Week 40

Doctorow: "Epic Systems makes the dominant electronic health record (EHR) system in America.. How could a product so manifestly unfit for purpose be the absolute market leader? Simple: as Robert Kuttner describes in an excellent feature in The American Prospect, Epic may be a clinical disaster, but it's a profit-generating miracle.. At the core of Epic's value proposition is 'upcoding,' a form of billing fraud that is beloved of hospital administrators, including the 'nonprofit' hospitals that generate vast fortunes that are somehow not characterized as profits..

The reason hospital administrators love Epic, and pay gigantic sums for systemwide software licenses, is directly connected to the two hours that doctors spent filling in Epic forms for every hour they spend treating patients. Epic collects all that extra information in order to identify potential sources of plausible upcodes, which allows hospitals to bill patients, insurers, and Medicare through the nose for routine care...

Epic can automatically recode 'diabetes with no complications' from a Hierarchical Condition Category code 19 (worth $894.40) as "diabetes with kidney failure," code 18 and 136, which gooses the reimbursement to 1273.60"

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"@silverspookgames@wandering.shop

Why does the US military have an exemption from nuclear waste laws in Hawaii unless it's poisoning us Native Hawaiians and other residents? Curious, colonizers"

"Hawaii Council Considers Repealing Military Exemption From Nuclear-Free Law"

This sounds like the Amazon "cashier-less" store.. there is no AI, bought items are identified by operators in India who look at the video of the customer and jot down purchases made.

Jalopnik: "It Takes An Army Of Engineers To Make Self-Driving Cars Actually Self-Drive.. The self-driving car you’re riding in might not actually be driving itself, instead it could be getting instructions from engineers hundreds if miles away"

ProPublica: "In late January, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to 25,000 and droves of Palestinians fled their razed cities in search of safety, Israel’s military asked for 3,000 more bombs from the American government. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, along with other top diplomats in the Jerusalem embassy, sent a cable to Washington urging State Department leaders to approve the sale, saying there was no potential the Israel Defense Forces would misuse the weapons...

The episodes uncovered by ProPublica, which have not been previously detailed, offer an inside look at how and why the highest ranking policymakers in the U.S. government have continued to approve sales of American weapons to Israel in the face of a mounting civilian death toll and evidence of almost daily human rights abuses. This article draws from a trove of internal cables, email threads, memos, meeting minutes and other State Department records, as well as interviews with current and former officials throughout the agency, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly...

The records and interviews also show that the pressure to keep the arms pipeline moving also comes from the U.S. military contractors who make the weapons. Lobbyists for those companies have routinely pressed lawmakers and State Department officials behind the scenes to approve shipments"

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#TaNehisiCoates #Apartheid

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Fuel Cells Works: "South Korea's Goal: 21,200 Hydrogen Buses by 2030.. South Korea aims to boost green transport with 21,200 hydrogen buses, making up 25% of metro fleets by 2030 for a cleaner, efficient future"

Fuel Cells Works: "Port of Oakland receives $2.5 million hydrogen grant - Port Technology International"

Yankee sci institutions of course did give rise some brilliant scientists, US had the world's best during and after WWII move and teach there, the know-how rubbed off on some locals who would turn out ok, Tim Boyer, Putoff are two of those... But the general atmosphere, the culture would not favor them. As Cetta and de la Pena point out, some of the groundbreaking papers in theoretical science are collecting dust, almost noone is paying attention, US as the global steward of sciences is dropping the ball. This needs to change. The future does not lie in the dreamy scifi-friendly bullshit generated by the most visible popularizers right now (you know who they are, get on YouTube and every other sci vid has some brilliant take arguing there are multiverses, time or determinism does not exist, cats are both dead and alive). The future lies with a straightforward basis that can reproduce known experimental results removing the anthological aberrations.

Boyer is now at City College of New York, and has some elite uni credentials. Studied with them however stepped out of their consensus.

Boyer: "[I]t is shown that free-field quantum electrodynamics bears a close resemblance to classical electrodynamics in the presence of a randomly fluctuating transverse field. In particular, the energy eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the quantum theory are found to be exactly the field energies and probability densities for the stationary probability distributions of randomly fluctuating normal coordinates. The result provides the direct connection between Casimir's zero-point energy calculations and Lifshitz's general theory for retarded dispersion forces between macroscopic objects..

