From an extremely different era 13
Lately I've added episodes of Can You Imagine That to the bedtime playlist. This was another show along the lines of Ripley or Strange As It Seems. CYIT was calmer and a little more 'intellectual' than the others, with an emphasis on word etymology and music etymology along with the expected bits of ancient and recent history. Like most syndicated shows in the '30s, it had OUTSTANDING anonymous musicians.

In this episode the unusual bit of history is a wolf seen in Milwaukee in 1930. The cops didn't believe the call, but went to look anyway, and immediately shot the wolf. Problem solved.

STOP AND THINK. IN THE 1930S CIVILIZATION EXISTED. HUMANS HAD REMOVED WOLVES AND BEARS FROM CITIES. AN APPEARANCE OF A WILD ANIMAL WAS SO UNUSUAL THAT IT MERITED INCLUSION IN A RADIO PROGRAM ABOUT INCREDIBLE EVENTS.

Now, thanks to 45 years of EPA holocaust, climaxing this year with total holocaust, wolves and bears and moose and coyotes are common in cities. If you try to call the cops or the Animal "Control" officers, they laugh at you. Even professional exterminators won't take the case because they don't want to spend the rest of their lives in jail. We never never never never never never never never never solve a problem. We only make problems infinitely exponentially worse.

Labels: infinite infinite infinite infinite infinite infinite infinite INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE lunacy

  ¶ 8:13 PM

  gniruT tseT
AI point-missing at MindMatters as usual.

The article is trying to show that a good novelist can create an entire character in a few words, which no AI-generated text can possibly do. This should be a pretty good Turing-ish test. Good authors can certainly accomplish this task, but the chosen example shows the exact opposite.

Example from Flannery O'Connor:

He kept on digging but the grave did not get any deeper. "The dead are poor," he said in the voice of the stranger. "You can’t be any poorer than dead."

No actual human ever said those words. No actual human COULD say those words. The paragraph sounds exactly like the output of a badly configured AI story-generator. Without the author's name, this would instantly fall on the machine side of a Turing test.

Here's a more useful example from another Southern writer, TR Pearson, in exactly the same gravedigging scene.

Mrs Ida Dinkins McCoy 1904-1967 Gone to God had plastic jonquils and bows at her feet and a gilt-framed picture of herself embedded in her headstone. Apparently Mrs Ida Dinkins McCoy had not made her way in the world on account of her good looks.

SES. Tells you all you need to know about Mrs McCoy in one sentence. Only a human can understand the laconic negated subjunctive of the sentence. We instantly form an image of how Mrs McCoy's life would have gone if she had been blessed with good looks; and then we negate the image.

Labels: AI point-missing, SES

  ¶ 2:45 PM

  Speaking of walls....
I noticed in the statcounter listings that a reader in Riobamba, Ecuador was reading some of the meaningful parts of this blog, the tech history. Thanks, reader! You're the reason I do this.

I hadn't heard of Riobamba, so I looked it up. It's about the same size as Spokane. Wandering through the images on Google Streets, Riobamba is typical of South America with WALLS around every house. Aside from that difference, it's clear that Riobamba is in better shape than Spokane. Businesses are everywhere, and all of the businesses appear open and thriving. The streets are maintained, sidewalks are clean, cars are new, walls are solid, most of the buildings look clean. Well-dressed people are walking calmly in all of the neighborhoods. No beggars or gangsters visible. Nothing looks ragged or beat-down.

Ecuador was one of the anti-Soros bright spots for a while, until the Assange mess caused Deepstate to step in and change it. Those changes clearly didn't affect everyday life, which looks prosperous and normal.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Morsenet of Things, Sorosia

  ¶ 5:25 AM

  Unfashionable evil still marches on
While most of "science" has turned its attention to improving the efficiency of the "virus" holocaust, some stubborn old-timers are still working on the "global warming" holocaust.

A literal new frontier for globalism:

Fences are one of humanity's most frequent landscape alterations, with their combined length exceeding even that of roads by an order of magnitude. Despite their ubiquity, they have received far less research scrutiny than many human-built structures. Despite the difficulty in studying these structures, the movement-restricting effects of fences have profound ecosystem consequences. "To put it simply, in a fenced world, there are winners and there are losers," say the authors. Generalist and disturbance specialist species fare well, whereas specialist species often struggle with restricted access to habitat, altered community composition, and changes to the ecosystems on which they depend. As an example of the potential "losers," the authors highlight research indicating that "a planned US-Mexico border fence would dangerously restrict gene flow among desert bighorn sheep, isolating populations across the border."

A planned US-Mexico border fence?????

Bizarre illusion, pure DNC nonsense. In their "minds", Trump invented the concept of fencing. In plain reality, the southern border has been partly fenced for 100 years. About 2/3 of the border has a fence. Trump TALKED about a wall, but has only added a dozen miles** during his four years as Pied Piper. Obama did a much better job of border enforcement.

Well, if all fences are ORANGE MAN BAD, then we should develop ways to break down all walls in nature. Dissolve all nests and hives. Use noise-canceling and smell-canceling devices to eliminate territorial markers among animals and plants. Remove the bark from trees, and stop trees from poisoning insects that invade their shade boundaries. Remove the skin and cell walls from all animals, since skin "isolates populations" of viruses and bacteria across the border.

= = = = =

** Let's compare this achievement with an ordinary fence contractor with 4 employees and one truck. Judging from what I've seen in the neighborhood, fence contractors can put up about 100 feet in a day. In four years of constant work with no weekends, 100 * 365 * 4 = 27 miles. So four guys could do twice as much work as the entire Federal government. Admittedly the border wall is taller than the typical household fence, so put on two crews with two trucks.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 12:21 AM

  Another hack
Another accidental hack, showing the REAL purpose of murder masks.



Everyone with the slightest connection to reality knew this from the fucking start. The riots taught many folks who hadn't stopped to think about it.

As with the previous hack, the most informative part is the ATTITUDE. We can hear that ALL of the demons know what they're doing. They don't need to explain anything among their circle. They know that they're killing everyone, and they ENJOY killing everyone.

People are different. People have different talents and tastes and tendencies. Psychopaths are HAPPY when they're allowed to maim and ruin and kill, just as carpenters are HAPPY when they're allowed to hammer and saw and build. Civilization happens when DESTRUCTIVE talents are discouraged and constrained, and CONSTRUCTIVE talents are encouraged and rewarded. Right now we're doing the exact opposite of civilization. All constructive skills are prohibited, and the worst criminal skills are INFINITELY rewarded.

The hacks won't make any difference because demons don't have inputs for facts and feedback. But it's a fun little parlor game for those of us who are stuck in strangulation hell forever.

Labels: Jackboot stomping forever

  ¶ 10:51 PM

  Was KT right?
Reading a Collectible Auto article on the '49s. Needless to say, it quotes KT Keller's famous speech berating Californians for assuming that nobody wears a hat. KT made cars that wouldn't knock your hat off.

Was he accurate or just selling?

In the same article a detailed chart of interior dimensions answers the question.

Front headroom in Chevy was 34 inches. Ford was 35 inches. Plymouth was 40.

40 - 34 = hat.

It wouldn't make much difference for shorter people, but for an average or taller man KT was quantitatively accurate.

I'm 5'8, median for that generation. A quick measurement finds 32" from chair to scalp. So a 1949 hat on my head wouldn't fit in a Chevy, and would fit in a Plymouth.

Hat or not, a taller interior makes entry and exit easier for everyone, and feels roomier.

Labels: Asked and answered, Real World Math

  ¶ 4:43 PM

  Was this new or just deceptive?
An intriguingly vague innovation in a 1960 issue of Westinghouse Engineer, newly added to American Radio Library.

This was clearly one way of making ICs, but it doesn't sound the same as the path already started by Intel in 1958. The Intel method resulted in identifiable components formed as part of the same layered substrate by controlled etching.

This Westinghouse proposal sounds more like the whole substrate is participating, with loosely defined areas serving as complete functions, not individual R and C and transistor. Later iterations of ICs came closer to this idea, but still have mainly distinct and identifiable components.

This involves a new concept in the design and function of electronic systems, called "molecular electronics," to indicate its dependence on phenomena occurring within or between domains of molecules in the solid state.

As one accomplishment of the joint program, a variety of molecular electronic "function blocks" are being produced, three of which are shown in Fig. 1; these solid-state elements achieve, entirely within themselves, electronic results previously gained only by assembling many varied items of electronic hardware. Because of this, these elements are not intended as "components," such as transistors and tubes, but rather as "subsystems." Examples of functions performed by function-blocks are such electronic operations as amplification, oscillation, and telemetering.

Effects of this general type are used in molecular electronic blocks by creating - usually in single crystals - a number of distinct operative domains, which can be regarded as molecular "communities" having a common civic purpose, in that each domain will sustain a desired electronic occurrence. The domains border one another at boundaries called interfaces, which are like political frontiers in their ability to initiate phenomena different from those occurring inside the molecular domains.

