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I was coming close to the epilogue and a new character jumped out, and since she’s a gossip I’ll have to add her to most of the earlier parts, but that’s pretty much how I write, anyway. It will need an awful lot of editing.
        It’s turned into a sequel of sorts to Mars, Ho! and Voyage to Earth as well as a couple of other stories in Voyage. Spaceship captain Bill Kelly returns, and although everybody else in the earlier books is dead, they’re mentioned.
        I’m guessing it will be sometime next year before it’s ready for publication. I’m releasing this differently than the earlier books. I always posted the HTML and ebooks at the same time I published physical books, but this time will be different.
        One of my bucket list items has been to join the SFWA, Science and Science Fiction Writers Association, who award the Nebulas, one of the two most prestigious SF awards on the planet or off. At first I tried submitting stories to SF magazines, since if three are published at professional rates in a year, you’re eligible. But even most of the best are rejected. There is room for fewer than 5% of submissions, while the head editor of S&FS says he wishes he could print a third of the submissions he gets. I came close a few times, but that’s a crapshoot.
        But a book only needs to earn $3000 for its author to be eligible for membership, and I’ve sold Amazon Kindle books without even trying. At $3 apiece (I just raised the prices) I make $1.05. All I would have to do would be to sell 3000 Kindle books from Amazon and I’m over the lower limit by quite a margin.
        This one looks to me like it might turn out to be my best. So for this one, as soon as I send the manuscript and cover art to the printers I’m sending it to Amazon. This time, the Amazon ebook will be the first version posted, followed by the hardcover and paperback; they take a month or two to hit bookshelves.
        If and when I hit the three thousandth sale, I’ll give that three grand to charity and post the free versions.
        So far it’s about 35,000 words, 140 pages. It will be another twenty or thirty pages longer before it’s finished.

This was originally a comment in an article here at S/N that was posted a couple of days ago. Since I'm a little late posting it, I'll repeat it here.

The article was about a pop songwriter being sued by the late Marvin Gaye's estate for copyright infringement. The greedsters lost the case, thankfully. BUT,

Those Marvin Gaye songs wouldn't be under copyright any more and this case could never have come to trial had it not been for Sony Bono and a corrupt judicial system.

The rich pop singer Sony Bono got himself elected to the US Senate and made a lot of friends there before suffering a rich man's death at the hands of a skiing accident most could never afford. So for the poor dead talentless pop singer, they raised the copyright length from 20 years, extendable another twenty with proper paperwork and a twenty dollar fee as previously, to the author's life plus ninety five years, ninety five if done for a corporation, without any copyright paperwork at all unless it gets to court.

Since the constitution allows copyrights and patents for limited times anybody with two functioning brain calls can't possibly believe that a century past the author's lifetime ("The Congress shall have Power To...promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;") is in any way constitutional. A lifetime plus a century is logically and reasonably unlimited.

I thought the law was passed as a result of bribery, but when folks tell me all congressman are crooked, I say it's almost statistically impossible that 535 people would ALL be corrupt. Then I realized, they don't have to be corrupt. 535 cowards fearful of losing an election are easy prey for the likes of the Music And Film Association of America (MAFIAA). "Nice campaign, be a shame if anything happened to it. You know I'm a good citizen who gives you and your opponent both fifty million buck campaign contribution. Be a shame if he got a hundred million and you got nothing." Too bad none of those 535 have the courage to outlaw "contributing" to more than one candidate in any given race. It should be a felony with mandatory prison time.

But they can't extort the Supreme Court like that. They face no election and hold office until they retire or die. It's been shown publicly that Clarence Thomas broke every ethical rule the judicial system has, Except that the rules don't apply to the Supreme Court! Since the other eight refuse to enact a code of ethics, I must assume all nine are as God damned dirty as Thomas.

That not only explains "Limited means whatever congress says it means" but why Citizens United ruled that a corporation is a person (who can't go to prison or be executed for any crime, only fined).

America's slide into fascism is well underway. As you're aware, under fascism, business runs government. Under communism, government runs business. I don't see a lot of difference, both require dictatorships. I'm just glad I'm old enough to miss the end of this shit show, I won't exist thirty years from now.

TV Meteorologists all, every single one, are victims of our abysmal educational system. It shuts off children’s thinking and demands they not learn, but memorize. For example, history class. I always hated history until I reached college. In public school, they want you to memorize names and dates without ever mentioning why those names and dates are important, or how what happened in the past affects you and can happen again.
        So like almost everyone else in our once great nation that has fallen greatly at the hands of the rich and the politicians they have purchased, meteorologists don’t think. It’s a wonder they could graduate college after the damage done in public school. Let’s outlaw private school! If the rich were forced to attend public school, things would vastly change for the better, because they would be well funded.
        So it’s no surprise that their “feels like” temperature calculations are missing variables, the first thing wrong with “feels like”. In the summer, the formula takes into account temperature and humidity, since hot wet air feels hotter than hot dry air. But two eighty degree days with identical humidities will feel different if one has a breeze. It won’t feel as hot.
        But they leave that variable out. Laziness, perhaps?
        In the winter, it’s temperature and wind. But then they ignore humidity, which does the opposite in the winter; on two windless days with identical temperatures, the high humidity day will feel colder than the low humidity day. But they ignore humidity in the winter.
        Summer or winter, the wind affects temperature. But the wind almost always changes, never a steady speed all day, making any “feels like” temperature flat out wrong almost any minute of any day.
        The one break I’ll cut them is that their science is still in its infancy, not really existing at all until we put up satellites. Maybe someone from Sweden or somewhere that they value education and teachers will set our dumbass meteorologists straight.

