The stronger becomes master of the weaker, in so far as the latter cannot assert its degree of independence — here there is no mercy, no forbearance, even less a respect for “laws.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Author: photog
Tom’s World – 20DEC2024 – Feline Pose
Here’s kitten Lorie on the back of my office chair on which she has inflicted hundreds of puncture wounds.
She doesn’t have the guilty look to be expected from such a miscreant.
Update:
Master Diver commented:
My office chair has suffered similar indignities from Queen-Empress Piper and Ladies Florence and Cuddles.
Sweater
Top Men Working on It – Part 2
Well, I enjoyed yesterday’s outing so much I thought I’d have another go at solving the world’s problems on Uncle Sam’s dime. Here are some more projects to keep me off the streets and make the world a better place:
- Stamp Out the Metric System. – That’s right. I want to outlaw it and insist that the freezing point of water is 32 degrees and the boiling point is 212 degrees. And I’m talking Fahrenheit. I want halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths and thirty seconds of an inch as the way we measure lumber. I want everyone to know that a pint’s a pound the world around. I want horsepower, tons of cooling, foot-pounds, cubic yards, pounds per square inch and inches of mercury everywhere you look. I want the speed of light to be 186,000 miles per second. I want pounds and ounces and BTU’s and I don’t want any kilometers or kilograms or ergs or any of that European or Canadian jazz, thank you very much! And I will back up my hatred with the force of Trumpian law. Anyone found using a metric tape measure, scale, thermometer, pedometer or any other metric device will be subject to public dunking followed by banishment to Bogeyland. And no one will be immune. If I find out that Elon Musk is using metric tools and hardware on his cars, they will be forced off the roads. And if his rockets are instrumented using metric units, the Air and Space forces will be authorized to shoot them out of the sky. This may sound harsh but order must be maintained. Some of you may claim that decimal units simplify and make calculations easier. I say, calculations are supposed to be difficult. So, suck it up!
- Defund PBS and NPR and Subject the Personnel to the Inquisition – My hatred for these institutions knows no bounds. Every time I heard some bow tie wearing doofus on NPR whispering softly about some pathetic cause he wanted me to espouse I had to change the channel. Now it’s time for payback. And closing down their operations and returning that money to the American people is a wonderful accomplishment. But shutting them down is not enough. I propose that a sort of Artificial Torquemada (AT) be programmed to subject these awful people to whatever punishments will make them suffer the most. First off, their diet will be Big Macs and fries, morning, noon and night. Secondly, a public address system will play a loop of Donald Trump’s greatest hits from his campaign rallies, played twenty-four hours of the day. Each inmate will be provided with a mockup of the Sunday New York Times newspaper featuring a facsimile of the Times crossword puzzle but unfortunately, none of the possible answers will fit the spaces. The gulag will have mandatory television viewing of reruns of Hee-Haw, The Dukes of Hazzard, Benny Hill, Home Improvement and Baywatch. The prison library will consist of the collected works of Mickey Spillane. And finally, every month there will be a special session where the inmates will be strapped into chairs and forced to watch a ten-hour compilation of the 2016 and 2024 election coverage including the rants and crying jags caused by the epic failures of the Clinton and Harris campaigns. None of the inmates will be available for parole until under surveillance of a lie detector they can state honestly that “The 2020 election was rigged against Donald Trump through voter fraud.”
Okay so that’s enough for now.
20DEC2024 – Photo of the Day
20DEC2024 – Quote of the Day
I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Tom’s World – 19DEC2024 – Incarceration; Retribution or Isolation?
Check this link, the subject is about something I can’t remember ever before having seen.
As far as I can remember, I’ve heard of incarceration in the context of the benefit to society, i.e., putting them away so they can’t do more damage. Among reasonable people, there is no dispute as to the truth of that proposition. (Unreasonable people? Who cares, screw ’em)
The link above is about the mass commutation Biden recently issued and how there is a very low chance of recidivism from the individuals freed, therefore not a net negative to society based on the principle of isolation. But the article disagrees with the commutation based on this principle: retribution, some of those people just flat deserved punishment.
The poster boy for this principle is a judge who was receiving $millions in kickbacks from a for-profit-boy’s prison for sentencing boys to that institution and betraying every principle, every person, and the trust (such as it is these days) in the judicial system, all for his personal enrichment.
So the guiding principle behind punishment for crime is now extended from incarceration for isolation from society to also include retribution, or the principle that people who do evil deserve punishment based on society’s perception of right and wrong.
Top Men Working on It
My recent thought experiment to determine whether the geometry of our universe is Euclidean or not has inspired me to get involved in the upcoming Trump Administration. Just as Trump has farmed out budget cutting to DOGE, I would like to volunteer (well not for free though) my services to perform research that is woefully needed by the United States government. I haven’t come up with a snappy acronym for my team but I’m working on it.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the projects I’d like to tackle for Uncle Sam.
- Global Warming – Now, this is a no-brainer. Up until now research on this subject has been performed by commies. And no matter what information they get they “analyze” it until they can work it into a hockey stick graph that warns that the end of the world is imminent. What is needed is an objective, scientific approach. And that’s me all over. I will analyze the hell out of that data and something tells me that my result will be a call for more fossil fuel and nuclear energy to stave off the next ice age which is already rearing its ugly head. Also, I’ll perform a mass and energy balance and a cost analysis around such technologies as wind generators and solar energy panels. Something tells me that the cost of each kilowatt hour taken over the usable life of the equipment and including the replacement cost of the equipment (not neglecting the cost of environmental remediation for mining and processing of heavy metals and other toxic materials) will be an order of magnitude higher than either fossil fuels or fission reactors. Is it too much to ask to have the “climate scientists” hauled into court for fraud?
