1 Thanks for the update.
I think he should be fine. I knew several people who were done to death by the hospital environment, but the only thing that can do him in while in rehab is a real infection (more real than Wuhan Corona).

1 If the communist government is in its late stages, local workers at foreign organized facilities may not be behaving in strictly sane ways. For the foreign company, a release is bad for their reputation and further earnings, and fixing it before it gets worse may mitigate some of the reputational damage. But, for the communist government, the incentives are different. Local deaths, now or later, are not a problem for them. Admitting to a problem is itself a real problem for them. That said, late stage communist regimes are too noisy to take any information too seriously.

2 An interesting story that has been going around Taiwanese media over the last week is that the open arrival and departure of a USAF C-17 (At a military airbase, but in daylight and in public.) was for the purpose of extracting a high level defector from the mainland back to CONUS.  While I doubt that is the case, the close timing of the C-17 and the French report (Which, it must be remembered, the US only knows because the French government heard it first from the company and approve it to be passed on.).

3 That sounds silly. It's probably some crazy conspiracy theory. 

1 Thoughts - Now I see that Super Cub can actually be improved - That delivery suspension system is real
- Coincidentally I was practicing hand-to-hand transitions in my last CQB class, so her taking a shot with the left while the gun is out of right-hand (cross-draw) holster would not be weird at all, if she weren't on a motorcycle.

2 I note that upon closer examination, that box canon is shooting authentic .30 Mauser ammo.

There's a lot to like in that picture.

3 Nah. She's Chinese so she's probably loading Tokarev and that antique will break in a few more rounds. 

But I'm a pessimist so YMMV. 

1 Kaku and the Rovelli probably should be switched. 

Dover has some nice texts.  Cheap coverage of some topics that are usually a lot more expensive, at least in paper.

Took me a while to realize why you might have wondered if it was a real quote.

Even now, Statistical Mechanics is supposed to worse than Continuum Mechanics. 

Back then, before Fisher's statistics, and other recent developments in statistics, I can see it being a lot worse.  Might have been the sort of thing that takes a pretty extreme personality type to study. 

You totally should read up on statistical mechanics approaches to super sonic reacting turbulent flows.  Would definitely suck less than trying to follow the current political situation very closely. 

I'm pretty sure that statistical mechanics is one of those topics that needs a pretty good foundation, and to avoid unreasonable expectations for what one is able to learn. 

2 I read the kindle edition of The High Frontier. It came off as kind of ... pie in the sky - if you will. Although after thinking about the design of O'Neill colonies, I had an idea for improving the ratio of land to window space, and simultaneously improving the light gathering capabilities of the mirrors for colonies out, say, in the orbit of Mars, or further.

(Short form. Windows can be narrower if you parabolically curve the mirrors so the focus is near, but not at, the window, and spreads across a wider swath of land. You can similarly double-up, so that two mirrors, focused through two adjacent windows, light the same swath of land - AND have two mirrors each shining through the same slot aimed at different lands.)

3 The island designs are definitely soft. You can look the flywheels in some editions of the machinery's handbook, and apply the thinking to any spinning colony design. Colony bursts in Gundam should be more frequent.

4 Ugh, more gratuitous shoehorning of quantum mechanics into things where it isn't essential, and doesn't help.

There is a classical version of statistical mechanics. It deals with the lengths of time a system spends within various positions in an abstract configuration space. Classical positional entropy is proportional to ln(V). Classical entropies only have meaning in a relative sense, because they relate ratios of phase volumes between states.

5 They're basically doing all the same stuff, they're just dividing up their velocity configuration space into cubes of size related to hbar/m. No additional physical content.

6 One of the reviews thought that the book was useful for solid state physics. 

Is it possible that the quantum version of statistical mechanics is useful for a deeper understanding of very tiny electrical gates?

1 Okay, I can excuse many, many things, but touch the steak and bacon? 


Nuke the bastards to the ground, don't take any prisoners, and shoot the survivors on sight.

1 It's funny how he blames pornography at the increase in sexual assaults, whereas a number of studies measure negative correlation when other variables are controlled. But the reason why rape skyrocketed in Britain is rather obvious. I don't think I need to spell it out when we talk about the country where Rotherham is located.

