Severance

The Summit, in Danbury, CT channels the program Severance as it's a 1.2 million square foot former corporate headquarters that now, is largely empty. One sees ghosts here without question. Enjoy. 

10,000 hours ... & then some :)

A Bridge not too far 2019

To become an "expert", IMHO, is somewhat misguided as the more you know, the less you know as any craft requiring expertise will continue to confound the "expert" in question as taking a beginners mind to the discipline is key to become one with the profession one has undertaken. With this in mind, the article in Pysche regarding on how to become an expert is apt to a fault as there's always a cost in becoming truly competent in anything worthwhile.

The drive to become expert – to become as good as we can be, at whatever we’ve chosen to do – is something we all share. It is not about external markers of success, such as moving up the career ladder or becoming more marketable (though that may happen too). It’s an internal, ontological process; a shift in the nature of who you are, not just what you can do. It’s a commitment to developing your own potential as a person, to pushing your limits. It transcends short-term goals and waypoints. Running counter to contemporary pressures to show quick results, it requires decades of commitment and effort – perhaps a lifetime – and there are no shortcuts. It’s a slow-burning fuse, especially when you don’t seem to be getting anywhere and you feel like giving up. Being expert means you can achieve excellent results almost every time and in any situation – not just pull off the occasional success.

Prepare yourself for the long haul and more

A lot of people talk glibly about ‘the 10,000 hour rule’. This comes from the work of K Anders Ericsson, a psychologist who devoted his life to researching how people become expert. Several decades ago, he started observing ‘elite performers’ as he called them, especially in the world of music. He discovered that all those who had become successful in this highly competitive world had spent at least 10,000 hours in ‘sustained deliberate practice’. By this he meant working in a focused, concentrated way, with the intention to make progress – very different from mindless repetition of a task when your attention is somewhere else. Ericsson’s ‘10,000 hours’ has become something of a mantra, popularised by writers such as Malcolm Gladwell.

Angle 1

Chasing infinity

A Trip to Infinity, a stellar documentary from Netflix, describes infinity as a concept connected to zero as both describe something beyond the notion of number in trying to describe reality in a way indirectly related to Tao or Zen as both attempt to describe existence without the need to parse numbers. Yours truly has talked about infinities within a finite space as seen by the Mandelbrot set, the Menger Sponge and Cantor Dust as all three endlessly subdivide space in ways most enchanting to viewers like myself. Another take on infinity centers on chaos as the law of initial conditions and the inability to exact repeatability is, as quoted below, is but a dream as seen by the Lorenz Attractor, endlessly moving through 3 space, coming close to repeating a given track but never quite getting there.  

To whit ... As seen by the beautiful Lorenz attractor, used in monitoring temperature variations in weather patterns, the notion of exact repeatability in open systems (in this case, temperature) is but a dream, something duplicated, among other things, in the variance of planet orbits, the growth of ferns or the dripping of a water faucet. Additionally, what is also seen from this research is the emergence of complex behavior coming out of seemingly simple systems, something that has forever changed how we view reality. "and so it goes." KV/Slaughterhouse Five" BRT Sunday, 2007.

Why are we so intrigued by the infinite? Maybe it’s because of the tension between our finite lives and the seemingly unbounded range of our imagination, between the limits that we experience and the possibly infinite universe that we inhabit. Young people can think that life will last forever; older people, realizing that it will not, might look for a semblance of immortality in their legacies. Buzz Lightyear, in “Toy Story,” teaches kids that life is full of infinite possibilities; Hamlet, as he laments the finitude of life, remembers Yorick as a man of infinite jest. Perhaps to make sense of infinity, even just a little, is a way to feel some control and comfort in the face of life’s big questions.

Out of context - 2020

The Big Joke ...

 Anthony Eslick

As George Carlin said, the big joke relies on us rubes believing we have a choice when it comes to selecting politicians who "truly represent us" and not to the powers at be who fund their endless campaigns. The big joke also applies to banks "too big to fail" getting bailed out by us when making bad investments as there's no consequences whenever these entities make bad decisions like that of pols lying to the public about Viet Nam or banks selling options on toxic assets before the housing bubble burst in 2008. In indirect fashion, this big joke applies to The Donald's big lie as seen by the blurb below.

Donald Trump’s so-called big lie is not big because of its brazen dishonesty or its widespread influence or its unyielding grip over the Republican Party. It is not even big because of its ambition — to delegitimize a presidency, disenfranchise millions of voters, clap back against reality. No, the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke, and that it can be treated as such without consequence.

The big lie depends on the big joke. It was enabled by it. It was enhanced by it. It is sustained by it.

When politicians publicly defend positions they privately reject, they are telling the joke. When they give up on the challenge of governing the country for the rush of triggering the enemy, they are telling the joke. When they intone that they must address the very fears they have encouraged or manufactured among their constituents, they are telling the joke. When their off-the-record smirks signal that they don’t really mean what they just said or did, they are telling the joke. As the big lie spirals ever deeper into unreality, with the former president mixing election falsehoods with call-outs to violent, conspiratorial fantasies, the big joke has much to answer for.

Orwell's take also rings true regarding the joke in his classic essay Politics and the English language 

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. 

We pretend to work, you pretend to pay us

Without god ...

Yours truly is an atheist. Have been for well over 60+ years as needing god to be ethically honest and caring is not necessary IMHO, a notion shared by Camus, Einstein and George Carlin, among significant others too numerous to count. With this being said, the move by Harvard to make Greg Epstein, an atheist, as chief Chaplin, is a smart move by bringing atheism as a viable alternative to the dark vagaries of magic and religion in the year of our lord 2022.

