Rebane's Ruminations

Happy Fourth, if you can (redux and up a notch)

George Rebane

On this year’s Fourth our beloved land is in more disarray than in my living memory, and that’s a fer piece in anyone’s book.  Half the country does not know where we have been, what we have done, nor shares a common vision of our future.  These dark clouds were already gathering a year ago during which some prescient words were recorded in these pages (here).

Yet those of us who hold dear what has been and continues to be the America we love will join today in a special celebration of our birthday.  And we do this with the pledge that we with our families and friends will always keep this day a sacrosanct observance, even in the face of sinister forces that now work to erase the greatest country built by people of all races, creeds, and backgrounds joined together.  May God continue to bless the United States of America.

Hunker Down Diary – 23may20

George Rebane

Competition is the only cure for incompetence.

On this Memorial Day weekend today is HD77 for Jo Ann and me.  Even though we have not left the county, we have taken a number of ‘essential’ trips to the grocery, nursery, and hardware store.  We have also had a number of essential dinners with family and local friends, and continue our Facetime cocktail hours.  Jo Ann has her farm planted for this year, and everything appears to be on track for a bountiful summer and fall.  I overdid it on splitting firewood; we now have enough to finish out this season and much of next season.  Both of us keep attending Zoomed meetings of the various organizations in which we are active.

As political animals, we maintain ferocious reading and writing schedules.  For better or worse (currently still worse), we have not touched our portfolio during the recent wild dip and roller coaster recovery.  So far so good.  I am having a great time rummaging around the technical sides of epidemic science and management.  Readers know my thoughts on the amount and kind of ‘science’ that has been brought to bear on this coronavirus pandemic here in America and also in other developed countries.  As more and more people begin to understand and admit, there is little or no science that is evident in the measurement and/or management of this disease (you heard it first here two months ago).  The whole C19 affair is a dreadful self-inflicted farce that continues to play out in the healthcare and economic sectors.

The record of pronouncements by both our national and state healthcare professionals, and political leaders illustrate a growing tsunami of contradictory statements regaling us with predictions, prescriptions, policies, and prohibitions which range between the comical and insane.  Basically, no one knows anything definitive about how/what to measure that can be used to track and support a coherent set of response policies.  Everyone is flying by the seat of their pants under the rubric, repeated with the greatest gravitas, that ‘we will be guided by science and not politics’.  Given the bevy of brown numbers that continue to flow from universities and alphabet-soup agencies, the real national and state responses long ago succumbed to exactly the opposite guidance – what little science there is about dealing with the coronavirus, it doesn’t have a chance.  In the meantime, people are revolting against the lockdowns and betting on herd immunity until a vaccine makes its debut from the wings.  Actually, it’s only half the people who understand the real desolation that economic destitution brings, the other half don’t have a clue and believe in the tooth fairy, endless newly printed money, and the states’ national guards mobilized to work the farms, deliver the goods, and staff the grocery stores, until the all-clear is sounded by Drs Fauci and Brix.  (more here)

And to put a ribbon on it or add insult to injury, we here on Hind Tit Rd (aka Cement Hill Rd) suffered our second power outage in a week.  Don’t know what the boys and girls at PG&E are doing, but they ain’t doing it right.  I again draw your kind attention to my above tagline.

C19 - a rose by any other name would …

‘For yourself, never seek justice, only mercy.’ Coach Dick Beedy

George Rebane

The pathogen causing today’s worldwide pandemic is referred to by many labels – novel coronavirus, Covid-19, 2019-nCoV, SARS-CoV-2, Wuhan virus, CCP virus, China virus, … .  The politically correct don’t want to attach a “stigmatizing” name to anything that may gore the reputation of one of their champions in today’s ongoing ideological narrative that propagandizes and defends their vision of a brave new world, so the WHO selected Covid-19 as its official name to the virus.

My own penchant for labels favors those that have the fewest readily-available characters, eschewing all unnecessary delimiters (which are also characters), and that unambiguously identify that which is labeled.  As a bleeding edge techie all my life, I’ve enjoyed the pleasure of giving new names to countless things just discovered, invented, developed, … that never had a name, let alone a short spiffy name or a distinguishing TLA (three letter acronym).

