Keeping sentences "light"

I am trying to write a book about rock piles and along with some curiosity about how one paragraph is supposed to flow into the next, and some abstract interest in what works and what doesn't, I am noticing the need to edit sentences that have too many un-necessary words in them. This is starting to be a kind of "theory". I have a young friend who reminds me it is only Strunk and White but, here are some notes on my personal version of it. These apply when you are writing a longer work and need to worry about not exhausting the reader; when you need to keep things "light".

Don't worry about losing the noun, unless another noun is introduced. You can use indefinite articles and avoid restating the noun.

Don't add emphasis: "He was very strong" vs "He was strong"

Don't be redundant for specious clarification: "He was, in the past" vs "He was"

Don't waste words: "They were able to" vs "They could".

Do use contractions: "He could have" vs "He could've"

Narwhal tusk used as a weapon

Fabulous!

Famous last words

Gauss the famous mathematician is known for his last words:

More light

I used to think this was because he saw a brightness ahead as he began his final exit. But when my grandmother died, the last thing she said was

More water

Which leads to realize that Gauss actually was asking for more light in the room, that had started to go dark for him. I was thinking that I could make a joke at the end:

More or less light

Harvie the Seagull

There was a seagull hanging out at the Woods Hole Waterfront Park. He had really nice lines:

I decided to make him my bestie:

I even named him Harvie Wheeler. He seemed to hang out at the park and I actually changed my morning walk to pass this place and see if "Harvie" was around. One time I brought him some bread but he was not interested after the first nibble. But I thought it was probably not a healthy place for a seagull to hang out and get used to. I saw him begging for scraps at the end of the summer, from people eating their lunches at the park, and imagined him failing to develop good seagull hunting habits. I think he had a parent that was still feeding him mid-summer and them got lazy and stayed in the park.  

Later Harvie appears to be gone and  I saw the remains of a half-eaten seagull down the street. I guess he was not prepared for the fox that hunts along there. 

What is "pain" as a software concept?

I was thinking about how "pain" could be used as a programming concept. Found the answer in

Homeostasis and soft robotics in the design of feeling machines

by Kingson Man and Antonio Damasio

They say that feelings are the response to a system being out of equilibrium.

So then a good answer to my question is to allow every subroutine of a "system" to be passed a pointer to its "environment", as well as pointers to other "neighboring" system subroutine's state, and have an automatic mechanism for comparing the curret subroutine's internal state to this environment and neighbors, to come up with a vector of disturbance from equilibrium. Each subroutine can then take exactly the same form as a 'switch' statement on the values of the disturbance vector. Pain would then be considered to be some of the case statements within this 'switch'. In a simple version, the disturbance is a real valued number and pain is a threshold that affects the subroutine's behavior.

Note in passing that a system would simply move towards death, if all that mattered was equilibrium. There needs to be a larger "equilibrium" driving a system out of local equilibrium, if the system is to do any work. For better or worse, such ideas lead the conversation forward and connect "pain" in a useful way to other programming constructs.

The Levallois Technique

From Wikipedia. Note that the back side may show a "bulb of percussion". The front side has a few flakes removed.

Now consider this from Woods Hole. I think it was in the sand and clay below my yard and I found it in a pile of excavated dirt for the new foundation:

 It has a bulb of percussion and signs or "erraill.

 Additional back-side flakes.

 Side vide of bulb

Darn nice piece of quartz, unlike anything else in the yard.

