Sucker Filter Ultra
The latest Bitcoin variant began on April 1, which probably should tell you something. It's a joke based on extreme numbers, issuing something like 616 trillion abstract "coins" with a par value so close to perfect zero that you can hardly calculate it. Seems to be aimed directly at the autistic and Krautistic types who hunger for MORE DECIMAL POINTS! MORE DECIMAL POINTS! MORE MEANINGLESS PRECISION!

So far I haven't seen any echoes of it in the literalistic autistic Quora world, which indicates that even autists understand it's a joke.

Labels: Sucker Filter

  ¶ 9:18 AM

  Super-random auto thought
I was wondering why windshield wipers were so late in arriving. They weren't common or standard until the mid-30s.

The answer is simple. Before the mid-30s, wipers weren't seriously needed.

Polistra illustrates with her 1917 Detroit Electric, typical of closed cars before 1933.

When the car is still and the rain isn't blown toward the windshield, rain can't hit the glass at all.



When the car is moving about 10 MPH, which was typical before 1930, the visor would still protect the glass from much of the rain. The vector shows 10 MPH horizontal movement versus the standard terminal velocity of raindrops, which is 20 MPH.



Many cars had wider visors and lower roofs (less glass height), giving even more protection.

You don't need a vector to see what happens with a slanted windshield. ALL rain hits it all the time, regardless of wind and motion.

Labels: Asked and not worth asking, Entertainment

  ¶ 7:56 AM

  More rambling on copyright
Spinoff from previous item about copyright. This is just rambling, not a basic point.

The alleged American Dream has always been based on permanent private property. Libertarian and sovereign individual types bitch about property tax because they claim all property should be absolute, and property tax means you're just renting from the county.

Well, they're correct about the facts of property tax, but incorrect about the necessity of absolute permanent property.

In fact there's no such thing, and permanent holding is a bad idea.

The original copyright law was NOT permanent. It recognized that intellectual property should be temporary, and required you to officially REGISTER and RENT the material if you wanted to use it for profit. When you stopped paying the rental, the material became public domain. There was no ambiguity, no room for an arbitrary claim by an unrelated thief.

The Disney law creates a permanent "right" without any registration or rental. This means that Disney and a few other giant corporations can claim anything they want and prevent its use for as long as they want, because they have the armies of lawyers.

The old system made it possible for anyone to pay a reasonable fee and create a temporary claim which the GOVERNMENT would help you to defend, because you had PAID THE GOVERNMENT for the service of defending you. Feedback loop, pay for value.

This is closely parallel to the notion of retail vs wholesale "corruption". When petty bureaucrats are for rent, anyone with a reasonable amount of money can get service by paying. A tight feedback loop couples the payer with the servant, insuring accountability both ways.

When petty bureaucrats are supposed to be "pure", only Disney and Amazon get service, because they can exert massive economic and blackmail power over all bureaucrats in the world simultaneously.

Labels: Equipoise, From rights to duties, Natural law = Soviet law

  ¶ 5:58 AM

  Copyright violates natural law
Convective counterintuitive thought:

If you want to leave a legacy, don't copyright your work.

After previous item on Aberree and astrology, I was thinking again about Alphia Hart's uniquely CONFIDENT view of copyright:

Copyrighting everything you write is a confession that you have little faith in your ability to continue producing salable stuff -- and that there may come a time when you'll have to fall back on your own, protected material to make a living. When we can't produce new copy for The ABERREE, The ABERREE ceases to exist, because we're certain no one wants to read tomorrow what we said yesterday and today.

I reached a similar conclusion a long time ago in making courseware. The restrictions of 'digital rights' get stricter and more tangled every year, but they don't bother me because I have CONFIDENCE in my own ability to produce new images and animations.

= = = = =

Despite his probably fake modesty, Hart did leave a legacy. His work is still eminently worth reading 60 years later.

BUT: If he had copyrighted his work, or even failed to EXPLICITLY turn off the copyright, his legacy would be GONE.

Thanks to recent anti-Hubbard types who found the collection and scanned and uploaded it, all of Hart's work is readable. If he hadn't made a point of turning off the copyright, those blessed preservers couldn't have done their job, and his work would be lost.

A similar situation exists in the recordings of old-time radio. The obscure syndicated shows are better preserved and more available than the big network shows. Why? Because the networks still exist, so a copyright could be enforced. This makes it possible for one of the OTR vendors to play copyright troll games, forcing the other vendors and the free service at Archive.org to delete items it wants to sell. Even though the one trollish vendor has no inheritance rights to the recordings, the potential of a copyright makes the big network shows harder to find and hear. And because they're less widely distributed, they're likely to disappear when that one trollish vendor goes out of business.

A much more important application of this principle was already operating at the time when those radio shows were made. Local stations and small syndicates and small civic orchestras were able to play live music as long as it was classical. Modern copyrighted music could only be played by networks who had enough money to pay the royalties. THEREFORE: Classical music has been performed and enjoyed and remembered much more widely than modern copyrighted music.

We have a dense and constantly performed legacy from composers who worked before copyright laws. Similarly with literature and visual art.

