Saturday, December 28, 2019

Face recognition bans, and an ad-based Internet. Is there no end to foolishness?

There is no more important news, and they hope we won't notice: 'In a free speech ruling that contradicts six other federal circuit courts, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals - based in Missouri... has upheld a district court ruling that says Americans do not have a first amendment right to videotape the police, or any public official, in public.' This is of course a blatant attempt to reverse the most important year for civil liberties in this century, when courts and the Obama administration declared a universal right of citizens to record (and hold accountable) encounters with authority-force on the streets. Make no mistake, this is part of the Roberts Plan to reshape America according to the blackmailers' will. See below for what we must do about this.
== On Surveillance and Facial Recognition ==
Come by for a lively debate among friends on Warren Olney's "To The Point" NPR radio show -- "Surveillance cameras are capturing what we do on the streets, at airports, in stores, and in much of our public space. Facial recognition software is touted as making us safer. But mass surveillance has downsides of major proportions. Kade Crawford of the Massachusetts ACLU is concerned about violation of privacy."
... and she's perfectly correct! So I say in my on-air response, while asserting that the ACLU's emphasis on trying to blind elites is tactically all-wrong, as there's no sign of it ever having worked for long, across human history. Far better to strip elites naked. It is what the bad ones fear most.
It is fast coming on us. China is expected to have 626 million surveillance cameras – or one camera for every two people – in use by 2020. “The country, which has a 1.386 billion-strong population, has also reportedly invested in facial recognition technology to track people’s movements and even predict crime. According to an earlier report, the system is touted has being “fast enough to scan China’s population in just one second”, and can scan the world’s population in just two seconds.”

One can see how this leads to Orwellian Hell. But is there a way out, as non-Chinese cities like Singapore and London hurry to keep pace? 

Now comes: Bernie Sanders announced this weekend that he would bar law enforcement agencies from using facial recognition systems if he’s elected president in 2020.  Not only is Bernie a near clone of my dad. He's clearly technologically clueless.  One thing is certain, attempts to “ban” facial-recognition systems in San Francisco etc. may flow from legitimate Orwellian fears, but the prescription is a sure sign of lunacy and truly cosmic level ignorance. That isn’t the solution.

The cameras and their analytic systems are coming, soon to be like pollen in the wind. But they can as likely be freedom’s friend as its enemy, depending on whether access is limited to controlling elites or spread among a population of confident citizens, who use the flood of light to sousveil the mighty, holding them accountable.

And… The physics professor who says online extremists act like curdled milk. "Hate may be less like a cancer and more like bubbles, says Neil Johnson, who applies physics theory to human behavior.”

== Alternatives to advertising in social media? ==

"Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has quietly rolled out a new social network that is intended to get right what Facebook and Twitter have so far been getting wrong.  The new social network, WT:Social, which Wales announced had 25,000 members on November 6, now has about 78,000 members who are at least intrigued by the idea of a social network that combats fake news."

The site goes against the ad-funded models normalized by Google, Facebook, and Twitter, instead asking users to pay a subscription fee to access information and communicate on the site.  It costs $12.99 a month or $100 a year in the US, or €12 a month or €90 a year in Europe. It's £10 and £80 in the UK. In other words, about the same as a Netflix or Spotify subscription.

It seems a stiff price and a mistake not to do a ramp up, letting folks know in advance that the price will rise from pennies at first.

Meanwhile, Facebook debuts vaccine pop-up windows to stop the spread of misinformation. 

I have a better approach...

== The time has come ==

Keynes said you’ll run out of money (betting against market idiots) long before the markets run out of idiocy. And yes, it applies to me. Way back in the last century, I foretold that it would be loony to imagine that the whole internet would be financed by advertising for much longer. But well, it has, with  countless negative outcomes including the near destruction of many old-line investigative journalism outlets and local newspapers, the convergence of ad dollar flows into a half-dozen trillion-dollar companies, and the massive collection of personal data from almost every person who ever goes online. 

Can it go on? In his most recent Strategic News Service newsletter, Mark Anderson cites dozens of reasons to figure that it can’t, though not the biggest one.  

