General

We live in a strange world. There is so much information at our fingertips that it is almost impossible to comprehend just how much of an information age we live in.

I’ve talked about this in the past, my mother was a telephone operator, as was her sister. They worked in a large town in Wisconsin.

There were two T1 trunks heading towards Chicago and two T1 trunks headed west towards Minneapolis. This means they could have a grand total of 96 long-distance calls going at any one time.

The grand total of the bandwidth for the town was 6.176 Mbit/second. That was it.

In the early 90s, we were mostly using 10base2 and 10baseT connections. That is, 10 Mb/s. The actual throughput was closer to 5 Mbps. So, about the same bandwidth as the entire town.

We were pleased when we upgraded to 100baseT. We were also using 125Mbps fiber connections. We actually had more network bandwidth than disk bandwidth.

Today, most of my boxes, at the office/house, are 1000baseT. I’m in the process of upgrading the infrastructure to 10Gbit/second. This isn’t for the servers, most of them will continue to be 1Gbps connections, but the inter-switch connections will upgrade to 10Gbps.

Why is this of any interest? Why am I doing this? Simple, I currently have 70 TB of storage at the home. This is about to get to nearly 100 TB. There will be 5 servers with 24 TB of disk each, 2 servers with 12 TB of disk. Those servers need to be able to move data very rapidly. The bottleneck has become the network, again.

This storage is for every movie I ever purchased plus daily backups, plus more software than I can shake a stick at.

Each of the primary servers cost $300 to stand up. $100 for the computer, $200 for disk drives. The other servers are multipurpose, so they have more CPU and more memory.

For you, old folks, you might remember the encyclopedias of your youth. This was the single largest collection of knowledge we knew. The Encyclopedia Britannica was 32 volumes in size. It was released on a two CD version. Each CD held 750 Mbytes of data.

1.5 GB total.

That encyclopedia would consume 0.00101725% of my storage. And I’m small compared to the bigger boys out there.

All of this is to say, there is nothing that has ever been digitized that doesn’t now exist somewhere on the Internet. Storage is cheap.

If you have ever sent a “dick pic”, it is on the Internet, somewhere. If you have ever sent a “bra pic”, it exists. It doesn’t go away.

If you have ever written a comment or posted an article, it exists, somewhere.

There are entities whose entire business model is to scarf every last byte from the internet.

To quote a great philosopher, quoting some stranger:

A First Principle is that two things can be true at the same time.

I can be fat and I can be old. Both are true, at the same time.

Next, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

50 years ago, a picture was worth a thousand words, and it could communicate truth where words could lie.

This was never “true”, it was just believed. Photographers have been doing “touch up” of photos since the earliest days. Some of that involved painting directly on the plates, other times it was more extensive.

It got to the point where people were building composite photographs, showing things that did not exist.

This painting caught my eye when I saw it in the National Gallery. I took a picture of it, then had a correspondence with the Gallery because I could not find it in their gallery.

The reason is that the painting doesn’t belong to the Gallery, so it is not in their gallery. This was explained to me, and then the very nice lady explained that this painting was a “fake”.

It was fake in that this particular scene never took place. This is not the artist adjusting the setting or anything like that. The artist was known to make quick sketches of interesting people doing interesting things. Or just interesting things. He would then create a composite image from those sketches and, from that image, paint something that wasn’t “real” but it wasn’t truly fake, either.

I expressed it as “The Photoshop of 1846”, to which she agreed.

We have become much more sophisticated. We even have a word for those manipulated and faked images, they are “Photoshopped”.

We see, and most of us recognize, the manipulations that are used on the cover of magazines. We notice it when things “just don’t look right”.

One famous example was the Vogue cover featuring Cindy Crawford. The magazine had “erased” her mole. She got upset and said that her mole was part of who she was.

I spent years working on Computer Graphics, making very high-quality renderings with no real images involved. At one point, one of my teammates was giving a presentation to some brass. He was talking about how we had managed to make our trees look more realistic.

As he was speaking, he was clicking through different images of a real place. Well, the digital elevation map, as we rendered it, with our fake trees planted where the trees were in the real location.

Not a single pixel of the images shown was real. It was all computer-generated images.

After about 15 minutes of the talk, somebody with brass on his shoulders stood up and said something like: Enough, I’ve been to there, I know what it looks like, I want to see your images.

