Rebane's Ruminations

The Split Pill Problem Solved

George Rebane

RR readers were introduced to the Split Pill Problem (SPP) in a passing Scattershots entry last summer.  The problem involved giving our puppy Puna her pain meds after her second knee repair surgery, and that evoked an interesting problem the solution to which turned out to have several features which generalize to and can illuminate other realworld problems.  Puna’s daily dose from the pill bottle was a half pill.  If I shook out a whole pill, I would split it and give her a half, returning the other half to the bottle.  On a day when a half pill emerged, I would just give the half.

The vet said to do that until the pill bottle was empty.  Given the random way in which whole and half pills emerged, I wondered how soon could I expect to get to a day when only half pills remained in the bottle and I would no longer have to split pills.  The solution turned out to be very interesting, which I have documented in a somewhat whimsical technical note that requires no math beyond grade school arithmetic to understand.  You can access the pdf here – Download TN1910-1_Split Pill Problem Solved

I’ll leave you with a piece of eye candy from the report that illustrates the graphical beauty of the SPP solution where it will be fully explained.  Enjoy.

Toward the Singularity via super-intelligence

George Rebane

Knowing my relationship with Dr Judea Pearl, fellow blogger Russ Steele sent me a link to a recent interview (here) on AI with Judea.  Longtime RR readers recall pieces citing my friend, colleague, and mentor Judea Pearl as the inventor of Bayes and causal nets, and one of the true pioneers of AI and winner of the Turing Award (here and here).  I was privileged to be one of his very small group of doctoral students contributing to his research and the writing of his landmark Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (1988) introducing Bayes nets for which I was able to contribute my research in machine learning that wound up in what is known as the Rebane-Pearl algorithm (here and here).

Early on (late 1980s) our little group began to understand that the alternative ‘causal net’ that was also used in the literature for Bayes nets may not be appropriate.  To be frank, we were somewhat guilty of introducing that appellation ourselves before we recognized that our enthusiastic reach exceeded our grasp of causality as provided by our research.  In our paper on the Rebane-Pearl algorithm I introduced the concept of a ‘causal basin’ and showed (in my hand-drawn figure which somehow made it into the paper and Judea’s book) how the algo could take a dataset and divide it into several causal basins.  I recall having long discussions with Judea on the relationship of probabilistic inference and ‘true causality’ as we humans ascribe to the goings on in our environment.

A decade earlier Judea and I spent time during our family social get-togethers ensconcing ourselves with a bottle of wine to speculate on the future of intelligent machines and what computational, perceptual, and cognitive requirements they would need to achieve peerage with humans.  Over such discussions it became clear to both of us that machines would have to include the ability to handle the subjunctive and counter-factual ‘thoughts’, in addition being able to reason probabilistically a la Bayes nets.  It was Judea who came upon the idea that causality was a distinct cognitive beast that could not be tamed and understood through mere extensions of Bayes nets – a whole new calculus would be required.

Where Are They Indeed?

George Rebane

There are about 2,500 galaxies (not stars) in the picture below – each of even the smallest dots is a galaxy.  Each such galaxy has about 300 billion stars, and each star has at least five planets.  Today we can see over 2,000,000,000,000 = 2 trillion such galaxies.  Fainter galaxies exist but don’t show in such photos.  This means that we can visualize only a part of our universe which itself contains 3x10^23 (a 3 with 23 zeros following it) planets.  Of these, at least 1% are in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone from their sun.  This suggests that there are about 3x10^21 planets that could potentially have an environment that supports life as we know it. (There are undoubtedly other forms of life about which we are ignorant.)  In our own galaxy there are about 11 billion of such planets.

To further illustrate the vastness of our visible universe, consider that the above photo is a magnification of what our telescopes see when looking at a part of the entire sky surrounding Earth that is less than 1/33 of (or more than 33 times smaller than) the size of the period at the end of this sentence when held out at your arm’s length.  This means if you printed a page with a period (from Times New Roman size 12) on it, and made a hole with a very sharp needle through and exactly the size of the period, then holding it out at your arm’s length you would be able to ‘see’ over 84,000 galaxies through that pinprick, no matter in which direction you looked in the night sky.  Of course, your eye would have to have the magnifying power of a big telescope (like the Hubble) to resolve all those galaxies as shown in the above photo.  Perhaps this understanding would allow us to better contemplate the size of our visible universe and consider all the extra-terrestrial civilizations that have already existed, are now in existence, and will come to be in the interminable future.

The background to this meditation was posted as ‘A copernican answers Fermi’, and later I’ll have more to say about the portents of all this. (more here)

On Smaller Governments and Corporations

"The skill of making and maintaining Commonwealths, consisteth in certain rules as doth Arithmetic and Geometry",  John Hobbes in the Leviathan.

George Rebane

Time to review some important tenets of my credo as they impact Rebane Doctrine’s prescriptions for the size and complexity of good governments, good businesses, and good organizations in general.  I do this so that I can reference it for the intelligent reader when the inevitable questions of governance and corporatism come up in these pages.  For the longtime reader of RR, there is really nothing new revealed in the sequel by this retired systems scientist and registered professional engineer in control systems.  However, it is the correct way of looking at the realworld, one that really works and has provided us the QoL we all enjoy.

