Warren Kinsella: Credit where credit is due.

Something I never expected to see, and really something that is quite a shocking departure from history, Warren Kinsella the back-room Liberal fixer has just stood tall for the truth.

I must say, I am really quite amazed. Here's what he said.

A few weeks ago, this writer was invited to the Israeli consulate in Toronto to see 42 minutes of raw video footage. It was mostly taken from video recorders dead (and uniformed) Hamas terrorists brought with them on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023.

The uniformed Hamas killers wanted to keep a record of what they did in Israel that morning. They were proud of what they did: on the videos, they said so, over and over.

[snippage of the witnessed atrocities]

With the permission of the victim's families, some journalists and legislators have been allowed to see the video. To bear witness, the Israelis told us.

We bore witness to something else, however. Something that hasn't been written about nearly as much, but it is important.

It was easy to spot the Hamas men. As noted, they wore uniforms and looked like soldiers, even though they acted like animals – worse than animals, actually.

But here's something else we witnessed: people who weren't in uniforms, at all, flooding into Israel to participate in the barbarity of that dark Saturday.

He goes on to mention atrocities committed by civilians from Gaza, caught on video. Not the "official" terrorists, but freelance murderers/rapists/etc. Private enterprise, as it were.

So, good on Mr. Kinsella for finding his backbone and standing up for human decency against the drift of the political wind. Even attending the Israeli consulate shows guts I frankly did not think he had, given his history. How nice, in these dark days, to find this strength in such an unlikely place.

So, we end 2023 on a high note. Kudos and blessings upon Mr. Kinsella, for saying the truth when very few will.

I'm so proud.

Government of Canada's principled position on ceasefire in Gaza praised by HamAss.

"In addition to the other calls worldwide demanding immediate ceasefire in Gaza strip — the last of which was a statement by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand backing sustainable ceasefire in Gaza — we welcome these developments and consider them in the right direction toward isolating the fascist Israeli government globally and ending the longest ever occupation in our modern time."  -  Dr. Ghazi Hamad, a senior leader of the Palestinian terror group HamAss.

On an unrelated note, does anyone else feel that the Hunger Games movies are starting to feel like a documentary?

New Rules, Lefties. Because you insisted.

 https://twitter.com/UAlberta/status/1725988052454326510

 

Statement on the University of Alberta Sexual Assault Centre 

The recent improper and unauthorized use of the name of the University of Alberta’s Sexual Assault Centre in endorsing an open letter has raised understandable concerns from members of our community and the public. Effective immediately, the director of the centre is no longer employed by the university. The university has appointed a new interim director of the Sexual Assault Centre.

 

The open letter:

 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12763853/sarah-jama-susan-kim-university-alberta-hamas-rape.html

The director of a sexual assault center at a Canadian university is coming under criticism for signing an open letter denying women were raped during Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel.

Samantha Pearson, director of the University of Alberta's Sexual Assault Center, was among those to sign in support of the letter written by two local politicians.

Sarah Jama, a member of Ontario's provincial parliament, and Susan Kim, a city councillor in Victoria, British Columbia, authored the letter to all members of Canada's parliament.

We, the undersigned, residing in so-called Canada, urge Canadian political leaders to end their complicity in the ongoing massacres and genocide in Gaza, Occupied Palestine,' they wrote.

The letter - entitled 'Stand with Palestine: Call on Political Leaders to End Their Complicity in Genocide!' - called on the MPs to resign after the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, refused to demand a ceasefire.

And the signatories criticized opposition leader Jagmeet Singh for having 'repeated the unverified accusation that Palestinians were guilty of sexual violence.' 

You do not despise the media enough.

Media coverage of Israel continues.

https://twitter.com/RabbiWolpe/status/1727683461136122272

You see them do it, and you can't believe they'd really say that, but there it is.

Shani Louk, RIP.

 

Shani Louk

We finally have confirmation that Shani Louk has passed.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/german-israeli-shani-louk-seen-paraded-by-terrorists-in-gaza-confirmed-dead/

https://twitter.com/IsraelMFA/status/1718946200307593261

My condolences to her family who lost their daughter, and who were made to suffer for so many days.

Rest in peace, Shani. A video from happier times.

 

 

Free will itself now under assault.

A while ago I created an imaginary alien civilization for my current book. I needed bad guys so evil that readers would cheer when the hero blew them up, so I created a civilization that told its citizens that nothing existed and nothing mattered. They did that so they could treat individual citizens as consumables. Like Communists, but worse. To my mind, that type of thing deserves a hearty blowing up.

Imagine my surprise to find some guy one-upped me, and my book isn't even published yet.

Dr. Robert Saplosky, not content with Postmodernism which states that the world doesn't objectively exist and that "reality" is created by human speech, has now decided that is not far enough. He has decreed that humans are nothing but meat robots. Every action a human takes is determined by heredity, environment and neurology. We decide nothing. And going even further, can therefore be blamed for nothing, no matter how heinous the act. "He din do nuffin" is now an existential truth.

