Looks like they know what they're doing
I've gradually subscribed to about 6 of the 'newsletters' at Substack. 3 of them are writers I was already following elsewhere, and was grateful for the chance to pay for previous value.

After wandering around through a variety of topics, I think Substack has the right recipe to succeed and grow. I'm also halfway convinced that they're not playing any AP or sting games.

Other new media like Gab and Parler were obvious stings. Quora was interesting a couple years ago, but after it turned toward subscription I left. It's not clear what Quora is trying to do; I just know that it doesn't make sense, it feels wrong, and I don't want to be around.

Substack has a rep for carrying dissidents, but in fact about 70% of their content is on uncontroversial subjects like food and music; and within the hot topics, 70% of the content is strictly orthodox Establishment thinking. The dissidents are less than 10% of the total. This proportion resembles an old-fashioned pre-1946 newspaper.

Those percentages are reassuring. Despite the reputation, readers and writers who want 'ordinary' stuff are the solid majority, so it will be a lot harder for Deepstate to make the case that Substack is solely for wackos.

Maybe Substack should do more to publicize these percentages.... but it appears that both types of material are growing and profiting, so maybe they know exactly what they're doing.

The basic business model is simple and old. Pure subscription to individual writers, NO advertising. This used to be a common model for large magazines as well as small newsletters, until Google and FB turned all business into pure advertising that is "free" to the "consumers". Pure subscription naturally creates a two-way obligation loop between writer and reader, with no shaping by external forces.

The non-fungible aspect of subscribing separately to each writer is also important. You can see and sample all the wares, but your money isn't paying for the wares you don't want to buy. I hope Substack can maintain this modularity. For many years I paid large amounts of money to individual teachers through DonorsChoose, which had a similar modular policy. In 2020 DonorsChoose started issuing mandatory SCREECHES on both the "virus" and the riots. My money was no longer supporting the individual teachers; my money was officially encouraging riots. So far Substack has refrained from breaking into regular programs with corporate SCREECHES. When they do, I'll pull out.

Incidentally, pure subscription also makes a faster website. Other websites are slowed down by constant negotiation with Google-based ad servers. Sometimes a website won't load at all when one of the ad servers is slow. Substack loads instantly.
  ¶ 8:03 PM

  Three answers
And while I'm in the usual point-missing mood, here's another easily solved mystery.

Via MindMatters as usual, a puzzle about brain size. Why has the size of brains been gradually shrinking for 40k years while (supposedly) our intellect has been expanding?

Three plausible answers.

1. The broad logical answer is that brain size is an irrelevant variable, or nearly irrelevant. There are some hard limits, which are easy to locate. Crows and elephants and whales are in the same range of intelligence despite hugely different brain sizes. But ants and wasps are NOT in the same range as crows, and bacteria are not in the same range as ants.

2. Engineering provides a more subtle answer for the more subtle question of a 10% shrinkage in one species. Microcomputers are faster than 1957 mainframes because the WIRES ARE SHORTER. The 1957 mainframe had the same calculating and decision power as a modern CPU. The modern version can handle more decisions per second because the electrons only have to travel a tiny fraction of an inch instead of several feet. In an analog system like the brain, shorter wires and smaller coils allow higher frequency resonances. Resonance is thought.

When the associative fibers between cortex and brainstem are 10% shorter, the RESONANT WAVES can be 10% higher in frequency, getting more processing done in each second.





Actually I prefer Door Number 3:

3. Nature starts with the most complex and then simplifies. Evolution is subtractive. We are dumber than Neanderthals. We've built up the materials and methods for superior technology over thousands of years, and as the technology takes over more of our brain function, we LOSE our brain function. Our brains are smaller because we've offshored and outsourced part of their skills.

Labels: Answered better than asked, skill-estate

  ¶ 9:10 AM

  Nature works whether you "believe" it or not
The wokesters are decolonizing the names of Darwin and Huxley, two of the founders of their secular "science".

Removing names and statues is a perfect example of real natural selection and real genes in action.

1. Natural selection, of course, was perfectly well known before it was branded by Darwin. It's negative feedback. Nature doesn't allow linear or exponential curves. Feedback always places a ceiling on any activity. A predator who eats too much food will use up the food and starve. In this case the wokies are intellectual predators, eating up the intellectual food of their founders and mentors. After Darwin is unspeakable, how do you continue MISusing his doctrines to justify your eugenic and genocidal crimes?

2. Genes exist whether you believe in them or not. Orthodox fashion-followers are a specific genotype, always present. The wokies don't believe in genes. They apply tabula rasa to everything. You can pick your own gender and race. The wokies are also rigid fashion-followers. They are canceling their own fashion-following ancestors for the "sin" of following the fashionable intellectual trends of an earlier century. Darwin applied clear thinking to animals and plants, but didn't question his current orthodoxy when thinking about early human species. Darwinists continue to express the same peculiar genotype, applying objective rules to non-humans while considering Neanderthals to be niggers or rednecks or antivaxers, according to current fashion.

Labels: Emersonian justice, Real World Math

  ¶ 8:03 AM

  Sucker selectors
Madman Lincoln advised his Deepstate tyrant successors to fool some of the people etc.

I've been noticing the rule for a long time, and it's especially strong in the current hoax.

I was fooled by 9/11 but not by the "virus". Most of the people who were NOT fooled by 9/11 are fully on board with the "virus".

These two #WholeOfSociety hoaxes are nearly disjunct, mutually exclusive, in their selection of suckers.

Assassinations and shooting wars and 9/11 are conjunct for obvious reasons. People with real experience in war know the difference between real wars and fake wars. I don't have experience in war and guns, so I'm easily fooled in this area.

Gaia and "Virus" are conjunct. People with real experience in science know the difference between real science and fake science. The exact same people buy both of these hoaxes, and many of the worst tyrants smoothly shifted from Gaian genocide to Viran genocide. Same agencies, same methods.

Noam Chomsky is today's example. He was a careful and consistent exposer of Deepstate hoaxes in the area of war and surveillance. Now he says antivaxers should be slaughtered.

So we have two separate classes, war suckers and science suckers, at least partly based on personal experience. But as Lincoln advised, there are also people who will climb on EVERY bandwagon and cheerfully join the slaughter. These people aren't really fooled, they're just demons.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Carver, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 11:40 PM

  Astrocyte Abacus, reprinted
I was searching for 'abacus' inside the blog, just to check the animations for the IBM 650 (DCL). I wasn't sure if I'd replaced a bad frame.

'Abacus' led first to this item from 2019, which turns out to be important and timely.

Meritocracy is one of Deepstate's oldest weapons in the war of attrition against peasants and incorrect people. We are trained to try harder FOREVER to achieve PERFECTLY IMPOSSIBLE goals. The Enlightenment lies of tabula rasa and equality were meant to kill us in a way that demons find especially fun to watch.

Trying harder forever is UNNATURAL, and we have a specific mechanism to stop wasted effort.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Another astonishing discovery in brain function.

Learning is controlled by an internal abacus.

Via Eurekalert, a study using larval zebrafish.

These two pictures tell the story.



The experimental setup is 'virtual reality' or in old-fashioned terms a flight simulator. The fish is held firmly in place in a small aquarium. A visual landscape is moved forward and backward in response to the swimming motion. In real life each wiggle moves the fish forward, and then the counterwiggle moves backward a bit. (Like a rowboat with incompletely lifted oars on the backstroke.) So the simulated landscape does the same thing.



As long as the landscape moves, the fish moves forward in bursts. Swim for a second, rest for a second. When the experimenters turn off the motion, the fish tries harder for about 30 seconds, then gives up entirely.

This is rational behavior for all animals in all** situations. Modern human dysculture aka "meritocracy" turns us irrational by persuading us that forward motion is ALWAYS necessary regardless of our observed gains relative to the status landscape. If you're not gaining, you need to try harder. We keep trying harder, wasting exponentially increasing quantities of energy and soul, until we violently burn out and die.

The experimenters were trying to determine how the fish decides when to quit. Is it just a buildup of charge or neurotransmitter on a comparator neuron?

What they found is ASTONISHING. The action is controlled by a specialized type of glial cell, not by neurons.

Here, we found that the fish analog of the mammalian astrocyte is a central computational element of a circuit implementing a behavioral-state change after integrating sensory information.

Specifically, radial astrocytes in a subregion of the brainstem in larval zebrafish temporally integrate noradrenergically encoded failures to accumulate evidence of futility before inducing a state of passivity (giving up). This behavioral pattern has a familiar combination of features: trying to achieve a goal, repeatedly failing despite trying harder, giving up temporarily, and then trying again. Fish swim more vigorously in open loop (i.e., ineffective swim attempts), become passive, then swim again.

First try harder, then give up for a while.

