Who matters

Chesterton's The Donkey is a fun short poem.

And we're that donkey too, aren't we? Not who we are, but Who we bring with us matters.

Obedience

Obedience teaches. Some things you may have words for, but don't undestand what they mean until you've lived them. I understood the demographic preference for monogamy over polygamy (and I certainly didn't have anybody else in mind), but after years of marriage I'm starting to understand what "one flesh" means and why more wives would be less.

Kids are in no position to decide what's best. "Just learn your times-tables; you'll understand later." We didn't go the "unschooling" route--we knew better than the kids what would be useful in understanding the world. Once they had obeyed and learned the background they could dig into what they pleased.

Sometimes we learn from bad choices, but I know a few adults who double-down on willfulness.

Automated Synthesis

The phrase Artificial Intelligence isn't appropriate. Slapping the word "intelligence" into the name doesn't make it real, and the result is misleading. This morning one of the men in our prayer gathering complained that the CEO, and a number of the new hires, were putting undue faith in the computer's analysis, and ignoring experience.

Since what the systems do is a more like a probabilistic synthesis of existing material, "Synthesis" seems like a better word than "Intelligence." That term emphasizes the aspect of compilation of existing material, instead of the implied "thinking about" that isn't actually happening.

In place of the term "AI", I propose that we use "AS": Automated Synthesis. Given the systems' notorious propensity for hallucination, one might call it "SS" -- Stochastic Synthesis -- but I gather some systems are getting better.

Maybe with a more accurate label people will be less tempted to put inappropriate trust in the systems, and recognize and use them for what they are. Rectification of names?

Ghost melody

Can you make out the original tune by subtracting notes from a background?

Can you make out any kind of melodic movement at all?

In trying to answer that question I hit two obstacles: I couldn’t hit the notes I needed to reliably, and I already knew what to expect.

To deal with the competence problem I used MuseScore software to compose and play back for me, and as for the bias due to expectation—I can’t solve that for myself unless/until I script something to take a random tune and generate the silhouette tune automatically, but I can solve it for you by obfuscating the title of the tune.

I chose to use as a “background” the collection of all the notes used in a tune. For each note in the original tune I played this background without that original note. I thought of it as like a ghost in the background noise.

Does that ghost, that absence, make something melodic?

Youtube video of Gjvaxyr (I am still learning ffmpeg. Please forgive the video quality. The audio was assembled with Audacity.)

Those who have some musical background will predict that the result will be dissonant, and so it is.

I think I can sort-of hear something, that is vaguely like the original—sometimes.

Later I’ll look into removing chords rather than single notes, though I expect it will still be dissonant.

I wonder under what conditions would the ghost tune not be dissonant. A base song with notes only from a chord, yes--others?

UFO data

I have not looked at the UFO data released the other day.

I assume that there's nothing security-related in there--which implies that whatever we're working on lately won't show up. (I hope we're working on some new secret technology...)

Some claim that UFO reports are the modern parallel to ancient visions of angels, demons, or gods. Um. I don't know how to compare rates of "strange observations" between not-always-literate times and now. Maybe people have always seen unusual things in the skies and attributed it to whatever the zeitgeist suggested. It's a plausible hypothesis, but I wouldn't care to try to prove it. I suspect that a large fraction of the UFO reports are due to artifacts of modern life, including secret military tests and glitches in our detecting/displaying systems.

Let's suppose after accounting for glitches and private drones and secret project, that there is a residue.

That could be due to natural but not understood or expected phenomena. In this case the rapid changes in direction and whatnot are "real" but not quite what they look like--sort of like the spider on the telescope looking like a monster. Once we figure out the mechanisms, we'll understand them going forward, though probably never be able to retroactively determine what somebody long ago saw.

They could be displays by supernatural creatures: ghosts, angels, demons, or other things not in our catalog. I'm assured that angels and demons exist, I'm agnostic about ghosts (lots of testimony but little that's clear to me), and I can't say much about "unknown."