Our fake images looked enough like the real thing that an intelligent guy, with stars on his shoulders, that he was looking at real images.

Those images took days to model, weeks of programming, hours per image to render.

Today, you can ask an “AI” to create an image for you, refine it, then push it out as real. The image will often be a composite of many real images or sub-images.

Photoshop actually has “smart fill” and “smart erase” that are designed to use AI to “seamlessly” fill areas of an image or erase areas of an image.

What 20 years ago took a team months to accomplish, a troll on a media team can accomplish in minutes.

It has gotten to the point where people can create an AI movie by creating the proper prompts.

Some AI-generated images are easy to detect. A Tuesday Tune I posted had visuals created by AI. Not my doing. Some guns were absolutely mind-blowing. The cylinders with 8 chambers, each chamber looking like a keyhole. It was fun, in its obvious errors.

We had the period of time when people were getting multiple rows of teeth, or hands with six fingers, or a dozen other “standard” errors. It was fun to pick out, or down right terrifying, depending on your view point.

Can we trust our eyes when we watch a video? We know some ways that things are faked. But this new technology is going to get better, harder to detect. We are already long past, “Pictures, or it didn’t happen”. We are rapidly moving past, “Video, or it didn’t happen.”

Dad is in long-term care. He will never return to the home he shared with his wife, my mother, for the last 20+ years.

Last week was a hard trip to say goodbye. He was in good spirits and doing “ok”. He is not nearly as sharp as he was a couple of years ago. He has had one major cardio event, and they think he is having mini-strokes.

He remembers that his wife is dead, then 5 minutes later starts asking if we have talked to her recently and know how she is doing.

He remembers her going into the basement at our family goodbye to mom. That was about 6 months ago. He does not remember her ever coming back upstairs.

He has conflated an event with my eldest daughter and his wife to think mom borrowed some money from him to buy a car and left him.

It is easier for him to believe that she left him, than that she is dead. I wish I could believe she was still alive.

But that is boring stuff.

The more interesting part was that we were tasked with helping to clear the house. My youngest coordinated with “The Cousins” to make sure all the grandchildren got a fair share and what they wanted. When we arrived on Wed., they were there.

They went into a search and divide mission, which was cool to see. What was even better was the lack of anxiety or conflict between any of them.

After the work was done, I had the pleasure of working with one of my nephews. He is interested in picking up his first EDC pistol. He is very down on “small” pistols. That was until I showed him the P398 to show him that it works very well as a pocket pistol.

That started to change his mind, but then he got to try the 1911 for size. That he liked, even though he felt it was a bit heavier.

He got to look over and handle the AR15 platform.

The conversation then turned to Mom and Dad’s views on guns.

Dad was never “anti-gun”. After he was exposed to CNN and the constant Republican’s are bad rhetoric, he changed his opinion from “2A” to “you don’t need a …”. At the end, he was no longer pro-2A and felt that universal background checks, LCM, and “assault weapon” bans were ok.

He never pushed back on me about my very PRO 2A opinions. It was something we didn’t discuss when he was able to discuss.

One of my tasks is to evaluate and rescue every piece of data he has on his computer. This meant collecting all the external drives, the main desktop computer, the two husks, the external drives, the USB cards. I think I have all of that.

In the process, I was down under his desk taking things apart, and I turned and looked at the mid-shelf of his desk.

I’m looking at the back strap of a Glock like pistol.

To say I was a bit surprised would be a serious understatement.

I take the pistol and bring it out to inspect, automaticity going through the clearing operation.

The slide doesn’t run. There is no safety keeping the slide from moving. The weight is wrong.

I drop the mag and only then realize it is a BB gun.

0.177 steel balls.

Mom hated the squirrels in the bird feeders. She must have gotten tired of the lack of results from airsoft and upgraded to this thing.

The next time somebody says, “It was only a BB gun.”, I will remember this instant. There is no way in hell I would have let a bad guy point that thing at me. There was no way to know it was “just a BB gun” from the muzzle end at 5 feet.

I started caring about computer infrastructure in the early 1980s. We feed our computer via punch cards, 9 track tape, and a few dozen hardwired terminals at 4800 baud.

We upgraded our network. We got our IBM 3090 on BITNET. I learned more about networking.

