Never been one to let the carrier drop

Super chill.. this may get another layer of paint – I’m thinking of making it a spoken word peice..

Chill

This is more of me trying to get a handle on Vienna. This one is interesting in that *none* of the instruments in it have any corporeal existence – well, many of them might be based on samples, but as of now they’re all software running on a x86 😉

String Blues

All Lives Matter

Black lives matter. Blue lives matter. Orange lives with polka dots matter. If we don’t treat it as *everybody* matters, we’ll end up in a world where *nobody* does.

So, one of my long-standing criticisms of Christianity is that it repeatedly makes the claim that God is perfect and we humans are inherently flawed, so much so that someone had to die for our sins.

Well, now, hold on a minute. Anyone who can argue there aren’t bugs in the human genome with a straight face is so delusional that I don’t think having a conversation with them would be useful. And we *know* the bible received a patch at one point – that’s why we’ve got the old and new testaments. One of my biggest criticisms of the bible is that revelations contains a place (Rev 22:18) where it says, in essence, “Do not patch this again” even though it’s still obviously a very flawed text.

Is it so hard to consider the possibility that there might be a God, but said God might be imperfect? Anyone who’s ever written software knows that only the very simple things work on the first pass. The human genome is *gigabytes* in size – is it at all surprising that it contains bugs? The bible is 4.13 megabytes – again, is it surprising that it contains bugs?

I think one of the big issues here is that humans are easily brainwashed / convinced of things that aren’t necessarily true. And once convinced, we tend to be very tenacious about holding onto our beliefs. I think it would be a very good thing, however, if we could acknowledge the clear, reality-testable concept that if there is a God, said entity is not a perfect being.

For that matter, the bible contains some very interesting contradictions. 1 Corinth 13:5 makes the assertion that ‘Love holds no record of wrongdoings’, which does in fact sound like a definition of perfect unconditional love. The Bible asserts God is love (1 John 4:8). Yet the bible is full of places where it claims God is going to send you to hell for actions you’ve taken in the past – this in fact is exactly what Rev 22:18 is saying – if you add to this book, we’ll send you to hell. This is a obvious and major contradiction.

I can’t speak with the same level of authority for Islam, because I haven’t read the whole book, nor have I been immersed in the culture which would help me understand it, but from a surface level view it appears to contain the same sorts of contradictions and improvements. The impression one is under is that our religions are being evolved – by human programmers in my view. I think these books are inspired by our imagination of what is divine, but I can say with great confidence that there is little chance they are inspired by a monolithic, unchanging being.

And, really, there’s nothing wrong with the idea that God might be imperfect. Certainly it takes human developers many thousands of tries to build complex software (and really, both religions and our genome have a lot to do with software insofar as they’re both strings of data that are interpreted and lead to results)

In fact, it’s a lot easier for me to live peacefully with the idea of a imperfect God than a perfect, never makes a mistake one given the reality I experience. The idea of God I was sold as a child is incompatible with the reality I experience, which as a result puts a noticeable size strain on my neural network any time I attempt to reconcile the two.

If the world could recognize the idea of religion as a memetically evolving thing – recognize that we’ve been wrong in the past and we’re slowly converging on right – it would undoubtedly make the world a better place. I see a lot of signs of this in the current catholic pope, which is encouraging, although he still hasn’t come out and said birth control is a good idea. (I do think it’s possible that he will at some point)

In fact most of my hatred of organized religion comes from the assertions it makes and the people who think that they should be controlling other people’s behavior based on what their religion says. In the worst form, you have shooting, raping, mutilating, and torturing others based on your religion, and then you have threatening, shaming, guilting, and inducing fear in others based on your religion. I’ve certainly read about the first, and experienced the second firsthand. None of these strike me as good things and it would be a good idea if all of them stopped.

So, I was watching vihart’s channel, and I came across https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toap7iPpTbs.

I didn’t make it all the way through the video. Perhaps at some point I will. I’m not really over being sad about all the horrific things that have been happening lately – it seems like when I decided to stop following the news, the news decided to start following me. Everyone on facebook feels duty bound to make facebook not the news feed of what my friends and family are up to, but the alternative news feed about what the world is up to. And yet, in the hopes of seeing little bits of contact from my friends I feel I speak to far too little and spend far too little time talking to, I keep feeling drawn to it.

