One year ago today: December 26, 2018, three times as many . . .
Five years ago today: December 26, 2014, Indians and musicians.
Nine years ago today: December 26, 2010, right here on page 252.
Random years ago today: December 26, 2015, uncannily accurate cabin figures.
Here, I found that picture of the raccoon trap. This could almost be called a man trap because you have to crawl 3/4 of the way inside to position the bait. The trigger is that metal strip at bottom left. Shown here the bait bowl in empty. That’s because the feral cats got it. They are light enough to get over the treadle without tripping it. So far, nothing has been caught but we know the raccoons are out there.It was such a nice day, the boys and I decided to do nothing.
It was sailing for a port in the Netherlands to pickup the required army for an invasion. It is sometimes called the Fourth Crusade, mostly by people who think up such things. A Crusade is Christian against Muslim, not Catholic against Protestant. The King of Spain didn’t get along with the Queen of England. Then again, Spaniards rarely get along with anybody, but back to the Armada. Like most sea battles, it was determined mainly by luck and error. But what I’m getting is the horrible logistics on the Spanish side. For instance, the army was there, but wasn’t ready.
At that time, Spain was the greatest empire in the world, totally due to gold extracted from the Americas by unbelievable cruelty. Other than fuedalistic exploitation, the Spanish appear to have had no other aptitude for politics, leaving decrepit systems most places they even touched. The Brits had their saps, as well. Twice during the battles in the English Channel, an admiral stopped to loot a galleon while the rest of the fleet struggled on.
Strangely, the cannons on the Spanish ships were supposed to be fired by the soldiers on board. Spain still fought by using grappling hooks and boarding parties. This meant such soldiers who could fire a cannon had zero experience doing it from the deck of a rolling ship. The English, on the other hand, could get off a cannon shot every minute, never allowing the enemy to close. That the English defeated the Spanish in a channel battle is myth, neither side lost a ship.
It was when the Spanish got near the Dutch coast and could not manouver that the English fire-ships broke up the formation. It was this mess that the English attacked, quitting only when they ran out of ammunition. But the Armada was still intact, minus the army they were supposed to ferry across the Channel. That Channel was now blocked by the English, so they tried to sail around Scotland and Ireland. They ran out of supplies and most were wrecked on the rocky shorelines by Atlantic storms. The English lost about 90 men dead, but the rest were held on board ostensibly in case the Spanish returned, but in reality so they didn’t have to be paid. Around half of them died of disease and starvation. That really puts the royal you-know into the Royal Navy.
One of the documentaries I viewed was almost an hour long, yet there was not scene of the man in a fire suit. Remarkable. Here’s today’s trivia. Where does the salute come from? When knights wore armor, they had to raise their visors to talk to each other. There you go.
The Bell Lab mousetrap (T-rex).
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Again, I’m not going to write much about Xmas. I think you’ve got as much of it as you already want. Today, on the long walk, the doggies and I were pondering the outcome of A.I. and how, in its present rotten form, it will change warfare. I would like to see an end to conflict, but you know the odds of that. The best example I can think of is the development of “smart bullets”, but more examples will surely come along. Once again, the problem C+ and its inherent hackability. C+ code probably cannot be made invulnerable, or at least doing so would likely be more expensive that scrapping it and starting over.
Smart bullets are supposed to guide themselves to the target. Electronically, there are a limited number of ways to do this. All are susceptible to hacking. I’m reminded of an article I once read by a scholar called Atteridge(?) who wrote about electronic weaponry just before WW I, when the military was just beginned to use radio waves. Bear with me a moment and I’ll explain the connection. Atteridge speculated that radio waves could be developed to remotely detonate explosives. Not by a wireless trigger, but the explosives themselves.
This would render modern warfare obsolete. The abiity to explode artillery limbers, ammunition pouches, and magazines would, he said, revert warfare back to the age of pikemen and archers. The advent of microchips in ordinance brings what he thought back into focus, the major difference being the methodology. Rather than the power of the radio wave, we would use digital signals. Make no mistake about two things. There are some military minds in our once-great country who are taking this form of warfare seriously. And secondly, not one of them has ever read Atteridge. Everyone born since 1991 knows there were no smart people before then.
Embedding chips inside ordinance re-opens the door to the possibility of tactics like disarming the enemies ammunition or even using it against back against him. After the developments of the past seventy years, it would be foolhardy to consider anything impossible. And with the increasing militarization of the police, it is only a matter of time before the technology is used for what, in our surveillance society, still called law enforcement.
The people most vulnerable to facial recognition are those who posted thousands of pics of their faces on eFAG. Since each match involves thousands of internetworked digital points, there is no way to hide, by wearing glasses or growing a beard. This technology will get worse by getting better. Again, I stress it is not facial recognition that is bad, it is the uses to which it will be put.
A good question at this point would be am I immune from the system, since I have never posted any close-ups of myself on -line. Nope, it just means that the electronic records on my are kept until such a time as future events establish a match. I call the aarping. I coined that word. It derives from the AARP (American Association of Retired People). You see, there are a lot of people over 50 who are not on file because they don't smart phone or use computers. The AARP mission is to get them on file.
Now, leaving the above topic aside, this is where my hobby interest in Morse code lies. Morse code is best transmitted by cable, not radio waves. It does not require computer chips and if I found any connected to my Morse key, I would rip them out. I doubt I’ll ever have any chance to use Morse code in my lifetime, but then again, I’ve also studied celestial navigation. Satellite failure is about to become a real concern with “space companies” launching thousands of who-knows-what into orbit. Such corporations have even less oversight, accountability, or transparency than most government departments staffed by sub-educated non-elects.
I find it odd that slanted media like the New York Times and Washington Post are so gung-ho about A.I. They give the current versions rave reviews where they should be issuing cautions. There could have two opposite explanations. Either they have no friggen idea how A.I. operates, or they know something we don’t. Quick, pick the right answer. One thing the Internet has proven is that when everybody is an expert, nobody is an expert.
ADDENDUM
“Sunspring”. It’s a movie made from a script that purports to have A.I. It claims to be created by a neural network, but if you believe that, watch the movie (no link)*, it’s less than ten minutes long. Don’t try to follow the plot, there isn’t one. It is a strung together smash of sentences that amount to babble. I was reminded of that early Apple program (back when they had real programs instead of apps) that would fake a conversation based on any answer you gave it. What was called? I keep thinking it was “Lisa”, but wasn’t Lisa the least successful Apple computer of all time?
The 2017 movie is your prime example of what is not A.I. It is solidly the mlllennials idea of what is being passed off as A.I. Sadly, it is about as bug-free as the code they write. It’s a good example of the dreaded “curve-fitting” which is slithering its way into more and more devices. I view the current examples of A.I. as what happens when coders increasingly learn to produce apps with built-in deniability as their past work catches up with them.
*this blog avoids links to sites that urge you to enable their cookies, and this blog does not associate with Pinterest at all. (Except by mistake.) There is plain something funny going on over at Pinterest.
