thirdwave

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Week 5

Dj Food - Well Swung #music

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The author's description "junta giveth, junta taketh away democracy" is spot on.

"The 2008 [Burma] constitution – adopted after a referendum described as an 'insult' by international rights groups – was a military venture that instituted a form of tutelage democracy with the military playing national caretaker. The 213-page document includes several articles enshrining the military’s 'right to take over and exercise state sovereign power' in case of an emergency.

Monday’s scrapping of the constitution was, in effect, constitutional"

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"@paulmcleary

US plans to start flying B-1s out of Orland Air Base, Norway - the country's current F-35 hub. 200 USAF personnel showed up there today to start training to operate the bombers, EUCOM says"

"Award-winning UK scientist Dr. Lui Terry discusses how his pioneering work on nanoconfinement could help advance the global transition to cleaner energy... Metallic hydrogen is the densest form of solid hydrogen - a supremely compact way to store clean fuel. However ... is classically formed at very high pressures – close to the center of a planet. Thus, it is energy intense and currently impractical to produce, but it is predicted to be metastable like diamonds. Therefore, on removal of the pressure, they remain solid. [Bristol is] developing an alternative way to increase density at much lower pressures and higher temperatures .. [w] nanoconfinement"

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Obviously I am very much interested in metallic H2, for energy storage

"For astrophysicists, the Sun imparts lessons which may well have direct applications for mankind. For instance, the solar body holds the key to fusion. If the Sun is made from condensed matter, then our experiments should focus on this state. Sunspots may also guard the secret to synthesizing metallic hydrogen on Earth. If sunspots are truly metallic, as reflected by their magnetic fields, then attempts to form liquid metallic hydrogen on Earth might benefit from the presence of magnetic fields"

Fusion has been the Holy Grail of enegy for a long time. But right now AFAIK the work on it has stalled. They cant get more energy out of it than the energy they put in. They keep building machines for it but, like the LHC, the act of building the machine is more exciting, fruitful than the result u get from the thing itself. That has been the story so far.

It will help us understand the fusion process more. Work on fusion was inspired by the Sun, so if we understand the Sun better we might do fusion better.

"Why does it matter to understand how the Sun works?"

D2Q9

U know wha'm talkin bout dont you..? Yieeah

What is this free suffix buuulshit

$a_j b_j z_k = x_k + a_i a_i y_k b_j b_k$

is same as

$ (\mathbf{a} \cdot \mathbf{b}) \mathbf{z} = \mathbf{x} + |\mathbf{a}|^2 |\mathbf{b}|^2 \mathbf{y} $

???

Buuulshit

Bitch I much prefer the vector notation..

Sure commercialization can be a form shackling; US de-patented transistors, then there was a "vibrant ecosystem" around computing.

Their vacc was available before anyone else's. I bet US / Europe could do much better wout shackles.

"Europe warms to Russian jab after positive trial results"

Video

The over-commercialization of biotech led to subpar results.. Too slow.

"Pentagon moves Israel into [CENTCOM] to boost cooperation with Arab states... Change approved during Trump’s final days shifts Israel out of US military’s European Command sphere, will allow for greater regional collaboration against Iran"

"Spanish Deputy PM: Spain Looks at UAE's Offshore Expertise in Green Hydrogen Production"

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Nobel Peace Prize for Kusshhhh. Literally being discussed..

Looks like Abraham Accords will last after all? New admin is ok with it?

"@ReverendWarnock

The moral arc of the universe only bends towards justice when we push"

Tweet liked by tax-reform advocates I noticed

"@KClausing

Update: Sworn in today as deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis in Treasury. Tax policy is a key tool for tackling our biggest challenges, incl. pandemic relief & recovery, climate change, and inequality. Grateful to be part of Biden policy team! Fired up and ready to go"

reshuffle.. nice

"@poppymcp

Chinese media calls the military coup in Myanmar and replacement of officials with army men a 'major cabinet reshuffle'"

But better, more accurate term wld have been just nonlinear regression (for these recent neural nets that created most of the hype)

Why the switch..? The label "Machine Learning" was just fine..

The word AI has been so sullied by existing state-of-art, now movies have to get away from it to sound cool. Convo from Outside the Wire,

A: "So, what are you? Like, AI?"

B: "Your cell phone's AI. A Gump's AI"

.. as in he is something else, not some trick code that recommends you the shoe you just bought.

