Category: Decline and fall

Miscellany

Noise comes in colors. There are white noise, pink noise, red noise, brown noise, blue noise, grey noise, etc. The various shades are most easily perceived by acousticians and sound engineers.

While wandering around an airport earlier this summer, I realized that there music playing throughout the building. It was light, watery jazzish stuff, difficult to pay attention to. There was a trumpet in the mix, but the sound was bland, not bold. The melodies were trivial and the chords hackneyed. It may very well have been AI slop. What I was hearing could be called “beige noise”: music intended to be ignored.

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Joseph Epstein on a biography he never wrote:

In my early thirties I signed on to write a biography of John Dos Passos, who was still alive. I wrote to Dos Passos to ask if I might have his cooperation in writing his biography. He replied instantly, saying that he would help me in any way he could, on the condition that I “put my liberal ideology in mothballs” and pledge never again to use the word “explicate.”

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Atomic Fungus shows how to talk to machines:

Mrs. Fungus was trying to get a tech on the phone, and was stuck at the recalcitrant AI prompt. After hearing her say, “I want to talk to an agent!” fifty-odd times, I took the phone from her.

Machine: “Do you want to try to restart your cable box now?”

Me: “NO! BIB GOBBLE WAGLE BAG GAG HANGLE!”

Whenever the clanker would ask me a yes/no question, I’d answer it, but then add random gobbledygook. And I kept making the tone angrier and angrier.

It gave up and shunted us to a human.

Mrs. Fungus: “How did you do that?”

The algorithm that translates what the user is saying into something the computer can understand has a limited capacity for literal nonsense. In theory, after a sufficient number of errors, it should crap out and send the caller to a human.

That was my theory. I’m glad it worked!

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A thousand years ago I discovered three records in the University of Dallas library that would determine much of my musical activity over the years to come: Augustin Anievas’ Chopin waltzes, the first disc of Isolde Ahlgrimm’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” and Songs by Tom Lehrer1. Lehrer died recently. A few years ago he released his music into the public domain. You can find all the songs here.

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One of the places I passed through in Alaska, southeast of Fairbanks. There is culture in the wilderness.

Mw = 8.6 ± 0.2

From Izvestiya, Physics of the Solid Earth, July 23, 2025:

The epicenters of the August 17, 2024 earthquake and its strongest aftershocks fall in a shallow ring-shaped structure (Mt1 = 5.3), which supports the hypothesis of a preparation of a great earthquake in the South Kamchatka region. In the previous works, the correlation dependences of parameters Mt1 and Mt2 on the magnitudes Mw of large earthquakes have been constructed for the western Pacific (in the range Mw = 7.0–9.0). Using these dependencies, we estimated the magnitude of the great possible event in this region at Mw = 8.6 ± 0.2.

I.e., last week’s titanic Kamchatka earthquake had been accurately predicted about a week before it happened. However, there is a paywall; if you want to read anything beyond the abstract, it will cost you $39.95. Consequently, almost nobody saw this prediction.

Volcano Café:

And the bottom line: if you want to warn people about an impending disaster, don’t do it behind a paywall. Those paywalls are there to stop people from reading the work, and in this they are quite effective. You risk becoming a voice crying in the publishing wilderness.

Today’s quote, Prussian schooling edition

Joseph Moore:

Pity poor Horace Mann, Henry Bernard and other ‘educationists’ trying to sell modern schooling to such people. They had to convince such an educated population to hand over their children’s education to experts. Basically, the educators failed to convince Americans. Mann started pitching Prussian schooling, otherwise known as compulsory age-segregated classroom instruction, before 1837, but it took a dozen years and special circumstances to get the first school off the ground. That first school in 1848 in Boston snuck by because it targeted immigrants. ‘Real’ Americans didn’t send their kids there; those ‘real’ Americans became convinced that it was a good to use the state’s power to beat a little of the right kind of Jesus into the skulls of the Irish Papists kids that were showing up in Boston in large numbers at that time (the Irish Potato Famine began in 1845). From the very beginning down to this day, schooling is seen by the self-appointed Enlightened as a way to correct the moral defects – Catholicism back then, all the ‘bigotry’ and ‘hatred’ today (which of course includes Catholicism) – of the unwashed masses.

