Schrödinger's Accountant

The Cat not in the hat :)

This pix has been in BRT many times as it is so outrageously cool as Schrödinger's cat has been a feline of consummate mystery for over a hundred years but is this really the case? It doesn't hurt to ask, right?

Schrödinger's Accountant

Theoretical physics has spent over a century telling us quantum superposition—the idea that a particle can exist in two states at once—is a mystical, almost magical phenomenon. One puts a cat in a box and proceeds to tell you it is both alive and dead at the same time until you open it. 

Pretty wild eh? But countless experiments proved this duality over and over again. Light is both a wave and a particle when looked at from different perspectives but ...

what if the universe isn't a magician? What if it's just an honest bookkeeper?

You're a customer at Starbucks. You're going for a large black coffee. The price, five dollars. You pull out the five and hand it to the barista. To you, it's a PO, a Purchase Order, to pay for the coffee. To Starbucks, the five is an Invoice, payment for the item purchased. The minute the five is handed across the counter, both the buyer and the seller hold the five in their hands at the same time. For that fraction of a second, the money exists in two states simultaneously: the Purchase Order and the Invoice.

That isn't magic, and it isn't a paradox. It's simply the exchange required to execute a secure transfer of assets. 

Now, let's apply the exact same accounting principle to light.

 

Thomas Young's 1801 Double Slit experiment

Both a wave and a particle but when looked at closely, it's just balancing the ledger. Light, when moving in free space, is a wave. Analog. Think of a violin creating music or look at the above video. 

Seen below are photons, comprised of analog waves, striking a metal plate. At the exact moment of impact, the photons transform into discrete quanta or packets of energy (digital). This transaction allows the plate's electrons to absorb the energy and dislodge from the surface. The higher the frequency of light, aka photons, the higher altitude the electrons attain when dislodged. When the photon is released by the electron at a later time and reenters space, 
it becomes analog yet again, thus balancing the ledger, like an honest bookkeeper.

The emission of electrons from a metal plate caused by light quanta – photons

The universe doesn't deal in paradoxes; it deals in ledgers. And right now, standard academia is still staring at the cat, completely missing how reality, and business, does business  24/7. :) 

2007 ... of Protege and the notion of meaning

Three Body Problem

Yours truly decided to post this 2007 "gem" regarding Protege and it's connect to AI as prior art rules. Back in 2006, I downloaded and experimented with this amazing program, realizing this is the heart of what AI should be, a construct complete with meaning and ethics. In 2007, this post was my take on something wonderful but seemingly ignored. Sadly, ethics is consider a bolt on but it goes far deeper than that. Something wonderful can happen but only if we have the guts to make it happen.

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut.

https://beyondrealtime.blogspot.com/2007/02/semantic-web-cometh.html

Friday, February 23, 2007

The Semantic Web Cometh

Much has been said about the Semantic Web but let's look at accurate definitions of it and see what is being done to make it reality.

Wikipedia: "The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can not only be expressed in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.[1] It derives from W3C director Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange."

W3: "The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and its not part of the web. I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar?"

"Why not? Because we don't have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself."

"The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing."

In other words...Data transparency and the assignment of meaning to data.

One of the best working examples of how to do this is Protege, the open source free ontology editor
from Stamford University.

Seen below are two screens of a travel app depicting how to conduct a trip. Users not only can modify, connect and expand the nodes in interactive fashion to build knowledge based applications but also can share this content with any application/software agent able to read how Protege models this kind of information. 

Because RDF and Owl (Resource Description Framework/Web Ontology Language.) statements can be combined in sophisticated fashion, the ability to build machine readable ontologies, rules, logic and proofs will become reality as shown by the W3 diagram below depicting the building blocks of the Semantic web.

2026, life finds a way. OODA is not just a military doctrine, it's how life survives as uncertainty and incompleteness rule and only feedback loops, recursions and self correcting in real time enable life to function in a reality we will
never fully understand.

People are getting really angry ...

