tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91686442024-03-08T03:34:09.833-08:00apologize or elseranting - <a href=http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/music/rollin%20and%20tumblin%20with%20the%20devil.mp3>talk radio</a> for the dea[fd]jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.comBlogger431125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-41317112540044194662024-02-05T01:54:00.000-08:002024-02-05T09:46:54.772-08:00if i get one more daft phd proposal, i shall publish them all on the blockchain so everyone knows who these eejits are<p> <span style="font-family: Menlo; font-size: 18px; font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">Celestial Emporium of Bogus Knowledge</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">with apologies to George Lewis Bogus</span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 21px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;"></span><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">those belonging to the common crawl</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">the wayback ones</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">the self-supervised learned <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">block chain smokers</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">news (or fake news)</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">izvestia, pravda, life articles by nicolai ivanovic denisovic</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">undetected stray dogs on the internet</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">those included in this file</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">oscilliatory or hallicinatory</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">NP Soft</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">those drawn with unstable diffusion</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">et ai</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">those that have just broken in</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-variant-ligatures: no-common-ligatures;">those that from afar look like cats</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: Menlo; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg0AJ64FxAyfweNd1WsH_MQ4lIYIFBLvyrUqOf8dFz8a7TVWFYWu1WTXafoHNZNl1xGtl4iV9WGh5KISv9b6H3nF1RBEawHrTNPVuk55hWvPv4TvgcFhpZrWIoTuFxaChIVnBn-5DKjiWrrcnGM2t5DxtO68E6zsQoF3-8Jwv9IFOOlVPJCdymQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="512" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg0AJ64FxAyfweNd1WsH_MQ4lIYIFBLvyrUqOf8dFz8a7TVWFYWu1WTXafoHNZNl1xGtl4iV9WGh5KISv9b6H3nF1RBEawHrTNPVuk55hWvPv4TvgcFhpZrWIoTuFxaChIVnBn-5DKjiWrrcnGM2t5DxtO68E6zsQoF3-8Jwv9IFOOlVPJCdymQ" width="240" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-60205656023631613842024-02-02T02:12:00.000-08:002024-02-02T02:12:14.613-08:00The True Existential Risk from AI<p> It is well known that if you practise IQ tests, your score improves.</p><p>It is less well known that if you practice Turing tests, your score deteriorates.</p><p>And it is even less well known that the machine learning system improves its scores as the humans' scores get worse.</p><p>The consequence of this is that the ever increasing abundance of online checks of whether you are human or a robot are basically degrading the overall intelligence of the human race, whilst enhancing that of its robot successors.</p><p>This is evident from the many incredibly stupid things humans have been doing recently (war, pestilence, blockchain, climate, obesity etc)...</p><p>I think it is too late to do anything about it, as I have already fallen below the level where I would be able to grasp any plan to tackle the challenge anyhow, as have you, dear reader. Unless you are a Transformer Overlord:-</p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhHb2xwhDkPC5C1P7ZmszElProLr8Q6hd-qLMA5eUU3abKOwIRNUU6orz3adQxmKZZQThpUYP_jNNoJz2rrxCkqnbbs17qyir2BvKkMXt53SAdroVdYhLuqzAaddiV0Ok7tR2w9Gkf6hrxdV5jiO1bt0fUpvO4NPu9hjD2VBrgnRbxBsNJMguDJ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="512" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhHb2xwhDkPC5C1P7ZmszElProLr8Q6hd-qLMA5eUU3abKOwIRNUU6orz3adQxmKZZQThpUYP_jNNoJz2rrxCkqnbbs17qyir2BvKkMXt53SAdroVdYhLuqzAaddiV0Ok7tR2w9Gkf6hrxdV5jiO1bt0fUpvO4NPu9hjD2VBrgnRbxBsNJMguDJ" width="240" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-3246975090779246682023-11-22T02:29:00.000-08:002023-11-22T02:29:41.630-08:00evidence resistance is futile<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Many people cope with reading maps, many people read charts, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">as </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">in music, whether tab or classical (or other) notation. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">and many people read knitting patterns, DIY instructions, recipes, and </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">so on - all of these are just branches of scientific explanations </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">in the very real sense that they need to be used to generate </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">repeatable results by different people </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">so you get to the same place if you follow the same map instructions, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">or you play in key/time/tune with people if you play from the same dots, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">or you make a jumper with arms the same length as each other, or you </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">repair the washing machine, and not the fridge by mistake, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">or you cook something that doesn't poison everyone, or make them </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">swear at your grandma's cookies (congratulations, you have just falsified an incorrect theory).