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

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

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

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

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

Labels: Emersonian justice, Real World Math

  ¶ 8:03 AM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

  ¶ 7:47 PM

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

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

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



= = = = =

Reviewing the modes of electrical data storage:

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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



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

= = = = =

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

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

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



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

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



= = = = =

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

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



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



Here I'm showing opcode 12 and address 3456.

= = = = =

Listing related links so far:

Computers are always sorters.

Parallel is always faster.

Timelines and rentalizing

Just before the NSA web

When analog fertilized digital

Time was a whole bunch of money!

IBM had Pascal in 1957!

The 305 RAMAC

McBee cards

Not medieval enough

IBM DCL [650]

And finally, the Poser models are here on ShareCG.

Labels: Equipoise, Real World Math

  ¶ 9:32 AM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I get the sense that Radulf was an utgota.

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

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



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



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

Labels: 2000=1000, Real World Math

  ¶ 9:30 AM

  SETI + METI = SILLY
More silliness about talking to aliens.

SETI/METI is the ultimate replacement of What by Who. Aliens are expected to be cult leaders for the cult of IQ and abstraction. Presumably they will be just like Fauci but cooler. We are waiting to be led by them.

Vakoch is planning on sending messages containing references to the periodic table. The idea being that certain elements, such as hydrogen, are abundant across the Universe so any receiving civilisation is likely to recognise a reference to the chemical signature of those elements.

Another important requirement is making sure that whoever is on the receiving end of the message knows what they’re tuning into, says Jacob Haqq-Misra, a researcher at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. “The basic idea is to define some sort of mathematical language,” he says. Initial messages might establish some basics. One is not equal to zero, but one is equal to one, for example. “And now we've established a common language, we can talk about physics with each other.”

No, no, no. Your "basics" are NOT the basics of math. Axioms and definitions are the fake "foundation" stuffed under the REAL structure of math by Peano and Hilbert and Godel.

Why should we talk about physics? Real humans don't talk about physics.



One good idea: Do what hams do. Talk about antennas and transmitters and receivers and propagation. In other words, talk about the process of communicating.

A better idea: Talk in parallel instead of serial. Talk the way we talk. Send harmonies on many frequencies at once, so the receiving party could build a 3d object from the spectrogram.

The best idea: Shut up. First listen to the universe itself, instead of searching for a cult leader who is Just Like Me But Cooler. Figure out what the universe has in mind for us and for me.

This was the purpose of astronomy from Plato through the Arabs and Persians to Brahe and Kepler. After Kepler we stopped listening to the universe and started listening to cult leaders who spoke in the name of Science.

= = = = =

Later and more random thoughts:

Discussion of aliens is packed full of CASTE. The trite old cartoons featured an alien who looks like a vacuum cleaner approaching an Earthly vacuum cleaner and saying "Take me to your leader." He wasn't saying "Tell me about your life and your place."

The people who wish for aliens are high-caste Courtiers, the same type who wish to be leaders. Courtiers dress like leaders (including ballgags), drive the right cars and eat the right foods and medicines as recommended by leaders. They don't realize the leaders don't actually wear or eat or drive or inject any of those recommendations. It's a cargo cult.

BUT: The people who report actual contacts with aliens are pure 100% Deplorables. White Christians in Dixie, the lowest caste of all, the caste every leader and influencer wants to EXTERMINATE, but only Lincoln actually accomplished the task.

Conclusion: If the aliens are really landing and contacting us, they're good scientists following Carver's rules. They realize that Deplorables are sane. They want to interrogate sane realistic people instead of wacked-out cargo cultists. A vacuum cleaner can tell you more about the house than the owner can.

Labels: AI point-missing, Carver, Real World Math

  ¶ 12:35 AM

  Mathematicians don't learn or teach
I like to salute and thank the people who do the hard work of real archiving. Preserving the past is the MOST IMPORTANT duty of scholars in a time of Room 101 and Github.

Bitsavers is a comparatively small but excellent archive of documents from the early years of computing, from 1950 to 1990. As I model the 1957 IBM RAMAC system, I've relied heavily on Bitsavers.

Most of these manuals were printed in offset form, using regular typewriters or Varitypers to lay out the pages. IBM had the budget for proper linotype and hot-lead printing, but most of the upstart companies and academic writers didn't.

From a 1962 Burroughs manual, a mix of typewriter



and Varityper.



