5 Thoughts for October 28, 2015

1. Why do I love football so much? Those Xs and Os are chess pieces and what those pieces do, matter as much as how you lay them out; much like chess, your choices (both as the coach and as players) are improvisational moves based on what you think your opponent is planning to do. To a much lesser extent, other sports do these same things, but a football playbook is a thick binder whereas any other sport is roughly a couple dozen concepts and a few added kinks to a known strategy. It is such a complex game, that even if you had the team's playbook there are audible and visual cues on the field that change the play and the formation.
2. See if you can pick out the image of Jupiter's moon, Europa, from photos of frying pans. It was easy for me, because I already knew what Europa looked like, but for other people it might not be so easy as the other 8 look a lot like planets from science fiction. Knowing the basic composition of Europa helps a great deal, too.
3. German privacy officials have decided that they will not entertain any Safe Harbor alternatives, and will immediately act on local subsidiaries of foreign companies who host user data offshore. Their privacy concerns ought to be weighed against the very fact that the EU's own website has neither a digital certificate (to ensure visitors are visiting their website) nor enables HTTPS (to ensure no one is watching your activities while on the EU's website). Furthermore, the EU does not protect foreigners' privacy rights, which means that France can and most certainly does surveil foreigners on their soil. The EU is seemingly rife with hypocrisy, but as I've most often said, this is not about privacy; it is about protection of domestic companies against the dominance of American ones; privacy is a convenient excuse when the EU won't protect foreigners' privacy on its soil. In practice, it is mostly American companies who're ahead of the privacy curve by building in layers of end-to-end encryption that prevents any data access by governments -- how ironic of the EU.
4. Oh boy, I listened in to the GOP debate and it was pure laughs. Chris Christie demonstrated that he knew nothing about how social security worked; Ted Cruz refused to answer a question he didn't want to answer until time ran out and he demanded to answer it; Marco Rubio, apparently unaware that he was seizing on liberal ideas, demanded that US companies hire Americans first, and when they hired from abroad, to pay prevailing wages; Carly Fiorina demanded accountability for job losses, except of course, when she was at HP. The folks at Fox News were apoplectic at the "liberal media bias", which is pretty rich considering that their own deba avoided serious issues and confrontations of the truth; in this closed bubble, hard questions are signs of "liberal bias".
5. I'm getting caught up with Lillehammer on Netflix. I enjoyed season 1 a while back, but forgot about the show until I saw it on Netflix's site, and started streaming. It's entertainingly humorous, some of it dark but mostly just laugh out loud funny.