JG4 • August 26, 2017 9:25 AM

I like skepticism of government programs, including the Apollo project. It should be a lot less tedious to arrive at a correct summary of the physics and technology of the 1960’s and 1970’s than what has transpired. I am not suggesting any censure by the moderator, and perhaps the tedium is as good as it gets on the old blue marble. If all parties are acting in good faith, that really is as good as it gets. We all have our cognitive limitations, some worse than others. Crowdsourcing allows blindspots to be covered, much as the photograph at the bottom of my long and tedious rant today.

I saw some egregious physics errors by the Esteemed Chairman, as well as history errors. I believe that radiation damage to semiconductors takes a significant amount of time in orbit, not what would be accumulated in a short trip of a week that spent only minutes to hours in the van Allen belts. The early astronauts were able to see flashes of light inside of their eyes from the radiation. It was confirmed by having someone stick their head in a particle beam from a cyclotron or synchrotron, where their eyes became scintillation detectors and/or Cerenkov detectors for heavy ions. The payload analysis can be readily carried out by assigning an efficiency to the rocket engine (well into the 10’s of percents, maybe as much as 50%) and looking at the total energy of the fuel. I vote that this leads quite clearly to a successful landing. Today, you can buy a toy helicopter for $20 that has a more sophisticated attitude servo than is required to land on the moon. Three electrical engineering students could build a suitable analog feedback loop in one semester for a gyro-stabilized rocket engine. I’ve said before that Rudy Kalman deserved a Nobel prize, or would have if there were a prize for math. His work played a key role, and its application largely was the result of a coincidental meeting. The world was not ready for his ideas, but they have been widely applied.

I want to touch again on energetics, bioenergetics, systems and security. Can’t recall if either of two publications showed up in the comments here, but Stratfor did a nice job with a geopolitical analysis of Iran in 2012.

The Geography of Iranian Power – An excerpt from The Revenge of Geography
http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/geography-iranian-power-robert-d-kaplan
By Robert D. Kaplan | Aug. 29, 2012

The Zomia article was somewhat earlier, but addresses the same root topic, which is the cost of delivering, or if you prefer, administering, government in mountainous regions. Think of government as a proxy for security and the cost of delivering it on your hardware/firmware/software platform. Doesn’t matter how high the GDP is, if there is no money left to pay for loyalty after paying for delivery of government. Speaking of payment, this article may be behind a paywall:

The mystery of Zomia
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/12/06/the_mystery_of_zomia/
In the lawless mountain realms of Asia, a Yale professor finds a case
against civilization
By Drake Bennett December 6, 2009

One of the reasons that the US became an economic superpower is water transportation. The history of river and canal transport built the country, and it involved major investments, back when major investments were blood, sweat and tears, not fiat paper. I think that the all-in cost of the canal in upstate NY that follows the Thruway was about 1 year of NY State GDP. That is a serious bet on the future and it paid off handsomely. It wasn’t made in fiat paper, soon to be fiat vaporous magnetic and electric fields on rust and sand, backed by various carrots and sticks. The railroad revolution followed the extension of water transport from the interior to the coast (paid by an early analog of the SBIR program), and the trucking revolution expanded the reach of the railroads. The solar-electric robot-truck fleet is going to be less expensive to operate, but is going to free up a lot of human capital with limited skills. Some of the cohort were sighted in Charlottesville and many others in that demographic are hooked on opioids. Ted Kaczynski provided some useful input on the topic. The fleets of drones from Skynet will require some type of IFF system. As the Huey Pilot said, “this ends with licenses and permits to scratch our asses.”

The Stratfor piece indicates that Iran will never be a real threat, because the country is so mountainous that it is very expensive to deliver government to the tribes. The surplus available after paying for internal costs will never be sufficient to pay for imperial forces stationed at forward bases in 180 countries around the world. The term government is secret code for the proverbial carrot and stick. As long as the flows of carrots and sticks keeps all critical parties cooperating, you have a functioning central government. When the delivery of carrots and sticks is interrupted, the situation reverts to the very old equilibrium of warring tribes. I touched on the food security aspect of systemic failure yesterday.

