Ellie K's Annex Feed

Shearing time: Let's go hyper-local Arizona

2026-07-11T01:30:00.000-07:00

The original post of this name and URL was written in 2010. My 2026 update begins at the "Click here for more" jump.

It's that time of year again. In September, Navajo sheep herders start coming down from the mountains north of Valley of the Sun. I hope they're psychologically well-prepared for news of the big city:

a broken dam due to burst bladders at Tempe Town Lake ("bladders"?)
$1,000,000 price on the head of Maricopa County's Sheriff Joe by the usual Mexican cartels/drug lords
the ever popular (no, not really, only to me and Sheriff Joe Arpaio!) Arizona Senate Bill 1070, also known as Arizona Immigration Reform.

To commemorate shearing season, this post provides an extravaganza of gentle sheepy imagery, from varied sources. Well, I admit, from two sources: a Zazzle merchant and Amazon.com. The images were so nice, I thought you might enjoy looking at them too.

Hmm... I need to find a better source for illustrations than re-purposed advertisement images, especially since I don't participate in any online ad program. I'm definitely not a Zazzle or Amazon-affiliate website.

A sweet sheep

Consider this a follow-up to my post referencing findings by the Floating Sheep blog.

Coda and update

I was young and foolish in 2010. Those Amazon links broke long ago! Today is July 9, 2026. I replaced the Amazon ads with ruminant-themed activity of Matthew Zook. He's webmaster of the Floating Sheep blog.

Professor Zook held a class competition for Best Map featuring sheep in New York City. Very challenging, as there probably weren't any sheep, not even in Sheepshead Bay, in 2010. (Maybe a few can still be found in the most remote and exotic of New York City's five boroughs: Staten Island.)

The contest winner was Team Mutton, for their work, "Sheep of Dreams", depicting:

... the locations of seven deadly plagues affecting sheep according to an ancient prophecy. The map uses kernel density estimation, a type of spatial analysis, to show where high densities of each plague occurred in the past. These indicate the most dangerous areas for sheep! They must try to avoid them in order to survive the same plagues, as foretold, prior to the second appearance of The MUTTON.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (their motto is "Know the World, Show the Way, From Seabed to Space") could probably keep Professor Zook and his students occupied with many exciting GIS projects.

Sheep of Dreams

This slideshow about the winning map transforms the substance of my prior, rather lacking-in-substance post so that it matches its title about going hyperlocal... although the sheep story that follows is set in New York State, not Arizona. Sorry. It was the best I could do. However, I DID manage to fix the embarrassing spelling error! Adjective sheer in "a sheer blouse" describes gauzy, almost transparent material, nearly see-through. Shearing might be an adverb and it is what one does to overgrown sheep's wool.

Although there haven't been portents of imminent return, don't take any chances: Stay away from sheep-interdicted geolocations, as you don't want to be tangling with The MUTTON.

Team Mutton: Sheep of Dreams via Slideshare

If this is appealing, I highly recommend a visit to Professor Zook's Slideshare profile. Among other things, there is a brief illustrated narrative of the professor's first encounter with the floating sheep:

"It is a playful entity, which engages in various comedic activities, manipulating the landscape and critiquing human materiality."

The playful entity was revealed as a "powerful yet humorous force in the natural and urban environment of Missoula, Montana." Keep an eye out for Iron Sheep too.

Scribd acquired Slideshare: Do not tarry!

Something comparable to tangling with The MUTTON might be on the horizon: Scribd acquired Slideshare recently. Both sites are intended as repositories of user-created content. Instead, they have morphed into garbage heaps of purloined internal corporate presentations, illegally reproduced chapters of engineering textbooks, partially redacted CIA Reading Room releases, sample test questions for every sort of minor accreditation exam, job seeker resumes, old securities offering prospectuses, and conspiracy theories about Atlantis, the Federal Reserve, Jews, aliens (extra-terrestrial, not undocumented), 9-11, etc.

The Scribd and Slideshare interfaces are slightly different, but despite warnings everywhere that copyrighted material is not allowed, both sites are piled high with copyvios. I'm unsure what their past or current business plans are, but I doubt that Scribd or Slideshare are long for this world. They are among the vestiges of what I have been demise of Web 2.0 maybe? I am not the only one with such concerns: see this 2020 post, Where Have All the Bloggers Gone? by another former IBMer although he was a much more glorious one than I was at GPD San Jose, using queueing theory to model storage products performance.

Vibe coding an IQ test using GPT5

2026-05-07T07:35:36.486-07:00

The purpose of IQ tests is to measure cognitive ability NOT knowledge per se. Education should not be about memorizing test answers (even though it often is). The idea of IQ test prep is even worse, as it defeats the entire purpose of psychometrics; yet evidence of efforts to increase one's IQ are everywhere online. Sometimes, it is unclear whether the goal is increasing intelligence, or just getting better IQ test results!

After a brief peek into this world, I found myself taking a timed online IQ test developed by GPT5.

reddit brain training

reddit offers multiple subreddits for users who are intent on increasing their IQs. First, I read this morose post in r/cognitiveTesting: I took mensa's online IQ test and got 95 despite thinking all my life that Im smart: (make some allowance for English as a second language... maybe?)

Throughout all my life, I was told i was intelligent and my relatively low grades didnt reflect poor cognition but rather, laziness. In secondary school... I was painfully mediocre, bordeline on below average, though teachers said ''if you specifically study more, you'd excel'' And always coped by saying ''its because im lazy, not because im dumb;;
In reality, i was both.

Dont know how i managed to get into a good uni. At uni, Im not the perfect student and Im a bit dissatisfied that study isnt easy. I just wish I was more intelligent
I know its mostly biological, but can i naturally increase my IQ?

redditor Yonderboy responded:

Look up quad n-back (QNB). I can’t vouch for it personally, and most people will tell you it’s not possible (without ever having tried it), but there are a few cases of people dramatically improving test scores, school performance, and subjective feelings of cognitive ability after very prolonged (> 6 months) and regular (> 3.5h/wk) QNB training.

What is N-back training?

N-back tasks are often used in psychology and cognitive neuroscience assessments to measure working memory. The n-back task consists of reading a series of letters to the test subject. The subject indicates whenever a letter repeats some number of letters previously. The n in n-back is the number of letters. n = 3 is typical.

Some redditors and, admittedly other, less unhappy people, enjoy doing n-back tasks as a game. The IQ test redditors are interested in them as a means for improving memory, memory capacity, and increasing fluid intelligence. There is scant, if any, evidence that n-back "training" has any such beneficial effects.

Dual n-back is when two n-back tasks (e.g. one auditory and one visual) are administered simultaneously. Of course, there is a subreddit devoted to that, r/DualnBack. It is easy to misread it as Dual In Back. Multiple phone apps are available for dual n-back enthusiasts.

At the end of his post, Yonderboy (see above) linked to a Google Group, which described a redditor who supposedly had impressive results from n-back training, going from baseline SAT and ACT scores of 900 and 16, respectively, to FSIQ (full-scale IQ? full spectrum IQ? some sort of IQ!) of 148. I followed the bread crumb trail. This is the post associated with those impressive cognitive gains. Emphasis is mine. 1000 sessions - awfuly slow progress (sic)

Hi there!
I really love the concept of improving your cognition through sheer mental will. Unfortunately, based on the available studies and anedoctedal evidence in this community, my improvement is absurdely low. I improved 2.0 points in average in over 1000 sessions in 2 years spam (Doing 6 sessions / day)

My recall and working memory always have been low. Concernig performance on IQ tests, I have done 3-4 different ones Over the span of 3 years and my IQ improved roughly 20 points (scoring 115-120 now). I attribute this increase to a general improvement in a mental health diagnosis (psychosis), and Im questionig what has been the influence of dual n back - because I'm hardly improving score in-game.
Thoughts? Anyone with similar performance who kept pushing and saw results? Any tip to help improving? Thanks!

I think "...over 1000 sessions in 2 years spam" is supposed to be "in 2 years' span". Everything else is verbatim. Do any of these wannabe reddit geniuses know how to spell or use a spell checker?!!

There is an accompanying time series plot that looks like it came from a mobile phone; the Fresnel bands are photograph artifacts, not part of the analysis. I don't fault him for effort, and hope he continues recovering from his psychosis.

Progress after 2 years

The amount of time that is spent on improving results on IQ tests is concerning and sad. Multiple redditors who were were receptive to n-back and other methods agreed that any IQ increase or other cognitive improvement due to brain training would be transitory unless the training regimen were maintained. If neglected, expect regression to the initial (baseline) state.

My overall impression is a combination of Flowers for Algernon and Clavicle.

Gwern

The Google Group, Dual N-Back, Brain Training & Intelligence has 3412 threads including a few by practitioners of Quad N-Back. Yes, that means doing four n-back tasks simultaneously.

The intensity makes redditors seem like casual hobbyists in comparison! My personal opinion on this (whether n-backs or any other methods of IQ test "training") is this:

It's pseudoscience garbage. IQ is static; it cannot be changed.

Punished redditor: Sad but typical fate

By now, I was unsurprised that the Google Group pinned post, dated October 2010, had over 14,000 views. Its only content was a single link to a webpage on Gwern Branwen's website, "Gwern's N-back FAQ".

Could brain training (that Google Group's URL) get any stranger?

GPT-5 arrives

This thread, Inject Your Preferences: Apps and Live websites caught my eye. A helpful group member, Michael, was taking requests for digital preservation (or copying) online brain training resources:

Yo, share what apps and websites you want live for a more or less permanent basis? I've just spent a little time figuring out GitHub for the first time, easier than I thought. That means, I'll be able to keep websites live indefinitely.... I'm going through a phase where I'm testing out the coding abilities of AI, and with that, app and live website generation...

This is the best, and only answer:

I don't know. I want to be a genius though. In whatever way is possible through online training.

Artificial intelligence Intelligence Quotient

I didn't see links to any replicated websites or apps. but let's pause here, at Michael's Draft Cognitive Benchmark Site entry:

GPT5 as I'm just now finding is just super, super good at re-creating pre-existing ideas. Genuinely impressed... AI creativity will obviously take more time.... all I simply asked GPT5 was this precise prompt
"in HTML create a website that's designed to test a whole range of cognitive benchmarks and finish with an aggregate IQ score".
And here was the result, again a reminder that only for a test run I've put it on codepen, the final site will be placed on a GitHub link... https://codepen.io/qvmbioip-the-typescripter/full/ZYbJKjx
Between now and next Sunday (not this coming Sunday) I'll have to decide whether or not to have the final 'aggregate IQ score' spit out, which may or may not be accurate.

Go ahead and try it. I've worked my way up to an IQ of 54 after a few more tries following my initial attempt in early May 2026, see below.

*Since I don't trust any website with iframes and embedding, it was simply common sense to type this out.

Comment
by u/Firm_Opportunity3411 from discussion
in cognitiveTesting

Rare and amusing Saturday Night Live satire of Democrats

2026-02-24T13:41:00.002-07:00

It was near the finale of the 2024 U.S. Presidential campaigning. On the last weekend before the general election, Saturday Night Live satirized the media's penchant for the Democratic National Party; or perhaps, the GOP's allegations of such.

I was delighted that the episode included a faux David Muir, whom I perceive as a thinly-veiled version of MSNBC's Rachael Maddow. (Muir does manage to maintains his composure and admittedly, Rachael's show is intended as commentary not reporting.) The real Muir's news delivery has a distinctive "the world is ending!" tone, which isn't modulated by the gravity, or relative lack thereof, of the content he reports. I'm not a media professional nor even much of aa viewer, so I was delighted that at least one other person, the ersatz SNL Muir parodied real Muir's genuine anchorman voice with an edge of hysteria!

A faux Minnesota governor Tim Waltz made multiple appearances. He professed his love of fried foods and dislike for anything spicier than a tomato.

This doesn't happen very often

The real then-Vice President and DNC general election candidate Kamala Harris made a cameo appearance toward the end. Her SNL counterpart was great, so much so, that the opening of SNL made me laugh outright!