"New measures of success needed to avoid catastrophic breakdown, landmark review finds. ... The world is being put at 'extreme risk' by the failure of economics to take account of the rapid depletion of the natural world and needs to find new measures of success to avoid a catastrophic breakdown... Prosperity was coming at a 'devastating cost' to the ecosystems that provide humanity with food, water and clean air, said Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta, the Cambridge University economist who conducted the review. Radical global changes to production, consumption, finance and education were urgently needed"

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More from Jack Brouwer, professor at UCI, director of the NFCRC, APEP

"If you want to go to all the way to zero emissions meeting, providing a zero emissions option to a large apartment complex is not possible with battery electric vehicles, because we can’t put new charging stations at every one of the parking spots that this apartment complex has without, like, tripling the electric infrastructure that goes into that apartment complex. However, one hydrogen fueling station on the corner would be able to serve that entire complex at a much lower cost"

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Dude solved a Kreyszig problem using autograd.

By "average" yesterday I meant long-running average between two (or more) views (cld be immed avg too). One party cld be for 30% tax rate, another for 70%. Each enact their thing one in power, if they can, long-running average is 50%.

Stiglitz: "Biden’s proposed spending plan is urgently needed. Recently released data show a slowdown in America’s recovery both in terms of GDP and employment...

The economy would, of course, be better off without zero interest rates. It would also be better if policymakers raised taxes by imposing levies on pollution and restoring greater progressivity to the tax system. There is no valid reason why the richest Americans should pay lower taxes as a percentage of their income than those who are far less well off. Given that wealthy Americans have been the least affected, medically or economically, by the coronavirus pandemic, America’s regressive tax system has never looked uglier...

Under President Donald Trump, the programs that focused on small businesses were not as effective as they could or should have been – partly because too much of the money went to businesses that were not really small, and partly because of a rash of administrative problems"

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"Sumitomo Corporation of Americas Makes Strategic Investment in Hydrogen Fuel Provider OneH2"

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"GM partnering with Navistar on hydrogen fuel cell semi trucks"

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Podcast from the University of California, Irvine, talking to Jack Brouwer, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCI, also the director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center, as well as the director of the Advanced Power and Energy Program.

"It’s much more reliable to have both a renewable fuel and renewable electricity delivered in society. And we experience that today, for example, when we have the public safety power shutoff events, and when we have wildfires that shut electric grids down, or when electric grids themselves cause fires because they become too overloaded. When these things happen, we depend upon underground delivery of natural gas, today. Of course, it’s going to have to be transformed to this renewable hydrogen vector. And when we put those together, we can envision a 100 percent renewable world that is also reliable"

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Both shooting, and weight guessing involves knowledge / skill BTW, very important. Good noise around bullseye means person knows how to shoot. Judging weight by naked eye is possible bcz we have innate knowledge of weights of things, through evolution, and part of growing up, so the noise is normal. Stat ppl know this, when they apply a model to data, they determine whether it is good by looking at its mistake, its "residual" (diff between model pred, and real data). If resid is gaussian, they are happy. Bad models leave patterns in data. When unskilled (or dumb) people eff up you know why. There is pattern in their eff ups (usually due to some bias).

Height is normal of course.. many factors contribute to height. Some ppl might have a fat ass, small back, others large back, skinny ass. Large or small head.. All cld lead to same height.

Anyway; then, if shooting errors, weight guesses are true value + normal noise, averaging removes noise, bcz average of zero-centered Gaussian (which is noise) is zero. This is the magic.

But if I sum every 6 die throws and histogram,

rolls = [random.randint(1,6) for i in range(b*n)]
rolls = np.array(rolls).reshape(n,b)
s = np.sum(rolls,axis=1)
plt.hist(s,bins=12)
plt.savefig('dice1.png')

Bell shaped. Normal.

Why? Bcz more sums result in a 6 than 2. I can get 6 with 4+2,2+4,1+5,3+3,etc.. More chance to hit it. Very low, very high nums are harder. Easy sums form the bulk in the middle.

Demo. Throw a 6-sided die 1000 times (numbers below are from software generator), histogram rolls,

import random
n = 1000; b = 6
rolls = [random.randint(1,6) for i in range(b*n)]
rolls = np.array(rolls)
plt.hist(rolls,bins=6)
plt.savefig('dice2.png')

Nearly uniform (not normal), all equal chance,

Normal distribution is weird; it shows up everywhere. Take a group of ppl, their height dist is normal.