I didn't add much to the story, as I've been at the hospital visiting my daughter, who went into ICU Thursday night with ketoacidosis. She went home this morning. It prompted the only part I've written, and follows:

        The band got on stage to start having a good time playing, as playing children always do. Of course, nobody ever really grows up, not even the geriatric. Not inside, anyway. Some people’s souls die, but otherwise there’s a child inside every old codger.
        Bill finished up in the pilot room, cursing that damned Mort for dying, and hurrying to the commons. Maybe he could actually catch a show tonight, if that damned phone would shut up and let him be for a while. He sat down next to Mary, who started trying to get the best of him, female style.
        Nobody ever really grows up. She pulled out a joint.
        Bill wrinkled his already wrinkled old nose. “Excuse me,” he said, and moved to the table Joe was sitting at by himself. After perfunctories, he said “That Mary! I’m glad I’m not Ralph or Jerry. Damned woman was hitting on me. I’m four times her age!”
        Joe grinned. “Is that what the company records of your entropy say?”
        “No, that’s what the tax collector says, charging me a year’s taxes for a three month run.”
        “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We’re going to start with a very, very old number called ‘Moondance’.”
        Sue started playing her flute.
        Harold, as usual, was missing the show, dealing with the various miseries elderly geezers always have most of the time.
        “It hurts when I raise my arm like that.”
        “Then don’t do that.”
        “Ha, Ha.”
        “Look, George, gettin’ old ain’t for wimps, you know? You think I don’t have all the aches and pains and heartaches and misery as everybody on the ship?”
        “Can’t you give me something?”
        “You have arpirin, don’t you?”
        “Yeah, but...”
        Harold rolled his eyes. “Let me tell you a little ancient medical history. About 1800, not sure the actual year...”
        “Krodley! ancient is right. How could it apply today? They didn’t even have electricity, did they?”
        “I don’t know, but they made a drug named ‘morphine’ out of a plant that’s now extinct called a poppy. It was kind of like a modern pain diffuser, but if you took too much for too long, you had a physical need for it, so they made strict rules, laws, actually, for its use.
        “They developed more and more powerful drugs in that class, but in the twentieth century fascism was born, and was nearly wiped out in a world wide war but the nascent movement started taking hold world wide in the twenty first...”
        “They taught us all this is high school!”
        “Not all of it, they didn’t. Just about how the entire planet became a fascist dictatorship. Now, the drug industry...”
        “The drug what?”
        “Believe it or not, producing drugs, actually all aspects of health care were monetized. A diabetic without the means to afford enough medication was doomed to a horrible death by ketoacidosis...”
        “You lost me.”
        “Their blood turns to acid.”
        “They were really that cruel?
        “That’s what happens under fascism. Poverty could result in death by torture. But anyway, the opioids, as they were called, were legally only used for [FIXME] pain until the heartless drug dealers, very rich people who made medicines that doctors prescribed, somehow convinced everyone that their drugs could be safely used for [FIXME]. The result was millions of people addicted to the drugs the drug salesmen pushed, dying from overdoses, stealing to support their habits... it was awful. Believe me, you don’t want to go back to that. How about using a diffuser if it hurts that bad?” His instruments told him that George was in less pain than he was.
        He shook his head. “I can’t think straight with one of those.”
        “Drugs would be worse. Let’s get a beer and listen to some music.”
        “It’s Saturday?”
        “Well, yeah!”
        They walked down, and entered the room as raucous applause was ringing. “Good,” Doc said, “We didn’t miss it!”
        Before they reached a table, the applause died, and Bob’s amplified voice said “Thank you! Thank you! You’ve been a great audience, we’ll see you next Saturday!”
        “Well, shit.”

From Ezra Klein (archive link:

Among the many unique experiences of reporting on A.I. is this: In a young industry flooded with hype and money, person after person tells me that they are desperate to be regulated, even if it slows them down. In fact, especially if it slows them down.

What they tell me is obvious to anyone watching. Competition is forcing them to go too fast and cut too many corners. This technology is too important to be left to a race between Microsoft, Google, Meta and a few other firms. But no one company can slow down to a safe pace without risking irrelevancy. That’s where the government comes in — or so they hope.

A place to start is with the frameworks policymakers have already put forward to govern A.I. The two major proposals, at least in the West, are the “Blueprint for an A.I. Bill of Rights,” which the White House put forward in 2022, and the Artificial Intelligence Act, which the European Commission proposed in 2021. Then, last week, China released its latest regulatory approach.

Let’s start with the European proposal, as it came first. The Artificial Intelligence Act tries to regulate A.I. systems according to how they’re used. It is particularly concerned with high-risk uses, which include everything from overseeing critical infrastructure to grading papers to calculating credit scores to making hiring decisions. High-risk uses, in other words, are any use in which a person’s life or livelihood might depend on a decision made by a machine-learning algorithm.

The European Commission described this approach as “future-proof,” which proved to be predictably arrogant, as new A.I. systems have already thrown the bill’s clean definitions into chaos. Focusing on use cases is fine for narrow systems designed for a specific use, but it’s a category error when it’s applied to generalized systems. Models like GPT-4 don’t do any one thing except predict the next word in a sequence. You can use them to write code, pass the bar exam, draw up contracts, create political campaigns, plot market strategy and power A.I. companions or sexbots. In trying to regulate systems by use case, the Artificial Intelligence Act ends up saying very little about how to regulate the underlying model that’s powering all these use cases.

Unintended consequences abound. The A.I.A. mandates, for example, that in high-risk cases, “training, validation and testing data sets shall be relevant, representative, free of errors and complete.” But what the large language models are showing is that the most powerful systems are those trained on the largest data sets. Those sets can’t plausibly be free of error, and it’s not clear what it would mean for them to be “representative.” There’s a strong case to be made for data transparency, but I don’t think Europe intends to deploy weaker, less capable systems across everything from exam grading to infrastructure.

The other problem with the use case approach is that it treats A.I. as a technology that will, itself, respect boundaries. But its disrespect for boundaries is what most worries the people working on these systems. Imagine that “personal assistant” is rated as a low-risk use case and a hypothetical GPT-6 is deployed to power an absolutely fabulous personal assistant. The system gets tuned to be extremely good at interacting with human beings and accomplishing a diverse set of goals in the real world. That’s great until someone asks it to secure a restaurant reservation at the hottest place in town and the system decides that the only way to do it is to cause a disruption that leads a third of that night’s diners to cancel their bookings.

