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Abbreviated Arguments
I know a lot of you are disappointed I didn't go ahead and finish the debate on the MIT petition story. Tough.
Most days it's fun smacking down the willfully ignorant but sometimes outside forces conspire to make me too tired to bother. I just delete all the messages, pop open a beer, and watch some TV.
This was one of those times and you're just going to have to live with it.
Trump's superior management style
You have to admire a person who knows just how many 3am tweets that they need to spew in order to barely get elected president of this great country.
Moderation Today
So, I've been sitting here watching the Spam moderations page and the mod-bombs page post-election thinking someone's gonna get butthurt and abuse moderation. It has yet to happen. Kudos to everyone for managing to restrain themselves. You guys make me fucking proud, so I'll leave you with this little bit of humor on an otherwise tense day:
Britain: Brexit is the most shocking thing a country will do this year.
America: Hold my beer...
The most influential work of literature?
When that happens, their mere existence will skew what is perceived as the greatest and most influential works of literature on Earth. For it won't be the great religious works of the major religions by which our descendants in space will be able to trace their mere existence. The Bible, Koran, I Ching, or the Vedas won't get us there. It won't be the great works of philosophy from Plato's many works through to modern times. Or almost anything we consider great literature today. One doesn't get into space by the unsteady hand of Hamlet, for example.
Works of economics are similarly disfranchised. This future might be enabled by Das Kapital or Wealth of Nations, but it's not going to be able to trace its lineage to these. Nor most great works of science such as Origin of Species (though Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica will have a prominent role in the foundation leading up to this great work).
There is a peculiar aspect to early space engineering (basically everything before the Second World War). Namely, that it was very insular, even from its closest neighbor, astronomy which would reasonably be thought to share common interests. There are very few notable researchers in the field until one gets to the late 1920s. There was little official interest in space development until the Nazis got involved in the mid-30s. But they all share common inspiration. And everything that involves putting anything in space or doing anything in space comes from this inspiration.
So when humanity has gone beyond Earth, there will be one work of literature which will stand out from all the rest. I, of course, speak of From the Earth to the Moon, by Jules Verne, published in 1865.
Fixing work by breaking it
meustrus:
Underemployment could be a society-side solution to class disparity caused by systemic unemployment. Think about mechanization especially: a single factory may have had 100x as many workers before robots, but all the remaining workers are still working full hours. Perhaps instead of concentrating that wealth in the investors, we could keep more like 1/2 of the workers earning the same wages for fewer hours. That way we could maintain a wider income distribution while improving overall quality of life. But there is a fundamental problem that may be intractable: human greed. The investors want the maximum return on investment for the robots they bought, whether or not that return comes at somebody else's expense. And the individual worker, with the opportunity to work 30 hrs/week for the same wage as their former 40 hrs/week, would usually rather keep their hours and earn 33% more.
While there's a lot more written in this discussion thread, I'll stop with that.
There's this idea that work is broken. We're working too much, paid too little, and employers are fat cats leeching off our work. So we're going to force everyone to work less so that these employers have to pay us more. There's a certain sense to it. Lowering the hours worked per week constrains the supply of labor and hence, in a vacuum would raise to some degree the price of labor.
But then we start getting into the many, many problems. The most obvious is simply that work does things and makes stuff. The less we work, then the less things we do and the less stuff we make. This is a problem in a variety of ways.
It means we're doing considerably less overall - the virtues of that level of underemployment aren't enough to compensate for the drawbacks. And I doubt it's a great idea to slow down the rate of progress just for some labor policy. For example, I'd much rather we at least get the developing world up to developed world status and some major progress on human longevity done before we dial back.
That output of work also pays for our labor. The less we do, then the less output there is to pay for our labor.
We also have large fixed costs per worker in the developed world. The less labor per worker the more these costs dominate. That means yet another way employers end up employing less people.
Moving on, another key observation here is that work (not effort!) and employment are not fixed. We can always find more stuff to do, we can find ways to do that stuff better, we can start new businesses, or change existing ones. This leads to another observation. Why curb supply of labor when we can increase demand for labor? Well, that would require throwing bones to employers such as reduced minimum wage; easier employment termination; lower thresholds to business creation, growth, and shrinkage; lower taxes; and reduced mandatory benefits.
One notices a striking component of these work reduction proposals. The employer is the enemy often labeled as "human greed" (as in meustrus's comment) or as the impersonal "investor". Somehow it's not human greed to pass laws to force employers to pay you the same for less work (on top of all the other wealth extraction ploys out there) even though you're pursuing your own benefit at the expense of the employer and threatening the viability of the whole system. But it is human greed just to be an employer. So of course, throwing bones to employers is unthinkable and we are left with this dysfunctional spiral.
