dopewars risk battleship

 After everything becomes electric, all load is shunted to the power stations which turn nuclear and super-nuclear to cope up with the demand. The excess of nuclear radio active waste is handled by  a company named DJ , which conveniently resolves the problem by slinging radioactive oil-tanker sized canisters towards the sun. A one time attometer-inaccuracy in the microchip calculating the trajectory causes the canister to miss the sun just enough to slingshot around it without getting incinerated.

Canister ZZ Beta is now heading to earth

Nasta (nasa but for space trash) estimates impact in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and so mediandrops interest witjim the week

Zookie, a space salvager , notices something odd tripping his distant-probe-laser-lines intermittently. 

Zookie's ship is a strange one,  it is powered by clockwork springs which he diligently winds up whenever in gravity. on his dashboard are wheels with handles, which when turned, would position a spring exactly so, and a button, which would release it, propelling him in the needed direction . An extremely low-tech solution, this had saved Zookie's ass in multiple scenarios involving running out of fuel, pirates, competitors, and skirting sector-control-patrols. A true entrepreneur, Zookie had stationed himself just far enough from the space-elevator-gate so as to not bother the patrols and the serious-minded traffic, but close enough to magnetically siphon off all the space trash typically jettisoned at re-entry /departure from the space-elevator-gate.

.... Ghost Protocol is the best MI movie, mmkay ?

the earlier ones have the angst of a young agent coming to maturity, to terms with the world and the work. The agent is emotional, falls in love, loses girl, gets girl etc etc so much that the action was more the background . Having plot elements centred around retrieving family members (or dear ones), doesn't make for a super-villain-world-domination play. 

In GP,  the balance is just right. The agent is tempered, the villains are simply NOT flamboyant and rambling, there's a satellite involved ( a killer plot element in every successful movie, starting from GoldenEye and many many James Bonds before it, nothing makes a villain looks like he means business than a hijacked satellite ready to death-ray London to oblivion ).  And let's face it, the team is just KILLER in GP. Brandt could've been a second Ethan Hunt by himself, and brings that much firepower into the winning side. Benji (Beam me up Scotty) does a passable techie role (let's face it, tech sucks today compared to GoldenEye days, now it's all touch screen, 3d images, touch flick touch flick ... agents of yore could press the detonator button with a closed fist and so much righteous deserved vehemence as entire evil lairs went up in balls of fire, that you'd think that pressing harder on the detonator button literally added more explosive power to the booms... ). Paula Patton is a girl, agreed, but she's built like a horse and kicks like a mule. The central message is that these are hard guys ( even the girl). They are uniformly here to kick and kill, and other things are just bonuses. GP gets this absolutely bang-on right. 

And what villain be that villain if not kremlin be he. One more thing where GoldenEye wins.

GoldenEye is the best Bond movie yet. I'll tell you about it another day, dear reader.

The later ones have just blind dumb action sequences and no plot. it's like one long tedious decathlon, starting with the opening scene, and then racing all they way to the climax away from the bomb towards the captives towards the baddie with the secret code away from the police etc etc

 reading the Return of the Griffin

the sf world is awesome. 

in the psycho-physics world, there would be Maslow planes, having   channels, and there would be linkages from other channels in other layers, giving a zig-zagging line representation of a person's psyche.

however, this is only the partial picture. what we also need are actuator planes, things one can do, and a event-probability plane -on what can happen

apparently someone predicted the big-bang, and the 'god-particle' etc on a whim and a lark right before science figured it out ( and probably eons after the vedics figured it out) . The Eureka essay by Edgar Allan Poe. Was he an American Transcendentalist ? Hard to picture the cabin in the woods by the lake with a grim raven and grey skies, and the sunny greens of the Emerson/Thoreau/Whitman in the same image.

The Darto model for product. also the Craigslist model. and to some extent the basecamp model. 

From the Sivers website .  I was looking for the book notes on Pema Chodron's "Go where you are afraid". (actually it's titled 'wisdom of no escape', which is a better one-liner than 'wisdom of insecurity')  Found a blog post, and a quote.

"Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth)"

Was reading about Weka yesterday. The Data mining book (han,kamber,pei) has a lot of the words and terms that showed up in the course. Where it diverges is the second part - the machine learning. Weka has all this plus the neural networks/ deep learning part. No one has the Gen AI part.

