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



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

= = = = =

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

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

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

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

= = = = =

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

Labels: Jackboot stomping forever, storage

  ¶ 6:00 AM

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

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

Bitcoin shit provides a perfect illustration of both at once.

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

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

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

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

= = = = =

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

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

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

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

= = = = =

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

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

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

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

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

= = = = =

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

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

= = = = =

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

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

Labels: Experiential education, MMT, Real World Math

  ¶ 10:44 PM

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

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Idiot headline at RCS:

Why is science letting us down?

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

= = = = =

The proper answer is:

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

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

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

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

= = = = =

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

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

= = = = =

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

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

= = = = =

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

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

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

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

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

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

Equipoise.


= = = = =

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

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

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Labels: endless hell, Equipoise

  ¶ 12:06 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

= = = = =

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

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

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

Labels: 2000=1000, Equipoise, Jail mode

  ¶ 7:08 AM

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

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

This immediately evoked an example.

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

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

= = = = = START REPRINT:

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

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

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

Instant choice. Had to buy it.

Unpacking......


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


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

Scanned both sides:


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

= = = = =


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

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

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

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

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

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

= = = = =

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



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

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

= = = = = END REPRINT.

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

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 9:58 PM

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

DAO governance tokens are themselves a $40 billion market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: Entertainment, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 3:33 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: Bemusement, TMI

  ¶ 10:40 AM

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: Equipoise

  ¶ 8:57 AM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: #WholeOfSociety, endless hell, Parkinson

  ¶ 6:52 AM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

= = = = = START REPRINT:

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

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

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

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



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

= = = = = END REPRINT.

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

Labels: Metrology

  ¶ 12:45 AM

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

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

= = = = = START REPRINT:


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

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

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

This picture seems to show the real machine in use:


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


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

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



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

Electronic version:



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



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



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

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

= = = = =

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

= = = = =

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


= = = = = END REPRINT.

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

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

Similar?





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

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

Labels: Equipoise, Make or break

  ¶ 10:57 PM

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

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

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

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

Labels: Sucker Filter

  ¶ 3:10 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

= = = = = START REPRINT:

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

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

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

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

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

21HHERMAN HOLLERITH IV

to honor the constant Hollerith tradition.



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

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

As a dict in Python:

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

= = = = = END REPRINT.

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

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

Labels: AI point-missing

  ¶ 2:11 PM

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

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

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

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

Psychopaths rule by imposing chaos to ACHIEVE equality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: #WholeOfSociety, Asked and badly answered

  ¶ 11:31 PM

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

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

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

PING!

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

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

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

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

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

= = = = =

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

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

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

  It's abacuses all the way down.
Careful observers have decoded the honeybee's waggle dance. It's a vector message. The dancer is telling her hivemates about a good source of honey. She repeatedly forms a figure-8 pattern, with the message in the middle.

The direction of the dance is relative to the main honeycomb wall of the hive. The angle between the central motion line and the wall represents the vector of the food source relative to the sun.

Transposing the viewed dance to a position on the bee's internal compass is complex, but using the memorized template can be hardwired in an insect with compound eyes that cover most of the compass. The template is assigned to one radial set of lenses, and the bee keeps the sun centered on that group of lenses.

The distance component of the vector is conveyed by the number of waggles in each central run.

This reminds me of the glial abacus that keeps track of numbers in short-term memory. Astrocyte cells 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 body to stop swimming or flying.

Let's try to imagine how this feels to a forager bee watching the dance.

Polistra has a hive near the mill...



Looking downward inside the hive we see one scout telling one forager about her find:

The forager observes the direction of the dance with respect to the hive, and forms a template for where the sun should be when she's flying.

Taking the important part in slow motion:



Each waggle ticks up the beads of her astrocyte abacus. For a simple animation we'll assume she's a Babylon Bee who counts in base 60. For each of these five waggles she brings in one 12-bead astrocyte. The total of all the counters tells her how many wingflaps she needs. (Obviously the real multiple of wingflaps per waggle would be far more than 12.)

She then launches out of the hive and turns until the actual sun matches the template position supplied by the dance. As she flies, each wingflap clicks down a bead. When the astrocytes have all reached threshold, she's there.




= = = = =


Even better: The clover is also an abacus!



What looks like a blossom is actually a cluster (inflorescence) of a few dozen tiny florets. Each 'spike' is a complete little flower, with a green cup (calyx) containing a white crown (corolla).

Why are some pointing down? Those are the florets that have already been touched by a pollinating insect. The clover detects the touch and removes nutrition from that floret, allowing it to drop down and turn brown.

Labels: bee, Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 3:41 PM

  Young whippersnappers miss this point
More thinking about Batya's magnificent message on the media.

One point she makes repeatedly in various interviews is correct in general but not quite in specifics:

She says that before TV, there was typically one newspaper in a city. One newspaper doesn't want to divide the people, because it wants to advertise to everyone in town. Now we have divided media, so CNN and FOX can satisfy and amplify the most extreme views of the two teams.

She's correct about the unifying effect of a normal business in a smaller city or state. But the history of media doesn't really match the normal business model.

