Mom - Him Too?

-
I was disturbed by Romney’s reference to “his kids” in the second debate. Being a northerner he might be ignorant of all the various implications of that phrase in American culture. Still being from Utah he shouldn’t be. I suppose he was talking about Massachusetts. That kind of paternalism has a poor reputation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Please do not post how you agree with me.

Popular posts from this blog

Sail Boarding

-
  I had been sail boarding with my friends in Lake Michigan with little success. Being male, we used our backs rather than our brains. We took turns wrestling the board while the rest of us considered the futility of our meaningless existence on the beach. In the 80’s Chicago winters were extreme enough to push me into the Caribbean. Going for two weeks meant I paid less in air fare. This also meant that the resort boards were unused over the weekend, when everyone else was in transit. In fairness to my friends, Lake Michigan is choppier and less buoyant than the ocean. By now I knew to paddle out to deep water and fall off the board, rather than on the board. Standing on the board, holding the line connected to the boom where it joins the mast, I reckoned the wind direction and maneuvered the sail to the opposite side. I wasn’t going to let the sail push me off again. I gently lifted the sail slightly out of the water. The water fell out of the uplifted hollow mast. The mast and...
Read more

Fuzzy Logic and AI

-
  Back in the 60’s when the Earth was cool Fuzzy Logic computer programming had a moment.   Rather than strict decisions, the program totaled weights into a variable then tested for the decision. If the expert was thinking that way, I suppose that code might be easier to read. We might think of that as coding a synapse. If you wanted to juice it up, you could give the expert a screen to set the weights or write more fuzzy logic to determine the weight conditions. I worked on a program that had started fuzzy. The fuzzy had been replaced by strict determinist logic. It was more important to be consistent than be right. Artificial Intelligence follows the same path. At some point the learning is turned off and the final decisions are hard coded. AI gives the specification then people lack patience and value predictability.   I have noticed the Waymo effect. Terrible name for self-driving cars, sounds like whammo. Initially people were worried, then we realized that Way...
Read more

Rebuild Los Angeles

-
Start with fire. You are going to build a fireproof house. Once you have a plan to build a fireproof Los Angeles house build an architectural model using the same materials, say an aluminum foil roof etc. Then take a blow torch and hold it to your model for a day. Dena means valley, Pasadena, Altadena…A valley is a wind tunnel. Say you have a surviving model. Then blast it with your garden hose, raising the water level to half the level of your model. Desert valleys flood. Make sure your model is somehow anchored, so it doesn’t float or slip away. Check your model for mold. The seals on your model must survive fire and flood. Then take a large pail of gravel and dump the gravel from some height on the steel framed model with the fancy Swiss made seals. Valleys also have rockslides. Make sure your model can withstand the landslide without moving. After that, take the entire diorama, including the model, lift it up and bang it on the table as hard as you can. Earthquake proof means...
Read more