Metrology – Polistra's Mill

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 fly. The computer says it, I believe it, that settles it. Math is the only law.

From Molly White’s wonderful aggregator:

The Solana blockchain clock drifted about 30 minutes behind real-world time on May 26, as a result of slower-than-usual slot times. Solana’s status page read that “this has no impact on performance or network operations”, though The Block noted that this time drift could result in smaller staking payouts.

Blockchain timekeeping is a selling point of Solana, which talks up its “proof of history” algorithm in a blog post where Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko says, “our clocks never drift”.

Note especially smaller staking payouts. I have no idea what staking payouts are, but presumably they’re the only way for suckers to get a return from whatever Solana pretends to do.

Off-standard clocks were a common feature of the more ingenious scams in earlier eras. Example 1. Example 2. The sucker thinks he’s hearing real-time race or game results, but the scammer already knows the results and delays all the clocks and watches visible to the sucker. This trick faded out in the computer era when everyone had direct access to real standard time. Now it’s back, thanks to the crazy ‘private world’ of bitcoin.

Our clocks never drift, so if you’re seeing a different time on some other clock, your other clock must be wrong! Math wins every time!

Polistra and Happystar, remembering that Nature is full of accurate clocks, are especially disgusted by this reliance on fake clocks supplied by obvious fraudsters. Centuries of painstaking work by astrologers and astronomers pinned down the rhythm of the universe. Now we’re letting the algorithm set the “only” clock, just as we let the algorithm jumble up time altogether.

Metrology day 2022, AI version

Today is Metrology Day, but I’m trying to go for Entertainment and Enjoyment this year, so here’s a gathering of AI-generated nonsense from CookingFlavr.com.

Is A Meter Long?

A meter is a unit of length that is used to measure the distance between two points. The meter is also used as a unit of weight.

Is A Meter Longer Than A Yard?

A meter is about the length of a yard. A yard is about the size of a hand.

What Is Exactly A Meter Long?

A meter long is 1/1,000,000 of a meter.

How Long Is A Meter Visually?

A meter is a unit of measurement used to measure the size of a surface or body. Meters can be in any shape or size, but they are typically about the size of a human hand.

How Long Is A Meter How Long Is A Yard?

A meter is the distance between two points. A yard is the distance between two lines of equal length.

Is A Meter Shorter Than A Foot?

Are meters shorter than feet? It seems like they might be. Many meters are shorter than a foot, making it easier to move around. Plus, meters are often used in place of feet in measurements, like altitude or width.

What’s The Difference Between A Yard And A Meter?

A yard is a unit of measurement of linear distance, typically one hundred meters. A meter is a unit of measurement of time, typically one second.

What Percent Of A Yard Is A Meter?

A yard is a unit of measure in land use. It is equal to 1/12 of a kilometer.

How Do You Convert Yard Times To Meters?

There are many different ways to convert yard times to meters, but one common way is to use a metering device like a meter reader or a garden hose.

How Many Cm Are In A Meter Stick?

A meter stick is about 8.4 inches long and 1.1 inches wide.

Why Is A Second A Second?

A second is a unit of time equal to 1/6 of a day. It is used in English to represent the difference between a day and a week. For example, if someone says, “I’ll be in town for two days,” this means they will be in town for six days. [Precisely true.]

Did The Romans Have Hours And Minutes?

The Roman Empire was a huge and powerful empire that lasted for over two centuries. The empire was divided into two parts, the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire was more powerful than the Eastern Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire was more powerful than the Western Roman Empire. [AI does Orwell.]

The Roman hours and minutes were created to help people stay on schedule. The hours were divided into ten days, and the minutes were divided into thirty minutes.

= = = = =

I can’t figure out the PURPOSE. The format closely resembles Quora, especially the Indian questioners. But the answers on Quora were generally meant to be useful, not totally screwed up. If a student uses these answers on a test, he’s guaranteed to flunk. Maybe that’s the point? A bait trap for cheaters?

Some of this crap, not necessarily from CookingFlavr, shows up in Google searches along with real answers, not marked as AI-generated.