Before TV, newspapers WERE the dividers. As I've noted before, every village above 200 population had one weekly paper. Every town above 2000 had one daily. Cities above 20000 had more than one daily, often 5 or 6 in a city like Topeka or Spokane.

One-paper towns were TINY. The vast majority of the population lived in cities with two or more papers, so the vast majority could pick their favorite brand.

The real unifier was radio and TV, specifically because of the Fairness Doctrine, which was SERIOUSLY ENFORCED from 1934 to 1980. News and entertainment, including comedy, had to be STRICTLY NONPARTISAN. Batya is too young to remember FAIR radio.

= = = = =

We tend to think that monopoly creates disconnection from customers, and thus enables extreme or crazy views.

The causation is reversed. Monopoly vs competition isn't the driving variable. Disconnection from customers is the driving variable.

A profit-seeking business of any size wants as many customers as it can get, so it doesn't try to repel customers unnecessarily. (Obviously no business wants a non-paying or criminal customer.) This is true whether the business has a monopoly or not.

In the current globalized "market", big corporations DON'T WANT CUSTOMERS. They want SHAREHOLDERS, and SHAREHOLDERS all have one insane set of values and opinions.

This is not a monopoly problem, it's a complete failure and loss of BUSINESS AND CAPITALISM.

Labels: Constants and Variables, the broken circle

  ¶ 2:54 PM

  The switchover from order to chaos
Via Evolution News, a POWERFUL idea from Neil Thomas.

Here I will make the attempt to drill down even further to the root causes of what appeared to be the Western world’s unprecedented rejection of tried-and-tested philosophers and scientists such as Aristotle, Cicero, Plato, and the physician Galen in a strange capitulation to “out there” philosophic fantasists like Epicurus and his Roman disciple, Lucretius.

It was the would-be rehabilitation of those ancient materialist thinkers by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, in the late 18th century, coupled with the later Victorian crisis of faith and the sudden irruption into this already volatile mix of Charles Darwin which was to result in the particularly strange irrationalism which has stubbornly persisted right up to the present day.

This abdication of normal canons of reason consisted in people forsaking traditional norms of philosophical common sense and (effectively) throwing in their lot with the ancient goddess of chance, Lady Fortuna (or Lady Luck as she was later to be called), that accursed personification of unreliability whom the ancient philosopher Boethius, Geoffrey Chaucer, and many others have arraigned since time out of mind for being incapable of any productive and dependable action on behalf of struggling humanity.

Thomas is onto something big. This change from order to chaos happened in politics when the orderly and genetically determined sequence of hereditary kings was replaced by the random dice-toss of revolutions and "elections". Not coincidentally, the replacers (Robespierre, Tom Paine, etc) were psychopaths devoted to SMASHING order and life, and ENFORCING perfect chaos and death.

Around the same time, science abandoned the quest for order. The Arab and Persian astrologers, trailed by Kepler and Brahe and Chaucer, were observing the heavens to discern God's will. After Kepler, astronomers stopped looking for order and contented themselves with sampling the dots.

Also around the same time, economics was taken over by BETTING MEN who developed statistics to profit from rolling dice and shuffling cards. Previous investment had been based on common sense and personal involvement. Two-way obligations between the investor and the farm or business, and two-way obligations between employer and worker. Sharia codified this arrangement best, but it was also strongly encouraged by Catholic and Jewish economic systems.

The stock market broke up the obligations, turning investment into a fungible and STATISTICAL process with no common sense or human connection. Share Value functions on multi-layer SIDE BETS, not personal judgment of competence.

When the psychopaths took over biology, they abandoned the two-way obligation loop of feedback. Natural selection is explicitly random, bringing in the astronomer's pet randomizer of cosmic rays. Unpredictable particles change the genome, and unpredictable climate events decide which changed version will survive.

Finally in 1906 the psychopaths took over physics and math. Godel and Bohr declared that everything is perfectly unpredictable. We're not allowed to trust our own senses and instruments; we must wait for a Credentialed And Approved Scientist to tell us whether the cat is there or not.

Darwinians assume God is a psychopath just like them. Change the rules, kill the defiant, change the rules again, kill the defiant again, loop forever. Never allow the victim to regain BALANCE or swing with a RHYTHM or form his own FEEDBACK LOOPS with your chaotic torture.

Actual nature has constant rules. The inherited mechanisms of negative feedback (life) interact with the predetermined patterns of inanimate nature (weather, geomagnetic fields, earthquakes) in an infinite pattern of two-way loops.

Two-way? Yes. Every life form alters the inanimate parts of nature. Bacteria dissolve rocks and build new rocks, and create and move clouds. Trees break up rocks and build soil, and change temperature and humidity patterns. Complex animals dig up minerals and food, plant more food, and build hives and houses and dams. Intelligent brains reshape the magnetic field.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, switchover

  ¶ 11:14 PM

  Sucker filter = DAO
Some tech types are pushing a peculiar deal that possibly crosses the line into fraud. One of the few remaining copies of the original printing of the Constitution is up for sale. The techies are putting together a Bitcoin thingamajig that will purchase this copy and then give it to a museum, or build a museum, or burn it, or eat it, or pretty much anything you can think of.