Who's more important? A horde of underemployed workers who can't do stuff for themselves? Or the relatively few employers who keep everything going? Sure, you need workers, but when you're in an underemployed situation, there are too many of them and not enough employers.
And of course, the idea of forcing this change on everyone, the unspoken iron fist in this discussion, is completely ignored. In a free society, we certainly should have the choice to work harder to better ourselves and circumstances.
So here's my take on the whole matter. Breaking work further will not make it better, particularly in a world which already has attractive substitute goods for your labor: developing world labor and automation. The perverse and stilted ideology behind this proposal will not consider the obvious alternative, making employing people more attractive.
The proposed benefits of labor reduction are laughable such as income equality (devaluing labor hurts the poor far more than the rich making income inequality worse), inflation prevention (making stuff that people pay money for is deflationary so forcing people to make less stuff is inflationary), better quality of life (why do I need to work less to make your life better? Perhaps, you ought to unilaterally work less? I'm not holding you back), and of course fighting the good fight against human greed (human greed has always been with us, why is it suddenly more of a problem now than the past?).
So how about we fix what actually is broken or do something positive rather than entertain proposals that aren't even pointed in the right direction to fix anything or help anyone?
A summary of the Clinton email saga to date
The FBI could not review all of the Hillary Clinton emails under investigation because: The Clintons’ Apple personal server used for Hillary Clinton work email could not be located for the FBI to examine.
- An Apple MacBook laptop and thumb drive that contained Hillary Clinton email archives were lost, and the FBI couldn’t examine them.
- 2 BlackBerry devices provided to FBI didn’t have their SIM or SD data cards.
- 13 Hillary Clinton personal mobile devices were lost, discarded or destroyed. Therefore, the FBI couldn’t examine them.
- Various server backups were deleted over time, so the FBI couldn’t examine them.
- After State Dept. notified Hillary Clinton her records would be sought by House Benghazi Committee, copies of her email on the laptops of her attorneys Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson were wiped with BleachBit, and the FBI couldn’t review them.
- After her emails were subpoenaed, Hillary Clinton’s email archive was also permanently deleted from her then-server “PRN” with BleachBit, and the FBI couldn’t review it.
- Also after the subpoena, backups of the PRN server were manually deleted.
Notice the "after the subpoena" stuff at the end of the list. That's destruction of evidence which is likely yet another felony for whoever did that. After that, the report lists all classified information that was discovered from what emails the FBI investigators were able to reconstruct; a list of Clinton players involved in the scandal; and a timeline. The timeline repeatedly lists concerns raised about the email setup, security training for Clinton and her staff, events like destruction of evidence, and hacking attempts, some which were successful, into State Department affairs and personal email accounts of State Department officials and Clinton associates.
Thus, we have strong evidence for gross negligence, which is a felony even if it is not intentional, evidence of coverup of something, and a presidential candidate with a remarkable disregard for the responsibilities of her duties.
A good day at Yellowstone
Geysers are notoriously finicky and some at Yellowstone take years or decades to erupt. Fan and Mortar Geysers are typical of the breed. They have a dormant and active phase and tend to stay in a phase for at most a few years before transitioning. Currently, they're in the midst of their active phase, trending to more frequent eruptions. The current frequency this year has averaged around 5-6 days with periods between major eruptions of between 4 to 9 days. This phase may continue to next year, but who knows?
Anyway, I had heard from one of my coworkers that the geysers had last erupted around 2pm on August 28. The beginning of September 3 was day 5 since the last eruption. I had the day off, so I thought I'd give it a try, assuming that they hadn't already gone off yet. I slowly worked my way over, first checking the times on some of the more predictable geysers of the area (there are around 50 active geysers in this particular area, the "Upper Geyser Basin" including Old Faithful, the most famous geyser in the world and a uniquely consistent performer for a large geyser). It was a bit overcast and cool, a bit too warm for the thin parka I wore, but not quite warm enough for T shirts.
I arrived at Fan and Mortar around 7:30am (MDT). There were already three people watching who informed me that the geysers hadn't gone off yet (it leaves puddles when it does go off). Two had radios going. The area has an avid fan community, the "geyser gazers" that keeps track of the geyser eruptions via radio. The US National Park Service also monitors the channel and records significant geyser eruptions. It's quite active. During the 3+ hours that I stood watching the geyser build up, there were three other eruptions reported, including one of the nearby Riverside geyser, another predictable geyser that goes off just shy of two times a day.
