Pacwest

 

TikTok Goes the Clock

I had my comment on this vid:  

I’m glad Linus went public with his sentiments. Not all Finns are sucking up to NATO so contrary to his statement, it’s far from obvious what his attitude would be based simply on nationality. Part of open source is getting these dirty secrets out in the open.

He'd likely take exception to my phrasing, however we do have Finns who take a skeptical attitude towards that state's recent suckering for specific genres of propaganda.

As an Oregonian, I feel I should say this Linus guy isn't speaking for all of us, those of us proudly of Russian heritage included (I'm more Swiss if we go by memes, Swedish if by genes). 

Many Russian Oregonians with sympathy for those caught up in WW2 era reflexing (i.e. knee-jerk dino thought patterns) were nevertheless hoping the software engineering world was on a plane above such politicized robotics. 

That was an element in the early idealism of free software more generally, if not of Linux in particular. 

Linux certainly benefited from the "cyberpunk" movement, bringing us PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and the like. RSA is built in to the HTTPS protocol, since even before Elliptic Curve crypto.

But that was then and this is now. 

Linux is by now the new Microsoft, the behemoth, more button-down and corporate than ever, and more at home simply running things, as the ubiquitous operating system, versus going back to playing the role of youthful idealistic outsider.

My own preference is these sanctions (including the Magnitsky ones) be rescinded amidst a return to sanity, such that politicians stop doing harm to our shared infrastructure, around which they have very little management competence. Their schools are to blame.

Wait, wasn't this supposed to be a post about TikTok?  As of this posting, a nationwide ban is about to occur.

Like I said, politicians are poking their knuckles into machinery they were not the ones to either plan or design. They bring their own set of unbalanced biases to the table. I don't wonder that they wipeout often, or that their plans frequently backfire. 

Surely You're Joking Mr. Fuller

In culty backwaters, or call it a swamp, where the sausage gets made, we have our little niche controversies. 

Perhaps goaded by Braingate, the controversy swirling around the two elderly gangsta presidents (were their faculties still intact? Not really, at least in Biden's case), and the subsequent coverup, some latecomers to our party have decided to retell the story around Bucky. 

According to them, our guy was too Alzheimery by the 1970s to really know what he meant in Synergetics, which means the rest of us have been engaged in a coverup, trying to make Synergetics seem more coherent than it really is.

This new "Bucky was senile" faction wants to purge S3 (an important constant) from the future curriculum, to spare people the need to understand what it's all about. 

They say because Bucky was close to senile by the time those two volumes were published, he was able to confuse himself about this nonsensical number (~1.06066... or 2nd root of 9/8).

But was he really that confused? We're talking about two conceptions of unit volume and comparing them. Both the cube and the tetrahedron will need to be sized, when the other is unit. We'll need a conversion constant in other words, like a currency conversion constant, between Tetrahedron Dollars and Cube Dollars.

If a tetrahedron's six edges are all twice that of a cube, then that difference in volume, one of proportion between them, is S3. The difference is only about 6%.

I think what makes readers doubt the sense of Synergetics is that what it does to the cube seems too drastic: a cube of edges 1 no longer has a whole number volume of 1, but of 1.06066...

That can't seem right to anyone already brainwashed to think "right angles rule" and "cube is king", the predominant orthodoxy. 

Surely you're joking Mr. Fuller!

Quick Response

It's but minutes before class, me the teacher, however I thought I'd update with this vlog from Natasha. You'll find others of hers scattered through my journals. 

I've watched her editing skills evolve, in tandem with her many adventures. My comment on this one (I don't usually comment): 

@kirbyurner 53 minutes ago 

I’ve watched a lot of Lex interviews over the years. I know this one was a major achievement for him. Congrats Lex. Some DC think tanks have for many decades promoted Ukraine-involving designs to challenge Russian influence in the region. British too. I don’t believe Putin could have prompted this war simply as a self-serving popularity stunt. He needed to tap into the deeply engrained paranoia of the populace. His opponents made that easy. There’s lots of momentum behind these unfortunate developments going back to WW2.

Back to Work

I’ve enjoyed the break in the workflow and didn’t travel anywhere further than Eugene, and that for a day trip only, at the beginning. Today the break is over and we pick up where we left off. Not wanting to get out of shape in the interim, as the instructor, I did some workouts with tabulations and multi-indexing in my School of Tomorrow PWS (personal workspace in GST).

In the comics and in myths, we encounter those endowed with superpowers, by dint of ingenuity or by inheritance, and the literature gets into lots of detail regarding these awesome capabilities. Some become invisible, whereas others fly. Many have multiple abilities. 

But let’s bring it back to the mundane. Just being able to read and write is something of a miracle, as is the ability to drive safely. A lot of our skills are collective, but get rusty if we don’t rehearse them. More people are shopping in pajamas, losing the ability of keep up a full spectrum wardrobe. A lot of powers are mental. Simply pondering and coming up with results of contemplation is as close to supernatural or paranormal as it gets, without being either, because these are such normal, everyday, taken for granted abilities.

Another highlight: visiting faculty from out of town dropped by for an evening. They introduced me to the Sri Lankan place on Belmont. After which we elected not to see Nosferatu at Bagdad, choosing to yak some more in NPU mode (comparing notes). I caught Nosferatu later, assuming Lexi and I will be able to find another fun movie, perhaps the new fictional rendering of Bob Dylan.

Happy New Year from Crow Town

Data Science for All

I was listening to one of Starmer's StatsQuests again, this one on Entropy, and it really hit me why I'm glad for data science having taken off, not leaving statistics in the dust so much as giving it a much needed makeover. That was my old lingo in the 1990s: math was overdue for a makeover, by which of course I included the need to phase in more Synergetics. That much hasn't changed. "More than Cosmetic" was a slogan, to counter the stereotypes "makeover" comes with.

