Fly Me To The Moon (2008 Remastered)

Strongman Trump Returns

 

Democrats lose Senate. Harris wins in VA, MD, Del., NY, NJ, Conn, RI, Mass, NH, Vermont, Ill, Minn, Colo, NM, Wash,Ore, Calif.- 

The Christian conviction is that no human being comes from bad seed — no one is genetically programmed to evil. Neither is any of us lacking a capacity for evil. As Solzhenitsyn wrote:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of hearts, there remains… an un-uprooted small corner of evil.

[Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, “The Ascent”]

Continues.... https://jimandnancyforest.com/2005/04/we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-us/

Neural Nets Nab Nobel

Hopfield circuit

I was pretty lucky to cover neural networks on occasions for EDN Product News in the 1990s. I'd edited articles on the topic previously for ESD. So always paid close attention  .. and more so  as machine learning increasingly concentrated on neural engines. So, when The Nobel Prize for Physics went to Hopfield and Hinton, I shifted from on project and wrote an old style tech news story. A bit of a pleasant rush, especially to complete for Miller Time for my Progressive Gauge Blog.  Here I insert some images that basically show neurals. Admit the story lacked that. JV

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today announced that neural network science pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2024. The two researchers are cited for “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

The Nobel award is a capstone of sorts for two premier researchers in neural networks. This computer technology has gained global attention in recent years as the underpinning engine for large-scale advances in computer vision, language processing, prediction and human-machine interaction.

John Hopfield is best known for efforts to re-create interconnect models of the human brain. At the California Institute of Technology in the 1980s, he developed foundational concepts for neural network models.

These efforts led to what became known as a Hopfield network architecture. In effect, these are simulations that work as associative memory models that can process, store and retrieve patterns based on partial and imprecise information inputs.

Geoffrey Hinton, now a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, began studies in the 1970s on neural networks mimicking human brain activity. Such reinterpretations of the brain’s interconnectedness found gradually greater use in pattern recognition through many years, leading to extensive use today in small- and large-arrays of semiconductors.

In the 1980s, Hinton and fellow researchers focused efforts on backpropagation algorithms for training neural networks and, later, so-called deep learning networks which are at the heart of today’s generative AI models. As implemented on computer chips from Nvidia and others, these models are now anticipated to drive breakthrough innovations in a wide variety of scientific and business fields. Hinton has been vocal in concerns about the future course of AI, and how it may have detrimental effects. He recently left a consulting position at Google, so he could speak more freely about his concerns.

What’s now known as artificial intelligent in the form of neural networks began to take shape in the 1950s. Research in both neural networks and competitive expert system AI approaches saw a decline in the 1990s as disappointing results accompanied the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, which had been a big driver of funds.

This period was known as the “AI Winter.” Hinton’s and Hopfield’s work was key in carrying the neural efforts forward until advances in language and imaging processing inspired new interest in the neural approaches.

Drawbacks still track the neural movement – most notably the frequent difficulty researchers face in understanding the work going on within a “black box’ of neural networks.

Both Hinton and Hopfield addressed the issues of AI in society during Nobel Prize-related press conferences. The unknown limits of AI capabilities – particularly a possible future superintelligence – have been widely discussed, and were echoed in reporters’ questions and Nobelists’ replies.

“We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us,” Hinton told the presser assembled by the Nobel committee. It’s going to be wonderful in many respects, in areas like healthcare. But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences. Particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

Hopfield, by Zoom, echoed those concerns, discussing neural-based AI at an event honoring his accomplishment at Princeton.

Taking a somewhat evolutionary perspective, he said: “I worry about anything which says ‘I’m big. I’m fast. I’m faster than you are. I’m bigger than you are, and I can also outrun you. Now can you peacefully inhabit with me?’ I don’t know.”

Hinnton's Boltzman Machine

But is it physics?

As implemented on computer chips from Nvidia and others, the neural models are anticipated to drive breakthrough innovations in a wide variety of scientific and business fields.

Both Hinton’s and Hopfield’s work spanned fields like biology, physics, computer science, and neuroscience. The multidisciplinary nature of much of this work required Nobel judges to clamber and jimmy and ultimately fit the neural network accomplishments into the Physics category.