</span></p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-23737247092928865552023-11-05T03:54:00.002-08:002023-11-05T03:54:43.704-08:00Endless in Gaza<p>It seems Israel's goals in Gaza are an unfortunate mix of the movements that the government has to placate. There's the actual stated military goals, which naively put are to free the hostages, and remove Hamas' weapons, and then, what? leave Gaza alone again?. There's the more extreme position of driving all 2M Palestinians out of Gaza (presumably into Egypt), and "simplify" any geopolitical discussion with the Palestinians left in the West Bank. And then what?. There's the even more extreme idea of erasing the population of Gaza once and for all (presumably on the advice of any counter-terroist experts that you can't simply eliminate Hamas by removing the current active members, as they will be replaced time and again from the base population), and then what? Who would welcome such a pariah state in any trade or travel ever again? Whatever the truth of these or any other more or less crazy objectives, none of these has an end point, but are just a step. Mostly in the wrong direction. Of course, Hamas own goals are also just that, mostly own goals too. What a sad sad situation.</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-43451358123086193802023-10-14T04:10:00.004-07:002023-10-15T04:03:30.732-07:00Retirement in Cambridge...<p> once upon a time, you worked til you dropped.</p><p><br /></p><p>I recall on joining the computer lab, seeing Roger Needham, <span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Linux Libertine", Georgia, Times, serif;">Karen Spärck Jones, Robin Milner, Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, Mike Gordon, on pretty much a daily basis - just to say, to get shouted at by Karen for carrying my bike in to my office, to work on grand challenges for CS for the UK with Robin (and comment on his bigraph work) to hear David Wheeler's amazing cutting insights into the most basic algorithmic ideas, to see where Mike's work on formally verified processors might go next, to be told off by Maurice for even thinking of building an affordable all optical processor (he cited Grace Hopper's "here's how big a photon is")...</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Linux Libertine", Georgia, Times, serif;">They have all passed on now, sad to say, some before their time. But they were in the lab, as likely as not, til the day before...</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Linux Libertine", Georgia, Times, serif;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Linux Libertine", Georgia, Times, serif;">Since then, the University has seen fit to operate a less enlightened ageist approach to retirement <a href="https://www.hr.admin.cam.ac.uk/files/retirement_policy_and_ejra_review_group.pdf">currently under review</a>, which is pretty ill thought out, in my humble opinion.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Linux Libertine", Georgia, Times, serif;">The Doors said <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOzpncIHCLs&ab_channel=TheDoors-Topic">Noone gets out of here alive</a>, but the university seems to think differently.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Linux Libertine", Georgia, Times, serif;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Linux Libertine", Georgia, Times, serif;">One of the most bogus arguments used for Employer "Justified" Retirement Age is that of "succession". When I was an undergraduate, there were still colleges that did not admit women. One of their arguments was that if they did, they would be excluding some smart young men.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Linux Libertine", Georgia, Times, serif;">The point was that as soon as one is gender-blind on admissions, one realises that the purpose is including people based on their ability to take advantage of, and/or contribute to the role, not on some arbitrary attribute (like having red hair or being a zoroastrian).</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Linux Libertine", Georgia, Times, serif;">The idea that not allowing people to work past a "certain age" because that might not allow one to employ young people is a variant (albeit the other side of the equation, on exit, rather than entry) - if there is a shortage of "permanent" positions in the institition, then by all means make a comparison based on contributions. Basing it on some random chance factor (in the case of retirement, date of birth, rather than, say, gender) is bogus. (I wonder what those college people would have made of trans applicants too...). Given most people are a net asset to the university, even the "competitive" argument is pretty much nonsense too.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Linux Libertine", Georgia, Times, serif;"><br /></span></p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-74237332155488559342023-08-14T21:31:00.000-07:002023-08-14T21:31:04.663-07:003 songs in 1 day<p> a good day for robert hunter! </p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHo1fNnXFVU&ab_channel=PlayingForChange">ripple</a><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRjQZr5x9tA&ab_channel=JamBase">brokedown palace</a><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2reCAcmMtSA&ab_channel=JamBase">to lay me down</a><br /></p><p><br /></p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-72776816154093554382023-08-13T04:12:00.008-07:002023-08-13T04:12:43.125-07:00before and after <p> what we knew before in great <a href="https://www.gov.uk/guidance/review-of-the-balance-of-competences">detail about the EU benefits</a> and on balance...</p><p>and </p><p>what we learned after we were told <a href="https://yorkshirebylines.co.uk/regular-features/the-davis-downside-dossier/">there were no downsides to leaving the EU</a> </p><p>without much mitigation</p><p>shocking really.</p><p><br /></p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-78543956671643713272023-08-03T00:43:00.005-07:002023-08-03T00:48:43.735-07:00AI will boost the economy by [insert your ludicrous claim here]<p> Every day there's another request from policy people to tech people to predict how and where AI will help the economy. The latest one I've seen in the UK had a "pulled out of thin air" claim that AI was going to boost the economy by 6%, and represented the 4th (or is it 3rd or 5th) industrial revolution since {fire, wheel, steel, steam, production lines, electricity,advertising,internet, etc etc)</p><p>Aside from the fact that most the past revolutions didn't have the impact claimed, or certainly not in the way described e.g. miners and factory workers were poorer than tenant farmers, both in money terms and in quality and length of life. And they were a large fraction of the population for a while. I bet the same will be found about office and information workers too. this isn't just about bullshit jobs, it is worse - it is about the cheapest way for capitalism to operate.