Archives for September 2024

Saturday, September 28, 2024

I have somehow gotten on a Facebook feed that plays little bits of things Neil deGrasse Tyson says. He’s an interesting guy. Recently, he said the point of college is to excite your curiosity, or something like that. Of all the traits I’d say that describe me curious is probably the best. The other day I was reading a book on great problems in mathematics – the ones that have been solved. I don’t understand much of the notation of the unsolved ones, but I do like the videos that Cohl Furey did a few years ago about octagonal algebra.

Yesterday morning I was watching an episode of How the Universe Was Made. This episode was about the size of the universe. What we can see is only as far as light has had a chance to come to us from afar. Think of it like a spotlight shining a round circle down onto a surface. We can only see to the edge of that circle. However, at that edge is a galaxy and it is 13.1 billion light years from us. (Given that the universe is 13.4 billion years old.) That galaxy has a spotlight around it that can see 13.1 billion light years too. But it can see things we can’t. Not only that but given that the universe is expanding and that the farther things are away from us the faster they are moving from us, soon we won’t be able to see that distant galaxy. 

How far away is that galaxy? Given that light travels at 186,000 miles per second that’s 6 trillion miles a year multiply that by 13,100,000,000 and you’ve got the distance – give or take. Yikes!

Then I worked on reading the glyphs on a Mayan stela and putting it into a talk I’m due to give near the end of October.

I communicated with my contacts in Angkor, Cambodia about shooting video there this spring, and offered my help to one of my Egyptian buds who is looking at sending a camera seventy feet down a shaft that hasn’t been looked at since 1927.

I am finishing up Nate Silver’s book On The Edge. His take on Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is much different than Michael Lewis’. And now he’s talking about AI and what if we make a machine that optimizes making paperclips.

I have to spend quite a bit of time replying “STOP” to emails asking for money. One of which said Nate Silver was predicting a high probability that Trump could win the Electoral College. I went to his SiverBulletin, which is what 238.com used to be, and didn’t see any evidence of the claim. Oh wait, Silver says if Harris has +1 to +2 % more of the popular vote Trump has a 66% chance of winning the Electoral College, But if she has 2-3% he drops to 36%. Currently Harris is at 55.1% to Trump’s 44.6%, which is 10.5% and new news says she’s increased her lead. Thank goodness. Oh wait, The Guardian show her at +3.6 : damn.

I’m also trying to wrap my head around statistical modeling. I don’t quite get it. It’s like when Nate explains it I go, “Yeah. Yeah. Okay.” Then I try to repeat it back to myself and I go, “What?” 

I watched Virginia Tech football where at the final play of the game – a Hail Mary into the end zone – was caught by a Tech player and the refs signaled Touchdown. Miami had been celebrating until that moment. Now Tech was celebrating. Now video replay nobody doing anything. Incomplete pass. Miami wins. WTF? The man caught the ball, fell to the ground. The ball popped off his chest as a player who had fallen out of the field of play may or may not have dislodged it, and they (the refs) say the man who caught the ball didn’t have control all the way to the ground? WTF? That does not excuse the poor decisions that the coaching staff of Tech made. With twenty seconds left in the half they squibb kick the ball allowing Miami to start near the 50 and kick a field goal (3 points Miami). VT is within field goal range on 4th down and they decide to fake the field goal? Okay. Who designed a play where the player getting the ball is running on the line where the players trying to block the punt will be rushing in? Who does that? Yeah, it failed – big time. (bye bye 3 point VT) The difference in the game was four points. Lemme see -3 Miami and + 3 Tech that’s a difference of um 6 points. Seems to me they VT could have won the game by – as a paintballing kid once said to his buddy when my son was into paintball, “Don’t play stupid!” Or as a Twitter person said of the two coaching staffs, “They have a bomb and are told to cut the red wire, but they are color blind.”

I finished the day reading about people thinking about quantum physics, blackholes, and if the universe is a hologram. Apparently, one can describe the universe as a 3D object wrapped in a 2D sphere where the quantum fields rippling on the surface of said sphere describe what is going on in the 3D world inside the sphere. It doesn’t make any sense, yet the equations say it does, and people are going back to Von Neumann’s algebra of the 1930s to see if that works to describe it. Me? I’m wondering what happened to the flashlight circle? I wonder how Cohl will weigh in on this, and Tyson. Not Mike, deGrasse.

