The First Law of Holes

Image Credit: Mike Kiev, follow him here.

If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging - The First Law of Holes. 

A quote most apt when it comes to the far right and the sheer incompetence people like Trump, Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson exhibit regarding all things related to governance. This incompetency extends to others, particularly when adhering to the Peter Principle, an observation that the tendency in most organizational hierarchies, such as that of a corporation, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level of respective incompetence.

The cover of The Peter Principle (1970 Pan Books edition)

Think Musk and Twitter as Example No. 1

Twitter’s dying, in case you haven’t heard. The World’s Richest Man bought it — and the press showered him with adulation. A genius! Surely, a visionary! And yet here we are, a few scant months later. And this “business visionary” has just…had to…put in place…viewing limits…for a platform…he’s trying to sell…ads on. LOL.

Imagine having to walk into a boardroom. And even if you can bat away the question, “So, what are you going to do about my Mega Brand being right next to a crackpot who thinks vaccines don’t work and Hitler was a pretty good dude, like, for example, ‘Moms for Liberty?’ — even if you can somehow answer that, what are you going to say when the next question is: “What’s the point of me spending Big Bucks on ads…when you’re limiting people to viewing a few minutes worth of tweets per day?”

Example No. 2

Let me give you a couple of examples more before we come back to Twitter’s sudden cardiac arrest. A story from…Finland…recently swept the globe, dropping jaws. Finland — the last place you’d expect, a mature social democracy — went far right, and put in place a fanatical party called, LOL, the “True Finns,” who’ve now changed their name to “Finns Party” because I guess “True Finns” was a bit too obvious. What happened next, almost as soon as they took power?

The Economy Minister was forced to resign. Why? Take a deep breath. After a Hitler salute, he was found to have said that the answer to climate change is…for African babies…to be…aborted. Whew. How ugly is that? To most thoughtful and sane people, that’s repellent, stomach churning, even, perhaps. But that’s not even really the point. The point is that…this is the level of competence…delivered by an Economy Minister. His answer to climate change is Heil Hitler and let’s just get rid of African babies. Think about that for a second. It’s not just repugnant, it’s also bizarre, absurd, and idiotic.

Blowback, the law of unforeseen consequences, looms.

blow·back

/ˈblōbak/

noun

1. 1. 

   a process in which gases expand or travel in a direction opposite to the usual one, especially through escape of pressure or delayed combustion.

1. the unintended adverse results of a political action or situation.

   "this is the blowback from all those aggressive public health campaigns"

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Definitions from Oxford Languages

Any questions?

Funhouse

TPhoto: JoeBakal / Shutterstock.com (Shutterstock)

When reading this blurb, think The Man Who Came to Dinner, a biting comedy about a family being terrorized by Sheridan Whiteside, a self-absorbed boor of a man who slips on a patch of ice prior to an arranged dinner with Ernest W. Stanley and his family. 

Confined to the house for a month, Whiteside drives his hosts mad by viciously insulting them, monopolizing their house and staff, running up large phone bills, and receiving many bizarre guests, including paroled convicts, and the eccentric Professor Metz, who brings him a glass-encased cockroach colony. Although he earns the intense dislike of Mr. Stanley, Whiteside manages to befriend his adult children, June and Richard, as well as his wildly eccentric older sister, Harriet Stanley. 

The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)

Bette Davis, Jimmy Durante, Ann Sheridan, and Monty Woolley in
The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)

Written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, it's funny as hell but this blurb's not about the play but rather about Google explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot. 

Something akin to a digital Sheridan Whiteside who will never go away comes to mind here, right?

To whit ...

The practice raises new and interesting privacy questions. People generally understand that public posts are public. But today, you need a new mental model of what it means to write something online. It’s no longer a question of who can see the information, but how it could be used. There’s a good chance that Bard and ChatGPT ingested your long forgotten blog posts or 15-year-old restaurant reviews. As you read this, the chatbots could be regurgitating some humonculoid version of your words in ways that are impossible to predict and difficult to understand.

One of the less obvious complications of the post ChatGPT world is the question of where data-hungry chatbots sourced their information. Companies including Google and OpenAI scraped vast portions of the internet to fuel their robot habits. It’s not at all clear that this is legal, and the next few years will see the courts wrestle with copyright questions that would have seemed like science fiction a few years ago. In the meantime, the phenomenon already affects consumers in some unexpected ways.