The smallest of adventures

I took Barb for a row in Rosie. The tide was low at 10:45 so around 11:00 it was still easy to row out the gut, against the current, into the "hole", and around the corner to the right. I wanted to show Barb what it looked like behind Penzance. As we got out towards Buzzard's Bay the waves got bigger - no problem for the boat but Barb wanted to turn back and we did.
On the way back, a motor boat went bye in the hole and left a big enough wake to worry me. Earlier, the same boat had gone bye going fast and left little wake. But it was significantly worse when it went bye slowly. Anyway I watched the wave approach and did something stupid: I tried to race it around the corner of Penzance into the gut. The wave, above the gunnel in height, caught me almost broadside, just as I am passing a big rock. Barb starts voicing worried noises about the rock and the wave crested right next to us. We were thrown sideways but Rosie is no more willing to get her gunnel wet when tilted at 45 degrees than she is at 0 degrees and we were fine. Except the wave was throwing us against the large rock and, as the wave passed beneath me it lifted my left oar out of the water, taking the oarlock with it, out of its socket. So I am distracted by a missing oar on one side and coming down on a large barnacled rock on the other and I row with the one oar that I have on that side, and get us around the corner into the smoother inward flow of the gut. That one stroke of the oar included a bit of sculling, which I do automatically when I am using just one oar. Then I fixed the oarlock, then we were in calmer water.
I want to say that I am right proud of my fine boat. I say it didn't take a single drop of water. Barb thinks it did take a drop but I think that was spray off the cresting wave that came in next to her.

One oarstroke from Ram Island back to the yacht club

I was rowing with Tyler, out to Devil's Foot and Ram Island and we stopped at Ram Island to check for clams. There seem to be fewer than when we went last year. The current was setting into the harbor and the wind was from the southwest. Anyway, from behind Ram, I took one strong stroke of the oars out into the current and we quickly drifted out from behind Ram and into the harbor. The wind was blowing us back towards home.

I thought it would be fun to see how far we could drift back towards Dory Beach where I keep my boat, so I rested on my oars. Aside from fending off one mooring, we drifted all the way back to the beach and only missed it by 20 yards. Amazing! One oar stroke from Ram back to home. The entire way, the boat stayed pointed in the same direction, except it started to turn broadside to the wind one time. So I moved towards the back of the boat - leaving more freeboard in the bow for the wind to blow on and this straightened her out. We missed the beach by a couple of yards and got in behind the last Penzance dock next to Dory Beach, rowed underneath it and over the last few yards to where I store my boat.

Went for a row around Penzance

Launched at A and rowed counter clockwise around Penzance. I got to B about an hour before low tide, with the current flowing out, south, and against me. The wind too. But at B, I rounded the corner without difficulty and followed the eddies and occasional counter currents through the gut and into the harbor side. "Easy peasy". Got my boat Rosie in at C, left her on the beach and went back to A to retrieve the boat dolly. Etc. Saw fish splash near the southern red nun in the hole; and again in the harbor on the final leg. It was a bit scary and a bit awesome to be in more open water. Waves and current were not a problem but one submerged rock that suddenly made an unexpected splash off my bow, took me by surprise.

An autobiographical note

Leaving work and moving to Woods Hole at 65, a year later I have run out of motivation and seem to drift from moment to moment. Why even write music? First time since I was 12 that I am not engaged in a creative project. I will try to get more engaged, at least with music, this winter. And I promise to at least do some carving in the future.

An embarrasing possibility

In reviewing how the cuttlefish might create a camouflage skin pattern to match a give environmental background, one possibility is that it is simply a display system that uses the intermediate neurons between the eyes and the skin to transfer input to output in the most direct way possible [whatever that is] or else to transfer the statistical properties of the input to the output.

Either way, the consciousness of the cuttlefish is not in question. I suppose it knows perfectly well what it is displaying on its skin. So its consciousness might be a sort of "occasionalism" that derives from it performing such a duplication process. Or perhaps it's display is more like a reflex that is not willful and has no auxiliary meaning.

All of which gives rise to the question of how my consciousness is different from a display system, as per a squid? Can I legitimately claim to be doing more? Well yes there is certainly a delay between input and output.

While I am moving anyway

I am motivated to do X but not enough to move and do it. But then I am also motivated to do Y and do begin to move. But, where efficient, I do X first.
Probably related to this.

