Never been one to let the carrier drop

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.

1) Bernie supporters, while it would be great if the government would become more socialist, we don’t actually have to wait for it to live in a more socialist world. If your financial situation is above average, help your friends. If it’s below average, share the problems you’re having so people can help you, and accept help. Whenever possible, trade skills for skills to stay outside the tax system entirely. I’m sure we can think of a whole lot of ways to live in a more socialist way without needing the government’s help or permission.

2) As we’re woe-is-meing about the horrible horrible “other side” in political situations, remember my discussion earlier about how the conservative or liberal neurons in a natural neural network are both playing important roles. If you removed either the right-bias or left-bias neurons from a NNN, the results would not be good. The same is very likely true for big systems of humans. We probably need to find a better way to make this a blending of signals rather than a war – machine assisted telepathy is one of the things I like for this – but whatever your political bias, we need both you and your opposite number to make good decisions.

3) Look at the big picture. Most of us are fed, most of us are clothed, most of us have power, most of us have the ability to send a message anywhere in the world in milliseconds. Increasingly, we’re aware of the places where there are fundamental problems and we’re trying to fix them. Overall, the long term curve for Earth is very positive. If you doubt this, go read some history. The immediate situation often looks very screwed up, but if you look at the big picture, stuff is getting better.

I remember the first Prince song I ever heard. I had bought a FM radio at a yard sale with a misaligned IF, and after twiddling a few tuning slugs in the back, it started bringing in some New York pop station. One of the first songs I heard on my newly operational radio was ‘Kiss’.

I of course loved it. I loved a lot of his music. Since hearing of his death, I’ve only played one Prince song (let’s go crazy), but the playlist in my head has included a lot more of them (Seven, Kiss, Little Red Corvette, When Doves Cry, among others)

I like writing music about sex, which gives me something in common with Prince. I imagine I have some other things in common with him as well, but there are also some striking differences – religion, mostly. I suppose right now he knows whether he was right or wrong. Or he doesn’t know anything at all.

I first heard he was dead on Brig. I think I was laying in my bed. My first thoughts were that it was too soon.

So, I have a humble suggestion for making a good electronic voting network. What we need is widely deployed, hardened, secure, reliable computer terminals with some ability to identify the user. What’s that you say? We already have those, and they’re called ATMs? Why, yes, that’s exactly what I’m thinking.

I figure there aren’t that many models of hardened ATMs, and they’re all X86 based. It would not be that hard to deploy voting software to them. While we’re at it, let’s use modern crypographic methods to make sure that our votes were really counted. The ATM can print a receipt with a signature that you can go look up to make sure your vote made it to the vote aggregation centers.

The government could issue a ATM-esque card to every voter, that they could use to verify their party registration, vote, etc. The way the current ATM network works is probably a perfect model for how to handle this. People who already have bank accounts could even just use their current ATM card to authenticate themselves, although that might be going a little far.

So, watching Human has me thinking.. the general prevailing wisdom of religions is that we were engineered by a perfect being. But we’re clearly full of bugs, which people usually call a fatal flaw. If we were engineered, isn’t it more likely we were engineered by a previous version of ourselves?

I’ve talked about the bottom-up rather than top-down model a fair amount in various bits of this blog. I don’t see any advocates for it – people either believe we were created by flipping bits at random and testing the result against the environment, or they believe that we were created by a diety, which for the moment I assume to be a much, much larger and more advanced NNN.

But the bottom-up model makes the most sense to me.

So, I have to wonder, if you could build a exact carbon copy of me – with the same neural nets connected in the same way – would it be functionally identical to me? Is there any ‘magic’ to us beyond the mechanics of thought? Would it experience the world exactly the way I do? Is it possible our whole world is the result of someone doing a exhaustive search for a particular neural configuration, one that responds in particular ways to particular inputs? Is it likely?

One of the thoughts I had recently is that we’re always encouraged to ‘be ourselves’. Except that the band of ways you can ‘be yourself’ without getting into trouble is very small, and shrinking all the time. A friend of mine posted on facebook that his community had passed a law against wearing your clothing in such a way that your underwear show. He was pleased – I am not. I am alarmed at how little freedom we have in the “land of the free”, and how fast it is eroding. What you wear is a form of freedom of speech.

Anyway, I seem to have wandered off my original point. Certainly, we don’t want a sociopath to “be themselves”. Of course, “Be yourself within certain boundaries” doesn’t sound nearly as nice.

I think I have widely different definitions of which those boundaries should be than most people. And it scares me that those boundaries get smaller every year. I like the idea of a widely diverse population. But it seems like unless you’re riding the exact middle of human behavior, there’s someone who doesn’t want you doing what you’re doing. And I guess I feel like they should be free to want that, but not able to enforce that. Some percentage of them have some political power, and they *do* enforce their beliefs on our behavior.

As a side note, increasingly it seems there is a move to force people to provide services even to those they disagree with, to fight discrimination. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of discriminating against gays or blacks or what have you – but I’m not sure this is the solution. I do think there should be a minimum subset of rights we all have. I do not think that owning weapons is on the list. I do think the freedom from having them aimed at you ought to be.

I do know that every law passed makes us less free – and we never delete laws, and we add new ones all the time. At this point only someone who does nothing but study the law could even keep track of what is and isn’t legal.

I don’t seem to have any consistent point or even thread of thought here, so I’m going to stop for now.