I was curious. It exists on Youtube.
It feels sloppy, and I can easily believe they didn't yet know where they were going. Good Vibrations ends the set--the contrast seems stark. They experimented with all kinds of instrumentation and musical ideas, but it didn't seem confident and ready to me.
Sometimes you need to respect an author's privacy about "unfinished works." There's likely a reason the thing wasn't finished.
A walk in the woods sometimes qualifies, but it isn't always convenient, especially in winter.
I use quiet for prayer and writing and just being silent sometimes. (Walking is lousy for writing.) Other people live here as well as I, and they listen to music or podcasts or talk on the phone (or sometimes want to talk to me, which is fine, but not quiet).
When I need silence, I find that headphones and instrumental music to overcome other people's music/noise is almost as good. Half the time. If I need to be doing something rather than resting the mind, it isn't good enough. (Do I need to say that any music at all is bad when trying to write poetry?)
When you have little kids, silence is more of a late-night thing, and you're tired and sleepy then.
Early in the morning? Perhaps. There are tradeoffs.
Can you work out a seating arrangement for a banquet in Heaven?
If we weren't limited to 4 dimensions... How about a "Hilbert table" with as many dimensions as guests, everybody sitting next to Jesus and kitty-corner with every other guest?
And we're that donkey too, aren't we? Not who we are, but Who we bring with us matters.
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.
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?
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?
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.
It's missing a little something, though...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
From a screenshot of LinkedIn: "Mechanical Engineer, IJK Controls, "Reworked existing two-axis gimbal design to fit specifications of new project by redesigning..."
Maybe a mechanical engineer can tell how much skill that requires. I have no idea.
My suspicion is that the vast open areas in the USA make us more vulnerable to drone attacks and assassinations than more congested countries, once an adversary manages to smuggle inventory in.
It seems that it has been this way all my life.
The same reasons for not doing it at all circulate again: Benefits are speculative, We've got great needs (wars, the poor, etc) that all need dealing with and this is a mere distraction, and so on. There's a new reason too: Why not use robots for exploration since they work so well now.
Of course the benefits of using low earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit are not speculative at all anymore, but we have a better handle on what we can find on the Moon and Mars and a better appreciation for how hard work there will be.
The "How can we spend money on this when we have so many poor/etc" sounds very noble-minded, but that argument has no boundaries or limits. Why did Beethoven waste his time composing music when he could have been agitating for peace and trying to relieve poverty?
No. There are things worth doing, things that make life better, that have nothing to do with the usual list of desperate needs. I judge exploration (physical and scientific research) to be among those, along with arts. "We can put a man on the Moon but we can't fix homelessness." Well, we can carve a Pieta but we can't cure drug addiction--and probably never will. I don't believe the societal-problem advocates should have an automatic veto on the work of the rest of us.
The question comes down to balance. You can overdo anything. And there are several kind of costs to consider: money of course, but enthusiasm and good will too. Thanks to the intervening years of development some effects can be had for much less (in constant dollars) than they could for the Apollo program. Enthusiasm seems harder to come by, for pretty much anything. A certain decadence set in in society, and NASA turned rather sclerotic. Private rockets pack a lot more enthusiasm now.
If you argue that the Artemis program lacks vision--that we're just doing what our ancestors did, just a little bigger; a little larger pyramid this time--I admit there's justice to the argument.
If you complain that it's inefficient to try to loft people instead of robots--granted.
If you complain that the Constitution doesn't mandate research spending like this--well, it doesn't mandate poverty spending either. And several decades of the latter have shown some stubborn problems with poverty elimination and a moral hazard or two as well--the programs are not an unmitigated good.
You could argue that private firms should take up the torch of space travel. I like the idea, though we have a tragedy of the commons problem already.
Where should the balance be--this year? I don't know. Existential problems, such as war or overwhelming debt, may demand cuts to the bone and beyond. We don't have a good track record of facing up to problems and making hard decisions either.
Nor do I know on what scales you weigh conflicting desires: smaller classes or more to teach about?
I do know that if I had funding authority, I'd want to keep trying to explore.
Even with that, autofocus is painfully slow.
He was a thief, and helped himself to what was in the moneybag. How did John know? Matthew, a tax collector, might have spotted small discrepancies easily enough, and told Jesus, and John, close to Jesus, heard of it. Was Judas afraid of exposure, unwilling to repent?
I've read it proposed that Judas, knowing Jesus' power, wanted Him to quit dilly-dallying and use that power and popularity, and so tried to force Jesus' hand. It didn't work the way Judas hoped, hence his despairing not-quite-repentance. It's quite plausible, but not supported by the texts.
Or perhaps he was jaded with miracles. Many others saw the same miracles and merely got angrier with Jesus, and not at all interested in following Him. Jesus had said some things that would be really hard for a good Jew to listen to ("eat my flesh"), and maybe Judas was wondering if Jesus was really good. We're told that the disciples, when on mission, were also doing miracles--perhaps Judas did some miraculous healings too. People are really good at forgetting inconvenient things, but that would be a doozy to try to forget.