Not everything is great, but some work that was considered trash when written has been appreciated later because it was PRESERVED in some form. PRESERVED work can be revived and re-judged.

When the work is copyrighted, it has much less chance of being preserved and reprinted or replayed, no matter how good or mediocre it is.

Natural law and Sharia law agree: Use it or lose it. Everything in nature is meant to be useful, meant to serve. Copyright prevents use, so copyright guarantees loss.

= = = = =

Later addition: I was forgetting one specialized but important form of loss. Forgetting is peculiar because I've personally experienced this form!

When a publisher owns exclusive copyright, the publisher may go bankrupt or merge, or it may simply decide to stop selling the item. At that point there's no automatic procedure to revert the item to public domain, or to return it to the author's possession. Sometimes a revert contract is written, but big corporations don't obey laws. They can and will prevent ANYONE from using the material, even though they're not using the material either. Total and permanent loss.

= = = = =

See also storage vs JIT.

Labels: Aberree, From rights to duties, Natural law = Sharia law, skill-estate, storage

  ¶ 10:43 PM

  Opening the doors again
Speaking of Fairness Doctrine in science, here's an unusually fair historical piece from Physics Today. It treats unfashionable views and unfashionable cultures with fairness and respect.

I've been lobbying for a return to astrology as science. This article goes even farther, pointing out that astrology did a good job of predicting weather for hundreds of years.

Astrometeorology was developed by Islamic scientists, then picked up by Euros in the 1400s and developed farther. Almanacs continued to mix planetary patterns and seasons, and some may still do it.

Islamicate astrometeorologists were the first to replace the ancient practice of observing only short-term signs, such as clouds and the flight of birds, to predict weather. They based their action on the hypothesis that weather is caused by the movements of planets and mediated by regional and seasonal climate conditions. Improved calculations of planetary orbits and updated geographical and meteorological information made the new science possible and compelling.

The prospect of acquiring reliable weather forecasts, closely linked to predictions of coming trends in human health and agricultural production, made the new meteorology attractive in Christian Europe too. Considerable pride shines through medieval Christian accounts of the weather questions that they could now start to answer. Central among them was one that classical meteorologists had failed to figure out: How can weather vary so much from one year to the next when the seasons are caused by regular, repeating patterns produced by Earth’s spherical shape and its interactions with the Sun?

How did it work? Some of the details are lost, but:

Astrometeorologists noted that the angular relationships between planets were important for determining their mutual effects. Planets facing one another across the zodiac were negatively related; an angle of 45° was also problematic and likely to produce an atmospheric disturbance. However, planets at 60° or 120° would interact more positively and produce more moderate weather. When planets were close together, the intensity of their effects would increase depending on the natures and placements of the planets involved.

In other words, plain old vector algebra.

One phrase caught my eye:

The techniques in al-Kindi’s method required that forecasters confidently judge which factors would have the greatest effects and for how long, and they accepted that experience was crucial in making a successful prediction. Experts put their trusted methods on record for the benefit of others. Especially influential was al-Kindi’s application of the concept known as “opening of the doors.” The treatises do not explain the phrase, but it hints that rain was caused by an almost physical change in the atmosphere, driven by specific combinations of planets and their movements in relation to one another.

Opening of the doors.

Here's the Ridhwan clock, designed by and for those Islamic forecasters, combining science with religion and entertainment. By some descriptions, the upper dial rotated seasonally to show the current arrangement of constellations. I didn't try to animate that part.



Each hour opened a door revealing the number of the hour. The 12 houses behind the doors may have dispensed something to the priests or people. (The balls transferred to the birds were stacked up like a vending machine, so similar devices for the little houses would have been possible.)



Happystar appropriately illustrates.

HOW did planetary position control our weather? The astrometeorologists were correct given the state of their knowledge:

Astrologers believed that the planets and the fixed stars, including those making up the constellations to which the houses of the zodiac were linked, had special affinities with individual elements and qualities. Those qualities determined the nature of the effects each planet would have on the terrestrial world as it moved through the heavens.

Affinities with elements = magnetic field. The planets pull and shape the field of the entire solar system, giving it a different 3D graph of intensities and declinations for each configuration. As the earth passes through this field, the intensities influence the distribution of heat in our core, cause static fields through the dynamo effect, and influence bacteria in the clouds and nematodes in the soil. Not mysterious or metaphysical, unless you're a follower of the modern astrology that attributes all long-term weather to OrangeTrumpQanon Witch Carbon.

Labels: 2000=1000, Aberree, Carbon Cult, Entertainment, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 12:59 PM

  Fairness and Fraser
Eric Anderson at Evolution News lays down a new Fairness Doctrine for scientific discussion. He's writing as 'advice' to one specific scholar at Simon Fraser Univ in BC who is setting up a new institute; but clearly Anderson is advising more generally.

Similarly, don’t burden your lectures and presentations and published papers with unnecessary Darwin-speak. As Joe Friday would demand, “Just the facts ma’am.” You have great substance in the research you’re doing. Stick with that and focus on the actual observed evidence. In your next lecture, rather than saying, “We’re going to examine an amazing molecular machine that nature evolved,” just say, “We’re going to examine an amazing molecular machine found in nature.”