From a terrian perspective, the energetics and bioenergetics of transportation in Afghanistan, which makes Iran look like a fruited plain, are nearly impossible for centralized government. Unless drugs figure prominently into the picture. Laos is the far side of Zomia, where it also is very difficult to deliver efficient government, and drugs are the major export crop. Just for the record, the largest-scale purveyor of lean and efficient government in human history (on a global per capita basis) to ever live was Ghengis Khan. Even his power to project government into mountainous areas was limited. This general line of reasoning essentially is what Boyd applied to air combat, which also involves gravitational potential energy, power and energy reserves, how quickly energy can be manipulated into different modes, and cost of delivery.

Security is like government in several senses, particularly that it has to be affordable. The definitionn of affordability varies with the value of the data stored and processed on the system, as well as with the threat model. If we have seen the word unobtainium mentioned here, it’s been a while. Not a bad idea to mention it again. The cost of securing systems is staggering, if you have to lock down every process from the fab all the way to the coders, then make sure that the hardware hasn’t been modified during delivery. That level of security is, at best, very difficult for state-level actors with the deepest pockets. The best that can be done after the fact is some limited system identification (testing a defined parameter space), then insuring that the data and instructions stay inside a known-good space (filtering).

The surveillance-state is a relatively low-cost approach to government, where all of the spy gear is paid by consumers. The only way to win is to not play. I still am interested in the topic of how to create a secure system for my business IP. Physical security in Switerland would be a good start, but I can’t see any way to enforce a suitable level of care in the supply chain. That means government has to be a partner in every business, and there has to be some mechanism for establishing trust that they aren’t going to take over your business. The news headlines have shown that .gov cannot be trusted.

the daily news dump

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/08/links-82617.html

…[quantum cryptography]

Scientists Finally Prove Strange Quantum Physics Idea Einstein Hated Gizmodo

…[signal integrity]

Confused sunflowers during eclipse EarthSky. Chuck L; “If this is what they looked like at 70% occlusion, sunflowers in the path of totality must have freaked out. Photos anyone?”

[water security; your wetware security system won’t run without it, and additives like arsenic and antimony don’t enhance wetware performance]

The Pentagon is Poisoning Your Drinking Water Counterpunch

[signal spoofing in biological systems]

The Parasite That Wires Plants Together Wired

[I haven’t pointed out that some drugs are signals or signal spoofs; others block, amplify, switch or attenuate critical neural signals. Addiction is a feedback mechanism that locks a system into a destructive mode. I was pleased to see someone raise the question of who owns our thoughts. It should be fairly obvious who thinks they own our thoughts, but a simple and highly efficient MOSFET H-bridge goes a long way to addressing that threat model and a lot of others]

How Zebrafish on Drugs Help Us Understand Opioid Addiction National Geographic. UserFriendly: “Great, fish junkies..”

[humor is a leadership trait, in part because it showcases the ability to see all sides of a space. a very close analog for security, where effective system design demands consideration of all dimensions, or if you prefer, all threat models and all failure modes]

When Dark Humor Stops Being Funny Nautilus (micael). Notice YouTube removed the Louis C.K. video….

[surveillance state; not touched in the article is the fact that an overlooked aspect of computer security is the wildly toxic manufacturing chemistry. chemical security also requires various barriers and filters]

China?

The Dark Side of China’s Tech Boom The Diplomat (resilc)

[the most dangerous threat model involving the NorKs is Starfish Prime right in the middle. their other option is to nuke one city. a successful EMP attack has the potential to kill 200 million, whereas nuking one city might kill one million. coincidentally, the successful Japanese nuclear program in WWII was conducted in what is now North Korea. I think that I’ve commented before that they were 10 days from delivering a crude nuclear bomb to the west coast of the US. that puts a different light on Truman’s decision to nuke civilian populations, not that it changes it from wrong to right. at the time, the US was sending uranium and know-how to Stalin. I haven’t had time to comment on that, but it is an interesting topic. I think that Klaus Fuchs leaked a lot more than the Rosenbergs (sp?)]