Or perhaps he was sloppy and the devil slowly took hold of him.
Or perhaps his motives were a mix of all of the above.
I heard it asked if Judas had a choice; if the prophecy meant that somebody had to betray Christ. I think that's a bit backwards. If Judas had chosen otherwise, the prophets would have been told something else to say.
It's been claimed that Peter is Everyman, standing in for us all, denying Christ through fear and surprise. But so is Judas, betraying Christ and perhaps not entirely sure why. And so is Thomas, doubting the testimony. And so is John, loved by Christ.
That would certainly explain the mob that tried to kill Thomas earlier.
Following the incident, Thomas Cooper reportedly confessed, alleging that Morris was killed through traditional means. He claimed that food and alcohol consumed at the gold mining site were poisoned through witchcraft. He also alleged that others were involved but has not disclosed their identities.Authorities say investigations into the matter are ongoing.
There's a picture of a partly destroyed house that Thomas was hiding in. I rarely saw palm-branch roofs--they weren't legal. Crowded villages tended to have one house set the rest on fire, so corrugated metal or asbestos roofing was mandated.
I wonder when during the various proceedings the confession happened. I'd bet it was before the authorities rescued him.
Grafting is weird -- who thought of it? How could you guess you weren't going to just kill the scion?
People started doing it somewhere between the Middle East and China, and it slowly spread from those places. Apparently more observant people noticed naturally occurring "inosculation" where branches or roots grow together on contact. I've not seen this with branches, but I have with tree roots -- I just never made the connection. Somebody did, played around with the process, and came up with other possibilities.
Lots of other possibilities.
The city then expanded bus service, including an in-town only route, which I have used twice. Once again, I wondered: how much was that subsidized?
Budget shortfalls are bringing a lot into public view. Last year Metro Bus+Paratransit had 113,951 riders on this town's lines. Counting weekends as a single day, that comes to about 9 riders per bus run. That's more than I expected, based on what I see through the windows, but OK. To be clear, there are two circulator lines, and one which links to Madison downtown. I just assumed everybody rode the circulator.
The contract with Metro this year is for 2.04 million. That's about 18 dollars per ride, all lines included. Fares were about 2 bucks (and there is some state aid, but that doesn't reduce the cost per ride, just changes who pays), so the city itself subsidizes 600,000 -- a bit over 5 bucks a ride.
Madison Metro got itself a reputation for exploitive contracts with the suburbs, but 18 dollars a ride? You'd have to put 2 people on every seat to make 2 dollar fares alone pay for the contract.
For the in-city short hops, a taxi costs less than the real price for the bus ride. I wasn't expecting that.
This year one of the bulbs started sprouting early after the winter-over, so my wife potted it and set it up in the kitchen window. (We don't get a lot of direct sunlight in the house.)
It grew nicely, and started to flower.
I spent some time emptying cabinets trying to find the dead mouse until I realized where the smell was actually coming from. Turns out the voodoo lily is related to the infamous titan arum.
It is now in the garage with a plastic bag over it to keep it warm. When it is done blossoming it can come back inside, or if the weather warms up return to the deck...
One could quote Dirac on learning that Oppenheimer wrote poetry:
I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say ... something that everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand.
That's probably not being entirely fair to Oppenheimer, though it may depend on which poems Dirac was thinking of. (I don't think my wife would be thrilled to receive such an Epithalamion.)
But in the general case Dirac was wrong, the poetic ideal is to be understood.
"True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd; Something whose truth convinced at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind."
True, in the sciences and in math precision is vital—a statement should mean one thing only, while in poetry a phrase can stand for or allude to many things—preferably compactly, memorably, beautifully, and rhythmically. "In size, a node; in swing, more anti."
Dirac was convinced of the importance of beauty in physics, that the clumsy expression of the details of reality could be underpinned by simple and beautiful equations.
The language will be unfamiliar to many, but surely this is also a kind of poetry too.
(And it's better poetry than when we try our hands at more traditional versions.)
France had loaned us money for the Revolutionary War. In 1793 we found it inexpedient to keep paying (Louis was dead, and we were having trouble with the Brits), and the French Directorate got a bit upset with us and let loose privateers to seize ships. With customary brilliance Congress had sold off the last warships.
The Brits had us over a barrel--they had a bigger navy and were at war with France (and seizing some of our ships trading with France too) -- and the resulting Jay treaty left us nominally sort-of anti-French (not popularly, though).
We wound up losing about 2000 merchant ships by the time things wound down.
No declaration of war (the Supreme Court said that was OK) -- that set a bit of precedent. It made sense not to go all out; all we wanted to do was shoot up their corsairs until they quit bothering us. And get reimbursed for our loses, which didn't happen.
It's a trivial difference, and both readings make sense and neither changes anything about the thrust of the passage.
But the image of "those who dwell in heaven" is different between the two. With the "that is, those who dwell in heaven" reading, all those in heaven have the Spirit of God within them, and are also a kind of tabernacle and a kind of incarnation.
Catholic and Orthodox devotions refer to the Virgin Mary as the tabernacle--the place where God is/was staying. Some call her the first of the new tabernacles. Seems reasonable.
