Category: Uncategorized
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Reprint on “privacy”
Noticing more idiotic “concerns” that one agency or company might be accessing your private data. THIS IS FUCKING STUPID. Everyone who isn’t hopelessly bound up in partisan soap opera assumes that EVERYTHING IS PUBLIC ALL THE TIME. This isn’t specific to one agency or company, and it’s NOT NEW AT ALL. Only the shockedshocked is…
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Was Emerson right?
In 1840 Emerson wrote: Though no checks to a new evil appear [at first], the checks exist and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor’s life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. Nothing arbitrary, nothing…
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Hard answer to soft question 5
Continuing an irrelevant series. The question this time was ‘If free classes were offered, what would you like to learn?’ In this case you could pick out the SERIOUS answer by looking at the names, not the answers. The correlation is perfect. And we wonder why China is winning…
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Booms and busts
An essayist at Medium gives us 12 quotes from Beat Generation philosopher Alan Watts. I read the piece to see if his selection was the same as mine. Nope, it was disjunct. He remembered and treasured the stuff that I had tossed aside as mystical drivel. I read Watts when I was about 14, and…
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Cheaters
Just for fun and weirdness, a couple of items about computers and cheating. = = = = = Via MindMatters, AI is not very good at catching cheaters, but it’s also not very good at cheating. Detecting cheating, at any level of education, is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game. AI, far from being a…
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When the S in ESG really meant something…
EnidBuzz featured the Failing company, and linked to a longer article at Okla Hist Soc. I always admired the deco architecture of the building, but had no real connection with the company or its drilling rigs. The commenters filled out the story. The company treated its workers well, and the founder’s family semi-retired into real…
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Black-boxing Brinkley
Quoting from Frank Edwards’s career biography yet again: = = = = = In 1930 the AMA delivered a bolt from the blue: Brinkley’s goat-gland operation, they said, was an impossibility. It could not be performed as Brinkley claimed. Brinkley immediately filed suit against AMA seeking damages of $600,000. “I am not a member of…
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Patent pain and Bain
Continuing on the futility and stupidity of patents…. This article in Frontiers Magazine tells the story of Alexander Bain. He worked for a watchmaker, and started mixing electricity with clocks in wildly imaginative ways. I’ve featured his absolutely futuristic tactile fax machine, reprinted below. This wasn’t practical for business use because it required turning the…
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Less enticing
Via Web3 is going great, it sounds like Starbucks is developing an outright cult with NFTs. From the Starbucks website: = = = = = New Starbucks Odyssey experience will offer members the ability to earn and buy digital collectible stamps (NFTs) that will unlock access to new, immersive coffee experiences. Starbucks Odyssey will be…
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High-strung
Yesterday I cited this 1910 article on telegraphers, focusing on the neurological implications of music and Morse occupying the same brain section. The words are also interesting. Telegraphers are usually nervous, high-strung men, and some develop eccentricities that cause them to be considered cranky. High-strung is literal enough. It might have originated in the violin…
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Gold Spot
Looking through some 1930 issues of Broadcast Advertising, noticed an ad for Doc Brinkley’s station. This was aimed at national corporations, so it’s thoroughly bland and objective. Also found an ad for WIBW, my late-night comfort in the ’50s. High culture all the way! WIBW was mainly aimed at farmers, but it also had live…
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What about Brinkley?
After writing previous item about the quack ‘hearing restorer’ who was peddling real medicine without knowing it, I got thinking about JR Brinkley. Doc Brinkley is a far more familiar figure for radio history fans and Kansans. I’m both, so I grew up hearing about him. Edwards had a brief encounter with Brinkley. Around 1933…
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Morse is music
A column from Telegraph and Telephone Age in 1910. Morse is a way of speaking and hearing language, so it ‘logically’ should be processed in the same parts of the brain as spoken language. These 1910 observations indicate that Morse occupies the same areas as music. Experienced operators were not bothered at all by general…
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More Tirn Tibbles
Another case where Kirn misses a point because he’s not inside the tech world. I believe deeply in creativity, innovation, imagination & in the idea that they must be protected because they benefit all of us. The framers of the Constitution believed this too. It is why they gave special attention to patent law. We…
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Grandma was more right than she knew
Common wisdom was right about nearly everything before “science” and “democracy” and “philosophy” turned wisdom into genocide and torture. Some branches of science are accidentally recovering old wisdom in recent years, while other branches (like “social” “science” and public “health”) are zooming out beyond the event horizon of infinite satanic lunacy. = = = =…
Polistra's Mill 