- 1 in 5 ad-serving websites are visited exclusively by fraud bots (The Verge, 2017)
- For every $3 spent on digital ads, fraud takes $1 
- Click fraud is currently growing at 50% per year
- The click fraud operation Methbot generates $3 to $5 million in fraudulent revenue every day 

Fake news sites have been major perpetrators that clone the look and feel and almost the same URL as reputable sources like ABCNews. Among the myriad are those used to spread financial rumore that manipulate stock markets. Another published a false story claiming actor Denzel Washington endorsed Donald Trump for president. The fictional headline led to thousands of people sharing it on Facebook, a prominent example of fake news spreading on the social network prior to the 2016 presidential election. Then there are real-but-unhinged sites like InfoWars, soon to be wholly owned by the parents of Sandyhook victims. Anderson’s long list of examples is daunting and depressing and just a scintilla sampling…

… and all the more reason we need a savvy counter-attack against lie-spreading methodologies. I offer a dozen or more potentially effective approaches in Polemical Judo… and no, not one of the proposals involves anything remotely resembling a “Ministry of Truth.”

  "I can think of nothing that has done more harm to the Internet than ad tech. It interferes with everything we try to do on the Web. It has cheapened and debased advertising and spawned criminal empires.... Nobody knows the exact number, but probably about 50 percent of what you're spending online is being stolen from you." - Bob Hoffman, veteran ad executive, industry critic, and author of the blog the Ad Contrarian; quoted on Bloomberg.com

And now the key point. I know why all past efforts to do micropayments have failed. Would you pay a nickel to read a New York Times article, knowing you could get the nickel back, if you thought it inferior? And if it was one-click and saved you having to type passwords to get into a subscription silo?

Then see the "secret sauce" that could offer this alternative to insidiously awful advert-based internet commerce in your information. And part II showing how micropayments could be the alternative that frees us all.

== Defend our right to see! ==

Oh, what to do about the right's effort to re-criminalize recording the police?

The transparency-accountability prionciple still hols outside the 8th Circuit. - "A transparency auditor was photographing a local police station from a public sidewalk. As a result, the transparency auditor was illegally detained for 2 hours. The Colorado Springs Police Department agreed to pay the transparency auditor $41,000 and to update police policy and provide local police with training on transparency and citizen rights." But for how long, if this truly opens a wedge for John Roberts to use against us? (Or to rule favorably, for "balance" while cutting us off at other ankles?)

We need to wage a full frontal assault on every libertarian we know. Propagandized by $3billion spent by Kochs and Mercers/Fox etc, the supposed "freedom lovers" reflexively and automatically deem Republicans less-bad than democrats, and hence represent an important part of the "hold-my-nose" factions staying loyal to the GOP at the ballot box. Despite liberals sharing descent from Adam Smith, being far better on deficits and flat-fair enterprise, blue states leading us out of the Drug War and taking the law out of the bedroom, and EVERY major deregulation that ever made sense.

They will move goal posts again and again, and it is time to corner them and dare them to actually, actually justify joining the putin-putsch to re-establish 6000 years of feudal-inheritance-brat-rule.

113 comments:

Lorraine said...

While I desperately want to see the development of micropayments-that-works, I assume micropayments, like adware, can only be implemented where digital restrictions management (DRM) is in place. I want to believe that there will always be some amount of noncommercial and non-DRM content on the web, hopefully with better audience shares than the one-channel-among-many that is PBS on TV. I want to keep alive the dream of the free software movement of creating software that is pro-hacking; not engineered for maximum tamper-proofing. I believe the open and nonproprietary cross pollination of tech ideas is the fastest way we can develop the sousveillance and equiveillance technologies needed to, as you say, "strip elites naked."

Larry Hart said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Larry Hart said...

You know what burns my butt? *

The fact that these people have no problem with insulting us and asserting that their excesses are acceptable and that only they are the real heirs to the designation "American". And not only do they not concern themselves with whether or not they alienate voters who otherwise might agree with them, they don't have to care, because owning the libs and being mean to "others" is actually a winning electoral strategy for them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/us/politics/trump-2020-trumpstock.html


...
There was a fringe 2020 Senate candidate in Arizona who ran a website that published sexually explicit photos of women without their consent; a pro-Trump rapper whose lyrics include a racist slur aimed at Barack Obama; and a North Carolina activist who once said of Muslims, “I will kill every one of them before they get to me.”

All were welcome, except liberals.

“They label us white nationalists, or white supremacists,” volunteered Guy Taiho Decker, who drove from California to attend the event. A right-wing protester, he has previously been arrested on charges of making terrorist threats.

