Category: Uncategorized
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It’s all in the deltas
UD notes the death of Frank Drake, father of the Drake Equation estimating likely planets for intelligent life. Drake was working at the Green Bank Radio Telescope during the early days of radio astronomy, in the late 1950s, when he was inspired by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison’s famous 1959 paper in Nature about using…
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One Liz dies, another ascends
I’ve given up on Britain. Still, the tradition of REAL nobility resonates in REAL humans. It’s innate. Sailer catches the power of REAL nobility in an elegant little story. Another evocation of REAL nobility. The monarch leads the troops into battle. REAL nobility is detectable between species.
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Interesting for other reasons
This new study at PNAS caught my eye. The title implies an actual resonance: Neural synchronization predicts marital satisfaction After buying and reading the article, it’s not about phaselocked waveforms, it’s about brain regions activating at the same time. Still somewhat interesting. The details of the subjects and researchers are more interesting. The team was…
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Today is & day!
Time to reprint the genuine history of the symbol, which doesn’t match the standard etymology. = = = = = START REPRINT: I’ve always been bothered by the bizarre-sounding etymology of Ampersand. The symbol itself is no mystery: just a stylized version of et. But the usual etymology for the name doesn’t make a lick…
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Can’t be monetized
CNN is trying, or pretending to try, for a less partisan approach. Its viewers are revolting. No fairness allowed! We want pure D-brand crack! There was never any profit in plain truth. Newspapers have always been partisan. The only difference is that they’re all D now, compared to about 60% D in earlier decades. Radio…
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Meta-lesson
This is a good lesson of some kind. I read that British energy costs were going up from $1200 per month to $3000 per month. Both the before and after seemed utterly insane, but in a time when all governments are utterly insane, nothing can be counted out. Today I checked other sources and found…
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Appropriate names
The new out-in-space Webb telescope has found a constellation described as a space tarantula. Huh? Where’s the tarantula? My first thought is a bow-legged cowboy wearing an old-fashioned sombrero. (eg Yosemite Sam.) Second thought is a bear rug erasing a crescent wrench. Those are obviously too contrived, so here’s a one-part image: I guess Yankee…
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Math random vs real random
This distinction was generally recognized in earlier decades. Now that the Platonists are fully in charge, it seems to have been lost. I recognized it in 2000 when I was designing and running perception experiments. Lately I’ve noticed a couple of older references to the point, indicating that it was common knowledge. (1) Puthoff and…
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Private and public names
Enid Buzz asks about middle names. Most people mentioned that their middle name was only used when Mom was seriously pissed. This is a common habit in America, but it can’t be very old. The three-name standard is basically limited to the Protestant parts of the English-speaking world. Catholic areas traditionally have a pile of…
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Probably a healthy tendency
Looking at Substack after a pause, I notice several teapot tempests about accusations of Controlled Opposition. The accused APs are stoutly defending their veracity, which doesn’t help. I think it’s a good sign when people are sniffing the unmistakable AP smell. An influencer who argues persistently and expertly for one side of the wrong question…
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Refunders vs hoarders
This is completely irrelevant and overly nuanced, but it’s what I want to write about today…. Duane Jones, in his wonderful little book about advertising and human nature, gets hardass at times. He talks openly about forcing a purchase. Here he’s discussing the money-back guarantee: = = = = = Mr Burke was silent for…
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Why sane people avoid IOT
This is why sane people avoid ‘Internet of Things’ and ‘smart’ appliances. Thousands of Colorado residents were locked out of adjusting their thermostats on a 90 degree summer day. The thermostats read “energy emergency” and customers had no way of moving the temperature down. Energy company Xcel had placed a temporary lock on some smart…
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Back to Kirn Quibbles…
Kirn’s latest pithy: The forces of adamant top-down control & the forces of creative distributed responsibility both feel that they now have an opportunity in technology to manifest long-held dreams. So they’re fighting. Nope. Wrong three ways. First: Distributed responsibility is NOT creative. Strong cultures don’t need a lot of top-down control because they’re bound…
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Somebody else gets it!
The bitcoin enterprise was developed BY Deepstate FOR Deepstate. This was obvious from the fucking start, and I’ve been shouting about it for 10 years. Bitcoin is CENTRALIZED BY FUCKING DEFINITION. When all transactions MUST take place inside NSA’s web, all transactions are CENTRALIZED IN THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY. You can’t possibly call this decentralized…
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Fake question
Saagar and Krystal are giving us fake solutions to the fake problem of “dark money” in politics. I didn’t bother to watch. OCKHAM. This is a fake argument designed to focus our attention on the wrong question. We have to recognize the difference between Profit and Share Value. In earlier decades, local and state elections…
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