The Eternal Doorman

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Some placenames here remained and me of John Muir's "Steep Trails". Around Deer Creek and Antelope Creek, he says "The only effective vehicle in this country is a horse."  The Forest Service already has a multi-million dollar road maintenance backlog, but you can do controlled burns without new roads. Apparently I need a Lookout hat! See  https://the-lookout.org/ . Subscribe to The Lookout . 

19:27   Lamarck described Erythroxylum coca in 1786: See  Encyclopédie méthodique. Botanique : 44:26  There seems to be another possible progenitor of the cultivated species, Erythroxylum cataractarum  see Wade Davis' report of collecting a specimen of this "coca monte" from an 8m tall tree in 1976 at 1:14:25 . See Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't - Erythroxylum gracilipes :The Mother of Coca , but there were possibly two (or three: 53:47 ) different lines of domesticated coca, one in the North (Trujillo and Colombia) and the other in the South (Yungas). He hasn't mentioned the possibility of cross-pollination between different cultivars subsequently brought together. At 1:07:00 he talks about the modern hybrids created for Cocaine production. See Lynn Hirschkind (2005)  The Enigmatic Evanescence of Coca from Ecuador . For more about the summit, see McKenna Academy - Wisdom of the Leaf Coca Summit . Subscribe to McKenna Academy .

Apparently Israeli arms dealers were particular about who they sold their weapons to: they didn't want them to get into the hands of Communists, so they preferred to deal with people like Manuel Noriega who was an admirer of Adolf Hitler. It turns out that Israeli arms dealers were a lynch-pin in the Iran-Contra weapons sales. You can watch this without the awful YouTube AI "dippy American chick" dubbing if you choose the original soundtrack from the settings. Andrew and Leslie Cockburn's 1992 book is available on the Internet Archive:  Dangerous liaison : the inside story of the U.S.-Israeli covert relationship . Subscribe to Julia Buenaventura .

See  This Is Rhodesia  and  Ridley Scott Talking About "Alien" For One and a Half Hours . Subscribe to Deepfocuslens .

A twenty-minute talk given at FOSDEM'23. I just searched YouTube for talks about Forth Interpreters and this one looked the most promising. It is a really great little project he did. See  https://github.com/remko/waforth  and also the thurtle demo:  https://mko.re/waforth/thurtle/ 9:23 He managed to get a kind of poor-man's JIT compilation using a call-out to JavaScript to load a new Web Assembly function.  11:47 He can also use Forth to generate web-assembly "machine code" and so he can write the DUP primitive in Forth. Subscribe to  Remko Tronçon .

The Wisdom of the Leaf Summit took place in the Sacred Valley of Peru on February 3 - 7, 2025, and was produced in collaboration with Wade Davis. See  https://mckenna.academy/mka-programs/wisdom-of-the-leaf-coca-summit/ . There were a lot of talks, including from the Vice President and the General Secretary of Bolivia. "Bolivia is working with the World Health Organization (WHO) to reclassify the coca leaf, moving it from Schedule 1 of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. A strong dossier, supported by Colombia and Peru, has been submitted. Independent experts are reviewing the dossier, and the WHO is expected to issue a draft report in June 2024, open for comment. A final report will follow in October, with a final vote in March 2026. "  Subscribe to McKenna Academy .

See Tai-Danae Bradley, Juan Luis Gastaldi and John Terilla  The Structure of Meaning in Langauge Parralel Narratives in Linear Algebra and Category Theory . See also  Peter Wang on How to Democratise AI . Subscribe to  Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics .

I'm surprised it was so easy to source materials for a design almost a century old, but there seems to be a market for this timber, at least in the US. See Aircraft Spruce . Subscribe to Xyla Foxlin . I did some fact-checking on this one, ... but it's not like she says, ... Subscribe to Warner Bros. Classics . She did a 3-week time-lapse of it. It's exhausting to watch! Subscribe to Xyla Foxlin Offcuts .

It was just three days: see  2025 Summer School on the Assumptions of Physics Recording and slides , and  Curt Jaimungal Intervew With John Norton  and these posts , particularly  Gabriele Carcassi on Physical Convergence and  Sabine Hossenfelder on How Reductionism Changed Her Life . See Gabriele Carcassi, Manuele Landini and Christine A. Aidala  Classical mechanics as the high-entropy limit of quantum mechanics . Subscribe to Assumptions of Physics - The Research .

Interesting bit here about Kier Starmer defending activists! It's about more than Israel though. This is Britain's bullshit economy on trial. Some Al Jazeera pieces: Palestine Action are not terrorists. Israel is More than 800 lawyers, judges call for UK sanctions on Israel over Gaza war Subscribe to Double Down News .  And it's a two-way street:  This was made a year ago:  Subscribe to Al Jazeera English . 

