There is a lot written regarding soul. There are also a lot written about the uniqueness of Human intelligence. Certainly I will start into fiction as I often do from Star Trek stories. Picard S1 ends with his body dying but the “substrate” of his mind transferred to an Android body. This is a far out idea, especially to happen to the star of a show whose Humanity is what we tune in for. Boldly we have fictionalized! FAMX0.25

So… it seems that in the Trekverse, there remains some idea that there is a non-replicable component of our intelligence, or “our being” when the get sentimental This essence can be transported but it cannot be replicated to make two of you.

It is certainly within our imagination that human uniqueness can be interpreted as an Pseudo-random number generator. Each of us can have our own PRNG seed that were set at behest of god or the Big Bang. It kind of determines who we are. At any time our beings have a state, it results from all of our history and determines how we think in the future. One can also imagine that perhaps the limit of our lives is at the limit of the PRNG cycle, when it repeats your initial state, the life ends. Even if it repeats, the essence of the existence is same as the first time it ran, the life has ended. So suppose our intelligence, or our biological/genetic process is a program that invokes this PRNG. And the ideas of free will is encapsulated as the PRNG as well, the freedom from deterministic behavior and stimulus response is the PRNG, it is our freedom to ultimately decide no matter what and where the Universe puts us.

Along those lines, one can imagine a kind of state that cannot easily be observed or replicated. So when they make a copy of you, at some level, some material, some black box machine, must be transported to the new copy, and thereby your identity within this body is destroyed.

This kind of give rise to ideas of reincarnation… of a particular PRNG has a very long cycle that somehow outlasts corporeal longevity of the computer using it, it may have to be transported to another computer to continue running.

Also, PRNG may be a retronym. In retrospect or in a frame of thinking where time is static, for example when considering the world as a 4-D volume, the information of this soul we consider may most easily be described using an PRNG, either in analogy or to model it. Ex ante, the soul is the soul, how it will play out is difficult to think about in the 3D representation that is the body and mind. For all intents and purposes, it is a true RNG, to me.

And of course, that I think it now seems to imply that what I use to think is not quite 3-dimensional either, or that it is but is a result of a suitable RNG.

Oh hoooohooo!! My complaints into the inter web have been heard, the federation, in the 24th century, celebrates 14th century Chinese Navigator Zheng He by naming their state of the art flagship after him. Wow! And she leads an armada of ships… as the original Zheng He did.

The willingness to use a Chinese Naval general is awesome! There is so little Chinese here that anything is a huge boon! I mean, also, talk about getting all the bang for the diversity buck in using just two words… Zheng He is was born to a Muslim family in 14th century China. He was enslaved and castrated by the Han-Chinese Ming dynasty at a young age,… but to make a long story short, he overcame that kind of adversity and rose to become a general/Admiral and lead a series most successful naval missions known in all of Chinese history.

It’s like Dunkirk… so much in so few words

The season of Star Trek Picard has ended… in great haste. That 10th episode was at least two episodes in Best of Both Worlds… I don’t understand why everything feels so rushed. It may be just that the story and acting is so good that one wishes to linger longer in the Universe of Star Trek. Especially, now that we have regained our corrected Starfleet. In my younger youth, I remember being able to hold that excitement and memories of emotions and tech and myths and plots all for longer time after an episode… I mean, for god sakes, we’re talking about an tempted galaxy-wide biocide! Like, it’s not homicide, it’s not genocide, it is BIOCIDE! My mind just cannot take that in within the span of one sentence! It needs time to experience this.

One cannot praise the acting enough though. Stewart, can blush like Briones and barf like Pill… heck, he can probably play a few half’s of soccer with Cabrera and… and when he smiles, you know it is right. You know the universe, with starfleet, is alright.

The Trek is a little bit less subtle than TNG, IMHO, when Picards explains to Rios the powerful tools of federation: Openness, Optimism, the spirit of curiosity, (all they have is fear, fear is the great destroyer, not…)… failing to use these powerful tools is a failure of imagination (creativity/intelligence/technology) These words while verbalize some ideals behind Star Trek, it is difficult to contemplate that they can be taught in words, until I saw Picard do it. You can actually say these things out loud in a human language. I do not know how I feel about this direct approach, but it hits the nail right on the head, directly.