After more than 40 years studying humans and other primates, [Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky. has reached the conclusion that virtually all human behavior is as far beyond our conscious control as the convulsions of a seizure, the division of cells or the beating of our hearts.

This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane.

Yeah. Thomas Hobbes, with a new coat of paint. I'm rolling my eyes pretty hard.

But the extent to which this guy is full of shit doesn't become fully evident until you get alllll the way to the last bit at the bottom.

We are machines, Sapolsky argues, exceptional in our ability to perceive our own experiences and feel emotions about them. It is pointless to hate a machine for its failures.

There is only one last thread he can't resolve.

"It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, meaningless to believe that something 'good' can happen to a machine," he writes. "Nonetheless, I am certain that it is good if people feel less pain and more happiness."

It's completely self-refuting. The ability to perceive -anything- requires consciousness. Without it, there is mere response to stimulus. That is what a toilet does when you flush it, the mechanism performs its designed motions when you push down on the lever. The toilet perceives nothing. A completely determined creature would also feel, perceive, nothing. Stimulus, response. That's it.

Consciousness is not mechanistic. Can't be. The human being knows himself, observes and perceives himself, and in the knowing, chooses his actions. That's why he thinks it is better for people to feel happiness than pain. Because he knows they FEEL it, which means they exist and are not mere robots acting out stimulus/response programs.

But he wrote the book anyway, because he appears to be some form of appalling asshole.

Another day, another socialist Ivory Tower dickhead paid with government money, chipping away at Western civilization.

Requested walking stick pictures.

 As requested at According To Hoyt today, a couple pictures of the walking sticks.

Half finished walnut stick with test piece above

Detail of walnut stick joinery and lamination

Test piece showing handle to shaft joinery

 

Little pine outdoor table I'm making a YouTube video of.

Keeping busy out in the shop, keeping my mind off what's brewing up overseas.

The cost of doing business.

 

Shani Louk, 23.

Rest in peace, dear girl.

Reposting so it doesn't fall down the memory hole...

 soldiers in our streets

https://twitter.com/Leftc0aster/status/1704221089080209540

New release day! Alice Haddison!

Special for September 1st, a new Short Story from Edward Thomas (aka me!) called Alice Haddison's Busy Day.

 

Alice, to put it bluntly, is a shit magnet. Anything bad, wrong,weird or messed up in a hundred miles will come right to her. It used to only be criminals and crazy people, but now she sees monsters. The kind that don't stay down when you shoot them.

Alice's new hobby is finding those things and killing them. Its not a great hobby, but it is hers. She's becoming quite good at it, due to all the practice she's been getting.

The police of course have a big problem with Alice, they arrest her all the time. She'd be in jail forever, but she has "friends" in high places, people who want her out, running around and attracting monsters.

Follow Alice on her hectic day of monster hunting and having lunch with the police, followed by dinner and a zombie.

New book from The Phantom!

Yes, I finally pulled the trigger last night and published my samurai story.

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0CGKQZCJ5

 

It's a novella, 25,000 words, pretty quick read. It concerns a young samurai found dying at a crossroads by a very strange and very ugly old lady. The old girl takes a liking to him and offers to sew up his wounds in return for his hand in marriage. He thinks she might be an oni, an evil spirit, but his life is fading fast.

Should our hero take her up on the marriage proposal? Well, you'll have to read it to find out! ~:D

Shiny Pony, average guy.

Their propaganda.

 

 

Our propaganda.

 

Bearings make the world go 'round.

It occurred in a blog post at Small Dead Animals regarding windmills and why so many of them seem to be broken, that people generally don't understand how basic machinery works.

 

Dead windmill in PEI. See that brown crap on there? We're going to talk about that later.

 

This is entirely expected. Education, in my Boomer generation and ever since, does not talk about machinery. At all. I believe this to be part of the hidden class-warfare against the Commoners in our society, the sort of pervasive disdain for plumbers, carpenters, mechanics and workmen of all sorts that permeates the media and Academia, but that is a topic for another day.

Today's topic is bearings.

 

 

So many bearings.

Ten thousand years ago, some guy in ancient Sumeria got sick and tired of pulling a big bag of wheat behind him on a travois. That's two sticks tied at one end and pulled along, dragging on the ground. 

 

The noble travois, in use.

 

 

That un-recorded genius decided to put something that ROLLS on the end of his travois. So he whittled a piece of wood round, put a hole in it, and invented the wheel. He also invented the axle and the bearing, but nobody talks about that.

World's oldest surviving wooden wheel. New meaning to the phrase "I got a flat."

And then, after a little while of enjoying the beauty of reduced friction that the wheel brings to our lives, he discovered that his wheel had worn the axle in half because his bearing really sucked. His next invention was probably grease. Remember that, it's important.

 

Travois, hipster version.

(Truthfully the first wheels were probably potter's wheels, but bear with me, I'm on a roll.)

It took a long time for his idea to take hold, but eventually animals and people pulling carts became the way of the world. Humans got really good at wheels, axles and bearings. They made them out of special harder wood, and eventually out of bronze and even iron. And they used grease too.