I, of course, did not remember the man's name -- Troy Hurtubise -- nor whether it was actually ever tested yes, sort of. The grizzly was afraid of it and the Kodiak bear's trainer wouldn't let the other trial continue.
Check out that wikipedia page: he invented several things, including a fireproof paste, a nominally bulletproof exoskeleton for soldiers, and "angel light" for making things transparent (I hope I may be forgiven being more than a smidgeon dubious). He died in a fire from a traffic collision with a gasoline truck.
we conducted a 31-question survey of modern knappers ... A variety of injuries (lacerations, punctures, aches, etc.) can occur on nearly any part of the body. The severity of injury sustained by some of our participants is shocking, and nearly one-quarter of respondents reported having sought or received professional medical attention
"Recommended protective gear, which modern knappers use to varying extents, includes gloves, leather lap pads, leather or rubber hand pads, and eye goggles"
Using leather protective gear suggests that somebody has done a bit of successful hunting already.
When asked what he would do if he got a knapped flake in his eye, Ishi indicated that he would “pull down his lower eyelid with the left forefinger, being careful not to blink or rub the lid. Then he bent over, looking at the ground and gave himself a tremendous thump on the crown of the head with the right hand”
Just in case you were looking for a new hobby. Or were trying to write a Robinson Crusoe story of your own.
Found via this article about bow and arrows in the Americas. With dating material so scarce, perhaps they have the first appearance of it (1400 years ago) wrong--maybe it appeared in the south first.
One of the ingredients is "Malted Barely Flour." OK...
The label says a loaf provides 17 serving sizes. Loaves consistently have 15 slices of bread, including the heels.
The loaf is listed as 1 lb. The kitchen scale says 1 lb 3 oz.
I'm not complaining, but has anybody looked at what they are advertising on their label?
Anyhow, the nutrition scaling factor is 1.34.
Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, has set His seal.” 28 Therefore they said to Him, “What shall we do, so that we may work the works of God?” 29 Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” 30 So they said to Him, “What then do You do for a sign, so that we may see, and believe You? What work do You perform? 31 Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.’”
"What then do You do for a sign?" In light of what happened just the day before, that's an odd question. "Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness" Hint hint hint.
"You just gave us ordinary bread and fish. We want a jazzier miracle."
But it is very interesting that a) the Chinese see benefits in charity which they didn't a few years ago or b) the Chinese government sees benefits in appearing to be charitable. Or perhaps both.
Hmm. I'm not fond of jello numbers. Alliance says 73% of Pakistanis donate money and 16% volunteer while 42% say "they are unable to donate to charitable causes due to financial constraints." Maybe they give to their neighbors (as required by Islam) and don't consider that "charitable cause." The WGR says 51% give directly.
The WGR says 61% of the US population donate and 28% volunteer, and only 28% give directly to people in need. Nigeria has 89% donating, 69% doing so directly, and has 76% volunteering.
The "UK ranked 64th most generous country".
I'm not sure where the data for all this comes from, and what the denominators are (in Nigeria they use "working age people" for the volunteering rate), so I suspect some fuzziness and some apples to pears comparisons. But at some level, in most places, people are helping neighbors and even strangers.
Why Pakistan? It considers itself the "land of the pure", devoted to Islam; and one of the pillars of Islam is Zakat: alms giving. Apparently they take it fairly seriously: 1.64% of income (.75% directly) vs 0.97% (.26% directly) in the US.
One should revisit these things now and then, and not take the solution as "good for all time." There's a pair of buses now you can take to get to Aurora, the commuter trains run every hour until late, and the intercity bus leaves from close to Union Station, so you can skip the O'Hare link. Which is probably a good thing, especially when not at peak ridership times.
We visited an Illinois park with a little museum attached, which included a reconstruction of the interior of one of the cabins, with lots of original artifacts.
The cabin had been in use for a century, and undergone some expansion and remodeling and refinishing. Which snapshot do you use to represent its history?
With computerized displays alongside it (all the "cool kids" use them), why not all of them? Pick a year range and show what it looked like then. Maybe even animate them. If you wanted to be really wild you could let a camera take a picture of your face and have yourself among the avatars inhabiting the house. But a camera is one more thing to break, of course.
I'd think you could do this fairly inexpensively these days with the new AI drawing systems – I hear they've even starting getting the number of fingers right. It might help make it easier to understand that everybody had to start small, and simple, and rough. And a lot of the first changes were utilitarian.
When monotheism arrives, most of the sacred sites are swept away, and those that remain are, as it were, baptized into meaning as part of the monotheism. The landscape is cleaned and emptied, to some degree dis-enchanted, certainly somewhat exorcised.
If the monotheism fades, what new demons come to fill that now-empty space?
I'd bet that you couldn't use a Taylor series to calculate it – maybe locally, but nothing like the famous $1 + x/1 + x^2/2! + x^3/3! ...$.
