First censorship /// and last post here.
Looks like I'll have to move this blog elsewhere. For the first time in 16 years, somebody is complaining about "misleading content" and forcing Blogspot to "unpublish" posts that tell too much truth. From email this morning:



Statcounter shows what happened. All of these posts were viewed yesterday by one reader, who is not in USA.

= = = = =

Judging by the experience of other familiar bloggers, Wordpress seems to have a better record of openness. It's also a paid subscription, which establishes a two-way obligation. Customer, not product. So I've started a new blog at Wordpress, as Polistrasmill.com. It starts with a repetition of this item.

Fortunately I made a firm habit of storing all archived content offline, so I can eventually restore the lost items to the new blog. No point in copying all of this content. I can still link to it when needed.

Okay, inquisitor, burn as much as you want. You can't touch my truth, you can only strengthen my resolve.

I'm sure as fuck not going to fall for the 'appeals' routine. That's a trap. I'll never revise the truth to satisfy an inquisitor. When I determine FROM MY OWN OBSERVATION AND EXPERIENCE that I've been wrong, I do retract and revise.

= = = = =

12/1 After a week to organize the new blog and regather courage, the new blog is public. It's still a little crude in format, but I had to 'get back on the bicycle' fast.

Labels: Jackboot stomping forever, storage

  ¶ 6:00 AM

  Math should be slave, not pope
I've given up arguing with "conservatives" on educational topics. They're stuck in a self-defeating war between old abstractions and new abstractions. They want students to memorize Cicero and Locke. They want students to memorize Euclid and Descartes.

This is the wrong argument. Students shouldn't be memorizing ANY abstract theories, new or old. Students should be learning how to USE math and politics, and at the same time learning how enemies MISUSE math and politics.

Bitcoin shit provides a perfect illustration of both at once.

Ethereum is a wildly obvious trick, a version of the old Spanish Prisoner swindle. You see the potential of a huge jackpot. The swindler runs you through a complicated set of hoops, involving a fake stageplay of good and evil elements. You're helping to defend the good side, but you know that you're also slightly outside the law, so you aren't going to call the cops. You pay and receive mysterious amounts to help the good side win. What you DON'T notice is that every transaction comes with a cost, and you don't get the cost back in the end.

Last week's "constitution" dodge is an ideal example of the sloshing and the hidden cost. Thousands of people contributed about $200 each, expecting to get the money back if the bid failed. Well, they can get the money back, but the 'gas fee' on each side of the transaction ranges from $75 to $100, arbitrarily changing all the time. The lucky ones might get $50 back; most will end up with nothing.

Aside from the swindle aspect, why in the fuck would anyone agree to ANY transaction that costs the same as the transaction? Non-crypto transactions typically cost about 3%, not an arbitrary huge amount.

It's clear that MATH IS POPE for these people. They don't know how math really works because they haven't used it yet for any real purposes like cooking or carpentry or sewing or sales clerking. They just know that math is infallible, and even worse the math embodied in the crypto is OFFICIALLY INFALLIBLE. You aren't allowed to read the scriptures and make your own interpretation. DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR?

= = = = =

The potential of computerized cheating was visible from the start. Sheldon Dansiger, writing in 1967, tried to remind programmers and trainers of the danger:

Before computers became part of the American way of life, there were countless occurrences of embezzlements and frauds done by hand. With the computer mystique now present, there is a strong indication that a day will come in the not-too-distant future when a new, sophisticated style of stealing will begin coming to light. What can we do about it?

Dansiger was a real auditor who had seen the tricks of embezzlers, and could also see how to computerize each of the tricks.

If students were learning math as a NATURAL TOOL of selling and buying and clerking, math would not be a mystique.

= = = = =

Another DAO swindle would fail if people had learned the important parts of history.

Swindlers have organized a "new city" based on DAO code, and they've already crowdfunded a 40 acre piece of land in Wyoming. The land is barren and useless, just right for a utopian cult with no skills and no chance of success.

History is full of utopian projects. The cultists think they're blazing new trails in governance and religion and economics. In reality they're just losing their savings and wasting part of their life. The organizer always absconds with all of the money.

The Topolobampo Colony is a perfect example. Kansas Populists, persuaded that they were beating the banks and inventing a new way of life, flocked to Albert Owen's colony in a distant part of Mexico. Nothing happened. Owen got rich.

School history could help people to see this type of shit if it focused on scams and bubbles and utopias instead of battles and generals and "constitutions".

= = = = =

Bitcoin is also venturing into "art", without inventing or creating anything at all.

