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Waiting for Shannon
I’m following the latest “revelations” from Twitter. So far no Shannon, no actionable information. Deepstates know how to reveal without revealing, and spy agencies know how to test a defector who claims to be revealing. Is he telling us something we already know, either from experience or monitoring? Is he simply lying? Or is he…
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Missing a difference
Via MindMatters as usual, a new study on the linguistics of cussing. The authors find that most cuss words lack ‘soft’ consonants and emphasize plosives. In a following study, the authors also looked at minced oaths – which are variations of swear words deemed less offensive, for example “darn” instead of “damn”. The authors found…
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Gotcha.
Sam was arrested yesterday by the authorities in the Bahamas. Lesson: When your criminal syndicate depends on currying the favor of demons who are BIGGER THAN YOU and MORE EXPERIENCED AT THE DEMON GAME, you shouldn’t go around taunting the demons. His accomplice Caroline played a smarter game by turning snitch against Sam. Musical accompaniment.
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Speaking of genes and epigenes
Speaking of genes and epigenes… Another ‘earlier than thought’ for fire and cooking. Via MindMatters, a pre-Sapiens species with 1/3 of modern brain size was frying up antelopes: Such behavior has not been attributed to H. naledi before, largely because of its small brain. But it’s now clear that a brain roughly one-third the size…
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Another waste of talent
Skimming through the thousands of updates on nonsense projects like NFT and DAO, I’m struck by another waste. The waste of tech skill is obvious to a nerd like me, but I was slow to notice the waste of sales skill. Every one of these offers is creatively persuasive, putting together nonsense buzzwords in a…
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Tech genes and epigenes
I just finished pulling together the Morse prototype and the Endicott experiment into a single Poser set, released on ShareCG. Gathering up and debugging a set always stirs thoughts. The obvious thought is that both are experimental setups featuring a sender and receiver and controller. Here’s a more random and disorganized thought. Technology and life…
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Not dumb
For contrast, one of the anticoin redditors is brilliantly comparing the Madoff “fraud” with the Bankman-Fried fraud. He found an old government press release from the task force assigned to undo Madoff’s mess. The government managed to refund 88% of the losses. This means that Madoff and his partners OWNED most of the money needed…
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That’s dumb.
Kirn: The point of social media was not to craft, perpetuate, and defend a one-party state. Crap. That’s just DUMB. I’ll grant that the web didn’t need to CRAFT a one-party state, because the one-party state already existed. The last real federal election was 1952. Before the NSA web, Deepstate organized activist groups on “both”…
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I don’t buy it.
I don’t buy the notion that “journalism” can ever be uninfluenced by its owners and financiers. Taibbi tried to peddle this old line. Now a bitcoin outlet called The Block turns out to be LBO’d by Bankman-Fried. The Block is making the same absurd claim: No one at The Block had any knowledge of this…
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Another good joke
Another fine joke from upjoke.com…… List 10 bad dog breeds. 1. There 2. Are 3. No 4. Bad 5. Dog 6. Breeds 7. Only 8. Bad 9. Owners 10. Chihuahuas
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Not a horseshoe
Many of the bitcoin commentators are trying to place the Effective Altruism types (eg the FTX boys) and the alt-white types (eg the Unz boys) at opposite ends of a spectrum. They’re not opposite at all, not even in the wraparound ‘horseshoe graph’ sense. They’re identical with slightly different labeling. Both groups are cullers. They…
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Three cheers for coal!
Following on Coal vs Ice: Coal is coming back, and New Nazi Torturist magazine hates it. The UK is set to get its first new deep coal mine in three decades after the government approved plans for a project in Cumbria, despite widespread opposition on environmental grounds. The Woodhouse Colliery in Whitehaven will produce about…
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Still itchy
Robert Marks talks with lawyer Richard Stevens about the puzzling Thaler project. Marks asks the same question I’ve been asking, in the same emotional tone of itchy frustration. What is Thaler trying to GAIN? What’s the business advantage of relinquishing the human possession of a patent to the AI software? Lawyer Stevens doesn’t have a…
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Locally interesting
Just a couple of ‘locally interesting’ pictures from a newly uploaded station brochure at American Radio Library. Here’s Frank Edwards in 1946, just before he went national on Mutual. This one is more meaningful in a Shannon way. The SCR-268 was the first American radar equipment. When I was reading up for my tech history…
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Starlight to Sonnabend?
It’s always fun to explore whatifs surrounding Studebaker. Here’s one that hasn’t been explored much. In 1958, after Curtiss-Wright had already LBO’d and raided the company’s best assets, management hired Abraham Sonnabend to start developing new niches. He got to work quickly and efficiently on a low budget, acquiring several profitable mid-size companies that were…
Polistra's Mill
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