For those of my fellow DEC Alumni and Alumnae who are not in the area, you may not have seen this.

The Boston Globe has the article Intel to close Hudson plant, lay off 700.

Intel also operates a research and development facility in Hudson which employs an additional 850 workers. This facility will continue in operation and its workers will not by affected by the job cuts.

The MetroWest Daily News has the article Intel to close Hudson plant – 700 jobs lost.

So it is not a total loss, but still, it comes as a shock to me.  One of the things that has changed with the times is how engineering can be distributed around the globe independently of manufacturing.

When I first started at DEC, the engineering was in Maynard and the manufacturing was in Shrewsbury (or was it Worcester).  The Hudson plant was built to house the manufacturing and by this  time the engineering had wandered to temporary quarters in Westboro.

The managers of our group thought that engineering and manufacturing were still not close enough.  So another building was added in Hudson, and engineering moved to be close to manufacturing.  Our Computer Aided Design (sometimes  called Design Automation) group was able to serve circuit design engineers and manufacturing process design engineers.  The circuit design engineers were able to design circuits while the process with which the circuits would be manufactured was being designed.

The circuit design tools that the circuit design engineers use can be updated for millions of dollars, but the manufacturing equipment update is more in the billions of dollars range.

I was having an interesting online conversation with someone who was telling me about a number of historical coincidences that I might not be aware of.  I wanted to use an example from a noted physicist, but, in a senior moment, I could not remember his name.  I remembered enough of the story to convey the idea, though not as well as the original story did.

A little later the name popped into my mind, and I was able to find this reference online.  I want to record it here for my future reference.

There is a blog article Richard Feynman, Erik the Red, Earl Henry Sinclair, and Cristopher Columbus:

The mind sees what it wants to. It is an excellent detector for patterns in seemingly random data, but it also excels at making patterns where none exist. It’s built to do that. It’s how we learn. And that often gets us into trouble.

Dick Feynman had a very interesting teaching trick to illustrate this problem – he used it several times in different situations, ranging from his freshman physics lectures at Caltech to his lectures during trips after his Nobel Prize award. Feynman would suddenly interrupt himself in the middle of a statistics lecture, and excitedly say something like: “On my way to campus today, I saw a car with the licence plate XRT-375 in the parking lot – isn’t that amazing? What are the odds of seeing that exact licence?” After letting the class wrestle with exactly what he was asking, he would make the point that there is a HUGE difference between calculating odds before the fact and after the fact. The chance of seeing that particular plate is simple to calculate: 1/26*1/26*1/26*1/10*1/10*1/10, or about one in eighteen million. And it really would be amazing if you picked a number out of the air, and then found it in the lot. However, Feyman’s point was that having seen the plate first, it is unremarkable that you then ask the question about that particular number. The chance is unity. You can’t use a set of data to make a hypothesis, and then turn around and use that same data to test the hypothesis!

I hope the lesson learned is that you cannot poke through history, discover a number of items that are similar, and then say, “That’s an amazing coincidence.  What are the chances that all these things in this list would happen?”  If you search for random things and create a list of things that did happen, then the chances are 1 out of 1  that they did happen.

Here is a great example of the problem,  Lincoln–Kennedy coincidences urban legend.

The coincidences between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy are a piece of American folklore of unknown origin.

You see the same logical fallacy in stock market systems and roulette wheel systems.  You might also want to look at one of the most popular posts on this (my) blog,  Diversion–Highway Fatalities and Lemons, by RichardH.

Of course, if I cannot remember the name of the physicist, it won’t help me to record this story here. See Feynman in the blog post Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks. The funny thing is that I thought I did search for “quack”, but I did not find anything. (Accidentally had “match case” checked.)

The Real News Network has the interview Exclusive: Interview with Congressman Grayson on Syria .  There is so much straight talk in this interview that I am not sure your spun head will be able to stand it.

ALAN GRAYSON, U.S. REPRESENTATIVE (D-FL):
… Even though we have a legal right through our classified clearance to see the underlying documents, the intelligence reports, the SIGINT, the HUMINT, to see these things underneath it all, we haven’t been given any of that. In fact, German intelligence, it’s been reported through Reuters and The Guardian, has indicated through their intelligence that Assad did not order the attack and in fact ordered that there be no attack and that this was in essence a rogue operation. Frankly, it’s disturbing and disappointing to me to see that we get information like that through Reuters and through The Guardian from German intelligence rather than through our own intelligence.

And I think that a great nation like ours needs to have a rational decision-making process when deciding on war and peace. That means giving the decision-makers all the relevant information and letting us make up our minds.

DESVARIEUX: Have you been able to ask the White House for more information? And part two of my question is that there was a report by Gareth Porter from IPS, and he states that essentially the White House culled the information in the public intelligence report, essentially questioning whether or not the White House omitted certain information in order to make sure that they were making the case to strike Syria.

GRAYSON: Well, as you can see from the public document, the four-page document that was released, they’ve omitted all of the information that goes against their case. There’s not a single bit of contrary information in that document. And many members of Congress now, including whole committees in Congress, have asked the administration to provide the underlying intelligence, the signal intelligence, the human intelligence, and so on, and at least let us, through our classified clearance, see the reality of the situation. And so far, after a week of requests, they said they were going to do it and they haven’t done it.
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GRAYSON: … have to tell you honestly that when we are three weeks away from a government shutdown, when we are five weeks away from the government running out of money when we hit the national debt limit, maybe it’s time for us to think about our own needs. I think it–I’m proud of the fact that the United States is the number-one country in the world. But I don’t want us just to be number one in military power. I don’t want us to be number one in the number of prisoners that we have in this country. I want us to be number one in health care, number one in life expectancy, number one in education, number one in wealth, number one in standard of living. That’s what I want to see us concentrate on. And I think at this point with these deadlines facing us and so many things on our plate, it’s time we took care of ourselves.

The New York Times has the OpEd A Plea for Caution From Russia: What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria by Vladimir V. Putin.

If we can avoid force against Syria, this will improve the atmosphere in international affairs and strengthen mutual trust. It will be our shared success and open the door to cooperation on other critical issues.

My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

It is ironic when I compare Putin’s remarks with my own thinking.  Compare what he said above with what I posted on this blog yesterday, Give Peace A Chance.

I’d better watch myself before I start forming a too positive opinion of Vladimir Putin.