Using whole-brain imaging, we found that astrocytic calcium was elevated just before and during passive states. Activation and silencing experiments established that these glial cells are required to trigger the passive state. Neuronal imaging and manipulation showed that the NE system encodes an expectation-outcome mismatch signal, which activates Ca2+ signaling in radial astrocytes. Thus, behavioral failures are detected by NE-MO and integrated by glia, which, after accumulating sufficient evidence of motor futility, trigger a passive behavioral state via GABAergic neurons. Once passivity is triggered, its persistence may be due to sustained effects of the glial cells on neurons, or a lag in the reactivation of swim circuits.

In other words, the astrocytes serve as a kind of scorecard or abacus outside of the neurons. The neurons click up the astrocytes, and when the number of raised beads reaches a threshold the neurons tell the muscles to stop swimming.

= = = = =

** Later thought: It's obvious that frustration is universal, but why is it universal? Why do so many situations need this calculated give-up response? Specifically, why would zebrafish need to know when their attempt to swim didn't result in forward motion? Virtual reality experimental setups aren't exactly common in the real ocean. A headwind in the current would be the main reason for lack of progress. When you're moving against a headwind you do have to try harder, but I'd think the frustration response would include something like gliding down to the floor for stability until the current slows down, or turning around to swim with the current.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

We're seeing millions of people reaching the last bead on their abacus. Some jump off bridges, most just stop actively living. It's even happening in China, where it's called Lying Flat.

A sane and SURVIVABLE civilization recognizes that PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT, and guides each type of person into an appropriate niche where his particular talents lead to ACHIEVABLE goals.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 2:36 PM

  Would be funny
From Evo News, discussing foresight as an aspect of intelligence.

That ability to look ahead and foresee is no small matter, and even human beings can have trouble with it — as witness the supply chain problem that many people are starting to worry about. Who saw that coming? Apparently, not enough of us. If the most intelligent creatures on the planet failed to look ahead to such a dire possibility, could the unintelligent process of Darwinian evolution do better than we do? Not likely.

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO.

This isn't an unpredictable accident.

THIS IS A STATE OF SIEGE. THIS IS A WAR OF ATTRITION.

The war planners have been strategizing and scheduling this war since 2005, and dreaming about it since 1900. They know exactly what they're doing. They are killing the #WholeOfSociety, killing everyone except themselves. They need to be the sole occupants of the universe.

For some reason the Catholic ID types are unable to imagine true evil. Even though they recognize genes, they're still stuck in the Enlightenment tabula rasa view of human behavior. They can't see that morality is a talent like any other, and psychopaths are at one end of the spectrum.

I don't know what's wrong with these Roman IDers. Is it Father Flanagan niceness? Or is it Original Sin, which requires all of us to be equally evil? In either case their lack of perception leaves them vulnerable to the myths generated by the demons.

Demons always blame and frame others for their crimes. Demons especially love to blame Nature or Unintended Consequences or Witches or Viruses or Random Mutation for their crimes.

If we heard these excuses from a low-life methie, we'd find them funny.

Hey, this isn't my gun, officer! It belongs to a virus I met in the bar!

Not my meth, officer! Cosmic rays must have evolved my pencil into a meth pipe!

It wasn't me who broke into the house, officer, it was some Russian guy!

These excuses aren't funny when they're offered by holocausters binding and gagging and torturing and killing the entire universe.

Labels: #WholeOfSociety

  ¶ 5:58 AM

  Just sort of cute
An ad from Computers and Animation in 1965. Not relevant, just cute.



It nicely combines my latest two graphics projects, Brahe's star castle and IBM in 1957. Note also the animistic tendencies.

The story is clever in deadpan British style. Unfortunately the company didn't last.

The guy talking to the secretary seems to be holding a medieval clipboard. Did such a device exist? Writers and artists have always needed a way to write or draw while standing or traveling. It couldn't include an inkwell, but it could include a patch of dry ink. ... Oh. Now I see. Yes, it existed. It's called a palette.

Labels: coot-proofing, Entertainment, TMI

  ¶ 3:18 PM

  No, it's not natural
At Persuasion, Haidt and Lukianoff see the results correctly but completely misattribute the causes.

They describe the current fake political "sides" in accurate detail, bringing out one important factor that I hadn't thought about. The D side is focusing on theories because it doesn't have a Personality right now. The R side has the Personality of Trump, so it forms a Personality Cult around Trump.

I can see the latter part every day. All the email I get from R sources is strictly about Lord Trump HIMSELF and his family. The emails want me to engage PERSONALLY with each of Trump's mistresses and misters and wives and husbands. I'm supposed to love these grotesque aristocrats in a personal and physical way. I'm supposed to lay down my life to defend them.

There's no Big Personality on the D side. Bernie could have filled the role, but Bernie surrendered to the soulless and mindless Biden. When the D side had Bill Clinton, the Personality Cult was on the D side, and the R side was making do with nonentities like Bob Dole.

The authors attribute polarization to "natural forces".

But we worked hard to take a holistic and multi-faceted view of the problem, and we devoted a full chapter—chapter 6—to situating campus events within the broader American culture war in which each side drives the other to do ever-more-outrageous and illiberal things. In fact, we opened the chapter with Newton’s third law and then we modified it for life in a polarization spiral: “for every action there is a disproportionate reaction.”

Bullshit.

Life runs on negative feedback. Natural negative feedback is perfectly proportionate. The only way to get a disproportionate reaction is through intelligent and malicious MANIPULATION.

Simple example: You're carrying a coffeecup. The reflex arcs in your arm adjust in an infinitely delicate and perfect way to keep the cup balanced. Suddenly some asshole grabs your arm and pulls it to one side, then lets go. What happens? Crash! Disproportionate reaction to an intelligent and malicious restraint.

More complex example: You're inhaling air that contains viruses. The immune cells in your nose adjust in an infinitely delicate and perfect way to keep the viruses in balance. Suddenly some asshole forces you to wear a ballgag, rebreathing the same viruses over and over and over, destroying the natural feedback. What happens when you remove the ballgag? Crash! Disproportionate reaction to an intelligent and malicious restraint.

The polarization we see in social media is driven by intelligent and malicious assholes who know exactly when to strap down and exactly when to release. THIS IS NOT NEW. Machiavelli drew up the blueprint, and it has been refined by expert assholes like Lady Edgar and Roy Cohn and Jeffrey Epstein.

Unsurprisingly, Trump and Clinton, the Big Personalities in recent times, are INTIMATELY tied to Epstein. Trump was also tied to Cohn.

Are Haidt et al really as dumb as they sound, or are they part of the malicious game? I'll go with the latter.

Labels: Equipoise, Jail mode

  ¶ 5:01 AM

  The missing piece in the point of inflection
In the last two weeks I've been reading and noting some remarkably prophetic articles in Edmund Berkeley's Computers and Automation journal, from 1956 to 1976.

The authors had a sharp and clear grasp of the virtues and failings of computer tech, which was just about ready to transform the world in 1976. They also saw and predicted Deepstate's takeover of all souls through tech.

At the exact same time a parallel change was rumbling, a change that affected the country and economy in the same way and the same places as tech. Offshoring had started around 1958 in consumer electronics (first to Japan), and spread to the entire real economy by 1990. 1976 was the BIG inflection point in this trend because Mao died.

Nixon had been opening the gates from our side, but China didn't unbolt its side of the door until Mao died and new leaders restored China's natural capitalism.

Other tech magazines and CEOs like Romney were already worrying about offshoring in '58. I haven't seen even the slightest mention of China or Japan or offshoring in Berkeley's mag.

Why? I don't know. Were these authors ivory-tower academics who didn't think about factories? No, there were plenty of articles ABOUT factories by practical industrial types.

Labels: Asked and unanswered

  ¶ 9:15 PM

  Before OCD took over every fucking thing
A few years ago I discussed the 1918 use of a salute that was later adopted by Germans.

Today vintage.es has some pictures from Southington, Connecticut in 1942. They focus on defense work and students saluting the flag. Two of the pictures include the same "German" salute, which was still clearly in use despite the symbolic dissonance.

Other non-modern things are obvious in the same pictures. A couple of dogs are standing at attention in dog style while the kids are saluting outside. Presumably the dogs simply walked to school with their owners. There's also more casual handholding and hugging than in modern times.

Long before we got Lucited and Distanced and Ballgagged, we were shaped away from normal human contact with animals and other people. A typical street pic from the '30s shows casual friends holding hands, and dogs participating in many activities.

Now every gesture and thought and symbol must be rigorously examined and self-censored. Infinitely escalating exponential OCD on all possible levels, with no limit to the precision sterility.

Labels: endless hell

  ¶ 10:23 AM

  Bot oddity
This blog always has 3 or 4 real readers and lots of fake-reader bots. The reals tend to be partial Luddites like me, sticking with older versions of Windows and browsers. (I saw a Windows Vista last week!) Bots always use the latest Chrome and Win 10. (Come to think of it, I haven't seen any Win 11 yet.)

Lately the bots have been following a simple pattern.



More bots on even days, less bots on odd days. Sometimes the rhythm skips a day and flips the even-odd.

Presumably the low point, around 150 per day, represents the baseline random assortment of bots without daily schedules, and the peaks are added by one bot-center that hits this blog as part of an odd-day group or an even-day group.