 

Not just for hair.

Fast forward a pretty long time, and we find the Egyptians using logs to move huge blocks of stone. Everybody knows this, right? Of interest here is that everybody spends a great deal of time focusing on the logs. Nobody seems to realize the log is only half the story. The other, and more important half is the ROAD they're pulling the block along. That can't be a dirt track. You get a ten ton rock and try to pull it across your backyard, the first thing that happens is the logs dig into the dirt. Those roads in ancient Egypt had to be smooth, they had to be flat, and they had to be hard. They also had to be cheap to make and maintain. That's important as well.

See how they don't mention the freakin' road?

Fast forward a little farther, and we find that the Romans got really good at roads. Whatever the Egyptians did to pull off their moonshot, building the Pyramids, the Romans copied it and conquered Europe with it. 

 

Probably not coincidentally we find the first use of ball bearings that we know of. ~40BC, in a luxury ship recovered from Lake Nemi in Italy. Used to make a rotating table, of all things. Probably fantastically expensive, because both the ball and the track that it runs in must be smooth and hard and flat. You really can't get a round track flat and smooth without some pretty special tools, and the fitment has to be just-so. Not too tight, not too loose. The balls were metal, the tracks were wood. Super expensive custom work.

Roman ball bearing

Roman ball bearings in use..

Reproduction of the rotating table, without the bearing race.

Fast forward some more, we find detailed drawings of ball bearings and bearing races from Leonardo DaVinci and Galileo. Their designs were wooden, and Leonardo included spacers between his bearings. 

 

Leonardo. Show-off.

 

 

John Harrison invented the caged roller bearing in 1740. Philip Vaughan patented the first ball bearing system in 1794, for trains. 

Of note is Isaac Babbitt of Massachusets, who developed his famous Babbitt Metal for use in poured machine bearings in 1839. The majority of industrial machinery and trains, boats etc. used poured bushings in their moving parts because that was the only way they could get enough precision at an affordable cost. Pre-1940s cars all have Babbitt bearings throughout, except for wheel bearings. Babbitt won the race for a long time not because it was the best, or the longest lasting, but because it was Good Enough and it was cheaper.

Babbitt bearing. Note cracking and piece that fell out.

After that, FAG began precision grinding bearing balls in 1883. In 1898 Henry Timken received a patent for the tapered roller bearing. In 1907 Sven Wingquist patented the self-aligning spherical ball bearing and race. After that, everything switched to ball and roller bearing because Babbitt wasn't cheaper anymore, and also because roller and ball bearings were better. So much better.

Tapered roller bearing, extra beefy.

So here we are, 2023, and the windmill industry, of all things one would never expect, represents the bleeding edge of bearing design and manufacture. The loads on the blade, the shaft and the generators inside those huge windmills are immense, intermittent, and unpredictable. Inside the guts of that huge bird chopper are roller bearings as big around as your thigh, running in races the diameter of your living room.

Now we come to some of the limitations that bearings have exhibited over the years. Remember how the Egyptian roads had to be smooth, flat and hard? Well, the bearing race for a windmill faces exactly the same problems. The link above goes to Liebherr in Germany, the same guys who make the huge cranes. It's no mystery how they do any of this stuff, they use forgings, metal lathes, milling machines and surface grinders. Really, really, BIG ones. Machines that can achieve amazingly fine tolerances of less than 1/1000th of an inch over 20 foot diameters, all day long, every day. The precision and consistency of manufacture is near-miraculous.

My living room is smaller, as it happens.

It's fantastically expensive. Affordable only because they make many, many units. But as one might imagine, you do not want to have to change out that bearing. It's meant to last the lifetime of the machine.

 

Imagine trying to move this thing. It goes on top of a 200 foot tall tower.

Which inevitably leads us to all those idle windmills around the country, and the reason they are idle. Brinelling. Named after August Brinell, the creator of the Brinell Hardness Scale. Long story short, Brinell tested hardness by pushing a metal ball of known hardness into a metal surface with a known amount of force, then measured the diameter of the dent it made. The harder the metal, the smaller the dent. 

 

 

Scientific divot.

It turns out that if you load a ball bearing or roller bearing with a static weight, the balls or rollers will make a dent in the races just like a hardness tester. Particularly if you bang on it, or vibrate it. That's Brinelling.

You don't want to see this in a bearing.

Brinelling occurs in windmills if they stand still. This is because although the roller is large, the part that is touching the race is very small. Just like the log digging into your lawn, the roller will dig into the race. Think of a knife pushing down on a piece of cheese. You don't have to push very hard, because the knife is thin. The cheese will hold up your finger, but not the knife.

 

Brinelling, turbo-nitrous version.

 

Under the types of loads common in the largest windmills, hardened steel will behave like cheese. It'll bulge, flatten, dent, bend, do all the sorts of things you don't want it to do. This problem is solved the same way our ancient Sumerian fixed his problem, grease. In the windmills they use oil pressure to keep everything rolling nicely and keep the bearings from digging into the races. If the windmill has to sit still for a while and be buffeted by the wind, it can survive if the oil pressure is kept up. 

