Cats, charts, and politics
I'm now one-fourth of the way through my radiation treatment. No ill effects yet, as expected. The worst is yet to come.
I've already warned Marian that I plan to whine endlessly when the pain starts. But maybe I'll give her a break once in a while and whine to you guys instead. Something to look forward to.
Business Insider says human beings are behind the scenes of Tesla's AI-driven cars:
The company relies on a small army of human "data annotators" who continuously improve how the cars drive by reviewing camera footage from thousands of Tesla drivers and teaching the vehicle how to behave like a human driver, like deciding when it's appropriate to use a blinker or identifying a construction cone.
This is nothing unusual. Annotators are key parts of every commercial AI model. But then there's this:
Business Insider has learned that those annotators focus their efforts on two high-profile categories of drivers: Tesla CEO Elon Musk and a select set of "VIP" drivers. BI spoke with over a dozen current and former Tesla employees, all but one who spoke on condition of anonymity, who said images and video clips from Musk's Teslas received meticulous scrutiny, while data from high-profile drivers like YouTubers received "VIP" treatment in identifying and addressing issues with the Full Self-Driving software.
This comes via Atrios, but unlike him I mostly find it kind of funny. Musk is a man so rich he can afford to have an army of annotators to make his drive more pleasant instead of just hiring a chauffeur.
It's all part of Musk's theory of life. He owns an auto company so that he, personally, can have a custom self-driving car. He owns Twitter so that he, personally, can have an extra special megaphone for his political opinions. He owns a rocket company so that he, personally, can someday be emperor of Mars.
I guess there are worse things to do with billions of dollars.
Various reports say that NATO is about to announce that Ukraine is on an "irreversible" course to gain membership just as soon as they get their corruption under control.
So out of an alleged fear of NATO encirclement, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and got (a) Sweden in NATO, (b) Finland in NATO, (c) NATO members finally spending 2% of GDP on defense, and (d) Ukraine on a clear course to join NATO.
Quite the geopolitical genius, Putin is.
We will rebuild our capital city so it is no longer a nightmare of murder and crime.... Right now if you leave Florida — "Oh, let's go darling, let's go look at the Jefferson Memorial" ... and you end up getting shot, mugged, raped.
Uh huh. Washington DC has always been a high-crime city, but as usual, Trump is full of shit:
As of the first quarter of 2024, the violent crime rate in Washington DC is 18% lower than it was when Donald Trump left.
Donald Trump keeps saying that he's the guy who reduced the price of insulin, not Joe Biden, and he repeated this claim yesterday. What's up with that?
It's a bit like claiming that Henri Poincaré really invented the Theory of Relativity, not that Einstein fellow.¹ It isn't true, but there's a little something there. Here's what Trump did about insulin prices:
So that's it. Trump did talk about insulin copays, and he started up a test program with lower copays. But nothing more. It was Joe Biden who permanently lowered insulin copays under the Inflation Reduction Act.
¹Edmund Whittaker published a history of electricity and the aether in 1953 that famously said "Einstein published a paper which set forth the relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz with some amplifications."
Now, it's true that the problems of physics in 1905 were very widely known, and it's also true that Poincaré nibbled around the edges of a solution. In a sense, you can say that Einstein merely explained the conceptual premise of empirical facts well known to Poincaré. Needless to say, though, it's those conceptual innovations that were of prime importance.
I think I'll just make this astronomy week. The second picture I took last Friday was another crack at the Milky Way, but it didn't turn out even as good as my first try. There's a long and fascinating story behind this.
I had decided to try a different location in hopes of finding an interesting foreground for the Milky Way. My choice was a place called Arch Rock in Joshua Tree National Park, but things didn't work out.
First, every one of my maps failed. As I was driving through Twentynine Palms my Garmin GPS suddenly stopped working. It just turned off and nothing I could do made it come back on. My phone map only showed detail a little way into the park, and my tablet showed nothing because it relies on the phone for an internet connection and the phone was out of cell range.
As a result, I took the wrong turnoff and, long story short, I never made it to Arch Rock. Instead I settled on a place called Jumbo Rocks, which is exactly what it sounds like. I finally found a place to set up, but it turned out I had chosen the only spot within miles that had a group of night-owl campers with a ton of lights they kept on until 3 am. So I couldn't place my tripod where I wanted to, which would have had an interesting rock and a Joshua tree in the foreground.
It didn't matter anyway. I chose a different spot and hauled out my little portable equatorial mount, but after squinting for a while to find the North Star I realized it wasn't working. I had gotten it out a couple of weeks ago to reacquaint myself with its workings, but apparently I left it on the whole time. So the batteries were drained.
Then, as if that weren't enough, there was a massive glow of light to the southeast, which is where the Milky Way is. What was it? Indio, I guess, which I thought was too far away to interfere much. Wrong.
In the end, all I could do was take a few short exposures at a high ISO and with lots of light interference. Oh, and around 2 am my Garmin suddenly came back to life. Go figure.
I'll try again next month with fresh batteries and yet another location. I'm not sure where that will be, though. I need to do a little more sleuthing.
One of the fastest-spreading corporate buzzwords in recent years, “double-click” is both polarizing and pervasive. Particularly on Wall Street, the figure of speech is now being used as a shorthand for examining something more fully, akin to double-clicking to see a computer folder’s contents. Some, like Roy, find the idiom obnoxious or twee. Double-click defenders say the phrase encourages deeper thinking.