That’s not what I’m here to talk about today.

I recently brought up the idea that we are neural networks, and neural networks are event driven, and thusly the concrete existence of guns may generate what I would refer to as ‘gun events’ in our minds and thusly fuel shooting. I’m also thinking that with the internet in general, and facebook in particular, we’re perpetually stuck in what I’ll call ‘tragedy events’. And so my mind is constantly reacting to the fact that, really, there are awful things happening all over the place all the time.

After I watched about half of that video, I was reminded both that vihart would likely automatically hate me if she knew me, and that we’ve built a really broken system. We’ve got all these concepts flying around that as they merge together, more or less guarantee misery for all. I could spend some time identifying them, and perhaps I will do so later, but right now I’m feeling too miserable to put my finger on them, other than to comment that perhaps the womens and the mens should contemplate that both sides are made equally miserable by the current battle of the sexes. I am sure there are many female types who would assert that in fact the men have it all their way and the women have nothing and are downtrodden but I don’t agree. I think both sides are not getting what they want and need. Of course, I could probably identify the same situation with republicans and democrats. And very likely with the 99% and the 1%. And just about anywhere things get broken into ‘us’ and ‘them’, both ‘us’ and ‘them’ are getting the shaft one way or another.

And I wonder, if I could manage to put facebook down.. just put it down, walk away, and not come back, how much of this would stop hurting me? And, would something else rise to take it’s place? Is my mind just geared to experience a certain amount of hurt no matter what I do, and there’s nothing that can be done about it?

I mostly need to just not think about 49 people shot in Orlando. It’s yet another horrific thing I can’t do anything about. I read Deadly Passage by Erik Larson and felt odd tuggings of wanting to buy a gun. Even though I know the very last thing I want to own is a gun. I do not want a tool for making bad decisions very quickly. I’m kind of in the mood that the NRA probably fears the most.. where I would take the guns away from everyone if I could. Even the police. Perhaps especially the police, actually.

But back to the neural network thing. So, neural networks are event driven, I’ve mentioned. Not entirely event driven in the case of NNNs, but largely event driven. Those of you who go out and buy guns, who shoot guns, who spend time defending the right to carry, you’re generating gun events. You’re helping the gunnish part of your mind pump iron. For this reason, I don’t find it that surprising that the number of shootings and the number of guns out there are more or less linear. And, you can talk about responsibility and whatnot all you like but I’m starting to suspect that to a certain extent we’re just bumpers in a pinball machine. We get free will, yes, but not as much as we think. We’re not free to do anything at any time, because the mechanics of our physical neural networks won’t let us. We can only think inside the box defined by our hardware. This feels a little calvinist, and I am not sure it’s really what I think – maybe it’s just what I think right now. Just the delusion I happen to be riding at the moment.

And if we were talking mechanical semiautomatics with a fair amount of lag time between each shot, that might not be so awful. But exhaust gas powered semiautomatics that can shoot 30 rounds in 3 seconds are a thing. And I wish they weren’t a thing. If I could just not be affected when I hear news of tens or hundreds of people being gunned down for no reason..

I worry a lot that we’re finding the failure modes for humanity. Global warming, water shortages, mass shootings, starvation, hoarding, nuclear weapons, I could go on for a while, but there’s so much negative stuff to negative on if you’ve got a mind to. I try to stay positive – after all, thus far, most of this stuff only affects me insofar as it hurts when I read about it on various news sources. I do wonder, if I hide my head in the sand completely, what would the results be? After all, as I’ve pointed out many times, it’s not like there’s anything I can *do* about these things.

One of my .. I hesitate to use the word friend though that’s what I wish he was.. acquaintances, I suppose.. thinks that I’m what causes mass shootings. That the world would be safer if I were in jail. He might have just said that in a moment of anger. Or he might have really, deeply meant it. I’m not really inclined to talk to him about it. I figure in a few years maybe he’ll figure out what a jackass he was being. Or maybe not. I do wonder if some of what resulted in this comment from him was me talking about bullet control – he’s a fan of the gun. I am not. I was kicking his sacred cow.

I just had a whole series of thoughts about how perhaps it’s both male entitlement and female entitlement that lead to so much unhappiness, but I lack the energy to write them down and they’re probably extremely politically incorrect anyway. Maybe at some later date.