If you pan out, they look remarkably like the real thing.

SNL viewer reactions

Plenty of people; i.e. the masses including me; were watching by time-delay via YouTube. There were many expressions of grief and anger in the comments. Did I already mention the extreme antipathy toward Donald Trump, regularly on display in his first term?

In case you've forgotten, or are still trying to forget, Joe Biden had an unsettling tendency to smell women's and young ladies hair. While visiting YouTube, I realized that this should have been well-known long before Biden's tenure as President of the United States.

I found a very brief clip of former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He is being vigilant, shooing Joe Biden away, preventing the VP's attempt to sniff the hair of Sessions' very young granddaughter. Democrats didn't like Sessions. They didn't like the government waste and corruption that he acted against either

Government opacity or corruption

Sessions was appointed to lead the Department of Justice during the Trump 1.0 administration. He held the position of Attorney General for less than two years. I'm still impressed with one of his lesser-known accomplishments, in support of victim and taxpayer justice.

During the Obama administration, funds from settlements, fines, and penalties paid by corporate wrongdoers for malfeasance were partially or entirely diverted to non-profits or other causes selected by lawmakers rather than to the U.S. Treasury.

Volkswagen AG was fined $2 billion for cheating on emissions tests in 2015. Instead of those funds going to the Department of Transportation and perhaps to the only national consumer automobile advocacy group, AAA, the Department of Justice required Volkswagen to build a network of electric vehicle charging stations, i.e. forcing investment in zero-emissions technology and promoting zero-emissions cars. American auto makers complained that it served as an unfair government-backed windfall.

In 2014, banks that deceived investors with risky mortgage-backed securities paid about $110 billion in fines and settlements:

Most of the money went to the U.S. Treasury then into the government’s general fund, where it can be spent on any budgeted item, including employee salaries. The funds are “spent as Congress authorizes.”

Seven states got $5.3 billion split among them. In New York State, the funds were not used to reduce loan balances for affected borrowers nor directed to areas who were harmed by the financial crisis. Instead, Cuomo used the money to repair the Tappan Zee Bridge and renovate the Port of Albany. He also allocated $50 million of it to build equestrian facilities for the New York State Fair. Other states deposited their shares of the funds into public employee pension plans.

In 2013, J.P. Morgan was ordered to pay $400 million in settlements and fines. Instead of paying restitution to victims of banking abuse, e.g. homeowners, the DoJ offered credit to J.P. Morgan for donations to nonprofits, including $7.5 million to the American Bankruptcy Institute’s endowment.

Double credit

Even worse was that the Obama-era DoJ considered these donations to be worth “double credit” against penalty obligations While direct forms of victim relief were still counted dollar-for-dollar, a $500,000 donation by BofA to La Raza took at least $1 million off the company’s bill. The Obama DoJ maintained a list of government-approved nonprofit beneficiaries, all liberal activist groups, such as La Raza, The National Urban League, The National Community Reinvestment Coalition, and NeighborWorks America. NeighborWorks is a successor to Acorn.

The Obama DoJ forced corporate defendants to allocate a chunk of their financial penalties to these groups. Banks were made to fund (mostly left-wing) activists, although such groups were neither victims nor parties to lawsuits.

It would be much fairer to the American people to stop Congressmen and the DoJ from funding their favorite NGOs and special interest groups with fines and settlements penalizing bad corporate actors. Instead, why not use the money for restitution to individuals who had been directly defrauded, by the specific corporate offenders. That is exactly what Jeff Sessions did.

On 7 June 2017, early in the Trump 1.0 administration, Sessions directed the DoJ and all 94 US Attorney's Offices:

“When the federal government settles a case against a corporate wrongdoer, any settlement funds should go first to the victims and then to the American people—not to the political friends of whoever is in power,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “Unfortunately, in recent years the DoJ has sometimes required defendants to make these payments to third parties as a condition of settlement. We are ending this practice and ensuring that settlement funds are only used to compensate victims and redress harm....”

Under the last Administration, the DoJ repeatedly required settling parties to pay community organizations that were not involved in the litigation nor harmed by the defendant’s conduct."

Mixed reactions

Democrats; instead, there were concerns expressed that in the case of environmental damages, only third party non-profits could do the necessary clean-up! As a result of Sessions directive, some were concerned that there would be no money or resources for environmental restoration. Via The New York Times, a lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center (perhaps a division of the Southern Poverty Law Center?) warned of the following Settlements for Company Sins Can No Longer Aid Other Projects, Sessions Says ((emphasis mine):

Frank Holleman, a senior lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center, said that if settlement money for environmental violations goes to the Treasury Department, it may be spent on something else, and prevent restoration of or protection of an affected community or ecosystem.
“You can’t just dump money in the river and it gets clean,” he said. “You have to contribute to a nonprofit that does the work to make it that way. It‘s not just being thrown away or given to these entities — it’s payments for a particular service.”

What about the EPA?!

Regardless of how one feels about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's competency, they have been a well-funded cabinet level government agency since President Richard Nixon recommended its creation to Congress in the Spring of 1970. The EPA was established on 2 December 1970.

Beautiful B-2 Spirit and not-so-beautiful DoD testimony

2025-07-04T03:40:00.020-07:00

Let's look at pictures first, before getting into the nitty gritty of U.S. Air Force project management.

Putting a B-2 through its paces at 90° North

This is a beautiful photo of a beautiful B-2 Spirit approaching the North Pole.

Testing B-2 performance at a
geomagnetic extreme point

The US Air Force provides some details about this test flight:

A B-2 Spirit flies to the North Pole on October 27, 2011, on a test mission from Edwards Air Force Base, California. The polar flight helped ensure that the B-2 maintains its combat capability in all environments...

The North Pole's coordinates are 90° North latitude and 0° East or 0° West longitude, take your pick. (For the sake of notational accuracy, it is usually expressed as 90° North but disregard that for the moment.) Patience, please, as I am going somewhere with this.

Comfortable expedition to the North Pole
thanks to Russian icebreaker (2013)

So, 90°N 0°E is merely a "quarter" rotation of the Earth away from coordinates of 0°N 0°E according to the map projection of the World Geodetic System 1984. WGS84 is an often used global reference system for modeling the Earth. The U.S. Department of Defense and GPS (Global Positioning System) both use WGS84.

Notably, the DoD developed GPS AND made it freely available to all in the early 1980s.

Null Island is L0L0

If one is doing geocoding with GPS and WGS84, the Library of Congress describes 0°N 0°E as

"a curious blend of real and imaginary geography, of mathematical certainty and pure fantasy"

The most exotic aspects of the location, referred to by some as Null Island, are captured by the depiction in the Library of Congress link above. Please click? It is a great image!

Further details, for the VERY curious, are available elsewhere in a secret repository:

"Null Island is an ephemeral geography, a foggy ship of state sailing thru autumn mists, surrounded by sirens and map cherubs. Null geocodes, welcome home."

Latitude 0, longitude 0 is also the Land of L0L0!

Null geocodes, welcome home

EDIT October 2025: Even the Wall Street Journal has become aware of Null Island! They think of it as the place where all poorly geocoded data goes and remains.

If you can’t follow directions, you’ll end up on null islandhttps://t.co/Wq3FAV1SO5 pic.twitter.com/tOVg0ozLHV
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) July 14, 2016

F-16 with bomb at Bagram

A GBU-54 is a really heavy precision-guided bomb. It uses both GPS and laser to find its target. Moving targets are challenging, and the GBU-54's "dual" guidance system improves accuracy.

In the photo below, a GBU-54 is mounted under the wing of an F-16 at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. I hope Joe Biden didn't leave it behind for the Taliban following our disastrous departure from Kabul in September 2021.

Image courtesy U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Christopher Boitz

I am curious whether those are two GBU-54s or one. If just one, does the smaller, oval-shaped thing next to it help launch it, or provide fuel for travel to its target?

I think it is just one bomb, not two, because both objects have visible part numbers that start with "BJ21". I would really like to see more of the mechanism to secure the bomb under the wing, and how it releases!

Thank you for your attention...

A few days ago, I saw a great meme thing on the Twitter X. It was a GBU-54 just like this one, hanging on the wing of an F-16. On the side was written, "Thank you for your attention to this matter". I can't find it now. This is the best I could do.

Peace through strength works.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. https://t.co/OkjMKOvsIS pic.twitter.com/QrCbYvlJQs
— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) July 3, 2025

That seems to be Donald Trump's new favorite phrase. I have read it frequently during the past few weeks, as part of his Truth Social and other communiques, especially with Iran and Israel, and the bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities in June 2025.

B-2s can deliver both conventional and nuclear missiles.

A very big flying wing!

The B-2 has a two-man crew, yet the aircraft is so large! It is much bigger than the two F-16s on the right and an F-18 on the left, in the image below.

Landing field at Anderson AFB in Guam

I like this next photo too. It really gives a sense of the size of a B-2, as an adult man walks the wing as part of routine maintenance.

Time to switch to the more serious part of this post.

Fear and loathing at the Department of Defense

In May 2024, Congressman Matt Gaetz and one of his colleagues questioned former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin about serious cost and reliability problems with the F-35.

Two of the most salient issues were cost control and conflict of interest. Let's start with a video excerpt.

Budget overruns and moral hazard

Only the grossest sort of corruption or lack of understanding would result in a manufacturer being responsible for performance testing of its own products. This is especially true when the product is an F-35. Each one costs about $100 million. Only 29% of the current fleet of F-35s are "mission capable", i.e. usable. Lockheed-Martin makes the planes. Lockheed-Martin also is responsible for reliability testing them. One would think it was time to find a different, more independent performance tester.

Given the combination of massive cost ($1 trillion) and massive budget overruns (an additional $700 billion) for the F-35 (and that over 70% of the planes are so unreliable that they cannot be used), is there any way of salvaging this disaster? The sunk cost fallacy always applies, but some sort of lesson should be learned from the debacle. Given Lloyd Austin's cranky demeanor during questioning, I'm not sure that anything was learned! Too bad that representatives from the contractor weren't present.

Matt Gaetz wasn't my first choice for attorney general, but he was developing into a surprisingly good Congressman; he did hs job very well here. The Department of Defense needs better internal controls, including a better utilized OIG (Inspector General) to act as deterrence for mishaps such as the mismanaged F-35 development project

*Not sure why the still shot for the above video is so awful. Matt's teeth look normal once the video starts playing!

L0L0 addendum: PIRATA, pirates, and Houthis

The Library of Congress informs that 0°N 0°E is also the home of Soul in the PIRATA program. (I'm a bit concerned, as Soul hasn't been heard from for 45 days.) Despite the intriguing name, PIRATA has nothing to do with piranhas, Pirates of the Caribbean, Somali pirates, "stateless dhows", nor those persistent Houthis.

Houthis are active on Twitter, where they all register as "Arts & Entertainment" accounts.

Who is the head of the Houthis? Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, of course.

Hostile Houthi activity primarily disrupts maritime traffic in the Red Sea, which adversely impacts western Europe and maybe China, not the United States. When President Trump decided to take more serious action in late March 2025, after 18 months of Houthi attacks, the U.S. Navy received minimal support from the most affected nations: one UK destroyer and one ship from France. Denmark sent a brand new frigate; unfortunately, the first time it was fired upon, its missile defense system didn't work, and then it totally lost power due to crew inexperience with the electrical system. The U.S. Navy had to defend it from Houthis and it got sent home. Greece also sent a ship that promptly broke down, but at least it had the excuse of being 20 years old.

Donald Trump set a time limit of 30 days for the Houthi campaign. On day 31, he asked for a status report, and decided that it wasn't worth the cost and potential hazards of further engagement. He negotiated a ceasefire with the Houthis in May 2025, thanks to the ubiquitous Steve Witkoff and, and more significantly, the Sultan of Oman.

On May 5, Trump announced that the US would “stop the bombings” after the Houthis told the US that “they don’t want to fight anymore” and agreed "not to blow up more US ships". Vice President Vance said that if the Houthis stop shooting in the Red Sea, they can “go back to doing whatever it was they were doing before attacking civilian vessels.”

