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  • Epiphany at Trinity

    George Rebane

    It was our first solo trip with our ‘new’ trailer.  Jo Ann and I got back from Trinity Lake yesterday afternoon after spending a few days under the trees at Pinewood Cove RV Park.  We are lifelong dirt campers, so talking us into upgrading to a starter trailer wasn’t all that difficult.  It only took Russ and Ellen Steele about five years to help us switch from a ripstop tent to an aluminum box on wheels.  Memories of weeds poking into our undercarriage were a definite goad to less surprising twilight head calls.

    TrinityLake2011 So there we were, practically lakeside and under a thick canopy of tall pineys with our little toyless toy hauler all properly hooked up and canopy deployed.   The RV park grounds sit on, what else, scoured red dirt.  You know, the kind we have right here in Nevada County.  Our little  camping chairs and tables were all set up in the stuff.  Our puppy took no never mind to it, and, rejecting her nice clean bed, stretched herself out on the dustiest parts, being careful to change sides regularly so as to apply an even coating.

    Meals were fun because Jo Ann could use the kitchen to prepare some really special vittles for eating around the campfire.  We brought along our own firewood – cured digger pine which makes and maintains a beautifully tight flame mass for hours (contrary to popular local myths, I have yet to burn a bad piece of madrone or digger pine).

    The pictured idyllic little scene was made possible following a six hour drive that involved some very curvy roads after we headed west from Redding on State 299.  While there, the major entertainment consisted of driving down to Weaverville to celebrate our 49th, and watching RVs occupy neighboring sites.  From this educational spectator sport one learns a little bit each time as vacationers of various skill levels maneuver their rigs into place and go through the set-up chores – the Germans also call this shadenfreude.  It’s especially relaxing after you are already comfortably ensconced with martooni in hand, and covered with red dirt beyond caring.

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  • What’s Really ‘Eating the World’?

    George Rebane

    ComplexSystem Web browser pioneer Marc Andreesen writes ‘Why Software is Eating the World’ in the 20aug11 WSJ.  It is a well written compendium of the commercial sectors that have grown in recent years, and promise to really grow more because of cheap and ubiquitous computing power.  Andreesen, whom I much admire, outlines how such computing has literally transformed all those sectors – manufacturing, medicine, merchandizing, communications, finance, transportation, … – and is now creating new enterprise sectors yet undreamed.  But he makes a fundamental error in his main premise – that it is “software companies” that are ascendant in this transformation.  They are not.  Please let me explain.

    Today, most information technology (IT) based businesses develop, market, maintain, and consume software.  But the software is just the medium through which the plethora of unique and powerful functions required of the business are first computed and then implemented by humans or other energy/mass moving machines.

    Andreesen goes on to a long list of companies populating the business sectors that he identifies as really being “software companies”.  He could just as well have made the argument that ‘processors are eating the world’, or that ‘silicon is eating the world’.  In a former day he could have said that ‘metal machining is eating the world’, or ‘printed paper is eating the world’.  Of course, none of these have eaten the world nor will they do so in the future.

    Each of these world eaters did nothing more or less than serve as the medium for products that required more than, say, machinists or printers to create and purpose them for use in a society.  The creators and developers, who saw an existing need that could be filled better by a configuration of newly bent and/or machined pieces of metal, it is they who ate the world and are still doing so.  It is they who summoned the machinists to make the stuff, and printers to print the information that changed the world in their day.

    Andreesen attributes to computer programmers all the wondrous systems that today make modern life the affordable convenience that it is, and the more so what it promises to be tomorrow.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Today computer programmers provide the important final step to implement an algorithm or to generate a functional module that fits into a more comprehensive system design, whether that be interpreting geophone signals to map out possible oil fields or managing inventory in a robotized warehouse.

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  • ‘The Next Grand Minimum’ Launches

    George Rebane

    Russ Steele, Nevada County blogger extraordinaire, closed down his long running NC Media Watch blog.  He has moved his blogging enterprise to a new blog – 'The Next Grand Minimum' – that was launched today.  In this research and publishing effort he will focus on real climate change backed by science that is yet to be tainted by politics.  Specifically, he will present ongoing scientific evidence – imported and generated – that will validate or falsify the advent of the next grand minimum (NGM) in earth's ever changing climate.

    Grand minima in precipitation and temperature have occurred cyclically throughout the millenia, and the next one appears due in the lifetime of those of us here now.  Russ will collect, develop, and present evidence that is relative to the advent of this civilization impacting event.

