Who Were the Sea Peoples?

The election of Donald Trump as president was a (legal) coup against the military-industrial complex that has dominated the US for decades. The people who have benefited from that dominance are now staging a counter-coup. In staging a coup like the one we have just seen, the coup leaders, even if moved by genuinely populist concerns, have to enlist the aid of many, many powerful people, in order to resist the counter-coup, or they will fail. The resistance to any such coup will be fierce: there are trillions of dollars at stake here! The leaders of the counter-coup have a multitude of resources at their disposal: they have already corrupted most of the "free press" to act as their toadies, so they can easily spread anti-coup propaganda in national media outlets. They understand psychological manipulation, so they will enlist the aid of many well-meaning but naive people by making them believe they are opposing "racism," or "sexism," or "homophobia.

The mathematics lecturer said he was next going to discuss "the Menger sponge." "Ah," I thought, "he's going to discuss that bloody socialist Wieser ! I'll bet he sponged off of Menger all the time!" But no, it turned out he discussed this: (Actually named after Carl Menger's son, by the way.)

My math lecturer just called this: A "map of England"! A few of centuries of propaganda can be quite effective!

I just read an intelligent economist (not an oxymoron, I swear!) claiming that market exchange "guarantees" that in an unfettered free market, goods go to the people with the highest valued use for them. Sigh. What about the ability to pay? Let's say we establish a market in human organs, as many libertarians advocate. And further imagine this market is unregulated, something of which they would no doubt approve. In such a market, there will be many poor people who need kidneys. But imagine that George Soros likes to have a dozen grilled human kidneys for breakfast every day. Poor people in need of a transplant might very well value those kidneys much more highly than Soros (i.e., if we gave them each a billion dollars, they would easily outbid him for them on a free market) -- but they simply lack the funds to compete with his voracious kidney appetite. It is reasonable to contend that the price we pay for the benefits of free markets is that sometimes rich peo

In the comments on this post , rob argues that a bunch or "circuits" (or neurons, I guess) behaving according to deterministic, mechanical laws is exactly what "gives rise" to intelligence, in humans or computers. The problem with this view is Occam's razor . Let us consider a door lock. If the lock is set, one can't open the door without a key (at least without breaking it). We can see why this is so on simple, mechanical principles. Now, it just could be that the door "knows" when it is supposed to let people in who don't have the key, and when it shouldn't. But generally we reject any such hypothesis as superfluous: once we understand how the door mechanically does its job, we simply don't need to posit any "knowing": it won't "do any work" in our explanation of when we can get in the house and when we can't. Now let's say we add some biometric feature to the door: the owner can still get in by f

I am searching for an assembly language simulator for I can teach my Operating Systems students how processes work at the CPU level. In the course of doing so, I came across this site , and found: 10110000 01100001 The first few bits (10110) are an instruction to copy a value into a register. The next three digits (000) identify the register which the value will be copied into. The rest of it (01100001) is the value which is to be copied. Of course 10110 is meaningless, and the computer doesn't "know" that it means "copy the value." The processor is designed so that the series of electrical impulses represented by 10110 (on-off-on-on-off) causes the desired result. This is part of what is meant by "mechanical." Yesiree. Maybe if all of the AI true believers had to program in assembly for a month, they'd all realize, "Oh yeah, it's just a bunch of circuits performing that exact mechanical operations I set up for them to perform."

When I first began programming on UNIX, in the late 1980s, the computer press was filled with stories about how "old-fashioned" UNIX was, and how its death was imminent. Nearly 30 years later, between Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android, and other UNIX variants, UNIX-based systems completely dominate the operating system market. The "experts" were computer journalists, with no "skin in the game." They had never actually tried programming on a UNIX-based machine and also on any of its rivals. They had no idea that the geniuses at Bell Labs had created the ultimate IDE, and that the inherent superiority of the way of developing software that they had pioneered would only become clearer as the years passed. Do not trust "experts" with no skin in the game.

FIFOs and LIFOs and core device drivers IPC, RPC, threading and scheduling Memory-mapped files, filled up with strings These are a few of my favorite things! When the disk breaks When the RAM fails When I'm feeling sad I simply remember my favorite things And then I don't feel so bad

the web site, is being born .

