You "used" those courses every time you delegated willingly to another person who had real talent to offer in that skill domain.

Unfortunately, we have a dumb definition for the word "use" which allows you to press these ridiculous assertions as if they were common sense.

In math, you can divide both sides of an equation by x, if and only if x is not zero. People need to take every course until they acquire basic proficiency in "spot the zero". Hint: if you look around the table and you don't know who's the chump, you're the zero. Knowing when you're the zero is one of the most fundamental skills in life in getting out of the way of those who are actually getting it done.

I'm not a zero in math, not by far. But I'm a zero in cover art design, and I plan to get out of my own damn way at such point as I publish my first book. For pretty much every other book publication skill I'm at least a passable epsilon. Long ago I read Kunth's Texbook so many times, I could recite from memory the list of English words hyphenated different as nouns and verbs (the only one I remember now is pro-ject and proj-ect). So let's just say in the typographic domain, I'm not drawing a blank on widows and orphans.

Widows and orphans

A person who never experiences math the hard way before leaving school will not just be terrible at math, but bike-shed terrible: unable to do the first thing, but still willing to offer opinions to those with 1000x more clue.

(Who said TeX has no social justice? It's all about mitigating widows and orphans.)

Or Voodoomofo. That works, too.

[continued due to lameness filter]

Earth's oceans contain about 1.8 ug of vanadium per liter. Its a tiny trace. But if you multiply out by the total size of the ocean, it works out to 2.34 billion tonnes (Google calculator with ocean volume of 1.3 billion cubic kilometers plucked from a plausible source).

Propaganda glass half full: a mind-blowing amount of untrustworthy piss water.

Propaganda glass half empty: way too much trustworthy vanadium after all.

Given the problem, they're doing a reasonable job of hiding all this luscious vanadium. Most people have barely even heard of vanadium. (Or argon in the Earth's atmosphere, either.)

You can't filter out the vanadium in one convenient Google search. But you can do what they do in Iran: cascade your centrifuges to exclude the centrifudge. Search, record, excerpt, refine. Work your way to the leading edge of the surf, and stay there for a year at a time.

Now there needs to be another sharp warning here. Of course the powers that be can disrupt this, too. The word "can" here has popped its buttons, outgrown its pants, and needs a quadruple bypass ASAP. This is the volcanic island edition of the word "can". You brain has been damaged by too many popular media portrayals of evil bastards with tidy volcanic islands.

The problem with taking "can" to this level is that eventually society begins to eat its own flesh. A vigorous society does not want to make it impossible for its smartest people to do the kinds of things that its smartest people naturally do: refine, triangulate, repeat. War might actually break out. You might need to press those smartest people into prompt service. Better for you if you haven't damaged their brains with having first taken the mother of all "fuck you" hairy-cheeked dumps into the world's information oceans.

That's not how you manage the problem of having a society with a nucleus of smart people who notice the vanadium signal. Far easier to price them out of the conversation and keep them on a list, in case you actually need them at some future date.

How do you price these people out of the conversation? Been on slashdot lately? For every person here with a legitimate signal, there are ten blowhards disturbing the candle of illumination with low-resolution copypasta ideology, with zero coefficient of proximal originality. The most you can credit is tweaking the little red laser dot of the laser targeting system at whatever is easiest to frame as a shocking violation of "common sense". Of course, it's a completely bastardized notion of common sense, carefully manufactured by the vast engines of propaganda to keep the unwashed rubes from thinking too hard. It's not actually that hard to escape, but you have to wash yourself. And then you can't tell anyone what you've concluded anyway, because the unwashed have been carefully cultivated to not listen. That's how it's really done.

The tactics of the Russian IRA was a nice little microcosm to observe this in action. You pretend to align yourself with what you wish to disabuse, then you seed little kernels of volatile doubt, until the entire discourse catches fire. Mission accomplished. Who successfully studies for a final exams while surrounded by a fifteen-bell fire response?

The truth of the matter is that greater society has been vaccinated against vanadium. The truth is actually out there. It's darn hard work, but it can't be stopped in broad strokes. And then when you do isolate the vanadium (which is a wheel inside a wheel inside a wheel, but definitely not the last wheel) hardly anyone will listen to you. Why prevent smart people from finding the truth when it's so much easier to polarize ideologues to not listen to the truth no matter what?

What you need to do with the ideologues is pump their egos. So you feed them ersatz problems that seem to need a keen mind to resolve. You feed them the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle as an ersatz Easter egg hunt. 3 down, 4 letters: "ergo". What the gravedigger actually meant to say. Only he'd have been even better off with "ergot", which is a fungus, definitely apropos as he exhumed human bones, and not just any fungus, but one likely associated with lycanthropism. No, all this CSI Agatha Christie business does not prove you have a fine mind. What proves you have a fine mind is consilience, and an intuitive understand of asymptotic equipartition: in the extreme, all plausible comprehensive explanations shrink to an equiprobable disk of compact but non-unitary size. The very word "truth" has lately become propaganda, because it denies the underlying statistical reality of asymptotic consilience. Truth behaves like a unique point. But truth isn't a point, it's a compact disk of maximal uncertainty over what has yet to be winnowed out. You never arrive at certainly. You constantly arrive at higher levels of concentrated uncertainty concerning a much reduced ocean of nearly infinite filth and spam.

When an ideologue sticks a pin into a real thinker, there's your first clue. The real thinker puts forward a dense and compelling surface which is clearly studded with massive uncertainties. Because that's where real thinking always takes you. And then the ideologue pantomimes deflating your studded surface with a sharp pin, as if its a giant bag of gas. While sticking in the pin, the ideologue will also make a deflating or popping balloon sound so as to emphasize the rapture or the rupture of the thin rubber skin. Ideology is mainly about selling the pantomime. Real thinkers don't actually deflate like cheap condoms attached to undersea diving tanks. But on a drive by basis, they can be rather easily made to appear as if they do.

