Marc's Musings Reality from Marc's point of view!

I’ve been watching “The Mentalist” since it first began airing last year and was very happy with the show. The premise of a guy who was attuned to the minutia that most folks never notice using his abilities to solve crimes rather than just dupe the public with cold readings and other mystical flim-flam was quite appealing to me.

Is it just me or, starting with episode 16 – where Jane loses his sight – the series took a serious left turn into buffoonery and started stretching credibility beyond the point where I at least am able to enjoy it. Running around a parking lot, blind with a hail of bullets chasing you and then trying to drive, again still while blind, to avoid a skilled and intelligent killer was just silly and stupid.

The most recent episode, where everybody and his dog is being hypnotized (“in a trance”) to do outrageous and ridiculously out of character things was equally disappointing.

It’s as though some network execs came down from their offices, chased out all the writers and the director and decided they could do a far better job of the show themselves by removing the intelligent content and ensuring that any character development that was carefully crafted for the first 15 episodes would be summarily tossed out the window.

I am very disappointed…

As a rant, if you ever saw the pilot episode for “Lois and Clark, the new adventures of Superman” and then saw any of the episodes that followed, you can see the EXACT same thing going on here. That pilot had thoughtful characters and a seemingly intelligent plot being mapped out and that was gutted and discarded in favor of a sloppy, silly weekly romp through dumb-land..

Posted under Movies / TV, Opinions

I’ve been working my way through Bruce Schneier’s book for a while. Not due to any shortcomings in the book itself, but rather other distractions have been interfering with my reading for the past few months and I’ve fallen well behind as my “to read” shelf has been growing steadily.

“Beyond Fear” should be required reading for EVERY SINGLE ONE of our legislators. Well… this book and the constitution. Knowledge of both of these tomes would go a long way towards stemming the tide of ridiculous, pandering, appear-to-be-doing-something-ANYTHING laws that seem to flood out of State and Federal government houses each month.

Combining relevant examples with 5 comprehensive steps that should be evaluated as part of any important security assessment, Bruce pragmatically walks the line between impractically crippling defensive measures and vulnerably insecure systems that must be used by myriad folks on a daily basis. He emphasizes our natural tendency to overestimate certain kinds of (ultimately irrelevant) risks while we casually accept on a daily basis risks that are of far greater likelihood and, ultimately, consequence than those we emotionally invest ourselves in.

While Bruce does not say this explicitly, the examples and figures in his book support the statement that I have heard made that “If you read about it in the newspaper, it’s not something you need to worry about.” (BTW, this can apply to positive things too, like reading about someone winning the lottery). The only reason it’s being reported is because it’s unusual or spectacular. That’s why the handful of deaths airplane crashes (631 in the U.S.A each year) receive so much publicity but the thousands of people dying in car accidents (41,700 in the U.S.A. each year) receive only the vaguest of coverage.

Perhaps my favorite quote in the book on this topic is that “More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks.”. To contrast with the numbers above, about 0.6 people are killed in the U.S.A. each year by sharks. That’s five orders of magnitude less than the automobile figure. Yet how many people do you know are fearful of going swimming, yet have no problem driving to the corner store for some milk?

Anyway, there are great examples given of computer issues, financial issues, terrorist issues and even beekeeper issues. You will not want for examples that you can relate to.

Definitely a starting point for a reasoned, rational discussion on how to make the best possible trade-offs for the most useful and unencumbering risk reduction in a world of finite resources.

Posted under Books