Author: admin

Today’s post is in honor of my fellow U.S. citizen Javier Ramirez:

First they came for the transgendered
And I did not speak out
Because I was not transgender
Then they came for the Haitians
And I did not speak out
Because I was not Haitian
Then they came for the students
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a student
Then they came for the Hispanics
And I did not speak out
Because I was not Hispanic
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

— after Martin Niemöller

I feel bad for the children of the people who are currently enabling the criminal (quite literally) who is sitting in the White House. His “rule by Mafia” seems to be powered only by ostentatious corruption, overt racism, contempt for our country and its people, and the creation of an atmosphere of fear, all topped off by a very mean sort of score settling.

When these bums are finally thrown out, and many of them start their prison sentences, their children will live with the stigma of being associated with monsters and traitors. That isn’t fair to those children.

After WWII, the innocent children of members of the Nazi party must have had a similar difficult time. By letting themselves be part of this authoritarian hate mongering, I wonder whether these assholes understand how deeply they are harming their own children.

I was in a research meeting this morning where we discussing what is often known as extended reality or mixed reality. Sometimes it is also called blended reality or augmented reality.

When we really went through how it is likely to be used in practice, we agreed that not one of those terms is quite right. In most cases, people won’t use such technologies to replace the reality around them, but rather to provide information about it.

We agreed that a more apt term would be annotated reality. I wonder whether that will catch on.

Millions of Americans all around our nation showed up for peaceful No Kings Day protests. Meanwhile, a small scraggly crowd turned up in Washington D.C. for the president’s gaudy military parade, a not so thinly disguised (and very expensive, my fellow taxpayers) birthday present to himself. Most of those that did show up in D.C. left at the first sign of rain.

Unfortunately, the day was marked by tragedy, as the consequence of pardoning violent January 6 anarchists seems to have encouraged more violent anarchy, when Vance Boelter assassinated former Minnesota House speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband.

Maybe he thinks he will get a presidential pardon. Given that this administration enjoys rewriting American history, perhaps the history of this weekend will get rewritten too, and then Boelter will get that pardon after all.

Today, June 14, some notable people have birthdays. First there is Harriet Beecher-Stowe.

Born on this day in 1811, Beecher-Stowe probably did more than any other individual, via her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to make people aware of the horrors of slavery. The runaway popularity of that book helped lead to the abolition of that monstrous institution in the United States.

Alas, Stowe eventually succumbed to what is now believe to have been Alzheimer’s disease, which was not diagnosed until around 1906 by Alois Alzheimer, who was also born on this day, June 14, in 1864.

The tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease strikes millions of people. From all evidence, a certain highly placed U.S. official seems to be increasingly in its grip.

Wait … I know I’m forgetting somebody. What other famous person, worthy of our collective appreciation, was born on June 14?

Aha, I’ve got it. Happy Birthday Boy George!!!

In anticipation of No Kings Day tomorrow, here are some thoughts:

Based on its recent statements and actions, the current administration of the United States is not edging toward authoritarianism. Rather, it truly believes that it has already achieved authoritarianism.

The First Amendment (the right to speech and public assembly) is there in the U.S. Constitution, as plain as day. But that right (or any right, for that matter) is only meaningful if it can be safely asserted.

This administration has made it very clear that it will mis-label any peaceful assembly for the purposes of political speech as public violence, as impeding government function, as rioting, as destruction of property, or as whatever label is required to discredit the U.S. citizens involved.

No matter how peaceful the reality on the ground, tomorrow’s nationwide protests will be shown on Fox News and on right wing social media as violent affairs, and as attempts to overthrow the government.

If this administration needs to hire thugs to create that illusion, it will do so. We know this because we have already seen that this administration has never shown any ethical restraints in its efforts to mold public perceptions.

Which leads to another point. After the administration has created the false sense that tomorrow’s peaceful protests are some sort of rebellion, it will use that as a pretext to justify ignoring any relevant rulings by our Judiciary, all in the name of “national security”.

