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Zen doesn’t cut it
Substack’s leader McKenzie tweeted: I’ve seen a bunch of writers on Substack become millionaires from subscriptions now. Lots of half-millionaires too. It’s thrilling to me. When we started this company, “Writers are getting rich” wasn’t a trend. Most respondents were unhappy with the vagueness. If you’re going to talk about money you need to be…
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No quibbles at all
Kirn hits the mark precisely this time. One clever way to fight the power is to get onboard in a totally inert way with absolutely everything it does, to comply unenthusiastically with every last little dictate, forcing the system to carry your dead weight in full, along with everyone else’s. This is the ONLY way…
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Great podcast on probability
Via MindMatters, an excellent podcast on probability and gambling. Not the usual math-only stuff. Sal Cordova knows the math, and has also spent considerable time in casinos. He discusses the names for various types of gamblers, and the history of cheating. According to Cordova, all of the physical and mathematical tricks have been eliminated by…
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NFTs are missing the best ‘use case’
Looking at the latest idiotic NFT failure. Idiot bought one of those awful pipe-smoking monkeys for $513k, probably not in real money but in jumped-up internal funny money. Later he tried to sell it. The record shows that he first refused an offer somewhat below what he paid. Greedy. The would-be buyers punished him for…
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Already done
UncommonDescent reviews some new CGI of dinosaurs. It’s impressive visually, but the audio is stuck in the Godzilla era. The dinos emit hoarse roars. Birds are little dinos. So the ancient huge birds would have the same type of vocal mechanism with a VASTLY longer resonant cavity. They would sing complex songs in the same…
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Was the old idea partly right?
John Tyndall was involved in the Trinity House research at Lizard Point, which I animated earlier. Today I was looking again at Tyndall’s 1880 textbook on sound, trying to find a new project to keep my graphics juices flowing. Tyndall’s description of the cochlea (p 325) shows that the pieces were fully known in 1880,…
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EXPonential EXPectation reprint
Inspired by NFT stupidity, here’s a reprint from 2018. = = = = = ABSTRACTION is the cause of EVERY SINGLE CRASH in business, government, and ordinary lives. Abstraction has three Ds: (1) Debt. (2) Delusions. (3) Drugs. All three are unsustainable departures from real value and real work and real measurements. Sooner or later…
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Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
An idiot paid THREE MILLION DOLLARS for an NFT of Jack’s first tweet a year ago. He tried to sell it this month. He was hoping to get FIFTY MILLION. The best offer was $277.
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Random grumps
A couple of random peeves. = = = = = Most people quote the old saying as Money is the root of all evil. This is wrong in two layers. First and most well known, the real saying is Love of money is the root of all evil. This is still one step away from…
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More Girn Gibbles
Kirn’s latest pithy point is offbeam. Perhaps the most disabling glitch affecting political conversation is people’s inability to grasp that the other side is sincere in its beliefs and views the “facts” which support them as authentic. What’s missing here? Most beliefs are NOT sincere when declared by the politicians and influencers. Deepstate writes a…
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All the fine old swindles 2
Cathie Woods alias ARK Invest is a classic swindler who somehow got into a position of respected power and influence. Her claims are identical to the techy con men of 70 years ago, pushing Perpetual Energy Machines or Magic Gasoline Tablets. She says that AI will give us annual doubling of the economy. This is…
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Model of the solution
MindMatters is worrying about hard-to-detect deepfakes in “scientific” research. As with replication, this is not a serious problem, and doesn’t affect real research. The real problem is tenure and federal funding. Quantity, not quality. The vast QUANTITY of low QUALITY papers is a direct result of tenure and grants. These papers don’t matter because real…
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More mechanical Tur(k)ing
Sometimes I wonder if cookingflavr.com is at least part human, like the similar machine expertly exposed by Eric Holloway.. = = = = = Whats A Capper Food? A capper food is a type of food that is used to cover the end of a spoon or fork to help prevent food from spilling. What…
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All the fine old swindles
I enjoy watching the bitcoin idiots “rediscover” and fall for all the old scams. A bitcoin thingy called Solana made a big deal of keeping perfectly accurate time “on the chain”, which is obviously necessary because obviously there are no other clocks in the world. Just like grasshoppers are the only living things that can…
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It’s a book code.
Trying to track the latest in Elon vs Twitter, I noticed that Faker Trump is getting into the act with his usual random whiplash, countering Elon’s random whiplash. I’ve discussed this post-1990 style of random-sounding disorganized emissions from leaders and commentators. It’s dramatically different from the previous organized structure. Bush Senior started it in politics,…
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