AI point-missing as usual
More of the same.

Seattle University, with funding provided by Microsoft, has created a free, online course intended to train businesses on the “meaning of ethics in AI.” That’s a promising move because it’s not just the tools that create problems. The developers themselves often don’t know how to think about ethical issues. Michael Quinn, Dean of the College of Science and Engineering at Seattle University, notes,

Many people who work in tech aren’t required to complete a philosophy or ethics course in school’, said Quinn, which he believes contributes to blind spots in the development of technology. Those blind spots may have lead to breaches of public trust…”

Philosophy or Ethics course???????????

Jesus.

The point is simple, and has nothing to do with "ethics" or ethics. The point is that the PEOPLE IN CHARGE of big data are totally immune from legalities. They are above and beyond the law. Suing them or regulating them is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE because they are paid-up members of Epstein's Blackmail Web. Lawyers and regulators and judges want to remain alive and functional.

Labels: AI point-missing, Ethics

  ¶ 9:41 AM

  Everyone loves a good panic
I wrote on Jan 25 that the fake "flu" panic was designed to shut down Wuhan province, to fire insubordinate leaders and squash an incipient rebellion.

True. See this and this.

Now it appears that China is also trying to reshape its own economy and the world's economy. See this.

Best guess: Creating the conditions for an "unavoidable" default on all debts followed by total cashless economy and MMT. Foreign investors would be forced to understand.

Deepstates elsewhere LOVE LOVE LOVE a fake panic. All are jumping on board to create military camps for dissidents and open borders for migrants, per the "medical" orders from WHO, even though the number of cases is still microscopic, nowhere REMOTELY near the cases and deaths from ordinary non-newsworthy non-panicable flu.

Flu is always a serious disease. This Swine Flu is also a serious disease because it's flu. Media never cover deaths from generic flu, so we get fake comparisons between ONE media death from Swine Flu versus ZERO media deaths from generic. The real comparison is more like ONE from Swine Flu versus ONE THOUSAND from generic flu in the same place and time interval.

It's similar to School Shootings. The vast majority of shooting deaths are within the criminal world, gangsters killing gangsters. Media never mention these deaths. Occasionally a gang murder happens near a school, and it immediately becomes a newsworthy School Shooting.
  ¶ 6:56 AM

  Bye, Bernie
Just another Trump, another faker. Bye, asshole.

Labels: se-lu

  ¶ 1:58 AM

  Is Boris learning?
Boris seems to be following Putin's lead in several ways. After he threw the Brexit switch, his next move was to activate INFRASTRUCTURE.

Even before the bizarre anti-Brexit stageplay, England was paralyzed on the infrastructure front. The previous soap opera was centered on a third runway at Heathrow. For several years this was the ONLY topic of discussion, the ONLY allowed debate, in British politics. It was a pointless debate, and it wouldn't have solved any problems if built.

Now Boris has started a major high-speed railway, and his speech at the event sounded Putinish.

Latest move: Get rid of old cabinet, bring in people who will HELP HIM GET SHIT DONE. This is just a week after Putin's cabinet rebuild, and again the rhetoric is similar.

I've been hoping and ranting for years that SOMEBODY on the Sorosian side of the world would start LEARNING from the effective leaders on the non-Soros side.

Still reserving judgment, but the important sign is GETTING SHIT DONE instead of playing endless BLOCKING games.

= = = = =

The best cure for individual depression is



The same cure on a different scale works for national depression. Stop fussing about purity of motive and ideology. Just KEEP MOVING AND KEEP MAKING.

Chatley Heath sends the message.



More life, more value, more beauty. More life, more value, more beauty.
  ¶ 12:41 AM

  Just odd
UK Independent has an interview with Bernie's actual bro. His older brother Larry has lived in England for a long time, and is described as a retired academic.

Oddly, the bro doesn't seem to understand modern politics. His categories belong to the Adlai Stevenson era. Deepstate and globalism are not within his perception.

Even more oddly, he calls his younger brother Bernard, not Bernie. Normally it's the other way around. Siblings use nicknames, public uses full name.