[T]he theory of the free quantum electromagnetic field may be regarded as a convenient description of a classical electromagnetic field subject to stochastic random fluctuations. Hence, it is easy to understand the connection between the various calculations for retarded dispersion forces between metals. Starting from the situation of a classical fluctuating field, the analysis as given by Lifshitz merely takes a different route from that leading to the quantum mechanical description which was used as a starting point by Casimir"

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That's a good meme

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Increased connectivity might push people to see more wisdom in the masses then there actually is. It can cause Future Shock, a term advocated by Toffler, sensory overload due to increased stimuli in this case due to more ppl talking out of their ass

Gen Y'er Zuck 'connected people' in technical terms, right?

Some in Gen Y and later might have been brutalized by increased numbers around them due to population growth and social connections.. Population increased from 3.68 bil for typical Gen X to 5.3 bil for typical Gen Y, interconnectedness increases to the second power (between $n$ people there are $n(n-1)$ potential interactions), that means

n1=3.69*1e9; n2=5.3*1e9; np.round(n2**2 / n1**2,2)

Out[1]: 2.06

The amount of potential interactions doubled for Y.

Firstpost: "Hezbollah chief Nasrallah had agreed to ceasefire shortly before Israel assassinated him: Lebanon minister"

#Lebanon

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Cetta, de la Pena, The Emerging Quantum: "[In] 1963.. physicist Trevor Marshall published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society under the short title Random Electrodynamics—an intriguing title, at that time. To date this paper has received just over four citations per year, which means it is alive, but not as present as it could be, considering the perspectives it opened for theoretical physics. Shortly thereafter a related paper was published by..Timothy Boyer, under the longer title Quantum Electromagnetic Zero-Point Energy and Retarded Dispersion Forces. Boyer does not cite Marshall’s paper (although he does so in his third paper, which is followed by a productive 50-year long work in solitary), but instead he refers to the work of David Kershaw and Edward Nelson on stochastic quantum mechanics. All these papers share a central feature: they are based on conceiving quantum mechanics as a stochastic process. Marshall mentions explicitly the existence of a real, space-filling radiation zero-point field as the source of stochasticity. Boyer sees a deep truth in this, and in a note added to his manuscript he comments that '...in this sense, quantum motions are experimental evidence for zero-point radiation.'

From a historical perspective, we recall.. in 1916.. Nernst had proposed to consider atomic stability as experimental evidence for Planck’s recently discovered zero-point radiation. This visionary idea was largely ignored by the founders of quantum mechanics.. such is history. Both Marshall and Boyer succeed in demonstrating that some quantum phenomena can indeed be understood by the simple expedient of adding this random zero-point field to the corresponding classical description. Their pioneering work was soon followed by that of other colleagues, moved by the conviction that the random zero-point field has something important to tell us about quantum mechanics. Many other results have been obtained during this period, which constitute the essence of the theory largely known under the name of stochastic electrodynamics. At the same time, other researchers, notably Nelson, dedicated their efforts to develop the phenomenological stochastic theory of quantum mechanics. The perception that quantumness and stochasticity are but two different aspects of a reality, started to gain support from several sides"

"@mnot@techpolicy.social

This is the best way for governments to be 'sovereign' in the face of big tech dominance. Well done, Germany and STF"

The Register: "Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), which is backed by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, is funding open source work again. This time, the recipients are the FreeBSD Foundation and SerNet, which is one of the backers of the Samba Project.

The STF gave the GNOME ecosystem €1 million in 2023, as we mentioned in July, but clearly the fund has broader aspirations. The Register has previously mentioned that FreeBSD also received funding. Now it looks like the foundation will spend its €686,400 ($767,200, or £573,000) by investing it in its infrastructure"

Ain't that great..? Need money, in debt? Just start slapping around corps and the ultra wealthy. They owe their existence to government anyway which subsidizes them through infra, R&D, if not outright through cold hard cash. Gov giveth and (should) taketh away.

CNBC: "Ireland reveals how it plans to spend 'transformational' $14 billion Apple tax windfall.. 'It is this government's view that we should utilize these revenues to address the known challenges that we face in housing, energy, water and transport infrastructure,' Chambers said"

The problem is the rich gobling up assets, using real-estate as investment. To find the culprit of housing price rise look no further than the former secretary Jeremy Hunt who bought seven homes at once to exploit a stamp duty loophole. He is not an aberration, and, sadly, not even that rich. There is wealth that can buy them by the dozens.