These instructions are hugely complex and detailed, but everything is in normal English, so you can read it unambiguously.

When mathematicians wrote manuals, they continued their blackboard habits of mixing Greek and Hebrew and Roman and Fraktur and made-up symbols, scrawled loosely and sloppily.

From a MANIAC III manual written at Univ of Chicago in 1962:





Can you tell the difference between the alpha and gamma? And what is that symbol for Tag? Is that a tau or a iota with an acute accent over it?



Note the beta superscripted by a capital R which is subscripted by 11, or is it [1 sub 1] or [1 in the first category and 1 in the second category]? No, it's not any of those things. It's the fucking RIGHT QUOTATION MARK for the sentence.

More to the point, they had just defined specific WORDS for their concepts. Operation, tag, information, left designator, right inflector. THEY DIDN'T NEED THE GREEK. The entire discussion would have been clearer using the ACTUAL FUCKING WORDS.

Do an Operation, in a manner specified by the left and right Inflectors, on information designated by left Designators and modified by left Modifiers; and on information designated by right Designators and modified by right Modifiers.

Even when they accidentally used only Roman letters, the blackboard habit of supersubsuperscripting continued.



The limited character set on keypunch keyboards FORCED programmers to talk English.



No Greek, no math symbols, no subs and supers. Just uppercase Roman, numbers, and a few bookkeeping symbols like dollars and percent. COBOL was written on and for keypunches, and it originally had no symbols at all.

DIVIDE NUMA BY NUMB GIVING RES-DIV.

Naming variables in English was the biggest contribution of programming.

Later keyboards and languages made longer names possible, and introduced more symbols, but never dropped to the level of mathematicians.

Those academics at Chicago had been using computers and keypunches for several years, and still hadn't learned English. Modern mathematicians still insist on a tangled jumble of Greek, Hebrew, supersubsupersubscripts, and an occasional SINGLE letter of English. Never never never allow a word to contaminate the purity of obfuscation.

Labels: Real World Math, storage

  ¶ 10:49 PM

  Honesty about math
Rare honesty about math education.

Labels: Experiential education, Real World Math

  ¶ 6:52 AM

  Reprint on CASES
Reinforcing previous item with a reprint from July 2020.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Another where's the guild question. In this case I'm not really puzzled by the absence of a guild response because I know exactly how and when the guild was subverted and flipped. It happened 20 years ago.

The current holocaust is based HEAVILY on cheating with software.

The use of software to create and expand a fake crisis began with the Carbon Cult, with Mann's fake hockey stick models showing exponential increase of CO2 "pollution".

A more visible example for outsiders was VW's diesel cheating. Diesel is intrinsically and incurably MORE DIRTY THAN GASOLINE, but the Carbon Cult flipped the comparison and redefined diesel as clean because VW bribed them to flip. VW then used software to fake the numbers. The control computer in each car sensed when the car was connected to an official test rig, and outputted artifically low numbers.

Same thing with the "virus". Exponential models can't possibly represent reality because reality is never exponential. Governments use the models because governments want to kill everyone. Software processes the "cases", and HIPAA prevents us from checking the "cases". Even if the "cases" were honestly counted, "cases" are THE WRONG FUCKING MEASUREMENT. Just as with diesel vs gasoline, the holocausters have flipped medicine upside down, redefining "cases" as dirty.

The proper MEANING of "cases" isn't in the models, so we don't get to hear it.

= = = = =

From a modern perspective it seems obvious that ABSTRACT software makes cheating easier, but this total misuse wasn't always normal. There was a guild spirit in software that tried to protect the craft from misuse and cheating.

When did it change? 2000. Dotcom. Cheaters took over the biz.

Computing began with the government census, at a time when the government wanted accuracy. From 1890 to 1990 software mainly served corporate accounting. Computers were seen as fancy adding machines, and they were REQUIRED to be strictly honest.

Bookkeepers and their adding machines were the honest end of the system. After the bookkeeper had carefully verified the accuracy of the double-entry ledger, the accountant walked in and arbitrarily moved numbers around to cheat on taxes. This may be unfamiliar to outsiders, but it was standard procedure. You can see the setup powerfully in this Racket Squad episode.

The machine was the honest end, and the human accountant was the criminal.

The dotcommers reversed the paradigm. They used the software itself to create false impressions of their wealth and corporate solidity, then used software to manipulate the market, and had no compunction at all about ruining lives to EXPONENTIALLY increase their wealth.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Later question: More specifically, how did software switch in the public mind from an adding machine to an authority?