To Giles Laurent, re cuttlefish camouflage algorithms

We went to a great lecture in Woods Hole this summer by Giles Laurent about how cuttlefish can match a background texture with the colored dots (chromataphores) of their skin. It was particularly fascinating in its discussion of image texture statistics being matched rather than image shape statistics.

The speaker distinguished between statistics of "things" (shape) and of "stuff" (texture) and this got me thinking about how the Blaschke problem of reconstructing shape from statistics was never evaluated for reconstructing texture from statistics. After all, the cuttlefish seems to be performing such an inversion in displaying an image on its skin that has similar texture statistics to its background. But look at the previous post about arrays of colored dots being building blocks of a form of texture recognition. There is an algorithm there, which is:

• find an array scaled correctly to best match the background - for each of several color channels.
• localize a piece of that array and display it with a matching color channel chromatophore
• do this for all color channels.

So Giles, here is an algorithm: match the scale of different colors, locally. And synchronize the displayed colors with the perceived ones - either one channel at a time or with a mixing matrix that varies locally.

Trimming the hedge and visual cognition

The hedge has little green tips of growth. I think of it, late at night on a day when I was hedge trimming, and it devolves into an array of light green dots - as though the 'thought' or 'image' of those green growing tips is composed - in part - by detecting such an array. A small field of view pattern is recognized as a sample from a full field array. It does not matter which part of the full array is sampled for the array to be a recognition factor.

Also briefly in this fleeting thought, different arrays at different scales appeared to my mind's eye. With all those constant full field options, as a basis, in various colors, you would be able to recognize quite a bit.
Update: what this suggests is that texture recognition can be done using linear regression, not with the parameters of a straight line, but with the parameters of the grid of colored dots.

Barb Waksman in 2017

Age 60

How the Megalithic walls of Cusco were made - using pendulums

The answer is: large rocks were suspended in the air and ground together systematically, one rock after another and/or several rocks at the same time. Here, this picture proves it because it shows exactly the sort of partial grinding that must have occurred from time to time:

Foerster does not spend much time, talking about the obvious finishing effort that smoothed away the handles used for attaching the rocks and, further, finished the grooves off to eliminate ragged edges between them. The finishing of the grooves is evidence of post-placement finishing. Once that is admitted, then removing the handles becomes a possibility.
Here is one of the handles that would be easy to remove afterwards.

I write the comment: After watching your videos it becomes obvious that a VERY extensive finishing effort occurred after the stones were placed. The grooves were finished afterwards, so the knobs might have been removed as well. Thus, suspension from ropes becomes the obvious method for grinding large rocks against one another with little or no effort using pendulum motions.

Here is Rosie

Comparing peapod shapes

My Doug Hylan peapod:

The Chesapeake Light Craft tender:

I like the lines of mine better.

Gorgeous oarlocks

June 13 and people are getting their boats into the water.

Could YouTube be democratized?

Seeing that YouTube is capable of censorship, one wonders what kind of distributed capability would truly be "free" to content providers and consumers - without censorship?

The best parts of YouTube are the public eye-share it provides through its "recommended" and "trending" functions. As mentioned in the previous post, to create a filter that re-enforces the viewpoint from "authoritative" sources is a pretty slippery slope.

But these sorts of considerations come up because YouTube not only provides the free (or inexpensive) video storage capability, it also provides the browser and the advertising channel (is there one?) on top of it. In some ways those considerations are a biproduct of YouTube being a monopoly. A little monopoly inside a much larger one - functioning to monetize peoples private behaviors and -now- to reinforce someone's status quo.

To democratize YouTube, the company would need to open source its video classification (labels? AI?) and encourage external vendors to build alternate browsers - some with ads, some without.

Bad YouTube!

YouTube should ask its users to define "authoritative" in there own terms. This is Jimmy Dore.

Painting a boat is hard

Didn't get the light right and could not see what I was doing properly, so the result is imperfect - which you can see now that I arranged the light:

I did ok on the outside:

And later, when I added the stripe:

Boat progress

They have added a mast partner in front (far end) and I have been going through the trauma of learning how to paint - doubtful that I will do a decent job even after a week of painting and sanding and repainting.

