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

  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

  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

  The one question we don't need to ask
1975 was unquestionably a major point of inflection in the Long March of Deepstate toward total obliteration of civilization.

Edmund Berkeley had been quietly editing the establishment journal of the ACM since the late '50s. In the '70s he got pissed, and he steered the journal toward more noisy and serious anti-establishment advocacy.

The Feb '75 issue includes two articles that show what it felt like to live inside an inflection point.

= = = = =

First:

On p 28, Joe Raben, a prof of English at CUNY, writes on the future of computers in education.

It's worth remembering that mechanical and electronic teaching machines had already been around for a hundred years, and had already established the operating methods of courseware. Present the material, then present a series of questions and record the answers.

Personal computers were EXACTLY on the inflection point in '75. IBM had just introduced its first PC, which didn't succeed commercially; and DEC personal machines were already common but not really general-purpose computers.

Raben is pushing hard for a more individual approach to teaching, more like apprenticeship. He foresees the interactive potential of computers only in a vague abstract way, even though mechanical and (non-digital) electronic machines were already fully interactive.

In this new learning environment, the student need not be restricted to verbal or symbolic information. Since the cathode-ray tube on his terminal is designed to project visual images, he can call up all kinds of pictures, and the treasures of the world's art collections will be his to command.

He can have performed on a tape recorder whatever music he is interested in hearing, while on his screen he watches the notes that represent it. He can hear great poetry spoken, he can watch a surgical operation performed, he can have a geometrical theorem demonstrated, he can watch the re-enactment of a historical event.

And no nervous human teacher, anxious about distractions to himself and to the other students in the class, will have to concern himself over whether that student is chewing gum, doodling, or in any other way relieving the tensions of his own concentration. We give adult workers in our factories soft music to ease their efforts; when can we begin to show equal sympathy for the strains we impose on hyperactive kids when we compel them to sit for hours and listen to us talk at them?

He misses the main purpose of apprenticeship. Job training doesn't just individualize the passive experience of a classroom. Training engages the student in a PRODUCTIVE task. Making things, serving customers.

In '82, just a few years after the '75 inflection point, many programmers (including me) were starting to use the interactive potential of the computer for job training. Visual graphics had been around since the '20s on analog computers, and since 1950 on specialized digital terminals. Audio was much slower to develop, as always; but it was expensively available on PCs in '81. (A professional-level ADC/DAC accessory board was $1500.)

= = = = =

Second:

On p 36, Richard Sprague goes deep into Deepstate's nefarious activities, which had just been fakely "exposed" by the Watergate crap. Watergate was meant to attach the evil to Nixon, then kick out Nixon to "remove the evil", like an anti-rust anode on a ship.

Sprague wasn't fooled. He had been organizing computer professionals to analyze aspects of the JFK assassination, and had seen Deepstate's stings and controlled opposition up close.

An organization I belong to, called "The Organizing Committee for the Fifth Estate," has decided to concentrate on the issue. It is the growing, illegal, immoral, and clandestine use of various methods and policies by the intelligence "community" in the U.S. This ·development could lead us toward what we may call "technofascism," a dictatorship in the U.S. by technologists in the Interests of the military-industrial complex. The methods involved include the use of computer technology and information systems. The Fifth Estate defines the clandestine intelligence "community" as including secret divisions or departments or contractors or subcontractors of agencies and groups at four levels of government; federal, state, regional, and local.

Evidence is mounting that all four levels are currently increasing (and not decreasing) the amount of illegal, unethical, immoral, and unconstitutional activity, aimed at reducing or limiting the rights of citizens and increasing the power of the clandestine groups.

On the fucking dot.

To sum up, I recommend again, as three controversial issues for discussion:

1. Who is assassinating our political leaders and why?

2. What activities are leading us toward "technofascism," how can they be exposed and stopped?

3. Where and how is the American establishment using technology in other countries around the world to help suppress people and murder them?