What do you get for your donation? Nothing except the pleasure of knowing that a document, which you will never see or touch, is being transferred to someplace that might or might not be the same place it would have gone if it hadn't been purchased by the Bitcoin thingy.

There's nothing wrong with gathering donations for a specifically named gift. Keeping an important artwork in public view is a worthy goal for people who appreciate the artwork. Many people support museums in this way, without ever visiting the museum.

The potential fraud arises with the Bitcoin NFT shit, which is of course a total fraud from the getgo. This group is claiming that the donators will be able to help control the destination of the document, or maybe not. The donators may be able to choose a director who will make the decision, except that the structure of the NFT excludes a director and doesn't provide a "voting" mechanism.

"Decentralized control" is another name for dictatorship. Ultimately SOMEBODY will have to decide where to put the document, and there's no assurance that your "vote" will make a difference. A museum won't accept a donation from a vague "decentralized collective" that might randomly decide to take back the document. Museums are properly fussy about provenance and chain of possession.

The organizers are free to sell the document to a private collector for a profit, which is the most likely actual outcome.

I think DAO is a modern retread of the "artist rights" movement that started and fizzled in the '70s. Some artists tried to maintain full possession of everything they sold, considering a sale to be more like a rental. The artists tried to control how the work could be used and displayed. Very few collectors and museums want to buy artworks with no control. They do sometimes borrow artworks or collectibles, with an explicit term-limited lease arrangement, but they won't "purchase" without control.

= = = = =

Later: Happened to notice that the auction is live right now, so I'm watching it. Auctions are always fascinating. The alleged million-dollar "artworks" are vastly less competent than anything I see in low-cost places like Etsy.

ONLY ONE THING MATTERS IN THIS PICTURE. NYC IS DONE WITH MUZZLES. THE AUCTION IS A CROWDED ROOM IN NYC. ONLY ABOUT 10% OF THE AUDIENCE IS MUZZLED. THEY'RE SHOWING A 'SATELLITE' ROOM IN LONDON, WHICH IS ALSO BREATHING. WHY THE FUCK CAN'T WE BE ALLOWED TO BREATHE? GODS, GET YOUR FUCKING ASSES IN GEAR. IF NYC AND LONDON CAN BREATHE, WHY CAN'T WE BREATHE?

= = = = =

Next day: The DAO didn't win the bidding. They announced in advance that they had raised $40 million, so the other bidders knew in advance that the price of the item was $41 million. It wasn't really an auction. The 'organization' says it will now refund all the contributions, and will go on to bigger and better Sucker Filters.

What was the purpose? Was the DAO sponsored by an enemy of the winning bidder, in order to make him spend more money than he would otherwise? That's a common tactic at auctions.

Labels: endless hell, Jackboot stomping forever, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 2:46 PM

  Best
This interview with Batya Ungar-Sargon is the best thing I've seen in a long time.

Batya narrates the CASTE history of journalism, which I hadn't heard before. It started as a working-class profession. Reporters were not college-educated. They lived in the same neighborhoods as plumbers and cops, and shared their worldview. Now journalists are extremely rich and extremely "educated" and extremely isolated. They don't know any actual humans, so they don't get any corrective feedback for their holocaustal THEORIES.

The British interviewer asks the right questions. At 27:00 he asks "What can we do about it?"

Her answer is perfect and classic.

Media gives you road rage. You feel the urgent need to berate and correct someone who has said the wrong thing on the internet.

It's not natural to feel that way about a stranger. Every time you feel that way, media makes a million dollars.

PING.

Tons of meaning packed into a few sentences.

Her next point is older but equally important. For a LONG time, media has persuaded us that we NEED to know about the rest of the world. "It's the responsibility of an informed citizen". Bullshit. This is an outright lie. We don't NEED to know anything about distant places and unconnected people. We only NEED to know what's happening in our house and neighborhood and immediate surroundings. When the demon mayor or demon governor issues a new genocidal torture mandate, or a windstorm or snowstorm is approaching, we need to prepare ourselves for danger. We don't NEED to know about tsunamis in Japan or mandates in France. Media inspires fear and panic by telling us that what happens in France will happen here. Admittedly the holocaust was running in worldwide unison at first, but the unison quickly dissolved. Paychopaths only give orders, they don't take orders. Now each demon is serving his own sexual needs.

Labels: SES

  ¶ 8:24 AM

  Two jumps to one conclusion
We have the usual bridge jumper today. In fact we have two today.

Both of them generated multiple copies of the two standard comments:

1. We need a net under the bridge.

2. I hope they get the help they need.

Well, the net is impossible because of state and city laws. The Monroe Bridge is an official Historical Site, so it can't be altered with nets. (Hint: Does this suggest a broader problem with state and local laws?)

And the "help" is also pointless. One commenter has been there and gives the facts:

To be “babysat” by security guards, “cared for” by some who really don’t care, until they can move him out and on. Sad. Hopefully he has it inside himself to heal. That’s really what’s needed in this country today; to be your own best friend, whatever it takes.

On the fucking dot. In an uncivilized wilderness you have to make your own life.

