That’s a great season! I cannot believe this show evolved so much. In many ways it is an evolution for Trek: capitalism with family on board will be an interesting thing to explore.

I suppose I should kick myself for noticing but not thinking about Saru being too by-the-book in this season. Trek has always had a distain for rules and regulations. From its first capitain till last, doing the right best thing has always been a key feature of successful Trek leaders. Saru didn’t get it… Burnham is born with it. Done!

I mean seriously, ejecting the warp core and waiting for Book to figure out how to zap them out of there… that’s some serious fly by the seat of her pants leadership.

The personal growth experienced by each member of the crew is well developed and now established. Burnham from pointing a phaser at deadly departed captain Georgio to being named captain a thousand and odd years later AFTER she revived the whole of Federation… wow!

I suppose it is still premature. Purportedly, TNG didn’t really get established until season 4, where as TOS only lasted 3… We’ve surpassed TOS and heading towards Enterprise’s 4, and then only Trek legend status of 7 seasons. I guess season 4 is really make or break season.

I pointed out previously that TOS spend a lot of scenes admiring humans. like you’d watch it and there would just be 5 seconds when the camera is staring at a nurse in a miniskirt and she holds pose but not completely still. TNG likes to admire the beautiful ship that is the Enterprise D, and some other spacial phenomenons. Here you will just find scenes of D flying at warp, or another one is Picard staring out his ready room window at the beautiful stars. DS9 too loves to just orbit the space station I. Super high resolution and watch background stars rotate, and warm hole opening and closing…. DSC, I have to say, does retain a lot of TOS’s human study shots. I do enjoy admiring the characters in almost-poses, they move, but largely the lighting, their skin and facial expressions are largely the same (at 4K, these people look terrific!) in these shots, but the extended focus help the audience to fully appreciate the character and their feelings and thinkings. I do think we have lost the TNG’s wonderment about beautiful ships and DS9’s love for spacial phenomenons. And DSC is a little too posh to have Enterprise’s quick and dirty (and mainly small) feel. So DSC can’t really put that small-but-hyper-functional visual on display.

I would suggest stop the progression of decreasing episodes (15,14,13), and make something like 20 episodes and take the time to show us something grand and beautiful. True, the spirit and the principle is what we truly want to show, but the imagery of a proud starship with power throbbing through its veins and plenty of machinery to skip along in space, it is well provisioned to easily resurrect a whole civilization… show us this visual slowly and beautifully as an expression of hope and strength.

Alas, Picard will surely take care of my needs here, it already has. But it would be a bit of shame for DSC to not have enough of that.

Anyways, looking forward to season 4.

Just lost a round $32 to the Atlantis Casino Reno. I had wanted to come to a corner of this casino and mope about landscaping. That’s right, landscaping. Today, I finally admitted to my wife that I have never before understood why so many people plant so much vegetation near their houses, and by near I mean touching. Why do people do so when it has been well known for decades that trees pull up moisture and rots wood used to build the house? The phenomenon is quite prevalent in the Bay Area. People do landscaping to their houses all the time like people do drugs to their own bodies.

And then it dawned on me today that they do it out of hedonic needs. The trees and flowers, so close you can touch and smell, they make people happy. So what if the house will fall down in 20 to 30 years? What comparison can you make with the happiness of the house’s residents for those number of years? A modern human being would always choose happiness of people over the happiness of dead wood. An ancient human being may also argue that since god created everything for humans, that this destructive servitude is most holy. There is no why. It just happens, by will of God and Humans. There is no why.

But I choose not to mope about soiled by my realization of how normal people think. Another idea to write about is the wonderful buildings of casinos. The Atlantis has two gigantic torches outside that blows 5-stories-tall flames every 30 minutes. The other casinos are also decadently extravagant. The artwork, the fanciful lighting, the domes, arches, fountains,… a single casino could have many architectural and distinctive features that come from centuries of history and art. Combined with modern day lighting, they look fantastic. The casinos here look like the originals of buildings and paintings that belong to a future museum. How do they get white walls so white? How do they make yellow walls work?

