Misfits Rule

My dream died, and now I'm here
Sabine Hossenfelder

I enjoyed this video. I feel we are somewhat kindred spirits. When I was working with computers, I was only interested in making them work which mostly involved debugging code and connecting wires. Since there was no end to the supply of problems, I thought I could keep on doing it indefinitely. Turns out wasn't the case. Looking back, I think I was like the guy who fixes up old cars because he can, but meanwhile the world is churning out new cars as fast as they can, so there are fewer and fewer old cars, and more importantly fewer and fewer people who are willing to pay to have them repaired. Everybody wants new cars that don't require the services of a mechanic.

News Media

Time Magazine Headline

The Shekel explains the irony of this headline, in case you don't get it.

Complexity Run Amuck

Hyundai Mystery Fuel Injector Shutdown - How Can We Fix It if It Won't Stay Broken?
Watch Wes Work

I've been watching a bunch of Watch Wes Work videos lately. He covers the gamut of automotive repairs, from patching up old rust buckets so they can limp down the road for another year to delving into instructable electronic nightmares, like this one. These kind of videos always remind me of the hangar scene from Star Wars:

Star Wars Echo Base

People working on complex machinery using more complex instruments. Come to think of it, it's very much like what the maintenance and repair guys do on fighter jets for the military.

Some problems with broken machinery are obvious, something is leaking or something is broken, but some problems, like the one in the video at top can benefit from some analysis. Sometimes a mechanic will just start replacing parts figuring that eventually one of them will fix the problem, but that can get very expensive. Analysis requires an intelligent and functioning brain. When I am sharp and motivated, problems like this are like a good meal: I gobble them up. If I am dragging and foggy, I will be stymied. I suspect this is why repair manuals have gotten so big, wait, what I am talking about? I haven't seen any new repair manuals, they've all been moved to digital versions where they can lay out all the steps required to diagnose the problem. Except they can't foresee every problem, so at some point they will simple direct the mechanic to replace a component.

New Common Rail System
(From the left: fuel pump, injector, and common rail)

Common rail direct fuel injection was a new term for me. It was originally used in WWI submarines. Denso pioneered it for use in automotive applications in 1995. It offers certain benefits but the part that struck me is the extraordinary pressures it operates at: 29,000 PSI (pounds per square inch) which is like ten times as much as a typical hydraulic system, which uses 2 or 3,000 PSI.

Stupidity

Stupidity and Transcendence

Interesting essay:

The Third Force by Garret Keizer - On stupidity and transcendence

One idea I picked up is that stupidity can be a learned behavior. People will sometimes so enjoy being a member of a group that they will ignore some aspects of the group that normally one would consider stupid. Some of those aspects may be innocuous, like wearing dunce caps, but they can also be dangerous, like beating anyone who isn't wearing a dunce cap. 

I didn't read the whole thing, it's kind of long for me right now since I am operating on about four hours of sleep which translates into about half a brain. I am surprised I was able to put this post together. 

Pretty picture though. I just made up the caption. On my blog, pictures need captions and since it didn't have one in the original, I just used the subtitle.

Via View From The Porch

Big Word for the Day - Epistemology

Knowledge Venn Diagram

Epistemology - the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.

Via Astral Codex Ten

Bogus Word History

In which Beats are Sweet

Some people just like to make things up as they go.

Eluminator

Electric Ford F-100
Mashable

Pretty truck, though I think what makes it attractive is the paint job and the lowered stance. Not sure why that is. Perhaps it is years of conditioning. Stock cars have several inches of ground clearance to enable them to cope with real world roads, roads filled with all manner of obstacles. Custom cars, hot rods, race cars, super exotic cars all sit very low to the ground. It looks cool, but is totally impractical for anyplace besides a race track. I suspect they are feeding a fantasy - if you have this car you can go really fast on race track, a fantasy that completely ignores having to go to the grocery store to pick up a box of pampers.

The idea of an electric car is attractive, but the reality is a little hard to swallow. An electric car would probably work very well for me. I seldom make any long trips, the car would sit in the garage all night, every night, charging away. All I would have to do would be plug it in when I pull in and unplug it when I leave. Yes, all that plugging and unplugging would be a nuisance, but so is going to the gas station. Stopping at Costco for gas on my way into town takes an extra two miles and ten minutes, not counting waiting in line and at the pump.

There are other factors, like the cost and weight of the batteries, the possibility of a battery fire and the difficulty of putting out such a fire, but every modern convenience comes with risks and I suspect electric cars are less risky overall than others.