Israel was not included as a party to the agreement, so they will still be contending with the Houthi menace until a separate detente is achieved.

Houthis launch missiles from both land and sea

I was surprised by the favorable tone toward Trump expressed by the Arab Center of Washington D.C. (a non-partisan NGO headquartered in Doha, Qatar), in their coverage of the US - Houthi ceasefire compared to CNN and The Times of Israel. CNN continues to ridicule Trump, same as ever; Israel is likely concerned that the ceasefire doesn't include Israeli vessels, as well as having lingering uneasiness about the sole Houthi ballistic missile that made it through and landed right near Ben Gurion Airport last year. I really hope there isn't any more of that.

Looking backward: Shifting U.S. allegiances in the Middle East

2025-05-21T16:29:00.145-07:00

This is a two-page excerpt from a book titled Muslims in Europe: Notes, Comments, Questions by Manfred Wolf, PhD. It comprises several dozen essays, written over the span of a decade.

I found the following brief section from "Muslims in Europe" of interest because Wolf wrote it in 2015. He had had a run of accurate short-term geopolitical predictions. I was sufficiently impressed, as I read with the benefit of hindsight, to give his longer term prognostications some consideration.

Some background about the scholar

After 40 or so years as a professor of English literature at San Francisco State University, Manfred Wolf worked part-time as a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, teaching Dutch language and literature.

Wolf also wrote an autobiography of his early life, titled Survival in Paradise.. It details his and his family's journey from pre-WW2 Germany to the Netherlands. A happy childhood was soon interrupted by abrupt departure--as Nazi Germany invaded western Europe--transiting through France to Portugal, then travel by ship across the Atlantic, and finally, adolescence in the Dutch Antilles in Curacao. For many years, Wolf wrote a column in a San Francisco weekly newspaper and many other non-fiction works and literary articles. "Muslims in Europe" is self-published. Wolf is not what I would consider a professional author, although he is a very fine writer!

Be aware that Manfred Wolf was about 80 years old in 2015. He is a liberal non-observant Jew, maybe leftist in his youth, who probably voted Democrat, up and down ballot, for all his years as a naturalized American citizen. He seems to possess a greater propensity for supporting exercise of First Amendment rights than many people of that demographic.

Manfred Wolf's response to Bari Weiss's announcement of
the new University of Austen

Less background about me

Manfred Wolf is the father of my former boyfriend and fiance of many years ago, Michael Wolf.

EDIT: The website for Manfred Wolf's autobiography, Survival in Paradise is apparently defunct. Perhaps it was due to expire as of 31 Dec 2025.

The last paragraph of interview of Wolf about the book included Michael's insightful question about his father's trek; I had wondered the same thing for many years. It is rather serendipitous to discover the answer today! Sadly, it is all gone now, but I recall the intent of Michael's (the son's) question and his answer!

To my enduring regret, I broke my engagement with Michael.

Let's get started!

I do wish Manfred Wolf had written more, or at least in more detail, than those two pages.

I don't recommend the next passage in the book! (It can be accessed by scrolling down in the text. It is a drawn-out analogy between being the male subject of unreciprocated romantic affection from a woman and being terrorized by jihadis or a religious fatwa. Seems a bit unhinged to me, or at the very least, written by someone with an icy emotional attitude toward relationships.

Obama and the Middle East

In 2015, I would have found it very surprising that the United States might shift its long-time alliances with Sunni countries (both Arab and not Arab, e.g. Pakistan) and Israel to Iran. As time passed, I realized that one indicator was Obama's initiation of nuclear non-proliferation negotiations with Iran. Those began in November 2013, in the aftermath of the Stuxnet hardware virus and its successful attack on SCADA protocol ICS (industrial control systems) used by Iranian nuclear facility centrifuges to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels.

Founding of the Quincy Institute in 2016 was another peculiar but suggestive event. This tweet provides a mostly accurate description. The Quincy Institute is a think tank founded and financed by George Soros, Charles Koch, and a Washington D.C. resident who is an Iranian expatriate. The Institute's flagship publication is Responsible Statecraft. I occasionally read it especially for a more balanced view of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Over time, my own views on Iran have evolved.

Lol. pic.twitter.com/8Owm4mANnl
— suri (@suri_washere) October 4, 2025

An initially secret transfer of $400 million from the New York Federal Reserve to the Central Bank of Iran on 17 January 2016 was not necessarily part of that shift. The prior day, former President Obama announced several important events pertaining to Iran.

release of five Americans held as hostages (no, they weren't left behind from the 1979 seizure of our embassy during the revolution!)
settlement of a 35+ year dispute over $600 million paid in advance by Iran for US military equipment purchases;
Iran's compliance with the first stage of the JCPOA nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action);
relief from selected sanctions.

Obama was in a hurry to do the funds transfer because the hostage arrangement was still in progress. Iran insisted that funds "repatriation" occur at the same time as the hostage release.

This is important because the obligation is still not widely understood, i.e. the U.S. did not just "give" $400 million to Iran. That perception spread widely and persistently due to confusion regarding the rather complicated deal and American inter-party strife. The Brookings Institute article, linked above, explains very thoroughly.

In summary, during 2016, Obama returned $400 million in principal and $1.3 billion in interest, in several installments, always in cash via Switzerland. Former President George H.W. Bush had wisely returned $200 million of the original $600 million to Iran in 1990, otherwise the interest accrued would have been even more!

Biden era rapprochement with Iran?

Several key appointments during the Biden administration supported Manfred Wolf's prognostications. It is difficult to determine whether these appointments were part of a coherent policy shift. The Iranian Experts Initiative (IEI) network was the most visible locus of Iranian influence in the Obama and Biden administrations. Of course, with that name, they were hardly hiding!

Ariane Tabatabai was a founding member of IEI. She was a 1st generation Iranian-American who served in a Department of State senior role and then as Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. She was in a position to influence U.S. policy decisions and access sensitive intelligence information. She frequently was in contact with former Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif without reporting it. How do I know? Because Senator Tom Cotton said so. I don't know if anything much came of this.

Robert Malley was Biden's Special Envoy for Iran, and he led efforts to resuscitate the nuclear deal negotiations. 18 months later, his security clearance was suspended and he was placed on leave due to mishandling classified information. Who had hired Ariane Tabatabai? Robert Malley!

Digression

Iran, like its neighbors, whether friend or enemy, Sunni or Shia, is capable of conducting influence operations in the United States. I suspect that the powers that be in Iran were more competent (thus more likely to be effective) than the combo of a mentally-diminished Biden, his Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and his National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.

Jake Sullivan might have been the best of the three. Yes, he made that statement about how calm the often volatile Middle-East was, a few weeks before 7 October 2023, but as yet, in mid-year 2025, only Hamas knows the rationale for their timing. Biden was condemned and replaced by his own political party, and Blinken is a dim bulb. He's now the director of the University of Pennsylvania Biden Center. UPenn has tried to distance itself from THAT fiasco by subsuming it into one of its other programs.

Nuclear deal reset efforts

The Biden administration's efforts to pivot toward Iran were rather hamfisted; regardless, their objectives were incompatible. Biden and Blinken wanted to re-initiate the JCPOA deal while punishing Iran with sanctions for various non-democratic and terrorist acts by the Iranian government and its proxies.

The initial obstacle was US activity during the prior 4 years of the Trump administration, most significantly, the 2020 killing of Qasem Soleimani. Just as the US could sanction Iranian proxies and individuals, so Iran seemed to realize that it could too. In December 2021, Iran imposed sanctions on (and requested Interpol to arrest) Trump, Pompeo, and eight others because of Soleimani. Meanwhile, the centrifuges at Natanz had increased uranium enrichment to 60%, their highest ever, and Blinken expressed concern over Iran's rapidly progressing ballistic missile development program as well.

U.S. entreaties for a nuclear deal in early 2022 during meetings in Vienna were at an impasse. Iran accused the U.S. of being the cause of the impasse.

In April 2022, something of a nadir was reached. According to Reuters reports, Iranian officials said Blinken had made frequent proposals to ease sanctions and extended various concession offers. Iran responded by

"declaring that even the assassination of all American leaders would not be sufficient to avenge the U.S. killing of Soleimani."

Efforts to revive the JCPOA were abandoned.

Yesterday, our deputy special envoy for Iran left his post as part of the U.S. team negotiating Iran's return to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action #JCPOA (he was in Obama admin). 2 others left too. They wanted the US to take a tougher approach. https://t.co/OO6n21UXTN https://t.co/CABmY0Ft3E
— Ellie ♕ (@EllieAsksWhy) January 25, 2022

The U.S. imposed sanctions on an Iranian-Russian oil smuggling network. Iran followed up with sanctions on Rudy Giuliani and more sanctions on Pompeo.

In August 2022, an Iranian plot to assassinate John Bolton for $300,000 and Mike Pompeo for $1,000,000 by IRGC operatives in the U.S. was uncovered.

Blinken did have one diplomatic breakthrough with Iran. After many months of secret then public negotiations, a prisoner swap of five Americans for five Iranians was completed on 18 September 2023. In addition to releasing the five Iranians being held on various charges in the U.S., Iran also demanded and received $6 billion in frozen oil funds held in South Korea.

Denouement

On 29 November 2023, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei delivered a speech on Twitter. He said that "U.S. plans for forming 'a New Middle East' have failed". He gloated that plans to eliminate Hezbollah resulted in its strength increasing by a factor of 10 and that Hamas's Al-Aqsa Flood was "an historic event that would de-Americanize the usurper regime" [Israel].

In the short-term (Manfred Wolf extended his prediction out to 2050 and it is merely 2025 now), views attributed to "the historian Glenn Young" were more prescient than Wolf's own. Glenn Young is Manfred Wolf's former brother-in-law, i.e. brother of Wolf's ex-wife.

Levity break

Why are they petting it?
— Bob Loblaw (@LoblawBobLaw) June 17, 2025

Aside: Russia and Crimea

I should have been more aware of the level of U.S. interest in Ukraine during the second term of the Obama administration. I was not; e.g. I didn't even know who Victoria Nuland, highly influential and very neocon State department Undersecretary of Eurasian Affairs, was until 2017.

I was also unaware that Crimea had been historically Russian, by population (lots of ethnic Tatars) and territorially. In the late 1950s or early 1960s, Nikita Khrushchev was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR. In a supposed show of magnanimity, he responded to the persistent undercurrent for Ukrainian independence by "giving" the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine. At the time, Ukraine was truly just another (the second?) Soviet socialist republic, so Khrushchev's gesture made no difference: It was all USSR.

I'm surprised that Manfred Wolf does not seem to be aware of this. Maybe he was, but thought Putin and Russia were too decrepit to do anything about NATO's eastward expansion, let alone take "kinetic" action to address the increasingly violent conflict between Kiev and its two eastern, ethnic Russian oblasts of Lugansk and Donetsk.

OMG Immigration police seen detaining people denied asylum

2025-05-17T15:03:00.001-07:00

Deporting illegal aliens

U.S. Customs Enforcement and Immigration officers are caught by the local Phoenix affiliate of ABC News, ABC15, in the act of DOING THEIR JOB! Just look at what is going on in downtown Phoenix today.

This is a Breaking News report. According to the ABC15 live action reporter,

Our crews at the scene on Wednesday morning saw agents waiting outside and detaining people as they exited the building. ABC15 spoke with a few of the people who were being placed in vans, who said they initially came to the courthouse for asylum cases, which they say were then dismissed.

Is case dismissed a good outcome?

The reporter asked questions of two women being assisted to their seats in one of the white vans. Through the assistance of a Spanish interpreter, both said that they had gone to court for hearings of their request for asylum cases; the immigration judge had "dismissed" both cases. One woman was from Venezuela, another from Mexico.

