One year ago today: December 1, 2015, it will be a sad day.
Five years ago today: December 1, 2011, 23.5mm, duh.
Nine years ago today: December 1, 2007, no clear instructions.
Random years ago today: December 1, 1981, my first budget, ever.
MORNING
The jack is back from the shop and these guys are beyond professional. When I first saw the job, I thought they had found the original handle. Take a look at this photo and tell me that isn’t a top-caliber work. The fit and finish are perfect. This was not a simple as it may look, there were some clearances that had to be planned around.
On the premise that any movie with Morgan Freeman is worth a ‘boo, I made some tea and gave it a view. That must have been one risqué book in it’s time. But it is also fiction, the nobleman who hires the woman for companionship and falls in love with her. I don’t think so. But I liked the ending, where the retired pimpstress drowns on the journey over, so nobody on the island knows when Moll takes her place.
I’ve hit a similar stretch with the book “Improbable”. It goes along fine until you hit the chapters where you get the author describing what gambling addiction is about. Who cares? Get on with the story, man. That’s what I mean, I can understand gambling, but it doesn’t follow that I give a twit about how people who do it justify themselves. It’s like listening to some goof describe why he likes getting drunk. No matter how they word it, all I hear is that they are such boring assholes to begin with that vices, by comparison, seem like fun.
The premise of this book is the possibility of what would happen to gambling if someone figured out the randomness. Consider that certain situations which seem random exist because nobody has put the pieces together yet. The book is top notch interesting when it sticks to that theme. In this case, our hero is an epileptic who takes an experimental drug. It takes the position that while you cannot predict the future, you can to an extent control it. Like frinstance, if I go out and buy a replacement motorcycle soon, the fact that I have the cash is hardly random, yet there are some who would say I was “lucky”.
Big Sur, California.
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NOON
It was warm enough by noon to get me over to the air conditioned library. They have a mini-cart of coffee and today were featuring this concoction from Starbucks. Peppermint Mocha, another one of those dismal Millennial candy stuffs that passes for food. Starbucks, fostering the legend that a good cup of ordinary coffee isn’t fashionable any more. They should just eliminate the coffee and sell milkshakes, or make that artificially flavored liquid-of-some-sort shakes.
They ask the same question, where can a person learn electronics to the point where they can build original things. And my answer, sadly, is that as far as I know, there isn’t any such place. I don’t want to discourage them, but look at the lies and bull that I had to put up with?
It took years to get past the nonsense. How many times did I have to unlearn complicated instructions and build something myself before the instructions made any sense? Things that should have taken an hour took months because the book was wrong. Ha, to see what I mean, pick up a copy of Popular Mechanics with their claim to show you “How To Build Anything”.
It sounds great, except their instructions are written by imbeciles. A typical example would be their article on building a “rocket stove”. The first step says to lay one concrete block with the holes “facing out”. Isn’t that bloody helpful? The rest of the instructions are equally vague. Last I heard, there were six ways to place a block on its side. These are the people who will be sending a spaceship to Mars?
That’s what I mean when I say we now live in an era where majority rule determines what is “true”. This does not mean if 50 million publicly-educated Millennials say the world is flat, then the world actually is flat. No, no, it means that idiots in the majority can determine what happens next. Like I said about programming and C+. It is the worst language, so how did it become a standard? Majority rules.
You see, not that long ago, people had a firmer grounding in facts because that is what was required to survive. But today, very few products have any serviceable parts. The end-user is dependent on a factory somewhere to build his iPad and his cell phone. He can develop the weirdest notions of how the thing works and still be rated a power user. With that in mind, here is a better example.
The computer as a scientific instrument. If 50 million Millennials say it is a toy, does that make it a toy? In one sense, yes. It dictates the next series of computer factories that start up will be geared to produce a toy. Soon there is no support or even spare parts for any other type of machine. Just ask anybody who uses XP. All you got left is the toy, so what is “true” has been determined by a group that have no grounding or even interest in productivity. Majority rule has indeed determined what is “true”.
NIGHT
Good, the paperback quickly got past the sympathy for the poor gambler part, at least for now. If you always wanted some easy to understand explanation of probability theory, the book will teach you a lot. Kind of like this blog, you have to read so much of it, that’s the trade-off. What I like is the explanations of “determinism”, a word that gets its share of tossing around. A Iot of this ties in with the magnets I was seeking to purchase. The magnet induces an electric current when passing near a wire conductor.
This [electromagnet] effect was discovered not by an electrical experimenter, but by a philosopher, Maxwell. This was revolutionary at the time, that one could use other disciplines to make scientific discoveries. You should read the book for entertainment, but here is the quick definition of determinism. Last day we talked about how some events seem due to chance, but some early French philosophers thought that one through. The classic example is flipping a coin. Is the outcome due to chance?
Or are there forces at work, that, if we knew how to measure them, we could predict 100% of the time if it would be heads or tails? Think about it—determinism says that everything that happens is a result of what happened before. If you could measure the resistance of the air, the momentum of the coin, the time of flight, the arc, the tension of the tosser’s thumb, and every variable involved, determinism says you could know the result in advance every time. All you need is better measurements.
That’s only the first half. Although we do not yet have perfect measuring instruments, we’ve come a long ways. One thing nobody can dispute is that scientist’s are incredible when it comes to measuring things. However, we just learned that precision is often lacking. How is that handled? Ah, enter another philosophy. Take a lot of measurements and calculate the average. That calculated number is called a statistic.
Who remembers the bell curve? The theory is called “central tendency”. Get fifty carpenters to measure a board, you’ll get fifty answers. But most of the answers will be grouped around a single point. That point may not have any measurement that is exactly on the spot, but that theoretical point represents the best answer for the length of the board. There, now you know actually quite a bit about determinism.
What I mainly draw from it is something I’ve always felt since a child. Just because somebody does not understand something or can’t follow the logic, that does not attach any supernatural cause to events they cannot understand. Which is why I want them to discover life on Mars before I’m gone. It wipes out the basis of organized religion. I don’t dislike religion, but I dislike people who use it as an excuse to remain ignorant. Primary example: critics of Darwin. If they use religion to argue against Darwin, then they don’t understand what he said and should shut up.
Invitation: if you return tomorrow, I will give you some outrageous and, to some, infuriating statistics about IQ and social status. And why you never believe some divorced, 30 year old welfare case mother with illegitimate children who tells you her IQ is 130. It never happens.
ADDENDUM
Speaking of Millennials, I’ve decided to write the web’s best Millennial directions for making a sandwich:
1) Get bread.
2) Put butter. (Don’t spread it, just “put” it.)
3) Add “filling”.
20,000+ hits per day. Goes viral. Please “like” me. Friend me. Anything. It’s not like you haven’t noticed 100% of the rampage school killings lately aren’t the same two-bit prick-head zit-faces who have always been surplus no matter what they do. The Internet now gives them a forum.
Last Laugh
Google “pub in UK” result.
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