It's an important point, because as easily as real thinkers can be pantomimed out of the attention span of the average non-thinker, they are painfully hard to hide from other thinkers. The concentrated disk of intensified uncertainty is a dead giveaway within the brotherhood.

In a world where the average person can be deceived into worrying about whether the global Covid pandemic is a 100 million pound cover story for a much smaller thing, just about any level of political malfeasance becomes possible. Terrible cover story, but the one true Godzilla of public distraction.

Maybe somewhere out there in the Slashdot landscape are five to ten people who will read this post and go "yeah, baby, yeah". I totally understand where I reside on the cultural energetics landscape. I can persuade nothing and no-one in bulk measure. There's this old cliche that you win the battle by converting one person at a time. That's a dangerous half truth. You can win the battle this way, but the ground is also shifting under your feet. By the time you win the battle by this patient method, will you even care about your victory, or will the world under your feet have already changed so much that your victory is totally hollow?

There's also a dangerous half truth that "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Hmm. Wherever that tricksy word "progress" appears, Houston, we have a problem.

George Bernard Shaw was channeling a societal age where all our wood was behind one arrow. "Progress" was the universal invocation of that one chosen arrow. He was born into the 1860s. Transcontinental rail lines, the telegraph, Darwin, Maxwell, Heaviside, Mendeleev's periodic table, a final end to official slavery among the world's blushing paragons of liberal democracy.

Somewhere after the OPEC embargo of the mid-1970s, progress as we knew it began to MIRV. It was clearly no longer just a solitary fat arrow of collective societal progress, but some other creature of many heads.

It's no longer possible to harbour dark personal fantasies about playing the unreasonable man (or woman). We're in a post-MIRV society now. The very concept of progress itself is under asault from all fronts. One unreasonable man to one unreasonable wagon. Completely useless post-MIRV.

I finally do it, I suppose, with the fascination of watching a habitual drunk stagger out of a pub blind stinking plastered without actually killing himself, some tiny brainstem of self-preservation still operative out of pure habit alone.

Lately the human enterprise has become the most fascinating drunken walk a man could ever hope to observe. It's not that we don't continue to have a brain, it's how cleverly we now talk ourselves out of actually using it. You know the ones. All those people now mired in anti-vax agitprop, penny wise and pound foolish, and a ready army of same for any issue of import that could possibly arise down the road.

What's too little appreciated about human intelligence is that it rarely feeds well on its own outputs. Like an over-amplified microphone, it readily begins to squeal. Human intelligence is designed to be embedded in a complex, challenging world. We pretend that we are abstracting thought, when what we're really doing is abstracting ourselves out of our natural, vigorous embedding. Social media has fundamentally changed the parameters of how we mutually embed in modern cognitive society. We already knew the human mind was unstable on insufficient embedding (sustained solitary confinement is slowly but surely worming its way onto the official register of crimes against humanity). And now we are playing around with the other side: excess embedding. For this reason I do not participate in bird-chirp circle jerks. On Twitter you can achieve the miraculous dufecta of being both under-embedded and over-embedded at the same time. Terrifying to behold, and yet fascinating as all fuck.

So here's the final payload, the BIG LIE finally exposed. This is the golden era of consilience, and don't let any acne-riddled partisan tell you differently. Over my own short lifetime, my powers of consilience have increased at least 1000 fold, due to having a trillion-dollar library at my fingertips (the Internet) and actually knowing how to use it. Do not divide by the number of turds in the ocean. That's a mug's game.

What it's NOT, however, is the golden age of anyone else giving two hot damns about your miraculous power of consilience, deployed wisely. It's one of those horrible King Midas fairy tales, where you wish upon a golden lamp to achieve Solomonic illumination, but what you imagined would be a shining lighthouse of virtue is dwarfed by a plague of locusts, newly enhanced by CRISPR to glow like doomed fireflies after licking the radioactive plate clean at Tense Mile Island. You puny little Solomonic lighthouse doesn't stand a grey snowball's chance in a xmas-illumination dollar store.

Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy, but was also cursed by the god Apollo so that her true prophecies would not be believed.

Maybe there is hope yet. Maybe five people give a damn about this long post I've just written here. If it's as much as par five, I count myself blessed. Yes, I wield the superpower of consilience (flame of Anor), but unlike Gandalf, I can also do the math. The true battle is not what you can figure out, it's what you can get people to care about concerning what you've figure out. In the majority of cases, persuasion achieved to energy-expenditure ratio is deeply in the red. That's how it really works. The partisans, ideologues, copypasta artists, and Russian IRA baristas of bullshit have won this round going away.

So the Enterprise is on a collision course with a giant space iceberg, and the navigation and propulsion systems have been ransomed for Bitcoin by a galactic nemesis wiped off the face of the universe by an unexpected supernova. Decryption password destroyed. You feel a great disturbance in the iron law of Narrativium, as if the entire teeming multitude of REvil cried out in blimary and were suddenly silenced; there's no saving Enterprise (or Earth) this time.

But on the plus side, you got a plush front row seat to rival the captain's chair, and not only a big fat big screen TV, but pretty much the iconic, original big fat big screen TV. You're wearing Fonzie's original leather jacket, and inside the pocket is a napkin autographed by Leonard Nimoy. Groovy! You'd pay a lot of money to go to a theatre to watch this epic collision. And here you are, actually onboard, with pretty much the best bird's eye view in the history of humanity, Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe, drinks are on the house. So it's true that the robotic parking attendant drove all the fancy space cars over a cliff into a giant space heap; this is not a reversible calamity. There will be no refunds the morning after. There will not be a morning after. But what's to complain about, really?

Ultimate consolation prize: The more you sit back to enjoy your looming demise, the harder you are to finally manipulate. Nothing greases an epic calamity of Ringwheels within Ringwheels spiraling out of their gyres like a zesty pinch of Zen saffron.