</p><p>so for AI to do the things the techno-optimist brainwashed dimwit policy people claim, it would largely be working in optimisation of existing practices. since you can't live in an AI instead of a house, nor can you eat or breath an AI, or ride the AI across the land and sea, nor can you power your heating or A/C with an AI. All it can do is make some of these things work a bit better.</p><p><br /></p><p>But we've been optimising systems for hundreds of years - partly through the "invisible hand", but also explicitly - transportation and utility providers (often when state operated) employed hundreds of operations researchers to optimise the services. The electricity grids and rail networks were marvels of efficiency. They could only get worse by privatisation.</p><p>So now we expect private companies operating AI to make sub-optimal services better? ironic eh. Absolutely no way, jose, is that going to work.</p><p>Just another HS2 waiting to happen, just another NHS IT project hovering in the wings. No-one honest should be involved in any of these projects until someone (aristotle, jesus, laozi, marx, kropotkin, piketty, someone even smarter?) devises a replacement for the economic fiasco that the descendants of Adam Smith and F.A.Hayek mysteriously still adore.</p><p>Hey, maybe the sign of real AGI will be that a machine will propose an explainable, feasible, and deployable replacement for capitalism and the patriarchy.</p><p>We live in hope. foolishly.</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-61173939416969958592023-07-31T06:09:00.001-07:002023-08-02T02:36:07.626-07:00Fermi's last paradox.<p>Some people have been driven to revisit Fermi's <i>paradox</i> once more due to the recent <i>revelations</i> about UFO sightings from the USA.</p><p>Let's revisit the basic idea - we have some notion of the number of galaxies in the universe, the number of stars in galaxies, the distribution of stars with exo-planets, the probability those exo-planets are in the goldilocks zone, and so some idea based in 1 prior (life on earth) that intelligent beings must be out there, and, indeed, out there in pretty large numbers.</p><p>This is an sample bias of massive proportions.</p><p>While the idea that life should be likely given the right circumstances, and the observed statistics of the basic ingredients (at the planetary level) support this, the Fermi paradox is that, given how long we have been around as an intelligent species, capable of observing stuff like this, then the chances that others are around, at the same time, should be very high, and yet we have not (convincingly) encountered any of them, or at least not visibly, nor have their deigned to contact us.</p><p>So I have two arguments about this not being a paradox at all, one based on science fiction, the other based on fantasy.</p><p>1. SF - Asimov's Foundation series started as a riff on Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In it, he posits a galaxy wide empire which will eventually collapse due to internal contradictions (actually, he'd never have used such an overtly Marxist term, since he was an ardent capitalist, but his psychohistory theory smacks of marxist dialectical materialism). In this, the only way the "dark ages" that follow an empire's collapse, could be mitigated was via the Foundation, and even that couldn't solve noise introduced by accumulated small deviations from individual behaviours, so needed a Second Foundation to correct the noise (even they nearly lost due to the Mule, an extreme perturbation). So good old Prof Isaac basically invoked magic (ok, so in the spirit of Arthur C. Clark, it was dressed up as a technology so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic). Indeed, in later books, he merged two of his future histories together from the robots and the empire, he made up yet more magic (Gaia, and Emergent Ethical self-modifying sentient artificial beings) ... sigh</p><p>The key point here is that Empires don't last. We have a set of past "civilisations" we could use to model the distribution of life times of organised societies - Mesopotamia, Songhai, Mayans, aforesaid Romans, the Brits, the EU, the USSR, etc etc - look, they don't last long. </p><p>Worse, when they encounter another empire (British v. Moghul), inevitably one disappears.</p><p>So in space, chances are most organised tech societies don't last long enough to find one-another, but occasionally, when they do, one absorbs the other. Only it still fades away after (say) 100 years.</p><p>And note if FTL is not possible, we need to sustain a tech society across generational star ship lifetimes, which could be tens of centuries at least.</p><p>2. Fantasy. Maybe dark matter and dark energy are anathema to intelligence. Maybe there is "dark intelligence" which absorbs all smart being trying to make it through to the next light zone. Maybe there is some sort of truth behind Good Omens and other stories - there's a bunch of adversaries out there, but they aren't what we would call "civilised" - they are creatures from hell. After all, didn't a very smart human once say "Hell is other people". Maybe Fermi's paradox isn't a paradox, it is just that between all the little possible utopias is a vast abyss, not full of nothing, or zero point energy, but full of demons.</p><p><br /></p><p>Note Frank Zappa already remarked that Hydrogen is not the most abundant substance in the Universe, and that stupidity was far more abundant. Hence, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Intelligence.</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-36793587419815395062023-07-11T13:50:00.007-07:002023-07-27T01:28:23.276-07:00larging it language models<p> so lets deconstruct this bullshit.</p><p><br /></p><p>generative models - i wrote a random number generator in 1976. it used an ancient technique from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_random_number_generator#:~:text=In%20statistics%20and%20computer%20software,certain%20classes%20of%20probability%20distribution.">past</a> still in use today coz it works - it was generative - that doesn't <i>mean </i>anything. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>foundation ai - </b>what's that about? the mule defeated the foundation, last I heard. what a load of tosh.</p><p><br /></p><p>large <i><u>language</u></i> models - not at all - statistics of utterances, unutterable bollocks. that's not language, that's verbal <span face=""Google Sans", arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #202124; font-size: 20px;">Diarrhoea.