Author: admin

I noticed a while ago that software to support on-line communication is named ironically. An app to support greater productivity is called “Slack”. An app to help collaborators work in harmony is call “Discord”.

It looks as though the U.S. government is taking a page out of this playbook. As any child knows, the primary purpose of a nation’s Department of Defense is to prevent wars.

And now the U.S. is about to change that name to the “Department of War”. Obviously this is meant ironically, since nobody actually wants a war, unless they are a complete idiot. Or unless they derive some sort of sick pleasure from watching large numbers of people die.

Why stop there? In the spirit of irony, let’s change the name of the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Disease and Dying.

Oh wait, that’s not ironic at all. That creepy half-dead RFK Jr guy is indeed turning it into the Department of Disease and Dying.

In a rather impressive effort to kill off as many Americans as possible, he is proposing to get rid of vaccines, and therefore to bring back such old favorites as smallpox, polio, diphtheria, measles, and tetanus.

I’m sure there is irony to be found here somewhere.

Last month the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that employment was down. The president took immediate and decisive action: He fired the person in charge of the bureau.

This month the BLS again reported that employment was down. There is, of course, only one sensible course of action: The president needs to immediately fire the person he just appointed last month.

And he will need to keep doing this until the numbers go the way he wants them to. I wonder how many months in a row he will need to keep firing people until those pesky numbers finally get it right.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the discovery of my favorite molecule — buckminsterfullerene. It will come as no surprise to anyone that this esteemed molecule is named for the famous architect, due to its geodesic dome-like structure.

Buckminsterfullerene is a beautiful molecule in many ways, and that fact that it occurs in nature has makes me very happy. It consists of 60 carbon atoms, arranged in a semi-regular polyhedron.

That 32 sided polyhedron is called a truncated icosahedron, which also happens to be my favorite polyhedron. Which is one reason that I love buckminsterfullerene.

As it happens, the locations of the carbon atoms are identical to the locations of the 60 corners of the panels of a soccer ball. So if you look at a soccer ball (which consists of 20 hexagons plus 12 pentagons), you are basically looking at a buckminsterfullerene molecule.

Except that the soccer ball is bigger. A soccer ball is about 22.5 centimeters in diameter, whereas a buckminsterfullerene molecule is about one nanometer in diameter.

Which makes the soccer ball more than 200 million times bigger. Also, you cannot kick a molecule of buckminsterfullerene.

I was talking with someone today about the wonderfully subtle ways in which words vary in their shades of meaning. Take for example the word “abnormality”.

That is most definitely a pejorative word. If you describe something as an abnormality, then you are saying there is something wrong with it, and you may be implying that it needs to be corrected.

But you could also choose to say that something is an “anomaly”. That sort of means the same thing, but the tone is quite different.

An anomaly might be a good thing. Maybe, depending on context, you want more anomalies, and are eager to search through your statistical results to find another one.

Or, you could simply choose to say that something is an “outlier”. That is a much more relaxed word.

To say that something is an outlier doesn’t imply that it is either good or bad, just that it is unusual. You are not taking a stand one way or another.

If anything, you are making a shrugging commentary on statistics itself. It’s as though you are saying “Oh well, we all know that numbers don’t always behave themselves. What can you do?”

Suppose there were a service that let you and another person swap bodies for 24 hours. Would you do it?

It seems to me that you could learn a lot from such an experience. On the other hand, it would raise all sorts of issues.

You and the other person would need to have a lot of trust between you. After all, anything they said or did could come back to haunt you — and vice versa.

Then there is the other side of it. If it were generally known that people could swap bodies, how would that affect interactions between people?

For example, how would you know that you were really talking to the right person? Maybe people would start to develop little code words and phrases — something only the other person could know.

We will eventually run into similar problems with A.I. Over time it will become gradually more difficult to know whether you are talking to a real person or to an A.I. factotum.

So who needs a body swapping service, when we already have something just as scary?

I have been wondering, since the new U.S. administration took office, when they would actually do something other than bully their own citizens. Sure, there has been a lot of theater.

It is, indeed, arguably great theater to impose a punishing sales tax on Americans in the form of bizarrely high tariffs, reduce Medicaid benefits, place a bozo in charge of the CDC who might actually succeed in bringing back mass deaths from measles, fire people for the “crime” of accurately reporting jobs numbers, pull foreign aid in a way seemingly calculated to ensure the death of millions of children around the world, send masked goons in unmarked vans to round up any Americans who look too “foreign”, fire anyone in government who is guilty of the unforgivable sin of SWB (serving while black), and that’s just a very partial list.

But those are not actual accomplishments. They are just ways of turning a functioning democracy into a low rent parody of a George Orwell novel.

But now the president can actually claim to have accomplished something substantial. This week the leaders of China, Russia and India met to publicly declare solidarity with one another. India (the world’s most populous country) would most likely not have joined forces with the other two if the U.S. president had not quickly and decisively destroyed the long-standing good will between Washington and New Delhi.

Between them, those three countries represent a collective population of more than three billion people. Now that they have been thrown together by the actions of the U.S. president, they have a vast collective potential for political and economic influence around the world.

Finally the U.S. president has accomplished something truly worthy of living on in history. I wonder whether there is a Nobel prize for that.

Every so often I realize that the once small and tidy codebase that I was building has grown all out of proportion. Somehow, while I wasn’t paying attention, it morphed from a little canoe to a giant battleship.

This is fine in its own way — you can get a lot of power from a sophisticated tool set. But like any Frankenstein’s monster, it starts to take on a life of its own.

After a codebase gets to beyond a certain size, it has a definite tendency to want to do some things more than others. And it’s very difficult to steer it away from that tendency, because you are no longer steering a little boat — you are steering a giant ship.

And so, every once in a while, when I want to explore something really different, I begin afresh. I don’t throw out the old Frankenstein creature, but I let it rest for a while, and start a little side project.

That little side project can’t do everything, but it can do some particular thing that I am interested in with only a very small amount of code. Which means that it is very easy to steer.

Sometimes you need to get away from your own edifice complex. Take off that captain’s hat, find yourself a nice quiet stream, and paddle a little canoe.

Suppose you were to write a dystopian novel in which a moron like RFK Jr. was hired by the president of the United States so he could use the CDC to threaten millions of Americans with unnecessary illness and death. Somehow, I don’t think anybody would believe it, even as fiction.

In fact, I seriously doubt that a plot that was so utterly absurd and unlikely would ever find a publisher.

WebGL doesn’t do everything that a computer graphics developer could ever want. But what it does do, it does well.

One of the many things I love about WebGL is that you get to write your own shaders. As the person who wrote the world’s first shaders, this is a concept that is near and dear to my heart.

For example, I know that my Noise function produces the identical output in Javascript on the CPU and in a fragment shader on the GPU. Why? Because thanks to WebGL I was able to implement it myself in both places (see: https://cs.nyu.edu/perlin/noise3 ).

So for me, as a person who doesn’t like other people to make decisions for me, it’s a dream development platform. Oh and one other thing…

Thanks to WebGL, anybody can see my 3D graphics while running in pretty much any web browser on pretty much any hardware platform, whether Mac or PC or Android or IOS or whatever. A lot better than needing to download an app for everything, isn’t it?

The good thing about a U.S. administration actively working to destroy nearly 250 years of democracy and trying to turn America into an authoritarian state is that it is hard to complain about anything else. It’s nice to know that there is a silver lining.