And how do we know what unhealthy cohort to exclude? By which exclusion best bolsters your argument. You've got p-hacking built in.

The only way you can possible believe the vaccine causes more medical harm than Covid is that medical systems the world over are failing to fully report vaccine complications, because your conclusion is simply not found in any data with a responsible government stamp on it.

I refused the first vaccine offered to me, which was AZ. At that point I was living in a corner of Canada with a lower ambient infection rate than in America other than perhaps Hawaii. I was working at home and almost totally housebound. My wife was also in the same boat. Our small and incidental social circle consisted of elderly people who were already vaccinated with a strong mRNA vaccine. And finally, I wasn't sure whether I would have a choice when my second shot rolled around.

So I refused my first vaccine and got Pfizer instead three weeks later. I used numbers reported by responsible governments from around the world in making my calculation. And I was very glad I did months later when it turned out that people with two AZ doses are less protected, and people with mixed AZ / other vaccine profiles face extra challenges in crossing boarders.

I invested one to two hours per day tracking the global vaccine story for about fifteen months. I took notes from every source I encountered that told me anything new. When things were super active, I was collecting twenty links per day. I didn't just read what Google gave me, but I drilled down specifically in every country with anomalous statistics. I even drilled down to the state level in India on multiple occasions.

There was at least a three month period where I laughed my ass off at the IHME predictions on a daily basis. Some of the other models weren't so ridiculous. You would see it coming about a week away, where the IHME model started to head into territory that even the statistically unwashed would soon recognize as bullshit territory, and then there would be a notice posted instead of the usual update about how the model was in the shop for hasty renovation and improvement over the next five days. And then it would return, less ridiculous, gradually becoming more ridiculous with each passing day, until this whole thing happened again.

For quite a while, I preferred the Youyang Gu model. It wasn't perfect, but it was responsive, and it wasn't tampered with by a political agenda. I was particularly watching these models around Florida, because there were some wildly discrepant predictions about some of the peaks in Florida, from both sides. This was particularly complicated, because Florida changed their collection and reporting standards mid-stride. Yeah, that's what you actually can do, if you want to control the story, and you don't believe in millions of highly educated people lining up behind a global conspiracy without so much as the tiny printed brochure they hand you when you attend a classical music production.

Biology is not a small field. Outside of medicine as such, the larger field of biology and biotechnology is populated with many of the world's smartest people. These people are not hard to find, they're all over the Internet. Many are opinionated, and not inclined to await central marching orders. The quality of the signal depends on discerning which voices are the leading indicators and which voices are the lagging indicators. It takes two hours a day of personal investment to curate and maintain your own mental model of what is leading and what is lagging. But then it turns into a virtuous circle. Because you can tell the difference between who is in front and who isn't, you begin to tune into the right voices. The more you pay attention to the right voices, the easier it gets to tell the difference.

I've followed the intelligence community since The Puzzle Palace (1982) first edition. I've done my 10,000 hours of wheels within wheels. Another 1000 hours invested in watching the world melt down during Covid was a minor extension of my existing skillset. This is how I knew from the outset how important it is to identify the leading voices in a global media shitstorm, and to take notes on every voice as whether the latest URL bolstered or diminished the story of a certain voice or camp as leading or lagging. It also helps to figure out from among the leading voices who is capable of original thought, and who is merely capable of staying on top of the emerging wave of new opinion and imitating their betters with least delay. Both of those groups are useful signals, but it's best if you can tell them apart at the outset.

It's simply not possible to coordinate this many lies at this scale the world over.

The underlying problem is that people simply don't understand the capabilities of the Internet. In the Intelligence community, your most closely guarded secrets are your capabilities. Low resolution stories about your capabilities that leak out are a coin flip on whether they hide inside a higher resolution story about a different, narrower and more important capability. Every single thing is painted with this uncertainty field. Information wants to be free. But confidence about information is easily manipulated and counter-manipulated. The funny thing about this is that by the end of the day, between fully invested superpowers, you don't really have that many secrets left. What you have are two giant haystacks of putative secrets with everyone's fingerprints all over them. Inside that large haystack there are smaller shadowy haystacks. These are also covered with fingerprints from both sides. Inside those even smaller haystacks, there is yet another layer of secrets. At this point, there are actually a few that the other side hasn't stumbled onto yet. This creates a small amount of specific uncertainty in the mind of your adversary. What secret inside the secret inside the secret (putative) are we missing here? Uncertainty at the bottom is wildly contagious. It spreads and permeates everything. Your adversaries know 99% of everything to a second approximation, but the 1% they don't know terrifies them beyond measure. A small measure of terrified doubt seeps into every briefing note at every level, up and down the chain. For all that purported secrecy, that's what you're finally paying for: that your adversaries are inflicted with a slightly larger dollop of terrified doubt than your own side.

The final governing term is the expense of all this machination. You need ten of thousands of very clever people to keep all these plates spinning in all directions, to fully bedazzle your adversary over the last 1%. The Americans throw real money at this. You would think the Russians couldn't keep up, but they do. They throw something different than money at this problem: not offering their populations so many other compelling career choices: will work cheap to avoid queuing their lives away among the quivering and paranoid unwashed. Where the Russians did end up suffering was on semiconductor process capabilities. They simply didn't have enough expertise in their own industry. You can attempt to spy on TSMC or whatever, or the many companies that supply TSMC with stepper motors and all that other advanced kit, but it's just not easy when you fundamentally lack an equivalent industrial base in your home country. In a number of cases where it appears the Americans really did manage to pull the Russian's pants down, it largely began there.