The FCC fairness doctrine forced this type of factual objectivity on radio for 40 years. It worked.

Was it possible to have political comedy without partisan teams? Certainly. The expert comedians of Ignorant did it all the time.

"How did you get to be so stupid?"

"Easy. First I went to Washington...."

Insults aimed at politicians were aimed at ALL POLITICIANS, not Republicans. This is JUST THE FACTS, since there is precisely no difference between D and R.

When the Fairness Doctrine was abolished, it opened the way for Deepstate to create Symmetrical Scapegoating. We insult the PEOPLE on the other team. We never insult ALL POLITICIANS. Therefore ALL POLITICIANS can now get away with mass murder. Therefore they do.

Incidentally, the target of Anderson's advice could also take some advice from Simon Fraser. He explored the area now occupied by BC. He named a river after his logbook-keeper who found the river, but he refused to name a river after himself because he wasn't convinced it was truly a separate river. He refused a knighthood and died poor. JUST THE FACTS.

Labels: epistemology, Trinity House

  ¶ 7:16 AM

  Paris more like Okla?
Vintage.es has some pix of French bakeries with their employees posing in front, circa 1910.

What's interesting: Aside from the BIG bread loaves, these people look more midwestern American than Euro or NYC. They don't look the way I imagine Parisians would look. Instead, they're dressed like my Okie ancestors in pictures from the same period.

Several of the pix include kids and dogs, clearly and proudly part of the crew. Everyone was useful before bureaucracies ruined culture.

  ¶ 5:32 AM

  Rediscovering as usual
This bit of research is part of the "rediscovery" of electrotherapeutics. Researchers found that:

In compulsive “addicted” rats, low (30 Hz) but not high (130 Hz), deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the STN efficiently reduces pathological cocaine seeking.

I was curious to see if this correlation was known by the original electrotherapists. I couldn't find a direct connection to cocaine because cocaine and opium were just ordinary medications at that time, not forbidden fruits. In the 1880s no substance was considered to be witchy.

I did find one use of frequencies in the same range to get rid of a persistent muscle spasm, which is on the same end of the spectrum as cocaine.

From Journal of Electrotherapeutics:

Aroloring and Chantre have made some interesting studies into the contractions of the sphincter ani. The form and duration of the muscular shock are modified, and the muscle shows a greater aptitude to become tetanized in comparison to other muscles . The contraction is slower in starting and disappearing and in graphic tracings the summit is less acute and the duration of the contractions longer than in an ordinary muscle. Fewer excitations are necessary to tetanize it. Under the influence of excitations induced at the rate of 3 per second , the contractors of the sphincter become confused and cease to be visible when the excitations are increased to 22 or 24 per second. The primary effect of an excitation is to produce a brief diminution of the tonicity of the muscle.

In other words, 24 cps 'confuses' the contracting muscle and breaks up its spasm.

Labels: 1901

  ¶ 1:11 AM

  Constants allow variables, variables force constants
UncommonDescent points to a study of gut bacteria. In urbanized places with lots of Die-Versity and immigration, only a few types of gut bacteria are found. In isolated tribal villages, bacteria are much more varied.

This is a special case of good old Graybill's Law. Globalization forces rigidity. Learning requires stability. Experimentation requires stability.

Reprinting a 2016 item that focused on Graybill in technology:

= = = = = START REPRINT:

A point I've made many times in many contexts. In its most general form:

Infrastructure is meant to be STATIC. Roads and bridges and sewer systems and rules of morality and rules of discussion and written laws and computer operating systems are all supposed to HOLD STILL so you can USE THEM to get things done. Navigating a fast-changing set of social or moral rules is like driving on Galloping Gertie. There may be a line down the middle where you can slowly crawl across to your destination, but the risk is so obvious that a sane human just doesn't bother. Your best bet for survival is to stay where you are. Shelter in place until the shaking reaches you and kills you.

My point began with a 1978 realization that a classroom conducted with old-fashioned decorum was MORE OPEN to discussion of new ideas. Classrooms conducted by Alinskyan 'anything goes' behavior were dominated by bullies and tyrants who enforced orthodox doctrine.

Constants allow variables, variables force constants.

I considered the same point in the realm of culture and religion here.

In tech: When building an EXE for use in Windows, you can count on a consistent set of API rules. The native Win functions are well defined, and the workings of C++ are well defined. Provided you understand both of these rule sets and use them correctly, you can predict what will happen when you write something like

MoveToEx(this->hdc,NewPt.x,NewPt.y,NULL);

When you put all those pieces together into a self-contained EXE, you know it will run on the Win versions that were specified in the rules. If there are problems, you can be 99% sure the problems are your own fault, even though you'll always waste time by blaming Windows first.

In the new world of HTML5 and CSS and SVG and JS, none of those certainties exist. All of those standards are only partly standardized and constantly changing, and you can't count on a package running on all common platforms. If it runs today, a version change by Firefox or Chrome may blow it up tomorrow.

In other words, 'platform-independent' really means 'excruciatingly platform-dependent.'

