Cobb

But I Can Afford It

I just skimmed through a story about bluefin tuna. Apparently, we are about to run out. But yet it's everywhere. It makes me think about what might be a fatal flaw in our form of capitalism, and raises the following question.

What if supply and demand is a function of capacity but capacity is not a function of supply and demand?

Or think of it this way, what if you built a water well powered by a machine that was driven by a huge flywheel that took you 2 years to spin up. As you start pumping the water you deliver more and more to your thirsty customers who drink their fill. After two years, you are pumping as fast as the machine can go, and at this point your business is mature. Supply and demand are now pretty much about in balance. Basically, you have exploited the economy of scale of your massive machine. You serve a million people five million gallons a day and your pricing is low because of the sunk costs you've already paid for. Now you are in a prime capitalist position. Price the water as you please, but mostly to increase demand, pump out profits and keep your customers loyal. You sell subscriptions, you give discounts, you offer trials for new customers. It's all about marketing now. I would basically say this point is the maturity of the overwhelming majority of markets for consumer goods and commodities. They are machines.

Then you notice that the water supply is getting lower, in fact, you have about one year of actual supply left. If you slow down the flywheel, you'll have to lay off people, and that kind of disruption will start to kill your economies of scale. Your unit production costs will go up and you'll kill your margins. So what do you do?

I am guessing that in most industries, businesses keep up the demand pricing rather than supply pricing, and then figure out an exit strategy with fungible cash. Which is to say, you sell sell sell your product until the well runs dry. Then you crash the business and cash out. In other words, you are captive to the 'will' of the machine you have created which doesn't care about whether or not its resource is limited. It's job is to produce, not to conserve. When you run the mining equipment, or the farming equipment at anything less than full capacity, you're wasting money and will lose your customers.

In the case of a global shortage, this is dangerous. You will run at full capacity until you hit the wall, because it's too difficult to downscale the business, raise the prices, and retain the appropriate market share.

What if it's chocolate? What would people not pay for chocolate? The price elasticity for chocolate (whoops, now I'm going to make technical mistakes - beware) is negative. It might even be a Giffen good. In other words, you want it so badly that no matter what Hershey's charges, you're going to pay. With regard to the supply going tits up, Starbucks coffee drinkers will drink all of South America's coffee plants bare. There will never be a point at which gasoline costs too much for us to not empty all the wells. We will eat all of the bluefin tuna sushi until there is no more in the sea, and the businesses between us and the raw materials of the earth will spin their flywheels until the whole enterprise crumbles. In other words, people will watch Robin Williams tell jokes until the day he dies, even if show business is killing him. And the day before his last show, there will be no indication by the price of the ticket that it is the very last ticket. 

Consumers won't know, because whatever it is, they can afford it. And then it's a ghost town.

My Top Ten Time Travel Movies

Now I'm going to say right up front that Terminator, Back to the Future, Pleasantville and Peggy Sue Got Married are not going to make the list. I just don't think they're good enough and I don't possess the sentiment to include them. There are two honorable mentions though, and I'm going to put them right up top so I can feel a bit better about being jerky in my selection.

Honorable Mentions:
Donnie Darko: Because it's just a very good movie and I really don't want to get into it with its fans. 
Star Trek: The Voyage Home: Because there are three or four drop dead lines, the best being with Commander Scott talking to a mouse.

10. Planet of the Apes
Of course I'm talking about the original here. Greatest surprise ending of just about any movie ever, next to The Usual Suspects, The General's Daughter and several caper films I can think of. But what a marvel. A classic to this very day. It gets on the list.

9. Source Code
This movie was way better than I expected and it throws in the kicker of being a countdown against the clock movie as well. I found it riveting.

8. Timeline
You cannot be a fan of middlebrow science fiction and not love Michael Crichton. This is really a wonderful film in lots of ways, true enough to the book and the times. Just a lovely film.

7. Edge of Tomorrow
OK if things are going to be impossibly bad for humans in their fight against alien species, this story is the most plausible of them all, which is that humans don't come up with a giant bomb or well-placed sniper shot to the boss, but that the aliens' own tech gets used against them. What a super movie.

6. Deja Vu
This is a personal favorite. I've watched it at least 3 times, and it works on multiple levels. It's a mystery, a love story and a sci-fi action flick all at once. It has heroism, treachery and a great location. What more can you ask for?

5. 12 Monkeys
If there's a sentimental favorite here, this is the one. It's just so imaginative and plays so well in memory. It brings forth just the amount of crazy and absurdity to the time travel mission itself without going totally off the deep end.

4. Groundhog Day
There's really nothing else to say. If you haven't seen this movie, your life is incomplete.

3. Looper
Now we come to the movies that take the premise of time travel and work out the details in stunningly creative ways. Looper is darkly mysterious and very satisfying. Any film with gangsters in a nightclub and a young mother in a farmhouse has got to be extraordinary.