I make this attempt at pedagogy to both educate and illustrate our unfortunate uneducables, many of whom are in positions of power.  Since RR is a socio-political blog, we shall see here the tragic error that underlies and makes dysfunctional all collectivist ideologies, especially in their approaches to governance.  We will then see the spectrum of responses that illustrate this.

The above diagram is a summary of how closed-loop, controlled systems work.  Stay with me.  The system to be controlled in a desired way is called the ‘Plant’, and the subsystem that wants the Plant to work in a certain way is called the ‘Controller’.  The Plant can be anything from a rocket heading for Mars to a Medicare for All program.  The purpose of building/developing the Plant is so that it can beneficially impact certain aspects of the ‘environment’ in which it is to operate – interplanetary space, a population requiring healthcare, a temperature regulated house.  The environment, of course, in return impacts the Plant, its operation, and sometimes even its structure.

To read the rest of this little missive, please Download Smaller Governments and Corporations

When will the bull run end?

George Rebane

We are now in the longest bull run in the history of America’s security markets. The nearby figure filched from the 15jun19 WSJ provides some perspective.

The question on everyone’s lips is when will this bull run end. As readers know, I’m a semi-retired successful entrepreneur and capitalist who has managed his own securities portfolio for decades, has recently focused on financial engineering, and still enjoys inventing and coming up with new squigglies in that field. One of my recent contributions has been the extension of Gott’s theory that probabilistically treats the future termination of minimally known processes. This extension was described here in – ‘…, and this too shall pass’ - on 10 November 2014.

Well, it turns out that stock market bull runs are exactly the kinds of minimally known processes that succumb to the expanded R-G theory – all we reliably know about the bull market is its current age. So we can now ask more interesting questions such as, ‘What is the probability that the bull market will end in any future quarter (three-month period) starting now?’

The answer to that question is shown below for the next couple of years.  The blue dots/line indicate the diminishing probabilities that the bull will end in the quarter starting then, and the red dots/line indicate the growing probability that the bull will end sometime between now and the date shown.  (click on figure to enlarge)

Should there be more astute investors reading this, a natural extension of the above question is ‘How can we update such a probability when later we get some new information that bears on the markets?’ The good news is that this question can also be answered by using a form of the Bayes formula in which the then computed R-G probability serves as the ‘Bayesian prior’ from which to calculate the new (posterior) probability of the process about which we now know more than its age. The Bayes formula (described here) should be used thereafter as more pieces of relevant information are obtained. Fun stuff if you’re a bettin’ man (or woman).

Scattershots – 18may19

George Rebane

Freedom and equality have never been bedfellows – naturally enabled inequality in all dimensions is the litmus test for a free society.

‘The Myth of Wage Stagnation’ is explained by Phil Gramm and John Early.  Dr Gramm is an economist and the former chair of the Senate Banking Committee. Dr John Early is the former assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Convincing the country’s lightly read that middle class wages have stagnated for decades is the Democrats’ sine qua non Big Lie, along with ongoing fake news reports, required to beat President Trump in 2020.  The basis of their argument reduces to, ‘Do you believe your lying eyes or what we’re telling you?’  After supplying the reader with a snootfull of relevant economic data, Gramm and Early conclude with – “The suggestion that America hasn’t gotten a raise in 46 years doesn’t pass the laugh test. Poor measurements of compensation are more than misleading; they also cause many voters and policy makers to favor redistribution that would depress growth and compensation. Nothing is more critical to promoting sound policy than measuring economic outcomes accurately. A nation is only as good as its facts.” (more here)

Speaking of facts, our educational systems are supposed to teach us both facts about the world and how to deal with them to create wealth and benefit society.  Two men who have outdone themselves to hinder America in these pursuits are David Coleman and the late Howard Zinn.  Coleman is the maven behind the disastrous Common Core curriculum (extensively covered in these pages) that has put the latest dent into our public education system, and the man who is also the architect of taking down the merit-based SAT by appending to it a proprietary and secret “adversity score” to aid colleges in returning to sub-rosa, race-based admission policies. (more here).  Zinn is the author of the notorious revisionist and widely-used The People’s History of the United States (1980) that has mangled the historical view of two generations of our country’s high school and college students.  Historian Wilfred McClay has now written a counterpoint text, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.  While not “some saccharine whitewash of American history”, the tome does correct the country’s past from Zinn’s version as “a comic-book melodrama in which ‘the people’ are constantly being abused by ‘the rulers.’”, that explains today’s younger generation’s love affair with socialism. (more here)

Power from magnets may provide us a more hopeful future if the ‘Earth Engine’ prototypes of industrial engineer Dennis Danzick pan out.  He claims to have cracked the long-hidden code of how to suck net energy out of magnetic fields, and has demonstrated the process as something that could soon be commercialized.  No one, including Danzick, has yet to explain the physics of this contraption, and a couple of prominent physicists have poo-poohed the whole thing as yet the promotion of the latest perpetual motion machine.  You can see a live stream of the ‘Crystal’ version of the engine working at the facilities of Inductance Energy located in Scottsdale, AZ.  (more here and here)

Deciding with Minimally Known Processes

George Rebane

[Trigger warning - this post is primarily for our technically oriented readers.]