= = = = =

For reference, here’s the first Metrology Day item in 2010, and here’s the deadly serious 2020 item. Nothing has changed or improved since then, I’m just trying to stay in Science As Entertainment mode.

Amazing graph

Cited by Batya, this is an AMAZING graph. It’s the percent of NYTimes headlines occupied by each president from Wilson through Biden. Most of the chart is rational and expectable. Presidents who made more news (wars, depressions, scandals) got more headlines. Unexpectedly there’s not much D vs R difference**.

Aside from the regularity, the chart has TWO GIANT AND OPPOSITE OUTLIERS.

Reagan didn’t exist. Perfect Unperson. His name was apparently unprintable and unthinkable.

And Trump is the ONLY president in the last 100 years. His headline total is WAY greater than all the other presidents combined.

= = = = =

** Sidenote: I think you could tease out more regional difference than R vs D difference. NYTimes claims to be national but it’s really local. For instance, LBJ was less headliny than Nixon, despite overlapping years and similar involvement in wars and protests. LBJ was always a Texan. Nixon lived most of his political life in NYC. Reagan was a Californian, never lived in NYC. Trump is NYC and NYC is Trump. Two names for the same monster.

In math,

(% Importance) * (% NYCness) = (% Headlines)

Keinpeilempfänger

Fifth in a vaguely defined series on obscure secret electronics, after SCR-268 and Tenzor and Peilempfänger and Kleinstpeilempfänger.

= = = = =

American Radio Library has uploaded new issues of the British Post Office Engineering Journal. Why did the GPO have an engineering research facility? Because the GPO managed ALL communication in Britain. It was like Post Office plus Western Union plus Bell Tel plus FCC.

This is the first in a long line of BBC television detector vans, enforcing the British policy of financing BBC with receiver license fees. It bears a remarkable resemblance to the Kraut Peilempfänger truck. [So I was able to modify the Kraut truck easily.]

According to the article (which is short on electronic detail) the receiver was not picking up the superhet IF oscillator. It was picking up the audio-frequency radiation from the horizontal sync coils.

This freq was certainly radiated from antennas. When TV antennas were common, and when my ears were younger and sharper, I could hear the 15750 cycles turned into acoustic form by electrostriction.

Here’s another view:

Our pet alien feels perfectly safe here despite the allegedly intense magnetic activity in the truck. Why?

According to a recent Daily Mail article, the Detector Vans have always been fake.

First, it’s nearly impossible to sort out the signals in a crowded city environment where each building may have a hundred residents.

Second, all the horizontal sync coils are on the same frequency, so it’s a much harder task than locating a spy transmitter or locating one superhet radio tuned to the WRONG freq.

Third, BBC never had more than a dozen vans for all of Britain, yet BBC has prosecuted thousands of unlicensed sets every year. The vans just cruise around to scare the yobs. The real license cops find scofflaws the lo-tech way by comparing a residence list against a license list, and then double check by knocking on the door and listening for BBC programs with their Mark I Eardrums. Sometimes the license cops pose as salesmen to get into the house and look around.

So our charge-based life form can rest over this van. No electronic activity inside it, and the residents have heard that the van will be working their neighborhood, so they have turned off all their electronics. The van is a Mobile Quiet Zone.

Bellyaches and quakes

One of the stories in Frank Edwards’s non-UFO books illustrates how real science gets suppressed or forgotten, then turns out to be correct in the light of later discoveries.

He tells about Bob Barr of Oakland, who reliably predicted earthquakes by his belly. Bob could distinguish a specific kind of activity in his gut that presaged an earthquake somewhere nearby, and could even predict the Richter number. (Or so he claimed.)

Edwards then mentions that animals everywhere in the West, best documented in zoos, were frantic on the day before the big ’64 Alaska quake. The USGS noted that the earth’s magnetic field showed a tremendous blip during that day.

This knowledge faded out, and until quite recently geologists ferociously denied all claims of objective or subjective prediction. Quakes were perfectly random.