But why? What do bots gain by "reading" a blog that has only a handful of actual readers? They're sure as hell not learning what Influencers think. It's a puzzle.

Labels: Asked and unanswered, Metrology

  ¶ 5:32 AM

  The 'moral relativity' argument doesn't work
Just realized something.

For many years I held the (fairly common) hypothesis that Deepstate creates chaos and riots in order to "justify" an Authoritarian Strongman. This sequence of events happens often, so the assumed cause is plausible.

2020 persuaded me otherwise. I should have seen this in 2017 when the Pied Piper role of Trump was known, and then in 2018 when Trump's connection to Roy Cohn was published.

Deepstate DOESN'T WANT a strongman. When a potential strongman appears, Deepstate undermines or assassinates him.

Chaos IS the purpose and the end goal. That's all.

Psychopaths love chaos. They are attracted toward situations full of chaos and riot and war and pain, and above all they need to manufacture endless chaos and pain.

And I mean chaos in both senses, cultural and mathematical. When psychopaths are in charge, there is no RHYTHM or PATTERN to life. Every time you think you're in a pattern, the demon breaks it.

The old hypothesis arises from a true observation. A strong non-chaotic leader who wants to serve the country and the people must punish and remove the creators of chaos in order to serve the people. FDR did it, Putin did it. When a human leader restores order, he is popular.

NORMAL PEOPLE NEED SECURITY AND STABILITY, NOT FREEDOM.

A popular leader who restores order is the worst of all possible worlds for psychopaths, not a utopian goal. Chaos itself is the sole purpose and goal of psychopaths.

Trump proved it, or more precisely the Trump character proved it. Trump was intended to play the Strongman, and media advertised the role heavily. Courtiers obediently feared the Authoritarian Hitler. He didn't clean the swamp, didn't change anything, didn't restore industry and culture.

In 2020 when Deepstate mounted the most audacious chaos in all of human history, Trump didn't fire anyone, didn't blackmail anyone into silence, didn't stand in the way. He did nothing to maintain civilization. Mecher's gang was able to break the world with no opposition.

Labels: Jail mode, NOW I SEE

  ¶ 5:45 AM

  One possible way to restore empathy?
Weizenbaum's clarity about the mechanistic and psychopathic mode of modern thought led back to an earlier point of inflection.

Among the radio detective and cop shows around 1950, there's a sharp dividing line between the empathetic and the mechanistic. The big network shows, following Deepstate's new 1946 guidelines, focus on the rigorous mechanical nature of "law", which of course doesn't exist. The cops operate strictly by all rules, giving victims no choice. After you report a crime to the cops, the rest is all SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE. The shows go into great detail on the processing of ink and paper in forgery cases, or the analysis of chemicals in arson. It's all SCIENCE and no HUMAN.

The older shows, especially the low-budget syndicated or regional shows, are much more human. Detective Browning in the Chicago-based 'Calling All Detectives' ignores chemical analysis. He tries to align and adjust the rules to achieve the best, or least-awful, result for his client. In blackmail cases he tries to help the client realize that exposure is usually less awful than perpetual payment and entrapment.

I was thinking along similar lines a few months ago.....

= = = = = START PARTIAL REPRINT:

Another point came up in the '60s when profs were being fired for "political" reasons. My father explained that "political" reasons were usually a cover story for plain old dislike. In a bureaucracy the department head can't write down "I don't like him" or "We don't get along" on an official document. The department head can write down "Communist agitation" or "Trumptard insurrection", according to the fashion of the era.

Isms and ideologies don't matter. Caste matters, and innate personality matters.

I forgot this lesson in the '90s when I got lost in the ideological fake battle of neocons vs RadicalIslamicTerrorists. I regained it in 2011 when I threw away the TV.

The point became EXTREMELY SHARP in 2020, when all governors but one, all national presidents but one, and all mayors and Public Death Officers without exception, acted in holocaustal unison. At first I tried to map the isms onto the pattern, but the isms didn't fit.

Isms don't count. "Laws" and "constitutions" don't exist. The only thing that matters is GUTS.

Strong demons will kill forever when given the opportunity. 2020 gave them the opportunity. Weak demons will kill for a while then get bored. A few non-demonic leaders who had the courage to resist blackmail and extortion were able to break out of the monstrosity and save their people from mass murder.

= = = = =

A vague Trinity House type thought.... What about the non-demons who didn't resist? There's no way to fight blackmail with blackmail. The Deepstate and Epstein blackmail networks have been building their cadres and structures and skills for 120 years. They own everything that counts. We can't overwhelm them with superior blackmail force. Failing that, is there a way to give non-demonic leaders more GUTS? A Mutual Benefit Association to check out the specific threats and open them up in a way that neutralizes the force? Most threats are empty or fake. The real ones are generally not worth losing your soul to maintain silence. This Association wouldn't need to be especially large or rich, but it would need to be located out of country.

Continuing later and even vaguer: MBAs were the ancestor of insurers. Before insurers were totally corrupted by Share Value, they were motivated by profit to give good advice. Insurers understood real risks in fine detail, and knew how to avoid them.

Insurers also paid only the largest and most serious claims, which motivated the customers to do their own risk controls. Balance and equipoise.

Life insurers advised customers how to live longer. Theft insurers evaluated collectibles to spot forgeries, and advised owners on burglar alarms and security. Fire insurers tried to prevent obvious fire hazards.

This blackmail insurer would function the same way. It would understand the real risks of shame and exposure, and would advise customers that it's usually better to take some shame than to lose your soul and life by obeying criminals. (Handling only the most serious claims.) It would also evaluate the threats for forgeries, as mentioned above.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Still seems like a pretty good idea.

Labels: Jail mode, Trinity House

  ¶ 3:27 PM

  More from the point of inflection
The April 76 issue of Computers and Automation includes a POWERFUL article by Joseph Weizenbaum, the author of ELIZA. He got everything right, and saw the dismal consequences.

Weizenbaum had originally wanted to demonstrate the limits of computers. He wanted to show people that computers were just machines. He was truly shocked to find that ELIZA had the opposite effect....

DOCTOR, as ELIZA playing psychiatrist came to be known, soon became famous around MIT mainly because it was an easy program to demonstrate. Most other programs could not vividly demonstrate the information-processing power of a computer to visitors who did not already have some specialized knowledge, say, of some branch of mathematics. DOCTOR, on the other hand, could be appreciated on some level by anyone. Its power as a demonstration vehicle was further enhanced by the fact that the visitor could actually participate in its operation.

Participation and the use of language were certainly key differences. In the '60s ordinary students punched a pile of cards and submitted them to the Computing Center, which then returned a printout several days later. No connection with the process. Nearly all instruction in computers and programming started with number theory, the most abstract and least useful part of math. Prime numbers are mental masturbation for math freaks.

The shocks I experienced as DOCTOR became widely known and "played" were due principally to three distinct events.

1. A number of practicing psychiatrists seriously believed the DOCTOR program could grow into a nearly completely automatic form of psychotherapy. I had thought it essential, as a prerequisite to the very possibility that one person might help another learn to cope with his emotional problems, that the helper himself participate in the other's experience of those problems and, in large part by way of his own empathic recognition of them, himself come to understand them. What must a psychiatrist who makes such a suggestion think he is doing while treating a patient, that he can view the simplest mechanical parody of a single interviewing technique as having captured anything of the essence of a human encounter?

This point isn't surprising. Freudians knew they weren't doing anything real. Eysenck had disproved the human value of the process, but the practice continued because it was lucrative.

2. I was startled to see how quickly and how deeply people conversing with DOCTOR became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it. Once my secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore surely knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room.

We think computers are private. In 1964 this was more or less true, though ELIZA obviously had a logfile generator. Otherwise the transactions couldn't have been written up in articles. The secretary had been editing those logs, so she knew it wasn't private. The same illusion continues. The vast majority of iPhone users worry about "Russian hackers", and go along with all the "security" needed to block "Russian hackers". The same iPhone users don't notice that Siri is listening all the time. If Siri WASN'T listening all the time, she wouldn't be able to jump in and answer your questions when you say her name.

3. Another widespread, and to me surprising, reaction to the ELIZA program was the spread of a belief that it demonstrated a general solution to the problem of computer understanding of natural language. In my paper, I had tried to say that no general solution to that problem was possible, i.e., that language is understood only in contextual frameworks, that even these can be shared by people to only a limited extent, and that consequently even people are not embodiments of any such general solution. But these conclusions were often ignored.

Deeply correct, and AI still proves it all the time. NSA and Google have been working hard on this problem for 40 years, and it's still not solved.

Here's the strongest and most prophetic part.

...the question of whether or not human thought is entirely computable. That question has, in one form or another, engaged thinkers in all ages. Man has always striven for principles that could organize and give sense and meaning to his existence. But before modern science fathered the technologies that reified and concretized its otherwise abstract systems, the systems of thought that defined man's place in the universe were fundamentally juridicial. They served to define man's obligations to his fellow men and to nature. The Judaic tradition, for example, rests on the idea of a contractual relationship between God and man. This relationship must and does leave room for autonomy for both God and man, for a contract is an agreement willingly entered into by parties who are free not to agree. Man's autonomy and his corresponding responsibility is a central issue of all religious systems.