North Korea fires three failed missiles DW

[physical security]

Thailand’s ousted PM Yingluck has fled abroad: sources Asia Times

[the substance of my preface is that Afghanistan is an ungovernable tribal area and Tacitus already has explained what “call it peace” means. the US used the term “pacification” in the peasant extermination programs. I already commented that the US version means, “Kill Anything That Moves,” or “How to Win Friends and Influence People”]

The War That Time Forgot Counterpunch

…

Big Brother is Watching You Watch

[peak irony: mind the event horizon]

Why did CIA create a bogus software upgrade? To steal data from FBI, NSA ZDNet (Pat)

[well covered here by a recent post]

Connected cars have an ‘indefensible’ security vulnerability Network World (Phil P)

[eventually some important systems will be compromised. I hope that they are designed for graceful degradation]

No, USS McCain Probably Wasn’t Hacked. But What If It Was? Defense One. Resilc: “Thumb drive porn”

…[it’s really not security when your security apparatus are dirty]

When J. Edgar Hoover told Chicago FBI to set the Outfit on Dick Gregory Chicago Tribune (Sid S)

Our Fabulously Free Press

[signal integrity: if your signals are corrupted, the system cannot follow design intent. a free press was part of the design intent. it’s good that we don’t have a truther cohort here. if I didn’t say it already, jet fuel can not just soften steel, it can melt it to a bright white liquid. and nanoalumina is what you get when you melt a jetliner and smash the liquid with a quarter million tons of steel and concrete. there are many real conspiracies, but we have to be careful in sorting information. there is obvious 8u115h1t, there is ambiguity and there are things that are obviously true. the same applies in security software – you need a fuzzy category of might indicate attack that could heighten security posture without unnecessarily compromising system performance. if additional information suggests attack or escalating attack, the system performance can be degraded gracefully to counter the attack.]

Al Jazeera had been pushed to ‘discredit or offset’ 9/11 documentary which was out of the US official line failed evolution

…[security posture: six eyes total, four out, two in]

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/babboon-family-links.jpg

JG4 • August 28, 2017 9:32 PM

@Bob Paddock, albert, Clive and others consistently commenting in good faith. Thanks for the crowdsourced knowledge.

I wasn’t clear enough in saying that the blue and UV LEDs can be used to trigger neon bulbs, if the potential is high enough, i.e., close enough to breakover. That echoes the point that you made. I don’t know what the minimum photon energy is, and it almost certainly varies with electrode material. Trialkali is the most sensitive known material for longer wavelengths. The light will begin ionization, presumably through photoelectron emission or excited electronic states on the metal surface. My point was suggesting the use of LEDs or lasers as triggers of gas discharge lamps, not that LEDs have negative resistance. I have seen some pretty crazy phenomena with LEDs generating negative photovoltages at below-bandgap wavelengths, but that is a different discussion. I had noticed in the 1970’s that the breakover voltage of the NE-2’s is sensitive to light. I may even have noticed that they were more sensitive to blue light, or I may have added that as conjecture later. I’ve been meaning to revisit the topic in the past 6 months, but have been too busy.

There are other interesting phenomenon in flames, beyond ionization. One is amplification of sounds, which is one of the reasons that larger fires make roaring sounds. The reactive chemical species in the flame respond to local pressure increases by reacting faster, resulting in amplification of pressure waves, as chemical energy is coupled into the acoustic waves. Putting a finer point on it, the flame is a gain medium for sound in certain frequency ranges. One limiting case of chemical amplification of acoustic waves is pulse detonation jet engines, which are only slightly off topic, because of their security implications. Speaking of the cat and mouse game with the Soviets, including radio and radar reflections from balloon-borne antennae, nuclear fireballs and even the moon, all were discussed in Secret History of Silicon Valley. It’s a security classic, so I don’t mind reposting it occasionally.