Now Bob’s bellyache makes perfect sense in light of recent knowledge about our emotional and cognitive connections to the gut bacteria. Most bacteria are magnetosensors. When the earth’s field goes wacky, the bacteria get confused and dizzy, and our nervous system hears about it.

I had a fairly reliable earthquake sensor for a decade or so. A specific dark mood appeared 18 hours before a big quake in this part of the world, with no obvious proximate cause. The sensor disappeared recently, perhaps because living in the “virus” NAZI TORTURE CHAMBER makes smaller emotions harder to detect. Baseline darkness is above the level of the quake-predicting darkness.

Winged metrologists

I bought several of Frank Edwards’s books on UFOs and other subjects. Near the end of his short life he was following the model of Hix and MacHarrie and Nesbitt, producing a set of books and short radio features on historical and scientific oddities, well beyond UFOs.

All of these ‘Fortean’ writers were presenting known and observed FACTS that don’t fit the official THEORIES of historians and scientists. They were strengthening the resolve and the moral compass of non-Experts.

Edwards was a GREAT writer. Each book grabs you on the first page and doesn’t let you put it down. Edwards understood people deeply and empathetically, but didn’t understand technology quite deeply enough. He drew some tech conclusions that don’t work well.

Coral Lorenzen was the other way around. She was an introvert with less experience of human strategies, but she had a tremendous capacity for technical patterns and details. Some of her conclusions about human motivations don’t work well.

Most importantly, the ‘Forteans’ understood that non-Experts have MONEY, which modern writers have forgotten. Edwards sold millions of books, and his radio features reached millions of listeners.

Edwards’s UFO book starts with ancient stories. Ezekiel is the most famous, but similar accounts are found in India and China and the Americas.

Previously I was betting that the ‘standard UFO’ was simply an experimental surveillance tool developed after WW2. The pattern of secrecy and censorship pointed in that direction. I didn’t see any reason to assume origin from another planet, and I still don’t. After reading those parallel OLD descriptions, I have to bet on a more complex earthly origin story.

= = = = =

Just for fun, let’s take several of the observed facts I’ve been discussing lately and apply them to the long observations of UFOs.

1. Start with the interlocking facts about secrecy. Privacy is natural inside a guild or tribe, thus secrets are easy to keep forever within a guild. Secrets don’t want to leak.

2. Add the facts about tech history. Invention and life and language are NOT LINEAR. Technology and skills develop suddenly, then die out unless carefully maintained by a guild.

3. Add the perpetual observations of the ‘standard UFO’. It has a few basic ingredients that imply a massless charge vortex or wave knot, capable of assuming the external qualities of a solid object when necessary.

4. Add the perpetual observations of a hidden tribe of small people or angels with wings who are not quite material, capable of assuming quasi-material form.

5. Add the Booker T / mouse rule. When you’re the low-status mouse, you need to be very quiet and very smart. Live inside the walls, find your niche and stay there.

= = = = =

Sum: An ancient tribe of small humanoids developed tremendous technical ability based on the correct assumption that everything is patterns of energy. They never bought Epicurean atomism and chaotism. They know how to appear solid and massive as seen by our senses and tools, and they can turn off the stageplay just as quickly. We don’t know where they are because waves don’t have a where.

This ancient winged tribe realized that the big wingless tribes enjoy obeying the demonic will of evil psychopaths. The big tribes constantly slaughter each other, and the demons often slaughter their own tribe for fun and profit. We’re seeing the latter tendency right now in the broadest and most vicious form in all of history.

Occasionally, when the big warlike humanoids are getting especially nasty, the ancient little angel-tricksters wander around in their invulnerable fast-dancing fast-disappearing aircraft to see what we’re planning. They have no hope of fixing the big humanoids, but they may be doing some ‘wiggle and watch’, popping out in interesting places and ways to measure our responses.

When they appear over non-psychopathic areas or guilds, nothing much happens.

= = = = =

When they appear near one of the demon-owned areas, their ship is pursued and shot.

= = = = =

The shooting doesn’t matter (or isn’t matter) because the angel-tricksters are only appearing as matter; but the shooting gives them a measure of the demonic power at this particular time and place.