Something's wrong with this picture, but I don't know what it is. The Independent is pretty much the only major US/UK media that supports Bernie, so they're not trying to raise doubts.

Update next day: Not so odd after all. Turns out BERNARD is just another NYC faker like DONALD.

Labels: Bemusement

  ¶ 6:19 AM

  Acetylene world 8, the most patient of all
Acetylene was an efficient and reliable light source, and the Dalen sun valve was an effective and reliable automatic control for acetylene lights. Lighthouses and buoys used it until the 1930s when electric systems began to reach the same reliability.

One lighthouse stuck with acetylene, and stuck with Dalen, until 2012. Chumbe Island lighthouse, on the east coast of Africa, was built in 1904 as an oil burner, converted to acetylene with Dalen in 1926, and finally converted to solar-powered electric in 2012.



You can see the Dalen hanging on the roof of the light itself, above Polistra's head.

Labels: Patient things

  ¶ 1:42 AM

  Speaking of differentials....
While USA and UK are "debating" whether the death penalty plus torture or just the plain death penalty is the best punishment for heretics who insist that gender is binary, Russia continues running in the opposite direction.



Russia's constitutional working group is trying to add an amendment stating firmly and legally that a family is a male father and a female mother. Putin approves.

This is getting a little repetitive, but the contrast is so STARK and the difference is ACCELERATING so fast that I have to keep noticing. We are killing our culture and our people faster and faster and faster while Russia and others are RESTORING natural law faster and faster and faster.

Labels: Sorosia, switchover

  ¶ 2:29 PM

  Diff in architecture?
In previous item I cited symmetry.

The best patient mechanisms, in life and in built devices, use active symmetry in the form of differentials or balances.

Is there an equivalent in architecture? I can think of patient systems but no diffs.

Bungalows are patient mechanisms. Winter sun heats the interior, summer sun doesn't touch the walls.

Double-hung windows are patient ventilation.

Gravity heating systems were sort of patient, but didn't work very well.

Aha! Drain traps are differential AND Willsonian patient. Balance maintains the water, and the water does all the work. A prosaic gadget with an elegant function!

Anything else?

Labels: Asked and partly answered, Patient things

  ¶ 6:42 AM

  More classical misdirection
More on the Trump architecture "order".

Sumantra Maitra often makes tremendous sense and usually gets it. In this case, as with Dalrymple's article on the same subject, he is precisely correct about the violent nastiness of modernism.

Leave aside the fakeness of Trump, who has no fucking idea what he's talking about.

Dalrymple and Maitra are right about the bad side of this choice and wrong about the good side. Both specifically want Greco-Roman architecture with columns and arches.

Classic architecture is just as useless and wrong as modernism. Both arise from theories, not the reality of human shelter.

Symmetry and structure are important, as I've been emphasizing in art and music and grammar. But symmetry and structure should be formed on patient buildings that take care of natural enemies and human needs without excessive technology. Patient buildings are local by necessity. Snowy places and sunny places and rainy places and quaky places and floody places have distinct requirements, which must be solved experimentally. Greece is a sunny and stable place, so its forms aren't suited for other places.

Time for a reprint.

= = = = = START REPRINT 1:

In the deep of winter I observed that the Cape Cod with heated attic is UNQUESTIONABLY the best house for snow. Not really surprising, since it was designed by experiment in a snowy place.

The modern idea that roofs should remain uniformly cold to avoid ice dams has been definitively disproved. Roofs should be steep and warm.

I started 'making' a tribute to Cape Cods, and it's pretty much finished now. Got carried away as usual, expanded the project to a nice 1930s neighborhood. Not quite ready for release; I like to do a little testing and usage before release, and these pictures are part of the testing. (The store interior was used here.)

First the winter version, since snow was the whole purpose of the project:


A different view in summer:


Continuing in '30s mode, I decided to tackle a pure Streamline Moderne, a THEORY-BASED style that has NOT held up over the years. Very few Modernes survive unless they're forcibly maintained by Historical Preservation laws.


= = = = = END REPRINT 1.

= = = = = START REPRINT 2:

Article in local paper features a museum exhibit on Mid-century Modern in Spokane. They detail one house that supposedly represents subtle functionality.

