Example of orienting in a non-geometric context

Rather than going someplace interesting on the internet directly, it can be easier to start with my email, browse past the news, and then get going someplace interesting.

A different "razor"

You know about Occam's Razor. Here is another such principle:

If you have a hypothesis that does not explain significant and interesting details, then the hypothesis must be wrong.

I apply this to the current situation with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. That a lone shooter named Tyler Robinson took it into his own head to do the shooting is a hypothesis that does not explain things like: why the FBI drone surveillance was turned off at the precise time the shooter used his drone. Or why the Israelis were searching on "Tyler Robinson" and the name of the judge presiding at his trial the week before. Or the failure of coordination with local police. Or the strange stuff about the bullet and about his chief of staff.

It follows that the "sole shooter" hypothesis must be wrong.

Modular Government

[This is an abstract thought, hardly a recommendation.]

Since governments tend to become corrupt, the simplest suggestion is to keep government small, to minimize the opportunities for corruption and inefficiency. However, this should not mean minimizing the variety of services a government supplies. 

Is there any reason the people who run the military should be the same as the ones regulating foods and drugs? So, a different idea is to break up government functions. You could have different governments for different functions.

Halloween Pumpkin 2025

AI turns one of my math papers into a comic

I don't know how they did this but it attempts to characterize my paper "Determining an Analytic Function from its Distribution of values". It almost gets it right.

Hitting deer with your car

For the record, there were two times during my drive to Nevada where I almost had a deer jump in front of my car. In one place, a deer in the median was racing me and trying to jump in front of the car - indicating some kind of competitiveness - but I out-ran it. In another case, in the confusion of small roads north of Cairo Illinois, trying to get to Paducah Kentucky, a large deer stood beside the road and decided not to jump in front of me, instead turning back in to the woods.

My drive to Nevada and Back

Just so I do not forget the basic details: I drove to Pittsburgh and spent the next day driving back 300 miles to get a credit card I lost, then returning to Pittsburgh. The next day I chased the sun all day but he beat me over the horizon and I just kept driving from Pittsburgh to Columbus Ohio, then southwest to Cincinnati and Louisville Ky. I crossed the Mississippi at Cairo Illinois, turned south through Missouri - where I started seeing cottonfields - and then Arkansas and Rt 40 West. I was getting tired and pulled over into a rest stop in western Arkansas. I slept OK in my car, peeing right out in the open late at night. The next day I did the same all day of driving, crossing OK, a bit of Texas, and most of New Mexico, till I got to Grants, where I spent the night in the parking lot of a Navajo Walmart. Next day got me all the way to my campsite.

At camp at Wamp Springs Trail (1/2 mile in) and plagued by much wind messing up my tarp. Spent two days walking around and sitting around waiting for dark. At night, the wind howled, flapped the tarp, and rocked the car. Knowing it would be impossible to sleep, I slept pretty well. I re-positioned the car and had less noise but not much less wind the next night. After two nights I upped camp and spent the morning at the glacial lake "hillocks" south of Coyote Spring. I found one broken base, not too diagnostic for me.

There is an extra little glacial lake there and I wanted to explore the north end, and took a dirt road, Sawmill Rd, east from 93 over to the broken-up land that I thought worth exploring. Well, that drive became hair-raising when the road was up on the top of the hillocks, winding past steep 20' gulllies with little road to spare and some foot-deep ruts in the road. After that little adventure, I drove back south to the access road to my little hill. Trying to setup camp with the car blocking the wind at the best angle, had me rearranging the pegs and guy ropes 3 times. But I got settled in, had coffee, had whiskey, had some corned beef hash with ketchup. I brought WAY more food than I had any intention of cooking. The next day, I explored the hill more carefully than usual, especially on the northeastern slope. Across from there, on the southwestern slope, I did find some slightly diamond-shaped bifaces. Two of them, at most 2 inches long.. These were as close as I got to realizing my dream of finding more Solutrean blades out there.

After a day at my little hill, I upped camp, drove down into Las Vegas, and spent the night at the same hotel I usually stay at: the Cannery on East Craig Rd. I was able to review my route back home but it did not really matter because I ended up sleeping at other rest stops that I could not have planned. I spent the first night west of Amarillo at a truck parking stop; with the most intense stink of cow manure that I have ever experienced. Even if I kind-of like the smell, I feel sorry for that part of Texas. From Amarillo, I just continued east, back past Oklahoma City, Fort Smith Arkansas, Little Rock Arkansas, north across the Mississippi at Cairo, and on to a rest stop at Beaver Dam Kentucky.