Peilempfänger

Part 3 of a vaguely defined theme on obscure spy equipment.

Part 1 was the first American radar.

Part 2 was the Russian Tenzor portable spy rig.

Today I’m featuring a Kraut portable direction finder or Peilempfänger. (Peilen = take a compass bearing; Empfänger = receiver.) It’s not as interesting as the other two, so I didn’t devote much attention to the schematics and functions; but one aspect struck me as dissonant.

Here the Peilempfänger operator is searching for an Untermensch transmitter. He has two choices. Резидентка Полистра may be sending with her Тензор rig; and Спутник may be sending pictures back to Moscow.

The web doesn’t offer much info on this rig. There’s only one photo of a truck, which seems to be a Borgward. Krauts favored this blue-gray color for military trucks.

Back view as seen by the operator entering the truck:

And here’s what the operator would see while using the rig.

He would be turning the big handwheel, directly rotating the loop antenna over the truck. The antenna mechanism has three concentric dials. The outer dial is fixed, representing directions wrt the truck itself. The inner dial is controlled by the big knob in the middle, to represent true north. Finally, the antenna’s motion is repeated by the red pointer sandwiched between the two dials. As he tried various angles, the little meter on the left side of the receiver would indicate signal strength. He would also be listening through headphones, which is generally a better indicator of centering.

The stopwatch is peculiar. At first I thought the brown panel in the middle was a viewport for a magic-eye tube, but there’s no magic-eye in the radio. It’s just a leather pad to cushion a hanging watch, so the precision of the watch isn’t affected by the truck’s vibrations.

What’s dissonant? FESTIVE COLORS. This Telefunken receiver has colors and shapes for every purpose.

Krauts are not known for festivity. Krauts are precise and rigid and NUMERICAL. But German military radio equipment used colors far more than ours, to represent operating modes and wavebands.

I’ve seen and used a lot of American WW2 radio stuff, and I’ve never seen a color. Dials are black and white, outside case is either olive drab or unpainted aluminum.

Here’s a comparison of a 1918 Telefunken with our 1918 receiver. More festivity!

The Soviet Тензор also used colors for UI/UX. Our equipment in the ’50s was still black and white and drab all over.

We’ve been missing a beat in the UI/UX department. Our adversaries were making life a bit more interesting for their operatives, and adding personality to the various controls.

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Footnote: Speaking of festive colors and obscure cryptographic machines, here’s the absolute CHAMPION. The Barbie toy typewriter. Pink and purple and soft-looking, it’s not really a toy at all. It’s a fully functional electronic word processor with a built-in Enigma-style ciphering system. According to the web info, the ciphering system can be activated by a key sequence which isn’t mentioned in the ads or the currently used manual.

Always a thrill

Coral and Jim Lorenzen developed a network of independent UFO observers across USA and South America. Their organization knew what was happening, and thus knew when the media was choosing not to report what was happening.

Immediately after Sputnik a large number of media reports came to the surface, and the media went supernova after Sputnik II (carrying Laika the dog.) Coral knew that the change was mainly in the media, not in the actual frequency of reports. The media clearly wanted to distract us from the Russian success, and needed to associate HORRIBLE UFOs with Russian satellites.

Even so, a couple of highly dramatic incidents happened just after Sputnik II. A huge orange ball was seen by a military installation at Itaipu in Brazil, and a similar orange ball (possibly the same ball) was seen in Levelland, Texas. These objects used their electric fields more aggressively than before, seriously burning two of the soldiers at Itaipu and ‘warming up’ some people in Levelland. Both of these objects also stopped cars and electric power systems.

Coral believed UFOs were from other planets because she grew up under FDR and couldn’t imagine our own government killing its own people for thrills.

She wrote:

Is there a purpose and a pattern? I believe so. A moderate-sized American town “besieged” by an object which stopped traffic. A test to halt panic-stricken flight of the natives when the day of contact comes?

A modern observer who grew up under the post-FDR Deepstate wouldn’t be so sanguine. We’ve seen repeatedly, with increasing frequency and cruelty, that our own government ENJOYS trapping and destroying us.