Another pair of comments fits the standard joke about men and women responding to a problem:

1. Someone was on the monroe street bridge a few minutes ago... I was on the bus and couldn't get off I wanted to help but nobody stopped to even try to help. My heart hurts for those who think they have no way out.

2. I’m sure it’s a bit chilly, but at least they fell in a relatively calmer wider section. Although the river is now higher, about 3500 cubic ft/second. It was 500-1000 max, all summer. It’s a ways down stream before any narrowed mini rapids.

Can you guess which is male and which is female? No points for correct guess.

Finally, this one gets to the center and heart of the whole problem.

It's not always a mental health issue. It's a people are cruel issue. Cruel to the point that they feel like they have no other choice. It dosent matter if you fix the mental health situation if the people that are being cruel don't seek the help too. People can only take so much before they give up.

When all governments and corporations and "mental health facilities" and hospitals are run by the cruelest psychopaths in history, there's no alternative. There's only one form of "help" for a psychopath, and the sooner we start applying this "help", the faster we'll heal.
It's Nuremberg time.

Labels: Make or break

  ¶ 3:40 PM

  More on high-status hippies
Wolf is graphing the dot-com weirdness and cultishness of WeWork. Cults are running strong now, from Elon to Elizabeth Holmes to Adam Neumann. A business with an obviously stupid and impossible goal sucks in all the investment, leaving no money available for real business.

One commenter brings up a historical parallel:

This prolonged departure from fundamentals is so weird. I recall in the dotcom years, Silicon Valley started off with promising (if speculative) companies and ideas, and drifted over time into pure marketing. Sensing free money on the table, free lunch, a zero sum transfer, the rats moved in (as they did into the hippie movement, which has interesting Bay area cultural parallels). No need to provide value, just have a charming superficial story, build a facade, and the “investors” will come. I am not sure of the relative numbers (I don’t have Wolf’s skills) but things now seem far down that path. Cults of personality abound in today’s society, not unlike the grotesque scenes in the post-hippie Bay area.

Like Elon and Elizabeth and Adam, those high-status hippies had government connections and money connections. They turned the drug trade (which has always been a Deepstate specialty) into personality cults, and some of the cults were info feeders for Deepstate.

We're parallel to the early 70s in many ways. Nixon saddled business and citizens with a crazy pile of new mandates, in environmentalism and Die-Versity. Cults were everywhere, and cults were mainly Deepstate operations. Now we're seeing inflation, which Wolf is also graphing expertly.

The only thing in this comment that I hadn't seen in my own experience is the "investors". This commenter had a different set of experiences.

Labels: Sucker Filter

  ¶ 6:14 AM

  Small victory
Amid the unending "virus" torture, which appears to be fading in many states but still running full force in Demon Woodward and Demon Inslee's torture chamber, and amid this year's unending bad weather, I try to create and treasure small victories.

This one is especially delicious and vindicacious. My courseware has been working properly in the Blackboard and Moodle LMSes for three years. Many universities are switching to the Canvas LMS for unknown reasons, probably cost. Canvas was slow to handle SCORM, and until now it didn't handle SCORM properly even in the systems that were supposedly equipped.

Free testbeds are no longer available for any of the LMSes, so I have to rely on the kindness of customers to lend me a temporary login on real systems. Last year around this time I conducted a long and careful test of my courseware in a Canvas system, and determined that it was only partly functional. The lessons displayed, but grades weren't recorded. Without access to the inner workings of Canvas, I couldn't draw any conclusions. Other users were having the same trouble, so I had to assume without proof that Canvas was the defective side.

But I know from long experience that the system is usually NOT the problem. The problem is usually on my end.

This week an existing customer using Blackboard found that her university is switching to Canvas and asked if I could try it out. She kindly finagled a login, and THIS TIME it works perfectly.

I didn't change anything. Canvas must have fixed its problems. The whole setup looks different now, and it's much easier to use as well.



So a little gloating is called for. Normally this type of incompatibility is my fault. THIS TIME it was the system's fault.

Labels: Constants and Variables, Equipoise

  ¶ 2:36 PM

  Light and sound are opposite
Random popup thought:

Signal vs noise has opposite meanings for light and sound.

We are built to need ambient light, but we don't primarily use light for signals. Sunlight gives us vitamin D and immunity, and light helps us walk and work. Reading and writing are innate, but they weren't an important means of signaling until a few hundred years ago.

We are built to use sound for signals. Ambient sound is annoying and unhealthy.

So: Our buildings are designed to MAXIMIZE ambient light and MINIMIZE ambient sound.

Labels: asked and worth asking again

  ¶ 6:14 AM

  Reminds me of
Zuckerberg's new 'metaverse' crap is either the standard AI hype covering a nearly nonexistent vaporware project, or scary as hell. I can't decide.

Zuck's performance in the intro video is weirdly robotic. Everyone has a comment on it, so I might as well join the crowd.

Instantly reminded me of Mitch Miller.