As a simple example, the element diagrammed in Fig. 3 is composed of two domains that meet physically at one interface. One of these domains is composed of a resistive material selected and shaped to present a resistance R1 to the passage of current; the other domain is also resistive, but is so planned that it has a resistance R2. At the interface, the interaction between domains causes a capacitive effect. Thus, this tiny element is a subsystem equivalent to a time-delay circuit

Was this just a poorly worded description of the Intel process, or an intentionally deceptive description for competitive and patent purposes, or an entirely different concept? Hard to tell.

The idea of custom-shaping a component to serve an entire function was already familiar before ICs, in the microwave realm where every wire and transistor and space between components is unavoidably acting as inductor and capacitor. The entire system needs to be designed physically and geometrically all at once, more like a sculpture than a schematic. The article doesn't start from this familiar concept.

Labels: Asked and unanswerable

  ¶ 5:08 AM

  Krauss reprint from 2008
UD was advertising a discussion featuring Lawrence Krauss. I hadn't noticed Krauss in a while; apparently he got on the wrong side of the #metoo Karens, but that still doesn't make him any smarter or better.

A long time ago I thought he was worth arguing against.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

I've been arguing with (or more precisely arguing at) Lawrence Krauss for a while without naming him; he has been writing some truly obnoxious opinion pieces in New Scientist, and I've been responding indirectly.

My quote on the right-hand side in this post was from Krauss.

Right now Krauss is giving a speech at AEI, broadcast on C-Span, in which he makes the same terrible points. Luckily, some questions are allowed, and luckily the questioners are excellent. It would have been better to format the whole presentation as a debate, with questions after each point, so that Krauss's illogical arguments weren't allowed to stick in the audience's minds.

Krauss (to his credit) backed off in some places, but he stuck to a couple of silly and dangerous arguments, which nobody questioned in the time available.

Krauss began by associating ignorance with totalitarianism. He gave the example of the Taliban destroying important parts of world culture (the ancient Buddhist statues) "because of ignorance", and proceeded from there to state that Americans must understand the BASICS of evolution as taught by the current consensus, in order to avoid totalitarianism.

This is worse than nonsense.

First, the most effective totalitarians were very smart. Hitler and Stalin poured huge amounts of money and emphasis into research and education. German and Russian math and science teaching was -- probably still is -- vastly superior to ours. Modern Russians know more about nearly everything than modern Americans.

Our entire space program depended on scientists educated under Hitler, not on scientists educated in America. Hitler's problem was emphatically not ignorance.

Second, Krauss seems to think that American science and math education is bad because we hesitate to tell students that evolution is an axiom.

It's exactly the other way around.

Our science and math education is awful BECAUSE WE HAVE FOLLOWED the Krauss model: start with a few axioms, build theories, consider the theories to be settled. Ever since the Scopes trial, we have IN FACT been telling students that evolution is the only possible theory, and this hasn't made a damn bit of difference.

Science and math education -- for that matter, science and math in general -- work best when you start with experimentation. Students learn best when they know first why each fact or theory is important. Why did I slip and fall on the ice this morning? Why did the fried egg stick to the pan? Why did the snow hit Spokane instead of Pullman? Why did this resistor burn, while that one over there is nicely cool? How do I know which part of the computer needs to be replaced?

After the students have their motivation, after they feel the frustration and puzzlement of the question, after they know that the answer will help them to live better or earn more money, THEN you can go into the lab and check out the details. And after the details have been discussed and settled, preferably with some (carefully contained) failures to show what doesn't work, THEN you can show the math and theoretical background.

This is how the Russians did it, with great results; yet despite a few good local programs, we still don't teach this way in most schools.

The Taliban way of thinking is destructive because it starts with definite knowledge and proceeds to immediate action. Allahu akbar, therefore we must destroy all evidence of other gods.

Krauss's own mindset is much closer to the Taliban than to science or Christianity. He takes evolution and global warming as unquestioned axioms, from which we must proceed to immediate action.

A good Christian, or a good scientist, is far more humble. "We'll understand it all by and by" is a Christian attitude and a scientific attitude.

= = = = =

Update: It appears that NBC Nightly News will be doing a feature on math teaching, called "Math Wars", Mon 2/18. Dispute is an encouraging sign ... but it would be more encouraging if the CORRECT method, the EXPERIMENTAL method, had been chosen 100 years ago when it was already obvious.

In a backward sort of way, the Kraussites are right about one thing. Good teaching is actually opposed by conservative and religious factions, but this is totally unrelated to Darwin. Every respected "conservative" is required to rant for "sticking to the basics" and rant against "progressive" education. Unfortunately "sticking to the basics" always means teaching by memorization of verbal facts, while "progressive" education includes the Montessori methods that work, PLUS a batch of egalitarian ratshit about eliminating competition and eliminating grades.

The correct solution, the Russian solution, is not "the basics", but Montessori PLUS competition and evaluation. Since the correct solution lies outside the rigid chalk lines of each team, it will never be adopted. The "conservatives" will never allow experiential education because it has been dirtied by association with the Left; and the Left will never allow competition because insane egalitarianism is an absolute core belief of the Left, second only to the sacrament of Abortion. I conclude that the teams have drawn the lines this way intentionally, since the one thing our political teams WILL NEVER ALLOW UNDER ANY CONDITIONS IS A CORRECT SOLUTION TO ANY PROBLEM. We must, must, must, must, must, must, continue our pointless repetition of opposing meaningless mantras, while the ship continues to sink with nobody at the helm.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Only one thing has changed since 2008: We're now imitating the Taliban literally instead of metaphorically.

Labels: constants and constants, Experiential education, Krauss, Natural law = Soviet law

  ¶ 8:35 PM

  Regenerative Karens
Some Brits are surprised at the ferocity of Karenism in the current holocaust. They shouldn't be surprised. The British government has cultivated Karens for a long time. US Deepstate has picked up the habit, but it's still nowhere near as strong or well established. YET.

A 1924 article in Wireless Weekly shows the consistency of the long Karen pattern.

Headline: The BBC as Secret Police

Background: Regenerative receivers worked by creating an internal oscillation that served to demodulate the signal. Early regens had the annoying habit of transmitting their internal oscillation back through the antenna, which was a serious problem for neighboring receivers. Superhets, which were brand new in 1924 and not commercially popular yet, use an internal oscillator in a more orderly and 'quiet' way.

Many of our readers will have been astonished to note in the issue of Radio Times of March 21 a column headed " The Oscillation Nuisance - An Official Effort to Assist Listeners." The Officials of the British Broadcasting Company, in this "Important Notice," ask for information to be sent to them on a particular Form, which should state : Your name; Your address; Nature of complaint (duration, intensity, whether constant or intermittent); Name and address of offender (if known). The note which appears under this Form indicates that the information will be treated confidentially, and with regard to the third item, it is pointed out that it is useless to make wild guesses.

History in past centuries, and even in this century, has indicated that the encouragement of giving information to those in authority, whether this authority has been the Inquisition or the Secret Police under the Czarist regime, has led to the worst form of despotism and misery. When an important body like the British Broadcasting Company practically invites listeners to send them the names and addresses of people they think are oscillating, things have come to a pretty pass. Although the offence of oscillating is not a serious one in comparison with certain crimes, yet the principle is not altered, and the people of this country resent any interference with their liberty and peace.

If the BBC continues this invitation, no one will be safe from the secret postcard to the BBC which "will be treated confidentially," and which, in most cases, will be an outrageous, and sometimes spiteful, libel. Jones will not be able to meet Smith without wondering whether he has turned informer.

For comparison, America in 1924 was bootleggers and speakeasies. Snitches got stitched up by a Thompson gun.

We're getting far more Karenish in the current holocaust, but Karens who try to dominate a Facebook conversation still get blasted down effectively. We haven't reached parity with British Karens. YET.

= = = = =

Sidenote: I compared Prohibition to lockdowns back in May, but at that time the strictly partisan craziness wasn't fully formed. Now that it's formed, the comparison is worth trying again.

Prohibition was passed by midwestern Christians and Populists. NYC and media immediately rebelled, and most of the country had a healthy disdain for the rules.

Lockdowns were started by Trump, an NYC Deepstater who is falsely and maliciously mislabeled as a Populist. Even though he started and encouraged the holocaust, NYC and media are rebelling for MORE lockdowns and masks and riots. Pluponents, not opponents. There are NO OPPONENTS anywhere in the power structure. Normal people still have a healthy disdain for the genocide, but we have no support from any written or media source, no support from any politician or expert or entertainment.

The partisan divide is fully insane. Biden promises to MAINTAIN and INCREASE the lockdowns and masks and riots that Trump started. Trump has made no attempt to slow down the holocaust, but the idiot R partisans want to re-elect him so he can stop what he obviously enjoys. Both "sides" are incomprehensibly bonkers.

Labels: Jackboot stomping forever, Pluponents

  ¶ 4:51 PM

  Peculiar switch in Quora
Lately I've been perusing Quora out of boredom. The random popups often yield semi-interesting material that seems to be shaped by my preferred clicks. Pretty good use of Big Data. See what the user clicks, give him more of it.

Two days ago for no obvious reason Quora required me to fill out a survey of my desired subjects. Since then, the random pops are no longer suited to my interests as expressed in the survey. Everything is about Steve Jobs, who I've never found even remotely interesting (to put it EXTREMELY MILDLY) and never tried to read about.