“In a way, it’s sort of Zen-like, with no unnecessary movements, no unnecessary notes if it were music – only what’s necessary to accomplish the program, whatever that happens to be. There’s a very simple beauty in that.”

Well, let's look at the featured house, 723 W. Sumner. It's in one of the best neighborhoods, and the landscaping is unquestionably beautiful. Google gets a nice view of the featured house (left) with its older "non-Zen-like" neighbor.



Which is more functional? Old non-Zen-like. It has a sloped roof and wide overhangs on all sides. Snow and rain can flow naturally off the roof; sun reaches the windows more in winter but less in summer; the foundation is protected from water (and thus somewhat protected from termites.)

The Zen-like modern house has a flat roof and no overhangs at all. It is highly vulnerable to snowload and leaks, it has no shelter from the sun, and its walls and foundation have no protection from water. That's not functional, it's just dumb.

Most of the dull ticky-tacky '50s houses in Spokane are more practical (i.e. less Zen-like) than this highly architected raw rectangle, which is why they have held up with very little maintenance. (Sidenote: The Google Street front view of the raw Zen-like rectangle was blocked by a maintenance truck parked in the driveway!... which is why I had to slide over to this side view. Probably unfair to draw conclusions from a single-day sample, but nevertheless it was there.)

= = = = = END REPRINT 2.

Labels: defensible spaces, malign misattribution, Patient things

  ¶ 4:25 AM

  What next?
Erdogan is incurably American. I thought he had learned something, but obviously not. Now he will be forced to learn.

In 2018 Turkey agreed to help Russia end the Syrian war. This was clearly in Turkey's own interest. Having a war next door is dangerous, and Turkey had been bearing the burden of Syrian refugees for many years. A sane country would jump at the chance to end a war, and Erdogan was briefly sane.

Sanity should have been easy. All he had to do was NOTHING. Just mind his own fucking business and stop making war.

But he can't do NOTHING, can't mind his own fucking business, can't be sane. He's American. Now he's pushing back into Syria, fighting DIRECTLY AGAINST Russian forces. Russia has officially called the action unacceptable.



What next?
  ¶ 12:31 AM

  Interesting exception
Exceptions are worth examining.

The "election" this year started normally. DNC blatantly and obviously rigged the Iowa primary. Reassuringly normal.

Sucker Filter. If you're dumb enough to believe that the rigging was incompetence, you're the kind of "voter" both parties want and cherish and cultivate.

But at least initially, New Hampshire seems to have been unrigged. Bernie was allowed to win.

It's always hard to gather a pattern from only two instances, but Iowa and NH are traditionally the most important buildup for our "election" racket.

Two choices.

1. New Hampshire somehow resisted DNC's normal blackmail operations, kept its own functional system for counting votes, and didn't alter the results.

2. This is the rigged and planned result, for reasons that aren't yet evident.

Given the way our "elections" work, (1) is just barely conceivable, (2) is vastly more likely.

A quick hypothesis without any supporting data: William Henry Harrison. Bernie is 78 and had a heart attack or a "heart attack" during the campaign. He won't last much longer, and he knows it. VP Pete will be able to take over almost immediately, and Bernie's fans will fade away without resentment or resistance.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 12:14 AM

  Elon's nail parlor
An investigation connected to a lawsuit found that Elon's Fremont factory has major connections to organized crime. A significant part of its inventory is "stolen".

Reminds me of a sharp observation by a British commentator: When you see a business that is thriving and surviving, but doesn't seem to have any customers, you can be pretty sure the business is a front for money laundering or other mob activities.

He was talking about small stores and nail parlors in strip malls. The same observation applies to Tesla on a much larger scale. Share value equal to Ford or Toyota, but very few actual cars compared to Ford or Toyota. Not a complete fraud, because products or services do exist; but the visible products are a small part of the operation.