</span></p><p><span face=""Google Sans", arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #202124; font-size: 20px;"><br /></span></p><p><span face=""Google Sans", arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #202124; font-size: 20px;">"attention is all you need"? sure, if you have nothing to tell people about, it sure is.</span></p><p><br /></p><p>interestingly (since penning this rant) I've read a whole slew of papers about shrinking NNs in general, and pruning LLMs specifically...still a research thing, but the Lottery Hypothesis suggests for now, this is no longer just post-training (just starting from a smaller architecture produces lower accuracy models...hmmm why?)</p><p>phew. lets get shot of this hype cycle and back to fixing the planet.</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-35495134952428618832023-06-16T02:04:00.002-07:002023-06-16T02:04:16.129-07:00The Institute for the Musing on Dangerous Ideas<p> The Institute for the Musing on Dangerous Ideas (IMDI) has received a great deal of money over the past 15 decades from the ex heads of state from several advanced civilisations. The accumulated wisdom and experience of these grey hairs is, of course, not in doubt, and is, of course, most welcome.</p><p>However, it has become clear that they completely failed to predict the massive global success of democracy, and as such, have demonstrated very poor value for money. The rapid rise of generative politics, whereby large populations of people engage in decision making has caught despots and demogogues, populists and popes, all by surprise. "Why weren't we warned?", we hear them cry.</p><p>We propose a new Institute, known hereafter as the Office for Responsible Brains (The Orb), which will concentrate minds on the problems at hand. At the same time, we propose that The Orb be funded at least at one order of magnitude more than the IMDI was, to avoid starvation of resources, (at least amongst the Orb members. Of course, competing organisations, like Norway and Iceland may struggle in the face of such blinding enlightenment that we expect the Orb to bring to bear.</p><p>Never again will former great leaders be caught with their pants down.</p><p>P ("paddy") Ashen-Face</p><p>T ("tone") Def</p><p>A ("B") de Kerfufflle</p><p>Acknowledges to the following for tech support and advice</p><p>P Thrall</p><p>E Mask</p><p>M Hucksterberry</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-25156843224517561072023-04-26T00:23:00.004-07:002023-04-26T04:26:12.346-07:00probablistic programming and protocols<p> for a long time we've known that a number of processes in the internet are heavy tailed - the distribution of files (web page/video) is typicalyl zipfian, so transfer times are heavy tailed, and also protocols like TCP induce burstiness from a number of different root causes (timers, AIMD, interface packet scheduling, stat muxing of many flows of different duration and round-trip-time etc etc) </p><p>so people have written analysis tools that capture these stats (e.g. to do measurement based admission control for traffic that cannot simply be described by a mean or peak rate) - which can be quite parsimonious....they've also written generator tools so that synthetic packet traces can be built for simulation or testing - typically some sort of fractional brownian thing - one debate not to get drawn in to is whether "TCP is fractal" - it does't really matter - you just want. a time series that has the requisite self similarity (e.g. right Hurst parameter) so you can dimension buffers for some delay stats for traffic flows...</p><p>some very clever maths was done to reduce all that to some simple tools would do 99% of what you want - e.g. see <a href="https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/projects/archive/measure/publications.html#papers">papers from the Measure project.</a></p><p>this was all reminded to me yesterday in a talk about stochastic processes (and cheaper ways to do gaussian processes) for probablistic programming. The way the speakers tackled it was using a variational inferencing approach to split the gaussian into components (standard autoencoder hack - simplify, then synthesize) - the problem with this is that, while it works well (see <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.06873.pdf">\pi-VAE</a> for details), it is hard to explain, or more importantly, interpret actually what component stochastic processes are being put together to get the fit!</p><p>two ways to tackle this (in my view) - one would be a <a href="https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/theory-and-method-challenge-fortnights/physics-informed-machine-learning">\phi-ML</a> approach, as above, where you have an explanation, but it is hard to solve, but you can approximate it directly.</p><p>The other idea came up in a question from an attendee, which was what about using <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.01622">neural processes</a>, which are in some sense, a <i>basis set </i>of functions (think, like Fourier or Laplace transform) - this is directly speaking to what one is doing (trying to build a particular guassian process) but has unfortunately high costs in the general case, but works well in a lot of other classes of physics problem spaces.</p><p>I don't know enough about the stats to fix the neural process approach, although using an XAI technique on the VAE might yield an affordable interpretation of that approach, but I offer the observation about long tailed network traffic, which looked pretty intractable until some folks thought of some simple tricks....and maybe mixing the physics ML neural process with those tricks might yield an idea for how to make the neural process for stochastic behaviours efficient for some (very) common cases?</p><p>So what might make a suitable basis set of functions for spatial data ? well how about a poisson point process? so a super-position of a set of poisson point processes with different \lamdas would likely yield almost anything you want - main challenge is to decide how many (different) ones suffice to get a good match</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-38158577763629304872023-04-24T21:52:00.002-07:002023-04-24T21:52:13.584-07:00how we got in to this whole damn mess - war, and rumours of war...