We encounter ongoing minimally known processes (MKPs) continually in our daily round, and we often need to make decisions based on the likelihood of their terminating during a specific future time interval, or surviving it.  Yet few are aware of this perspective of the daily round, and fewer yet know how to obtain quantitative information from such processes, information that is important for decisions in such fields as finance, medicine, environmental risk, and other areas of science and technology.

The ongoing MKPs considered here are 1) a process about which we know only its age, or when the process started (label these MKPA); and 2) a process about which we know only its lifetime, or the length of time before such a process terminates (label these MKPL).  Both kinds of such observed and observable processes are of interest in that we want to know the probability the process will end during or survive through a specified future time interval.  A simple example of a MKPA is, say, a spring which started flowing five years ago, and today we want to know how likely it is stop sometime during the next nine months (or its complement, how likely is it to continue through the next nine months).  An example of a MKPL query is, given that such an ongoing process is known to last ten days, what is the probability that it will end or continue through the next 90 minutes.

The answers to such and even more complex questions can be calculated quickly through the use of formulas whose development is based on an ingenious application of the Copernican Principle first demonstrated on an MKPA problem by physicist J Richard Gott in 1993.  For reasons unknown, his work was discussed briefly and then quietly laid to rest.  My own involvement began with its serendipitous discover while researching approaches to solving another problem.  Since then, I have reformulated Gott’s work to expand and obviate its applicability, and expanded it to the class of MKPLs.  An interesting use of MKPLs is in allocating resources in the observation of periodic processes about which we only know their periodicity.

I have found these results useful in my own analysis of securities’ performance, and in making of healthcare decisions.  A little thinking on what processes qualify with the Copernican approach to minimally known (understood) processes continues to yield new uses.  As an important footnote to the application of this theory is in Bayesian decision making that require a reasonable prior probability to kick off the calculations as new evidence comes in.

We looked at MKPAs in a previous RR post here.  To update the elements of this theory and its resultant formulas, I have written a short technical note which you can download here - Download TN1902-1_lifetimeMKP , the progenitor of which you can download here - Download TN0708-1_GottExtensionConfirmation190120A .

NASA now reports global cooling

George Rebane

Now here’s a report by some people from the mother temple of global warming that is guaranteed to summon the Left’s crickets.  More cool-headed scientists have been reporting on the new cooling trend that correlates with low sun-cycle activity for years now.  This has been echoed and amplified on many serious websites (e.g. Anthony Watts, Russ Steele, …, and, of course, RR) written by people who understand the science involved and not just echo ‘consensus science’. (H/T to reader)

Now ‘NASA Sees Climate Cooling Trend Thanks to Low Sun Activity’.  At NASA’s Langley Research Center, Dr Martin Mlynczak reports, “We see a cooling trend, … high above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.” (more here and here)

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.

 

Ruminations - 18jan19 (updated 21jan19)

Federal workers demonstrate because they don't have the money to buy food or pay the rent. Why haven't some of the nation's major lenders stepped forward to lend them money at low/no interest rates until they start getting a check again?  The money so lent would be at minimal risk since the borrowers have their government jobs and their back-pay checks as collateral of equal quality to US Treasury bonds.  Where are all these rightwing bankers who could lend Trump and the Republicans a political hand while reaping beaucoup PR rewards? ...  OK, then where are the leftwing lenders since the overwhelming share of government workers are Democrat voters?

[update]  RR contributor and blogger Russ Steele wrote and excellent Other Voices in the 18jan19 Union making the case for “upskilling” your workplace talents in the age of galloping AI.  In his ‘STEM for all’ he also pointed out what SESF has been doing in promoting and supporting STEM education in Nevada County.

Former Trump attorney Cohen’s most recent allegations about candidate Trump’s real estate dealings with Russia are making big headlines that have every Dem and all their cousins calling for more investigations, and definitely for the president’s impeachment.  But no one is lifting an eyebrow about what was just released about Bruce Ohr’s testimony last August that revealed a string of lies the FBI told Congress and on its FISA application to investigate Trump’s campaign.  And also that two of the liars have been key members of Mueller’s team continuing to investigate the president.  The magnitude of such misdirection of national attention is beyond astounding and does not portend well for our beloved republic.  (more here)

‘If Weed Is Medicine, So Is Budweiser’, so goes a convincing argument by Dr Peter Bach of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.  He points out that MJ “is a toxin, not a medicine” per se as its adherents claim for ailments ranging from hepatitis to Parkinson’s.  Citing studies, Bach tells us that “if weed is a pain reliever, so is Budweiser.”  His message of “Legalize marijuana, but don’t pretend it’s therapeutic” come with the bottom line that MJ “belongs in the same category as alcohol an tobacco – harmful products that adults can choose to enjoy”, and they need to be regulated as such.

"Trump's Shutdown" - Here's a quiz, how is this government shutdown significantly different from Obama's shutdown, and previous ones?  And here is the answer.