    I and most RR readers wish Russ the best in his new and important endeavor.  RR has installed a permanent link to the blog in the 'Our Links' section in the right panel.  We expect many points to the published work on that site.

    Break a leg Russ!

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  • Singularity Signposts – Cognitive Computing Milestone

    George Rebane

    CCC-IBM Yesterday IBM announced the first fruits of its cognitive computing initiative.  It’s a processor chip with an architecture that mimics some of the neural net topology (how neurons hook up to other neurons) of a human brain.  The cognitive computing chip (CCC) from IBM Research shown here is not to be programmed in the traditional sense of programmers writing code that computer scientists have designed (more here). 

    Instead, CCCs will be hooked into an array called a cognitive computer – one that we may think of as a ‘mini-brain’ – and it will be fed data comprised of observations of, say, a process like the progress of a disease revealed through symptoms and tests.  The mini-brain is then prompted to learn and label the process (disease) in essentially the same manner that critters learn processes. They observe, detect repeatable patterns, and test their knowledge by attempting to predict what comes next in the process.  If they predict correctly, then that positive feedback reinforces the pattern (i.e. model of the process).  Otherwise, their prediction errors become the negative feedback which prompts them to try something else.

    The structure of the new CCC is such that it promotes more facile and rapid learning.  And the equally important benefit that CCC structures provide is much lower power consumption than conventional (cf. von Neuman computer) processing chips demand.  To assemble the brain’s processing power from conventional chips would require an enormous computer system that may consume as much electricity as a town.  Clearly, critter brainbones are much more efficient – none of us run around with smoke coming out of our ears.

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  • Do Our Schools Really Suck? (Working Title)

    George Rebane

    I don’t know whether that overstates the case, but in any event it’s not that far off.  Reading this morning’s lead piece ‘STAR tests’  in the 18aug11 Union, I was a little put off by the reporter’s opening attempt at logic.

    Despite efforts across western Nevada County to improve student test scores, money still matters in the realm of student achievement.

    Districts where property values and household income tend to be higher — and where affordable housing is less available — did the best in results of California's Standardized Testing and Reporting program, or STAR, which were released this week.

    Since the government can't make more well-to-do parents, the implication here is that we need to continue increasing the per student spending to improve the learning levels of our students.  This policy, of course, has not helped during the last forty years, but then it is the only progressive answer – ‘stasis is good’.  The correlation of household income to student performance has been explained in countless studies – in the aggregate, better earning parents are better educated and therefore support their chidren's education more, which yields better students.

    Just so you don’t misunderstand my stand on this, let me say it straight out – we don’t have a student learning crisis, we have a long standing teacher crisis; it is time to get the dummies out of our classrooms, and attract good teaching talent into our schools.  And for icing on the cake, I really do believe that it has been the agenda and accomplishment of this country’s progressives to get unqualified teachers into the profession and keep them there through support of the teachers’ unions.  It's called voter development.

    After reading the article I was going to launch into an extended harangue about how Nevada County schools are screwing up.  Family matters intervened and we had to take our last grandkid to the airport to conclude what has been an extended week of enjoying some of our own arrows into the future.  By the time we got back, most of my points had been co-opted pretty well by readers in the wild comment stream to ‘An Evening with the Tea Party Patriots'.  The points there made are worth their own focus and discussion, so I am including here below a few selected and unedited comments (please go to the linked post to see other related comments).

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  • An Evening with the Tea Party Patriots

    George Rebane

    Mr Paul Emery – KVMR news director, musical personage extraordinaire, bringer of arts, and erudite RR discussant – and I have been invited by the Nevada County TPP to engage in a moderated ‘civil discourse’ on issues of current interest as their featured special program for September.  The event will be held on the eve of 27 September in the Horseman’s Club lodge off Brunswick Road.

    As readers may be aware, I am both a member of the NC TPP and a regular KVMR commentator.  However, both of us will be speaking as private individuals, neither claiming to represent the views of KVMR or the NC TPP.

    The intent of the discussion and Q&A is to provide and explore today’s perspectives held by people of conservative and liberal persuasions in these contentious times.  (Paul and I are a self-declared ‘green libertarian’ and ‘conservetarian’ respectively.)  There will be no intent to make the exchange into a debate, but to keep it simply at the level of a comparative explication.

    As a footnote of interest to this event, I want to draw your attention to the reaction of the local left after NC TPP announced the event and invited its attendance.  I was made aware by a regular reader that my participation in such an undertaking caused quite a dust-up on the blog of our former Union editor, Mr Jeff Pelline (here).  My correspondent supplied a copy of a comment stream from that blog which is faithfully replicated herein below.

