Thursday, June 12, 2025

Monopoly



My wife beats me at Monopoly and now ... my 8 year old granddaughter does the same thing though I think I finally learned how to win against both my tormentors but one never knows. Maddening, greedy and altogether predatory, the game encourages capitalism at its worst while being disguised as a pastime for the ages. With that being said, it seems Monopoly has a rather interesting story to tell.





Nothing ever happens in a vacuum, including Monopoly




Nothing personal but I like The Landlord's Game a lot better. :)

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Escher lives ...


Escher would approve. 

1037 ...



Hidden in plain sight but maybe not as Trump's Big Beautiful Bill contains big plans to turn America into something unimagined prior to the reelection of Agent Orange, the luckiest man on planet earth.

To whit ...













Factoid


And we haven't even talked about the negative impact of this bill on science, research and tech. Seems this administration has no competency whatsoever save for the lust for money and the power it accrues as grifting and surveillance as art form is the one thing this administration know how to do well without question. 

Read the very long NYTimes Op piece, you will learn a lot, I know I did.


Monday, June 09, 2025

The wheels are off ...


The wheels are off. Combine this with the supremes granting the DOGE team launched by Elon Musk unfettered access to information collected by the Social Security Administration, data that includes Social Security numbers, medical and mental health records, and family court information.

In an unsigned order, the court, acting at the request of the Trump administration, temporarily overturned actions by two lower courts that had limited the DOGE team's access to sensitive private information at the Social Security Administration. The high court sent the case back to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., to rule on the merits. ...

Splinterlands awaits ...

Julian West, looking backwards from 2050, tries to understand why the world and his family have fallen apart.

Part Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part 1984, part World War Z, John Feffer’s striking new dystopian novel, takes us deep into the battered, shattered world of 2050. The European Union has broken apart. Multiethnic great powers like Russia and China have shriveled. America’s global military footprint has virtually disappeared and the United States remains united in name only. Nationalism has proven the century’s most enduring force as ever-rising global temperatures have supercharged each-against-all competition and conflict among the now 300-plus members of an increasingly feeble United Nations.

As he navigates the world of 2050, Julian West offers a roadmap for the path we’re already on, a chronicle of impending disaster, and a faint light of hope. He may be humanity’s last best chance to explain how the world unraveled—if he can survive the savage beauty of the Splinterlands.


You will remember this work forever ... Robert E.

Not right!!!


I'm lucky as we have, in West Haven, CT, a really good VA resource as said enterprise is connected to Yale New Haven Health, which means the young docs, interns, techs and nurses coming out of there are top notch and really care. When spending time at this VA, one sees how universal HC works in practice because the professionals there don't have to deal with insurance companies but rather to us "wonderful" rubes as needs warrant. Needless to say, this differs from HC in the public sector unless one has good insurance, something becoming increasingly difficult to come by given just how greedy the insurance companies truly are. With this being said, yours truly had to update the online connect to the VA, a rather arcane process for me (4 tries) but for folks not knowing tech ... a CF of epic proportions. Prior to Trump, vets needing to link to the VA could talk on the phone to get the info needed to make the connection but now, vets have to drive to the VA resource of choice to get the same info they used to get on the phone. Now, think of the people who are disabled, who have to make the trip in person ...

Anger does NOT BEGIN to address the outrage this vet feels as this is not right! I've talked to some of the VA people who help me out and they are just as angered as well. Not right, as stated before, applies.

An extinction-level event ...



From tariffs to diplomacy to science, it seems Agent Orange's crew can do nothing right save damaging rather important endeavors like space exploration and science as it's better to not tax billionaires and surveil against us 24/7 rather than insure the health of the nation with emphasis on research as research enable countries to thrive, a notion these people seem to not understand in any way, shape or fashion.









China is so happy about this administration from hell as it's doing a great job of
dismantling a once great nation for China at no cost.
Something to think about don't you think? 

Sunday, June 08, 2025

Nature is economical ...



Nature is economical as energy and entropy, the two entities that drive reality, manifest themselves in consistent fashion. From Fibonacci spirals to strange attractors in chaos, the ways nature distributes energy is limited, something readily seen in how life survives on planet earth.

Seen below is an elegant example of how energy is distributed in an open system via chaos.



 What could be driving this universal pattern? The team points to a mechanism long proposed in ecology but rarely confirmed at a global scale: environmental filtering. This is the idea that only species suited to local conditions—such as temperature, rainfall, or soil type—can thrive in a given area.

The researchers found evidence for two kinds of environmental filters shaping these patterns. One filter works within regional hotspots, where conditions are just right for a high number of unique species to thrive. The second operates at the edges of regions, where conditions are more variable and only certain species from neighboring regions can survive.

