Happy Thanksgiving 2025!

We all have something to be thankful for.  If nothing else, that we made it to this new milestone.

Look around.  There is beauty in the world.  Enjoy it.

Don't over-complicate things.  All the best things in life are simple.

Mark 12

28 And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all?

29 And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord:

30 And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

31 And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.

32 And the scribe said unto him, Well, Master, thou hast said the truth: for there is one God; and there is none other but he:

33 And to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.

34 And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. And no man after that durst ask him any question.

Forwarding the signal

I ran across this at a link to the Powerline blog.  I'm copying it wholesale to spread the word.

Service memories

 The SecArmy made a great statement about mentally and emotionally supporting the troops this Christmas season. That’s terrific, well needed, and much applauded.

It’s a good start.

My son still sees a VA counselor regularly after “peace time” service at Fort Hood. The things they did to the troops during Covid bring nightmares. (The shots they got killed 2% almost immediately, and another 2-3% never came back from the hospital.) The lethal degree of institutional incompetence and apathy, open drug dealing by the officers and senior NCOs , and murder for hire (mostly by CID, invariably ruled as “suicides” despite being zip tied and shot in the back of the head) on the base didn’t help at all. Nor did finding the bodies of several victims, including a roommate. He’s lost too many friends to drugs, violence, suicide, and institutional callous disregard. In his experience, our own government is the greatest threat.

All I had in my years of service was cleaning up after suicides (please be considerate and shoot yourself outside, or at least over tile), digging up mass graves (the one with the cow on top was memorable), evaluating scenes after the fact, hunkering down through months of daily mortar and rocket attacks, and the occasional “sniper” (most attackers don’t know what the sights are for). We were generally safer while on our near-daily missions outside the base, even with the roadside bombs.

I finally broke when the local command refused to go to the aid of a convoy under attack right outside our base, and locked down the gates so we couldn’t go out to help, either. They listened to fellow American Soldiers dying and calling for help on the radio, and thought it was great entertainment. That was just before I was betrayed by my own company commander. (To say nothing of our incredibly cowardly battalion commander.) With one notable exception, every officer I interacted with in Iraq was arrogantly and blitheringly incompetent.

I stopped making new friends decades ago. Every time I tried to make a new friend, they were killed within a week. (By now we’d come to look at all replacements as dead men who temporarily had the use of the arms and legs. The came and went so fast and so regularly that sometimes we didn’t even learn their names. Truth is, after a while, we sort of avoided gettin’ to know them. - Private Zab, The Big Red One)

I don’t have a phobia about being outside, I have a minor phobia against going outside. Crowds attract explosions. I’m not fine, but I am within tolerance. (Except for this whole medical retirement thing, caused by one too many high fevers plus experimental medications that turned out to have permanent and debilitating side effects.)

Who, us, bitter, angry, and a touch paranoid? You bet your ass we are.

Weather memories

“Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.”

When we lived in the People’s Democratic Republic of Maryland, our home was in the first valley in the mountains, on the slopes of the Potomac just downstream from the Shenandoah. This area was gorgeous, but had an interesting climactic novelty: it existed at the intersection of three separate weather zones/patterns. So we just counted on getting the worst of everything.

Riding the train along the banks of the flooded Potomac every spring was sort of neat. The day with the massive hail and microburst downdrafts (essentially a hole-punch tornado) was interesting. The two week downpour while a hurricane parked just off the coast was memorable. Snowmageddon was deeply unpleasant. (Where do you put all the snow you have to shovel when there’s seven fricking feet everywhere?)

But at least the temperature never changed 50 degrees in an hour, it never dropped below zero, and you never had to worry about adding humidity.

A life without hope

Our young men exist in a world without hope. They don’t have children. They don’t have wives. The young women their age (the ones that haven’t been brainwashed into being gay or trans) are all crazy and “strong independent woman don’t need no man.” They can’t find jobs that pay a living wage in an era when rent for a small apartment starts at $2500 per month. (That requires a wage of more than $45 per hour!) They have been taught, every day for at least 13 years, that they are inherently defective and evil; that the world would be a better place if they all just died.