The one thing that concerns me is the electronic power controls. Being solid state, they are going to be reliable, but at some point they are going to start failing, maybe just of old age. When they fail they are going to very expensive to replace, partly due to their very reliability. If they never fail, there won't be a stout supply chain to supply replacement units. You'll have to go back to the factory where you will find that they quit making that model years ago and your best bet is to pick up one from a junkyard, or send it to Joe's Electric Power Control Repair Shop where they will tell you that the flux capacitor is blown, the ones used in your control box are very rare and will cost as much as a new control box, which you can't buy. Best just go buy a new car. Vunderbar.

The main reason I don't want an electric car is I allocated too much of my brain to the internal combustion engine. I could dive deep into how electric cars work, you can go all the way down to the quantum explanation of magnetism, but I don't think I've got the brain capacity for that AND all my knowledge about conventional automobile engines. Something would have to go, and since all my current knowledge was hard fought, I am reluctant to let my engine knowledge go. Of course, at my age, memory leaks are starting to appear (no they aren't!). I've made a couple of passes at trying to understand magnetism, but it gets really deep really quickly, and some of it just doesn't make any sense.

If your ignore the really deep parts of magnetism though, electric cars are simplicity itself, and I suspect that is one of the main attractions. Electric motors are ubiquitous in the modern American household, so people are familiar with them and how they operate. Internal combustion engines by comparison are horribly complicated. I can see how - for someone who is not mechanically inclined - they could be a little off-putting. You may as well tell a non-mechanical person that they need a new slankerator (an imaginary part) as tell them need a new head gasket (a real thing). For a non-gear head, it's all just Greek and could very well just be myths designed to extract money from their wallet.

Obligatory slam on the bogus green-ness of electric cars: most electric power in the USA comes from burning fossil fuels. So right there electric cars are producing just as much greenhouse gas as conventional cars. Add the amount of power lost in long distance power transmission and the efficiency of an electric car is worse than a conventional gasoline powered car. So electric cars are contributing more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than regular cars.

The Unwanted Blog has a post about the Eluminator.

Knowledge is Ephemeral

Linear A tablet from the palace of Zakros, Archeological Museum of Sitia
We have plenty of examples, but we can't read any of it.

“Always”: Unspoken & Clueless Assumptions by Joseph Moore. Joseph is one of my favorite thinking writers. He links this video:

Why Can't we Remake the Rocketdyne F1 Engine?
Curious Droid

Doomed! We are doomed, I tell you!

Annoying Puzzles (and Cognitive Reflection Problems) - Numberphile
Numberphile

Our brains sabotage our minds, or is it that our* minds are sabotaging our brains? Anyway, whatever you think about most anything is probably wrong.

I was going to say 'are our minds' but I can't say it or even think it without tripping over it.

Belief

A couple of items regarding belief showed up in my email this morning. First was this item from Wondermark:

#1522; In which a Backstory is established

Then there was this post by Syafolee:

Hello Darkness, How Can I Turn You into a Story?

The unexpectedly hard windmill question (2011 IMO, Q2)

The unexpectedly hard windmill question (2011 IMO, Q2)
Another math video. The problem itself is not that interesting, but the problems this problem caused, that's another story.

On My Mind

Several things have been ticking over in my mind, but between my lower energy level, and my everyday obligations (which includes an hour of reading and 2 or 3 hours of Behzat Ç.), I haven't put up any posts, so I thought I'd just go over them briefly.

---

Radiation in deep space is a real problem. Spaceships in science fiction always seem to have big windows that offer a spectacular view of the stars. I'm thinking spaceships destined for long term voyages, like years, would need to be like a ball made of concrete or steel and would certainly have no windows. There would cameras on the outside and video screens on the inside, but no windows. Criminently you say, what's the point of going way out there if you can't actually look at anything? If we wanted to see digital reproductions of the universe, we could just have stayed home and sent robots to take pictures for us.

Well, we could, except for the time delay. If you want to actually do anything out there, like, say, pick up a rock, it's better to be Johnny-on-the-spot. You should be able to exert adequate control over anything within a thousand miles. Hmm, a thousand miles is going to take about five milliseconds, round trip will take 10. Turn that into Hertz and we get a low pitched hum. Electrical equipment hums at 60 Hz. Seems like there are some doctors who are performing surgery remotely. I wonder what the delay time is on live internet video.

Okay, you could probably teach a robot to pick up a rock, but it's going to be a while before a robot can do everything a person can do, and even when that happens, there are still going to be people who want to go out there and do it for themselves, even if they are only doing it through digitally controlled Waldos.