The platform-makers obviously love this, because they have finally reclaimed the power they lost when Windows owned the universe.

= = = = =

Comes down to this pair:

When the rules are stable, ordinary people can function.

When the rules are changing all the time, only the rulemakers can function.

I was looking again at my courseware product in its old EXE form and in its new JS form. The old form was packed with ORIGINAL graphics and ORIGINAL ways of presenting material and asking questions. The new form looks just like any other Imperial web page, with rounded buttons telling User to SUBMIT. Why? Because I was required to use the 'Twitter Bootstrap' pre-written code as the base of the presentation. And why did I have to use 'Twitter Bootstrap'? Because it's AUTHORITATIVELY VARIABLE. It's not contained in my code. It's strictly owned and controlled by the MASTERS OF VARIATION.

POINT: You can't have your own tools.

You must borrow the tools provided by the Master, because only the Master knows which tools will work at this millisecond on the systems run by the Master.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

How does this apply to gut bacteria? When a small town lives together and has constant mutual contact, bacteria are sharing a constant and predictable infrastructure. They are free to vary, and each new variation can count on working in the other people it transfers to. In a Die-Verse city, only a few bacteria that are SIMPLE AND GENERALIZED will be able to handle the transfers among all the quickly changing and varied genotypes.

Language works the same way. In empires, language loses its complexity and its ability to learn and vary. Nuances and idioms don't transfer in a Die-Verse population, so only literal and legalistic speech remains. In isolated tribal villages, language is complex and poetic.

Labels: Constants and Variables, skill-estate

  ¶ 11:15 PM

  Satan wins every fucking time.
They killed Magufuli.

I suppose it was inevitable. Satan does not allow exceptions. Satan does not allow truth and goodness to exist. Satan had already killed another African leader who tried to maintain sanity and freedom.

Apparently the new leaders haven't revoked freedom yet.

Will Noem be next? DeSantis? Ioannidis?

The biggest and most important news story of the year, and it didn't even echo in the usual sources, including the "fact-gatherers".

This distributes the burden of truth-telling more heavily on the remaining faithful.

= = = = =

Later and calmer: Magufuli apparently had a bad heart, and 61 is the typical age when a bad heart finishes. The fact that the new leaders haven't muzzled and locked the country YET may indicate that the death wasn't entirely murder. Nevertheless, I've learned to assume the worst when Satan is involved. Reality is usually worse than I imagine. Remains to be seen.

On the other side, his brilliant experiment proving that WHO's "virus" tests were fraudulent has been verified by authorities in several countries. WHO itself finally admitted that the tests were fraudulent, and Austria's government has just stopped all lockdowns specifically BECAUSE the tests are fraudulent. Needless to say, Magufuli will never get credit for doing the real science FIRST. Real inventors and scientists never get credit. Sometimes they are allowed to survive.

Old saying: First they laugh at you, then they kill you, then they agree with you.

Later again: Whitney Webb, overly detailed as usual, sees the event from a different angle. Magufuli was SERVING HIS PEOPLE, trying to keep resources under national control instead of yielding to the globalists. He created a functional and prosperous and HAPPY country, and the people are heartbroken now that he's gone. He was a direct descendant of the Soviet-flavored founders of most African countries, and exemplified both the Soviet and Sharia flavors of Natural Law. Any leader who blocks the wealth and power of Deepstate, in resources or in culture or in "virus", is an obstacle that must be removed.

Labels: endless hell, imprecatory psalm, Jackboot stomping forever

  ¶ 2:00 PM

  Luck and chance aren't the same
Still meandering about purpose and design....

The usual ID argument about randomness doesn't quite hit one important point.

Luck and chance are not the same thing.

Every object, living or non-living, is battered by the chance events of weather. Every human is battered by the effectively random events of crazy or sane governments. Once in the life of a nation we get lucky with a Harding or FDR. Mostly we get holocaustal demons.

Inanimate objects can't respond to chance by ANTICIPATION. When a wind gust blows a pebble around, the pebble can't see it coming and take cover.

Living things ANTICIPATE the pattern of random events. Plants learn a pattern of light and dark or prevailing winds, and bend to meet the opportunity before it happens. We feel a storm coming, or feel a quake coming, and take appropriate steps.

On a higher level, humans can ANTICIPATE more complex opportunities. We can see that traffic is thinning out, so we get ready to jump in. We can see that Prohibition is likely to end, so we start converting our factory from cars to beer. We can see that jobs are starting to appear in the neighboring town, so we move there to be ready. We don't KNOW when the slot between cars will happen, and we don't KNOW when the 18th amendment will be repealed, and we don't KNOW that a job for our skill will appear, but we ANTICIPATE and make our own luck.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 9:00 AM

  Right for dubious reasons
For a century, biology has considered starfish to be the closest major group to vertebrates. This never seemed right on an intuitive basis, and a new gene-based approach agrees that it's not right.

This article runs through a statistical analysis of constants vs variables in genes, and finds that chordates are closer to insects and mollusks, and farther from echinoderms. I'm not especially convinced by the stat approach, but their conclusion is correct.