 

Remember this? That brown stuff is not rust. That is oil. Oopsie.

 

But if the reason it is sitting still is because the oil pressure failed? Oh, that's bad. Because now your 20 foot diameter main bearing race has divots in it, and your six-inch rollers are all flat-spotted, and she ain't going to roll no more.

 

 

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

 

According to the CBC article we were talking about way back at the beginning, six out of ten windmills installed at a Prince Edward Island wind power facility in 2014 are now defunct. Busted. Not turning. No word on why from the Powers That Be. The CBC is mystified. What could it be?

Brinelling. That's what.

Why the Metric System sucks.

One metric banana in length.

 

 

I've said, since Canada adopted the metric system in the 1970s, that it sucks. It is a stupid French utopian idea, and I hate it. 

At a very basic level, metric doesn't mean anything to me. How big is a centimeter? I have to check every single time. It has no meaning, it's an arbitrary thing.

Imperial is based on real things. How big is an inch? My thumb, pretty much. My foot is about a foot. My stride is about six feet. Close enough to get me in the ballpark, anyway. Weights and measures are the same thing. An ounce, a quart, a pint, these are every-day amounts of things you use in food etc. A pound is roughly how much bacon you want for family breakfast. A kilogram is 2.2 times as much as you want, which is stupid.

How much is a milliliter? Um, who cares? I'm not a doctor, I don't titrate drugs in exact amounts. I'm not a machinist, 1/64th" is about the finest measurement I ever need. If I need to do better I get out the micrometer and do things in thousandths. Which is decimal not fraction, just like metric right? The only difference is 1/1000 of something I know instead of 1/100 of something I don't.

But I am constantly told I am a troglodyte and I must get with the Modern Age. Because... well no reason, really. Just because. Shut up, old man.

So now, to my vast enjoyment, here is a study showing that I am right and all the stupid French Revolution utopian bastards were wrong.

If you had to estimate the dimensions of a room without the benefit of a tape measure, you might walk its perimeter heel to toe, counting your steps. To estimate the height of a wall, you might count hand spans from floor to ceiling. In doing so, you'd join a long human tradition. Most human societies around the word—perhaps all—have employed similar body-based measurement strategies, according to a first-of-its-kind study published today in Science. And these informal body-based systems can persist for centuries after a culture has introduced standardized units of measure because, the authors argue, they often lead to more ergonomic designs of tools, clothing, and other personalized items.

"Nobody has ever done this kind of systematic, cross-cultural study of body-based measurement before," says Stephen Chrisomalis, an anthropologist of mathematics at Wayne State University who penned an editorial accompanying the new paper. "It brings together a huge amount of data that [show] not just how common they are, but that they tend to fall along certain patterns. That is actually an extraordinarily important finding."

Everybody, all over the world, throughout history, used the hand, the foot, the span, the yard, etc. Only the French were so ridiculous to invent a system that relates to nothing. The meter is the length that it is because some guy said so, and for no other reason (and he made it that way because it wasn't a yard.) A yard at least started as the distance from the king's nose to his outstretched index finger, which is something.

If you are making any object for use by human beings, be it a chair, a spoon, a car, the human body dictates the design. The proportions of the body also dictate artistic sensibility. If the proportions conform roughly to those of the human body the thing will be appealing. If they do not, it will be ugly. Which makes a yard or a foot useful information. A yard is how far your arm can reach.  A shoe is a foot long.

That this is news to the academic world, an "extraordinarily important finding" quoth the authors, seems to me to represent an abject failure of the education system as a whole. 

It seems as if none of these people studying these things has ever made anything with their hands. If they had, they'd know you don't proceed to make a thing by manufacturing all the parts to a listed tolerance. You start with what the thing is for. From there you decide how big the parts are. Then you proceed in logical fashion from the most awkward part to the easiest. 

Chair seat first, then the holes for the legs, trim the legs to fit the holes (because it is EASIER to trim the leg than to trim the hole), then the leg braces, then the back, then the arms, etc. Each piece is measured from the previous piece, or from the body of the person who is going to sit on it.

Tables, chairs, boats, all made the same way, each one unique. Because it doesn't matter if no two are the same. It only matters if it fits the person it was made for.

Making a standardized object in a factory out of standardized, interchangeable parts is a profoundly unnatural process and only began in the 19th Century. Such a process requires all kinds of things that had never been required before. Two of those things were accuracy and precision of physical dimensions. The tapered pin that goes into the tapered hole must be accurate to within a few thousandths of an inch for diameter, roundness, taper and length. In the 18th century such things could not even be measured. In the 19th they were commonly being produced in lots of ten thousand. The Singer sewing machine, patented in 1851, is an example of a device that would have been impossible to make at all 100 years before.