Stay curious – about everything.

Thursday, September 26, 2024

Every season of Dancing With The Stars I say I’m not going to watch, and then … I do the same with football, and something else – I forget what.

The problem I have with DWTS is I don’t know most of these supposedly famous people. I guess if you said Dancing With Some Flash-in-The-Pans or Who Dats it would not have the same amount of glamour. It’s early in the season and we have the usual lineup. Some young women who were either child Disney stars or on the Bachelorette, a few stiff older male actors, the fading rose, the NFL player, the NBA player, two Olympians (one male, one female), a controversial figure (a convicted female felon), and a swimsuit model. I probably missed a few, but that’s the line up – in general. This often elicits a conversation of “Who’s this?” and “Why are they famous?”

Most of the contestants I don’t know. A few I know as “You know that person who did such and such.” I can say I knew three, wait – maybe four. Danny Amendola the NFL guy, Dwight Howard the NBA guy, the Olympic pummel horse guy, and what’s her name the daughter of the well known producer of thirty years ago who got gigs as an actress – Sorkin? No, that’s not it, but it’s close.

At this point in the competition you are seeing who has any ability to dance and those that have little to none. The bottom of the barrel has at least four if not more candidates: the two stiff older actors, horse faced Sorkin, and the felon.

Let’s start with the felon. I forget exactly what she did but it was fraud. Somehow she passed herself off as a princess and got people to give her money, a lot of money. Then she got caught and was convicted of her crimes. She still has to wear an ankle bracelet. The staff did a nice job of doctoring it, but it’s a box on her ankle, just to remind her and you of her recent crimes. Okay, she cute. She’s annoyingly giggly, which she’s past the age where that is acceptable, and she tried to say she hoped people would forgive her and see another side of her. We did see another side. She’s annoying, petulant, and lacking much if any personality. At the end of the second show when they eliminated two contestants (no one was eliminated after the first show) she got eliminated. She was asked what she was going to take away from this experience. “Nothing,” she replied. Truer words were never said. In the first episode she made a slight attempt at dancing, in the second show she did not. I’d say it was petulant child mode and she displayed less interest or emotion than the pretty girl a few seasons ago who had a reality TV show where she went shopping with her mother in New York. 

There were two surprises for me. Dwight Howard is graceful. He’s huge and paired with the tiniest dancer they have. She won last season with a tall NBA player, but Dwight? He’s huge. I mean compared to that guy he’s got like another 5 or 6 inches. His partner comes up to – hum, his sternum? It’s hard to describe he’s so big and tall. But man can he move – gracefully. The other surprise was the female Olympian. She’s a rugby player. She’s not a small woman. She and her partner did a routine where he lifted her. That was quite a feat, but then she lifted him! I mean, she lifted him like he was a piece of tissue paper. It was hysterical. They lifted each other twice. Great stuff.

Then there was the people whom I thought did a good job that got low scores and the people that did terribly that got the same scores. I think the judging is all over the place right now. There are two, maybe three people who can dance. 

Okay, moving on. Do you think that Kamala calling Donald “The Biggest Loser” (when it comes to American manufacturing jobs he lost) will bother him? Nah. Kamala also spoke of strengthening the apprentice trades programs, “skills not degrees.” I wonder how that will go over? I liked the commentator who said Kamala actually understands what an apprentice program is as opposed to a game show host who had a program with that word in the title. BTW did you know that the creator of The Apprentice had thought they could use the conference room at Trump Tower for their show, but it was seedy, moldy, and it stunk. He had to build a set.

I was going to do a piece on the guy in Florida who was caught outside of Trump’s golf course. I mean he’s just a patriot with a gun. Am I right? He didn’t shoot anyone so how can they say he was going to assassinate someone? I mean, what happened to the second amendment and free speech? Well, yeah, he did write a note saying he wanted to assassinate someone, but isn’t that free speech? He might have been joking or “being sarcastic.” Isn’t that what Trump calls it when he’s caught saying something terrible?

But I’m not going to write that piece. Okay, I already wrote it but I’m not going to release it. Well, what would I call the paragraph above if it’s not the article? A summary of the article. 