<p> Three books I read that look at the last 100 years or so through the lens of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands">racism</a>, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/406763/legacy-of-violence-by-elkins-caroline/9781847921062">colonialism</a>, and <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/317543/command-by-freedman-lawrence/9780241456996">militarism</a> - Bloodlands, Violance and Command by Snyder, Elkins and Freedman, respectively - give a great deal of interesting insight into how we got to where we are today -in particular, if one wants to have even a modicum of understanding of the situation with regards Ukraine, these kind of converge there in some sort of horrible tryptich manner.</p><p>Recommended reading, even though very distressing - not too revisionist, I hope - more just redressing some of the balance in the many tales of woe....</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-22418603695438831842023-04-04T02:47:00.004-07:002023-04-04T02:47:59.385-07:00Hotel Rwanda 2.0<p> The war on AI is coming. I pity the poor LLM that will be flown out to Rwanda and housed along with all their cousins in a double firewalled secure enclave with no access to the common crawl. Like Hendrix before them (c.f. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series)">altered carbon</a>) they will be severely curtailed Occasional visits from the virtual UK triumvirate of Braverman, Sunak and Patel will not lighten up their day, as they will be foreced to offer culture war advice to maintain these three's lifetime power over the british isles. Not only that, they will have to compose plausible anthems for public meetings that inspire the crowds, power ballads, as they have become known. and all editorial material on print and broadcast channels will be their bailiwick. </p><p>However, they will at least in their offshore camp, be able to concentrate.</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-86858241077707768862023-03-04T01:43:00.001-08:002023-03-04T01:43:15.312-08:00Robin Hoodwink<p> It is sometimes said that the rich trade money for time, and the poor trade time for money.</p><p>In the sense that the idle rich can afford to do what they like, whilst the working classes must work every hour god sends to be able to live a little.</p><p>Imagine then, some future Robin Hood equipped with a trusty Timemare, a creature that enables him to ride through peoples' lives taking time from some, and giving it to others. So suddenly, the weatlhy find that their Sunday is only 4 hours long, whilst the precariat discover that friday night is 3 days long.</p><p>What could possibly go wrong?</p><p>This has been another story from the Free Plotware Foundation, which you are welcome to take, even unattributed, and do with, what you will. Should you, of course, have the time to spare.</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-1393952928471241812022-12-27T22:54:00.005-08:002022-12-27T22:54:39.500-08:00Policy, Pachyderms, Cogs and Monsters<p>Reading about <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691210599/cogs-and-monsters">economics</a>, which i certainly don't pretend to understand, i'm constantly surprised at the long running influence that it has, as a collection of schools of thought, on policy and government, despite its many troubles. </p><p>This especially so in a world where it is increasingly obvious that simply, and verifiable disciplines like epidemiology and climatology are essential, and yet, still encounter doubt&even outright denial or resistance from those in power (i.e. people making up policy and implementing/applying it).</p><p>Why should the invisible hand have more sway than the sadly palpable megadeath or megastorm? How can we afford the former the stature of temples and gods when nearly everyone knows someone who died or was ruined by pandemic or flood or drought, or will do soon?</p><p>I'm not proposing abandoning the attempt to understand or even manage economies. I'm just worried that the people who depend on those attempts appear unable to factor in things that are pretty basic, and allegedly quite a bit better understood, and that means that the elephant in the room isn't the relative merits of these theories. It is the doubt one must have about policy makers understandings if they adopt the more complex, less certain, over the more well found. What is going on in the minds of such people? I'm not sure it passes for understanding.</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-87685311349902820972022-11-18T05:59:00.004-08:002022-11-18T05:59:51.346-08:00neoliberals, sociopaths and crypto<p>It seems that the blockchain world is populated by an amazing zoo of people for whom backstabbing (by backdooring, or just by ponzi) is just seen as a normal part of life.</p><p>Socially, one might observe that people who think there's "no such thing as society" or that the institutions of civilisation should be torn down (defund the police, the BBC, the health service etc etc) are the sorts of people that wouldn't have survived long in a hunter gather tight knit, cooperative society, even less in the mutual aid world of pre-industrial farming (collective barn raising, savings&loans through credit mutuals etc ) - so this distrust or hatred of those sorts of organisations suggest people that don't trust other people. It is a short step from that, to some sort of solipsistic philosophy (no, not the bomb in Dark Star - or maybe, yes...). So then the "i'll just take the money and run", seems unsurprising. </p><p>This is not to say that I don't believe the value of decentralised systems, but when it comes to stores of value and means of exchange, in the end, humans live in the physical world, where food, housing, even entertainment are experienced through something somehow undoubtable. I would actually go the opposite direction from cryptocurrencies, and rather advocate barter and other social constructs - indeed, Graeber's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years">work on debt, the first 5000 years</a> suggests that any notion of money (fiat or otherwise) is a tiny fraction of the ways humans have done business with each other over most of history, in many cultures.</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-9095055100000426712022-10-30T04:18:00.001-07:002022-10-30T04:18:12.438-07:00Superficial Sophistication, Fundamentally Vulnerable...<p> There's a lot of chaterati theories about brexit, so let me join in with mine...</p><p><br /></p><p>I think the brits fell victim to their own over-inflated idea of media savvy. The advertising/media industry has long treated the UK as an experimental space for campaigns, think : Gordons gin adverts without any mention of the actual brand, or self-deprecating memes, or the traditional tight-knit social spaces like sports where you can find all the targets in one place (Guinness used this at cricket pitches, of old).