The only thing I know about Apple is that I've never voluntarily owned their shit or used their "services". Apple has been Satan for 40 years.

Later: The Jobs emphasis was a brief artifact. Quora has returned to its usual patterns.

Labels: AI point-missing

  ¶ 2:53 PM

  Debugging the demons
Some pretty good thinkers are having trouble, or pretending to have trouble, with the obvious connections between Public Death Officers. The thinkers are still claiming it's just Groupthink and imitation. Nope, won't wash.

Let's look at this from a technician's point of view, debugging the circuit.

= = = = =

We're watching a timelapse of a neighborhood over 24 hours.

First case.



This is human action. The residents are turning on the porchlights for their own reasons. Maybe they're expecting visitors, maybe they're letting the dog out, maybe they're checking on a suspicious car.

= = = = =

Second case.



This is NOT human action. All of the porchlights are wired to one central switch or central wi-fi command, perhaps with cutouts in each house; but nobody is using the cutout. All the houses have paid their electric bill, all the bulbs are good.

= = = = =

Third case.



This is more interesting. Clearly all but one are responding mechanically to a central command. One is not responding. At this point we don't know why. Maybe the resident has cut the wi-fi, or maybe the house is without power, or maybe the bulb is burned out.

The third case is what we see in the current holocaust. All but a handful of countries turned their Demon lights on at EXACTLY THE SAME TIME on March 1, and all but a handful added the Murder Mask light at EXACTLY THE SAME TIME on June 23.

The handful may have different reasons. In this case we know the reasons. Sweden and Belarus have excellent Socialist health care, and intentionally cut the wires from the central switch to maintain NORMAL control over their own lives. Some African countries are too disorganized to follow a central command (no electricity), or don't have a health care system that could implement the orders if they were given (no bulb).

The most heroic is Tanzania, which is on the disorganized side. The president refused the blackmail offered by WHO, refused to IMPRISON AND KILL HIS OWN PEOPLE in return for funding to "improve" and murderize his health care system. Instead, he used REAL EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE to demolish the fake witchcraft "science" of the demons. The proverbial Martian archeologists will recognize Lukashenko and Lofven as courageous heroes, and single out Magufuli as the biggest hero of SCIENCE in this holocaust. (No point in writing a hypothetical sentence about Earth "historians". Nonexistent entity.)

= = = = =

Update March 2021: And now Magufuli is a martyr, killed for his heroic science and his heroic resistance. Again, if "historians" existed, he would be in the same category as Bruno or Lavoisier.

= = = = =

Later thought: Another simultaneous event that can't be explained by Groupthink or imitation is the switch to counting "cases". All media, including alleged "independents" like Zerohedge and RT, learned the trick with all of its details at the same time. This was NEVER done before in any real epidemic. If the instructions hadn't been passed and enforced at the same moment, we'd have some media continuing the previous habits from REAL epidemics when media simply noted untimely deaths, mainly deaths of famous people. Since there haven't been any famous people "dying" from this "epidemic", the media wouldn't have been counting anything.

Labels: Constants and Variables, Jackboot stomping forever

  ¶ 6:09 AM

  Comparing yaks
After spending a week waiting for various permissions, I finally settled into proper testing of my courseware on the Canvas LMS. After two days of trying and failing, I happened to notice some forum discussions.... It turns out others are having the same problem, which seems to have cropped up this semester. Canvas simply isn't handling SCORM grades properly.

I don't know whether I should be semi-satisfied that it's not entirely my bug, or annoyed at spending so much UNPAID time and energy on someone else's bug. I'll pick 'Both'. Canvas is part of a fairly large corporation that has its own PAID programmers. Why aren't they fixing their OWN bugs?

Overall, I can't see why Canvas is becoming the preferred LMS. Compared to Blackboard and Moodle, it's much harder to get into, much harder to use, much less transparent, much less resilient. Canvas rejects several browsers outright.

Blackboard and Moodle are about equal. They behave differently, but both have the same general level of convenience and flexibility. For my taste Blackboard is marginally better because it handles multi-SCO packages.

Labels: TMI

  ¶ 1:47 PM

  Silly question
Alleged "study" headlined at RCS: Did Neanderthals live in caves?

Simple answer: Where caves are usable, EVERYONE lives in caves. The early settlers in Kansas took advantage of plentiful caves along the Kaw, where the river had carved under a limestone layer. Some of those caves were just indentations at the base of a bluff, others were deep and spacious. Most were used at one time or another. The biggest ones have been turned into a complete underground city beneath parts of KCK and KCMO.

I saluted one of the 'indentation' caves in my Cave Gas blog item and Poser set.



Speaking of Manhattan and limestone, the Kimble Castle is for sale right now. Only $1.5 million. (That's a genuine 'only'; the property is worth a LOT more by any rational standard.)

I used to walk past the Castle on the way to school and always wondered what it was like inside. Unfortunately Zillow didn't satisfy my curiosity about the original innards because the Castle has been "updated" with all the latest rich fuckhead crap. The original innards were long gone anyway. For most of the 20th century the Castle was subdivided into student apts.

= = = = =

Irrelevant sidenote: I called it Kedzie Castle at first. Didn't seem right, felt like I was conflating it with Kedzie Hall on campus, which was also a castle; but I didn't know for sure. Checked KSHS, found Kimble Castle. Sure enough I was conflating two similar castles with similar names. Edited to correct. While searching KSHS, another K* Castle showed up, with a beautiful example of Emersonian Justice. The story of Knox Castle in Topeka:

Here are two photographs and an illustration from Saturday Evening Lance showing the exterior of John D. Knox's "Belvoir" home in Topeka, Kansas. The house was built in 1884 at the north end of Potwin on a 7-acre tract of land between Woodlawn and Elmwood Avenues and facing Grove Avenue. The rambling three-story structure--also known as Knox's Castle--cost $40,000 to build. John D. Knox, a Methodist minister, was employed by the Kansas Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He arrived in Topeka, Kansas in 1865 and started preaching at the First Methodist Church. Knox discovered he had a talent for making money and eventually made a fortune by buying tax sale certificates and property. By 1871, Knox was president of Capitol Bank in Topeka, resigning in 1873 to become head of John D. Knox and Co., Bankers and Loan Agents. In the mid 1890s, the United States was in the midst of a financial panic, and on August 10, 1898 the Topeka Daily Capital reported that Knox filed for bankruptcy. He lost everything except the house his family continued to live in for several years. The house, which cost $40,000 to build in 1884, was sold for $23,000 to Herman Baumer. It was demolished in 1924 and the lumber was used to build a dozen bungalows in the Belvoir Court District.

Preacher Knox got rich by profiting from bankruptcies, and then went bankrupt. Justice. Couldn't happen today, of course; rich criminals (redundant) are rewarded with trillion-dollar bailouts and continue committing even larger crimes.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Emersonian justice

  ¶ 10:33 AM

  More from 1942
Another article in the 1942 Westinghouse Engineer also has an immediate resonance. The subject is electrical dust filters. History:

This simple principle of electrical precipitation of dust was noticed by Hohlfeld of Germany in 1824 as he watched the behavior of an electrical discharge in smoke. Nothing came of his observation until 1884 when Sir Oliver Lodge successfully applied the principle in a lead smelter. Electrical precipitation of dust did not become widely practical until 1906 when Cottrell, who had worked with Lodge, brought out the precipitator that bears his name.

Hmm. Lodge. Where have we heard that name? And where have we heard 1906?

Most of the article discusses various modern precipitators, based on the 1906 Cottrell invention.

This chart of the Dust Spectrum is especially useful. (I tacked on Orange Man Bad "virus" for future reference, but it's not the focus here.)



Note the area of 'smokes' and the typical smoke particle.

In the recent Gaian Punishment Smoke Lockdown, the EPA warned us NOT to use electrical precipitators. Only use filters!

Which of them would take care of the smoke? Precipitators, not filters. I found that the filter was ineffective by experiment, but I don't have a precipitator so I don't know if it would have done a better job.

Why did EPA tell us NOT to use the precipitators? Because they generate ozone, which is a "pollutant".

Can't make it up.

The rule is always the same. Government FORBIDS self-defense and REQUIRES methods and devices that make the pollution or disease WORSE.

= = = = =

Later, I animated the Lodge precipitator.

Labels: Carbon Cult, defensible spaces, defensible thymes, defensible times

  ¶ 5:36 AM

  Turning blackouts to light
When you know nothing will affect the psychopathic demons, you shouldn't waste time gathering facts or supporting candidates or protesting. Those actions are completely futile and often sponsored by Satan.

In the first month or two of this holocaust, the total waste wasn't yet clear, so gathering and spreading facts** seemed worthwhile. Now it's clear that nothing but personality counts. Sane leaders remain sane until the end, demons continue killing everyone until the end.

Peasants and intellectuals in the 1500s understood that there was no way to change the insane inbred infantile monsters who were permanently in charge. If you were lucky enough to get a sane monarch for a while, you enjoyed it. Otherwise you just tried to serve God as payment for the miracle of life, and PRAYED HARD for an end to the monster.

