Channeling Jeremy Bentham

11 years ago, yours truly wrote about ...  a most ingenious "device" to keep prisoners in check by making it impossible for any of the denizens of such prison to see if they were, in fact, being spied upon via a visionary approach to surveillance known as the panopticon. 

To whit ...

The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched.

Fast forward to 2012 & beyond where Palantir's digital version of the panopticon is alive and well, not only operating in Afghanistan but also now in the states as surveillance and the art of tracking behavior is big business 24/7 due to Palantir's unique ability to sift through vast amounts of visual and textural content to enable the military and police, among significant others, to find specific skeins of data impossible to locate by any other means.

An aerostat is a giant surveillance balloon. Its onboard cameras and sensors suck up vast amounts of data on what’s happening on the ground. That raw data gets processed, organized, and aggregated into an army intelligence product thanks to software developed by Palantir Technologies. 

It gets better.

Activity-based intelligence began in the war theater with the presumption You are what you do, but it is now being pushed into a new realm, says Biltgen. One that asserts: Because we know what you did, we think we know what you are going to do next. “Just like [the film] Minority Report predicted in 2002.” Today, some of these same methodologies are being used by the US federal government, including the Department of Health and Human Services, to tag, track and locate people who might carry the coronavirus. This raises concerns among legal scholars of a burgeoning biometric cybersurveillance state.

The question to ask here is ...

Who controls what data gets saved as potential evidence, and what data gets deleted—including data that could potentially act in a defense? What happens to the rule of law when individual citizens are persistently surveilled without knowledge of, or access to, the information that is being collected on them? -  Annie Jacobsen - Wired  

The best toon ever ...

The best toon ever ...

End of Empire ...

Thomas Cole -  The Consummation: The Course of the Empire 1836

Empires, at their zenith, present themselves to the world in grand fashion as seen in the Thomas Cole painting depicting why this is so but this illusion doesn't last forever ...

The look of the painting suggests the height of Ancient Rome. The decadence seen in every detail of this cityscape foreshadows the inevitable fall of this mighty civilization.

With this in mind, channel 2021 and the state of America with yet another Cole work.

Destruction. Oil on canvas, 1836, ​39 1⁄2 × ​63 1⁄2 in.[11]

The inevitable decline starts with inequality and corruption, the two headed construct

 that leads every empire to decay without question.

To whit ...

Just down the block, I can see the line of people that has formed every weekday since early December. Masked and socially distanced, they wait patiently to cross the street, one at a time, for a Covid test at a center run by the San Francisco Department of Health. My little street seems an odd choice for such a service, since — especially now that the school has closed — it gets little foot traffic. Indeed, a representative of the Latino Task Force, an organization created to inform the city’s Latinx population about Covid resources told our neighborhood paper Mission Local that

“Small public health clinics such as this one ‘will say they want to do more outreach, but I actually think they don’t want to.’ He believes they chose a low-trafficked street like Bartlett to stay under the radar. ‘They don’t want to blow the spot up, because it does not have a large capacity.’

What do any of these very local sights have to do with a crumbling empire? They’re signs that some of the same factors that fractured the Roman empire back in 476 CE (and others since) are distinctly present in this country today — even in California, one of its richest states. I’m talking about phenomena like gross economic inequality; over-spending on military expansion; political corruption; deep cultural and political fissures; and, oh yes, the barbarians at the gates. I’ll turn to those factors in a moment, but first let me offer a brief defense of the very suggestion that U.S. imperialism and an American empire actually exist.

And this

What better source for a definition of imperialism than the Encyclopedia Britannica, that compendium of knowledge first printed in 1768 in the country that became the great empire of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries? According to the Encyclopedia, “imperialism” denotes “state policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominion, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining political and economic control of other areas.” Furthermore, imperialism “always involves the use of power, whether military or economic or some subtler form.” In other words, the word indicates a country’s attempts to control and reap economic benefit from lands outside its borders.

Read Rebecca Gordon's detailed piece titled The Rubble of Empire in its entirety as it delineates why the US empire is crumbling as we speak. 

Pardons, Pardons & a fond goodbye to A. O.

Barry Blitt, a cartoonist and an illustrator, has contributed to The New Yorker since 1992. 

In 2020, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.

Kinda says it all doesn't it?

Nothing else needs to be added ...

Nothing else needs to be added for this craven, corrupt but competent pol by the name of Mitch McConnell aka the Turtle. Judges, tax cuts and abiding and supporting Agent Orange while getting kickbacks, he will go down in US history as one of the worst politicians ever in harming this nation in ways most astounding and depressing.

So tell me, Mitch, in these, your final hours as Senate majority leader: Were the judges and the tax cuts worth it?

Were they worth the sacking of the Capitol? The annexation of the Republican Party by the paranoiacs and the delusional? The degradation, possibly irremediable, of democracy itself?

Those close to him say that Mitch McConnell has his eye on his legacy, now more than ever. But I wonder whether he already understands, in some back bay of his brain where the gears haven’t been ground to nubs, that history will not treat him well.

