2017/12/17

After reading the "discussion" between Elon Musk and established public transportation experts my first thoughts are established industries  need outsiders to come in periodically with new ideas and disrupt things, otherwise the industry tends toward stagnation. People who are already versed in the current state have a vested interest in Keeping things how they are, on top of  peoples natural reluctance to change. The issue in this case likely will come to revolve around  government regulations however, as that's what  always happens when the government is running an industry , they regulate away competition.   We'll see if Musk has the wherewithal and  staying power to shake up another government run industry, this one with more players.

2017/12/14

So I've been using AngularJS for about 2 years now and while it is a vast improvement over using the javascript of old, the IDE's still fail to impress. I know it's due to javascript being a duck typed language but I've been waiting far too long for Something to impress me. VS Code is good, but still doesn't recognize things that are defined in other files when trying to go to definition, and for parameters you won't get anything other than "any" if you're not working with typescript. I know, duck typed, and that's what gives JS a lot of its power but man I hate not having intellisense for so many things.
On another topic, tomorrow I finish up my focus topic(?) on headspace (meditation), it will be nice to finally move on to something new, but I haven't picked out my next area yet.
My goat farming partner has brought me 6 more goats over the last 3 days, herd size is now 18. I'll be working this weekend to get more yard fenced in and hoping the guy that will be clearing another acre for us will be able to do it before next month. I also need to set up a catch pen so I don't have to chase them to give them shots.

2017/12/13

So today I'm writing on politics, hopefully in an area not too controversial. There is an idea/app that I saw mentioned some years ago and have re-visited recently, democracyOS. I find this more interesting from a policy perspective than I do from a technological one, for this reason: the ratio of congressional representatives to the constituents they represent has become far out of balance from its original value. I think the original ratio was 30,000 to 1, and it has now grown to approach 1,000,000 to 1. That means each individual is getting 30 x less representation. Is it any wonder why congress only listens to the most vocal? I appreciate what the difficulties of organizing 30 x more congressional representatives, and managing that number of people would have been untenable even in the recent past, but we could change this with the technology available today. There is really no need for representatives to physically gather in D.C. Keep then home and available to the people they represent. I don't think managing 10,000 people voting on things is really that big a deal now.

Musings on writing

so I've read numerous times in the past couple of weeks on topics along the lines of in order to get good at something, do it a lot so here I am Writing. My topics will be many and varied, as I have lots of interests, from goat farming to electromagnetic rail launches for satellites, AI and Machine learning to hapkido and meditation, politics to religion (2 of my favorites at parties).

Today I think I'll write, a bit about two AI./ Machine /Deep learning courses I'm Taking from coursera.org. These are interesting so far, one feels a bit light on algorithms, but has said it will get more in depth later. What I find vexing is that what they all seem to be using is the same couple of ideas, neither of which Could be Called new. One is back propagation in order for these algorithms to be (somewhat) self learning, and the other is that gradient descent, or some variant of such, is used to find optimal equations for the data. I'm not a mathematician by any stretch , but I wonder if there are it other, better ways to fit the data. I wonder if quantum computing algorithms would make these processes foster, it would Seem applicable at fist glance with my limited knowledge of QC on the other Concern, back prop being the current backbone of AI, I can't think of an other Method of automated  feed back Maybe using another algorithm to Complement, A kind of Automated supervised learning to handle tweaking the meta parameters used in the process.

Well, that's  it for this time, forgive any horrendous typos as I'm writing this On my surface Pro and will be using the writing to text feature ☺

Judging by this I will definitely need to work on my handwriting or just type.

Dying is easy

We all do it.   Why do we see the sacrifice that Jesus made as such a difficult choice?  Why raise up as heroes those that die to save others?  We are all going to die, it's just a question of when and how.  Wouldn't you give your life to save your children?   I know I would, without hesitation.  And I would for any child I could save.   With adults the decision becomes more difficult, at least for me: would you give up your life for a stranger?   Someone you don't even like?   It is still an easy choice when you talk about groups of people, again, at least for me.

Wouldn't 90+%(?) of people sacrifice themselves to save all of mankind?   I think a much harder moral question is one raised in the movie Swordfish; who would or could you kill in order to save another person/group of people?  Would you kill 1 to save 1000?  Kill one to save 100? 10?  You can make this arbitrarily difficult,  but the ultimate question is the same: if you kill some to save many is that more moral than allowing the many to die, but not by your hand, and what if you can't guarantee that if you didn't kill the one, then the X would die?