See the loss of two-way obligations.

The spiritual cosmologies engendered by modern science, on the other hand, are infected with the germ of LOGICAL NECESSITY. They no longer content themselves with explanations of appearances, but claim to say how things actually are and must necessarily be. In short, they convert truth to provability.

Surely, much of what we today regard as good and useful, as well as much of what we would call knowledge and wisdom, we owe to science.

But science may also be seen as an addictive drug.

Not only has our unbounded feeding on science caused us to become dependent on it, but, as happens with many other drugs taken in increasing dosages, science has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison.

Beginning perhaps with Francis Bacon's misreading of the genuine promise of science, man has been seduced into wishing and working for the establishment of an age of rationality, but with his vision of rationality tragically twisted so as to equate it with logicality. Thus have we very nearly come to the point where almost every genuine human dilemma is seen as a mere paradox, as a merely apparent contradiction that could be untangled by judicious applications of cold logic derived from a higher standpoint.

Even murderous wars have come to be perceived as mere problems to be solved by hordes of professional problemsolvers.

As Hannah Arendt said about recent makers and executors of policy in the Pentagon:

"They were not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being 'rational'. They were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them; that is, they were eager to discover laws by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary, and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be. An utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality became the leitmotif of the decision making."

And now we're back in the territory of Conelrad and CDC. Predictive models control everything, and the psychopaths decide the variables for the predictive models. Science has passed beyond slow-acting poison. It's now a full-fledged HOLOCAUST, obliterating life and soul and universe FAST.

The demons are simply hiding behind the computer. Most people STILL don't understand the mechanical nature of computing. Most STILL believe that computers think rationally. The latest New Superstitionist STILL says computers will achieve true thought with more power and more speed. (Translation: More grants.)

Only programmers know how powerful the programmer is.

In '76 these trends were just starting to show up, and only a few prophets saw them. At that point we could have tamed the trends, could have applied the brakes with some strong negative feedback mechanisms keyed on empathy. But we didn't. Nobody listened.


= = = = =

Irrelevant personal sidenote: I've never humanized a computer, perhaps because as a programmer I know it's just a machine. I do humanize my house to some extent, and fully humanize the air conditioner. This odd choice started from a charming Japanese ad for Hitachi ACs. The word Kura stuck in my head, and I started calling the AC Kura. When Kura fights through an especially hard day, I pat it and praise it. When I pull Kura out of the window in October, I lay it down on a soft towel and cover it with a soft towel, and give it a sendoff to its annual long vacation. Six months of rest and dreams, with no exposure to sun and wind and rain and snow.

Labels: endless hell, TMI

  ¶ 6:18 AM

  Conelrad in the new context
I've done Conelrad several times before, including one of my first items in 2005.

Seen in the context of the LATEST fake "threat" and real genocide, Conelrad has an extra resonance.

American Radio Library just added a brief brochure about Conelrad from 1957.

This brochure includes the usual tech details and propaganda blasts...

CONELRAD will go into effect simultaneously with the first warning from the Air Defense Command. The surest, safest way to know what to do when you hear the sirens is to tune to your CONELRAD station at 640 or 1240 on your AM radio dial.

Top-down authority. One commander controls absolutely everything and everybody. ADC = CDC.

With many CONELRAD stations in operation, all on 640 or 1240 kilocycles, this completely confuses the "homing" capability of the finder. Tests conducted by our own Air Force have proved that the CONELRAD system eliminates broadcasting as a navigational aid.

Technically true on its own, but broadcasting was IRRELEVANT. In the first fucking place, enemy bombers weren't going to make it over the Pacific or Atlantic or Arctic without being detected by radar. In the second fucking place, Soviets already knew where the presumed targets were. Russian spies had been mapping important locations. GPS was in the future, and presumably our Loran was turned off, but they did have gyrocompasses. We weren't blacking out lights as we had done in WW2 (also pointlessly) so visual sighting was possible at night.

In the current holocaust, the focus on CASES is a similar self-deception. Real public health was never based on testing everyone in advance; real public health and real medicine started with patients FEELING SICK and deciding to see a doctor. The patient's own judgment was the radar and the compass. The new focus on CASES pretends to be fighting the enemy "virus", but in fact it only creates panic and fear in our own population. CASES force us to depend on the opaque and demonic judgment of Virus Defense Command. We're not confusing the virus, we're just spoofing our OWN internal radar with "cases" and ballgags.

Due to the reduction in transmitting efficiency and the use of only two frequencies ( 640 and 1240 kc.) throughout the Nation, interference between stations may limit coverage obtainable in many suburban and rural areas. If you are in such an area, your radio may go silent or interference may prevent you from distinguishing the civil defense message being broadcast.

In other words, we're not "protecting" the peasants. In the current holocaust, country folks are left "unprotected" because there aren't any substations of the Public Death Agency in small towns. So country folks mostly continue living a normal life, without heart attacks from panic and fear, and without strangulation from constant ballgags.

Your local authorities may order you to take SHELTER if immediate attack is threatened. CONELRAD can bring you instructions in your shelter. Because local power may fail, a battery- operated portable radio with an outside aerial is your best insurance.

SHELTER IN PLACE. No metaphor needed. Same shit every fucking time. It makes sense for an actual bomb or a tornado; inside is better than outside. It doesn't make sense for the INVISIBLE PATHOGEN OF RADIATION, which is a natural phenomenon. And it doesn't make any sense with the INVISIBLE PATHOGEN OF VIRUSES, which are a natural phenomenon. Our immune system is built to deal with BOTH of those invisible pathogens in small quantities.

The advantage of an invisible pathogen, a spiritual pathogen, is that you can't see it. With visible pathogens like mice and roaches, there's no way for experts to hijack your senses. Normally we do trust our own body's NON-VISUAL senses to tell us when we've got an invisible pathogen. But the lack of CONCRETE EVIDENCE opens the way for the hijackers to replace your internal senses. (See ASYMPTOMATIC CARRIERS and ORIGINAL SIN.) You learn to trust the official witch hunter with her PCR test, which was known from the start to be fake. Because all details of nuclear stuff and priestly stuff and medical stuff are top secret, there's absolutely no way to find out the truth.

With atom bombs, the real risk was the bomb itself, not the radiation. If you're close enough to a big bomb, nothing at all will save you. Outside of the blast range, most people survived.

EVERY FUCKING TIME, THEY KNOW IT'S A HOAX BECAUSE THEY MADE THE HOAX.
  ¶ 10:42 PM

  Fitting finale
A fitting conclusion to my series on IBM in the '50s:

Chris Arnade, the chronicler of collapsed America, has a new article on Binghamton and Endicott, the cities where IBM flourished until it moved to China.

Binghamton's Main Street, the commercial spine, bisects downtown and then makes its way through Johnson City and to Endicott. Once you cross west over the river, things immediately feel on edge, ready to burst out at any moment. A busy road of fast-food franchises, vape shops, abandoned and reclaimed buildings, and large wooden homes of single occupancy apartments. It is also filled with college kids, drunks, and various people with no clear motives, all whooping it up and disrupting working people rushing to and from work. All of it is encased in the constant smell of weed that never leaves.

One of the boarded-up buildings, an old cleaners and leather refinisher, has a public notice pasted onto its plywood window. A notice for an upcomping hearing “for the establishment of a Crematory in this building.”

Looking around I spotted nobody who would or could take notice, because almost nobody was around, besides a few cars zooming by. The few people who drifted by looked like the time, technology, or desire to comment was beyond them. Not that anybody would listen to them anyhow.

Says it all.

Watson ran IBM in Social Economics style like NCR and Ford and Conoco, giving his employees a REASON to be loyal and efficient. So the loss was more dramatic than a company of the normal American robber baron style.

In other words, IBM maintained two-way loyalty with its customers AND its employees.

.... I just realized I'm using a Lenovo PC, made by the Chinese spinoff of IBM. Hadn't thought about the connection before. It's a good computer, quiet and fast, ten years old and still holding up. But it didn't contribute anything to the people in Endicott, and didn't use their well-developed skills.

Labels: endless hell, skill-estate, the broken circle

  ¶ 6:44 AM

  Reprint on Trinity House
I linked this in previous item. Feels like time for a reprint....

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Continuing on the theme of Trinity House, the guardian of true beacons and true science. Trinity has been running for 500 years without ever losing its sidereal focus. We need to build a new Trinity House.



With Trinity funding, Marconi used South Foreland lighthouse on the White Cliffs for his experiments with radio.



Here's a look at Marconi's transmitter in one of the wings of Foreland, based loosely on a few pics and diagrams.



There are three pieces. Two are derived from telegraphs and clocks, one is new for wireless. I'm not showing the connecting wires here to avoid confusion.