Secret History of Silicon Valley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

JG4 • August 29, 2017 7:30 AM

@the usual suspects – Thanks

@65535 – a nice tutorial and further proof that we could crowdsource a book with Bruce herding the cats

@Clive – the sad part is that I have had the LEDs, the neon lamps, the power supply, the scope and the signal generator for as long as I can remember. but I can’t find enough bench space to get the power supply and signal generator to the same place. I only remembered about 6 months ago that I want to try it out. I’ll let you know what happens, but at my present velocity we may be looking at 3 to 12 more months

I stopped short of saying that cash flow is a gain medium for growth of orgnizations, both good and bad. You could think of prohibition as setting up a dam that creates a pressure differential, as exploitable source of Gibbs free energy. There probably is a corollary of enropy maximization that states “Any exploitable source of Gibbs free energy in any ecosystem eventually will be exploited.” Psychopaths and sociopaths have a much wider range of options for harvesting those energy sources. Nature is a fascinating mix of cooperation and competition. I’ll have more to say about feedback mechanisms, self-defense, power security and food security in coming days and weeks. The magnesium has been life-changing in a good way.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/08/links-82917.html

…[tech company tie-in]

Uber’s New CEO May Get at Least $200 Million to Exit Expedia Bloomberg and New Uber CEO Khosrowshahi Faces Daunting Fix-It List Bloomberg. Like a business model that can’t ever show a profit.

Hedge funds see a gold rush in data mining FT

The age of AI surveillance is here Quartz

Boffins bust AI with corrupted training data The Register

Showing the Algorithms Behind New York City Services NYT

Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, And It Won’t Tell Me How Gizmodo

Facebook’s Fight Against Fake News Hits Pages and Business Listings Fortune. “The company recently partnered with third-party groups like Snopes, the Associated Press, and ABC News to identify stories proven to be fake.” First, it’s amazing to me that Fortune can mention AP and ABC in the same breath with a tiny firm whose owners are at odds, and keep a straight face. More centrally, would Facebook have been able to detect that Judy Miller’s WMD stories were fake? And if so, what action, if any, would Facebook have taken? Finally, it should be amusing to see the arms race between Facebook’s algos and Macedonian teenagers (or the Silicon Valley companies that are the real problem). This entire projects reeks of bad faith.

‘Economic censorship’: YouTube bans advertisers from Ron Paul videos RT

The great digital media culling of 2017 The Week

The Mayweather-McGregor Fight Shows It’s Impossible to Stop Social Media Streaming of Big Events Motherboard (Re Silc).

…[security, surveillance]

Police State Watch

Soul Snatchers: How the NYPD’s 42nd Precinct, the Bronx DA’s Office, and the City of New York Conspired to Destroy Black and Brown Lives (Part 1) Shaun King, Medium. Rather like Chicago’s Homan Square, which also happened under a Democrat mayor.

Trump rescinds Obama limits on transfer of military gear to police Reuters

Police Access to Military Equipment Needs More Oversight, Not Less Project on Government Oversight

Chicago cops get more Tasers, but red flags remain Chicago Tribune

Boyfriend’s betrayal: ABQ woman jailed after ATF informant lured her into drug deals New Mexico In Depth

A Federal Judge Put Hundreds of Immigrants Behind Bars While Her Husband Invested in Private Prisons Mother Jones

JG4 • August 29, 2017 8:29 PM

@Clive – Thanks for the tip. The discussion you mentioned is here and it includes some real gems:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/evidence_that_t.html

I must have missed the post and discussion, because I was hurting pretty bad that month. It looks like I bounced back in July, but it wasn’t like the good old days. Rough year, except for the part where people stopped laughing at me about being spied on.

My ballpark number matched up pretty nicely with what went before. The crowdsourced version did a good job of bringing into the picture details like electricity costs for keeping data online, the utility of text-searching and plenty more.