Irrelevant sidenote: After using Ford and Toyota to represent the top two, I decided to check with reality. While waiting for the bus on the boulevard I sort of informally and proportionally "counted" brands. Ford and Toyota are NOT the top two. Ford and Chevy are still the absolute dominators, just as they were in 1970. After Ford and Chevy, it's about half Jap and half Jeep. Among the Japs, Toyota is not first. Subaru and Honda are roughly tied for first, with Toyota a distant third. Why did I overrate Toyota? Maybe because most of the taxis are Toyotas, so I've seen them and felt them from the inside?

My presumption about Tesla cars is accurate. In 68 years of watching cars, I've seen exactly two Teslas. I know they weren't the same car because one was red and one was white.

Update next day: Now it's THREE Teslas. The other two were Model 3, this one was a black Model X. Maybe they're starting to reproduce around here.

A few days later: Found the reason for the sudden increase. Earlier, when I hadn't seen any Teslas at all, I checked the map of "filling stations" for Teslas. At that time the nearest station was in Coeur d'Alene. Now there's a station in Spokane, which opened 12/21/2019. So the killer cars will be reproducing, and the fires and deaths will also be reproducing.

Labels: Metrology

  ¶ 7:01 AM

  Was Lenin our SOB?
Russia Insight features the opening of a private archive, the letters of Admiral Kolchak. He began as an oceanographer, then enlisted in the Navy to help fight the Japs in 1904. He quickly became an Admiral.

When Germany and Japan and USA worked together in 1918 to break up Russia, (while we were still NOMINALLY fighting against Germany) Kolchak stayed with the Tsarist side, stayed with real Russia.



We were mainly working in Siberia, and Kolchak was also fighting there. Our side, the Axis side, captured Kolchak and turned him over to the Bolsheviks.

This casts the War Of Intervention in a new light. From available sources our goals were unclear, and perhaps we weren't entirely sure what we were doing. It appeared that we were trying to favor the Mensheviks.

The clip is equally unclear, leaving doubt whether Kolchak's capture was opportunistic or strategic. If it was strategic, it would certainly fit the usual pattern. When we start a revolution, our favored rebel usually wins. Castro and Khomeini were ours, funded and assisted by CIA. Both broke loose and opposed us, earning our undying enmity. If Lenin was ours, he would add to this correlation.

Labels: Asked and unanswered

  ¶ 5:38 AM

  Doesn't know how things work
The new urbanist types are happy with Trump's "order" that pretends to suggest non-modernist architecture for federal buildings.

Dalrymple gets carried away:

The order will give renewed courage to patrons of architecture, who for a long time have been cowed by the architects’ mastery of high-sounding verbiage and gobbledygook to promote their inhuman work, so much of which these days looks like a snapshot taken of a huge shack in mid-collapse during an earthquake. Patrons, like the courtiers of the Emperor with no clothes, have hitherto been afraid to confront architects for fear of appearing ignorant and unsophisticated, but will no longer have to accept the dictation of architects. Examples will show that things can be done differently, that patrons do not have to accept what Thom Mayne, the architect responsible for some of the worst of recent buildings, called “demanding art-for-art’s-sake architecture that only other architects can appreciate.”

Shack in mid-collapse is a BEAUTIFUL AND PRECISE description of modern design. Unfortunately Dalrymple doesn't understand the sole purpose of Trump.

The people who write "orders" to be signed by Trump do understand their purpose. Everything Trump "does" is explicitly and cleverly designed to cause no actions by bureaucrats. The bureaucrats knew from the start that they could simply continue doing what they were doing under Obama. The only consequence of a Trump "order" is to shift the blame for bad results to "altright white neoNazis" who can then be rounded up and EXTERMINATED.

Now that classical architecture is officially associated with the Trump brand, any patron who asks an architect for a non-modern building can be instantly shipped to the ovens.

THIS IS NOT AN UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE. THERE ARE NO UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.

Labels: malign misattribution

  ¶ 10:54 PM

  Why is that dark?
Via Eurekalert as usual,

The study involved 184 college students who read short narratives that they were told were plots to possible television episodes.

The students read 15 narratives: one-third in which the villain was treated positively by the victim; one-third in which the villain received a just punishment; and one-third in which the villain was punished over and beyond what would have been a suitable penalty for the crime.
...
So the participants may have paused slightly before responding to the forgiveness stories to reflect, because they saw them as more meaningful, Grizzard said.