You can see some asymmetry, which I am assuming will not matter. We ordered gudgeons and pinions for the rudder but the pinions are the wrong diameter. I am wondering if a person can stretch out on the bottom, with their feet below the rear thwart?

Woods Hole Stories #1

I hear some good stories around town. It is worth recording some of them. I can't gurantee the accuracy of my retelling.

Here is one from Damian McLaughlin:
#1
I man was sailing from Europe to America across the Atlantic in a solo, trans-Atlantic, race. He had equipment problems and put in to the Azores to get repairs. When his boat was fixed he headed on back out into the Atlantic, thinking it would be difficult catching up, from a week behind the other boats in the race. As he is sailing along he sees what looks like a life boat and thinks: "Oh man, now I have to go rescue those people, that's the end of my race." But when got over to the other boat it was, in fact, someone rowing solo across the Atlantic. So they had a nice chat for 10 minutes and continued their separate ways. [And both of them knew Damian]

Hear are a couple from Tom Renshaw:
#2
Dave Wald and a friend were paddling Dave's dad George's Klepper folding kayak on a nice March day. They went out into the hole (Woods Hole passage) from the gut (between Penzance and Devil's Foot island) and the cross current hit them and capsized them. So they struggled for a moment or two and then started dying, when the friend said "hey I can touch the bottom" and dragged them out of the water. Dave had stopped trying. They went to the nearest occupied house and dripped on the floor.

#3
During a cold winter in Woods Hole, a schooner full of lumber got caught in the ice and pushed through the hole, upon which, the boat broke up and the pieces floated off on the tide. Now, Sumner Hilton knew what was going on and where the tide was headed - towards Nobska - and he went down there and harvested the lumber - from which he built boats for many years.

Here is one where the names of the guilty are omitted.

#4

A group went out rowing in the hole. As you enter the main current you need to beware of it hitting you broadside and kicking up the bow of your boat. One fellow had a bucket full of water on the back seat, for ballast, and was warned about having too high a center of gravity. He ignored that and ignored advice about entering directly into the main current from the side. So up went his bow, the bucket turned over, and he summersaulted into the drink. This was early in the summer when the water is cold. The group was not able to get him back into a boat until they had floated over to Juniper Point. I think now he is a bit traumatized.

Boat progress

Easy to be happy about this.

Persistence of unfinished tasks

I make simple mistakes at the sink: picking up the Ibuprofen rather than the bar of soap, etc. These mistakes are a windows into aspects of cognitive processing. So here was one:

In the morning I was looking at the pill bottle thinking I wanted a pain killer. But I decided I had only a mild and temporary headache, so I did not take the pill. Later in the day, going into the bathroom to wash my hands with a vague plan: "use object on back of sink", I did not pick up the soap but, rather, the pill bottle. As I reflect on this, it seems I had some residual desire to take a pill and, in the absence of clear task specification, that elevated the pill bottle to serve as the "object" in the task.

In my framework, an unfinished task is part of a narrative structure guided by Truism #7. So the above error is seen as a bi-product of the truism. This, together with the observation that the truism remains operable and persists for, at least, a day. together these gives us a sense of duration for something like a narrative truism.

The error is a small and very simple example of a "subconscious motivation". Imagine how our motivation evolves when tens, hundreds, or thousands of small sub-motivations are present in the same moment. Sure, behaviorism explains it but internal mental state is the simplest implementation of behaviorism.

Wings help a running bird turn on a dime

Watch a turkey take a corner. You heard it here first folks: running dinosaurs benefited from the added high speed maneuverability afforded by wings. Flight would be a side effect.

Limiting the good feelings

One thing that limits my happiness is a tendency to anthropomorphize mollusks.

