Wiscombe Family Christmas Letter - 2013

Wiscombe Family Christmas Letter - 2013

To help ensure the freshness of this letter, we made sure to wait until the last possible moment to deliver it. That way you can be sure that the news contained in this letter isn’t stale or out of date.

2013 has been a year of change for us: Graduations, New Schools, New Jobs, New Grandbaby, New Callings, New Roles in Life:

Jacqueline graduated from High School and is attending BYU-Idaho in Rexburg. Based on the number of phone calls to her parents (or lack thereof) we determined that she was having a great time during her first semester. Jacqueline is beginning the process of submitting her papers to go on a mission.

Liesel is a sophomore at BYU-Provo. She is working at Café Zupas and fills her free time with rock-climbing, slack-lining, long-boarding, and anything else she can do outside. Liesel enjoys the fact that she is the closest aunt (in distance) to Madeline and can drive to North Salt Lake to see her.

Cacia and Paden Henson just celebrated their 1st anniversary. Paden graduated in July from BYU-I with a degree in Graphic Design and they have been living and working in Almo, ID for the past 6 months. Paden has been doing construction and Cacia substitute teaching. The will be starting new jobs on January 2nd in Idaho Falls (see, I told you this was fresh), so will be relocating between Christmas and New Years.

Katherine and Tom Sizemore welcomed our 1st Granddaughter on March 31st.  Madeline is about the happiest/cutest/most adorable baby we have ever seen. That might be a biased opinion, but feel free to cut out her picture to keep in your wallets or on your fridge if you need a smile. Katherine graduated in August from BYU with a degree in Psychology and they have moved to North Salt Lake. Tom is going to school and working when he isn’t playing with Madeline.

Laura loves being a new grandma – even if she doesn’t look like one. She has been active putting together a new business (check out cozy-corner-design.com) and just started working with KnitLab. After finishing the school year teaching Seminary, Laura served briefly with the Stake Young Women and is now the Young Women Secretary.  Her new role as an empty-nester is giving her a lot more time to spend with Peter.

Peter’s job with BB&T is keeping him busy. He was able to convince his bosses to let him try working remotely during the summer, so was able to spend July and part of August in Utah. In June, he was called as a counselor in the Bishopric so has been busy reacquainting himself with the ward after serving for eight years in various stake callings. Peter also loves being a grandpa, except for looking like one.

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We hope you are having a Happy Holiday season and wish you a great new year!

Peter & Laura Wiscombe

Great Artists Steal

I'm just finishing up the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Issacson. There are a lot of items I could post about it, but one thing that stood out to me, and to a lot of others, was the apparent hypoocracy that Jobs had regarding stealing intellectual property.

Steve Jobs had a fit about Microsoft stealing the GUI, Android stealing MultiTouch and Dreamworks stealing the idea about CGI insects. But Jobs was also quoted as saying "Picaso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." This was referenced in the section regarding the "heist" of the GUI from Xerox PARC.

I think I can understand where Jobs could make a distinction in his own mind between his stealing and others stealing. In his case, he saw what others were doing, took those ideas, nad made them better. He saw other taking his ideas, and either making cheaper crap (he would have used a different word) or else simply marketing it without improving on it.

The Macintosh GUI was vastly improved over the Xerox one: Smooth rolling mouse, overlapping windows, drag and drop interface. After seeing the Xerox Star, said "We were very relieved... We knew they hand't done it right, and that we could, at a fraction of the price.

The Macintosh (or Lisa) wasn't the first GUI based PC (Xerox Alto or Star), the iPod wasn't the first hard drive based MP3 player (Compaq designed Hango/Remote Solutions Personal Jukebox PJB-100), the iPhone wasn't the first touchscreen smart phone (probably the IBM Simon 15 years earlier), the iPad wasn't the first tablet (they had been out for decades). In all those cases, one could make a credible claim that Apple was stealing someone elses ideas.

But if my idea is better than your idea, can you say that I stole your idea? I suppose that's the distinction that Steve Jobs might have been making.

Skeptics' Guide, Pregnant Men, and Global Warming

One consistent theme I will be using in this blog is referring to other, seemingly unrelated issues, to illustrate a point. That's just the way my mind works. (Drives my family nuts...)

One podcast I love to listen to is the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. I really enjoy the point of view that the panel of skeptics takes on science and pseudoscience, especially as it relates to events in the news.

