Jan 25

Charlotte Overclock and Miley C

Have to get out of the mode of thinking about the abject stupidity enveloping both sides right now in the US. This will help.

And this is great. Miley’s voice is amazing without autotune. So much better.

Jan 25

Cotte

I don’t usually visit Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter feed as it causes my brain to glitch. But I made that mistake, so I will also inflict it on you. You know you love me. Here’s her “takeaway” about the Clinton campaign.

Yeah, it was the evil left that caused Clinton to lose. Sure. That’s exactly what happened. No other explanation.

Damn, the Democrats are so done. Why even bother to run anyone in 2020?

(I took screenshots because Marcotte tends to delete her tweets. What’s weird about her in a side note is that I read her nearly every day for years — really liked her writing, respected her lack of pulling punches. And then Something Happened around 2008 or 2009. Not sure what. And now she is like she is.)

Jan 24

Impuissance

During the Obama admininstration, the argument went that Obama basically had no power to do any differently than he did — he couldn’t possibly have achieved any more than the weak sauce that we all saw. That he was hamstrung. That the bully pulpit was useless, that he was as powerless as an infant in a tornado.

First, recognize that Trump has signed no new bills. Congress has not acted on anything.

Also recognize that for all the destruction Trump has already precipitated, Obama could have done just as much or nearly so in the opposite direction with the tip of his pen, just like Trumpty Dumpty.

You fucking idiot putzes, you froward flap-mouthed louts, you were Obama impotence apologists all — and now you’re seeing to all our regrets just how worthlessly wrong you all were.

Fuck each and every one of you.

Jan 24

Bam

If Obama had prosecuted any banksters in 2009 and later — those who were most responsible for the global financial crisis — there is a very good chance Trump would not be president right now.

Good job.

Jan 24

Hiddenness

I may have been bagging on Lance Mannion a lot lately, but we have in common that we are basically incapable of math.

Personal prejudice: Most people can’t do math. What we call math is actually simple arithmetic. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Calculating. What Jethro Bodine in his pride at his sixth grade education called cipherin’. Nobody does math, and can do math, until they understand why multiplying two negative numbers together produces a positive number. I’ve never understood that one. So I can’t do math.

I can explain that, but I still am utter shit at math. I can spend 100 times as long as someone who is capable in this field studying, learn far less, and then forget it all irretrievably in a week like I’d never studied it even once. It’s not because I don’t like it or that I don’t try, or that I have a block. Blocks are easy for me to overcome; I just do it. Always have, always will.

It’s just not a block, as much as math people like to believe that for some reason. I guess it makes them feel better. I don’t know.

As the son of a physicist and computer scientist who, hard as he tried, never could get me to follow his math when he helped me with my homework, and as someone who was an A student in math in grade school but was stymied by ninth grade algebra and defeated in eleventh grade by calculus, and as the father of someone who has struggled with a severe math learning disability—dyscalculia they’re calling it these days—and is two daunting math courses shy of completing his degree, I’m here to tell you…

Math ain’t natural.

Yep! Math people just have no idea how hard it is — how impenetrable — to those not so inclined. It’s like someone who when encountering another person who doesn’t speak their language, they just talk progressively louder until they are nearly screaming.

Yeah, that does a lot of good.

I think math people are so very delusional about this because it is easy for them. They just get it, even if they have to work at a little. Like me reading Nietzsche or Wittgenstein or Schopenhauer, even if I don’t understand it right away (which I often do not), I can tell that there is something there, and that if I just keep thinking about it, I will eventually comprehend it fully. I imagine that is what math is like for those who can grasp it, because that it what reading something very hard is like for me. No matter how difficult, I know I will eventually parse it out (and probably explain it to the math person who won’t be able to understand it).

With math, I start out confused, and it never gets better — in fact, it gets worse, more tangled, less comprehensible as I go along. It never makes any more sense, but rather less sense over time. In that realm, it’s obvious that there is nothing I can do or try to get closer to any sort of answer or even basic comprehension. There is no path forward.

It’s strange that these delusional people are so talented at math, but so bad at understanding that for some people, this mathematical implement that they were born with is just not in the math-deficient person’s toolbox.

I wish math people weren’t so smug in their beliefs about this. We who’ve struggled with this for years know our own minds pretty well, and often have spent more hours than the math-talented people for no results at all.

Believe me, if it were a block, most of us would’ve overcome it pretty effortlessly when we were 10.

Jan 24

Antipodean

If as most mathematicians and scientists do, you accept mathematics as based on some Platonic ideals located…somewhere, then you also implicitly subscribe to Cartesian dualism — and if you claim that you don’t, your views are logically inconsistent and irreconcilable.

I’ll leave the exposition of these thoughts to the reader, in his or her own mind.

Don’t you love when people do that?

Jan 23

TrumPPed

No matter what other harm Trump does, withdrawing from the TPP will be a very good thing for the US.

It was already unofficially dead, but this puts the spike in its heart.

On balance, I think relatively-open trade is a good thing; however, the TPP was a deal negotiated in secret by large corporations, with overreaching and onerous copyright restrictions, little to no protection of worker rights, and was mostly a racket to protect corporations from competition and lawsuits, even above the power of sovereign nations.

It is a very, very good thing that it is dead.

Jan 23

The math, it is broken

When I was in school, there was some space shuttle simulator computer game we used to play.

I don’t recall its name, but I do remember that there was a bug that if you crashed the shuttle calamitously enough while attempting landing, it’d say something like: “11 out of 7 astronauts on board died.”

Of course for us the game became all about how we could for example orbitally slingshot the shuttle around the moon to slam it into the earth at 60,000mph or any other method we could discover to arrange for the most fiery, disastrous crash.

My speculation is that the designers and coders didn’t consider that anyone would devise ways to crash the space shuttle as devastatingly as possible to cause the most fatalities, so they coded nothing to check if someone went beyond whatever bound they’d established for a “normal” crash.

My memories are hazy as I was 10 or so at the time, but I think one of us eventually got it to say, “20 out of 7 astronauts on board died.”

And that my coders is why you test your software for scenarios that you think surely no one will ever try.