The Rosie: My new boat takes shape

Damian McLaughlin offered to build a Doug Hylan "Peapod". We settled on the 15 foot model:

The history of the peapod says the design originates in the Penobscot ME area, probably related to birchbark canoe design. I question this, since Norwegians never stopped building boats in this shape and could have been in Maine at the time. It is probably a mixture of these things. Note the high stern and bow, together with the flat bottom mid-ship, means seaworthy and stable.

I am calling the boat "Rosie", after a faithful dog that belonged to a friend. See here.

Common Coding is the only thing that makes sense

The idea that to watch a nut being cracked a monkey uses similar parts of his mind as when cracking the nut himself.

Why would you ever want to store the understanding and perception of a sensation anywhere other than in association with the sensation itself?

Why not sell advertising on Uber?

You could put out little placards in the driver's car.

Migratory Species return

I saw an osprey yesterday, then a pair of cormorants today. Read that the herring are running over on the Vineyard. The first New Yorkers started occasional appearances 2 weeks ago but now sightings are getting common.

Staging of "The King in Thule"

A brief note: The King in Thule has three soloists and a backup chorus. The soloists are Faust, Mephisto, and Margaret. The piece begins with a horn ensemble, followed by a song by Faust and Mephisto. It could be staged like this:

Faust, Mephisto, and Margaret are in the marketplace, walking around. Faust and Mephisto pass Margaret and both she and Faust turn back to look at each other, while walking on. Then Faust starts making plans with the devil to get the love of Margaret. While they are plotting, she feels a shiver run along her spine. Then both Faust and Margaret sing songs of love about the other. Margaret's song devolves into a folk song about the King in Thule. Later they plant the jewels in her room, later she finds them, it does not work out etc. Most of the action can be either in the marketplace or in (or just outside) Margaret's room. Structurally, I am not sure where the best place is to put the choral version of the folk song. So I put stage it during the hiding of the jewels.

When Meg finds the jewels she is horrified. She shows them to her mother, who gives them to a priest. The devil watches. This pisses off the devil who sings "by the pangs of despised love" and "the jewels for Margaret" and he and Faust exit, singing "Let's Go".

Peter Waksman In a Tuxedo

for the Mozart Requiem by the Falmouth Chorale:

King in Thule Commentary

Woods Hole Bragging

Woods Hole is known as a famous scientific community, containing important private institutions like the Oceanographic and the MBL, as well as public NOAA, USGS, and Coast Guard. The town is located where there is the only deep water harbor on the Cape and where the fishing is good.
But I find it equally important that Woods Hole is a fishing village, a place with many talented carpenters and boat builders and a place where instrumentation, gadgetry, and craftsmanship are valued and available. I went to a seminar at the Oceanographic where they bragged about how other people would develop "marine" technologies and then be forced to come to the Oceanographic to find people who knew how to make underwater electrical connectors. The 'craftsman' community in Woods Hole is as intense as the scientific one.

Not all narrative structures are linguistic

For example the smell of fear or the sound of disappointment. Or am I going to far?

I guess narrative pattern could mean: a re-useable template for connecting ideas

Interesting scietific news

Just in the last few days, I read about

• Sleep induced waves of neural activity that move globally through the brain, creating pressure waves that flush out chemical residues mechanically.
• Yeast engineered to produce THC and CBD, inexpensively.
• Mice being injected with nano technology, letting them see in the infrared spectrum.

Good stuff!

Modeling "pain"

So many ways to model pain. Could one use the notion of a breakdown in trust between entitities?

Update: I read some clever guys modeling pain as a difference from equilibrium.

forced completion

Suppose a new pattern emerges from an old one when in perceiving the new we decompose it into an incomplete old pattern completed in a new way. My thought experiment involves seeing a dumbbell shape as a violation of the circle - a forced completion of the circle creating the new pattern.

This should result in storing the dumbbell shape nearby the circle shape, either as a subtopic or as a brother topic to the circle in a more general category.