But no one in Academia these days seems to appreciate what that means. Even the notion of measuring by rule of thumb does not occur to them, apparently. What did they do when they built those sailing ships to cross the Atlantic the first few times? Inch, foot, yard, fathom. That's what. We're humans. That's how we do it. 

Except the French, whose one driving need throughout history is that they have to be different.

NYC air quality taday

 

Wooden. Satelite.

 Coming to us from Japan, a satellite made of Magnolia wood.

A satellite made of wood could be launched into space in 2024.

The high durability of wood in space was recently tested and confirmed at the International Space Station (ISS) by an international group of scientists led by those from Kyoto University.

Their experiments showed wood samples tested at the ISS for durability underwent minimal deterioration and maintained good stability.

Preliminary inspection, including strength tests and crystal structural analyses, of the wood samples was also done once they were brought back to Earth from the ISS by Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata.

We all know (or bloody well should know) that the Mosquito bomber of WWII was made of plywood, and very successful as well. 

 It turns out from a quickie interwebz search that the Ranger moon probes of the 1960s had an "impact limiter sphere" made of plywood.

The wooden sphere held by NASA Systems Design secretary Pat McKibben.

They really knew how to do things back in the 1960s, eh? Get the fabulous secretary to pose with the exotic spacecraft part as if it was a Holly carburetor in a hot-rod magazine.

One of the reasons for trying to make spacecraft parts out of wood, mentioned in this article, is space junk. More specifically, powdered aluminum raining down on the Earth as satellites and rockets inevitably fall out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. 

I must say that I don't really share the concerns of the people mentioned in the articles, but on the other hand we really don't know what the long-term effect of vaporized metals in the atmosphere will be. At a guess, it probably won't help anything.

Therefore, it couldn't hurt to make things out of wood, if this can be done. Using wood as an aerospace material also has the advantages of hugely reduced cost of materials, impressive strength-to-weight ratios, and ease of fabrication.

Something else to consider, for the future, is the possibility of deliberately growing trees and shrubs into desired shapes.

Grown from a sapling, not bent.

 

Industrial scale version in pine, from Poland.

This could be an exciting application of vat-grown vegetation, you put the shape you want into the tank as a form, and the wood grows into it. 

Makes me wonder how vat-grown bone would do as a space material. You could probably get it to grow much faster than wood. Cows grow to full size in a couple of years, right?

Woke medicine 2023: racial apartheid is de rigueur again.

You know how I always say the medical journals are not to be trusted, that they are full of shit and act as propaganda organs for the Left? This is why I say it.

Racial Affinity Group Caucusing in Medical Education — A Key Supplement to Antiracism Curricula

April 27, 2023
N Engl J Med 2023; 388:1542-1545
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp2212866

That's the title. Here's the begining:

As academic medicine begins to recognize and examine racism as the root cause of racially disparate health outcomes, we need curricula for training physicians to dismantle the systems that perpetuate these inequities. Since traditional approaches to medical education are themselves founded in inequitable systems, new approaches are essential.

Yes my friends, the existing hospital and medical school "systems" are hopelessly racist and need to be "dismantled." Here's their suggestion to replace everything:

 Racial affinity group caucuses (RAGCs)

Hmm. Interesting bafflegab, what does that mean in English?

Cultivating sacred spaces: a racial affinity group approach to support critical educators of color

ABSTRACT

Despite repeated pleas for diversifying the U.S. teacher force, teachers of color who are committed to social justice are often unsupported and even pushed out via structural, interpersonal, and pedagogical obstacles within the profession. In response to neoliberal, colorblind, and apolitical approaches to teacher development and support, educators and organizers have reclaimed and reframed their pedagogies through critical professional development and grassroots activism to center healing from the impacts of oppression in its myriad forms . The ethnographic case study in this article examines how, over the course of three years, a grassroots racial affinity group became an important space for learning and healing for its members. I explain how the group explicitly centered twelve members' voices, needs, and collective knowledge, and in so doing: (a) collectively cultivated a critical, humanizing, and healing space for their sustainability; and (b) navigated various positions within socially toxic education institutions and organizations. I conclude by discussing how and why critical racial affinity spaces for educators of color are necessary in order to support their personal, political, relational, and pedagogical growth, which has implications on their retention and leadership within the field.

Ohhh, I see. It means this:

1. An official policy of racial segregation formerly practiced in the Republic of South Africa, involving political, legal, and economic discrimination against nonwhites.
2. A policy or practice of separating or segregating groups.
3. The condition of being separated from others; segregation.

Apartheid. Except chaged up to discriminate against Whites.

Capital W on White, by the way, from the article.

Founded on legacies of colonialism and racism, medical education has historically centered White learners and continues to perpetuate structural racism.⁴ Pedagogical approaches often center White learners and ignore the differential impact of content on BIPOC learners (Black, Indigenous, or people of color) with personal experiences of racism that are nuanced and have been informed by interactions and observations over their lifetimes. Immersion in the existing medical education system can therefore be retraumatizing, resulting in imposter syndrome, heightened anxiety, and a reduced sense of belonging. Especially as we seek to recruit more medical students who are BIPOC, we need to recognize this harm and encourage pedagogical approaches that support the needs of BIPOC learners.