“The laureates’ work has already been of the greatest benefit. In physics we use artificial neural networks in a vast range of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties,” said Ellen Moons, Chair of the Nobel Committee for physics in a statement. – JV

Sunnyland Slim - Everytime I Get To Drinkin' (Live Video - 1969)

Blind Willie Johnson - Sings for Dearly Departed

Boston Punk Rock Discussion

 A Discussion: Boston Punk Rock: Landmarks, Bands, and the Scene - Saturday, September 14, 3:00pm–4:30pm Parker Hill – Registration is required.

 

Raw and simple, punk music emerged in the 1970s in reaction to mainstream rock of the era. It was DIY - you just needed three chords, and you didn’t have to be in tune.

 

That is arguably background for Saturday’s special discussion which features A.J. Wachtel who has covered the Boston Entertainment scene as a music journalist for over 40 years. He is the host on Wachtelligence podcast, where he has interviewed such Boston music mainstays as Rick Berlin, famed of Orchestra Luna, Steve Cataldo of The Nervous Eaters, Bob Margolin of the Muddy Waters Band, and many others.

 

The event is intended as a celebration of the city's vibrant punk heritage, spotlighting influential bands, iconic venues -- Who went to The Ratskellar?! -- and the indelible impact they've made on the genre.

 

In fact, the discussion is part of the Boston Public Library’s ongoing “Revolutionary Music: Music for Social Change” Project, which covers musical innovation going back to the American Revolution, and up to the present. https://www.bpl.org/revolutionary-music/

 

The Friends of the Parker Hill Branch Library Newsletter spoke with Amy Layton, PHBL Generalist II, to get a view on the meaning of Punk music in the context of community. We asked what was the value of the Punk movement viewed from this 21st Century vantage point. She said:

 

“The first and foremost thing is that it really does connect a community together, especially from a do-it-yourself aspect. And I think, too, it would be really fun for the people who have actually been in the original scene to be able to connect with some of the youth now in the movement, so to speak, and just be able to share their experience.”

 

Notably, the Boston Punk Rock discussion kicks off a week of Punk-related specials at the Branch! Punk Rock Week events include : Drop-in Zine Making Tuesday, September 17, 4:00pm–5:00pm; Vinyl Record Painting [which now has a wait list and has full registration] and Mosh Pit Injury Prevention - Wednesday, September 18, 1:00pm–3:00pm. Call for information.

 

Til next time – Keep Reading!

Walking by Blues on a brickwall

 

A favorite picture of Cecelia [in Chicago, late 1970s]

Moon Times

NIST researchers have developed a system called lunar coordinate time with the express purpose to achieve precise timekeeping on the Moon. 

 We may recall US astronauts wore Omegas to the Moon. But maybe their time was off.

 That’s because the Moon's weaker gravity causes clocks to tick faster than on Earth. That’s due to what Einstein reckoned was gravity’s influences on passage of time,

 I guess you could “synchronize watches” as they did in every Mission Impossible heist, and you’d remain in time with your bro buddies, if not the cosmos.

 That may not work when the great era of colonized lunacy arrives, and the machines inside different Ice Stations Gamma Alpha and Zebra call each other at an agreed-to time.

 NIST boffins say this innovation paves the way for a GPS-like navigation system on the Moon, which would greatly enhance lunar exploration efforts by enabling precise landing and navigation capabilities.

 Will they use a distinct satellite network?

 Proposed is a system that aims to create a lunar equivalent of GPS, referred to as a "lunar positioning system," by establishing a network of atomic clocks at specific locations on the Moon's surface and in lunar orbi

Lunar orbiting atomic clocks would function similarly to GPS satellites, providing accurate timing signals for navigation. That to answer the question: “Where’s Neil?”

 NIST, heck yeah!

Vaults of Vonnegut

Player Piano by Vonnegut describes the factory and the rise of automation in a dystopian but whimsical future. Machinists with their blackened hands. The punch press sound: 'Aw grump. Tonka Tonka. Aw grump. Tonka Tonka.' Vonnegut paints a picture where all humans face the fate of Native peoples run over by a colonizing power, in this case the power is technology, you have little but leisure time, your caught in a dream of 1984 with less harsh edges.

He was something of a technical writer when he composed Player Piano [alternatively titled "Utopia." 