But, as David Levy reminds me, if there is no value attached to identifying a new pattern, it will not become learned. For example, I got lazy above and drew something that was not a dumbbell, in order to make my point. In fact it looks like a couple of bubbles inadvertently glued together - a different forced completion than the one I was trying to illustrate. In that case, we either ignore identifying a new pattern or we start duplicating the original circle.

Physical Community and Online Community

Woods Hole is a place with a strong sense of community in the winter and it has a pretty strong sense in the summer as well - when the town is packed with people from NY, Texas, Paris, etc.
Recently I was having an online exchange with someone, having trouble discussing "community" because I was talking about physical community and he was talking about online community.

Why can't online community and physical community be the same? It leads to this question: what resources could be put in front of an online community to help people in a physical community? I am doing an aggregated calendar. Other answers range from: help with home maintenance and construction to babysitting, catering, eldercare, shopping, transport, laundry, and maybe anything else that one person regards as a chore and another person is happy to offer.

The idea is taking form slowly and I am wondering about minimum useful capabilities. One idea I like is that accounts are formed around "my project", with possible "ask and bid" supported executing the project AND a passive view mode allowed where the public can watch. A kind of live TV.

In some ways, though, you want to eliminate a direct quid-pro-quo for low budget projects. For example, I would be happy to do some baby sitting, assuming that sooner or later I am going to need some eldercare.

A version of the spliting principle

From an old Italian woman in a TV show Happy: "Once you know the Truth you can't un-know it".

Feels like a million dollar idea

A couple different thought threads intersect.

I had a slightly stressful morning conversation with the civil engineer on our home addition project. He is doing a great job facilitating things like the contractor/plumber relation and he has been of immense help, knowing everyone and moving the project along. I could not get the project done without him.

Separately, I have been doing this woodsholecalendar.com and trying to get some nice young people to throw some energy into helping me expand - with better music content; better source-to-aggregate automation tools; and, who knows?

So I am walking into town, thinking about adding resources like: free-form written content or classifieds, or whatever makes a newspaper useful. But online. What kind of resources would be valuable to a community? I am remembering a most recent text message from one of these younger guys, saying he was interested in "ways people can come together and form community". So I thought: rather than pitching online newspaper ideas to the guy [who I am trying to get interested in helping me] why not reflect his idea back at him. And I message back: "Like what? Besides what Facebook does...."

Around this time, thoughts of my morning conversation with the civil engineer intrude and I start to wonder: how could you create a community resource [sub-part of the calendar] that would help people like me and my civil engineer get a project going, scheduled, and completed? And in a way that encouraged community values? In a broader context I have been exposed to the philosophical discussions of building large homes and why they should or should not be allowed in different places. Right now, Woods Hole is listed (perhaps a bit inaccurately) as one of the top ten mostly costly home locations in America. Oversized houses are a problem here and in places like Concord and Chilmark on the Vineyard [We saw a great documentary from there called "One big house"]. The interesting thing is that the dynamic driving houses to be larger is not only coming from people seeking status. It is coming from feature creep in the design and construction of the home. It is a natural dynamic when homeowners are uncertain and the designers have a conflict of interest: they desire to please and they desire to make profit.

The 'community value' precept comes both from the discussion with my young colleague and from the discussion of oversized houses. They converge on the idea of doing something

To facilitate the interaction of builders and homeowners during the project while serving community values*

Think about doing that online and add a spark: non participants watching the progress of the project, like a reality TV show. These viewers could add a lot of value back into the project.

So the sub-webpage could be called "My Home Project". You go there as a homeowner and start a project. Then builders etc go there to find work, or to track it. What is publicly viewable is a negotiation between homeowners and potential builders. Hopefully this social medium becomes a useful networking tool for the project. I am not sure what is the incentive of a builder, other than the homeowner calling the shots and trying to manage things though this website. SOUNDS TOO AMBITIOUS SO: is there a minimal version of this sort of thing that is doable?