But this fantasizing is colored with the lens of twenty-teens. We go to museums to see these historical buildings because they are beautiful, difficult to create, and original (when they were created) in a few centuries time, what will actually attract humans to museums? It is not going to be casinos for sure. I mean, they won’t be able to get the smoke out of these buildings for another millennium.

Occasionally, some of us has the experience of being reminded that classic, museum-worthy, privately collectible and perpetually appreciating, transcendental art works from the past, they might have been nouvo and scandalous at their time of production, and they might have taken hundreds of years to gain their due desert of acceptance and appreciation. What we know for sure is that some sufficient number of human beings, at some remarkable times in the past, found such works appealing and decided to preserve them and propagate appreciation for them. Here and now I remark upon Reno casinos… I appreciate these whole buildings that art art.

Museum put on display historical intellectual arguments: who said what and influenced whom… visualized or represented in multi-media ways. We can watch great historical debates about politics and sciences. We can watch humanity decide what it wants to believe and wants to do. We can put on display Creationist Science versus Evolutionary Sciences, Climate change spectrum, Bayesian versus Frequentists, Empirical risk minimization versus… We can put on display the battle among titans of industries–IBM versus Apple, Tesla versus the rest, Intel versus Asia, AC versus DC, Amd versus NVIDIA, Ford versus Ferrari, … possibly many other struggle for dominance or survival. Perhaps these will be the legacies we will be remembered by. Our modern marvels will be the process that got us to that time and place where we are museum-worthy relics.

Eentsy weensy spider climbed the dragon’s ’nout,

Down came the snots and washed the spider out,

Out came the fire that dries up the snots, and the

Entsy weensy spider went up the snout again.

Just saw NPR news about Gebru being fired/resigning for reason related to publication dispute with Google the company. Some many number of people signed letter to ask for transparency and reconsideration.

Honestly, HR is not the most customer friendly or innovative department of silicone valley companies—on average. There are certainly awesome HR individuals and HR leaders that I’ve encountered, but there surely are some seriously uncaring individuals, senior leaders and policies that acted inhumanely and unreasonably. This quotation from Gebru, as published by a very sympathetic review in the Washington Post, is something that perhaps most minorities can write with significant degree of sincerity:

Gebru recounted her most recent experience in the email as an example of why she had given up on advocating for diversity inside Google. “[S]top writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference,” she wrote. “[Y]our life gets worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people, you start making the other leaders upset when they don’t want to give you good ratings during calibration

This advocacy she speaks of represent a swath of disparate and dissenting opinions regarding various modes in which minorities are treated. When “reasoning” with the employee through normal management chain fails, the mighty HR steps in and uses company business related performance reviews (known as calibrations at Google) to enforce the company’s stance. The only exception here is that one of Gebru’s job is to improve minority inclusion at Google—by losing her own inclusion she has created a self-fulfilling failure to perform her duties to the company. Also, her declaration that writing documents is useless is self defeating as well. As a scientist, a big part of her work will be to document and publish her learnings and believes. Quit writing documents is quitting the job. Sigh… the troubles we have in the computer industry.

It is certainly not surprising that Gebru had to separate from Google. Recall recent episode of her very civilized and reasonable discussion with LeCunn on Twitter. Sadly, I empathize with both of them. Being a minority who likes to think about the reasonable, I definitely feel her frustration from lack of acknowledgement and consideration. But I also feel the scientific curiosity that I imagine LeCunn has for the science.

The problem here is what we do not know. 3 hours after the NPR articles published, I do not see the paper whose quality is in dispute on pre-publication sites. It is highly unlikely that Google will respond publicly to explain why it does not want Gebru at al. to talk about why Google’s core technology is inherently racist and environmentally damaging.

The next day, Jeff Dean published a google doc presenting his view of this incident. One obvious takeaway from Dean’s postmortem write up is that, somewhere in some of her communications, Gebru challenged the mystery, anonymity and opacity of “the official Google internal review process” that assesses scientific qualifications of prospective publications. Her challenge may have been that the review process has excessive and unaudited (white/discriminative and profit-only focused) power. Google apparently has kept that process a secret even to its subjects and in light of this very public revolt.

Interestingly, many academicians and institutions come out in support of Gebru. Some many dozens of hours later MIT tech review published writing based on draft of the paper. MIT seems to also take the position that there is unclear and inconsistent behavior on the part of Google.