On the left, batteries provide low voltage with high current to the primary of the Transformer.

A transformer works by expanding and contracting the magnetic field. As the primary builds up, its field pushes through the windings of the secondary, developing a current in each turn. If the secondary has more turns than the primary, the output will have higher voltage.

In order to keep the field rising and falling, the Hammerbreak (more familiarly buzzer) operates by negative feedback like a clock pendulum. It begins with a closed switch, causing the magnet to charge up. As the field strengthens, it pulls the Hammer in toward the magnet, opening the switch. As the field collapses, it allows the Hammer to fall back toward the contact, closing again. The inertia of the field and the inertia of the Hammer maintain a steady frequency.

The high voltage AC from the secondary terminals goes directly to the Leyden Jars (capacitors) which are connected by another inductor. The spark is maintained by the high voltage from the secondary. A spark generates a wide range of frequencies. The capacitors tend to shunt the higher frequencies toward ground, and the inductor shorts out the lower frequencies, leaving only the middle frequencies undamped. This form of resonator (a pi-section tank) is still used on transmitters in the tube and transistor eras.

Here I've added the wires in somewhat schematic form. The key breaks the circuit between the batteries and the primary, and the Hammerbreak also breaks the circuit much faster while the key is down. The high voltage secondary goes directly to the spark gap, where the capacitors and inductor narrow down the frequency; then the somewhat tuned output goes up to the antenna.



Finally, the whole thing in operation.



Inventions don't come from theories. Like all parts of life, inventions come from PURPOSES. Inherent dreams and wishes, or perceived needs. Wireless was a perpetual dream, first documented around 300 BC. It had to wait for a long series of materials and techniques, evolved through clocks and telegraphs. None of this development came from theories. Some useful theories came from the development.

= = = = =

Footnote on Marconi, since I normally avoid the Great Names. In some ways he was similar to our tech IPO founders. Young, fairly wealthy, extroverted and charismatic. Other industry founders at the same time were older. The Great Names in the auto industry were around 40 when they founded their eponymous companies. They had already established a career in bicycles or carriages or locomotives. But Marconi was distinctly different from Zuck and Bezos and Elon. He was modest and cautious, always building on previous experience and crediting previous experience. In other words he was an engineer, not a stock scammer.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Labels: Trinity House

  ¶ 8:34 PM

  Still missing the same point about alien talk
From MindMatters yet again.

The other question is, in a universe governed by the same principles of logic, mathematics, physics, and chemistry throughout, it should be possible for intelligent entities to somehow find a way of making contact. The fact that those principles of math and physics can be described abstractly at all seems to show that we do not live in a meaningless universe. Thus, in principle, there is meaning that we — and ET — should be able to find.

If extraterrestrial intelligences exist and want to communicate, it will be the same meaning. They won’t have a different “logic” or “mathematics” because they can’t.

No, no, no. Logic and math are irrelevant and unnecessary.

When we are communicating via radio waves, there is a guaranteed set of commonalities. We don't know anything about the aliens, but we know how their receiver works, and they know how our transmitter works. There are only two basic ways to create and receive electromagnetic waves. Nature does it one way, and human technology does it the other way.

Nature alters the static field by moving ions in neurons or tissue. Human tech alters the magnetic field by moving electrons in wires.

We know several of Nature's methods. Radio fish simply extend the axons of neurons out of the body in an antenna, with its length tuned to match the impedance of the mud they live in. Flowers transfer ions into petals to send a message to bees, then pull back the ions after the bees have grabbed the pollen.

Nature did it WITHOUT USING MATH, and the first humans to send and receive radio were doing it with minimal math. Mostly by trial and error, expanding in directions that seem to work, steering away from directions that don't seem to work. FEEDBACK IS LIFE.

So, as I've been saying repeatedly, the communication should be ABOUT the communication. Describe the circuits and antennas in a two-dimensional pattern that can be scanned after the receiving intelligence realizes the scanning freq.



This is how radio hams communicate across cultural barriers, especially when censors are listening. Humor and politics and religion aren't easily understood, and may be deadly. Antenna lengths and circuits can be understood by everyone in the circle.

HOWEVER! Considering that I've been repeating this message for years in the tiny single-culture circle of a few blogs, and nobody has heard it yet, I doubt that we have any chance of communicating to mysterious aliens.

Labels: AI point-missing, infinite STUPID, Real World Math, Trinity House

  ¶ 7:47 PM

  A little Philco Phun
American Radio Library has added a 1931 Philco publication aimed at salesmen. Philco hadn't yet asserted its unique style of circuitry and cabinets and corporate behavior. Still, these two pictures are sort of interesting.

A display in Wanamaker's department store demonstrated car radios, a new idea. Philco later specialized in car radios and became a division of Ford. In '31 Philco receivers were mainly installed in Chrysler products. Note the common classical theme in the '31 Philco and the '31 Chrysler. The lights are on, so presumably the car's electrical accessories, including the radio, were powered by a transformer to provide a bit of drama.



Here's the control box in a Lincoln. In the early '30s the steering column was vacant and available for accessories. Earlier the hand throttle and spark control were usually on the column. Later the shift lever and turn signals. Philco took advantage of the vacant territory for the radio controls.



In other words, column selectors for receptions came before column selectors for transmissions.

Labels: Entertainment

  ¶ 3:13 PM

  IBM DCL
Previously I showed the 305 RAMAC, which was IBM's first equipment. The 305 was a complete setup designed to serve accountants and nobody else.

The DCL (or 650 in today's money) came slightly before the 305. First produced in 1954, it was just a processor with no input and output capabilities. It had to be connected up to a tape drive and cardpunch for permanent data storage. Later it could connect with the multiple disk pioneered by the 305.

According to Wikipedia, the DCL became the 'iconic' computer in movies, with its flashing lights catching your attention. It was also the dominant IBM machine in colleges, so it was the first machine most young programmers saw.



= = = = =

Reviewing the modes of electrical data storage:

Tape came first, as seen in the picture above. The huge disadvantage of tape is that you can't access any location in the storage quickly. Tape is suitable for reading in a long series of data in a specific order, and then writing out a long series of data in a specific order. It's not suitable for holding the numbers or categories used in actual computation or decision-making.

All calculators have some form of register, an immediately accessible store for a few numbers.

Mechanical calculators, like this one used by IBM field engineers, hold the number as the positions of rotors. More complex cash registers or adding machines had many registers, built like odometers.



Every electronic computer has at least one register formed by flipflops. A flipflop is the electronic equivalent of a snap-switch, with a pair of opposed tubes or transistors. When one tube conducts, it holds the other tube in a nonconducting state. An input to one side switches the pair to the opposite condition. There's no real difference between the tube flipflops in the IBM DCL and the extremely miniaturized transistor flipflops in the latest CPU.

Each flipflop is relatively complex, and requires current to maintain its state. So there's a practical limit to how many registers you can 'afford'.

The first solution to this problem was the magnetic core or matrix memory, which was dynamic in the modern sense.

Each ferrite core was intersected by several wires. Any current passing through any of the wires induced some magnetic field in the core, which would last for a short time before fading. The currents and the cores were designed so that a current pulse on BOTH of the XY wires through this core would leave a magnetic charge large enough to last for a longer time. I show this charge as enlarging the toroid. After the field has been induced, a much smaller pulse in the coinciding pair would be enoough to trigger a pulse in the sense wire, shown wandering around through all the cores. The sense wire is essentially the secondary winding of a transformer, with the coinciding XY wires as the primary.



That's how you'd write and read a binary ONE in this particular spot of the matrix. Writing a ZERO was the same thing with reversed polarity. Here I show the opposite induced field as shrinking the core. The sense wire would give an opposite pulse of voltage when the small read pulses coincided.



Core memory was highly dynamic, so it also needed a complex set of refresh pulses to keep it up.

= = = = =

The DCL wasn't the first to use a drum for a multiple register, but again it became the most famous. I remember seeing the DCL in a college Fortran class in 1967. The instructor showed us all the parts of the computer, and opened up the attic of the DCL to show the drum.

In essence the drum is just a very short multi-track tape loop. Instead of a long and narrow tape, it's a short and wide tape wrapped into cylindrical form. Each track holds about 50 numbers, repeating over and over.

Each of the V-shaped troughs around the half-cylinder holds a long horizontal series of read-write heads. I'm showing (abstractly) how each head was activated for part of a revolution to access one track of the 'tape'. This activation wouldn't be visible in real life.



The drum itself isn't visible; it's rotating inside the half-cylinder of heads. The drum held about the same amount of information as a core matrix, but it was non-dynamic. A track once written would stay there without any use of energy or refreshing, and it could be read or rewritten almost instantly.

The 305 RAMAC switched to multiple disks, and we're still there 65 years later. Same principle as the drum, with tracks in three dimensions instead of two.



= = = = =

Why am I calling it the DCL? Because it used Roman numbers. The lights on the front showed the contents of individual flip-flop registers. The knobs and buttons on the front selected which register you were seeing.