The Chinese watched all this play out from the sidelines, then carefully plotted a cyberwarfare campaign to exfiltrate quite a lot of this information very quickly while the Americans overestimated their information security perimeter. Who is the proud national purveyor of America's distributed security perimeter? Microsoft. Game over. Everything in this world giveth with one hand, and taketh away with the other hand. Microsoft moved fast and broke things. This helped the Americans build a huge national IT advantage over the Russians. But the speed that Microsoft moved meant that the fundamental soundness of this massive IT infrastructure contained a permanent glass ceiling. There's no possible way to retrofit this massive steaming pile of garbage to the security standards America really needs. So Microsoft and America are presently in damage control mode. And one of the end results is to vote every CPU not manufactured in the last 12 months off the island. Less Spectre mitigation will free up more of Microsoft's internal security talent to work on the long list of other things the intelligence community is on their case about.

It's a nice cover story that this whole thing reeks of business as usual in the greed department. Do I know for sure that it's not? No. You never know for sure that it's not. But you look at what the Russians have done over the last decade and what the Chinese have done over the last decade, and surely the only way America can jam a rapid thumb in the dike is to hit Microsoft hard to shrink the distributed attack perimeter. Along with another thousand things, few of which are quite so large or important as this one.

Being an armchair intelligence analyst of the Covid pandemic is no different art. It takes a lot of dedicated and directed sitzfleisch, and a lot of highly focused note-taking to swim upstream to the leading voices.

Too many people think the Internet is a giant steaming cesspool of incorrect information. Wrong. There's an ocean of cess out there, but it hardly matters given the power of our existing search tools. Like any other security attack, you begin with a crack. You find a slightly higher quality signal than pure cess, and then you adjust your search parameters accordingly. Then you find a nucleus of yet another higher quality signal, and so it goes. This isn't some kind of trivial gradient that's easily distorted by invisible men of the Order of the Eyeball Pyramid. This is a signal made out of pure consilience: an incessant cross-referencing of the whole of human knowledge against itself. There are at least a dozen different undergraduate degrees where I can enter a conversation with someone who once studied that subject in the university setting where I can hold my own in conversation as if I also once did this. In political science, my cover story soon frays in conversation with a sharper knife, because in politics I have many holes. In literature, geography, history, and philosophy I have fewer holes. In economics not so many. In linguistics, psychology and cognitive science my holes are counterbalanced by narrow specialist expertise. Then you get into STEM territory, which is my natural terrain. Probably my conversation heads immediately to: what are the open research problems you're aware of, and have they made any interesting progress lately, since last I looked into this? In these fields I don't even need to pretend I know any factual information, because I know all the right questions. Nobody ever challenges a person with all the right questions over also having all the right facts.

So American has a populist president who wants to put a populist spin on the global pandemic, and he commands the world's most expensive intelligence service. Much can be tilted with this kind of power. Your putative allies (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and allied paragons of liberal democracy (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland) might for pure diplomatic reasons feel the need to somewhat fall into alignment. But honestly, behind the scenes, the well-nourished swamp of liberal democracy that continues to exist in all these wealthy countries mostly hated Trump's guts. Even if they wanted to, their democratic systems don't contort in all the same ways as America's democratic system. With enormous cleverness, they might find some middle ground. But none of the best and brightest swamp critters within the intelligence communities of these putative allies were bending over backwards to make this happen. And all of these countries have their own political inertia which is hard to deflect without creating an enormous liability: an obvious signal that you're hard on the reigns for an emergency course correction.

You can blunt those external signals by laying the groundwork over five to ten years with coordinated propaganda, such that everything you wish to do for a single concerted reason has multiple alternative explanations, including especially the ever sexy reason of pure greed on the part of business as usual. If this kind of greed did not exist in the world, we'd have to invent is, so that the intelligence communities could avail themselves of their most useful cover story wrapped around their specific deflections.

This clearly did not happen in the case of Covid. So what is the motivated conspiracy theorist left with in his or her now mostly empty bag of tricks? What you do is suppose that Covid is not the story, but is itself the cover story for the real story. Right. And this might almost look plausible to many rubes who fancy themselves clever. Except for the fact that Covid is not just the mother of all cover stories, but the mother of all 100 million pound cover stories. It would be like hiding the Moon behind Jupiter. Really? You need to conceal the Moon, so you dragged Jupiter into Earth orbit to accomplish this small feat of misdirection? My oh my, someone shook the entire jar of MCU boosterspice into your Cheerios this morning, didn't they?

Yeah, there aren't so many of us out there who actually know how to drag a 100 million pound cover story onto the bathroom scale to debunk the entire ruse. We can be shouted down. Mostly.

Come on, any serious intelligence analyst who does a proper risk assessment on the Internet as a global communications medium begins by noticing one true thing: what an enormous windfall of pure shite to leverage until the end of time. And then that person notices a second thing: unfortunately, there a large persistent trace component of actual truth seeded among all the shite, which is nearly impossible to erase.

[continued due to lame TL;DR lameness filter]

No precognition involved whatsoever, if you've got a four or five digit user ID. The DNA is strong in this one. We were there for the Spanish Influenza of 1918. Predicting another global pandemic in the era of totalitarian cloud overreach was as easy as scoring 800 on a vocabulary SAT prepared by Dr Suess based on Green Eggs and Ham.

Bonus marks for nerd, guff and grinch, all of which he invented in one book or another, according to a compilation that doesn't look entirely wrong. On the other hand, Dr Seuss also invented gooch, squitsch, spazzim, kwigger, and nizzards.

Here are the 'wrong' illustrations that got six Dr. Seuss books cancelled — 3 March 2021

Of the six, the problematic imagery in On Beyond Zebra! is probably the least obvious. The book catalogues a whimsical set of new letters in the alphabet, and briefly features the "Nazzim of Bazzim," a figure of unspecified nationality riding a camel-like creature called a "Spazzim."

Compare Yosemite Sam: "When I say whoa, I mean WHOA!"

I'm not sure which is worse: using Sam's Arabian headscarf as a towel dispenser, or not properly disposing of the used towel in an approved recycling bin.