Sounds like sci-fi? Sorry, but this kind of problem is sci-fact. Anyone training these systems has watched them come up with solutions to problems that human beings would never consider, and for good reason. OpenAI, for instance, trained a system to play the boat racing game CoastRunners, and built in positive reinforcement for racking up a high score. It was assumed that would give the system an incentive to finish the race. But the system instead discovered “an isolated lagoon where it can turn in a large circle and repeatedly knock over three targets, timing its movement so as to always knock over the targets just as they repopulate.” Choosing this strategy meant “repeatedly catching on fire, crashing into other boats, and going the wrong way on the track,” but it also meant the highest scores, so that’s what the model did.

This is an example of “alignment risk,” the danger that what we want the systems to do and what they will actually do could diverge, and perhaps do so violently. Curbing alignment risk requires curbing the systems themselves, not just the ways we permit people to use them.

The White House’s Blueprint for an A.I. Bill of Rights is a more interesting proposal (and if you want to dig deeper into it, I interviewed its lead author, Alondra Nelson, on my podcast). But where the European Commission’s approach is much too tailored, the White House blueprint may well be too broad. No A.I. system today comes close to adhering to the framework, and it’s not clear that any of them could.

“Automated systems should provide explanations that are technically valid, meaningful and useful to you and to any operators or others who need to understand the system, and calibrated to the level of risk based on the context,” the blueprint says. Love it. But every expert I talk to says basically the same thing: We have made no progress on interpretability, and while there is certainly a chance we will, it is only a chance. For now, we have no idea what is happening inside these prediction systems. Force them to provide an explanation, and the one they give is itself a prediction of what we want to hear — it’s turtles all the way down.

The blueprint also says that “automated systems should be developed with consultation from diverse communities, stakeholders, and domain experts to identify concerns, risks and potential impacts of the system.” This is crucial, and it would be interesting to see the White House or Congress flesh out how much consultation is needed, what type is sufficient and how regulators will make sure the public’s wishes are actually followed.

It goes on to insist that “systems should undergo predeployment testing, risk identification and mitigation, and ongoing monitoring that demonstrate they are safe and effective based on their intended use.” This, too, is essential, but we do not understand these systems well enough to test and audit them effectively. OpenAI would certainly prefer that users didn’t keep jail-breaking GPT-4 to get it to ignore the company’s constraints, but the company has not been able to design a testing regime capable of coming anywhere close to that.

Perhaps the most interesting of the blueprint’s proposals is that “you should be able to opt out from automated systems in favor of a human alternative, where appropriate.” In that sentence, the devil lurks in the definition of “appropriate.” But the underlying principle is worth considering. Should there be an opt-out from A.I. systems? Which ones? When is an opt-out clause a genuine choice, and at what point does it become merely an invitation to recede from society altogether, like saying you can choose not to use the internet or vehicular transport or banking services if you so choose.

Then there are China’s proposed new rules. I won’t say much on these, except to note that they are much more restrictive than anything the United States or Europe is imagining, which makes me very skeptical of arguments that we are in a race with China to develop advanced artificial intelligence. China seems perfectly willing to cripple the development of general A.I. so it can concentrate on systems that will more reliably serve state interests.

China insists, for example, that “content generated through the use of generative A.I. shall reflect the Socialist Core Values, and may not contain: subversion of state power; overturning of the socialist system; incitement of separatism; harm to national unity; propagation of terrorism or extremism; propagation of ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination; violent, obscene, or sexual information; false information; as well as content that may upset economic order or social order.”

If China means what it says, its A.I. sector has its work cut out for it. A.I. is advancing so quickly in the United States precisely because we’re allowing unpredictable systems to proliferate. Predictable A.I. is, for now, weaker A.I.

I wouldn’t go as far as China is going with A.I. regulation. But we need to go a lot further than we have — and fast, before these systems get too many users and companies get addicted to profits and start beating back regulators. I’m glad to see that Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, is launching an initiative on A.I. regulation. And I won’t pretend to know exactly what he and his colleagues should do. But after talking to a lot of people working on these problems and reading through a lot of policy papers imagining solutions, there are a few categories I’d prioritize.

The first is the question — and it is a question — of interpretability. As I said above, it’s not clear that interpretability is achievable. But without it, we will be turning more and more of our society over to algorithms we do not understand. If you told me you were building a next generation nuclear power plant, but there was no way to get accurate readings on whether the reactor core was going to blow up, I’d say you shouldn’t build it. Is A.I. like that power plant? I’m not sure. But that’s a question society should consider, not a question that should be decided by a few hundred technologists. At the very least, I think it’s worth insisting that A.I. companies spend a good bit more time and money discovering whether this problem is solvable.

The second is security. For all the talk of an A.I. race with China, the easiest way for China — or any country for that matter, or even any hacker collective — to catch up on A.I. is to simply steal the work being done here. Any firm building A.I. systems above a certain scale should be operating with hardened cybersecurity. It’s ridiculous to block the export of advanced semiconductors to China but to simply hope that every 26-year-old engineer at OpenAI is following appropriate security measures.

The third is evaluations and audits. This is how models will be evaluated for everything from bias to the ability to scam people to the tendency to replicate themselves across the internet.

Right now, the testing done to make sure large models are safe is voluntary, opaque and inconsistent. No best practices have been accepted across the industry, and not nearly enough work has been done to build testing regimes in which the public can have confidence. That needs to change — and fast. Airplanes rarely crash because the Federal Aviation Administration is excellent at its job. The Food and Drug Administration is arguably too rigorous in its assessments of new drugs and devices, but it is very good at keeping unsafe products off the market. The government needs to do more here than just write up some standards. It needs to make investments and build institutions to conduct the monitoring.

