a conversation with HR.

[9:47 AM] Chris: whenever you get a chance, could you give me a pointer to FSA enrollment for the new plan year?

[9:56 AM] HR: hey chris. we have open enrollment for health benefits and FSA mid Feb. We have not made official decisions on new plans just yet
 
[9:57 AM] Chris: ah okay, so there'll be emails then. thanks!

[9:57 AM] HR: oh tons of them
        you will be sick of me nagging :)
 
[9:57 AM] Chris: ALL THE EMAILS
[9:57 AM] HR: hahaha
[9:57 AM] Chris: no it's totally good for people like me
[9:58 AM] HR: and thats why i do it ;)

[9:58 AM] Chris: my wife gets justifiably nervous when there's some piece of paperwork that's up to me.
 
[9:59 AM] HR: HA!
        love it
        we have an odd plan year, so ive heard this from a few people

        they think they have missed something

[10:00 AM] Chris: at one point she was like "I'm doing all this stuff, is it bothering you that I keep asking you questions? I feel like I'm nagging, or assuming you're not competent to handle it yourself."



"nono, my inability to do paperwork on time long predates you. anything that wasn't critical often didn't get done at all."
 
[10:01 AM] HR: this is awesome
[10:02 AM] Chris: all about the teamwork. :)

Seattle

I was in the Pacific Northwest for ten days, which I think is the longest I've been away from home since Chile, and possibly before that. We were at my brother-in-law's for 4 days, and then Anna and J went home, and my company (which is mostly people working from home) had our annual kickoff rally, where everyone comes into town and we spend days and days figuring out the coming year and hanging out.

The sad thing about visiting the Pacific Northwest, and Seattle especially, is that at some point I have to leave. I like it there. It's moist, but not overwhelmingly so, and without having spent a full year there, I think I've clocked a full month, spread out over all the seasons. The weather seems to have plenty of variety for me, which fits with the two kinds of ex-Seattle people I've known:

1. "Oh, God. I lived there for twenty years, and it was just constantly gray and raining and I had to leave or I was going to die."
2. "The weather's fine. But don't tell anybody, or else they'll want to move there!"

I joke about how they told me I'd only have to visit Seattle occasionally, and in fact I've been there almost every month since I started, but the truth is Seattle is one of my favorite cities. I wake up in my hotel, get everything together and go to breakfast (somewhere besides the hotel, because life is too short to eat at the Marriott), and air is all damp and misty and full of salt from Puget Sound. In the winter, it can often be below 40 degrees, and the buildings are insulated (which my house is not). I've no Seattle trips planned for a long time, sadly. I'm sure I'll wind up traveling at least a few times, especially now that I'm a manager, but it'll probably be to chat with some major customer in Montana or something.

With the new year, I'm a manager again. I only have one employee, but since it's my old friend and enforcer Jess, that one is thoroughly satisfying. Others will emerge throughout the year. We're doing cool stuff! We spent the Rally week fleshing it out, refining the story of what we're doing and why everyone should care. It turns out that when you collect fundamental measurements of your product usage, everyone cares, and you just have to give them a chance to tell you why. Engineering, Support, Operations, Customer Solutions, Sales, Marketing. The executive team. Let me tell you, it's a ton of fun to be working on something the executive team is really excited to get their hands on. No pressure, though.

I really enjoy using my leadership brain again, of course. Every leadership role is a new set of challenges, and this one is right where I need it: figuring out what to build and how to present it. I've already done team composition and dynamics stuff, and while I'd hardly say I know it inside and out, I've got a good handle on it. Jess and I are (a) two people, and (b) sort of a pre-packaged functioning team, so that's just not a concern.

I'm tired--I had one of my sleep downswings again, now recovering--but life is good.

right speech and urban evasion.

We do some things right, we do some things wrong.

I was walking down 1st Avenue this afternoon, and a woman was waiting to cross at the corner. A man passing behind her looked her up and down, and just past her looked over and said "Heyyyy, how you doin'?". The woman, as almost all women do, looked anxious and exasperated and tired of this prime example of the bullshit women deal with, and grimaced at him and looked away.

I've never spoken up when this happens. But there's a choice to make. How does the world get better if I just stand there and let it slide? How many times can I stand to watch this shit and not do anything?