After reviewing the plethora of labels for our current dastardly ‘bug’, I said what the hell, and referred to it simply as C19 in these pages – writing or speaking elsewhere, I pick a more communicative label from the above list.  Nevertheless, I have been taken to task here by one of our more tightly-wound, assiduous intellects, and longtime readers with a technical background.  His point is not so much that RR readers would misunderstand, as it is that C19 doesn’t accurately and repeatedly focus blame on the country, ideology, and political party to blame for loosing this dreadful disease on the world, nor is it the technically correct label for the virus.

He has a point worth considering on the ‘blame’ component of his criticism – screw the technically correct part.  Since I am a dedicated anti-communist, anti-collectivist ideologue of established repute (I suspect it’s in my double-helix), I should take every opportunity to dun the dastardly sumbiches of the CCP when writing about C19.  After all, the CCP lays uncontested claim to operating history’s biggest murder machine on mankind, having killed hundreds of millions of people, and making life a misery for more hundreds of millions.

But then again, I’m also a somewhat lazy sumbich, especially when in the white heat of laying down some thoughts on the keyboard.  So for the time being at least, I will go on using C19 in these pages, and, without prejudice, continue suffering the subsequent slings and arrows that may still come my way.

Hunker Down Diary – 8apr20

George Rebane

Today is HD32 for the Rebanes.  Yesterday morning we strapped on our pitifully sparse PPE (masks and gloves) and went to our usual Safeway to replenish the larder – we brought home a ton of veggies, canned goodies, and fresh pieces of dead animals.  The store had only one door open through which the customers were being metered – there was no line to get in and the people density was low.  Nevertheless, shelves containing paper products, sanitary supplies, and staples like flour were empty.  The last was important to me since I’m a baker and have baked ALL of our bread for the last 23 years.

For such things the dictum still holds that shortages and empty shelves will be the order of the day until all closets in America are filled with what people fear most doing without.  Fortunately, we have practiced the full closet FIFO system since we first were married and immediately witnessed the buying panic in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis (people suddenly preparing for WW3).  Actually, I already came with that kind of household policy which was hardwired into me by my parents through the WW2 years and then more years in post-war DP camps.  It has served us well, and I recommend it to all families as do our Mormon brethren – when society churns, it’s good to stay at home until at least some of the smoke clears.

Anyway, we’ve been home doing all kinds of projects, continuing our organizational meetings online, having FaceTime cocktail hours with friends, and even venturing a couple of visits to a neighbor and our local daughter, both households carrying out equal hunker down policies.  I’ve also been busy pushing squigglies on various C19 analyses, another one which I will post today.  It’s interesting that RR’s commenter cohort could care less for anything quantitative or technical, but I take heart in all that through an extensive correspondence and telecons with STEM oriented friends and colleagues who are also squiggly savvy and share my criterion for what’s really required to understand the issues du jour.  Fun time.

On this same thread, I find myself revisiting the question as to why I continue to bother posting on socio-political topics and issues, especially since I have pretty much shot my wad on how this pilgrim views the world about all things considered.  Any reader who cares, has at his disposal my entire ontology.  The only answer to that puzzle that comes up is RR’s readership; I feel that they have become part of my greater circle, perhaps even my greater family whose ongoing presence with their insights, reports, opinions, … I get a measure if not a corroboration of my picture of the world’s goings on that I update continuously.  In any case, the jury’s still out.

More later?

Russ Steele (1939-2020) RIP

George Rebane

My dear friend Russ Steele died this morning in the loving arms of Ellen, his wife of 56 years.  Russ was taken by pancreatic cancer which he had been fighting for the past year.  The Steeles and Rebanes have been close friends since we moved here in 2002, having worked on various community projects together, frequently entertaining and travelling together and with friends, and, of course being ideological twins in the great partisan battles that have raged over these years in our county, state, and country.  Lieutenant Colonel Steele retired after 20 years in the Air Force as an EW officer on B-52s, and then moving to systems test planning staff.  After the Air Force, Russ joined a large aerospace company to manage a group doing R&D in advanced transportation electronics, and moved back to Nevada County where he was born.

Since retiring from aerospace, Russ has been very involved in the county’s efforts to support local economic development through expansion of our telecommunications and broadband access.  Russ and Ellen were also very active in Nevada County’s Friends of the Military.  The Steeles raised four daughters who eventually left Nevada County to live in the Sacramento area with their families.  Three years ago Russ and Ellen moved to Lincoln to be closer to family and healthcare services.  Russ continued his interest in and love for Nevada County through frequent visits and consultations with various county managers and regional business development organizations.  He was also a prolific author, contributing articles to local business magazines and writing a book on his years growing up in a small Idaho mining village.