Asylum hearings are not like civil lawsuits or non-immigration related criminal charges! Dismissal of a lawsuit or criminal indictment would be a GOOD thing for a defendant. Dismissal of a request for asylum would NOT be a good thing for an asylum seeker. If dismissal were the outcome of these immigration court hearings, then arrest and deportation would follow.

ABC15 doesn't seem to realize this, as they "reached out to officials to find out why people were being detained or arrested".

Asylum as shortcut to migration

The consequences of illegal entry (i.e. deportation) are held in abeyance if one claims to be seeking asylum in the U.S. Until the presidential administrations of Obama or maybe, G.W. Bush, this sort of asylum seeking was rare, and mostly sought by citizens of Warsaw Pact countries during the Cold War.

As of 2018, an estimated 11 million illegal aliens resided in the U.S. including the Obama-declared DACA aka Dreamers. Between 10 and 20 million asylum seekers joined them during the four years of Joe Biden's presidency. Be aware that the entire U.S. population is about 330 million men, women, and children.

11 + 15 = 26 million illegal non-citizens residing in our country means that 7.9% of the people in our country lack legal status.

Not-so-developing story

ICE's response should surprise no one:

"U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is executing its mission of identifying and removing criminal aliens and others who have violated our nation’s immigration laws. All aliens in violation of U.S. immigration law may be subject to arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States, regardless of nationality... The agency publicly announces operational results when appropriate."

Illegal entry to the U.S. is a criminal act, yet ABC15 news didn't consider the ICE statement to be helpful in shedding light on the situation.

Chrome browser still has memory problems

They have been standing outside since 7AM this morning, in the mid-May heat. The illegal aliens have had an easier time of it.

Unlike the reporters, they were whisked away from the cool comfort of the courthouse into white air-conditioned vans.

104 degrees

ABC15 News is not so fortunate!

It is now 95 degrees downtown, with rising temperatures expected. Viewers were told that the reporting crew will stay put, to provide updates on this developing (?!) story.

Making North America into South America

Many of the 10 million people (minimum) now seeking asylum from Latin and South America who are currently residing in the U.S. give reasons such as an abusive husband, possible danger from local criminal gangs or drug cartels, systematic racism against indigenous groups, or really bad elected governments such as Maduro in Venezuela.

A justification often given by American and Canadian NGOs and migrant advocacy groups is that the political misdeeds of the U.S. government and large corporations prior to the year 2000, to nations due south of us, were so egregious and destructive that the citizens of those countries deserve to be given taxpayer funded residency in the U.S. without the usual path to citizenship required of foreign nationals desiring citizenship here.

These asylum-eligible (although not necessarily asylum granted) situations are broadly applicable to at least 10% of the populations of Mexico, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Belize. How many people might that be?

10% of the population of those nations, in order as listed, based on total populations by United Nations as of 2024 (projected) which is consistent with more current non-projected data from Worldometers (remember them from the COVID-19 days?) is

13.1 + 5.2 + 1.1 + 1.8 + 0.7 + 2.8 + 1.8 + 0.04 = 26.5 million people

Add that 26.5 million to the approximately 26 million already here, for a total of 52.5 million people in the United States who mostly don't read, write, or speak English, totalling 16% of the population. Of course, it could be 20% of those countries, in which case we would have

(26.5 x 2) + 26 = 53 + 26 = 79 million people

Now we're up to 24% of the population of the U.S.

Enough extrapolation. Let's say someone has been living in the United States for the past year, as these two women have. They've been receiving U.S. taxpayer-funded free housing, food stamps, mobile phones, clothing, medical and dental care, for themselves and any minors they brought along with them. Hearings before an immigration judge are very backed up. Sometimes cases take two or three years to heard.

My point here is that the United States cannot absorb the all of the developing world, which should be obvious to Americans, but apparently, is not.

Looking back at AZ SB 1070 and root causes

This could have been avoided. I recall Arizona State Bill 1070 and even wrote about it here, over 14 years ago.

Illegal immigration problems are sometimes due to lack of political will. In the United States, the more significant cause is the benefit accruing to some members of both political parties by disregarding our existing immigration laws.

For the Democratic Party, the common trope is that Democrats do want illegal migrants, as they're equivalent to "undocumented Democrats" as a loyal voting block for the next several decades. The equally disparaging trope ascribed to Republicans is that they don't want illegal migrants because the GOP are all racists.

In fact, both Republicans AND Democrats want more immigration, whether it is by illegal entry or under the auspices of the much abused H1-B visa program. Upper middle-class GOP and Dems enjoy the savings realized by having household help and home services provided by low wage migrants rather than paying fair wages to Americans. This extends to small business owners needing day laborers, low-skill jobs in agriculture (e.g. picking crops at harvest time), back-of-the-house restaurant workers, auto mechanics' helpers, farm hands, lowest level landscaping, paving, and abattoir workers, etc. These jobs are vital, although behind the scenes, for a developed economy to function.

Americans used to do these jobs, mostly when they first entered the workforce, but not necessarily. Until about 1970, these jobs paid sufficiently, and the prices of housing, food, medical care, clothing, and transportation were such that it was a living wage, usually sufficient to support a wife and a few children after a few years of saving... but this is a subject for another day.

Trailer Park Hillbillionaires

2024-11-23T20:30:00.003-07:00

For the love of God, PLEASE listen with volume on!

Elon plays a mean banjo. Count how many different versions of the stars-and-bars Zuckerberg wears on his t-shirts!

And yes, this video was created by generative AI but reddit didn't provide any additional details.

The Trailer Park Hillbillionaires
by u/johnpershing in aivideo

How many hillbillionaires can YOU count?

I'm unsure if the one standing at a distance, toward the end, is Warren Buffet or not. I thought Bill Gates with the jar of bugs is hilarious.

Plane malfunction illusion: Rolling shutter effect

2024-10-03T00:54:00.002-07:00

Chris wanted to take a photo while on an airplane flight. The aircraft was a Bombardier Q400. Chris didn't have a camera with him, only his Apple iPhone 3GS. The scanning order of his iPhone sensor combined with the light refracted from the airplane window caused a distinctive "detaching blades" phenomenon in the photo. Rotating the camera warps the blades in different directions.

Edit: Unfortunately for me, Chris is no longer sharing his photos online, but I have found others. Keep reading!

Bombardier Q400 digression

Q400 passenger airplane by The Cranky Flier on Flickr

There have been some serious safety concerns with the Bombardier Dash Q400 Turboprop. Persistent problems with faulty landing gear received plenty of media coverage. Also, landing gear failure is highly noticeable to passengers! Some of the worry is depicted by The Cranky Flyer in the little drawing.

Although there have been no passenger injuries, thanks to pilot skill, multiple instances of left or right wheels failing to extend fully (or at all!) upon landing have occurred in Canada, the United States, and France. Those are the markets for Bombardier's small-to-medium sized commercial and business aircraft.

Engine stalls in very cold weather, due to ice, is another issue with the Q400. Both the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Canadian air safety regulators launched formal inquiries.

Despite the appearance of Jason's photo below, there have never been any problems with Q400 propellers blades detaching and falling off while in flight!

Blades by Jason Mullins on Flickr

Jason observed the same effect as Chris. He took his photos with an iPhone 4 rather than an iPhone 3GS, but as he explains, that doesn't make a difference:

Wanted to try this - flying to Guernsey UK and back today. It's an iPhone 4, and the scanning typically goes from top left to bottom right, so moving objects lean to the left. Essentially any electronic shutter camera (i.e. not an SLR-like mechanical shutter) will give these effects. Wikipedia has some good articles on rolling shutters.

For those who want to try this out, just point your simple electronic shutter camera at an object moving parallel to you, preferably fast, and take the photo. The faster the relative speed between you, the more the distortion. Rotating objects go really weird!"

Wikimedia Commons Category: Rolling shutter has the best explanation I've found yet:

Rolling shutter is a method of image acquisition in which each frame is recorded, not from a snapshot of a single point in time, but rather by scanning across the frame either vertically or horizontally. In other words, not all parts of the image are recorded at exactly the same time, even though the whole frame is displayed at the same time during playback.

Wikimedia Commons is the repository for most of the photos and other image files used as illustrations for Wikipedia articles. I found this image on Commons.

de Havilland Canada Dash 8 propellor with rolling-shutter
artifact; Pixel 3 camera via Wikimedia

One of the most striking examples I found of rolling blades, or more accurately, rolling shutter, is from an airplane that was on the ground rather than in flight. Although stationary, the propellor was powered on and rotating.

Yak-TD Soviet 2-seater plane
with engine on but not in flight

The explanation given by the photographer confused me. I'll quote the most relevant parts, and link to the image source webpage which goes into more detail.

If you watch the prop through the camera, the blades spun down and came off the prop at the 6 o'clock position, then looked like they bounced off the ramp and reattached at 9 o'clock. Very weird. Aircraft was a Yak TD with a M-14 engine idling at 1000 RPM. Yes, we had someone in the seat and brakes were set... As for Photoshop, if I had those skills I would not be working on communist iron.

Observed on blimps too!

I noticed that the same 'detaching blades' aka rolling shutter effect can be captured on other aircraft types, as long as they have propellers not jet engines.

I've become fond of the official Despicable Me blimp, or rather, the DespicaBlimp. Yes, it is from that animated motion picture with the minions! The effect is visible in these two tweets with photos.

Home of the #steelers from the #despicablimp by AJ pic.twitter.com/cBW8vKFJD9
— #Despicablimp (@Despicablimp) September 26, 2013

It is more centered here.

#Florida from the #despicablimp by AJ pic.twitter.com/AcAywr9rxM
— #Despicablimp (@Despicablimp) April 18, 2013

Decline of Web 2.0

2024-02-14T20:17:00.009-07:00

In a prior post, I wrote about a whimsical 1870s era cartographic depiction of America as a Young Hog. The source publication from which I first learned of it, University of Michigan's Map Library blog, has since been discontinued. I shouldn't be surprised, even though it makes me feel sad.

Web 2.0 is user-contributed content

Blogs, Huffington Post and Forbes per-pageview paid contributors, BuzzFeed, Second Life, YouTube, image sharing services, question-and-answer sites, and comment sections (for online newspapers as well as blogs) are examples of user-created online content. It is difficult to believe that Technorati tracked millions of active blogs at one point in time. User-contributed content sites seem to have been in decline for years.

Technorati was considered an authoritative source for blog activity. It was before my time, but sounded great, even including a blog search engine that was superior to Google's blog search. Google Blog Search vanished years ago, like many Google services.

Blog growth outpaces Moore's Law?!

That's what Technorati claimed in 2005: Blog growth was frequently doubling. The BBC seemed VERY excited about Technorati, and blogging in general, see "A new blog created every second"! Even though the dot com bubble was years earlier, there was still a lot of Internet hype then.

In August 2005, Technorati was tracking 14.2 million blogs, up from 7.8 million in March of the same year, according to the BBC. New blog count was doubling every six months! That's analogous to the real Moore's Law, applicable to technology, not blogs.

Moore's Law isn't a law of physical science, but rather, a rule of thumb based on the observation that semiconductor processor speeds double every six months. (Moore's Law hasn't held up so well due to the physical limitations: there are only so many nanometers of room on processor chips.) There's more to read about Moore's Law here including a link to Gordon Moore's original article about it.

Technorati landing page

With such amazing growth, it wouldn't be long before blogs outnumbered Earth's adult population!

I found a good summary of the hype timeline from this Fail-0-Pages post, Abandoned Blogs and Life Spans:

In May 2004, Technorati claimed to track 2.4 million blogs, increasing to 11.7 million blogs in June 2005. The Technorati figure was assailed as simply a count of blogs registered: it did not identify blogs in regular use and did not differentiate between genuine blogs and splogs (spam blogs).

U.S. vs Korea race to close blog gap

This is especially amusing, from the same Fail-0-Pages post.

In January 2005,the blogosphere was abuzz with claims that 25% of all South Koreans have a blog, some US pundits lamenting a ‘blog gap’. That supposedly included 90% of those in their 20s and 79% of those under 40. In fact, the figures were for basic homepages – often little more than an email address – with the nation’s service providers, rather than blogs.