When you look at things from the PURPOSE angle, the relationships are clear. What do vertebrates accomplish? What do echinoderms accomplish? What do insects and mollusks accomplish?

Echinoderms are the outcast in this view.

Vertebrates, insects and mollusks are all capable of high intelligence and intricate manipulation of their environment. Echinoderms don't do any of that. They mostly sit on the seafloor and wait for food to come into their tentacles.

All PURPOSES were available in the original genome, just as all FEATURES are available in the first technology or the first language. Descendants pick distinct groups from the original tree of PURPOSE, and later descendants along each branch gradually lose features. When two branches share lots of PURPOSES, they're more likely to be closely connected.

Labels: Blinded by Stats, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 12:46 AM

  Collaborators
When countries or institutions fail, they like to blame an enemy or a competitor. Usually (not always) the blame is misplaced. Usually the country or institution deliberately sabotaged its own citizens and members, then framed a competitor or a randomly chosen alternative.

We've been blaming China for our loss of all business and skills and work. Nope. China didn't invade our factories and universities in a warlike way. China took advantage of our own INTENTIONAL SUICIDE, sponsored by the bank side of Deepstate. Our universities and research institutes invited Chinese students and opened up our secrets to them, knowing FULL FUCKING WELL that the students are spies. Our evil demonic corporations HATE AMERICANS and URGENTLY NEED TO KILL AMERICANS. China made it possible for our evil corporations to destroy the country they profit from.

Churches blame social media for their loss of members. Nope. Social media didn't burn or lockdown any churches. Social media took advantage of the INTENTIONAL SUICIDE of Christian churches.

For many decades Christian churches have offered nothing of value for most people, and have been GROTESQUELY AVERSIVE for heterosexual men. Why in the FUCK would a normal man want to sit in a room and worship a statue of a naked dude wearing a loincloth?

I had enough of that lifestyle in jail, where it WAS aggressive and invasive. I vowed that I'd never get near it again.

= = = = =

Two articles on Christian websites start with the latest Pew survey of church numbers. This year is an extreme outlier, with a REAL SATANIC ENEMY actually forcing churches to shut down. But the numbers have been declining fast before this year, and the number for 2020 fits on the existing curve. The two articles miss all the points and get nothing right.

Churches totally missed the opportunity to oppose this ACTUAL VIOLENT WORLDWIDE HOLOCAUST COMMITTED BY ACTUAL LITERAL PHYSICAL SATAN. Instead, they meekly obeyed all of Satan's lockdowns and distances and ballgags.

THIS WAS YOUR CHANCE TO PROVE THAT YOU'RE WORTH A HAPPY HORSESHIT. THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A BIGGER OR MORE PERFECTLY APPROPRIATE CHANCE IN THE ENTIRE MISERABLE TIMELINE OF HUMAN HISTORY. YOU BLEW IT ALL TO FUCKING HELL.

Again, why in the HOLY FUCK should any sane human bother with an institution that EAGERLY AND SUPINELY COLLABORATES with its officially defined enemy?

[Contrast footnote: here's one Catholic writer who gets it exactly right. Since I first cited that piece, Leila Miller's commenters have added even more real science and real religion. They're all well informed and all ferocious about the failure. Raises my confidence in the ordinary members of the church!]

Labels: infinite STUPID, Jackboot stomping forever, Jail mode, NOW I SEE

  ¶ 11:27 PM

  Odd variation on Sucker Filter
Now that the "election" crap has cleared out of spam, the spammers are back to the usual tricks. One recent trick is new and puzzling.

Congratulations Capital One Customer!

Special Offer for Wells Fargo Customer!

Refund for Walgreens Customer!

Open for news, valued State Farm customer!

And today a paper mail containing a supposed refund from Hemmings Auto News.

Why odd? They're all for companies that I don't use. My bank is USBank, not Wells Fargo. My credit card is Citibank, not Capital One. My insurance is Allstate, not Geico or State Farm. And I've been subscribing to Collectible Automobile for 20 years, but never bought an issue of Hemmings.

The spam is never aimed at my actual purchasing patterns. All of it seems to think I'm a customer of a different company in each category.

Must be Sucker Filter. If you're foolish enough that you don't know your own bank and insurance and shopping habits, you're foolish enough to go for Bitcoin or an inheritance from somebody you never knew.

Labels: Sucker Filter, TMI

  ¶ 12:39 PM

  It's not the math, it's the PURPOSE
This article claims a new logarithmic 'law' of nature.

Most pointy things grow into a two-sided curve, which tends to have the same formula. But the formula is nowhere near reliable, so it's not really a formula.

What's reliable is the method behind the formula. It's simple. Grow one side faster than the other. More or less the same principle as refraction of light, or curving of a column of soldiers. When one side of a column or beam is moving out faster than the other, the beam steadily curves.

PURPOSE enters the picture when you consider the many forms of growth that don't curve. A plant stem grows straight unless it needs to curve to restore vertical. A bone grows straight. Most hair grows straight. Even a zit or wart grows straight.