"Dude, leave her alone. What the fuck is your problem?"

"WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU SAY, YOU PUNK-ASS BITCH?"

Oops. I once called a fellow aikido student "punk-ass bitch," which was something every group of friends had tossed around casually since high school. However, he had served a couple years in prison for dealing meth, and had quite a violent streak, and it turns out that in some hypermasculine and crime-associated American subcultures that aren't mine, that is an extraordinarily serious insult, and I had to talk him down from reflexively beating the shit out of me. Better late than never, I softened my language.

"Leave her alone. What the hell is your problem?"

Okay. There are better ways to say that. The traffic light turned and the woman and I crossed the street, with the gentleman shouting obscenities, which I decided to laugh loudly at as I walked away.

As I walked past, I told the woman, "Like you don't have enough problems."

"MAN, FUCK YOU! YOU GONNA GET YOUR ASS BEAT. MOTHERFUCKING FAGGOT!"

"Thank you for that."

She went into a shop for lunch, Harasser Guy turned his corner and walked, and I kept walking. The day went on.

Except.

After I'd gone about half a block, I heard angry yelling again, and looked back and the guy was walking after me, about a block behind.

I was obvious I needed to ditch the guy, but here's the full risk assessment that went through my head:

Harasser Guy is walking, not running. I can't run very far right now, but I can probably get myself to a safe place. He's about 6'3", about 300 pounds, quite a bit bigger than me, and people willing to get into fights usually have experience doing so. I have a black belt in a primarily defensive martial art, and a very sharp pocket knife. My body has very little energy due to my health issues, and I am carrying a fully loaded commuter backpack.

As you may or may not know, my preferred movie genres involve lots of shooting and/or swords and/or explosions--I usually get car chases as a bonus--and so I've seen a lot of non-James Bond spy movies, as well as every episode of Burn Notice and The Americans.

(Don't get me wrong, I've seen every James Bond movie as well, but here we're only interested in spies who try not to get noticed.)

I've seen a lot of these movies multiple times, so I remember the urban chases in some detail, and there are some pretty simple and logical ways to handle this. Also fun, since I have the really excellent Plan B (running flat out to safety, which would be fine but then I would be all sweaty), and the extremely unappealing Plan C (fighting, which would be a shitshow). Here's the map.



He harassed the woman on the southwest corner of 1st and Main. I was about 2/3 down the block to the north when I heard him coming.

1. Take a right onto Washington eastbound.
2. Jog to take the next right along the east side of Occidental Park: if the pursuer has started running, I don't want to be caught in the open, and that side of the park has bars to duck into and parked vehicles for better-than-nothing cover.
3. Start walking diagonally northeast across the park, which has many small groups of people (with open space between them, and they're almost all black, so it's not like it'd be hard to see me, but you work with what you have).
4. My very large, bright blue hooded jacket is the visual cue he'll be using to track me, so take it off and bundle it up inside-out so the blue is hidden and the gray liner is showing. Now instead of a large royal blue target, I am a normal-size black-shirted one.
5. Shift my backpack from two shoulders to one, which may not help, but can't hurt.
6. Walk at a normal pace, don't look around nervously, and especially don't look back. Judging by the yelling, he's not interested in sneaking up on me.

Instead of going diagonally northeast across the park, I had wanted to go straight south to Main, west across 1st Ave. and closer to my destination; but the guy had been turning east up Main when this started, so if he had given up looking for me, I could just run into him again, and I can only fit so much stupid into a day.

I reached the far corner of the square, and the cover of the building that must be at Waterfall Garden Park (intersection of Main and the alleyway). I peeked around the building just in time to see him stopped on the sidewalk on the Washington side, looking around, and not finding me. I continued on and made a bit of a loop out of my way, and back to the office. If I get myself into a mess, it's at least pretty gratifying to get myself out.

Obviously I fucked up, and nothing reminds us why we try to practice Right Speech like failing to do so and weathering the consequences. There are a few ways this could have gone poorly, and then the absolute worst case would probably be if the guy were a fast runner with a gun. But it didn't go worse, and that's enough to be grateful for.

Most people would read this story and think it's pretty odd that I thought and did all this, and they would be absolutely correct. I haven't had any training, not even a course (though those look like fun). I don't have a terribly clear explanation for you, except to say that I watch spy movies in part because I find this stuff interesting and potentially useful, so I've paid attention, and that I've spent decades refining my tendency not to panic, and probably those things came together today in exactly the way I would hope.