In my high school, statistics was, like trig, one of those semester courses one could take towards filling a math credits requirement, even while opting to get off the main track: pre-calc + calc. The latter was considered the more stringently "college prep" path, whereas if one already knew the goal was a business degree and not to shoot for a "next Einstein" award, then why not take statistics, a kind of knucklehead math that'd be useful in Economics, a knucklehead science? 

I was happy to take stats and trig, but I took pre-calc + calc also, and was good in them. I placed straight into honors calc at Princeton, with Dr. Thurston as my prof. Then I went on to study linear programming (featuring its simplex algorithm) with one of the leaders in the field, Dr. Harold Kuhn. I'd circle back to linear algebra much later, when getting into the geometry of rotating polyhedra (we use matrices for that, if not quaternions).

My point here is I no longer have that old prep school mindset. I'm happy to see calc (Newtonian delta calculus) postponed until college, and have it feature inside a major, such as physics, or why not more stats? 

Slicing and dicing into infinitesimals is at the limit of discrete math (where we meet the so-called manifold), which math (discrete) became the focus of my lobbying at the state level. Let kids take a discrete maths approach all the way through high school if they like, with less focus on calc (by definition) and increasing focus on number and group theory, say, with computer programming.

Data science is providing the glue though, in bringing it back to everyday coping, like people do, with words like expectation and surprise, entropy and probability. Likelihood. These are the everyday words of common experience, and to see them treated mathematically, with notation, with symbols, is a kind of music to my ears in the sense of providing segues to what many find a turn-off.

Hey, I hadn't realized that Edward Teller and his wife, more Martians (Hungarian heritage), had contributed to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) taking off, as later abetted (translated to stats language) by Hastings.

Data Science connects us to Information Theory, signal versus noise, entropy and cryptography, but by anchoring some of our everyday bread and butter notions as agentic humans in Universe. Bayesian thinking connects to machine learning, which is also the kind we do when push comes to shove.

Merry Xmas 2024

by DAF w/ AI

A Synopsis

Europe was headed in the direction of relative utopia with Nord Stream 2 about to come online, but Social Darwinists in The District wouldn't have it. 

What if the French working class were actually able to stabilize around that much vacation time, with Club Med level leisure class facilities, and what if socialized health care actually worked over the long haul?  The American public would become dissatisfied with their lot.

Condoleezza Rice could see the writing on the wall. The rapacious license to exploit, called the American Way, would fall into disfavor and the accompanying grotesque lifestyles might become a thing of the past.

So Europe's ruling cast quislings consented to have their own workers' jugular sliced so they could more effectively concentrate power in the hands of the few with less of a threat to their "system". 

Military Socialism (e.g. NATO) would continue to rule, with its veneer of Cowardly Capitalism. 

Their consent would be in exchange for making Russia weak again, so that their future energy imports might be controlled by Wall Streeters and post WW2 financial institutions created by the military-entertainment complex.

Europe would share in the glory of the American Empire.

Fuller predicted in the 1980s in Critical Path, that LAWCAP's greed would eventually lead it to attack the Russians. 

Perhaps the honesty of his financially and engineeringly informed poetics helped open a window of optimism that such a scenario might be avoided, and giving the USSR a chance to reform. 

However, in the aftermath of Grunch of Giants we got the message: LAWCAP would not morph into something spanking new without a fight. 

Fuller's writings would be relegated to the "subversive" pile (his reputation would be smeared) and good doobie apprentice capitalists would be insulated from such futurism going forward. That was the plan anyway. I'm not suggesting it was ever realistic.

The Business Plot

Although it’s not a no brainer, it’s almost that, to recognize Major General Smedley “Fighting Quaker” Butler for his bravery not only in the company of his men, but later in life, as more of a loner, when he published War is a Racket and had to expose the creeping private sector, anxious to keep devouring the public space.

What public space? In some ideologies there’s no such thing. The world inherently belongs to this or that people, championed by this or that cult, and if not the whole world, then at least a part of it, with the intention to expand. That’s to claim the land on behalf of a people as private to them, which becomes the rallying cry of citizens once they have it. But do they have it?

We know about public spaces and public services, which happen when private interests collaborate to achieve something no one could afford to undertake solo. That would be the space program for example, in its more writ large aspects, and certainly that would be war.

However these days the wars are privatized, not declared, and run irrespective of any meaningful oversight. Weapons and funding is easy to come by. All one needs are ideologues with a willingness to die for some cause. If not that, at least they can eat, presuming the militia is able to support itself logistically, which is not always the case.

Do we have any public space left in education? I would say some. Without authorization from some private company, or better, with the authorization of only my own company, I have the right and ability to purchase public facing screen estate. Prospectors are able to scroll through my material. 

Smedley Butler was approached with a scheme to finally privatize the remaining public institutions that had survived thanks to FDR. The ruling elite wanted their country back. Smedley would have nothing of it and blew the whistle. After all he’d done to be loyal, he wasn’t about to go down in history as a traitor. Probably the business perps who tried to persuade him said they were doing it for the peoples’ benefit.

Fast forward and the push to privatize would reach an apex under president Reagan, coincident with a similar high water mark under Margaret Thatcher in England. The private sector would attempt to establish control without its takeover destroying the underlying legitimacy of their platform. One might call this Business Plot 2.0 and without a Smedley in the picture, it mostly worked, except that people were sensitive to the hollowness and lack of statesmen.

Fast forward some more and we have a eugenics-minded Social Darwinist private sector acting like we’re in the early 1900s again. The public sector is all but gone and a private mercenary army supports the highest bidders with WMDs. The USA to some extent still fights back, in part by keeping Smedley Butler relevant to the narrative.