Early Spring 2020

A2 color finch

Glissando WF/C

Glissando WF/B&W

Sitting Pretty

The Rolling Stone Timeline ... COVID-19

In the middle of a crisis, it can be difficult to comprehend the full scope of the failures that brought the nation to its knees. To reframe the coronavirus pandemic, and the Trump administration’s catastrophic response, Rolling Stone presents here a timeline.

It shows that the pandemic was not a “black swan” event — some unforeseeable tragedy. Rather, a global pandemic of this sort has been predicted for decades, and indeed previous administrations, both Republican and Democrat, had sought to prepare the country for just such an outbreak. Yet upon taking office, the Trump administration consistently sought to defund and disarm America’s preparedness against a mass outbreak of a viral respiratory illness.

Read it and weep to see why Americans must take back the country before it's too late.

We'v lost control/rev Xl ...

Hate to say it but BRT and significant others have discussed the probability that AI would evolve on its own and it is. All the major players no longer write AI code, rather they give the system a task and get out of the way. In essence, we have lost control and the creators who developed this tech know it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving—literally. Researchers have created software that borrows concepts from Darwinian evolution, including “survival of the fittest,” to build AI programs that improve generation after generation without human input. The program replicated decades of AI research in a matter of days, and its designers think that one day, it could discover new approaches to AI.

Put a fork in it, It's done.

So Quoc Le, a computer scientist at Google, and colleagues developed a program called AutoML-Zero that could develop AI programs with effectively zero human input, using only basic mathematical concepts a high school student would know. “Our ultimate goal is to actually develop novel machine learning concepts that even researchers could not find,” he says.

The program discovers algorithms using a loose approximation of evolution. It starts by creating a population of 100 candidate algorithms by randomly combining mathematical operations. It then tests them on a simple task, such as an image recognition problem where it has to decide whether a picture shows a cat or a truck.

In each cycle, the program compares the algorithms’ performance against hand-designed algorithms. Copies of the top performers are “mutated” by randomly replacing, editing, or deleting some of its code to create slight variations of the best algorithms. These “children” get added to the population, while older programs get culled. The cycle repeats.

In essence, genetic algorithms evolving millions of times faster than us rubes, disquieting is it not?

A cautionary tale ...

A cautionary tale is more than apt regarding plaques and COVID-19 though the coronavirus will not be nearly as deadly as the plague where 1/3 of the population of Europe was wiped out. While history never repeats itself, it does rhyme and this excellent piece in the NYTimes titled Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics explains why this fact rings true.

In the fall of 1347, rat fleas carrying bubonic plague entered Italy on a few ships from the Black Sea. Over the next four years, a pandemic tore through Europe and the Middle East. Panic spread, as the lymph nodes in victims’ armpits and groins swelled into buboes, black blisters covered their bodies, fevers soared and organs failed. Perhaps a third of Europe’s people perished.

And yet this was only the beginning. The plague returned a mere decade later and periodic flare-ups continued for a century and a half, thinning out several generations in a row. Because of this “destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish,” the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote, “the entire inhabited world changed.

Pushback of the elites ...

The wealthy found some of these changes alarming. In the words of an anonymous English chronicler, “Such a shortage of laborers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent for triple wages.” Influential employers, such as large landowners, lobbied the English crown to pass the Ordinance of Laborers, which informed workers that they were “obliged to accept the employment offered” for the same measly wages as before.

But as successive waves of plague shrunk the work force, hired hands and tenants “took no notice of the king’s command,” as the Augustinian clergyman Henry Knighton complained. “If anyone wanted to hire them he had to submit to their demands, for either his fruit and standing corn would be lost or he had to pander to the arrogance and greed of the workers.”

As a result of this shift in the balance between labor and capital, we now know, thanks to painstaking research by economic historians, that real incomes of unskilled workers doubled across much of Europe within a few decades. According to tax records that have survived in the archives of many Italian towns, wealth inequality in most of these places plummeted.

Circa 2020, conditions are different but not that different regarding inequality and how that has negatively impacted this country in all things related to healthcare, education, infrastructure and wages.

In looking for illumination from the past on our current pandemic, we must be wary of superficial analogies. Even in the worst-case scenario, Covid-19 will kill a far smaller share of the world’s population than any of these earlier disasters did, and it will touch the active work force and the next generation even more lightly. Labor won’t become scarce enough to drive up wages, nor will the value of real estate plummet. And our economies no longer rely on farmland and manual labor.