- The Definition of a Woman – In a country where this
Is called a woman, things are not going to go well. What I propose to do is convene a panel of experts. I will use the most credentialed individuals available. I will include married men, wedding planners, hairdressers, script writers from the Hallmark Channel, employees at grocery and clothing stores and shoe salesmen. In addition, I’ll recruit a fair cross-section of guys found habitually at strip joints from across this great land. Between them all we will work long and hard to come up with a consensus definition and if necessary, a list of qualifying and disqualifying “conditions.” I’m sure the team will have a contentious and spirited discussion about everything from terminology to visual aids but we’ll make sure that the exhibit shown above or anything like it is never mistaken for a woman again.
- My team will devote a full year to trying to figure out exactly which mental conditions Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are suffering from. After making an exhaustive study we will try to translate their last four years of speeches into rational English sentences. Where no meaning can be found we will overlay those sections of the transcripts with pictures of kittens and puppy dogs.
So that will be a start. Eventually we’ll expand out and solve all the problems of the multiverse. But I will charge time and a half on weekends. After all I’m only human.
19DEC2024 – Photo of the Day
19DEC2024 – Quote of the Day
And nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I Can’t Wait to Get Started!
I was reading a chapter in a mathematical survey that I bought a long time ago (Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning by A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov, M. A. Lavrent’ev). It was a section in the non-Euclidean Geometry chapter called something like “Real Space.”
The author was trying to make the point that since gravity bends light and light rays were the closest thing to perfect straight lines that you could claim that parallel lines can intersect and triangles can have more or less than 180 degrees in real space. And to get away from the idea of straight lines in empty space (no matter present) he said that the concept of space only exists in the context of it containing matter.
And I stopped to think whether that seemed to follow. I never usually question the meaning of empty. My basic visualization of reality is that the universe is the void of the Bible augmented by really small golf balls bouncing around in it. Empty space to me is wherever there aren’t any golf balls at that moment. Now granted, I’ve heard that particles are always appearing into and disappearing out of existence in the “quantum vacuum.” And I know that many physicists characterize the universe as just a bunch of “fields” of the various elementary particles; the electron field and the Higgs field, etc. But I don’t understand why we can’t imagine empty space. I mean I know that at any time a quark or a gluon or some other ephemeral exotic particle can show up anywhere but why is it so hard to say. “Right now, right here is empty space because nothing is there.”
I guess I’ll have to read more deeply. After all, if the empty space between galaxies (and everything else) is always and ever more rapidly expanding as the universe itself inflates at an accelerating rate, it seems logical to me that there’s more and more “empty space” everywhere.
And so, I propose the following thought experiment:
I posit that using the James Webb Space Telescope, we find a spot in the sky where there aren’t even any really, really old galaxies hanging out. There’s nothing along that line of sight. I then take two flashlights (or “lasers” if anyone insists) and using a protractor and some really straight two by fours I line them up parallel to each other in the direction of that cosmic empty spot and turn them on. Why wouldn’t those two beams continue on to the end of the universe exactly the same distance apart? Now, sure, a few photons here and there might be deflected by a some randomly situated gas molecules or by the odd quantum vacuum quark that appeared for a femtosecond along the line of sight but for the most part the laser beams should continue on forever and ever, amen.
So, if that is the case. What’s the problem with imagining empty space (mostly) with my two flashlight (or laser) beams going out and out and out forever? And forever parallel. After all there’s nothing close enough to really bend those light beams. Now to prove this result there will need to be someone on the other end of the universe to do the measurement. This presents something of a problem. However, there may be a solution (well, a thought solution anyway). It’s a well-known part of the Big Bang Theory that there should be equal amounts of matter and anti-matter in the universe. But here we are with basically none to be found. I theorize that at the end of the universe is the anti-matter we’ve been looking for (just like those ‘droids). Granting this, then there should be an anti-matter me at the end of the universe. Let’s call him anti-photog. Now assuming he’s extremely long-lived (which anti-matter life forms always are) and that he thinks precisely as I do, he’ll be waiting for those two beams of light and he will measure the angle between the beams and find them to be parallel and thereby prove the Euclidean (or in his case anti-Euclidean nature of empty space. Then he can send a return beam back in our direction (somehow) and we will have the answer. Of course, the sun and probably the Milky Way Galaxy will have long ago been absorbed by the local super massive black hole and cosmic lichens will possibly be the only form of life remaining but that’s how science works sometimes. You have to take the good with the bad.
So, Lobachevsky, Gauss, Riemann and all you other “non-Euclidean” geometricians (I’m looking at you A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov and M. A. Lavrent’ev!) shouldn’t put too much stock in all this curved space hand-waving. Until the results of this wonderful research of mine are available, they should sit tight. Estimates for the return trip signal are still being calculated but I’m sure it won’t be too bad. I’ll be starting my crowdfunding page to buy the lasers and the two by fours very soon. I’ve still got my third-grade protractor somewhere around here so I don’t need that. I can’t wait to get started!
Update:
I asked an AI image generator to reproduce my thought experiment rig
It came up with this!
This may take a while.