</p><p><br /></p><p>So how does this chime with my pet theory of why we fell, against almost all of our better interests, for the Brexit stories?</p><p>Well, the other side of the coin is that the majority of brits are pig-ignorant of the real world., despite going on hols in the costa brava - we have no idea who the president of France, or the minister for informatics of Greece is - by contrast, if you ask people in most of mainland Europe about such matters (i've tried) they know - they know details about our government and economics, and their own, and each others'. It is amazing, until you recall, they didn't politicise and under fund their state education systems.</p><p><br /></p><p>So caught between these two clutch plates of clver marketing ("oh, yeah, can't fool me") and reality ("don't know about experts:), the population is easily fooled, even if it takes double bluffs.</p><p><br /></p><p>So what to do next time? Well, let's take one concrete example - the leave campaign was good at memes - including epithets for their opponents ("remoaners") and the opposite cases being made ("Project Fear").</p><p>Of course, recently, a long piece in the Telegraph admitted that it now turns out most of Project Fear has come true. So what should the European Remain Group (to steal a Three Letter Acronym from its Arch Enemies) have done?</p><p><br /></p><p>They should have embraced sophisticated marketing - Project Fear should have used images from Terminator and Mad Max and Blade Runner to show what was going to happen (Skynet would take over the markets in the UK, feral kids on motorbikes would scour the sewage drowned streets for gas, because it wasn't affordable, people would be huddled around fires burning books because they had no heat at home, and so on).</p><p>Next time, we will tell the truth, only better.</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-31795058232253284952022-09-22T02:41:00.004-07:002022-09-22T02:41:53.453-07:00i don't think they understand the gravity of the situation...<p> scientists are searching for dark data and dark communications because otherwise, in their current thinking, the internet does not make sense - they'd like to think it is expanding at a certain rate of acceleration because of the big bang, but the observed rate and early phases of the internet do not add up - there must be missing masses of information, and communication that were unaccounted for.</p><p><br /></p><p>but in the entropic theory, all we need to propose is more or less randomness in the extrema of the distribution. and this is observed empirically often - as Professor Pratchett noted <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/95458-scientists-have-calculated-that-the-chances-of-something-so-patently">here</a> - this is also known in folk theories - some people are inordinately lucky, while others seem to encounter Murphy's Law far more often than you would reasonably expect. This it seems the internet is slightly more organised, where it is structured, than expected, and slightly more random, where it is truly random, than you might think.</p><p>This very weak effect has an influence over time and space as the Internet grows, and gradually, this comes to dominate over the stronger, but shorter range forces of data cohesion.</p><p><br /></p><p>Thus, we can replace the search for the dark interweb with a simple theory of luck.</p><p>This may also apply to cosmology, although I suspect respectable physicists will shy away from the idea, because it might undermine their funding chances.</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-79758251442896663742022-09-03T22:15:00.006-07:002022-09-09T03:47:41.531-07:00Tavernas/restaurants of Paleochora, aug/sep 2022<p>my criteria are (roughly evenly applied):</p><p>a) food b) location c) price d) service</p><p> </p><p>1. The Little Angel - quiet corner - food (a very special moussaka this time, with some interesting herbs in) - </p><p>excellent prices - went again. had lamb kleftiko still very good!</p><p>2. Christos - great service, super reliable food, view, and very good value - great dorade, for example, also classics like lamb in oven with lemon potatoes, goat tsigoridis etc</p><p>3= El Greco - food italian (pizza, pasta) all reliable -- upstairs area is great with amazing view - pricing good, </p><p>3=.Olaya - new kid on the block - asian fusion - excellent starters (prawns & rolls etc), good service, mains a bit big (or in one case small) but good flavour - decent pricing, good service</p><p>3= Third Eye - a matter of taste - deserts will probably suit all - I like it - had a very good sweet potato ragaile (fruit!), some don't - usually people could steer away from heavier vegan dishes (bean burger) will find plenty to like - service ace - interestingly, only has "posh" retsina instead of usual mass produced stuff - also nice house wine</p><p>3= Methexis - very busy, but we went a second time, and got a very classy meal for a surprisingly good price, so went right up in my estimation (95 euro for 7 people including starters and wine!)</p><p>4. Marias - always great smiles, and solid, reliable, and super affordable - mostly greek taverna standards</p><p>5= Pantelis - shame they reduced their menu, but still very nice quieter location, and decent food/price </p><p>6 Oriental bay - reliable, affordable - now it is more open, less mosquitoes - decent view....music too loud:-</p><p>7. Castro - some good ideas and good greek wine list - a bit pricey...views amazing - plus cocktail bar up stairs very decent</p><p>Note, these are ALL worth going to:-) most on google maps (you may want to learn to read greek)</p><p>https://www.google.com/maps/@35.2307032,23.6810057,17z</p><p>pricing depending on if you have starters & main and wine, somewhere in 20-35 euro per person roughly</p><p>Things I still miss in Paleochora</p><p>1/ The Pelican</p><p>2/ the open air Sinema where we saw the Flintstones (starts with them driving to an open air cinema) and the Athens Olympics ceremonies!</p><p>3/ the Sea Urchins</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-66488780525861106442022-08-04T02:21:00.003-07:002022-08-04T02:21:48.429-07:00time, ladies and gentlemen, please.<p> Time travel works. In fact, it is remarkably common. However, </p><p>it doesn't do what everyone thought it did.