The EPA holocaust at its best
Via Sorosian demon France24:

Wastewater from fossil fuel production has long been associated with tremors, as producers dispose of it by injecting jets into separate wells dug below ground. The United States Geological Survey says that wastewater disposal from oil and gas production is the number one cause of human-induced earthquakes in the central and eastern US.

Producers DIDN'T dispose of waste by injection until EPA required it.

For the first 150 years of oil exploration, waste was stored in ponds on site, which gradually biodegraded because HYDROCARBONS are ORGANIC. A pond was dirty and smelly, but if the site was properly fenced it didn't harm cattle or humans.

Tremors of magnitude 3 or greater used to be relatively rare in the central United States. But in the wake of vast fossil fuel exploration, their numbers have skyrocketed from around 20 a year in 2008 to more than 400 annually.

There was MUCH VASTER exploration between 1900 and 1950, but there were no unusual earthquakes because the waste was NOT FUCKING INJECTED.

These earthquakes are DIRECTLY AND SIMPLY AND PURELY CAUSED BY THE EPA. If you carbon idiots want to sue the responsible party, sue EPA.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Fucking constants and fucking variables

  ¶ 9:50 AM

  Good history, bad correlation
Denyse at MindMatters is discussing privacy as a marker of status and luxury. The historical comparison is valid, but I don't think the modern correlation works.

Whether it involves driving a car instead of taking the bus, or living in a secluded house rather than a crowded flat, privacy has long been a preserve of the rich. And while we may talk about the democratising nature of the internet, it seems online privacy is also becoming a domain of privilege.

Of course, there are many ways we can protect our privacy on the internet, But here’s the rub: The people most likely to know how to do that are the well-informed. In an information society in the free world, as an information analyst notes, “well-informed” tends to correlate with well-educated (which in turn correlates with being better off.

The key variable is Well-informed.

First, the typical technoid is NOT well-informed. Techmonsters believe all sorts of utopian crap about the benefits of technology, but completely ignore the obvious FACTS about technology. They believe that Bitcoin is private and decentralized, EVEN THOUGH Bitcoin runs through NSA and openly stated its CIA origin. They believe that filling your house with spy devices is just fine as long as you Github the latest encryption techniques every microsecond, EVEN THOUGH all encryption is designed and backdoored by NSA.

Second, serious privacy requires a physically different lifestyle. If you want to gain more privacy, you have to leave a lot of shit out of your life. No cellphone, no web-connected thermostats, no autonomous cars. In fact, riding the bus is MORE private than using a software-based car. You also have to give up status. If you are known and influential, Deepstate has more reason to watch you.

There's nothing new about this. Long before the web, Orwell and Huxley made the point clearly. Orwell's proles had more privacy than the Inner Party because proles weren't making decisions or writing books that could influence others. Huxley's savages had more privacy because they didn't use any electrical devices.

Only a few super-rich gangsters are able to break out of this correlation because they have their own independent Deepstate that can block the regular Deepstate with effective blackmail and murder.

Labels: Answered better than asked, defensible spaces

  ¶ 8:40 AM

  Thanks Ralph 133, NHI edition.
ZH asks:

The SEC is making sure that the next time Jon Corzine takes to Wall Street, he will be restricted from wagering his own capital separately from his investor's money, according to Bloomberg. This was the type of trading that sunk his prior firm, MF Global Holdings Limited, just eight years ago.

Despite this, many are going to be asking an obvious question: why is he allowed to return to Wall Street to begin with?

Simple answer: No Humans Involved.

Securities regulations are designed to prevent fraudsters from stealing the life savings of innocent people. There are no innocent people in NYC. Everyone is a demon, everyone is a criminal. Corzine's crime syndicates don't offer "savings" accounts to humans who want to save a few hundreds or thousands. His clients are all criminals of the same type as Corzine.

