Look Deep Into Those Googley Eyes

Before you read this, you may like to check out something I blogged in August 2003
Chaos Theory and Shakespeare - Get Me 100 Monkeys Now! which looks at some research into utterances as data streams and the way they can be anaylsed.

I'm one of those who found Don Rumsfeld's "unknown unknown's" trope to be trivial, but accurate and I wish more CEO's would at least acknowledge that fact. But that turns out not to be the only little verbal tic that DH has.

When you ask him for a numerical estimate, he has a very specific groove that he slides into; one that, if you only hear that specific instance, you might take as having some relationship with actual information that supports the statement.

You might be wrong

In a posting on Kos by fivesideagon, there's a very revealing set of Google search results that tells on Donny. In a Knight Ridder Newspapers/ AP report titled Iraq peace may be 12 years away" you will find this

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday it could take as long as 12 years to defeat the insurgency in Iraq, but he said it will be up to Iraqi forces to do the job.

"That insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years," Rumsfeld told "Fox News Sunday."

But fivesideagon thought he recognised a verbal "tell", (In poker, a tell is a detectable change in a player's behavior that gives clues to that player's hand. [Wikipedia]) So he dropped the numerical sequence into Google with Rumsfeld's name.

Some of the results.

The discussion when I met with members of the Duma -- it was the relevant committee for this subject and there were probably six, eight, ten, twelve of them and four or five of us, some Congressmen, Kurt Weldon, Jim Woolsey.
Auszuge einer Presskonferenz mit Donald Rumsfeld auf dem Weg nach Moskau 11 August 2001

Donald Rumsfeld, the American Defence Secretary, also gave the strongest  hint yesterday of what Operation Noble Eagle is all about. "I think  what you will see evolve over the next six, eight, ten, 12 months, probably  over a period of years, is a coalition to help battle terrorists," he told CNN.
US and Britain's secret plans for 10-year war 20 September 2001

We'll make some tweaks, talk to some people about any remaining issues that have been worked out among people who had different views, and that we will in fact send up what we will consider the Quadrennial Defense Review roughly the way I've indicated previously, with a couple of big pieces that may take six, eight, 10, 12 months, particularly in the personnel area, and a piece in the Guard and Reserve, which is something that merits a great deal of thought and attention by itself.
DoD News Briefing - Secretary Rumsfeld 25 September 2001

Some midlevel terrorist leaders also were killed in the U.S. bombing, he added.
"To our knowledge, none of the very top six, eight, 10 people have been included in that," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference.
Rumsfeld says some al-Qaida leaders have been killed in U.S. attacks
29 October 2001

I had said at an 8:00 o'clock breakfast that sometime in the next two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve months there would be an event that would occur in the world that would be sufficiently shocking that it would remind people again how important it is to have a strong healthy defense department that contributes to -- That underpins peace and stability in our world.
Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Larry King, CNN 5 December 2001

"We hear six, seven, eight, ten, twelve conflicting reports every day. I've stopped chasing them," he said. "We do know of certain knowledge that he is either in Afghanistan, or in some other country, or dead. And we know of certain knowledge that we don't know which of those happens to be the case."
Pakistan Not Diverting Troops from Afghan Border, Rumsfeld Says 27 December 2001

Check the whole list here. There's 37, and a bet that they aren't an exhaustive list. Our eyes may be the windows to the soul, but our words are the side door and on the net they can be aggregated very quickly.

There's an interesting discussion on privacy at the moment, of which more later, but I suspect we are going to have to get used to the idea that Scott McNealy was right, back in 1999 when he famously said "You have zero privacy anyway"

We leave our DNA on everything we touch, our image everywhere we go and our mind in public places, either intentionally on a blog, or accidentally where it can be found by those great big Googley eyes.

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