2. Predestination
This is the reason for this list. This is the most extroardinary twist on time travel ever put to screen because it uses brilliant story telling to deal with the very paradox of going back in time. It's so extraordinarily well done without being overly intricate that you can get your mind blown three times in one sitting.

1. Primer
The reason this is the greatest time travel movie of all time is because it has time travel within time travel within time travel and accounts for every minute. It is superbly complex and brilliantly executed with that kind of malltown realism that makes the best independent films. It evokes perfectly the sense of young hotshot thinkers facing their own fears and daring to be great. It is by far the most realistic and gritty portrayal of the actual discovery of time travel and the devastating consequences that would issue from greed, power and revenge such an invention would open up in the world. Do not miss this one. It is the American History X of time travel movies.  

Glitching and Learning

My theory of information dynamics says that knowledge cannot be maintained without the expense of energy. I'm finding an interesting inefficiency in my gaming lately. The presence of exploits both expands expertise and decreases propriety.

It is inevitable that as much as I game, that I will be using analogies to that in life. Get over it. Because Lombardi. But just in case you need an intro, here's a thick paragraph about the Destiny Raid:

Destiny Raid
Destiny is a free-roam open sandbox videogame in which the player takes on the avatar of a Guardian. A soldier who runs individual and small cooperative missions against legions of extraterrestrial baddies. The area of operations is the inner planets of the Solar System, Earth, Venus, Mars, Earth's moon, and Mercury. This sort of gameplay (PvE) falls into three categories, Patrol, Strike and Raid. Patrols are random in that there are not specific targets for your activity, although one can select various mercenary missions while on patrol. You can go solo or with up two two buddies as your loot and shoot. Strikes are more crafted adventures with a brief bit of story to get you going - rather like the messages at the beginning of Mission Impossible, you are assigned to take down this and such boss, facing several preliminary battles along the way. The Raids, however are the showpiece and crown jewel of Destiny. On a Raid, you need six players to accomplish tasks that are impossible to guess. Magical things happen that are not obvious, the rules of physics are bent and the team must figure out a way to overcome them. More than just sequences of enemy attacks, but changes in the physical enviroment take place on the way to beat the final boss. There are no instructions for these battles. Teams have to figure out what works. 

Now I'm going to talk about one particular Raid level and the exploit we have been using. It is the second level of the Crota Raid. Interestingly enough, I don't know what it's called. But here's how we play it, and playing it this way made me think about glitching and learning. In case you're not familiar with the term, 'glitching' means taking advantage of a weakness in a systems and short-cutting the process in a way contrary to the way the designers had in mind. For example, if you're hiking down a series of switchbacks, you might literally cut the corners by going down the middle of the hill instead of the gradual left an right on the beaten path. 

As our team enters the second level, we are stand at the top of a set of stairs over looking a pair of plazas. Between the plazas is a cliff. Each plaza is about 200 meters east and west and 75 meters north and south. The gap between the two is about 150 meters. On each plaza are three 10 meter radius circles forming a shallow triangle that points to the other plaza. The top of each triangle is the circle that lies at the foot of an invisible bridge between the two plazas. In the feet of each triangle are tall structures that hover above the center of their respective circle. These, are called 'totems'. So there are four totems, two on each side. The play begins once a player descends the staircase and enters the plaza.

Method One
Behind the near plaza is a large room cut into the face of the mountain. Our method is to hide five players in this room at its extreme rear while one player goes out and excites the enemies. How exactly he does so is a mystery, I've never seen what he does. I'm one of the hidden players. After about 30 seconds, two things happen. First an enemy called a Swordbearer comes out of the hidey room from a small door on the right, below the platforms upon which we are hidden. Then, all of the enemies that have generated out on the plaza dissappear leaving just the Swordbearer. We all then go out to the plaza and attack the Swordbearer who drops the sword. One player is designated to stand at the bridge circle, this materializes the invisible bridge between the two plazas. Two other players are designated to stand in the totem circles. Once gameplay begins, if no players occupy those circles the totems will begin to glow red, and after about 20 seconds destroy the entire team. The trick then is to create the bridge, destroy the Swordbearer, and keep the totems quiet. Then one player can take the sword across the bridge and face another enemy, the Gatekeeper. 

The most difficult part of this part of the game is that usually there are multiple enemies swarming the plaza harassing the players in the totem circles. The difficulty is defeated by the team using the rear platform of the hiding room which, for the purposes of generating enemies, makes the presence of the five hiding players invisible. Destiny levels up difficulty by taking into account the number and strength of the players. Few players, few enemies. More players, more enemies. By hiding, we eliminate the possibility of the game generating more enemies.