The concerning problem is Google’s monopoly. If you look carefully, the organizers of the public challenge letter to Google uses a Gmail address. Google’s infrastructure powers so many silicone valley companies that if there were any unconscious systemic or cultural bias, they would be ingrained in the business infrastructure that every silicone valley company depends on. How do you learn about academic freedom or ethics or AI? Well, you will undoubtedly Google it. Leaders of startups are recruited from Google to bring their magic Google mojo to power new startups. Software is taken, for free, from Google because others do not have the tech… Lint from under the nails of the likes of Dean become treasures of the industry when they are unearthed from Google.

This is not a company. This is a center of a civilization. While it is very brave for a few researchers to stand up to it to demand something, the outcome and benefit of this divisive exercise is not clear at all. The signatories of the complaint letter certainly cannot all resign from their jobs under leads who wishes to uphold the values and methods that worked so great at Google.

My firm belief is that we need to build more common ground by working on creating the common ground. We need for people of all kinds to come closer and closer to discuss and improve shared core principles. And I definitely mean that the shared principles are truly shared: when presented with similar situation, different people owning the same principles react and decide essentially for the same reasons.

Despite our biological similarities, despite our common humanity, common ground does not come for free. Despite our shared computer protocols for global exchange of information. All that needs to be said must still be said to build understanding. Demands for apologies and submission to a point of view, while righteous to do for the righteous, doesn’t really build common ground, it doesn’t improve shared understandings.

But I will always end my commentary on this subject by saying that my people, my ancestors were not enslaved for centuries. My direct ancestors had not had the pleasure of being subjects or objects of European men. My parents were not firehosed or beaten to shot or burned or segregated for the color of their skin. I will humbly acknowledge that I have lesser cultural and genetic sensitivity and immunity to racism and imperialism. This leaves me with a gaping chasm of doubt about my views regarding the forgoing news. Maybe I really don’t know how bad things really are and what radical means of resistance or revolution are required for a true change for the better.

😬😱

A week later, some big wigs have weighed in. One unavoidable observation is that University of Washington prof is taking Jeff Dean’s side. Perhaps Dean’s matriculation there had this kind of politics. behind it as well?!

Here is one question is if you were behind the veil of ignorance, and you don’t know if you are minority or not, you don’t know if you’re rich or not and you don’t know if you have knowledge or not, would you:

• Want to work with someone like Gebru or Dean.
• Would you want to manage Gebru or Dean?
• Would you want to be managed by Gebru or Dean?
• Would you cite Gebru or Dean regarding the safety and ethics of Google inc taking on the same position as their paper?
• Would you follow either one’s leadership in terms of ethics or social justice.

I cannot imagine myself wanting to be any where near either of these two characters. I would probably have to cite both opposing opinions since BOTH of them have knowledge about the matter far beyond my cognition and experience. But honestly, I do have to factor into consideration that Dean is really protecting a possibly very evil industry that he was instrumental in creating. I also must factor into the citation that Gebru is highly leveraged in the Identity Politics market. One cannot conscientiously discuss the very polarizing political topic without acknowledging these objectively existing aspects of these characters. In either case, although I fear for my own personal safety and sanity to come into proximity of these people, I do have to say that they are highly valuable assets of our society. Their existence enriches us all, and quite possibly quantified in similar orders of magnitude. IMMHO, this is great!

… some time later… 🎇 The formation of a minority union is a nice touch. Hope to see more…

I have the joy of instructing a child in the techniques of eating recently. It occurs to me that I have not really ever described the chewing process. It took some years for me to finally point out the deficiencies of their eating technique.

First issue may have been caused by our own pedantic habits. We insist to the child that she swallow a bite fully before starting next bite. That’s how we were taught. But after years of struggling with slow eating, I finally decided that perhaps they should put more food into their mouth while the last bite is incomplete. Truth be told that is what I do. The food at the end of chewing is tasteless. Adding more unchewed food in the front helps supplant our taste sensations to stimulate saliva production which in turn helps the food go downs. Our teeth are arranged for staged chewing. Front teeth’s cuts and rear molars grind the food. So pipelining the chewing seems natural.