In the Racket Squad episode, the boss tells the bookkeeper to release an arbitrary and dishonest set of numbers. The bookkeeper refuses. Boss says "Are you calling me a liar?" Bookkeeper says "No, but my adding machine doesn't lie either." In that situation we can see clearly who's lying.

The trick seems to be AI. Most people don't understand that AI is still an adding machine. The AI hype by both commercial and governmental propagandists has persuaded us that AI can make its own decisions independent of human input, while remaining impartial and mechanical.

Can't have it both ways. The trick conflates the demons who are writing the intentionally bad predictive models with the computer that doesn't lie. Because the DECISION POWER has been falsely transferred to the computer, we don't blame the demons who actually DECIDED to write counterfactual and unrealistic math models.

If most people learned math in the context of job-related problems and projects, they would understand the stages of this process better. They'd know that the PROGRAMMER can lie, even if the CPU doesn't lie.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Metrology, Real World Math

  ¶ 5:30 AM

  From bikini to martini to NFTni
[Couldn't resist the stupid pun.]

Normal people correctly associate heft with value. This makes sense in most real products. A car or house built with thicker materials and bigger beams WILL last longer, and WILL be more resistant to rust and rot and fire.

The correlation continued in analog electronics and mechanical appliances. Heavier chassis, bigger transformers, larger shafts, more shielding. All contribute to better performance, longer life, better cooling, and less unwanted noise and vibration.

A contrary movement started in the 1880s with minimalist art, which has expanded into all areas of products and food.

Rich assholes want less heft and less material. The movement penetrated ordinary life around 1950 with Loewy, bikinis and martinis.

Loewy's slogan was "Weight is the enemy." Bikinis gained value as they lost material and became more like dental floss. Martinis were allegedly best when the vermouth was reduced to exactly one molecule.

Nouvelle cuisine reduces food to a random splash of dots on a plate.

Now rich assholes buy only supersuperabstract 10th derivatives of reality like NFTs, which are a weightless digital package representing some kind of art, gaining "value" by a meaningless association with Holy Bitcoin.

The Dow absolutely HATES real material. No products, no factories, no employees, no customers, and above all NO STORAGE OR STABILITY. Only PURE MATH has Share Value.

As a formula:



Real value varies linearly with heft, up to an asymptotic limit where the heft becomes impractical for its purpose. Tanh as always.

Asshole value is the reciprocal of real value. As real heft goes to zero, asshole value increases (as always) exponentially.

Labels: Real World Math, storage

  ¶ 12:27 AM

  Diamond in a sewer
Every now and then a beautiful answer appears on Quora. Diamond in a sewage pit.

The question:

Are good mathematicians and scientists out there okay with the fact that there will always be logical answers that don't have accurate methods of proving these answers?

Most of the answers parrot the standard Big Science idiocy. PROOF IS THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD. ALL THINKING STARTS BY PROVING A THEOREM.

Here's a truthful answer:

Most scientists have, quite literally, zero reason to care. Physics, chemistry and biology are not threatened by the challenges of proving statements about infinite domains using consistent, recursive axiom systems.

Many mathematicians (good or bad) don’t care either, and those who do are perfectly okay with it. Failing to “be okay with it” is, in fact, one of the telltale signals of not being a mathematician.

Labels: Real World Math

  ¶ 11:08 PM

  Reprint on auts and krauts
Mentioning autists and Krautists in previous item reminded me of this 2019 defense of a "woke" math movement.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

This academic movement is more important and more valid than it sounds.

First, how it sounds:

Since apartheid ended in 1994, South Africa’s universities have struggled to transform themselves, leading to escalating student protests over the last three years — including the toppling of a prominent statue of Cecil Rhodes, an infamous colonizer who donated the land on which the University of Cape Town now stands. And as students and academics accelerate the process of decolonization across South African universities, the spotlight has fallen onto mathematics.

Exactly what decolonizing math would entail isn’t entirely clear: Curriculum revisions that promote non-Western contributions to the field, new teaching methods rooted in indigenous cultures, and greater openness to ideas outside the academic mainstream are all under discussion. Some want to go further, challenging the philosophical foundations** of mathematics itself.

Sounds like the usual SJW crap.

But the actual leader of the movement is onto something entirely different and hugely more important.

