Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I was just involved in a argument on facebook with someone who was under the illusion that there are no stupid people. I mean, I would love to live in a world where that was true – but it just really isn’t. Recent things coming from this person’s corner make me suspect that they have recently succumbed to a damaging information virus (translation: religion)

Anyway, this is one of a few different times today when I’ve been bothered by people who obviously believe things which are not true because of the religions they are infected with. Normally I’m all for whatever gets you through the night, but I think these beliefs in things which are not true are really starting to hurt us all. I mean, you have all the people who voted for Trump due to deeply delusional beliefs, but it goes a bit further than that. You have people pretending peak oil won’t happen, global warming isn’t real, and that if we just pray real hard everyone in the Ukraine will be okay. (You also have people ignoring that the US has over and over provided the weapons – and sometimes the soldiers – to destroy people’s houses and kill folks just as Russia is currently doing to the Ukraine – generally because we didn’t like their ideology surrounding resource allocation although occasionally just because it was profitable for US corporations)

Anyway, my point is, one of my problems with religion is that it makes people believe things that are clearly not true, and then make decisions based on those beliefs. I’m not saying this is the biggest problem facing humanity but it clearly is a problem.

I don’t know why it rubs me so much the wrong way today to have people making clearly untrue assertions and suggesting useless actions in response to disasters. Maybe I’m just in a bad mood because of other factors. But the appeal of just deleting my facebook account seems larger than usual today. I do continue to think it will be useful as a vehicle for getting people to listen to my music, although it also may be that I’m never going to have that large a audiance because I am not sure I can be what most of the world would apparently want me to be – I mean, the odds of someone as anti-religion as me being cancelled seem pretty high.

I did unfriend the person – they haven’t contributed anything positive in my life in the last several years and various aspects of their smug superiority combined with lack of connection to observable reality made me think I’m better off without them. My patience with people who are convinced they are vastly superior to me seems to be wearing very thin.

So, occasionally I find my ability to control the future amusing. I’ve stopped transacting in bitcoin because I find the amount of power that it uses unacceptable and the lack of evolution of the bitcoin network distressing. However, I still have some bitcoin. If I were to sell this bitcoin, the future value of bitcoin would exceed $1m/BTC – after I sold it, of course. If I HODL it for the rest of my life, the future value of bitcoin will asymptotically approach zero.

Just sticking this here in the hopes that it will get listed in google and maybe save some folks a little time.

If you are trying to use rabbitMQ’s websocket STOMP connector, as discussed on https://www.rabbitmq.com/stomp.html, be aware that the URL given in the documentation on this page is wrong (or perhaps only applies to newer versions of rabbitmq).

The correct way to successfully create a websocket to RabbitMQ 3.5.7 (which ships with Ubuntu 16.04) is as follows:

var ws = new WebSocket(‘ws://yourhostname:15674/stomp/websocket’);

var client = Stomp.over(ws);

Later note: The documentation is correct for newer versions of RabbitMQ.

I posted this on facebook, but it occured to me it might be worth saving here

“Seeking a middle ground in racial politics, given that one side is nazis, is a little like seeking a middle ground between closed and open on a circuit breaker. It might exist (in the sense that briefly the contacts are in transition and there’s a arc drawn between them) but if you stay there too long shit is probably going to catch on fire and someone is going to get hurt. Some things really are black and white, and I am mystified as to how you can find middle ground between “I want to kill people who are a different race than I am” and “everyone is the same under the skin”.”

So, I’ve been buying Dell 7810s for my kitten trader 3.0 cluster, and I thought I’d somehow gotten three bad ones from two vendors. No, actually, Dell thoughtfully stores the slot that the video card is in in the BIOS! Changing the video card for another model results in no video – so, if you have a 7810 that you’ve put a new video card in that won’t display anything, the trick is to remove the battery, short the two pins that would have been the battery together, then power it on – the display will, after about 45 seconds (be patient) and one uncommanded power cycle actually light up with the dell logo and a option to push F2 to enter setup – *immediately* go into setup and select the slot # the card is in under ‘video’. (There will be a helpful hint listing video card type on every slot with a detected video card). It will tell you that on systems with a single video card you can select ‘auto’ but as far as I can tell, this is a lie, or maybe is only true if you use only Dell-approved video cards. If you don’t save this setting the next time you boot you will again have no video.

Most of these systems are destinated to be headless for me anyway so I really only need video long enough to configure them, but it’s still a great help. I hope this helps someone else in the same kettle of fish I was in as it took me 2 hours to figure this out.