Bristling Dixie — 4 January 2013

As Neal Gabler's biography reveals, Disney hired a leftist screenwriter, Mauric Rapf, to modify the original script by southerner Dalton Reymond; Disney Company reps met with producers of the racially controversial 1943 film Stormy Weather to hear about their marketing experiences; and Disney publicists warned management of potential racially charged blowback. Walt Disney himself even invited NAACP president Walter White to California to oversee script revisions, though the meeting never occurred.

Flash forward to modern times.

The Disney Company hasn't let Song of the South out of its hallowed "vault" in 25 years. ... If you were born after 1980, you've almost certainly never seen it in full, and it's unlikely that will change anytime soon.

I did see this film in full as a child, probably more than once, during the Disney's famous Sunday evening family hour. Even as a very young child, it didn't quite square with my fragmentary encounters with The Mod Squad on Saturday mornings, when the other channel was even less to my childhood taste (wrestling, banjo jamboree, the Osmonds, Rene Simard, or one of Elvis's beach movies).

Clambake is a 1967 American musical film directed by Arthur H. Nadel and starring Elvis Presley, Shelley Fabares, and Bill Bixby. It is considered by many to be the worst film ever made. Written for the screen by Arthur Browne Jr., the film is about the heir to an oil fortune who trades places with a water-ski instructor at a Florida hotel to see if girls will like him for himself, rather than his father's money. ... The movie reached number 15 on the national weekly box-office charts.

I didn't actually dislike The Mod Squad, but I had no available cultural context to process what I was seeing.

More than a year before the release of the film Easy Rider, The Mod Squad was one of the earliest attempts to deal with the counterculture. Groundbreaking in the realm of socially relevant drama, it dealt with issues such as abortion, domestic violence, child abuse, illiteracy, slumlords, the anti-war movement, illegal immigration, police brutality, student protest, sex education, soldiers returning from Vietnam and PTSD, racism, euthanasia, and the illegal drug trade. ... In 1997, a 1970 episode "Mother of Sorrow" was ranked #95 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.

Without the modern, you'll struggle with the postmodern. Without culture, you'll struggle with counterculture. As a nine-year-old child in a sheltered multicultural community (we had both types: English and Scottish) many of these themes were a real struggle for me. I understood practically nothing. But then, the next evening, onto our family screen would arrive Song of the South and I was already starting to think "something is really wrong here". The Mod Squad was clearly trying too hard to be edgy and hip, which came at the expense of making their themes comprehensible if you had no prior reference. But Disney ... the fairy castle wasn't really trying at all to explain anything with a basis in reality. That much was already clear.

When Microsoft arrived in the 1980s, there were no such difficulties or ambiguities from day one. It wasn't just a cultural veneer, or a form of treacle invented in media focus group. A certain form of corporate hardball was the very essence of the beast. Bill Gates correctly perceived chaos as opportunity, while all the other dinosaurs busied themselves in board meetings, pretending that they could "control" things using the proven corporate tactics of a prior era. He understood from day one that chaos meant never having to apologize, because you could simply move the goalposts of the conversation by releasing Shiny 3.0. The original PC sucked so hard, world and dog were as addicted to Shiny as a lost desert people are addicted to rumours of verdant river valleys, as yet uninhabited.

You didn't need no flipping crystal ball to know that Alex from Clockwork Orange was a heck of a lot closer to Bill Gates than to Walt Disney. Walt could be sent off to the Swiss Alps for a comprehensive round of cosmetic surgery, and a 12-week program of societal finishing school. Bill, not so much. The psychopathic dark triad is legendarily resistant to treatment. Try this on as a dark triad: embrace, extend, extinguish. Does the shoe fit? Does the slipper fit the bill?

Not only did many of us see this day coming long ago, but we also saw it common that there was going to be a lost generation in between who would simply not understand the true depths of Microsoft's delinquent adolescence. Microsoft ceased to behave this way over a long period of time only because it had ceased to work, not because they were a profoundly changed corporation. Now they think they have regained enough power to return to their original bag of tricks, and this is all the same as it ever was.

Another thing. I could not bear to watch Bill Cosby as a child. I was not sensitive to this kind of thing, there was none of it in my own environment so far as I ever noticed, but Bill set off my "creep" detector. There was something deeply eerie about how he seemed to monitor his environment for affirmation that his antics were pushing the right button, by just the right amount. He seemed less about himself than about the audience's weak spots. He seemed to be more about worming his way into your funny bone than actually saying something funny. Then when he became famous for his TV series in the 1980s, exactly the same era as Bill Gates' original climb to world dominance, I would catch a show from time to time and boggle at how smooth he had become in pulling the same strings, but without the creepiness poking through. Could this really be the same man? I wondered to myself. Could my childhood perceptions have once been this far off the mark? It seemed to me highly unlikely. I could still see the apple. I still suspected it was a deeply poisonous apple. But the magic disappearing act of the toxic apple tree was truly a sight to behold. It's gotta be there, somewhere, I kept saying to myself.

And there were early clues that I was not wrong. Angel Heart (1987) was a very dark film.

Kathryn Lindsay — 2018

Lisa Bonet was known to have a tense relationship with Bill Cosby during their time together on The Cosby Show. While Bonet played the flighty and popular daughter of Cliff Huxtable on screen, off screen she upset Cosby with her choice to do a sex scene with Mickey Rourke in the movie Angel Heart, and her topless appearance in Interview magazine to promote the film. ... "There was no knowledge on my part about his specific actions, but ... There was just energy. And that type of sinister, shadow energy cannot be concealed," she told the outlet.

There's a story out there that this was the natural outgrowth of creative differences and the need for Bonet to escape type casting, in retrospect, it seems like a freakishly well-targeted blow at Cosby's wholesome family image.