In his evening classes, meanwhile, Chinyoka hopes to broaden students’ understanding of what they can do with the mathematics they are presented with in lectures — from engineering to academia to law. He believes that South African mathematics should be reframed around the challenges faced by South Africa, as well as other developing countries.

In fact Chinyoka is not going far enough in the correct direction. He's treating the real life problems as a supplement after the theory. This is somewhat better than the normal math class which PROHIBITS any mention of the real world. The CORRECT method is to train students in real job-related or household-related solving, and let math come in naturally as a supplement. You're starting to cook a meal for your family. You set out the pans and read the recipe. The recipe is for 4 people but your family is 6 people. Now we have a problem that needs to be solved, and math provides a way to solve it.



After you solve the problem, you can eat the solution.

Back to Chinyoka:

“We still have this more Westernized view: You sit in a mathematics class on topology or abstract algebra, with zero idea about which context it applies to,” he says. Pointing to the current water and energy crises in South Africa, he argues that math should be taught with concrete applications in mind, rather than purely theoretically, which is a luxury afforded only by the West.

Not really a Westernized view, more precisely a Krautized view. Before we surrendered to the Krauts, US math and science teaching often had "concrete applications in mind". Around 1910 we went full Kraut. Theory in the morning, theory in the evening, theory at suppertime, concrete applications verboten all the time.

Soviet math and science teaching recovered from Krautism, focusing PROPERLY on real-life problem solving. That's why they beat us with Sputnik. As always we learned backwards. Fucking idiots.

Chinyoka is on the right track. His approach is better for ALL kids except autists and Krautists.

Western math is SOLELY for autists and Krautists. The EXPLICITLY STATED PURPOSE of math class in elementary and secondary school is to FRUSTRATE AND REPEL non-autists, so only the most precise and bizarre and reality-free wackos will end up with PhDs.

Unfortunately the movement toward USEFUL APPLICATIONS is confused and conflated with silly DieVersitarian nonsense. Many of the participants are more concerned with measuring Identity than measuring rice yield or baking temperatures or generator output. They are simply replacing one set of useless theories with another set of useless theories.

= = = = =

** Footnote: there's no point in challenging the philosophical foundations of math because they don't exist. A real foundation goes in FIRST, and the rest of the building depends on the strength of the foundation. Math developed in all sorts of useful and interesting directions for 5000 years WITHOUT explicit foundations. Around 1880 the Kraut fetish for thoroughness demanded a "logical" foundation, and Krauts shoved in some logic stuff under the massive structure that obviously didn't need the logic stuff. Soon thereafter, a Kraut named Gödel detemined, using the rules of the Kraut logic stuff, that the logic stuff was internally contradictory and thus pointless.

So: If you believe that math has philosophical foundations, you must also believe that math can't have philosophical foundations. If you find math to be a wonderfully useful tool for real life problems, you don't need to think about the foundation question. Just use math.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

I can't immediately find any more recent writings by Tiri Chinyoka, except for an applied math research paper that isn't about education.

Labels: Carver, Experiential education, Real World Math

  ¶ 2:58 PM

  Random thought about useful math
While looking at some archives of courseware, I was intuitively estimating how much of the mass is constant overhead of HTML crap, versus the variables of real text and animation.

Convective thought: This type of net/gross estimation is UNIVERSAL in all practical uses of math.

Businesses know how much of their cost is constant monthly expenses, how much varies linearly with the real materials, and how much is the real materials and labor.

Tax calculations involve a separation between basic rate and marginal rate. Shopping requires separating net weight from package weight. When you compare job opportunities, you account separately for the constant of commuting and the variable of hours actually worked.

Bridges and balances, my recent focus, are specifically meant to cancel out the package and measure only the contents.

Despite the universality of this distinction, we don't have a notation or function or operator on the same level as addition and logarithms. In a standardized formula like y = ax + b, we know by habit and convention that the letters early in the alphabet are probably constants, and the letters at the end of the alphabet are probably variables. But this is not guaranteed, and not really the same thing as net vs gross.

Labels: Constants and Variables, Equipoise, Real World Math

  ¶ 8:17 AM

  Strange dream
Odd dream this morning about a power slide rule. It looked something like this:



Basically a regular Pickett in a motorized platform. The buttons around the top were little slide levers controlling various actions. One of them was labeled 'Noise', which introduced jitter into the actions.