    Furthermore, I was also informed that progressives of many stripes presented themselves last week at the NC TPP’s fair booth to protest that the likes of me would be allowed to share a stage with Paul Emery.

    Now what I find most interesting is that such people, who are virulently opposed to the very existence of the tea party movement and consider organizations like the NC TPP to be ‘terrorists’ and ‘hijackers’ of good governance, deign to publicly inject themselves as juries and judges of how the NC TPP may properly compose and undertake its gatherings.  Don’t get me wrong, such attempts to assess and control what is 'good, correct, and proper' in society is of a piece in the public implementation of progressive ideology.  Nevertheless, it is an illuminating confirmation to see it also being played out right here in Nevada County.

    And below is the view from Mr Pelline’s blog, a left-shoulder venue that often and ardently proclaims its residence in the middle of the road.  The verbiage and vituperation is by Mr Steven Frisch, CEO of the Sierra Business Council, leading light of the county's left, and RR commenter.  The reader is, of course, invited to validate from these pages Mr Frisch’s vitriolic allegations.

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  • Decline and Fall of Europe and the West

    George Rebane

    UKriots_Aug2011 Progressive organs around the world are starting to hyper-palpitate about the EU economy, sovereign debts, and unexpected violence in the streets.  The Economist and Time are in general agreement that Europe is “about to blow”.  And it’s all due to the planned and announced budget cuts because their governments are rapidly running out of other people’s money.  The continent’s social programs have finally started taking down entire nations, and there is no end in sight to the spreading economic blight.

    The post-Wall economic boom of 1991-2008 has come to an end.  Eurozone and socialism was supposed to “bring about economic stability and remove traditional barriers to growth such as tariffs and regulations.”  Don’t get excited that these mavens have finally discovered that tariffs and regulations are frictions to business.  No, no – they only apply to trans-national barriers that must be removed, before growth can resume.

    You see, the entire problem is that the EU has become a “selfish union in which flailing economies feed rising nationalism, angst over immigration, and simmering distrust between rich and less affluent countries.”  And again, all this because the continent’s political union is yet incomplete.

    The 22aug11 issue of Time points out that, just like people, entire countries go for the gold ring in their own inimitable ways determined by their culture and resources – no one holds back.  And when a country provides economic freedom to its people, guess what, some people tend to do better than others.  All of these factors are raining down on the European policy naifs, they never thought such inequalities could come about.  Their models of socialist altruism prohibited these realities.

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  • Our Painfully Uninformed Young People (Addended)

    George Rebane

    [This is the corrected form of my Union column for August.  In the submitted form I mistakenly assigned PM Cameron to the Labor Party.  However, due to a glitch, it did not appear today but will instead publish next Saturday 20aug11 here, hopefully in the corrected version as below.  Thanks again to readers for pointing out my blooper.  In the post below I have addended comments about a related piece on the “skills gap” that appeared in the 11aug11 WSJ.]

    There’s a burr under my blanket about how our young people are short-changed by establishment schools.  But before getting to that irritation, we need to frame the issue.

    Across the world we have two massive social storms merging into an historical typhoon of unknown proportions.  Expanding economic crises due to massive overspending by European Union governments and the United States is colliding with an un(der)employed youth demographic already cooked into developed western societies.  The result is growing civil unrest.

    Without adding in the so-called Arab Spring uprisings across the middle east and Africa, Europe is showing the strains of belated austerity measures as the growing “number of protests against public-spending cuts have turned violent.”  They began last year in Greece and have haphazardly spread across southern Europe, and now we have witnessed days of wanton rioting and looting in the UK.

    There Tory Prime Minister Cameron has attempted to sweep it all under the “pure criminality” rug, but when such criminality quickly spread from London to other big cities like Birmingham, Bristol, and Liverpool, then wiser heads know that there is something more than spontaneous hooliganism going on.

    We in the US are not immune from this social disease.  Here no progressive politician would consider sponsoring a serious cut in the only major entitlements that might slow our fiscal freefall.  But cuts will come, they have to.  And then we will see the thread count of our civilization’s ‘gossamer veil’.  It has ripped before.

    So what have we been doing with our young people, those whom we expect to graduate from high school and go on to college or into the job market?  Other than giving most of them a second rate education, we send a large fraction of our youth into the job market without even a high school diploma.

