Author: admin

Leaving aside the Orwellian doublespeak of the proposed Kansas amendment (“giving up your rights will make you free”), what concerns me is how it does not deal with the real human issues. If we accept that all life is precious, we still need to think about some serious questions.

Who will proper take care of and protect babies? How will healthcare and counseling be provided for victims of sexual assualt, some as young as 11 years old, who will now have no choice but to give birth? How will adoption services be adjusted and properly regulated? What will be the appropriately increased penalties for rapists whose crimes will now have vastly greater consequenses?

If we think seriously from the perspective of “pro-life”, rather than just throwing around that term as a glib slogan, what is the proper role of Government here? Government needs, at the very least, to take seriously the dictum “If you break it, you own it.” It shouldn’t just take away rights, cause a big mess, and then say “not my problem.”

The proposed Kansas amendment is very short. It just takes away the right to an abortion. It does briefly mention the issues of pregnancy resulting from rape and incest, or when the life of the mother is at risk, but only in order to add that maybe somebody can “regulate” those situations later.

The proposed amendment is worded in a weirdly twisted way that makes it sound as though the proposed legislation will somehow give people more rights, although it is quite explicitly taking away rights. But to me the most important part of all this may be what the ballot initiative does not talk about.

More tomorrow.

There is a constitutional amendment on the ballot in Kansas in a few weeks that looks deceptively simple, but which touches on some of the most complex issues that our society is facing.

Over the next few days I am going to attempt to unpack the meaning of what is going on there. Fasten your seatbelts. It might be a bumpy ride.

People who invest in start-up companies hate production. What I mean by “production” is the process of a company doing custom jobs for clients.

That kind of work requires investment of people-hours, and it doesn’t scale. When you are doing production, you are essentially being paid for your time. A day’s work for a day’s pay.

But when you have a software product, you can scale. You might get millions of people using your product, and that creates an enormous multiplier factor for whatever effort you put in to support that product.

That’s the kind of value proposition that interests investors. That’s why some companies turn out to be Unicorns — little start-ups that grow to become mega-corporations.

So you could say the goal is to make the transition from production to product. To get those three letters “ion” off the end.

In other words, deionization.

People use my noise function everywhere. I’ve gotten used to it, and it’s definitely cool to see.

But every once in a while I am surprised by how it is used. Today, in a set of illustrations to accompany several opinion pieces in the New York Times, it was used by illustrator Sean Dong in a number of inventive ways.

But the one that jumped out at me was this visual for the piece about Capitalism. It was elegantly done, and it also reminded me a lot of some of the earliest things I did with noise back in the day.

His illustration is a morph between the Earth as a sphere, to the Earth as a superquadric, to the Earth as a sphere displaced by my noise function. Very simple, very weird, very effective, and very familiar (to me, at least).

I remember creating a very similar sequence in my early experiments with noise. I even eventually ended up printing some of those shapes on a 3D printer.

To the readers of the NY Times his illustration hopefully conveyed the ways that Capitalism can distort our perception of reality. To me it was pure (and delightful) nostalgia.

This week I am building on last week’s example of graph paper. Except now I am going to start to have things happen in the graph paper world.

In particular, I implemented a story of seven sisters. I chose seven because that seems like a good number for a fairy tale.

Each sister starts out close to home, and is free to wander away, but it still takes a long time before they all leave. Mathematically, each sister is each doing a random walk.

The weekly widget itself is here. Just like last week, you can click on the word at the bottom of the page to see and modify the computer program.

Just as the U.S. Senate gave up on meaningful plans to do anything about climate change, today became the hottest day in history in the U.K. It’s a clarion call if there ever was one, but it seems that important people are not listening.

Yet that is not even the most worrisome part. It’s not about what has happened so far, but rather about what happens next.

After all, records can be broken. And so can planets.

I am participating in a workshop at NYU which aims to help us take our research from the lab out into the actual marketplace. It is very enlightening.

When you do research, you generally try to imagine what the future will be like. You need to make guesses about how powerful, in perhaps another ten or fifteen years, computers will be, or networks, or graphics processors, or some other resource that currently exists only in the lab — if at all.

But when you think in terms of the marketplace, you need to think nearer to the present. There needs to be a value proposition for people in the near-term, not ten or fifteen years from now.

It’s a different way of thinking. In some ways it can be confining, but in other ways freeing. One thing I can say for sure is that I am enjoying the learning process.

 

	Neonatal		just born
	Brionatal		born enthusiastically
	Rionatal		a Carioca
	Leonatal		born between July 23 and August 22
	Theonatal		born again
	Cryonatal		IVF
	Geonatal		a new planet
	Yeonatal		born in an English river
	Trionatal		triplets
	Dionatal		Jesus

Today, July 16, is the birthday of Shoeless Joe Jackson. Which I decided was a great occasion to rewatch Field of Dreams.

I haven’t seen it for so many years. And I was worried that it wouldn’t hold up.

But I wasn’t disappointed. It was even better than I had remembered. And it was like I had seen it yesterday.

Some movies, like some fine wines, don’t age with time. They just get better.