The fourth is liability. There’s going to be a temptation to treat A.I. systems the way we treat social media platforms and exempt the companies that build them from the harms caused by those who use them. I believe that would be a mistake. The way to make A.I. systems safe is to give the companies that design the models a good reason to make them safe. Making them bear at least some liability for what their models do would encourage a lot more caution.

The fifth is, for lack of a better term, humanness. Do we want a world filled with A. I. systems that are designed to seem human in their interactions with human beings? Because make no mistake: That is a design decision, not an emergent property of machine-learning code. A.I. systems can be tuned to return dull and caveat-filled answers, or they can be built to show off sparkling personalities and become enmeshed in the emotional lives of human beings.

I think the latter class of programs has the potential to do a lot of good as well as a lot of harm, so the conditions under which they operate should be thought through carefully. It might, for instance, make sense to place fairly tight limits on the kinds of personalities that can be built for A.I. systems that interact with children. I’d also like to see very tight limits on any ability to make money by using A.I. companions to manipulate consumer behavior.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. Others will have different priorities and different views. And the good news is that new proposals are being released almost daily. The Future of Life Institute’s policy recommendations are strong, and I think the A.I. Objectives Institute’s focus on the human-run institutions that will design and own A.I. systems is critical. But one thing regulators shouldn’t fear is imperfect rules that slow a young industry. For once, much of that industry is desperate for someone to help slow it down.

I still haven’t found a catchy yet fitting name, so for the time being it’s Anglada.odt. It has turned out to be a sequel to Mars, Ho! and Voyage to Earth, and a prequel to Nobots. Bill Kelly returns, aged 245 Martian time, 61 relativity time. Einstein’s theory is the story’s main theme.
        This story has a lot I’ve not used before, like a dystopia. I’ve become really tired of reading future dystopias, it seems that’s the only thing kids can write these days. Probably because we’re sliding headlong into one, thanks to people like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberh, Bezos, the Sacklers, the Waltons, the Cochs, everyone who’s dirty, filthy, stinking rich with vast stock portfolios that include oil stock and bribes to legislators moving their taxes from them to the working class*, and legally stealing their labor.
        But there are two “worlds” here, Earth, and the spacers on Mars and in the asteroids. Those living on asteroids are called “asterites,” a word Poul Anderson coined in his Industrial Revolution. The spacers (Asimov coined that one) live well, all what we would call overweight, a boon to someone living on Sylvia or even Mars, because of the low gravity. Work is voluntary, and there’s a mandatory retirement age of sixty.
        Earth is my first dystopia, a real hellhole, with hurricanes on land, five mile wide EF-5 tornadoes, and everyone living underground, even the Amish. At the beginning of the story, the Yellowstone supervolcano has exploded, killing millions instantly and billions of war and starvation afterwards. It begins with Earth a dictatorship that resembles both fascism and communism; basically, the whole world is North Korea with weather running everyone underground, and everyone skin and bones, always hungry. You kids like dystopias? There’s a pandemic that kills three quarters of the population... but fortunately, very little concerns Earth. Most of the story is on the trip to Centauri, and the Martian base.
        It’s also my first story with a sad part; I hate sad stories. Also the only story with a little kid, an orphan whose Grandpa is headed to Anglada.
        Here are some snippets, which may or may not be in the final book. It starts off:

History’s first human venture outside our star’s heliosphere was an utter catastrophe that ended in insanity.

        After a few paragraphs, most of Grommler is in it. Everyone thinks the insanity is from the plants on Grommler, but it’s the time stretch.
        Almost everyone in the story are elderly, the youngest three on the ship are in their fifties. Explaining why would involve a spoiler. One is fifty five, the youngest (except the psychologists, in their early fifties) The fifty five year old is a musician, there to put on shows for the crew, so the story’s a lot about music, and all that goes with it, like insane copyrights, which have stretched to infinity in the story, everything before the twenty first century public domain, and afterwards perpetual copyrights owned by corporations.
        Computers write all books, plays, music... A geologist named Will is an amateur guitarist (there are no more professionals, it’s all computers) who thinks he sucks. Sue is a hydrologist who also plays a mean flute.

He finished the tune. “I told you I sucked,” he said as he put the guitar back on its stand.
        Sue was applauding. Bob said “Dude, that’s a much better version than what the computer plays.”
        “You’re just being nice.”
        Sue said, “No, really, that was good! Bob’s right, it was better than the computer version. The computer version has a lot more notes but no soul at all. You could make money playing that!”
        “You think so?” he said.
        “No,” Bob interjected. “A two hundred year old Earthian law says that an ancient corporation owns the tune and you have to pay them. There’s no way you could profit. Copyrights have been perpetual for two hundred fifty years now. Let me teach you some of the old, pre-copyright tunes. Here, here’s one called a Bolero...”

        It isn’t mentioned by name, but the song Stairway to Heaven is in it, as is...

Three days later, Bob Black sat on the stage in the commons with his guitar, a real antique, a Fender Stratocaster, tuning it with a normal electronic tuner like they’d had almost since the Strat had been invented. The computer generated Muzak that Bob hated played. Bar stools were all occupied and a large fraction of the tables were, as well. Half of the people there had never heard real music, played on a real musical instrument by a real person before.
        Bob’s family had been musically inclined for generations. He had been named after another guitar player long ago, his great grandfather Rob Black; both were named “Robert Black” on birth certificates.
        Not only had he seemingly inherited his musical talent, which science didn’t say was hereditary, but musicians did, but also books and books of sheet music going back centuries. He’d had them digitized, and the physical books were locked up in a warehouse on Mars.
        His guitar tuned up, he started with an ancient tune called “Thirty Days in the Hole” from one of the antique books. He never had found out what “Newcastle Brown” was, a disease, maybe?

        Unlike way too much science fiction, mine always actually has real science, scientists, end possible future engineering. The main science in this one is psychology, although there are other fields.
        There are no computer scientists in the story, but lots of computers. I wonder what OS they’ll be running in a few hundred years?
        So far it’s about 27,000 words and 85 pages, maybe a third of the way finished.