The tendency was already clear in the ’50s in retrospect. Our Civil Defense program was designed to paralyze us with fear and panic, not to shelter us from real bombs. And now we recognize with horror the BESIEGED CITY, halting panic-stricken flight with lockdowns and lucite and ballgags in all transportation.

The UFOs were clearly part of the experiment, giving a thrill to the demonic experimenters. Imprison the peasants! Stop their cars! Burn them to a crisp! Day of Contact! Orgasm!

= = = = =

Calibration: My own attitude toward Civil Defense was much more sanguine before I tossed the TV and sobered up from the neocon drug.

2005: Please protect us from terrorists! Need more lockdowns!

2011: Civil Defense was formerly sensible but now it’s useless.

2014: It’s always been crap.

Constants and variables 171

On 3/11/2022 Obersturmbannführer Inslee started another brief reprieve from ballgags. Finishing the current two-year contract, 3/11 to 3/11. It doesn’t matter a whole lot to me, because the buses are still strangling me, and the stores weren’t enforcing the rule.

The change does allow a better measurement of public insanity. Previously, Obersturmbannführer Inslee gave us a reprieve in June ’21, which lasted two months. During that reprieve, the vast majority of customers took off the ballgags and breathed. When the reprieve ended, the stores resumed enforcement, but looser than before.

During the loose enforcement, about 20% of customers were breathing. Breathers needed two innate qualities: (1) Sanity. (2) Confidence that they can get away with shit.

In other words, sane people who were pretty or impressive could breathe openly. Unimpressive sane people (like me) realized that we never get away with shit, so we complied loosely and symbolically. (ie over the mouth but not over the nose).

Today I was expecting to see the majority of customers breathing. Nope. The proportion hasn’t changed much. Maybe 30% open breathers now (including me, because the official signs are gone). 70% are still fully gagged.

Now we know who is crazy, without any confounding variables of status and personality. The second year of the torture contract has turned half of the population incurably loony. So it was worth the trouble and expense for the Nazis.

= = = = =

Calibrating! Next store trip, two days later: Now almost all of the customers are breathing. I was too hard on them. I apologize. They were apparently unsure or confused on the first day after the change.

New GenRad toy, 1/2

I started collecting GenRad equipment as a sort of tribute to proper analog measurement, and as a specific apology to GenRad itself for favoring Bruel & Kjaer during my time in academia. GenRad equipment was solid, rugged, easy to handle. BK was Danish, with the typical Kraut qualities. More precise than anything else under precise conditions, but brittle and fussy. At Penn State we had a dozen BK capacitor mics, and all but one had shorted out from PA humidity, which is similar to Danish weather.

First I bought this 1565B sound level meter:

Only $50 from Ebay. IETlabs, the successor to GenRad, still sells it for $3500, so $50 is a pretty good discount. As I noted before, the extreme overprice is really paying for legal support of the calibration, not paying for the device itself.

Made in the ’90s, it doesn’t have the classic GenRad styling but it was MADE IN AMERICA, and it’s still solid and fully functional. I didn’t use it much until 2020 when I started doing ‘real science’ as a form of prayer against the NAZI FAKE SCIENCE THAT IS KILLING THE WORLD.

I’m mainly using it as a microphone. It’s a cheap way to get a wide-range mic with a built-in preamp and tone control. Changing the dB setting changes the amplification, and changing the weighting alters the filtering.

Later in 2020 I modeled and animated the 1565A, mainly because GenRad’s handbook included a POEM. This was a nice fit for my Science As Entertainment theme.

The 1565A and 1565B should have been given distinct model numbers since they’re totally different in every way, not just the same innards in square and round cases. Since GenRad chose to number them confusingly, I’m going to call them square and round. Here’s the abstract tribute to the square:

= = = = = START REPRINT:

In 1970 GenRad published a lively little handbook of sound measurements.

