Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

On July 16, 1969 NASA's Apollo 11 mission took off for the Moon. Four days later on July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong would famously take that first step on the Moon, saying "that's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." That was fifty years ago. I personally had a lot going on around that same time and consequently I will never forget exactly where I was and what I was doing on July 20, 1969 the moment Neil Armstrong's foot hit the ground on the Moon. But first, a little personal history to set the stage: During my years at Baylor University (1964-1968) America was rapidly escalating it's presence in South Vietnam as part of the Cold War with China and Russia. US military personnel in Vietnam jumped from ~16,000 in 1964 to over 465,000 by the end of 1967. The year 1968, which began with the North Vietnamese surprise Tet Offensive [when most American's thought we were winning] would turn out to be the worst year of the Vietnam War. [About 17,0...

This past May my wife and I celebrated our 50th Wedding Anniversary. The time has passed quickly but it certainly doesn't seem like 50 years. Like most, we've had our ups and downs in fifty years, but on the whole have been blessed with good health, three fine sons and nine grandchildren. Looking forward to the next chapter.

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran My rating: 5 of 5 stars View all my reviews

Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson My rating: 5 of 5 stars Having read only snippets and never a complete biography of Leonardo da Vinci before, I have no basis of comparison from which to judge the accuracy of Isaacson's beautifully written account of Leonardo's life. Assuming it's accurate, Isaacson's account leaves no doubt that; the man was a true genius, he led a fascinating life much of which was enabled by being born near the beginning of the Renaissance in Europe and he was fortunate to have been associated with so many other brilliant characters. The only minor issue I had with the book was not always being able to tell exactly what the current scholarly research consensus is about the many mysteries of Leonardo's life versus Isaacson's opinion. The book is well worth reading. View all my reviews

How to be a conservative by Roger Scruton My rating: 5 of 5 stars View all my reviews

I don't like labels. Labels are an unfortunate legacy of our evolution which once required that instant  "is it friend or foe" decisions be hard-wired as a matter of life and death. You would think that civilized human beings would have had enough time by now to evolve something better than simplistic warning labels like liberal and conservative, but for some reason we still haven't done it. Liberals would label me a conservative although I am often in agreement with ideas which liberals claim to be theirs exclusively. Conservatives would label me a "closet liberal" because I didn't meet some ludicrous litmus test criteria; but frankly, there is no litmus test of what it means to be a conservative that I really give a dam about. And both gladly take my contributions. So why am I rambling on about my personal philosophical leanings? Because I am distressed about the sorry state of "The New Republic" magazine. The latest issue (Feb 2015) was ...

I subscribe to e-mails from The White House (like the one below) to keep track of what they are actually saying. Normally their e-mails are recitations of the President's talking points and don't add anything meaningful. However, this time David Simas was soliciting input to prove their case that the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") is actually working. So, since I involuntarily have new health coverage as of January 1 (that's what The White House was asking for) I decided to submit my own "story." Here's what I submitted: I am retired. I pay for Medicare but I don't rely on it for quality health care. I have new coverage as of January 1st which I was forced to purchase privately as an individual. I believe I was driven to this largely by one of the unintended consequences of Obamacare which is that large employers will now more easily drop retiree group medical plans (to pay for other costs of Obamacare) citing Obamacare as the backstop for t...

One thing I learned from my father when I was very young was to always keep something in reserve. He lived this in many ways and I believe he meant it in those many senses. Don't push yourself beyond your limits keep something in reserve; save for a rainy day; do your best joke last; "don't drop your candy in the lobby" (an inside joke that all salesmen know...meaning don't tell everything you know about your product in the first five minutes of the sales call, listen, wait, keep you candy in the jar until you know what they want); save your ammo; make her happy before you are; and this list goes on and on. My dad had one particularly useful way of keeping something in reserve that he taught me sixty years ago and I'm still doing it today. It was after a Cub Scout meeting on a wintery Saturday afternoon, probably in Kentucky (I can't remember where). My dad and I were supposed to get milk at the grocery on our way home. Dad remembered the milk but when w...

It is difficult to describe how profoundly influential Dick Clark's American Bandstand was to many teenagers (like me) in the early 1960's. In those days before PCs, Internet, cell phones, IM, Facebook, MTV, etc. American Bandstand was what you did to see what new artists and what kinds of music the "cool" people were listening and dancing to, what they were wearing, how they did their hair, and what they thought about stuff. It was part of the vast technological impact that TV had on our lives visually improving the experience over radio DJ music programs by an order of magnitude. The impact of TV back then, now taken almost for granted and morphing again with nearly limitless new sources of online video, was not just a shift but a complete phase change from audio to video. It was amazing. In the late 1950's and early 1960's I happened to live near Philly. When we first heard about this American Bandstand thing we thought it would be like "The Hit Para...

I loved the ham sandwich and baloney story that Leonard Susskind told about his friend Richard Feynman.

I listened to a lecture today by Brian Wansink, Ph.D., author of Mindless Eating, a book about better eating habits that lead to weight loss and better health. It's amazing how simple things we get use to are really bad eating habits. Here's an example. Take two normal table glasses. One is tall and thin like a water glass, the other short and wide like a cocktail glass. Wansink's research shows that most people (even professional bar tenders) will fill the short glass with 38% more liquid than the tall glass. Why, because we're conditioned to be a better judge of the volume we want by height than by width. Same thing with the size of the plate we use to eat with. If we use a smaller plate we'll eat significantly less because using a larger plate we tend to fill it up and eat more unconsiously even though we'd feel perfectly fine with the volume of a smaller plate. I'm going to give his " Mindless Method " a try and see if I can shed this stomach o...