BTW, speaking of the cost of electricity for keeping data online, memristors were supposed to have revolutionized computing by now. Can’t recall if I posted the link, but the guy who was behind HP’s ill-fated foray into memristors moved on to a new position. He had some profound comments for where the value-add in the computing ecosystem is moving. Not surprising that a dynamic system would change over time. At one point the value was the in the semiconductor devices, but those became commodities. I think that his point was that the data are the real value right now. “Data” is secret code for “your identity and thoughts, including every point on the attack surface.”

JG4 • August 30, 2017 6:58 AM

Can’t recall if I posted “Google is The Deep State” previously, but this dovetails to it. The term of art is public-private partnership. With the right safeguards, it would be a good idea. Given that there are no safeguards, we already are in a turn-key totalitarian state. I still have not published the simplest, cheapest opt-out. You could think of it as the permanent withdrawal of consent. Is it far preferable to a bout of thermo-rectal examination by the guard labor. Consequently and for other reasons that can be derived from first principles, it should be taught far and wide.

Why Google Made The NSA
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-29/why-google-made-nsa
Authored by Nafeez Ahmed via Medium.com,

Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet…

INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’

…

@the usual suspects – Thanks for your diligent efforts to build secure hardware. I have a budget for it and my budget is well into the hundreds of dollars. I have some cognitive limitations that prevent me from being much direct help, but I am happy to backfill the first principles derivations.

@de La Boetie – Betrayal is a convenient term for a particular failure mode of trust. I think of it as a scaling problem, where you can make so much more money by betraying hundreds of millions of people or billions, instead of only a few.

@Dirk Praet – Nicely said. I still favor vigorous protection of speech, but I like the dividing line of incitement vs. incorrect facts. To the extent that the racists claim that e.g., blacks are inferior, that can be proven wrong with facts, not that many of the racists will ever recognize their errors. Incitement is a different matter and only a short step from claiming inferiority. Your point about the Constitution and the Declaration is spot on. I’ve been trying to avoid politics (and not doing a great job because it permeates everything), but I’ve thought about a first principles statement that starts with “We hold these truths to be self-evident” Self-defense, including collective self-defense, fits neatly into that picture. Safeguarding data and hiding attack surfaces clearly is self-defense. Nothing is more self-evident than all of the life-forms on your planet doing whatever it takes to stay alive. I am happy to be ethically constrained, if that is the price of living in civilization and I am happy to see people who betray trust swinging on hemp lines, because they threaten all of us with their treachery and lies. From a very few a priori assumptions about the nature of reality, you can get to a variety of political/ideological positions. I try to navigate deftly between Darwinist, JudeoChristian and Buddhist ideas, finding them complementary.

Putting a finer point on my previous comments, “blacks” is the most misguided catchall ever, because there is more genetic diversity in Africa than there is in the entire rest of the human population put together. I have heard very smart people say, “There is more genetic diversity between two neighboring troops of lowland gorillas than there is in the entire human population.” We will explore later how that happened, but my view of race is that each portion of humanity adapted to their local ecosystem as best they could. The difference between groups are very small compared to the differences within groups. To the extent that there are differences, they are interesting things like tolerance for heat, tolerance for cold, tolerance for sunlight, distribution of muscle mass, ratio of slow-twitch to fast-twitch muscle fibers and so on. The propensity for genocide is equally distributed. In evolutionary-speak, that would be a highly conserved trait. Or as they say in computing, that’s a feature, not a bug. All you need beyond that is a propensity to seek profit by grinding bodies and souls to make money and power. And than some psychpaths and sociopaths to drive the machine called empire. If your surplus efforts are not directed to checking the abuses of power, you will have nothing but the ashes of civilization.

@ab praeceptis – We are close to the point where access to information should be recognized as a human right. Many of the problems on the old blue marble can be traced to asymmetric information. This forum is doing a good job of bringing to light some important asymmetries.

@Thoth, Figureitout and Markus Ottela – Thanks for your diligent efforts.