Method Two
In this version, all of us go out onto the plaza. One player must be the sort who can regenerate his life after death. We go and thin the enemies a bit. When the Swordbearer comes out we degrade him a small bit, but then all of the players jump off the cliff in close proximity to each other, including the regenerating player. The game begins a countdown clock to resetting the level and just as it hits 1 second, the last player regenerates his life and then restores the lives of the other players. The effect is that the multiple harassing enemies do not regenerate and only the Swordbearer is left. He can then be dispatched in short order and the sword taken across the bridge. 

Both of these methods are effective in eliminating the primary difficulty of defending the totem circles from swarming enemies while trying to kill the Swordbearer, who is more than any single player can defeat in a short period of time. Doing this will creating the bridge adds to the chaos, which is reduced through these glitchy methods.

However the result is that I personally, and certainly many other gamers who have passed through this level have done so without having experienced the game the way on presumes the designers intended. However this is different than a cheat because we were given an environment whose rules were discovered by experimentation, not explicitly laid out by its creators. The aim of the game is to survive and advance. Whatever works, works. Or as the meme says 'Everything bows to success, even grammar'. 

We avoided the difficulty of the challenge of harassment incurred defending the totems, by convincing the game that we didn't exist.

Harassment incurred defending the totems is a particularly apt way to describe a lot of life's challenges present in society every day. It has the virtue of allowing one not particularly skilled at defending totems to survive and advance. One might possibly, through all of the shortcuts, manages to beat Crota, the goal of the Raid. That's a win. The game only polices itself, but there's a meta game as well. How you beat Crota matters in some circles. Ultimately, the most skilled players will figure out how to defend the totems and win, or not waste their time doing so and still win. After all, only multiple wins in the Raid can gain you all the gear randomly distributed at the end of the final boss battle.  

I'm not so much interested in the ethical question here, because that's ultimately longitudinal in the meta game. Either the game creators will fix the exploit - say by resizing the hiding room, or find some way to raise the difficulty in another aspect of the mechanics of the Raid. The designers do indeed update the game to block usage of those exploits they deem to be 'cheese', while leaving others intact. That feedback loop is thus is self-correcting and the game becomes ultimately what the designers intend it to be. Their decision for popularity of a game level, or difficulty is the balance they must strike. But what about the knowledge?

I said at the outset that the presence of exploits increases expertise and decreases propriety. If I beat the plaza level, then I am an expert, whether or not I take the architected path. I will continue to play the way I do and teach others to play the way I do. They in turn will play according to the method they learned. There's an interesting dynamic at work in such cooperative endeavors obviously involving leadership and expertise but also consensus. Everybody on the team doesn't necessarily want to learn so much as win. So it's not so very likely that someone playing with the same circle of friends that team up to raid will learn multiple methods. Only going outside your small circle will you come to better understand the mysteries, and how many of them will be actually doing it 'the hard way' as the designers intended?

The proper way to beat the game involves defending the totems. (Sorry if I can't get over the aptness of the metaphor). And yet when certain methods are employed, that task - which was added for the purpose of making things more challenging (and fun?) - disappears as do the consequent difficulties. The skill of defending totems is lost, and over time their very meaning can be lost. As more experts figure out more alternatives to gaming the game, the rationality of the game design itself can come into question. This happens all the time in Destiny, as in life.

There is a meta game to which we take on various levels of care. The method by which you approach the game is a signal of your skill in the game, which others will interpret as you temporarily collaborate. But glitching itself is a skill which is not only valuable to the player who aims to survive and advance, but to the designer who has an opportunity to eliminate, modify or let the exploit remain. Sometimes you want to play with glitchers, sometimes you don't. 

Black Tweet Envy

I still get missives from the Kwaku Network. The latest one contained the following gem:

One look at Charlie Hebdo cartoons shows that the word satire is being used very loosely. The depictions of cabinet minister Christiane Taubira as a monkey, and the kidnapped Nigerian school girls as pregnant welfare recipients make a mockery of the world satirical. Regardless of how many French politicians are skewered in its pages, it must be pointed out that Charlie Hebdo indulges in racist hate speech.

Their reputation for insult and offense was quickly forgotten and the call to unquestioningly identify with the victims was immediate. Within a few days, #Jesuischarlie was tweeted more than one million times. The propaganda onslaught created an awkward example of hypocrisy for world leaders who are always the worst killers of all.

I think there is some interesting quackery going on in defense of 'free speech', but I know that's just chatting class bandwagoneering. Maybe I'll discuss it at length, but I'll probably wait for something actually interesting to be said which qualifies on my scale as excellent writing. There's a lot that can be said with cartoons. Here are mine.  Cartoons leave a great deal to the imagination, and some people's imaginations are sick and twisted. 

The other gems are scrobbled in my memory as a bit of a backlash over the lack of press coverage over the IED ignited at the NAACP office in Colorado Springs. Somewhere there is a thread of haters mad that their favorite case of domestic terror has been overshadowed by the death of 12 in Paris. 

That's just sad. 