Jo Ann and I will miss Russ’s penetrating insights and always ready sense of humor – he was a man of information and avoided daisy talk - above all he was a patriot and a gentleman.  Today an important and intimate part of our life is gone.  I am reminded of John Donne’s words made famous by Hemingway, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main…. Any man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Christmas 2019

Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.  Matthew 1:23

George Rebane

Another tumultuous year is ending with celebrations for peace and joy.  The Rebanes count themselves among the diminishing number of American Christians who still wish their family and friends, and RR readers of all persuasions a season of remembrance and reflection on what has been bestowed on this third planet, circling a modest star, making its way with billions of similar stars in a galaxy that populates this universe with uncounted trillions of other such galaxies.  Christmas still reminds many of us that we are among the blessed in our seeming insignificance.

Cancer Researcher at Work

George Rebane

It’s time for one of my infrequent Proud Grandpa sessions.  Granddaughter Elizabeth is a project lead doing cancer research at UCLA.  Her work continues in the fight against Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM), a particularly deadly form of brain cancer that took the life of our granddaughter and her cousin Ellen at the age of 14.  The research is part of her work toward a PhD in neurosciences.  Today she is at the Society for Neuro-oncology conference in Phoenix presenting her work, a project she actually started during her undergraduate studies, to the cancer research community.  The photo shows her with a storyboard illustrating her research and the published paper on which she is the lead author.

Elizabeth is part of our Northern Tribe from the Seattle area.  Today she lives in Westwood (home of UCLA) literally three blocks from the first apartment that Jo Ann and I rented after we married while still undergrads.  Elizabeth is the fifth in our family to get degrees from UCLA, and will be the second to earn her PhD from there.  Grandma and Papa (prenom de famille) couldn’t be prouder of this arrow into our future.

Scattershots – 16sep19 (updated 17sep19)

George Rebane

The Trump haters led by the NYT did their best to relaunch the smear campaign against Justice Kavanaugh.  The formerly prestigious newspaper continued to dig its journalistic grave by publishing a carefully constructed story of another sexual escapade the Justice was supposed to have participated in as an undergraduate, and then later had to ‘amend’ it in response to a public outcry for the truth.  Well, it turns out that in the process the NYT rolled another fake news honey wagon down the street, immediately onto which jumped about twelve leading Dem presidential candidates to start spreading its contents through the lamestream media.  Our moral high-ground progressives (witness also these pages) have decided to respond with their usual crickets.  It’s telling that even Nadler is not going to touch this one with a ten-foot ladle.

Fox News should review the grade school credentials of some of its news editors.  Tonight on Bret Bayer a map showing the latest Iran/Saudi crisis had Oman labeled as the UAE, and the entire Arabian Sea as the greatly expanded Persian Gulf.  Our criticisms of the post-Great Society disaster in educating America’s kids is confirmed daily in what we see and hear on the news.

[17sep19 update]  My main desktop computer died on Sunday morning.  And I mean died, like in DEAD – even its operating system Windows10 did not load, it just got to BIOS and went belly up.  The tech mavens at Quietech (my goto PC docs) diagnosed it as having a hardware failure that required ordering a replacement part from China which will take at least a week to arrive.  Having PCs since ‘Day One’, I have never experienced such a failure in over 40 years.  We always have a bunch of computers around the house, but losing my main brain left me somewhere between devastated and discombobulated (I think psychiatrists know the difference).  The emotional experience was/is an interesting episode, and very revealing about my dependencies.  The dearly departed and about to be resurrected is a very large and very fast Alienware laptop game computer that can juggle multi-million element matrices in a single bound (yes, I still spend time messing with such beasts).  Now Jo Ann has the only working Windows box left in the house; the rest of our laptops, pads, and phones are all Apple products – e.g. I’m typing this on my MacBook Pro which lives in the front room by a comfy couch.  My self-indulging response to all this is having another super-fast (AMD 8-core, 16 thread) Windows tower built that will be delivered with a new 32 inch high-res monitor which will join my formerly biggest 27-incher.  Both of us got addicted to two-monitor setups some years back, and having only one screen to work with is now downright stifling.  Anyway, that’s more than you wanted to know about my current emotional shock and functional deficit.