On all the fucking dots.

50 years later his grim prophecies have come true, and the genuine opposition never got any traction.

The metaquestions are:

4. What happened to those three questions?

5. What happened to the people who were asking them?

A question that DOESN'T need to be asked is:

0. How did the entire tech establishment join Deepstate?

We know the answer to this one. Epstein.

And those dissidents WERE aware of the power of an Epstein.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Experiential education, Jackboot stomping forever

  ¶ 7:10 AM

  Inspirational meme
Cartoon seen on Quora:



It's a damn good observation. Birdsongs are relatively rigid recordings that play the same way every time. Each bird makes small variations, but the theme is recognizable.

Earworms (what I call the mental jukebox) are also rigid recordings with variations. Does our earworm mechanism occupy the same brain structure, or derive from the same gene set, as the bird's standard song? Is this another bird-human parallel?

Labels: Answered better than asked, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 10:46 AM

  It's just Parkinson
Quora question:

Who are some people who the world thought were crazy, but were right all along?

Answers cite Wegener's idea of continental drift, saying "Revolutionary ideas are rarely accepted".

I hadn't stopped to think about it before. This answer is mostly backwards. Not entirely.

Drift is the opposite of crazy and revolutionary. It's OBVIOUS. Anyone can see it. Wegener was dismissed because geologists wanted NON-OBVIOUS theories.

Most of the time common sense is dismissed. The obvious is dismissed. Crazy and revolutionary and murderous ideas are REQUIRED.

A similar change in a closely related subject is Schiaparelli's OBSERVATION of rivers on Mars. For hundreds of years official science laughed at the claim. We KNOW that Mars doesn't have water, so it can't have rivers. How do we KNOW Mars doesn't have water? Because we KNOW that Schiaparelli was wrong.

A similar pattern happened in speech, with "competing" theories about the function of the larynx. The old idea was OBVIOUS, and the old idea was right. The larynx is like an oboe or saxophone. A column of air resonates, allowing a double reed to open and close with the variations of pressure. Bell described it clearly.

But this wasn't good enough for the scientists. They assumed that the larynx produced vibrations by direct muscular action, like a tapping finger.

The latter was OBVIOUSLY wrong, and you don't need fancy instruments to see why it was wrong. The larynx vibrates from 60 to 600 cycles in singing, and 150 to 300 cycles in normal speech. You can't even reach 20 cycles with a tapping finger, and 600 is OBVIOUSLY impossible. Muscles just don't move that fast.

Despite its OBVIOUS wrongness, the textbooks and teachers in the '70s were still treating both theories as competing and equally likely.

= = = = =

I'm tempted to cite Michelet on the psychopathic innovators yet again, but this problem is much simpler and more crassly Parkinsonian.

There's no profit in proving the obvious.

Proving a crazy idea takes HARD WORK and UNLIMITED WORK. The best part of proving a crazy idea is that you CAN'T GET THERE. So the budgets and authority must INCREASE FOREVER. It's a self-feeding pump.



= = = = =

Semi-relevant: Another Quora question mentions this quote:

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

I hadn't heard this before. Concise and comprehensive. Parkinson in one sentence. Google credits it to Ernest Benn, a British political writer contemporary with Parkinson.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Parkinson, SES

  ¶ 10:19 PM

  Might have been my question
Saagar and Krystal run a weekly 'answering session' reserved for their subscribers. I'm one of their paid subscribers so I get to watch it.

In this week's session, one question could have been mine. Sounded just like my shit, but it wasn't me unless I've been sleepwalking or something.

Question: "I grew up in the era when the Fairness Doctrine kept media honest. Is there any chance of returning to the Fairness Doctrine?"

Saagar's answer is unsatisfying but unfortunately valid. The web "jumbles everything up", so the best chance of fairness is finding a source that tries to be fair. When you find such a source, support it. (So I do.)