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Most of what we know we acquired by instinct. Walking, talking, listening are all things we all learn how to do before we can even begin any formal education. Somewhere in those first dozen years we pick on social behavior, how much pushing, shoving and yelling is required (stand up for your rights) and how much is too much (or you might be arrested by the police). We learn to identify emotions in other people. We learn to identify people, but that might be hard wired into the brain, maybe no learning is required. Yes, you need to see someone at least once to be able to recognize them again, but I don't think any learning is needed. It's just something you are born with.

All this readin', writin' & rithmetic are just icing on the cake. On some cakes the icing adheres well and can be piled to prodigious depths. On others it just slides right off and none of it ever sticks.

Why are pastors known as shepherds and their parishioners known as sheep? Because most of his flock are as dumb as sheep. Readin', writin' & rightmetic may as well be a foreign tongue. Silicon Greybeard was talking about people not being numerate, which is like literate except with numbers.

In their day, pastor's were essential to keeping society well ordered and on an even keel. Religious gatherings have been going on for so long I wouldn't be surprised if it was in our DNA.

Is the time of pastor's over? Despite all the mayhem loose in the world, I think pastor's are still a force for good in our society.

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I'm trying to stop thinking about the election. It's not going to make any real difference who wins. All politics is just a big circus designed to keep us distracted while the king monkeys steal all the monkey biscuits.

Some people are hollering about fraud. Given that everything is being done by people, I am sure there was some fraud somewhere. Whether there was enough to sway the election doesn't matter. What matter's is whether the various state justice departments decide to investigate, what they find, and how vigorously they prosecute any cases that come to light. All this vague, national agonizing doesn't matter a whit.

---

Money for nothin' is great (unemployment checks, welfare checks, stimulus checks), but what we really need is something to do. People with no resources and nothing to do are going to find something to do and it will probably be destructive. Yes, there are some people who are just going to be ornery and contrary no matter what you do, but there are a good number of people who just need someone to follow. Maybe he'll lead us to greener pastures. Or maybe he'll lead us to hell. 

The COVID-19 lockdown is bullshit. The longer it goes on, the more destruction you are going to see.

Pic of the Day

The LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) experiment is one of eight particle physics detector experiments collecting data at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

Ethan (Starts with a Bang!) Siegel has a post up on Medium with a wonderful title:

The Standard Model Is Not Enough, New LHC Study Shows
The Universe, according to our best understanding, just doesn’t add up.

No shit, Sherlock.

On Expertise

 

Expertise

Adaptive Curmudgeon has a post up about expertise. It's great! I recommend it to your attention.

Bipolar Self Evaluation

Stages of a photographer

This is a pretty great graph. These curves can probably be applied to any skill.

Via View From The Porch wherein Tam mentions the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Outside the Box

Carpentry 'Magic': Draw a Circle... with a SQUARE?!
I'm reading The Outside by Ada Hoffman, a very spacey science fiction novel and it's pretty great. One of the first things that comes up is knowledge versus understanding. Geometry and algebra might be a good example. It is possible to learn the rules for manipulating algebraic equations and by applying these rules you can 'solve' an equation, but just because you solved it does not necessarily mean you understand what the equation means. If you took algebra in school you probably solved a couple zillion equations. I know I did, but it wasn't until I got into geometry that these equations started to make any kind of sense.

Venezuela, Oil & Politics

Despina Andrianna
Blacklisted oil tanker

Reading Google's translation of Crimenes sin Castigo (Crimes without Punishment), I come across this little bit:

On Friday, March 5, the US Treasury Department added to the list of OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) two companies related to the maritime business, registered respectively in Greece and Liberia. and 35 oil tankers.

Okay, so we are trying to put the squeeze on Maduro. That's consistent with what I've heard. But when I Google OFAC, the first news story that mentions Venezuela is from Tass, the official news agency of the evil Russian empire. I guess Venezuela has fallen so far in importance that Americans can't be bothered with it. Or maybe Google has decided I like Russian news better.

The Tass story seems pretty even handed. There's none of the bombast that I normally expect to see from a despotic regime's state run media. Could they be attempting to lull us into a false sense of complacency so that sometime in the future they will be able to lead us to the dark side?

Are We Stupid?

The cruise ship Viking Sky arrives at port off Molde, Norway, on Sunday after having problems and issuing a "mayday" call in heavy seas off Norway's western coast. (Svein Ove Ekornesvag/NTB scanpix via AP)

We are all on board the express train to hell, or maybe I should say cruise ship. Rough weather started the engine lubricating oil to sloshing about in the tank, which caused the oil level sensors to sound an alarm, which caused the artificially stupid engine controller to shut down the engines, which set off panic amongst just about everyone.