Fail-0-Pages seems mostly dormant too.

Much woo

All seemed to be going well when ZDNet reported on Technorati's expansion using news aggregator tech to add social publishing features in 2007:

This is the first major acquisition for San Francisco-based Technorati, which says it tracks more than 72 million blogs... "We are adding flexible publishing capabilities, so that everyone can find conversations, track up-and-coming ideas and stories, and customize the 'Live Web' in any way they like..."

72 million doesn't seem plausible.

By December 2008, Technorati reported that only 7.4 million (5%) of tracked blogs had been updated even once in the prior 120 days. According to a September 2009 Slashdot post, Most Blogs Now Abandoned:

Technorati
unhappy little face

Technorati said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but 50,000 to 100,000 blogs generate most of the page views.

Three very hyped Web 2.0 terms were social, democratizing, and world-class. The latter appeared a bit later, often in the context of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Early MOOCs included Stanford University professor Andrew Ng's 2010 machine learning class and Sebastian Thrun's Coursera endeavor.

Technorati also produced an annual "State of the Blogosphere" report that received a lot of attention from Web 2.0 luminaries such as Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis (he live tweeted his prostate cancer surgery), Jay Rosen (NYU journalism school professor who was a journalist for all of nine months, about 30 years ago), Chris Messina (inventor of the hashtag as seen on Twitter), Michael Arrington the TechCrunch guy, and of course, tech evangelist Robert Scoble aka The Scobleizer.

The Scobleizer

This reminds me of Robert Scoble's most memorable user-created content. He chose to demonstrate how well Google Glass computer eyewear worked while taking a shower, then posted a selfie of it on Google+ for everyone to see. A line drawing of the image was depicted in another product's patent filing. Instead of trying to explain the patent part, I refer you to coverage available from GeekWire.

funny i can reach with brave browser: pic.twitter.com/MuWE7MTa9H
— Buck Smith (@NelsonDaleSmith) February 23, 2024

For those of us who do not use Twitter um X, here's a screenshot of what my friend Dale found.

Scobleizer revealed as a nude hairy redhead
taking a shower while wearing Google Glass

State of Blogosphere not so good

Technorati was acquired by a programmatic advertising company in 2013. Without any prior notice, they deleted their entire blog directory.

How do blogging platforms such as Moveable Type, TypePad, tumblr, Medium, and Automattic survive with presumably lower revenues? TypePad is not surviving; it will be permanently shut down on 30 September 2025.

Automattic is the owner of WordPress, Akismet, and tumblr. There is still work to be found in developing plugins for WordPress dot org sites. Many businesses use Wordpress as their company blogging platform. Some high-traffic publications use WordPress VIP as a content management system. The New York Post online version is one example.

Substack is not advertiser-supported and seems to be doing well. It has allowed some people to find their audience as well as providing independence to already well-known columnists from legacy media publications.

Video and podcasting can be both ad-supported and subscriber-fee based. Youtube, rumble, Odyssee, Daily Motion, and Vimeo have survived.

Several online comment platforms remain, as publisher-paid services. Disqus is most common on blogs and smaller websites such as Mediatite and Christian News. Both Yahoo! News and The Wall Street Journal use spot.im for reader comments. Jeff Atwood aka The Coding Horror developed a combination comment platform-narrative project tracking service; Boing-boing and some open source software projects use it. I haven't seen LiveFyre or Interfora for a long time.

StackOverflow and reddit are user-contributed content sites, but both are troubled, to put it mildly.

Who clicks on online ads?

Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest:

People who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged... an advertising executive in Atlanta had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate.

“I did Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month,” he said. That led to some small advertising deals, including one with PetSmart. "I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads."

Do any website owners earn a living income or even hefty supplement from banner advertising? Some YouTube channels do. About 85% of Google's revenue comes from AdWords according to Alphabet annual reports, so I guess the business model still works.

Addendum One

Technorati continued to evolve. It seems to have been repurposed, replete with original logo, as a news aggregator. There isn't much advertising, and there aren't many text articles. There ARE a preponderance of grim news videos. This was the first that I saw.

Technorati transformed - December 2023

Sources are Newser, Canadian state media CBC, and Qatari-sponsored Al Jazeera.

If I were more cynical, I would assume that Technorati was a public relations organ of the Office of the President of Ukraine, given the content in the images above and below.

Lackadaisical website interest algorithms are more likely than the SBU or GRU (Ukrainian intelligence agencies).

Addendum Two

The Fail-0-blog has a good post about schadenfreude as well as linking to the amusing Anger Central and its more modern follow-on Musings of the Angry Webmaster.

Make America Porcine Again

2023-07-28T08:53:00.002-07:00

Years ago, I found a post on the University of Michigan's Map Library blog. I consider it evergreen, as it is about two of my favorite things: Piggies and cartography! Now seems like a good time to write about it. After all, maps were the safest way to travel during the COVID19 pandemic. Old maps even allow one to travel in time, with sufficient imagination.

In lieu of the Map Library blog, I turned to Big Think's Strange Maps. I located this excellent post, National Porcineographic: Portrait of America as a Young Hog.

Helping humans by helping pigs

William E. Baker was a 19th century tailor. He made his fortune thanks to a strategic alliance with what became the Grover & Baker Sewing Machine Company. (It was later acquired by Singer Sewing Machines.) Baker's philanthropy was extensive, but centered on his Hygienic Farming and Sanitary Cookery initiative. He wanted to improve human health by helping pigs.

Unvirtuous circle: Boston was a cesspool

New England rapidly industrialized, and the population grew along with it. An ecosystem evolved but it was of a distinctly pragmatic sort. The City of Boston instituted a garbage pick-up service but then disposed of the garbage anywhere and everywhere possible. Typical locations for garbage dumping were on the outskirts of the city or in neighboring communities. It was NOT environmentally friendly! Town and nearby country dwellers developed a recycling response: They fed the garbage to pigs.

W.E. Baker believed that this practice was the cause of much disease, in both swine and the people who consumed unwholesome pork. In 1875, he introduced a 'Sanitary Piggery' in rural Massachusetts. It was the cornerstone of Baker's contribution to the pure food movement.

"Baker’s Sanitary Piggery involved a clean environment and wholesome food for its porcine residents - it was even rumored they had individual beds, and slept under sheets. That may have been hyperbole, but it underscores Baker’s belief that public health depended greatly on sanitary food production."

He didn't blame pigs for the filth and squalor in which they, um, wallowed.

The world’s finest example of porcineography

The Porcineograph

The United States of Pig map commemorated the opening of W.E. Baker's Sanitary Piggery. 2500 copies of the map were produced as numbered lithographs. Few still exist. Most were given away as party favors to guests attending the event, i.e. as a Good-Cheer Souvenir.

The map is reproduced above, in a smaller size than its original glory. I will try to remember how to make the image clickable, so that it may be enlarged for better viewing. My html is getting rusty from disuse.

Cuteness abounds! Washington State has a curly tail wrapped around Alasqueue.

Subtle details in the porcineograph margins evoke America's history and regional variations. Quoting again from Strange Maps:

"The map itself is surrounded by a herd of pigs... The main trio is labelled, left to right, Hog & Ham & Pork. Hog is holding a plate of shrimp and what appears to be a palm tree. Ham is emblazoned with a patriotic slogan and holding an eagle’s nest containing a young chick and some yet to be hatched eggs. Pork is preparing a bean-based condiment..."

Manifest destiny: The whole hog

The porcineograph also reflects geopolitical concerns of the time. For example, the United States had its eye on Hawaii, which (like Alasqueue) was not yet a member of the Union. Map piggy conveys this by extending his faintly-outlined left hind leg from the California mainland, out over the Pacific Ocean. His hoof lightly rests on the Hawaiian Islands, then known as the Sandwich Islands. They are intuitively represented by bacon sandwiches, of course.

Cuba as extension of America's Spanish legacy?

Possible U.S. territorial expansion is indicated by piggy's front left leg. He is striding forward to touch Cuba, which is sausage-shaped.

April was the month of mathematics

2022-05-31T06:32:00.003-07:00

April 2020 was the scheduled date for the most recent Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month. It is a biannual event, i.e. held once every two years. Sadly, it was uniquely ill-timed to coincide with the arrival of the full-force of the COVID-19 global pandemic. A lot of recurring events have fallen by the wayside.

Tea for 8 by S. Goldstine

Possibly even worse is the fact that I see no mention of

any activities for 2022. I noticed this while browsing through the pages of the online Mathematical Imagery SIG (special interest group) of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). I encourage readers to visit! Included here are two scaled-down examples that I liked.

The Four-Color Theorem works for any map on a plane or a sphere, i.e. four colors are sufficient to color every neighboring region with a different color. For other shapes, say this toroidal tea set, eight colors were necessary.

Polar coordinates
by D.A. Lakew

The shape on the left is a group of super-imposed polar surfaces. There is much more, along with detailed explanations, equations, etc.

You will also find pleasing drawing such as those I shared in my Cornucopia of Mathematics post, dating back to the turn of the century, uh, this century. Although I didn't hot link to the images (well, maybe one), and gave full credit to the source, a 2003 academic event at a university in New England, I noticed a few months later that the source web pages had gone 404 error not found.

On the origins of Mathematics Awareness Month

As any blog reader of mine knows, I strive to find surprising information. The origin of AMS's Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month can be traced back to none other than... Ronald Reagan?

Yes, former U.S. President Reagan established the event in 1986, by Presidential Proclamation, with the following announcement:

Despite the increasing importance of mathematics to the progress of our economy and society, enrollment in mathematics programs has been declining at all levels of the American educational system. Yet the application of mathematics is indispensable in such diverse fields as medicine, computer sciences, space exploration, the skilled trades, business, defense, and government. To help encourage the study and utilization of mathematics, it is appropriate that all Americans be reminded of the importance of this basic branch of science to our daily lives.

--via President Ronald Reagan, Proclamation 5461 - National Mathematics Awareness Week, April 17, 1986 PDF

If Reagan had only known what would happen in the future maybe he would have made it an executive order instead of a mere proclamation.

The Future?

A lot of the problems with "the future" or rather, the present, are a result of globalization and neoliberalism, e.g. offshoring manufacturing to China. Don't forget how American engineers were forced to train H1-B visa holders as their job replacements. Although IEEE figured out that the STEM crisis was a myth, employers preferred to hire low wage replacements rather than an American workforce of science, engineering, mathematics, and technology degree holders.

In 2014, I heard a lot of talk in the news media about our best and brightest becoming knowledge workers. Amazon's Mechanical Turk would supposedly utilize these new knowledge workers. It is a Jeff Bezos creation. Mechanical Turk enables people with college degrees from all over the world to bid on "micro jobs" that pay an average of 50 cents for an hour of online work. I think they call it the gig economy.

This is a better description: Inside Amazon’s click worker platform or, how half a million people are being paid pennies to train AI.

Bard of the Deep State: Brookings not to merge with Heritage

2021-04-01T07:56:00.001-07:00

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is the central bank of central banks. Think Tank Watch is similar to BIS, except it is for think tanks. Both are meta organizations although only BIS has global gravitas. Also, I suspect that Think Tank Watch lacks any governance role for think tanks, unlike the mild governance authority of BIS over central banks.

Think Tank Watch's editor-in-chief seems rather pleased with himself. There's nothing wrong with taking pride in good work.

One of Harvard’s best think tank sources: Think Tank Watch. #thinktanks https://t.co/7mwFAnKm8H
— Think Tank Watch (@ThinkTankWatch) March 24, 2021

Think Tank Watch saw something and said something

Brookings Institute to merge with the Heritage Foundation:

Think Tank Watch has learned that the center-left Brookings Institution is in the late stages of a merger deal with the conservative Heritage Foundation to form a new think tank behemoth called "Brookitage."

The news comes via unnamed sources. Is there any other way to get information in Washington D.C. than 'unnamed sources'? Of course not!