Daniel Jurman

People are getting really angry. From Flock Safety cameras spying on our ass to hidden gotchas whenever one goes to buy something, the slop, the veniality and the crassness of the once wonderful net has become a worse version of Idiocracy where everything's for sale, including your soul.

Yours truly has talked about this nonsense often but now it's a plague and folks are getting pissed off about it. Surveillance 101, from Palantir to the government and big tech, it never ends, something needing to be addressed before something untoward happens.

The discounts, promotions and offers you receive from businesses from Starbucks to Kroger to Target to Home Depot are all too often targeted calculations about what to charge you, built from data including your location, browsing history and social media activities. This information can be used to build hidden profiles of customers’ intelligence, abilities and preferences, which can signal how much you are willing to pay for any given item or service. When you are presented with a deal, you may not have realized that algorithms have already invisibly sized you up with the goal of squeezing your wallet.

This is a part of the commercial surveillance business model. Over the past decade, companies built up infrastructure to harness vast amounts of consumer data, using it to target individuals with unfair price hikes. Now, the concept of a price is itself degraded. Left in its place are numbers engineered for individual consumers, based not on market conditions but on the weaponization of your personal data. Policymakers should mandate that companies offer a real price — one that must be simple, public, accessible and consistent in a given market, with rules on discounts and loyalty programs to promote fairness and protect consumers and competition. No more targeted price adjustments based on surveillance. No more hidden costs or fees. No more prices that change on the fly.

Some argue that targeting and personalization are simply how modern discounts work, a natural evolution of coupons. But there is a meaningful difference between a public offer and a surveillance-driven one. The Sunday circular goes to everyone in the neighborhood: The terms are visible, the discount is available to anyone who clips it, and consumers know what they’re signing up for. Surveillance pricing works in reverse. Companies collect data, infer your willingness to pay and set a price, without you ever knowing your neighbor was charged less for the same thing. One rewards a consumer’s action; the other exploits a consumer’s profile.

Bait and switch applies

In 2022, Target settled a case brought by multiple California counties accusing the company of advertising one price on the website or app outside of the store and then changing the price once customers were in the store. When a traveler is looking for flights or accommodations, sites can show different prices based on the customer’s location — higher for those searching from, say, the San Francisco Bay Area, lower for Phoenix or Kansas City. Last year, when a former Washington Post reporter requested data Starbucks held about him, he noticed that the more he visited the coffee company, the fewer discounts he received.

Per Flock's website, its cameras are able to track individual people, not just cars.

Question, is Flock selling it's data to significant others? One never knows, do one? - Fats Waller

An agree upon lie ...

𒂼𒄄 ama-gi4 written in Classical Sumerian cuneiform

When reading the amazing NYTimes opinion piece titled an amargi, one readily sees there's a practical solution to the world's debt problem just as there's a practical solution to keep a car engine working if one understands what the system needs in order to survive. 

• The engine must have oil to enable the pistons to move up and down in their cylinders because without lubrication, the engine will seize. 
• The same requirement applies to water as it enables the engine's cylinder assembly to run at proper temperature, thus avoiding an engine meltdown while driving. 

In an internal combustion engine, a head gasket provides the seal between the engine block and cylinder head(s).

Its purpose is to seal the combustion gases within the cylinders and to avoid coolant or engine oil leaking into the cylinders.[1] Leaks in the head gasket can cause poor engine running and/or overheating.

This also applies to money.

When analyzing the August 2026 economic reality,  a $40 trillion U.S. debt and a $350 trillion global debt, the core structural flaw of modern finance is ... Money is an agreed-upon lie.

It's not a law of physics. It's an artificial ledger. And like all ledgers, if you do not account for the friction of the system, the debt load, the engine will eventually melt down.

Money is the ultimate illusion. It was invented to handle the give and take of business transactions
with as little friction as possible.

The ancient Mesopotamians invented money but today's bean counters believe that money is reality.
They treat the $350 trillion debt as an unbreakable physical law, completely forgetting that money's just a construct designed to grease the wheels of the business transaction.