I would love to be wrong about any or all of this!

I always thought it was a shame that the metric system for length (millimeters, meters, etc.), and the English system (inches, feet, etc.) seem so unrelated. For one thing, the number ten shows up everywhere in the metric system, but it’s hard to find in the English system.

Sure, in 1959 a standards committee set the ratio of an inch to a centimeter to be 2.54, but that always seemed weird and arbitrary to me. I always thought that it would be great to find some poetry between the two measurement systems.

Then I started a project a few days ago in which I needed to compactly represent some 3D curves in virtual reality, measured in meters. My approach was to store first the starting point of the curve, and then the difference in millimeters from each point to the next, because smaller numbers require fewer bits of storage.

I use a single signed byte to represent each difference, which means those differences go from -127mm to +127mm^†. The range between the smallest and largest possible value is therefore 254mm.

Which turns out to equal exactly ten inches. Poetry found!

† Because this is an encoding to compress a data string, I need to reserve -128 (binary 10000000) as a flag to embed any mode switches. That leaves only 254 actual values to work with. [footnote added]

In the last few days things have accelerated rapidly. There have been large protests in a number of major U.S. cities, and I suspect there will be more.

As I and others have said, the burden is on the protesters and their organizers to keep things peaceful. Public speech, including public gatherings for that purpose, is strongly protected by the First Amendment, as long as the protesters are not violent or disruptive. Like the U.S. Constitution says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The ACLU also has some useful guidelines which I have found to be very practical and helpful.

Of course bad actors can create a false narrative. What shows up on Fox News can be very different from what actually happens during a peaceful protest.

I suspect that the forces working to create an autocracy won’t play by the rules. They will likely try to spin any acts of peaceful protest into some sort of violent rebellion.

So unfortunately, we may end up going to a dark place before we can come back to the light. After the people in red states start to feel the economic consequences of this administration’s policies — growing unemployment, sky high prices for groceries and other everyday needs, gas prices out of control, domestic agriculture becoming economically unsustainable, loss of access to affordable healthcare (the list goes on and on) — they will eventually realize that they have been betrayed, and will join the protests.

But by then, if martial law has indeed been declared, it might be a lot more difficult to restore democracy as we know it.

This much may be obvious, but it needs to be said: Everything our current president does is an invitation to a fight. That seems to be his entire playbook.

I don’t think he really cares one way or another about illegal immigration, or pretty much any other issue that does not directly affect his own power or his own pocketbook.

As it happens, rounding up immigrants like they are cattle makes for a perfect wedge issue to inflame his political opponents, and his approach to any situation is to inflame his opponents. Because when people are enraged, they are generally not thinking clearly or strategically.

So what Democrats need to do, immediately, is to condemn any and all violence, no matter how heated the issue. Right away that will take away a large amount of his power to win through the process of inflammation.

I think Mark Twain said it best:

“Don’t wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”

Before going on with this topic, it might be useful to touch on the concept of planning of worst case scenarios. Even when such scenarios have a low probability of occurring, the consequences if they do occur can be very severe. So on balance, it’s good to be prepared.

For example, if you live in the Midwest in the U.S., you have probably experienced at least one tornado warning. When that happens, you are supposed to go to a safe place (most likely a concrete lined section of your basement).

Everybody knows that the probability of any given tornado actually approaching your house is quite low. But everybody goes down to the basement anyway, and waits the 20 or 30 minutes that it can take for the weather service to call the all clear.

It’s not that you really believe a tornado is likely to wander very close to your house today. But just in case, you don’t want to be anywhere near a window.

That is the spirit in which I’m discussing plans for responding to this administration’s pointedly political act of calling up of the National Guard in L.A. It’s not that we know for certain that the game plan is to escalate to an invocation of marshal law in order to scuttle the midterm elections. But just in case, we need to be prepared.

More tomorrow.