My employer (Cisco) published its most recent forward looking study of the Internet today. It's called " The Evolving Internet: A look ahead to 2025 by Cisco and the Monitor Group's Global Business Network " and although I haven't studied it in detail yet, I scanned it this morning and I liked what I saw. Those who know me will not be surprised that I particularly liked the three dimensional evaluation criteria that they used to frame their analysis. Lately nearly everything I do ends up finding its way into some sort of analytical cube like this. I've been wondering whether there is something wrong with me that I can't seem to frame things simply in two dimensions. Glad to have company.

My personal strategy for anonimity on the Web is to game the system by joining every social site I discover, liking everything, friending everybody (whom I actually know and who want to be friends, ok almost everybody), and posting the same benign profile stuff everywhere. Why you ask? To confound those spooky behavorial targeting algorithms that lurk in the backgroud of the Web as best I can. I see it as a challenge; to not be profile-able. Because of this strategy, I have long since passed the so-called "Dunbar Number" on many social sites to which I belong. It's also caused me to follow closely the work of people like John Udell and projects like Open Social. The Dunbar Number is a hypothesis about social group size limits by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. A good summary of the hypothesis can be found on The Psychology Wiki and in this blog entry by Chris Allen. What made me think of this in the first place was a podcast interview of Spencer Wells by NPR's D...

Myngle has built something in the "that's a good idea, wish I'd thought of that" category. It's pretty simple. Use Web 2.0 technologies to connect language teachers (who make a few bucks on the side) in real-time, and one-on-one, with students interested in learning a new language. I may have to try it when I retire. I've always wanted to speak French.

You just have to love Dr. John Malone. The guy's a certified genius but also a "what you see is what you get" straight-shooting kind of guy. His Ph.D. is from Johns Hopkins, BA is science from Yale, worth $2.3 billion (according to Forbes, but probably way low because they just couldn't find all of it). He ran TCI (America's largest Cable company) and sold it to ATT for $54 billion. He's the kind of person that you could just sit and listen to for hours. He's so logical, well informed and well spoken. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal here's a few nuggets from what he had to say... (I agree with him about Obama) WSJ: What are the biggest risks for Liberty right now? Mr. Malone: I think the biggest concern I have for the next year or two would be on the retail side, because of the consumer sentiment and the macro conditions. The concerns really tend to be much more macro: Is America going to make it, rather than are we going to make it?...

My friend Bruce Pearlman and I played in a Member-Member golf tournament at The Golf Club of Georgia this past weekend. I had one of those rare moments in life that ABC Sports use to refer to as "The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat." It happened like this. We were one of seventy-two, two-man teams organized in nine flights ranked by golf handicap. I'm an 11.0 handicap and we were in the 8th flight (next to last...so our expectations weren't that high.) The tournament was played over two days and was essentially a "best-ball" format net after handicap. We both played great the first day and what's more (the real secret to success in "best-ball") we never had a bad hole at the same time. We shot a net 62, or 10 under par, and lead our flight by four strokes after day one. The highlight of the day was my partner Bruce Pearlman's natural "EAGLE" on the 18th hole of the Lakeside course (a net double-eagle or 3 under par for ...

I spent nearly three hours today trying to understand the meaning of the Obamacare legislation. I am a reasonably intelligent individual, I have experience analyzing legislation (in my work), I know generally where to look and despite all that, I found it to be basically incomprehensible. This suggests to me that most people; don't have a clue what has happened, how it will effect them, why it was necessary (0r not), when it will take effect, what it will cost, what the alternatives might have been (or might still be), or in general what they should think about it. I'm going to try again to decipher it and when I do, to write here what my opinion is. Right now I am suspicious of it simply because it's too complicated to understand.

A family member sent me this story recently. I don't know whether it's true or not? I wasn't able to find any evidence that it is true. Somehow I wish it were both true and not true. In Washington , DC , at a Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007, this man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, approximately 2,000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After about 3 minutes, a middle-aged man noticed that there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, and then he hurried on to meet his schedule. About 4 minutes later: The violinist received his first dollar. A woman threw money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk. At 6 minutes: A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again. At 10 minutes: A 3-year old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the viol...

This Wall Street Journal article Climate Change and Open Science - WSJ .com made the right basic point about liberal hypocrisy in the Climate Change debate, but disappointingly it failed to cite the best sources of real information from an unbiased scientific point of view. I believe that source is Dr. S. Fred Singer & Dr. Craig D. Idso , from the Science and Environmental Policy Project and Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, who coauthored "Climate Change Reconsidered; The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change" published in 2009. In this book, the petition letter shown here from Dr. Frederick Seitz ( Ph . D. Physics) President Emeritus of Rockefeller University was published. Dr. Seitz circulated this letter: urging fellow academics with qualifications in the physical sciences to sign the petition at http://www.petitionproject.com/ and thereby acknowledge their agreement with this statement in the petition: Accor...

Not only has Susan Boyle's performance on "Britans Got Talent 2009" received 85 million view on YouTube so far, she also stormed onto the top selling artists list with 3.1 million albums sold in 2009. Good for her, she has a wonderful voice. 2009 Top Selling Artists RANK Name Name 1 Michael Jackson 8,286,000 2 Taylor Swift 4,643,000 3 The Beatles 3,282,000 4 Susan Boyle 3,104,000 5 Lady Gaga 2,813,000 6 Andrea Bocelli 2,668,000 7 Michael Buble 2,280,000 8 Eminem 2,166,000 9 Carrie Underwood 1,895,000 10 Black Eyed Peas 1,881,000 Source: The Nielsen Company