smittyoneeach's Journal: A Most Righteous Rant

Jeff Goldstein Mar 26

A Re-Declaration of Independence
Tyranny is already upon us. To defeat it, we must first learn to reject its premises. And to say so aloud.

Be it so understood:

I refuse to "unpack white violence." I reject the idea that my existence "perpetuates white power structures." I will not â" and in fact cannot--"examine my implicit biases." I'm an individual. I refuse to grant determined interpretive communities authority over my being. My meaning is mine. It is what makes me me.

Iâ(TM)m not taking any "journey" to "discover" the impact of my "privilege" on "black and brown peoples." I will not become "anti-racist" or "anti-fascist" to satisfy your demands. I reject Cultural Marxism. I am an individual. I'm not defined by my color, my religion, my sex. I'm Jeff.

I will not "respect your pronouns" or "celebrate" your "queerness." I am hostile to your sexualizing of children. I reject your neologisms, your "triggers," and your desire to control my speech. I know who and what you are: you are my presumptive master, or else the Useful Idiot who empowers him. But I will grant you and your ideology no power over me.

I reject "equity" because it is collectivism disguised as virtue. I reject "inclusivity" because it is inorganic, superficial, and contrived. I reject mandated "diversity": I will not surrender to the Crayon Box Mafia, nor to the gender changelings who pretend I am a construct answerable to their whims.

Read the whole spleen dump. Excellent palate cleanser.

And sorry I haven't logged in since November, apparently. You've been in my prayers.

thoughts and prayers

[fustakrakich]

We missed ya!

I am an individual[!]

He just thinks he is

I'm Jeff

That's just a name his mother gave him, so he knows when he is being yelled at

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

I should have thought you had some libertarian bones, and might support Jeff somewhat.

Re:

[fustakrakich]

Oh, I do! But this stuff is just repetitive distraction, entertainment.. try doing it with a Burma-Shave riff...

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

It is, but one needs a spleen dump from time to time.

Re:

[fustakrakich]

Of course, I'm always for venting spleens, but none of it is meant to be taken seriously (even if it is, it shouldn't be), it's a paid clown show to take your mind off the price of eggs and the recent bank heists. Hardly a rational thought anywhere in there

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

How evident has that been, especially of late? However, it does seem to be moving toward a point of inflection. The international banking system appears creaky, and the BRICS have apparently started transacting in Yuan for hydrocarbons. If it becomes a thing, and Bretton Woods is undone, the reckoning promises to astound, and not in a good way.

Good to see you back

[damn_registrars]

It was getting awfully quiet around here without you here. Hope you're doing OK.

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

Doing fine, and I hope that you are, too. It's just been all about getting the PhD thesis proposal together.

Re:

[damn_registrars]

I am, thank you for asking.

My thesis turned 10 a while back. It's been collecting dust on a shelf for most of that time, and I suspect the copy at the library of the school where I defended is as well. Time marches on, of course.

Care to share some info on the subject or department of your research? I'm curious to know a little more.

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

Here's the thesis proposal intro, which isn't likely to survive intact:

\chapter{Introduction}
``The medium is the message'' as \cite{mcluhanMediumMessage19642010} famously intoned:
\begin{quotation}...the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium--that is, any extension of ourselves--result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. \end{quotation}
This is a useful jumping-off point for considering this research.
We want to cast ``medium'' in a geospatial context, and consider how messages,
summarized by the format of the station, transit the radio frequency spectrum to
influence an audience.

The natural intuition is that the ideas to which people are exposed form a
general boundary for thinking (without chasing a ``Sapir–Whorf hypothesis''
rabbit). That is, some geo-spatial relationship between radio station format
exposure and electoral results is likely to all out of the data.

Inquiry regarding that intuition begins with a several-pronged literature
review. It is needful to:
\begin{enumerate}
\item explore the history and geographic aspects of radio stations as such;
\item investigate communications geography in the context of radio station formats; and
\item consider electoral communications.
\end{enumerate}

Spoiler alert: there is relatively little quantitative research on offer
pursuant to communications geography, in comparison to other spatial topics.
Thus, this proposal advances a brief, general framework concerning the
individual-to-population continuum that will inform the analytic approach.
Analytically, data ingest and transformation chores are needful in the service
of mapping the spatial density of the radio formats across voting precincts.
Once the format saturations are available, ANOVA can then be applied to answer
detailed research questions. In general, it is expected that radio station formats, along with related
demographic data, will show distinct correlations between specific formats and
election results, especially in areas of lower population density.

I'm something of a weirdo for using LaTeX, but I have boutique publishing dreams once I can retire.

Re:

[damn_registrars]

Interesting! Thank you for sharing.

Analytically, data ingest and transformation chores are needful in the service of mapping the spatial density of the radio formats across voting precincts. Once the format saturations are available, ANOVA can then be applied to answer detailed research questions. In general, it is expected that radio station formats, along with related demographic data, will show distinct correlations between specific formats and election results, especially in areas of lower population density.

• By spatial density are you describing a quantification of the variety of radio programming (ie is there only one type of programming available in an area vs many)?
• Would you expect radio consolidation in some medium-density markets to show similar behaviors, especially as some stations find it difficult to bring in enough revenue in such places to stay on the air?

I'm something of a weirdo for using LaTeX, but I have boutique publishing dreams once I can retire.

I knew of several theses in my field that were written up in LaTeX. I didn't do it simply because I was un

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

Data:
One can obtain this nasty delimited file https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/fm-service-contour-data-points [fcc.gov] and know lat/lon of transmitters
With height/power data from, e.g. https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/fm-query [fcc.gov], one can use their calculator to get power at a distance https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/fmpower [fcc.gov]
What is not available is the station format. I bought some data from https://radio-locator.com/ [radio-locator.com] to tell me about Virginia.

Given that I'm doing a GIS doctorate, my advisor was all "Gotta use a ra

Re:

[damn_registrars]

Back when I was in informatics I had a colleague who worked exclusively in GIS space. He was hired to handle ag-related data, and last I heard he's still working on it. Interesting stuff for sure and very different from the biologically oriented " 'omics " work I was involved in.

I happen to know someone who recently took a position at Research Computing at U-Va. Could they be helpful on your processing needs? I didn't dig real deep into their site but it looks like they even have some beefy Windows

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

I was given an ESRI server license key.

Which sounds a boon, until one looks at the amount of AWS instance spend it would take to do much with it.

So I'm doing more https://www.osgeo.org/projects/ [osgeo.org]. I've banged my head enough to compile anything reasonable from source.

Re:

[damn_registrars]

Which sounds a boon, until one looks at the amount of AWS instance spend it would take to do much with it.

I don't know much about George Mason University beyond the link you sent me. Similarly I don't know much about U-Va. What I do know is the HPC group I worked with at a different public university freely allocated computational time to nearby public and private universities for approved projects. Certainly some people went with AWS and various cloud based solutions instead (indeed we lost a couple employees to Amazon and others to help them with such efforts!), but what we offered for free helped a lot o

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

products that "looks" cheap at the start but the bill quickly scales up.

Oh, yes, indeed, and quite.
One can get in there and prototype the app cheaply enough in a "test" mode.

Where Bezos has you by the tender parts is the data, which is sort of a Hotel California situation[1].

Especially after several years of operating, with historical logs &c piling up.

One can be spending in the 10s of thousands for (admittedly) cheap storage, and be faced with lethal bills to exfiltrate data.

---

[1] "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."