I am also a little scared of season two, probably for lack of my own creativity. How do they follow a Picard-data story like this… and many bigwig producers are leaving the show.

But, I suppose I should take a cue, and boldly look forward to the unknown, with hope and optimism full blast!

Well, it’s been years, so hopefully this isn’t a big deal any more. But for the moment, there is definitely a lot of anger against Asians.(NYT story.)

My own experience with it began around March 10th 2020. That’s on a day when the market was half way down but everyone was still being reassured at the Corona Virus will not be harming Americans. When I took my chevy Bolt to be services at a very established Chevrolet dealership in San Mateo County to be serviced, I was treated with the absolute worst treatment. Zero explanations were given on a surprising maintenance costing almost $1000. Estimating two days just to diagnose the problem. And then, angry calls from the technician, leading to myself being informed that the technician, and his manager, wishes we take our business else where. “Get out of here, and don’t come back.” He practically yelled it several times.

After much of my effort, I was able to talk to the service technicians boss, and everyone was able to converse civilly and resume business relationship. But honestly, on the way there, members of the dealship seem to have rehearsed this line. Everyone from sales to service will have, at some point in related conversations say, you are welcome to take your business elsewhere. I felt the need to workout my relationship with this authorized Chevy dealership and garage because I drive two GM cars. These are hybrids that only that angry technician can service. Yes, sure, I can risk taking my Asian face to another dealership, but somehow I do not believe my experience there will be any better. Since I drive my family with this car that this angry technician services, and since the angry technician and his boss and his boss’s boss has my residence address, and since GM transmits all my driving data (through onstar) to my dealership… It is to my very unfortunate advantage to suffer some indigence for sake of survival.

(Btw, both GM and Tesla have this internal feature where things don’t go well, they don’t send you a post-service survey. I mean, I don’t know if it’s an American car maker thing… my Honda services is always followed by a survey that always had at least four out of five stars. I mean, the employees are all Americans right? But corporate culture sure makes a lot of difference.)

That utterly unprovoked anger is still around. When I shop at WholeFoods in San Mateo, the white cashier spends a lot of time adjusting the nose clip on her mask when I arrived. Simple questions are met very very stern and curt responses. It is a big upgrade from being told to “get out of here and don’t come back,” But I am not enjoying flinching at every move the cashier makes at the super market. There are a lot of non-Asians to watch out for, if white racists lead them into hatred.

This is a good moment for me to think about my idea to establish an “integration process” for immigrants. I too dislike immigrants, they bring uncertainty into my life. My desire for immigrants to take some time to learn how to live here civilly, how to drive, how to speak, how to stand in line,…, and most importantly of all, how to not hate based on race and gender and wealth… But for the moment, that seems like an unfair requirement. The people who are established here do not act that way. The people here discriminated against Asians, and can not control their emotions like professional adults should.

Is it fair to expect new immigrants to be better?

As a American minority, it still makes sense to me to request that new immigrants do not hate based on race. It will be worth the time and effort and money we spend on it to make sure immigrants do not hate, perhaps even as we maintain our own hatred. Even if our society is provably racist, we can make it better if we integrate new members with less hatred than we have now. I am starting to understand the very weak requirement of Rawls’ Difference Principal. When all are failing, and nothing is within anyone’s control, it makes sense to just make things better: more equal in the case of Equality Justice, and simply less hatred in the population in the case of hate for Asians.

As always, I wish that by the time this post publishes that this post will not make any sense to me or anyone else reading. But it is a reminder to us all, that in the early quarter of the 21st century, what happened to people, the American people, we show our true color, when faced with a dangerous virus from China: B many will begin to single Chinese people to hate, many will call it the Chinese Virus, some will refuse to service Chinese people, some will be violent Against Chinese and Asians, and some Asians will “shelter in place” and try to ride it out.

It’s March 2nd 2020, 5 states in America has ordered shutdown of all non-essential businesses. Italy and Spain are kind of spinning out of control with a lot of sick and dead…

But in China, PR of, people are starting to go back to work, ending very strenuous quarantines for almost two months.

So… one wonders why is it safe for China to let people into the streets now? If the R-nought is more than 2–apparently meaning each sick person will eventually infect more than two people.