Or they could be displays by "non-supernatural" creatures, i.e. like us (even though we're arguably supernatural also). Aliens, natives we haven't met -- whatever. If they're from elsewhere, how in the world did they get here? The structure of spacetime restricts how fast you can get around, and astronomical distances translate to astronomical times. If they're from around here, why haven't we run into them? We've been looking hard enough.

Bottom line: not much I can say about "unknown."

Do I think there are aliens out there?

Yes. I look around our planet and see life everywhere, even in hot springs, deep underground, and around hot vents at the bottom of the ocean. From this I take a guess about the nature of God: He's very creative and He likes life. From that I predict that there will be plenty of life in the universe, though not necessarily things we would recognize: different chemistry and ways of using energy, living much faster or much slower, other things I haven't imagined. That's not even including angels and whatnot, whose relationship with our physical universe isn't at all obvious to me.

As Lewis pointed out, just the existence of other intelligent creatures doesn't say anything one way or another about the relationship of God and man, or even man and the other creatures. We'd have to know a lot more.

I don't expect to learn anything from the documents.

For the history buff

A virtual walk-through of 4'th century Rome: most of the city model along the road is there. I've never been to either modern or ancient Rome, and the reconstructions are fun--and leave you wondering what living with such monumental reminders of history would be like.

It's missing a little something, though...

Damaged taste buds

From an article on recovery of radiation-damaged taste: "All the five taste types are seen to decline around the fifth week after the start of RT. Bitter and salty tastes are affected the most while the sweet taste is the least affected."

Recovery of taste function may occur as early as 4 to 5 weeks after the completion of RT. Complete recovery of taste function following RT is still not quantified or reported. Whether the damage caused to the taste buds is temporary or permanent is still unclear. Partial taste loss is seen to be prevalent even 20 years after completion of RT.

This was an overview of studies, which varied a great deal in methods and selection and radiation targets, and only the most general information is obtained.

I've another data point, though. I could appreciate sourdough fairly soon after treatment, and bitter seems to have gone into overdrive. And nobody will be hiring me for wine-tasting in the foreseeable future. After nearly a year, recovery seems to have plateaued. "This is what things taste like now."

FWIW, I lost about 25 pounds, but was slightly above optimum weight so I had some slack available, and am only a little below my original weight now. There's more to taste than just the tongue's part. The nose plays a role, as does the "mouthfeel," and though I couldn't taste sweet for a while I could still feel the effect of sugar. I'm not sure how, exactly, but I could.

Teaching how to cheat

Musing on an irrelevant news bit reminded me of John Scarne the magician who the Army hired to teach soldiers how to spot cheating.

They figured that the risks of soldiers learning how to cheat were outweighed by the benefit of soldiers learning how to recognize cheating. This is something he did for the Navy.

Children

Althouse has a post on people not having children, and a lot of the talk is about economics and technology and social propaganda.

What I thought of was Chesterton and "The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial."

The world is rediscovered every day.

Which super-power?

AVI remembered an old question: what would be the best superpower?

I suppose that depends on a balance of your fears, your dreams, your work, and your amusements – and your calling, if any.

Invulnerability, for example: It would be nice not to have to worry about falling or getting hurt in a fight, but it would also be very handy for a vulcanologist, or just somebody with 'satiable curtiosity. It's also handy if your calling is crime-fighting with emphasis on the literal fighting.

In college the topic came up with a small group of guys and one guy volunteered that his preference would be the "time stop" or whatever he called it because – OK, I tried to argue him out of it and never really dealt with him afterwards. Creepy.

Super-speed could be handy sometimes, but most of the time what use would it be? Skipping the commute is all well and good, but then you're at work.

Teleportation to anywhere would be wild, if you could afford the spacesuits to go with it. Even restricted to just teleporting on Earth would be handy – sometimes. Especially if your work involved acquiring portable and valuable property...