Can't argue with that. Saagar does try to stay above mechanical partisanship, and usually succeeds. Krystal is firmly inside the D echo chamber but halfway tries to see outside the fishbowl.

Labels: Answered better than asked

  ¶ 9:01 AM

  Not ironic, just good planning
Another viewpoint flip.

I've been making the usual sardonic schadenfreudisch comments about the Eastasia/Eurasia switch from the "Plastics" Crisis to the "Virus" Crisis.

In 2019 we were supposed to avoid all plastics to Save The Ocean.

In 2020 we were supposed to buy new plastic ballgags every day, then throw them in the ocean.

Just now I stood back and looked at the situation from the opposite angle.

If you were planning to make and discard trillions of plastic ballgags, you'd want to slow down other uses of plastics for several years in advance, so you could STOCKPILE plastics.

= = = = =

Incidentally, I never bought or accepted any of the official ballgags. I rigged up a muzzle from an old T-shirt, rather cleverly fastened with zipties. It has minimally complied with the demonic "rules" for 14 fucking months, needing no purchased or new materials at all.

Labels: Answered and unasked, Answered better than asked, NOW I SEE, SES

  ¶ 1:27 PM

  More than self-explanatory
A meme seen on Quora. It's concise, a true Self-Explanatory Sentence. Plus, the punch line helps to see the connection between Wellness, Testing, OCD, and muzzling.



What do the voluntary stranglers get out of it? They feel like they're participating in the practice of medicine.

It's parallel to the pleasure of any mass movement, including "democracy" itself. When you riot and "vote" and muzzle, and righteously demand that everyone else must riot and "vote" and muzzle, you delusionally believe that you're part of the power structure.

See Courtiers.

Labels: #WholeOfSociety, Answered better than asked, SES

  ¶ 7:11 AM

  More reviewing
I looked back again, specifically to Oct and Nov 2005, around the same time as the Venkayya event mentioned by Jeffrey Tucker.

From a Nov 2005 discussion of superstitions:

Two prime examples: Global Warming and Bird Flu. Both of these, like all superstitions, begin with a limited set of valid observations. Global warming starts from the unquestionable fact that the last decade has been warmer -- at least in urban areas -- than most decades in living memory. Bird flu starts from a genuinely fatal disease affecting third-world chicken farmers and butchers. But both of these superstitions proceed boldly into raw fraud and tyranny, based solely on somebody's desire to infect the world with fear.

The global warming superstition tries to claim that increased CO2 is the cause of our relatively warm decade, despite piles of long-term data showing that CO2 is a LAGGING variable, not a LEADING variable. Whatever it is that drives our heat cycles -- most likely solar variation and volcanos -- it increases earth temperature BEFORE it increases CO2.

The bird flu superstition is not quite so bizarrely loony, but it takes an actual disease and carries it through two stages of pure speculation. What if the virus mutates into a form that can be transferred between humans? What if the virus also becomes wildly contagious? Those are not demonstrably wrong, but they are low-probability events, and when you require two low-prob events to happen together, you're betting on a loooooooooooong shot.

Now we know that Bush Junior was the SOMEBODY who desired to infect the world with fear.

The project was already beginning its rehearsals with the 'bird flu' panic. What if the virus mutates and becomes supercontagious? Prime elements of the 2020 holocaust fraud.

= = = = =

Bush's phrase whole-society plan is unfamiliar. Decided to look it up. Not much from Google. Seems to be mainly British, and mainly used by Gaian types. Sustainable development, global warming, biodiversity. Here's one example. So Bush was solidly inside the Gaian church. No surprise there. It's been perfectly clear from the start that the "virus" is a smooth continuation and expansion of the "climate" panic. Greta said KILL GRANNY, and we obeyed.