I soon started speaking with the neighbors and getting myself acquainted with this peculiar system. There are a number of things that make Fan and Mortar very unusual. First, they have a complex dynamics between the two geysers even over the course of a few seconds as energy is transferred between geysers. I could see this in how the various vents (there are around a dozen between the two) would come to life (either steaming or sometimes spurting scalding water a foot or two). The two most important vents of the group were the Upper Mortar Vent and the Main Fan Vent. Heavy splashing in either of those two is a usual indicator of an incipient eruption of the pair. The geysers are closely connected and you won't get a major eruption from one without something from the other.
About halfway down this page is a labeled photograph of the two geysers. The river behind them is the Firehole River which runs through the most extensive and vigorous geyser fields in the world. Upper Geyser Basin is further upstream than the other major geyser basins and close to one of the three known magma bulges of the Yellowstone hotspot. There is also this discussion of the dynamics of the two geysers:
Let me walk you through the basics of Frustration and Mortification, ehem, I mean Fan and Mortar Geysers. These two erupt together and when active, the intervals typically fall every 3-7 days. Here's a labeled photo for reference.
Normally, Fan goes through cycles in which its vents turn on in a certain order. After a quiet period (during which Mortar may splash lightly from Bottom or Lower), River Vent turns on. River actually erupts horizontally, away from your perspective in the photo above - so figuring out when River is on either involves using heavy steam as a proxy or walking 100 meters up the path to the bridge where you can get a clear view of it. High and Gold begin to splash and are considered on when the splashing becomes nearly constant. Finally, Angle turns on with a swishing sound. The cycle ends when River turns off again - a single cycle can be anywhere from 20 to 70 minutes, typically.
Every once and a while, an event cycle occurs, simply meaning something different happens. Here's where things get complicated. Main Vent is not a friend to Fan's other vents, and splashing in Main Vent often leads to pauses in activity from the other event. Here's a timeline for what we might consider an "ideal" event cycle:
Main Vent splashing.....River Vent on.....River Vent pause.....River Vent on.....River Vent pause.....River Vent on.....no more Main Vent splashing.....High/Gold Vents on.....Angle Vent on
The final component needed for an eruption is called lock. In lock, High Vent erupts steadily to a height of 1.5-2 meters (5-6 feet), and Gold/Angle Vents splash continuously. An eruption may be initiated from East or Main Vent, or in Upper Mortar. Soon all the vents take off. Upper Mortar reaches 23 meters (80 feet), Main Vent hits over 30 meters (100 feet), and East Vent shows off an impressive horizontal throw that will absolutely get you wet. The following photos are from a particularly strong eruption on August 12th, 2014. Note the drenched people and the beautiful jets from Upper Mortar.
Anyway, back to my story. I came as an event cycle petered out and say on a bench. About 9am after watching nearby Riverside go off, we noticed a pause with almost all activity, particularly that of the River Vent on Fan Geyser, going quiet. One of my cowatchers stated that the pause was rather long, meaning it might just lead to an eruption later that day. He advised I stick around. Despite getting hungry, I decided to heed his advice. Just before 10am, one of the observers saw a bit of water splash in the Main Vent. I was thinking, dude, it was just a little splash. About 15 minutes later it did it again.
Now, you might ask yourself, what's the draw in watching a pile of rock emit steam and water for three hours? Even when the geysers aren't doing the real thing, there's a lot of interplay and activity. It's always doing something. Fan is the main performer here with six major vents running in a line across its mound. River Vent faces the Firehole River, of course, and provides the main indicator of the "event cycle" described above. The three vents across the top, Top, Gold, and Angle Vent all spurt steaming water and often rob power from one another. Then opposite the river are Main and finally East Vent which are the main soakers of the audience when a major eruption happens.
Meanwhile Mortar Geyser groans and hisses ominously. You could always tell when the Upper Mortar Vent was steaming because of the deep growl it emitted while nearby Bottom Mortar Vent would near continuously hiss even during the quiet periods.
So there was always something going on. After 10am, the Fan Geyser vents on the top (Top, Gold, and Angle) resumed activity and soon, we spotted the second singular splash in Fan's Main. That was faithfully radioed in at 10:15am. By this time, I noticed that we were building up a small crowd. Soon after, Top started erupting continually indicating considerable activity. But the other two by it, Gold and Angle would only erupt fitfully with Angle having very little activity. As noted above, we were now looking for "lock" all three vents going simultaneously and continually. The crowd kept building up to I'd guess around 100 people.
