Author: polistra
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Pointless peeve
I keep hearing rumors and claims that the Repooflicans are learning lessons about the importance of JOBS and SKILLS. So far I haven’t seen any evidence for those rumors and claims. Here’s a column by AEI that doubles down on the same old shit in the WORST possible way. The column is mainly by Phil…
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The techy president
Millard Fillmore is famously the non-famous non-descript nothing-much president. He deserves credit as an early adopter of tech. In 1851 he got the White House kitchen to adopt cookstoves instead of fireplaces. The cooks went on strike, fearing explosions or something, so he brought in tech advisors from the company that made the woodstoves, who…
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Censorship or weariness?
Some of the definitely ‘clean’ non-establishment substackers are noticing a sudden drop in their views and subscribers, and readers are noticing the sudden appearance of Content Warnings in some browsers. (I’m not seeing them in Firefox.) I’ve noticed a decrease in my VASTLY SMALLER view count, which is probably meaningless. Monthly variations in a single-digit…
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No, it’s the exact opposite of math
Bitcoiners constantly say they’re letting math rule. Math is god, math is supreme, math is unarguable. Nope. They’ve kicked math out of the house. Math is always formed in equations. Using math means screwing around with both sides of the equal sign, always keeping both sides effectively equal. That’s the original definition of algebra, and…
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Key ingredient
Most inventions are very old ideas by the time they are turned into a practical product. Some ideas, like flying, are innate in our part-bird genome. Others, like communicating at a distance using magnets, were tried 2000 years ago. Practical inventions happen after the right MATERIALS and METHODS are in place.** The materials and methods…
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Best prescription
Writing in City Journal, NS Lyons diagnoses the rebels of this age precisely and comprehensively, and offers the most REALISTIC prospect for a solution. Lyons gives too much credit to Trump. Like many other sympathetic diagnosers, he believes Trump was blindsided by Deepstate: = = = = = As the Trump administration belatedly discovered, taking…
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Avi does Carver
Avi makes a nice strong Carverian point in this piece. He’s discussing astronomical stuff like gravitational waves and spectral lines. In each case the theoreticians predicted that the signal would never be there, or at best would be ferociously hard to detect among the noise. In each case the signal was perfectly obvious after the…
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Fractal exploration
From the Twitter of Bitsavers, one of the Blessed Preservers of this world: Book that doesn’t exist that needs to: “The Fractal Geometry of Writing” The thought actually started out that whenever I start writing something, I end up going down ratholes that each turn into something that would end up being the length of…
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Waaaaay beyond quibble
Latest from Kirn: AI doesn’t suffer from impostor syndrome, nor does it ever feel suicidal, which is how one knows it isn’t sentient in any meaningful sense. It can never be human-like until it possesses the capacity to review its deeds, judge them, despair, and permanently turn itself off. This is so fucking dumb it’s…
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Why we can’t have nice things
Trite, but applies here. EnidBuzz asked what is the worst TV show. The View was the overwhelming winner for worst show, ESPECIALLY among women. The best answer was only there for a moment. The show about the Indian chief that used to air at midnight. Brilliant! When I tried to put a Like on it,…
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Oldoleth
The latest issue of Collectible Auto arrived today, with a nicely illustrated article on Buick in the ’30s. Auto writers assume every reader knows the basics of engines and transmissions and suspensions and differentials. Writers will explain unfamiliar antique technologies like sleeve valves, wood-framed bodies, magnetos, and free-wheeling. They always get free-wheeling wrong. This explanation…
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Similar oddity
Thinking about the oddity of Quisp, a mainstream product happily simulating UFOs and cheerfully treating UFOs as real for 60 years, while the government loudly maintained the opposite and sucked up all information that might prove reality. Avi’s project is odd in the same way. He’s totally convinced that his comet is a remnant of…
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Stacks, not Savannahs
Sharp observation from Gary Smith, discussing the perils of letting stats lead you around by the nose: Our distant ancestors benefitted from noticing that elephants could lead them to water and that wildebeest stampedes might warn them of predators. The best pattern spotters were more likely to survive and reproduce, passing on their pattern-recognition skills…
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Out of all the parks
Thomas Harrington hits all the balls out of all the parks with this article. He focuses on 1990 as the coup when the Bush family took over the world. Harrington also kicks the alleged “independents” who were “independent” on every issue until the NAZI TORTURERS bought them off. We’ll never know which of them were…
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Now we know what happened!
EnidBuzz asked about your favorite cereal as a kid. No hard answers this time, just one surprise. Many people liked Quaker’s Quisp. It came along after I was more or less grown up and skipping breakfast, so I never heard of it. Maybe this is the answer to the mysterious disappearance of the disc-type UFOs…
Polistra's Mill 