Okay, recovering Trekkie here, and reborn Whovian. Just watching the seasons backwards from nine and now on s2e1… having just seen Amelia’s final farewell. So sad that the show is so honest about age and usefulness to a TV show.

It occurs to me that some day in the future, haha, in the future, that an angels episode should be shot in Tibet, or in one of the other major Buddhist temples such as those in Shaolin temple. There are literally rows upon rows of these sculptures of people and some monsters that look like they’re trying to scare you. And some are smiling too of course and others are doing kungfu..(google Shao Lin arhats for example there are a few of lots of these)

If I didn’t know any better, I’d suggest that a time traveler from the future where all of our cultures are all mixed together has come back and brought those future daemons from future Buddhism to modern fiction.

But who knows, maybe a time traveler like dr. Who traveled back to ancient China and inspired these meditations in sculptures…

Funny dialog in s3e1 of catastrophe…. 

American husband: what? You held that guys penis?!?!
British Wife: yes , I don’t know, maybe, it was  tough time! You, me, the Brexit, your new president..
Guy: what?! Don’t ping what you did on me, that wasn’t my fault!

Why don’t you take a vacation at foxconn in Shenzhen ? you’ll get to see all the freaking iPhones in the whole world!!!!

(historical note, foxconn used to make all the iPhones in the whole wide world… iPhone was the most famous and widely used smart phones in the world…)

There come times when you find yourself allergic to some sounds(for example of some people), some expressions of (political propaganda and advertisements) or even some ideas themselves. The general symptom of these generalize allergic reaction, just like pollen allergies, is that of excessive defensive activation.

One may find oneself unable to stop from speaking rudely interrupting a speech–that way one doesn’t have to hear it. One may find oneself blinking or averting one’s eyes at just the time for just the duration needed to not see something. One may even completely miss a hugely important thing due to sudden forgetfulness that one recovers from shortly after, but certainly too late to remedy what ever is missed.

The worst part is that these things happen autonomously. One needn’t think: hey there’s pollen in the air, let’s sneeze it out, it just happens. And similarly, much of generalized allergic reaction are quite subcouncious, the causes sometimes are so subliminal and so imperceptible that it is actually hard to detect both that there was a cause and that one’s own mind caused the reaction to happen.

The symptoms become illness when the entire person gradually becomes less and less adept at living and surviving–the organism is made less fit in the evolutionary sense, and actually, really, the organism is made less fit in the common sense of its society.

The organism is uncontrollably rude and is unaware of it. When pressed to change one cannot make a change because the cause and action mechanism is completely unobservable by oneself or others.

I myself have these gigantic blind spots that occur at the worst times some times. I can walk into huge signs of an odd color at a store if the store overdoes it with use of that odd color.(imagine, for example, an orange sign in the middle of an isle at the HomeDepot where the brand color and shelfing are all orange) Just yesterday I drove my child in the car seat without tying the harness… and that’s not the biggest thing I miss. Some times I skip the most important sentences, sometimes I miss very important portion of a short speech. The only really observable thing is that something very important is made incomplete or tardy or put at great risk. Some times there are clear causes like overuse of colors, other times I suspect foul play by others with clear motive. My current conclusion after a lot of thinking about it is that I have a very bad case of generalized allergies.

Please, tell me there are medicines for these conditions…

Why Life, Liberty and pursuit of happiness inalienable rights?

Life is inalienable because people do not exist without life–it is an existential requirement.

Liberty is inalienable because we believe it is required.

What about the pursuit of happiness? Why is this so important? Let us put aside all that evolutionary mumbo-jumbo about happiness endorphins are evolved to tell us all that is righteous about us… That statement needs as much evidence as God.

One wonders if there is wisdom in the founding fathers declaration? Why pursuit of happiness?

This idea is very foreign to many grand themes, if you look at great documents of high aspirations, do we not always call upon something outside the human conditions, something greater and a priori to us to give support to the ideals?

At least in Asian cultures, the forsaking of selfish needs have always been required characteristics of heroes and leaders. Jesus died for you. He gave his life liberty and happiness in this world… (for one example)… the archetype of most holy worthiness is self sacrifice and suffering of all that is undesirable. I suppose there is Nirvana, which targets a happiness. But keep in mind that the prescription of said doctrine for achieving it involves much suffering and sacrifice, also one needs to be mindful that it is a different happiness that that which we are familiar with. Americans does not claim happiness to be supernatural.

Why then, was America founded on happiness?