They don’t believe in anything. They’ve been told they have no culture. They have been carefully taught that Christianity is uniquely evil. They have been subject to over a decade of steady brainwashing. Every level of government, every mode of entertainment, oppresses good and elevates evil.

They trust nothing and nobody. They have been lied to about everything since they could walk. As far as they can tell, everything they’ve ever been told by every authority figure is a lie. They see through the transparent, corrosive lies they have been forced to repeat ad nauseam.

The schools and universities are full-blown Leftist indoctrination camps that can’t manage to teach basic arithmetic and reading skills. The factory jobs were sent overseas. The technology jobs were insourced to hostile foreigners who openly brag about invading our nation. The office jobs are gate-kept by the blue-haired harpies that infest HR departments. The entry level jobs (the few not given to illegal alien invaders) are filled with retirees trying to survive.

They have nothing to lose. Burning it all down would, to them, be an improvement. At least that way, they have a chance at a future. In their current world, they have none.

Happy Halloween 2025!

 

The end of comically bad fiction

Sadly, the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest has finally come to a close. Over 40 years of comically bad opening lines to imaginary novels still reside at the website, though.

https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/about

The original, penned by Lord Byron Bulwer-Lytton himself in 1830:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

"Virtual particles" are not real

Oh, sometimes things just piss me off. Take “virtual particles” from physics. Please. Eliminate them. They are neither necessary nor helpful.

“Virtual” means “non-existent” or “fake”. They are not particles.

Here’s a Feynman diagram for two electrons repelling each other. Take a look at it. It contains no less than four virtual particles.

sourced here

1. The electron on the left, sensing the approach of the electron on the right, emits a virtual photon, the recoil of so doing forces it to change trajectory.

   1. How did it know?

   2. How did it get the trajectory exactly correct?

   3. Emitting a photon makes the electron on the left lose energy and change spin.

2. The highly energetic virtual photon splits into a virtual electron-positron pair.

   1. Why?

   2. The virtual electron should be repelled by the real electrons, and attracted to its counterpart. This mostly cancels out to an attraction to its counterpart.

   3. The virtual positron should be attracted to both the real electrons and its counterpart. This mostly cancels out to an attraction to its counterpart.

   4. The real electrons should be attracted to the virtual positron, and repelled by the virtual electron. This mostly cancels out.

3. The virtual electron-positron pair recombine, releasing a highly energetic virtual photon.

   1. The annihilation happens at the right place and time to conserve momentum and send the new virtual photon in exactly the right direction.

   2. The creation-annihilation takes time. How did the sending electron know this random reaction would take place, and adjust the trajectory of its virtual photon accordingly, before it happened by pure chance?

4. The virtual photon continues on just the exactly correct trajectory to impact the electron on the right, forcing it to alter its momentum.

   1. The electron on the right gains energy and changes spin.

5. In the end, the electrons are repelled from each other. Both change spin. The one on the left loses energy and slows down, while the one on the right gains energy and speeds up.

   1. Which one loses energy and which one gains is randomly determined. The reaction can go either way.

      1. Therefore, the reaction actually goes both ways, with a 50% probability of each, so it all balances out.

         1. Yes, physicists actually believe that.

So what really happens when two electrons approach each other? The field gradients alter their trajectories, without any direct interaction necessary. The Feynman diagram with all its virtual whatsits is a mathematical tool for describing statistical outcomes of waves and ripples in fields, not details of actual events.

Taken from an excellent summary of this topic.

Canal and Revolution

The history you don't know.

I have occasionally wondered what caused all the peasant revolutions in Central Europe in the 1830's and 1840's.  Turns out, the opening of the Erie Canal was the root cause.  It's amazing how things are connected.  Especially when new connections completely alter trade routes.

Where do you think all those Norwegian bachelor farmers in Lake Wobegon came from?

Objects and Closures

Yes, this is another short post about programming theory.  I'm a geek.  It's what I think about at 2AM.

What is the difference between an object and a continuation?

An object is data with associated code.
A closure is code with associated data.
A continuation is a closure with a goto at the end.

That's it.  There's no need to overcomplicate these things.