So, it took me numerous tries, digging, and beating of head against curtin and the like, but I have finally figured out how to set a static IP on a host using cloud-init.

Mind you, I am not talking about setting a static iP for while the installer is running. That’s easy, and well documented. I’m talking about the next time it boots.

The solution requires two bits. They’re pretty straightforward, and both go in the cloud-init file

Bit one goes at the end of the autoinstall section, and deletes the default configuration and writes a permanent one instead. Note that the filesystem is mounted as /target

  late-commands:

  – rm /target/etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/50-curtin-networking.cfg

  – mv /tmp/00-installer-config.yaml /target/etc/netplan

Bit two actually writes out the /tmp/00-installer-config.yaml that late-commands will be editing

write_files:

  – path: /tmp/00-installer-config.yaml

    owner: root:root

    permissions: “0644”

    content: |

      network:

        version: 2

        ethernets:

          ens160:

            critical: true

            dhcp-identifier: mac

            dhcp4: true

          ens192:

            dhcp4: no

            addresses:

            – {ipaddr}/16

            gateway4: 172.16.1.1

            nameservers:

              addresses:

              – 172.16.5.6

              search:

              – search.domain

So, one interesting question that occured to me is whether Paul genuinely believed that worshipping Jesus was the best idea – that God wanted worship, that one shouldn’t emulate Jesus but rather consider Jesus above one and a different type of creature – whether in fact the message of the sacrifice being necessary for God to forgive us and Hell being what would happen to anyone who didn’t believe in the sacrifice – and of course the ever-dangerous-and-stupid message that Christianity was the One True Way and all non-Christians were Less Than – whether he believed all that, or whether he found it a convenient thing for Rome to make others believe that.

Remember, Paul was originally Saul, who was tasked with squishing these peace-loving hippies before the love started to overrule the desire to run a militaristic empire. Gee, this story’s never happened before – or again … anyway, maybe he figured out that he couldn’t *actually* squish them like grape, but what he *could* do is subvert and confuse their beliefs into patterns that were useful to the empire, or at least not as dangerous to it.

Or, maybe he genuinely believed himself in all the things he wrote. He clearly had some moments of genius – as I said, 1 corinthians 13 has the ring of eternal truth and is some of the best poetry in the whole book – but he also had a lot of moments of confusing local truths (the customs of his tribe) for eternal truth, and he encouraged a lot of things that have hurt us memetically for centuries.

So, the other day I was musing about how that rat bastard Paul, who otherwise caused all sorts of unfortunate things to occur, may have written the most beautiful lines of the entire Christian Bible (1 Corinthians 13)

Howsomeever, he also did a lot of really awful things. Not that Paul started the patriarchy, but he certainly codified it into a document a awful lot of people have believed was the word of god.

And, as I’ve been discovering, he did something else that in some ways is even worse. If we accept the idea that Jesus existed as canon – and even if he was a fictional character I think we can safely accept he was created in the mind of his author – or lived – or something – around 30 AD – then I would hope we could all agree that Jesus’s message was “Be excellent to each other”. Over and over he talks about empathy, talks about using your gifts, talks about being a good friend, citizen, neighbor, etc.

Paul warped this into being all about ego, all about names. Got people to worship Jesus, worship Jesus’s name, to think that they needed to pray in Jesus’s name. He turned a “treat each other well, love each other well, be wonderful and live well” cult – a bunch of pot smoking hippies basically – into .. well, what we’ve got now. People who think God wants and needs worshipped. People who think they should be judging other people not just based on whether they treat each other well, but based on some very strange ideas about what is “sinful”. People who are anxious to condemn for everything from sex to being a “illegal immigrant”. And, people who think that God is completely broken internally and insane.

One of the basic tenets of Christianity is that the reason Jesus had to die is “God is a just God, and therefore requires a sacrifice to avoid torturing people for having made mistakes”. However, if you’re me, what this actually reads like is “Two wrongs make a right”. There’s no way that hurting Jesus because other people were hurt makes anything better. That’s not justice, that’s just insanity, the same sort of insanity that keeps revenge going for cycle after cycle – exactly what Jesus himself preached against when he talked about turning the other cheek.