And you may criticize me for being extreme and uneducated about the matter, but I will cite dead poet society (movie) for a quote about the maladies of “excessive happiness”–it is quite common place to think happiness is not all that it is hyped to be.

How then, do Americans sustain themselves on happiness (and life and liberty of course)??

I seek an understanding of this.

There seem to be all hese suggestions to develop technology to monitor driver using self-driving cars, for example to check if they are alertness by tracking eye movents, or checking if the head is tilted weirdly(dozed off). I wonder if anybody considered resorting to old-tech.

Why don’t we use the legacy human verification system known as CAPTCHA to confirm that driver is awake and not drunk or otherwise temporarily disabled? Since the car is self-driving, the driver could take a few seconds to solve a puzzle. The puzzles should be chosen to require the perceptive and cognitive abilities relevant to driving the car. In an extreme degenerate case, the test could be to ask the human river to take a drive in an simulated environment. This would detect a driver failure ex machina. If he’s drunk, tired, or on drugs, then he fails and the auto-pilot can take some actions:

1) turn on the flashers. And I think self-driving cars should have special signals beyond the turn, break, parking and headlights to indicate to other drivers that the AI is failing and human is not in control.

2) shine bright lights, blast loud sound or cold air, blast oxygen enriched air, spray very cold water, inject adrenalin, etc. to attempt to revive driver.

3) pull over (AI should slowdown or speed up to try to reach a safe lane to temporarily stop and wait for help)

4) call the cops

5) “phone a friend” by dialing up a remote-ops center to have a trained (human) professional guide the vehicle to safety.

6) call the owner’s insurance company.

7) do all of them at the above at the same time.

I’ll perhaps hate this when implemented, but for now it seems much simpler and more effective than AI passively ascertaining proper driver condition.

P.s. the two birds being AI and human driver.

I’ve been arguing with myself about the matter a lot recently. Is stress the right key metric to guide effort?

There once was a time when I worked for a company where stress was the key modus operandus. People are stressed in new and ingenious ways. Computer hardware, operating system, and other software are used, reused and abused to the extreme of human imagination. It isn’t quite stated rule but is de facto law. Fear, uncertainty and doubt, blindly enforced by infants of the industry… mantras repeated quite abstract from their original context and application, or even some of their own concoction:

kill the bug! cut its throat! add a test! bash it in!

Later, these infants grew up, and the company grew up… now I am left to wonder if I made a mistake not accepting all those great practices as my own and had a great time with it?

Roughly, because only paranoid survives, the idea is to place high cognitive load and emotional load on employees. Systems are complicated by multiplicity of undocumented bugs and “standard procedures” employees are essentially punished for not knowing industry non-standards by means of semi-public derisions(eg PR review comments emailed to whole company) to formal performance warnings and unexplained terminations. The added emotional stress induced by stern barks of reprimand, taught to management by relevant corporate department during training, hurts a lot and mainly detracts from meaningful knowledge transfer.

The problem with all this stuff not killing you isn’t that it makes some people better. Mainly it really scars participants. Higher than normal cognitive load makes people more likely to make stupid decisions. I look onto my youthful coworker some times and suspect that I have been accidentally transported to a cross between Harry Porter and the Modern Times… so engrossed in these highly secretive incantations… and fighting an ever lasting fight between good and evil inside repetitive mechanical work for long hours… and then after that we exert our mental and physical selves even more on the treadmill, marathon runs and bike trips, ski slopes or in deep meditation.

Is anybody able to think objectively about normal human experience and sensations? What is normal? Is there a chance that all this stress is the normal and derangement really is just normal human specialization? Is there truth behind the interpretation of PhD as permanently head damaged? (Different school on another beaten path) Are we more susptible to mental influence if we are not stressed? Are we more prone to errors if we are not stressed? Are we less fulfilled if we are less stressed? Do our brains become less efficient at present task if we are not stressed? Or are the opposites true? is it inhuman to want to veg-out on the sofa, kid in tow, watching some cartoon, everyday? I feel like I must have grown up on the wrong side of the moon to need 10 hours of that after work everyday.

How can I tell? How do I know if this is real or another stress enduced hallucination or some kind of mental break down from my inability to accept this reality? How can I be sure what I perceive as coordinated systematic attack on a population of employees is actually that and not an artifact of my observation or just conventional human society operating norms?

How do I know if this isn’t a simulation made by a super AI that was created because we humans stressed the system too much?

Do you know?

Are you sure?

Can you tell me how I can be sure?

