Tuesday, September 09, 2014
Graphing the memory hole
In this entry last year, Polistra defended a Common Core math curriculum against 'conservative' complaints. The CC course emphasizes graphing and practical uses, and the 'conservative' complainer wanted to go back to Euclid. Prof P's point was that learning how to graph gives you a much better tool for spotting official lies, because graphs incorporate a TIME axis. Euclid trains you to accept static axioms as given, which is EXACTLY what the commies want us to do.
Now is an excellent time to demonstrate the point!
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Here Professor Polistra shows us a graph of news bias in an ideal world. As the story proceeds, some sources are taking side A and some sources are taking side B. Their strength varies, but you can always find a supporter of the official line and an opponent of the official line.
This graph does show up sometimes in the real world, on completely trivial stories. When Side A says "Pepsi tastes best" and Side B says "Coke tastes best", we see this pattern. Unless, of course, the CEO of one brand was caught saying, or thinking, or appearing to consider the potential possibility of thinking, something that ordinary sane people would consider to be a tautological self-evident truth, hardly worth the trouble of thinking or speaking. In modern terms such a self-evident truth is either an Offensive Racist Remark or an Offensive Sexist Remark or an Offensive Homophobic Remark. In that case the graph would immediately switch to the second type........
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Here Prof P shows a graph of the Memory Hole, as seen in stories like the MH17 crash or Unarmed African-American Teenager or Bashar Assad's supposed use of chemical weapons. All paid news sources on "all" "sides" blindly and rigidly follow the official line. Their overmodulated copy-pasted roaring grows and grows .... until some unpaid report brings out the Whoopsie. There's evidence that the Kiev forces shot down MH17; or it turns out that Unarmed African-American Teenager was a hardass thug with a long criminal record, as all sane people knew to begin with; or it looks like the anti-Assad forces were using the chem weapons AND Assad was perfectly willing to give up his chem weapons.
After the Whoopsie, there is still no paid news source opposing the official line. And of course there is no admission of error. Instead, the story just fades out, drops through the Hole, to be replaced by the next lethal lie.
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Sidenote: The first graph is an excellent example of how mathematical 'random' often looks patterned. It seems to have a sine shape, but it was produced by Python's random function.
Y=random.uniform(-2.0,2.0).
If you want a pattern to look random, you sometimes have to take special steps to derandomize it.
Here Professor Polistra shows us a graph of news bias in an ideal world. As the story proceeds, some sources are taking side A and some sources are taking side B. Their strength varies, but you can always find a supporter of the official line and an opponent of the official line.
This graph does show up sometimes in the real world, on completely trivial stories. When Side A says "Pepsi tastes best" and Side B says "Coke tastes best", we see this pattern. Unless, of course, the CEO of one brand was caught saying, or thinking, or appearing to consider the potential possibility of thinking, something that ordinary sane people would consider to be a tautological self-evident truth, hardly worth the trouble of thinking or speaking. In modern terms such a self-evident truth is either an Offensive Racist Remark or an Offensive Sexist Remark or an Offensive Homophobic Remark. In that case the graph would immediately switch to the second type........
= = = = =
Here Prof P shows a graph of the Memory Hole, as seen in stories like the MH17 crash or Unarmed African-American Teenager or Bashar Assad's supposed use of chemical weapons. All paid news sources on "all" "sides" blindly and rigidly follow the official line. Their overmodulated copy-pasted roaring grows and grows .... until some unpaid report brings out the Whoopsie. There's evidence that the Kiev forces shot down MH17; or it turns out that Unarmed African-American Teenager was a hardass thug with a long criminal record, as all sane people knew to begin with; or it looks like the anti-Assad forces were using the chem weapons AND Assad was perfectly willing to give up his chem weapons.
After the Whoopsie, there is still no paid news source opposing the official line. And of course there is no admission of error. Instead, the story just fades out, drops through the Hole, to be replaced by the next lethal lie.
= = = = =
Sidenote: The first graph is an excellent example of how mathematical 'random' often looks patterned. It seems to have a sine shape, but it was produced by Python's random function.
Y=random.uniform(-2.0,2.0).
If you want a pattern to look random, you sometimes have to take special steps to derandomize it.Labels: Real World Math, Гром победы
¶ 4:09 AM