Cobb's Culture Ship Names

Culture Ship Names

--A Pool of Culture Ship Names--

I’ve Got the Water, Who Has the Board?
Lambs Eat Ivy
A Descent into the Maelstrom
Over My Dead Body
Propria Persona
Charmed, I'm Sure
Irregardless
Pack A Lunch
Pocket Lint
Never A Dull Moment
Cliche'd Cliche
Quietly Brusque
To The Manner Born
Ballbuster
Pun Punter
Not That There's Anything Wrong With That
I'd Rather You Not
Who's Crying Now?

An Appetite for Pathology

I just watched two movies that I didn't really want to watch. I recognized the promise in the trailers that these films were ready to deliver something grotesque and so I avoided them. However, my daughter Scholar, has a particular rule for selecting movies to watch with us and it was her night to choose. She refuses to watch anything the lot of us have watched before. For her, it's all about us in the living room experiencing the same emotions at the same time for the first time. I think that's a reasonable approach to watching even unreasonable films. For me, I want films that are unsubtly vivid and loud and I primarily want to see them at the theater. At home however, I much prefer something humorous and witty like Robot and Frank or The Grand Budapest Hotel. I don't like movies that take themselves too seriously. For me, films are only visual literature. Like anybody else, I occassionally watch movies for what I presume to be the same reasons as anyone else, including buzz about them being hot movies. These two very hot movies I consciously decided to stay away from with my customary 'ick'. 

The two movies were Nightcrawler and Gone Girl, essentially two stories about psychopaths going about their business and getting away with it. Unlike with Indiana Jones or Robocop, the bad guy doesn't fall from a great height screaming all the way down.   

There's not much to say about either flick in and of themselves. They are both professionally done in such a way that they convincingly tell their stories, although from a strictly cinematic point of view, Gone Girl is the superior film. What's more interesting to me is the reason why I would, or why you would go ahead and watch. You see both of these are films about a mindless public's complicity in the weavings of a psychopath. They are about the profession of maintaining a mainstream media narrative that is voyeuristic, perverse, obsessive and inescapable. 

There's no news that dirty laundry sells, and that America is a huge market for that sort of nasty business. And it's no secret that even during the feral motorcycle movie heyday of the 70s, breaking through with Mad Max, the entire post-apocalyptic world was never so graphically obscene as what we watch today. However, there are a couple of questions that raise my eyebrows at this particular moment.

Firstly, how are thoughtful people to deal with the fact of their seduction into participating in this phenomenon? It never fails to escape me that I'm watching an explicit portrayal of something that I already know. As soon as an individual in a film is given a hinky enough personna, we know there's going to be ugly deeds done. How could you not know what Javier Bardim's character in No Country for Old Men was going to do? Films are about dramatic exposition and somebody has to die, right? 

Secondly, how are less than thougthful people with an appetite for this sort of entertainment integrated into society? I say this not as a prude, but as an observer of the figurative 1000 channels of television (which are probably more like 50,000 channels of multimedia) and their capacity for narrowcasting only what individuals choose. This in contrast to the three television networks I grew up with that forced some common understanding of the world around us and thus some social cohesion. With my eye to radical autonomy, I see less of a fragmented society but on shattered into 50,000 bits - each adequately funded to create a Foucaultian epistemelogical multiverse. Every clique has its truth, and they carry it along with them in their smartphones in their idiot-proof cities. This is the world of the Nightcrawler. Why shouldn't his fantasy of what people ought to see be the truth? Look for Nightcrawler 2, the Nightcrawler News Network, (NYSE: NNNK)

Now it can be said that these are grim fairy tales about our modern times and provide a nail-biting exposure of exactly how much our media does satisfy the narrative of evil. In fact, that must be their only redeeming value, otherwise they are profiting from the very same game they ostensibly decry. Yet in both of these tales there are no heroes, there are only villains, victims and professionals who shape the way all of the nasty business is handled. The public, whose appetite for pathology fuels all of the madness cannot be stopped. They are an oceanic mob force whose perverse depth cannot be drained. We can only ride their waves until we drown or are shipwrecked. The public is like a god that must be satiated. If you are going to be a successful filmmaker, or TV anchor, or talk show host you pretty much have to believe that.

That is the crux of the matter that must be broken which is why I started this essay speaking about the reasons and the expectations for my video choices in the first place. I'm trying to be virtuous in all ways (except to the extent that I am growing fonder of what I know about Kingsley Amis) and I understand why watching any such movie, or six o'clock news show, or glib talking head program is derivative at best of what we should properly expect in our information flows. 

What I'm not saying is that our entertainment should be a purified diet of stories where the good guy always wins, but who is going to be the hero when the evil is the public? How can you make movies about that which sell in a democracy? There is always something a bit self serving about movies that give you the opportunity to step away from 'them' which at the same time requires 'them' as a salacious audience posing as a sagacious audience. The true sagacious audience already read the book and doesn't need much prompting as to what psychopaths can do. It seems to me that there are only two answers, movies will have to be preachy or we stop letting the good guys lose.