And then on episode 140, they addressed the issue of the "pregnant man." For those of you who routinely skip news articles that look like they belong in the Weekly World News, this is the story of the individual in Oregon who claims to be a pregnant man. It turns out that the person in question is transgendered. He was born a woman, but had a partial sex change surgery. That is, breast reduction and is taking testosterone to allow for some facial hair. When I first read the story, I kept saying, "It's a woman. It's a pregnant woman. She has ovaries. She has a uterus. She has 2 X chromosomes. " As if a lack of breasts and facial hair is what it takes to be a "man." I think that is a huge insult to any unfortunate woman who has had to have a mastectomy following breast cancer. According to this point of view, you're now a man. (Especially if you have a mole with a few hairs growing in it.)

I was expecting Steven Novella to jump all over this news story, since he is an MD and I'm sure he took anatomy classes when he went to med school. Yet he started making excuses for the story, with comments about how there is more to gender than 2 X chromosomes, there is an entire spectrum of conditions to consider: appearance, self identity, emotional makeup, etc. The only one of the skeptics who followed my line of thinking was Jay Novella, who kept saying, "She's not a man. She has ovaries, She has a uterus, She has 2 X chromosomes." Rebecca Watson's reply to Jay was to ask over and over, "What's your problem, Jay?"

These people are educated. They understand biology. Their web site claims to discuss "the latest news and topics from the world of the paranormal, fringe science, and controversial claims from a scientific point of view." But their political bias to support the GLT agenda superseded any rational thinking as to the science.

So these intelligent skeptics are willing to change the definition of gender to fit a political and social viewpoint. Maybe they are willing to change the definition of Anthropogenic Global Warming to fit their political and social viewpoints as well.

I consider myself to be fairly reasonable and fact based, and I get really frustrated with the emotional and political approach to Global Warming, when the basic science seems to suggest that the entire IPCC report was faulty, and that Al Gore should look closer at the trees he's hugging, because he is currently barking up the wrong one. Given the critical viewpoint that the Skeptics' Guide has, and how quick they are to point out inconsistencies and logical fallacies, one would think that they would be at the forefront of pointing out the inconsistencies and logical fallacies in An Inconvenient Truth.

But they don't. When they do speak about Global Warming, it is either neutral, or follows the Gore agenda. How can a group of such intelligent people look at the facts and come up with a completely different conclusion than mine. Doubt starts to creep in. Maybe I'm the one who's wrong. After all, I like the environment...I don't want to pollute... I recycle... I don't drive an SUV. Maybe Al Gore's right after all. But then I remember the pregnant man. And that accurate science is less important then promoting the correct social agenda. And the doubt fades.

The Bush Speech, Obama and Cosby's Shop Class

I'm surprised that I'm not the only one who thought of this: (see also this post : )

There's an old Bill Cosby routine where his shop teacher uses psychology on his students. It seems that one of the kids in his shop class threw a bullet in the furnace in the metal shop class and the teacher was trying to find out who did it.

"It reflects on a boy's mother if her kid would throw a bullet in a furnace. Yep, you'd have to have a pretty low mother to throw a bullet in the furnace."

Finally, the culprit can't take it any more. "I didn't do it, and you stop talking about my mom."

As I wrote above, I wasn't the only one who thought of this routine with the recent protests from the Obama camp about President Bush's speech in Israel regarding appeasing terrorists. Bush didn't mention Obama, but when he spoke of appeasing terrorist, Obama supporters just "knew" that was a code word for Barrack. With apologies to Shakespeare, "The candidate doth protest too much, methinks."

Precise Logic

Back in the early 1990s, I became the go-to-guy for most of my family, friends and co-workers for computer issues. After spending yet another evening working on someones PC trying to get their DOS applications to run, I decided that I could start a small business doing in-home PC repairs.

I wanted to have a company name and my wife and I sat down and tried to come up with a good one. She had the idea to write a list of adjectives and nouns that describe me and put them together in various combinations. Some worked better than other. "Stubborn Jokester"probably wouldn't inspire confidence in potential customers. What she came up with was Precise Logic Computer Solutions. And I have used the name ever since.

As a side note, in case anyone is wondering why Precise Logic isn't a computer repair company anymore, after about a year of having my name in the local Yellow Pages, I came to the following conclusions:

1. Companies who need PC support are willing to pay twice as much to an established company but won't hire an individual.
2. Individuals don't think they should pay anything to have their computer repaired in their home.
3. Once you repair someone's computer, they think that all future repairs should be free.

So Precise Logic turned out to be a one year experiment. I made almost exactly enough money to pay for the new PC that I bought, so it wasn't a complete loss, but I loved the name "Precise Logic" and kept it for my email addresses ever since.