The best thing you can do is to flip the ugliness of war and evil into practical and beautiful creations. Raise good crops or good children, make good furniture, do good science, write good music. This is what God expects of us.

= = = = =

American Radio Library added a 1942 issue of Westinghouse Engineer with an apt example of turning the exigencies of war into beauty and practicality.

WW2 was a necessary and justified project, like all of FDR's projects. But blackouts were a fake exigency. They weren't needed, and most people understood they weren't needed. Bombers could find targets without streetlights. Still, most people obeyed.

Westinghouse was trying to find solutions to retain more of normal life while lights were forced off:

If a military blackout consists merely in discontinuing past methods of illumination, it well may delay and confuse the defenders as well as the enemy. If unmodified darkness should interfere radically with necessary traffic movement, or if it should cripple production, facilitate sabotage or lead to panics, then its result would be much the same as if the enemy actually destroyed property and morale by bombing. But since blackouts seem necessary under present conditions, it is comforting to know that through the development of new luminous materials it is possible to alleviate some of the inconveniences and hazards of complete darkness; it is possible to provide "storage batteries" of light as substitutes for lamp bulbs, luminous signs, or the usual signals and markers during emergencies. Incited by the impact of blackouts and stimulated by wartime needs, phosphorescent materials have developed rapidly and are now becoming useful tools in the lighting art.

Generally speaking, these materials are zinc and cadmium sulphides in one group (greens, yellows) and calcium or strontium sulphides (blues) in another, with traces of other inorganic compounds.

Phosphorescence didn't really catch on, and certainly didn't continue, except in watch dials. We've gained the false impression that phosphorescence is always radioactive, but most of the compounds are natural and 'organic'.

= = = = =

** How futile is gathering facts? The futility can be proved by simple logic.


The CDC doesn't listen to the CDC's own facts.


From the fucking start of the holocaust, CDC's own published numbers have shown clearly that the "virus", if any, is NOT AN EPIDEMIC. From the fucking start, the deaths in CDC's own published data have been almost entirely among people in nursing homes and hospices, people SCHEDULED TO DIE. When the monsters won't listen to their OWN facts, there's no purpose in trying to bring EXTERNAL facts to their attention. They know the truth by fucking definition, and they continue to murder the world in direct contradiction to their own published data.

Why do they publish data that disagrees with their actions? Sucker filter. Cults and scams always do this. If you want to select the craziest and fiercest adherents for your cult or fraud, you want ONLY the people who refuse to believe their own senses.

= = = = =

Later thought: Phosphorescent paint didn't gain popularity because blackouts were temporary, and electric power was reliable after WW2 thanks to FDR's hydro dams and infrastructure projects. Now electric power is no longer reliable, thanks to EPA's destruction of dams and nuke plants and coal plants and grids and forests. So phosphorescent paint might be worth trying again on the west coast where power has reverted to third world standards with government-forced blackouts.

Labels: 2000=1000, Natural law = Sharia law, Natural law = Soviet law, storage, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 2:40 PM

  Riots are government projects.
In previous item about silly riot "causes", this sentence popped out spontaneously:

Riots are government projects.

Seems like a pretty sharp observation, so I added it to the top icon.

The word projects is the key. The US government often runs big projects. Most of them are military projects to kill people in other countries. Some of them, like Madman Lincoln's War, are military projects to kill Americans. The grand exception to this rule was FDR's projects. His projects aimed to BUILD the productive economy and BUILD skills in the workers who had been forcibly disemployed by the banker economy.

After FDR, Eisenhower ran the Interstate Highway project in the same constructive spirit.

Aside from the Interstates and dams, ALL projects since 1946 have been solely destructive. Real riots, real wars, fake panics, fake emergencies, fake epidemics, fake terrorism, fake bank crises. All aimed at enriching a handful of aristocrats and obliterating the skills and lives and souls of the nation.

Labels: Jackboot stomping forever, skill-estate

  ¶ 8:31 AM

  Tube sidetrack continued
In previous item I suggested an alt-history where coherers and catwhiskers developed directly into semiconductors, or secondarily where the original Audion tube remained small and low-voltage. In those universes, experimentation would have remained easy, and real inventions would have occurred faster.

I was focusing on two separate variables, safety and size. In safety the oldest and newest eras are equally good. The tube era from 1925 to 1965 was hard for experimenters because plate voltages were dangerous. In size, the oldest era had most of the advantage. It's nice to fit your workbench into one desk, but it's nicer to SEE and HANDLE and REPAIR the devices you're working with.

Bigger things are easier to handle and repair. The latter may not be obvious to moderns.

Here's a comparison of 1918 components with moderns, more or less in proportion. In each case the 1918 is from a GenRad catalog, so it's probably a tad larger and more accessible than regular commercial parts.

Variable capacitors:


Inductors:


Potentiometers:


Rotary switches:


The 1918 components are all open, with their internal parts visible. You can clean the contacts, lubricate the shafts, and see an incipient hot spot. You can examine and fix many problems without removing and replacing the component.

The modern items are all closed and tiny. There's no way to see or fix anything. You can only replace the whole item when it goes wrong. In most real devices these components are mounted on a multilayer PC board that will be ruined if you even try to desolder and resolder, so in fact the entire board, or the entire radio or computer, must be replaced.

= = = = =

I noticed another item in the GenRad catalog that I'd never seen before:



A spark indicator. Clearly this was built from an ordinary electric fan. I can't find any GenRad manuals for it, or any pics in magazines of the time. It must have been something like a stroboscope, allowing you to see the sync-ness and shape of the individual pulses created by a typical Ruhmkorff coil with spark gap. Strobes were a GenRad specialty from the start.

Labels: Alternate universe

  ¶ 5:59 AM

  First TOTAL return to normal.
Florida was already pretty close to normal, and now DeSantis has made it ABSOLUTE AND OFFICIAL. No more requirements. Most important, counties and cities are FORBIDDEN to impose their own lockdowns and murder masks.

The mayors have been the worst of the mass murderers. In states where the governors tried to be slightly sane, mayors insisted on running an all-out holocaust.

BRAVO, BRAVO, BRAVO.

DeSantis has been ahead of the curve for a long time. Now he's the unconstested absolute leader of the sane side.

Now there are exactly two normal places in the world. Belarus and Florida. Belarus never departed from normal at all. Florida didn't depart very far and returned fairly fast.

As I noted before, Turkmenistan and Sweden and Uruguay remained officially normal at the national level, but it's clear from randomly sampled Youtube clips that many localities have imposed their own murder masks, so the official rules didn't really control the country.

= = = = =

Later: I've been trying to correlate the normal/crazy axis with more systematic variables like strength of control. There's no clear pattern. For sure, a sane leader needs to have control of his bureaucrats and military if he wants to impose sanity on the mayors and school boards. A leader who doesn't have control, or isn't willing to USE his real control, will allow crazy mayors and crazy corporations to ruin the whole country.

Examining the four points of the truth table:

An innately sane and good leader, with strong authority, will create a normal country where normal people can live in peace and security.

A sane leader who doesn't have or use authority is useless. Lower-level demons will take control.

A psychopath with full authority will kill everyone.

A psychopath who doesn't have full authority is logically impossible. Psychopathic demons will do everything necessary, from honeytraps to assassinations, to GAIN total absolute control of the bureaucrats, and then kill everyone.

= = = = =

Strength of control is a second-level variable. In the end PERSONALITY is the only thing that matters.

Labels: Jackboot NOT stomping forever

  ¶ 3:16 PM

  Same myth
Randomly semi-connected to the 'Darwin causes riots' idiocy.....

An item from Berenson:

C) Japan has certain sociological or other factors that make it more resistant to the virus (ie very low obesity)...

Team Apocalypse has chosen

D) Japan didn't actually fail and DID CONTROL THE VIRUS. (And a well-designed study that says otherwise is wrong! Because science.)

All non-genetic explanations for Japanese difference are pointless. The same failure happens with the question of diet. Nutrition researchers like to claim that the Jap diet gives them long life. In fact the Jap diet is awful by the standards of the same nutritionists. Lots of salt, lots of red meat and white rice. Japs smoke like chimneys and drink like fish. They still live to 110. They're just DIFFERENT, and SUPERIOR in many ways. They would probably be considered a separate species by the more rational definitions of species.

You'd think that the existence of GENES wouldn't be controversial, 150 years after Darwin and Mendel, and 65 years after Watson and Crick. Unfortunately the idiots who claim to be following Darwin still won't acknowledge that GENES EXIST.

In the specific case of the current holocaust, neither side should be drawing conclusions from Japan. Nothing that happens in Japan can be applied to Euro types. Different species. I've been careful to separate out the Oriental countries in my futile counts of sane vs holocaustal countries.

Labels: variables and variables

  ¶ 9:30 AM

  Constants and Variables 156, riot myth edition
Bizarrely stupid and intentionally wrong myths about riots are proliferating fast.

Riots are caused by lack of shared narrative.

Riots are caused by lack of classical education.

Riots are caused by Darwin.

These idiocies are NOT EVEN PART OF THE STORY.