Nature knows which outgrowths need to curve toward a hook, so they can be used as pullers or rippers. When an outgrowth needs to be hooked, Nature grows the appropriate part of the curve faster. With human fingernails, the hook is 'hollow', so the middle section grows faster than the outer edges to create a curve in an open arc.

Test case: Curly hair vs straight hair vs wavy hair. Tight curls grow unevenly just like claws. Was this for a pulling or grabbing purpose? Velcro?

Later note: I hadn't thought about this before... The best hands-on demo of refraction is steering the flow of a garden hose or kitchen faucet. Put your thumb on one side, restrict the flow. The water steers toward the restricted side. Also: the fingernail version explains why my big toenails were curving upward when my shoes were too short. The middle of the nail was bumping into the shoe and getting pushed back, so its growth was slow or negative. The outer edges weren't bumping, so their growth was normal.

Labels: Constants and Variables, Experiential education, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 2:53 AM

  Speaking of balances and bridges...
A preliminary study finds intriguing evidence that neurons in the hippocampus and other brain areas are self-balancing like a drain trap.

When a neuron ends up with too many inhibitory inputs or too many excitatory inputs, it cuts off the excess side.

As far as I can tell from skimming the article, the researchers haven't yet figured out HOW the neuron does the balancing. Maybe it just attenuates one side, or maybe it breaks some synapses.

See also how glial cells keep loops balanced. Even more amazing.

Labels: Equipoise

  ¶ 1:17 PM

  Trivalent? No.
From previous: Binary logic forces us to play team games, in sports and in politics. Teaming makes it EASY for Deepstate to keep us in an artificial stageplay, where we believe we're "discussing" or "voting" or "deciding" between two views that are both written by the same author to serve the evil purposes of the same author.

First thought: Would a three-value logic system help to deal with the teamplay situation?

= = = = = START REPRINT:

When dealing with media figures, the only constant fact is that everything you hear is intended to make one side or the other look bad. Some of one side may be true or not. There's no point in evaluating the truth.

Deepstate is jumbling up everything. Time, space, logic, memory.

We're supposed to ignore experience and accumulated knowledge.

We're supposed to pay sole attention to the displays presented by Deepstate.

And we're supposed to "vote" and "decide" according to these displays. The "control" is in our hands! Better make the right "decision" or the "Constitution" and the "Republic" will be trashed!!!!!!!



Polistra and Happystar have a better display.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Second thought: Three-value logic doesn't really describe the solution. Trivalent systems start with the assumpion that T and F are the desired goals. The in-between range is considered as undefined. Not enough info available to pick T or F. The third value is still outside of teamplay, off the field. You're supposed to resolve the lack of info and join one of the teams.

Life doesn't have teams. Life has tanh. Analog systems and our sensory systems are based on tanh. Every smoothly variable control has endpoints. A volume control or a tuner has endpoints. The stereo balance control has endpoints.

In an analog system the area between the teams is the ONLY area. The two endpoints are available, but you rarely need to use them. If you have to turn the volume to max all the time, you need a more powerful amplifier. If you turn the volume to zero all the time, you don't need the radio at all. You can throw it away.

This is a sloppy metaphor because it still implies that the endpoints are part of the "usable" spectrum. They aren't. The picture above is a better metaphor. Endpoints are fake scenes generated by Deepstate to prevent us from opening the window and looking at plain old reality.

Nevertheless, pure binary thinking was much less prevalent when we were more accustomed to analog systems like slide rules and mercury thermometers and radio tuning dials. Our math is now digital, with every number appearing as a falsely precise set of digits. Our tuning is channeled, with each channel coming from a specific company. Watch this on Youtube or Hulu or Disney. Get your "news" from CNN or FOX. There's no uncharted space on the dial. These choices aren't necessarily binary, but they are digital. You have to click the rotary switch to one of the approved teams.

Polistra's 1938 Philco was all analog.



Here's the dial:



The top line suggested bands typically used by various parts of the world, but most of the dial was 'uncharted', with unexpected goodies available to the patient listener. The physical characteristics of shortwave reception also contributed to the unexpected SPORT of listening. Sometimes the ionosphere would bring in Norway or Burma with local volume while blocking nearby stations. It was a game of skill AND chance.

1938 was the peak of analog news and entertainment. Government and corporations INVITED us to listen outside the team boundaries. Most radios had shortwave bands. Newscasters in WW2 explicitly stated that BOTH of the endpoints were censored propaganda. We were expected to favor our censored propaganda because we were fighting a real and JUSTIFIABLE war, but we needed to know WHY our side was better.

After FDR died, Deepstate rose from its grave. Lady Edgar resumed playing her old "two" "sides" fake-terrorist games, and we immediately returned Russia to its old familiar role as boogeyman. We stopped making SW radios for consumer use. TV was divided into 12 channels with no uncharted tuning allowed. We started down the ever-narrowing canyon toward today's rigid channelization.

Labels: Carver, Entertainment, Equipoise

  ¶ 1:38 AM

  Reprint on medical / magical
I linked this 2017 piece in previous. It deserves a full reprint. I wasn't using the word entertainment yet, but I was hitting the same theme with clarity and power.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

The Enlightenment's big crime was binary truth tables.

