Shaky Danny

  In 2017 Christine dragged me on the Katy Trail near St. Louis to see the eclipse. We were not in the totality. The first effect I noticed was the sickling. People were making pinhole viewers with blades of grass or a circle with thumb and forefinger. Sickling, the crescent moon shadow, was everywhere. The next was shadow bands. The sickling turned off and shadow bands, alternations of light and dark, appeared on the ground. They were straight and went on forever. Towards maximum darkness, and stillness, the shadow bands clicked off and then reappeared on the other side of the eclipse. Then the bands turned off and sickling reappeared. The shadow bands did not move. I don’t know if their position was the same on both sides of the eclipse. I had not heard of shadow bands before. Shadow bands are an interference pattern. An interference pattern occurs when a light is split, and then subsequent two slits create a wave interference pattern. The question is where the interference com...

Humans differentiate on location and association. We change location to meet association and change association to meet location. Two material conditions of the US constitution were taxing whiskey [i] and protecting slavery [ii] . The document is designed to frustrate popular will. Political parties are intended to ameliorate that frustration. We now have a small group of Republicans preventing the passage of a popular defense bill that contains appropriations for Ukraine and Israel. America has always been a nation of divided loyalties. Some Americans have loyalty to Mother Russia. That is an influence. There is also a material cause. Republicans focus on the border while ignoring immigration policy. Republicans like undocumented immigrants who know their place. Republicans terrorized the undocumented immigrant’s children when it looked like they may get status and eventually become voters. That’s when Mexicans got insulted and the fruit rotted on the ground and stores close on M...

  A ridiculous amount of effort is spent criticizing Hillary Clinton’s character. When elections are that close, every infraction is magnified. There is a much simpler material explanation. It is pathetic how cheap Congress is. Most of their time is spent on phone banks raising money. There was a moment when it looked like Chicago’s alderman Vrdolyak would be sent to Congress. Imagine: -This is a billion-dollar appropriation? I get more than this for a zoning variance. Occasionally money rains on Washington. World War II was cost plus. Johnson unleashed Taiwan. When Nixon made the China deal, they had so much cash they were shoving it into filing cabinets. Reaganauts were Nixon wannabes. Bush Sr. held up the Saudis for Kuwait. Hillary Clinton was queen. She shook down healthcare so hard their teeth rattled. Everyone in Washington should love Hillary Clinton. The Saudis had to sit down, and Ross Perot complained about the service. Insurance and Pharmacy were in a bidding war t...

  Life doesn’t play fair. We cheat. From virus to Dolphin, we slip the wink, nod, hidden card. All entities communicate, sometimes to our advantage. Roots respond to fungal signals. Flowers attract insects. Birds shriek at hawks. Stephen Jay Gould, in his book Full House , has evolution as a disordered wandering in a local domain from a variational minimum. He is contradicting the belief that humans are a culmination of effort. We are merely a twig on the great evolutionary bush.  Except when the wandering is selected. Communication across and within species is such a selection. The principle of intelligence, the consequence of its various possible algorithms, develops from communication. Unlikely there is one common algorithm for intelligence. More reasonable there is a principle among the algorithms. Given communication as the source of advantage, intellect is inevitable. Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. The principle of intelligence will be the same, regardless ...

  Back when Chicago had winters, I once dragged myself through the slush into a travel agency and said: -Get me out of here. I hate to travel. There is some remarkable geology. In Lacrosse Wisconsin there are bluffs. There is a fun mix of prosaic and profane seeing people living on and around the bluffs. There are also the plaques. In Pennsylvania there is mention of Jumonville. George Washington at the age of twenty murdered Jumonville causing the French and Indian War which lead to the Seven Years’ War, which lead to our revolution. The revolution was not popular, ask the Tories, who respected the king, paid their debts, and opposed slavery.  The Evanston Illinois light house, built in 1873 after the North was freed of the South’s hatred of boondoggle. Why of all the stretches of sand along Lake Michigan was the light house built here? The light house was an emotional reaction to the sinking of the Lady Elgin in 1860. In Milwaukee there is a wonderful plaque explaini...

