March 11, 2022

Yesteryear
One year ago today: March 11, 2021, maybe it’s the hinges?
Five years ago today: March 11, 2017, old Highway 640.
Nine years ago today: March 11, 2013, dislocated, not broken..
Nine years ago today: March 11, 2013, these momentous issues.
Random years ago today: March 11, 2012, Finnish & German.

           [Author's note: not a typo, the orignial 2013 post contained two March 11s. The blog was posted before the error was resolved. These things happen in a work this size.]

           It is 5:30AM and here is a view of the upgrades on the dresser. It’s blogged because circumstances took me five years to get around to this chore. The knows don’t match but neigher to they clash, the new piece is the right-side picture. The price of this hardware has become prohibitive. I now buy only at flea markets or salvage them. Incredible what’s going on out there, I wonder how people are getting by. The scary part is maybe they aren’t. I will continue with my hurricane shed just to be on the safe side. The pallet walls are 3/4” thick so far.

           So that black dude who was paid to bait a race war got 150 days in jail. The guy who lied to the police that he was attacked by Trump supporters. Hardly a fitting punishment, the mood is that if he had been white, he’d have got 20 years and the J6 treatment. One more thing, when you see a pic on-line of a couple making love with all their clothes on, somebody usually adds the caption or comment, “At least he took his hat off”. That was me.

           And Big Tech has temporarily lifted its ban on calls for violence if they are directed at Russia. The war that Biden built is fizzling faster than his voter base. From Redditt, I learned a pickup line I like but have no use for: “Wanna listen to a movie?” The banks continue to hammer down silver prices, it almost got away on them this week. How about the latest rover designed for moving cargo on the Moon and other planets? Shown here, it persists with the small wheels which confine it to flat terrain. I call it the “shopping cart”.

           As shown, it is operating on sand dunes. I thought part of space exploration was to find alien life. Whoever does so first will have a dominant position over us all because it will likely have technology the human mind cannot imagine. But it also has to be useful and that’s the peculiar thing. On Earth of you want something useful, shall we say the finest specimens of mankind’s progress do not live in the sand dunes. Seeking things good for man, one normally does not go looking for people who live in the desert.

           One spot of good news is Montana is beginning to pump oil in defiance of Biden’s shut down mandate. At $7 per gallon they can’t be blamed. And it is pretty hard to invade Montana from the outside without being spotted. If he does, it’s “Biden’s Last Stand”. And am I the only one who notices so many “activists” are persons who lack a skilled trade? I understand proportion, so should not at least one activist in eight be a welder or pilot or something?
           And I’ll tell you who needs to be dehydrated. The azz-clown who made Blu-ray disks the same size as DVDs. They fit but they won’t play. That’s millennial marketing for you. Next, rumors abound that Biden says if the mid-terms are “stolen” by Republicans, he will veto every bill they pass. Good, not only does that prove how scared shitless they are, it will expose how weak the Democrats are, and make him universally hated except by evident lunatics. And Chuck Norris is 82? Yep. Today.

Picture of the day.
Marilyn Monroe holding drone propellor.
(before she was blonde.)
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           I found the mist nozzles. Actually, I found the whole mist kit. It was $20 marked down to $10, so the hummingbirds and cardinals will like me. I got a couple of the fittings wrong but that is one scooter trip to the store for an exchange. At the same time, I picked up enough pieces to fit together one of the bathroom faucet arrangements. You may have forgotten how the clearances were tiny after I enlarged the bathroom so you didn’t have to walk around the sink to get to the head. But that left no room for the smallest store-bought models. They were either too high and bumped the mirrors, or too short to reach over the rim of the sinks.

           This misting system says it is temporary and can be moved around. Don’t believe it, the pieces are far too flimsy to last more than once or twice with that. I’m still short two planned shelves in the silo, but I balked at the price of each 2x3” support. $6.50. I think maybe time to go through my scrap pile and rig something together. Yes, that is the apple pie I baked while this was going on.