[a press release and story writer for GE in Schenectady, NY after WW II] and was quite aware of "Cybernetics" because Weiner's writings were prominent. Norbert Weiner appears on page 14 of Player Piano, he comes up in conversation about time and motion. 

Reading' And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut a Life" by Charles J Shields page 97 vonnegut is working at General Electric in Schenectady the job he got through his brother a company scientist who among other work experimented with seeding clouds to create rain. Kurt fudged his application form saying he graduated from college. In fact,  he had attended Cornell and another school without graduating.

 

We will find him at the GE Schenectady works among full time publishing staff that created manuals examinations and visual aids and promotional stories on GE advances in all kinds of publications. He had previously worked as a newspaper man, and readily found targets for story ideas about the company’s progressive technology.

 

The author Shields says Vonnegut was initially very positive about working at the company he wrote for example about sodium lights. Among favored projects was an oral history with some of GE famed long time researchers headed to retirement.

 

General Electric was all about progress. The company motto was “Progress is our most important product.” [Recalling tonight a train trip from Chicago to Boston, and an interminable evening’s wait in Schenectady [for a NY train to connect] near GE which was a limitless industrial complex of otherworldly sodium lighting.]

 

He bemoaned on occasion his classification as a science fiction writer, saying the fact that he had technology in stories should not consign him to such a category.

 

But the experience was to sour and in the end would see Schenectady serving as a setting for his first novel - Player Piano.

 

Page 123 play it piano saw a cameo [of sorts] appearance by Norbert Weiner - the father of cybernetics. Player Piano [a droll title choice as the paper punch-roll programmed instrument put a few ticklers out of work in its day.

 

Player piano was very much about automation and dehumanization as a result of computerization. Kurt sent a copy of player Piano galleys to Weiner who bridled at the books  insertion of a John von Neumann character. Why don't you change the name? he asked.

 ***

Later on Cape Cod, It was a struggling artist version of KV that was to follow. Writing novels. Trying to pay for his family's needs by selling stories to Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post. Knowing the different magazines of the day that placed short fiction would come to an end with the Golden Age of television emerging. He quickly realized that work orders for magazine fiction would have to give way to television show scripts that he couldn’t quite hit with. When his father died he inherited money which mostly was wasted on the effort to start a foreign car dealership in Osterville on the Cape. The hope was it would work magically, and he could just write. The bottom feeder market of paperback reprints sold in ‘dime stores and bus stations’ would have to serve as his golden path.

copy to come

***

Reading Player Piano. And remembering the factory cybernetic. A lot of these idea were in my head when I got a summer job on assembly lines at Johnson's Wax [if you ever get to Wisconsin, be sure in visit the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Johnson's Wax building - the factory moved many years ago.]

When I worked the Paste Wax line at Johnson's, we placed the lids on the cans (two of us) by hand. It could well have been the oldest line in the old factory. With so much cybernation around, it seemed primitive - something that could be automated. And I would look at the other lines (the Jubilee line with its ear shattering glass jostling was adjacent) and wonder how. Earl, the engineer, I remember him now in crew cut, white short sleeve shirt, tie, glasses and pocket protector, would come by and eye the process as well. This was me entering the world. When I worked the line, one day, my compatriot, Pedro did not come back from lunch. His girl friend shot him over his paycheck. Well, he was just 'winged' - and he was back in work the next day (hilariously using just one arm to put lids on cans).

When I worked the line: they would pump-in Muzak. Then by syndicated radio. Once a week, in some alternating pattern related to pay day: "Whistle While you Work."

Player Piano [1952], his first book which I bought at Shorecrest circa 1965. A satire on corporate life that carries echoes of Brave New World and concerns an engineer working at Ilium Works [GE] who comes to lead a band that destroys machines they think are taking over the world

Player Piano by Vonnegut describes the factory and the rise of automation in a dystopian but whimsical future. Machinists with their blackened hands. Great description of the punch press sound: 'Aw grump. Tonka Tonka. Aw grump. Tonka Tonka.' Vonnegut was something of a technical writer [a press release and story writer for GE in Schenectady, NY after WW II] and was quite aware of "Cybernetics" because Weiner's writings were prominent. Norbert Weiner appears on page 14 of Player Piano, he comes up in conversation about time and motion.