Double clicking has been around for nearly 40 years. Why is it just now being made into a buzzword? And what about Apple users? Do they use it too, only vaguely understanding why?
Matt Yglesias has a bit of an odd cri de couer today about Joe Biden's mental state. Except that it's actually more about Matt's mental state:
I really don’t enjoy being wrong. But looking back on Biden’s disastrous debate with the benefit of some time away, I have to admit that I was wrong.... I’ve felt sick to my stomach since the debate, and I get why key decision-makers don’t want to admit they were also wrong.... I feel, personally, hurt and embarrassed about how this played out. I think Biden made me look foolish, and I don’t like it. But it is true that most people were not fooled and will not necessarily react in the same way.
I don't think this garment rending is really called for. First off, it's not true that most people thought all along that Biden was too old. YouGov polled this question a few months ago when the Hur report came out and the result was that 80% of Republicans said he was too old but only 20% of Democrats agreed. It's obvious that most of the believers were motivated not by evidence but by partisan attacks that had been fanned by Fox News for years, regardless of Biden's condition.
By analogy, it's not right to say that most people think the 2020 election was stolen. Or that most people think the economy is terrible. Most Republicans think the election was stolen and the economy is terrible. There's never been any reason to pay any attention to this. It's just partisan hackery at work.
In any case, the Hur report turned out to be obviously exaggerated, and a few weeks later Biden gave a good performance in his State of the Union Address. At that point there was no compelling reason to think Biden had anything other than physical problems.
In the few months since then, evidence started to gather about Biden's condition, but there was still little reason to take it too seriously. Republicans had been impugning Biden's mental health long before it was merited, so their attacks were meaningless. And Biden's public appearances were more or less OK. It really was the debate that changed things.
So I see no big reason to be embarrassed by defending Biden up through last week. The evidence of his fitness for the job was debatable but perfectly reasonable. The only reason to be embarrassed is if (a) you've been attacking Biden forever, long before he deteriorated, (b) you knew about his recent decline and covered it up, or (c) you're continuing to defend Biden even after the debate.
As John Maynard Keynes said (maybe), "When the facts change, I change my mind." On June 27 the facts changed. There's no sin in changing your mind only after that.
Apparently the Republican National Committee, under the direction of Comrade Trump, has decided to do away with long, boring fights over the party platform at this year's Republican Convention. I actually think this is a good idea, since party platforms are meaningless these days anyway. But what will replace it?
The answer is: a platform handed down by Trump and prefaced by a 20-point listicle written by Trump himself. Here it is:
I note that this list contains no mention of abortion or mifepristone or IVF; no mention of energy efficient appliances; no mention of NATO; no mention of China; no mention of Russia; no mention of vaccines; no mention of Fauci; no mention of crypto; no mention of health care; no mention of climate change or the environment in any way; no mention of the national debt; no mention of education; no mention of technology even in passing; and no mention of sharks. I guess that stuff is all either too boring for Trump or else too divisive for a guy who's suddenly trying to appear more reasonable.
The full platform does mention some of this stuff, though not in much detail since it's only ten pages long. Still, the listicle is clearly what Republicans want everyone to pay attention to, and I have to say that its lack of any reference to abortion is quite a bold change for a Republican statement of principles. Hell, even the longer platform document barely mentions abortion, saying only that Republicans "stand for life," oppose late term abortions, and think states should be in control. It's remarkable what the MAGA base will let Trump get away with. I suppose it's because he's more or less admitted that he's lying for political purposes.
UPDATE: Sorry, but I was initially under the impression that the listicle was the whole platform. It's not. It's just the preface to a ten-page platform that covers more topics. I've corrected the text.
I was out in the desert Friday night and took this picture of the Trifid Nebula, one of the best nebulas in the night sky. However, it's only really visible in the summer, so it was now or never (until next year, anyway).
My initial integration of the images was disappointing. The problem was that my focuser kept trying to kill itself. It first tried to commit suicide via software, but I managed to revive it via some Task Manager tough love. Then it tried to commit suicide via strangulation, when its USB cable got caught on something during a meridian flip and came apart. I figured the meridian flip shouldn't affect the focus, though, so I kept on going. But I guess I was wrong. I had to throw out all the images from after midnight or so.
(What's a meridian flip? An equatorial mount rotates to track the sky, and eventually it gets to a point where the counterweight is above the telescope and the telescope is in danger of banging into the tripod legs. So it flips 180 degrees on both axes and keeps going. It was while doing this that the focuser cable got stuck.)
In the end, I had only about 20 images left, but the finished stack looks OK. The detail seems a little weak, which might be for several reasons. The Trifid is low in the sky, which means a denser atmosphere and more haze. I was in a new spot, which has a higher altitude than my usual location but is slightly less dark. And I used a broadband filter. A narrowband would have been better for the main part of the Trifid (in red), which is an emission nebula, but would have blocked the blue part, which is a reflection nebula. So I compromised.
Note that it's the Trifid Nebula, not the Triffid. It means "three lobed," even though you can see that it really has four lobes. I suppose only three were visible in 18th century telescopes when it was discovered.
The Trifid is cataloged as M20, and I haven't cropped this image as much as I normally would. That's because I wanted to include the image of M21, a star cluster in the upper left. The Trifid is one of the closest star-forming regions to Earth, a mere 4,100 light years away.