The great conceit of our time is that by being"modern" we are smarter than all humans who came before us. This belief is most often adopted by people abysmally ignorant of the past, and what people were like in the past. And this myth has been embraced for little more reason than that we modern people have been told it is true by someone who seemed smart, and it flatters our egos. Ironically, it is this extreme willingness to adopt a self-flattering belief, based on no evidence, that shows that "moderns," on average, may be the stupidest people who have ever walked the earth. And that makes sense: no people so stupid could have survived as hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers.  It is only our great wealth and the mind-numbing tasks by which it is today possible to make a living that permit so many zombies to survive. Is it possible to imagine an aboriginal hunter so dull-witted as to deliberately block off his own hearing, restrict his own vision to within a f

Just wrote my first awk script in a dozen years. Here you go . If you don't know awk, it is a very useful tool in a programmer's arsenal, and you ought to learn it.

Try my final exam for this past semester.

However, I don't think it is a good idea to allow unlimited amounts of alcoholic beverages to be poured down my gullet every night. I also like immigrants.* However... The idea that anyone who wants reasonable control of immigration is a "xenophobe" is every bit as sensible as the idea that someone who does not want to engage in unlimited consumption of alcohol every night is an "alcoholaphobe." * For instance, I happened to have a party at my apartment tonight: 13 out of 15 attendees were immigrants.

I called this one the day the story came out in November. It was obvious that burning a black church and painting "Vote Trump" on the wall, right before the election, was the worst Trump campaign ad ever, but a great Clinton campaign ad. "Cui bono?" folks, "Cui bono?"!

"An animated world, divine intervention, the 'openness' of the soul's life are not preconceptions or errors or results of a superficial approach, but clearly recognizable components of this [Homeric] experience of the world, and their elimination constitutes an elimination of important knowledge." -- Paul Feyerabend, Philosophy of Nature , p. 90.

"In theory, theory and practice are the same. But in practice, they are different."

The Weather Channel site now boats that its site uses Watson. Watson apparently doesn't know that if it is 20 degrees at this very moment, the low for the day can't possibly be 26.

As I keep repeating, I've learned a lot from Scott Adams on persuasion. But every time he tries philosophy, he babbles nonsense. Consider : "As a hypnotist, I doubt any of us can see reality for what it is. My worldview is that we were in one kind of illusion before and some of us moved to another. When it comes to understanding reality, the best we can do is pick a version that does a good job predicting." This makes no sense whatsoever: if we are always living in an illusion, than we have no possibility whatsoever of determining what "version" does "a good job predicting"! Because whatever we perceive as having happened according to our illusions' predictions is also, itself, an illusion! So Adams is suggesting we can test an illusion against another illusion and by doing so, refine our understanding of reality!

What is the best (best = 1 / cost * features) software out there (for a Mac, or online) for generating graphics of the sort one might find in a mathematics or computer science textbook? Right now I am cobbling things together with Python graphics packages plus post-editing with Acorn, but I'm sure I can do much better.

algorithms, that is .

"The gods are there. To side with the Greeks in recognizing and acknowledging this as an accepted fact is the first requirement for an understanding of their beliefs and culture. Our knowledge that they are there rests on a perception, be it internal or external, and be the respective gods perceived directly are only via the recognizable effects" (Wilamovitz-Moellendorff, quoted in Feyerabend, Philosophy of Nature , p. 71). Quite so: if you tried telling a Greek in 600 BC that Dionysus does not exist, he would simply think you must have never gotten drunk or even been around people getting drunk. One could perceive the god entering into oneself, or the others drinking, and feel one's own (or their) enthusiasm  (the entering in of a god). Similarly with Aphrodite: the Greek would ask how you could possibly avoid feeling her presence when you fall for some pretty young thing? It is interesting to note in this regard that scripture certainly does not deny the existen

then sex will be less fun ! And nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of that!

Apparently, if you don't want your country to become Muslim, that qualifies . If only Charles Martel had known this, he could have turned Europe over to Islam 1300 years ago!

Robert Cialdini's Pre-suasion , despite its touting by Scott Adams, is just OK. It has a number of good tips, and some nice stories, but the whole thing could have been a forty-page pamphlet or e-book. (As it is, the book ends at page 233, and the last 180 pages are references, notes, and the index.) One thing particularly annoying in the book is its regular, phony invocations of neuro-this and evolutionary that. For instance, "kin selection" is invoked in a section on why being like people whom you are trying to persuade is a good idea. But it does absolutely no work: everyone knows that "blood is thicker than water," and evolution is conjured up to give a fake veneer of science to this commonplace knowledge. Every time neurology is brought up, it is the same: none of it does any work. This name-dropping plays the same role that mentioning "Oh, and the Pope likes it" would have played in an astronomical argument in 1300.