The researchers found evidence for two kinds of environmental filters shaping these patterns. One filter works within regional hotspots, where conditions are just right for a high number of unique species to thrive. The second operates at the edges of regions, where conditions are more variable and only certain species from neighboring regions can survive.

These two filters, working together, help determine which species make it into the core, which ones reach the edges, and which ones never cross into a new area at all.



The Golden Mean


Sunflower



Wednesday, June 04, 2025

The genius myth ...

 

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

High IQ does NOT equate to genius. Richard Feynman's IQ was 125. The last time I checked, Feynman was a genius so ... high IQ does NOT equate to genius. These characteristics, IMHO, do.

Curiosity, as prime driver, is the key to creativity without question.

The Act of Creation - Arthur Koestler: The creative act is the joining together of two or more seemingly dissimilar ideas that generate a heretofore unexpected result. i.e. Chemistry - H20 consists of 2 Hydrogen + 1 Oxygen atoms, both explosive yet, when combined, becomes water. 

The joke: Henny Youngman - Take my wife, Please. :)

Creativity starts with the asking of a question: Why is this the way it is?

Question everything - Einstein

The ability to see relationships is key because everything is connected as reality is a Quantum space and entanglement stitches it together.

Play is indispensable. What if ... is the real deal here. A sense of wonderment is essential.

Creativity takes courage as new ideas disrupt the "natural" order of things.

Creativity is problem-solving. It matters not the discipline used save that said discipline shapes how the creative act is produced.

The act itself is ineffable and cannot be explained. Like quantum, creativity just happens. It cannot be forced, only acted upon when the idea shows up. The finished act is anything but as it can be explained after the fact without issue.

Practice makes better. Beginners mind and intuition are key.

The size of the problem solved dictates the significance of the creative act. i.e. Mixing anchovies with pineapples on a pizza is a creative act. The size or importance of the problem solved, not so much while Einstein's Theory of relativity proving that Newton was wrong at universal scale, is.

Creativity, like tech and existence, has no morality. It simply is.

Stay hungry, stay foolish - Stewart Brand/Whole Earth Catalog. :)

AI is but a tool, the issue now becomes, does the tool become the master? 

As per the Atlantic ...

Who has the highest IQ in history? One answer would be: a 10-year-old girl from Missouri. In 1956, according to lore, she took a version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and recorded a mental age of 22 years and 10 months, equivalent to an IQ north of 220. (The minimum score needed to get into Mensa is 132 or 148, depending on the test, and the average IQ in the general population is 100.) Her result lay unnoticed for decades, until it turned up in The Guinness Book of World Records, which lauded her as having the highest childhood score ever. Her name, appropriately enough, was Marilyn vos Savant. And she was, by the most common yardstick, a genius.

Vos Savant hasn’t made any scientific breakthroughs or created a masterpiece. She graduated 178th in her high-school class of 613, according to a 1989 profile in New York magazine. She married at 16, had two children by 19, became a stay-at-home mother, and was divorced in her 20s. She tried to study philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, but did not graduate. She married again and was divorced again at 35. She became a puzzle enthusiast, joined a high-IQ society, and occasionally wrote an essay or a satirical piece under a pen name for a newspaper. Mostly, she devoted herself to raising her boys.

What did happen, though, is that on the back of her anointment in Guinness, vos Savant built a career as a professional genius. She wrote books such as the Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest and Brain Building in Just 12 Weeks. Billing her as “the smartest person in the world,” Parade magazine gave her an advice column, where she answered readers’ queries and published puzzles. (She didn’t respond to my attempts to contact her through the magazine.) Her specialty was logic problems—which showcase the particular type of mental ability most readily identified by IQ tests. In one column, she provided a solution for an apparently insoluble conundrum, the Monty Hall problem. Angry readers wrote in to correct her, but she stood firm.

Vos Savant’s life perfectly illustrates how genius can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. She was a housewife raising her children in total obscurity, until she was labeled a genius. And then she became one.

Reality is fractal.

Tuesday, June 03, 2025

Nowhere to go ...



Oh where have the insects gone?, a question more and more people are asking while the collapse of these creatures continues unabated due to pollution, environmental degradation, habitat loss and chemicals, a situation becoming increasingly dire as we speak. Back in the day, yours truly had to clean off the windshield of a beloved VW Camper Bus nearly every 15 minutes due to the flying hordes of insects one encountered in the 70's but no more. As per George Carlin, the earth will survive, us, well, that's another story.











Now a rare sight