Have someone shoot at a target, measure distance from each hit to bulls eye, dist is normal.

Whenever many factors contribute to a thing, normality occurs.. bcz sums of anything (random) approaches normal. And there are many things like that in nature

To elaborate more on how consensus among (knowledgeable) people can result in correct decisions.. Remember earlier post at a country fair 800 people estimated the weight of an ox. Statistician Francis Galton observed that the median guess, 1207 pounds, was accurate within 1% of the true weight. Magic.

The reason is, guesses have noise, the right kind of noise, around the right answer. Averaging removes noise.

The noise distribution is bell-shaped, "normal" or a "Gaussian" (a dist is the formulaic form of a histogram, occurence count, frequency).

"@michaeldweiss

Protests continue across Russia today to free Navalny. Video of cops beating people in St. Petersburg"

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Fast digital payments are a good thing.. But a fiat currency needs the ability to have its money base expand depending on political decisions.

Hal Finney (so called "Satoshi")'s reasoning for creating BTC was wrong. He created it in the aftermath of 2008 crisis (his pseudo is taken after his neighbor's name who lost money during crisis), and thought "printing money" was the culprit. The problem wasnt printing money per se, but who it was printed for.

BTC is absolutely the expression of the naivete coming from common tech guy - bright, shiny object loving, unaware of landscape, soc ecosystem, side effects, etc..

Left-leaning econs dislike this thing to a man.

In the absence of clear-cut scientific law, differing views surface, and among enough knowledgable people, their average leads to something acceptably optimal.

In econ there is division around thriftyness and extra spending (some research popping up on the question but nothing solid), right and left have different answers. Fine.

But Bitcoin exclusively chooses one side of that argument, ignoring the other (money base cannot expand = thrift) hence it takes itself out of the discussion altogether. A country cannot adapt BTC as currency bcz of this.

What kind of notation is that? If random, not-referenced-elsewhere Greek letter is used, you have to assume summation over all indices? $u_\beta$ means $u_x + u_y + u_z$? WTF? What the actual f--k man?

Gerardo Frisina - Bluesanova #music

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But they love proposing such ostentatious ideas, it makes them sound smart. Hell one is thinking abt multiple universes.. isnt that smart?

Sadly nah.. I gurantee it a lot of these muckers are extremely bleeping dumb.

Fundam phy is stuck, and they know it. But they mistakenly think more elaborate ideas are needed to get out of it, enter endless "thought experiments" on time, universes, determinism, etc. But it is very possible what they missed is something basic, only two or three steps ago. They built up all this shit thinking that step was real, so the fix will involve fixing that error, or creating something more fundamental than having these "sexy tricks".

Started to watch more cable news, this must be return to some kind of normal

"@MattZeitlin

wow wonder why VCs and tech execs want no taxes on capital gains, an expanded market for equities, and short sellers banned and/or jailed"

Right it'd be pretty stupid if they kept dividing the stock market cap by the same number, for three months.. Then there'd be no need for this ratio, you would just look at the market cap value itself..

No they use projected GDP, and apparently take it from the GDPNow estimate of the FED.

"Wilshire uses market cap divided by GDP. But official GDP is released quarterly? Do they they use that number for this calculation?"

All-around shoot-the-shit is no picnic either, I tell you.

Skills to be a journo has to be different than the skills to be an all-around shoot-the-shit commentator. Lots involved in checking a story, talking to ppl involved in it, etc right? Lota focused skill

Outside the Wire, little Training Day'ish, but has some solid anti-militant messages.. The actor with the wing-suit from Avengers was in it. Brother was like the black Terminator!

Cutler - Sync Estate #music

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Is this relevant today? Well modernity (the second wave, after the agro first) added its own mental structures that are in some ways even more encompassing, and intricate. No wonder many ppl are still interested in these things.. Zen, Buddhism etc, not to mention other mainstream religions from the West.

I guarantee it Eastern religions, Taoism, Buddhism are a protest against agro, village societies as well.. These societies constructed a conceptual world with its idols, worship rituals, rhytms so ever-present that new religions would rebel against. I bet the Zen koans are packaged to make zero sense in that frame, to stir shit up in the mind so that only when that frame is dropped, it makes sense, or rather, the act of trying to make sense is dropped, hence the practitioner reaches "enlightment".

messaging has been off