[20jan19 update]  Fiber in Nevada City.  Russ Steele sent me this which might be of interest to our locals concerned about the county's economic development.  "I am reading Susan Crawford's book Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It. Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor at Harvard Law School.  There are ten references to Nevada City and John Paul's Fiber Network in her book recounting the struggle to bring fiber to Nevada City/Grass Valley.   More details on my blog:"  https://ruraleconomytechnology.com

[21jan19 update]  Gov Newsom’s early childhood education spending. Our new governor wants to spend “$2.4 billion in early childhood investments, including significant funding for health care, home visiting programs, early developmental screening, high-quality early learning and paid family leave.”  That’s all well and good with two significant caveats – 1) anyone know of any successful govt education program outside the military?  2) anyone know of any early childhood education programs that made a measurable difference by the time the child reached 3^rd grade?  But in a state that already has the largest number of poor, indigents, and welfare recipients in the Union, along with uncountable and uncounted unfunded liabilities, the governor’s budget proposal is sure to add another tranche of government employees and reliable Democrat voters.  (more here)

A Bayesian Gem - Least Squares

George Rebane

Some readers may have become aware of my involvement with and amazement of Bayesian probability.  Sadly, most RR readers couldn’t care less, and therefore have no idea of the impact that Bayesian inference plays in their daily lives.  I admit that as a techie, my Bayesian bias started early in my career when I learned to design Kalman filters for Uncle Sam’s military systems.  From there I became more immersed in probabilistic models, especially as applied in AI, all powered by Bayes.  Today Bayesian inference is supremely (yes, SUPREMELY!) important in all kinds of systems, devices, social enterprises, and legal proceedings.  Why?  Simply because it is the basis for ALL the correct ways to update current knowledge with new information and data.  If you don’t change your mind based on what the Rev Bayes taught, then you’re not doing it right.

The newest technology buzz to evoke smidgens of lay interest revolves around algorithms developed through the application of machine learning that are based on deep neural nets, which, you guessed it, are based on Bayesian probabilistics.  The net that the good reverend casts today even collects the humble and long-known least squares estimation techniques, many of which can be derived by simple application of the calculus.  But even least squares derives its ubiquitous power from its Bayesian tap root.

I just came across a gem of a very short paper – ‘Where did the least square come from?’ - that gets two birds with one stone.  In there, author Tirthajoty Sarkar (another goddam immigrant 😉) gives a lucid explanation of how Bayes founds least-squares, a well-known estimation technique that forms a key optimizing computation in the guts of deep neural nets, an approach to machine learning which today is used to derive new and awesome capabilities from large datasets that are completely beyond the ken of man (and woman).  If you are numerate, you should really give this little paper a read.

CA Exodus Denied

George Rebane

The exodus of the producers and the productive from California has been a recurring theme on RR ever since the Democrats assumed total control, turned the state into the nation’s home for welfare recipients, started raising taxes and fees as if there were no tomorrow, and opened its gates to illegal aliens.  Essentially, the Democratic super-majority has turned the state into a sanctuary from sanity.  Among the reams of data presented to buttress the exodus argument, a reader sent me the graphic below that highlights just one aspect of nationwide migrations – and these are NET migrations – from/to our country’s prominent metropolitan areas (more here).

This shows that from LA alone we have a net outflow of 46,720 people per year.  And do you think these are the gimmes who think they’ll get more sanctuary protections and better government bennies from some other state?

Calling Global Warming a Hoax can be Confusing!

[Russ Steele is a regular contributor and commenter in these pages.  He hosts Sierra Foothills Commentary, a blog that focuses on the ongoing debate about the science behind the highly politicized ‘climate change’ issue.  RR invites submitted bylines from various viewpoints on a wide spectrum of issues.  gjr]

By Russ Steele

Let’s be clear, climate change is not a hoax, the climate on this planet has demonstrated a wide range of variability over millions of years and continues to vary year to year, as the oceans warm and cool, orbits around the sun change, and the sun’s output varies.  No hoax, it is real.

So why would President Trump call global warming a hoax?  Perhaps, because there was a hoax played on the American people by a group of climate scientists as to the cause of current climate variations, claiming it was human generated CO2.

Red Pill America has the hoax story, in Episode 7, a podcast by Patrick Courrielche who has done an excellent job of telling the story in a way that all can understand. Even global warmers can follow and understand the story, and the basis for the hoax label. That is if they listen.

Listen to the Podcast HERE.  The Transcript is HERE.

As a friend of Anthony Watts and close follower of Steve McIntyre, I was an observer to the events described in this podcast. It was Steve McIntyre who got me started learning the R programming language, as I studied his Hockey Stick analysis software. I later used some of his R code in my temperature plotting programs. I am now using Python.

Listen to the biggest science heist in history and you will understand the hoax.

Plastics and more from CO2

George Rebane

The latest chapter in the global climate change hysteria was published last week.  The ‘4^th National Climate Assessment, Vol2’ (NCA4V2) purported to summarize for light readers the dreadful fate that will surely befall all of us were we not to immediately put in place policies that would pauper ALL developed countries.   This is the only reason the others are not willing to commit economic suicide, and instead relegating their earth preserving wrath into versions of public outrage against the US for not willing to fly solo into that mountain of politicized climate science.