* In 1940, the lowest federal tax rate was over four times the median income. In the 1950s and '60s a single paycheck paid a family's bills, the minimum wage would support a young couple with a child. We have been ROBBED silently.

Jackass is set to be photographed, fingerprinted and arraigned on Tuesday.

I urge all humans (regardless of their stance on/interest in this criminal case) to come to NYC to express (or not) themselves. And once you've done that, stick around for a few days or a week.

I'd start with some nice dim sum. Jing Fong is just a few blocks (perhaps a 5-7 minute walk up Centre Street, 202 Centre Street to be precise) from the Manhattan Criminal Court building where Trump will be arraigned (100 Centre Street, to be precise).

If you're not a fan of Chinese food, head over to Little Italy for some lovely Italian food.

Don't forget to stop by Cafe Ferrara for some dessert. I heartily recommend the Sfogliatelle, although just about everything there is delicious!

Or (or in addition to) head downtown to the 9/11 memorial (open 'til 8PM, associated museum closes at 7PM)

If you're around Trump Tower, walk a few blocks south to 53rd Street and turn right. MoMA is right there.

It has a wonderful permanent collection, as well as several interesting current exhibits (see link above). Highly recommended!

I'd also highly recommend The Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of the City of New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (not as close to Trump Tower as MoMa, but everything is pretty close in Manhattan).

Or head a few blocks uptown and you'll be at Central Park, especially since Tuesday will be a really nice day, (mid 60s and sunny). There are so many wonderful places in the park (the Mall, Sheep Meadow, The Great Lawn, The Shakespeare Garden, the famed Central Park Carousel, Belvedere castle (where, incidentally, the National Weather Service maintains weather monitoring equipment. So if you hear the news say "it's 64 degrees in Central Park, that's where the measurements are taken). If you're with your SO (or want them to be so), go to the Castle around sunset -- ~7:39PM on Tuesday) and take them to the Pagoda next to the castle. It's one of the most romantic places in all of NYC.

And there are too many wonderful museums, Broadway shows, musical performances from jazz to hip hop and everything in between! Numerous dance clubs and a wide variety of other places and activities as well.

If you're interested, recreational cannabis is legal to posess in NY State. There are currently three state-sanctioned cannabis retail dispensaries in Manhattan (where Trump Tower and the Criminal Court are located), and ~1500 unsanctioned stores/dispensaries around the city as well. "Dude! Look at the colors! Wow!"

And there are so many other places to go, things to do and experiences to have. From the U.S.S. Intrepid, (if you stick around 'til at least Thursday Shen Yun, the opera and rafts and rafts of other stuff.

So come on down to protest/support (or not) who and/or what ever you want, and stay for all the wonderful stuff NYC has to offer!

Hotels are kind of expensive in NYC, but deals can be had. What many folks do is to stay in hotels/motels outside the city and take public transportation (free parking is hard to find and paid parking is very expensive -- much more so than public transportation, and driving in NYC can be incredibly slow). I personally really like The Arthouse Hotel on the Upper West Side. Near the iconic Zabar's, The Beacon Theater, Central Park, The NY Historical Society (an often overlooked gem!) and (my favorite) The American Museum of Natural History.

I couldn't possibly expound on all the fabulous stuff to do and see in NYC (I believe journal entries have a character limit), but you will certainly find many wonderful things here!

So come and support/protest Trump, then stay for all sorts of wonderful stuff!

All (as long as you're not violent) are welcome and encouraged to come and stay as long as you like. We support free speech and peaceful protest here. Enjoy!

Sorry I'm just linking my personal site but there's just too much formatting to move it here, and I'm lazy today. I haven't even worked on the novel.

But here's a small bit that needs no formatting:

Ever since 1946 when ENIAC was patented; or rather, the presidential election of 1952 when CBS news introduced the computer to America, computers have been called "electronic brains". The name is half right, they are, in fact, electronic. But they're not brains.
<snip>
You can do a lot with numbers. You can compute orbital trajectories, predict orbits of comets and asteroids, engineering, cooking... you can even create simulations and recordings of auditory and visual signals, but they can't create or mimic reality. But people still call them "electronic brains" and speak of "artificial intelligence".

You can't mimic intelligence, but you can fake it. Margarine is more honestly called "butter" than what a computer does can be called "intelligence". The only intelligence is the real, chemical, analog intelligence, that of the programmer's.

It's a trick, not unlike the ones David Copperfield performs.

I learned magic at age seven. When my sister's grandson was four, she was showing me her new computer, and the child asked her how computers work. She shrugged, and said "it's magic." As Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

That's why those of us who actually understand how computers work are called "Wizards".

Magicians use subterfuge and misdirection, among other tools. The AI misdirection is from anthropomorphism and animism, two powerful forces on the human psyche.

People are easy to fool.

I thought of this as a huge problem for the future, when some evil man will use "artificial intelligence" to subjugate populations. I later found that I wasn't the only one; in the beginning of Frank Herbert's Dune there had been a jihad against "intelligent machines" which were therefore illegal.

I decided to do something about it and wrote a program to convince people that computers couldn't really think, by writing one that seemed to but was insane. The problem was, when I explained that it couldn't really think, that it was just trickery, they wouldn't believe the Wizard, probably because of that Oz guy.

There is more at the link, including some original source code and a scan of part of its printout.