* Beauty, energy efficiency, neighborhood character, feature integration (rather than sprawl), use of local resources

Life is Language

I had a strange thought while half asleep last night: that the nature of planning an action, inherent in any action, involves a linguistic component of the brain. Now maybe not for plants that do not act [really??]. But thinking of a wolf, smelling a sick bison bull a mile a way and heading for it in a straight line (ignoring all other bison ….you've seen the video) makes me believe that the wolf has an abstract understanding of a straight line AND some form of mental grammar allowing the straight line to be implemented as the wolf decides what to do. I cannot see how an action can exist without a plan, or how a plan could exist without a grammar for combining geometry and purpose.

An unlucky clam

You wouldn't think that a clam would have good or bad luck. I assume, for the most part, that clams are born, grow in the mud, then die. So I went clamming yesterday and one of the clams I pulled up had a limpet (a single shelled mollusk) growing across the two shells of the clam. Now, the clam has little leverage for opening itself up - as needed for its feeding and rudimentary navigational capabilities- and where the limpet crossed from one side to the other, it was probably keeping the clam shut and constricted, preventing the clam from doing much of what it needed to survive. The limpet would have killed the clam after a while.

So I pried the limpet off and was about to pocket the clam when I noticed there was also a small oyster drill (yet another type of mollusk) starting a hole through the clam's shell, in a different place. In a little while the drill would have gotten through, inverted its stomach through the hole, and started to digest the clam from the inside.

And now I am about to toss that poor clam into boiling water. I mean: how many bad things can happen to one clam? Talk about bad luck. Possibly, since it is now resting in a bucket of sea water, freed from the constrictions of the limpet, and not yet punctured by the oyster drill, it might be experiencing a brief moment of relief before the disaster that's coming tomorrow at lunch time. Sad. At least it had an exciting life.

Update: I decided to have mercy on that clam. Broke the oyster drill off and returned the clam to its home waters. The others got cooked and eaten. Whose laughing now? On the other hand, I have read that the seabirds - gulls and diving ducks - pay attention to where people are clamming, and go around afterwards to collect any clams that fell off the clam rake. Smart birds. In fact there were gulls and mergansers swimming where I was clamming the other day, so I payed close attention to where I dropped the unlucky clam back in the water. I am afraid the birds did too. I'll go look for the clam in the future, but its run of bad luck may continue inside the stomach of a bird.

AI - know it by knowing its failures

I was surprised to read an academic study showing AI did not have human-like shape recognition. They use the trope of a teapot with golf-ball texture and come to the long-since obvious conclusion that the software is prioritizing texture over shape. I first heard about this with sea turtle texture identification over a wide range of non-sea turtle shapes.

I construe Neural Nets as providing pieces-wise linear coordinate rectangle mapping which, if done at sufficiently hi resolution will be able to approximate any smooth curve. There are no explicit provisions for multi-curve problem spaces. There is no understanding of differentiability. One real problem is that the neural layers are essentially training on small groups of pixels. The larger the group the more time it takes to "learn" and one approach is to toss on new layers for larger and larger groups. But -GOD- mathematicians knew long ago that shape was a global property, and common sense says there is rarely a guarantee of "smoothness" or the sorts of convexity that are assumed in their vague theories of interpolation/ extrapolation. Trying to deduce shape from texture is complete nonsense. Trying to use raw pixels is the stupidest thing imaginable, from the point of view of position-invariant shape. What has become clear is that often the data->result mapping is discontinuous.

So I wonder a couple things, in a snide sort of way: why don't these guys go learn some math? And what about all those other AI "successes" we are hearing about? Like medical diagnostics. How do we know these aren't subject to the same errors - correlating a global outcome with an easy to compute local property that is- in fact coincidental? I see some risk ahead when no one can check if the emperor's new clothes are real - when the problem domain is harder to check than image recognition.