NCA4V1 was published last year, and contained the then ignored ‘science’ behind the current version of the hysteria.  Now that NCA4V2, the political summary of the 1,500+ page NCA4, has issued, scores of scientists and analysts, not on the climate change payroll, have again reviewed the purported science, and again concluded that both volumes represent a big nothing-burger at best and fake news at worst.  Specifically, the rebuttals echo the years of identical arguments presented on RR, and can be stated compactly as –

1. The NCA4V1 results are calculated from over two dozen general circulation models (GCMs), none of which agree, and some of them clearly implausible;
2. None of the GCMs “used to compute the effects of human influence on climate have successfully predicted the weather, weather cycles (such as El Niño or La Niña events), or climate.”

We are alerted by Russ Steele (here) to one of the more comprehensive analyses of NCA4 by Andy May (here).  In there May points out that even in the NCA4’s summary, the economic effects of the predicted climate change are minuscule, and most certainly contain no verifiable demonstration that human activity is the controlling cause of the GCMs’ predicted temperature change(s), not that reducing such activities would have any significant effect on the perpetual dynamics of earth’s climate.

OK, so what’s the latest that real technology and science have to say about that dastardly GHG, yes, CO2.  Well, as reported by New Atlas (here) it turns out that a team of scientists at Rutgers University have achieved an artificial photosynthesis breakthrough that promises to allow the manufacture of plastics, resins, and pharmaceuticals “on the cheap”.  The overview of the process is shown in the figure, and the complete story is published in Energy & Environmental Science (Issue 9, 2018 here).

The point to be made here is that the realworld is rapidly giving lie to the climate change hysteria mongers rushing to put us on a one-way road to global governance and its inevitable autocracy cum tyranny.  The real climate change is not what’s being sold to the world’s masses, and accelerating technology continues to produce environment sustaining solutions without government diktats, driven by (gasp), yes, capitalism.  “With patents in hand, the (Rutgers) team will now work toward commercializing the technology.”

Yellowstone Supervolcano about to blow?

George Rebane

[This little interlude will most likely interest very few RR readers, but it has provided me a respite from the political struggles through my continuing love-affair with pushing squigglies.  Truth be told, I do this kind of stuff quite often, and who knows, there's always the off-chance that some reader may show interest.]

As we sat last Saturday morning waiting for the history making Senate confirmation vote on Judge Kavanaugh, I meandered across yet another article on the supervolcano that rumbles under Yellowstone National Park.  Geologists tell us that the volcano has erupted every 600K – 800K years or so with a devastating effect that we in recent decades have come to call a ‘nuclear winter’.  The last one occurred about 640K years ago.  When that magma dome blows again it will put so much dust, dirt, and ash into the earth’s atmosphere as to change the earth’s climate for several years starting with a two- or three-year winter that will kill much of the planet’s vegetation and critters, make agriculture near impossible, and therefore cause the wholesale death of most of us who live here – at least that’s what NASA and a covey of paleo-geologists tell us.

It turns out that modern technology today can provide a very beneficial prophylactic to prevent such an event, and in the process generate a considerable amount of clean geothermal electricity.  Scientists at NASA tell us that it would be possible to cool the molten magma bubble by drilling laterally into its sides, pumping down cold water, and harvesting super-heated steam for electricity generating powerplants on the surface.

The cost of drilling such 10km deep holes comes to almost $3.5B, add another few billion dollars to the budget to put up a powerplant or two, and you could see doing the whole thing for about $10B while lowering or completely eliminating the risk of a big blow-up.  The cost of the electricity generated in this manner comes to about $0.10/kWh – cheap at twice the price.  So why aren’t utilities rushing in there to do just that? (more here and here)

Well, the best anyone can tell is the high business risk of such an undertaking in a national park that is surrounded by high walls of environmental regulations manned by legions of super-zealous, lawyer-ladened, eco-nazis with a paucity of critical thinking skills.  Now this is where government should step in and play the crucial role of paving the way to implement such a humanity-saving insurance policy with a clean energy solution to boot.  But so far no one on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue has made a peep about this.  It can’t be the cost, because the feds lose more than $10B a day with what they drop off their loading docks.  So, for an answer, let’s look at the risk side of this potential earth-shaking catastrophe.

To quantify the downside risk we techies first appeal to what is called probability rate theory that is a well-known tool in areas like search and detection using radars and sonars.  The best estimate of Yellowstone’s catastrophe rate is once every 700K years.  That’s about the average frequency at which the big magma bubble gets close enough to the surface for its outward pressure to blow its top.

The real question we have to answer today is something like ‘what is the probability that Yellowstone blows again in the next 100 years?’  Clearly, if that probability, let’s label it P100, is sufficiently high, we should get busy tout de suite on the drilling and powerplant project described by NASA.  I have no idea what is ‘sufficiently high’ for the congress critters to get something going.  Most certainly if P100 = 0.5, then things in Washington would start happening.  But if P100 = 0.01, then I think we would continue to sleep on it a bit more.  So what is the real value of P100?