Scattershots - 5sep19

Trip report.  We’re now on the Rhine heading for Koblenz to view some historical fortifications.  On this trip we landed in Munich, and drove to Bad Worishofen for a big reunion with four German families we have known and visited for decades, and ate ourselves silly at different places in the foothills of the Alps.  Very interesting was that no one wanted to talk politics very much - a staple of German conversation.  Then we drove to Basel through Austria and Switzerland to catch our Viking river longship.  The trip down the Rhine has been wonderful, especially the tour of the actual battlegrounds of the little known Colmar salient (contemporaneously fought with the Battle of the Bulge and the campaign made famous by Audie Murphy).  The daylong walking tour of Strasbourg was almost a reminder of the march up the Bataan peninsula.  We’re again traveling with friends with whom we done this before.  So far we’ve been through four countries and will add Holland before coming home.

Dropout Derby - 15aug19 update

George Rebane

And now Hickenlooper has hit the silk.  The results gentlemen.

Memorial Day 2019

The price of liberty is never paid up,

payment for its maintenance is always due.

Earthshaking News – Cancer Cured?

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regularly scheduled KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 30 January 2019.  An edited version of this commentary appeared in the 2feb19 Union.]

Standby for the next tranche of earthshaking news.  You know, the kind of report that promises to make a big impact on the lives of each of us.  Well, there’s another one of these that has come out, but has yet to make a big splash in the headlines, which today are probably more interested in keeping the latest Trump/Pelosi brouhaha at a boil.

Remember the earthshaking news back in 1989 when a couple of scientists claimed to have cracked the code on cold fusion (here).  Fusion energy is the holy grail of humanity’s search for a clean and virtually limitless source of power to make our civilization hum without polluting the earth with fossil fuels residues and/or fission power catastrophes.  From our high school science class most of us remember that fission power is generated by splitting atoms which releases the desired energy, along with a bunch of deadly radiation and radioactive stuff that needs to be contained and then disposed of safely.  Today fission reactors around the world power everything from electric grids to big carriers and missile submarines.  The other bad part about fission reactors is that their operation must be constantly controlled lest they go into an unstable meltdown like the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

Fusion energy comes from hydrogen atoms being fused into the heavier helium atoms in an environment of extreme gravitational pressure and ten million-degree temperatures such as occur naturally in the cores of stars including our sun.  If for some reason the pressure is released or the temperature goes down, fusion stops instantly.  And the only bad byproduct of controlled fusion is some high energy neutrons that tend to corrode anything that attempts to contain the process.  Well, the cold fusion experiments ended as an embarrassing bust, and to date no one has made much progress on controlling ‘hot’ or thermonuclear fusion.  It’s turning out to be much more difficult to contain and harness on earth what goes on naturally all over the universe.  So the arrival of fusion power has yet to shake our world. (more here)

Now, get ready for today’s earth-shaker – seatbelts please.  Israeli scientists announce that they have a demonstrated a cure for cancer.  This ongoing development, to be completed “in a year’s time”, is reported in the Jerusalem Post and Forbes magazine.  The scientists work at Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd (AEBi), a pharmaceutical company located in Ness Ziona, Israel.  The reported cure is more than a bit mind-blowing since it can be targeted to attack all types of cancer cells.  And once it kills them, the cure is permanent, there will be no lurking cancer stem cells left that will later bloom into a full-blown cancer that is so common to the disease.

But that’s not all.  Using a multi-target toxin drug they named MuTaTo, AEBi reports that “Our cancer cure will be effective from day one, (the process) will last … a few weeks and will have no or minimal side-effects at a much lower cost than most other treatments on the market.” (more here)

So there you have it – the next promise of a real earth-shaker that will save the 1 in 5 men and the 1 in 6 women who will develop cancer during their lifetimes.  MuTaTo will then go into clinical testing and the usual bureaucratic obstacle course.  You can read more about it with the links posted on my website.  But overall and so far, what’s not to like about such uplifting news?

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

 

MIM’s first major 2019 concert

[Mr Nowlen, is a major mover in Northern California’s classical music community.  He is a longtime musician, educator, conductor, and senior staffer for several of the region's musical organizations and performing groups.  His activities range from teaching at UC Davis to Music in the Mountains here in Nevada County where he has been involved for years bringing and making music for us.  He also currently serves as MIM’s Artistic Director, and submitted this invitation for your kind consideration.]