WTF? No engineer on board? Well, maybe not, after all, we have a sophisticated engine control system so we will not have the problem that we had. We're seeing the same situation with airliners falling out of the sky. We are putting people in command of these complex machines, people who don't have a complete understanding of the machines under their control. It's a dilemma. Our control systems have become very sophisticated and most of the time, everything works perfectly. It's only in those rare instances that something goes wrong, and in those cases the only person who can save you is the one who knows more than the control system does. Those people are few and far between and becoming fewer everyday. Someone who knows enough to save the ship in that rare instance when things go wrong is going to be very bored babysitting a system that will likely never fail. If you are running a business, are you going to pay the big bucks necessary to have a talented person sitting around when you can hire a novice for a fraction of the cost, a novice who will more than likely be able to competently handle the job?

One hundred people paying $100 a seat for a short flight comes to $10K. One million similar flights adds up to ten billion dollars. One plane crashes where everyone dies happens once out of 300 million flights (my guesstimate). How often could one of those been averted if a super competent person had been in charge? How many of those happened where there was a super competent person in charge, but that super competent person had gone off the rails for some reason?

Automobile accidents still make the local news, but if you want national headlines, you need a major disaster. There are any number of ways to die. Life is a gamble. Place your bets accordingly.

Politics

Remember the brouhaha over President Bill Clinton's involvment with Monica Lewinsky? Ken Starr was the prosecutor of that farce. Would you like to know who his right hand man was? Brett Kavanaugh, that's who. Just goes to show you that what goes around comes around.

On Sunday The Oregonian announced their support for Knute Buehler, a Republican, for governor. This is in deep blue state so I was a little surprised. The story seemed fairly well balanced and fairly rational, but then I thought "who are they kidding"? Nobody cares about the facts. The only thing that matters to the public is rumor and innuendo. If there aren't any sexual shenanigans, nobody cares.

We're about halfway through The Rise of the Phoenixes (why do I think it should be The Rise of the Phoenii?) and it continues to fascinate. The plot is a little convoluted as it involves a couple dozen characters that are intimately involved in palace intrigue, so it can a little hard to follow sometimes, but it's a series, so there is plenty repetition and flashbacks to fill in what you've forgotten. The best part is that you don't have to spend thousands of hours watching the screen to find out what's going on like you do with real life politics. They've distilled it down so you only get the high points. I guess my point here is that political infighting hasn't changed in a zillion years.

There is one scene (episode 32) where our hero, who is pursuing revenge for crimes committed 20 years ago, finally has the villain dead to rights, or so he thinks. We have a showdown in the emperor's court (not like a modern court with lawyers and judges, this is an old feudal court where everyday empire-level business is conducted). Our hero lays out his case, thinking this will be end of the villain, but, naturally enough, the villain denies everything. It was incompetent subordinates, so yes, it's his responsibility, but he apologizes for his failure to maintain proper control and promises to punish the miscreants. Our hero dang near bursts a blood vessel when confronted with this mountain of bullshit. Reminds me of the old trial lawyer's rule of thumb: don't ask any questions in court that you don't already know the answer to.

There is another scene where a visiting prince wants to gain admission to the royal academy. He is enamored of the director, who is a woman pretending to be a man. Not quite sure what's going on here. The character is maybe 20 years old and very thin, so she could be a boy, but from her face alone she is obviously a woman. All I can think is that they have rules of conduct and if you follow the rules, nobody is going to question whether you are really a man or a woman.

Qingming Academy Entrance Examination
The director, the prince and the three students.

Anyway, the prince wants in. To gain admission he must pass the entrance exam (episode 35, 28:42 mark). The exam consists of one question. The prince is presented with three students, each holding a small box. One box holds a stone, the other two are empty. Each student makes a statement regarding this situation. Two of them are lying and one is telling the truth. Their statements are:

1. The stone is not in this box.
2. The stone is in Yao Yangyu's box (student #1).
3. The stone is not in this box.

Prince Helian cannot figure it out. I admit that at the time, relaxing in an alcoholic haze, I couldn't figure it out either. Ready for the solution? Student #1 is the only one telling the truth and the stone is in box #3. It's a fairly simple matter to deduce the answer using elementary logic. Makes me wonder whether logical thinking was really such a rare commodity that being able to solve this problem qualified you for entrance to the academy. I guess I shoulnd't be surprised, logical thinking is still in short supply, as evidenced by stupidity on display every day in the halls of power.

Quotes of the Day

“Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.”– Thomas Edison

“Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession – their ignorance.” – Hendrik Willem van Loon

“During my eighty-seven years, I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.” – Bernard M. Baruch

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” – Isaac Asimov

The author's names link to books on Amazon.

Stolen from Culture of Ignorance via Anonymous on Quora