Harper, The Guardian: "Even though housebuilding in the UK has decreased since its high point in the 1960s, we are still building new homes faster than the population is growing. In 1971 there was almost one dwelling for every three people in the country. Today, there is about one dwelling for every 2.25 people, meaning we actually have more homes per capita right now than we did 50 years ago.

If the yimby [yes in my backyard crowd] hunch that house values fall when the supply of new homes outstrips population growth were correct, we should have seen overall prices come down since the 1970s. In fact, Britain has experienced the exact opposite; five decades of astronomical property-price inflation...

The bottom line: increasing the supply of new homes relative to the population simply doesn’t bring down prices as yimbys claim"

TASS: "Hezbollah says its fighters engage in battles with Israeli army in southern Lebanon"

Politico: "The big VP debate takeaway: Neither candidate delivered the goods"

Newsweek: "China Unveils 'Groundbreaking' Hydrogen High Speed Train"

Carscoops: "Bentley Delays EV-Only Plans"

Euronews: "Italy, Germany join carmakers in call to rethink internal combustion engine ban"

Van Flandern: "[1998] The link between relativity and the causality principle involves issues of the meaning of gravitational waves and curved space-time analogies. Apparently, Lorenzian relativity better describes nature than special relativity... [W]e note experimental evidence from neutron interferometers that purports to demonstrate a failure of the geometric weak equivalence principle, that gravity is due to a curvature of space-time. This experiment confined the strong equivalence principle (local equivalence of a uniform acceleration and a gravitational field), but its results are incompatible with the geometrical weak equivalence principle because interference effects in quantum mechanics depend on the mass, and therefore cannot be purely the result of space-time geometry. This is because the wave nature of the neutron depends on the momenium of the neutron, which is mass times velocity. So all phase-dependent phenomena depend on the mass through the wavelength, a feature intrinsic to quantum mechanics..

Since the experiment confirms the applicability of quantum mechanics even in the presence of gravity, including this non-geometrical mass dependence, the experiment seems to be a step in the undermining of the purely geometrical point of view, and 'tends to bother theorists who prefer to think of gravity as being intrinsically related to geometry'"

"@13hannes11

I am surprised how well @organicmaps works in china. It really made a lot of things easier"

What is known as "smart" usually indicates tunnel-vision, micro-problem smart. This smart gets the mechanics, and cranks through problems, within a given backdrop. They almost never question the backdrop, the underlying domain, hence the "wrong direction" comment by Hintjens. At times however one needs to question it all, the accepted, the given, the basis. That is another level of smart.

Pieter Hintjens: "Smarter people may work faster, but they may also work in the wrong direction."

TASS: "Houthis announce UAV strikes on targets in Tel Aviv, Eilat"

CNBC: "Abu Dhabi's [UAE] ADNOC to acquire German chemicals firm Covestro for $16.4 billion"

Fortune: "Japan's new train-loving prime minister wants a higher corporate tax rate, .. and a review of long working hours"

Vuhledar Has Fallen

#Frontline #UA #RU 09/23 - 10/01

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Physicist Sakharov.. Russki mfker. He got some game, fine scientists hail from the land.

Puthoff: "[1989] Gravity as a zero-point-fluctuation force.. Sakharov has proposed a suggestive model in which gravity is not a separately existing fundamental force, but rather an induced effect associated with zero-point fluctuations (ZPF's) of the vacuum, in much the same manner as the van der Waals and Casimir forces. In the spirit of this proposal we develop a point-particle — ZPF interaction model that accords with and fulfills this hypothesis. In the model gravitational mass and its associated gravitational effects are shown to derive in a fully self-consistent way from electromagnetic-ZPF-induced particle motion (Zitterbewegung). Because of its electromagnetic-ZPF underpinning, gravitational theory in this form constitutes an 'already unified' theory..

In this view the attractive gravitational force is more akin to the induced van der Waals and Casimir than to the fundamental Coulomb force. Although speculative when first introduced by Sakharov in 1967, this hypothesis has led to a rich and ongoing literature on quantum-fluctuation-induced gravity that continues to be of interest. In this approach the presence of matter in the vacuum is taken to constitute a kind of set of boundaries as in a generalized Casimir effect, and.. quantum fluctuations of the vacuum under these circumstances.. lead to an action and metric that reproduce Einstein gravity...