Some point after 10:30am, we got a key escalation with water splashing out of the Upper Mortar cone. Shortly after that, lock happened. That's about when the build up of the video above started. You can see Mortar Geyser on the left side with sporadic splashing and the mound of Fan Geyser behind and to the right with steam shooting into the river from the River Vent and the three vents on top steadily erupting to a few feet (the "lock" of course). Then there are larger spurts from the Upper Mortar Vent which shortly cascade into a full-blown eruption from every vent in the video (at 10:48). I was between the spot of the video and the main brunt of the East Fan Vent so I got wet, but didn't get a face full of water. People cleared out of that space quickly.
In addition to my parka, I also wore a hat. That turned out to be a great idea since I would have gotten completely soaked otherwise. The eruptions are hard to video because they generate a huge cloud of steam (and silica rich spray too, hard on lens!) quickly, hiding the details. But moving around, I could see the vents and where the water eventually fell.
Just as with the build up, there was some weird dynamics with power shifting between the two geysers. One geyser would surge with its vents and the other fade a little, back and forth.
I think the build up and eruptive dynamics make this one of the most spectacular geysers in the world though you have to be very lucky to see it erupt, if you don't have the time to sit around to wait on it. The local Old Faithful Visitors Center would have information on recent Fan and Mortar activity and they would be good to consult, if you're just traveling through.
After about ten minutes, the eruption stopped and the geysers entered a heavy steam phase. At that point, I headed off to bed.
Related: check out this awesome video.
Top Comedians 16.09
By request, these are our top resident wiseasses, clowns, and wit smiths:
By count: Nick Funny Mods %Funny wonkey_monkey60635% aristarchus59625% c0lo58522% Ethanol-fueled43113% VLM3809% bob_super35624% maxwell demon35520% Tork29720% frojack2574% Bot25337%
By percent: Nick Funny Mods %Funny Anne Nonymous16960% Buck Feta19755% Bot25337% DECbot12137% skullz10137% Gaaark21536% wonkey_monkey60635% JeanCroix9232% jimshatt9530% davester66624129%
A tip of the hat to @wonkey_monkey: and @Bot: for being the only ones to make both lists. Their asses are indeed wise.
Looks like I'm going to have to up my game if I want to make the list next time.
Q about math writing on SN
I've been kicking around a few mathematical ideas for a number of years and think I'd like to throw them out there similar to how NCommander is planning his development of a keylogger. Unfortunately, my current writing is very symbol heavy, though it mostly relies on normal calculus and algebra symbols. I suppose I could dump it on arxiv.org, though that has visibility to the entire math world, and their expectations are probably going to be higher than the relatively informal mess I'm planning with this project.
Anyway, to outline, way back when (back in the late 90s), I had this hare-brained idea that since I was studying some graduate level algebra at the time, adding a differential to the polynomial-style algebras I was studying would be neat. I soon realized in a naive way that I had a collection of differential equations of a complexity between what are termed "special functions", solutions of very special equations with unusual or even unique characteristics and general functions which are claims made about fairly arbitrary systems with modest restrictions on the equations and/or solutions. I thought at the time, that an intermediate system might have some of the interesting math of the special functions but with a much broader application.
I have off and on over the years read and explored this idea, slowly expanding my understanding of this subject and a number of related topics.
It has turned out to be a huge rabbit hole with all sorts of weird influences from a variety of fields of mathematics such as complex analysis, dynamical systems, algebra, geometry, number theory, and even analog computing. While I would make an attempt to make this material understandable, it would be going to some really esoteric destinations, I think. But I would try to write so that the ideas could be accessible to a knowledgeable layman who has kept up with the series.
Also, if you'd be interested in this, then please speak up.
Troll Hall of Fame 16.08
Here we go again. AC is excluded of course because he cheats by having tens of thousands of people do his posting for him.
By count: Nick Trolls %Troll Ethanol-fueled56517% Runaway19563097% jmorris23712% The Mighty Buzzard21910% aristarchus2179% frojack1503% Hairyfeet1499% zugedneb9025% khallow876% VLM802% By percent: Nick Trolls %Troll zugedneb9025% Ethanol-fueled56517% Khyber2015% jmorris23712% The Mighty Buzzard21910% jasassin3010% aristarchus2179% Hairyfeet1499% TLA148% Runaway19563097%
A tip of the hat to the returning champions and a hearty welcome aboard to the newcomers.