Making policy not shaping or influencing

"We cannot afford to be just a liberal think tank in today's polarized political atmosphere," said a senior level Brookings official. "Bringing the most well-known liberal think tank together with the most well-known conservative think tank would send a huge message to Capitol Hill. Things need to change."

It is unusual for think tanks to take such an active political role. Also, think tanks tend to be hothouses of similar ideologies. Brookings and Heritage are not similar, so merging will no doubt be uncomfortable for all involved. Also, Heritage is likely none too happy with that portmanteau of a name, Brookitage.

Brookings and Bernanke

For context, recall former Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamín Bernanke. He oversaw the Fed's response to the 2008 financial crisis, taxpayer bailout of incompetent Wall Street investment banks, AIG, their friends, and crony colleagues. After eight years as Fed chair, Bernanke's first stop after he left central banking was as Resident Fellow at Brookings in 2014.

Bernanke started an economics blog at Brookings in March 2015. Everyone got excited about it. Bernanke never responded to reader comments, mine included. Eventually, everyone on Twitter lost interest, especially since we didn't want to hear more about his embarrassingly-titled autobiography, "The Courage to Act".

"Courage..." the book, as well as Bernanke's actions during the financial crisis of 2008-2010, were only so-so. He bailed out the risk-taking speculators using taxpayer money. He and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson forced relatively healthy financial institutions to take possession of floundering investment banks along with their sub-prime credit derivatives and toxic assets, e.g. Bank of America was never the same after being forced to absorb Merrill Lynch.

Bernanke via "Courage..."
review, NY Review of Books

I have read many favorable reviews of Bernanke's book, especially when it was first published, and praise for Bernanke himself. One of the few critical reviews of "Courage..." to be found is via the CLS (Columbia Law School) Blue Sky blog, the subject of a post by Kathryn Judge, published 20 October 2015.

Judge observes what I did: The financial crisis began before Lehman’s failure. The interval between August 2007 and the collapse of Lehman in September 2008 was truly the first year of the crisis. If the Fed and Treasury Secretaries Paulson, then Geithner, had acted sooner than Autumn 2008, that would have been better than courageous: It would have likely saved Americans and the global economy some portion of the financial crisis misery.

Was Bernanke Courageous?

The conventional wisdom, which Bernanke invokes... is that a central bank should flood the market with liquidity... this is the wrong approach when liquidity shortages persist despite countervailing efforts by a central bank.

While too little liquidity can exacerbate financial distress and the provision of liquidity can play an important role preventing shocks...liquidity alone will never resolve a crisis once panic takes hold... Markets require credible information about how risks are distributed... when that picture reveals the need for more capital—as will often be the case when liquidity shortages persist—policymakers cannot hope to restore financial stability without identifying and rectifying those shortfalls.

Adding more liquidity without identifying and starting to fix whatever caused the original market dysfunction can make the financial system even MORE fragile.

Bernanke stopped spending time with Brookings after a year or so. He moved on to highly-paid speaking engagements and private equity advising.

Not so non-partisan

Apparently, not all think tanks are non-partisan. Heritage Foundation seems to be one of Think Tank Watch's favorite targets for Heritage's conservativsm and any associated stodginess.

Heritage Foundation mocked for defending British monarchy. https://t.co/jgxSJci3m3 #thinktanks
— Think Tank Watch (@ThinkTankWatch) March 21, 2021

Wait a sec... something isn't right here. This originally appeared in the somewhat higher visibility Lawfare blawg. "Blawgs" are blogs about jurisprudence and legal stuff, i.e. blawg = blog +law. Think Tank Merger.

"One official with knowledge of the discussions said that President Barack Obama is among the top candidates to become president of Brookitage when he steps down in January 2017."

APRIL FOOL'S!

This appeared on April Fool's Day, from the unnamed editor-in-chief of Think Tank Watch... uh April Fool's Day 2016. That was the final year of the Obama Administration! So, I guess the Heritage Foundation won't be merging with Brookings after all.

The primary contributor to Lawfare's "Miscellaneous" and "April Fool's" tagged articles is Benjamin Wittes. Does that name sound familiar?

Rapid Onset Trump Derangement Syndrome

It should, as Wittes created a huge ruckus a few years back, in 2017. He went to the New York Times to disclose confidential conversations he had had with FBI Director James Comey, a few months prior. Wittes said that Comey was worried President Donald Trump would pressure him (Comey) to compromise the FBI's independence. Although Wittes has written about legal matters at the Lawfare website for decades, he isn't an attorney, didn't attend law school, only undergrad at Oberlin, so there wasn't any violation of lawyer-client confidentiality, merely weird attention-seeking behavior.

With hindsight, both Wittes AND Comey seem a bit deranged. For example, Wittes told the Times the following:

“He was disgusted by the episode,” Wittes (Brookings, Lawfare blog, and a friend of Mr. Comey) said... about what the former FBI director has told him about his relationship with President Trump.
Comey did not want to attend the Jan. 22 ceremony at the White House, organized to thank officers who had worked during the inauguration. Comey, who is 6’8”, wore a blue blazer to try to blend into blue drapes in the room... standing as far away from Trump as possible. Trump singled Comey out and called him across the room. Comey extended his hand, and Trump pulled him into a hug. “[Comey] thought it was an intentional attempt to compromise him in public...” Wittes said.

This was the famous episode when Comey was described as hiding behind the drapes at the Oval Office.

Bard of the Deep State

The New York Times reporter who Wittes contacted asked, "WHY are you telling me this?" Wittes said that he just thought it was something the public needed to know. For the first and only time, Wittes made it into the POLITICO 50 of 2017; he was listed at number 15, Bard of the Deep State.

It seems likely that Wittes wrote, or had editorial input, into the 2016 think tank April Fool's Day piece. If so, it would also explain wishing for Obama to be "president of Brookitage". Obama departed from office in January 2017. Wittes was an Obama supporter. There's also this: Wittes is both a Brookings fellow AND a Heritage Foundation fellow!

Why hasn't the growth rate of Real Potential GDP recovered?

2020-06-24T11:53:00.006-07:00

Missionary Work Among Savages blog is authored by 2slugbait, a pseudonym for an econometrician. He recently wrote a post about whether President Reagan's 1981 tax cuts performed as advertised with the perspective of hindsight. I think his motivation was also to assess whether a similar supply-side approach could have been a better alternative to the fiscal stimulus measures implemented by President Obama during the 2008-2010 financial collapse.

Although the recovery during Obama's second term in office was one of the most anemic in U.S. history, 2slugbait's conclusion was that a supply-side effort would not have produced an enduring benefit.

Voodoo economics not so great

Economist Arthur Laffer was known for his Laffer curve. Laffer's recommendations about supply-side measures (rather than demand-side economic stimulus) were referred to as voodoo economics by detractors, most famously by former President George H.W. Bush.

Voodoo economists in action?

2slugbait demonstrates empirically why supply-side economics was only mildly effective. Specifically, neither of the following worked out the way supply-side economists posited at the time:

cutting the top marginal tax rate would encourage greater labor efforts and
more hours worked would have a greater net impact on increased personal savings than increased consumer spending would.

The (infamous?) Laffer curve

Skepticism about David Stockman and Laffer's tax policy recommendations during the Reagan Administration is the less interesting part to me. Tax cuts for middle-income wage earners (not solely those high net worth "job creators" 😕😡 ) CAN provide a modicum of economic stimulus, even though it is not enduring! That was apparent from 2017 to March 2019, as well as the early 1980s.

Something else is much more interesting to me: The long-term decline in Real Potential GDP. 2slugbait noticed this too in his post.

Real Potential Gross Domestic Product

According to 2slugbait,

"If the Reagan tax cuts actually affected the supply side of the macro economy... then we should have observed an unparalleled increase in the growth rate of real potential GDP...

Yes, real potential GDP did grow at a pretty good clip immediately after the Reagan recession, but it quickly faded... even at its peak it was only barely above the growth rates during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years and well below rates enjoyed during the LBJ and Clinton years."

Real potential GDP (let's refer to it for convenience in this post as RPGDP) is defined in the Federal Reserve Economic Data repository (FRED) as

"The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate of the output the economy would produce with a high rate of use of capital and labor resources."

CBO measures RPGDP in non-seasonally adjusted billions of chained 2012 dollars and adjusts for inflation. Frequency is quarterly.

Reagan era tax cuts were somewhat helpful. They resulted in temporary growth in RPGDP as the US economy lurched out of the late 1970s oil supply shock and 1980s stagflation.

Growth was lackluster, then AND now

The rate of growth of RPGDP stalled after the dot com bubble in 2000. It never returned to the historical levels of the prior 50 years. That is apparent in the single chart featured in the St. Louis Federal Reserve's 'Celebrating 25 Years of FRED' blog post of April 2016, as well as 2Slugbait's graphs of the year-on-year rate of change.

20 years of declining Real Potential GDP

I wanted to confirm 2slugbait's findings by using more directly comparable data to what the CBO uses, i.e. seasonally-adjusted quarterly data (instead of non-seasonal, year-on-year data).

First, I extend the time interval, in both directions. I went to the source for that, the St. Louis Federal Reserve's FRED, available as the GDPPOT series .

Next, I took the rate of change of the GDPPOT series, on a quarterly basis.

Recall that 2slugbait used year-over-year, seasonally adjusted rates, while I used quarterly, non-seasonally adjusted rates. My assumptions more closely correspond to those of the CBO. I was curious if that would make any difference.

It didn't. Our results are substantially the same.

Where did our Real Potential GDP go?

I don't know. Shouldn't it have recovered to at least 1990s levels during the economic expansion of 2002 to 2007? We even had a war as fiscal stimulus!

Real potential GDP should have grown for some interval during the years 2012 to 2019 prior to COVID19. Is the CBO wrong perhaps? They are the source of the data. If I were 2slugbait, I would check on that.

I am merely Ellie. I don't have a PhD in econometrics. So supply-side economics didn't work as intended, that should be acknowledged; it is water under the bridge. There is still something very wrong with our economy and hollowing-out of our middle-class.

I feel like deleting this entire post, but no one ever reads them.

In writing this, I have learned a lot about FRED and ALFRED (vintage and historic economic data) and GEOFRED (geospatial economic data... EDIT: discontinued in 2022).

Gold Star of Texas

2020-01-09T08:15:00.000-07:00

The state capitol building in Austin, Texas (21 October 2008)

Cupola of the state capitol at Austin

Photograph by TedLandphair via Picasa

Credibility and the Internet: Queuing Theory

2018-05-21T09:00:00.066-07:00

This was old news about queues back in the 1990s, yet it was written up as an (Inderscience) journal article, and received coverage as though a new finding in the June 2010 issue of ScienceDaily, an online "new discoveries!" update service owned by Reuters. See footnote #1 for even more.

M/M/1 queues, Kendall notation, and models of balking and reneging behavior are certainly useful. However, the concepts and most models have been well-established for at least forty years.

This Wiley text book, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, was published in 1998.

An earlier edition was published in 1983, and explains in detail the theory and application of the concepts presented in the journal article summarized by ScienceDaily in 2010.

A little more about M/G/1

Over at Math StackExchange, I noticed a rare inquiry. If you're curious to learn more about queues, go read my answer to this question, Kendall notation's “General distribution”, what does that mean?

I found this comment endearing:

Oh I thought that this stuff wasn't even used in real life jobs... I thought it was merely theoretical, but seems that I'm wrong!

I'm okay with the G general theory [G as the general case when you just don't know what sort of service time distribution to expect] since I'm not required to study it for now (I'm following an academic course), I just wanted to understand what the G meant and you helped me in that. Do you have any experience with multi-class queues too?

Reference

Liao et al. "Optimal staffing policy for queueing systems with cyclic demands." International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2010; 7: 317-332.

Chemical Heritage

2018-05-20T02:30:00.001-07:00

This aluminum necklace was on display at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) in 2010. It was part of the CHF's Chemistry and Fashion: Making Modernity exhibit. A description of the necklace is still available via an unfortunately image-free post about Atomic Age women's jewelry.