Lucky for you dear reader, mom sent me to school to learn how to answer such questions.  So I’ll save you the trouble of reading my brilliant analysis before calculating the answer, and give it to you right off the bat – P100 = 0.000246.  That’s a pretty low number for the next supervolcano eruption to take place sometime in the coming 100 years, and it pretty much explains why people aren’t getting too excited about it in the government or in the energy industry.

Now that doesn’t mean we won’t have one of those smaller eruptions that occur every few 10K years, these will not be civilization enders, but they might screw up our agriculture on the Great Plains for a few years.  Maybe later, if there’s available data, I’ll do some noodling on the chance that a ‘minor’ eruption will happen in the next century.  So the question remains, why are the NASA people getting excited about Yellowstone’s civilization ending volcano?

fMRI in your pocket

George Rebane

A longtime friend, RR reader, and former colleague just made me aware of this latest reason to celebrate capitalism.  The name of the new start-up is Openwater that has invented and is now productizing a whole new medical imaging technology that uses light and sound.  Its introduction into the healthcare markets here and abroad promises to totally revolutionize the ability to deliver timely, continuous, and low-cost healthcare to literally billions around the world, especially those who have never been able to afford or get close to today’s massive imaging equipments such as fMRI and CT scanners.

The technology was invented by the active and successful entrepreneur Dr Mary Lou Jepsen and her team.  Here is the link to more information and to the TED talk on her technology that Dr Jepsen recently gave in Vancouver.  Wow!

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.

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.

Iffy Science and Public Policy

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 18 April 2018.]

Will Rogers, humorist and keen observer of American life, once said, “It ain’t whatcha don’t know that worries me, it’s whatcha know that ain’t so.”

A lot of government procured science, especially science on which politicians base public policy, is not what Americans have been led to believe.  The mention of ‘science’ as supporting this law or that regulation is too often enough to stifle further critical examination of why we should stop doing this or start doing that, especially if you have never done science or are not that good with numbers.

While science has given us the technologies that make modern life possible, and often a pleasure, it is far from being a foolproof pursuit.  As we have noted before, science walks on two legs – Occam’s razor and falsifiability.  Occam counsels that the simplest explanation or theory is almost always the correct one.  And falsifiability demands that every scientific proposition or theory must be falsifiable.  That means it must contain elements that can be tested, and if the test fails then the theory is either rejected or raises serious questions that must answered by more experiments and testing.  And experiments that appear to have turned out well must then be replicated and their results reproduced by other scientists before credibility is established and the advancement is acknowledged.

Now also consider that at least half of the results in published scientific papers will subsequently be shown to be wrong, and we begin to understand why doing good science is really a careful, sometimes tedious, and a grueling slog.  This being the case, there is plenty of room for mistakes where science is involved.  And in recent years as more and more science has been done, we have run into more and more errors and mistakes, especially where science meets the politics of public policy.

The most obvious symptom of this is that we are informed of wonderous and remarkable discoveries and breakthroughs, on which new laws and regulations are often based, and later it turns out that the science could not be reproduced – it was either misunderstood or was simply a mistake, or even worse.

Too many so-called scientific results that politicians and regulators demand are fraudulent, delivered by self-serving scientists that bend experiment and /or the resulting data to match what their ‘customer’ providing the money wants.  This kind of practice has become an epidemic as reported by Drs Peter Wood and David Randall of the National Association of Scholars, an organization that researches the practice and delivery of higher education in America.  Their most alarming findings are about reproducibility – many of the important and accepted “landmark” findings in areas such as behavioral psychology, education, and climate change simply cannot be replicated by other scientists.  Nevertheless, their hyped results have been embedded into laws and regulations which determine how we raise our children, educate the nation’s students, and attempt to control our nation’s economy.

In a recent WSJ essay they present a summary of their research (here).  And since we know that the relevance and immediacy of every social problem is only told by its numbers, here are a few relevant ones.  The journal Science reported that only 39% of 100 prominent psychology studies could be replicated.  Amgen attempted to reproduce 53 “landmark” studies in hematology and oncology, and could only replicate six of them.  A 2015 study estimated that American researchers spend $28B annually on irreproducible preclinical research.  And on and on.

For the layperson and voter, the advice here is don’t immediately believe every new scientific finding, and then embrace the proposed law or costly regulation that some special interest wants to immediately build on such a hot-off-the-press report.  Instead, dig into the science a little bit, and at least ask your elected representative who else has been able to replicate the claimed landmark results.  After all, the bottom line will inevitably impact your health and wallet.   

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.

Max Tegmark, welcome aboard!

George Rebane

The Singularity must really be near when we have MIT physicist Max Tegmark climb aboard with the spate of science and industry luminaries who have recently discovered that intelligent machines will someday surpass humans, will systemically displace human labor, and (in a TBD form) will become the dominant lifeform on Earth.  Dr Tegmark has just published his epiphany in Life 3.0, and joins Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, … in spreading the news of the incipient Singularity to the general public.  Of course, none of them dare call it Singularity; for if they did, then it would instantly identify them as Johnny-come-latelies.

