Simulating Fools

Where is GigaText when we need them?!  We need to simulate that as well!  A happy people do not blog about technology failures; rather, they laud and sing hymns to technology break-throughs!  Pierced with the arrows of technical insight!

Simulate everything - especially the sound of millions down the drain ...

And don't forget those happiness metrics and social networking tag indices ... and simulating the interest world-wide in which individuals are being simulated tracking the world simulator's versimilitude ...

Let's start be simulating Iowa.  No, to get that right we first need to simulate the United States - let's start there.  And to be ready for the IPO, let's start by simulating 2014 first and then work back to 2011 if our web hits justify the expense ...

In fairness, this as deen on BBC Technology page and not the sci/env page where some sanity is present (so CNN has no such rubric.)

Favourite science web quote of the past week: the last super-nova in the Milky Way occurred 600 years ago.

Runner-up: man who submits data anomaly credited with discovering 4 gas giant exo-planets without a telescope (and which amateur telescope might he otherwise have used?)  Discovery attribution peer-evaluated by ....

Let me see ... kid discovers body (says there is a new lumpy area in the woods and Dad digs it up but stops at first sight of what could be part of a skull) ; forensics team identifies body as that of X - so kid discovered X without use of what?  Their gas injection spectroscopy machine?  Their DNA gel sheets?  Dental xrays?  Tweezers?

In the running: Vultures as spies; spy agency sharks in the Red Sea.

Mental Health and violent acts in America

This is the US mental health link mentioned in connection with the shootings in Tucson: NMHA.

The proposed DSM-5 manual for mental health professionals is found in wikipedia here. Note the change from the DSM-IV Roman numeral to arabic numeral 5 in the acronym.

A Slate article reports the six dimensions for DSM-V diagnoses as negative emotionality, introversion, antagonism, disinhibition, compulsivity, and schizotypy.  Intent to do harm to a public figure not of ones personal acquaintance was not statistically useful in their current approach - let alone murderous intent without cause.  The model of 'disinhibition', 'antagonism' and 'compulsivity' is not consistent with 'intent', planning and 'action' in any obvious way because the view is fundamentally one of learning, behavior and physiology.  Even foolish and simplistic political notions have no obvious place in this psychiatric approach in which language and cognition are secondary to behavior patterns and neurotransmitters.  Anti-social behavior becomes a set of high numbers on some 5 or 6 of these dimensions.

But someone in the White House thinks that these diagnoses can be used to root out possible whistle-blowing traitors who are more interested in others (foreigners) than the American State - and that official's delusions we would call what on our own dimensions for the stupidity of fools with official titles and official bulletins?  Talk about 'family secrets' ... and the US government seems to have so many on so many levels.  Maybe if unnamed US Senators were not blocking so many appointments, a few of these nutters would be reigned in and better heads prevail.

Quote:
"

 Do you use psychiatrist and sociologist to measure:
    Relative happiness as a means to gauge trustworthiness?
    Despondence and grumpiness as a means to gauge waning trustworthiness

"

Question: sociology and individual loyalty assessment - let's look for that science for 'identifying whistle-blowers before they leak'.  Perhaps in some old speeches of a Senator Joe?

Note it is not about 'how' or 'should' but 'do'.  "Do you ask your employees if they discuss wrong-headed policies in which we persist despite no good science or results?"

BBC link.

Zweite Elegie

I added the second of the Duino Elegies at aule-browser.

This page is also in minimalist HTML so that the source can be copied with ease to create a new page.

The minimal markup has been made as unobtrusive as possible: the BR elements are aligned to the right so that even as raw HTML the page is readable for uses such as adding translation snippets and other annotations.

Joel Hauserman photographer

Cleveland photographer Joel Hauserman declined to share a photograph of his via the internet.

He has a point - I had not provided him with a secure eyes-only/no-copy/no-forward viewer as an alternative to email or browser.

The photograph is from a series, itself a work in progress.

[also to be continued ...]

Duineser Elegien / Duino Elegies / poetry markup

Over at aule-browser I have placed a page with the first elegy from Duino Elegies.

The German text is in a minimal HTML layout so that you can create you own web page with notes.

The layout is not as useful or minimal as I can offer in Curl, but it seems useful.

notes: die findigen Tiere [...] in der gedeuteten Welt  perhaps as in the Adamic naming of the animals of the field ( the passage is followed by the Baum; cp opening of the first of the Sonnets to Orpheus.)

Alternative markup:

stanza[1] line[-3] words["noch"] style["spaced-letters"] 

but this placed in a separate 'markup-style' file included by the poem viewer/internet resource browser and NOT in the cleanly formatted text.

Inline markup dates from paper publishing, slow computers and conventional programming languages.

Edmund Husserl's 1927 encylopedia article on Phenomenology

Over at aule-browser.com there are now two links to alternate versions of Edmund Husserl's 1927 article on phenomenology: one is a Curl version of the text and one is a version for readers new to his awkward German style.  The latter requires a screen with at least 1024 pixels width (for the time being.)

At the level of web code, the difference between the two is minimal: both use the same source file.  That text file has minimal markup - so it remains very readable and easy to correct.  But the minimal markup in one case does very little and in the other case it reformats the text line-by-line.  As a result, the second version breaks down every sentence into a bite-size phrase formated rather like a paragraph, but with inverse indenting.

Very simple Curl text procedures are declared which permit this: in one case display the text and in the other case, re-format the text. The procedures are
  {article }
  {section }
  {para  }
  {ln }

It is the last which results in most of the reformatting, while the {para } markup has the effect of preserving white-space in the text.  {article } wraps the entire piece and {section } wraps each original division of the article.

This is very similar to the minimal markup which I use for poems
   {poem }
   {stanza }

More information on Curl can be found in English at curl.com and in Japanese at curlap.com

Rebol 2.7.8

Looks like one year after Rebol 2.7.7 here comes 2.7.8 according to Carl Sassenrath's blog.