I believe I mentioned that I am sitting in on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's lectures on "Strange Risk" this fall. He brought up a slide on things we could throw out once we properly took account of volatility, and one of them was Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage. That prompted a question from me as to what he meant. I thought the answer was interesting: once we take price volatility into account, it would be foolish to "obey" the law of comparative advantage to slavishly. Why? Well, he explained, imagine you are France, and you produce only wine (your comparative advantage) and export it in exchange for everything else you need. What happens if, say, everywhere you are exporting to falls under Sharia Law? Or you are Saudi Arabia, in reality producing pretty much only oil, and some great new source of clean energy is developed? If your nation has hyper-specialized in one good, and the market for that good collapses, your nation is in deep trouble.

Because basically, every single thing said on the computer side of the analogy is false: "These concepts have been previously primed for influence. By analogy, think of almost any computer program you use. It is likely to contain transfer links [Transfer links? WTH?] that you need to click twice: once to ready the link and once to launch it. [Double-clicking is a single mouse gesture: from the program's point of view: the program just receives notice that the user double-clicked. There are not two phases, one during which the "transfer link" could be "readied," whatever the hell that would mean.] But the program also likely contains links that launch with just one click [that's because the programmer triggered the event associated with the link on a single-click mouse event, and not a double-click], because they have already been readied -- that is, hyperlinked [' hyperlink ' just means links within hypertext: nothing to do with 'prefetc

I had paid little attention to the "Pizzagate scandal" until a few days ago, when certain people forced it onto my radar. As a trained researcher, I know not to pay too much attention either to the people who accept such stories uncritically, or to the people who reject them uncritically. A trained researcher does not "believe" or "disbelieve" his sources: he interrogates those sources and treats them as evidence of events that have occurred, and not as descriptions of events that have occurred. So, for instance, no one should take the wild conspiracy theories emerging from the darker corners of the Internet at face value. Nor should anyone take an uncritical piece of garbage like this at face value. Amy Davidson basically declares there is not even any point in trying to figure out why the conspiracy theorists believe what they do: the conspiracy theory arose from nothing at all, and focuses on the things it does for no reason whatsoever. But ev

Two words I can't get Apple's voice recognition software to recognize when I say them: Than : I always get "then," unless I really consciously stress the difference, in which case I get "van." Will : This comes out as "we'll." This one is especially puzzling to me: if I listen to myself say the word "will," my pronunciation of the vowel doesn't sound very much like a long-e to me.

I got some pushback on my piece on ethno-nationalism from people who said, "No, an ethnicity must be characterized by a common bloodline!" Oddly, this pushback came both from racists who wanted to exclude non-whites from being "true Americans" and from their critics. First of all, racists define ethnicity as being identical (almost identical?) to bloodline. So what? We now have to turn to racists for our word definitions? But more importantly, if we define things that way, there pretty much are no nations for the racial-nationalists to "preserve." Consider England: Far from all being descended from a common bloodline, the English people are descended from Picts, Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Norman French and more. Two of the most prominent Englishmen of the 19th century, Ricardo and Disraeli, were the descendants of Portuguese and Italian Jews, respectively, and yet both were clearly English. James Callaghan was of Irish and Jewish

I am currently reviewing Paul Feyerabend's Philosophy of Nature  for The British Journal for the History of Philosophy . Feyerabend worked on this book in the 1970s, but it was only released this year. This promises to be a wonderful review experience, since Feyerabend was a brilliant man, and in this work he reviews the "philosophy of nature" from the Stone Age to Bohm. And here is my first quote of note from the work: "The assumption that humans of the Stone or Bronze Age would have had only the most primitive knowledge of nature may be flattering to our progressivist self-image. But it has little plausibility since Stone Age humans were already fully developed members of the species Homo sapiens , and it is incompatible with recent research. The environmental and societal problems that the early Homo sapiens had to face were incomparably greater than the challenges facing our contemporary scientists. These problems has to be solved with the most primitive

I've assembled a partial list .

Here . (Courtesy of David Lull.)

Trump just riled up a bunch of his opponents with his tweet about "taking away the citizenship" of anyone who burned the flag. Of course this is absurd: he's not going to do anything like that: he's trolling. A friend recognized this, and said Trump's trolling is "Not nice." This is an understanding of politics as a big kindergarten classroom: If you're just nice to Johnny and let him play with your truck, he will let you play with his. Unfortunately, real politics is nothing like kindergarten: the new prince, as Machiavelli taught us, must consolidate his rule. If he is overly "nice," his foes will see it as a sign of weakness and oppose him all the more fiercely. And as Machiavelli noted, to be "nice" and fail to establish one's rule is really not nice at all, since civil unrest and ultimately civil war result, and they are very not nice. So Trump trolled those claiming "Trump is not my president," and