Oops and Wow. Switching from "whole-society" to "whole-of-society" changed the search entirely. "Whole-of-society" is EVERYTHING. It's the core concept of the holocaust. It seems to have originated in UN, and now it's in all governments and NGOs and corporations. Everyone is calling for a WoS approach to everything, from "climate" to "virus" to "cybercrime".

The earliest item I can find quickly is this 2012 piece called 'Transcending Borders, a WoS approach to human, animal, and ecosystem health', by the chief Public Death Officer of Quebec. Presented at Davos.

All the pieces of the holocaust neatly knitted together in one title and byline.

Continued here.

Labels: #WholeOfSociety, Answered better than asked, Carbon Cult, Jackboot stomping forever, NOW I SEE

  ¶ 8:41 AM

  I did say it
I wrote this Quora answer, pulling together some themes that I hadn't properly connected before. Worth repeating here. I should have written it here first.

The question was: What's the opposite of cancel culture?

Answer:

Cancel culture is more subtle than usually described.

Censorship and editing have always existed, and are necessary parts of civilization. Before the cancel era, editors and administrators decided who to fire, or which articles to censor, based on experience and laws and internal rules.

Cancel culture gives total power to ONE complainer or accuser, provided the complainer is on the correct side. Admins or editors who had been following the normal rules now fire and censor after one single button-push.

This is part of a much larger abdication of power by editors and selectors and judges and legislators. The abdication also allows the opposite type of unmediated individual power.

One “scientist” who runs obviously wrong statistical models and advocates obviously murderous “measures” can take over the entire medical profession, provided the “scientist” is in the right direction. Ethics boards and FDA regulators and lawyers stand back and let him murder the world.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Editors

  ¶ 12:12 AM

  Wish I'd said it
A perfect answer on Quora.

Q Do you prefer having the coronavirus variants identified by their Greek name or their geographic origin?

A It would make more sense to identify them by their designer / sponsor name.

Labels: Answered better than asked

  ¶ 9:47 AM

  Bryan again
An old thought leads to a new 'data visualization'.

Old thought. This is one of my Thiel questions, one of the relatively unknown facts I've figured out by research.

Jennings Bryan was a faker like Trump. The other populists of that era were following Bryan and proposing the same fake solution, but I'm pretty sure most of them didn't understand it was fake.

They diagnosed the PROBLEM of globalism brilliantly. Graybill stated it elegantly. Their SOLUTION, more debt and looser money, was precisely backwards.

More debt and looser money means more power for bankers. More savings and harder money means more power for real business, including farmers.

Bryan was smart enough to know this. He was also working toward a goal, using the populist appeal to catapult him into power. After he got into the Wilson administration, he IMMEDIATELY abandoned populism and started making foreign wars and designing the League of Nations. Total betrayal, just like Trump.

= = = = =

This basic rule about savings vs debt was NOT NEW, to put it mildly.

DON'T LET THE BANKERS CONTROL THE WORLD.

Jesus taught it firmly and violently. Mohammed and his economic writers put the principle into complete and logical form.

So there was no excuse for missing it. The lesser populists were most likely swept along on Bryan's coattails, eager to gain power and not thinking deeply about the principles.

Visualization: Storage and savings and experience and culture are on the real axis. Just-in-time and debt and theory and Room 101 are on the imaginary axis.

When you stay within known cultural and economic territory you're always on solid ground, always sure of your steps. When you think you're Innovating and Changing The World, you're on IMAGINARY TERRITORY, always vulnerable to psychopaths and scammers who are CREATING FAKE MAPS for you.

EXPERIENCE SURVIVES. THEORY KILLS.

= = = = =

Later and alternative thought. Returning to the Pied Piper theme. We know that Trump's purpose was to guarantee that no American would EVER consider any agenda besides Soros and Bezos. Like all the other "terrorists" created by Deepstate, he made populism look HORRIBLE.