It does explain a lot of the bad behavior of the Christians that they completely missed the point, and thought they should be worshipping Jesus himself. Just as Buddhists do not worship the Buddha, but merely practice in a effort to become more like him, Christians shouldn’t be worshipping Jesus, they should be emulating him. Again, as I’ve mentioned, people who need and/or want unwavering worship – yes-men, in other words – are not all there. Stable, well developed personalities don’t need that sort of thing – I would think this would be *extra* true in the case of a larger neural network – which, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, if God is anything that has a personality I would think God would have a larger neural net than humans and be *more* capable, *more* stable, and whatnot. That isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for both gratitude and positive reinforcement, because there certainly is – as there is in all our friendships and connections.

I Just had a interestingly cynical thought about why we might not hear more about peak oil in the USA.

One of the most destructive Big Industries is Big Politics. I’ve talked about how the USA carefully keeps people divided on hot button topics while making very little progress on them so it can continue to donation farm the suckers. (Lately this has been combined with the right out and out selling total falsehoods to their constituents, who are apparently not bright enough to figure out they’re being lied to or even remember that the past has changed over and over and over so that whatever’s Pravda now can be Pravda. )

Anyway, one of the things I’ve been deeply puzzled by is why people don’t talk about peak oil more, because while we might be arguing over the science of global warming it’s just about impossible to argue about the fact that Earth’s oil wells are going dry at a prodigious rate and that subject matter experts estimate 35 years of economically recoverable oil remain.

I think the reason global warming is pushed is because Peak Oil is something that there’d be bipartisan agreement about. Like infrastructure renewal, we carefully have to keep peak oil off the table to discuss because we’d all agree something needs done – and even worse, the things that we’d all agree need done are for the most part the same thing those global warming nuts want anyway! It’d be a very bad day for Big Politics.

(One consistent distraction from all this is the bullshit hydrogen economy. A few reminders, just to get them out of the way

1) There are very few metals that can catalyze hydrogen and oxygen to make electricity i.e. make a fuel cell for hydrocarbons. They’re all *very* rare and very expensive. There’s no way we have enough of them to put a FCV vehicle in every driveway in america
2) Hydrogen has a much lower energy density than any other hydrocarbon. This is a problem for several reasons. The first is that if we wanted to burn it in a conventional engine that engine would need enormous displacement per horsepower output. This makes using conventional engines to use hydrogen impractical
3) ALso because of the lower energy density, combined with the fact that it is a cryogenic gas (cannot be liquefied at room temperature, requires significant refrigeration to maintain in a liquid state), hydrogen is very difficult to store. Absent some sort of catalytic storage system (and it is possible such a thing could be found, ammonia seems tempting) storing hydrogen requires storing it at hundreds of atmospheres in order to get usable energy densities. Such a container is fantastically dangerous if it is ruptured because everyone near it will freeze to death – and that’s before we talk about fires etc.
4) Because hydrogen has to be compressed to hundreds of atmospheres, there’s some significant challenges in making it energy efficient because of the Boyle’s Law impact of compressing a gas to hundreds of atmospheres. Various challenges ensue to try to recapture all the waste heat of the multistage compressors required.
5) Hydrogen is very slippery. IT’s a tiny molecule that likes to leak – in fact many of the Los Angeles based hydrogen fueling stations have burned to the ground because of such leaks. It’s not the easiest material to work with.
6) It is not practical to have a fuel cell battery big enough to provide for the peak power (100kW) required during acceleration of a modern car. Therefore a FCV by definition is also a BEV, with all the complications that implies plus the complications of moving energy between the fuel cell and the battery pack. Even if it were possible to make fuel cells big enough, fuel cells must go offline from time to time to purge the water they are generating from their membranes.
7) Oh, yes, as well as being stupidly expensive (and if you thought having your catalytic converter stolen was bad, wait till you get your fuel cell stolen) fuel cells also *wear out* much faster than batteries do. Expect to change your fuel cell every 100k miles, as opposed to 200k for battery packs. (oh, yes, and expect to change your battery pack too, see above about how a FCV is a BEV)

Fuel cell vehicles may well be the answer for very large things, like trains, boats, and possibly tractor-trailers. But they are not a good candidate for everyday drivers and therefore using “let’s wait for the hydrogen economy” as a excuse for not settling the issues surrounding peak oil now is bullshit. Naturally the republicans love it.)

Anyway, all that said, Global warming *will be inconvenient*. It’ll cause crop failures, bad weather, heatstroke, etc. Peak Oil *will kill us*. Our entire food network runs on oil. It takes us more than a calorie of petrochemicals to *make* a calorie of food (counting fertilizers) and that’s before we even start to talk about moving it around. And it will kill us *soon*. If you are my age and have children, *they will starve to death* unless we change our ways.