For those of us in the field, as recorded herein, the possibility of Singularity has been known for at least thirty years (and more decades in science fiction).  And science savvy entrepreneurs like Ray Kurzweil (now at Google) and Jeff Hawkins (founder of Numenta the developer of hierarchical temporal memory) have long staked out businesses that are pioneering the only branch of computer science that promises to deliver the Singularity – systems that are capable of learning from vast amounts of data present in their ‘environments’.  Here I don’t want to revisit the ‘learn vs program’ debate on the path to super-intelligence other than to say that the ‘program school’ of computer science has woefully been the dragged anchor, diverting resources from the ‘learn school’ which now finally dominates the field of AI.  All of the above people and technologies have been introduced and discussed here over the years (see RR’s Singularity Signposts section).

Deep learning is the label given to the latest generation of massive artificial neural networks (ANNs) that have learned to do amazing feats requiring intelligence and cognitive processing.  Most of these feats already far surpass humans’ ability to do the same tasks.  And what is happening today in the field of deep learning will literally blow your mind, in the sense of blowing it away as redundant, in the event that you decide to compete with it in the workplace – this brings to mind the story of John Henry, the steel drivin’ man (here).

Companies large – e.g. Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Baidu, Alibaba, … - and small are racing to integrate deep learned AI into their operations and products at breakneck speed.  The heads-up companies are launching in-house education and training programs to introduce deep learning to their technical and management staffs.  As an example, I can modestly cite my computer scientist son-in-law Roland Fernandez at Microsoft Research who has co-developed and operates that company’s online course in deep learning (q.v.).

What the sclerotic (‘programming school’) side of computer science did not realize for some decades, with some still in their benighted darkness, is the message Dr Kurzweil has been telling (preaching?) to people for years – that technology is advancing exponentially.  The programmers could not conceive that very soon there would emerge computers and databases that are large and fast enough to implement ANNs with thousands of layers that learn to ‘instantly’ manipulate millions of parameters in tasks like voice understanding, image recognition, medical diagnosis, concurrent large cohort control, and on and on.  And that’s just today.

For more on Professor Tegmark’s new book, I bid you read the excellent review ‘When Machines Run Amok’ by Frank Rose.

Male/Female Brains – different?

George Rebane

Here’s the latest little piece of reportage on a very uncomfortable topic for progressives – clinical and physiological differences between men’s and women’s brains.  In ‘Do Men and Women Have Different Brains?’ with tagline ‘A controversy sparked by a Google memo brings up an old question: What role does biology play in personality and behavioral differences?’ we have a report of researchers Dr Daphna Joel, et al at Tel-Aviv University gingerly tiptoeing through the tulips in their ‘Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic’ to conclude -

Our study demonstrates that, although there are sex/gender differences in the brain, human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain.

This conclusion does its best to buttress the politically correct assertion that cognitively men and women are essentially identical, and most certainly clinically so, thereby seeking to debunk once more ex-Googler James Damore’s notorious memo (here) about men/women's cognitive and behavioral differences in the workplace.

Dr Joel and colleagues attempt to convince us through their research that there is no discernible difference in the observable FUNCTIONING of the male/female brains.  What I’m willing to bet the ranch on is that if the raw MRI data gathered by the team were appropriately labeled, that a deep learning algorithm could be easily developed that would have no trouble telling the difference between the sexes’ brains.  Furthermore, I believe it would be very difficult to get government funding to do a similar body of research gathering only EEG data to submit to a deep learning program, because the results will most likely turn out to corroborate what Nicholas Wade documented in A Troublesome Inheritance (here).  And that is a big no-no.

The Global Warming Religion Revisited

George Rebane

We are told the Internet is forever.  So this is another missive I want to put in that time capsule to inform both my progeny and future cyber-archaeologists that George Rebane lived in the Post-Intellectual Age of Ignorance and was not party to, but merely an observer of, the hysterics camouflaged as science that then swept the globe.  This posting is merely a matter for the record, an effort to drive another stake in the ground of reason.  My previous writings on ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’, and most importantly on the preventable manmade component of global warming are a matter of record in these pages (e.g. here, here; also Download Climate Change Format_22jan08 and Download Climate Change Revisited).

A friend and RR reader recently sent me some links to videos of renowned physicists Freeman Dyson (Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study) and Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever discussing global warming.  Their calm words debunking the “pseudo-scientific” support of preventable manmade global warming (PMGW) are clear, concise, and comprehensive to an intelligent inquiring mind.

Both acknowledge that the belief in PMGW has assumed a mantle usually worn by religions, and therefore is now the compelling 21^st century religion that is every bit as vindictive to and intolerant of countervailing thought as are the orthodoxies of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.  Science advances on the twin principles of falsifiability and Occam’s razor (q.v.); rejecting both of these, PMGW sits sclerotic behind a moat of politically mandated ignorance.

Today the mob hysteria has gotten so bad that PMGW adherents will believe nothing beyond the politically inspired psalmists in the Climate Consensus Choir celebrating a new age that began when the PMGW debate was pronounced to finally be over.  From that day onward, according to the acolytes, only the philistines and greedy purveyors of profit remain unrepentant in refusing to sacrifice their all for Gaia.  As a scientist, I proudly wear that philistinian badge while absorbing the obligatory slings and arrows from my frenetically faithful brethren.