The top section was one 10-digit number, with a sign light on the right. Each column was like an abacus. The upper pair was First Five / Second Five. The lower lights were 0 through 4 added onto the upper pair.



The lower part of the front panel was devoted to functions. The left two columns were the opcode of the currently executing command, and the next four were the address of the current command. The lower right lights indicated what was happening now, as in calculating or reading from drum or reading from the external tape.



Here I'm showing opcode 12 and address 3456.

= = = = =

Listing related links so far:

Computers are always sorters.

Parallel is always faster.

Timelines and rentalizing

Just before the NSA web

When analog fertilized digital

Time was a whole bunch of money!

IBM had Pascal in 1957!

The 305 RAMAC

McBee cards

Not medieval enough

IBM DCL [650]

And finally, the Poser models are here on ShareCG.

Labels: Equipoise, Real World Math

  ¶ 9:32 AM

  Problems with scambusters
Zuhlsdorf calls attention to the scam-busters who track down the scammers and send them stink bombs or other nasties.

I have two problems with this activity.

1. It's vicarious justice, not real justice. Fun to watch, like a cop show where the bad guys always end up in jail. But nobody is really caught and jailed. Vicarious justice tends to use up some of our revenge-juice. We feel satisfied even though nothing has really changed.

The scammers are running an industrial-scale international operation, and the stink bombs seem to end up harming innocent people who are used as temporary receiving addresses. The actual scammers don't live at the address. Even if one of the actual team got stinked, it would be a meaningless bit of 'overhead'. Gangs always use disposable low-level operators.

2. Many real scams involve two fake sides, like everything else in this faked-up fucked-up world. One side poses as a scammer, and the other side poses as a cop or private investigator. You're suckered into paying the fake cop to help catch the fake criminal.

When a scambuster like Rober calls the victim to explain what he's doing, how do they know that he isn't the fake PI side of the scam? For that matter, how do WE know he isn't part of the stageplay?

Labels: Shared Lie

  ¶ 11:59 PM

  Learning and teaching by making
In previous item I was noticing that the maker of a medieval font didn't try to draw K and W because they weren't in classical Latin. But real scribes weren't writing classical Latin. They were using Latin as a framework for a mix of local languages, and they included the local character set where necessary. Following a theoretical assumption led the fontmaker astray.

While 'building' and animating these old devices, curiosity always drives me to understand the culture and feelings of the era when they were made and used. I'm learning a lot of history, including some fairly important and rarely written history, AS A SIDELINE.

If I tried to read about these times and places in the usual history text, I wouldn't learn anything because THERE ISN'T ANY FUCKING INFORMATION in the usual history text. The usual history text is a list of battles and generals. Battles and generals have NOTHING TO DO with history.

I'm a fake artist using 3d software. I've noticed a similar tendency in the real artists who draw anime-style cartoons with real pencils. They often situate their characters in a specific time and place, and they end up learning and teaching important things about the chosen time and place.

This is my most basic and constant theme, of course. Education by experience, education by making. No subjects, just work. If you want students to learn a certain type of information, arrange the work to create curiosity about the certain type of information.

There are two extra advantages to experiential learning in history and "social studies".

1. Learning by curiosity puts you in touch with the lives of real people, not the lives of the leaders and generals.

2. Learning by curiosity gives you practice in the actual WORK OF A HISTORIAN. You're not doing any historian work when you memorize the battle scheme of the Peloponnesian War. You're just being a dumb computer. When you're trying to understand the background of what you're drawing or making, you explore original sources outside the filter of historians and propagandists.

Labels: Experiential education

  ¶ 6:50 AM

  Not medieval enough
A monk has built a digital font resembling Teresa of Avila's handwriting. Or more generally the typical hand of that era.

The font has a couple of unnecessary oddities. K and W were not common in the Latin used in Italy, so they are thrown in undrawn, using a generic sans font. Arabic numbers are also thrown in undrawn.

Leaving the numbers out makes sense, but leaving out the K and W doesn't make sense. Latin documents in most parts of Europe included K and W in local names and local words. In such documents the undigested K and W stand out.

From the Lancashire Rolls, British legal documents in the 1100s, listing people who paid debts.

Radulfus filius Bernardi reddit Compotum de cc.li. numero de firma de Lancastra. In thesauro c. et l.li. et xv.s. et vij.d.

Et in terris datis Willelmo de Valeines x.li. numero in Culfho. Et Willelmo filio Walkelini ix.li. in Stainesbeia.

Et Nigello de Greselea iiij.li. et xvj.s. in Drakelawa. Et Engelrano Portario et Rogero de Sancto Albino xx.li. numero in Crokeston. Et Warino Venatori xxv.s. et j.d. de liberatione sua per breve Regis. Et Jacobo 1.s. et j.d. de liberatione sua per idem breve. Et Gibbe xxvj.s. et iij.ob. de liberatione sua per idem breve. Et Petro Bernardi vij.s. et ij.d. de liberatione sua per idem breve.

Idem Radulfus r.c. de vj.li. de Cremento de Presteton. Et de vj.s. de firma de Mareton hoc anno. In th'ro lib. in ij. tallis.

I get the sense that Radulf was an utgota.

Other documents in the same set include AngloSaxon thorn þ, eth ð, and wynn ƿ along with the regular Latin. Scribes, like later typesetters, were flexible and adaptable. The maker of this font doesn't give the scribes enough credit.

Rewriting this using the Teresa font, the Ks and Ws are obviously wrong:



Here Polistra and Happystar are printing out the medieval document on a 'medieval' computer.



Why medieval? Because the IBM 650 on the right used the Roman system instead of decimal or binary. I'll feature the 650 in the next IBM item....

Labels: 2000=1000, Real World Math

  ¶ 9:30 AM

  Both were flipped
Continuing from here. In 1974 Suskind suggested a new Hippocratic Oath for engineers that would have made things worse SOONER.

Thinking about the parallel:

The practical oath, tradition plus Hippocrates, has been flipped upside down for BOTH doctors and engineers.

Before the flip: First do no harm. Hold steady. Stick with EXPERIMENTALLY PROVED SOLUTIONS.

After the flip: Do ONLY harm. Change everything all the time. NEVER do anything that is known to work.

Civil engineers (bridges and sewers) haven't been fully flipped yet, but they are mostly paid to do harm. Environmentalism forces them to tear down dams and bridges, and to build flood generators instead of flood controllers.

Software engineers (the main target of Suskind) were specifically flipped by Larry Ellison and Google. The new slogans are Move fast and break things and Let the fires burn. These are perfectly opposite to the tradition of engineering.

And I don't need to repeat what happened to the former "medical" profession in 2020. Move fast and kill everyone.

In short, both professions traded a Hippocratic Oath for a Psychopathic Oath.

= = = = =

Later: Here's yet another 'open letter' from the tiny fraction of doctors who have NOT flipped. This declaration emphasizes restoring the spirit of the oath:

RESOLVED, that the physician-patient relationship must be restored. The very heart of medicine is this relationship, which allows physicians to best understand their patients and their illnesses, to formulate treatments that give the best chance for success, while the patient is an active participant in their care.

RESOLVED, that the political intrusion into the practice of medicine and the physician/patient relationship must end. Physicians, and all health care providers, must be free to practice the art and science of medicine without fear of retribution, censorship, slander, or disciplinary action, including possible loss of licensure and hospital privileges, loss of insurance contracts and interference from government entities and organizations – which further prevent us from caring for patients in need. More than ever, the right and ability to exchange objective scientific findings, which further our understanding of disease, must be protected.

RESOLVED, that physicians must defend their right to prescribe treatment, observing the tenet FIRST, DO NO HARM. Physicians shall not be restricted from prescribing safe and effective treatments. These restrictions continue to cause unnecessary sickness and death. The rights of patients, after being fully informed about the risks and benefits of each option, must be restored to receive those treatments.

Of course none of this will happen. The rulers are enjoying the game. Endless orgasms. Psychopaths never give up power after they've tasted blood and turned feral. Still, I suppose it's nice to see that a few thousand members of a profession have NOT turned into monsters.

The hundred leading signers are not the 'regular crowd'. I don't see any familiar names. They're currently employed by a variety of clinics and universities, which makes their action GUTSY but still meaningless. Nothing will change, but other professionals may gain a bit of courage when they see someone in a similar position, or someone they know, speaking out and not being fired or assassinated.

From the fucking start it was clear that only MASSIVE UNION STRIKES BY PEOPLE WHO COUNT could make a difference. Recently a real strike by Southwest Airlines workers caused their demonic management to back down on vax mandates. As long as the opposition is scattered, it's meaningless.

Labels: Alternate esrevinu, Carbon Cult, endless hell, Jackboot stomping forever

  ¶ 5:20 AM

  Always harder to measure a fadeout....
Interesting observation from Sailer. As other Identity Subcultures get stronger, the Deaf culture seems to have faded out.