NFTs are collages of real art. I only see one attempt at "creating" art. This NFT mixes the real photos in a pattern that was common in the earliest era of digital graphics around 1962: repetitive sinusoidal doodles. It doesn't even use the power of modern computers, let alone the imagination of a real artist.

= = = = =

When math is taught as a NATURAL TOOL in the middle of real work, you can't be fooled by cheaters. When you're sewing or cooking or soldering, you use ANALOG measuring tools like cups and tapes and voltmeters. You constantly learn that measurement is ALWAYS APPROXIMATE, and you learn that the results of proportions and formulas can only be applied APPROXIMATELY.

Reality itself is infallible. Following math will lead you to cook inedible glop or sew a misfitted shirt or solder a fuse-blowing short. You need to be guided by reality at all times, keeping math down in the role of occasional servant.

Labels: Experiential education, MMT, Real World Math

  ¶ 10:44 PM

  Nothing has changed
I linked this August 2020 item in previous piece about two-way blackmail. Time for a reprint. Nothing has changed except the list of sane countries, which gradually faded down to zero.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Idiot headline at RCS:

Why is science letting us down?

I won't read the underlying article since I know in advance that it will be answering the wrong question to serve Satan.

= = = = =

The proper answer is:

Science isn't letting us down. We abandoned and obliterated science.

Science means Solving problems by objective measurement and analysis, refined by experiment.

Science already knew how to deal with a virus, and science had done all the necessary experiments to refine the answer.**

Let the immune system do most of the work. Encourage people to live a normal healthy life. Sunlight, exercise, fresh air, work, social contact, confidence. When possible, give the immune system an early preview of the virus with vaccines so it won't be surprised.

= = = = =

In the few blessed countries that REMAINED with science (Sweden, Belarus, Turkmenistan, Tanzania, etc) this definition still applies.

In all other countries, science was replaced by Satan. There's no other word for it. Pure murder, pure evil, pure genocide, serving no purpose except satisfying the bloodlust of psychopaths. The accumulated knowledge of public health was TURNED BACKWARDS and used to commit a holocaust.

= = = = =

We also have solid scientific knowledge about psychopaths, acquired by observation and experiment. We know what they want, we know how they work, and we know that there are only two ways to solve the problem. (1) Kill the psychopath. (2) Redirect his energy toward hedonism and dissipation.

Natural Law uses solution 2, giving psychopaths plenty of riches and pleasure, PROVIDED they use their powerful talents to serve ordinary people. A satiated psychopath doesn't have enough energy to do serious harm.

= = = = =

500 years ago the Circassians solved BOTH problems at the same time. Unsurprisingly, Turkmenistan is part of Circassia.

Circassian girls were a major export product. They were especially beautiful, and the psychopathic sultans of the Ottoman Empire bought them for a good price. [Why did the Ottoman sultans prefer slaves or commoners? Because they had seen how the Euro habit of marrying foreign royals led to stupid wasteful wars.]

Unfortunately, many of the girls were disfigured by smallpox, decreasing the profit. Presumably by serendipity, the Circassians figured out that a small dose of cowpox prevented smallpox. They developed inoculation into a science.

Selling their daughters to sultans solved the psychopath problem and provided a better life for the pretty ones. A harem girl gets the best food and the best clothing, and has ample opportunity to display her beauty through dancing and ceremonies. She takes her turn occasionally in the bedroom of the blubbery oversatiated Sultan, who can barely find his dick amid the rolling mountains of fat.

If the pretty ones had stayed at home, they would be milking cows, pulling plows, weaving crude clothing, losing their beauty, and enduring daily sessions with a strong muscular farmer. Some would enjoy the sex, but most wouldn't.

So the Circassians used REAL SCIENCE to solve both of our current problems in a SYNCHRONOUS AND BALANCED WAY. The pretty daughters had a better life, the people were protected from smallpox AND protected from the worst excesses of the psychopaths, and the people received PAY FOR VALUE.

Equipoise.


= = = = =

** Footnote: This is true of ALL REAL PROBLEMS. We have already solved all real problems that can be solved physically. We've acquired all the necessary data, we've done all the necessary experiments. Anyone who claims we need "new science" or "emerging science" to solve a "new problem" is a criminal and a murderer. The sole purpose of "new science" is to CREATE problems, not to solve problems. We are making valid new observations in a few areas like neurology, and it's possible that the new observations may help to refine existing solutions, but they won't generate new solutions to new problems.

Nature doesn't have new problems. All new problems are created by psychopaths.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Labels: endless hell, Equipoise

  ¶ 12:06 PM

  A useful collectible
I'm continuing to watch various interviews with Batya Ungar-Sargon. As a collector, I know by now what she's saying. Her message is clear and mostly correct.