Law of excluded middle, fact or not fact, true or false, prove or disprove, null hypothesis, guilty or not guilty, honest or fake.

Digital technology and digital training have elevated binariness to a lethal level.

For some reason thinking about Volney's beneficial hooey pushed me over the line on this question.

Nature doesn't do honesty. Every smart and surviving critter uses deception, looking or smelling or sounding or moving like something else. Honesty is death.

The dividing line CANNOT BE deception vs honesty because honesty DOES NOT EXIST.

The only meaningful measure is the PURPOSE of the deception. Aggressive or defensive? Helpful or harmful?

When a deception is aggressive or harmful, you need to break it down and observe** the underlying reality so you can defend yourself against the aggression, or at least stop HELPING the aggressor. Stings and false flags by Sorosian governments are lethal and aggressive. We need to observe basic facts. 9/11 was a Saudi + CIA operation. Both "fascists" and "anti-fascists" are organized by the government as traps. Knowing these FACTS can slow down the aggression by depriving it of active support.

When a deception is neutral or helpful, we should quietly realize it's a deception while still allowing it to function. Good medical practice, good selling, and good religion, all involve a lot of magic and placebo. When we criminalize "alternative" medicine we're not giving the magic a chance to work. Over the centuries our criminalizing of various therapies has switched back and forth wildly, often depriving entire generations of a therapy that we later "rediscover" as useful. We'd save thousands of lives if we just LOOSENED UP.

Smart and surviving cultures were never fooled by the Enlightenment nonsense. Persians and Russians and Chinese understand reality more clearly. Teutons and Anglos and French fell into the binary trap around 1790 and never climbed out. Now it's killing us.

= = = = =

** Observe the underlying reality: I'm bumping into language limitations here. Our internal representation of reality, also known as observed reality, is also disconnected from instrumental measurements. If you take the instrumental measurements as the sole standard, you'll never be able to function in the world. That's why our decisions and actions need to be based on purpose rather than "finding absolute truth". Our internal fiction has been experimentally shaped to match our survival needs, so it's the best available standard. When you see media toxin that clashes with your experiential template, you have to prefer your internal version of reality because you ALSO know from experience that the media toxin is aggressive and lethal. Media toxin, like wasp toxin, is designed to paralyze you for easier enslavement and slaughter.

= = = = =

Continued here.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

What happened in 1790? Tyrants adopted science as the God who drives and approves their wars and genocides. The adoption was explicit and sudden in France, more implicit and gradual in Britain and US. Before 1790, tyrants used church-gods as weapons. A religion used by tyrants is inevitably corrupt, always changing to suit the psychopathic rule-changing drive of the tyrant. When science was outside of this demonic circle, scientists were much more able to discuss and negotiate and experiment and explain. The real switch in US happened in 1946, when Deepstate resurged after FDR's constraints. Vannevar Bush and the NSF made science into the temple of government, and scientists into high priests and secret-keepers.

Labels: Entertainment, From rights to duties

  ¶ 11:37 PM

  Salute to Benjn Pike Jr part 2: Electrotherapy
Continuing from the intro.



The 1856 Pike catalog featured a Magnetic Machine For Medical Purposes on its cover. I've animated it, and added another unique item from the period. Both of these have a medical/magical flavor.

Here's the magnetic machine in use for electrotherapy. You can see that Happystar is getting a pulse once in each revolution of the big wheel:



The Magnetic Machine (left) is just an induction coil with a buzzer, the most common source of high voltage from Wheatstone to Marconi to the Ford T. The coil has a primary with less turns and a secondary with more turns, and the iron core (protruding on left) can be slid in and out for more or less coupling.

The Pike catalog gives $10 as the price of the machine itself, which is about $400 now.

This early version has a uniquely shaped buzzer:



A fine iron wire is pulled down when the magnets are energized, breaking the circuit to the magnets. When it springs back up, it closes the circuit again. This seems overly delicate, and most later buzzers had a more massive spring element, looking and acting more like a pendulum.

= = = = =

The big wheel in the middle is a Rheotome (flow-cutter), a long-forgotten source of timed pulses with controllable width. It was often used in electrotherapy to provide brief pulses that could be sync'd with the heart or other rhythms. It's driven via pulleys by the electric motor on the right. Speed varied with usage; apparently 10 RPM was typical.

This particular rheotome has two entirely separate timers, for different purposes. Each timer consists of a pair of sliding brushes mounted on the wheel. The wheel itself doesn't carry any electricity, and there's no connection between the two pairs of brushes. Each pair skates on the insulated turntable below the wheel, and each pair connects two sets of contacts mounted on or in the turntable, but only when it skates onto the contacts.



The outer pair of brushes has one needle and one brush for more precision. The needle is running over a 'compass rose' of precisely spaced metal contacts protruding from the insulating turntable. The outer brush is running over a continuous circle. When the needle passes over one of the precise compass points, current flows from the outer circle to the compass rose. These are tied internally to the binding posts on the right leg.



I've connected a simple series circuit with two drycells and a voltmeter, showing when the needle makes contact. (Not running the full circle here, because the rest would be repetitive.) These ticks could be used to activate a buzzer, but they would be more suitable as drivers for a time-marker pen on a chronograph.