Yet the most important lesson of history endures. The impact of any pandemic goes well beyond lives lost and commerce curtailed. Today, America faces a fundamental choice between defending the status quo and embracing progressive change. The current crisis could prompt redistributive reforms akin to those triggered by the Great Depression and World War II, unless entrenched interests prove too powerful to overcome.

Carpe Diem - Henry V understood this maxim and so should we.

Survillance ... to be continued ... indefinitely

No good crisis ever goes to waste, especially when governments are involved. 

To whit.

Edward Snowden on Monday warned that high-tech surveillance measures governments use to fight the outbreak of COVID-19, the disease caused by the newly identified coronavirus, could have a long-lasting impact. That's according to an interview with the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.

After the virus is gone and the data is still available to them, governments can use new causes like terrorist threats to justify continually gathering and analyzing people's data, he said. 

"They already know what you're looking at on the internet," Snowden said during the interview. "They already know where your phone is moving. Now they know what your heart rate is, what your pulse is. What happens when they start to intermix these and apply artificial intelligence to it?"

Questions, questions indeed.

Music for hope

No words needed.

COVID-19 Dashboard

Johns Hopkin's interactive COVID-19 Dashboard. Informative to the max.

1st Amendment & Facts/Blurb 3100.

Nobody has the right to not be offended. - Salomon Rushdie.

Yours truly understands why the 1st Amendment is the most important we have so why are we letting the left and right try to take this away from us? Think about it, I have. Blurb No. 3100.

How not to run a government in a crisis

How not to run a government in a crisis has no better example than Trump "dealing" with COVID-19.

The Lie ...

“Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion,” President Trump said last month. He has repeatedly said that no one could have seen the effects of the coronavirus coming.

The response or lack thereof.

WASHINGTON — “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

“You guys made fun of me screaming to close the schools,” he wrote to the group, which called itself “Red Dawn,” an inside joke based on the 1984 movie about a band of Americans trying to save the country after a foreign invasion. “Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.”

His was hardly a lone voice. Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.

Read the rest of the NYTimes piece and weep. How not to run a government in a crisis indeed.

And it's not over yet. Think if Trump opens the country up too early. I know I have.

Addendum: God has plans as well.

Donald Trump had such high hopes for Easter. So high, in fact, that when he burst forth on Fox News a couple of weeks ago with his idea of “re-opening” the country wide this coming Sunday, he gave it an exemplary rating of three “beautifuls”: “I just thought that it was a beautiful time …  a beautiful timeline. It’s a beautiful day.”

You could close your eyes and easily imagine what the president was envisioning: At a time of his appointing, on Easter Sunday, shop doors would be flung open simultaneously across America to great cheers. The people singing hymns in “packed churches” would turn their minds and hearts toward Trump and the miracle he’d wrought. Next morning, the stock market would rise like Jesus. And so it would come to pass that this Easter — Trump’s Easter — would be even bigger than the original.

It's like Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure save that George Carlin isn't around to save the day.

Any questions :)

Dragonfly :)

Like it's insect namesake, Dragonfly will have four counter-rotating rotors to enable it to fly in Titan's thick atmosphere while exploring Saturn's giant moon. Awesome mission as followup to Cassini, the most successful mission IMHO, that NASA has ever done.



Dragonfly is a rotorcraft lander mission – part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program – designed to take advantage of Titan’s environment to sample materials and determine surface composition in different geologic settings. This revolutionary mission concept includes the capability to explore diverse locations to characterize the habitability of Titan’s environment, to investigate how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed, and even to search for chemical signatures that could indicate water-based and/or hydrocarbon-based life. Credit: Johns Hopkins APL

Titan’s dense atmosphere offers a key benefit to scientific exploration, especially combined with its low gravity (1/7th of Earth’s) and frigid temperatures (-290 Fahrenheit, -179 Celsius, 94 Kelvin). These three features will help Dragonfly stay easily aloft above Titan’s surface and to fly faster and farther with little energy. In fact, Dragonfly is expected to fly more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) over a nearly three-year mission — that’s almost double the distance traveled by all the Mars rovers combined.

How cool is that? :)

These three views of Titan from the Cassini spacecraft illustrate how different the same place can look in different wavelengths of light. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Read the SciencdDaily piece in it's entirety, it's the smart thing to do. :)