All the way along, going and coming back, I was plagued by not being able to charge my phone reliably. When I was camping, there was no signal, and I never did figure out a reliable charging strategy. Primarily because I needed that little extra white box for iPhone charging. The only thing that worked was running my laptop from the car and charging my phone from the laptop. I did not work well and I had become more and more reliant on Siri getting me to the right route. Turning Siri on and off to save battery, while trying to get through the mess of roads and hidden bridges in Cairo was no fun. I spent about an hour being lost and Siri rescured me at the end. So I got into Kentucky and on to that rest area. It poured very hard that night and I sat at the Beaver Dam rest area, really enjoying the coziness of my little bed setup in the back of my Rav4. But my computer stopped working and stopped charging the phone, so I barely got back to Pittsburgh with Siri's support. I will say that some of Siri's instructions are insane. She'll take you off a highway into a bunch of neighborhood streets and then back onto the same highway. I had to fight with her hard, to get south onto Rt 95 in CT. Before that, I got back to Pittsburgh and spent a nice visit with the Raatz-Vargas family. So it was 4 days driving out, and 4 days driving back. I ask myself: what was the point. I think there was one and did eventually shrug off the sense that my pain was appropriate to the guilt I felt. My car's "Maintenance Required" light came on - I changed the oil in Pittsburgh on the way out but it has been more than 5K miles of driving and was time to go again. 

I was feeling pretty down when I got home but some food, shower, with my wife nearby, and sleeping in a familiar bed are helping get things back to something like normal. Then my new PC arrived and its like Christmas.

I'll tell you a poetic thought from the road: It is afternoon and you are driving past some red boulders in a field. Each boulder makes a dark shadow in the bright light. Then you see some shadows that are not attached to boulders - they are black cows - shadows without a source.

Hey Singapore.....WTF?!

Much as I appreciate the hundreds of visits you are making to this and my other blog, I cannot help thinking this is not a person making these visits but rather a machine that is scraping my writings.

Feel free to leave a comment or contact this blog. What is your purpose?

If you encounter a shark underwater...

Back away slowly and don't run.

Faint-hearted town names of Central Connecticut

Heading towards Providence from Tolland CT we pass: Dayville, Willington, Killingsly. I comment to Barb that they did not seem to have expended much energy in choosing town names. 

We spent the week in Dayville. It was too long.

What about Maybe CT or Sort Of CT or going from Willingly to Killingville.

Brisket and cole slaw

Getting ready:

Coleslaw brine

I suspected there was a way of leaching out some liquid from the shredded cabbage, before making the slaw. This recipe, from How To Make Real New York Deli Coleslaw more than fits the bill. The idea is that shredded cabbage should be tossed together with a brine, and let sit for 8 hours. Then you drain it, add 3/4cups mayo and are done. So:

1 medium cabbage, shredded extra fine (maybe add some shredded carrot)

For the brine ⅓ cup white vinegar ⅓ cup water ⅓ cup sugar 3 tablespoons vegetable oil ½ cup onion - grated 1 ¼ teaspoons fine sea salt ½ teaspoon white pepper

Blueberry Muffins

 Taken from here: To Die For Blueberry Muffins Recipe

Muffins:

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour

¾ cup white sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

⅓ cup vegetable oil

1 large egg

⅓ cup milk, or more as needed

1 cup fresh blueberries

Crumb Topping:

½ cup white sugar

⅓ cup all-purpose flour

¼ cup butter, cubed

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Grease 8 muffin cups or line with paper liners.

Whisk (dry ingredients) flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt together in a large bowl.

Pour oil into a small liquid measuring cup. Add egg and enough milk to reach the 1-cup mark; stir until combined.

Pour into flour mixture and mix just until batter is combined. Fold in blueberries; set batter aside.

To make the crumb topping: Combine sugar, flour, butter, and cinnamon in a small bowl. Mix with a fork until crumbly.

Spoon batter into the prepared muffin cups, filling right to the top. Sprinkle with crumb topping.

Bake in the preheated oven until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean, 20 to 25 minutes.

A preamble

Probably all idiosyncratic projects begin with vanity but, in their pursuit, accomplish new discoveries and new ideas which overtake the personal motivations, replacing them with bold new positions; allowing the researcher to sit back later, with a certain smugness, believing themselves to have done something useful.

Thus was the arc of my travels to Nevada.

AI represents humanity just giving up

Evolution is HARD

Now Hollyhocks are flowering

I anticipate several other pictures.

Just before the flowering hollyhocks

Goldfinch

I love irises

But I don't think I do them justice

Maybe the last is the best. Its about being casual.

Things rich people say

(Overheard on a Woods Hole sidewalk)

"Also, the air quality in Paris is not so good."