“There’s no such thing as a white supremacist, just like there’s no such thing as a unicorn,” Mr. Decker said. “We’re patriots.”
...


In other words, people who insist that white Christians have a superior claim to citizenship than other Americans are not white supremacists. Which sounds just like "I'm not gay--I just like to have sex with men."


...
At Mr. Trump’s official rallies, including a recent one in Florida, the president has referred to Mr. Obama by stressing his middle name, Hussein, and said Democrats were “trying to stop me because I’m fighting for you.”
...


It has been said that Trump is busy equating himself with his supporters so that when he's impeached or defeated in 2020, he can rile up the base with the assertion that they are being disenfranchised. Well, you know what? I'm ready to take them at their word. If they love Trump and love him because of his deplorable qualities, and they're willing to wage war rather than be subjected to others having equal rights to them, then they are deplorable, and the only way we will have any peace and security for our own selves in this country is to send them scurrying to the rat holes they've been hiding out in for the last few decades.

It's them or us, and I choose us.

* The correct answer is, "A flame about this high".

David Brin said...

When access to an item online costs a penny or a nickel and the decision is one-click, don't you think much of the DRM angst starts to look moot?

---

In Polemical Judo I talk about possible chess moves in case Trump becomes both a major liability and far too dangerous to cross. Any turn by Senior Goppers against him will be punished by the system they created... gerrymandered destruction of the General Election in favor of radicalized primaries.

There are solutions. Like urging all Americans in gerrymandered sitricts to simply join the dominant party OF that district, rendering all the gerry-mavens' calculations useless. Suddenly all the democrats living in such a district would be kingmakers in the GOP primary and moderate conservatives would find their balls.

It would work... it's what - in-effect - happened in California and bitter polemical extremism went DOWN. Alas, though, not even the most impudent pundit has offered this solution publicly. (Imagine if Andrew Yang did it, on a debate stage!)

And so we are left with a scenario. Trump dragging goppers down but refusing to leave and ready to take his hate to the GOP at his rallies, if he feels betrayed. In that case, it will be up to the Secret Service to protect him from Putin's next obvious "Howard Beale" solution, turning him into a martyr driving our civil war hot. God bless the US Secret Service.

Lorraine said...

If the price is a nickel, perhaps payment on the honor system would be the norm. Sounds like street performer protocol, which is similar to a lot of existing crowdfunding. You could loosen my purse strings, even if the payments aren't micro-sized, if 1) accounts are strictly pre-paid, not post-paid 2) payments for services rendered are only the cash outflows - no "fees" 3) remaining pre-paid balance is instantly queryable at all times, 4) no "sticky subscriptions," either everything is sold one item at a time, or subscriptions are cancellable without "talking to a person," or jumping through hoops in general. With those 4 conditions met, I wouldn't even want to try to hack my way through the system, but someone probably would, and walls surrounding content would still be engineered like some kind of cash box. Deposit on a pop can is only a nickel (but a dime in Michigan) and apparently (according to Seinfeld) one can build a criminal business model around that.

David Brin said...

Read my articles on this. There's a generous "take-back" reserve for canceling X payments per month. Amounts to the same thing. I do wish you'd read them tho.

Samirasun0808 said...

Your website says you are a tech consultant. Who listens to your old ass?

David Brin said...

Samirasun0808 How about we make your snark subject to a wager. Deposit $5k in escrow with a reputable law firm so I’ll know I’m not wasting my time with another Kremlin-boy blabbermouth. If you’ve got the cojones to do that, like a man, then  I have offered dozens, scores of bets. But we'll make this about whether civilization, businesses, corporations agencies, governments, NGOs and hundreds of thousands of people pay me more attention in any week that will heed you across your long, useless life?

What? No balls to back up your snark? Huh. Didn't think so.

David Brin said...

What the heck does "yeest" mean?

David Brin said...

Oh, it's "yeet." Okay. Not my fave neologism.

duncan cairncross said...

Hmmm

45 working years, 52 weeks in a year - 2,340 : 1

I reckon I might just beat you - or maybe not!

I'm definitely NOT going to put my money on that bet

 Ashley said...

Samirasun0808 said..."Who listens to your old ass?"

Wow! The stupid it burns. Gosh David, you have my sympathies for having to put up with such shit.

Larry Hart said...