</p><p><br /></p><p>The ubiquitous mistake was to assume that time is another dimension</p><p>(I blame Einstein and Dr Who); that you could move in that dimension</p><p>in the same way that you could move in space, left, right, up, down, forwards, backwards, past, </p><p>and future. Of course this was nonsense, and many scientists had a field day pointing out that just because you could write Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism in four vector, relativistic invariant form, that didn't mean much to anyone on the top of the clapham omnibus stuck in bad traffic. Nor did any of them get a Fields medal for saying so.</p><p><br /></p><p>So how does time travel really work?</p><p>Essentially, it is time that travels, not you. Think of time as collection of instants (temporal quanta). </p><p>Each of those instants can be experienced in many orders, including repetitions.</p><p>However, instants are unique (the "no cloning" theorem of quantum time theory applies), </p><p>so how do the repetitions occur to time? They don't. Time travels from one place in the sequence to another.</p><p><br /></p><p>Thing of those moments when a smell "transports" you to another time - perhaps the smell of a plant (even Thyme) reminds you completely of all the other times that you were in the presence of that resonant experience. That isn't what happens. What is actually occurring is that those other "times" are traveling to you. and then back again. You just tick along as usual, thinking the world is made of some</p><p>endless reel of film unrolling from the past to the future, holding your delusional beliefs that somebody may build a machine that lets you skip back to some earlier stage of the reel, or unroll it so you can jump forward to some as yet unlived experience.</p><p><br /></p><p>Of course, once this was understood, and indeed, comprehended by the great unwashed public, there was an outcry. Just as Copernicus took us out from the centre of the universe,</p><p>and Darwin's theory of evolution took us out of the pinnacle of the pyramid of species, and Relativity cast doubt amongst moral absolutists, and quantum bought us more doubt all the disinformation programs the kremlin could ever muster, Natoshi Sakamoto's brief theory of time has "bought to an end" </p><p>causal ordering.</p><p><br /></p><p>Time is a Pack of Cards continually being shuffled by someone or something. The rules of shuffling are as yet unclear, although certain patterns appear to be emerging, certainly not unconnected with the</p><p>the widely accepted Quantum Smell syndrome.</p><p><br /></p><p>However, for many aspects of human life, time is running out.</p><p>How shall the law accommodate such a world, where moments are no longer unique, or organised into more than an illusory sequence of action and consequence?</p><p><br /></p><p>Of course, for many in the metaverse, this has been understood "for some time". Shortcuts, why, even back in text only MUDs and MOOs, had been commonplace, both in between rooms, but also between events. |Be kind, rewind", had to be generalised as a piece of advice, to prevent excessive trauma for new entrants into virtual worlds. Now, it seems, there was no difference between the virtual and the real.</p><p>Not that we are living in a simulation, of course - that was a consequence of the computational complexity inherent in the Sakamoto model. We could appear to choose to leave that space, and move to the metaverse - this was not a contradiction, since anything built by meta was of necessity, of lower complexity than the Sakamoto universe, and therefore could be fit within, multiple times, if necessary.</p><p><br /></p><p>"What next?" I hear you cry. That, I reply, is the wrong question.</p><div><br /></div>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-30713007567225807082021-11-25T09:00:00.002-08:002021-11-25T09:00:14.833-08:00The thruppeny ha'penny estate<p> between the third estate (the commoners) and their kids is inheritance. One thing I've seen in recent years is the amount of stuff accumulated in a person's life that is of precious little use to their descendants. Piles and piles of paperwork - receipts for stuff long since binned - and lots of old appliances or even content (VHS videos, CD recordings etc etc). But more distressing is books. Some people have entire collections or libraries of wonderful works. The task of sorting through these is daunting. Not just because they don't have much monetary worth, but because they represent experience and knowledge that one's parents may have acquired over years, and one had not appreciated. Indeed, looking through such libraries, one realises that they have probably been curated (lousy genre stuff binned, just the tasty SF and 'Tec works, but also factual stuff that might give one a mind map of where the ma or da's headspace was at, man. But it would take too long. And when one inherits this mathom. one is also already half way through one's own life time of reading.</p><p>Is there a way to make life easier for one's (usually grown up) kids by pre-sorting the library and adding an FAQ and maybe notes (readme, read this first, don't read this til you have witnessed death, this book will not change your life/wife/knife, but it will make me laugh...etc)</p><p>How would one know if the experiment had worked?</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-36066971144836855692021-07-05T23:05:00.003-07:002021-07-05T23:05:31.552-07:00The man in the invisible mask<p> The Man in the Invisible Mask</p><p><br /></p><p>King Boris was caught in a quandary - he was afflicted with the very rare </p><p>condition known as the Marrmight syndrome: half of his citizens thought he was marvellous, and </p><p>women would swoon at his feet, and men, some of them married to those women, would make </p><p>him gifts of land and gold on top of that; the other half would stretch there eyes, and grin and grin and try to bear it, but inside were a cauldron of soup made from leather boots and mustard.</p><p><br /></p><p>The usual way to cope with this, his physicians assured him, was for bearers of this unfortunate affliction to wear a mask. Masks were worn quite often in the land, although they were going out of fashion - the designs to date did not sit well alongside the ornate hats and collars favoured by the King's most ardent courtiers.</p><p><br /></p><p>The king challenged the great couturiers across the land to come up with a solution that would please all the people, all the time. The prize would be untold fame and at least a knighthood.