What she's hearing is more interesting now. She's a great interviewer and a good listener, and she brings out hidden gems from the people who are supposed to be interviewing her. It's a two-way transaction.

In this clip, Yannis Pappas is interview/ing/ed. He comes from an old Greek culture and has a long racial memory. His old culture gives him a more mature view of Western idiocy.

Starting around 4:00 he narrates a universal story in that part of the world. The Ottoman sultans were EVIL, and their occupied countries developed ways of surviving. His grandfather was sent to Egypt to keep him away from a local sultan who liked boys.

In a more modern sense Pappas talks about his father's Greek restaurant in NYC. Mafia protection was a MATURE way of dealing with criminality. Systems are fake. Systems never work. Personal power works. Blackmail works, and blackmail can be a beneficial two-way transaction.

Everyone thinks like a child now. It's all good guys and bad guys, all a game board. Back then everything was cash. If you didn't want to get robbed you got protection. When the criminals knew your restaurant belonged to Albert Anastasia, they didn't bother you.

YES. The Mafia works better than police. I've seen it in Enid, which was a fully connected city when I lived there in the '70s. There was very little petty crime, the social structure was 'flatter' and more accessible, and the city government was COMPETENT. The government actually SERVED THE PEOPLE because it functioned on a COMMERCIAL BASIS.

I learned the cultural lesson a few years earlier in prison. The guards were incapable of protecting you from private rapes. If you had a Man, you were protected. You could also find a less violent cellmate through Beasley's Realty Service.

= = = = =

Retail transactions create a personal two-way obligation. True in business and in governance. When you forbid the analog adaptiveness of retail, all transactions become binary. In a binary system, one man has all the power.

The evolution of this new setup began around 1910 and accelerated in 1946. "Good Government" movements eliminated local retail politics and stressed the importance of "rule of law". At the same time, parenting and personal relationships were destroyed by all-consuming EXPERTS. Never trust your senses. Always trust the Scientist and the Economist and the Doctor and the FBI Agent.

2020 exposed the total and absolute failure of all systems and abstractions. It's all medieval now, all old-culture, all raw PERSONAL POWER. If you still believe in systems, you're a fool.

Labels: 2000=1000, Equipoise, Jail mode

  ¶ 7:08 AM

  Powerful metaphor
Gunter Bechly is discussing the failure of 'missing links' in fossil records. Every major transition requires new genes and new proteins that couldn't have been generated gradually, and the gradual steps required by evolution are simply not there.

Bechly tells an evocative story. Experienced collectors learn where to find the good stuff, and learn what they are going to find in each of the suitable places. After you've been exploring and gathering long enough, you are never truly surprised. If you find an item that seems to be 'in between' two types or two layers, it will ultimately turn out to be in one layer or the other.

This immediately evoked an example.

I've been collecting old electronic stuff for 60 years. I'm not a serious collector because I don't display and classify stuff. After I've had fun with a device, I put it in the drawer or toss it.

In 2016 I bought an intriguing item on Ebay. It was advertised as an 'experimental transistor'. After closely examining it and running it through the usual transistor and tube tests, I decided it wasn't a transistor at all. It was experimental in the sense of being a prototype, but it was an ordinary subminiature vacuum tube, not a transistor or an in-between mashup. It also happens to look like a pre-Cambrian critter.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

I was idly browsing Ebay for Soviet transistors. Curious to see if the oldest ones looked similar to America's oldest transistors. Mostly yes. The Prince Albert shape of the early ones reminded me of my first live encounter with a transistor.....

Around 1958 I was fiddling with radios and electric stuff, and somehow picked up a catalog from Burstein Applebee. Spent hours dreaming through it. When parents visited an uncle in KC, I badgered them into letting me see the Burstein Applebee store in downtown KCMO. They dropped me off and went shopping somewhere else. I walked in and started wandering the aisles, marveling at all the receivers and antennas and tubes. The clerks were NOT happy to have an 8-year-old loose in the store. They herded me out, but not before I got a good look at THE REAL THING: A Raytheon CK722.

Does Ebay have CK722s? Plenty of them but that wasn't the most interesting item. Seller VintChip had a Raytheon 'experimental transistor' for $50.

Instant choice. Had to buy it.

Unpacking......


Vintchip does a good job of packing. Bubble wrap and tissue.


First impression: Printed label says Raytheon Experimental. Written in ink on one side is QF336, on the other side just the number 8. Presumption: This is serial number 8 of a set of experimental tubes denominated QF336.