I suspect this was a solidified version of the Lukyanov water computer. I wrote a PY to run the Lukyanov, including the ability to add noise. Jitterizing would be a worthy feature in a real** analog computer.

A power drive would actually work better with a BIG circular rule like the Norma Grafia. You wouldn't have to reverse at the ends. For instance, you could set C and D to a proportion, then run the cursor slowly around the circle to see all the similar proportions.

The shape of the platform is tanh. Was that an intentional choice by the dream scripter? A way of saying that we need an analog computer focused on Nature's way of doing things? The curve was important in the dream, and the control levers pivoted around the curve. Probably not intentional, but it's still a good piece of advice. More likely the dream scripter was just copying the VW tool pictured in previous item.... or the iconic shape of the '61 Lincoln that was the main subject of previous item. All tanh.

= = = = =

** Was this feature tried? A quick google finds the vast majority of computers, both analog and digital, were concerned with avoiding or smoothing out the phase and amplitude jitter in real signals. Only one analog computer was trying to do the opposite. ASTRAC was a true analog computer with digital counting and control systems attached. Some of its analog modules intentionally introduced randomness and Zener noise. The developers were apparently using the random for 'Monte Carlo' simulations with repeated analog functions feeding a digital program. I'm thinking more of dynamic stability, wiggling into a negative feedback loop to reach the optimum quickly. Simulating the action of a gamma muscle loop, for instance.

Labels: Alternate universe, Morsenet of Things, Real World Math

  ¶ 5:39 AM

  Reviewing fluidic computers
Thinking about the natural basis of calculus reminded me of the Lukyanov fluidic computer, which reminded me that I've featured several fluidic computers this year.

First and most elegant, the Willson automatic buoy. Willson used nothing but natural forces, placed in constant and elegant equipoise. Water pressure counterbalanced acetylene pressure, with the rate of change supplied by combustion.

Next was the Dalen sun valve, using the heat of sunlight to control the flow of acetylene.

Willson and Dalen were practically useful and lifesaving beacons, tied to the Trinity House theme. They represented the original meaning of artificial intelligence, a self-sustaining machine with lifelike properties helping to solve human problems.

The most beautiful and mysterious is the Ridhwan water clock, which used a true fluidic computer to control a series of doors and bells and birds and pointers and lamps.

A medieval night clock used the combustion of oil by a flame versus gravity to count hours and signal end of work, without any mechanism at all.

The Gabry flame clock used combustion versus oil pressure to drive a mechanical pointer.

The Tiffereau water clock used water flow in equipoise to 'tick' a full-fledged clock escapement.

And finally the Lukyanov, a genuine analog computer using nothing but water flow for logic and calculation.

All of these devices are infinitely closer to the natural use of calculus than the lookup tables in books or silicon.

Labels: Equipoise, Patient things, Real World Math, Trinity House

  ¶ 4:22 AM

  Calculus is more natural than arithmetic
The position of math in the universe has been a constant pointless dispute among "philosophers", and it's still an active pointless discussion among tech-monster types and Intelligent Design types.

Plato and Aristotle staked out the two sides, which haven't changed and haven't settled the issue in 2000 years. A question that can't be settled isn't a real question. It's just a way for "philosophers" to justify their grants.

A possibly more fruitful subdispute arises in math teacher circles, as well as the AI and ID types.

Is calculus more important than arithmetic?

My teacherly position is that the fine details of calculus are only needed by engineers, and even engineers don't really carry on the type of thinking that happens in a calculus class. They just use lookup tables for the results of specific equations, and multiply the results by constants as appropriate. Before computers the lookup tables were paper, now they're silicon. Same thing.

= = = = =

Here's a somewhat fresh thought, based more on neurology than teaching.

Integrals and derivatives are basic and universal parts of life. Arithmetic is NOT a basic part of life. Arithmetic is an overlaid skill invented late in history by humans.

Every neuron is a derivative. We process only changes, not constants. As the signal moves up through higher layers in the ganglia and cortex, it is differentiated several more times. Some feature detectors respond to linear upsweeps in frequency. Second derivative. Others respond only to accelerated upsweeps. Third derivative.

Many neurons are also integrators. They pick up changes from a network of input dendrites, and sum up the total of the changes over time. Some of the changes are additive (excitatory), some subtractive (inhibitory). The neuron will typically emit a series of pulses when its integral reaches a threshold set by yet another field of inputs. These pulses may feed into higher-level integrators that sum up the readings from the first layer.