1. Starting a successful riot or revolution requires massive preparation and organization. Massive preparation doesn't happen unless GOVERNMENT WANTS IT TO HAPPEN. This isn't new. For at least 170 years Deepstate has been deciding which movements to wipe out and which to co-opt. The wiped-out organizations don't get a chance to speak or protest. They only get to die. The co-opted and owned organizations are encouraged and assisted in rioting.

Real revolutions require FOREIGN government support to overbalance the internal Deepstate.

2. Starting isn't enough. Riots only CONTINUE when governments tell police to stop being police. This variable is easy to observe in the current situation. Seattle vs Spokane. The same people started the riot in both places. (I happened to hear some of the "visiting" agitators, so I'm not just guessing about this.) In Seattle the city government openly wanted riots and told the police to surrender. Here, despite the best efforts of the permanently insane city council, some part of the government accidentally allowed the police to continue being police. The heroic cops carefully distinguished** between non-violent and violent actions, and QUICKLY ARRESTED the violent actors. The second weekend fizzled, and the third riot failed to start. (Admittedly the Weather Gods also assisted.)

In all the cities where riots are continuing, the city government is OPENLY AND SOLIDLY on the side of violence. This is not mysterious or theoretical.

Riots are government projects.

= = = = =

** Distinguishing isn't hard. Most of the violence in riots is performed by non-political professional criminals who are recruited for their violent skills. The cops know these criminals on a first-name basis, since the permanently insane "court" system simply gives the professionals a two-hour coffee break between jobs.

Labels: #bluelivesmatter, Constants and Variables, Jail mode, skill-estate

  ¶ 6:46 AM

  Tubes were an unnecessary and destructive sidetrack
Random afterthought to real coherers.

Thinking again about those submini tubes while using the breadboard for experimentation led to a historical oddity.

Tubes were probably an unnecessary sidetrack in the overall development of electronics, making experimentation unnecessarily hard for a few decades.

If the path of coherers and catwhiskers had been extended, it would have led quickly to transistors. The Lodge liquid coherer was a solid-state diode. Some early experimenters with catwhisker-style detectors developed the triode transistor but didn't pursue it.

Tubes made experimentation hard because they needed high plate voltage, which in turn required special precautions. When you're fiddling with 1.5 to 18 Volts, you can plug and unplug stuff and screw around to your heart's content, without stopping your heart or starting a fire. When you're working with 250 Volts, extreme caution is needed.

The HV could have been avoided if the original Audion had led directly to those submini tubes. Subminis easily live in the same breadboard world as transistors and ICs, with 1.5 V filament and 18 V plate. DeForest's original Audion operated in this range.

The Brits had subminis in the '30s, but America stuck with the big HV tubes until '48. By that time the transistor was already underway and the tube era was fading.

Plain old size is another factor in experimentation, but it's more of a balanced factor. The components in 1920 were much larger than now, requiring bigger workbenches and more woodworking and metalworking tools. If I had been working with those components, I couldn't keep my electronics stuff inside one desk. I'd need a separate workroom or an outside ham shack. But larger components are easier to handle and repair, and easier to see, so there are advantages both ways. Safety is a purely one-way variable.

Continued here.

Labels: Alternate universe, Lodge, Morsenet of Things

  ¶ 12:08 AM

  Real Coherers!
After doing an emotional salute to the coherer, I got curious to see if any original coherers were available, or a newly made version. No originals, but amazingly Navone Engineering is making new ones following the original Marconi recipe.

We'll do the unboxing routine. In the box:



The packed innards:



And here's the coherer, along with a penny for scale and a submini tube for comparison. (The powder is in the short gap between the two brass rods.)



The actual coherer looks better up close than Navone's promo pic on Ebay. It's made the same way as the submini tubes that I was playing with a few years ago.

The enclosed instruction brochure is well written, professionally printed and folded. It runs through the same history I covered, including the Japanese 'second life' of coherers.

Navone included a little piezo sparker to make a proper electric spark. This was actually the hardest part of the experiment for me. I understand coherers but I'd never used a sparker, and various online videos didn't clarify how to use them. The button was too firm for my elderly fingers. I used Channellocks to squeeze it until it SNAPPED, and got a spark.

I set up a simple series circuit on my homemade lab breadboard. After trying various combos of voltage and LEDs and meters and resistors, I ended up using 3V with no inline resistor and a little incandescent bulb.

The coherer is highly sensitive to tapping, as it should be; and it's also highly sensitive to the applied potential difference. When powered by 9 or 18 Volts, it wants to conduct all the time. On 1.5 V it doesn't want to conduct at all. 3V is the Mama Bear.

Very low light before the spark, light increases after the spark, and stays on until tapped.

Here's a GIF showing one sequence of spark on / tap off.

= = = = =

And here's a schematic version.



= = = = =

Happy second life, Coherers!



Techy footnote: Coherers weren't originally meant to sense nearby sparks and RF in the ether; they were meant to sense RF in the circuit from an antenna input. They worked both ways.

This real coherer doesn't seem to respond to non-sparky RF. I tried keying my little Pixie 40-meter transmitter near it, and even touched the antenna wire from the Pixie to the coherer's wire. No brightening. It does respond to a mechanically generated spark from my flint propane lighter.

Labels: Carver, Equipoise, new toy, Trinity House

  ¶ 10:00 AM

  More in the same mode
In the current fake emergency, as well as previous fake emergencies, many skeptics are focusing on misperception of risk. Innumeracy. Bayesian denominators. Inadequate evolution. Inadequate education. That's not even part of the story.

Most people perceive real risks accurately. We don't need numbers. What happens in these fake emergencies is a barrage of FALSE INFORMATION about the EVENT ITSELF. We end up perceiving the risk of the MYTH accurately, and forget about plain old REALITY.

Example 1: Three Mile Island. Most people perceived the risk of nuclear power accurately, and the ACTUAL EVENT corresponded EXACTLY to our perception of risk. Some employees at TMI were injured or killed, but NOBODY outside the plant was even bothered. ZERO radiation escaped. Design and engineering worked perfectly to protect the PUBLIC from a cascade of stupid operator errors. The media pounded us with FALSE INFORMATION about the event itself. Even though I knew what happened, I still have to slap down the impression that thousands of people died.

Example 2: AIDS. Most people perceived their risk accurately. Active homosexuals saw their friends and "husbands" dying, and knew they were in immediate and lethal risk. People outside of that culture saw nobody dying, and knew they were at zero risk. Then the media POUNDED US over and over with the FALSE INFORMATION that AIDS was spreading to everyone. It was, as fucking always, an Equal Opportunity Disease.

Example 3: The current holocaust. People who are already dying know they're dying, and know that their risk from any virus or stress is 100%. People who are not already dying know that we're not sick, and NOBODY is sick. THIS IS NOT AN EPIDEMIC, and probably isn't even a "virus". Both groups perceived their own risk accurately. Then the media BARRAGED US AND MACHINEGUNNED US with holocaustally false disinfomation that the "virus" is an Equal Opportunity Killer, as fucking always.

Labels: Blinded by Stats, Jackboot stomping forever

  ¶ 7:49 AM

  Interesting map
An item in Quora about introvert-friendly countries talks mostly about weather.

The author picks Estonia, Finland and Russia as most introvert-friendly.

In cold places people spend more time huddling inside, so culture is less touchy and more lonely. Makes sense, but I don't think it's the real variable. Estonia and Finland are a unique ethnic group, more closely related to the stoic old American tribes than to Teutons or Slavs. Warrior tribes don't talk. In parts of America where those tribes formed the culture, talking is peculiar and silence is expected. Much easier for innate introverts.

The item includes a map of population density that sort of halfway makes the point. The map really shows something unexpected, not tied to weather at all.

Where are most of the people in Europe? On the Rhine.

An unmistakable crescent in the middle of the continent. A few big cities like Paris and London are isolated islands of population, but most of the people are on the Rhine.

Labels: Answered better than asked

  ¶ 5:27 AM

  More auto random
The latest issue of Collectible Auto mag has some good articles as usual, and some unusually good letters from readers.

One letter offers a hidden explanation for a sales pattern that already had an open explanation. Why was '55 a great year for car sales and '58 an awful year? The open explanation, which is undoubtedly part of the story, is that the '55s were distinctly better than before, and the '58s were uniformly horrible. Chevy finally got a V8 in '55, and Chrysler products finally got styling.

The hidden explanation: In '55, just in time for the model year, the Federal Reserve loosened regulations on car loans. Previously car loans were restricted to 2 years with 20% down. After the loosening, most loans were 3 or 4 years, so short-term thinkers felt that they were able to buy new cars. They weren't really more able, of course, since a longer loan costs more.

'58 was certainly a bust because of horrible cars, but it was even bustier because those short-term thinkers were still paying on their 3-year and 4-year loans. Previously they would have been able to start a new loan. This effect probably extended into '59 as well for the 4-year loans.

Another letter offered a new factoid about those mysterious Nash trucks made from '47 to '54. Previously it was thought that they all went down to Mexico in response to fleet orders. In '51 about 200 went to Scandinavia for retail sale, and at least one of them is still in active use, pictured in the letter.