So, I had a thought the other day about the recent epidemic of autism – and mind you, this is definitely tinfoil hat territory.

I think it’s possible autism is enhanced – made to be a more prominent trait – by standardized testing.

So, the basic thesis works like this. Natural Neural networks are always adapting to whatever load is placed on them. Standardized testing encourages them to develop more black-and-white thinking. I think professional educators often forget that the minds of the students are still adapting during the test itself – that the test itself is causing them to learn something, but it’s probably not anything you’d call good.

And, of course, we run our children through many, many standardized tests these days. I think it’d be really interesting to run some large advanced ANNs through standardized testing and looking to see what happens to the structure of a mind that is adapting to standardized testing.

http://www.umc.org/news-and-media/florida-bishop-responds-to-massacre.

I’m not a huge fan of Abrahamic religions. But increasingly, I see people growing beyond the horror and hate of religion, and embracing the idea of love, tolerance, acceptance, and the like. In the midst of the dark, fear, and dystopia, every ray of love, life, acceptance, and hope is appreciated.

Bernie does a very good job of underlining one of the basic problems with a two party system with a third party attempting to break in.

Those of you who are students of history will remember that Clinton won his first term partially because of a man named Perot, who was also a independent with some interesting ideas. Of course, Clinton was running against Bush – and, insane as this sounds, lately we’ve had cause to feel nostalgia towards Bush. Bush was maybe not the president I would elect, but he wasn’t much of a heel (in the faces and heels speak of WWF) – he was a moderate, and is repeatedly on record as saying things which are mostly pretty reasonable.

In the meantime, this year, our election is between moderate capitolist conservitive Clinton, insane reality TV star Trump, and democratic socialist Sanders. So, another three way race. However, unlike our last three way race, in this one, the split is between Clinton (who, much as we don’t want to admit it, we can mostly live with) and Sanders (who many of us would love to have as he represents real tangible progress on a number of fronts). Meaning, if half of us vote for Clinton and half for Sanders, Trump wins.

Now, if you’re a Trump fan, I don’t really know what to say other than, why exactly do you want WWIII? But, let’s leave them out of the discussion for the moment and talk about those of us who aren’t fans of building walls and evicting people because we don’t like their religion.

If Bernie gets on the ticket somehow – either as a independent or on the Green Party or, really, any way other than by getting the Democratic nomination, we’ve got a real problem.

The problem is remarkably similar to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. I think most of us could agree that either Bernie or Clinton would be better than Trump, but we have to find some way to agree, en masse, who we’re going to vote for.

We also have to find some way to verify that we really voted for this person. In essence, I do not think the US voting network is secure or trustworthy or believable, so I want to go out on a limb here. I am suggesting we perform something not usually done. I am suggesting *every one of us* photograph our ballots and upload them all to a central repository. We’re going to have to put together something that can handle this, ideally in some decentralized (blockchains? peer to peer) manner. We are going to have to build a reliable voting network as a system for verifying that the current voting network is reliable

I also am suggesting that one way or another, if both Bernie and Hil are on the ticket, we need to all agree which direction we’re going beforehand. The very last thing we want is a 50/50 split between Hil and Bernie winning the election for Trump. At the same time, we don’t want Bernie to step down, because the things he’s saying are the things that need to be said.

More on this later.

Side note – It’s easy to see one feature we *really* should have built into the voting network – the ability to list candidates in order of preference. This would facilitate indicating that you both like Hil and Bernie better than Trump, while indicating which you would rather have elected. However, my hunch is that the whole thing is a bit of a show – just like WWF – and that in fact the powers that be run the place using entirely different methods, while keeping us distracted with the faces and heels.

So, I keep going back and forth as to whether this would be a good idea. I think I’ve talked about it before. But it would be technically feasible to add a device similar to Amazon Echo to every dorm room and frat house. The idea would be to create a ‘safeword’ – something that would almost never false positive – that would call 911 and give the location of the device and audio clips from it.

The downside is it’s surveillance, and it would also probably get abused by government which would then insist the devices could be used for monitoring. The upside is that it could vastly cut down on things like campus rape. I can’t decide if it’s a good idea or not. But watching The Hunting Ground makes it seem like it might be.