And the whole system is a constantly running infinite set of balanced equations. Negative feedback balances or counteracts inputs to maintain a steady state of temperature or muscle tension or anxiety or weight.

By contrast, simple arithmetic is rare in the nervous system. There are a few integrators specialized as counters, but there's no explicit addition or multiplication of counting numbers.

Labels: Equipoise, Real World Math

  ¶ 4:57 PM

  Literal computer
I'm studying old analog computers this week, setting up a graphics project along those lines. Yet another lost and un-re-discovered technology.

Some of the computers in the '30s were weirdly complex and designed for a highly specific task.

Patent 2179822, a computer to simulate the balance in an airplane.





This is a mechanical balance or bridge providing a scaled-down version of a real multi-dimensional balance, the weights in various parts of the plane pulling against the center of gravity. It automatically computes the vector sum of the torques in foot-pounds. The feet part is constant, set by the length of the arm, and the pounds part is variable, set by the rack-and-pinion knobs.

Early passenger planes were highly sensitive to loading patterns. Airlines in those days knew the weight of every passenger and luggage item because they weighed everyone. With this gadget, the loading agent could try out the weight in each row and tank and compartment as he processed them, simply by setting the dials for each. The net balance would immediately show on the dial, so he could move a heavy passenger from row 4 to row 1 before really loading the plane.

I'm sure digital computers in the '60s could calculate the result, but there wasn't a way to instantly input each estimate and read the result until the '90s.

This mechanism isn't really an analog, it's just a scale model of the aircraft. A literal computer!

Labels: Equipoise, Real World Math

  ¶ 3:46 PM

  Constants and Variables 162, alien desire edition
An interesting question from MindMatters, based on an old and pointless discussion about aliens.

Pointless: There's no point in asking whether aliens exist, or why we haven't heard from them. If they exist and they WANT us to hear from them, we will. If they exist and they DON'T want us to hear from them, we won't. If they don't exist, we won't hear from them.

Focusing on technology and lightyears and event boundaries misses the main point of PURPOSE. Just as with human Deepstates, the absence of apparent communication tells you nothing about the technology or existence of the communicator. NSA, along with its branches Apple and Google, has been way ahead of "earthling" tech since the '60s, for the specific PURPOSE of exerting INVISIBLE AND UNDETECTABLE DEMONIC ABSOLUTE POWER. All of Deepstate's satanic monstrosities are attributed to Nazi terrorists or Red terrorists or Islamic terrorists or Hippie terrorists or QanonTrumpTard terrorists or (best of all) "viruses". Deepstate's bloody fingerprints are always displaced to the currently fashionable terrorist.

Denyse asks an interesting question anyway: Do progress in science and technology inevitably lead to the collapse of a civilization?

Not quite so simple.

We need to separate science from technology.

Science = theory.

Technology = Material solutions for real problems.

I've handled this question before in the context of radio, which is presumably necessary for alien contact.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

An article in the latest New Superstitionist puts forth an old idea, common in science fact and science fiction for decades.

If we ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star, we would expect some problems communicating with them. As we are many light years away, our signals would take many years to reach them, so there would be no scope for snappy repartee. There could be an IQ gap and the aliens might be built from quite different chemistry.

Yet there would be much common ground too. They would be made of similar atoms to us. They could trace their origins back to the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, and they would share with us the universe's future. However, the surest common culture would be mathematics.

The article goes on to discuss which formulas and theories would be good candidates for interplanetary chit-chat.



Polistra begs to differ. The supposed "universality" of math is a myth.

Our new Facebook Friends on Alpha Centauri could have the technology to text us, while knowing very little math. Let's look at the start of electrical communication on Earth. Sam Morse was an artist, not a mathematician, and his telegraph was built by trial and error. Alex Bell was a speech teacher with a deep visual comprehension of wave action. Early radio sets (spark-gap transmitters, cat-whisker detectors) were also built without fancy math, though a certain amount of measurement was important for meaningful testing.

You need a way of remembering size and comparing this size with that size. When testing antennas, you'd need to see that a longer antenna worked better than a shorter antenna, and you'd need to know when the lengthening stopped improving the performance and started making it worse. In other words, you need GRAPHS, or the mental equivalent of GRAPHS.

Even without trying to imagine an alien mind, it's easy to see how we Earthlings could have developed a communication system able to reach distant planets, all without any math beyond measurement.