Bryan was designed for the same purpose, but the Piper pooped out. Wilson took globalism to the extreme with Bryan's full collaboration, and took internal tyranny to the extreme via Lady Edgar. The people saw the problem and chose Harding, who tried to break down both sides of globalism. Deepstate scandaled him and possibly killed him, so Coolidge and Hoover reverted to norm. But the people still remembered, and FDR finally got past the assassins and started to solve problems for the first and last time in our miserable fucked vile history.

Did Trump take the HORRIBLE too far by piling the "virus" on top of all the pre-existing panics and depressions? We can't tell yet. Some factions in the Biden administration appear to be vaguely Hardingish, attempting to dial down the panic.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Carver, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 3:11 AM

  To impress Jodi Foster
This is crazy enough that it just might be true. Or partly true.

[Correction: this wasn't Gilder, it was Jeffery Tucker writing in Gilder's blog.]

Gilder is analyzing the Fauci FOIA emails, and thinks he's found the point when Fauci flipped from defending normal public health to rabid holocauster. The previous condition was definitely true; I had observed on March 1 that Fauci was trying to hold back the Trump-based craziness.

What flipped him? Jodi Foster. I mean Morgan Fairchild.

So as far as I can tell, Fauci’s first mention of the coming school closures was in an email exchange with... Morgan Fairchild. That’s right, the famous actress from Search for Tomorrow, Paper Dolls, Falcon Crest, Murphy Brown, and my personal favorite, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure in which she played Agent Dottie.

Morgan on February 26 wrote Fauci: “I’m reaching out to see if I can help in any way to get good information out to the public, as I tried to do with AIDS. I have almost 100,000 Twitter followers and have been tweeting articles to them that I feel are helpful, but if you have any info I can help disseminate, please let me know.”

The next day:

Notice the nonchalance in his prose. Closing schools and workplaces, widespread quarantines, forced human separation – hey this is just the kind of stuff we do in a pandemic. Right? It’s just normal! Only the day before (Feb 26), Fauci had told China state media that “the USA is not in a preparative mode... our response is much different than that of China.”

Gilder thinks Fauci was dazzled by Fairchild's celebrity. Wildly unlikely. Blackmail is far more likely. Blackmail is the universal driving force of Federal politics.

We don't know what Fauci was doing in the 80s, but a famous doctor has special opportunities to deal with celebrities. And some of those celebrities might remember those opportunities and might want to disseminate good information about those opportunities.

= = = = =

Watching the false flags line up neatly, it appears that Fauci is assigned to take the fall now, along with China. This is the usual trick. Fauci was not the big boss; he was a mid-level player, initially reluctant, who was deeply enmeshed in Epstein crap and loved to take the spotlight.

These "leaks" came through FOIA, which means they're a carefully crafted part of the stageplay. We still don't have even ONE real admission or apology. A million demons working for 15 years ought to include at least one retired semi-demon who feels a slight microscrap of guilt.

We still don't know who the big boss is, and above all we still don't know WHAT THIS SHIT WAS ABOUT. Who was meant to gain? Was there a specific goal other than demons in need of orgasms?

The maneuverings inside DC were only part of it. Britain has always looked like the intellectual center of contagion, and the pre-existing Gaian Gang looks like the boss. Greta said KILL GRANNY, and the world started up the currently available plan, using a "novel virus" that happened to be the scariest available "threat" at the moment.

The carefully staged fake "death" of Epstein feels like a time marker. At the same time, preparations for the holocaust were shifting into high gear. I'd guess that the foundation of the power structure shifted in mid-2019, requiring the boss to bunker down, and also requiring a holocaust to impress the opposition.

Labels: Answered better than asked

  ¶ 3:14 PM

  Pretty good explanation, stupid explanation
Two studies that appear in RealClearScience today make a nice pair. Both deal with subjects I've wondered about and written about often. One seems plausible, the other is just stupid. One increases knowledge, the other subtracts.