IETlabs continues to make and calibrate derivatives of GenRad products, and performs a tremendous service by maintaining old GenRad publications online. Maintaining old records of old technology is an even more important form of calibration in an era of Github memoryholing. Clearly they were using the original booklet from GenRad files, not one of the 20,000 printed copies that were ordered by the original form. Calibration at all levels! Thanks, IETlabs.

The book was aimed at industrial tech types who were suddenly required to deal with noise measurements by new OSHA regs in 1970. GenRad’s simple sound level meter at that time (the 1565A) looked like this:

The artist took full advantage of the meter’s face, turning it into a character.

Decibels don’t add like apples and oranges.

Meters and humans don’t work the same way. Human hearing is totally oriented toward filtering OUT stuff that doesn’t matter, and bringing IN new information in the strict sense. If a sound is meaningful and new, we focus on it, starting with the remarkable tip-link mechanism in the cochlea, and continuing all the way into the higher language centers.

The meter has no idea which sounds are meaningful. It just picks up waves of air pressure and filters them by frequency.

Here’s how the GenRad book balances out the human and meter perceptions:

You have been told, correctly, that measurement is the first step in the solution of a noise problem, and you have made your measurements. The noise, meanwhile, continues, apparently unintimidated by your bulging data book. But your day is near; you have the facts you need to act intelligently. An effective noise-reduction program requires careful planning. The man who finds a noise level too high and immediately says, “We’ll just slap some acoustical tile here and there; that ought to take care of it,” will probably be disappointed at the results.

Not that acoustical tile isn’t a good way to reduce noise – it often is. But this approach is like shooting a person full of penicillin at the first sign of a cold.** The more prudent course is to analyze the noise (either roughly with the sound-level meter, as discussed on page 74, or in detail with a sound analyzer), decide from this analysis what to do about it, and check results by further analysis. This procedure ensures that you’re reducing the noise at the frequencies you’re most concerned with – usually, those frequencies that are about the same as speech frequencies.

The meter can filter by freq, so you have to use those filters as a crude approximation of our PURPOSE filters. The A-weighting filter is closest to the spectrum of speech, so the A is the best setting to measure interference with meaningful communication. The B weighting tends to focus on the upper freq range that is likely to cause damage to the cochlea. C is broadest, covering the whole range of hearing while ignoring freqs that don’t affect the ears at all.

Here Polistra is using a pistonphone to calibrate her 1565A.

= = = = =

The handbook ends with a poem!

With so much sound-measuring equipment and counsel available, there is no longer any need to suffer the annoyance and hazards of excessive noise. Ry acquiring a sound-level meter, you will take the first step on that golden stairway to the promised land where …

Like beacons on a sea of silence
Life’s silver sounds invade the air:
The wind plays tunes upon the trees,
The stream sighs and from the mountain flees,
The rain’s beat, the phoebe’s call –
Ears were made for sounds like these.

The author isn’t credited, and I can’t find the text online, so it might have been written at GenRad. Do any modern industries have poets on staff, or use poetry in their handbooks? Especially poetry that says ears were MADE? Not even worth asking.

= = = = =

** Shoot everyone full of penicillin at the first sign of cold: Neanderthal primitive analogy. As we know now, the CORRECT SCIENTIFIC MEDICAL approach is to shoot everyone full of fear and panic and isolation and depression and starvation and darkness and unemployment and screeching hopeless desperation, and then strangle them to death, in order to PREVENT people who were already dying from catching colds in the middle of dying. This is SCIENCE. Back in those primitive Neanderthal times, the primitive Neanderthal knuckle-draggers called our modern progressive methods “human sacrifice” because they were completely uneducated and stupid.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Continued in next item.

New GenRad toy 2/2

Last year I bought an incomplete GenRad octave analyzer, as part of my overall move back to analog stuff. This machine is especially rare and useful, so it’s worth fixing. The microphone is missing, and I’ve been watching Ebay since then, hoping to grab up the mic or another ‘parts car’.

So far no mic, but another rare SLM appeared this month: a 1565A, the square predecessor to the 1565B. Since I had already done a tribute to the square, I had to buy the real thing.