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  • Ruminations – 11aug2011

    George Rebane

    - The Left’s American Dream movement
    - UK riots have an unmentionable cause
    - California’s popular vote law

    Led by Van Jones, our favorite self-declared communist and former Obama staffer, the American Dream Movement “announced the Contract for the American Dream, a new agenda for economic recovery supported by a grassroots movement that progressive leaders say will rival the Tea Party in size and impact.” (more here)  Those progressives can’t get their message straight – one minute they're decrying the Tea Parties as yesterday’s newspaper, and the next minute they’re trying to get something similar going to match its “size and impact”.  This is their second attempt at flattering the TPs; the first was something called the ‘Coffee Club’ or clatch or whatever that was launched into oblivion a couple of years ago.  In any case, one man's dream is another's nightmare.

    British social scientists are quietly starting to ascribe the cause of the ongoing riots in the UK to multi-culturalism (gasp!).  It seems that there is insufficient reason to suspect deprivation of this sort or that since Great Britain is one of the most socially generous and culture-compliant countries in the world.  The rioters have been mostly black Africans who have attacked the shops and businesses of other ethnic groups in UK’s major cities.  (The police shot one of their gang members.)  In response, the target ethnics – Pakistanis, Sikhs, Turks, … – have coagulated into defensive ethno-centric vigilante platoons since police protection is sparse and late.  Prime Minister Cameron and other European leaders have already gone public with their assessments of how mulikulti affects their respective countries.  Tough reporting job for the leftwing press.

    California quietly took another large step toward Progressive Amerika with Governor Moonbeam’s signing of the National Popular Vote Law.  This law will assign all of California’s 55 electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the nation’s popular vote, regardless of the candidate that won in California.  (more here)  It is another step away from the Founders’ republicanism and toward popular democracy, an inherently unstable and beguiling form of governance that leads to autocracy.  Unfortunately that is the progressive agenda (aka UN's Agenda21) in full swing – eight other states have already adopted similar legislation, and now it's coming to a state near you.  We can already hear the strains of ‘The Internationale’ in the distance.

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  • Bernanke’s ‘non-Keynesian’ QE3 (updated)

    George Rebane

    This is just a little stake in the ground so I can keep the audacious prognostication momentum going on RR (and put myself at your mercy if I’m wrong).  The Fed under The Bernank has put out the message that there will be no QE3 as the previous two quantitative easings (aka printing faith-based money) have been known.  Instead, the chairman today set a new record for clarity in stating that current interest rates have been chiseled into a two-year stone.  And everyone is talking about that.

    Dear readers, I’m asking you to look at the other hand, the one below the table.  The to-be-anointed Divided Disciples are going to crash and burn, and this holiday season will have Santa Claus putting a lot of lumps of coal into stockings hung with care.  Some time before the primary season ends next year, the Keynesians in the administration are going to demand more of that ol’ stimulation.  But the kind that was misspent in the government directed projects of QE1 and QE2 won’t do any more.  Both the Democrats and the Fed would then look as if the ‘do again, expect different’ insanity definition was written for them.

    BernankeTrillion

    As a change, Bernanke will try to pump fresh cash into the other end of the economy – put more liquidity in the hands of people who actually know how to create jobs.  It still fits the Keynesian mold, but from a distance doesn’t look leftwing Keynesian.  And he can do that by quietly starting to buy securities (stocks, funds, hedge products, real estate, …) to ‘balance out’ the Fed’s asset accounts.

    This QE3 will be a direct infusion of newly printed cash into the private sector that bypasses the dead hand of the US Treasury under Heckuva Job Geithner.  Now I’m not sure how well spoon feeding the economy from this end will work.  But sure as hell, the Fed’s pouring liquidity through the enema tube has not restored regularity to the beast.

    [update]  Sumbich, that was easier than I thought.  Today’s WSJ came out with a piece  – ‘More Fed Bond Buys HInge on Inflation, Indicators’ – that blithely had the following –

    Four words in the central bank’s announcement Tuesday—the acknowledgment that policy makers discussed a “range of policy tools”—indicated to investors eager for a government fix to the economy that the Fed was willing to take further steps. More than anything, markets are expecting a new, third round of bond purchases known as quantitative easing, or QE3. (emphasis mine)

    Nowhere was it mentioned (admitted?) that the Bernank had told Congress that no QE3 was required or planned.  So now the only question remains as for what kinds of assets the Fed is willing to print new money.  The market’s continued nosedive today provides some mighty attractive buys; the Fed may even make money on some of that stuff and be able to take cash out of the system.  Now that’s a novel thought.

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