Never been one to let the carrier drop

I realize that it’s become politically incorrect to say that all lives matter – that by doing so, some people somehow feel like I’m saying all lives *don’t* matter. Or like I’m saying there’s not a problem with people of color being gunned down by people wearing blue.

Look, I do get it that statistically said people have been getting the short end of the stick. However, I belong to another group of people who I would wager are a lot MORE likely to be gunned down by the cops – people with mental illness. 99% of the time I’m perfectly normal. 1% of the time I’m really not. I’m not *dangerous*, but I’m definitely way, way outside of normal. Numerous times I have had cops with their guns drawn and aimed at me, so I know of what I speak. I’ve never acted threatening towards them in any way, but nonetheless it would not at all surprise me if I were gunned down someday by a cop with had a itchy trigger finger.

But I’m not looking for special service for my group, because I think that’s part of the problem. I’m looking for general, broadband fixes that will help both people of color and the mentally ill – and anyone else who interfaces with our gaurdians:

1) Streaming video from body cameras, which can not be disabled nor easily tampered with
2) Guns and tasers that have small but powerful ANNs* and video cameras and software designed to make the ‘danger/no danger’ decision, so that even if a cop does pull the trigger, the gun will not fire. As a backup, two individuals (generally dispatch, who has streaming video from #1, and the officer in question) can override the computer to un-safe the weapon.
3) Until the day that #2 is a reality, any cop who shoots a innocent should lose their right to carry. Actually, anyone who shoots a innocent, period, should lose their right to carry. You’ve proven via the only test that matters that you don’t have what it takes to carry a gun. It’s *extra* important that this apply to cops, however, given that their job often puts them in situations where emotions are running high and split second decisions are needed.

#2 is just common sense. Humans are not really rational enough to be trusted with guns. Unfortunately we have a ton of them out there, and it’s going to be a long time before we realize this, but of all the guns you want to be safe, the guns carried by the guardians are the most important, because they might see use at any time, 24×7, they’re always loaded and always being carried.

In any case, while it may not be possible to preserve all lives under all circumstances, all lives matter. The lives of our guardians matter. The lives of people of all colors, stripes, and religions matter.

* = Artificial neural networks. It should not be that difficult, in a era when we can do face and voice recognition, to teach a computer to recognize when there’s real danger, especially once we collect a corpus of incidents where there was real danger from #1.

http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=1727.

2 terabytes was actually a impressive amount of disk. Now I routinely slam 2T SSDs in things, and one system I work with regularly has a RAID array of PCIe 2T SSDs capable of 2+G/s read and write. I’ve recorded more than 2T worth of multitrack content. And so forth.

One of the things my friend Andy wanted me to do was figure out a mathematical model for measuring the impact of gratitude.

I haven’t done that yet – I’ve put in some time on it, but it’s resisting a easy solution. I have, however, as a side corollary been thinking about measuring suffering, which is not exactly the inverse of gratitude but is tangentially related to the inverse.

Measuring suffering mathematically is a important thing to be able to do in order to do triage to figure out which issues facing the human race should be solved first. I grant you that we don’t currently do this kind of triage in any meaningful or useful way – somehow the herd picks a flavor of the week to solve, but it doesn’t appear to be that connected to what’s hurting the most people.

Anyway, let me talk about my thoughts on the matter, and then we can come back to that if I still have the energy. If not, I’ll probably talk about it in a future article.

For measuring suffering, the first and most obvious thing to measure is direct impact. You measure the suffering intensity (we could arbitrarily scale this as between 0 and 1), the suffering duration, and the number of people impacted. Multiply these three numbers together and you have the suffering quotient. It doesn’t really matter what scaling you use on the three numbers, as long as you use the same scaling for all problems, since all we’re really trying to get at here is some meaningful way to measure that can be used to compare sources of suffering and figure out which ones to fix first.

Beyond the direct impact, there’s the indirect impact – the “If mama aint happy nobody aint happy” impact. For example, the police shooting innocent people has a large indirect impact – it makes everyone sad and angry – while kidney stones would have almost no indirect impact. Deaths tend to have indirect impact. This can be measured in the same terms, but is a lot more complicated to figure out what the appropriate values are and likely involves a statistical distribution of values depending on the number of people indirectly affected and how strongly the issue affects them.

The direct and indirect impacts just sum together, nothing complicated there.