@Craig McQueen – Genetic adaptation is a gradient-descent multiplex optimization algorithm. Just as rain collects in puddles, life forms will appear in local minima, having passed over topological saddles from other local minima. Looking back through the polydimensional space over time, there will be multiple chokepoints, some of which isolate populations into new species and others which completely trim branches. Similar branches may grow later via convergent evolution. The local minima may disappear without any preservation of the genetics that were adapted to them, which must have happened the seven times that the oceans were boiled by impacts. The Great Frost in Ireland is a good example of the puddle level shifting down ~20 C via statistical fluctuation. Convergent evolution may craft similar adaptive structures from widely disparate starting structures, at such time as similar local minima reappear. The old blue marble can be gone in a flash, (from the point of view of life) be it a gamma ray burst, an asteroid flash, or a nuclear flash from a doomsday device. To the extent that evolution has a purpose, it would be entropy maximization. Living systems operate under the laws of non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

on to the daily news dump (each of the stories is linked in the catchall link)

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/08/links-83017.html
…

Crowdsourced gaming of Google Translate dubs Kim Jung Un “Mr. Squidward” ars technica

Google to Comply With EU Search Demands to Avoid More Fines Bloomberg. Google says it will comply. We’ll find out in a month if the EU deems Google’s plans to be adequate.

…

New Cold War

NEW PROOF: Intelligence Analysts Say Russia Didn’t Hack U.S. Election Lee Camp, YouTube

Imperial Collapse Watch

‘Missile Gap’ Redux: Heroic Days of Threat Inflation Aren’t Over American Conservative (resilc)

Big Brother is Watching You Watch

Comcast builds out ‘smart home’ strategy as cable shrinks Reuters (EM)

Man in jail 2 years for refusing to decrypt drives. Will he ever get out? ars technica

…[cars and pedestrians have very different energy-maneuverability diagrams, roughly equal to the asymmetry between paper and scissors]

Not What I Signed Up For: Why This Fighter Pilot Is Running for Office Military.com. JTM: “Just what we need, more military people in charge of things…”

DHS warned authorities of potential violence ahead of Charlottesville rally: report The Hill

White supremacists joked about using cars to run over opponents before Charlottesville marches Salon (furzy)

…

Tech Censorship

Facebook now blocks ads from pages that spread fake news The Verge (furzy)

Rural America Is Building Its Own Internet Because No One Else Will Motherboard (Chuck L)

Publishers Are Making More Video—Whether You Want It or Not Bloomberg.

JG4 • August 31, 2017 7:11 AM

@all – Thanks for the continued excellent discussions of computer security. I managed a few insights this morning, which are my stock in trade. They come from a modest repository of knowledge. I cracked the control problem I’ve been working wide open. The first insight relevant to this discussion is that I should write up a tutorial on memristors along the lines of 65535’s excellent compendium on bitcoin. I picked up the memristor thread somewhere in the 2006 to 2012 timeframe, possibly by way of a TED talk. I’ve definitely seen good content on Youtube. I revisited the memristor topic in 2013 or 2014, because I have a client interested in secure data storage on thumb drives. Secure from the point of view of data loss, although robust encryption and not spreading malware in national security infrastructure also are appealing features. My budget for that is in the thousands. In my foray through the literature on robust thumbdrives, which overlaps the discussion of partitioned machines, I found only the Sony Duo and HP’s dream of memristors, which had a timeline to release in the past few years. That dream died with Fink’s departure (without getting bogged down in questions of causality and entanglement), but memristors and other robust memory devices are relevant to the smart card computing enterprise discussed here. It wouldn’t be paranoid to suggest that the memristor enterprise that HP formulated has important national security implications at various Spookwerks shops and may not have actually died, but rather gone dark. Fink now will have his hands and ideas in Western Digital’s national security enterprise. I’ve been too lazy and dysfunctional to estimate what fraction of global rust demand goes to Spookwerks Utah, but that is an excellent question that I didn’t see covered in the 2013 discussion of audio bandwidth vs. data depth. The Sony Duo platform is tragically flawed in that the robust recovery option is to mail it back to Sony for extraction. I found some hobby-level RAID implementations with thumbdrives, which also answer the question of data loss prevention. RAID with small solid state drives also would be fast and robust, but more difficult to filter (partition) without a first-principles effort to put together hardware. When I said that this is a profound view of the world, it was more aimed at the memory-first paradigm and the concept of a moving value-add target in the computer ecosystem, rather than the “data are not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not power, power is not benevolence, benevolence is not contentment” line of reasoning, which also is quite profound. I hope to put together that thread later, in part because it overlaps AI and adaptive systems, as well as the question of purpose in evolution.