We upgraded to 10base2 when our Sun 360s arrived. More and more of campus had Ethernet.

When I arrived in Maryland, I was babysitting some Super Computers. There were nearly 1000 computers hooked up to the network. Most of those were running some variation of Unix.

To keep all of those machines up-to-date took a highly skilled team of system administrators. They handled all the machines on campus except for the Super Computers, which my team took care of.

If they needed help, the team could call on my Mentor’s team. His team was part of the group of people that defined the Internet. Yes, really.

That support team spent about 25% of their time caring for around 800 Unix machines. They spent the other 75% trying to care for the Apple’s and Microsoft machines. The workload was getting greater and greater as more and more Microsoft and Apple machines came on campus.

By the time I left, they had to increase the size of that support team from two skilled workers, to four skilled workers. 2 of them did nothing but Microsoft support.

The number of Unix boxes increased and still was taking less than 20% of the teams efforts.

I wish that was still the case.

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There are 15 shooting sports in the current Olympic Games:

1. 10m Air Rifle Men
2. 50m Rifle 3 Positions Men
3. 10m Air Pistol Men
4. 25m Rapid Fire Pistol Men
5. Trap Men
6. Skeet Men
7. 10m Air Rifle Women
8. 50m Rifle 3 Positions Women
9. 10m Air Pistol Women
10. 25m Pistol Women
11. Trap Women
12. Skeet Women
13. 10m Air Rifle Mixed Team
14. 10m Air Pistol Mixed Team
15. Skeet Mixed Team

The pistol and rifle are .22 Caliber, the trap, and skeet are 12gage. The air pistol and air rifle fire 10 mm projectiles.

In reading the rules, they talk about how the shooting jackets are padded to reduce recoil.

How would they deal with the recoil from a 30-06? It boggles the mind.

The rapid shooting requires 5 rounds on target from low ready in 4, 6 and 8 seconds.

Jerry’s 6, reload, 6 in 1.9 seconds would likely break their heads. Of course, they are looking for accuracy rather than speed. Jerry puts all of his rounds in the A box, that is different from the ISSF target.

The 10 Ring is 100 mm in diameter with the inner 10 being 50 MM, the outer ring is 500 mm. They define a miss a bit differently than we would at “9.7”.

Regardless, there are still real rifles at the Olympics.

This dude looks relaxed and laid back as he takes the Bronze. What is spectacular, in this picture, is that he doesn’t look like a cyborg. No fancy gizmos, nothing except ear plugs and prescription glasses.

Why is some random ex-cop from Turkey taking a bronze in a shooting competition? The top four slots should all be Americans.

USA! USA! USA! Rah rah rah.

How many of you have precession air guns? I have one. And it isn’t great. If I had a few hundred to spend on a good air-rifle, I have enough to spend on a good rifle.

My guess is that air-pistol and air-rifle competition just isn’t that popular in the states. We have young children competing in shooting sports. Often times starting with their parents’ firearms.

Those that are superb get sponsorships and are soon professionals, which means they don’t qualify for the Olympics.

Since they added snowboarding to the Winter Olympics, maybe we can hope they will add Three Gun or one of the other standard shooting sports. At that point, I would expect to see more American’s taking medals. Until then, I’m going to laugh at the people who think that a guy shooting with limit equipment is something unheard of.

Then I’m going to the range and putting a few hundred rounds down range. A mix of 9mm, 0.45.

If you are reading this, you are part of the 1% richest people in the world.

I can confidently say that because there are so many people living in object poverty. Not poverty as defined by the government, but actual poverty.

The government likes to define poverty in relative terms. This means that when you are part of a rich society, you can be “below the poverty line” and still be richer than most of the world’s population could ever dream of becoming.

If you are reading this, you have a device capable of connecting to the Internet, that makes you wealthy.

But wealth is not just money, it is also goods. I do not consider myself or my family to be well-off. We struggle to pay our monthly bills, we struggle to support our children’s quest for a collage education. It feels like we are always just one paycheck from disaster.

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Aside, there are two cases pending articles. I’m working on them.

I do not have many friends. It is difficult for me to reach out to my friends to keep in touch with them. Since I work from home, I’m not forced to interact with co-workers. So, few friends.

Note, I use the word “friend” to mean “friend”, not somebody that I work with or classmates. A friend is a friend.