Lost in my slight aggravation about the content of such movies is the proper disctinctions about art, education and ethics. It's hard to call either of these an art film, except to the point that they might be considered gothic horror in the vein of contemporary conspiracy flicks. I don't know what art is supposed to be in America, but I'm kind of sure that it's supposed to be important and I know these films are not art. They are crafts. They are well built and have a perfection about them as productions, but they carry a troublesome payload. We are grossed out, but not enlightened. Is that what movies are for? 

 

 

The Hebdo Comic

Three Databases

I just did something remarkably easy that reminds me about why Amazon is winning and will continue to win. I started up three different databases and then threw them away. For anyone who has worked in the Amazon ecosystem, this may seem like just an ordinary thing. Indeed it is, but let me take you back in time.

In 1985, I took my second summer internship at Xerox in El Segundo, CA. I reported to a guy named Jack Starkey who was one of those starched-shirt engineers of the first order. I loved the guy. My assignment was to build a data dictionary for the parts and service database that Xerox used to keep track of the maintenance of their top of the line laser printers. Xerox was considering migrating from an IBM VSAM hierarchical database to something called Focus, a new fangled relational database. My job was to insure that I had all of the definitions correct. I asked Jack if I could use the new Xerox Star Workstation in order to complete my job, which was essentially all about documentation. He agreed. 

My first internship was more interesting because it was more technical. I actually wrote a financial modeling program. But my boss was loathed and feared in that area and a lot of people hoped everything he did would fail. That guy, whose name I actually cannot remember Jim somebody, was a notorious pipe smoker back in those days when you could smoke in the office. He liked something called Amphora Green.  My project did not fail, although there were some interesting twists. My job was specifically to make a realtime pricing model that salesmen could use to develop a quote for customers based upon the way they actually did their electronic printing. At the time, most computer printing came out of printers attached to mainframes and the most popular one was the IBM 3800. But the Xerox printer had duplex and quadplex, meaning it could print on both sides of the same sheet of paper. My program would show the long term economic benefits of using the Xerox tech which often came down to power and supply costs. So I learned 'Total Cost of Ownership' at a fairly young age. The MBA intern with whom I was working had her HP calculator. My code was being held up because she was late in delivering a 'cost matrix' to me. I sat down with her finally to discover that she had just been plugging numbers into a formula run on her HP 12C. The MBAs didn't sit with the engineers, you see, so getting this meeting took weeks. I had to explain to her that this CP/M based computer could actually do that kind of formula calculation. She was shocked that Xerox actually made a computer that could do the same things as an HP 12C. We all learned a little something. I recall later on that a cat named Burkhart, whom I seem to have never forgiven in person, got the chance to present the wonders of my completed program to Xerox folks in London, while I went back to school that September. 

But that was the pace of things in the mid 80s. Three months just to build the equivalent of a DDL script to help move data from one database technology to another. Today I do that in realtime. Another dude I vaguely recall had the radical attitude I might have enjoined were I not so desperate to drive a BMW. He advised me to get all my hacking done before the implementation of ACF2. What we were dealing with was the gap between the time you could get engineers to understand a technology, the time it took them to implement it, the time it was adopted by the business, and the time that an actual payoff could be seen. Then there was the time it took for the capacity of the business to exceed the design limits of the system in place and the time it took for that problem to arise to the level of necessity and a new replacement process begun. 

In the 80s, all of that was glacial. Moore's Law kept us all expectant about the future, mostly in terms of how much of all of the business processes could be captured outside of the pocket calculators of MBAs, but the process of business adaptation as well as the process of re-sizing systems have continued to be slow all the way to the current day. Amazon has emerged to understand these kinds of problems very well because of how e-commerce begat DevOps. And yet the majority of businesses still use 'Enterprise' architecture in their systems implementations. 'Enterprise', for all intents and purposes, was the term used to convince IT buyers that UNIX based servers could handle all of the business once only owned by the sort of mainframe computers that spit data out to Xerox and IBM printers. And then came e-business which introduced the 'n-tier' solutions, multiple tiers required because no single vendor, not even IBM, could provide hardware, networking and software solutions for the new class of applications being envisioned and built.  

I don't have a buzzword we could reliably depend upon to be what this time of transition to cloud architecture will be. 'Post-Enterprise' is all I will hazard. However, what processes can and will be improved is a lot clearer. So I hope to speak to you, my fellows still using the systems designed with on-premise Enterprise class architectures in mind. That's my aim for this year, to help you see what I see and what my company, Full360, can do to help you realize some of the promises of computing that were made a long time ago and have been a long time coming. 

