Miscellaneous

“Public Service”

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In a WSJ piece about the report recently issued by special prosecutor Robert Hur, John Sciortino notes that “The report also expressly weighed in its non-prosecution recommendation President Biden’s “nearly fifty years” of public service as a senator, vice president and now president.”

Left unsaid is why 50 years as a politician and officeholder should be considered as of more value than 50 years as a farmer, an entrepreneur, research scientist at a drug company, or night-shift worker at a steel mill or a semiconductor fab.   This kind of privilege seems directly contrary to the whole idea of equality before the law.   Indeed, it seems reminiscent of the kind of privilege that caused so much anger in pre-revolutionary France.

Note also that there are special student-loan forgiveness provisions for people who are employees of government entities (state, federal, local, or tribal) or of 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations.

Book Review: Theft of Fire, by Devon Eriksen

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Marcus Warnoc operates a spacegoing freighter, assembled by his father and himself out of whatever parts they can afford. He is surviving financially only by the skin of his teeth, and has out of desperation engaged in some operations of questionable (or worse) legality.   He finds that his ship has been taken over by a young woman named Miranda Foxglove…who knows what he did, and her price for not telling will be: to take her where she wants to go.

And where she wants to go is a planet called Sedna, in the outer reaches of our solar system. No one ever goes there–for very good reason.

Miranda has also brought along an artificial intelligence–its name is ‘Lily’, rather, that was the name of the 12-year-old girl whose brain Miranda imaged into the AI system.   Given that the real Lily is back home with her family, the AI entity is dubbed ‘Leela’.    But it, or she–this AI appears to be conscious–still has all the memories and emotions of the 12-year-old from whose mind her mind was copied.   Leela is not happy about her current disembodied state, despite her silicon-enabled ability for every fast thought and her ability to shift her vision to cameras anywhere throughout the ship, and while she is basically a happy and positive-thinking entity (person?), she does feel a certain resentment toward her creator.

A well-written and thought-provoking book, which is surprisingly emotionally affecting.   The author is a frequent poster at X/Twitter, and is especially good at the art of the denunciation.

Red Guards in Mexico?

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In Mexico, Rodrigo Iván Cortés, a former Congressman of that country, has been convicted of “political violence” for social media posts on gender, referring to Mexican Congressional representative as “man who self-ascribes as a woman”.   In addition to a fine, he has been sentenced to publish an apology (written by the court) on his social media accounts, daily for 30 days.   He was also was entered into the National Registry of Persons Sanctioned in Political Matters against Women.   A petition has been filed on his behalf with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.   See also this Twitter post.

Responding to a post from Claire Lehmann about her kids coming home from school and being required to write letters of apology for colonization and ‘wrecking the planet’, Greg Ashman remarked that this sort of thing was dismissed circa 2015 as just ‘fringe American campus politics’, but that but it inevitably came for Australian school rooms.

Indeed, Wokeness has spread around the world with amazing speed…and now, apparently, has gainedd a significant lodging in Mexico.   Yet how many people in that country..among the elites of that country..really believe the full party line about there being no real differences between men and women? Very few, I would hazard a guess.   Yet they seem quite happy to go along with the enforcement of those beliefs on their population.

Yet perhaps there is hope for a turnaround.   A Canadian nurse reports on Twitter:

I was seeing a therapist who said most of her clients have become professionals who are deeply unhappy with DEI & woke culture at work. They feel afraid of speaking up, but are sick of the constant barrage of racist, delusional nonsense they’re supposed to champion. It is making people miserable & fearful. It is making people leave careers, or get forced out for infractions. Organizations still clinging to DEI are making a terrible mistake.

There seem to be a lot of reactions like this developing. Things that might sound all right as catch-phrases often don’t seem so good when people see and feel them working out themselves in practice.   And much of the support for Wokeness seems to represent Preference Falsification, at some level…people not really being comfortable with those assertions, but going along with them because they believe that everyone else (in circles that matter to them) believes in the assertions.   And when cracks in the wall of apparent unanimity begin the appear, the Preference Cascade in the other direction can change things quickly.

Retrotech: Lofting and Machining Components for the T-38 Supersonic Trainer, 1958

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A participant writes about the early days of numerical control machining and also discusses how definition of complex aircraft shapes was done prior to the computing era.   Imagine the labor intensiveness of that process, which descended from traditional shipbuilding techniques but surely required a much higher degree of precision when applied to aircraft production.

A Bendix G-15 computer was used for the NC work described at Northrop, with paper punched tape as the communications medium between the computer and the machine tool.   There is a Bendix G-15 at the American Precision Museum in Vermont, along with many machine tools and other interesting exhibits–see my post here.   Recommended visit for those interested in the history of technology.