Also, the trucks were rated 4 tons, not 1.5 tons as usually written. The question remains. Why did Nash go to the trouble of designing and tooling and building 5000 heavy trucks, developing plenty of new skills, then sell them only in foreign countries? It runs contrary to Nash's preservationist character. There was plenty of unsatisfied demand for trucks, and farmers would have loved those trucks. Especially in northern states where Nash's superior heater would beat the crude aftermarket heaters in other trucks.

Labels: Answered better than asked

  ¶ 4:47 PM

  Got curious
Speaking of mental self-defense....

A couple weeks ago in an item about the Lucid Interval of the 1930s I was quoting a remarkably sane article by a certified expert, John Erskine.

At the end I sidenoted the education inherent in low-budget radio programs....

Sidenote from another angle: Erskine was undervaluing some of the education available in plain commercial programs, especially the low-budget syndicated serials. Ann of the Airlanes was packed with serious information about geography and technology, presented in digestible form. Dick Tracy organized the young listeners in Detective Clubs. For 5 boxtops of Quaker cereals you got a Secret Decoder Ring, and every episode gave you a "coded" message to solve, so you could stay ahead of the villain. Kids who spent time on that task were learning more about language than the idiotic fictional "grammar" they were hearing from Miss Marley.

Well, I got curious, so I found a Decoder Book (not Decoder Ring) on Ebay and bought it.

The book is pocket-size:



The book and other items like badges and rings were 'premiums' acquired by sending in boxtops from Quaker cereals.

Most of the book is organizational advice and OpSec training for the Secret Detective Clubs. The radio program had a virtual 'meeting' at the end of each episode, with a message to decode. Each message started with a keyword followed by a series of numbers. I wrote down one of the messages:

FOOTBALL
10 11 7 17 11 26
17 9 12 25
5 17 6 15
11 25 13 3 26


The keyword made me wonder if the cipher was a Vigenere style, but it's not that complicated.



There were three active keywords, each leading to a different 'static' transposition, not a 'mobile' transposition as in Vigenere or the Hagelin machines. The transpositions are nicely randomized, indicating that the program must have paid a real cryptographer for advice.

Unfortunately the episodes available online are from a different year with a different set of keywords, so I couldn't actually decipher the message. But I did satisfy my curiosity about the type of cipher. (The book cost $35, so I'm not going to buy a different edition to find the right keywords!)

The writers gave especially good advice about when and how to use ciphers without making the use obvious. They advised club members to send at least one message to each of the other local members every day, to stay in practice. Learning with a purpose!



Members were also supposed to learn Morse and use it in a variety of ways for private signaling. Club members were learning the essentials of communication and meaning, and developing their own private modes of communication.

Before WW1 the Army Signal Corps was training its members in a similar way, mastering creative communication so they could circumvent enemy interception without central guidance.

Needless to say, no school or media or corporation is going to sponsor this category of learning now. No codes, no private OpSec. Only NSA-created and NSA-backdoored digital encryption is allowed, and creative modes are never discussed.

Labels: defensible cases, Experiential education

  ¶ 1:14 PM

  Non-news about non-orders from a non-skeptic
In the distant past, Radio Moscow offered a genuine opposition view. It was naturally self-serving, but it was often correct. Now RT simply runs the same nonsense as any other US media.

Non-news today:

Three major federal agencies have forged ahead with plans to host critical race theory training for their employees, teaching them to "co-resist" and check their white privilege, slides posted by researcher Christopher Rufo show.

The events, scheduled at the State Department, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Veterans’ Administration (VA) in open defiance of a White House memo banning them, are going to deal with “racial equity,” “white fragility” and “microaggressions,” Rufo tweeted on Monday, publishing photos of the training slides he somehow obtained.

Well of course. This is how Trump works. He issues "orders" that are carefully crafted to be non-orders, allowing the agencies to do what they want. Because the agencies are "opposing" Trump, their actions encourage the murderers and enrage the Deplorables. An enraged Deplorable is easier to identify and slaughter.

For a few weeks after the 2017 inauguration, the bureaucrats walked carefully, more or less obeying Trump's "orders" in case he was serious. By March 2017 they figured out the trick or received reassurance from Trump. They simply resumed doing what they always do. Enriching Soros and Bezos and killing everyone else.

RT, following the Fox "side" of the puppet script, helps to enrage the Deplorables about the "disloyal" agencies, which are really serving the same master as Trump.

Calibrating: Looking back through March 2017 to re-locate the item about the "climate" bureaucrats, it's clear that I was slower and stupider than the bureaucrats. Even while I marked the end of bureaucratic obedience, I hadn't really figured out the whole trick. I was still holding out hope for some of Trump's cabinet appointments who seemed to be saying the right things. Trump fired them quickly and replaced them with reliable Deepstaters.

Labels: constants and constants, malign misattribution

  ¶ 6:42 AM

  More typical
As long as I'm doing Quora, here's a more typical Quora question:



Do you favor a teleological or Roarshack approach in educational philosophy?

Like the bots that seek meaningless blog items, these trolls are mechanical assemblages of random words, some of which are misspelled or misdefined. The technique is consistent and easy to spot, but I can't begin to guess the underlying purpose.

Rohrschach has nothing at all to do with teleology or education.

But a Roarshack does have a purpose!

A hail cannon is a Roarshack.

Labels: Entertainment

  ¶ 2:05 AM

  New way of writing
Got bored enough to peruse Quora today. The stories about cultural differences are usually good, and the accounts of mysterious places and hidden rooms are always worth my time. Even discussions of criminals and punishment mostly stick to reality, not the standard myths of "both" "sides".

Along with the readable stuff, it's interesting to watch the new unanswered questions as a measure of troll trends. Right now the recent cessation of a Supreme Demon is the only topic for the trolls. All of them are working for the "left" side, as usual. Along with the predictable crap, these trolls are doing something that I haven't seen before. They're writing new Articles of the REAL constitution.

Of course we know that the REAL constitution is whatever the Supremes and other federal "judges" say at the current microsecond. The 1787 document was removed in 1803 and burned to a crisp, along with the whole country, in 1861. It never really existed.

Most of the recent Articles in the REAL constitution have been written by District Demons, not Supreme Demons. Now the troll army is getting into the act, slipping in ideas that have never been thought of before. One new Article says that the dying wish of an existing Demon must be respected.

Pretty neat trick. Start a rumor, get people talking about it, and pretty soon the crowd believes it. The old Assertion/Insertion routine. When you're involved in discussing ever finer details of an ENTITY, you stop asking whether the ENTITY is real. After the crowd believes it, the Supremes can enforce it.

Exactly a thousand years ago, old Bill Ockham was trying to fight this insertion of ENTITIES through discussion of fine details. He failed, and Deepstates since then have continued to perfect the technique.

Labels: Entertainment

  ¶ 12:23 AM

  More alt-universe
From Belarus, a clip of a student SKILLS exhibit.



Lots of youngsters and adults are milling around and talking normally. There are exactly TWO MASKS in the clip, and the TWO MASKS are exactly where they belong in the NORMAL WORLD. One guy is grinding metal, and the other is spray-painting. NORMAL safety precautions against REAL pollution. The people who are not generating REAL pollution are breathing REAL air. Belarus is NORMAL WORLD.

THE PEOPLE OF BELARUS ARE LIVING A NORMAL LIFE WHILE WE ARE STUCK IN THE WORST CONCEIVABLE HELL. I AM FUCKING TIRED OF THIS SHIT. IT WILL NEVER END. NOTHING HELPS. INFORMATION, LEGISLATION, LITIGATION, REGULATION, ALL FAILED OR NEVER EVEN FUCKING STARTED. NOTHING WORKS, NOTHING HELPS, NOTHING CHANGES.

Labels: Alternate universe, Experiential education, imprecatory psalm

  ¶ 7:48 AM

  Random auto history thought
Alt-history is fun, but needs to use realistic analogies.

Among the many active auto companies that failed, it's pretty easy to figure out a realistic Shoulda/Coulda for most of them.

Auto writers always assume that a company ceased to exist when it stopped making sedans.

Realism tells us that many of those "failures" simply switched from making sedans to making something else. Reo switched to trucks and lasted into the '70s. Hupp switched to HVAC equipment and lasted to the '90s. Peerless switched to beer and is still active now. Studebaker ran a holding company for a variety of products into the '70s, and its defense-contract plant is still running as AM General. Willys gave up on sedans and stuck with its own niche, and is now bigger than ever.

Packard should have switched to aircraft in '51, specializing in luxury corporate jets. In terms of unique skills and factory usage, Packard was already more of an aircraft maker than a car maker.

Nash and Studebaker should have merged. Their strengths and weaknesses were exactly complementary. In the end, Nash didn't need the Hudson merger and survived on a mix of sedans and Willys products until 1987.

But what about Hudson, which would have been left out in the cold by the Nash-Studie merger? It's hard to imagine an alternate future. Hudson never diversified, never branched out from sedans. The other independents at that time were already making a variety of products before the sedan "failure". Hudson's defense contracts were profitable but much smaller than the other independents. No aircraft or trucks or cars, just an assortment of parts and pieces. The contracts didn't add new skills or create new types of manufacturing.