So what I just did, single-handedly, today and yesterday, was build three different database servers Oracle 11g, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. They were each 4 core 15GB servers with at least 300GB of SSD. They took about 15 minutes to configure and secure, with automated backups in an alternate data center. I was able to connect to them directly through a secure VPN I had previously setup with my RazorSQL client using JDBC. Today, I'm shutting down the Oracle and MySQL services because my customer only has the MSSQL license. But it was actually fun playing with the alternatives. Fun!

What's going to happen next is that I will start using AWS Config to keep track of all of my compute and networking assets for my customers. I'll be able to tell, at a glance, which server is doing what in which stack in which VPC. I will be able to manage services to an even greater extent for this and my other customers. 

Back in 2001, I had a dream about a company I might work for in the future. I called the company 3DB because as a fundamental competency I wanted people who understood object, relational and multidimensional database technologies. We could then build the kinds of systems I envisioned. Now I work at Full360, but the 3DB concept is reality. We use multiple database technologies in our data management framework called ElasticBI. I didn't envision them running in a cloud architecture, but that is even better. Stay tuned. 

The Persistence of 360

Somebody asked questions the other day about why America.. whoa here we go.. was too stupid to adapt the metric system like Europe. Well the obvious conventional wisdom is that we're stupid and have bad habits. But let's think about that for a moment.

Let's start with a yard. Not your yard, a yardstick. But your yard could be measured with a yardstick just as easily as it could be measured with a meter stick. Why? Because we know what a yard is and we know what a meter is and we know arithmetic. 

Let's say your yard is rather large, like mine. It would then be 50 feet by 40 feet = 2000 square feet. Now there's something very nice about feet that we know, because feet divide into 12 inches. 12 is a special number because you can easily divide it in halves, thirds and quarters, and that is what you generally do with land. Yards are conveniently 3 feet. 36 can be divided very nicely too. But when you look at 360, then you get something that's rather strikingly brilliant. 

360 can be divided by 2,3,4,5,6,8,9,10,12,15,18 and 20. That's rather clever don't you think? You can't do that with decimals so easily, and after all the point of any system is not that things can be measured. After all we could invent meters and re-invent them to be any arbitrary length and do the arithmetic. The strength of the metric system lies in its ability to scale by orders of magnitude. But scaling by orders of magnitude is not something that happens very often in the human scale. In engineering, sure. But not in home construction, food recipes, human measurement or any other of a dozen activities (hmm dozen) that we are regularly involved in. Now we could go into all of the ways we measure all of the things we do from miles per hour to paper sizes, but that long long discussion actually gets to the heart of Metric vs Imperial. In short, however, this is all about fractions. Or if you like to be mathematical about it, it's about superior highly composite numbers.

Now a friend told me that there are two kinds of engineers in the world. The kind that have put a man on the moon, and the kind that use the metric system. The picture above is taken from his machine shop. It sounds like braggadocio until you listen for another minute. Then the man says 'SAE'. Now anybody who's turned a wrench in their lives knows something about SAE sockets vs Metric sockets. But if you look at what SAE actually was and is, things get very interesting. 

Check out this dude Kettering. I don't know about you, but to me that's a career full of wowsers. 186 patents is no accident. He helped build GM into the world's largest company. But what's fascinating, as when I listen enough, is to learn how many parts in the world's market for parts are of SAE measure rather than of metric. I often think in terms of meters nowadays, but only for things that are linear. I will always think of pies when I have to divide, and I will think of fractions. But isn't it interesting, just looking at the picture, which is a better, simpler, faster way to measure? 

Maybe the metric system is why we haven't put another man on the moon. 

Now I'm going to show the other side here, because what we've done in America which is metric to the bone before just about every other nation is in our currency. More than just about anything, currency lies in the realm of Extremistan. Orders of magnitude are quite proper here. But at the small level of the ordinary consumer, we don't do much with pricing that accords to common 360 sense.

For example. In old money there were 12 pence to the shilling. That would be quite nice if you purchased many things by the dozen. If a dozen eggs cost a shilling, a half dozen eggs would be sixpence. A smart shopkeeper would try to price such things that way for the convenience of his customers. Then again, one might be a bit too clever (by half?) using the same system to obfuscate, as bakers may have throwing in for their extra sized dozen. We certainly don't price things logically at the farmer's market level, but clearly decimal pricing let's us see unit prices reflect economies of scale in bulk pricing.  So for things that scale orders of magnitude, decimal is better. 

By the way, what time is it?

A Third is Given

The reason kids don't decide is that they know that whatever they decide, there will be a community for them. They are swayed in and out of things and places. It's where you're at, dude.

We live in a society where the meta is part of the discussion and we have decided that certain matters are unresolvable. This is the land of the non-excluded middle. Everything is true, everything is false, everything is true and false. What this means is that bullies rule, but are always subverted.