This is about writing a book about designing computers in the days before ECAD/EDA . See Back Into The Storm . 54:24 There's a lot in this about teamwork and confidence and stuff and it's totally alien to me!👽 Subscribe to Vintage Computer Federation . Here's Bill talking at VCF Midwest in 2016. 15:45 It was a pretty mercenary atmosphere. Subscribe to VCF Midwest . David Haynie talking about development of the Amiga up until 1993 or so. They were getting into video before almost anyone else. There are some interesting comments about early Unix efforts too and bus development which was just a huge mess by the sounds of it. Thete was an interesting question at the end about the Atari ST.  Subscribe to The Guru Meditation . 

It's amazing what they have done! It's an analog field-programmable MOS transistor array. See  https://mosbius.org/ See also  Curt Jaimungal Intervew With John Norton  for some ideas of the sorts of crazy things you could try with this. See also  Adventures in Code Land  where he interviewed Eric Schlaepfer, one of the people who built the Monster 6502 . Subscribe to Zero to ASIC .

33:06  This discussion of Landauer's Principle is really interesting. See this posthumous translation of Szilard's paper Über die Enfropieuerminderung in einem thermodynamischen System bei Eingrifen intelligenter Wesen  and Bennett's 1982 review Thermodynamics of Computation . In his book The Emperor's New Mind Roger Penrose wrote quite a bit about reversible models of computation and the Fredkin-Toffoli model of reversible computation based on the reversibility of Newtonian dynamics. Also Gabrielle Carcassi who is currently busy running the assumptions of physics summer school, has been trying to clear up some of the confusion around reversibility and conservative dynamics. See  Gabriele Carcassi on Physical Convergence . Whilst looking this up I came across a recent (2024) paper by Jacques Carette, Chris Heunen, Robin Kaarsgaard and Amr Sabry entitled  Compositional Reversible Computation . For more on real-world computation devices, see  Peter Kinget on the ...

Not really the brains themselves, just a language for describing what goes on inside a Robot brain, but, ... well, see  Matt Godbolt Explains "Young Man, It's Robots All The Way Down!"   See Marvin Borner 's page of links to articles:  https://git.marvinborner.de/marvinborner/interaction-net-resources/about/ . You can read Yves Lafont's 1997 article here: Interaction Combinators . There are working implementations on GPUs, for example  HVM2: A Parallel Evaluator for Interaction Combinators  by Victor Taelin: We present HVM2 , an efficient, massively parallel evaluator for extended interaction combinators. When compiling non-sequential programs from a high-level programming language to C and CUDA, we achieved a near-ideal parallel speedup as a function of cores available (within a single device), scaling from 400 million interactions per second (MIPS) (Apple M3 Max; single thread), to 5,200 MIPS (Apple M3 Max; 16 threads), to 74,000 MIPS (NVIDIA RTX 4090; 32...

See also Ursula Martin's talk in  Emily Riehl - Formalizing invisible mathematics: case studies from higher category theory . I'm too old for this shit! At 7:12 there's a sign of what's really going on in LLMs. See Florentin Guth and Brice Ménard's paper On the universality of neural encodings in CNNs   and Rishi Jha, Collin Zhang, Vitaly Shmatikov and John X. Morris's Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddings : We introduce the first method for translating text embeddings from one vector space to another without any paired data, encoders, or predefined sets of matches. Our unsupervised approach translates any embedding to and from a universal latent representation (i.e., a universal semantic structure conjectured by the Platonic Representation Hypothesis). Our translations achieve high cosine similarity across model pairs with different architectures, parameter counts, and training datasets. The ability to translate unknown embeddings into a different sp...

There's an interesting idea for a robot movie in here: Subscribe to Level1 Techs .  ... and an in depth discussion of the problems of being a CSO for a Managed Service Provider in the security business Subscribe to Defensive Security Podcast . 

See Marvin Borner's panblog  and  A Really Great Talk on Robot Brains . YouTube does a decent job of auto-translation of this into English.  It looks promising, but I want to see some decentralisation before I use it. The Web has DoS built in to the protocol. Depending on a DNS name and/or IP address for your content to be accessible is a single-point-of-failure even if you use Dynamic DNS. Also, I would like to see meta-syndication, by which I mean syndicating syndication and some sort of dynamic recommendation scheme built into this, so that your recommendations can be conditioned on those of others whose recommendations you trust. The thing is trust/value is context-specific: you might trust or value someone's opinions in one are, but distrust them in another.  This mechanism, whatever it is, could feed back into the decentralisation, so that content recommendation is based on CIDs, not URLs. See  Hosting Static Web Sites on IPFS  and  Georg Greve o...

