Me and Jimmy Durante

Once upon a time I got asked how I came by my pen name, Cyranos DeMet.  I've discovered that quite by accident my pen name is unique, it appears I'm the only one.  Just luck, that was.  Anyhow, my formal pen name is Cyranos DeMet, for a long time it was the only name I was  known by on the internet.  It is an evolved name, actually, and the story of how it came to be revolves, as do several others, around my muse Alex.

The Tardation Study: What Rocks Will Eventually Roll

It’s a great old song, jukebox fave for many decades running,  good chance you know it well.

 “Good golly Miss Molly

 Sure like to ball,

 When you’re rockin' and a rollin’

 Can’t hear yo’ momma call…”

 Even now I’ll turn it up and grin. What’s an open guess is if you know the colloquial meaning of the lyrics. Yup, you guessed it. In America of the nineteen fifties rockin’ and rollin’ was a most literal description of just what it sounds like… good old fashioned enthusiastic get down get after it sex.  Barely twenty years later "rock and roll" was a well recognized genre of music. America went through quite a change across those two decades, and the music of the times reflected them all. Here it is fifty years later and there is still debate on the what's and whys.

Changes… and the consequences associated. Some accidental, some deliberate, some destructive and some benign.  The focus today is the creation of some tool, some convention, to standardize a realistic risk assessment on what comes out the bottom of the machine.  Since most of what will be going in the top to be systematically examined will be things involving some form of change it seems a good time to take note of the concept of "change" as a risk factor.

Very few thing happen instantaneously. There is always a bit of time involved in any change.  From a great many directions it is known the two key factors in the stress associated to any given change is the degree of change... and of equal importance how quickly it happened. You can change the orbit of a planet if you do it slowly enough, you can break a jet fighter if you ask it to change directions to quickly.