Back to less serious stuff. Malinda just put up a highly enjoyable parody mashup of Christmas songs sung from the standpoint of both her optimistic and pessimistic sides looking at 2020. She also has done this for 2019 and 2018. She has two channels on youtube. The first, Translator Fails she runs various things through Google translate into multiple languages and back until it makes absolutely no sense. The second, just entitled Malinda is both more personal and has more original stuff.

An update on an earlier post about a training deck used by the Kentucky State Police urging cadets to be ruthless killers and quoting Hitler advocating violence. At the time that story broke on Oct 30, the Kentucky Justice and Public Safety Cabinet claimed the material had been removed in 2013. Since that date, state police have not replied to subsequent records requests. Maybe that particular slide deck was removed in 2013, but the Lexington Herald Leader reported today, confirmed by the Governor and the Kentucky Justice and Public Safety Cabinet that another training video had been approved for training use in September of this year that featured Nazi symbols.

I don’t want to watch assholes be assholes. This seems to eliminate all news, any social media where echo chambers interact, all sitcoms (really, is there any sitcom which doesn’t consist of making fun of people?), most dramas, most movies and most social media or forum where people are anonymous. Any suggestions would be appreciated. As usual, feel free to disagree using this contact link. My world view is a hypothesis, not a belief.

We don’t know a lot about dreams. A recent paper by Erik Hoel The Overfitted Brain: Dreams evolved ot assist generalization at Tufts Universtity suggests that one possible reason for weird dreams is your brain is trying to avoid “overfitting”. If you don’t want to read the paper itself (long but easy read), you can read an article about it at Discover Magazine. The concept of overfitting is borrowed from deep neural networks where the network is trying to “learn” from a dataset, but focuses so tightly on that dataset that it can’t generalize to similar but not identical datasets.

A high school newspaper in Kentucky broke a story on October 30 about a training slideshow used by the Kentucky State Police urging cadets to be “ruthless killers[s]” and quoting Hitler advocating violence. By 4:15 PM that day, the Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear responded with the following statement: “This is absolutely unacceptable. It is further unacceptable that I just learned about this through social media. We will collect all the facts and take immediate corrective action.

All the jokes and insults about the other side just make the polarization worse. So stop it. We are wired differently, we think differently we respond to different motivations. For example, one study Political Ideology and the Perceived Impact of Coronavirus Prevention Behaviors for the Self and Others indicates that conservatives apparently are more likely to wear masks if you point out it keeps them safer and less likely to wear masks if you point out it keeps others safer.

If politicians actually believed in their pleas to ‘think of the children’, they wouldn’t make so many outright lies. Think of the bad example it sets. And that goes double for the people writing the lies in the political ads. Criminal defense lawyers are not allowed to lie for their clients. Why is it allowed in the political process? As usual, feel free to disagree using this contact link. My world view is a hypothesis, not a belief.

So, trying to keep myself from fixating on the political news, I asked DuckDuckGo for suggestions on random websites. One of the suggestions was from lifewire that claimed “cool websites to look at when bored”. It claimed “Whether you need to kill some time or you’re in the mood to laugh, learn, or be inspired, this list of cool sites is all you need.” It was a typical list with “what we like” and “what we don’t like”.

Today I woke up at either 6:10 am or 5:10 am depending on whether I was looking at a clock that automatically reset itself for the end of daylight savings time in the US. I remember writing a song 20 years ago about the hassle of resetting all the digital clocks in the house. You had to hold down buttons and some of them didn’t go backwards or get faster, so you had to wait while it slowly advanced 23 hours.

This blog is eclectic because I can get sidetracked by lots of different things. Yesterday was the origin of the word “scientist”. Today it is data sourcing and analysis. WARNING: This is a data analysis rat hole expedition. Someone made a comment to me that police were the 22nd most dangerous job in the US which triggered some recollection in my brain that I had seen a report where they were 16th.

The 2014 Nebula Award winner for best science fiction novel was Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. It was interesting (sometimes pleasantly, sometimes horrifyingly) to watch reactions to the use of pronouns in the book. The main character and narrator natively speaks a language that doesn’t make gender distinctions in pronouns. (Finnish and Hungarian are similar in this respect). English, of course, does have gendered pronouns so to get the point across, the author has the narrator using feminine pronouns throughout the book except in dialog.

Think of a generic picture of a philosopher. When I did, I came up with a picture of a bearded old white guy. Now why do they have so many razors if so many of them have beards? All of the following rules of thumb are intended to reduce the explanations you should have to think about. “Occam’s razor” says that simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complicated explanations.

One of the many cultural differences between the US and Europe seems to be that Americans don’t trust the government collecting data about themselves but seem to find it acceptable that companies collect data and Europe seems to be the reverse. The American idea becomes an exercise in futility as soon as you understand that the government buys data from companies if it can’t collect the data directly. But what about other geographies and what data is getting collected about you anyway?