Last month, Harvard University named a new Chief Chaplain: Greg Epstein, an atheist. As reported in The New York Times,1 Epstein, the campus humanist chaplain, was unanimously elected to “coordinate the activities of more than 40 university chaplains, who lead the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and other religious communities on campus.” Perusing the hundreds of reader comments generated by the Times article revealed broad support. While some questioned whether an atheist could be a “real” chaplain, others suggested that appointing a humanist was a clever move—a way to have a neutral figure in a position of power.

Yet, across a chasm of difference, both reactions share a problematic assumption: that humanist commitments—by virtue of omitting belief in God(s)—involve no basis for religious authority, indeed no commitments at all. In stark contrast, the Harvard students interviewed about Epstein praised his ability to support an authentic quest for meaning without belief in God. “Being able to find values and rituals but not having to believe in magic,” A.J. Kumar, former president of a Harvard humanist group, was quoted as saying, “that’s a powerful thing.” But is it really possible to have meaning (the values and sense of purpose) without magic (the supernatural beings and metaphysics)? Are the commentators right to treat humanism as an absence of meaningful commitments, versus a commitment to humanistic sources of value and meaning?

Camus said it best in L'étranger

Comme si cette rage aveugle m'avait lavé, me débarrasse de l'espoir ; pour la première fois, dans cette nuit pleine de signes et d'étoiles, je m'ouvrais à la bienveillante indifférence du monde.

As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the benign indifference of the world.

 

Cover of the first edition

Fixit Girl

A mysterious programmer comes to the aid of her boss in solving a wicked problem with code. Enjoy.

Random Shots ...

Working Hard/Rev II

Taking it easy :)

11:00 PM

Barn Doors

Waxing Gibbous

Stratus Clouds

Stratus II

Sturgeon Moon

Kn U REED THIS?

Let's think about this. It's akin to the fact young people have a problem with the notion of time ...

We won't talk about stick shift cars but we could, right?

There's a cost to all of this as the question to ask is, what happens if the power goes out or one needs to be able to read cursive written information articulating something really important residing on paper. Disquieting don't you think? As often stated in BRT, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, something readily seen in the pix seen above when young people cannot discern the data contained within said images.

Illustration by Katie Martin. Source: Library of Congress.

GEN Z NEVER LEARNED TO READ CURSIVE

How will they interpret the past?

It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren’t very helpful to him, because of course he couldn’t read cursive.

Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and flourishes. Amused by my astonishment, the students offered reflections about the place—or absence—of handwriting in their lives. Instead of the Civil War past, we found ourselves exploring a different set of historical changes. In my ignorance, I became their pupil as well as a kind of historical artifact, a Rip van Winkle confronting a transformed world.

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past," 

 - George Orwell/1984

11:00PM ...

 

11:00PM ...

Why this image when this blurb's about AI, the open ended tech never to be fully understood as it takes real time software to react to realtime input, something not possible unless realtime evolving software is rewriting itself in realtime in order to cope with said realtime input. With this image as indirect reference, it stands to reason people who build this code are getting rather nervous to say the least as said software is evolving at speeds beyond the kin of man. With this being said, anybody who states AI will never become sentient assumes everything will remain as it is. Well, we all know how turns out, right? 

To answer why 11:00PM is the cover page for this blurb centers on the fact the lack of sanguine vibes of AI as a possible dark harbinger of the future reflects, indirectly, with the quasi dark nature of this piece although the summer night in question, when this pix was taken, was truly stellar as it was the prelude to a hurricane fortunately passing us by back in 2021. :)

After years of development, AI is now driving cars on public roads, making life-changing assessments for people in correctional settings, and generating award-winning art. A longstanding question in the field is whether a superintelligent AI could break bad and take out humanity, and researchers from the University of Oxford and Google Deepmind have now concluded that it’s “likely” in new research.

The paper, published last month in the peer-reviewed AI Magazine, is a fascinating one that tries to think through how artificial intelligence could pose an existential risk to humanity by looking at how reward systems might be artificially constructed.

To give you some of the background: The most successful AI models today are known as GANs, or Generative Adversarial Networks. They have a two-part structure where one part of the program is trying to generate a picture (or sentence) from input data, and a second part is grading its performance. What the new paper proposes is that at some point in the future, an advanced AI overseeing some important function could be incentivized to come up with cheating strategies to get its reward in ways that harm humanity. 

“Under the conditions we have identified, our conclusion is much stronger than that of any previous publication—an existential catastrophe is not just possible, but likely,” Cohen said on Twitter in a thread about the paper. 

"In a world with infinite resources, I would be extremely uncertain about what would happen. In a world with finite resources, there's unavoidable competition for these resources," Cohen told Motherboard in an interview. "And if you're in a competition with something capable of outfoxing you at every turn, then you shouldn't expect to win. And the other key part is that it would have an insatiable appetite for more energy to keep driving the probability closer and closer."

Verticality

Sisyphus had a better deal :)

Sisyphus had a better deal as he had no pointy haired boss there to mock him. :)

Cheating death twice has consequences ...

Then I witnessed the torture of Sisyphus, as he wrestled with a huge rock with both hands. Bracing himself and thrusting with hands and feet he pushed the boulder uphill to the top. But every time, as he was about to send it toppling over the crest, its sheer weight turned it back, and once again towards the plain the pitiless rock rolled down. So once more he had to wrestle with the thing and push it up, while the sweat poured from his limbs and the dust rose high above his head. (Odyssey, Book 11:593)

A detail from a black-figure amphora depicting the punishment of Sisyphus in Hades as Persephone looks on. 530 BCE. (Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich)

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch ... ever.