It goes beyond that as our posts, in effect, are no longer ours, content able to be distorted and manipulated by entities like Google as needs warrant. Think Funhouse, I know I have. 

Funhouse ... complete with feet 2020

 At the end of the play, Whiteside slips on the ice yet again while leaving the Stanley's. 

The principle of least action ...

Mirror, Mirror

The principle of least action defines just how lazy reality truly is when viewed through the lens of the two laws of thermodynamics where energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed and ... in any closed system, said system always goes to the state of maximum disorder (entropy) because the arrow of time rules. 

The Principle of Least Action says that, in some sense, the true motion is the optimum out of all possible motions, The idea that the workings of nature are somehow optimal, suggests that nature is working in an efficient way, with minimal effort, to some kind of plan. But nature doesn’t have a brain that is “trying” to optimize its performance. There isn’t a plan. It just works out that way.

As the system evolves, q traces a path through configuration space (only some are shown). The path taken by the system (red) has a stationary action (δS = 0) under small changes
in the configuration of the system (δq).[21]

Other takes on this principle include Occam's Razor or the Law of Parsimony ... pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” and Einstien's classic 

Lest we forget. :)

And, of course, Dizzy.

Less is more. 

Addendum:

 BRT waxes poetic about design and nature with The 2nd Law. 

Chaos and the Law of Initial Conditions also apply to the Principle of least action without question. 

The Tides ...

(Lord Kelvin) William Thomson's first tide-predicting machine, 1876.
Built by A. Légé & Co., 20 Cross Street, Hatton

Tide-predicting machine designed by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), built by A. Légé & Co., 20 Cross Street, Hatton Gardens, London, 1872. The machine is a mechanical analogue computer which traces the tidal curve for a given location, by combining ten astronomical components. It is the first working machine of Thomson’s design, based on his application of harmonic analysis to tidal phenomena.

Knowledge of the tides is valuable not only for navigators, but also engineers building coastal structures, and fishermen working in shallow waters. Since tides are affected by many astronomical cycles with differing periods, predicting them is mathematically complex. William Thomson had applied the technique of harmonic analysis to tides and, in conjunction with the instrument-maker Alexander Légé, designed this mechanical computer to predict the tide curves for any given location.

As stated in the Science Museum Group's article, predicting the tides is rather crucial as civilization needs to know the extent of the rise and fall of the twice-daily movement of tides in order to successfully cope with this crucial aspect of the ocean, a process, prior to Lord Kelvin's invention of the modern analog computer in 1876, given to ad-hoc guesstimates for as long as humans have resided on planet earth. With the advent of digital, analog systems, like Kelvin's, withered away but no longer as AI needs to handle the vagaries of the real world in real-time using neural nets, the analog construct AI must have in order to function. Digital can do the job but only at enormous cost in terms of efficiency and power, something becoming increasingly problematic as society moves further into the 21st century.

Polish analog computer AKAT-1, 1959.

Arising from the dead.

Why digital has problems ...

GOING BACK TO the concept of dropping a ball, and my interest in finding out how far it travels during a period of time: Calculus solves that problem easily, with a differential equation—if you ignore air resistance. The proper term for this is “integrating velocity with respect to time.”

But what if you don’t ignore air resistance? The faster the ball falls, the more air resistance it encounters. But gravity remains constant, so the ball’s speed doesn’t increase at a steady rate but tails off until it reaches terminal velocity. You can express this in a differential equation too, but it adds another layer of complexity. I won’t get into the mathematical notation (I prefer to avoid the pain of it, to use Sara Achour’s memorable term), because the take-home message is all that matters. Every time you introduce another factor, the scenario gets more complicated. If there’s a crosswind, or the ball collides with other balls, or it falls down a hole to the center of the Earth, where gravity is zero—the situation can get discouragingly complicated.

MNow suppose you want to simulate the scenario using a digital computer. It’ll need a lot of data points to generate a smooth curve, and it’ll have to continually recalculate all the values for each point. Those calculations will add up, especially if multiple objects become involved. If you have billions of objects—as in a nuclear chain reaction, or synapse states in an AI engine—you’ll need a digital processor containing maybe 100 billion transistors to crunch the data at billions of cycles per second. And in each cycle, the switching operation of each transistor will generate heat. Waste heat becomes a serious issue.