Here’s the square SLM with its square leather case:

This unit was owned by NASA Langley. The meter and the leather case are both heavy and tough, and show considerable use. There’s no obvious opening or door on the meter to replace the batteries. The manual says to unscrew the knurled nut. There’s only one knurled nut, encircling the mic. Unscrewing it lifts the top cone.

Ingenious structure. The single C cell is clamped inside the nose cone.

How is a single C-cell enough to power a transistor circuit? Clever answer:

The first transistor is a ‘tickler-coil’ oscillator, humming at 130 cps and powering a secondary that gives 22V after rectification and filtering. This type of elegant analog design has disappeared.

There was a folded paper inside the leather case, documenting the last calibration of this meter in 2001. Note that the calibration was ‘initiated’ on 9/11/2001.

The lively 1970 handbook gives the original price as $365, plus leather case $15. Total $380, times inflation of 7.3, gives $2774 as the modern equivalent. The actual modern price for the newer round version is $3500. So the lawyer premium was pretty much the same in 1970, which surprised me. I had assumed the overgrowth of litigation started during the ’70s.

The UI and UX on these two devices are opposite.

The round has much better UX. Buttons let you choose fast or slow response separately from A/B/C weighting. The square has a single dial to select A slow, A fast, B slow, B fast, C slow, C fast.

The square has much better UI in terms of visibility. The meter face is easy to see from any angle in any light. The meter of the round is hidden behind part of the rounded body, and it’s hard to see even in good light.

The round is easier to hold but harder to set down vertically. It wants to tip over. The square is harder to hold but nice and solid in a vertical position.

Even the output plug is affected by round/square. The jack on the round is a submini, and it’s submerged inside the round case through a strange D-shaped channel. I had to file down a submini plug to reach it, and even then the plug didn’t make firm contact. I have to wiggle it to get non-scratchy audio. The output on the square is a big full-sized earphone jack, and it makes firm contact. So the square turns out to serve my purposes better, though I wouldn’t have bought it solely for this reason.

The muddlers are worse than the cancellers 2

Following from here.

This morning the anti-cancellers are weeweed up about:

Apparently it wasn’t a real cancel, just a postponement of class coverage, so again this is more muddling than cancelling.

Fact: FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS A MYTH. Censorship is permanent and normal.

If you go back 1000 years in Russia and in England/America, you’ll see periods of relative looseness and periods of total strictness.

The Russian baseline is stricter than the English baseline. Russians expect their rulers to get rid of opposition, and their rulers do it more often and more massively than our rulers.

The departures from baseline happen at about the same frequency in both traditions, but not simultaneously. Our strictest rulers were Lincoln, Wilson, Truman, LBJ, and the Bush dynasty. We don’t chop heads, but we UnPerson heretics CONSTANTLY, we imprison heretics OFTEN, and we suicide the more serious heretics OCCASIONALLY.

Randomly related

Random crap, vaguely related to previous random story about the bitcoin rapping power couple…

Some smart observers have concluded that the bitcoin racket is the male equivalent of MLMs. Most MLMs are explicitly aimed at women, selling cosmetics, weight reduction, and cooking supplies. Bitcoin is selling pure numbers. Competition is based on X > Y therefore Me > You. Discussions among bitcoiners devolve into nearly pure math with only an occasional word.

Tesla plays a similar trick. It’s an environmental status symbol for male environmentalists who have some Car Guy genes. Car Guys are strictly numerical, with competition based on maximizing G force in acceleration and cornering. My G > Your G therefore Me > You. Car Guy articles are nearly pure math, with CID, bore, stroke, gear ratios, head bolt torque, valve clearance, tire sizes, and above all 0-60 times accurate to the microsecond.

Girls can express environmentalism through Animal Rights and Climate Change and Biodiversity and Orcas. Those are not guy-friendly topics. Tesla replaces the Orca with 0-60 in picoseconds and Megajoules Per Kilogram.

Constants and Variables 169

More from the trust-inducing 2/2/51 news report, which was ordinary mainstream CBS output at the time.