Scanned both sides:


Looks very much like a miniature hearing-aid tube. Same glass outer envelope, same leads coming through the bottom sealed in glass, same 'can' surrounding the active part. Mini tubes were used in hearing aids briefly in the '50s. Hearing aids soon switched to transistors, but not because of size. Early transistors were about half the size of mini tubes and you needed two or three transistors to substitute for the typical tube. No real advantage. Batteries were the advantage. Tubes needed a large 1.5V filament batt and a large 45V plate batt, and used up the filament batt fast. Transistors used one 9V battery and drained it slowly.

= = = = =


I can see the innards with a magnifier, but couldn't get a photo or scan. So I made a Poser version to illustrate. Two cylinders running through the can in parallel; one cylinder has one wire from it, and the other cylinder has a sort of sheath, with one wire centered and another wire Y-ing out of the sheath.

Innards STRONGLY suggest tube. The sheathed electrode is typical of a cathode with inner heater, with one side of heater tied to cathode. The opposite cylinder looks like the plate. Thinking tubey, this webpage shows a Sylvania experimental miniature thyratron, looking something like qf336, but the Sylvania has four terminals, which seems right. This critter has only three wires, which means it can't be a triode or a thyratron. Could it be a rectifier or a voltage-dependent switch?

One problem with tube assumption: the upper and lower ends of the can are closed by resin or epoxy. Tubes generally get too hot for epoxy.

Thinking solid-statey, the wire pattern reminds me of a thyristor or SCR schematic. Does this mean the schematic was meant to imitate this device? Probably not.

Well, let's try both assumptions. Using DVM, no connectedness shows between the terminals. On R scale and diode scale, just open ckt in both directions on all combinations of the three wires. About 7nF capacitance between terminals, which makes sense from the structure but doesn't mean anything. So this probably isn't solid-state, because even a blown or non-functional solid thing will show some kind of resistance.

I don't have any proper mini tubes for comparison. A large tube (35L6) shows about 40Ω across the filament, varying as the applied voltage slightly warms the heater. I don't know what to expect for a mini tube, but it would certainly be low enough to read easily. Two-digit ohms, not gonna look like open ckt.

= = = = =

Just for fun, trying the tube assumption in the simplest possible ckt for a rectifier. Battery across the filament, cathode to negative, 9V to the plate through a resistor, with voltmeter across the resistor to see if anything flows.



Nope. No heat from the filament, no flow at all.

Conclusion: This is probably a diode tube, and the filament is probably burned out.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Honest paleontologists run through the same process. Excitement! This looks like a missing link! Darwin was right after all! Then do the chemical tests and look at it from various angles with microscopes and scanners.... Oops. It's a familiar item in a familiar layer after all. It was just divided in an unfamiliar way or petrified with an unfamiliar mineral.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 9:58 PM

  What is $40 billion?
In a wonderfully funny article about the idiots who fell for the DAO "constitution" scam, Vice says:

DAO governance tokens are themselves a $40 billion market.

What are governance tokens? Nothing. They say that you have paid money to the scammer. That's all. The scammer can let you "vote" on the subject of the "smart contract" or not, as he wishes.

In 1948, $40 billion was the entire fucking budget of the United Fucking States. Or more precisely it was Truman's proposed budget, and the Repooflicans were bitching that it would drive us into bankruptcy as fucking always.

Granted, inflation since then is about 10, so the figure is really $400 billion.

Even after adjustment, the DAO shit is genuinely equal to the non-defense parts of the entire fucking government in 1948, and it does precisely nothing.

DAO is a super-complicated overload of the simplest scam in history. The simplest scam is a classified ad saying:

Send one dollar to PO Box 123 now! Beat the rush!

It's perfectly legal because it doesn't promise anything at all. It just invites you to send money.

Labels: Entertainment, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 3:33 PM

  Odd IRS point-missing
For the record, just in case:

Got a letter from IRS this morning, saying that I paid but didn't file a return.

I went back through bank statements and found that I did pay the same amount they say. The check for $673.15 was cashed Feb 18.

My records also show all the forms filled out in PDFs. I'm getting old and this year is hellish, so I might have forgotten to send the return at all, or forgotten to include the check. Those are plausible options. But I wouldn't send ONLY A CHECK. I always send the forms with the check folded inside.

How did IRS process the check but not the 1040 and other forms wrapped around the check? This makes me wonder if they're trying to set up a "crime".

I'll resend the forms and hope they get processed this time.

Later after reprinting the PDFs and resending: I noticed that I had left off the SSN on one of the schedules. Fixed it this time. Maybe their error indication is all-or-nothing, interpreting one missing element as NO_FORMS?