Using a new-age analog chip, you just express all the factors in a differential equation and type it into Achour’s compiler, which converts the equation into machine language that the chip understands. The brute force of binary code is minimized, and so is the power consumption and the heat. The HCDC is like an efficient little helper residing secretly amid the modern hardware, and it’s chip-sized, unlike the room-sized behemoths of yesteryear.

To see why Analog's elegant and cool, click the Veritasium video below 

Remember, analog measures, digital counts. :)

Beyond computation ...

 

A new system developed by researchers at the University of Rochester allows them to conduct quantum simulations in a synthetic space that mimics the physical world by controlling the frequency, or color, of quantum entangled photons as time elapses.
Credit: University of Rochester illustration / Michael Osadciw

Everybody talks about quantum computing from the code-breaking and factoring side of things due to the fact the compute power of said systems goes beyond computation because qubits can be 0s AND 1s at the same time, thus exponentially increasing the ability to solve difficult problems beyond the kin of serial processing via bits - 0s OR 1s, the way every non-QC system in the world crunches data. With this said, the real power of QC may be its ability to recreate reality in finite space, a concept discussed in detail by Seth Lloyd in his seminal book titled Programming the Universe.

Recreating reality was just a conjecture, until now.

Scientists have made an important step toward developing computers advanced enough to simulate complex natural phenomena at the quantum level. While these types of simulations are too cumbersome or outright impossible for classical computers to handle, photonics-based quantum computing systems could provide a solution.

A team of researchers from the University of Rochester’s Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences developed a new chip-scale optical quantum simulation system that could help make such a system feasible. The team, led by Qiang Lin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and optics, published their findings on June 22 in the journal Nature Photonics.

Lin’s team ran the simulations in a synthetic space that mimics the physical world by controlling the frequency, or color, of quantum entangled photons as time elapses. This approach differs from the traditional photonics-based computing methods in which the paths of photons are controlled, and also drastically reduces the physical footprint and resource requirements.

“For the first time, we have been able to produce a quantum-correlated synthetic crystal,” says Lin. “Our approach significantly extends the dimensions of the synthetic space, enabling us to perform simulations of several quantum-scale phenomena such as random walks of quantum entangled photons.”

The researchers say that this system can serve as a basis
for more intricate simulations in the future.

Channeling the monolith ...

CO2 writ frothy ... Blurb 4400

An evil version of a chocolate/coffee ice cream sundae comes to mind here.

This visualization shows the CO2 being added to Earth's atmosphere over the course of the year 2021, split into four major contributors: fossil fuels in orange, burning biomass in red, land ecosystems in green, and the ocean in blue. The dots on the surface also show how atmospheric carbon dioxide is also being absorbed by land ecosystems in green and the ocean in blue. Though the land and oceans are each carbon sinks in a global sense, individual locations can be sources at different times.

I'll think I'll pass on this bad boy if you don't mind.

Atlas 14

A car gets towed while men walk in the flooded waters of Telephone Rd. in Houston, Tex., 

on August 30, 2017. Credit: Thomas Shea/AFP via Getty Images

Being a designer, yours truly knows a little bit about form following function as all good design projects adhere to this principle without issue. (Think Roman Concrete for example) When things go out of sync, problems arise, something happening in all things related to civil engineering due to climate change and the fact NOAA's Atlas 14 is woefully out of date.

To whit.

NOAA’s precipitation estimates cover almost any U.S. location, and they are crucial to engineers and planners in designing projects such as roads and bridges to withstand the worst downpours.

And that’s why a new report by a leading climate research group calls the North Adams, Mass., station “the most extreme case” of what’s wrong with NOAA’s precipitation data and its disregard for climate change.

The North Adams estimates are based on precipitation records that go back to 1816, which the new report says makes them obsolete and inaccurate because they incorporate 200-year-old data and do not account for the current and future effects of climate change.

The station is unique only in the long time span it covers. At thousands of other weather stations across the United States, NOAA is incorporating decades-old records into current estimates while excluding the effects of climate change. The forecasts are known as the Precipitation-Frequency Atlas of the United States, commonly called Atlas 14.

A report published Monday morning by the nonprofit First Street Foundation warns that new infrastructure projects built today using Atlas 14 data “are instantly decades out of date.”

As a result, the projects are “unable to adequately protect against current and future flood risks from heavy precipitation events,” the report says.

Out of sync indeed.

It's only the beginning ...