@whoever said that the lack of trust is appalling has failed to see the implications of how many times people have been betrayed by governments in the past 100, 300, 1000, 3000, 10,000, 30,000, 100,000, 300,000 and 1,000,000 years. it’s a business model that is in play always and everywhere.

In rereading my comment from last night, I realized that encryption is aimed at formulating an unanswerable question, “What is the key?” while hiding the key in a safe space. The side channels, including rubber hose cryptography, really are the weak links in the proverbial chain.

I’ve mentioned at least one uncanny passage in the bible in the past, and I will revisit that topic in force later, because there are several more. There are many other ancient writings and legends that are equally uncanny. None more so than Odin plucking out his eye to trade off the depth dimension of vision in return for the ability to see through time. Can’t recall if I have mentioned previously that a major portion of the human brain is devoted to processing visual information. It is the visual cortex and in people born blind, it can be repurposed for audio processing. I believe that anaphasia allows some people to be stunning writers. It will be fairly obvious that neurons and brains are adaptive systems. You won’t have to do more than search Matthew Weigmann in the DuckDuck box to see how profound that can be. The blind can hear no better than anyone else, but their ability to process sounds into useful information often is spooky. So it is with me, in the sense that I could have been quite good at several of the many topics that we discuss. I used to be a solid writer of C with limited assembly language to manage some especially fast computations in an interrupt service routine for instrument control applications, but now it takes all the effort that I can muster to write 5 lines of SciLab code. I plucked out one eye, figuratively speaking, to be able to see across systems from quarks to galaxies, dollars to donuts, neurochemistry to politics. Not that I am good at any of those. A jack of all trades cannot master very many. Later we may be able to look at the neural and system feedback paths that make the spooks and police repurpose national security money to feather their own nests, as well as enabling psychopaths and sociopaths.

@Clive and Rachel – re: ketogenic/low-carb/optimal diet I haven’t been able to eat nuts while I was short of magnesium, as they produced some very ancient pain sensations from what might be called pseudodiverticulitis. There was trip to the hospital with peritonitis too. I’ve been doing a lot better in that regard, but my prediabetes has been worse since I started getting enough magnesium and cut back on wine. You read that right – wine lowers blood glucose, at least until the acetaldehyde damages/destroys one of the three most metabolically active tissues in the body. One of the perverse symptoms of magnesium deficiency, besides all of the lifestyle diseases it engenders, is that it causes a desire to drink, which causes more magnesium deficiency, as well as thiamine deficiency, which is linked to serious short-term memory loss (Korsakoff’s syndrome). Last night, I got into the nuts in quantity (walnuts, pumpkin seeds, almonds and a little bit of raw macadamias – I only eat raw nuts) and was pleasantly surprised that my blood glucose was 5 to 15 points lower than usual last night and this morning. If I haven’t said it before, there are three foods associated with longevity, which are fish, nuts and beans. Moderate wine consumption doesn’t hurt. A very powerful augmentation to ketogenic diet is fasting for 18 to 24 hours at some regular interval, at least once a month. My burst of creativity last week was from several in a row. I find that a modest amount of alcohol and fish at the end of that will produce a burst of insights. That may be secret code for neurogenesis, which is suppressed during starvation. The creativity has nothing to do with bipolar disorder. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

on to the daily news dump

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/08/links-83117.html

…

We Said Google Was Dangerously Powerful, Then Google Proved Us Right. Matt Stoller, Buzzfeed

Google-Funded Think Tank Fired Google Critics After They Dared Criticize Google The Intercept. We need real “scholars,” with academic tenure, precisely to avoid this sort of situation.

