These approaches have significant merit and may evolve rapidly

We note:

Prostate Cancer has been a challenging malignancy to treat. Surface molecules that uniquely identify PCa have been examined and combined with the multiplicity of targetable antibody therapies one may suspect several viable approaches may be evolving. We examine these in this Note. We present a protocol which allows one to take a path slide and determine optimum surface markers cell by cell and create targeted poly specific antibodies for optimal treatment.

This combined with treatments for the tumor micro environment are  demonstrating how therapeutics are evolving. There is an interesting course at Harvard that those interest may look at.

College Sports

 The NY Times has an interesting piece on college sports. Now I went to MIT in the 60s. I went with my wife once to get something on campus and passed the intramural football team. They were playing one of the local Cambridge HS teams, Rindge I think. They lost! The cheerleaders from MIT were coeds, we could say that then, and they were the most uncoordinated set of people I ever saw. But it was fun.

Back then MIT was focused on science and tech. No DEI stuff, no Media Lab stuff, no Music PhDs. We just produced things.  It is truly amazing how things have changed, for the worse. 

What is the function of the University? Knowledge, not sports, politics, the stage. Shakespeare did no lecture at Oxford, he played to the masses in London.