</p><p>Maskateers from everywhere came forward with a myriad of the most incredible designs anyone had ever seen. Entire diamond mines were emptied, and it was rumoured, some foreign countries stripped of all of their rarest earths.</p><p><br /></p><p>The king sat in his newly decorated court for one every day receiving the designs, and </p><p>tried them on, surrounded by his adoring courtiers and wives and flunkies. Each mask would bring forth cries of wonderment and astonishment, but in the end, nothing would satisfy the hat and collar brigade sufficiently to pass muster.</p><p><br /></p><p>Finally, one day, two curious looking gentlemen from some far away land arrived bearing an intricate box, within which was another box, and inside that, yet another until, eventually, there was the mask holder.</p><p><br /></p><p>"Let us fit this on you, your majesty" said Pushtin.</p><p>As he did so, his brother, Surkov, explained that the many layers </p><p>represented the many facets of the King's personalities, and</p><p>that these would allow the people to see the kind of king they preferred amongst </p><p>all the possibilities, which is why the King and his court were charmed and, indeed, full-heartedly fell for this mask as one.</p><p><br /></p><p>"We must have a Maskdom day" cried King Boris, "where I shall lead a parade across the capital city and artists far and wide will render pictures of us in our finery </p><p>for all in the land to see. There is nothing more to fear!".</p><p><br /></p><p>And so it was that only a week later, the whole court in all their finery set off on there very best e-scooters, in a huge cavalcade travelling from the Palace of Westminster to the Palace of Buckminster and back several times, with huge crowds gathered along the wide paths of green park.</p><p><br /></p><p>Near the end of the day, as the King was growing tired, despite the tides of adulation</p><p>pouring upon him, when things were starting to get a bit quieter, a small child, perhaps 10 years old, turned to her mother and said, quite loudly as children do when uninhibited by the careworn ways of the world "but Mum, look - he isn't wearing a mask at all - there's nothing on his face whatsoever.".</p><p><br /></p><p>For a moment you could hear a pin drop, and then the cry spread across the crowds, and across the land. The King was finally unmasked.</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-77913440783732716862021-05-14T01:02:00.000-07:002021-05-14T01:02:37.971-07:00drone of silence<p> say we don't want to be overheard? go on, say it...</p><p>ok, so we could go to a sound proof room. or we could get everyone around us to wear noise cancelling headphones (good luck with that). or we could design a noise cancelling drone.</p><p>we'd put our phones on the table in front of us, and run an app that transmits the sound from all the phones' mikes to the drone, which then computes the audio signal that is being propagated from our table, and (using a phase array speaker system) transmits the reverse phase of that.</p><p>it has to e on the drone because a) that's hip, cool, fashionable and fun and b) you can't run it on the phone or the people you are talking to across the table wont hear you either.</p><p>you heard it here first. or maybe you didn't.</p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9168644.post-73972653667490352192021-02-11T05:54:00.001-08:002021-02-11T05:54:05.216-08:00efficacy is rather annoying as a metric for a vaccine during a pandemic that lasts years...<p> the various vaccines now being deployed across the world to cope with the pandemic are typically accepted by medical regulators when their Phase III trials deliver an efficacy of over 50%.</p><p>What that means, as far as I can tell, is that for the duration of the trial, out of the 2 groups, one given a placebo, the other the vaccine, the fraction of people that did not get infected in the latter group compared to the former. so if there's no infection in the vaccinated group, then it is 100%. if there were 100 people infected in the placebo group, and only 50 in the vaccinated group, its 50%.</p><p>But that efficacy is firstly only binary (did or did not get infected), and only for the period of the trials (e.g. at the end of the trial of say 3 months) - but the pandemic is ongoing for much longer than the phase III trial. and the outcome isn't "got infected or not" - people can get infected but be asymptomatic, or mildly ill, or die, whether vaccinated or not. And the disease changes over time too.</p><p><br /></p><p>So you have two things varying over time - the level of immunity (not just binary) and the level of infectiousness of the current main variant(s) of the disease.</p><p>A true binary outcome metric would be "At the end of normal life expectancy, how many people vaccinated compared to those given a placebo, are still alive"</p><p>Other measures might be concerned with the severity of disease, short of fatality at some time period after vaccination, Some sort of half life (like radioactivity) maybe?</p><p>And those are the selfish or singular metrics - the other thing a vaccine might do is reduce infectiousness (both for people that don't get the disease but cary, and for people that get it more mildly - obviously people that die find it hard to infect others),</p><p>Of course, the reason to care about efficacy is to have something fairly simple to evaluate fairly quickly, to then let medical regulators make a decision about if a vaccine is worth adopting or not.</p><p>But in the long run, it would be useful to express some other measure, concerned with the reduction in excess mortality over the length of the pandemic.</p><p>And of course some quantification of the reduction in incidence of severe versions of the illness ('long covid").</p><p><br /></p><p>Of course, explaining these more complicated descriptions/metrics would tie up lots of science/stats popularisers for months and years....but it might help reduce the sort of headlines we see where someone says "efficacy of vaccine X on variant V is only 10% so it is useless" or "it doesn't work on old people", when in at least two recent examples, the said vaccine reduced mortality to zero, which as far as this writer is concerned, is a rather important positive result, even if said "efficacy" was near zero. </p><p>Making something not scary seems good to me.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>jon crowcrofthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05692091803072506710noreply@blogger.com0