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Status is all.
Facts do not exist. Status exists. Latest “news” item via New Superstitionist: We have ignition! An analysis has confirmed that an experiment conducted in 2021 created a fusion reaction energetic enough to be self-sustaining, which brings it one step closer to being useful as a source of energy. The fusion ignition took place on 8…
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Ask and ye shall…
Previous item about AI and creativity made me wonder what AI would do when instructed to draw an old car. Would it come out hopelessly weird like a ’62 Dodge, or would it be a statistical average of all old cars, like the generic advertising cars? Neither. Ian Fischer has made a movie solely by…
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1906 reprint
Linked this in previous item. It’s worth a reprint. = = = = = START REPRINT: Looking for old info on coherers, ran into a US Census publication from the magic year of 1906. The Census bureau wrote a splendidly informative article on the present condition of electricity and electronics, getting everything right and describing…
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Latest Kirn quibble
Kirn’s latest pithy point: We need a few experts on the history of experts. Such a figure could estimate their average accuracy. My guess is that it hovers between 1 and 2 per cent. If it were any higher, we would not have needed new ones every few years. This is a beautiful observation about…
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Some fishy rambling on AI
Creativity can be measured commercially. A new product gains profit when it serves some people better than an existing product. Duane Jones emphasized the need to find your niche and defend it. An older product generally broadens and simplifies to be halfway pleasing to a broad range of cultures and places and personalities, which leaves…
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Done with Substack
I had already passed through the point of not much fun, realizing that I enjoy writing more than reading. The facts and insights from various writers are not Shannon information. For the ‘cancelled’ elites like Dan Rather and Bari Weiss, Substack is just a money-making rest stop on their way back to the Real Establishment.…
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Might be on the right track
Most research on human vs chimp misses the point. Most research focuses on physical differences like skull shape and jaw shape to explain why humans speak and apes don’t. Feedback ‘factors out’ such differences. Within modern humans there are similarly large differences in size and shape of bones, and we all speak. Here’s a physical…
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For robber barons it’s a good thing
The videogaming industry is turning against the whole Web3 shit. VR headsets, blockchain “trading”, the NFT fraud. Minecraft, the biggest and oldest company, which is owned by Microsoft, recently banned the whole mess. Most corporations will stick with The Current Thing even when it repels their customers and employees, because most corporations don’t want customers…
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Just a rehash
I haven’t hit this theme lately. Time for a rehash. Free speech is a fake issue. Freedom is the goal of criminals and psychopaths. Normal people want to live a normal life and do useful work. Normal people want to be PROTECTED FROM THE FREEDOM-LOVING DEMONS. Freedom really means I win, you die. The high-status…
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Not unknown
LiveScience is all agog over a “newly discovered” aurora phenomenon. As Dyer noted, the strange sky glow called STEVE was first described by citizen scientists and aurora hunters in northern Canada in 2017. STEVE is typically composed of an enormous ribbon of purplish light, which can hang in the sky for an hour or more,…
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The real independents
While we bicker and squabble about “free speech” vs Woke, on Twitter and Google and Facebook “versus” Gab and Parler and Substack, the real independents are blasting away inside the very same tech pipes and companies. Who are they? Videogamers. The biggest games have about 200 million users each, the same size as Twitter. And…
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Natural beauty correlates with theft.
Still thinking about Bell Labs. I visited there once ‘on business’ when I was working in the acoustics lab at Penn State. I feasted my eyes on The First Transistor, which wasn’t under lock and key. It was just casually displayed in a glass case in the main hall. One of the Substackers wrote a…
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NFT next?
Earlier today I mentioned the invention (or rather evolution) of the transistor in 1947. Bell Labs also developed most of speech science, including synthesis and recognition, and the C programming language, and microwave technology, and a million other useful devices and entire branches of science. After the switch from profit to Share Value in 1980,…
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Reprint from 2016
In previous item I was bitching about modern podcasts failing to show the real balance of male and female in marriage. A similar change happened in drama and comedy, with a pivot point around 1960. Before the shift, spy shows and adventure shows had teams of men and women with everyone participating in appropriate ways.…
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No teams
Modern podcasters and writers are always unmarried when “on stage”. Males sometimes mention their kids but NEVER mention their wives (or more likely husbands). Females sometimes mention their kids but NEVER talk about their husbands (or more likely wives.) The earlier form of podcast was nearly always a team effort, a chat between husband and…
Polistra's Mill
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Polistra's Mill 