--

Godbey thinks I might have been the one who put some of this in mind, but it wasn't me directly, I don't think. Still I do think about the possibility of determining the truth of things. Yet I know that people will decide without going the last mile to find out the truth or falsity of things because we are demonstrably not in the land of great men who pass judgment. I ask people 'Who is your Leviathan' and they don't even bother trying to find out. Everything just sloshes around and people who put things in buckets are ignorable nerds. So nobody goes to Buddha to ask if things are true or false, and Buddha doesn't have to come up with catuskoti answers. Buddha doesn't exist in our society, Google does. And Google just tells you what the most popular answers are.

Over at Quora, a lot of people ask what's it like to be somebody who is somebody. There is the somebody who is the somebody and everybody else cheats and cheeses in the games that somebody invented, because rules are just power controls which are disposable as soon as the somebody is deposed. In the meantime, suck ass. 

To the core:

Let’s start by turning back the clock. It is India in the fifth century BCE, the age of the historical Buddha, and a rather peculiar principle of reasoning appears to be in general use. This principle is called the catuskoti, meaning ‘four corners’. It insists that there are four possibilities regarding any statement: it might be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, or neither true nor false.

We know that the catuskoti was in the air because of certain questions that people asked the Buddha, in exchanges that come down to us in the sutras. Questions such as: what happens to enlightened people after they die? It was commonly assumed that an unenlightened person would keep being reborn, but the whole point of enlightenment was to get out of this vicious circle. And then what? Did you exist, not, both or neither? The Buddha’s disciples clearly expected him to endorse one and only one of these possibilities. This, it appears, was just how people thought.

At around the same time, 5,000km to the west in Ancient Athens, Aristotle was laying the foundations of Western logic along very different lines. Among his innovations were two singularly important rules. One of them was the Principle of Excluded Middle (PEM), which says that every claim must be either true or false with no other options (the Latin name for this rule, tertium non datur, means literally ‘a third is not given’). The other rule was the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC): nothing can be both true and false at the same time.

Writing in his Metaphysics, Aristotle defended both of these principles against transgressors such as Heraklitus (nicknamed ‘the Obscure’). Unfortunately, Aristotle’s own arguments are somewhat tortured – to put it mildly – and modern scholars find it difficult even to say what they are supposed to be. Yet Aristotle succeeded in locking the PEM and the PNC into Western orthodoxy, where they have remained ever since. Only a few intrepid spirits, most notably G W F Hegel in the 19th century, ever thought to challenge them. And now many of Aristotle’s intellectual descendants find it very difficult to imagine life without them.

That is why Western thinkers – even those sympathetic to Buddhist thought – have struggled to grasp how something such as the catuskoti might be possible. Never mind a third not being given, here was a fourth – and that fourth was itself a contradiction. How to make sense of that?"

I think I remember something about Hegel's metaphysics. My essential take is that truth forms cannot become ossified, because as we say 'the journey is the destination'. In other words, nothing remains true simply by declaration, nor does anything remain false by declaration. To Hegel, you do not come upon knowledge in a pure form of truth or falsity, but through revelation through the work of discovery. Key word here is *work*. It takes energy to see what is true or false, and you only see when you are expending this energy. The answer is not '42'. '42' is an abstraction of the work of the greatest calculating mind, and the only way to know the truth of that answer is to actually do that work, which is of course impossible for everyon who is not that machine. But if you want an answer without doing the work and appealing to authority, it may as well be 42, which is as good as any other. Since Google is free, we are free to use and discard the results. So nothing at all is true or false, or mostly true or mostly false or both true and false, it is all in the process of being comprehended within Goedelian limits, and so it is all of that. 

In this way the kids of today have it right.  And yet in the end, somebody has to be authoritarian. Here's the scary part. The authority is energy. 

So we get back to the relativism of the hated Foucault who gives us the 'regimes of truth' concept. He's right about that. What's true is determined, not according to some Platonic form, but by the state of the masses' conventional wisdom, which is in turn shaped, if not determined, by the influence of the powers that be. 

But here's the thing. Human beings in their thinking machinery have no halting problem. Life cannot afford not to accept contradictions, otherwise we would be very poor at adapting to mind-blowing change. Our heads do not literally explode, we make some rationalizations and some abstractions and convenient bias confirmations and strategic forgetting in the retelling of our narratives. And we adapt. So what was true yesterday is not true today. But if you want a flat answer from the Buddha, he would have to tell you that this thing is true and false, because he must account for human possibilities of dealing with it throughout time.

I like how Aeon describes a function and a relationship in the bridge between mathematics and philosophy. 

At the core of the explanation, one has to grasp a very basic mathematical distinction. I speak of the difference between a relation and a function. A relation is something that relates a certain kind of object to some number of others (zero, one, two, etc). A function, on the other hand, is a special kind of relation that links each such object to exactly one thing. Suppose we are talking about people. Mother of and father of are functions, because every person has exactly one (biological) mother and exactly one father. But son of and daughter of are relations, because parents might have any number of sons and daughters. Functions give a unique output; relations can give any number of outputs. Keep that distinction in mind; we’ll come back to it a lot.