This story deserves respectful verbatim transcription. Note the literary level as well as the content……

= = = = =

With all the troubles that beset us, and perhaps more to come, this is an inevitable corollary. The AP reports a phenomenal upsurge of religion in the United States.

The AP is careful to say that while the survey does not show the nation is more devout, it does suggest that organized religion is commanding wider attention; and it cites evidence.

Seminaries are packed. Some of them for the first time are turning away applicants. Bible sales have nearly doubled in the last decade. Church building is at an all-time high. Colleges have expanded their religious curricula to meet student demand. Church attendance and contributions are at a peak.

For a 20th century materialist note, advertising men are backing a big nationwide religion promotion.

Here’s the way one minister explains the revived interest in things spiritual:

“People have discovered that the things they counted on the most are no longer dependable. The family structure is not what it was 20 years ago. The positive assurance of American invulnerability is gone. The value of money has fallen to pieces. To put it briefly, things are shaking, and people are looking for something unshakable.”

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Constant: Similar situation now in MANY ways.

Variable: Exact opposite response to churches, because churches have decided to be the MOST SHAKABLE INSTITUTION of all. Instead of maintaining the CONSTANT and PERMANENT values of morality, churches have joined the vanguard of the chaos-generating Deepstate torture brigade. Instead of providing sanctuary and protection from the Faucian stormtroopers, churches locked down and gagged their customers more enthusiastically than any other ‘voluntary’ institution.

How to create trust

It’s easy to say that trust requires truth. But truth is an asymptote, not a binary on/off measure. In any area of life we try to get closer to a useful set of facts and observations, but we never hit the plateau.

Here’s a better and more achievable rule:

In science and in journalism, trust requires METROLOGY.

You need to be perfectly clear about where and how you acquired and measured your data. You need to locate and specify your ground or baseline, and then tell how you measured the departures from baseline.

Above all your baseline MUST BE REAL. You can’t start history in 2020. Permanent parts of Nature and human behavior MUST be considered as permanent, and new things MUST be seen as a departure from the permanent baseline.

I previously mentioned a couple of randomly preserved pieces by Bert Andrews, a newspaperman doing news analysis on radio. In these features he was discussing the backroom maneuvers of the 1948 Repooflican Convention, not an especially important story. Andrews was a CAREFUL METROLOGIST. He told us how he knew each fact, whether he was sure, and why he was sure.

Here’s a slightly later and even better example. Don Hollenbeck subbing for Murrow on Feb 2 ’51.

The main stories are (1) Gradual removal of wage and price controls (2) Rumors that the Korean War would halt at the 38th parallel [which turned out to be true] (3) The atom bomb tests in Nevada.

For each story Hollenbeck tells us the metrology as above, and also tells us the cui bono for each side. Why does side A want us to believe A, and why does side B want us to believe B? On the bomb test story, Hallenbeck gets downright neurological, with an inside look at salience. He says that newsmen had started to treat the tests as baseline data no longer deserving daily updates, but the latest test was sneakily pre-revealed to a photographer in Los Angeles who “accidentally managed” to use the flash as lighting for a picture he was taking. Why did the AEC want to re-salientize this test?

This is a shining (or flashing) example of HOW TO CREATE TRUST. Now we occasionally get this level of analysis from independents like Greenwald. 70 years ago we routinely heard it on mainstream radio BECAUSE IT WAS REQUIRED BY LAW.

But FIRST FIRST FIRST FIRST!

Before any of this crap about information, STOP TORTURING US. It doesn’t matter what you tell us as long as you are imprisoning and strangling and disemploying and de-souling and obliterating and killing and squashing and slaughtering us. STOP TORTURING US FIRST.

Then we can talk about information and truth.

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Later thought: Hollenbeck was a tragic figure. His painstaking love of truth killed him. He was cautiously uncertain about the need for the Korean war, and cautiously uncertain about the HUAC crap. Murrow was ferociously dogmatically certain about both. War good, McCarthy bad. The Wikipedia bio of Hollenbeck implies that the conflict led to Hollenbeck’s suicide. I wonder if Operation Mockingbird was involved. They recruited and punished with blackmail, and CBS was fully on board with CIA.