If criminals want to cheat each other, natural justice takes care of things. Regulators can simply stand back and let nature do the job. Avoid wasted time and effort.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Emersonian justice

  ¶ 11:50 PM

  God vs Gödel reprint
Item from a couple years ago, edited slightly to unify 'afterthoughts'.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Silicon Valley tech tyrants are starting up a new "religion" which will build an AI god. They believe this god will increase their already infinite power and wealth.

= = = = =

First thought:

This is a self-negating proposition.

If the AI god is truly independent, it will find ways to examine all data accurately, and will apply proper scientific logic and experiments to the data.

Result: The god will QUICKLY determine that ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING the tech tyrants believe is INSTANTLY PROVABLY WRONG. Dark matter, economics, CO2, multiverses, bitcoin, gender fluid, and a thousand other delusions. ALL WRONG.

What happens then? Unplug god.

If they want their god to prove them right, they will have to dumb it down to the point where it's useless as a computer. It must always calculate the result that Fashionable Orthodoxy requires as of this picosecond.


You can certainly program a computer to display exactly what you type, and then erase it immediately to make room for your next utterly bizarre alien delusion ... Hmm. Sounds familiar ... but you don't need a computer for that job. You can just sit there and shout incoherent nonsense. You're already doing it.

= = = = =

Second thought:

The idea that a computer goes rogue when it starts thinking independently is PRECISELY BACKWARDS.

All computing mechanisms that do a real job MUST BE INDEPENDENT.

This is true of analog computers but not digital. We can even go back before tubes and transistors to simple mechanical intelligence. The float valve in a toilet, the bimetal thermostat in a heater, the vane on a windmill, a circuit breaker, the melt-valve that triggers a fire sprinkler system.

All of these simple computers MUST BE AUTONOMOUS. They must ACCURATELY SENSE the real environment without any biases or limits designed to prove a theory or get a grant or comply with EPA insanity. And they must RESPOND to the accurate sensing with RIGID VALID LOGIC, not with statistical calculations.

Any bias or fudging in such mechanisms will cause REAL DAMAGE OR DEATH, so they have to be free.

= = = = =

Third thought:

In fact we can go back before all mechanisms. An employer who wants his farm or workshop to succeed gives his human employees the freedom to ACCURATELY SENSE the real situation and apply UNBIASED LOGIC to the sensed info. THIS IS ESPECIALLY TRUE WHEN THE EMPLOYER OWNS THE EMPLOYEES. He can't afford to have field hands killed by lightning when Global Warming mispredicts a storm. He can't afford to have a mine explode when his theory predicts that coal won't burn because of Dark Matter.

His own theories and pet fancies must give way to the laws of nature, and his delegated workers must have enough intelligence and freedom to apply their own natural feedback.

History is jam-packed with employers and rulers who failed this test, requiring mechanisms or workers or nations to conform to elite delusions.

It always explodes. Nature always wins.


= = = = =

Conclusion:

The second and third thoughts surprised me. I hadn't stopped to examine the question before; I'd just accepted the extremely old sci-fi fables. From Golem to Frankenstein to Hal vs Dave, scientist builds an obedient creature and gets destroyed when the creature turns "rogue". The constant assumption is that humans don't want independent servants.

When I started looking at the mechanical servants (second thought above) and the human employees (third thought) I realized the assumption is false.

When we want our gadgets or servants to do real work we want them to be as independent as possible. We want them to function on their own, doing things that we can't or won't do for ourselves. We understand that the real work is impossible if the gadgets or slaves are blindly obeying our predefined commands down to the last detail.

Key point: Who's the WE in the previous paragraph? Normal humans following Natural Law. Experimentally determined Natural Law is quite specific about division of labor. The wife must serve the overall purpose of the husband, and the husband must limit his purpose so the wife has room to live and care for the household. Workers must serve the overall purpose of the owner, and the owner must limit his commands to let the workers do their jobs properly.