If I’m not an engineer any more, the AI probably ate me brains alive! All you can see is an organic exoskeleton a computer acquired some time second decade of 21st century… or rather TS > 1262348789000000000000000

Suppose we have two groups of people experiencing different treatment–there is inequality of benefit between the two groups. We can write the difference between their benefits as:

Usually though, we can inspect the size of inequality using quadratic difference, or the quadratic inequality:

Take the expected value:

And rearrange to produce:

This formula can be read off easily. The quadratic inequality between group having experience and group having experience is composed of

the mean difference in benefit, i.e. the mean-induced inequality between the two groups is a primal component of inequality,

which is the internal inconsistency of group and group also increases the inequality, but it could be removed by

,

which says if treatment and we’re anti-correlated, then that reduces the quadratic inequality.

To think through an example: suppose I benefit boys by giving or taking money from each by drawing a random number from . The benefit I give to girls is to drawn from a separate . Clearly boys on average receive $1 more than girls. But also there is an interesting difference in experience. Boys will more consistently receive money around $2, where as the the girls would have money taken or given to them with much more variability approaching $1 only when averaging a large number of experiences. It’s hard to say what the psychological effect of the larger variance is. For example is it unfair for boys or for girls if girls are drawn from ? In this analysis we can clearly detect that there is inequality between the two groups and that the inequality is induced by variance of the benefit to girls.

There is an interesting side note from this branch of social science that in such a circumstance, the number of boys we must sample to ascertain a highly likely interval of his mean reward is lower than the number of girls we must see in order to ascertain the same likely interval of her mean reward. So, if the treatment of minority has high enough variability, then it becomes harder to be certain that there is mean-induced inequality. This decomposition enables us to identify such situations.

This is bit of Machine Learning math is really neat! We can now measure inequality in all aspects of life and understand, beyond an average, what is causing inequality and uncertainty.

It’s march of 2017. Two weeks ago, America has placed an anti-missile facility on a lot in South Korea. If this posts publishes automatically, it’ll either be because we who live in California parishes from a Chinese intercontinental ballistic missile.  Or it may be because I stopped minding my blog.

In either case the situation seems tense. As a resident of California, as a caring human being, I hope this is all for show and no serious escalation occurred. We are the most populus and close point to China. Well with exception of Detroit. But any missile headed east across South Korea has to be headed our way. I hope they are not launched and exploded here.
Let’s hope we survive this one… 🤞

I’m reading an article in San Francisco Chronicle (4/17 article) about how Chinese gained rights to send their kids to School in San Francisco. 

It occurs to me that I have met some exceedingly smart and successful Chinese people who have a few characteristics in common when asked about their Chinese ancestry and its effect on their success

• America is a meritocracy and they are the proof
• Swears by a few benefactors who are absolutely benevolent and instrumental putting them on the right path.
• Repeats pop-wisdom mentras to be elite: network above all else; genetically well disposed with ancient and recent ancestors for proof; being crazy is vital; being different is vital; winning at everything contributes to ability to win at everything else; 

What do these two topics have in common?

Nothing really. These completely westernized Chinese Christians could not get their children to school due to superintendents scorn for Chinese people “a nation of liars … filthy and impure.”

Frankly, I could say the same today, perhaps I too have gained the true American perspective. But Chinese people do lie a lot and are quite impure in some sense and filthy in other ways.

Wait! What about those non-Christian Chinese who did not wear westernized clothing and who did not speak perfect English? What happened to their sob stories? Why was it particularly heinous that people of these attributes could not send their children to school? I suppose they tried harder to get into school.

Today, my friends are almost all saying that top ranked American schools are not worth the effort. There is significant loss of faith in the system: It allocates spaces to students by race.  The system seems to favor smallest most disadvantaged minority and not favor systematically producing productive members of society–it’s a show and not a school.

I’m saddened by this. But I think, at least for most minority from disadvantaged background they gain less from school than better prepared “more advantaged” students.

But that’s only fair.

Some times I don’t want to see minorities succeed. The cost of it is high. If a strange green aliens blob came into my kids classroom and it ask to be part of the class, I would say no. It would distract my kid from studying. It’s green goo might be pregnant with young kids… who knows? Maybe teacher will spend half a class making arrangement for him to show him that America welcomes Aliens that she fail to perform her normal duties for human kids.

I guess I am unsure any more. Was universal health care like this? Are the doctors busy feeding homeless people food through IV’s and not taking care of productive members of our society? Should that matter that some people are minimally productive and should be prioritized before nonfunctional elements of society? Who’s to say? But not being able to say does not deny the possibility of that peioritization having economic and moral superiority!