It's really cool how much stuff you can do a PDF. I think someone managed to get it to run Linux, after a fashion. Subscribe to media.ccc.de .

This talk was given on June 10, 2025. See  Terence Tao - Using Claude, ChatGPT to Formalise A Theorem About Magmas in Lean  and on feeding the AI models:  Alex Kontorovich - Rough Structure and Classification, Revisited . Subscribe to INI .

See Tim Gowers' publications list  https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/papers.html  where you can get a PostScript copy of this 200 paper: This was my attempt to do the `Hilbert thing', at a conference in Tel Aviv in 1999 entitled Visions in Mathematics . I start with some speculations about computers - I think that before too long they will have a much more serious role to play in helping mathematicians to find proofs, or even finding proofs for themselves. I then make some general remarks about what I call `rough structure' and `rough classification' in combinatorics, stating several problems that I find interesting. In a final section, I give a more miscellaneous list of (mostly well known) open problems that I would love to see solved. Unlike Hilbert, I do not intend my list of problems to have a major influence on the course of mathematics in the next century - it is just a list of problems that I like.   See  Tim Gowers Talking About Human-Oriented Automate...

They have problems with leaking toilet faucets! See  https://flightsafetydetectives.com/  and  Federal Register / Vol. 90, No. 114 / Monday, June 16, 2025 :  14 CFR Part 39 [Docket No. FAA–2025–1103; Project Identifier AD–2024–00141–T] RIN 2120–AA64 Airworthiness Directives; The Boeing Company Airplanes AGENCY : Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), DOT. ACTION : Notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM). SUMMARY : The FAA proposes to supersede Airworthiness Directive (AD) 2024–01–01, which applies to certain The Boeing Company Model 787–8, 787–9, and 787–10 airplanes. AD 2024–01–01 requires repetitive general visual inspections (GVIs) of the area under all lavatory washbasins for evidence of intermittent and active leaks at the faucet control module (FCM) and applicable on-condition actions. The FAA has determined that the affected FCMs must be replaced with an improved design FCM to address the unsafe condition. This proposed AD would continue to require the actions of...

Oh dear! She was the only person in the theater: See  Maggie Reviewing 28 Years Later . Here's her review with spoilers: Subscribe to That Star Wars Girl .  People seemed to really like the trailer. I don't know why. Maybe they see it some sort of commentary on Britain's 'colonial warrior' history. Subscribe to Sony Pictures .

... the Hovertrain! The project produced a lot of useful data, but it was shelved in the early seventies. They're making a documentary about it using archival footage that they retrieved from the dump. See the GoFundMe The Rise & Fall of RTV 31 - Hovertrain Documentary  and  Fenland on Film . See also Eric Laithwaite. Subscribe to Luke O’Sullivan .

See the previous episode:  CuriousMarc Making The US$33,000 HP 3GHz Signal Generator he Bought for US$150 Work! .   They're hoping to hear from the HP engineer who designed this amazing thing. There's a company called Forefront RF just around the corner from me who could probably show him how to make a drop-in replacement using an FPGA and a handful of mass-produced components that are used in mobile phones. Subscribe to Curious Marc .

This was given on 9th June and has been reuploaded:   See this MathOverflow discussion with the response by Andrej Bauer:  What makes dependent type theory more suitable than set theory for proof assistants?  and  Andrej Bauer's "Five Stages of Accepting Constructive Mathematics". See  Tim Gowers Talking About Human-Oriented Automated Theorem Proving . Ursula Martin's talk " Will machines change mathematics? " part of a workshop  Modern History of Mathematics: Looking Ahead . 18:48 Max Newman's 1946 Royal Society Grant Proposal: see Simon Lavington's  Early Days of Computing at Manchester: Max Newman's Royal Society Project, 1946–1951 : Max Newman became Professor of Pure Mathematics at Manchester University in 1945, having led the outstandingly successful Colossus cryptanalytical project at Bletchley Park during the war. He obtained Royal Society funding to set up a Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester to apply similar digital electronic...

This time it's the NTSB Urgent Safety Recommendation on the 737 MAX CFM LEAP-1B engines which dump oil to reduce vibration in the engine, and on the 737 MAX the combustion products get sucked into the air conditioning and appear in the cabin and the cockpit. See  Mentour Pilot on How NOT to Roast Large Birds in Flight .  Subscribe to Blancolirio . 