Pete Nowlen

Happy New Year! 

I’m so looking forward to our first Music in the Mountains major concert of 2019, when we feature my good friend Maestro Leo Eylar and the California Youth Symphony for a fantastic matinee concert on Sunday March 10. You are going to go crazy for this amazing group of more than 100 young performers. (details and tickets here)

The California Youth Symphony is one America’s top youth orchestras. It was the first such orchestra to tour abroad in 1963, and continues to tour internationally every other year, performing in many of the world’s great venues. It is a past first prize winner of the International Youth and Music Festival Competition in Vienna.

Our March 10 performance includes works of Rachmaninoff, Chabrier and Strauss, and will particularly feature two amazing 16-year-old performers, pianist Catherine Huang and cellist Davis You.

Catherine will be featured in Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini as winner of CYS’ annual Young Artist Competition. Davis, a past Young Artist winner, will be featured as the cello soloist and protagonist in Richard Strauss’ tone poem, Don Quixote. 

You can learn more about these amazing young performers below. I promise you that you do not want to miss this performance. It is sure to be the largest orchestra, and one of the most inspiring programs that Music in the Mountains has ever put on stage.

Sixteen-year-old pianist Catherine Huang is a sophomore at Lynbrook High School and studies piano with Professor Hans Boepple. She won first prize and the young jury award at the 2017 Arthur Fraser International Piano Competition and appeared on Kansas Public Radio as the first prize winner of the 2016 International Institute for Young Musicians (IIYM) International Piano Competition.

Davis You, 16, is a junior at Palo Alto High School. He studies cello with Jonathan Koh and previously studied with Irene Sharp. His awards include first place in the 2016 California ASTA solo competition, first place in the 2017 California Youth Symphony Young Artist Competition, and five invitations to perform in the Junior Bach Festival

 

Scoping Your Rifle

George Rebane

OK boys and girls, time to take a break from our usual work of solving the world’s socio-political problems.  Today we’re going to look at a new and, hopefully, better method for scoping your rifle.  I am a lifelong shooter and also a military and NRA trained range safety officer (RSO).  As a longtime member of our local Sportsmen shooting club (rifle, pistol, trap, archery), I do my required club work hours serving several times a year as the rifle/pistol RSO on Sunday afternoons when the club opens its outdoor range to the public.

You shooters can imagine the stories I have stored up over the years helping (the mostly inexperienced) shooters and keeping them from accidentally killing someone.  Well, one of the tasks I’m frequently asked to help with is scoping the rifle of a guest or member who is not quite clear on the concept.  To scope a rifle means to align the scope with the rifle’s barrel so that a shotgroup’s centroid is close to the center of the bullseye at a given range (say, 100 yds) when shot with the scope’s crosshairs, or point of aim (POA), centered on the bullseye.

A joyous Christmas to those who still believe

Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.  Matthew 1:23

George Rebane

A merry and joyous Christmas wish from the Rebanes (this year our Southern Tribe – the Esteys, children and grandchildren - moved here to northern California) to all who read these pages - God's annual promise reissued.  And to that, Jo Ann and I add the fervent hope that your new year will be healthy and fulfilling.

Fake News Defined (Addended)

George Rebane

Fake News – Assertions in the media (including blogosphere) disguised as news items which are purposely meant to mislead.  This includes assertions of data (facts and beliefs about the real world), information (various formatting of data to promote certain types of decisions/conclusions), and outright lies of the various types (more here).  Most, but not all, propaganda (“information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc.”) is delivered as fake news.

In the spirit of promoting operational definitions on RR, ‘fake news’ has been used in this sense in my commentaries, and will continue to be so used.  Commenters who do not subscribe to this definition are welcome to offer their own in order to clarify their remarks, else the reader is invited to interpret such uses in these postings according to above definition (now added to Download RR Glossary&Semantics_v181124).

Happy Thanksgiving 2018

George Rebane

Jo Ann and I wish all our RR friends and readers a very happy Thanksgiving.

PS. I've long been puzzled by how individual secular humanists think about and celebrate this day as they observe it with family and friends.  Since giving thanks is a show of gratitude for having received something - mostly unbidden and/or undeserved - to whom do such people show gratitude and for what?