There’s also the potential impact of not resolving the suffering. For the cops shooting civilians, you have a potential civil war on your hands, which has a enormous suffering quotient. For cancer and AIDS you have people dying, which is not as bad as people dying in a war zone but still bad. For some things, this third effect doesn’t apply.

Because it’s a conditional, it should really be in a separate column rather than summed with the other two.

Another question is where to get the suffering quotient from. You can get people to self-report, but outside the land of physical pain a lot of suffering quotients (fear of being homeless, fear of getting shot by the cops, etc) are really hard to quantify. It’s possible that some of this could be determined by looking at the fatigue poisons in people’s blood, and possibly neurotransmitters behind the blood-brain barrier. I don’t know to what state our science is when it comes to measuring misery, so I don’t know if this is something we already know how to measure or not.

Anyway, I do think figuring out a mathematical model for measuring suffering and using it to measure the current large problems facing us would be a smart thing to do.

This is more of me trying to get a handle on Vienna. This one is interesting in that *none* of the instruments in it have any corporeal existence – well, many of them might be based on samples, but as of now they’re all software running on a x86 😉

String Blues

http://www.umc.org/news-and-media/florida-bishop-responds-to-massacre.

I’m not a huge fan of Abrahamic religions. But increasingly, I see people growing beyond the horror and hate of religion, and embracing the idea of love, tolerance, acceptance, and the like. In the midst of the dark, fear, and dystopia, every ray of love, life, acceptance, and hope is appreciated.

So, I keep going back and forth as to whether this would be a good idea. I think I’ve talked about it before. But it would be technically feasible to add a device similar to Amazon Echo to every dorm room and frat house. The idea would be to create a ‘safeword’ – something that would almost never false positive – that would call 911 and give the location of the device and audio clips from it.

The downside is it’s surveillance, and it would also probably get abused by government which would then insist the devices could be used for monitoring. The upside is that it could vastly cut down on things like campus rape. I can’t decide if it’s a good idea or not. But watching The Hunting Ground makes it seem like it might be.

It does occur to me that there could be a easy opt-in system.. a app you’d install on your mobile phone that listens for a word and calls 911. It’d be power-hungry, you’d only activate it when going into a situation where you knew there was danger.. but it’d be useful. You could also have it call 911 if you *didn’t* say a certain word every N minutes, if you were concerned about date rape drugs, or if someone tried to disable it without disarming it first.

With a *lot* of CPU power (more than a phone likely has, you’d have to stream it to a more powerful computer), you could add voice detection so the app would know whether it was hearing your voice or not.. You could also add a monitoring center, like high end alarm systems, so rather than calling 911 you’d pay a monthly fee to have someone listen in and determine if the situation was all right. Groups of friends going to the same party could all register with it, or it could use GPS coordinates, so the monitoring system could do things like sending a message ‘Amy might be in trouble, we haven’t heard her voice in 20 minutes and she didn’t give the signoff / all clear word’

The other difficult thing would be getting people to know and understand that college campuses are dangerous places.

I also think encouraging the idea of affirmative/positive consent would be a good thing.

When I moved to the new house in Seattle I replaced the oil burner with a heat pump. This was mostly self-preservation – the inverter-drive pump I chose draws about $200/month worth of power off the line, vs $600 worth of oil.

The installers managed to take many days to install it, despite it being a basicly drop-in kind of thing. Partially, I chose a Mitsubishi PUMY, which has a computer network between all the various components and requires assigning unique addresses to them all, something that apparently was too complex for your average HVAC guy, and partially they needed some help installing the thermostat. (Yes, I installed it. They had spent a day trying to get it to hang on the wall.. the old wires were too short. A couple of quick disconnects and short extenders later, while they were out on their lunch break, problem solved.

I have come to suspect the people who I bought it from are idiots.

It’s a multi-zone system.. multiple heat exchangers with multiple fans.. because me and Gayle have different ideas about what is a comfortable temp. After my first “free” tune up, the basement heat exchanger wouldn’t turn on.

I called and they sent a tech out. The tech reported it needed a new circuit board. I expressed dubiousness, but told him to go ahead and order it. Tech went away. Later, another tech came out to install the circuit board, and after testing reported that it needed *all* new circuit boards, because a “power surge had destroyed something”.

Now, I’m dubious as anything. First of all, all the other zones were working fine. I couldn’t think of *any* failure mode that would have all but one zone working but need a new, say, inverter drive board. So, I sent him away with a “well, order whatever parts you think it needs…”

Then I got out the manuals. After perusing the relevant bits, I got out the voltmeter, and measured the voltage across the network cable to the zone that wasn’t working. 0 volts. Hmmm. Pretty sure the manual says it’s a current loop and I should see 24 volts at all times.