Talking to animals – might get boring, though zoos would probably love you. Super-hearing, super-vision – you'd be in great demand by researchers. Changing an object's relative momentum by arbitrary amounts just by touching it – a bit niche, but wonderful for some jobs, and lots of recreational fun taking pebbles and firing them at a cliff to chip out an image in the rock.

If mind-reading is a superpower – so long as you're not born with it; that could get really rough on a baby – if you could turn it off when you didn't want to be bothered it could be very handy. If you couldn't, given what flits through people's minds, that power could be very depressing.

Super-persuasion? I'm not sure I'd trust very many people with that. Maybe not even me.

Superfast reading could get me caught up on a backlog...

AI in command

When I first heard about the story of PocketOS having its production database and backups deleted by an Anthropic AI I thought back to the Anthropic dispute with the Department of War claiming the DoW was using its products for military purposes. They thought that unsafe, and probably had other objections too. It would seem a 'shoot yourself in the foot' kind of demonstration, but human dumbness is pretty extensive.

It looks like somebody at PocketOS needs to be booted far. Their architecture was weird: the backups were on the same volume as the production database (????), everything was on the cloud with no local copy, the designer gave unfiltered control to the AI agent -- lots of dumbness. But the AI's "confession" seemed really weird. If the agent had rules, how did it ignore them? There's something odd here.

FWIW, we had databases too, some more mission critical than others. Depending on the "brand" of database (mysql/mariadb or postgres or mongodb or sqlite) we had different backup approaches, but the copy was always done by entirely different agents, and copies kept in different servers in different buildings. I can't think of a way anything but deliberate admin action on different machines that could damage both. The whole point of backup is to keep the data somewhere safely distant from problems on the original host. Ideally you'd like a copy that only a different admin can delete, just in case somebody goes postal.

It turns out the cloud provider here was able to provide a way to access the data after all, but that's not usually the case.

UPDATE: Not reading the documentation compounded with sloppy security compounded with trusting the AI

Out of touch

We bought a replacement car, which came with a trial of Sirius. I am getting fliers and emails urging me to sign up for the low (or "current") price and suggesting channels to entice me. What does? Talk radio--hardly. Sports--no. "Every music genre" that didn't list the only channel I'd be interested in. "Nonstop news" sounds like Babel torture. "So much comedy"--not a diet of it, thank you, and most of the modern comedian shorts youtube offers up are more bitter than funny.

My wife was on the phone with someone talking about a child interested in manga. I looked it up. I'd heard of Isekai--I'd written something that might be classed as "portal fiction" (though not Isekai)--but most of the classifications were new to me. I'd have to spend quite a while at the library reading through stuff to get up to speed, and even then I don't know if the library carries some of the more "adult" stuff. It might--libraries have been getting a little odd lately.

Maybe a movie a year at the theaters, no broadcast TV, no cable TV... The HBO/Netflix/etc produced content I haven't seen at all. Young adult conversations are replete with references to catch phrases from shows I've barely heard of. I'm told the caliber of the work is better than the old 60's/70's TV shows (which I'm not interested in rewatching). OK.

The book of Daniel says the Babylonians trained their most promising captives in the language and literature of the Babylonians--presumably because the way the language is used references the literature for additional meanings. How far out of touch can I be before communication becomes difficult?

Some words have already changed meanings.

Won or not done?

Althouse wrote: "The war is over. We won. Iran just won't admit it,"

I'm not sure that's true. I think we won the first phase (taking more hurt than we admitted but yes, winning), and now we're in the second phase--the seige. Remember seiges? We remember WWII as mostly kinetic, but in the Pacific we did some island hopping too; isolating Japanese outposts and waiting for them to wilt.

I assume that the mosaic land defense the Iranians planned was paralleled by a "mosaic" coastal capability as well, and that eradicating all their hidden coves and attack boats will take a while. No simple "decapitation" here. And some of those attack boats/mine layers will be genuine fishing boats, slightly repurposed.