           They are rare but on-line there are a few excellent animations of logic gates. The way they work is not easy to describe in words and diagrams, which is part of the learning process. For example, once a gate is in a state, it does not matter if the inputs change until the next clock pulse. I did not know this and it was maddening to see an input change without altering the output. This clock pulse is a moving thing and I had a real time visualizing it until the animation.
           It’s becoming easier to see why the GPS systems are generally so screwed up. There are several models of integrated circuits (chips) that contain these gates, but there are several configurations in how those gates operate. I think the terms are active-hi and active-lo, but the point is I’ve repeatedly seen examples of people grabbing a chip without knowing about these differences, in too many cases they are not even aware of them. And it is teaching me why I never did properly learn this material the way it was presented. Up to now, I just programmed a gate when I needed one, or left it up to the Arduino. I still do, but this time I know why.

           There’s a storm brewing, sunrise this morning was too perfect. I set up the time lapse camera but, alas, that thing is unreliable. A typical millennial design, it can appear to be working while doing nothing. As a generation, they have learned the default mode is doing the job right. There were clouds scudding in from the southeast, a warning sign. But by the time I got the camera working, it was daylight and unfiltered lenses don’t pick up clouds that well.
           Another indicator is these slow moving bugs, which have congregated on my pistachio trees for whatever bug season it is. They are slow moving and called stink bugs, but have no apparent aroma to me. The big on is almost dead center, so big I mistook it for a spider at first. Note the excellent shed siding in the background. I’ve a day planned indoors tomorrow should the storm arrive but all it is now is a rather pleasant strong breeze. If it keeps up nice, I’ll get to the back side of that shed. Where is that hillbilly when you need him?

ADDENDUM
           Insane as it sounds, samples of A.I. code are getting harder to find. I did not do well with the way the two available modes of A.I. were taught in the 80s. Namely inference engine and fuzzy logic. What I’ve seen since then is not advancement, but further complication. The code has become nearly impossible to decipher. There was a module on machine learning, but I just read a borrowed textbook and decided not to take the course. I did not care for the way so much or the training was geared away from what computers could do toward whether or not people “liked” the results. Yes, Tyler & Brandon, this was a problem long before you made it a problem.
           Machine learning requires tons of data input before it begins to make predictions. I found the subject difficult because it is very similar to a type of puzzle I’ve never solved. You’ve seen the, where you want to figure out which hotel guest was on which floor using which key. You are actually producing a dataset. With A.I. you get a series of datatsets that refine themselves, based on probabilities that remind me of fuzzy logic. A.I. regards these as separate subjects. I doubt I could go back and pass my exams.

           One feature is consistent, each “program” suffers the collective bias of its creator. Once a wrong path is taken, it is practically impossible to back out of it. The code prefers what the coder wants and the end result is generally sub-optimal for my needs. Here is what a dataset looks like, I won’t go into detail, but this shows the win-loss situation for four sports teams. I immediately dislike the code because it is not self-explanatory and abuses punctuation. By feeding enough of these results, it becomes possible for the computer to predict the outcome of a new situation, say team 3 playing team 2. In this dataset, team one has a 50% chance of winning against team 2 or team 3. Can you see it?

           To those who follow, that is why it looks to me like fuzzy logic. One more feature I strongly object to is the commands issued to crunch the data. They are written by others and you must have blind faith that they’ve covered every possible scenario when in fact, that is impossible in real life. I’ve talked about my original A.I. program and now I’ve a mind to see if I can get good old basic to duplicate that as a demo of the difference between real programming and dumb coding which relies on imported modules and libraries. That places supreme reliance on some remote person doing their job right. That is not at all a good idea in this era of built-in deniability.

           If you are not familiar with fuzzy logic, it is based on probabilities and often a memory of a pattern that previously occurred. As a super easy example, suppose Team A beat Team C a hundred times in a row. And Team C Beat Team B once. What happens when Team A plays Team B. We don’t know, but fuzzy logic says Team A will kick ass.
           Yes, my program will be simple and I’ve done it before. But I stopped only after getting the program to exhibit the intelligence, which is a dot on the screen attempting to move in a straight line. The modules to allow it to use “memory” were not developed yet. The code was too complex and the necessary amounts of memory were rather expensive. Ask me about this later, I would need to bone up on BASIC, my language of choice for A.I. because it is readable. And also to demonstrate that A.I. is not an advanced programmiing concept and does not require "modern" computer code.