Zuck's idea of switching the whole web to VR simply doesn't make sense. VR has been around for MANY DECADES. The Link flight simulator was used in WW2. Driving simulators were used in driver ed classes and license exams in the '70s. Digital VR systems have been around since the '80s, and never became popular or profitable. People who have tried the most recent versions say that they're still clunky and clumsy, and often induce vertigo. If you can't make an idea profitable in 80 years, why do you think you're suddenly going to make it work now?

Labels: Asked and not worth asking

  ¶ 3:13 PM

  It's just share vs profit as usual
In this podcast Yang gets into a more substantial discussion of the problems, but his solution is still trivial.

After running an actual campaign he knows how the sausage is made, and he's doing a great service to the public by telling us about the process in detail.

Partisan followers of My Network and My Leader and My Party are generally unaware of the internal mechanism. They believe that My Leader is acting on his own human desires and heartfelt needs. In fact My Leader is a mechanical puppet reading a script. The script writers are the real leaders.

Interviewer Yascha Mounk asks why the candidates always listen to the NGOs and consultants, who rarely represent actual people. Yang didn't have an answer. Yang just wants to change voting systems, which will NOT make any difference.

The answer is simple. Share Value vs Profit. Same in politics as in business.

Big corporations all sound the same and move in unison because their value loop is solely connected to a few billionaires. Politicians all sound the same and move in unison because their value loop is solely connected to THE SAME FEW BILLIONAIRES. Bloomberg, Bezos, Soros.

The solution in both cases is to restore the profit motive. Small businesses like a dog groomer or a landscaper can't afford to alienate customers with irrelevant political crap. They have to provide a good product for a good price. They have to listen to the customer. If I want short grass, the landscaper can't decide to leave the grass long for Gaian Biodiversity**.

Politics used to be more like dog groomers. Local politicians did DIRECT BUSINESS with their customers. PAY FOR VALUE. You could pay to get zoning permission or more police coverage or a streetlight on your block.

The "Good Government" movement gradually eliminated the RETAIL BUSINESS of politics, turning all politicians toward NYC. When you aren't allowed to accept INDIVIDUAL PAYMENT for INDIVIDUAL SERVICE, you have to get money somewhere, so you make WHOLESALE DEALS with GIANT DEMONS who don't represent your own customers in any way.

** Footnote: Unfortunately the Gaian Laws and the Viran Laws are specifically targeted at those small "non-essential" businesses, removing their unique power to listen to customers. The pest controller can't use effective poisons, and can't deal with "protected" species, because EPA. In California the landscaper can't use gas-powered mowers and trimmers because EPA. And half of all small businesses were closed permanently because "virus".

Labels: Carbon Cult, endless hell

  ¶ 6:47 AM

  Familiar side, puzzling side
I've been following Carreyrou's coverage of the Theranos trial.

Carreyrou is the ONLY actual reporter still working for mass media. He knows how to dig and ask and pester sources until they give him what he wants, and he also knows how to protect sources from retaliation. Above all he knows how to knit the info into a riveting story.

The tech side of the Theranos story is complex but familiar. It's not clear that Holmes intended from the start to commit a fraud. Like some Ponzi schemers, she may have fully intended to build the proposed machine and solve the proposed problem. Also like some Ponzis, she didn't know when to stop. When experts told her it was impossible, her Silicon Valley arrogance tried to bullshit through the experts. Fake it till you make it works when the sole purpose is Share Value. Faking doesn't get there when the PHYSICAL MACHINE is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE and PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS. As she got deeper into cognitive dissonance, her insatiable psychopathic tendencies blasted down the opposition instead of halting.

The personal side is more puzzling. Carreyrou repeats this theme over and over with each of the board members and sponsors. Holmes had a hypnotic grip on these POWERFUL OLD MEN. These aren't lonely unpopular dudes who are desperately hungry for the slightest hint of attention. These monsters have been admired and obeyed and sycophanted for 70 years. They have been at the top of the food chain for money and power and sex.

Each of them saw Holmes as a goddess in the pantheon of war. The ultimate leader, the new Marcus Aurelius.

Board member George Schultz got his grandson a job working for Theranos. The grandson is a supersmart tech type, and he quickly saw through the fake demonstrations and empty machines. He started to complain through various channels, and ultimately got in touch with Carreyrou. At that point Grandpa George brought in the heavy artillery of private investigators and mobbed-up lawyers to threaten the life of his own grandson. After the grandson nearly killed himself, grandpa halfway realized what was going on.

What's the secret? Elizabeth isn't notably beautiful or sexy, at least in pictures. Some commentators focus on her supposedly cultivated "low voice". It's an average adult female voice, nothing special. Her appeal to these monsters must be partly sexual and partly something else. Best guess is plain old blackmail. She already knew these men through her family connections, so she didn't need to introduce herself with sex. The family connections may also have provided the source of the blackmail.

Later: No, blackmail can't be the source of power. Victims of blackmail don't want to talk about the blackmailer, and are usually forbidden to talk about the blackmailer. This religious devotion is simply a cult, not a blackmail operation. Cults sometimes engage in blackmail, but it's not an essential ingredient.

= = = = =

Totally irrelevant footnote: Back when shortwave broadcasting existed, I sometimes listened to Radio Beijing. Needless to say, they didn't appreciate our imperialism, so they often talked about our leaders. Their English was far from perfect, and they pronounced George Schultz as Jo-Da Shorts. Whenever his name comes up in the news, I read it as Jo-Da Shorts.