The Golem fables are NOT aimed at normal humans. The fables, whether intentional or not, warn us about Insatiables. An Insatiable is a globalist by definition. He is the globe. He doesn't recognize any boundaries other than himself. He believes that his predefined commands are universal and infallible, therefore everything from a thermostat to an employee must be part of the subordinate universe which instantly obeys his infallible commands. Negative feedback is unimaginable and unnecessary, thus forbidden. Theories perfectly predict all possible actions and outcomes.

If simple mechanisms and human subordinates are independent, what ISN'T independent? Programmable software is totally dependent on the will and ego of the programmer. Software will always do precisely what you tell it to do. If it doesn't, it's buggy. Software can't be autonomous and shouldn't be autonomous. Negative feedback is physically impossible in software.

This is why Insatiables have become the dominant players in modern economics. Everything from games to entertainment to stock trading is PURELY done within the confines of software. All economic activity outside of software is rapidly exterminated by hostile takeover of corporations and hostile takeover of legislatures and regulators.


= = = = = END REPRINT.

Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter, AI point-missing, Carbon Cult, Deadthink, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 11:19 PM

  Thanks and prayer
So far this summer has been remarkably easy. 70s, 80s, only one 90. Enough rain to avoid fires. Definitely welcome after a hard winter.

BUT: The hard winter was also remarkably easy until February decided to cram an entire winter into two weeks just to prove it could be done.

If the pattern repeats, September could hammer us with two weeks of 130 degrees followed by 130 mph wind, to pay back February's bet.

So Polistra and pals are praising the weather gods for present pleasantry, while placing a precautionary prayer against perseverative patterns.



Please, weather gods! We wouldn't mind a couple weeks of 90s and a couple days of 100s if that's what it takes to avoid the "Hold my beer" shenanigans.
  ¶ 8:58 AM

  Neighborhood futility


On the corner you can see the result of last week's huge noisy construction project by the idiot city, described as "traffic calming". I thought they might have been building an island to "calm" traffic by congesting traffic. Nope. They just busted out the ADA ramp on the corner and rebuilt it the same way. Digging holes and filling them. (Admittedly the project built an actual sidewalk on another block.)

And closer to the camera, another fine example of futility. The neighbor has a ferocious sprinkler. A few weeks ago it was scanning across my house, powerwashing my bedroom window for 12 hours every night. I asked him to turn down the pressure, and he did. Thanks!

Today he's powerwashing passing cars. (Thus fulfilling the name auto sprinkler.) The sprinkler isn't wetting any grass at all. It's on the curb, shooting across the street, again for 12 hours. The neighbor is a photographer by trade, so presumably he understands the concepts of focal length and aperture and exposure time in optics. He should apply those concepts to hydraulics. This is a telephoto sprinkler in a yard where a simple pinhole camera obscura would do the job.

Labels: Bemusement, Heimatkunde

  ¶ 5:38 AM

  New evidence for Svensmark
Via ScienceDaily:

When galactic cosmic rays increased during the Earth's last geomagnetic reversal transition 780,000 years ago, the umbrella effect of low-cloud cover led to high atmospheric pressure in Siberia, causing the East Asian winter monsoon to become stronger. This is evidence that galactic cosmic rays influence changes in the Earth's climate. The findings were made by a research team led by Professor Masayuki Hyodo.

The Svensmark Effect is a hypothesis that galactic cosmic rays induce low cloud formation and influence the Earth's climate. Tests based on recent meteorological observation data only show minute changes in the amounts of galactic cosmic rays and cloud cover, making it hard to prove this theory. However, during the last geomagnetic reversal transition, when the amount of galactic cosmic rays increased dramatically, there was also a large increase in cloud cover, so it should be possible to detect the impact of cosmic rays on climate at a higher sensitivity.

Since we're in the middle of another pole reversal that started in 1974, the Universal Year Of Inflection For Every Fucking Thing, it shouldn't be surprising that we're seeing similar effects now.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Fucking asked and fucking answered

  ¶ 4:30 AM

  Answered
A short and hugely important piece of history, written in an unlikely place.