Today’s quote

Kate McMillan at normblog twenty years ago:

Norm: If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be?

Kate: From the present – the American writer and conservative ‘hawk’ Mark Helprin, and rocker Ted Nugent. Helprin is on a lot of shortlists as ‘world’s greatest living writer’, but that’s not the only reason I’d invite him. I figure that given a few drinks, he could help me convince Nugent to beat the crap out of the third guest I’d invite – Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the socialist Canadian Prime Minister who set into motion the intellectual, military and political decay of a once proud nation.

Today’s quote: At the circus in clown world

JMSmith:

In the present election, we have to choose between a confidence man and a courtesan, two types the American people warmly approve as less obese reflections of themselves. Trump’s talent is the power to embolden nervous investors and make them sign checks they would not sign if they were not under the spell of Trump. Harris’s talent is the power to do whatever she is told to do while cluelessly enjoying dumb luck.

A hundred and more years ago, Trump and Harris might have been working together in a sideshow of a travelling circus, Trump outside the tent persuading the yokels to part with a quarter to take an edifying gander at the Queen of Sheba, Harris inside the tent beguiling the yokels with phony-exotic allure.

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I myself am still more likely to write in Dave Barry for his stand on plumbing issues3, though I am considering Vincent D. Furnier for his policy on school reform.

Today’s quote: TDS

suburbanbanshee:

Donald Trump is no saint yet, certainly; but he has the curious quality that many saints have, of revealing serious hatred problems deep in people’s hearts, even when those people have always seemed good or normal. Some of these “good” people go stark raving mad when exposed to someone sweet, kind, and gentle, possibly because they suddenly feel inferior somehow, or feel disturbed in their view of what is possible for a human to do and be.

Trump Derangement Syndrome has a similar quality, where something innocuous or funny done by Trump suddenly works like splashing holy water on a vampire, shrieks and all. I have seen it with a member of my own family, and still don’t understand it.

It’s lunatic time

Uncle Sam was a plausible personification of the United States of America a century ago, back before the USA became Absurdistan. In this silly age of Tapioca Joe and 57 genders, he’s no longer appropriate. We need someone more in harmony with the spirit of the times. Here’s a possibility:

Clownpiece is a character from one of the later Touhou games. According to the Touhou Wiki,

With the flame of her torch, Clownpiece is able to drive others insane. According to herself, any human looking at the light of her torch would be unable to maintain their sanity, making her able to mess with their minds. In the Human Village, she used this ability to make villagers extremely irritable and short-tempered, attacking each other for trivial reasons….

The flame of the torch is able to affect the lifeforce and make it go berserk….

Clownpiece is similar in nature to many of the other fairies in Touhou: she is playful, mischievous, childish, and a little bit dumb. She enjoys the aesthetics of Hell, often leading to strange looks from others; however, this is because it reminds her of home.

Clownpiece is also the “Embodiment of impurity.”

That sounds more like 21st century America than old, irrelevant Uncle Sam.

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There’s another election this fall, where once again the choices will be between Very Bad or Even Worse. I suggest sending the regulatory state a message by writing in “Dave Barry.”

In his spare time, Dave is a candidate for president of the United States. If elected, his highest priority will be to seek the death penalty for whoever is responsible for making Americans install low-flow toilets.

Notes from all over

Atomic Fungus:

Step 1: Be me

Step 2: Notice that all the numbers in my car’s odometer display are powers of 2.

Step 3: Work out that, expressed as powers of 2, my odometer reads 31210 (82421 miles).

Step 4: Realize: “WTF–did I just differentiate my F-ing odometer??”

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David Breitenbeck:

If you’re going to give someone a Nobel Prize in economics, shouldn’t the standard be “their economic policies were put into practice in a certain community and worked as intended to the benefit of the said community”? Because otherwise, isn’t it just judging who has the most appealing theory? Which is to say, fiction being written and judged by people who don’t realize it’s fiction?

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Clarissa:

I’m starting to suspect that the whole “Pride month” thing is a conspiracy by a group of rabid homophobes.

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The People’s Cube:

In the future everyone will get canceled for fifteen minutes