Labels: Bemusement, TMI

  ¶ 10:40 AM

  Why is this so rare?
The smartest thing about Substack is quite simple but rare. Monthly subscriptions.

Example: I'd read some interesting pieces by Darryl Cooper, who does a good job of understanding and empathizing with the working class. He has a newsletter on Substack, and I couldn't hear his pieces without subscribing. So I paid the $5 for a MONTH and listened to one piece. Whoops! He may be empathetic but he's not smart. Like many other realists, he's into digital anti-solutions like DAO and Bitcoin. He's also a fan of James Poulos, who is the OPPOSITE of empathetic.

So I turned off the subscription 10 minutes after starting it. Five dollars is like one copy of a magazine. A reasonable amount to pay for a proper sample of the material.

Why is retail sale so rare? The digital world is all-or-nothing. It's unnecessarily binary. Open source software is either free for limited use or millions for full use. Most subscriptions require you to enroll for a full year.

Customers SHOULD expect to pay for every valuable item. Free means you're the product. But outside the digital world customers DON'T have to choose between a lifetime supply or nothing. You can buy one tomato or one book or one magazine.

Labels: Equipoise

  ¶ 8:57 AM

  Speaking of theory goggles
Speaking of theory goggles, I'm trying to break out of an overly Ockhamish theory that I slipped into recently. A couple months ago I started assuming that the "virus" was an unnecessary entity. The torture and war techniques are NOT methods of controlling an epidemic.

This doesn't fit the observations. Public Death Officers and Bioterror warriors enjoy using a real microbe.

I need to return to my earlier Parkinson assumption: Mecher's gang picked out a real virus and did everything possible to extend and expand the virus forever. Strengthen the virus, eliminate immunity. This is an actual virus but it isn't an actual epidemic. Distancing and gags and lockdowns are not UNRELATED, they are INVERSELY RELATED to a virus. They are exactly what you do if you want to maintain an epidemic forever. This idea fits the visible facts. In the sane states that gave up muzzling a year ago, the virus has naturally faded out because human immune systems have been handling it naturally. In the demonic states where muzzles and distancing have obstructed immunity, cases are still running at the same level as a year ago.

I've been reading a book on the 2001 biowar rehearsal using anthrax. The book was printed in 2014, before the Trump lunacy and well before the "virus" war. So its facts and conclusions couldn't have been cherrypicked to match later facts.

Same Bush, same Bioterror Department, same methods. Anthrax was picked because Fort Detrick knew how to weaponize it. Anthrax was sent to journalists who had a habit of telling the truth, and to senators who were slow to approve the Iraq war.

Insiders, not just government officials, knew about the plan before it was implemented. The book notes a column by Maureen Dowd a few days before the "attacks" were published. She mentioned that all the NYC rich ladies were carrying Cipro in their haute-couture purses and using it.

CBS was preparing a thriller series in the summer of 2001 that featured an al-Qaeda attack on NYC followed by an anthrax epidemic.

The purpose of 9/11 and the anthrax "attack" was to generate war fever toward Iraq.

Some of the current fact-gatherers are making the same assumption about generating war fever toward China. It's a plausible parallel. We haven't started the war yet, but it took two years after 9/11 to get the Iraq war underway. So the parallel isn't testable yet.

It's also interesting that all of the NAMED deaths from the current "virus" are public opponents of Deepstate. Some supporters or insiders have allegedly acquired the alleged "virus" but didn't get sick. Is a weaponized version sent to the annoying opponents, just as weaponized anthrax was sent to annoying opponents? There's no way of knowing, since the "tests" are known to be false, and the real "data", if it exists, is all medically secret.

Labels: #WholeOfSociety, endless hell, Parkinson

  ¶ 6:52 AM

  Panpsych
Jerry Coyne is very slowly removing his theory goggles, and is showing us the process in some detail without realizing it. Breaking out of a cult or theory is like withdrawing from a narcotic. The theory fights back for a while, creating highly emotional cognitive dissonance. If you maintain abstinence, the withdrawal symptoms will recede and you'll forget that you were ever inside the bubble.

Right now he's experiencing CD on the subject of panpsychism, and he recognizes that the emotion is overwrought:

I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with panpsychism. It’s probably because I see it as scientific snake oil. It’s philosophy pretending to be science but not behaving like science, for it’s just a bunch of untestable assertions that cannot be falsified. And if a theory cannot be falsified, we cannot regard it as conveying scientific truth.

Well, panpsychism isn't really an ism or a theory, and it doesn't really claim to be science. It's just a necessary logical reflection of a minimalist assumption, which isn't a theory either.

