Category: Uncategorized
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The value of a precise worklog
American Radio Library has added an autobiography of Harold Wheeler, one of the mid-level pioneers of radio circuitry. (He was associated with the better-known Hazeltine.) The book is mainly interesting for its odd style. As a pure engineer, Wheeler kept a PRECISE daily worklog every day from birth, and had his own engineerish ways of…
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Overloading the abacus
Listening to a long interview with Balaji Srinivasan. He’s one of those all-around realists selling bitcoin. Balaji also reminds me of another type that has been around for a long time. I don’t know if he belongs to this type, but the pattern fits. Cult leaders tend to overwhelm the listener with a wide range…
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Follies that aided science, part 1 of 6
Continuing to republish the ‘good stuff’ from the old blog, compacted and sequenced properly. Part 1 on top, part 6 on bottom. = = = = = What’s a folly? It’s an antique word for a not-so-antique phenomenon. By dictionary definition a folly is a non-essential building or feature on a wealthy estate, offering amusement…
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Follies that aided science, part 2 of 6
I’ve done a graphic salute to James Hartness already, so will review the Hartness piece first. = = = = START REPRINT: When I don’t understand how something works, I build it. With electronic stuff I can build the real thing using tubes and transistors and capacitors and so on. With mechanical stuff I don’t…
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Follies that aided science, part 3 of 6
Frederick Smyth was less important in the big picture than Hartness or Green, and his folly served science unintentionally. Unlike the other two, he was primarily a politician. Smyth was born in 1819 and spent the first part of his life clerking or managing retail stores. In 1849 at age 30 he entered city politics…
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Follies that aided science, part 4 of 6
Colonel Ned Green was the most influential of these men. Money talks, and intelligently-directed ENJOYABLE money talks best. His mother Hetty Green was the equivalent of Buffett. She was generally called the Wall Street Witch. She started out rich and manipulated her rich inheritance up to super-rich. (In modern terms, from $100M to $4B.) Her…
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Follies that aided science, part 5 of 6
A mention in a ’50s era issue of Computers and Automation led to this mystery. The best account is in McClure’s Magazine in 1914. John Hammond was a visionary AND the heir to a huge fortune. The money and connections enabled him to turn his visions into large-scale reality. His first invention was a mechanical…
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Follies that aided science, part 6 of 6
Purely personal footnote on follies. I encountered and enjoyed two follies when I was young. One was an astounding and mystifying piece of architecture on a property that had once been wealthy; the other was more ordinary but still fun. The big one: In 1960 my radio uncle was renting the main section of a…
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Analyzing the handwriting on the wall
Somebody noted that the “variants” skipped the letter Xi because a non-insider might accidentally connect the project with China. Can’t let that happen.** I got thinking about the “variants” from a different angle. We need to remember that this holocaust was developed by the SAME demons who gave us 9/11 and “anthrax”, so the setup…
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Science as entertainment part 3
I’m going to start republishing some of what I consider the ‘good stuff’ from the previous Blogspot blog, in case the cancelers decide to work harder. This also gives me an opportunity to place things in proper sequence with connected titles. Part 1 goes on top instead of the usual blog sequence of first-is-last. So…
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His predecessors would have loved it
News item: Michael Cohen, one of Trump’s gangsters who got stupid enough to end up in jail for a while, is now jumping on the NFT bandwagon. Among the NFTs will be a handwritten manuscript of his newly released autobiography “Disloyal,” a video of Cohen writing a section of the book during his incarceration at…
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Compiling the Thiel questions
Since I’m restarting on this (HOPEFULLY safer) new platform, it’s time to gather up some loose ends into more solid and consistent lists. The Thiel Question generated several overlapping sub-lists in the last few years. Here’s a condensed and combined list. First the question itself, and my variation on it. How would you respond if…
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Murky territory
I’ve been trying to recover the four censored items. Two of them were easily found in the blogspot archives that I saved offline. The other two are lost for technical reasons, not from total censorship. One was written shortly before the censor struck on 11/26, so it was removed from the Blogspot archive before I…
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Endless Bitcoin point-missing
Greenwald has a long interview with a bitcoin activist. At least for the purposes of argument, Greenwald is taking the objective devil’s advocate side. As an experienced lawyer, he knows how to do this. The anonymous (clearly German) bitcoiner brings up all the usual stupid arguments about decentralizing and freedom from authority. Greenwald does an…
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Hint of the Fairness Doctrine?
Batya is impressively non-partisan. She’s an elite Jew who had been writing conventional elite stuff in mainly Jewish publications. A few years ago she stood back and realized that the elite media was genocidal. Trump gave them permission and ammunition in their long war of attrition against normal working people. Now Batya is closer to…
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