I like the necklace, a lot! Aluminum is very light; I do wonder whether the same necklace could be made of platinum or possibly iridium. If so, how it would it compare--in appearance (e.g. lustre) and weight-- to the aluminum version?

Aluminum necklace circa 1950

I wrote this post in October 2010. Times changed at the Chemical Heritage Museum since then, resulting in many broken links. This is an expanded version of that post, with replacement by valid alternative links for inline URLs. I apologize if I missed any.

URL persistence hasn't been taken as seriously as the IETF and Internet Society had hoped; URL status, according to a Google Groups thread, as of 2013:

URLs are simply not persistent...from a recent study, about 15% of URLs from a large sample reach a lifetime of 1000 days. It's abysmal. And other studies back it up.

No Moore Chemical Heritage

Sadly, Chemical Heritage was absorbed by the Science History Institute in 2018, including the CHF's 5-story building. Most CHF collections can still be viewed at the museum's original location, at 315 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I was born in Philadelphia, and attended graduate school there, so I feel an affinity.

The former CHF building is near Centennial Hall, the Liberty Bell, and adjacent to a nice residential neighborhood called Society Hill. Penn's Landing is a few blocks to the east. That's where William Penn first arrived on the shores of America.

Gordon E. Moore helped found the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and his generous donations provided much of the initial and sustaining funds.

Moore's Law

Periodic Tabloid:
Musings on the Molecular

Interested in the legacy of Gordon Moore? A reproduction of his 1966 article, in which he introduced his famous law, is included in Understanding Moore's Law: Four Decades of Innovation. The book also recounts many observations by Moore, his peers, competitors, and others. It was written in order to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Moore's Law.

Although "Understanding Moore's Law" was published by the now defunct CHF Press, the Science History Institute kindly keeps an electronic version of the full text available as a PDF for online readers.

Heritage of Chemistry: Moore notable, noble chemists

I promise that this heading will be my final pun for today. It is a double pun, the best kind!

When I first wrote this, chemist and materials scientist Andre Geim had recently won the Nobel Prize. In merely 10 years, he went from the dubious distinction of receiving an IgNoble prize for levitating frogs with magnets to winning the Nobel Prize for producing a one atom-thick material consisting of carbon atoms, arranged in a hexagonal lattice. Geim named it graphene, and mapped its properties: incredibly thin but still incredibly strong, good heat and electrical conductivity, almost entirely transparent yet very dense.

Geim tells many fascinating anecdotes about his life prior to winning his Nobel Prize at the young age of 56: He was born in the Soviet Union and raised by his grandmother in Sochi, then Chechnya. Why? Because both his father and grandfather--despite being physicists--spent years away from home, in the Siberian gulag. This was due to Soviet suspicions because of their German ancestry. Also, shortly after WW1, Geim's paternal grandfather served as a junior minister in the brief Ukrainian nationalist government of Petiluria.

In the course of Geim's studies and while an independent researcher (before immigrating to the West in 1990), he was a lieutenant in the Red Army, climbed several five kilometre high mountains, worked as bricklayer north of the Arctic Circle, studied intercontinental ballistic missiles while an undergraduate, and wasn't called ‘Russian’ until the age of 32. He experienced anti-German discrimination due to his last name, and his ancestry.

Double Ignoble-Nobel

Andre Geim is the sole individual to ever achieve the distinction of winning a IgNoble-Nobel Prize combo!

There was only one scientist who came close: Roy Glauber, a Harvard physics professor and researcher. Glauber was the youngest theoretical physicist to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. His primary contribution to physics was in the field of quantum optics. Glauber taught physics to Harvard undergraduates and even summer school students in high school during the final years of his career

Glauber served for over a decade on the IgNoble Prize nomination and award committees. One of his duties was clearing the stage of paper airplanes as the audience threw them at award winners. Glauber was on the stage with Geim, as the latter levitated his frogs.

Image credit:
Internat'l Assoc Physics

Five years later, Glauber won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics! He did not win an IgNoble Prize, unlike Geim, but as an annual participant at the award ceremony, he had a close affiliation.
Glauber appears quite serious in the photo on the left, dating back to his younger days as a post-doc at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.

Image credit:
Mike Kurry, Encyclopædia Britannica

This is an official Nobel Foundation photo of Glauber after delivering his acceptance speech in Stockholm. A decade later, Glauber misplaced or lost the gold prize medal, although it wasn't due to age-related cognitive decline. Glauber didn't suffer from that, not even in the years immediately prior to his death in 2018 at the age of 93.

Here, Glauber does appear much more like the sort of person (humorous and a bit whimsical?) who would enjoy officiating at the IgNoble Prize ceremony!

How To Rob An Online Bank And Get Away With It

2016-08-03T11:35:00.000-07:00

Ambitious!

"The subject of our dissection is an online bank robbery.

Not the all-too-common attack against an online banking user, his computer and his identity, but an attack against the bank itself - or more precisely, against the bank's online banking application.

An online banking attack has four distinct phases:
Vulnerability Finding Phase
Vulnerability Exploitation Phase
Buying Time Phase
Extraction Phase..."

via ACROS Security Blog: Anatomy Of An Online Bank Robbery

AOL Running Man Lives!

2016-03-17T03:01:00.000-07:00

The running man created by AOL (American Online) was, and maybe still is, the most iconic representation of Internet dial-up connections for many users from the mid-1990s to 2010.

Apparently, he was still making appearances at tech events as recently as 2009, as seen here in Washington D.C.

Running Man at TECH Cocktail DC 6

Location: Left Bank in Adams Morgan, Washington D.C. on August 27, 2009. Photo by Shawn Duffy, via Flickr.

I wish I knew the context for his appearance! I wish I had had a chance to see Running Man too.

Cartography of Second Life

2015-01-21T16:57:00.001-07:00

Surprise! Cartography enthusiast and mapping patron David Rumsey was there too: Viewing Second Life.

I am Ellie Heartsdale. I owned a small corner plot of land on an island sim in the west. I built a little house there, for me and the piggies. I went to the Second Life synagogue, in Nessus, on Friday nights.

Piggies

My father was still alive then. I was working for the State of Arizona, Department of Health Services, Office for Children with Special Health Care Needs, as chief research statistician. That was my title, "Research Statistician, chief".

I was happy, but as usual, didn't realize it at the time.

Maps

Click on images to view full-sized.

ThreadMap is a third-party mapping project
Location was Emerald Point

Screen shot in Hooper

Screen shot of road map of routes throughout mainland SL

All sims in early days of SL, approximately January 2003

I wrote a lot more about Second Life on my WordPress blog. It is all in one place, under the category Second Life.

Physikalische Typografie

2014-08-05T20:07:00.003-07:00

This is a situation where the German language -- not French, nor Italian and certainly not English, really captures the feeling and nuance of a work of art most eloquently. Physikalische Typografie* means "Typography of Physics."

I like that much better than my prosaic versions:

An Alphabet of Physics Diagrams?
Creatively Capturing Fonts with Physics
26 Physical Letters

This post is about physics-student-turned artist MunnaOnTheRun, and the story of his rather abrupt transition to artiste and graphic designer. The catalyst for his transformation was quite literally the Unified Field Theory of Physics. MunnaOnTheRun, and Wikipedia, refer to it as The Theory of Everything. It is (a yet to be proven theory) linking all known physical phenomena. Albert Einstein was intent on tracking it down in the last decade of his life.

Background

MunnaOnTheRun was an enthusiastic student. Unfortunately he was also a miserable failure in physical science coursework, by his own admission.

World Year of Physics || {Physics + Typography} by Munna

Now, fast forward in time. 2005 was designated World Year of Physics in commemoration of Einstein's Theory of Relativity centennial. MunnaOnTheRun wanted to create a typeface from physics diagrams for the event.

This is the story of his success, in the artist's own words:

After months of research... I finally got hold of 26 diagrams that looked liked the letters of the alphabet. This poster literally transported me into a parallel universe. I sent this around to graphic designers .... With no formal training in art, and nothing to show for except badly drawn doodles, I started believing that I could make art.

Physics changed everything for me.

* The website ILoveGraffiti coined that pithy phrase, Physikalische Typografie.

Cassandra Is Sooooooo Correct

2014-07-31T11:08:00.001-07:00

Nihon Cassandra is more of a stock market investor than macroeconomics type. In other words, she isn't really into bonds. In her own charming words,

So long as my distribution is skewed-right, and the tail not overly kurtotic, I am sanguine.

Recently, Cassandra excoriated herself for failing to predict our current global macroeconomic malaise, specifically, the odd lack of self-preserving behavior by those who have the most to lose. I think she is being unnecessarily harsh, as she understands far better than many others do, even now.

It was a close call. From September 2007 through 2010, the masters of financialization escaped ruin by the skin of their teeth. Saving the system, at public risk and expense, was useful to asset holders, e.g. the AIG crowd, Goldman Sachs and friends, Stevie Cohen, Walmart family scions, Icahn, Einhorn, Pritzkers, Koch brothers, Larry Ellison, Larry and Sergei Google, Mark Z, Jeff Bezos, Bill and Melinda, other much less publicly known owners of nation-sized yet privately owned wealth.

Looking backward at Peak Inequality

Cassandra expected that the excesses leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, e.g. over indulgence in luxury goods, real estate and high-end everything, would be known later as "Peak Inequality". If the authorities were to bail out highly-levered asset-owners (enriching them further in some cases e.g. the notorious AIG bonuses payments), Cassandra expected that the State would promptly devise a way to recapture most of this taxpayer-funded largess. In return, a modicum of social stability, sustained by an orderly market economy, would be assured.

In the aftermath, the Federal Reserve and fiscal policy makers would realize how fragile consumption was. They would not raise taxes nor cut government spending precipitously. Bad actors would fall from grace. Attitudes would change. All of us would feel chastened, and act accordingly.

In other words, prevent a nationwide populist revolt due to massive betrayal of public interests.

Trade recommendation for the integrity market: Sell calls

Cassandra, and I, expected that the 0.1% of the 0.1% would have been grateful. They were not. They are not now. Integrity is a market for perma-bears. Various practices associated with rapacious greed, including regulatory and legislator capture, have continued unabated. Inequality continues its incessant rise. Economic recovery is scant, yet deficits grow absurdly. Political divisiveness spreads. There is no end in sight to the public loss of confidence in,

elected government and
due process as a consistently effective means of fairly resolving disputes

Since Cassandra has clearly-stated content re-use rules, I recommend that you navigate over to her blog, and read her post directly. Focus on the final six paragraphs, and don't forget to read the comments.

* I question the usefulness of higher marginal taxes or changes to capital gains taxes. Tax laws have power over the "poorer wealthy". It does little good to raise taxes on small businessmen, physicians and others whose income is between $100,000 and $1,000,000 (net worth between $100,000 and $5,000,000). The real control of capital is concentrated among those with one or more magnitudes of order greater assets than that.

If he were a spy

2014-06-03T18:29:00.001-07:00

I looked for answers on Quora, a question-and-answer website.

Is Jacob Appelbaum a U.S. government employee?

He gets a huge salary from the Tor Project but mostly jets around the world, more lavishly than celebrities and movie stars. His home is chic, minimalist but opulent according to Rolling Stone. He posed with semi-automatic firearms in Iraq in 2008. He parties ALL the time, based on his flickr photographs. [These photos are no longer visible other than to logged-in flickr users with adult content viewing enabled. I embedded a few as part of my question on the Quora website and question comments.]

Martin Strohmeier

The question doesn't really seem to follow from the details, Ellie?

Ellie Kesselman

Granted, but maybe this will help to explain. Tor is a former US government project. Jacob works, or worked for Tor. I was trying to avoid asking directly whether Jacob were a spy. That would be indiscreet, so I said "US government employee" instead.