And some luck.

strictly missionary.

Visiting my brother-in-law in Recent Subdivision, WA leaves me a little bit adrift. The pre-teen boys are playing Minecraft, of course, and the other adults play games and seem mostly content to stay in, but I have to leave the house or I will go insane. So every day I go to the coffee shop.

Recent Subdivision gets the epithet because unlike most subdivisions, this was not actually designed to mimic Dante's conception of Limbo. It's quite nice if you like your house to be beige, taupe, gray, or slate blue, or a mute pine green, if you're particularly racy. There's a small main street with an adorable library and a mediocre diner and a Verizon store and the coffee shop. There are a couple dozen miles of beautiful Pacific Northwest trails spread throughout generously wide greenways. It's quite walkable, and the roads are thoughtfully laid out to prevent fast traffic, which means it's easy for me to get lost. If it weren't for Google Maps on my iPhone, I might not have returned from that first excursion.

Yesterday I took a different route in the general direction of coffee, and as I approached the mini-downtown and started looking for a way in, there was a call from across the street.

"Good morning, sir!"

I kept walking.

"Sir?"

I turned around and saw two guys, maybe 20 years old, identically dressed in black suits and trenchcoats, name tags and briefcases. I know that uniform!

"Good morning. Mormons?"

"Heh, yes. How are you doing today?"

I thought about ditching them, but that was going to be a pain: evangelists always peacefully and quickly retreat from my doorstep, for some reason, but on the street they won't take the hint any more than schizophrenic homeless people. I sympathize. If they gave up easily, they wouldn't be doing their job. So I let them catch up and decided to let my plans be changed, figuring that I've never actually talked to Mormons about Mormonism, and it could be almost as interesting as reading my novel.

"Well, I'm headed to the coffee shop, but you guys are welcome to tag along and chat. You don't want coffee, obviously, but they have other stuff."

Now, the only active Mormon I've spent much time with is a former co-worker, who is brilliant, curious, widely-read, and grew up outside L.A. My bar may be set wrong. I talked about my co-worker spending his missionary years in Sweden, and how they drew the long straw in not being sent somewhere particularly far off. They asked if I had a faith of my own, and I said "Zen Buddhist."

"You must learn a lot about Buddhism in the Middle East."

No. No, you don't.

I kept returning to them and their experience; unsurprisingly, they've clearly had a bit of practice re-focusing the conversation on how reading the Book of Mormon brings you closer to God.

I did manage to get us a little far afield, because I think they get thrown by the idea of spirituality without a deity, so we chatted for a while about meaning and love and connection. At one point I mentioned theodicy, the question of why God allows evil in the world; most people don't know the word, but I'd expect studied Christians to at least know the concept (or have considered the question).

"Do you guys study basic Christian theology? Augustine, Aquinas, all that?"

"No...not really."

"Augustine...why does that sound familiar?"

"He's one of the foundations of Western civilization."

"Yeah, I think maybe...I studied humanities before my mission, so I think I might have read something by him."

Oooookay then.

I had to get back to the house, which made ending the conversation easy. They were nice kids, but I was pretty surprised at how ignorant they were: the LDS Church tagline (which they repeated) is that the Book of Mormon is a completion of Christianity, but as far as they knew, it is Christianity.

I was super nice, I thought. I did a lot of work to keep the conversation going, because there are a whole lot of awkward questions you can about about Mormonism:

• Why does the story of Joseph Smith's revelation sound like any number of new religions and cults that have appeared in the past 300 years?
• Why would I believe this one over the others? How do you know there weren't other prophets after him?
• This is, prima facie, a little odd.

 And my favorites, if those are too crass:

• Why did God's prophets in North America have to be white?
• Doesn't it seem even a little odd to you that the President of the Church, God's living prophet on earth, just happened to have revelations about polygamy and racial discrimination (really, about the fundamental worth of black people) not long after political circumstances required them?

I learned a lot, though. At one point they said "You can't change someone's mind," and I said "What do you guys do all day?". But they really don't view themselves as being in the business of persuasion, as though this were debate club and Mormonism were like your opinion on cap-and-trade schemes. They speak from a position of Mormonism being self-evident if you just open your heart and do the reading; they are "inviting" people to join the awesomeness.