We'll NEVER KNOW what consciousness is. We'll never have a testable theory. The ONLY THING WE KNOW FOR SURE is that I am conscious. Period. That's it.

I have no way of knowing if you are conscious, or dogs or birds or roses or squids are conscious, or my air conditioner is conscious.

Below the level of certainty, we have plenty of measurable evidence for you and dogs and squids. The circumstantial evidence is dreams.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

This article considers the possibility of a Turing test for consciousness.

It's a surpassingly hard question, intrinsically impossible to answer objectively.

None of the paths proposed in the article are likely to get there. I think the best starting point is dreams.

We're reasonably sure that mammals and birds have dreams like ours. Cuttlefish also show the same external indicators of dreaming.



Why is dreaming a good marker? Because there's NO POINT in dreaming unless the dream is happening within consciousness. A dream is an internal play on an internal stage. If nobody is watching the show, there's no purpose in running the immensely complex mechanism of scripting and narrating the show.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Dreaming is the only externally measurable indication of consciousness, but there's no logical reason to assume that dreamers are the only possessors of awareness. There are only two logical possibilities. I'm the only conscious thing in the universe, or the entire universe is conscious. Given the large number of measurable exceptions to the former, we're left with the latter.

Labels: Metrology

  ¶ 12:45 AM

  Those imitative Russians ... oops
I'm trying to find a new graphics project, so I delved back into last year's frantic pile of stuff, created in a desperate and futile attempt to counterpray the Mecher monsters. It didn't work; the Public Death Officers are still killing and torturing millions; but it did keep me sane.

In my rush to churn out interesting and occasionally beautiful stuff, I left many sideroads unexplored. One fascinating item that deserves more attention is Lukyanov's hydraulic computer.

= = = = = START REPRINT:


The Russians made the most interesting analog computers. They stuck with analog cybernetics long after Westerners had switched to digital.

In 1936 Lukyanov developed a water-based computer to solve complicated functions for engineering and construction. He was working primarily with concrete and soil under freezing conditions, trying to help design dams and pavement in cold places. His machine, and later variants, served many purposes into the 1970s.

I've drawn the 'museum version' of Lukyanov's hydrointegrator. This may have been only the control panel; it diverges from his descriptions of the functional machine. The real machine was modular, with several large blocks of pipes and tubes behind the control panel.

This picture seems to show the real machine in use:


And this diagram is similar, with the plots showing up more clearly:


The cylinders holding graphic plots would normally be plotted outputs, but in this machine they're inputs. The real machine had four optional input variables, along with an implicit time variable.

A typical use was modeling heat transfer through a structure (dam or pavement) treated as a series of layers. Each water column represented a layer, and each column could be programmed to let in water at a specific rate. In other words, each column was like an RC filter in a sequential filter setup, with the visible height (or voltage in the electronic version) representing the temperature in that layer of the dam.



These diagrams clearly show the primary advantage of analog systems, whether mechanical or fluid or electronic, over digital software. In real life each layer or module or neuron or organism is always continuously influencing all other layers, with influence and feedback in all directions at once. Interconnected water columns do it naturally. You can't do it at all with interconnected functions in software. You can pass differences from subroutine A to subroutine B, and pass results back, but there's no way to make the influences simultaneous and continuous.

Electronic version:



The operator used the big lever to follow the curve already drawn on the wrapped graph. As the lever moved up and down, it moved a tank up and down, raising and lowering the 'potential voltage' input to the system. This diagram shows two input variables B1 and B2.



Programs were entered on the three rows of valves in the center of the control panel. The description doesn't clarify the specific purpose of each row, and the upper crank is also unclear. I suspect it was a manual turner or winder for the plot cylinder, which was apparently driven by clockwork.



Here Polistra is moving the big lever to follow the dam plot on the left cylinder, and the tubes are responding with a (purely imagined) output pattern. Another observer would record the heights at different times, or perhaps use a mounted movie camera to make a direct record.

The RC-like effect of the flow would also enable a single transient response to be modeled. After setting the valves for the appropriate pattern of Rs and Cs, just yank the lever upward and watch the columns move for a minute or two.

= = = = =

Footnote: The best descriptions in English are here at Archive.org.

= = = = =

Sidenote after thinking about "devices" and Pied Pipers: another advantage of mechanical and fluidic computers is independence. They can't be hacked or detected from a distance. Only a live spy in the same room can control or read them. Even electronic analogs are harder to penetrate than digital, because they don't emit a readable stream of patterned codes. An RC computer responds when you turn the knobs, then settles gradually into a new condition. No predictable and redundant patterns. Russia understood this point deeply after repeated invasions and penetrations by Krauts and Yanks.