OMG. Rolling Stone did a report on what Tucker Carlson is up to. He’s got a road show. People pay to hear the guy that pushed the Pizzagate story. And they go crazy for Alex Jones who now claims the globalist elites are growing organs in cows or cow human crossbreeds or something like that to be used by aforementioned globalist elites to repopulate Earth with a super race. I mean – really? Why isn’t Jones in jail? He has a $1.4 billion dollar judgement against him and it is said that after Sandy Hook he made $165M pushing that awful disgusting nonsense that he knew was not true. The dregs of his empire are being auctioned off. Too bad. So Sad.

I have to say, “what did he learn from his experience?”

I think the ankle bracelet girl said it best, “Nothing.”

Monday, September 23, 2024

Kamala Harris has had a spectacular rise in the polls, yet Trump has a 64% chance of winning the Electoral College. To which I say, “WTF?”

To Russia with Lev came out this week. It’s a documentary that details Trump’s obsession with trying to smear Joe Biden with false stories that his son was involved in something illegal in Ukraine and that Joe benefitted from it. It turns out it was all Russian disinformation. And amazingly his first impeachment which this clearly demonstrated his criminality did not get rid of the guy.

Meanwhile, Trump had the choice, some say, of pushing policy or racism after his terrible debate performance. Guess which one he chose? Well, to be fair, there was no choice because he has no policy.

The Washington Post has outlined what Trump promises to do on Day 1. There are over two hundred promises. Many of them illegal, unconstitutional, impractical, and unattainable, but so what?

One Day 2, I predict he will play golf.

The weird thing is this election comes down to a handful of states, maybe three. Maybe only one – Pennsylvania. And within Pennsylvania maybe a handful of counties or less than that.

People are still asking, “How is this possible?” Well, look at the Republican senators who voted not to impeach – twice. One even led the charge on January 6th to try and halt the counting of the Electoral College ballots. “They say” – he’s a smart guy. Really? It’s also said that no one likes him. He has a certain sliminess to him. It’s said also that Ted Cruz is just putting on an act. That he knows better. I think he went to the Ron DeSantis school of charm, which is to say he’s got none. It’s amazing to me that these guys get away with this.

Friday, September 20, 2024

I don’t see what the big deal is with the Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina is.

It has been revealed that he went on two different pron sites. Said he was a Black Nazi. And discribed himself as a perv.

If you’re a Republican what’s not to like? He embodies everything the modern Republican party has become.

Listen, I’m recruiting a search party to find that big faucet that Donald says is in Northern California. It doesn’t show up on Google, which is strange given how big it is.

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

Three incidents:

1. “They’re eating the dogs.”

2. Nicky Jam “She’s hot.” (Nicky is a man. He’s a Latin singer. He has a dark 4 o’clock shadow.)

3. Mistakes Bagram Airforce Base for Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge ANWR

So what can one say about these incidents?

#1 Is bat-shit crazy right wing stuff. This is just an udate to the “no dogs at Chinese restaurants” bit.

#2 Obviously, he had no idea who this person was and tried to fake it.

#3 Brain fart? I don’t know.

The question is, “Do you really want someone who spouts crazy stuff, doesn’t know the people he’s working with, and can’t keep straight places in Alaska and Afganistan straight running the country?”

Not only that, let’s talk about judgement. He said he hated the biggest pop star in the world. Hated. Yeah, she endorsed the other candidate, but hated? I saw a comment that said a parent has forbidden the playing of Taylor Swift songs in their house. I bet that’s going to work out well.

In the debate Trump quoted Victor Orban. He’s a dictator. That’s the kind of person Trump admires. Do you want an admirer of dictators running our country? He also likes Putin, Xi, and Un. How many friendship photos of him with them do you need? Or lap dog behavior?

Then there’s the not facing reality. Just because you say something is so, doesn’t make it true.

Our economy has recovered quite well from the effects of Covid, better than any ohter country. That in no small part to the work of Biden and Harris. Saying otherwise isn’t facing the truth. Yes, people would like prices to be lower. But what would Trump do? Well, nothing. He’d hold a press conference, and then he’d say, “we have plans” or concepts and that would be the end of it. How do I know this? Because that’s what he always does. 100% of the time.