The only religion I've ever seen that was even close to self-evident was Zen. And I only thought I understood it.

fear.

We live with this weird dichotomy, where in one sense we are whoever we are, and some part of us is born that way; and then as we grow, we can (or should) think about what we value, and what kind of person we want to become.

This past summer we had a membership at a swim club up the hill, a really remarkable place on an artificial pond (what Californians call a "lake") built in 1926. They have all kinds of cool stuff, including a water slide, a 1-meter diving board, and a 3-meter platform.

One day, I jumped off the platform. I didn't like it. I've jumped off taller cliffs (30 feet or so) into water, and didn't like that either. In fact, I knew ahead of time I wouldn't like it. The feeling of freefall is something I mostly associate with painful landings. I don't like adrenaline rushes.

I jumped off the platform again, which seemed like the obvious thing to do.

I swam over to Anna and said, "God, I hate doing that."

She said, "But you did it again."

Okay. I mean. If you want to put it that way, it sounds a little weird.

It's not that I'm not afraid, because I'm a normal human being and I am. I'm not a thrill seeker and I don't find adrenaline rushes satisfying. Actually, I find adrenaline rushes to be kind of a pain in the ass, because I have to work harder to think straight. And that's really what it's about.

I value being able to help people and act usefully in a crisis. I decided that a long time ago, and (probably not coincidentally) those are things I have an aptitude for anyway. In order to do something reliably and under stress, you have to train for it. You have to make yourself jump off a cliff into the water, go speak or perform in front of people, go teach English in South America for a year.

And that's all there is to it. I do scary things when I don't have to, so that I know that I can do scary things when I don't have a choice.

trust me! I'm an expert.

My parents just left after a long-ish visit. We spent Thanksgiving in Grass Valley, as usual, and after a quirky motel experience last year (and leaving this year until the last minute), I found us a rental house on VRBO ("vacation rental by owner"). We use VRBO all the time, and it's surprising how easy it is to find something price-comparable to a motel, and then you usually get a yard and a living room and kitchen and everything.

(There is Airbnb as well, but VRBO is a bit less chaotic and deals with serious vacation rentals, where you don't even have to filter out the "cozy cottages" that are actually a 1960s RV in someone's driveway. Conversely, Airbnb is where you will find crazy shit for $40'night.)

This house's owner is new to the renting game, so we had a little snafu with getting the keybox combination, leaving us with a 30-minute delay waiting for him to call or text me--bonus points for the house's spotty cell phone reception. The boy arrived in the second car, and he was all revved up to explore the house, because that's what we always do. (Partly he's a kid, partly it's helpful for spectrum kids to know the full environment right at the beginning.) We had no key! Expectations crumbled, plans fell apart, and anxiety produced an unquenchable spew of doomsaying.

"Oh, no, we're never going to get in--"
"J--"
"--we're going to have to sleep outside, or maybe in the car--"
"Whoa. Hey. Buddy."
"--this is the worst possible thing that could ever happen--"
"Okay, look. The guy's gonna call back, we'll get the key--"
"--what if we never get home? we're not gonna be able to eat--"
"Okay, hey, look, everything's gonna be fine--"
"--how am I going to fall asleep? and I can't charge the iPad--"
"Hey. Hush. Stop. Let me ask you: how many times have I told you everything will be fine, and then it wasn't?"
"I--"
"Let me help you. The answer is 'never'."
"But--"
"So if you need to perseverate, that's totally fine, just get back in the car, close the door, and read your book, and we'll come get you when we have the key."
"I--"
"Yep, there ya go. Bye!"

The owner texted back, and I got the key. And I could have just played it straight, but have you met me? I held the key and opened the car door.

"J? You're right! We're completely doomed."
[that got his attention]
"Just kidding! Here's the key!"
"But...how...what...?"
"What'd I tell you? Am I batting a thousand on 'everything will be fine'?"
"HOW DID YOU GET THE KEY?!"

What fun is family life if you can't troll your kid?

I just like saying "Antikythera"

Here's a story about learning stuff. Normally I just learn something, full stop, and this is only a story because it took a few years.