Today he posted this : When the Air India 787 crashed, I gave you a homework assignment to learn about the systems on a 787, STIG here has very accurately done this for us here. https://youtu.be/-MDjRMkc-cc You will not see this level of detail or research on the clown suit channels. Still waiting for actual data from the investigation. JB.  Subscribe to Blancolirio .  They call it "The Plastic Princess". At 8:37 he goes into details on the GEnx 1B engines which are "full authority digital engine (or electronics) control" ( FADEC)  and the FAA Airworthiness Directives; The Boeing Company Airplanes . Here is FAA-2015-0936: This AD was prompted by the determination that a Model 787 airplane that has been powered continuously for 248 days can lose all alternating current (AC) electrical power due to the generator control units (GCUs) simultaneously going into failsafe mode. This condition is caused by a software counter internal to the GCUs that will overflow after ...

Weird and brilliantly executed ... Subscribe to Dust .  

With some very special emus. Nice find by YouTube. It made a whole playlist .  Subscribe to ANTI-Records .

More rock is falling every day, and the Swiss Military have boats on the lake above the debris now:  See  Looks Like Blatten is Gone Now, ...  and  Villages Below Blatten Have Now Been Evacuated Because of Flood Risk . Subscribe to On The Pulse With Silki . 

I'm having to decipher his video demonstration to figure what this means in terms of the timing diagram, ...   Subscribe to Anders Nielsen . Here's the Apple I version of the circuit Steve Wozniak designed:  Here's the modern version for CMOS 74 series with the extra pull-up resistors. See Anders' Github page for this project:  https://github.com/AndersBNielsen/6502-Single-Cycle-Board . These flip-flops latch the Data inputs on the Clocks which are positive edge triggered. From the pinouts on the  TI Datasheet for the SNx4HC74 , we can infer that R and S in these diagrams are what the  data sheets refer to as CLR and PR: see  7474 Dual D Flip-Flop Datasheet . In addition ( 5:50 ), there seems is some confusion over which clock to use. He says "most modern circuits call the inverted input clock Φ1, but actually an inverted Φ0 arrives sooner than a Φ1 coming out the NMOS 6502 would, which means that the timing doesn't work for inspecting i...

What a brilliant talk! See his 2013 blog post:  An enneahedron for Herschel . Subscribe to Numberphile .

Her sister did some of the illustrations. See the video description for where to pre-order, but in the UK you can get it from Blackwell's . Here's her video on her vintage clothes after they all got stolen in Rome: see  Karolina Żebrowska Had Her Whole Summer Wardrobe Stolen!  And on vintage decor: Subscribe to Karolina Żebrowska .

I think it's quite intriguing that photomultiplier tubes are involved. Subscribe to Anton Petrov . 

A cheerful story about John Deere. Subscribe to The Level1 Links With Friends . Happy Birthday Elizabeth  Subscribe to Lana Del Rey .

Ben Seidel works for a company that makes ERP software for Mining companies and he has to do a lot of tedious code refactoring with no supporting tools. He would like to be able to use pattern-matching rewrite rules on the abstract syntax of the code he is working on rather than manually cutting/pasting/editing it all. The problem is that it has to work across C#, JavaScript, TypeScript and Java. A start would be to have grammars for these languages, so that you can parse code, but you also need to have a way for the system to understand the build environment in terms of directory structure, .jar files , JavaScript modules and all the bizarre rules that turn up in Cross Origin Request Sharing , not to mention the Java runtime . Cliff says "Welcome to the wonderful world of language and compiler implementation. There's a lot of reasons why things suck." He has been working on semantics of module languages for external function compilation and has invented a whole new set...

Subscribe to Curious Marc .   Subscribe to Jeff Geerling . The design for this one is available from The Internet Archive. See  Microprocessor systems design : 68000 hardware, software, and interfacing by Alan Clements . He cross-compiled Lee Davison's 68k Enhanced BASIC. See  Building a 68000 Single Board Computer - Enhanced Basic . You can still get Lee's original and unmodified EhBASIC V3.52 source code from  https://www.ist-schlau.de/downloads.html . His github is  https://github.com/jefftranter .   See also  Low Cost Logic Analyzers and Fixing Weird Retro Tech  and now for an exercise, program a Pi Pico to extract the SC/MP ROM listing from the soundtrack of Marc's video. But do it by writing a Pi Pico assembler in Blockly . That will be useful for my project. See  Some Ideas for a Hardware Project, ...  and David's Bare Metal Adventures videos which have all the technical details of what you need to do. Subscribe to Jeff Trante...