But while they also paused for the over-punishment narratives, they did not find them more meaningful, only more enjoyable, he said. That suggests the pause may have been simply to savor the extra punishment the villain received. "It appears to be the darker side of just enjoying the vengeance," he said.

Why is that the darker side? Encouraging goodness is the opposite of dark.

In a non-functional Sorosian culture where BIG crimes like killing millions and ruining billions of lives are INFINITELY REWARDED while undetectable "microaggressions" are SMASHED, it's normal to want more punishment for real crimes. We have a precise sense of balance, and we understand that negative feedback (error correction) has to be larger to null out a large departure from center.

Labels: Sorosia

  ¶ 10:15 AM

  Full moon
From the last 24 hours on Spokane News:

3100 East 43rd, reported 21 year old is arguing with his mother about laundry and so he has called 911.

WSP trying to catch up to a speeding vehicle going 103 mph northbound on the NSC from Parksmith.

Monroe Street Bridge Police and Medical activity for a mental situation with a person on the bridge. Situation is under control on the bridge.

7500 North Division, Reported male taking off his clothes and laying down in the drive thru.

Barker and Broadway, Reported a Chicken in the roadway playing the chicken game with vehicles causing a traffic issue.

Division and Glass, Vehicle Collision Reported. #Update from WSP: Crash involving wrong way driver with stolen vehicle who failed to yield to trooper and hit a building.

And finally, since I seem to be focusing on power lines today,

10200 East Montgomery, Vehicle Collision Reported. #Update Semi vs Power lines and lines down. Montgomery is closed.



The truck snagged a low-hanging line and towed a whole block of wires and poles.

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 8:27 AM

  Britain starts acting like Russia
Boris starts action on high-speed rail.

I'd been wondering if this would happen, but didn't hold out much hope. Now that the three-year Wagner opera is finished, now that the fat lady actually and surprisingly sang, Britain is starting to GET SHIT DONE. Boris is starting to act like Putin and sound like Putin, starting to build Russian-style stuff.

There was a time many decades ago when railroads were the epitome of British-style stuff. Britain invented railroads, Britain was the premier shit-done-getter. Now Russia and China are the shit-done-getters, so Britain has to re-learn from Russia and China.
  ¶ 6:24 AM

  Technically right
DC demons and stock-world demons have decided that the Swine Flu is a "bioweapon".

They're technically right but not in the way they mean. They want us to think that the virus was specially created as a weapon.

In fact the Swine Flu is a weapon in the same way that ricin and anthrax and EMP and Novichok and dirty nukes are weapons. All are potentially harmful, like a million other harmful things, but the virus or bomb is not the weapon, not the projectile.

PANIC IS THE PROJECTILE. The virus or chemical or bomb is just a thing that governments mention and manipulate to stir up anger and fear against a specific target. The target is always dissidents and rebels.

An airborne flu virus is useless as an actual weapon because a virus can't read your thoughts and can't figure out who is a threat to Deepstate. Most viruses kill infants and elders and chronically ill people, who are generally not threats.
  ¶ 5:58 AM

  Why are nouns a better trellis?
In previous item I mentioned a question that has been itching me for a while.

Why are noun forms more helpful than verb forms as a trellis or matrix to hold our thoughts in place when buffeted by the tornadic winds of Deepstate confusion?

The answer appeared immediately and serendipitously.

I was looking through the latest additions to the American Radio Library. This 1944 British engineering journal includes an obituary for Nikola Tesla, who died in '43. The obit was written by a man who had worked with Tesla, and focused on engineering, not cult worship.

Nikola had One Big Idea, based on steam-era thinking.

Storing energy and transferring energy are opposite processes with opposite needs.

The best way to STORE the results of labor is an inert mass like carbide or coal or wheat or gold. The stored material can't be active or reactive on its own. It must wait for the addition of water or heat or form.

The best way to TRANSFER the results of labor is a wave.

Why? Because a simple DC flow carries mass. Transfer works best with a reciprocating element, whether it's a piston on a crankshaft or a light wave in the ether or a rotating magnet inside a static field. The mass remains centered on one location, and its motions create fields that transfer only the energy.