It matters not what form money takes. Sea shells, gold, paper, copper. Nada.
It's the worth ascribed to such entity that counts. 

Compound Interest (The wealth engine of the creditors)

In a perfectly frictionless reality, debts could compound forever but in reality, the world's engine will seize.

Every transaction generates heat. Compound interest equates to running the engine at redline without an exhaust pipe. The debt snowballs, the debtor defaults and the structural integrity of the society begins to break, something that's beginning to happen as we speak.

an amargi ...

Illustration by The New York Times

Amargi ... Ama-gi is a Sumerian word written 𒂼𒄄 ama-gi4 or 𒂼𒅈𒄄 ama-ar-gi4. Sumerians used it to refer to release from obligations, debt, slavery, taxation, or punishment. Ama-gi has been regarded as the first known written reference to the concept of freedom, and has been used in modern times as a symbol for libertarianism.

When you think about money, one realizes it's an agreed upon lie of what something is worth and is an entity transactional by nature. It's an artificial construct enabling the world to conduct business.

The U.S. federal debt has hit $40 trillion. Add the debt owed by U.S. states, corporations and consumers and the figure rises to about $77 trillion in debt, set against an annual G.D.P. of about $32 trillion. The interest on all of it is compounding constantly. It’s not just the U.S., either. Globally, there is $350 trillion in debt, roughly treble global G.D.P. It’s like snowpack on a mountainside. It may look stable right now, but it’s creating the conditions for an avalanche. We are past the point where we can deal with our current debts in normal ways. The options open to us are extremely unlikely or highly destructive: Grow our way out of it, raise taxes, inflate the debt away or wait for the economic fallout.

Ancient societies had another method to deal with debt. It was called an amargi — a blanket declaration of public debt cancellation. All public debts written off. Disappeared. It sounds laughable, I know. But, really, that’s just because the idea has been buried so deeply in history you’ve probably never heard of it. In the ancient world, it presented a pragmatic solution to an intractable problem. And now, faced with impossible-to-repay debts that are weighing down our economy, is the time to look at the amargi and the lessons it offers about how to think about finance.

The ancient Mesopotamians are credited with inventing money. They invented loans and compound interest. They understood this system and its propensity for breakdowns when debts spiraled. That’s why they invented something else, too. About 4,400 years ago, a Mesopotamian king named Enmetena issued an edict. Essentially all public debts, he declared, were canceled. (Amargi typically left debts between merchants in place.) People who had been sold into bondage were freed. Similar edicts gave back land to farmers who had lost it to creditors. The campaign itself was called “return to mother,” the origin of the Sumerian word “amargi.” The word loses something in the translation across eons and languages, but essentially it’s a synonym for “freedom.” The concept was codified in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, which decreed a “year of the Lord’s favor” every 50 years.

The amargi was a response to a persistent problem that was recognized in the ancient world: Debt compounded until it destabilized society. Get enough citizens sold into slavery and enough abandoned farms and society crumbles. Nobody to grow the crops. Nobody to serve in the armies. The amargi was a relief valve, a final rebalancing tool. It was declared in the ancient Near East regularly when new rulers came to power. These actions were magnanimous but also practical. They allowed society to reset rather than being forced into monetary collapse.

Enmetena's foundation stone contains the first known mention of the word Ama-gi

The reason the practice often worked in the first place was because the ancient world understood something about our monetary system we have mostly forgotten: Money is an invented social construct. It isn’t real, not in the way a tree or a stone is real. The system of money and credit is a thing humans made up. It’s a record-keeping device for distributing resources. And since money is a human creation, we can alter it when needed.

It's the economy stupid. :)

Stowaways ...

An Artemis II astronaut photographed the cratered Moon and crescent Earth from Orion in April 2026. Credit: NASA. The image is illustrative and is not one of the microbial-survival maps from the study.

Nice to know, Aspergillus niger, a familiar fungus growing in wet places like the bathrooms on the USS Lincoln, can become stowaways from hell when astronauts visit the moon, something rather disquieting to say the least. 