Suppose you approximated it with longer and longer polynomials. Name the polynomial that fits the first $N$ primes ${}_{N}\Pi(x)$ (with ${}_{N}\Pi(k) = p_k$; the k'th prime, with k less or equal to $N$), and the coefficient of the $x^j$ term call ${}_{N}c_j$.<\p>
As $N$ increases, and the new polynomial fits more and more primes, do the coefficients converge? The first (the constant term of the polynomial) ${}_Nc_0$ is always $1$. How about the second ${}_Nc_1$ (coefficient of $x$) and third ${}_Nc_2$ (coefficient of $x^2$)? (By the construction of these, the polynomial to fit $N$ primes will only have $N+1$ coefficients.)
It won't come as a great surprise to see that they don't seem to converge. The polynomials resulting from fitting the first 30 primes gives this for the behavior of those two coefficients. They look like they're about to blow up.
But its not that simple. Expand the graph to include the first 50 polynomial second and third coefficients, and they switch directions and start to blow up the other way. You see that the deviation that looked so large in the plot above is invisibly small in the one below.
Not a big surprise – we didn't expect that the magic $\Pi(x)$ function to find all the primes was going to be simple to approximate. After all, the magic function has to be extremely "jumpy" and polynomials are nice and smooth. But the variation is certainly dramatic.
Of course this isn't entirely fair – trying to fit polynomials to points is famously ugly and unstable. But this is pretty dramatic.
UPDATE: If you were wondering if I was plotting round-off error, the answer is no. I did the calculations using pari/gp 2.13.3, and only turned the integer rational numbers into floating point at the printing step. If you are curious, I include the script below:
Top = 50
coeffs=matrix(Top, Top)
for(N=2, Top, \
target=primes(N) - vector(N, k, 1); \
arr = matrix(N, N, i, j, i^j); \
co = (1/arr)*target~; \
for(i=1, N, coeffs[N,i] = co[i];););
\\
for(i=1,Top,\
for(j=1, Top, print1(1.*coeffs[j,i],","););print(" ");)
I'd thought it was a Roman thing, but apparently he knew a bit of the local custom.
After mentally squirming a bit, I moved on to other tasks of the day -- and ran across "The dean of the Episcopal cathedral in Pittsburgh" shoplifted $1000 worth of baseball cards from Walmart.
In light of eternity many things we're fascinated with are foolish, but even by ordinary light: he's 42 and "Very Reverend"; is fascination with children's toys seemly?
"For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales!"
Perhaps the "hunger and thirst for righteousness" is really very common, but we go hunting for it in the wrong places: Do-it-yourself frameworks (If I do X, Y, and not Z I'm good), excuses, or persuading (or intimidating) other people into affirming you.
All instead of wanting real righteousness and finding the One who can make it right.
Well, minivans are scarcer and pricier, and a pickup doesn't match our main use cases. So if one or both of the drivers have a grumpy back, an SUV is quite a bit easier to get in and out of than a sedan. Sort of like those "old people's" big sedans with soft suspensions. I get it now... and we did, a compact SUV.
I've no objection to -- in fact it seems fine -- a pastor or other leader joining in some silly and perhaps slightly humiliating play: e.g. slide down into a tub of jello just as the kids are doing.
The dunk tank (or pie throwing) isn't the same. Somebody is humiliating another. Participation is voluntary, yes, but the ball thrower is acting against the dunkee. All in fun? Maybe. I still don't like it.
My record at prediction isn't good, so don't take this as prophecy, but at a guess, since politics is the art of the possible and Iran's mullahs invested the IRCG with a lot of their enforcement power, then if there is "regime change" the IRCG will play some role. Who has the arms and organization to stamp them out?
That would imply that the new government wouldn't be entirely satisfactory to us, since it would include a faction that still wants regional domination (and maybe to "immanentize the eschaton" too), and not be altogether stable either.
That's almost certainly still better than the previous situation. We can't command nice clear-cut victories and transformations all the time; or even most of the time. Even World War II -- we had lots of boots on the ground and "unconditional surrenders," and we still had to make some very messy compromises at the end of it: not least with the USSR, but also with the Germans and Japanese.
I sometimes think it's safer to fight for interests rather than ideals. Interests you can compromise, if the matter is not existential: "We need X but the price is too high so we'll settle for Y, at least for the next decade"; but ideals sometimes demand more dedication.
Unfortunately I am as wise as before; these don't map into categories I use.
At least it is clear that when one is told to "keep" the testimonies and statutes, the testimonies -- things God said that aren't commands -- are as important to remember as the rules.
I think it rises from the denial that there's a human nature – physical, mental, spiritual. The way they define things, and people, is by their actions. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck – nevermind if it needs batteries.
If you define humanity by the things a person does rather than some essence or nature, inequalities of ability are a problem for you. The world's economies define human worth by economic value added, but there's no reason for us to give assent to that. We know better (I hope).
There are normal differences in people, e.g. skin color. There are also abnormal differences, e.g. skin color (albinism). It's normal to have 5 digits on each limb, and rare indeed for more than 5 not to be a defect.
The Salisbury Organist goes to old country churches to play their organs. Not infrequently a note will be bad or the machine slightly out of tune – and you wouldn't be able to tell because he picks the music to fit the organ.