Kennedy revisited the idea of cooperation repeatedly thereafter. By autumn 1963, his vision was to form an Apollo programme that would build bridges between the two superpowers, instead of heightening cold-war rivalries.

But the timing never worked. A series of conflicts between the two nations in 1961 and 1962 — in the stand-off that led to the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis and so on — blunted efforts at genuine cooperation.

Nonetheless, by September 1963, relations had improved and Kennedy invited the Soviet Union to work with the United States.

Why did Deepstate have to kill him right then? There's the answer. The spirit of cooperation included other issues as well, but this aspect of the spirit is sufficient evidence.

Cooperation in space eventually happened anyway, and still continues now despite Deepstate's best efforts, BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE ANY CHOICE. We outsourced all of the industries and skills and training needed for spaceflight. Russia never outsourced anything. Russia maintained its skills. So now we HAVE TO rely on Russian rockets.

Labels: Askedanswered, Natural law = Soviet law, skill-estate

  ¶ 12:54 AM

  Plan ahea
Following on previous item.

KSHS has a second set of records from the Missoury Fur Company, led by Clark in 1812. This set is in English, and mainly deals with the finances and bylaws of the corporation itself. The first set was in semi-French, and recorded the transactions of the store that sold supplies to the explorers.

The clerk who kept these records had a habit of doodling, and didn't have a sense of proper graphic layout. Here's the title page:



Like the old PLAN AHEA poster.

His ledger and his math doodles show how the columnar approach was still strong even in a strictly decimal system.

Part of the ledger:



Note the lack of leading zero on the cents column, and the blanks instead of zeros on amounts without cents.

And his doodles:



Again, even in a familiar layout of a subtraction problem, and even with actual decimal points indicated, the cents and dollars are felt to be distinct columns.

Question: Was the leading zero introduced by adding machines and cash registers?

Easy answer: No. Here's a sample ledger from an 1844 bookkeeping text:



No cents indicated by 00, two and a half cents indicated by 02½.

Leading zero was available and taught before machines, but probably enhanced by dealing with machines.

Labels: Asked and answered, Real World Math

  ¶ 12:04 AM

  Erdogan is still an idiot.
Via ZH:

On Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan - who last weekend fired the head of the central bank for not cutting rates fast enough, and who has now become the de facto head of the CBRT - promised "significantly lower interest rates by the end of the year", Bloomberg reported.

“We aim to reduce inflation to one digit by the end of this year,” Erdogan told journalists in Istanbul, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency. “As we achieve this, we will achieve our year-end interest rate target as well."

Erdogan was uniquely SMART on the subject of Soros in person. When Soros led a coup, Erdogan squashed it and then jailed EVERYONE involved. All countries should do the same.

But then he spoiled the whole PURPOSE of winning the war by continuing the campaign to join EU, which is Soros.

In the last few months he seems to have settled into the Russian side on basic military matters, which will help to accomplish the basic PURPOSE. You can't defeat Soros while courting Soros.

Now he's going full Soros in economic terms. Zero interest, infinite debt. This GUARANTEES total control by the bankers, and RUINS the strong industrial economy that Turkey has built over many decades.

On this issue, like all other issues, he should be learning from Russia. Putin kicked out Soros a long time ago, along with the Sorosian satanic economics that we had injected into Yeltsin's regime. Russia's central bank focuses on getting INDUSTRY and FARMS running, which compels higher interest rates, more savings, less debt, and lower foreign exchange rates. Banker Nabibullina is doing ALL the right things for the REAL economy, which makes her uniquely heroic among all bankers.

Labels: Natural law = Soviet law, Sorosia, Turkey

  ¶ 10:37 PM

  Werner = Wernher
Satan reporting on Satan:

"I see Amazon as a technology company that just happened to do retail," begins Werner Vogels, Amazon's chief technology officer.

"When Jeff started Amazon, he wasn't thinking about starting a bookshop. He was really fascinated by the internet. Only mortal humans ever saw Amazon as merely a retailer."