We are chockablock with dysfunctional relationships. But they are indeed relationships, and we make lots of them, whether or not they have a function. It doesn't matter does it? We are related and we're all relatives. Call it relativism. Everything is true. Everything is false. Everything is relative until you get all functional. 

But when you apply enough force and power into something it has to behave in more deterministic ways, neh? Scary. 

That's all I have.

 

 

Obligatory Seriousness on #BlackLivesMatter

Yes of course. And some matter more than others. Your choice of which lives to call black or representative of black says a great deal about you. In fact, I'll say it says way more about you than it does about black Americans of which there are umpty millions. Your mileage may vary, but lots of people get pretty far with their racial theories. Me, I'm not into any of that, I call them as I see them with no respect for being politically correct. Why? Because my dealings with 'black America' isn't political. No agenda serves it, especially no special agenda. That doesn't stop people from trying and yet I digress.

Some time ago when the focus of Cobb was black political partisanship, I established the category 'Keeping it Right'. That had in mind the old cliche about 'Keeping it Real' and recalls the last hiphop group that mattered, De La Soul, on the best album they ever put out 'Stakes Is High' in The Bizness. I now repurpose that thread as my contribution to that unique American discussion which remains permanent and like memories of high school and formative cartoons like Johnny Quest, hits me square in the funny bone on occassion. So there it is with less emotion and yet more detail than the hashtag can evoke. Keeping it Right is my take on which black lives matter to me. 

That said, I suppose I owe a top ten now that I think of it. It shouldn't be hard, but it's also not so deep. (So I say before I write it - but let's see what I come up with.) OK. The first one is not in the top ten, but it is the reason why I have revitalized this thread.

Omar Hakim.

When I was living in Brooklyn, back in the early 90s, before Jurassic Park and Janet's massive album, I purchased Omar Hakim's solo album. And as the classy young man I was, I thought it was appropriate to my style. I therefore spent a lot of time being angry in a particular way that aesthetes get angry, that dudes like Onyx were making money. Nowadays that's called being a hater. I didn't hate Onyx, but I had minimal respect for them. Like Criss Cross. I happened across Omar's album in my collection today and paused for a moment of sadness in that Omar didn't become the star I thought he deserved to be, especially considering the huge sensation he made in Sting's world massive Bring on the Night concert. So who matters to me? Well, both Onyx and Omar Hakim made me think about music and culture, but Hakim matters more. 

Top Ten Black folks... alright this is silly but .. nevermind. It's too silly to even contemplate. I will re-awaken the topic Keeping It Right. That is all. 

Still. Onyx. Extra double dumb. 

 

 

Omar Hakim

Whether or Not God Exists

I take time, occasionally, to help atheists understand the reality of God as they often get tangled around their own rationality.

My love for God, whom I see as morally perfect, inspires me to attempt my own moral perfection. Nothing else inspires me to this degree. Therefore it is logical that if I retain my faith and love in God, then I will be a better person than I would otherwise. 

The above syllogism does not require acknowledgement or even the existence of an actual physical entity. It requires a commitment to the concept of God into which any number of spiritual, natural, mystical, supernatural, fictional characters might be employed. The proof is in the works and actions of the inspired individual. That is the reality of religious faith.

It is illogical to deny that religious people make this connection, and it is illogical to deny the causal effects of actions accompanying such connections. 

None of this hangs on the physical, provable existence of God in the way one's wife is physical of provable. If such a provable existence were necessary, all sorts of illogical consequences would follow. For example, If no provable god ever existed, it would be illogical to say the religion exists or that religion has consequences. Yet in fact religion does exist and instantiates the belief in god. This is repeatable in the human species, generation after generation. It is illogical to say that belief in God does not exist, whether or not God itself exists. It is illogical to say there are no consequences in the belief in God, whether or not God exists. It is illogical to say that none of the consequences in the belief in God are morally improving, inspirational or loving. 

It is logical to acknowledge that morally improved, loving and inspirational individuals are that way because of their belief in God, whether or not God exists. Whether or not Secular Humanism exists, whether or not Nazism exists. It is simply the existence of humans who are improved by their faith - one must logically acknowledge that such people exist, in substantial numbers, with substantial impact. Having done so, one needn't assign any kind of exclusivity to their moral position. 

-- A final analogy. Imagine that you drive a Ford automobile, and you do so because the existence of Henry Ford is physical, provable and logical. You drive your Ford from point A, of immorality, to point B, morality. I on the other hand drive a BMW, from point A to point B. You are telling me that I am illogical because there is no physical, provable Henry BMW, regardless of the fact that I arrive at the same point B. You are judging my vehicle for moral improvement on a basis which is irrelevant to the purposes of my using it. I love my BMW and you do not. So what?