Exactly ...

99.5% ...

Had to do a quick return to Surrey Nano Systems, the creators of Vantablack, a carbon based nanotube  paint that absorbs 99.5% of light, something high end imaging companies of all stripes are flocking 

to in order to enhance sensitivity to all things related to light as seeing how this 

amazing material works shows why this fact rings true.

Fleeting Winter

 CT winters are no longer the same. Cold snaps in early January are but a memory with little snow and thin ice but one can sense winter is still around but now it's a fleeting winter without question. Enjoy.

We have lost control/rev II

Photo by Natasa Grabovac on Unsplash

BRT has talked copiously about AI and the inherent dangers said tech has as its open ended and evolving at rates far beyond the kin of man thanks to the marriage of analog neural nets to real time genetic algorithms. Seems yours truly is not alone about this given just how fast AI is gaining ever greater smarts 24/7. 

We argue that total containment is, in principle, impossible, due to fundamental limits inherent to comput-ing itself. Assuming that a superintelligence will contain a program that includes all the programsthat can be executed by a universal Turing machine on input potentially as complex as the state ofthe world, strict containment requires simulations of such a program, something theoretically (andpractically) impossible.“Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.  This is largely because I do notdo sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to do.”Alan Turing (1950), Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind, 59, 433-460

The timing of the new debate about the dangers of superintelligence is not arbitrary.  It coincideswith recent demonstrations of human-level control in classic arcade games via deep reinforcementlearning (Mnih et al., 2015).  The key feature of this achievement is that the AI uses purely un-supervised reinforcement learning – it does not require the provision of correct input/output pairsor any correction of suboptimal choices, and it is motivated by the maximization of some notionof reward in an on-line fashion.  This points to the possibility of machines that aim at maximizingtheir own survival using external stimuli, without the need for human programmers to endow themwith particular representations of the world. In principle, these representations may be difficult forhumans to understand and scrutinize.

8 steps to control AI ... we hope.

Such an “ethics engineering” approach has been very useful in the design of systems that make autonomous  decisions  on  behalf  of  human  beings.   However,  their  scope is  not  suitable  for  the problem of controlling superintelligence (Yudkowsky, 2007).

In other words, we don't know how neural net driven AI works and ... real time evolving code must be written by code, not humans, this is why we have lost control. 

It tastes like veal ...

A deliciously long and wonderful piece from Wired discussing the finer points of cannibalism, points out the advantages of being old, sick and lazy in trying circumstances vs being young, vigorous and hard working, is both a hoot and a teaching tool, not only in terms of learning more about the Donner Party but also about cannibalism and how it became a taboo. Thank Polyphemus and Odysseus for that one. :)

The Donner Party saga

LET’S SAY YOU want to strike it rich. The year is 1846 and you’re somewhere in the Midwest pulling potatoes out of the ground. But you’re tired of pulling potatoes. You want to pull gold. And maybe you’ve heard the rumors: People are finding fortunes in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. 1 So you hitch up your Conestoga wagon and head west, joining that year’s convoy of California-bound immigrants. And on July 20, you and the rest of these early pioneers find yourselves staring at a crossroads in what is today southwest Wyoming. Like them, you’ll face a choice: Turn right or turn left?

Both trails lead to California, but the trail to the right detours far north. It meanders deep into Idaho before it reverses course and turns back south into eastern Nevada. The left trail eschews the northern deviation. It takes a straight shot across Utah, and by doing so removes almost 350 miles from your journey. So let’s say you look at a map, note the faster route, and decide to turn left.

ILLUSTRATION: CODY CASSIDY; KEVIN PLOTNER

At the time, this seems like the wise choice. Andrew Hastings, an adventurer and respected guide, had just scouted this shortcut on horseback the winter before and advertised his new cutoff in guidebooks and postings along the trail. Most of the convoy, fearful of the unknown and unwilling to trust one person’s word, turn right. But you’re not the only one keen to arrive early in California. When you turn left on that July day, 20 other wagons do the same. After a few uneventful days, you and the rest of these previously unconnected pioneers will caravan together for safety and, following some debate, you’ll elect a nice, older, wealthy fellow as the leader of your party. His name is George Donner.

Winter bites ...  and the lack of knowledge will kill you

Unfortunately, the winter of 1846 starts early. Two weeks of snow has buried the top of the Sierras by the time you arrive, and the weather’s terrible turn is as unlucky as it is decisive. Oxen always struggle to haul wagons up the steep granite walls protecting Truckee Pass (now Donner Pass), but when you attempt it on November 1, you’ll find it buried in five feet of powder. Less than three miles from the summit, you will face two terrible options: one, abandon your wagons and cattle, fashion snowshoes, and trek for Sacramento and your life; or two, retreat to a few cabins by Truckee Lake that previous pioneers constructed a few years prior. The Donners chose to retreat.

Food will soon become a problem. A few try to hunt, but this is largely hopeless, since the large animals either evacuate the mountains or hibernate in winter. The only animals that remain are too small to shoot, Bowness tells me, though you could possibly trap them. 