Went to a WHOI seminar where the man in charge of AI spending at MIT Lincoln Labs gave a superficial summary of AI that touched on its successes and the failures. Weirdly, he claimed "98% accurate" image recognition in one part of the talk, then mentioned later how easy it is to trick the system. Leading to the question: 98% of what?

Anyway, short of smart feature extraction (of global features) there will be no pixel-based image recognition.

Bagel Recipe

Adapted from: Perfect Bagels from TIQA

Makes 6 bagels. I am using King Arthur Bread Dough flour, soft water, and ~66 deg. F room temp.

Day 1: make the "pre-ferment"; let rest overnight
Day 2: make final dough by adding flour, etc to pre-ferment; let rest overnight
Day 3: form bagels, boil, then bake

Day 1 - make the pre-ferment
Mix in bowl

• 1 3/4 cups flour
• 1/2 tsp yeast (Active Dry)
• 1/2 tbs of MALT syrup (the dark brown colors the bagels, see if can find light color, or powder?)
• 1.5+ cups room temp water

Cover bowl and put in fridge overnight. 

Day 2 - make the dough

Take bowl from fridge and let approach room temperature.

Mix in:

• 1.5 cups flour
• 1/2 tsp yeast
• 1 tsp of salt [I increased this and eliminated additional sugar from TIQA recipe]

Stir in the flour and kneed in more flour as needed until the dough is not tacky and smooth.  [5-10 minutes, by hand] [Actually: kneed in more flour until you cannot kneed in any more]

Let rest a few (~15) minutes then cover bowl and put in fridge overnight

Day 3 - make the bagels

Take bowl out of fridge. 

Put large pot of water on to boil vigorously (which takes ~1/2 hour on my crappy stove top)

Preheat oven to 500 deg. F (should be ready when water is boiling)

After bowl has warmed slightly (during the 1/2 hour) and after the night resting, dough will have expanded a bit. 

Cut dough into 6 equal sized pieces, roll each in a ball, puncture, and form into bagel. (Dough will be a bit sticky, so an alternative is to form bagels the previous night, which I have not tried yet. Since the dough is getting warmer and stickier I put some dough back in fridge to keep it cool while making the rings. Don't let dough get too warm or start rising, as then bagels will flatten and not boil well.

Take baking pan, cover with baking paper and put the formed dough rings on pan, about 1 inch apart. (This is just while waiting to boil them.)

Three at a time, boil the bagels for 45 sec each side. [they may drop to bottom then float back up at first]. Take out with slotted spoon. Roll them briefly on a towel to remove extra moisture. Then put them back on the baking pan.

Bake at 475, ~8 minutes then turn pan and do another 8 - 10 minutes. Should be golden brown and not burnt on the bottom.

Notes:  I made two errors: (1) not enough flour kneaded into the dough, so no dropping to the bottom of the boiling water and a "crumb" with oversized bubbles. (2) Baked at 500 for too long: burnt the bottoms. I will be more careful with the flour and put the baking pan on the top rack - monitoring more carefully at 450-475. They are delicious anyway....but not good enough.

Google News is Un-Balanced

I wish they would "figure it out" -I am seeing one story after another about celebrities: politicians, comedians, celebrity shows, celebrity Royals, celebrity companies (Apple, Samsung, Tesla, etc...), not to mention celebrity CEOs. Then we get to scientific news and there are no celebrities, just pictures of asteroids and stories of hemorrhoids. At least since Steven Hawking is dead. Every day this week there was story about a single Netflix movie - a celebrity show.

I don't give a f*ck about your celebrities. I don't care about your iPhone updates and new OS talk. It is a whole problem with society.

My first fried clams

I spent an hour collecting at the yacht club and got ~24 clams. They are really close to the restaurant experience (no yuck factor) and delicious.

Got the recipe from YouTube: dip in cream/egg and shake well in inflated bag with flour/paprika/salt. Fry in peanut oil.

Later, with friends of Joe (Tyler and Jessie) we had a feast with more of these fried beauties.