A second problem with chew-swallow-more procedure is that sometimes the mouth end up with insufficient amount food. The mouth operates inefficiently as the food decreases. This is both in terms of bandwidth (that it is chewing less for every tightening of muscles), and in terms of per-chew efficiency. At the limit where our teeth are close together, the jaw muscles are not terribly strong. At least not mine. The chewing is most forceful when there is at least a quarter inch to an inch of food mass in the mouth. The effect of small bite is that with each tightening of the jaw muscles, less food is being chewed and the food is being chewed less effectively than a fuller mouthful. A similar problem arise when you use batch normalization, the original batch normalization where the normalization stats are literally computed on the mini-batch, if mini-batch size is is too small, the variance will be too high to be very useful.

What a strange thing to have to think about. I have always remembered the opposite directions: small bites, swallow before eating more. But in reality and in reasoning, it seems my de facto strategy of medium amount of food and pipelined chewing is most effective.

I suppose many people figure that out through experimentation, some may even do research in this subject. I wonder what else I did or did not figure out about myself as I grew and grew and grew?

It is, however, pure joy and peace, to be part of childrens’ growing process. Even though often we are made to examine the nature of our realities…, and the letters of our spelling.

Wait, what? The Dominion is involved in vote tempering in America ???? Quick, some body raise Sisko@DS9.starfleet.mil !

Actually, wait, what would the TLD be for Starfleet? It has that militaristic organization, but its driven by directives and principal that goes beyond serve and protect. Maybe they’ll have a TLD called .fed to service federation activities. Idk, there are paradigm shifts that maybe present say analogies just can’t describe.

It’s difficult to imagine a pursuit more noble than space exploration and exploitation as promoted by my most favorite TV show Star Trek. like would there need to be a TLD for FED? Are there any thing else I the future other than the Federation? Maybe the TLD will be .sf for Starfleet.

Thankfully, this is not yet a full blown problem yet today. The evil genius know as Elon Misk still does not have a definitive advent age on space exploration and occupation. But there are news appearing with titles like “Psyche, an asteroid believed to be worth more than $10,000 quadrillion is observed through the Hubble in new study.”

Don’t anybody tell The Chine$e, lest Trump tweeter storm America about its, what if they get a head start on these “rare” earth metals?

Also, did they consider inflation when they did that calculation? Were the metal really become available, their cost would drop so far that it wouldn’t be worth that much. This might be a thing that economist have a name for, but the intrinsic value of that asteroid seems vastly different from its market value due to plentiful ness.

The point being, what do we do when we find out our measly existence and value system is absurdly moronic when a technological shift suddenly changes everything…

Do we drop everything and go digging for precious metal? Do we give up monogamy because… we’ll just because it sucks. Do we fire the president and vote a Misklike person to be our eternal leader? That’s not completely absurd, for $10,000 quadrillion, nothing is absurd. We could reproduce profusely and prolifically until our bodies build a bridge to the stars and a wall against aliens. We could impeach the entire congress and only build rockets and fly, fly, fly!!!

Again, we’re obviously not there yet, but it feels tantalizingly close.

What shall we do then? Will our children live fruitful lives that we may comprehend? Where in the world is our world going ?

I have to get better 二锅头。Who knew these cheap Chinese products can all have same name and be so different in effects…

Ahhh, shoot, I just got it. “Black alert!”

I hope it doesn’t get misinterpreted as … in the context of BLM, … and worst if it is glorified for violence.

And I wonder why in those those thousands of years, now referring to Star Trek Discovery universe, why they haven’t figured out a stable way to make changes using time travel. It feels like there can be multiple equilibria that one can choose from and that achieving a different equilibrium can both be “good for everyone” and “immutable change” that cannot be changed by another time travel. I would be disappointed if that’s a physical impossibility.

Again, I need better …

I just voted in the 2020 election. Now I have rushed to Starbucks for that ceremoniously celebratory coffee. Democratic capitalism is so great!

Hey, did anybody find the radio buttons on this years voting app non-intuitive? After making a selection, you must in select it (by tapping the already-selected box again) before you can select another one. If you want to update a write-in choice, you must unselect, re-select, and retype the choice. This is kind of counter-intuitive. Most people are used to radio button groups that can unselect.