As discussed previously, my high school calculus teacher was the quirky and charming Don Joffray, who among other things was a big fan of the famously earthy Nobel physicist Richard Feynman. If you can look past Feynman being a womanizing chauvinist pig even for a guy born in 1918, he wrote a superbly entertaining book called Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, and the somewhat darker but still worthwhile What Do You Care What Other People Think?. In the latter, he writes the kind of passage that sets young people off on their scientific careers:

Yesterday morning I went to the archeological museum....I saw so much stuff my feet began to hurt. I got all mixed up--things are not labeled well. Also, it was slightly boring because we have seen so much of that stuff before. Except for one thing: among all those art objects there was one thing so entirely different and strange that it is nearly impossible. It was recovered from the sea in 1900 and is some kind of machine with gear trains, very much like the inside of a modern wind-up alarm clock. The teeth are very regular and many wheels are fitted closely together. There are graduated circles and Greek inscriptions. I wonder if it is some kind of fake. There was an article on it in the Scientific American in 1959.

...

[The Greeks] were very upset when I said that the development of greatest importance to mathematics in Europe was the discovery by Tartaglia that you can solve a cubic equation: although it is of very little use in itself, the discovery must have been psychologically wonderful because it showed that a modern man could do something no ancient Greek could do. It therefore helped in the Renaissance, which was the freeing of man from the intimidation of the ancients. What the Greeks are learning in school is to be intimidated into thinking they have fallen so far below their super ancestors.

I asked the archeologist lady about the machine in the museum--whether other similar machines, or simpler machines leading up to it or down from it, were ever found--but she hadn't heard of it. So I met her and her son of Carl's age (who looks at me as if I were a heroic ancient Greek, for he is studying physics) at the museum to show it to her. She required some explanation from me why I thought such a machine was interesting and surprising because, "Didn't Eratosthenes measure the distance to the sun, and didn't that require elaborate scientific instruments?" Oh, how ignorant are classically educated people. No wonder they don't appreciate their own time. They are not of it and do not understand it. But after a bit she believed maybe it was striking, and she took me to the back rooms of the museum--surely there were other examples, and she would get a complete bibliography. Well, there were no other examples, and the complete bibliography was a list of three articles (including the one in the Scientific American)--all by one man, an American from Yale!

I guess the Greeks think all Americans must be dull, being only interested in machinery when there are all those beautiful statues and portrayals of lovely myths and stories of gods and goddesses to look at. (In fact, a lady from the museum staff remarked, when told that the professor from America wanted to know more about item 15087, "Of all the beautiful things in this museum, why does he pick out that particular item? What is so special about it?")

Joff mentioned this passage in a class digression, but he didn't know any more than we or Feynman did. I never followed up on this, because I was in college when I read it, and the Internet was not yet in a state where you could just type "what's that mechanism in a Greek museum that Richard Feynman was writing about?" and get an answer. If you've ever used the old-school data archives like Lexis-Nexis, you know that life is too short to use them in your spare time.

Years later I saw it covered (lightly, as research was still sparse) in some books on engineering in antiquity, and then over the past 15 years we've had numerous breakthroughs as we develop better non-destructive imaging techniques, and uncover some more pieces of the thing from its surrounding collection. (Feynman may have been a little too hard on the Greeks, because the technology to investigate the thing didn't really exist yet.)

It turns out this device is called the Antikythera (an-ti-KY-the-ra) mechanism, and it's a brain-bender because it's more sophisticated than anything we've found from the following 1500 years, and we've found no precedents, nothing simpler or similar that would have led to it. It's like opening a time capsule from 1850 and finding a digital camera. There's no question of its age, but what the hell?

The thing is fiendishly complicated, at least if you lack a background in watch-making and astronomy, but you can read about that yourself--it calculates a variety of astronomical phenomena, including lunar and solar eclipses, locations of planets, and (WTF?) the dates for the ancient Olympics. The most recent news is that they figure the start date for the calendar is 205 BC, and if we assume they wanted to maximize the calendar's utility going forward, that pushes the date of manufacture back more than a hundred years.

There's the pure archeological puzzle, but how can we look at this in the broader scope of what we think we know about antiquity? An economist has a thought:

The key point, in my view, is that we have discovered no other comparable machine from antiquity or any other era other than modern times. It took us until 2006 to even understand what the device was supposed to do, using advanced tomography, and we had been holding it since 1901.