Black Magic and White Guilt: Voodoo in Angel Heart — 2011; trimmed for concision

When Harry witnesses Epiphany's actions in the voodoo ceremony, he is overwhelmed by the same fear of her physicality that terrifies him in their lovemaking scene. His otherwise angelic Epiphany seems possessed by the Devil, sexualized by the throbbing drums, turned savage by their primitive beat. As when he first met Epiphany, Harry is again excited by her blackness, fascinated at how her "dress clings to her wet body", but this desire soon gives way to a dread of otherness, a fear of her black female sexuality as a threat to his white manhood. When Epiphany sacrifices a chicken in the voodoo ceremony, Harry is overcome by castration anxiety. In his mind, it is as if she had taken the razor to his own red phallus: Epiphany "reaches into a basket, pulls out a chicken, its blood red comb vivid in the moonlight. She rubs it against her breast as she dances. She takes a razor and deftly cuts the rooster's throat. Drains the blood. The rooster screams. ... Harry goes back to his car and reverses out into the road and [scurries] away".

The author has the first name "Douglas", but doesn't declare their pronouns. Hmm, I wonder.

For this one, my crystal balls are a bit cloudy (of course I have more than one; we all did before the cloud era, for the mere prudence of not keeping all your eggs in one basket). Returning to the Microsoft files, there is no need to consult a spare crystal ball, and there never has been. If you wish to treat Clockwork Orange as an allegory of the corporate age, what corporation would Alex best represent?

Krupp? Microsoft? Oracle? Enron? Equifax? Amazon?

Amazon is barely even evil by the standards of the rest of this list. Bezos is like the hungry plant in Little Shop of Horrors. Not so much evil, as insatiable. Too bad we didn't knock it down with a pair of rusty pruning shears during its potty-plant infancy back when we had the chance. Too late now. Pity. For the rest, there was never any other business model, not ever. For Harvey Weinstein, there was never any other business model, not ever.

Microsoft has recently gone through an era of Cosby Show level rehabilitation in the public eye. And all the while, I've been muttering to myself, "nope, not really buying this one". Been there, done that, seen it before. Its original, nearly irreversible DNA will find a way to reemerge somewhere down the road. For a great prediction, you have to specify both what and when at the same time. My queasy feeling falls far short of a great prediction. On the other hand, I'm sure that somewhere out there, there's an actress or two of radiant, youthful physicality who got a bad feeling about Harvey on day one, and decided not to debate the matter, pursuing other opportunities—such as possible—far, far away.

Me and Microsoft —in so far as that remains possible—will never, ever in this lifetime be on a first name basis.

For videos with 700 likes and 300 dislikes I know better than to even begin to view the video. Now what happens when I have to watch the first 60 seconds of some execrable POS that I previously managed to filter? Does that count as a "view"? Does that count as positive engagement?

Sometimes it sucks to be alive.

This particular choice at YouTube makes me feel like it sucks to be alive. Fortunately, the feeling will only last five or ten minutes, because YouTube is just as disposable in the long run as every other social media platform. I merely need to adjust my personal algorithm to the long view. This too shall pass.

In the winter this means it is light from ~8 am to ~4 pm which is exactly what you want since it is not entirely dark when you go into work and (at least for most of the winter) when you come home.

Anyone with a more significant commute or an office which runs to the early side, it is in fact entirely dark for your morning routine for most of the standard time interval.

The super ridiculous thing about this semi-annual bitch fetch is that the convenience of having huge geographical regions locked to the same time convention is largely based on having most of the western world locked into the 8-4 or 9-5 concept of the inflexible five-day office workweek. That's why you can figure out in your head when to call people in other zones in the first place.

As work becomes more flexible moving forward, it's going to be more reliance on electronic calendars and less reliance on rules of thumb anyway. Our phones and computers already adjust automatically. So what do we have left to complain about? A difficult one-hour adjustment once a year.

I say this as someone with N24 sleep disorder, and a body clock that runs to a 25.5 hour day, when unmedicated. It was unmedicated for several decades before chronobiology reached a more advanced understanding of the circadian clock. For a long time I faced 365 annoying spring-forward adjustments by 1.5 hours each over the course of a standard calendar year. Starting from a good place, after eight of these in a row, I was pretty much on Tokyo time relative to my body clock. Lost in Translation was a moveable feast and a permanent feature of my daily life.

The same people who bitch about this single annoying spring-forward event of one hour, when not fixated on their own fleeting inconvenience, would say to me "why can't you push through it? we all have to function without sleep some of the time".

Some of these people had punchable faces.

I've been out of the software loop for a few years, as my interest turned more toward social systems.

"Modern" developers: please stop holding Unix up like some kind of virtue signal. Your tools suck ass, your development and runtime environments suck donkey balls, but maybe they're the best we've got, right now.

What I've learned from my dalliance on the other side is that the boundary between the problem space and the solution space is socially constructed. Unix was fairly austere about this division. This worked for slow-moving heavy infrastructure, not so well for a gold rush. What we thought of as "scale" in the 1990s wasn't really scale. Then we entered the true scale era, and it happened again. Unix remained useful for 10K connections (and beyond), but on the application side the game turned to barn raising quasi-prefab abominations by the seat of your pants. Eventually you have too many drill holes under the hood that didn't fully line up in the first place, and "debugability" is reduced to a notional concept. This became the problem space, and the solution space had to evolve so that the bridge somehow met in the middle. And where we wound up was microservices. But the original solution-space tooling wasn't originally designed for this, and now that's become the lagging "donkey ball" caboose.

There's no ownership for the end result from either side. The solution space (infrastructure) resents being bent on an ad hoc basis into the problem space (customers), and the problem space resents being bent into solution space work structures that are decades behind the times (e.g. coordinated service management).

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
      — Kernighan's law

That's a clever sentiment, but I've never actually believed it. It was back in an era where people indulged in the wrong kind of cleverness. Cleverness suited to purpose was always worthwhile, although it sometimes needed a higher grade of comment than some developers were capable of supplying (not every developer has excellent written language skills).

Kernighan was no dummy and he was actually onto something here, but he fired his gun prematurely at too small a final target.