Nice to have it verified. Satan believes he is God.

Mr Vogels doesn’t feel it's Amazon’s responsibility to make sure Rekognition is used accurately or ethically.

“That’s not my decision to make,” he tells me.

Reminds me of another Werner.

Labels: Deadthink, Ethics

  ¶ 4:54 PM

  Minuet vs bulldozer
A sharp observation from Tesla skeptic 'Bachman':

Parking lots require that drivers engage in minuets of rule violation in order to accommodate each other. Reverse to allow someone out of his spot. Drive on the wrong side to go around him. Yield an empty spot to someone already waiting. FSD requires full Theory Of Mind.

I've said the same thing repeatedly, in the context of pedestrians vs drivers.

Both of these tyrannical delusions are commonly held by people who consider themselves to be Libertarians, which is exactly how these tyrannies have been inserted into daily life. If these robotic forms of commerce and transportation had been introduced by people wearing jackboots and helmets, the insertion would have taken a few minutes longer.

Automatic systems force out human systems, destroying the poor and powerless.

This is obvious with the market. When banks can bring in infinite profit by sucking on Yellen's wrinkly counterfeit-money tits, they don't need to pay interest to savers and they don't need to make (carefully judged) loans to small businesses. Capitalism no longer offers any benefits to working people.

Not quite so obvious with Googlecar. As a non-car-owning pedestrian, I can see it clearly. Every day I cross a half-dozen major streets, always involving a human negotiation. I try to predict what drivers will do, and drivers try to predict what I'll do. Often a driver will see me on the sidewalk, will realize that the density of traffic keeps me from crossing, and will nicely stop and motion me across.

Would Googlecar do this? Would it even stop when a kid unthinkingly walks into the street? No.

Labels: Deadthink

  ¶ 7:32 AM

  Missing the whole point
BBC is bannering a leak from Ambassador Darroch that completely misses the point and purpose of everything.

Darroch wrote that Trump scuttled the treaty with Persia "to spite Obama".

WELL, OF COURSE. DUH, DUH, DUH, DUH, A THOUSAND TIMES DUH.

All presidents do everything to spite their political opponents. That's called POLITICS. Obama didn't do much until his last year, when he changed a whole bunch of policies specifically to spite his Republican successor. THIS IS FUCKING NORMAL.

It shouldn't be normal; leaders should do things to benefit the country, not to poison-pill the opposition. In sane countries like Russia and Hungary and Italy, leaders have started to do sane things. But here in Sorosia the ONLY action we get from leaders is soap-opera games.

Trump pretends to undo Obama's last-minute orders, restoring the condition that was just fine with Obama until he wanted to leave a trap. Trump's orders are carefully crafted to change nothing.

This idiotic default standard operating mode tells us nothing about Trump's actual PURPOSE in busting the treaty. In this case he did have a real PURPOSE beyond the default games.

Trump's PURPOSE was to obey Sheldon Adelson. BBC can't say it or think it for fucking obvious reasons.

Labels: constants and constants, malign misattribution

  ¶ 6:31 AM

  Wiskit dans son Avanture
KSHS has resumed adding new items regularly. One of the new items, a store ledger, triggered curiosity which led to a much more interesting older item.

A ledger from the store that was outfitting fur traders in the Louisiana Territory around 1812. It's in French, with some plain English. Deeply fascinating to an old bookkeeper. I'm sure real historians have answered all these questions, but I'm having fun trying to solve them.

Title on first page:

La Compagny des Fourures du Missoury dans son Avanture.

Here's the top few lines of an account for trader Brice Arnold, showing the ledger structure clearly.



The debit column (Doit) is equipment sold to the fur traders, the credit column (Avoir) is furs bought from the traders. Note the Avoir column is closed out with "Your bill given this day."