My email has been hacked

George Rebane

Got a call from a friend this morning telling me that my ‘sbcglobal.net’ email has been hacked, and people are getting emails from this address with the following message with subject line 'Urgent.....George Rebane'

How are you? I need a favor from you.

I need to get a Gamestop Gift Card for my Nephew, Its his birthday but i can't do this now because I'm currently traveling.Can you get it from any store around you? I'll pay back as soon as i am back. Kindly let me know if you can handle this.

Please ignore this as another sign of out fraudulent times.  Thank you.

Fair Division 101B

George Rebane

In ‘Fair Division 101’ I introduced readers to the field of fair division algorithms and presented a powerful and easy-to-use two-party algorithm derived from the literature which I named FD01.  At the conclusion of that dissertation I offered a method for extending FD01 for use by more than two parties.  The method works but is a bit clunky to apply.  Since then I have developed a slick multi-party version dubbed FD02 which retains the correctness, format, and all the simplicity of FD01.  FD02 is suitable for online implementation, and can be used in adjudicating wills, dissolving partnerships, mergers & acquisitions, and private occasions requiring the fair division of an identified set of assets.  You can download the short paper ( Download TN1808-1_FD02) describing it and the MS Excel™ spreadsheet ( Download FairDivisionAlgo_FD02) that is fun to play with, demonstrates its implementation, and can be modified or used as is in the realworld.  Enjoy.

Attribution in Dialogues and Debates

George Rebane

Conversations and debates advance toward productive conclusions when each participant in turn builds on what has already been recognized – either expanding or rebutting, but most certainly acknowledging that a notion, idea, or report of a happening has already been presented and made part of the discussion thread.  Admittedly RR presents many topics in complex formats that rely on already established positions, multi-subject posts, single topic commentaries, and uncounted sandbox threads.  Recently it seems that more of us posting in these pages often arrive breathlessly, to introduce something they think is new to the current thread, that really turns out to have been posted as a preceding comment or the subject of one of my (often recent) posts.

Doing this is, well, not nice, because it places the just-arrived contributor under a narcissistic mantle – ‘I don’t care to discover what others have contributed to this thread, this is my most recent thought on the matter, and you all need to re/acquaint yourself with my thoughts on the topic.’  If we were all sitting in a comfortable room around a blazing hearth, flagons of brew and wine at hand, Harry would never dream of suddenly introducing, out of whole cloth, something that Sue had already brought to bear, and the group had already made some progress in its expansion or dispute.  In such case Harry would look either the inattentive fool or the self-centered ass seeking group credit for the contribution just because he was the most recent one to regurgitate it.

Having found another revealing citation or even one of his own brilliant thoughts, Harry would be embraced as a well-mannered and welcome contributor would he but utter something to the effect, ‘Sue brought up a (good, confusing, bad, informative, … ) notion on (topic) that I’d like to (expand, correct, support from a different perspective, dispute, …).’

I don’t claim to always be innocent of the above charges, but as one who has had a career in generating new ideas and building new things within fiercely competitive R&D communities, early on I had it pounded in to me that you ALWAYS acknowledge any and all primacy that is known to you.  When you do, people will respect you for your generosity and knowledge of the field, and will want to work with you or share things with you, knowing that they will never be made to stand in your shadow.  But if you don’t, … well then, ‘nuff said.

Our horizons are expanded by the shoulders on which we have gratefully been allowed to stand.

Credo on Closure

George Rebane

Here I record a brief note made over a year ago that I discovered while clearing my desk for the next project.  It is probably of not much interest to RR’s current readers, but may be for some future internet archeologists, especially students of causality.

Closure, n. – the act of bringing to an end or conclusion in at least a satisficing manner that fulfills the objective that initially launched the search or the enterprise undertaken.

The main points are –

1. Man instinctively wants to explore to the ends of causal chains and the edges of causal basins. [see also Pearl (1988), (2009), (2018)]
2. Man desires closure that may or not end in an acceptable mystery; preferably one that lies beyond the acknowledged boundary of his ken. (e.g. the ‘mind of God’, the upward hierarchy of super-intelligences)
3. Other sapient species probably have the same or similar built-in ‘drive’, because that is how they got to be sapient.
4. No matter where a civilization resides, there they fashion or receive wisdom which provides closure or at least the prospect of it.
5. On Earth the secularists’ Holy Grail is to discover the Theory of Everything (TOE), which implies that they don't believe in 'turtles all the way down'. The TOE of religionists, meta-physicists, and many scientists is attaining knowledge of a super-intelligence that is at least universal and perhaps even divine.
6. The real question or the sink of all inquiry is John Wheeler’s “Why Existence?” We can ask this when we are alive; but can we also ask it in any other state (of existence)?  Or is that forbidden? – i.e. our cosmos does not support questions like that.