 

Christopher Lee for The New York Times

It's only the beginning is apt as the SC, the worst in history, continues to deconstruct the Constitution as we speak whether it be separation of church and state or institutionalized discrimination as it matters not to the six zealots residing on the court in the year of our lord 2023. In my lifetime, never have I seen an institution such as this become endemically corrupt, ideologically driven to the extreme or self-aggrandizing to the max in acting as the final arbitrators of law driven by religious ideology in a once great nation known as America.

Let’s be honest about the painful reality: America has functioned as a full democracy — guaranteeing the franchise to all — for less than one human lifetime. In practice, our democracy is younger than me.

I was born in 1959, into an America rived by apartheid. When I was a child, the adults in my life were technically eligible to vote. However, in the Louisiana and Texas towns where I grew up, they were prevented from doing so by the social and cultural norms of the American South.

During the first two decades of my life, the American people finally acknowledged this truth and, to borrow a phrase, acted affirmatively to address it. A new generation of American founders mobilized into a great, multiracial movement, challenged our nation to live up to its ideals and initiated a national construction project on the foundation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment (which was violated with impunity for an entire century after the nation ratified it).

Diversity is key ...

The data suggests exactly the opposite. Study after study demonstrates that, across organizations, diversity enhances critical thinking, creativity and collaboration, as well as productivity, profitability and performance. It is a national tragedy that diversity is now a contested issue rather than a common interest.

It gets "better".

Damon Winter/The New York Times

From Dobbs to Hobby Lobby to Greece NY and 303 Creative v. Elentis, the worst SC in our lifetime, is opening up the floodgates designed to create an emergent theocracy where religion rules while critical thinking, education and the practice of science become increasingly marginalized by a virulent minority intent on dismantling our democracy one ruling at a time.

The Supreme Court has sided with a Christian graphic designer who refuses to create wedding websites for gay or lesbian couples. The result comes as little surprise. Writing for a six-justice conservative majority, Neil Gorsuch said that Colorado’s anti-discrimination law violates the designer’s right to free speech because the state “seeks to force an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance.”

The decision in 303 Creative v. Elenis is the latest in a long-running battle between religious business owners and states seeking to protect the L.G.B.T.Q. community. In 2018, the court faced a similar question when a Colorado baker violated the same anti-discrimination law by refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. The court ruled in favor of the baker on narrow grounds, ducking the broader free speech question.

Now it has addressed that question in a ruling that is deeply significant. More than 20 states, including New York and California, have anti-discrimination laws like Colorado’s. By creating a free speech carve-out from these laws, the court’s ruling threatens to obliterate a vital tool in efforts to protect the L.G.B.T.Q. community at a time when it faces hatred and violence.

Civil war looms ...

Wet Bulb ... 2035

It will take a catastrophe before the world gets serious about GW, guesstimate for said catastrophe,
wet bulb in India around 2035.

Fossil fuels are the world’s dominant energy source, making up 82% of the global energy supply.

Non-OECD countries hold the majority of proven reserves for all fossil fuels.

These energy sources have powered, and continue to power, the industrialization of nations. They have a variety of applications, from electricity production to transport fuel.  Moreover, fossil fuels are necessary for the production of a variety of common products, such as paints, detergents, polymers (including plastics), cosmetics and some medicines.

Some fossil fuels, such as coal, are an abundant and cheap form of energy. Others, like oil, have a variable cost depending on geographic location. For this reason, geopolitical issues arise due to the geographic allocation of these highly valuable resources.

The clock is ticking.

Saturn yet again

NASA, ESA, CSA, Matthew Tiscareno (SETI Institute), Matthew Hedman (University of Idaho), Maryame El Moutamid (Cornell University), Mark Showalter (SETI Institute), Leigh Fletcher (University of Leicester), Heidi Hammel (AURA)

Saturn never disappoints. :)

On June 25, 2023, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope turned to famed ringed world Saturn for its first near-infrared observations of the planet. The initial imagery from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) is already fascinating researchers. 

Saturn itself appears extremely dark at this infrared wavelength observed by the telescope, as methane gas absorbs almost all of the sunlight falling on the atmosphere. However, the icy rings stay relatively bright, leading to the unusual appearance of Saturn in the Webb image. 

This image was taken as part of Webb Guaranteed Time Observation program 1247. The program included several very deep exposures of Saturn, which were designed to test the telescope’s capacity to detect faint moons around the planet and its bright rings. Any newly discovered moons could garner important clues about the flow of material in the current Saturn system, as well as its past history.