= = = = = END (modified) REPRINT.

If we look at human history, societies that developed PROBLEM-SOLVING technologies like dams and aqueducts and plows didn't die suddenly. They weren't killed BY the dams and aqueducts and plows. Sometimes they were conquered by enemies (eg Mayans), sometimes they lost their technological edge but continued functioning (eg Persia).

Societies that focused on THEORY were killed directly by the THEORY.

We can see the distinction RIGHT FUCKING NOW in the realm of medicine.

Vaccination was developed WITHOUT THEORY 500 years ago by the Circassians. It was brought to England and "reinvented" 200 years ago. Since then, vaccines for many different diseases have been developed by continual refinement of techniques and constant endless TRIAL AND ERROR. NEGATIVE FEEDBACK. The ERROR part is crucial. Before 2020, clinical trials were HALTED when too much ERROR appeared. None of this development used or needed any theories, except the OBSERVATION that the immune system can be trained to reject a disease by seeing a preview of the disease.

In 2020 we explicitly DELETED the entire concept of immunity. Public Death Officers still understand that it exists, but they use their understanding to ELIMINATE immunity, not to BOOST it. Now clinical trials are conducted to improve genocide, not to improve health.

Now we're operating on a magnificently maniacal THEORY that disease is caused by heretical beliefs. We still use the word "virus", but what we mean by "virus" is witch powder, not a microscopic package of RNA.

We are committing FAST suicide. Or more precisely, Deepstate and its branches are MURDERING us faster than ever before.

EXPERIENCE SURVIVES. THEORY KILLS.

Labels: Constants and Variables, Jackboot stomping forever, Real World Math

  ¶ 5:50 AM

  COBOL musing and bemusing
I've been playing with COBOL for a couple weeks. The more I play, the more I like. The advantages go beyond the proper handling of integers and decimals. COBOL's way of describing and using data structures was clearly the best and most intuitive from the start. Other languages departed from the intuitive and only recently came back to similar power, but still without the intuitive approach.

I've been using the GNUcobol compiler, which runs smoothly and quickly on the command line. The developers have been working together for several years, and the project is highly active.

BUT: There's one extremely basic thing missing. I was puzzled by it, and kept trying to make it work from various angles, then located a note in the GNU documentation that verifies the basic thing is missing.

This one missing function blocks everything I would want to do with COBOL.

COBOL has a built-in way to process an entire array at once, using the ALL keyword. For instance, you can take the median of TABLE1 like this:

COMPUTE MEDIAN1 = FUNCTION MEDIAN (TABLE1(ALL)).

Other languages don't have a built-in median function. Median is the ONLY VALID STATISTIC, and it's tricky to code properly. COBOL implements the correct accounting way of taking a median, along with the correct way of finding Midrange. I use Median and Midrange often in graphics programming.

What's missing? The ALL keyword is missing. There's no way to process an entire array in one step. GNUcobol doesn't handle it, so GNUcobol can't do the things that COBOL does best.

There are several other COBOL compilers for Windows. Some are way too expensive ($25000), some are way too simple (old 16-bit progs that won't run on Win 7). I'm willing to pay for value, but not thousands. So far I haven't found Mama Bear, but I'll keep looking. (There's probably a workaround for the missing ALL, but I haven't learned it or figured it out yet.)

= = = = =

Later: Here's what I mean by intuitive. In all other languages, starting with Fortran, an array or list has a name but the things IN the array don't have names. If you define an array with 12 items, the items are just index points inside the array. If each of the 12 items has its own contents, those are just a second index.

COBOL focuses on the things IN the array, not on the array itself. Simple example with eggs in a carton.

       IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
        PROGRAM-ID.  EGGS.

       DATA DIVISION.
       WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
        01 CARTON.
          05 EGG OCCURS 12 TIMES.
             10 YOLK PIC 9 VALUE 1.
             10 ALBUMEN PIC 9 VALUE 1.
             10 SHELLCOLOR PIC XXXXXXXX VALUE "WHITE".

       PROCEDURE DIVISION.
        MOVE 2 TO YOLK (2).       
        DISPLAY EGG (1).
        DISPLAY EGG (2).

       STOP RUN.

The carton is just a carton. The things IN it are eggs, and we make room for 12 of them. Each egg has measurable things or qualities IN the egg, which also have their own names. I decided to use the number of Yolks (normally 1 but could be 2) and the number of Albumens (always 1) and the color of the shell. I made Egg 2 a double-yolk egg.