This study offers an explanation of the electrical fields that precede an earthquake by days or weeks. The mechanism feels a little too complicated, but it does account for the delay. Seems to be based on electrolysis between two plates of different charge. Electrolysis moves bubbles, which effectively carry a current that creates the field.

This mechanism would seem simpler:



A giant electret microphone. The upper plate is charged relative to the lower plate. As the upper plate slides, its serrated field moves across the serrated lower plate, repelling and attracting electrons at each small approach and retreat, and creating a complicated alternating current.

I discussed fields before quakes here.

= = = = =

This article tries to explain why we don't like the sound of our own voices. It misses ALL the points and facts.

Hearing ourselves requires a second process. The sound has to go out through our skull as we produce it before it moves through the air and our ears. “When we then hear our own voice played back from a recording, that sound is then only filtered through air, just like other people's voices, and so it sounds different from when we hear ourselves while speaking,” Maslowski writes via email.

No. We hear ourselves purely internally. The skull moves relative to the eardrum and also shakes the fluid in the cochlea, and we hear the 'inverse' result. The outside path doesn't matter.

There's an added factor beyond the simple bone path. When we speak, the internal sound is so loud that several automatic dampers are turned on to protect the cochlea from destruction. The tensor tympani muscle pulls on the eardrum, limiting and DAMPING its movement. The stapedius muscle tenses up the stapes where it enters the cochlea, providing more damping. These protectors mainly lose high frequencies, so what we hear is bassy. THAT'S why the external recorded sound seems high.

A smaller missed point:

In 1968, only 38 to 55 percent of people quizzed could identify the sound of their own voices. One of the rare exceptions were radio announcers, who got it 100 percent of the time. Similar surveys conducted in 2008 and 2010 found about 90 percent or more of people identified themselves.

Before widespread use of cassette recorders and iphones, it wasn't just radio announcers who heard their own voice electronically from outside. Everyone who uses a regular landline phone hears their own voice echoing in the receiver. This version of our voice is ALSO bassy, since the landline cuts all freqs above 3000. Radio announcers heard an accurate version of their own voice in their monitor headphones.

I've discussed the question here among other places.

Labels: AI point-missing, Answered better than asked

  ¶ 1:07 PM

  Good slogan, not easy to follow
Slogan seen on Tumblr:

Buy art by living artists. The dead ones don't need the money.

Well said. What's more, buying 'great masters' doesn't help any artists at all. It only puts more money into a corrupt trading system that mainly serves as money-laundering.

Unfortunately the living artists and living manufacturers are completely skipping a wide range of good products. Nobody is composing classical music. Nobody is building practical and attractive cars. All four-wheeled vehicles are web-connected and grotesque. Nobody is building analog electronics.

If you want attractive and non-Satanic products, you often have to buy old stuff. I wrestle with this question. There's no simple answer. I try to buy from smaller vendors, and avoid anything connected to Amazon or China, but often the "smaller" vendor is just a cover story for reshipping Amazon.

Labels: Answered better than asked

  ¶ 9:58 AM

  Wrong vector
The usual pointless argument about free will vs determinism is looking at the wrong end of the timeline. There's absolutely no way to discuss what happened before. All arguments are perfectly circular.

Looking in the other direction, toward PURPOSE AND ACCOMPLISHMENT, is not circular at all. The FACTS are clear.


When you know your fate is permanent and innate, you have more real freedom.


Meritocracy is a vicious trap. When you think you can do anything, you end up wasting your life trying to do impossible shit. When you know you can do SOMETHING, and you know exactly what the SOMETHING is, you are free to do it. You no longer feel obliged to improve your popularity or raise your status or please assholes who will never be pleased. You're free to do PURPOSEFUL THINGS that are WITHIN YOUR CAPABILITY.

Labels: Answered better than asked

  ¶ 7:51 AM

  Random auto safety thought
I did a piece on wraparound windshields a few years ago. Wraparounds were a stupid fad started by GM.

New thought: For once GM missed an advertising point.