A related issue is the non-standard keyboard that is arranged alphabetically onscreen. Why not at least let me choose the QWERTY keyboard? This abnormal element of tablet UI surely adds to tech anxiety everyone has developed circa 2020 about stepping up to a new tablet.

Another thing kind of bugging me is the enormous screens in use. I mean I sure feel like this is special, the voting screen is even larger than the screen inside Tesla cars. It seems so long. But for especially engineered screens, it has horrible glare due to the angle and ceiling lights at my voting location. My tax well spent, I think…

Volunteers seem to have underrepresented minorities. I don’t know if white people just have more enthusiasm for democracy or what. Sure there’re those Asian kids trying to get community service hours. And sure there is a Hispanic guard. But election officials in my town were white. This is something we minorities have to try harder at. Yes, work is long and hard, pay is lousy and mouths-to-feed are many, relatively speaking, but you have gotta make the time for election! Minorities, please volunteer !!

And those are my only gripes. Otherwise I am immensely grateful for my safe and uncoerced participation in this sacred event in persons. It was very exciting to see people of all kinds standing in line, six feet apart, in this brisk November morning, to vote. I have voted many times before, but voting in person is definitely very different.

Why is 42 the answer?

Maybe the question is from a maitre’d at a restaurant…

“It’ll just be for(4) two(2) tonight.”

“It’ll just be 42 of us tonight.”

Never doubted the ingenuity of British literature.

Very cool. At most

Well, they have done it. Even though it’s only E3, we can feel that the whole show is definitely a millennium ahead of S1. Everything I’ve complained about, from not having any useful Asian bridge crew, to horrific dialog, to lack of gravitas when controlling computers, to the lack of happiness… it is all gone! Asians did a lot to bring USS discovery so far into the future. Dialog sound like real people in real dialogue, and the writing is witty and delivered instead of barked. Tech has progressed, programmable matter! That is damned cool sci-fi. Their operating the programmable matter interface definitely looks like the new UI let them feel the commands they are issuing. Headstrong characters that work. Inexplicable geniuses are a must in a sci-fi show and now we have a spectrum of them. Then, there is the story, this show is what Trek feels like. Excitingly barraging into the unknown full smile ahead, always coming out on top of tech and evil.

Looking back to history known to us, we can find Petroleum as one of the most transformative power source human has discovered. According to wikipedia, there’s good record of human comprehending relevant chemical and engineering properties of petroleum for the last 2000-4000 years. Modern commercial drilling began in the mid 1800’s, developing technologies to separate crude into gasses and liquids for various uses. Around the same time as start of commercial oil drilling, the internal combustion engine (ICE) was also commercialized. Since then, the most consuming use of petroleum is for powering ICE’s. So we are approach two centuries of using Petroleum to power our engines.

Jump ahead into the Trek Universe. It is theorized that first contact was made after humans successfully achieved faster-than-light travel using warp engines (presumably using dilithium crystal, the new Petroleum) in 2063. The events of discovery season 2 ends in 2259, then discovery season 3 starts in the year 3188, with the Burn (destruction of all dilithium crystals and the ships around them) occurring a century before that late in the 31st century. So we’re as advanced into the age of petroleum as the Federation will have been into the age of dilithium when Discovery jumped ahead 900 years.

This story really tickles the imagination. It challenges us to think at a grander scale about the comings and going’s of technologies. The massive changes in our civilizations when technologies come and go. Every person is such a small speck, so inconsequential, so very powerless against the emptiness and chaos of space. until you realize you’re the emperors daughter… oh wait… until you realized that you’d been part of something great, then you realize that you have greatness in you, that you are great! And even when you have rekindled that new hope, the newborn spirit is curious, fearless and determined, but it is frail…

Another aspect of the story is the change in Burnham. she says it a few times that she has let go of some of Federation within her. It’s kind of dangerous to see a happy person when Federation (and the Vulcan) is removed. But that’s what’s happened.

Absolutely mesmerizing!

Fantastic in so many ways!

Ravishing! Wild! Beyond!

Bravo!

…