Every now and then I see something on the internet, usually at Soylent News, about pre-digital music recording. It's almost always incorrect; something someone just thought up or heard it from someone else. Some of these people are actually pretty cognizant about most technologies.
        First, one needs to know the difference between analog and digital. Of course, one is computer codes and the other is an analogy, but when it comes to analog music, the more money you spent on equipment, especially speakers but all of it, the more it would sound like real instruments rather than an analogy. This was called High Fidelity when it was actually accurate enough that you couldn’t tell a recorded timpani from a real drum. With digital equipment it doesn’t matter as much. There are tricks that have been developed in the last few decades to fool your ears; no, actually, to fool your brain.
        So I thought I'd start at the beginning, with the birth of recorded sound and dispel all the falsehoods while I'm at it; or at least, the ones I’ve heard.
        I have personally lived through the last seventy years of innovation and change. When I took a physics class on sound and its recording, digital sound recording had yet to be invented.
        Ever since the 1940s or possibly earlier, all albums were copies. One difference between analog and digital is with every child copy, an analog signal degrades, but a copied digital signal is identical to its parent, because it is no longer a signal. It’s a series of numbers, measured voltages. In analog, as the signal from the microphone gets stronger, the voltage feeding the tape head gets stronger.
                In 1877, a century before I attended that class, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, named with the Latin for “sound writing”, writing with sounds. The first recordings were on tin foil. In 1896 and 1897 he mass produced his phonograph players and wax cylinders. You can hear some of them here at the National Park Service website.
        At one point he developed a talking doll, with a phonograph inside. It was a commercial flop; women had to scream into the recorder, as electronics wouldn't exist until 1904 when his labs developed the vacuum tube (called the “valve” in Britain; both names are accurate). They had one of the dolls on the TV show Innovation Nation. It was a commercial flop. I imagine they would have scared the hell out of little girls.
        In 1900 he patented a method of making his cylinders out of celluloid, one of the first hard plastics. Cylinders had been produced in France since 1893, but were not mass produced as Edison’s 1900 cylinders were. Dictaphones used wax cylinders until 1947.
        Alexander Graham Bell is often credited with inventing the gramophone, probably because of its name, but it was patented in 1887 by Emile Berliner, who named it. He manufactured the disks in 1889. He came up with the lateral cut, where the needle moved side to side rather than up and down as with Edison’s phonograph.
        Records were 12.5 cm (about five inches) and are now recorded at 8 1/3, 16 2⁄3, 33 1⁄3, 45, and 78 RPM. Berliner's associate, Eldridge R. Johnson improved it with a spring loaded motor and a speed governor, making the sound as good as Edison's cylinders. However, it would be a few decades before high fidelity.
        The first records were “about 70 RPM” and standardized at 78 RPM from 1912 to 1925, the year all companies standardized. Modern turntables still play them.
        I have seen comments saying you can’t do deep bass in vinyl because the needle would jump out of the groove, which is one of those things that’s partly right while still being completely wrong.
        This was solved by a “rollover frequency.” Records were recorded with the bass attenuated when recorded, then returned to full volume on playback. However, it created another problem: The records you produced, when played on a record player you produced, sounded pretty good. But played on anybody else’s record player you would have to adjust the tone control to make it sound any good at all.
        This is why the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was formed; to standardize the “rollover frequency”. It’s described well in Wikipedia. Since then, anyone’s record will play on anyone else’s player, and the quality depended on the quality of the disk and the equipment it was played on.
        However, the curve wasn’t standardized until the middle 1950s, when I was a child and high fidelity, usually called “hi-fi”, came about. Its aim was to reproduce the sound as accurately as possible, so good that a blind person couldn’t tell the difference between a recording and a live performance. They never quite got there, but they got really close. They gave up on fidelity when they invented the Compact Disk.
        An old, pre-digital myth presented itself when I was a teenager. My dad’s friend was an audiophile, and once asked me if I thought he should buy a more powerful amplifier.
        “What’s the loudest you turn it up?” I asked.
        “About three.”
        “Nope,” I then answered. “more watts doesn’t make it sound any better, only louder.”
        Some folks think the more watts, the better it will sound. It’s a myth. Or that you need a lot of watts for deep bass. Also a myth; a 1974 Kenwood 777 speaker with its fifteen inch woofer had plenty of deep bass, low enough to feel, with a portable monophonic cassette recorder powered by C batteries. Hardly high fidelity, but deep bass, and treble as good as cheap stereos. With a high fidelity receiver they would fool most into thinking it was live.
        Today’s “sub woofers” are magic; magic as in David Copperfield magic. They fool the brain into thinking there’s deep bass, because they transmit subsonics you can feel, making it seem like the bass is good, but play it with real high fidelity speakers on the same equipment and you’ll hear what a real woofer can do as opposed to a subwoofer. If you need a subwoofer, you don’t really have much bass at all. It’s a trick. There’s a lot of sound on that record that simply doesn’t come out of those cheap speakers that you can hear clearly with a pair of quality speakers with real woofers.
        By the 1950s the sound was good enough, if you could afford the high fidelity speakers, that the the only way adult ears could tell the difference was noise; tape hiss and dust on the final record. Tape hiss was minimized and even eliminated by speed; the faster the tape passed the heads, the higher the frequency of the hiss. At about 16 IPS (inches per second) the hiss was inaudible, as it was above the range of human hearing.
        The best high fidelity home tape decks were at 16 IPS (inches per second), and very expensive. Studio recordings were made at 32 IPS, twice as fast as hiss removal. Fidelity can’t get much higher than that unless they vastly increase the sample rate of digital recording, or get the ferrite grains on the tape smaller.
        It was about this time that stereo was invented. Stereo tape was easy, simply have two separate coils in the tape head, each sending a signal when recording, and receiving it when playing back. These would play both channels mixed together on monophonic tape machines. However, playback is slightly different than recording, so all but the cheapest recorders have separate heads for recording and playback.
        But how can you have two signals in a single groove of a vinyl record? How do you maintain the backwards compatibility that had existed since the Gramophone was invented? I found out in a physics class in the late 1970s.
        As mentioned earlier, the needle wiggles side to side in the same shape as the sound waves. For stereo, this motion carried both channels in the side to side motion, and a single channel in the up and down motions. These two channels are combined out of phase to remove one of the two channels from the side to side motion.
        I couldn’t remember which channel was which, so I googled, and wow! The internet is certainly full of nonsense. One site with “labs” in its name gave an explanation that was very complicated, was believable, and completely wrong, with images that could fool you.
        Even if it’s published in a bound book it may be bullshit. I have a half century old paperback titled Chariots of the Gods that “proves” that the earthen lines in Peru are evidence of extraterrestrial visitation, but it’s obvious to me from looking at them that they were ART. We artists do things like that, even though normal people don’t understand. The book was nonsense, the type of nonsense we call “conspiracy theory” in the 21st century. Way too many people think if a thing could be, that it must be. Occam’s Razor and my college professors’ teachings say they’re artworks.
        I’ve seen comments that claimed that in the fifties and sixties they made records with attenuated bass and treble so they would sound okay in car radios, which is patent nonsense. They weren’t recorded with attenuated bass and treble, you simply can’t get bass from a three inch speaker, and radios were AM only back then. AM radio and its tiny speaker is the limitation, not the music they played.
        They always strove for the highest fidelity possible in the uber-expensive stereo systems that cost thousands of dollars; if you bought a record that made your expensive stereo sound like a Fischer-Price toy, would you buy another record produced by that company?
        Car radio sucked because cars then had abysmal acoustics, and AM has never been remotely possible to produce high fidelity. Even analog FM falls short, due to bandwidth constraints. Radios were all amplitude modulation (AM) in cars, frequency modulation (FM) was new, and not much used until the 1960s, and car radios were all AM only until after 1970. AM radio has a very limited frequency response and unlimited noise; hisses and crackles from things like lightning in Tierra Del Fuego that frequency modulation lacks.