2 Actually the time period is wrong for that. The 70s predate the particular immigration issue that led to Rotherham. That was started by Blair in the 90's. However, the 70s were  when women could finally report rapes without social sanction, probably resulting in more rapes being reported. He notes this as a possibility.
Studies have gone both ways on the issue, people are responsible as individuals for their actions, and I'm gonna default to free speech. 
This isn't nearly as tight or profound a video as I thought it was when I was checking off the boxes of vaccine side effects, but I think the overall point is valid, : The slippery slope argument is not a fallacy, it's how the left does business. They just call it "moving the Overton Window".

3 Okay, true. Rotherham in particular was a cover-up by the authorities that tabled all investigations in order not to seem "racist". But the profile of growth in sexual offenses is completely consistent with immigration from the (former) empire and from other places.

1 Hope you feel better soon.

As they say, Fubuki a cold, Haachama a fever.

2 And that's why I had Hipster Corona in January 2020; I was so over it before it went mainstream!

-j

1 As Nietzsche said, "And if thou gaze too long into the rabbit hole, you end up with cat ears and glasses."

2 But you still won't be a real cat.

3 Nya?

All the HoloEN girls got new outfits just recently, and both Gura and Kiara evolved into cats.  Well, Gura is a catfish and Kiara is a catbird.

Actually that's two new outfits, because for April Fools' they all got chibi versions of themselves as fully-rigged Live2D avatars.

1 Well, hypothetically, spending the body's resources producing more antigens, etc., for something you are already immune to because you already had it without symptoms might leave those resources unavailable for fighting off routine exposure to the ordinary run of freshly mutated versions of the usual strains. 

1 This was pretty interesting, although it was strangely captured by narratives at times (or tried to set them, perhaps). The one that jumped at me was when Malice was factually incorrect about Kurds and our backing of them, and then Rubin jumped in with "Trump pulled troops from Syria". Trump did no such thing -- he promised to pull the troops, but did not follow through at that. As a result, our troops are still stationed in Syria and occupy a significant amount of the territory. The exclusion zone around Tanf is all ours, and the left bank oilfields are too. When Trump was a lame duck, the topic came up, and some of the liberal generals tried to make up a version whereas they engineered U.S. presence in Syria basically by straight-up lying to the President for 4 years. That, sadly, does not remove the responsibility from Trump for not pulling the troops, nor from Rubin for not knowing any of it (or worse, knowing and lying).

2 One other great moment in narrative setting was when Malice literally admitted on camera that Epstein did nothing wrong (the "statutory rape" is called that because it's not a rape) , and yet continued to act as if it's beyond the pale.

1 I like his bee-girls better than the original Bee-man, which I have an issue of in a box somewhere...

-j

2 And, in spite of the fears, bee population is way up these days.

1 Not old or ill or anything, just suddenly taken from us. He will be greatly missed.

A unanimous decision from SCOTUS. Meaning it's not another example of our liberties hanging by a thread. Also meaning that they'll now have to go for a 19 justice court. 

More here, here, and here. 

That there was any question about this is a sign of how screwed up things are, but the decision, especially its unanimity is a most welcome surprise.  

This may well kneecap the red flag laws in addition to the now debunked idea that people can just express "concern" about a gun owner and have all their guns seized without so much as a warrant. 

1 "This may well kneecap the red flag laws"
Well, eventually.  Thomas (I think) more or less invited people to file lawsuits about them, after saying this ruling didn't address them.

2 Yeah, the situation is not as bad as it sometimes seems, and as they would have us believe it is. 

Judges and lawyers include a bunch of scammers who are only constrained by their ability to seem plausible in the eyes of other judges and lawyers.  They are largely innumerate, and will roll over for scams that a numerate person would not be fooled by.  But there are scams even lawyers and judges can see through, and some of the scammers seem to have enough shame or pragmatism that they will not use those scams.

1 It is the classic race between projectile versus armor.  So far, there has been nothing to suggest that armor can sustain anything beyond momentary periods of superiority when it comes to IT.