The vaccine has not been developed yet. There has not been an announcement of effective anti-viral drug against covid19. So, why is it safe, now, in China, to release all the people back onto the streets? Can there not be one sick Chinese that can spread it to the rest of Chinese at an exponential rate of… more than doubling after each infection? (Admittedly it will take some where between 16 and 30 and sneezes before all 1.386 billion people have it)

Anyways, after some concerning myself for several days watching billions of people being let back onto streets, the only explanation I can think of is the rising temperature may make it more difficult for this flu to propagate—the r-nought is changing due to changing of the season. Wuhan, for example just reached 80 degrees yesterday, rising from the 60’s two weeks ago. Beijing is bouncing about 65.

California will be in the 60’s for the next week, according to the forecast. The rest of the US, of course, is not as warm: WA, MA, IL, NY, doesn’t even break 60 in the next week. 🤮

I wish this information is just available somenwhere. I don’t want to read a scientific paper. I mean can all these daily Press Conferences … can nobody give some more sense to us about how things are going to go? I heard about respirators, I heard about vaccines and drugs to treat, I hear about the curves and the hospital ships, but why not give the people a slightly longer outlook, perhaps a better picture of what to hope for using honest information about seasonal respiratory diseases? Why do we not know that it will be all cured by August because virus melts in the sun like icecream? To me, when everyone maybe dying, and the world is dark, there is a need for promise of a sunny day to come. I understand that it may be the “Chinese flu” that has its RNA’s written in Chinese. But can we translate the common sense to English? Can you all rich and famous and smart and powerful people talk in words the rest of us can understand ????

Anyways, I will applaud the efforts of trump administration and many philanthropists to recruit Data and Computer Scientists to help out curing covid19 flu. Link to the kaggle for it. I am, as eager as all the people funding AI research, to see AI save the day. Honestly, this is a great chance for a lot of dark-magic black-art of AI to see light of day. It’s like a dream come true for all the nerds and geeks… a chance to save the world… the president of USA and the richest people here, all are asking you to help save the world!! It doesn’t get better than this!! Isnt it a wonderful world?!! Big, bold, beautifully wonderful world!!

Wait, is this propublica story for real? North Carolina Senator, he’s heads the Senate Intelligence committee dumped up to $1.7 millions of stock after he found out it was a problem in January of 2020?

Where is the all might SEC and FBI ? Why wasn’t this activity detected and prosecuted like the entrepreneurs and other citizens? Reports from intelligence community is definitely material information about stocks.

I guess the world really is an unfair place, even if you live in America.

Shouldn’t he know the laws, having argued against the STOCK a Act, stating insider trading rules already applies to government officials. and since he is not “inside” The travel and hospitality companies, he is not subject to insider laws.

Fox News is prompt to report fellow senator Diane Feinstein also sold up to six million shares of some drug company in February. Of course, if you look at all these sales, Feinstein’s especially, it looks like a stop-loss situation… Feinstein’s sold a million shares at 30% discount from about 50 day’s before a day in January 2020. Then when price recovered a little two weeks later in February, it would appear that they sold the rest. If they waited until yesterday (a day late into Q1 2020), it would have lost another 25%. But at least she was no longer leading the senate intelligence committee when all these happened. And plus her stock seems less related to the virus than, say, travel and cruise companies as it were in the other senators case.

I find the Senate financial disclosure site promogated by ProPublica to be very accessible. Everyone should know about this. And man do these Congress persons have a thing for names, I see a Boozman here, there’s a Blunt, a Whitehouse, Cantwell, Simpson, multiple Graves, McGovern, there’s an Adam Smith,… this was a sad news cycle, reading names is more interesting.

Unfair advantages be damned I guess. I mean if political offices can be bought with campaign money, and if you are a politician and you can use secret information to make money… I mean, I don’t see the problem here.

Why doesn’t the SEC prosecute him? Why doesn’t the attorney general investigate him? Why doesn’t the people of North Carolina, all those who lost money these last few weeks, just call a referendum and dump this guy? I know we would in California if we though Feinstein took into consideration when dumping millions of dollars of stock.

Let’s see what happens, I guess, as president trump likes to say, let’s see what happens.