Happy Fourth - An American Celebration!

Media Bias

George Rebane

First, H/T to Bob Crabb where I first saw this graphic of 'media bias' before going to another site to filch a good copy of it.  Now I have several problems with where some outlets are placed on this chart, but I'll keep them to myself until readers have had a chance to make their own voices heard.  (As always, click on the image to make it larger.)

Memorial Day - 28 May 2018

George Rebane

Once more we gratefully contemplate the terrible price paid by those who gave their all so that America may remain the land of opportunity and the home of the free.  The words and photo from Memorial Day - 30 May 2011 still apply, and this video will explain the cost.

Sapir-Whorf on the Art of Coding and the Communications Conundrum

George Rebane

In his ‘Code to Joy’ essay (featured in the Jun-Jul 2018 issue of 1843, the Economist’s bi-monthly features magazine), science writer and author Andrew Smith almost discovers Sapir-Whorf.  But not quite, and therein lies a tale.  The man had been writing about computer technology and its impact on our lives for most of his career before he realized that he really didn’t know exactly how software worked, and it was the software that enabled all those wonderful things that most of us now take for granted in our daily round.

So he asked, “Is learning to code in middle age a fool’s errand or a committed act of digital citizenship?”, and started his quest for a programming language which he could learn well enough to code up a simple task.  On his travels through the programming world he interviews important personages and finds a well-known mentor to help him as he inevitably hits the ‘dark night of the soul’ when all gleaned progress and understanding fades into a hopeless morass of imminent defeat.  But with a mini-epiphany here and there along the way, he perseveres and finally celebrates his finished and fully functional Python code snippet.

What Smith’s trail of tears illustrates is another confirmation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis cum dictum that a person’s language(s) bound their capacity for thought.  We have visited the ramifications of S-W in these pages before (e.g. here) in the context of languages such as English and mathematics.  The bottom line of it all is that every human being is not capable of thinking all human thoughts; they are limited by the languages they have mastered.  And Smith’s essay is a clear illustration of this, even though he is not able to connect it with S-W.  (He is not alone, almost none of our ‘educators’ have this understanding as they mangle our schools’ curricula and/or teach in our classrooms.)

The ramifications of S-W necessarily extend beyond thought to communications and understanding.  What you cannot think, you cannot communicate, and what is beyond your lexicon, you cannot understand what someone else is trying to tell you.  Cultures with such language deficits have a difficult time making progress since it is hard for them to come together to solve problems and make more complex plans for productive cooperative enterprises.  It has been the expansion of language that has always provided the bases for the advancement of cultures in the sense of securing more resources, insuring their survival, and increasing their quality of life.

Think of what your life would be if you had no concept of nor ability to communicate ‘before/after’,  'future/past', ‘more/less’, ‘harder/easier’, ‘if/then’, numbering/counting things in your environment, expressing the subjunctive, considering counterfactuals (“A counterfactual thought occurs when a person modifies a factual prior event and then assesses the consequences of that change.”), quantifying risk (the notions of likelihood/probability), … .

In the same manner, Smith and others not familiar with the art of coding have no concept of the kinds of primitives that are both necessary and possible in various programming languages.  And therefore, given a problem to solve that involves the manipulation of specific types of data or implementing a user task, they simply have no place to start thinking about how to approach and structure a solution (i.e. to algorize).  Smith runs into this problem without appreciating it when he initially considers which one of the current 1,700+ programming languages he should first learn.  His mentor takes him through such considerations, but without connecting to the larger linguistic landscape of thought and communications taught by Sapir-Whorf.

Today much (almost all?) of our discussion of social issues is also hampered by the various boundaries that exist in the (partially) shared language people use domestically, which, of course, is immensely amplified when translation is required between languages with widely different roots and current capacities for understanding and expressing thought.  The comment streams of blogs (e.g. RR’s) along with countless letters-to-the-editor attest to the so far insurmountable difficulties Americans have in communicating with each other, no matter how sincere are their efforts.