Unfortunately, while the Donners are strong, smart, hardworking, entrepreneurial, and industrious, they’re Midwestern farmers. Not mountain men. They don’t have traps, nor the fishing gear to catch trout from the lake, and may not have known how to use either if they did. If you’re going to eat, it’s going to have to be the oxen and the food that came with you in the wagons.

Best be old & sick and do nothing ...

The gender roles of 1800s pioneers were clear: “It was the expectation of the men at the time that they would perform the heavy labor, and that’s exactly what happened,” Grayson says. Hard work increases your metabolism, so in a cruel twist, the more you helped with carving the trail over the Wasatch, the faster you’ll die.

Instead, not only should you skip the arduous hike—you should do nothing at all. You need to flatline your metabolism. If you reduce your movement, you can reduce your caloric requirements by some 50 to 80 percent. Rather than working to survive, you want to be in the worst shape of your life. “On the Donner Party, you absolutely want to be a couch potato, not a marathoner,” Grayson says. As proof he points to the example of George Donner, who had a hand infection that kept him bedridden throughout the winter. He survived well into March, long after most men around his age had already starved.

Regarding cannibalism ...

Archeologists have found butchered human bones far too frequently for it to have been a sporadic, starvation-only practice. And before Western culture washed over the globe, ritualistic cannibalism was not uncommon.

Blame it on the ancient Greeks ...

“The Greeks used cannibalism as a way to define the worst behavior possible in another group,” Schutt tells me. The probable explanation for why they chose cannibalism to represent the act of a monster is fairly straightforward: It’s what their northern European enemies, the Androphagi (Greek for “man-eaters”), did. For the Greeks, human flesh was the food of foreigners—and thus eating it the lowest one could stoop. From there, the stigma only grew.

If you're gonna ...

When practicing cannibalism, there are a few safety precautions one must take. First, cook your meat thoroughly to avoid diseases. No tartars or carpaccios. Also, avoid the brain. 

Lastly ...

Finally, if you’re considering best prep methods or pairings, then according to the journalist William Seabrook, who claimed to have partaken in ritual cannibalization in the 1920s, you can expect for it to taste like veal.

Migrations 101 :)

We all know animals, large and small, fliers and swimmers, make trips to find water, food, breed and better habitats in order to survive but man doesn't know just how far and what routes they take to do something they have done since the beginning of time, until now.

Last fall, teams of scientists began fanning out across the globe to stalk and capture thousands of other creatures — rhinos in South Africa, blackbirds in France, fruitbats in Zambia — in order to outfit them with an array of tracking devices that can run on solar energy and that weigh less than five grams. The data they collect will stream into an ambitious new project, two decades in the making and costing tens of millions of dollars, called the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, or ICARUS, project. Each tag will collect data on its wearer’s position, physiology and microclimate, sending it to a receiver on the International Space Station, which will beam it back down to computers on the ground. This will allow scientists to track the collective movements of wild creatures roaming the planet in ways technically unimaginable until recently: continuously, over the course of their lifetimes and nearly anywhere on Earth they may go.

By doing so, ICARUS could fundamentally reshape the way we understand the role of mobility on our changing planet. The scale and meaning of animal movements has been underestimated for decades. Although we share the landscape with wild species, their movements are mostly obscure to us, glimpsed episodically if at all. They leave behind only faint physical traces — a few paw prints in the hardening mud of a jungle path, a quickly fading arc of displaced air in the sky, a dissipating ripple under the water’s surface. But unlike, say, the sequence of the human genome, or the nature of black holes, our lack of knowledge about where our fellow creatures go has not historically been regarded as a particularly pressing gap in scientific understanding. The assumption that animal movements are circumscribed and rare tended to limit scientific interest in the question. The 18th-century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, imagining nature as an expression of God’s perfection, presumed each species belonged in its own singular locale, a notion embedded in his taxonomic system, which forms the foundation of a wide array of biological sciences to this day. Two centuries later, the zoologist Charles Elton, hailed as the “father of animal ecology,” fixed species into place with his theory that each species nestles into its own peculiar “niche,” like a pearl in a shell. Such concepts, like modern notions of “home ranges” and “territories,” presumed an underlying stationariness in undisturbed ecosystems.

But over the last few decades, new evidence has emerged suggesting that animals move farther, more readily and in more complex ways than previously imagined. And those movements, ecologists suspect, could be crucial to unraveling a wide range of ecological processes, including the spread of disease and species’ adaptations to habitat loss.

Big-data animal tracking.

The red trajectory shows how studies can now track animals with unprecedented detail, allowing researchers to predict the causes and consequences of movements, and animals to become environmental sensors. Multisensor tracking tags monitor movement, behavior, physiology, and environmental context. Geo- and biosciences merge now using a multitude of remote-sensing data. Understanding how social and interspecific interactions affect movement is the next big frontier.

Read the detailed NYTimes piece to learn why Migrations 101 applies. :)