The second week was lots of hanging around. The cousins all had a blast playing together. You can see one of my notebooks in these pictures on the table. That was just half the reading for the deterrence class. Once I was back for the weekend we went to the Dallas Aquarium.
And here’s a video of Heather playing with the hose:
June 1 – 7:
Jess and Heather spent this week (as most of the month) hanging out with family. Heather was able to meet grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. She had a blast with all of them after having a little time to warm up.
Kyle picked up his rental car and drove down to College Station. The Lab invited me to participate in what they call the National Security Leadership Program. It’s a joint program with Texas A&M. Each year the Lab selects ~7 employees to participate in the program. During June, those employees go to Texas A&M to take two graduate courses in national security at the Bush School of Government and Public Service. Then we take another course during each of Fall and Winter via video conference.
The two classes during June covered nuclear deterrence and coercion theory, international relations theory, military strategy, history of U.S. intelligence programs, intelligence agency organization and tradecraft, and counter-intelligence operations. The intelligence/counter-intelligence course was taught by a retired Director of Counter-Intelligence at the CIA who spent his life under cover as a case officer working operations around the world. So he knew his material. Both classes were fascinating and enjoyable.
They were a lot of work though. The deterrence course had 4 books to read plus 100-250 pages of reading per night and two papers. The intelligence course had 3 books, but luckily minimal additional reading, as well as a paper and two exams. So I was very busy the entire month.
I was, however, able to drive back up to Frisco for the weekends to hang out with everyone and have a little fun.
The first weekend we went to the Perot Science Museum and celebrated my birthday.
This report from Statista has been making the rounds telling everyone how Honda Accords and Civics are magnets for theft.
Now it is important to remember our discussion about Bayesian statistics and why the headline of the article and chart, “Honda Owners Are Most At Risk From Car Theft,” is simply wrong. This data makes no attempt to account for the number of these vehicles in use when considering how likely a vehicle is to be stolen. What this data really says is, “Of cars that have been stolen, we counted more Honda Accords and Civics than other vehicles.” Which is slightly different and explicitly says nothing about how likely Accords and Civics are to get stolen. Claiming that, from this data, Accords and Civics are most likely to be stolen is disingenuous at best. You must include the “prior” that accounts for the number of Accords and Civics that exist in the first place in order to say anything reasonable about the likelihood of Accords and Civics getting stolen.
If you don’t at least know about Bayesian statistics you’ll be misled by people who, either intentionally or not, report misleading data. And I guarantee this report is being used today to sell additional insurance coverage to someone sitting in a Honda dealer buying a car (the same way they tried to do so to me in 2007).
Heather’s been asking to go camping for a few weeks now (I had mentioned the possibility at some point, which she latched on to. She knows all about camping from an episode of Bubble Guppies. She’ll talk about having a tent and sleeping bags and a campfire and roasting marshmallows…). We are planning on going camping in a couple of weeks, but I mentioned to her we could go hiking sometime too. And we talked about her riding in the child-carrier backpack.
So last weekend I got it out and we went walking around the neighborhood for a while. Then she became slightly obsessed with going hiking. So I said we’d go hiking this weekend. Sadly, that promise was made before we knew it was going to be over 100 degrees this weekend. Regardless, she was super excited to go hiking today, so I looked for some place shady that might be a little cooler. We ended up at Redwood Regional Park on the edge of Oakland. It was probably about 10 degrees cooler than Livermore, which was at least something and there was a lot of shade for most of the trail.
We picked up some sandwiches and headed off for adventure. At the parking lot for the trail-head (which was packed) we ate our lunch. Jess, not being one for hiking what with her knees not being in very good shape, opted for sitting in the shade at the trail-head reading. Heather and I packed up and began our trek.
We hiked just about 2.5 miles. Heather was in the backpack somewhere from 1/2 to 2/3 of the hiking. She loved it, though she was pretty worn out by the end (and so was I). I had her on my back and the CamelBak on my front full of water and snacks.
On the way home we went to Chick-fil-A since none of us had enough energy left to think about making dinner. Hopefully the next time we go hiking it won’t be quite so hot.
This morning while helping me clean the garage Heather paused and tensed up all her muscles. I asked her what she was doing. She said, “I’m trying to take myself apart.” She’s done this every so often for the last several weeks since she’s seen Frozen enough times and tries to emulate Olaf (the snowman that disassembles).
This evening she started hopping and then started getting upset because, “I can’t float anymore.” We don’t know when she used to float, but when Jess tried to help her she said, “No, I just want to float by myself.” We tried to explain that people can’t float.
We fear that the mantra from Daniel Tiger of “keep trying, you’ll get better” may be detrimental in these cases.