I noticed the growth of deaf culture in the '80s because I was working around speech and acoustics. After I started working from home in 2004, I lost contact with those movements and hadn't really thought about them. Still, the culture is notable by its absence in recent years.

Atypically, Sailer gets the history wrong.

It’s useful to think about why there is deaf culture but not blind culture. Wikipedia’s article on the former is vastly longer than its short squib on the latter, which sums up, “…blind people integrate with the broader community and culture, and often do not identify blindness as a defining part of their culture.”

That’s because language can be essential to identity. Just as nationalism in Europe was an offshoot of the consolidation of local spoken dialects into a standardized national written language (such as the French government’s imposition of the Parisian dialect on its sprawling domain), deaf culture exists due to the consolidation of sign languages.

Language is fundamental to communication, of course, and perhaps even to thought. So life tended to be extremely difficult for those born deaf, especially if they didn’t work out an idiosyncratic sign language with their families.

Before computers, deaf people had a much wider range of occupations than blind people. Industrial work and farm work need good eyes, but don't need ears. Noisy industrial environments are actually EASIER for deaf people than hearing people.

Deaf folks were common in printing. When I worked at Cromwells, we contracted our linotype work to Gene Laird, a deaf guy who ran his own linotype shop in a storefront. His wife handled the telephone and talked with visitors. Gene ran the machine and drove around to distribute the finished forms to Cromwells and Vaters and Daugherty. No problem after you got used to talking by writing.

Automation and offshoring were thus especially hard on deaf workers. Computers made life easier for blind people, but actually got in the way of AMERICAN deaf people because AMERICAN deaf people are not good at writing and reading English. This is NOT true in other countries. You can see the difference easily when looking at deaf Youtubers. Most Americans type incoherent descriptions and titles. Others, including Brits, write correctly.

This is not a problem with ears, it's a direct result of the deaf subculture eliminating real English from their schools. And this is a standard procedure. "Human rights" crusaders ALWAYS damage their "protected" groups. The "protected" groups must lose their native skills and niches so they need the "protection" of the NGOs and government.

Labels: skill-estate, Sorosia

  ¶ 2:14 PM

  More from the inflection point
From Computers and Automation Feb 72, an article claiming that computers will "empower" secretaries. Oops.

In this case I'm sure the author is not a poor prophet. She's starting up a new company, and the article is basically an advertisement.

The way things stand now, many women making their way up in business and industry face the formidable liability of their own secretarial skills. The better their skills, the more they are categorized as secretaries, effectively precluding their promotion into more responsible positions. Many smart women are keeping themselves ignorant of such skills in order to avoid that trap; this is passing the burden on to office managers, who find good secretarial help harder and harder to come by.

Keeping themselves ignorant? I doubt it.

The editing typewriter is very useful for a secretary for it does a lot of repetitive work for her. Not the kind of work she might enjoy or profit from, but the jobs of retyping, revising, and correcting that go with the rest of the job.

True for TYPISTS, not for secretaries. The distinction between a typist and a secretary was perfectly well known at that time. This school film from the '40s defines the two jobs clearly.

Second, she will find herself with time on her hands -- and energy. A smart secretary can use her newly-found time away from the typewriter. She can take on new jobs that will put her in closer touch with the decisionmaking levels of the corporation she works for. She will be able to attend meetings, do the first drafts of reports, coordinate and keep records, follow up past activities, handle questions, and solve problems.

Actual secretaries were already doing those tasks. I was in academia from the mid '70s through 2003, across the transition to computers. Department secretaries didn't change their job. Unlike what you see on TV, a real secretary is more like a mother than a hot babe. She knows where everyone is and what everyone is doing. She knows who has the real power, and knows how to shape the power.

Computers did eliminate typists, who were generally students on work-study in academia. The executives and professors now have to do their own typing, which is a waste of their skill and time.

In short, computers didn't empower secretaries, they wasted the talents of executives.

Labels: AI point-missing

  ¶ 6:26 AM

  Speaking of Thiel and Shannon....
Speaking of Thiel questions, and things I didn't know, here's a fine example.

Economist Matt Stoller narrates how we lost our industry and our country to China, leaving only the rich alive.

It was a two-sided pincer movement as always. I didn't know about the other side.

The obvious side was the Friedman twins, Milton and Thomas. Share Value is the universe. Products and factories and workers must be exterminated.

The official opposition was the Consumer Rights Movement, which said that low prices are the only thing in the universe. How do you get low prices? China.

I wasn't aware of this movement, but it fits the pattern. Deepstate always runs "two" "opposites". One side pleased the rich fuckheads, the other side pleased the consumers. BOTH AGREED that production should stop. BOTH AGREED that SKILL is irrelevant. BOTH AGREED that humans have no purpose except enriching the rich.

The consumer pincer evolved into MMT and the web's fake 'everything for free'. These movements tell us that we shouldn't have to pay for anything, which REALLY means that we're worthless and disposable. When you're not a source of money for business, you're NOT NEEDED by business.

Thanks, Stoller! You told me something I truly didn't know, and it's a non-trivial consequential piece of information.

Incidentally, I paid for value by subscribing to Stoller's Substack. It doesn't look especially interesting, but one Shannon fact is worth plenty. Also, Substack itself has SO FAR avoided censoring unfashionable opinions, which makes it worth supporting FOR NOW.

Also incidentally: Before the web, dissidents communicated through obscure newsletters, generally mimeographed or Varityped. Substack seems to recognize this historical resonance. Each of its writers has a newsletter, not a blog or a webzine.

Labels: Aberree, MMT, NOW I SEE, Shared Lie, skill-estate

  ¶ 6:13 AM

  Surprising and unsurprising discoveries
Via Science Digest, a recently discovered Italian manuscript from 1340 describes the Viking settlement on the American mainland.

The authors speculate that Columbus probably knew about these stories.

NOT surprising. Historians have been aware for a long time that the Norsemen and Italians were in frequent contact. Both were traders and sailors, and there was plenty of two-way commerce. Columbus and his cohorts almost certainly knew that Greenland was close to a larger mainland.

What's surprising is that this particular manuscript was unknown until 2013! We tend to think that all old documents have already been found.

This leads to a question: Did Columbus really believe that he reached Indonesia? Or was he engaging in protective branding? Manufacturers often disguise or rebrand a new product during open testing, hoping to confuse competitors. Modern automakers just use zebra paint, which doesn't conceal the identity but makes it hard to derive contours and shapes from random photos.

Best assumption: Columbus knew the northern path to the mainland, and he was trying to find a southern path without passing through Norse-controlled areas.

Labels: Answered better than asked

  ¶ 12:31 AM

  Reprint on "whistleblowers" and Shannon
In 2019 I had a pretty decent idea. Use the Thiel test on alleged "whistleblowers". Most would fail miserably, including Snowden, Manning, and this week's Facebook "whistleblower".

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Strikes me that a slight variation on the Thiel question is a good test for people who claim to be "ex"Deepstate, or "whistleblowers" against Deepstate.

The original Thiel question:

Tell me something that's true that nobody agrees with you on.

My looser version:

Tell me something that's true that nobody else knows.

= = = = =

Variation to test the EXness of "ex"Deepstaters:

Tell me something that's true that I don't already know.

Real intel agencies use this exact question intensely and rigorously to test claimed defectors from enemy intel. We should use it for the same purpose, since CIA and FBI and NSA are enemy intel.

"Ex"es always tell us things that we already know, or give us unnecessary details about things that we had already guessed. This is NOT Shannon information.

Shannon information is fully surprising and unexpected, totally unguessable and undeducible from existing knowledge. Shannon is consequential, not trivial. When you act on Shannon information, things change.

We could formalize this by gathering (online or in person) a jury of UNPAID NONEXPERTS who have some experience dealing with aspects of Deepstate. People who have been involved in "radical" activities where CIA or FBI planted APs, or people who have worked in tech areas where NSA's tentacles are visible. Require the "Ex" to tell us something that is fresh and surprising to all jurors.


= = = = = END REPRINT.

Labels: Asked and worth asking again, Leth

  ¶ 2:21 PM

  Saluting Oklahoma
I haven't done a Salute in a LONG time because there hasn't been much worth saluting. Too many of my previous salutes were premature: the saluted country or ruler turned out to be the usual faker and betrayer, converging to Deepstate shortly after my praise. Maybe this one will also converge, but we'll salute anyway as a form of prayer. The EXPERIMENT is still underway, and we're still seeing the dramatic difference between states with sane governors versus states with demonic governors. Daily suicides in demonic states, normal life in sane states.

According to this data map, Oklahoma and Utah are the only states that FORBID waterboarding and torture by schools. Most of the country is in 'local option' mode, which is slightly better than total requirement of waterboarding and torture. The other Dixie states tried to ban torture but got overturned by Federal black-robed demons.

According to that same website, 21% of ALL schools are ungagged, which means the 'local option' mode is working in some places. This is an encouraging number, since 'local option' is probably the easiest to maintain against the black-robed demons.