The DISPLAY lines tell the computer to display the contents or qualities of Egg number 1 and Egg number 2.

The PIC stuff is non-intuitive but necessary in a strongly column-oriented system like a ledger or a computer memory. PIC is a 'picture' of the columns or memory cells needed for this particular value. 9 represents any digit, and X represents an alphanumeric character. PIC 99.99 would mean a dollars and cents number like 24.36 with no overflow allowed.

Labels: Bemusement, Real World Math

  ¶ 10:01 AM

  Where are the insurers, yet again....
I've been asking this question since 2008, when ZIRP took down insurance and pension funds INTENTIONALLY. Why were the insurers silent? They're a HUGE and RICH industry, with plenty of lobbyists and influence. They specialize in quantifying and predicting. They understand compound interest and exponential curves better than anyone else. They avoid bad models and stupid assumptions, because bad models are unprofitable. Profit comes from agreeing with reality, which makes insurance the most realistic and scientific of all industries. But they allowed ZIRP to continue forever.

This article by a RETIRED actuary compares the AIDS panic with this year's "virus" holocaust. He gets everything right, with an insider perspective.

Best of all, he doesn't play the stupid People can't estimate risk game.

In both cases the virus was largely confined to specific populations, and EVERYONE KNEW IT. There was never any reason to assume "equal opportunity". Viruses are specialists.

I spent the next several months developing mathematical models of the spread of infection, and applying them to official health statistics, which were provided under free subscription by the Centers for Disease Control in their Weekly Surveillance Report. And, like anyone who has worked with epidemiological models during an emerging infection, I came to understand that early-stage projections are not neutral; they have an intrinsic and marked tendency towards exaggeration of whatever threat they’re applied to.

The reason is that with any new health condition, early infections and deaths naturally occur among the most susceptible parts of the population. With AIDS, there were clearly-defined and relatively small groups of people who were at very high risk, and almost all of the early cases were among members of those groups. As the disease spread to the much larger lower-risk parts of the population, overall rates of infection and death fell significantly.

When unrepresentative infection and death rates derived from early data are projected into the far future their effects are greatly amplified, just as a rifle fired at a distant target will turn a tiny error in aim into a miss by miles. And once the projected rates have been translated into numbers of deaths for a population of millions we end up with apocalyptic forecasts that can’t help but induce panic.

Many scientists spend their careers searching for eye-catching results, and it must be extremely difficult to choose to tone down the few that do occur, especially when they apply to a novel and high-profile disease. The temptation to believe you’ve discovered a genuinely awful and important truth is a powerful one. The Royal College of Nursing certainly couldn’t resist: in 1985, they predicted that one million people in Britain would have AIDS within six years. But by 1990, the cumulative total was less than 5,000.

In both cases the insurers knew that the EXPONENTIAL projections were wrong and destructive, but they didn't step up to resist.

ANY TIME YOU HEAR AN EXPERT CLAIMING THAT A NATURAL PHENOMENON IS EXPONENTIAL, YOU KNOW INSTANTLY AND PERFECTLY AND TAUTOLOGOUSLY THAT THE CLAIM IS WRONG AND THE EXPERT IS A MURDEROUS CRIMINAL. NATURE IS NOT CAPABLE OF DOING EXPONENTIALS.

Silence can't be good for profits. In 1980, and even more now after Romneycare, insurers are the main payers for medical care. When projections are wrong, insurers will spend more for unneeded tests and appointments for people who really didn't need to worry. And in the current holocaust insurers will end up spending HUGELY more for serious cancer treatment, which would have been cheaper if caught early.

I'm glad THIS actuary (RETIRED) chose to use his SKILL to clarify the situation.

But the question remains: Why didn't the insurance companies speak out IMMEDIATELY at the time when their authority and lobbying could have made a difference? They could have saved a whole lot of expense for themselves, and could have saved MILLIONS of lives in the current holocaust.

For insurers, profit and saving lives are PARALLEL goals. In earlier decades insurers often lobbied for regulations to improve safety and health. Home and business insurers have always helped customers avoid theft and fire and other hazards. Auto safety regulations were started by an insurance-financed research project in 1956. Fuckhead Nader managed to put his brand on the project for self-aggrandizement, but it was really a cooperative effort by insurers and universities.

Labels: Leth, Real World Math

  ¶ 6:10 AM