President Trump – full interview (Axios on HBO)

interview by Jonathan Swan*

contemporary screenshot – live version is updated daily* *

Jonathan Swan: (01:16)
… Over the years, I’ve heard you talk about your adherence to a philosophy called positive thinking. Is this the mantra that if you believe something, if you visualize it, then it will happen?

President Donald J. Trump: (01:29)
To an extent. I also think in terms of the downside. I do. I’ve been given a lot of credit for positive thinking, but I also think about downside because only a fool doesn’t.

Jonathan Swan: (01:40)
To what extent do you think that that positive thinking mindset is suitable to handling the worst pandemic that we’ve seen in a century?

President Donald J. Trump: (01:49)
I think you have to have a positive outlook. Otherwise, you would have nothing without a positive outlook. I think we’ve done an incredible job …*


*a link – see a note on notes and links
Posted

nuclear power: just do it


in related news today, Tuesday, 28 July 2020:
The world’s largest nuclear fusion project began its five-year assembly phase on Tuesday in southern France, with the first ultra-hot plasma expected to be generated in late 2025*

meanwhile …

!tw pick a design, build identical copies, electrify everything (@LindsayPB)


*a link – see a note on notes and links
Posted

“there’s physics out there that we don’t know about”

from the largest ever 3D map of the universe: Color indicates distance from Earth, ranging from yellow on the near side of the slice to purple on the far side. There are 48,741 galaxies in this picture, only about 3 per cent of the total surveyed. Daniel Eisenstein and SDSS-III

citing Will Percival, director of the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics:
According to the history revealed in the eBOSS map, the expansion of the universe began to accelerate six billion years ago and has continued to get faster ever since.

“That’s just really whacky because if you just have a standard theory that gravity is acting on matter, gravity is an attractive force it pulls things together and it would in general tend to decelerate the universe,” says Percival. “Which means there’s physics out there that we don’t know about.”*

While there are theories, “none of them are really compelling.” According to Percival, the simplest mathematical explanation would be taking Einstein’s cosmological constant equation and change one sign in it to change the universe from static to make it accelerate. Mathematically, it’s a simple thing to do but when it comes to the physics it’s much more difficult to explain.


*a link – see a note on notes and links

Posted

Infinite Potential: The Life and Ideas of David Bohm


presented free of charge for a limited time by the Fetzer Memorial Trust and Imagine Films*

The film tells the story of the man Einstein called his “spiritual son” and the Dalai Lama his “science guru.” A brilliant physicist and explorer of consciousness, Bohm’s profound insights into the underlying nature of reality and the profound interconnectedness of the universe and our place within it are truly far-reaching.*

!w2 David Joseph Bohm / 20 December 1917 – 27 October 1992

!? adjectives: implicate, explicate (David Bohm)

we are “amphibian” … living “simultaneously in two worlds” (Aldous Huxley)*

other than in the mind,
nothing is other than what is;
no one is

“The observer is the observed.” —Jiddu Krishnamurti (!?)


Posted

Facebook: an advertising machine


Facebook, as an advertising machine, “knows only correlations between advertisers’ requirements and users’ profiles. It neither knows nor cares about cancer or anything else.”
This has been dramatically demonstrated in experiments conducted by imaginative journalists. In September 2017, for example, researchers from ProPublica did a test to see if the machine would help them to promote three posts to antisemitic users.

It did. At one point in the process, for example, the automated system asked the researchers if they wished to “INCLUDE people who match at least ONE of the following: German Schutzstaffel, history of ‘why Jews ruin the world’, how to burn Jews, Jew hater”. “Your potential audience selection is great!” it told the researchers. “Potential audience size: 108,000 people.” And all for $30. After ProPublica contacted Facebook, the company removed the antisemitic categories and said it would explore ways to fix the problem, such as limiting the number of categories available or scrutinising them before they are displayed to buyers.

There’s no point in trying to anthropomorphise this. Facebook is clearly not run by Nazis. But what its software engineers have built is an incredibly powerful, beautifully engineered machine for matching advertisers with people who might be receptive to their messages. And it’s clear that advertisers love that machine because it gives them a warm feeling that their advertising budgets may be spent more effectively on Facebook rather than on billboards or TV ads. Which, of course, sadly also means that the much-hyped advertising boycott spurred by the #blacklivesmatter protests will have little impact on Facebook’s bottom line. Morals matter, but money talks.

archived*


*a link – see a note on notes and links
Posted

returning to normal: returning to the source of our crises

Mariana Mazzucato*

from the NYT, 2019/11/26:
In two books of modern political economic theory — “The Entrepreneurial State” (2013) and “The Value of Everything” (2018) — Dr. Mazzucato argues against the long-accepted binary of an agile private sector and a lumbering, inefficient state. Citing markets and technologies like the internet, the iPhone and clean energy — all of which were funded at crucial stages by public dollars — she says the state has been an underappreciated driver of growth and innovation. “Personally, I think the left is losing around the world,” she said in an interview, “because they focus too much on redistribution and not enough on the creation of wealth.”

archived*


*a link – see a note on notes and links
Posted

eleven superstitions

Bryan A. Garner: In 1926, H.W. Fowler used the term “superstitions” to describe, in the field of writing, “unintelligent applications of an unintelligent dogma” … *

eleven superstitions:
A. Never End a Sentence with a Preposition.
B. Never Split an Infinitive.
C. Never Split a Verb Phrase.
D. Never Begin a Sentence with And or But.
E. Never Write a One-Sentence Paragraph.
F. Never Begin a Sentence with Because.
G. Never Use since to Mean because.
H. Never Use between with More than Two Objects.
I. Never Use the First-Person Pronouns I and me.
J. Never Use Contractions.
K. Never Use you in referring to Your Reader.

***

Raymond Chandler, in a letter to the Atlantic Monthly editor in 1947:
“When I split an infinitive, (expletive deleted), I split it so it will stay split.”*


*a link – see a note on notes and links

Posted

billionaire as predator

image via Caitlin Johnstone*

from the tweeted article:
It has always been almost impossible to know what’s really going on, since the narrative about the present has always been controlled by the powerful and the narrative about the past written by whoever won the most recent war. What’s changed is that now people are realizing this.
…

Me, a naive idiot: The world can be saved by a mass-scale shift in human consciousness into a healthy relationship with mental narrative.

Smart, realistic person: No that’s stupid and impractical. The world will be saved by monopolistic profit-chasing tech oligarchs.

cached*

update:



*a link – see a note on notes and links

Posted