This treatment of quantum field-particle interactions on the basis of a classical ZPF constitutes an analysis technique known in the literature as stochastic electrodynamics (SED). SED is a well-defined framework that has a long history of success in yielding precise quantitative agreement with full QED treatments of such topics as Casimir and van der Waals forces, topics directly related to the one pursued here [a topic mentioned before, see post on Cetta and Louis de la Pena]"

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Another grainy photo.

WION: "This UFO was shot down by US Air Force over Alaska. Ex-military official reveals the truth behind it"

Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: "Dyson [.. said he came] to the institute [in Princeton] hoping to get to know Einstein. So he went to Einstein’s secretary, Helen Dukas, to make an appointment. The day before the appointment, he began to worry about not having anything specific to discuss with the great man, so he got from Ms. Dukas copies of Einstein’s recent scientific papers. They were all about Einstein’s efforts to construct a unified-field theory. Reading them that evening, Dyson decided they were junk. The next morning, he realized that although he couldn’t face Einstein and tell him his work was junk, he couldn’t not tell him either. So he skipped the appointment and, he told me, spent the ensuing eight years before Einstein’s death avoiding him"

He tried until he died, in the last decade of his life he was producing gibberish too, Freeman Dyson told so to Lee Smolin.

Albert E did his best trying to unify his theory with QM but failed that's because he'd made a mistake two steps ago, he tried to "connect stuff on top" to make it go away, but he failed.

Build more homes! 🤨 #Hawaii

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I believe the two previous shares are related.

"Hawaii Ranks 4th for Homeless per Capita"

"Hawaii is the most expensive state in the nation for housing."

Sulzberger, NYT played a role in the overthrow, they are culpable. Will NYT apologize?

Kinzer: "United Fruit rose to its mythical status in Guatemala under the leadership of Sam Zemurray, the visionary 'Banana Man' who had organized the overthrow of President Miguel Davila of Honduras in 1911.. Soon after Guatemala turned democratic, in 1944, Zemurray sensed that its reformist government would give the company trouble... he wanted to be sure that American public opinion was with him. He decided to hire an outside public relations expert.. Bernays.. He proposed to Zemurray that United Fruit launch a campaign to blacken the image of Guatemala's government. That, he argued, could decisively weaken it and perhaps set off events that would trigger its collapse.

'I have the feeling that Guatemala might respond to pitiless publicity in this country,' Bernays surmised.. [Zemurray] authorized Bernays to launch his campaign, and the results soon began to show. First were a series of articles in the New York Times, portraying Guatemala as falling victim to 'reds'; they appeared after Bernays visited Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Next came reports in leading magazines, most of them written, like the Times series, with helpful advice from Bernays. Then Bernays began organizing press junkets to Guatemala. They produced glowing dispatches about United Fruit and terrifying ones about the emergence of Marxist dictatorship in Guatemala. Prominent members of Congress echoed these themes...

[Guatemalan goverment was soon overthrown, thanks to United Fruit]

It turns out both Einstein's SR and GR are incorrect, no wonder people can't unify shit.

Louis de Broglie was a big cheese in theroretical psy

Who is Vigier? Wiki says "in 1948 he was appointed assistant to Louis de Broglie, a position he held until the latter's retirement in 1962"

What is gravity's speed? Very fast (it's not $c$)

Jean-Pierre Vigier: "[T]he existence of.. faster-than-light interactions is compatible with causality if special relativity (SR) is replaced with Lorentz’s interpretation (LR) of relativity. In the latter interpretation, one describes real material objects causally moving within an absolute independent space-time, with a velocity $v > c$ (with proper internal energy-momentum and angular momenta) under the influence of Poincaré fields governed by the laws of relativity; i.e., which correspond to causal particle and field behavior. In other terms, in this model, the gravitational field can carry gravitational waves propagating at lightspeed and Newtonian, attractive, superluminal fields (surrounding massive objects)"

Land invasion of southern Lebanon is where the rubber meets the road. All this bombing and Holywood attacks (beepers!) are time fillers, for the cameras...

TASS: "China deeply concerned over growing escalation in wake of death of Hezbollah leader"

He really didn't say anything different.. Ending the conflict even w loss of some land is good for Ukraine

Politico: "Trump vows to negotiate Ukraine-Russia deal that’s ‘good for both sides’ in appearance with Zelenskyy"

Firstpost: "Xi, others admit China economy faces ‘new problems’; focus on fixing property sector"