Jacob has more fans and cart blanche globally than, well, I don't even know who to compare with him. He is like the Larry Ellison or Eric Schmidt of crypto fandom, but without any visible means of support. I don't see his name on the cryptography research server IACR as an author, nor any ACM nor IEEE scholarly journals, not even the Financial Cryptography conference.

ioerror is, well, to make an analogy, like the subversive version of Google's Jared Cohen. ioerror is the cool kids' hero, so to speak.

Martin Strohmeier

I saw him speak in front of the cream of the crop of the world's academic security researchers (and me) last fall at CCS in Berlin. I sure got the impression that he resonated there quite well. I don't know that much more about him though. He partied like everyone else, just a tad bit more paranoid.

Ellie Kesselman

He speaks all over the world! If there's a political uprising or controversy, ioerror is boots on the ground, at the scene, but never in the U.S.A. He is like the rock star of crypto, except he isn't affiliated with a company, nor a university, nor the Berkman Center at Harvard or EFF.

He always has lots of trappings of material success, nice clothes, hordes of women etc. Look at this! "The Sheik, Emir Appelbaum, Doha fashion victim". That is atypical, for security researchers, isn't it?

Martin Strohmeier

As for academic papers, many of these independent researchers can't be bothered to go through the long publishing processes in academia but prefer to present their work at hacker conferences such as Defcon, Black Hat, C3 etc. Looking through Google Scholar such an example would be "MD5 considered harmful today" presented at 25c3. The authors later published at CRYPTO 2009, a top tier security conference.

Besides those, he got his name on a USENIX Security Workshop paper and a Communications of the ACM article (Lest we remember), solid outlets.

Ellie Kesselman

Matthew Green, Mikko Hypponen and IBMer Craig Gentry, who figured out homomorphic encryption, aren't feted like ioerror.

Martin Strohmeier
Hypponen had a talk at that same CCS last fall, he's quite prolific, too. There are bigger security superstars still, Bruce Schneier comes to mind. It's never totally clear to me what makes someone an Internet superstar in any field, to be honest. Especially those Social Media gurus.

One thing I know though: Appelbaum is an extremely good orator (haven't really followed his Internet activity but if he's everywhere that's surely explaining his popularity). Speaking engagements are something that brings in quite some money for many people. At the very least you're being paid the travel cost to quite often pretty amazing destinations...

UPDATE

Adrián Lamo responded to my question Quora. His answer puzzles me.

"Jacob Raven Appelbaum isn't a USG employee, though I have no idea whether or not he may have technically been/contracted at some point in Tor's early Naval Research Laboratory funding.

This question reads more like a love-letter-by-proxy to Appelbaum than a sincere desire for information, and I'm not the only person in the security community who sees this trend in public palaverous platitudes.

No political climate lasts forever. Jens Karney once believed Berlin would protect him indefinitely. I guess Jake figures he should have fun while the opportunity remains available."

Adrián seems to infer that I am praising Jacob. That isn't true at all though! The inline link to Jens Karney is a melancholy Der Spiegel Online news story about an American who became a spy for East Germany during the last decade of the Soviet Union.

In the end, I am left with more questions, but no answers.

Message of the market

2014-05-23T07:47:00.001-07:00

Joe Saluzzi tried to get the word out. He really did make a good faith effort. This was one of his numerous appearances on Bloomberg, Fox Business News, CBS etc. The mainstream news media did not ignore him. He was interviewed for about 10 minutes in each station's Manhattan studio. Each appearance was broadcast live. Receiving that much air time is unusual.

Joe Saluzzi comments on problems with the stock market

The temporal backdrop for this interview was particularly good. I enjoyed watching the market tickers running across the screen. They were triple stacked, and occupied a lot of screen real-estate! The results of a New York State election were reported around the 5 minute mark. I am no longer familiar enough with the NY-NJ-CT area to gauge the significance, but phrases like, "concedes the election" are portentous.

I've followed Sal Arnuk, @ThemisSal on Twitter, since 2012. He is Joe Saluzzi's business partner at Themis Trading. That isn't how I found this video. Rather, I was reading an Amazon book review, about one of Ernest Chen's algorithmic trading books. That led me to R. Ryley's Message of the Markets blog.

The following excerpt is from an anonymous comment on Ryley's blog post, faithfully reproduced here under Creative Commons License by-NC-ND and replete with all-cap's

YES. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT NEWS CLIP IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS. THE THEFT OF GOLDMAN SACHS' MICROSECOND TRADING CODE HAS FURTHER REINFORCED THIS MAN'S COMMENTS... [Such] CODE* CAN BE USED TO UNFAIRLY MANIPULATE THE MARKET IN A WAY THAT GIVES AN UNFAIR ADVANTAGE TO WHOMEVER POSSESSES IT... THEN FACTOR IN THAT 49% OF MARKET ACTIVITY IS PROGRAM [trading], WE KNOW THAT THE IMPACT...IS MATERIAL. IN OTHER WORDS, MANY MARKET PARTICIPANTS, INCLUDING RETAILERS, ARE BEING CHEATED.

In retrospect, it doesn't seems so strange, e.g. US Taxpayers Pay For SEC to Arrange Early Release of Data to High Speed Trading Firms.

* I am not certain, but believe that Anonymous refers to the circumstances that led to former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov's conviction in 2011.

The Cleveland Fed Drawing Board goes silent

2014-05-13T01:45:00.005-07:00

I find Cleveland to be the most friendly of the 12 Federal Reserve districts. They do a lot of community outreach work, and have a good research department.

Thank you! :-) RT @EllieAsksWhy: Contrast @gapingvoid w/hand-drawn, all-original artwork by @ClevelandFed http://youtu.be/hWdm9pp6NQU
— ClevelandFed (@ClevelandFed) June 6, 2011

Evidence of friendly Cleveland Fed!

The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland is the headquarters of the U.S. Federal Reserve System's Fourth District. The district is composed of Ohio, western Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky, and the northern panhandle of West Virginia.

Main office in downtown Cleveland since 1923

The Cleveland Fed building was designed by architects Walker & Weeks. The building is considered an historically significant piece of architecture. I like how it looks too. Apparently, few know much about the art and architecture of the building, not even in Cleveland!

The building was extensively renovated about 15 years ago. The preservation company that did the work has some spectacular photos of the Fed's interior, which I couldn't find anywhere else. EDIT: Sadly, that architectural firm, WRL Design, is no longer extant: Parked domain and no business listing. I have included some others that I

Volatility Smile 3

Volatility Smile 3 is an artwork commissioned by the Cleveland Federal Reserve in 2018. The artist describes how it (abstractly) captured his anxieties about money and his uncertain financial survival.

Click for Propaganda and Patriotism war bonds exhibit

I could find only one more photograph of the interior, which wasn't even from the Cleveland Fed. Others were fuzzy, low quality images from an Illuminati conspiracy website. The irony is not lost on me.

Edit NINE years later...

All links to content of the Propaganda and Patriotism exhibit of 2014 at the Federal Reserve Museum have vanished into the ether. I am disappointed and surprised.

At the moment (May 19, 2023), I'm writing a post about the central bank of Greece. The Greek economy endured a prolonged and painful interval of deprivation from 2008 to 2013. It was most directly caused by creditor demands to repay massive debts owed by the Greek government, banking system, and populace. The borrowing and spending began after Greece's induction to the EEU (European Economic Union). For various reasons I don't want to get into now, the 2008-2010 financial crisis made it unsustainable for Greece to carry its debt load any longer. The Troika interceded with a rescue plan of repayment guarantees and loans, but imposed strict austerity measures.

What is the Troika?

The coordinated authority of the European Central Bank + IMF + World Bank was known as the Troika. Germany's Finance Minister Schnable dominated the Troika for two reasons.

Germany is the largest economy and has the least debt as a percentage of GDP in the European Economic Union.
The IMF and World Bank are supranational entities with global remits; also, they don't have printing presses. The ECB--essentially Germany--had to cover a larger percentage of the cost to rescue Greece than either the IMF or World Bank. What was the source of ECB loans to Greece? Yes, that's right: German taxpayers, for the most part!

Minotaur

Syriza, a left-wing party, was elected as the Greek ruling party. Opposition to the EU’s demand for austerity greatly increased their appeal to voters. The brief reign of Yanis Varoufakis, self-described "global minotaur" as the Greek Minister of Finance followed. Varoufakis resigned rather suddenly, leaving Prime Minister Alex Tspiras to deal the situation. Specifically, Varoufakis departed Athens on his motorcycle with his attractive blonde wife; he wrote a best-selling book, The Global Minotaur. Although he was charismatic and captured a lot of attention, he was no minotaur.

Despite these upheavals, the Bank of Greece managed to maintain the historical continuity of non-bank industry parts of its website.

The Drawing Board

This is the first of the Drawing Board videos produced by the Cleveland Federal Reserve. It is a series of 16 hand drawn, Fed economist-narrated videos.

"Really Bad Drawings, Real Simple Explanations"

Although they are the Cleveland Fed's most popular YouTube videos (there are complements and requests for more, instead of disgruntled monetary policy complaints!) I suspect that the series has been discontinued. There have been no new entries ~~in 11 months~~ since 2013. EDIT: I embedded the most topical video, given the March 2023 failures of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank.

Bitcoin in the limelight: Questions for buyers and investors

2013-11-24T11:02:00.001-07:00

Bitcoin exchange vulnerability

The most high-profile vulnerable Bitcoin exchange was Mt. Gox. In April 2013, Mt. Gox was overwhelmed by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The point, Mt. Gox speculated, was to destabilize Bitcoin transactions and fuel panic selling. After driving prices down, the attackers ceased the DDoS, and rushed in to buy Bitcoin at a lower price.

Life isn't fair but Bitcoin must be

Life might not be fair, but securities exchanges and currency markets require fairness. Without it, they will die. Trust is essential. Apparently, Mt. Gox was robust enough to withstand this DDoS incident. In their pursuit of unearned profits, the attackers took a selfishly short-term view. DDoS attacks and market manipulation can destabilize Bitcoin exchanges. If that happens often enough, it will undermine credibility in Bitcoin.

Mt. Gox wasn't uniquely vulnerable. In the past few months, there were other DDoS-related Bitcoin extortion incidents: BTC-China was brought down in September 2013, and BIPS, a European payment provider, experienced a DDoS attack two days ago, on 26 November 2013.

Regulation and volatility

Using DDoS for extortion is possible due to Bitcoin's lack of formal risk control measures. Eventually, such controls should be imposed by regulatory authorities, along with penalties and enforcement. Market manipulation and extortion are possible even when there are regulations. Market participants' own self-restraint and willingness to obey the rules are important too. The Bitcoin marketplace is rife with pump-and-dump schemes lately, which doesn't inspire confidence!

Bitcoin's current price volatility is very high. That is unsurprising for a new financial product. Volatility isn't inherently bad, but it should be caused by normal market activity. Bitcoin price volatility will need to diminish a lot in order for it to serve as a medium of exchange, i.e. a true currency.

Structural boundaries

If I were to trade or invest in Bitcoin, my first question would be, "What, if any, are the boundary values?"

The number of Bitcoins is fixed at 21 million.
Are there are price levels that have any contextual meaning, i.e. are associated with limits? For example, stock prices are always greater than or equal to zero. For fixed income markets, negative interest rates should not be possible. (They weren't, until the European Central Bank lowered real interest rates below zero as an ineffective attempt to stimulate economic growth through increased spending due to greater demand for bank loans). Are there any limits pertaining to Bitcoin?
Are there vagaries of the market place or the blockchain that could allow pricing power by colluding participants? That can happen in commodity markets, e.g. the three Hunt brothers buying 2/3 of the silver market. What about collusion among miners in a Bitcoin mining pool? A recent scholarly journal article about selfish miners proved that if more than 33% of any group of bitcoin miners (or any blockchain-based cryptocurrency) collude, they will succeed in earning income above their fair share.

Ebullience

The financial press and even well-known information security personalities are caught up in the thrill of Bitcoin. The odd aspect is that some don't seem to distinguish between good news and bad! The excitement is infectious. Perhaps it is a means of escape from the powerlessness most of us feel about monetary policy and government in general?