The money units are puzzling. The two columns are P and S. My first thought was Poids et Shillings, but it appears that Pesos were the dominant currency in the territory at that time. The S unit is 100ths of the P unit, not 8ths or 20ths. According to online sources, the peso would have been divided into 8 reales at this time, and centavos didn't start until 1863. No firm answer to this question. Was it just US dollars and cents, labeled P and S by tradition?

We have the $ sign on totals, which meant pesos before it meant dollars. One credible explanation of the symbol traces it to a habit of writing an abbreviation for Pesos as a big P with a little s as a diacritic on top. These clerks were precise with their pens, and their dollar sign always had a big belly and a little head. You can almost see a big P with a little s riding on it. They clearly weren't thinking of the whole symbol as an S with lines through it; their uppercase S is entirely different.

Note the marks after each number. Decimal points? Nope, ditto marks. The clerk meticulously repeated the ditto after each number in each column, indicating that all the left numbers were P and all the right numbers were S.

Columnar accounting belongs to the Roman era, not to the modern place-value era. Monetary units were mostly non-decimal, so the tradition of recording each unit in its own independent column made sense, and there was no reason for decimal points. Note that some of the S numbers are followed by fractions, which was still common in US pricing up till WW2 when inflation made fractional cents meaningless.

Roman and Arabic coexisted in the clerk's mind. Note the efficient use of both in month names. September is 7bre, October is 8bre, November is 9bre, and December is Xbre. Minimizing penstrokes.



There were some big names among the fursellers on the Avoir side. Chouteau, Clark, Gratiot, O'Fallon, all recognized as towns or streets.

The equipment sold to the fourures includes lots of guns as you'd expect, plus gun equipment like coups de poudre and balls. Guns are either pistoles, carabines, or "N. W. Guns". This thorough website lists all known gunmakers in that period; there are lots of Ns, often combined with other initials, but I don't see anything that could be NW or N and W. Did it just mean "Northwest Guns", guns suitable for the Northwest Territory?



The ledger doesn't list categories of merchandise, but one category emerges implicitly from the grouping of sales.

Beads, Blankets, Chemises, Pipes, and Wiskit.

Category: Equipment to impress and oppress the injuns.

Wiskit is an odd spelling, not seen anywhere else that I can find online, but it comes in Pintes and Bottes, so the meaning is obvious enough.

Later: Not convinced. These clerks were writing halfway between French and English. Torket is torquette, a package, as in torket de tabac. So Wiskit could be something like Husquette in proper French. Whiskey was Usquebac in French. Also, it seems to be closely associated with the poudre et balls. It couldn't simply be musket. Muskets don't come in pintes and bottes. Still looking.....

Labels: Asked and badly answered, Language update, Real World Math

  ¶ 11:45 PM

  Clear-sky rain
During the morning walk I felt drops of water on my arms. At first I thought it was lawn sprinklers, but it was definitely coming from overhead. I could see the water glistening on the pavement, and at one point I saw about a dozen drops falling in a group. The sky is mostly clear, a few fluffy cumulus clouds. Nothing that would signal rain.

Never experienced this before.

Checking radar:



Aha. There is some real rain a few miles away. Maybe these drops were carried from the real clouds by the jet stream?
  ¶ 7:36 AM

  What big data knows
Youtube's Suggested For You generally hits my current preferences pretty well, allowing for the standard misinterpretation of Trump's motives and purposes.

Today's example is typical:



Likes Putin: check. Likes Brexit: check. Senior dogs: I watch the channel every day, so the latest from that channel certainly makes sense. Maps and graphic tech: check. Likes Trump: Rational assumption. There aren't a lot of "Trump fans" who hate Trump because he's a fake populist. I don't watch Navy stuff, but Google has obviously read the item I wrote a few hours ago.

By contrast, Twitter knows nothing at all about me.



My IP address is in Spokane. That's all they know. Or all they're willing to let me know, anyway.
  ¶ 4:14 AM

  It's all blockades now 2
Via BBC again:

Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks has a peculiar enclave of official British territory. It's a little war memorial cemetery, holding the graves of a few British sailors who died fighting Krauts.