RAGCs have been studied in a range of settings, including K–12 education, undergraduate education, and workplace environments, but have not yet been well studied in medical education.^1,3 Some BIPOC people have been socialized to care for the egos of White people, to express their emotions only in ways that are palatable to White audiences, and to tread lightly around "White fragility" (White people's discomfort and defensiveness regarding their legacy of racism and complicity in systems of inequality) in order to maintain their relationships, professional status, and safety.⁵ In a space without White people, BIPOC participants can bring their whole selves, heal from racial trauma together, and identify strategies for addressing structural racism.^1,2,5

 Yeah. Just kick Whitey out of class, and everything will be way better, and all the non-White kids won't have to tread lightly around all that White fragility.

Haven't we seen that before though? I mean, didn't we address this shit in the 1960s? Oh that's right, we did. Equality under the law is a thing in every nation in Western civilization now. Even South Africa.

But these guys say that's not good enough anymore. They don't want to be equal. They want a special deal. They want to make all the White kids and the White teachers go to the White school, so the BIPOC people can... relax? I guess? Because that forcible seperation thing worked out so well in South Africa, you know.

There's a name for this type of thing. I think it starts with an R, or maybe an N. Some guy with this weird mustache started it, I'm trying to think where I've heard it before....

Speed of light violated, spooky action at a distance confirmed.

This is some very interesting news.

The experiment wasn't the first to show that local realism isn't how the Universe works — it's not even the first to do so with qubits. But it's the first to separate the qubits by enough distance to ensure that light isn't fast enough to travel between them while measurements are made. And it did so by cooling a 30-meter-long aluminum wire to just a few milliKelvin. Because the qubits are so easy to control, the experiment provides a new precision to these sorts of measurements.

The Ars Technica article.

So, long story short, quantum entanglement DOES transmit information faster than light.

In practice, this meant giving the entire assembly built to keep the wire cool access to the liquid helium refrigeration systems that housed the qubits at each end—and building a separate refrigeration system at the center point of the 30-meter tube. The system also needed flexible internal connections and exterior supports because the whole thing contracts significantly as it cools down.

Still, it all worked impressively well. Because of the performance of the qubits, the researchers could perform over a million individual trials in only 20 minutes. The resulting correlations ended up being above the limit set by Bell's equations by a staggering 22 standard deviations. Put in different terms, the p value of the result was below 10-108.

The distance traveled by the speed of light in a nanosecond is roughly a foot. Computers easily run at speeds that are measured in nanoseconds, making it possible to see the resulting measurements made of entanglement connecting one chip to the other faster than the speed of light. One chip reacts to the other sooner than light can travel 30 meters. By the look of that 10^-108, a hell of a lot faster.

So there you go, you -can- transmit information faster than the speed of light. Somewhere, Albert must be grumbling about it.

Update: Welcome Small Dead Animals! Thanks for the linkage, Kate!

We're gonna Dieeeeeee!!!

 Reposting this comment I made at According To Hoyt.

Yes, we’re all doomed. All going to die, the end is nigh, hasta la vista, baby. Doom and destruction all over TV, radio, streaming. Films, music, books. Yer gonna die.

Well, unless you listen to Korean pop idols. K-Pop is making HUGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY internationally by being sweet bubbly candy with cute girls and fun dancing that kids can actually -do- while they sing along. Lots of blown kisses and making your hands into heart symbols.

Leaving aside the fan armies and social media dramatics of K-Pop, their business model is to sell entertainment to kids.

No one (that I know of) is doing this in the USA/Britain/Canada right now. The closest you get is Trance, where there’s no singing and you just zone-out while moving your feet. There’s no “Positive Message” in Western music right now, the best you can hope for is “never mind, just drop some molly and dance until you puke.”

Being a geezer I can’t pretend to an encyclopedic knowledge of trendy trends for 2023, but if you look at the -wasteland- of modern entertainment the only shiny spots are in Asia. Japan, Korea, and weirdly, China.

That, my friends, smacks of an Arrangement.

We know for sure, given Sad Puppies, that dead-tree publishing is rigged to favor grimdark grey goo. Books, comics, all the same. Goo.

We know for sure it isn’t selling because bookstores (the few that are still open) are filled with manga now. Western SF/F, one bookcase. Manga, three -aisles- of book cases.

So they are deliberately doing what they KNOW doesn’t work. They know it. For sure. The proof is in the sales numbers. But there they are, persisting. So wtf are they doing?

Well, where else do we see this? Gun control, one example. I know -for sure- it doesn’t work to accomplish the stated purpose of reducing violent crime. Everybody knows it doesn’t work. It is exquisitely obvious that it doesn’t work. But they still do it.

Renewable energy, another example. Windmills and solar can’t supply the electrical grid with reliable power. Everyone knows this. Self evidently, solar doesn’t make power when the sun goes down. Windmills don’t make power when there’s no wind. But what are they doing? Putting up windmills and solar. Which don’t work. For sure.