= = = = = END REPRINT.

Returning to the source material, I didn't find any new ideas, but I did find something I hadn't noticed before.

In 1956, twenty years after Lukyanov, MIT got a government contract to build a similar computer and use it for similar purposes, modeling Arctic conditions for foundations and dams.

Similar?





Identical, except that MIT didn't bother to enclose the computer in a platform or case. By '56 we had essentially abandoned analog thinking. We were already retreating into our shell of pure digital abstraction, losing contact with physical reality and industry and muscles and senses.

And why were we imitating Russia's invention? So we could build Arctic missile silos to attack Russia.

Labels: Equipoise, Make or break

  ¶ 10:57 PM

  The DAO swindlers should have waited a few days....
A unique manuscript written by Einstein is about to be auctioned.

It's 54 pages of equations tried and crossed out, showing his thought process as he worked on relativity. Christie's expects it to bring about $3 million in ancient useless fiat "money".

Much more appropriate for the tech fools than the "constitution". Only a Turing or Tesla manuscript would be cooler.

However: Crossing out equations is dissonant to the DAO doctrine of immutable code. The code written by the swindlers must never be debugged or examined or changed. If you try to fix it, you might notice the built-in scams.

Labels: Sucker Filter

  ¶ 3:10 PM

  There. I relinked your missed AI point and raised you two links.
MindMatters continues to track the odd journey of Avi Loeb.

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, spoke at a recent Ignatius Forum on his differences with “the scientific mainstream” about the evidence for extraterrestrial life. Perhaps in part because the venue was the Washington National Cathedral, Loeb felt motivated to reflect on the religious as well as the science implications of a search for extraterrestrial life.

"In finding advanced extraterrestrial intelligence, religion might simply reflect advanced science with a twist. Traditional religions described God as the creator of the universe and life within it. They also suggested that humans were made in the image of God. But these notions are not necessarily in contradiction with science. A sufficiently advanced scientific civilization might be able to create synthetic life in its laboratories — in fact, some of our terrestrial laboratories almost reached that threshold. And with a good understanding of how to unify quantum-mechanics and gravity, an advanced scientific civilization could potentially create a baby universe in its laboratories. Therefore, an advanced scientific civilization might be a good approximation to God."

Loeb told Cathedral Dean Randy Hollerith that he is not himself a “person of faith.” But one must assume that he means simply that he is not an adherent of a traditional religious belief system. The extraterrestrials he describes are currently as much a belief system as any other; they are not, of course, traditional.

Hollerith? I remembered that Herman IV was an Episcopal Bishop. I can't believe that another Hollerith, who is also a Bishop, is unrelated. And sure enough Randolph is Herman's brother.

The MindMatters article slides right past this unique link of religion and science. Loeb, who is trying to restore the link via aliens, is talking with a priest who is the great-grandson of the founder of computing.

I had some stupid nerdy fun with Herman IV....

= = = = = START REPRINT:

I like to watch for interesting dynastic descendants, and I like to watch for dynastic names that go beyond III. The whole I II III thing is growing obsolete, but IV and V have always been rare. Ran into a double hit in an article about sneaky dealings among the Episcopalians.

An attorney representing the Bishop of Los Angeles before a church hearing panel investigating him for misconduct, has conceded the Rt. Rev. J. Jon Bruno had entered into an agreement to sell the rectory and parish properties of St James Episcopal Church in Newport Beach.

On 22 June 2017 Julie Dean Larsen, the deputy chancellor of the Diocese of Los Angeles, wrote to the hearing panel chaired by the Bishop of Southern Virginia, the Rt. Rev. Herman Hollerith IV, that her client had not been able to answer their questions of June 9. 14 and 21 if he had made a deal to sell the property, because he had signed a confidentiality agreement with the buyer.

Hey! We got a IV and we got an unexpected descendant. Herman Hollerith IV. Is he really the IV from THE Herman Hollerith? Looking up, the answer is yes. Unlike many inventors, the original didn't get tangled up in lawsuits or lose everything when his company was sold. He stayed with IBM as a consultant and made a comfortable amount of money, then retired. His descendants remained prominent citizens.

Of course the name should be written as a Hollerith constant,

21HHERMAN HOLLERITH IV

to honor the constant Hollerith tradition.



Should the number be treated separately as an integer variable? Probably not. It's an ordinal, not a cardinal; and it's an ordinal that isn't always properly sequenced. Henry Ford II was actually Henry Senior's grandson.

In more modern languages you could handle it as an associative index...