Labels: Asked and badly answered

  ¶ 11:59 PM

  The only UNbroken supply chain
UncommonDescent notes yet another mass retraction of low-quality "science" articles. Most of these are clearly produced by AI and submitted by Chinese grad students who are competing ferociously to get onto the tenure track.

In the real world supply chains are broken because normal people have decided en masse that working for demons is no longer worth the torture and pain.

The only area where we have an OVERsupply is "science" articles. Grad students are eagerly competing to be the next head demon.

Journal editors are in a tough position. The entire tenure system is built to increase raw quantity. More output means more money in a simple linear function. Nobody wants quality. Truth has negative value. Fashionable lies have high value.

But a "reputable" journal may lose its reputation if it's too obviously unreadable. These AI papers are too obvious. Even the titles are nonsense, like

Distribution of earthquake activity in mountain area based on embedded system and physical fitness detection of basketball

Sucker Filter at work. Select the stupidest readers by sending out the most brazenly stupid title. After being the stupidest readers and publishing the shit, the editors at Springer have decided that they don't like the feeling of being the stupidest readers.

If the Chinese authors had been smarter, they would have made nonsensical connections to FASHIONABLE LIES.

Distribution of earthquake activity in mountain area based on embedded system and mental illness detection of Trump voters

Now you've got a high citation count, and you're on the ramp leading to a Nobel.

Labels: Editors, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 9:41 PM

  Moral rigor vs math rigor, reprint
This 2016 item deserves a reprint.

= = = = = START REPRINT:


Half-formed thought, after reading about the admirable African bishops making one last attempt to turn the US/UK Anglicans back toward Christianity. It won't work, but sometimes you have to get the situation 'on the record' to forestall historical revision. When the facts are fully public, silencing the truth is more expensive.

I've often referred to the African talent for moral rigor, which is more important to human survival than the Oriental talent for math rigor. Our public education system and our industrial and employment policies are totally devoted to math rigor, even though the record is perfectly clear. When we emphasized moral rigor, we had a successful country. Now that moral rigor is illegal, we're failing fast.

Let's try to compare those two rigors in a concrete and consequential way.

Tech types and STEM types think moral rigor is nonexistent or irrelevant. Does Nature agree?

What happens when you get a math equation wrong? On paper or in the computer, not much. Nature doesn't care if you figure the maximum load on a beam incorrectly. But if you use that incorrect number to install an inadequate girder in a bridge or building, Nature will tell you about it, and people will die.

What happens when you get a moral equation wrong? On paper or in the church, not much. Nature doesn't care if you preach that nations should favor immigrants over natives. But if you use that incorrect judgment to install inadequate borders, Nature will tell you about it, and people will die.

Similarly with other incorrect judgments like "the sole purpose of sex is pleasure". Nature isn't bothered when you write books about this idea. Nature doesn't even care when individuals act on it. But when you use it to install mechanisms like birth control pills, abortion clinics, and day-care instead of parenting, Nature will tell you about it. Society will collapse and millions will die from cancer and crime.


MORALITY IS ANOTHER WORD FOR SURVIVAL.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

  ¶ 5:34 AM

  As fucking usual
"Conservatives" constantly support causes and goals that destroy the society they PRETEND to favor. ZERO TAX made Facebook and Amazon possible.

About 10 years ago charter schools were a big "conservative" fad. Allegedly charter schools would use public funds without the crap of public unions and idiocy. I threw some money at the state charter organization back then because I was an idiot.

Every now and then they send me emails. Today's email proves the point beautifully.

Ready for this?

As our world evolves, so too must our systems. At WA Charters, our vision for the future of public education looks like student-centered, community-rooted schools that are equipped to disrupt systemically racist and inequitable policies and practices.

Baionne Coleman, CEO of Rainier Valley Leadership Academy says it best. "Black, Indigenous and Global Majority teachers are needed in large numbers across our nation for all scholars. Our youth need to see Global Majority adults as authority figures and loving individuals, instead of the numerous stereotypical myths that depict Global Majority people as 'less than'."

By advocating for charter public schools to continue to grow in our state and for charter students to have access to fair funding, we can help more schools like RVLA launch and thrive. In the coming year, WA Charters, our partners and community will be leading the charge to help make more antiracist education possible.

Thank you for being a part of our community of support.

Patrick D’Amelio President, WA Charters P.S. Help support more antiracist education through a financial contribution or signing up to be an advocate for charter public schools in Washington state!

Ha ha ha. Gotcha! Or more precisely Got Me.

By now I'm not really surprised. From the start, most of the charters were "leftward" from public schools, not "rightward".

BUT: Under the Global Majority crap there's a diamond. Both "left" and "right" ignore and disdain real Africans. Real Africa is the source of sanity and hope for the world. Tanzania was the only country that firmly resisted the "virus" holocaust on SCIENTIFIC grounds.

And another diamond, or at least a zircon. The plain fact is that integration harmed black people far more than it helped them. Integration broke up the black upper class and disemployed black teachers. After the integration of the 1950s, students were mixed but teachers were all white.