Three programming languages

Here are three lesser known programming languages I like, and you might enjoy exploring. They’re each the creations of one man, who are all very opinionated about how their languages should look and work.

Nim - My current working language. Syntax is similar to Python, but it’s a statically typed, compiled language. It manages memory for you (very, very efficiently), unless you tell it not to. The language embraces generics, both type and procedural polymorphism, multiple dispatch, and meta programming. Has a remarkably diverse collection of packages available.

Odin - Another statically typed, compiled language. Syntax is similar to Go, but without all the hang-ups, and even easier to read and write. (Check out the “or_else” family of error handling keywords.) You have to manage your own memory, but the language makes that fairly easy to do. Has lots of features for games and systems programming, and is ridiculously fast. Ginger Bill’s opinions are worth paying attention to.

Frink - A small language that was designed to be a general-purpose calculator for engineering and science. It attaches units to numbers, and can automatically convert between them. It has a remarkably complete and correct table of constant value and unit conversions, plus historical purchasing power of the US dollar and British pound. It will even correctly compute error bounds and significant digits without any real effort on your part. It runs on the JVM, so it’s quick and flexible. It even has graphics built in.  (Yes, it's named for the mad scientist on The Simpsons.)

How bank loans actually work

I don’t have a problem with a modest rate of interest for loans. The time rate of money is a real thing, and opportunity costs always exist. I have a problem with banks (and that includes credit card companies) charging exorbitant rates of interest for – nothing.

The money (most) banks lend doesn’t cost them anything except their normal operating expenses. They make the money up on the ledger books and credit your account with it. Funds ex nihilo. When you repay your loan, the funds return to nothing – except for the interest you pay, which is profit to the bank. From digital bits the loans were formed, to digital bits the loans are retired. Banks can lend infinite amounts of money, because the reserve ratio (how much they have on hand compared to how much they lend out) is currently 0%. To reiterate, the money the bank lends you doesn’t come from your neighbor’s savings accounts. It is made up out of thin air and keystrokes on a computer. The banks have, in effect, been allowed to print their own digital currency, in unlimited quantities.

“As announced on March 15, 2020, the Board reduced reserve requirement ratios to zero percent effective March 26, 2020. This action eliminated reserve requirements for all depository institutions.” 

When someone defaults on a loan, the banks actually loses nothing but the value of the interest not paid. The bank then writes off the default as a business loss, as if the money had been real. You see, on their books, the money loaned out (which came from nothing and nowhere, remember) becomes an asset, not a liability. So when you default, the value of the asset becomes a loss, the quarterly revenue is reduced on the books, and the bank pays a bit less in taxes.

Yes, this also means that when you pay back your loan, the bank’s assets decrease – except for the interest and fees you paid with real money, which is pure profit.

But what about the money in your savings account? Isn’t that also an asset? Of course it is. The reason it’s not readily available, despite the bank handing out loans from nothing at all, is that the bank uses 90% of your deposit money playing in the stock and bond markets. But that’s a different topic.

Data structure taxonomy

There are quite a few standard data structures in programming. I’m not even talking about complicated things like red-black trees. These are basic data structures.

Sequence / Array / Vector
Keys: Numeric. May be fixed or flexible in number.
Values: One per key. May be fixed or flexible in type.
Pick: Any.

Struct / Record
Keys: Named. Fixed in number.
Values: One per key. Type variable per key.
Pick: Any or all.

Tuple
Keys: Numeric. Fixed in number. May be named.
Values: One per key. Type variable per key.
Pick: Any or all.

Table / Dictionary
Keys: Variable in format. Flexible in number (usually).
Values: One per key (generally). May be fixed or flexible in type.
Pick: Any.

Set
Keys: Variable in format. Flexible in number (usually).
Values: None (usually).
Pick: Any.

Enumeration
Keys: Named, fixed in number (usually).
Values: None (usually).
Pick: At most one.

Union / Tagged Union
Keys: Named and/or Enum. Fixed in number.
Values: One per key. Fixed in type per key.
Pick: At most one.

Linked List
Keys: None (usually).
Values: Completely flexible in number. Type may be fixed or flexible.
Pick: Iterate through the elements one value at a time.