Hudson had a couple chances to specialize in sporty cars, but blew both. In '33 the Terraplane was light, fast, economical and attractive. Hudson quickly eliminated the nice fast car and reapplied the name to the base trim level of big Hudsons. Around the same time, Hudson partly owned Railton, a British sports car firm that used Hudson engines. They never imported Railtons.

Labels: Alternate universe, skill-estate

  ¶ 12:53 AM

  Keeping track of Culp
I've been afraid that Culp would follow the Repooflicans into mindless obedience, but SO FAR he's sticking FIRMLY to the two REAL issues. He hasn't converged to the idiotic license fee issue, which is still the only thing the Repoofs are discussing in their spam emails.

Two real issues:

Stop the lockdowns and distancing and murder masks.

Stop the riots.

It's a good strategic pair. Seattle loves the murder masks but doesn't like being burned out by rioters. The rest of the state isn't directly affected by the riots, but HATES the murder masks and lockdowns, and knows the whole thing is utter ratshit.

He has a new and well-made image on distancing.

Later thought: Actually BOTH types understand that the whole pile of shit has nothing to do with "viruses". BOTH types understand that the murder masks are designed to protect Holy Pure Aristocrats from Bad Deplorable Breath. The Holy Aristocrats need the masks to protect their Physical And Spiritual Purity from Orange Witch Powder. The Deplorables don't have any illusions.
  ¶ 2:43 PM

  We won't allow
Still thinking about the hail cannons and cloud seeders and self-defense.

I made the weather connection in Polistra's 2008 time-travel story. After popping up in 1939 to escape the awfulness of 2008 (little did she know that things would continue getting unimaginably more awful!) she encounters Fran, her 1939 alter ego. Part of the discussion:

= = = = =

Fran: Well, what great advances has America made since '39? Cured cancer?

Pol: No. We have lots of fancy machines and drugs, but except for childhood leukemia, which we can definitely cure, we haven't improved the survival rate in general. You could even say that the fancy machines make things worse, because people know about the cancer earlier.

Fran: That's dismal. Well, cured infantile paralysis?

Pol: Yes, in 1954.

Fran: Cured the common cold?

Pol: No.

Fran: Have you controlled weather? Built domed cities?

Pol: No. In fact we have decided to make no progress in that area. We haven't gone beyond cloud-seeding, and even though we know it works, we won't allow ourselves to do it.

= = = = =

As mentioned before, the common cold question would have halted the story if I'd tried to write this piece now. Instead of curing the common cold, which didn't need curing anyway, we decided to imprison and gag and kill everyone to halt the spread of the common cold. We decided to treat ordinary people VASTLY WORSE than we treat prisoners convicted of crimes. I've been there and I know.

= = = = =

Focusing on the weather point:

We won't allow ourselves to do it is the key. At that time I didn't know about hail cannons, which would have strengthened the point, especially in hail-prone Oklahoma.** Both technologies WORK to prevent damage. They're not complete or always reliable, so you don't want to use them loosely. When properly targeted and considered, both techs can save billions of dollars.

The same applies to ALL forms of self-defense.

The 2nd amendment dudes are always chanting nonsense about an armed population preventing tyranny. This was always nonsense. There's no correlation. Many unarmed countries have decent rulers, and many well-armed countries have dictators. As of this year, the chant ought to be perfectly unchantable. Half of America is armed, but the demonic governors and mayors went right ahead and killed everyone. No deterrence. Only the BLM rioters have tried to attack mayors, and they were doing it because the mayors were INSUFFICIENTLY DEMONIC for their tastes, not because the mayors are TOO DEMONIC for the survival of civilization. Pluponents, not opponents.

In all areas from weather to computers to health to government, we HAVE the weapons but we refuse to use them. The most egregious part of this refusal applies to the INTRINSIC weapons in our own bodies and minds. TV and social media have neutralized our mental immunity with Room 101, and the Public Death Officers have neutralized our physical immunity with panic and lockdowns and murder masks. As I noted yesterday, the same Public Death Officers are using lockdowns against pollution, instead of allowing us to make our own judgments and adapt our own bodies.

= = = = =

** In fact the hail cannons, if I had known about them, would be the only valid argument in Okla. I wrote about cloud seeding because it was relevant to the Dust Bowl, but seeding requires clouds. A region is afflicted by drought because the clouds are simply going elsewhere, not because the clouds are reluctant to release rain. Hail cannons were known to work in 1902, before Okla was a state; and Okla always has more hail than the rest of the country.

Labels: defensible cases, defensible spaces, defensible times, Jackboot stomping forever, Jail mode, Pluponents

  ¶ 1:29 AM

  Metasalute to 1906
Courseware debugging is hung up this weekend by another of those yak-shaving waits for permission, so I got bored.

Reading splendid old French tech magazines.

1906, plus or minus two years, is a pivot point in tech history, for reasons that still aren't clear. Every real invention was done by 1906, at least in conceptual form. Some of the concepts had to wait for refinements in materials and manufacturing. All "new" inventions since then are reinventing a pre-1906 invention and falsely calling it new. Why 1906? It wasn't the start of a war or a major revolution, it wasn't a plague or religious frenzy. No obvious stopping points or inflection points outside the tech world.

Those old French books had wonderful illustrations. This one caught my attention because the car is obviously a Renault. Can I reproduce this with available materials?



Yes. Fortunately I didn't have to make the Renault, or substitute my 1906 Great Smith car. Amazingly, Lucien Lilippe already made one. I already had the telescope and the terrain, and I'd just used the terrain in the hail cannon animation.

Labels: Entertainment

  ¶ 11:36 PM

  Does rain clear the air?
The last 12 hours. Focus on visibility.



Nuff said.

= = = = =

Sidenote: I learned something from this "unusual" burst of bad air. On the first day, the OFFICIAL DASHBOARD was giving official alerts and official Mysterious Horrible Numbers!!!!!

PURPLE ALERT!

MYSTERIOUS AQI = 500!

UNCHARTED TERRITORY!!! LOCKDOWN!!!!!!!!!

So I took the STRONGLY RECOMMENDED ACTIONS and turned on my HEPA air filter full-time.

I also made my usual hour-long store walk during that PURPLE ALERT, anxious about possible consequences but needing to eat. Consequences: Dry throat for an hour or two. Nothing else.

After that, I experimented, turned the HEPA on and off several times, and concluded that it was doing more harm by stirring up the air and bringing drafts toward my nose. It's better to let the crap settle.

Lesson learned. With bad air as with "viruses", TRUST YOUR BODY. With bad air as with "viruses", avoid sudden overloads and forcible inputs. Allow the body to adapt to smaller loads.

Labels: Askedanswered, Experiential education, SES

  ¶ 6:26 AM

  Interesting idea but ignores Manweller
Via Eurekalert, a project is already underway to create citizen "focus groups" to guarantee compliance with gene editing like CRISPR.

Dryzek and colleagues believe that citizens' assemblies - groups of lay-people tasked with diving deep into the ethical and moral issues thrown up by genome editing - will provide a valuable guide for scientists, doctors and politicians around the world.

"The fact that they are made up of citizens with no history of activism on an issue means they are good at reflecting upon the relative weight of different values and principles," Professor Dryzek said.

Think of how we trust juries in court cases to reach good judgements. Deliberation is a particularly good way to harness the wisdom of crowds, as it enables participants to piece together the different bits of information that they hold in constructive and considered fashion."

No history of activism is an important distinction. Real juries follow this rule, and do in fact make good decisions. A lot of our "political" idiocy should be replaced by more jury-like deciders.

BUT: None of this matters because Big Science won't listen to the wrong decision. Big Science will simply continue doing what gets the grants. Genocide gets the grants.

Manweller's Rule is universal. Elections don't count unless they agree with Deepstate. Protests are only effective when they agree with Deepstate. Jury decisions are only allowed to stand when they agree with Deepstate.

Fake "democracy" is the biggest obstacle to real reform. We shouldn't waste our precious lives and souls on fake processes that change nothing.

PEOPLE ARE INNATELY AND PERMANENTLY DIFFERENT, and PERSONALITY MATTERS more than anything else. A sane leader will lead sanely, and a psychopathic leader will kill everyone.

When we're stuck in a country or state led by demonic psychopaths, we need to adopt a medieval attitude. Live our lives as decently as we can, recognizing that the demon will STOMP and kill us at any moment, ESPECIALLY when we feel the most hope. Pray for change but avoid hope. Just live.

Labels: 2000=1000, Jackboot stomping forever, Jail mode

  ¶ 1:20 AM

  One down, but doesn't change the count
The grotesque horrifying alien demon which killed under the fake-human title of "Ruth Bader Ginsburg" has ceased killing.

No point in celebrating. It will be replaced by an identical demon. The replacement will be less grotesque and horrifying, but won't change anything.

The process of replacement will get all the idiot partisans on Side A and Side B excited, eagerly defending Demon A or Demon B, dredging up all sorts of irrelevant information and ideology to claim that A or B will do something "different". In the end the new demon will seamlessly continue killing everyone and obliterating the universe.

Incidentally, I offer my condolences to the heroic cancer cells that voluntarily went beyond the call of duty, sacrificing themselves to destroy the grotesque alien. RIP, cancer cells.