If "antiracists" would recognize these facts in a more objective and less Maoist way, I'd support them wholeheartedly.

= = = = =

Later: This article shows that the "right-wing" movement for charters, sponsored by Betsy DeVos, was directly in charge of implanting the Woke shit. Also not surprising. Defunding police also started in "right-wing" circles.

Labels: infinite STUPID, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 9:10 AM

  Sailer has a better idea
A few days ago I was CAUTIOUSLY optimistic about the proposed non-cancel university. Maybe it's just another sting. If not, it still lacks a commitment to avoid tenure, and lacks a 'two-way obligation loop' with its alumni. It should be helping them to stay courageous, and they should in turn be helping to keep the next generation courageous.

Sailer sees the same problem from a different angle.

A big question is how do you avoid having U. of Austin grads blackballed by the rest of academia? For example, if you want to make a career in cultural anthropology, you’d probably be best advised to avoid having a free-thinking university on your resume.

Judging from comments by those involved in this start-up, they tend to be focused more on the humanities and social sciences than on pre-professional training of pre-meds and MBAs. That is admirable, but you need some way to attract bright students.

I could see making alliances with non-woke firms like Tesla, Palantir, and Coinbase and specializing in majors they need, like Comp Sci. It’s crucial to provide potential applicants with plausible career paths.

Smart solution. There's the two-way obligation! But I'm not seeing a recognition of this problem or this solution in the descriptions so far.

Community colleges routinely form these loops with local industries who need a specific skill. The industry pays the college to train welders or med techs, and the students have a guaranteed job offer if they perform well. BUT: What industry wants clear thinkers and courageous truth-tellers? None.

Labels: Answered better than asked, skill-estate

  ¶ 5:08 AM

  Excellent ID teaching
John and Sandy Palmer have produced an EXCELLENT series of videos on intelligent design. I've been reading and thinking about this stuff for 40 years, and these videos have clarified many points that I didn't see before.

Unlike the obnoxiously overproduced rock-n-roll videos from Discovery Institute, these are just straightforward discussions, with complementary insights from John the engineer and Sandy the teacher. Diagrams are included where needed, but there's no fancy camera cuts or rock-n-roll noise.

In this segment they cite an argument used by Darwinists to claim that gradual unguided randomness can lead to big visible changes.

The argument: If you look at a 1953 Corvette and a 2020 Corvette, you'll see two dramatically different designs that have a vaguely similar theme. But if you look at each annual model change, you'll see small and often invisible changes accumulating to the big jump across 60 years. John and Sandy point out that the Corvette was NOT altered by cosmic rays randomly impinging on the engine and body. It was carefully designed by intelligent humans.

BUT: If you understand WHY auto designers make changes, you can see that change itself comes from an intelligent decision, which was NOT an intrinsic part of the reason for design in either animals or cars. Harley Earl had a rigid policy of changing the appearance of every car every year. This was NOT a necessary policy. Other car companies changed far more slowly or not at all. Dodge's 4WD Power Wagon truck remained the same from 1938 to 1968. Jeeps have remained recognizable from 1941 to 2021. These were SUCCESSFUL products.

Nature is more like Power Wagons. Every product remains exactly the same for millions of years unless it is totally killed off. When a change occurs, it's nearly always from the variable parts of the genome, not from the hardwired constant genes. The epigenes contain all available variations.



Meta: Unfortunately it's easy to see why Discovery chose the obnoxious route. Their videos have 80000 views, while the Palmer videos have 10 views. Harley Earl knew what he was doing.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, infinite GOOD

  ¶ 7:38 AM

  Are bots conscious?
Two weeks ago I noted a consistent pattern among the bots that "read" this blog. There was a steady baseline around 100 per day, plus a peak that happened exactly on odd-numbered days. I speculated that there were two bot centers, one running constantly and the other hitting this blog on alternate days. I published that note on Oct 28.

Here's the pattern as I saw it then:



Now the alternate-day peak has disappeared.

When did it disappear? Oct 29.



Are the bots reading and thinking? Did they realize I was detecting their pattern?

Labels: Asked and not worth asking, Bemusement

  ¶ 6:07 AM

  Astrometeorology 9 and final: Back to Maragha
Returning to the Astrometeorology theme after a break. I started on this in April, and ran out of graphic gumption for several months. I'll try to close it out with a better view of the Maragha observatory in Persia.

Previously I showed several of its Instruments, then later showed Brahe's expanded versions. There's plenty of documentation of Brahe's setup, including a full floor plan, so I was able to 'build' the scene with some accuracy. I finally found a usable drawing of the actual Maragha, so now I've circled back to fill in the place and the theme. I'll mix the previously drawn instruments with the new scene and new instruments.

= = = = =

Maragha is in the northern mountainous part of Persia, more Caucasus than Asia. It's high altitude semi-desert with a wide range of temperatures and little rain. Unlike Tycho's rainy Denmark, Maragha is a good place for astronomy. The various instruments could be used outside in all seasons.

The observatory, active around 1400 AD, was a school with resident teachers and scholars. The three small rectangular buildings were residences for the scholars.