Scenic Left-hand Turns of Woods Hole - Oyster Pond Rd

Quissett in May

A couple of funnies from the internet

 

Another: Why do meteorites always land in craters?

Adventures in Turing testing

I found a couple of vulnerabilities in the current Bing AI. One centers around the experience of peeling an orange. The other around AI's lack of free will.

I asked: why do you peel an orange? It gave a good answer.

I asked: how do you eat an orange? The first step was to wash the orange. Obviously that  is unnecessary since you are going to remove the peel.

I asked it: how do you peel an orange. It gave two answers - showing more information that a person would.

I asked: why would you peel an orange that way? It had no good answer. Human example: 

    cuz that is how my mother did it

    cuz I like to use my knife, and it makes less mess

    cuz I like to separate the fascia of the segments

I tried to get the AI to explain why it was not able to initiate an action. It get making excuses for not being designed to do that. This is an area that could be explored.

Carnitas recipe

The correct way to make this is the cook the ingredients together - see a typical recipe. In my case, I made a slow-cooked pork roast for direct eating, intending to make empanadas afterwards. Instead I decided to make burritos and adapted a carnitas recipe to start with pre-cooked pork. This is not spicy but you can use Jalapeno and add heat with eg Tabasco sauce.

Ingredients:

 2-3 cups of cooked pork, chopped, 

spices: black pepper, oregano, chilli powder, bay leaf, cumin, parsley sprig. I also used one dried non-spicy pepper.

small onion, garlic cloves

1/2 green pepper (or Jalapeno)

orange, 1/2 lime

lard

Start the onions at medium heat, use lard. Add meat, spices, then garlic and green pepper, add citrus fruit juices. Add 1 cup of water.

Simmer for 1-2 hours. Stirring and topping off water. End with a small amount of liquid.

Use this "stew" with rice, beans, guacamole, sour cream, in a burrito or tortilla. 

How to beat the AI in a Turing test

The Turing test has an obvious flaw: a failure to specify the intelligence and knowledge of the real person testing the computer. For example if the real person is a newborn child, it cannot ask ANY questions. Or, slightly more reasonably, if the real person is particularly dumb and asks extremely simple minded questions.

But never mind that. I am contemptuous of computer scientists who think "intelligence" is possible in a un-embodied system with no sensory/motor perceptions. The real trick is to ask the AI a question that has never been asked before and cannot be answered by cutting and pasting previous answers. To do that, I am imagining examples involving sensory/motor perception.

My first try was this: "How does it feel to peel an orange?". This did not quite work with Bing's AI because it put together various descriptions of an orange that were available to it. If you look at what a AI says to this question, it is clear that the answer is cut and pasted from every bit of information the AI had available. Here, you need the real person doing the testing to know a great deal about how other people answer the question. People answer simply but the computer goes to great lengths to add details that a person would not. So the tester must already know the human answer [and be careful to not record any such answers or the AI can cut and paste].

A second try was this: "You are in a room with a table and an orange on the table. What do you do if you want to eat the orange?" This is supposed to test the AI's ability to form a plan. This is not good test because a good AI will know how to create a plan.

So let us ask a new question, never asked before: "Can you eat pudding with chopsticks?"  [To be honest, Bing's AI did a reasonable job with this question. It knows the difference between solid and liquid.]

It is not OK to come in, after the fact, and say every possible action with every possible material could be learned by an AI. One can argue that there is a continuum of questions and no continuum of programmable facts. The only way to ensure the continuum is available to the AI is to give it a working body.

Humbler Pie: It seems that however clever I can try to be, coming up with a kind of question, 100 Google engineers can come up with it as well and add a solution to the AI function.

Information must have a physical substrate

I was reading a Jack Reacher novel where a character discusses the theory that adding pictures to your cellphone memory makes the phone weigh more. This got me realizing that "information" must have a physical substrate. Leading to the thought that any given mass has a maximum amount of information which it can store. That leads to equations with things like "e", "m", and "c^2". 

Not a physicist... but just sayin.

First Osprey 2025

 Saw one yesterday

feb 27 - first crocuses

2 weeks later than last year

Exercise Ball Sock

This is a knit material to cover an exercise (bouncy) ball, so perspiration is not trapped, when sitting.

I find that draping a wool cover over the ball makes is more comfortable as a seat.

Live Well - Think Hard

How about that for a motto or epitaph?

First graphics experiments for "The Boy and Dragon"

 Some dragon sketches

That's Bark on the left, Clip in the middle and other views of Bark, flying etc. Wend is in the middle top. Llel is at the bottom.

The map sketch