Labels: constants and constants

  ¶ 12:04 AM

  Nasty little weasel
I got tired of Assange a long time ago. Like all other "independents", he turned out to be a false-flag AP. He pretended to be "opening government", but wouldn't open his sources. The best way to protect a source is to publicize the name along with the info. When everyone knows who the source is, Deepstate has a MUCH harder job of suiciding or accidenting the source. In this specific case, the likely source was ALREADY dead, so there was no harm at all in publicity.

New info via RT:

Trump attempted to cut a deal with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, offering the wanted journalist a pardon in exchange for the source of the 2016 DNC emails. Assange refused to betray the source.

Assange’s defense revealed the pardon deal to a court in London on Friday, where the WikiLeaks founder is currently fighting extradition to the US. Should he lose, he will be tried for espionage offenses and could face 175 years behind bars.

Good. Take it up the ass, you slimy slithery snake.

Labels: Emersonian justice, From rights to duties

  ¶ 12:23 PM

  More of our standard misattribution
An intriguing item from Belarus. For once, this isn't about Lukashenko or "viruses"!

A group of Hasidim in Belarus were trying to make a pilgrimage to a holy site in Ukraine. Ukraine wouldn't let them in, so they got stuck in a 'neutral zone' until they could filter back through the red tape of border crossings.

As BelTA reported earlier, over 1,000 Hasidic pilgrims gathered in the neutral zone between Belarus and Ukraine. They were traveling to the holy site in the city of Uman, Ukraine. The Novi Yarylovychi checkpoint has been closed until 27 September. The Jews remained at the Ukrainian border in the hope of reaching their destination, where they planned to celebrate the New Year according to the their national calendar.

The incident isn't especially important or injurious to the Hasidim; it just shows clearly where they are welcome and where they are unwelcome. They're welcome in Soviet Belarus and unwelcome in "free" "democratic" Ukraine.

Labels: malign misattribution, Natural law = Soviet law

  ¶ 4:09 AM

  What was special?
The yak picture in previous item stirred up an OLD memory of a salient moment, an AHA moment, a memory that hadn't popped up in 60 years.

I think the stirrer was the brick building, which I used in modified form in the Great Smith set. The Great Smith version reminded me of the real building in the memory.



This AHA happened in 1955. The sign was on the side of a laundry in Noble, where my parents lived at the time.

I was 5, and had been reading books for a couple years, so the words weren't special. What was the AHA? The big P serving as the initial letter for all three words. I marveled at the artistic efficiency.

In an older culture the AHA, plus the fact that I was competently reading at 5, would have led to an early and easy career choice. Typographer. Apprentice at 7, master at 21.

Unfortunately the cultural expectations and economic setup didn't lead in that direction, so I wasted 20 years trying to do math instead of letters.

Calibrating: Fortunately, one piece of the older culture was still intact in 1955. I was free to wander all over town and find my own AHAs, in vacant lots and creeks and letters. My mother was glad to have me out of the house, and probably would have been gladder if I just disappeared.

Labels: skill-estate, TMI

  ¶ 9:37 PM

  Just venting about yakshaving


In the last two months I've been dealing almost full-time with courseware. The idiotic school closures, necessary to "protect" students against Mythical Horrible Orange Witch Powder, have forced an increased use of all online facilities.

When we first designed this stuff 20 years ago, and again when we adapted it for online use in 2015, courseware was just an 'accessory', not a vital part of teaching. Most instructors didn't bother to use it. Now it's vital, which means I've got more work to do without more pay.

Pay isn't the problem. I'm working for Natural Law Duty anyway. I don't need the money, I need the work.

The problem is the YAK-SHAVING. Every single issue requires penetrating layers and layers of access and red tape and permissions. After I get through all the layers, the actual problem usually turns out to be a missing bracket, or a misnumbered page, or just student misunderstanding.

So the process is 90% yak and 10% solution.

Labels: Bemusement

  ¶ 2:47 PM

  Opening the blackmail has an EFFECT for the first time
Amazingly, a TV station committed REAL JOURNALISM.

They exposed emails among Public Death Officials in Nashville, obviously and blatantly hiding the LACK of "virus" in bars and restaurants, and obviously CONSPIRING to hide the facts and kill everyone.

The next day after the revelation, the city relaxed its restrictions on bars and restaurants ever so slightly.

Admittedly this is inside one of the Dixie states where the governor has moved a few millimeters away from total holocaust, so there was already some pull in the right direction.

Still, it's an encouraging sign when ACTIONABLE and SUABLE revelations cause tiny positive micromovements by demonic mayors.

There have been a few previous revelations with no effect on the demons.

Labels: Jackboot stomping forever

  ¶ 12:51 PM

  Face-reading is strictly innate
Interesting piece of research in terms of PURPOSE and design.

It's been known for a long time that humans and many other animals have a firm template for perceiving faces and expressions. How firm is this template?

The fusiform face area responds selectively to faces and is causally involved in face perception. How does face-selectivity in the fusiform arise in development, and why does it develop so systematically in the same location across individuals? Preferential cortical responses to faces develop early in infancy, yet evidence is conflicting on the central question of whether visual experience with faces is necessary. Here, we revisit this question by scanning congenitally blind individuals with fMRI while they haptically explored 3D-printed faces and other stimuli. We found robust face-selective responses in the lateral fusiform gyrus of individual blind participants during haptic exploration of stimuli, indicating that neither visual experience with faces nor fovea-biased inputs is necessary for face-selectivity to arise in the lateral fusiform gyrus.

The blind subjects were using their fingers to read 3d-printed 'bas relief' pictures of faces.

Experience is unlikely. In more 'touchy' cultures, blind people (and especially blind-deaf people) are allowed to use their hands on faces and throats, but not in US. A blind person would know his own face, but wouldn't have an opportunity to pick up expressions from others.

Even experience with the printed contour maps is rare. Contour printing was available before the modern 3d stuff; Playboy used to produce a Braille edition with a tactile centerfold. But this form of art was never common even in Braille publications.

So this is strictly hard-wired, part of the design and purpose. As with speech/hearing and writing/reading, both ends of the channel had to be matched by design. If faces or face muscles mutated significantly, the fusiform gyrus template wouldn't have worked.

Irrelevant alt-history footnote: Contour printing would have been much more common if the Bain tactile scanner had been commercially successful.

Labels: Constants and Variables, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 5:01 AM

  Lukashenko opens more blackmail
Lukashenko is the only sane leader in the world and the only truth-teller in the world. Period. Absolute statement.

More truth, more breaking of blackmail today.

Lukashenko noted that a step-by-step analysis of events in the country had unearthed genuine plans and tactics of external aggressors. ... For the last ten years they have been scrupulously preparing for this zero hour. “In order to remove all the masks, let's name these players. At the level of global centers the number includes primarily the United States of America, to be exact, their network of foundations designed to support so-called democracy. American satellites – Poland, Lithuania, Czechia, and unfortunately our Ukraine – worked on the European continent.”

Each country played its own role. Czechia has been a resource hub for a long time. Poland initially worked as an incubator of media channels (Belsat, Nexta, and other ones) and then as a platform for a government in exile.

“Wounded by the Belarusian nuclear power plant construction project, Lithuania worked as a battering ram of Belarusian-European relations. Despite our unwavering support for the country (for instance, in matters of territorial integrity and other ones), Ukraine became an outpost of political provocations contrary to the spirit of our mutual relations.

Thus, we clearly see subjects of this process, their conductors, and abettors. The organizers built the tactics in accordance with the classic American textbook on color revolutions by the notorious Gene Sharp. Today we can look back and analyze in detail all the stages of the scenario meant to destroy our country, which fortunately we have not allowed to come to fruition and will not allow.”

Bravo, bravo, bravissimo. Open the blackmail.

I haven't heard of Gene Sharp. Will have to look him up....

Briefly from Wikipedia, Sharp was a "pacifist" whose work was funded and supported by DARPA. Nuff said. Late in life his "foundation" was involved in spreading "democracy" and "peace" to the ex-Soviet zone:

Sharp's 1993 handbook From Dictatorship to Democracy[31] was first published in Burma, fourth edition in 2010. It has since been translated into at least 31 other languages.[32] It has served as a basis for the campaigns of Serbia's Otpor! (who were also directly trained by the Albert Einstein Institution), Georgia's Kmara, Ukraine's Pora, Kyrgyzstan's KelKel and Belarus' Zubr.

So there's the specific connection.

= = = = =

Later sidenote: Sharp named his "foundation" after Einstein, who was allegedly also a "pacifist". We have the persistent myth that Einstein was a freethinking hippie. We forget that he was ALWAYS quite obviously and openly a Deepstate employee. Can't get much deeper than the A-bomb project. The big names in the project switched in unison to "regretting" the bomb at the same moment in 1946 when Deepstate started to recover from FDR's constraints and started to kill everyone again.

NOW I SEE. I just now figured out why it was necessary to "regret" the bomb. In 1946 we started attributing all of Deepstate's evils to Russia. If we were proud of using the bomb to end Japan's unendable aggression, we couldn't bash Russia for developing its own deterrent against OUR unendable aggressions.

Labels: malign misattribution, Natural law = Soviet law, NOW I SEE

  ¶ 7:32 AM