2 The key problem with security isn't systems, it's people.  People are dumb.

3 Yeah, what they said, but also, security inevitably ends up being added to existing systems rather than being present from the start, leaving gaps that can be exploited years later. Particularly in startups, security (and, honestly, process in general) is seen as a barrier to being "lean" and "agile", and a security team formed later won't even know about all the shortcuts that were taken  until something explodes.

When WebTV was moved onto the brand new Silicon Valley campus, it was our first experience with being on the real Microsoft corporate network, and it was riddled with malware. You could not successfully download all the patches for a brand-new Windows machine before it was compromised; you had to install updates from a CD before connecting to the network.

Why was it so bad? Because engineers all over the company had desktop machines with a second ethernet port plugged directly into the public Internet for convenient data center access, and many of them were "accidentally" configured as routers, bypassing the firewalls.

-j

4 Security issues result from more basic issues within the field of CS/programming. 

There is an aerospace engineering analogy.  This discipline is fairly young, as an engineering discipline, and only really goes back to Orville and Wilbur Wright. 

In the 1950s, there were a lot of designers with experience building sub sonic fighters during WWII.  They made some super sonic fighter designs that were 'very unforgiving aircraft', aka 'lawn darts'.  This was partly because they didn't have enough data about fluid flow at those speeds, and hence didn't really know how to design supersonic fighters. 

There is a fundamental problem within aeronautical engineering, the fluid mechanics equations suck to work with*, and you have to have experimental data to do anything new and interesting.  When you are moving into a new area of fluid behavior, like supersonics then, or maybe hypersonics now, it is not always clear which rules of thumb are no longer valid.

Whether you date the real start of CS to the 1940s or the 1960s, it is younger** than aerospace engineering, and definitely less mature as an engineering discipline.  (Basically, programmers who cannot think as engineers, and engineers who cannot think as programmers are hard to sort from the actual software programmer-engineers who understand which tools and techniques are reliable, and which ones are not.) A defective program does not collapse of its own weight the way a defective structure does.  In some cases you have to study the program, and understand software testing, to identify even catastrophically bad programs.  So the customers do not have the obvious problems that they could point to for civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and aerospace engineering, that the public was able to use as a basic for forcing those engineers to develop a certain level of discipline maturity.

As of yet, it is not certain if these basic problems are fundamental problems the way fluid mechanics challenges are for aeronautical engineering.

If we could prove that they are fundamental problems, we could then prove that we would never achieve perfect security.

There are bits of theory where researchers are working on theory that could in theory deliver defect free code when measured against a specification.  But, there would still be problems in defining the specification, and in finding experts that one could trust to properly define the specification.


We don't understand all of the problems with software designed according to best currently known principles.  Therefore, unknown security defects to be discovered in the future, if we learn more.  So security is catching up.  If you do not always have the people in place working on catching up, you will not stay current.  And software design is really complicated, so when you prepare the team on a limited budget, security people, and trying to prepare security are tempting goals to remove from the team and from the scope of the project.  Issue is, building in security afterwards is never as good.  If you want secure software, any effort spent reducing the complexity of the fundamental problem is worthwhile, because it allows designing security into the system from the beginning, and reduces the ongoing maintenance costs.  The people with money do not really grok this, so everyone tends to specify absurd levels of complexity in to the basic specification for feature requirements. 

These other guys understand much better than I do, and have hit the essentials more succinctly. I expect that the wild eyed crazies promising an achievable level of assurance are best looking at those 'meeting specification' theoretical areas. It runs right through those questions of measurable, important, information loss, information delays, and organizational/people issues that make the general case of technocracy such a reliably bad idea.

*Look up the Navier-Stokes equations.  That prize for finding a general closed form solution is really significant, and has not been awarded last I heard.  And Navier-Stokes are a simplification of the more general cases of continuum fluid flow, and continuum assumptions do not hold for all cases of fluid flow of interest to Aerospace Engineers. 

**Pre-Wright CS history tends to have parallels in pre-Wright Aerospace engineering history.  At the same level of preliminary development, Aerospace is slightly older than CS.  Unless you take discrete mathematics or multi-step calculations as the earliest CS, and look back into mathematical history for stuff that may possibly predate kites.