Okla was somewhat slow in gathering up its GUTS. Late in 2020, as courage gradually spread out from Florida, Okla was among the last of the Dixie states to break free. At least as of today, Okla is free and breathing, until a black-robed demon succeeds in reinstating torture for students.

So here goes: Polistra and friends salute Oklahoma!



Nov 10: As predicted, a black-robed demon has overturned the total ban. Returned to local option, which is probably the least horrible alternative under a permanently demonic federal dysgovernment. Utah still has a total ban, but I'm sure that won't last.

Labels: Constants and Variables, defensible spaces

  ¶ 9:59 AM

  More 1975 inflection
Continuing from 1975 as a point of inflection in the growth of Deepstate.

Again from Computers and Automation, Feb 74 issue.

Charles Suskind narrates the history of ethics versus technology. He starts with the County Extension Agent system, a successful use of 'light-handed' government to spread the latest research to farmers. The agents had to gain the trust of farmers, the most realistic people in the world, and convince them to try new plowing methods or new seeds. It didn't always work, and the new methods WEREN'T always better than the old. Suskind doesn't seem to grasp the latter point.

Suskind then shows how Hitler expanded the allegedly 'moral' goal of euthanasia for suffering terminal patients into a total extermination of Untermenschen.

Here we have a perfect echo in this year's holocaust, which began with Gaian eugenics and euthanasia and switched abruptly to extermination of Untermenschen. Greta ordered doctors and governments to Kill Granny, and they followed the order.

Suskind suggests a Hippocratic Oath for engineers, which misses two crucial points.

I solemnly pledge myself to consecrate my life to the service of humanity. I will give to my teachers the respect and gratitude which is their due; I will be loyal to the profession of engineering and just and generous to its members; I will lead my life and practice my profession in uprightness and honor; whatever project I shall undertake, it shall be for the good of mankind to the utmost of my power; I will keep far aloof from wrong, from corruption, and from tempting others to vicious practice; I will exercise my profession solely for the benefit of humanity and perform no act for a criminal purpose, even if solicited, far less suggest it; I will speak out against evil and unjust practice wheresoever I encounter it; I will not permit considerations of religion, nationality, race, party politics, or social standing to intervene between my duty and my work; even under threat, I will not use my professional knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity; I will endeavor to avoid waste and the consumption of non-renewable resources. I make these promises solemnly, freely, and upon my honor.

The good of humanity is the main problem. Euthanasia and eugenics are ALWAYS grounded on the greater good of humanity. Governments ALWAYS claim to be improving the breed of humanity by culling SUBHUMANS. Culling was quite open in Hitlerian language, and it's equally brazen in the language of both Gaians and Virans. "Science deniers" and "vax deniers" are subhuman vermin.

Serving INDIVIDUAL CUSTOMERS is the best way to be moral. When you want to SELL MORE PRODUCTS, you want to have MORE LIVING AND PROSPEROUS CUSTOMERS who can buy your stuff. Share Value broke this connection, leaving tech solely tied to Deepstate and Epstein.

And Epstein brings us to the other missing point, secrecy and blackmail.

Engineers were NOT secret-keepers before 1946. They respected patents and trade secrets, but patents aren't killers. A trade secret protects an amortized skill. It doesn't induce blackmail.

After the rebirth of Deepstate, the NSF and the nuclear program started bringing engineers into the fold. The sudden shift was visible in tech magazines between '45 and '46. The classic 'open source' attitude was still there in '45, spreading knowledge without breaking patents. In '46 everything was closed down to "protect against commie spies", who were of course really working for FBI.

Secrecy was well underway in 1957. I remember talking with one of my engineer uncles who was working at Los Alamos. He said he was working on rockets, and that's all he would say. In '58 Ike lamented the fast shift of tech firms from PROFIT AND CUSTOMERS to government contracts and secrecy.

By 1974 this shift was complete in electronics, but hadn't yet infected the newer software industry. Other writers in the same magazine were seeing it, but Suskind missed it.

His first example, the county extension program, belongs to the open source world. Serving the customer with some help from the government. His second example, Hitler's euthanasia/eugenics, belongs to the secret-keeping world, slaughtering the customer with plenty of help from the government. Engineers were already in the secret-keeping world in '74, so no pledge could pull them back.

Suskind also salutes Gaia at the end of his pledge, which would have helped to enable Greta's euthanasia/eugenics.

I'll try to be charitable and assume he was just a poor prophet, but I'm not in a charitable mood this year.

= = = = =

Continued here.

Labels: AI point-missing, defensible times, endless hell

  ¶ 11:53 AM

  McBee
McBee cards were an obscure but surprisingly long-lived alternative to IBM's fully mechanized sorters and organizers. Especially in biology and chemistry, they were still around in the 1990s.

Hollerith cards were punched by machine and sorted by machine all the way from the start in 1880.



McBee cards could be punched and sorted by machine. The punching side was partly mechanized, but the sorting side was usually done by hand.

This has advantages and disadvantages. The most obvious advantage is cost. For McBee you need to order some cards, and you need a ticket-punch and an icepick and some boxes. The cards are the only real cost. For IBM you need to order some cards, and you also need to rent a keypunch and a sorter for about $150 a month (equals $1000 a month today). Individuals and small businesses could afford McBee.

When modeling and animating these processes I'm on halfway familiar ground. In the '50s I often helped my father with mechanical grading and categorizing for his college lecture classes. It was a job I truly enjoyed. I did a lot of sorting, and a little bit of hand-punching, but never encountered the punching machine illustrated below.

A typical McBee card had punchable fields all around the edge, and a writable area in the middle. The open central area was another advantage over Hollerith, which was solidly filled with punchable numbers. You could type or handwrite a considerable amount of info or diagrams in the center.



Cards were printed in a wide variety of individual styles for each business or purpose. Some had specialized non-numerical categories, some were all numerical, some were mixed alphanumeric.

McBee cards had a unique arithmetic system, based on 1 2 4 7. The system isn't a proper base-15, though it ranges from 0 to 14. The choice of these four digits was supposedly a compromise to minimize the number of punches needed. You could form all the digits from 0 to 9 with one or two punches. This was slightly more efficient than 4-bit binary.



Letters were formed with 1 2 4 7 plus an extra, called NZ for nonzero. This was NOT more efficient than a 5-bit binary system, but the familiarity probably made it faster. Binary digits were totally foreign to most people until the 1980s, and it's always better to amortize an existing skill.

[Here's a comparison of efficiency in terms of total punches needed.]

One definite advantage of hand-sorted cards is flexibility of form. When the stack is going to be handled carefully and personally, you can include samples of material or photo images on or in each card. McBee cards with inset X-ray images were useful in medical records:



These inclusions couldn't pass through an IBM sorter or card-reader.

Hand punching was done with a special triangular hand punch that looked a lot like a ticket punch. My father didn't have the special, so we just used a ticket punch.

= = = = =

This punching machine was shown in one detailed description of McBee systems. No other information is available, so I'm semi-guessing the way it worked. I'm assuming that you would set up the patterns using the 8 columns of buttons for up to 8 numerical fields on one side of the card, then hit the big button on the right to punch these. The long side of a typical card contained 6 or 7 fields, so the 8 columns would usually handle one side of a card. I don't know what the 8 buttons on top were supposed to do. Maybe reset for each column? The process would have been like an adding machine except that you were consciously forming the 1247 pattern for each field.



Mr McBee has just punched in 1309, so the card would look like this after turning it over:



Now Polistra will demonstrate the first step of the selecting process. Assume she's looking for cards with 1309. She begins by finding cards with a 1 in the thousands place.

McBee selection is inverse to the usual way of thinking. It's more like the military volunteer method, where the soldiers who are NOT volunteering to check out the minefield are asked to step back, leaving the volunteers and the sleepers in the original row.

The poker was called a tumbler for some unknown reason. (It should have been a stinger.) Polistra inserts the tumbler into the 1 hole of the thousands field. Cards that were NOT punched in this slot can be pulled up, while the cards with a PUNCH in this digit stay down. She then places the UNWANTED cards in the red box, leaving only the few WANTED cards in the original blue box.



She would then tumble a 1 and a 2 in the hundreds field, to complete the 3; then do nothing for the zero in the tens field; then tumble the 2 and 7 in the ones field.

All remaining cards in the original blue box would then be 1309.



This may seem tiresomely slow, but the basic IBM sorter in that era also sorted one field at a time, with repeated sorts of the smaller remainders. The difference is that the IBM processed all digits in a numeric field at once. For cards with non-numerical fields, where each value in the field represented one value of a category (like M/F gender or Small/Medium/Large size) McBee and IBM would need the same number of passes.

McBee later made a more IBMish puncher and sorter, but no info is available online except this one picture:



This machine didn't gain popularity for an obvious reason. When you OWN a niche, you need to claim and optimize the niche. Customers bought McBee BECAUSE it was naturally visual and lo-tech. McBee customers weren't buying McBee because they WISHED it was more like IBM.

Admittedly their marketers finally picked up the beehive theme!

Labels: defensible times, Equipoise

  ¶ 2:51 PM