What are the solutions? Well, for crops, Monsanto could stop being assholes and start working on crops that need less fertilizer and do less damage to the soil. For cars, battery electric vehicles – there’s plenty of lithium in seawater and for many of us nickel metal hydride would be adequate to our needs. For trains, overhead or rail fed power – although that’s less of a desperate need because trains are very efficient. For airplanes, BEVs for small ones and biofuels for big ones. Many different solutions exist – but we should begin transition *now*. We don’t want to wait until we have 5 years of oil left – among other things, humans are such idiots that we will spend the last of the oil fighting wars over the last of the oil. Also, almost all of this stuff is going to have bugs. None of it is going to work right immediately. We need to kaizen the designs (iteratively and slowly improve them)

For energy – the obvious big winners here are wind, solar, and nuclear. Not just because they’re carbon neutral, but because they’re the cheapest per kwh options in terms of deaths per kwh. Nuclear probably will also become the cheapest in terms of dollars per kwh as we design better plants. We’re already well on our way to replacing our peaker plants with wind and solar. Now we just need to slay the baseline load dragon – and if you all *really* hate nuclear even after you understand it, I guess we can talk about pumped storage, mechanical storage, and battery storage. We will come up with something.. if we try.

One thing we do need to figure out what to do about is republicans out-and-out lying about technologies to try and block them. I’m sure you’ve all heard the *absurd* claim that a wind plant or a solar array takes more power to make than it generates. We really do, as a side note, need to figure out how we can possibly survive as a country *at all* with one side willing to *lie repeatedly* about *everything* in order to try and make a few billionaires richer.

(Note: This is going to go some places that most folks are not equipped to follow.)

So, I had a thought the other day – as you know, I’ve debated whether or not God is (or has) a neural network, whether or not God is static and unchanging, and talked about how even if God is static and unchanging our experience of God can change in much the same way that when you move a static and unchanging tape past a play head you experience dynamic and changing music. And, I know there are people who declare that God is spirit.

However, one thought that came to me on facebook the other day is that infinity – the infinite set of sets – must perforce be bigger than God, unless God is in no way a individual or self aware at all. The infinite set of sets also by definition displays a limit to God’s omnipotence, because no one can remove anything from it. You can remove data from the world, but you can’t make 3 not be between 2 and 4 on the number line no matter how hard you try – and this idea can be expanded multidimensionally in all sorts of ways. For that matter, I still believe God can’t change the value of pi – it’s defined by the relationship of two lines at 90 degree angles to each other, and nothing you can do will change it.

Nor can true infinity – the infinite set of sets – be a self aware individual, because it cannot exlude or remove or rearrange *anything*. This would seem to even exclude awareness as we understand it, although I won’t go as far as to assert that is true (after all, many native Americans speak of everything as being aware and I’m not in a good position to say they’re wrong)

Nor can any one entity claim ownership of the infinite set of sets. One of the sickest and most disturbing parts of capitalism is in order to make the system work we’ve got people claiming to *own* ideas, even though clearly other entities in other parts of the world or galaxy or universe or multiverse might be having those ideas at the exact same time, or had them long before. “Intellectual property” shouldn’t be property at all – this represents a fundamental phoniness, fundamental way of lying about the universe to ourselves and each other.

In any case, surely any “God” couldn’t know there wasn’t another “God” in another frame with access to the same set of sets. In a multiverse, you might have parallel Gods next door to each other thinking the same thoughts – or different ones. That the bible doesn’t speak of these things is part of how I know it isn’t really divine inspiration by a creature more advanced than humanity was when it was penned. These are thoughts that are much easier for people like me who have been immersed in everything from set theory to quantum mechanics, and even tried to accept and grok Copenhagen, MWT, and PWT to grok than they would have been for the folks wandering around 2000 years ago. But a religious text that was truly inspired by a diety would already know these things. I think part of what’s most annoying to me about the bible is that it’s so clearly a lie. Any *real* God would know these things.

(Of course, if God *isn’t* aware and *is* static – that is to say, God’s just a tape – this could fit the Christian bible in that a non-aware God would have no need to be ethical. It would make less sense though in that a static God certainly has no need to be jealous. Of course, the best explanation, by far, of God’s jealousy is it’s actually the jealousy of the priests, who need people to keep believing in this particular set of fictions if they’re going to keep getting paid.)