If you don't have a right foot, walking is more of an accomplishment than it is for a healthy youngster. If we flatten everything to "difference" you lose that extra accomplishment.
Plenty of things are legitimately just "difference": including a lot of the skills. Just because it isn't always easy to agree on the names of things that are human essence doesn't mean they aren't real.
We seem to have a hunger to oversimplify. A "definition by action" is very useful (especially in mathematics), while a "definition by essence" is also important in determining purposes – like what a government is actually for. If we don't know what the essence of human-ness is, how do we know what human flourishing is? Keep both approaches, but in tension with each other.
Imagine yourself in one of those 50-minute classes. The now-year-old you would be bored silly by the material, and frantically trying to recall the names of the classmates around you.
Now imagine that 17-year-old you suddenly has the now-year-old you's mind and memories. You have 45 minutes – 5 to persuade the teacher to let you speak, and 40 to address your friends (aka captive audience). What do you say?
"Buy Microsoft" is pretty trivial advice. What do they need to hear? Can you warn them, inspire them, encourage them?
Would any of it do any good? Maybe just the apology...
It might be fun to guess how your friends might answer. Everybody at a table secretly writes what they would do, and then everybody guesses who wrote what.
A different video said use 4 clamps. I'm using 3 large ones and about 20 small ones, and am going to wait overnight for for the felt seal to "relax" into its new length before I try to glue it on. In the meantime I'll get a few more strong spring clamps (they'll also be good in wood work, so won't be a waste) before I start.
(*) Not with hard evidence, just with "It's obvious that they would." And it is obvious that they'd want to try, but I'm not expert on how supply, command, and control would work on a decades-long insertion. It's probably way cheaper to fund existing networks than to create your own; though you lose the "control" part.
On the other hand, faculty and researchers at the Michigan Technological University (MTU) School of Forestry and Wood Products have found that the Project ELF’s antenna grid makes the trees grow faster. MTU foresters have been studying the effects ever since the system became operational ten years ago.
The forester's final report says "subtle EM effect to the cambial and stemwood growth of some tree species but not to any other parameter". They claimed a relationship between "diameter growth and magnetic flux density" for aspen and red maple, and "annual height growth and magnetic flux density" for red pine.
That looked like an increase when the field was O(2-3mG), dropping off to "normal" for higher exposures. My first guess when seeing something that only effects a few species is a "look-elsewhere effect", but there's enough similarity that maybe it's worth looking at in more detail. I wonder what the conductivity of the sap is in the different species.
Squirrel!
Yes, I know there can be confounding factors, like distance from a cleared area (they look at that) or herbicides
I took a course in linguistics as an undergrad. Our teacher assured us that there were no primitive languages. You could talk philosophy in any language. If you had to make up and define new words, that was always possible. I gather he didn't care for Sapir-Whorf, weak or strong.
I didn't attempt to prove him wrong – that's too many languages to learn. It seemed plausible, people being people everywhere. You can't talk about nuclear physics without words for nucleus, but you can explain what those are, just as you can teach the relevant math. To an adult, anyway.
But. Poverty of language makes it harder to communicate some things. If you have leisure, that doesn't matter, but when you don't have time to define nuances that aren't part of a common language heritage, you've got problems.
That matters a lot for slogans, which we often use as a shorthand for thought.
Step back from individual words and think of phrases, or words that have changed meanings. If a culture has succeeded in framing a dispute in terms that admit only a handful of options, you can theoretically describe an alternative, but in practice it's not easy.
Though some people make it look easy. Maybe the most famous framing situation is the one when Pharisees and Saducees tried to get Jesus to take a side in a political quarrel about the legitimacy of Roman oppression – should they pay taxes to the Romans or not? Answer "Yes," and the average folks give up on Jesus, "No" and the Romans will kill him. Jesus was able to rephrase the problem in two sentences (and change the course of Western Civilization). You or I would have been struggling to be nuanced and wind up looking spineless, and disgusting everybody.
The language includes things taken for granted (denotation or connation), most of which most of us never think through. Who has the time to think through what we mean by "liberty" when the the kids need supper? We quote "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" but those invisible assumptions mean that John Adams would be startled at how we interpret the phrase. (Liberty: is it intrinsic, something granted, or something achieved? An addict is effectively a slave no matter what the law says. "Slave to one's appetites" is a real condition.)
Orwell went with a strong version of Sapir-Whorf: without appropriate words there are no concepts. But if you expand what you mean by language to include the cultural associations of words and phrases, and think in terms of average behavior, a weaker version seems to be true for populations – subject to the caveats that languages and associations(*) can be made to change, and one on one dialog can go anywhere the participants have the endurance for.
Insofar as slogans rule us, weak Sapir-Whorf seems true.
(*) E.g. Uncle Tom's Cabin changed the image and mental associations of "slave owner."
It's about Ojibwe hymn singers, who usually show up at wakes and funerals to sing Christian hymns in Ojibwe. Never heard of that before? Me either.