 The Goal is about a plant manager who doesn't know (or remember) that the rate of the equationreaction is the rate of the slowest step, but has to go on a boy scouts hike, with bunch of kids, including a fat kid in it, to re-learn this. However, he re-learns this in the context of manufacturing, so that's okay. Also his wife leaves home, but comes back  .
He gets in-frequent advice from his college physics professor who aha!s him continually with insights while globe-trotting (jet-setting, actually) to meet with CXOs in limousines to solve such problems.

The Goal is an amazing look inside how plants operate.  

The three definitions that Jonah gives are also superb at thinking about all things in this mediated, second/third-wave life

This book poses problems that are a typical subset of systems thinking (or rather operations research). 

also see : sizovs mention about queueing theory in the battlecruiser shaped programmer post

the core part about identifying the goal, is pure gold

the story of the marching boy scouts, as well as the bottlenecks in the plant resemble the wild demand/supply swings of the beer  game. I feel queueing in complex systems is a central problem (or bottleneck, if you will) in the 'real' world

 it's only wednesday

only 358 more days to go

 The I is a linearity imposed over the multi-dimensional simultaneity that is the brain

Sankopa ate a packet of old earth biscuits . It pushed his metabolism off its rocker, tanked his health-line for a day, and yanked up his med-premium. His wife was furious. "They had choco-cream filling !!" he explained .. but it didn't look like she understood.

A Med.Cen agent vid-called him, and spoke for a few minutes, explaining the damage, and the procedure required. The nano-bot pill arrived by afternoon courier. He was back to normal in one day, and back to slashing veeds in his home office. Veeds were video feeds which were weeds. They needed to be cut down. Motion detectors in his home office captured his Katana slashes, and deleting the related veeds . His cardio targets were reached in an hour of work, and then he switched to slow tai chi movements for flexibility, veeding as he went ( the right hand front slice was the gesture recognised for delete).  His screen pinged with a red circle in the corner,  indicating incoming communication. It turned out to be a intimation from the CAPaBara.

The enquiry by the Cultural Artifact Preservation Bureau (CAPaBara to those who had to deal with it) was more detailed entailed involved, and equally more annoying. They made him visit their office in the far far distant bureau district, and made him sit at a table which had a polygraph and recording device sitting on it. and  went over his story.  Since all agent cams had  software which  recognised faces, and recorded skin colour , temperature,  and movement patterns ;   lie-detection was implicit in any agent interaction,  Correlated with the vast rivers of data captured from the unavoidable transit gates, the system  ensured morality, in a way.  The clunky polygraph and recording devices on the Bureau table were there only because the Bureau never updated all their tech at once, and had eventually realised that the idiosyncrasy kept the subject off-balance, and more open .

They wanted to know where he got the stuff, to begin with.

Dan had trouble in counting class because he had seven fingers on each hand. He wasn't a mutant, just an alien in Skybox72-7. Skybox72-7 was in Economic Sector 72,  which was in a section of the skyhumans were just one of the many forms. Still, Earth's galactic hegemony ensured that the alien  tag remained

"I'm a number ....  !!???!!" ,  I asked, underwhelmed ...

He adjusted his glasses, continuing to look at me straight...

yes. that's what I'm trying to say. anything that's infinite in nature, by definition contains everything. we humans have thought up numerical infinity, and now we have to face the implication ...

our food lay untouched on the table. a cafe sandwich, croissant , coffee .... rites of passage. noises of the cafe washed over us. beyond the cafe chairs, people moved about carrying books and baskets. The library was our regular place of meeting.

of course I felt like a number. age, employee number, date, time, lat, long, salary, bank balance of assets, number of kids,  friends, car registration .... you could put together and assign a number to all this , and some government and some marketing agencies would've done already, in aggregate. (I wondered what mine was. Half-expected some bureau form would show it) 

but this was not what Slobov was saying.  Slobov was a scientist. But with the madness of a mathematician  . His friends considered him an irrational number himself. He studied dark matter matter while sitting in research ships at the edge of the empire , ran experiments with strange apparatus, and sent reports to research central office in the Far Centre.

 if you view the dance 

holding a soul

you see the skies, stars, galaxies

if you view the dance

holding just a bit of mass, and charge,

you see orbitals, nuclei, atoms

if you view the dance

holding money

you see vaults, profits, economy

what are you holding ? 

what do you see ?

are you not seeing 

the dark space holding the seen ?