A. niger growing on potato dextrose agar

There are others potential stowaways as one can well imagine as nature finds a way, always.

A NASA-led study published in August 2026 mapped small niches near the lunar south pole where human-associated microbes could remain viable. The most persistent candidate was Aspergillus niger, a darkly pigmented fungus common in warm, damp buildings and repeatedly detected in spacecraft environments, including the International Space Station.

Its advantage was specific. Among the organisms considered, A. niger had the highest measured resistance to ultraviolet radiation, surpassing even Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium so resistant to radiation and desiccation that it is routinely used as a benchmark for biological toughness.

The new work did not place living mould on the Moon. It combined existing laboratory survival measurements with detailed models of sunlight, temperature and terrain. What emerged was a map of where dormant microbial cells might endure for days, not where they could grow into a lunar ecosystem.

Any questions?

Moral courage not spoken here ...

President Trump walks to board Air Force One in Maryland.
(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Read the piece. This tells you everything about Trump.

Trump shrugs off concerns about dismal conditions on USS Abraham Lincoln

President Trump said Friday that he isn't concerned about the state of the USS Abraham Lincoln, despite calls from lawmakers to investigate reports of mental health issues for those onboard.

Why it matters: The San Diego-based aircraft carrier has been deployed for nine months, and numerous reports have indicated that crew members' families are concerned about a lack of food and other basic supplies.

• At least one sailor has gone overboard, prompting the Navy to launch an investigation and The Military Times reported that other crew members have also tried to go overboard.

What they're saying: Speaking to reporters Friday, Trump said he didn't think the ship had been deployed "nearly long enough."

• He also disputed that the family members of the 5,000-plus crew were concerned about their well-being, and pointed toward the USS George Washington coming to relieve the Lincoln from its Middle East deployment.
• While taking questions from the press Friday, a reporter mentioned families were worried, to which Trump replied "no they're not."

Zoom out: The Navy Times, The Military Times, and Stars and Stripes were among the first to report on conditions aboard the carrier.

• The ship hasn't made a port call in at least 200 days. Generally, those occur every 30 to 45 days unless operational demands interrupt plans.
• Family members of those aboard told The Military Times that the crew lacks basic items like hygiene products and faces other quality-of-life issues, including contaminated water.
• Low morale and exhaustion are also rampant among the crew, several families said.

The other side: Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao said in a statement that there has been no loss of life on the ship and that "a small number of mental health cases were treated."

• Cao said that meal plans on the carrier "were adjusted when fresh resupply was unavailable, without a single meal being missed," but he did not address allegations of other supply and quality-of-life issues.

For the record: "There is no question our young men and women have been pushed to their limits—but they have never broken. They are rightly tired—but have never been out of the fight," Cao's statement said.

If Patton was around, the shit would hit the fan in a nanosecond and heads would roll, fast. 

George S. Patton

“Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men”

― George S. Patton Jr.

Houston, we have a problem.

Harbor tug boats guide Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln at the Naval Base in Guam on December 11, 2025. Valerie Lynn Maigue/US Navy/File

As a former officer in the Army who was respected by his people, anger comes to mind in terms of just how bad the living conditions became during the months at sea the Lincoln was deployed without the respite of a port call and resupply of essential goods and services, a FUBAR for the ages based on a CF of an illegal Israeli/US sponsored war with no end in sight. 

The incident of the sailor going overboard, which has not been previously reported, adds to a growing list of concerns about the crew on the ship. Several Democratic lawmakers are calling for answers after concerns were raised by families of sailors aboard Lincoln about the deteriorating living conditions and worsening mental health during the ship’s record-breaking deployment.