When I left the horrid state of Maryland for the green, green hills of NH, I wasn’t leaving friends behind. My friend and mentor had died a few years earlier. With my kids graduated, there was nothing holding me there.

For six months I lived near the Vermont border while commuting 80+ miles to just outside the inner beltway of Boston. I did that commute 4.5 days a week. On Friday, I left work in Boston and drove back to my family in PA. On Sunday, I drove back to NH.

I was staying with a family as a boarder. I had met her in an online game. We had become online friends. When she got married, Allyson did it for her.

During the months, I became friends with her. She, and her husband, were conservatives. They had the same sort of beliefs that I had. I had many enjoyable conversations with her.

Note, the husband is currently in the “special prison” for those special prisoners who wouldn’t survive in gen pop. I was more than willing to help put him there.

Regardless, we were friends. I helped her when I could. When they lost their house a few years later (husband’s fault), we opened our home to them. When he was kicked out, we continued to support her.

There was many a rainy day that I worked on her car because we were all short on money.

She ate at our table, shared in our lives. She was here for Christmas and for other holidays.

A true friend.

I do not talk to her anymore. Not at all.

There is a part of the abortion argument that flat out escapes me. It is how so many women think that because the federal government is no longer blocking anti-abortion laws, that they are at a considerable risk.

My friend is a few months older than I am. She isn’t going to get pregnant. It isn’t going to happen. Having access to an abortion is meaningless to her.

What about her daughters? One daughter is happy making babies with her husband. The other daughter is happy being an Aunt. That one can’t think of a man sexually, see not above about her step-father being in the special prison.

Nether of her daughters is at risk of an unintended pregnancy. So why is abortion so important to her?

My youngest is also very upset that the federal government is blocked from blocking anti-abortion legislation. She considers it to be part of “woman’s health”.

It is essential to understand, abortions are not banned in this state.

Roe v. Wade found that women had a right to abortions under because they had a right to privacy. Because they had a right to privacy, what happened between the woman and her doctor was none of your business. Thus, abortions are a right under a woman’s right to medical privacy.

Dobbs said, “No. There is no right to abortion hidden in the Constitution. The plain text of the Fourth Amendment does not implicate the conduct in question. There is nothing in this Nation’s historical tradition of regulations that is similar to ‘right to abortion'”.

Having made the statement, the Court overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the question to the states.

Some states had laws that instantly went into effect, banning abortions. Other states enshrined abortion “rights” into their laws. Still, other states didn’t do a damn thing.

But the Dobbs case broke my friend.

She blamed Trump, personally, for strangers in other states having restricted access to abortions. Having decided that Trump was “evil,” she then dove into the Kool-Aid and drank all that she could and more.

She went from “there is no evidence that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted anyone” to “Kavanaugh was credibly accused of sexual assault and is not qualified to be on the Court.”

It happened in the course of a few days.

She went from “Thomas is a great justice.” to “Justice is a political hack, he is slimy, in the pocket of the wealthy.”

Her mind broke. It broke because it was so obvious to her, that Dobbs was decided incorrectly, that the only possible reason was corruption or malfeasance.

If the justices on the Supreme Court, whom she trusted, whom she respected, could betray her, then what else are they betraying.

Currently, she is of the “vote not Trump.” There is not a single thing that Trump did as president that she respects. All of it was destroyed, for her, with that one opinion.

I believe that I am willing to question just about anything. There are some things which are locked in stone. Not because “they” told me to believe that way, but because I did my research and in that research grounded my opinions.

I like to believe that I am moral. I have a moral code which I follow. Part of that code is to be willing to question my moral code and my opinions, to be able to separate facts from opinions, truth from wishful thinking.

My friend is lost. I do not expect her to ever recover. I will pray for her and hope she finds happyness in her new status as a subject of the state.

Ok, but what does that mean? More importantly, what does it mean to us?

To get an example of cognitive dissonance in “practice”, dig up “I Mudd” from Star Trek. At the end, the crew destroys the androids by setting up cognitive dissonance in their “logical” brains.

One such method was Spock saying to one android “I love you”, and to another, identical android “But I hate you.” When the androids point out that they are identical, Spock replies, “Exactly.”

The left has been trained to exist in a state of cognitive dissonance.

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