Refactoring architecture is twice as hard as refactoring code. Therefore, if you refactor your code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to refactor its containing architecture.

— Kernighan's law, vaguely postmodern

Debugging exists in a fairly deterministic space (modern concurrency hides this to a large degree, but not entirely). Refactoring architecture exists in an ecological context, of ecosocial construction. Nobody sane is likely to conclude that these two forces are going to play well together.

A big concept in my life these days is the efficient frontier (EF). This upgrades the hopelessly reductive linear order to at least a trade-off in two dimensions, the fewest number of dimensions where a trade-off can reasonably be expressed (I would describe the tension in a linear order as a contest not a trade-off).

Unix retains a large outpost on the efficient frontier (for slow-moving, permanent infrastructure at maximum scale with least bitrot (what's the proper term for architectural bitrot?). AWS holds some kind of EF outpost on elastic compute at scale, though I'm not myself deep enough into that universe to define this in concrete terms. There are many others.

Like all sports fans, the Unix crowd suffers from homerism. This is natural. You chose Unix in the first place because it appealed to your innate preferences. It's only natural this will continue unless it was a bad original marriage. Same with any other techno bigotry. Complaining about the Unix camp "virtue signalling" is a preparatory step in voting Unix off the island altogether. At least, this is how it works on the other side of the fence where I'm mostly been cooling my jets lately.

Microsoft (development culture): embrace and extend.

Facebook (user culture): smear and eject.

Facebook is successfully refactoring society as we speak.

I think there was too much initial focus (as in funding and development time and labor) on vaccines.

This is completely nuts. Off the chart nuts. Beyond Elon Musk's darkest inner SpaceY fantasy venture to colonize Alpha Centauri nuts.

Given the economic stakes involved—a supersized Big Gulp slice out of net global GDP with a dismal multiyear prognosis—we invested less in every possible medical direction than a rational ROI calculation would have had us do.

Partly this has to do with a weird neoliberal neurosis concerning debt. Taking on debt to cure social ills has a non-negligible but ultimately dubious ROI. This is the kind of calculation that can never be done to a high enough standard to finally quell partisan sniveling. And so the snivelers (on both sides) dominate public discourse.

The pandemic was no such beast. The ROI calculation was plain as day when we still knew next to nothing, and plain as a naked-eye supernova once we actually knew our asses from a hole in the ground.

The dumbest calculation entertained in this entire saga were the initial estimates on herd immunity on the premise of an acceptable death toll in reaching this haloed outcome.

Alpha knocked this ridiculous speculation sideways, and the delta delivered the coup de grace.

Based on the numbers as we knew them early on in the original Covid Classic outbreak, there was room for motivated ambiguity to spin a story about herd immunity as a viable global response. But it was never sane to assume the numbers we were seeing were robust against future mutation. The only reason the people involved in this got away with it relatively unscathed by searing blowback is that we have never before had the technological infrastructure to watch a pandemic evolve in flagrante delicto.

Day-one herd immunity under Covid classic: You can spin a suck-it-up-snowflake story.

Day-one herd immunity under alpha: You can spin a sadistic suck-it-up-snowflake story.

Day-one herd immunity under delta: Paging Nuremberg, we have another batch of fine contestants.

Pursuing herd immunity under delta from day one would have lead to global supply chain pressure on back hoes, the kind used to dig long collective trenches to accommodate the massed casualties before they festered into a twin pandemic.

We had no idea at the outset when delta would arrive, and we still don't, because we little idea of how delta might have arisen by other pathways (or not), none of which was anyways under our original control.

Come on people, start to draw some viable error bars around your arrogance. What we knew that we didn't know at the outset was problem enough. But there was also a potent reserve of what we didn't know about what we didn't know, because we've never before had the technology infrastructure to watch a global pandemic evolve in real time.

Back in March 2020, did we know whether delta would arrive in a decade, a year, a month, or a week? If you think you had a confident answer to this question back in March 2020, you're the next contestant on r/AmItheAsshole.

The short doubling-time of delta back in March 2020 before we had any kind of realistic response in place would have buckled everything: the medical system, the emergency system, the bulk of government, public health messaging, the global supply chain, mere mass burial.

In the weeks where some jurisdictions were late doing much of anything about Covid classic, observed doubling times were at most a week, and possibly as short as three days.

Delta might have managed a doubling time of one week under near total lockdown (before we had time to internalize the necessary behavioural modifications), exempting mainly people forced to leave their homes to gather or deliver corpses, which would not have been a small procession.

Do you miss grandma? Not even a little bit? Well, try this one on for size. With a great simultaneous cull of the geriatric and the obese on the scale of delta-day-one, try getting their estates out of probate any time in the next five years. As Elrond once said, our list of available barristers grows thin.

We immensely under-invested in vaccines. And we also immensely under-invested in treatment R&D (while spending a king's ransom on actually delivering the treatments we already had in hand). The scale of competent investment on both fronts would have requires a War Measures Act funding initiative delivered at the hands of a competent US President.

It's beyond ludicrous dichotomy from outer space to think that either vaccine or treatment came at the expense of the other.

No, the true story is that both lines of societal attack suffered at the hands of arrogance and bungling. FFS people! Back in March 2020, we could have easily been two short months away from Covid zeta. Zeta, unlike delta, does not multiply the transmission rate so much as it multiples the fatality rate. Zeta has not yet arrived, and it now appears unlikely because the evolutionary space in the event chose door number one over door number two over both doors at the same time, plus chips on top.

Given the immense evolutionary uncertainty that surrounds a novel pathogen, as we have subsequently discovered at great cost, the right time to hit the ground running with both shotgun barrels on nitrogen boost was March 2020. Both shotgun barrels: vaccination and treatment.