Wraparound windshields were a safety feature. (Sort of.)

Before 1949, windshields were flat or nearly flat, and close to vertical. The dashboard started from the nearest point on the bottom of the glass. With split v-shaped glass, the middle of the dash had about 3 inches of clearance from the glass, but the left and right ends were still flush.

In that configuration, seat belts and padding don't make any difference. Your head WILL hit the glass and probably shatter it.

Starting in '49, and especially with Ford, the V got deeper and turned into a curve, but the dashboard was still directly under the left and right ends.

The wraparound moved the entire base of the glass forward by about 9 inches, leaving a flat package shelf on top of the dash. Now it was easier for a belt to keep your head away from the glass, so padding was worth the trouble.

Later correction: It's more accurate to say that the wraparound moved the dashboard back by 9 inches, not the glass forward. The delta is still the same: better chance to hit the pad before the glass.

Labels: Answered better than asked

  ¶ 1:47 AM

  Pointless pigment ponderation
Looking at Collectible Auto as usual while eating, a pointless question about pigment popped up.

Most restored cars are bright colors. Restored woody wagons or early wood-bodied trucks always use transparent urethane on the wood parts, showing the bright grain beautifully. These restorations are wrong and unnatural.

Real cars were mostly dark until 1950 or so. It wasn't a matter of taste, it was just the quality of pigments. Dark paints lasted longer, and dark paints were easier to apply for some reason. Furniture or vehicle woodwork looked nearly black because it was stained and varnished. Varnish gets darker with age.

According to some sources, Duco developed better light pigments around 1952, so carmakers began using more bright colors.

Trying to roll back through memory, when was the change noticeable?

Some expensive cars had light colors before WW2. Buicks and Caddies were often light tan. Most others were dark blue or black.

My memory wants to place the line for lower-priced cars at '49, not '52. The newer and sleeker '49s, especially Fords, were generally light tan or light blue, sometimes white.

Commercial trucks were a major exception. Trucks were often white or bright varied colors, to stand out and carry the signage better. Businesses were willing to pay for frequent repaints to maintain the brand.

Later ponderation: Varnished wood seemed more resistant to rot and termites than painted wood. Is this true? Yes. Varnish wasn't just beautiful!

Labels: Answered better than asked

  ¶ 6:42 AM

  The Whorl Hypothesis
Via RCS, an oddity about koala bears.

Koalas seem to be the marsupial equivalent of monkeys. (Kangaroos would be the equivalent of humans.)

The newly found oddity: Koala fingerprints and human fingerprints are much more similar than chimp and human fingerprints.

The article speculates in Darwin style:

While the modern human experience with fingerprints centers around crime and identification, the mesmerizing whorls on our fingers (and chimpanzees' and gorillas') did not evolve for that purpose. One theory is that fingerprints function as 'tactile enhancers', amplifying vibrations to boost the sense of touch. Another is that fingerprints boost an individual's ability to grasp objects.

A tactile enhancer for vibration seems unlikely. To feel a vibration you need to hold the finger steady, and the ridges wouldn't make any difference. In fact the people who need to sense vibrations most precisely (old-fashioned safecrackers) often sanded down their fingerprints to get closer contact.

A tactile enhancer for sensing the shape of a surface by sliding the fingertip makes sense. Braille. The small dots would create vibrations as they cross each ridge.

Neither of those sensory modes would provide a purpose for the unique pattern of each individual. When you think of sending instead of receiving, the unique pattern makes more sense.

Try this:



Run your fingertip across the edge of cardboard, or a non-rounded edge on a desk. You can hear a 'syllable' formed as the crosswise and parallel parts of the fingerprint pass over the edge. The 'syllable' is different for each finger, and it would also be different between people. Each print is essentially a spectrogram of a syllable.

Stridulation. Crickets do it. Some birds do it. Why not primates and marsupials?

Labels: Answered better than asked, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 1:26 AM