Ideally, transfer grows more efficient with increasing frequency because the reciprocating mass moves less, so you're diverting less energy into reactance and friction. Higher frequency means shorter wavelength, shorter reciprocation, more penetration of the energy field itself.

Nikola's One Big Idea was More Frequency. His career was More Frequency.

Unfortunately a complete power distribution system has practical limitations that counteract this ideal formula. First: Whether AC or DC, it's better to use high voltage and low current for the long wires. Voltage is field, current is mass. High voltage is impractical for household use, so the HV mainline must be turned into low voltage power for houses. Second, as frequency increases, the energy pulls out toward the surface of the wire, so there's less cross-sectional area available to carry the electrons. The second limitation means that DC is actually somewhat more efficient for a high-voltage power line, but the first limitation requires some kind of "lever" to transform high voltage and low current into low voltage and high current. Until recently the best "lever" was a magnetic transformer, requiring AC. After solid state inverters matured, the main lines could be DC again to avoid the surface effect. Edison understood the whole system, and he ultimately won.

= = = = =

Now let's think about storing and transferring the most important products of labor, thoughts and culture. The situation is partly different because storage and maintenance are separate.

How do we maintain thoughts in our own brains? Not as inert carbide or coal or wheat. Thoughts are maintained as an infinitely complex resonance within the neurons and glia of the brain and body and muscles.

Culture is maintained as reciprocal and resonant interactions between people.

We can dry out a thought and turn it into a sentence or a painting or a song, which can then be stored like wheat or carbide, waiting for a buyer to activate it with fire or water or perception.

But most of the time a thought is a formant or harmonic within the infinite resonance of a brain, and most of the time a culture is live resonances between people.

Here's where noun vs verb comes back into the picture. The matrix of noun forms describes relatively static positional relationships. Number, gender, containment, location. Cases explicitly pin down interactions between people, so cases retain culture. Thus nouns are a better and more stable trellis or harp to maintain a growing and changing resonance.

Deepstate's chaotizers are smashing all the categories of grammar, from gender to relationships to tenses. A stricter and more algorithmic grammar helps to withstand ALL of these assaults, but the nouns are somewhat more important because of the resonant nature of thought.

Labels: defensible cases, defensible spaces, Language update, storage

  ¶ 2:06 AM

  Not a good fit
I made a stupid pun in previous item about woke math.

My pronums are x, f(x) and df(x)/dt.

X is exactly a pronum, but those math functions don't correspond to noun cases. They sort of halfway correspond to verb tenses or aspects.

What part of math would correspond to noun cases? I suppose set theory, but only in a limited way. Cases are dynamic and set theory is static. A set statement like 'x is in A' would fit genitive, and that's about all. There's no math way of expressing dative or accusative or instrumental.

= = = = =

Later extending the thought: We're accustomed to the tiresomely repeated Expert assertion that math is the universal tool, the universal language. Simply not true. Language is the best tool for thinking because it's a NATURAL PART of our minds.

But I mean more than just "writing helps you think". That's obvious. I mean that grammar can be used as a framework for thinking in the same way that addition and subtraction and integrals. The tool works best in languages where noun cases and verb forms are visible and chartable and algorithmic. The Latin descendants like Spanish have algorithmic verbs but no noun math. Teutonic languages have lost their algorithms entirely. (English has a Latin vocabulary, but it's Teutonic in grammar.) Russian has strongly algorithmic nouns and weakly algorithmic verbs. Hindi, though directly descended from totally algorithmic Sanskrit, has lost noun forms in the same way as the Latin descendants.

The agglutinative languages like Hungarian and Korean are STRICTLY algorithmic in all ways. They should offer the best tool for this purpose, the best framework for clear thinking.

As I've noted before, noun structure seems to be more important than verb structure, for reasons that I haven't figured out. A strong noun matrix helps to hold your thoughts in place when barraged by Sorosian confusion. A verb matrix ought to help, but the experimental evidence favors nouns for this purpose.

Continued in next item.

Labels: defensible cases, defensible times, Real World Math

  ¶ 2:52 PM