So what to infer? The first option is that this device was a true outlier, standing sui generis above its time. Cardiff University professor Michael Edmunds "described the device as 'just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind'".

As an artifact that is true, but is that so likely in terms of broader history? It is pure luck that we fished this thing out of the Mediterranean in 1901. (By the way, further dives are planned to search for more parts of it.) The alternative possibility is that antiquity had many more such exotic devices, which have remained unreported, at least in the manuscripts which have come down to us. That would imply, essentially, that we don't have a very good idea of what antiquity was like. In my view that is the more rational Bayesian conclusion. It is more likely than thinking that we just lucked out to find this one unique, incredible device. To put it another way, if you found some organic life on a traveling comet, you ought to conclude there is more of that life, or something related, somewhere else.

And to me, the Antikythera Mechanism does not sound like a "lone genius" kind of device: "The gear teeth were in the form of equilateral triangles with an average circular pitch of 1.6 mm, an average wheel thickness of 1.4 mm and an average air gap between gears of 1.2 mm." (Wikipedia) That suggests it was made by some kind of regular industrial process. It also had some sophistications which modern Swiss watches do not.

Given this Bayesian conclusions, which other strange claims stand a decent chance of being true of antiquity? Which other surprises await us? [emphasis added]

Short version: humans are awesome, and we know nothing.

So what to infer? The first option is that this device was a true outlier, standing sui generis above its time. Cardiff University professor Michael Edmunds "described the device as "just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind"".

As an artifact that is true, but is that so likely in terms of broader history? It is pure luck that we fished this thing out of the Mediterranean in 1901. (By the way, further dives are planned to search for more parts of it.) The alternative possibility is that antiquity had many more such exotic devices, which have remained unreported, at least in the manuscripts which have come down to us. That would imply, essentially, that we don't have a very good idea of what antiquity was like. In my view that is the more rational Bayesian conclusion. It is more likely than thinking that we just lucked out to find this one unique, incredible device. To put it another way, if you found some organic life on a traveling comet, you ought to conclude there is more of that life, or something related, somewhere else.

And to me, the Antikythera Mechanism does not sound like a "lone genius" kind of device: "The gear teeth were in the form of equilateral triangles with an average circular pitch of 1.6 mm, an average wheel thickness of 1.4 mm and an average air gap between gears of 1.2 mm." (Wikipedia) That suggests it was made by some kind of regular industrial process. It also had some sophistications which modern Swiss watches do not.

Given this Bayesian conclusions, which other strange claims stand a decent chance of being true of antquity? Which other surprises await us?

- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/11/what-should-a-bayesian-infer-from-the-antikythera-mechanism.html#sthash.5d9RhwoX.dpuf

The key point, in my view, is that we have discovered no other comparable machine from antiquity or any other era other than modern times. It took us until 2006 to even understand what the device was supposed to do, using advanced tomography, and we had been holding it since 1901.

So what to infer? The first option is that this device was a true outlier, standing sui generis above its time. Cardiff University professor Michael Edmunds "described the device as "just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind"".

As an artifact that is true, but is that so likely in terms of broader history? It is pure luck that we fished this thing out of the Mediterranean in 1901. (By the way, further dives are planned to search for more parts of it.) The alternative possibility is that antiquity had many more such exotic devices, which have remained unreported, at least in the manuscripts which have come down to us. That would imply, essentially, that we don't have a very good idea of what antiquity was like. In my view that is the more rational Bayesian conclusion. It is more likely than thinking that we just lucked out to find this one unique, incredible device. To put it another way, if you found some organic life on a traveling comet, you ought to conclude there is more of that life, or something related, somewhere else.

And to me, the Antikythera Mechanism does not sound like a "lone genius" kind of device: "The gear teeth were in the form of equilateral triangles with an average circular pitch of 1.6 mm, an average wheel thickness of 1.4 mm and an average air gap between gears of 1.2 mm." (Wikipedia) That suggests it was made by some kind of regular industrial process. It also had some sophistications which modern Swiss watches do not.

Given this Bayesian conclusions, which other strange claims stand a decent chance of being true of antquity? Which other surprises await us?

- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/11/what-should-a-bayesian-infer-from-the-antikythera-mechanism.html#sthash.5d9RhwoX.dpuf