This is from 2000, so things may have changed. Most of the singers were older, and it wasn't clear then if youth would aspire to joining the singers, who held a position of respect in the community by their willingness to be there for others in this ritual. I know none of these people, though people I know might know somebody who knows.
Ancient Ojibwe traditions in music have the drum as a central (and spiritual) component. Songs typically have few words with much repetition and vocalisms, many are sacred, and many come from dreams. Catholic and Epicopalian missionaries judged that providing Christian hymns to them in their own language was essential for discipleship. They and gifted converts did their best. Some concepts don't have easy analogs in the other language – even "spirit" isn't simple, since the closest analog in Ojibwe seems to have a primary meaning of "mystery."
From the book:
The way the holy prophets went
The road that leads from banishment
The King's highway of holiness
I'll go, for all His paths are peace
Re-translated back into English from Ojibwe:
The way they were going, those who were wise
The little path that leads straight there
I, too, will go off on it
On the little path that is greatly pitied/blessed
The religious situation on the reservations is complicated: some are adamantly pagan/animist, some are Catholic, some Episcopalian, some various other denominations (Baptist, Pentacostal, etc), and some, to judge from the gang activity, have invested their faith in drugs and guns. Many looked on the hymns as impositions by the whites when they were introduced, and still do over a century later.
But in the meantime singing Ojibwe hymns a capella has become a tradition of its own, most especially among "those who pray" but recognized by the rest as well. So much so, indeed that the author cites:
When one Ojibwe man heard hymns at a ceremony honoring a new drum, for instance, he whispered his opinion that such "Christian" music was disrespectful to the drum. For this man, hymn singing stood in opposition to the other music of Ojibwe tradition in that hymns do not involve a drum. The irony of this particular interchange is also instructive. The drum in question was being initiated or welcomed into the community by entrusting it to the safekeeping and discretionary use of the White Earth singers.
The hymns are often sung very differently, though often the original European tune can be discerned, with much more stress on the individual syllables than either the tune or the lyrics as such. They are sung (not "performed") in a ritual, almost liturgical way, with a clear starting and ending hymn but much variation of songs and silences in between.
The author seemed most interested in the things that made the hymn singing specifically Ojibwe and traditional, and seemed to overlook a different aspect: the hymns are a way of saying two things at once: "This is our tribe's" and "We are also part of a bigger tribe."
The author (and apparently others) found no evidence that there was any intent to subvert the meaning of the hymns in any sort of anti-colonial push. Of course the mere fact that they were in Ojibwe during the era when the government was trying to suppress the language might have been a bit of push-back.
If the subject and its history sound interesting, by all means read it, but be prepared: it is painful to read. Not just the history part – plowing through sociological jargon was not fun at all. (Can you possibly say this in five words instead of a hundred words referencing two different other sociologists?) But his personal experiences and observations made it worth it for me.
And yes, one of the White Earth singers was non-native, but he lived like them and next to them, learned the language, and met the standards of hospitality and respect.
Self-reporting is both necessary and biasing--does your culture deprecate boasting about happiness or professing unhappiness?
And, of course, do we agree on what happiness consists in? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Everybody recognizes all these problems, except of course the reporters turning the press release into a story.
I regard myself as fairly phlegmatic (especially when I have a head cold, but never mind that for now). I'm rarely ecstatic. I'm rarely depressed. How does a survey compare that with someone with bigger highs and lows?
I gather that these kinds of disposition are largely hereditary. I can easily imagine a survey giving radically different results on different temperaments. Suppose one ethnicity trends more choleric in one small country and a different one more phlegmatic in another... Yeah. Double whammy--the countries would have different average reactions to the survey and a different culture too, because of the differences.
My usual association with the word "contentment" is rest, but busy-ness can be contented too. Even driving, of which I am not excessively fond (I'd rather just be there without the intervening concentration and staving off chaos), can have a contented feeling when all is going well. And arriving can have a contentment, even happiness, of its own. It depends on what the journey's for.
According the the BBC, he gave Epstein confidential trade reports from his visits to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vietnam. That could be very useful to investors, or negotiators. I wonder if details about who got the info wound up in the files. I'd guess that there's nothing actually actionable, and Andrew will skate. And after 15,16 years the purchasers might not even be in power anymore.
The rest of us stoutly denied touching the instrument, but there it was, set for 72 instead of 69.
It looks like nobody was lying. Last night the thing decided that spontaneously shifting its setting wasn't good enough and what it really needed to do to get a little attention was to leave the control circuit open permanently.
That was at 2AM. It has departed the wall to live in an HVAC repairman's barrel of junk, and my wallet is lighter. But at least the house is warm again--it was 17 outside and blustery.
Every now and then the moment requires something different.
Sometimes one longs to invoke Hesychia, the muse(*) of silence and tranquility.
(*)I gave her a promotion.
Another aspect came to mind today. Genesis said and Jesus emphasized that "the two become one flesh." I'm a bit protective of my flesh, and I don't want my internal organs exposed to the day and the inspection of outsiders. (Surgery is a big deal!) It interferes with the mutual operations of the organs, and leaves the self in an inharmonious state, not an organic whole. If two are one flesh, an outsider likewise leaves their "one flesh" in an inharmonious condition, not a unified whole.