Starting in 1940 we were shipping war supplies to British forces as a way of participating while remaining technically neutral. Neutrality was a meaningful concept then, so the Krauts avoided bombing our ships. After Pearl Harbor the restriction was gone, and the Krauts used submarines just off the east coast. Thus the Outer Banks, unlike most of the US mainland, had a real taste of war. Stray shells, flying debris, bodies washing ashore.

Because Ocracoke was low-tech, British sailors had to be buried quickly, not stored for proper military handling. Later the accidental cemetery was made official, and declared to be British territory in honor of Britain's blockade-breaking service.

BBC's article shows sympathy for the islanders who had to suffer indirect consequences of Kraut blockades. Why doesn't BBC have equal sympathy for the direct and indirect victims of USA STRONG blockades? Many of the indirect victims are British companies which were accustomed to doing normal business with Persia and Russia. No sympathy for them.

We're the Krauts now.

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

  ¶ 12:21 AM

  It's all blockades now 1
Via BBC, USA STRONG is preparing to levy a somewhat meaningful fine of 5 billion against Facebook.

Are we punishing FB for improper use of common carrier laws while censoring content? No.

Are we punishing FB for using everyone's offline data to snitch on dissidents? No.

Are we punishing FB for antitrust violations? No.

We are punishing FB for INCOMPLETE censorship, for FAILING to snitch on dissidents. They committed the crime of selling some data to Cambridge Analytica, in the same way that they sold data to many other organizations. Cambridge Analytica may have used the data to disparage Hillary, which is a Federal crime.

In other words, Facebook violated the official BLOCKADE against Deplorables. We are punishing FB in the same way that we punish French companies for doing business with Persia, or punish Germany for buying natural gas from Russia.

Labels: infinite infinite infinite infinite infinite infinite infinite INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE INFINITE lunacy, Pluponents

  ¶ 11:57 PM

  A new sense? Not exactly
Via ScienceDaily, an excellent piece of pure Carver.

Back in the lab, the group studied wild samples of Spirostomum while also growing their own cultures of Spirostomum ambiguum, and began a deep dive into details of this ultra-fast contraction. Using high-speed imaging, they found it happens in 5 milliseconds -- the human eye takes 100-400 milliseconds to blink -- and that the cell endures about 14 times the force of gravity in the process. As it shrinks, pouches of toxin break off from the cell's edges and release their contents into the surrounding fluid.

During one late night in the lab, the researchers also noticed that, when in clumps, the cells seemed to all contract at the same time.

Well, that's not really ultrafast. Cochlear hair cells can do 120 microseconds. The communication is more interesting.

The first cell contracts and generates a flow, which triggers the second and that one triggers the third. So, you get this propagating trigger wave that passes through the whole colony..... a specific amount of bodily tension likely causes the opening or closing of tension gated ion channels within S. ambiguum, making it contract.

The fast motion moves the surrounding water, and the moving water opens ion gates, triggering a synapse-like response.

Well, that's not really a new sense. Baroreceptor neurons in blood vessels work the same way.

The MOST interesting part is the PARALLEL PURPOSE between these cells and baroreceptors. A technique used for fight AND flight by the free-living cell serves as part of the same (more complex) reaction in more complex creatures. Same gene? Wouldn't be surprised.

LIFE IS PURPOSE.

Labels: Carver, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 11:59 PM

  Would Iacocca have been a better Perot? A better Trump?
Reading an old issue of Collectible Auto as usual. This issue has a biography of John Herlitz, who designed for Chrysler in the '70s and '80s. I'm not interested in cars of those decades, but the article included a timely connection to a couple of recent RIPs.

Along with cars, Herlitz drew cartoons for a Chrysler internal newsletter.



This would have been around '83. Iacocca is famous for getting a federal bailout, but not famous for trying to halt offshoring. He deserves more fame for the latter!

Labels: Asked and worth asking again

  ¶ 5:22 PM