  The defaults seem the opposite of common sense. AdSense is pestering me about an ad.txt file. I finally get a custom one in settings. Then I just figure out to click the blog file in manage your sites to get it scanned. If they want a file why not just make the file? I can find my blog in Bing but not in Google. I hesitate to mention it because maybe Bing is in error. Is it something with indexing? I go to Google Search Console. The page is crawled but not indexed. So, I request indexing. They notify me they are thinking about it. Weeks later, still thinking. I finally found a way in search console to request another crawl, but that crawl didn’t show up on the report. Why is the default for blogspot to not show up in Google? How neat that I can request and control how Google scans my page, not. The reason Google surpassed Yahoo is because they didn’t try to control searches. What else is Google missing? It would be nice to have a table of contents. 

  Anyone who says “peace in the Mideast” should be slapped. They are announcing that what follows is stupid. Peace never had anything to do with the Mideast. The statement is arrogant. How would you like to hear “peace in the US”? American policy in the Mideast should be mute. It is disgusting to hear Americans advise and excuse each group their atrocities. Americans are never short of advice. “Debate” in the US has circled around who’s better. It is not going to convince anyone that they should shut up and take it because their families had it coming.   No one has rounded up their criminals. Here is a quick review of America’s relationship, keeping an American eye for the man behind the curtain and the emperor’s clothes: Before World War II, the countries of the world refused Jewish refugees from Germany. Germans made that a big deal. During and after the war Churchill sent Jewish refugees to Palestine. British grabbed Palestine from the Ottomans. Some Pan Arabism is no...

  Venezuela has the largest oil reserves of any country in the world. We don’t yet know about the artic circle, Somalia, or the Philippines. In spite of their resources, history and wealth, the US sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba have succeeded. The refugees are proof. It is silly to blame those governments because they couldn’t effectively fight the US. The only thing holding up those nations is their own desperate need for sovereignty. Maybe Venezuelans should install a Saudi prince. Everyone has noticed that the United States absorbed the Ukrainians and Venezuelans are on the street. The Ukrainians flee war. The Venezuelans flee poverty. Ukrainians got here first. There are more Ukrainian refugees. Venezuelans have more skills, that is why they came. As far as the initial brunt of refugees, the Orthodox take care of their own and Catholics don’t. The pope finally popped the Texas bishop. I don’t know how much say that bishop had, but he was representing his constituency....

Brandon Johnson has just been elected mayor of Chicago. Except Byrne we have always elected lawyers, even prosecutors, in the hope that they would avoid indictment. So far, they have. Johnson is the first schoolteacher. As a teacher Johnson is trying to approach crime from a Confucious perspective, systemically. Here are some obvious concerns: A court clerk just made the mistake of self-publishing a book about a recent case. In general police, prosecutors, judges and even clerks should be cautious publicly expressing opinions that could be thrown back at them, endangering testimony, and convictions. It is unfortunate that people closest to issues are precisely the ones constrained from public discussion. Police are not screened for clerical aptitude. Clerical tasks are a major part of police work, especially investigations. Back in the 90’s the federal government confronted domestic violence. Their solution was the development of a form that must be filed if the husband was not arr...

  Recently there has been some fluff that we couldn’t find American workers to build a new integrated circuit plant. Our workers say it is because they are not getting enough money. Boomers bemoan: -Our kids are too dumb to get the jobs we used to have. Depend on Americans to find the racist reason even when it is against us. Foreign workers may get less than citizens, but that is not enough for a business decision, particularly on a subsidized plant. As I explain in this blog in Income Disparity and Bribes , in 1969 America removed discretionary fund as an accounting entry. This has several consequences. Companies moved the amount in that entry to executive compensation, so it is now after tax. Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has a graph showing executive compensation on an upward diagonal from 1970 on. CEOs used to get ten times base earnings. Take the difference then apply the tax rate gives us the total compensation, for the bribes and kickbacks require...