= = = = =

The more interesting pair is the inner pair. Two brushes pass over a short pair of 'mesas' on the insulated turntable. The outer mesa (which is adjustable) leads to the outer binding post on the south leg, and the inner mesa to the inner binding post. When BOTH brushes are contacting BOTH mesas, current passes between the binding posts. Again I'm using a simple series arrangement so the voltmeter shows when the pulse is on.

The outer mesa can slide both ways to vary the pulse length. When it's more southward, the area of overlap is narrower, so the pulses are narrower. The difference isn't impressive, but this seems to be a realistic representation of the difference in the real rheotome.




The 1848 Pike catalog describes the use of the Magnetic Machine thusly:

It may be used agreeably, and with much effect, by the patient holding one of the conductors, and another person the other conductor, and with the other hand making passes over or around the diseased part. This is particularly useful about the head, and where the pain is under the hair it should be thoroughly wet, to have the effect pass through it. The best effects have followed from regular applications of a mild power, from five to fifteen minutes, twice or more a day. The machine may be used with confidence, no injury being known to result from its use.

And the machine was used with confidence! Happystar's waves are resync'd, back in resonance with the universe.

Sounds like the main effect was pulsed static charge, not current through the body. The hand of the healer has always been important in real healing. Modern "medicine" has forgotten it, and in 2020 prohibited all healing entirely.

Labels: Entertainment, Equipoise, Happy Ending

  ¶ 3:37 PM

  Darwin and Pertz and Quages
Francis Darwin and Dorothea Pertz did a followup paper in 1903, reproducing the original results and musing on the meaning of the results.

It is often said that periodic phenomena are due to aftereffect. But this, though true in a certain sense, is too vague a statement to be called an explanation. It is known that geotropic and heliotropic curvatures continue long after the stimulus has ceased to act. So that it might at first appear as if the curvatures in one direction were the aftereffect of a given half hour's stimulus, and the opposite curvatures were the effect of the next ensuing half hour. But we are unable to construct a scheme of this sort which fits the facts. The aftereffect in a curving shoot which has been stimulated for half an hour lasts a long time, and we cannot see how the series of opposite curvatures, each lasting half an hour, could be caused by the combination of such aftereffects.

Aftereffect in the ordinary sense is the result of the last stimulus received, and we know of nothing to make us believe that the latent aftereffect of an antecedent and opposite stimulus can be held to account for the sharp reversal of curvature which we find to occur.

Humans have feature detectors, which also generate aftereffects, for simple stimuli AND for repetitions and curves and vibrations. In other words we have first derivative detectors (because all senses are deltas) and second derivative detectors for sinusoid patterns. These vibration aftereffects are instantly familiar to people who were born after 1910, because we have experience with vibrating machines and fast-moving visual inputs.

Right now I'm running laundry. I went into the laundry room a moment ago to turn off the crappy front-load washer before it ran wild. (The crappy machine doesn't have its own off-balance stop switch.) I always hold onto the knob, feeling and listening to the spin, then turn off the knob FAST when it starts to get overly noisy. Now my arm is still sensing a vibration aftereffect. If I had leaned my body against the washer, the whole body would be vibrating.

We also experience fast-moving scenery in a car, and see scenery moving the other way when we close our eyes. Similarly with a fast scroll on the computer screen, or a vibrating image on the screen.

All of these aftereffects serve as one side of a null-detector balance, to detect when the incoming pattern stops doing what it has been doing. In other words, the balance is one more layer of derivative. At all levels in all senses, we need to know what's new and what's old.

Francis understood the balance perfectly and beautifully: What we do at a particular juncture depends on the nature of our previous experiences and actions. The “self” which seems to be spontaneous is the balance which weighs conflicting influences. But he didn't have experience with the higher derivatives.

These higher derivative aftereffects were much less familiar in 1903. Nothing in a house vibrated. Trains would have provided the scenery effect, but riding in a train wasn't nearly as common as riding in cars now.

From the viewpoint of modern human experience, the conclusion is obvious. Plants also have higher derivative feature detectors.

The detector for changing sunlight makes sense. The earth doesn't rotate every 15 minutes, but the available sunlight in a forest does change on a similar time scale. As the sun passes over a series of trees, the plant would learn to bend back and forth to grab the maximum light. Pattern memory would allow the plant to anticipate the next increase, and bend into the light before it arrives. When the sun gets near the horizon the pattern would stop, and the off-null balance between input and aftereffect would tell the plant to prepare for darkness.

Gravity sensing can't be explained that way. Land doesn't rock back and forth routinely, so there's no reason to learn or adapt. BUT: a plant floating on water does rock back and forth periodically. Did land plants start out on floating islands before they settled on stable land?



Did they build floating islands, which then docked on the rocky shore to start spreading soil?

Later thought after watching the animation: Anticipatory plants, working together, could actually stabilize a floating island. Humans use this trick in wave-damping ships and quake-damping skyscrapers.

Labels: Equipoise, meta-equipoise, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 4:41 AM