The central tower was an open observatory, essentially a raised platform.



The large rectangular building was the 'commons' for meetings and classes.



I've imagined the interior of a residence, using the Persianish furniture that I 'built' for Brahe's castle. Brahe was directly following the Persian tradition in his instruments and his astrometeorology and his architecture. Here Polistra is calculating with an astrolabe.



This is the tool that archeologists call Instrument 3. It's a simple sighter for both azimuth and altitude. Polistra is trying to realign with the beacons of the universe.





The sighting bar with two pinholes or gunsights is the alidade. It's the key element of these instruments and astrolabes.



Another view of Instrument 3 in the full scene:



Instrument 11 was unique in its ability to switch measurement modes.



The vertical measuring stick pivoted on the horizontal rod so that it could be used two ways:



When the measuring stick was horizontal, it measured the azimuth:



And when the measuring stick was vertical, it measured the altitude of the alidade:



Here Polistra is using Instrument 11 from the top of the tower.



Below is a scope-like tool. It didn't include a lens; the scope was apparently just to shield your eyes from ambient light while observing moon and stars in partial daylight.





Instrument 12 uses the alidades to create a pinhole image of an eclipse. The astronomer would then be able to time the eclipse exactly as it passed across the lines on her eclipse transit. This presaged the time-measuring transits and Personal Equation Machines of a later century.



= = = = =

Returning to the start of this set and tying up the threads:

AstroLOGY was the SCIENCE of the stars. AstroNOMY was nothing more than naming the stars.

Astrology was an attempt to observe and predict the patterns of the universe. Astrologers understood that humans are both passive recipients and active participants in the wave patterns. Astrologers were trying to help us with the passive part, by predicting both the physical and emotional weather of future days. Kepler and Brahe were the last true scientists in astrology. After Kepler, lenses replaced alidades, and astronomers became nothing more than namers. They saw more and more dots, and named the dots, but no longer tried to serve people by perceiving the patterns of the dots.

From my first writeup:

Why no lenses? My first thought was that glass wasn't available, but that's exactly wrong. Glass technology was highly developed in that part of the world 15000 years ago in the Bronze Age, and many practical and artistic glass items were found in the same place and era as the observatory. Even worse, some of the scholars who wrote about the observatory ALSO wrote in detail about glass technology. So refined glass tech was right there in the same place and in the same minds. Why didn't they look at the moon through the bottom of a bottle and think Eureka? We'll never know.

Now I've got a hypothesis, if not an explanation.

Alidades let your eyes and brain connect DIRECTLY with Nature. Lenses are one degree of separation from reality. Photography and math and computers create total separation and abstraction. No feedback or participation. Feedback is physically impossible in software.

We are meant to connect with reality ACTIVELY.

The old Persian scientists, trailed by Kepler and Brahe, understood this fact and built their instruments accordingly. Russians later returned to it, but Westerners have forgotten it.

Visual and auditory perception are NOT passive. The retina and the cochlea are constantly reshaped in ways that can be seen and measured, in order to focus on one desired signal and ignore uninteresting signals.

One new bit of research ties into the eclipse and transit theme. The pupils adjust their size automatically in response to the number of objects in the area of focus. More objects, bigger pupils. A measurable change.

= = = = =

Here's a hypothesis that agrees with neural and electronic reality:

Typically we regard eyes and ears and cameras and microphones as transducers. Our senses are transponders, not transducers. The brain receives and resonates and MODIFIES the overall wave pattern of the universe. Its own momentarily tuned resonances influence the overall pattern in a minuscule way, just as the momentary tuned resonance of one guitar influences the overall sound patterns in the room. This influence may well be an active radiation of waves. Other animals and plants actively radiate waves. Plants send out electrostatic fields, fish send actual radio waves. An antenna-like structure in our cerebellum is strongly suggestive.

But even without active radiation, our IMPEDANCE can affect the shape of the universe's wave structure, by absorbing or ignoring various frequencies. Our mental activity and attention PHYSICALLY changes our impedance, along with generating waves that can add or cancel the ambient waves. If we are sucking in one frequency, the universe's harmony is deprived of that frequency near us.

Direct perception is CRITICALLY IMPORTANT FOR SURVIVAL in all of our senses. 2020 broke our direct connection to the microbes in the air. Our immune system is no longer allowed to ACTIVELY DEAL WITH MICROBES in an undistorted way. Its perception is distorted and recycled by muzzles and Lucite and distancing, and the direct alidade of the nostril is replaced by the digital lens of the "vaccines" that aren't real vaccines.

We have the infinite gift of life and perception.

USE IT OR LOSE IT.

= = = = =

Links for the Astrometeorology set:

Intro: Opening the doors again

2: James Ferguson

3: From Ferguson to Kepler

4: Maragha and astrolabes

5: Qibla

6: Back to Europe

7: Brahe's star castle (first try)

8: Brahe's star castle, revised.

9: Back to Maragha, this item.

= = = = =

Brahe's star castle released as Poser scene on ShareCG.

Maragha and Ferguson released as Poser scene on ShareCG.

Labels: Equipoise

  ¶ 7:52 AM