I do some quick tracing, and discover that they had used wire nuts barely adequate for two 24AWG wires to bind together 5 20AWG ones. I tug on the bundle of wires, and one comes loose. I go and get the proper wire nuts from my toolkit, replace them, reboot the system (after a couple of false starts, turns out you must turn off the compressor last and turn it on first.. which is in the manual, but not in the obvious place) and lo and behold, my zone works again.

I’m better at troubleshooting a AC system than *two* technicians who do it as their *full time job*?

I could forgive them more easily if it had been something that was unique to a computer driven / networked HVAC system. But this issue would have broken even a plain ol’ relays and motors system.

I’m trying to decide what a appropriate thing to do is. I don’t want to be deliberately hurtful (i.e. call them and say “you guys are idiots..”) but at the same time I feel like they should in some way learn from their mistake.

What’s more, I paid for a year’s service contract, but there is no way in *hell* they are ever touching this system again. I’m scared what they might do to it. I have no doubt that if they’d replaced every PCB in the system, it would have *lowered* the reliability. Do I demand a refund? I also feel for anyone else who might be getting their system serviced by these guys. Do I publish my story?

Even worse, I looked at the PCBs.. they have surge suppression out the ying-yang. MOVs. zeners. Snubber caps. The idea that a surge could have knocked this thing out and not damaged any of the much-less-well-built electronics I have all over the place is laughable.

Meh. I have no idea what the right thing to do socially is. There has to be somewhere between “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” and letting people walk all over you.

1) Bernie supporters, while it would be great if the government would become more socialist, we don’t actually have to wait for it to live in a more socialist world. If your financial situation is above average, help your friends. If it’s below average, share the problems you’re having so people can help you, and accept help. Whenever possible, trade skills for skills to stay outside the tax system entirely. I’m sure we can think of a whole lot of ways to live in a more socialist way without needing the government’s help or permission.

2) As we’re woe-is-meing about the horrible horrible “other side” in political situations, remember my discussion earlier about how the conservative or liberal neurons in a natural neural network are both playing important roles. If you removed either the right-bias or left-bias neurons from a NNN, the results would not be good. The same is very likely true for big systems of humans. We probably need to find a better way to make this a blending of signals rather than a war – machine assisted telepathy is one of the things I like for this – but whatever your political bias, we need both you and your opposite number to make good decisions.

3) Look at the big picture. Most of us are fed, most of us are clothed, most of us have power, most of us have the ability to send a message anywhere in the world in milliseconds. Increasingly, we’re aware of the places where there are fundamental problems and we’re trying to fix them. Overall, the long term curve for Earth is very positive. If you doubt this, go read some history. The immediate situation often looks very screwed up, but if you look at the big picture, stuff is getting better.

I remember the first Prince song I ever heard. I had bought a FM radio at a yard sale with a misaligned IF, and after twiddling a few tuning slugs in the back, it started bringing in some New York pop station. One of the first songs I heard on my newly operational radio was ‘Kiss’.

I of course loved it. I loved a lot of his music. Since hearing of his death, I’ve only played one Prince song (let’s go crazy), but the playlist in my head has included a lot more of them (Seven, Kiss, Little Red Corvette, When Doves Cry, among others)

I like writing music about sex, which gives me something in common with Prince. I imagine I have some other things in common with him as well, but there are also some striking differences – religion, mostly. I suppose right now he knows whether he was right or wrong. Or he doesn’t know anything at all.

I first heard he was dead on Brig. I think I was laying in my bed. My first thoughts were that it was too soon.

So, I have a humble suggestion for making a good electronic voting network. What we need is widely deployed, hardened, secure, reliable computer terminals with some ability to identify the user. What’s that you say? We already have those, and they’re called ATMs? Why, yes, that’s exactly what I’m thinking.

I figure there aren’t that many models of hardened ATMs, and they’re all X86 based. It would not be that hard to deploy voting software to them. While we’re at it, let’s use modern crypographic methods to make sure that our votes were really counted. The ATM can print a receipt with a signature that you can go look up to make sure your vote made it to the vote aggregation centers.

The government could issue a ATM-esque card to every voter, that they could use to verify their party registration, vote, etc. The way the current ATM network works is probably a perfect model for how to handle this. People who already have bank accounts could even just use their current ATM card to authenticate themselves, although that might be going a little far.