As a dict in Python:

HermanHollerith =
{
'I' : 'Herman Hollerith',
'II' : 'Herman Hollerith Jr',
'III' : 'Herman Hollerith III',
'IV' : 'Herman Hollerith IV'
}
print HermanHollerith['IV']
Herman Hollerith IV

= = = = = END REPRINT.

And of course this ties back to abacuses in Nature and the IBM DCL with its Roman numeration.

Footnote for clarity: The ID types enjoy mocking Loeb. I can't do that. I think he's wrong about his comet, but he's a proper scientist. He's careful to distinguish facts from theories, and he's never arrogant or condescending. Those qualities are unique among publicly visible scientists now.

Labels: AI point-missing

  ¶ 2:11 PM

  Trying to sort out OCD vs Psychopath
Here's a raw unformed thought pattern.

I've been puzzling about the roles of OCD types and psychopaths in the current holocaust. Are they just different views of the same personality, or are they different types?

Order is another name for life. Order means COMPLEXITY and HIERARCHY. Each system includes a huge number of DIFFERENT TYPES, and the TYPES are connected in an infinite number of TWO-WAY OBLIGATION LOOPS.

In a chaotic setup there are no loops and no types. The types still exist, but the ruler doesn't recognize them as legitimate and tries to eliminate them.

Psychopaths rule by imposing chaos to ACHIEVE equality.

Chaos breaks down the order and hierarchy in the victim's brain, leaving him typeless and loopless and lifeless. All victims are created equal, or more precisely transformed to equal. The only exception is the ruler himself.

I think OCD and psychopath are not the same thing. They are two personality types that end up doing the same thing for different motives.

OCD wants to be the sole occupant of the universe. Everything else is dirt that must be scrubbed.

Psychopath wants to be the sole occupant of the universe. Everything else is vermin that must be exterminated.

Maybe it's just a difference of scale, small germs vs large vermin.

At any rate, both are working together in the current holocaust. Psychopaths like Carter Mecher are in charge, and the subordinate Nazis are OCD types who love working in this particular type of tyranny.

Labels: #WholeOfSociety, Asked and badly answered

  ¶ 11:31 PM

  Wentz mentioned
Archive.org has added a few clips on the '48 election from Bert Andrews. He showed how to discuss politics objectively and fairly, which was of course NOT UNUSUAL on radio. He apparently felt defensive about the divisive reputation of newspapers, which was VALID at that time.

I write the news straight. Everybody on the Herald Tribune writes the news straight. We try to give the readers an honest job whether we're dealing with the Republicans or the Democrats or Henry Wallace's third party or the Socialists or Communists. We figure that if we give the readers the facts ... and that's the only instruction a Herald Tribune reporter ever gets ... the readers are capable of making up their own minds. I drop that in here because I'm likely to be asked why I'm so sure that I'm right in what I report about these conversations in these smoke-filled rooms.

Well, I talk to men from New York. From Texas. From California. I talk to my old friend Lew Wentz from Oklahoma.

PING!

I've discussed Wentz often. Lew Wentz and EW Marland competed to turn Ponca into a beautiful and civilized town.

Both arrived from the East around 1920. At first both stayed in the Arcade Hotel, in a grimy part of downtown next to the railroad station.

Marland was a grandiose extrovert who built two grandiose mansions and got into politics, ending up as governor of Okla around 1940. His second mansion is still grand, now a museum.

Wentz simply stayed in the Arcade. He bought it and occupied the top floor. Instead of hiring an army of personal servants, he used the hotel's cafe and club and maids along with the paying guests. He remained close to the working class, just as reporters were also close to the working class.

This is the first time I've heard Wentz mentioned in a political or national context. He definitely didn't run for office, but he must have been a quiet kingmaker.

= = = = =

Broader thought: Bert Andrews spent a lot of time telling the listeners HOW he worked. Along with the facts, he gave us the provenance and credibility. Here's how I know this, and here's why I'm sure about it. Nobody in the mainstream gives us a HOW now. Mostly it's just rosary beads. Fuck_Trump Fuck_Trump Fuck_Trump January_Sixth_Violent_Insurrection January_Sixth_Violent_Insurrection January_Sixth_Violent_Insurrection. When it departs from rosaries, it's disconnected word salad with no meaning. A random shower of toxic fact-like particles. Brain poison masquerading as food.

Some of the independent ex-mainstreamers like Saagar and Batya and Greenwald have returned to the HOW end, focusing on provenance and credibility.

HOW-style journalism is closer to serious science. Methods, equipment, data, results, discussion.   ¶ 12:21 AM