There are many other examples like recycling, veganism, electric cars, carbon taxes, paper masks for the flu etc. Waste motion, all of it.

So I look at all that, the steady diet of grimdark, the waste of resources, the oppression of individuals at every turn, and it occurs to me I don’t really care any more why they’re doing it. It doesn’t matter why, even if I knew it wouldn’t help.

I’m pretty well done trying to figure out their motivation, and I’m done trying to convince by sweet reason. Where I’m at now is actively subverting their actions by simply saying the truth.

Recycling, sacred cow of Enviros, is a lie. Gun control, sacred cow of the Perennially Concerned and Caring, is a lie. Renewable energy, lie.

Grimdark literature, sacred cow of the Cognoscenti, is worse than a mere lie. It is a mind poison aimed at harming the people who read it.

K-Pop. Manga. Anime. That’s the thing.

 

Regarding a recent disturbance of sacred cows.

Recently some sacred cows were gored by Larry Correia. Sick of people leaving two-star reviews on his books because George Martin, David Gerrold and Patrick Rothfuss couldn't be bothered to finish their epic fantasies, Larry told their disapointed fans to suck it up and move on. Epically, as he usually does. 

But then, Chinese bot farmers decided that the Sacred Pillars of Fandom had been defiled and they needed to smear Larry. Again.

This rant is what my brain would do if it could. ~:D 

In the middle of said rant, regarding Rothfuss, Martin and Gerrold, Larry asks a question:

“How much did these vapid fucks screw over their own industry?” 

 

It may interest one and all to know that there is a number for that. The number is $8600.00. 

 

$8600 is the -median- (not the average, but the most common) annual income from writing in Britain. The bulge in the bell curve, as it were. Which means that Dead Tree published authors, generally, are not making any money. 

Their books, to put it plainly, are not selling. At all. (All those Hugo-beloved tomes? Nope. Not selling.) 

Which is not at all surprising, given the collapse of the retail book business. Which collapse was inevitable given the Woke TM garbage that passes for science fiction/adventure/fantasy these days. 

You guys know what the TOP SELLER is in comics these days? Manga. From Japan, you know. In translation, no less. Because why? Because Marvel and DC are all-Woke, all the time. Same for novels, but we don’t have sales numbers for those, because shenanigans. 

But you can tell, because authors are flipping burgers instead of writing. 

Now, is all this George Martin, David Gerrold and Patrick Rothfuss’s fault? Like, personally theirs? No. Clearly not. This is a publishing-wide phenomenon. 

But did they contribute to this decline? Oh yeah. That’s three BIG selling series that they just couldn’t be assed to finish, leaving BIG fandoms disappointed and pissed off to the point where they just stopped buying SF/F books. 

Look at it this way. My book sold hundreds of copies. Best case scenario, there are people waiting for the next one. (Its coming, I SWEAR.) If I were to crap out for some reason, those people would be mildly disappointed. 

GRRM has -millions- of fans. (I can’t understand why, but he does.) -Millions- of people are disappointed that he’s promised another volume and not delivered. 

That’s a pretty big deal. That level of disappointment has had an impact on the sales of other people’s books. Readers just gave up. 

And now the median author income is $8600 a year. Meaning the next Tolkien/Rowling/Correia is FLIPPING BURGERS so he/she can eat, instead of writing. Because time spent writing does not make any money. 

So, to quantify how full of shit China Mike and the Viletones are, they’re $8600 bucks worth full of it. That’s a lot of horseshit right there. 

 

 

Finally, something cool. Breakthrough in tiles.

Never mind the politics bullshit, this is actually interesting.

Previously, the least number of shapes required to tile a 2 dimensional plane with non-repeating patterns was two. Sir Roger Penrose invented his Penrose Tiles in 1974. They have a fivefold symmetry, which is supposed to be impossible in mathematics. They assemble to an infinite space and the patterns never repeat. Infinitely variable.

So now there has been discovered a SINGLE shape that does the same thing.

 

The Hat.

 

A quartet of mathematicians from Yorkshire University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Waterloo and the University of Arkansas has discovered a 2D geometric shape that does not repeat itself when tiled. David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig Kaplan and Chaim Goodman-Strauss have written a paper describing how they discovered the unique shape and possible uses for it. Their full paper is available on the arXiv preprint server.

When people tile their floors, they tend to use simple geometric shapes that lend themselves to repeating patterns, such as squares or triangles. Sometimes though, people want patterns that do not repeat but that represents a challenge if the same types of shape are used. In this new effort, the research team has discovered a single geometric shape that if used for tiling, will not produce repeating patterns.

This, believe it or not, is a Big Deal. A completely novel way to tile the 2D plane with no repeating patterns. Amazing.

You're welcome. ~:D

"You people do not deserve freedom." Liberal Party of Canada

I've been saying this for years. The ruling principle of Canada in particular and socialists everywhere is: People are stupid. They must be controlled.

Someone at the National Post and the Spectator UK seems to have finally noticed.