A leading Google critic’s firing from a Google-funded think tank, explained Matthew Yglesias, Vox. “[T]he case sheds light on the growing tendency of companies to use think tanks as essentially stealth lobbyists.” “Growing.” Really?

The Dumb Fact of Google Money The Atlantic

Barnum Presidents and Benevolent Monopolists: Mark Twain, Amazon, and the Futility of Antitrust LA Review of Books

Inside the Massive 711 Million Record Onliner Spambot Dump Troy Hunt

New Uber chief aims for IPO within 18-36 months FT

Ex-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was key in picking his replacement USA Today. Or so he says. “Khosrowshahi, who initially was not interested in the Uber post, describes how his mind ultimately was changed by the power of Kalanick’s pitch.” For more on “the pitch,” see NC here.

This letter from an angry Uber investor reads like a piece of modernist poetry Quartz. So Quartz formatted it that way. Hilarity ensues!

…

Imperial Collapse Watch

Army planners solve Korea tensions with proposal to move Seoul 300 miles south Duffel Blog

Is the US Navy a hazard to Asian commercial shipping? Lloyd’s List

Maybe today’s Navy is just not very good at driving ships Military Times

Erik Prince: Contractors, Not Troops, Will Save Afghanistan NYT

Our Famously Free Press

Opinion: Trolling is not opinion The Outline. From the URL, we infer the author’s title: “the-nyt-opinion-section-is-bad.”

New Cold War

New Russian ambassador to U.S. calls for resumed military contacts Reuters

JG4 • August 31, 2017 10:30 AM

the most profound game theory that you’re going to read today. I’ve been working on something that dovetails to this. the rest of it is worth the time.

http://epsilontheory.com/narrative/before-and-after-the-storm/
…
We tend to think big thoughts when big things like this happen, and there’s been a lot of that going on. For me, those thoughts have turned local, but I know a great many people outside of the Greater Houston area are focused on other things that are going on: Charlottesville, the Trump presidency, Berkeley, Eclipses, Nazis. It’s a lot to take, and Ben has accurately predicted and is now observing how some of these issues are manifesting themselves in Competitive Games that force us all into positions where we must either fight or lose. He was absolutely right that the aftermath of the Trump presidency would break us, that it would destroy any chance at productive political, social — hell, even investment dialogue. Was the event that broke us irrevocable? How do we get out of this Competitive Game? Can we?

These questions form the central context for one of the greatest works of science fiction ever written: Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. Spoilers follow, but frankly if you haven’t read it, you should stop reading this note and read it instead. It’s better. The story of Foundation is the story of a massive multi-planetary civilization and the development of a robust, flexible system for understanding and modeling the sociopolitical trends of its very large societies: psychohistory. The main champion of this system, a generational genius named Hari Seldon, identifies the inevitable fall of the prevailing government and its devastating aftermath. While the collapse is unavoidable, he determines, not all subsequent outcomes are equivalent. He devises a plan to plant seeds of the civilization that would survive in two corners of the galaxy, predicting that the evolution of those societies over future generations would lead to the maximum possible peace and stability. The system of psychohistory hinges on the behaviors of very large groups of humans and the simplifying assumption that no individual could possibly have the influence or power to break these models.

There are two kinks in Hari Seldon’s system. The first is the idea that Foundation — but really, any civilization — will reach inflection points from time to time where one set of actions will break the path back to peace and harmony, and one set of actions will maintain it. These events require active intervention outside of the normal behaviors that those in power would otherwise pursue. These are Seldon Crises. The second kink is different in that it is unpredictable, or at least was unpredicted. It is the existence of a single individual who does reach the level of power — in this case through the development of abilities to influence the emotions and judgments of those he encounters — to change the inevitability of Seldon’s map of history. The Mule, as he is called, nearly breaks the Seldon model, until those who rediscovered psychohistory rebuild the models and determine the appropriate strategy to ensure that the Foundation civilization gets back on its long-cycle path back toward peace and stability.