It does occur to me that there could be a easy opt-in system.. a app you’d install on your mobile phone that listens for a word and calls 911. It’d be power-hungry, you’d only activate it when going into a situation where you knew there was danger.. but it’d be useful. You could also have it call 911 if you *didn’t* say a certain word every N minutes, if you were concerned about date rape drugs, or if someone tried to disable it without disarming it first.

With a *lot* of CPU power (more than a phone likely has, you’d have to stream it to a more powerful computer), you could add voice detection so the app would know whether it was hearing your voice or not.. You could also add a monitoring center, like high end alarm systems, so rather than calling 911 you’d pay a monthly fee to have someone listen in and determine if the situation was all right. Groups of friends going to the same party could all register with it, or it could use GPS coordinates, so the monitoring system could do things like sending a message ‘Amy might be in trouble, we haven’t heard her voice in 20 minutes and she didn’t give the signoff / all clear word’

The other difficult thing would be getting people to know and understand that college campuses are dangerous places.

I also think encouraging the idea of affirmative/positive consent would be a good thing.

When I moved to the new house in Seattle I replaced the oil burner with a heat pump. This was mostly self-preservation – the inverter-drive pump I chose draws about $200/month worth of power off the line, vs $600 worth of oil.

The installers managed to take many days to install it, despite it being a basicly drop-in kind of thing. Partially, I chose a Mitsubishi PUMY, which has a computer network between all the various components and requires assigning unique addresses to them all, something that apparently was too complex for your average HVAC guy, and partially they needed some help installing the thermostat. (Yes, I installed it. They had spent a day trying to get it to hang on the wall.. the old wires were too short. A couple of quick disconnects and short extenders later, while they were out on their lunch break, problem solved.

I have come to suspect the people who I bought it from are idiots.

It’s a multi-zone system.. multiple heat exchangers with multiple fans.. because me and Gayle have different ideas about what is a comfortable temp. After my first “free” tune up, the basement heat exchanger wouldn’t turn on.

I called and they sent a tech out. The tech reported it needed a new circuit board. I expressed dubiousness, but told him to go ahead and order it. Tech went away. Later, another tech came out to install the circuit board, and after testing reported that it needed *all* new circuit boards, because a “power surge had destroyed something”.

Now, I’m dubious as anything. First of all, all the other zones were working fine. I couldn’t think of *any* failure mode that would have all but one zone working but need a new, say, inverter drive board. So, I sent him away with a “well, order whatever parts you think it needs…”

Then I got out the manuals. After perusing the relevant bits, I got out the voltmeter, and measured the voltage across the network cable to the zone that wasn’t working. 0 volts. Hmmm. Pretty sure the manual says it’s a current loop and I should see 24 volts at all times.

I do some quick tracing, and discover that they had used wire nuts barely adequate for two 24AWG wires to bind together 5 20AWG ones. I tug on the bundle of wires, and one comes loose. I go and get the proper wire nuts from my toolkit, replace them, reboot the system (after a couple of false starts, turns out you must turn off the compressor last and turn it on first.. which is in the manual, but not in the obvious place) and lo and behold, my zone works again.

I’m better at troubleshooting a AC system than *two* technicians who do it as their *full time job*?

I could forgive them more easily if it had been something that was unique to a computer driven / networked HVAC system. But this issue would have broken even a plain ol’ relays and motors system.

I’m trying to decide what a appropriate thing to do is. I don’t want to be deliberately hurtful (i.e. call them and say “you guys are idiots..”) but at the same time I feel like they should in some way learn from their mistake.

What’s more, I paid for a year’s service contract, but there is no way in *hell* they are ever touching this system again. I’m scared what they might do to it. I have no doubt that if they’d replaced every PCB in the system, it would have *lowered* the reliability. Do I demand a refund? I also feel for anyone else who might be getting their system serviced by these guys. Do I publish my story?

Even worse, I looked at the PCBs.. they have surge suppression out the ying-yang. MOVs. zeners. Snubber caps. The idea that a surge could have knocked this thing out and not damaged any of the much-less-well-built electronics I have all over the place is laughable.

Meh. I have no idea what the right thing to do socially is. There has to be somewhere between “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” and letting people walk all over you.