So here are the above referenced videos.  Pour yourself a tall one, put your feet up, and pay attention to these renowned representatives of sanity, reason, and science – Professors Giaever (here) and Dyson (here).  And for those for whom the debate is over and/or those whose comfort in such matters derives from consensus, please readjust and tighten your blinders before exiting.

TT2017 Survivors’ Breakfast

George Rebane

This morning we held the annual Survivors’ Breakfast for TechTest2017 at our usual venue, Tofanelli’s in Grass Valley.  The event was scheduled earlier than usual (0730) due to some school needs; after all this is a school day and we wanted to hold the lollygagging to a minimum.  This was the eleventh breakfast that feted the test takers who numbered 20 this year with 14 of those able to attend along with divers parents, sponsors, friends, and SESF directors.

Executive Director Russ Steele started off the hearty breakfast with some opening remarks, which were expanded upon by board member and former 7-Hills math teacher Robert Sharpe and yours truly.  Everyone had a chance to tell the gathering about their college plans and career hopes.  It was truly inspiring to hear about the futures to which these accomplished students were bound.  It’s good for the soul to be uplifted by such young people after being bombarded by America’s, and especially California’s, stats on STEM educational performance.

I am fortunate to have been able to work with many of these students during the preparatory TT seminars over the last years since juniors and some qualified lower-class students may take the test for practice before going for the money in their senior year.  TT is a four-hour, college level, merit scholarship examination - only your resulting test score counts in ranking the winners.  (All past TT solution sets are available on sesfoundation.org.)  The test is administered and graded by the Nevada Joint Union High School District – Ms Barbara Ross, academic committee chair - and draws scholars from all the county’s high schools as recommended by their science/math teachers.  SESF writes the test and, with participating sponsors, underwrites the scholarship awards.

Besides the coveted Survivors’ t-shirt, the top three scoring seniors receive scholarships of $6K, $4K, and $2K.  Additionally, $300 honoraria are awarded to the next several highest test scores.  Pictured in the above collage we have this year’s Survivor attendees and the three top money winners – l2r Harrison Constantino, Keegan Zetterberg, Jack Devlin – whose scores were within three points of each other.  (Thanks to Ellen Steele for the photos.)  The ranking of the top three will be announced during the county’s annual awards ceremony later this spring at which time all TT awardees will receive their checks.

The third picture with the four students (and the old guy in the back) includes Ryan Brott, this year a junior, who turned in TT2017’s very impressive top score.   Ryan is an academic all-star, respected and acknowledged by his peers, who excels in several different fields, and who definitely needs a dedicated post to do justice to all his accomplishments.

And now we start preparing for TT2018.

How Deictic is Your Ontology?

George Rebane

While our Left, especially of the academic bent, assiduously works to stunt the English language – e.g. reduce/mangle the information carrying capacity of words – our technologists have been very busy expanding the language and introducing new words into English and other tongues.  This battle is both important and its outcome is not yet determined, although for most people the Left’s determination to limit speech and thought along Orwellian newspeak lines seems to be taking hold with their constituents recently from union schools now being tutored by even more radical mentors in our institutions of higher learning.

In the last century we discovered a strong determinant that limits thought is a person’s language(s).  An individual has a hard time thinking thoughts (e.g. formulating concepts and storing them) that his language does not support.  More formally, the structure and breadth of a speaker’s language determines his perception and categorization of experience. This phenomenon is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which we have reviewed here before.

While words like ‘discriminate’, ‘immigrant’, ‘hero’, ‘prejudice’, ‘stereotype’, ‘racist’, ‘climate change’, ‘misogynist’, … have been mangled beyond meaning, other words like ‘meme’, ‘network’, ‘hashtag’, ‘feedback’, ‘in-the-loop’, ‘online’, ‘email’, ‘variance’, ‘steady state’, ‘causation’, ‘transient’, ‘algorithm’, … have worked their way into everyday usage as our individual ontologies have expanded to keep pace with the times.  (Ontology? Please stand by.)

‘Pausebuster’ busted – lamestream laying low

George Rebane

The corrupt ‘science’ (it does not deserve the name) behind the global warming hysteria is unraveling by the day, and the lamestream media is doing everything it can to hide the reports and the devastating supporting facts.  Today the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology issued a press release corroborating the reports now emerging that NOAA’s so-called Pausebuster paper, intended to show that there has been no temperature pause over the last 20+ years, is a deliberately perpetrated, politically motivated fraud based on crapola for data and worse for its processing.

You can read the initial break of the story on the Powerline blog here and then the House press release here.  This report was timed to impact the most recent Paris circus on climate change and was considered a success in keeping the hysteria going and growing.  It will be acknowledged as possibly the most influential fake news story fabricated in the last two years.  And the Left is doing its damndest to keep the low-information sheeple from getting the news.  Readers in California, and in our neck of the woods, don’t have to go far to listen to the bleating of progressives who don’t have a clue about the science, data handling, and computer processing that they are told to worship on the altar of Consensus Science – Hallelujah!

Hat tip to RR reader, fellow blogger, and compatriot Russ Steele for the timely heads up on this.