Many of the people now complaining in retrospect about the vaccination initiatives are the same people who were moaning in prospect about why reach directly for the social ban hammer, when we really didn't have proof on the ground that the worst case scenario was worse than a wet dream during Sunday service (the real reason they won't let you sleep through a boring sermon). Awkward, but not life-threatening. Why close the pub down the road? After a wet dream in public, a man needs a pint or two to regain face (shit face is merely a short-term transition zone on the road back to rectitude).

Turns out, the only compatible answer to dither with frothing delerium out of the starting gate, then seethe with resentment at the finish line over a vast, effective program of global vaccination is to claim some weird-ass middle road. Treatment. But not actually treatment (of which we already had plenty) but treatment R&D. Only it's not really R&D if you merely repurpose your current arsenal, throwing all the original, detailed cost-benefit analysis to the wind. Drugs are approved not because they are safe, but because they are safe relative to the other door (do nothing / do not very much with some other therapeutic) as optimally managed by a medical system that isn't teetering over the brink of calamity.

The safety of treatment can not be isolated from the caliber of the delivery of said treatment. What is the caliber of the delivery of a treatment while the medical system is reeling from a great obese geriatric die-off on the scale of an Australian coral reef?

Jesus faff, the retardation in this one is off the charts.

March 2020: Oh noes, let's not do anything hasty.

November 2021: On noes, what little we did do that was hasty and effective (beyond any sane expectation) came at the expense of something else which was actually explored in parallel (at a dull roar), and has yet to yield much compelling fruit.

Meanwhile, the notion that we dodged a bullet by the hair of our skinny ass that Covid delta showed up instead of Covid zeta.

Okay, so there's one more refuge of a cretin: Delta only showed up because of the vaccination program. The time line doesn't match up, but close enough to survive circulation on Fox News. Fine. We'll postulate an alternative response that emphasizes treatment over vaccination. Do you think Covid faffing cares? No, it can just as easily evolve around treatment as around vaccination. Suppose ivermectin was a real thing and we had discovered this fairly early in 2020. Then what? Covid begins to evolve around the expressed constraint. And we end up with what? We end up with Covid zeta. Should Covid zeta scare us out of shit-stained pants? Who the faff knows? But it could easily have been bad. It could easily have been colossally bad.

Both barrels, people, from day one, if you've got the common sense of a stoned mayfly.

If you genuinely mean it then you are proposing totalitarianism, at least in some regard to some issues.

This is an extremely sophomoric word game. We already have more totalitarian exceptions than you can shake a stick at. Jack the Ripper. Jeffrey Dahmer. Military service during times of major conflict. Many forms of insanity. 700 different behaviours in a crowded elevator.

If we end up with an especially unpleasant variant of ebola with the infection rate of delta, you will run, not crawl, to mash the giant "VAX THEM ALL" totalitarian button.

Normally we don't need to mention our totalitarian stance against Jack the Ripper, because it's not in any serious way leading to a broadening of our totalitarian mandate.

If you concede that a delta variant of extra horrific ebola warrants a compulsory mass vaccination campaign, then by the intermediate value theorem, there has to be some disease which is near enough to the dividing line to go either way. In such an instance, it doesn't improve decision making to run around like Chicken Little insinuating that the totalitarian sky is falling.

If you don't conceded that a delta variant of extra horrific ebola warrants a compulsory mass vaccination campaign, when that day comes, you'll be provided with a sturdy raft, and 2 L of the best glacial bottled water. Bon voyage.

If you'll look back at my first comment, I was pointing out that the Republicans aren't the only people complaining about election results, the Democrats did the same thing in 2016.

"The same" is very nearly the least reliable phase in the English language.

Some people see a tiki torch and see it as "the same" as the peaceful marchers on the other side. Other people see a tiki torch and see it as "the same" as collective racist hate crimes of yesteryear. I see the bitching about Hillary's defeat as much the same as every election. I see the actual Capitol building riots as not the same as any other election in American history.

The whole point of intellect is being able to make nuanced judgements about what constitutes the same and different. If you see 2016 and 2020 as equivalent, then you and I don't share a single conceptual commonality about the nature and proper function of democratic process in the 21st century.

It's frustrating that in one state, complaining about changes to absentee ballots was ruled too early because no election had happened, while in another it was ruled laches because the election had already happened. Not the same jurisdiction.

The whole point of a Republic is that each state has its own rules, and both of those rulings might be entirely correct relative to the law of the jurisdictions involved.

So you're frustrated by the Republican structure. I'm frustrated by the electoral college structure. Probably a numerical majority of Americans are frustrated the electoral college structure. But that's not how it works. I'm mature enough to admit this. Do you have the same adult gear in dealing with your own frustration?

I recently read Siobhan Roberts' book, Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway (2015), and enjoyed it immensely. It's not a traditional biography, in part because Conway is not a traditional subject.

While writing the Conway biography, she was a Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, and a Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

I don't know how you earn that gig at her age, but mad respect for getting herself noticed at that level.

Doing that lets them concentrate on individual words and word order rather than the corrected version that their brains automatically present to their conscious thought streams.

That's complete nonsense. The brain mostly fills in what you don't look at. When reading at speed, there's a lot on the page we don't look at. But when I slow down enough to read word by word in the forward direction, I get almost no interference from my predictive system unless my mind wanders.

Cook-book misprint costs Australian publishers dear — 17 April 2020

An Australian publisher has had to pulp and reprint a cookbook after one recipe listed "salt and freshly ground black people" instead of black pepper.

That's the error you desperately want to catch. Too bad your copy editors were reading backwards in brainless adherence to some misguided theory of cognitive function.

Penguin said almost every one of the more than 150 recipes in the book listed salt and freshly ground black pepper, but a misprint occurred on just one page.

This is why all real authors use LaTeX and the One Definition Rule.

Oddly enough, your brain may work just like your smartphone's autocorrect feature.

Any smartphone autocorrect feature worth having would have toasted that use of the phrase "just like" with a full-on lithium battery fire.