Tag: Metrology
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What would Proverbial think?
If the proverbial Martian picked up scenes like this while monitoring Earth TV, what would he think? People are standing and sitting bent over. Many of them are using crutches and canes and wheelchairs. If he was a proverbial evolutionist as well as a proverbial Martian, he’d automatically assume we were dropping back to quadrupedal…
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Aphid Day 2022 (tentative)
Oct 8, 2022, temp 78. We’re getting a fairly good swarm today so I’ll do the reprint. In the last few years the aphids have pulled a headfake before the serious swarm, so this is tentative. The weather.com forecast agrees with the aphids that it’s all downhill from today; the NWS forecast sees a few…
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VR = Casino
An article at Coindesk points to a jarring dissonance in numbers. A metaverse project called Decentraland has an average of 38 users each day. (Defined as people who log in, not just momentary views.) Decentraland has a stock “value” of $1.3 billion, meaning that idiot venture capitalists have used it as a toilet to throw…
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Out of all the parks
Thomas Harrington hits all the balls out of all the parks with this article. He focuses on 1990 as the coup when the Bush family took over the world. Harrington also kicks the alleged “independents” who were “independent” on every issue until the NAZI TORTURERS bought them off. We’ll never know which of them were…
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Booms and busts
An essayist at Medium gives us 12 quotes from Beat Generation philosopher Alan Watts. I read the piece to see if his selection was the same as mine. Nope, it was disjunct. He remembered and treasured the stuff that I had tossed aside as mystical drivel. I read Watts when I was about 14, and…
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It’s all in the deltas
UD notes the death of Frank Drake, father of the Drake Equation estimating likely planets for intelligent life. Drake was working at the Green Bank Radio Telescope during the early days of radio astronomy, in the late 1950s, when he was inspired by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison’s famous 1959 paper in Nature about using…
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Mother-in-law, cliff
Classic mixed feelings about this headline at Eurekalert: Exposure to past temperature variability may help forests cope with climate change On the one hand they’re still running the “climate” genocide. On the other hand they’ve finally accepted that Lamarck and Lysenko were mostly right and Darwin was mostly wrong. I’m going to take this as…
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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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Big money, bad science
The title is gruesomely and torturously true of Big Science itself. No explanation needed. Oddly, the correlation also applies to radio and TV shows about science. Among discussion-type shows, the elite academic “roundtable” shows and elite quiz shows like Information Please generally spewed old worn-out cliches that had been disproved for many decades. The UFO…
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Permitted concerns
Random thought about media vs experience. The current Officially Permitted Concern is inflation. Politicians and central banks are “responding” to the “public will” on inflation. Does this agree with my experience? No. I’ve never been bothered by inflation. In 1973-74 I was driving long distances for work and pleasure, and I wasn’t bothered by high…
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What am I comparing with?
Lately I’ve been fussing about low quality and low quantity of online stuff. Substack is low quality and low quantity. Straight Arrow News is good quality but low quantity. What’s the baseline? What am I comparing them with? I’ve said that old newspapers and broadcasts had a much better mix of topics, a “substantial and…
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Ockham, Machiavelli, Kernighan
Following on previous item with the simple advice DON’T PLAY. Watching the coiner idiots respond to the total collapse of their project is fun. Instead of running away, they continue arguing about PRECISE DETAILS AND PRECISE NUMBERS. Side A: This is an opportunity to 12.59347% short XTJIOERJY and long 36.78946859% UUEYHHGNOTC. Side B: No, FUD…
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It’s all in the baseline
MindMatters nicely handles Jeffrey Tucker’s confused and incomplete realization. Tucker admits that information was useless, but he still takes the aristocratic side, treating peasants as dumb cowardly beasts. MindMatters (probably Denyse but not bylined) gives Tucker a healthy kick. I’ve gone through the same process of realization, starting from a different baseline and with a…
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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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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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