A few days ago, Britain's Spectator magazine did a tremendous job of summing up all the intrigue, machinations, politics, and noise surrounding Chinese interference in Canadian elections. And it came to a remarkable conclusion.

"There are those who bemoan declining trust in our leaders. Here we see the damage that can be done by a leader who does not trust the public," wrote their correspondent Sam Dunning.

 They go on to cite a laundry list of Liberal Party scandals from the Rule of Pony era, and the response from the Shiny Pony always being a shrug of the shoulders, as if such things were beneath his notice and what's all the fuss about.

Their conclusion:

When it comes to China, we see the same ingrained paternalism. Trudeau knew there was a problem with Chinese interference; the Prime Minister's Office had reports that Chinese money was being funnelled to Liberal candidates in federal elections, national security agencies had warned that Chinese Canadians were being recruited to assist in distributing illegal donations, and to vote for preferred candidates in nomination races.

But Trudeau's reaction was to keep silent and keep Canadians in the dark. Why? Maybe Trudeau is a traitorous villain who allowed China to do their worst. But the more obvious explanation from his past actions is that he didn't think Canadians needed to know. In his arrogance, he almost certainly thought he and his party were not only best to handle it, but that they could learn little from anyone else's input.

This is the core of the thing, which the authors do not address directly. They blame it on Shiny Pony narcissism, which while certainly true, falls short of the reality.

Reality is that Freedom, capital F, is for the Great and the Good. The leadership of the nation, you know. People who know what's what. For the rest, there is Obedience. Capital O, which stands for "shut up and get back in line you filthy peasant."

Naturally they don't trust the sheep. Sheep are too stupid to live. The job of the shepherd is to guard the flock and keep it in line. The job of the flock is to be fleeced for the shepherd's benefit. Of what use is freedom to a sheep?

That's us. We are the sheep in this saga. That's the governing principle of your country, normies. How do you feel about that?

The stupid. It burns.

I haven't posted anything since January, there hasn't been anything sufficiently surprising to amaze me or sufficiently stupid to gain my ire. Until now.

The Idaho Supreme Court has vacated a Mountain Home man's conviction for felony drug possession and delivery after it ruled that a police drug-sniffing dog trespassed and conducted an illegal search by putting its paws on his vehicle, prompting the search that led to his arrest.

The court issued its decision Monday, with three of the five justices in agreement and two dissenting.

The case centered on the 2019 arrest of Kirby Dorff. According to court documents, the officer said Dorff was stopped by a patrol officer in Mountain Home after Dorff drove across lanes of traffic without using a signal. A second officer arrived with a police K-9 named Nero who was trained to detect illegal drugs.

While Dorff explained to the first officer that he didn't have a valid driver's license or proof of insurance in the vehicle, Nero began sniffing around the car. Police body camera footage showed the dog jumped up against the car multiple times, including once when his paws rested on the driver's side door and window as he sniffed the "upper seams" of the car, officials said.

Oh noes, the dog put his front feet on the car! Like dogs never do that.

The legal opinion:

 Justice Robyn Brody in the majority opinion wrote that justices weighed whether the dog's intrusion on the exterior of Dorff's vehicle constituted trespassing as it would have if the dog had entered the interior of the vehicle.

Ultimately, Brody wrote, she and justices John Stegner and Colleen Zahn agreed that the exterior of the vehicle is protected by the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unlawful searches. They said the drug-sniffing dog "intermeddled" with Dorff's personal effects by jumping up on the car.

"Intermeddling is the difference between someone who brushes up against your purse while walking by and someone who, without privilege or consent, rests their hand on your purse or puts their fingers into your purse before your eyes or behind your back," Brody wrote.

According to the majority opinion, it doesn't matter that the unlawful search included the exterior of Dorff's property or was performed by a drug-sniffing dog.

The dissent:

 Bevans in a separate opinion reiterated his view from an earlier case that a drug-sniffing dogs canine instincts aren't the same as intentional police intrusion.

For justices to equate a drug-sniffing dog "instinctually jumping onto the exterior of a car" to a government agent placing a tracking device on a vehicle "stretches logic beyond the breaking point of reasonableness," Bevans wrote.

The dissent, unsurprisingly, is a longer version of what I said. Dogs jump up on shit when they're excited. That's how they are.

The real issue, apparent from the utter stupidity of the majority opinion and the fact that the news article doesn't mention it, is that the Court does not want police to have drug-sniffing dogs present at traffic stops. Or possibly to have them at all. Because politics, at some level or other, has created two opposing factions. One faction represented by the majority opinion, one by the dissent.

The problem with letting courts decide things is that they invent stuff like this to disguise that they're really doing something else. Somebody doesn't want Idaho police to have dogs, or they want less drug dealers in jail, or they just want to fuck over Idaho by letting criminals have a free hand. But they can't get the votes to do it in the legislature. So they get their bros onto the court, and they do it that way.

Oh and Mr. Dorff got booked again in February 2023. Going by his picture he's a real pillar of the community.