I've heard it claimed that a couple is "one flesh" in their children, which is no doubt true in some sense, but not, I think, the main meaning. Paul wasn't writing about having children with prostitutes.
I was told that the translation is traditional, but poor -- there are two words for dog and this is the one "kynarion" that means puppy, as opposed to "kyon" (as used in Revelation 22:15) that means "dog" in a perjorative sense. The Mark passage reads a little differently with that translation:
it is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the puppies. But she answered and said to Him, "Yes, Lord, but even the puppies under the table feed on the children's crumbs"
You get the picture, right? Kids feeding the pet dog under the table? It's a lot less harsh.
I gather (same source) that some preachers want to imagine that Jesus learned a valuable lesson about racism from the woman's faith, i.e. Gentiles are just as good as Jews.
Well, there's an extended story that Mark tells earlier, from Mark 4:35-5:43. Jesus tells His disciples to head to the other side of the lake. A storm scares them half to death and nigh sinks the boat. On the other side they meet a demon-possessed pagan, whom Jesus exorcises and sends home with the mission to tell everyone about what God did for him. AFAIK, this is the first apostle whom Jesus commissioned. Jesus cared enough about this (pagan) man and his subsequent mission that travel, scaring His (jewish) disciples silly, the fate of a herd of pigs, and even the temporary death of Jairus' (jewish) daughter were secondary.
That sounds like He had very different priorities than I would have, but they're certainly not bigoted.
It's the "6 degrees of separation" thing, just applied to a particular man.
Just for fun, can we extend this to Epstein? He's number 0, and just for fun assign 0 to Maxwell too.
But what do we mean by connection? Having spent time with him or in his parties, or having had professional dealings with him? Maybe both? His guards or his chef would have "Null" for social connections and "1" for professional. Trump and Clinton have a "1" for social connections; dunno about professional ones. In fact, never mind the professional connections, it's boring.
Do I need to say that I'm not going to be in the lists? I don't run in "connected" circles. But pretty much everybody in the House and Senate is either a 1 or 2: knew him or knew someone who did. The people who know/work with them in turn are 2's or 3's in social connections. The next ring out will be the state legislators and such.
So if you know a state legislator (a former one was in a Bible class with me), you might have an Epstein number of 5 or so. Of course that's attenuated enough to be pretty meaningless too.
Me? Well, theorists like Hawking (a "1"; Epstein seems to have liked to hang out with scientists) tended to hang out with theorists, but the top guys do meet sometimes, so I'm probably at least a 5, maybe a 4. I don't feel particularly tainted by such a distant association.
Pick a figure or two you don't like. How connected are you to them?
It seems trivial to say that the "well-connected" will be have more connections to each other than to the rest of us, but the rest of us group into clusters too. I had one set of connections at the university, and a different set at church. At separations of less than about 3, there was pretty much no overlap.
Some of those clusters map onto tribes, and some of the tribes are hostile, but even so there are still connections. If your church is helping some of the poor, members will be establishing relationships with them (I hope), and have less separation from the underclasses than, say, members of the math department will have with them.
Connections can be curious. How is O'Hare airport connected to Al Capone? If you don't know…
UPDATE: Closer than I thought! Lisa Randall spent some time in the CDF control room. IIRC the accelerator was down and so we talked a bit about what I was reading to pass the time: Augustine's Confessions. This was before 2008, so I doubt that there would have been any.
love ... without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you
The prayer isn't gospel, of course, but since God is love, if we don't have love we, that far, do not fully have God in our life. Which is like not having life in our life.
We kid ourselves about love a lot, of course, thinking we're better at it than we really are, and mistaking sexual attraction and inoffensive habits for the deeper thing.
How much of what I did today was infused with "willing the good of another"? Was all the rest "wood, hay, and stubble"?
I have the usual lasers and lenses, diffraction gratings and polarizing filters, and this year I can do a double-slit demonstration too. And I can do some electrostatics demonstrations this year, not just the usual magnetic field demos.
A kids' favorite is the Newton's cradle with 1 pound steel balls. It is a bit too battered to be a nice momentum/energy demo (it doesn't keep clacking back and forth for very long), but with bits of paper in the middle there's a nice connection to meteors. Unfortunately the fishing line breaks a lot on that one and the younger kids want to make the balls flail around, so it needs extra supervision.
This year I got a cheap geiger counter, and wonder if some simple demonstrations of radioactivity are in order. Pro: they may not see this again until college, if then. Con: some people freak out easily and fear is contagious. But then people seem OK with the snake demo crowd, so maybe that's OK.
Since I'm alone at the table I have to supervise all the demonstration gear and do the spiel for the current demo at the same time. That's another limit on what I can do.
I've a uranium glass plate that makes the counter sing, but not much else. I could open up a smoke detector (I'm not such a fool as to try to get the source out of the well, though), but I'd probably get in trouble for that unless I posted it. The counter's not sensitive enough to pick up potassium chloride pills, much less bananas. The old thorium lantern mantles haven't been made for years. Any inexpensive suggestions? I can order some uranium ore, but I've already got uranium in the plate.