        I’m not going into detail about radio broadcasting here, perhaps in a later article. But if you had a copy of an early record from Jerry Lee Lewis or Chuck Berry, or even something silly like “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back” (it’s on YouTube, I’m sure), on a high end stereo it will sound like Mr. Lewis or Mr. Berry are in the room with you, except that the dust on the record will sound like it’s raining, with an occasional hailstone.
        Now, my dad bought a furniture hi-fi stereo that he paid hundreds of dollars for after his friend introduced him to high fidelity stereo classical music back in the early 1960s. He worked over his vacation to pay for it. This was when a McDonald’s hamburger was fifteen cents and the minimum wage was a dollar (note that the burger’s price stayed the same after the minimum wage went up to a buck fifty, despite politicians’ lies that raising the minimum wage causes inflation, a non-music, non-tech debunking).
        Even Dad’s expensive stereo wasn’t high enough fidelity to fool you, but I bought a stereo system when I was stationed in Thailand that would; sound equipment was expensive in America because of crazily high tariffs. I would have spent ten times as much on that stereo in America, but GIs could import duty-free. A Chuck Berry record played on that stereo sounded like Chuck Berry was in the room with you, with rain from the dist and scratches.
        I don’t remember exactly when Dad bought that furniture stereo, which now sits in my garage, but it was probably a couple of years before the cassette was invented in 1963 by the Dutch. Originally for dictation, the earliest ones were far from high fidelity. The eight track was invented a year later by a consortium of companies, wanting to bring stereo music to the automobile; no car had FM or stereo then.
        The cassette was an eighth inch tape, the eight track was quarter inch, which should have made the eight track superior, as well as its 3 IPS speed, twice as fast as a cassette.
        I never had an eight track, unless you count the player in the stereo my wife owned when I married her. I’d had cheap reel to real portables since I was twelve, and bought a portable monophonic cassette recorder when I started working in 1968.
        One myth wasn’t a myth to begin with. In 1964, the eight track was indeed superior to the cassette, due to its size and speed, as I mentioned. But eight tracks have disadvantages, and their possible advantage wasn’t followed.
        Cassettes got better and better fidelity until factory recorded cassettes surpassed factory eight tracks; they had invented eight tracks for cars and cassettes for dictation. But cars had abysmal acoustics back then, far worse than even today. Plus, nobody but the very, very richest had air conditioning in cars, so the stereo had to compete with wind and road noise, so producers didn’t bother with fidelity.
        By 1970 the studios had started producing pre-recorded cassettes, which sounded better than pre-recorded eight tracks because eight tracks were designed for cars, but people still thought eight tracks were superior despite their terrible habit of cutting off songs in the middle. Relatively few had cassettes; most folks had eight tracks, because of the myth. I busted that myth for a buddy in the Air Force in 1971 by simply playing a cassette.
        I always thought that designating eight tracks for cars and cassettes for homes was incredibly stupid, completely backwards. You could fit a cassette in a shirt pocket, but a cartridge was exactly four times as big as a cassette but held exactly the same amount of music as a cassette.
        The eight track was called as such because there were four stereo tracks, taking the tape size advantage away from them, instead of one or two. This allowed more tape to fit in the cartridge, but made four changes as opposed to cassette and vinyl’s two. And if it was “eaten”; pulled from its cartridge and wrapped around inside the player, it was almost impossible to repair, unlike a cassette, which was relatively easy.
        Dolby noise reduction was developed for recording studios’ master tapes in 1965, and introduced to cassettes in 1968. It worked in a similar fashion to the RIAA cutoff for vinyl; when recording, higher frequencies are greatly boosted, and reduced on playback. As the treble is attenuated, the hiss is, also.
        A twenty year old high end cassette deck is cheap. With the best, high priced equipment, a cassette can sound as good and have almost as good a frequency response as a CD, (up to 18 kHz compared to CD’s 20 kHz), although not CD’s dynamic range, which is even better than vinyl. But a CD can’t match vinyl’s frequency response, being capped at 20 kHz because of the Nyquist limit, which I’ll discuss shortly.
        “Quadraphonics” was introduced in the early 1970s, what we call “surround sound” today. There were four separate channels, two in the front and two in the rear, and the movie studios and theaters got it entirely wrong. Those two rear channels often detract from the movie, removing the magic and bringing you back to reality when the moronic director stupidly makes everyone’s head twist around to see what made that sound behind them. The four speakers should be positioned at the four corners of the screen, so sound can move up and down as well as side to side.
        Quadraphonic stereo was easy to make with eight tracks and cassettes. You simply added two coils to the tape head, each coil feeding a separate channel. This actually improved eight tracks, since there was only one track change. Cassettes had none, because they could be recorded on one side only, since a cassette only has four tracks. That’s all that could fit on a tape that narrow, so quadraphonic cassettes had to be rewound.
        An album was a different matter. I remember that once I had a stereo album that I had to replace; I don’t remember why, but its replacement was quadraphonic and didn’t sound as good as the stereo version on my turntable. Something was missing, and I couldn’t tell what. It sounded the same, but it didn’t. At the time, I had never heard a song in quadraphonic stereo. I didn’t know why it was different until I found out in that physics class later.
        They solved the problem of how to get four channels out of a single groove with electronics. They modulated the rear channels with a 40 kHz tone and mixed it with the front channels, and on playback the front channels were limited to 20 kHz and the rear channels demodulated.
        What was missing was the supersonic harmonics, over the 20kHz cutoff. Very few speakers back then and none today were good enough to tell the difference, but the pair I had went all the way to 30 kHz. You can’t hear tones above 20 kHz. For most people it’s closer to fifteen, especially older people. However, those high frequency harmonics affect the audible tones, and sound engineers can’t seem to understand that, insisting that sounds higher than you can hear can’t affect sounds you can, but I heard the difference with my own twenty five year old ears and learned what was missing the next year after the professor explained how quadraphonics worked.
        I say test it. Get thirty or forty children and teenagers and high quality headphones capable of faithfully reproducing super high frequency tones, and feed a 17 kHz sine wave to the headphones, with instructions to the kids to push a button when the sound changes. After a short time after the trial starts, change the tone from a sine to a sawtooth. I say the majority will press the button right after the tones change, the engineers say I’m full of shit. Stop making assumptions like a conspiracy theorist and TEST it scientifically! Science, bitches! Aristotle was a long time ago.
        This, I say, is what’s wrong with “digital sound”, which is actually a misnomer. All sound is analog; an analog of the original sound comes out of the speakers regardless if the recording is stored in analog or digital. It was invented when the biggest, most expensive computers on the planet were finally fast enough that they could finally record sounds up to 20 kHz, past the limits of human hearing, and cheap computers were capable of playing them back.
        The way digital sound, invented by the Dutch again, works, is periodically recording the voltage coming out of the microphone. With a CD, the voltage is tested 44,000 times a second and those numbers are stored on CD. They then discovered the Nyquist limit, named for the man who discovered it.
        Back to our teenager test with the sine and sawtooth wave, a 17 kHz sine wave sampled at 44,000 samples per second and cut off at 20 kHz is the same as a sawtooth wave, as there are only three samples per wave, far too few to discern between a sine and a sawtooth. But that untested theory says if you can’t hear it, it can’t color what you do hear. But a 17 kHz tone will audibly affect a 1000 Hz tone, even if your old ears can no longer hear a 17 kHz tone.
        Double the sample rate and that 17 kHz tone has six or seven samples. Multiply it by five and the differences should be striking, and digital should beat analog. But not at its present sample rate.
        The reason for the cutoff is that without the cutoff, ugly noise is introduced in a digital recording. It’s the computer’s bane, the rounding error. One too many samples in a wave changes its shape completely.
        That is why I earlier said that sample rates and bits per sample could be high fidelity and even surpass vinyl if they vastly raised the sample rate. They couldn’t when the CD was invented, they certainly can now that CPUs are thousands of times faster.