Since the Lincoln left its home port of San Diego last November, the aircraft carrier has been deployed for more than 250 days after being redirected to the Middle East to support US operations in the war with Iran, now entering its sixth month. With more than 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard, it has not made a port call in more than 200 days, setting a modern-day record for consecutive days at sea, according to Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

A sailor directs an F/A-18E Super Hornet on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea, Feb. 14, 2026. The Lincoln has been deployed more than eight months, and families of its roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines are bringing concerns about mental health and the risk of self-harm to Navy leaders.
(Daniel Kimmelman/U.S. Navy)

“There have been widespread reports of shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns,” aboard the ship, he said in the letter, as well as “disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages in route to the ship to be lost in transit for months.”

In a statement to CNN, the US Navy said, “We have not observed an increase in suicidal ideations or attempts aboard the ship. We take every service member’s well-being seriously and have religious, medical and mental health professionals available to assess and address concerns as they arise.”

USS Abraham Lincoln

Houston, we have a problem. 

Wag the Dog/Rev 2

 

Eric Lee/Getty Images

When Trump became president in 2024 and pardoned the January 6th rioters, yours truly said Brown Shirts.
I warned he would move toward implementing National Emergency Powers as needs warrant, particularly if his poll numbers tanked. People laughed. They aren't laughing now.

With Trump's and Bibi's war with Iran acting as catastrophic loss leader and gas and food prices spiraling ever upward, the orange menace is now talking seriously about declaring a national emergency in order to short-circuit the projected bloodbath the GOP might finally face in the midterms.

SA insignia aka The Brown Shirts

President Donald Trump is openly hinting at taking over the midterm elections
by declaring a national emergency.

Newsmax’s Wayne Allen Root interviewed Trump just after midnight Tuesday morning, and said that Trump had the right to declare a national security emergency next month, forcing through photo identification, proof of citizenship, limits on mail-in ballots, and other heavy voting restrictions. Trump seemed to like that suggestion, but didn’t want to tip his hand.

Trump is afraid of massive Republican losses in November’s midterms, and has been unsuccessfully pushing his allies in Congress to pass the draconian SAVE Act. With that appearing more unlikely each day, Democrats and other Trump critics are raising concerns that he may take drastic action, such as declaring a national emergency and maybe deploying legions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the polls.

In fact, Democrats have been trying for close to a year to get documents from the Department of Homeland Security regarding its policies and memos on sending ICE agents to polls. Agents were seen at polling places in Texas during its May primaries and in California in June, but when Democrats used the Freedom of Information Act to investigate, they were sent useless press clippings.

If Trump tries to invoke national security to take over federal elections, it would shatter precedent and could set off lawsuits and protests across the country. His repeated, disproven claims about voter fraud and rigged elections suggest that he’ll make the same excuses in November. The question is how to ensure a fair and accurate result that can stand up to his attacks.

If that doesn't work, the Wag the Dog gambit might.

“O, full of scorpions is my mind!”

― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Shield Font

 

Image - ShieldFont

The predator/prey arms race applies as Shield Font is building fonts able to shield content from AI's 24/7 never ending heist in order to feed its LLM, something most interesting to this old designer because selecting appropriate fonts for any given project was an essential part of the creative process. :)

A new “AI-proof” font was designed to be hard for AI agents to scrape, but you can’t tell by just looking at it. Unlike other anti-AI fonts that use letters that are difficult for bots to read, ShieldFont swaps out words behind the scenes to poison the data that automated scrapers take without permission.

ShieldFont was designed as part of a project created by a group of professionals including the Brazilian creative studio Seneda & Abrucio and the Danish type foundry PlayType. It shields text from large language models (LLMs) by garbling sentences in the HTML source code, leaving automated scrapers to sift through sentences filled with decoy words that make a sentence incoherent. Thanks to a custom font on a backend, though, the real text is displayed for a human reader to see.

How it works

ShieldFont works using ligatures, the technical term in typography when two letters next to each other in a word are combined into a single glyph. Ligatures are designed for aesthetics, so letter combinations like fi in “fish” or fl in “flow” look naturally spaced instead of visually cluttered. When a program sees these specific letters next to each other, it swaps two characters for one that combines the letters into a single glyph. ShieldFont works in a similar way, except instead of letters, it swaps out whole words.

Shield Font

Amazing site, amazing tech. :)