What would you have gone for? This is indoors, so nothing explosive or flammable, and the age range is 4 to 11 years or so.
A daughter generally does rocks and minerals at a different table. A rocket club shows some of their rockets but doesn't launch anything. A pity. Outdoors we could tether a rocket to wrap around a bar, or try a pinwheel.
I'm just not part of our harmless ritual of belonging: fans rooting for their team.
I've been like that all my life. It's probably a deficit of character somehow. It's not at though I spend the time with more productive pursuits -- I manage to waste time other, generally less social, ways.
It certainly cuts down on the small-talk possibilities.
(*) My knees say playing baseball is much less likely than it used to be, and once I was out of school and away from PE, it was improbable even then.
UPDATE: For anyone looking back on this years from now, wondering what brought the subject up, the Super Bowl was a few days ago and the Winter Olympics is still on.
Never mind petty details about the density and viscosity of cash. He wants to swim in it because other people value it -- not because of its beauty or sensual pleasure. Gold can be pretty, but piles of it aren't terribly aesthetic, though perhaps Smaug might see it so.
Which makes the pleasure rather second-order; not that it is pleasant in itself but it's pleasant because of what other people think about it. You don't enjoy it directly.
One first-order pleasure is admiring the beauty of the refracting crystals in the snow as your headlights shine on them as you drive. Not that I want to swim in the snow, but it makes me happier to look at it, no matter what Vogue says about this year's flake styles.
That's not to say that "first order" is better. Some pleasures are greater when shared, and you can have joy in the pleasure someone you love takes in a gift -- child with a new puppy?
But ... Arm candy or a friend? Caviar or red beans and rice? Up until the xrays burned out my taste buds, I could truthfully claim that no restaurant made the latter dish as well as my mother did, or my wife, or even me.
The zombie is a live body but dead mind and spirit. It looks alive, but isn't really.
Suppose one has a live body and live mind but dead spirit?
What could kill the spirit, though? Christians will probably see where I'm going with this; think of yourself in a world of living dead, with the fear that you are one of them yourself -- or can be one. Or were one.
"Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works." — Robert Farrar Capon
"Apocolypse" means "unveiling", so the zombie apocolypse means the revealing of a world of living dead.
What spiritual challenges and temptations do you expect to face? Not the easy ones, the weaknesses you don't like to think about.
How do you want to respond to them?
How can you train for that response?
I'm not thinking about plotting out dialog. Jesus deprecated that. Explaining the hope that is in you isn't what I'm talking about either.
When I remember some of the things I have faced and try to come up with exercises to train my reactions to try to do better next time, two things come quickly to mind. Some of those old stories about what saints did don't sound quite so outlandish, and "Lead us not into temptation". I can only do so much.
The Beatific Vision -- seeing God as we've never seen Him before -- is almost by definition greater than anything we see in the world.
And yet I think the wording of the hymn isn't quite right. I think the better we see God, the better we see Him in everything else as well. "Strangely dim" -- but only relatively so.
To whom do the privateers owe primary allegiance? Their organization or the country for whom they are fighting? With just a smidgeon of corruption and media connivance (you tell me if that exists in this country) it wouldn't be hard for a cartel to get approval and funding to attack their rivals.
Even with an organization with less disreputable initial aims than a cartel, mission creep can turn it into a public menace.
Going further, what would privateering look like in an era of drones? Drones can be carried and controlled in a truck as easily as in a boat--probably more so. Inconvenient prosecutors or judges might have to hide. Organizations do go rogue sometimes.
And as the cited Sal Mercogliano video notes, it isn't as though the US has a small navy anymore: 2nd largest in the world (Sal says 1st, but that's the Chinese). Recent events show that bureaucracies don't have to slow it down that much.
The law might have one useful side effect--it could force Congress to decide what sort of relationship we have with hostile non-state armed organizations. Is it a war, or something else--and when do we know we've won?
“If automation hollows out jobs, what will people do all day that feels meaningful?”Simple, he responded: They will do what humans have done since time immemorial, which is look to faith for answers and a sense of purpose.
I'm not persuaded that AI will be as disruptive as advertised. Much of the potential danger assumes that people will decide to rely on it and put it in control of things. But people have agency, and sometimes they even learn from mistakes.
But for the moment assume that it will be seriously disruptive. It's plausible that people, in turmoil and loss, will look to religion.
But which religion? Last century saw the rise of horrifyingly destructive cults--two of which demanded bloody world war to put down, and a third which demanded human sacrifices on a scale never seen before and is still active.
I would have written the last as "apart from the Law sin is paralyzed," but it turns out God didn't invite me to write a letter to the Romans, so take my preferences for what they're worth.
Anyhow, Paul uses death in several different ways here, requiring careful reading, hence some of the discussion.
One image that covers some of the description for me is that of a little child, too young to understand the rules, but not too young not to want to break them once found. Parents will know what I'm talking about.