It's been a while since I'd installed kubuntu and since I bought the Windows 11 notebook, and had forgotten what a pain in the ass any new OS is. But Mint is the least PITA in a long time, far easier than kubuntu was, or even setting everything up on the Windows 11 computer that already had it installed; installation is the easy part, at least after I used the OEM install. Except, have you ever installed Windows? Jesus, but any Linux distro is a breeze in comparison, unless they've changed it since XP.

The first headache was the ultra high definition. I had to bend forward and squint to be able to read the tiny type on the screen. At least the focusing muscles that operate the CrystaLens in my left eye got plenty of exercise. I really need to have one installed in my right eye. But things in this desktop's menu system are extremely easy to find, so I increased the font size to 16 points. Then I installed Audacity.

I wanted to get it so I could record and play from it, but you couldn't read any of the tool items, because most of the text is covered up by the neighboring tool bar and they're unmovable. Oh, well. I'll get back to it, I thought. Lets see if I can open the novel I'm working on.

Libre Office is installed by default, and since there are no images, it will do nicely, although I'll have to see if Open Office is available. I started it (Mint's menu system is more than head and shoulders better then any modern Windows, everything is laid out logically and rationally, while Microsoft appears to want it to be difficult), hit the "file open" button, and had to tell it "other [something]", lots of mouse clicks to get to the network drive, open the drive and it shows the two directories, with the one marked "share" (the drive shipped with those two directories). But when I clicked it, it said it wasn't a directory.

Damn. Will I have to copy the files to the local drive? No, going into Mint's file manager and clicking the file opened it in Libre Office. Rather than its native Gentium Book Basic that I use for the body text of all my books, some huge sans serif font came up, so I'll have to install some fonts. Or just keep writing on the Windows computer, it's a lot easier to open the files there.

Still better than kubuntu. I couldn't access the network at all with it. But if I'm in Mint, at least I won't have to change computers to open a document.

Back to Audacity, I went looking for changing screen resolution, found it, and set it to DVD resolution. Then I had to go back and reduce the font size. Fonts aren't all I'll have to do to it, of course. I got the sound set up so it will play in audacity, and where in its administration to change it from HDMI to Line Out and back, but still need to set up and test its recording. If I don't have it done by Friday it will be on the Kubuntu side this weekend, because KSHE will probably have their monthly "no repeat weekend" where I usually get a lot of new songs.

Lots more to do. A new OS is always a pain in the ass. Remember your first smartphone?