@Ashley,

Actually, the amount of such s*** on this blog is surprisingly low. Even the more trollish regulars are more engaged in actual conversation than that fly-by is. The exception that proves the rule.

scidata said...

By Grabthar's Hammer, the story of "Galaxy Quest" failure can finally be told. TLDR answer: blame DreamWorks and Egon.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/dreamworks-screwed-up-why-galaxy-quest-wasnt-a-bigger-hit-1264866

Larry Hart said...

Well, duh. And about time someone (else) noticed...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/29/opinion/william-barr-trump.html

In these and other cases, Mr. Barr has embraced wholesale the “religious liberty” rhetoric of today’s Christian nationalist movement. When religious nationalists invoke “religious freedom,” it is typically code for religious privilege. The freedom they have in mind is the freedom of people of certain conservative and authoritarian varieties of religion to discriminate against those of whom they disapprove or over whom they wish to exert power.

Larry Hart said...

same article continues...


...
The answer is that America’s conservative movement, having morphed into a religious nationalist movement, is on a collision course with the American constitutional system. Though conservatives have long claimed to be the true champions of the Constitution — remember all that chatter during previous Republican administrations about “originalism” and “judicial restraint” — the movement that now controls the Republican Party is committed to a suite of ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution and the Republic that the founders created under its auspices.

Mr. Trump’s presidency was not the cause of this anti-democratic movement in American politics. It was the consequence. He is the chosen instrument, not of God, but of today’s Christian nationalists, their political allies and funders, and the movement’s legal apparatus. Mr. Barr did not emerge in order to serve this one particular leader. On the contrary, Mr. Trump serves a movement that will cynically praise the Constitution in order to destroy it, and of which Mr. Barr has made himself a hero.

Don Gisselbeck said...

The Homeless Guy these people pretend to worship specified the things done by nations that would send them to hell; not serving the poor and alien. (Matthew 25:41-45)

Darrell E said...

Unfortunately the Homeless Guy they worship also said lots of really nasty stuff too, and if committed religious believers are expert at anything it is interpreting their religious writings to mean whatever the fuck they want them to mean.

Larry Hart said...

Sort of on the topic of transparency, this scam alert is posted at my workplace. Note that the scammer doesn't necessarily actually have any of your personal information--just the threat that he might is what induces you to pay ransom.

Of course, I'm somewhat hostage immune to this particular attack, as anyone who claims to have access to my Facebook page is lying because I don't have one. It also took me longer than it should have to comprehend why sending information about my contacts to my contact list would lead to a divorce. :)

https://www.aeafcu.org/documents/FBI-IC3%20PSA%20Extortion%20Email_06012016.pdf

The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) continues to receive reports from
individuals who have received extortion attempts via e-mail related to recent highprofile data thefts. The recipients are told that personal information, such as their
name, phone number, address, credit card information, and other personal
details, will be released to the recipient’s social media contacts, family, and friends
if a ransom is not paid. The recipient is instructed to pay in Bitcoin, a virtual
currency that provides a high degree of anonymity to the transactions. The
recipients are typically given a short deadline. The ransom amount ranges from 2
to 5 bitcoins or approximately $250 to $1,200.

The following are some examples of the extortion e-mails:

“Unfortunately your data was leaked in a recent corporate hack and I now have
your information. I have also used your user profile to find your social media
accounts. Using this I can now message all of your friends and family members.”
“If you would like to prevent me from sharing this information with your friends
and family members (and perhaps even your employers too) then you need to
send the specified bitcoin payment to the following address.”

“If you think this amount is too high, consider how expensive a divorce lawyer is.
If you are already divorced then I suggest you think about how this information
may impact any ongoing court proceedings. If you are no longer in a committed
relationship then think about how this information may affect your social
standing amongst family and friends.”

“We have access to your Facebook page as well. If you would like to prevent me
from sharing this dirt with all of your friends, family members, and spouse, then
you need to send exactly 5 bitcoins to the following address.”

“We have some bad news and good news for you. First, the bad news, we have
prepared a letter to be mailed to the following address that details all of your
activities including your profile information, your login activity, and credit card
transactions. Now for the good news, You can easily stop this letter from being
mailed by sending 2 bitcoins to the following address.”

...

Larry Hart said...

Per that scam alert above, the second example e-mail above tries to cover all possible bases, but by doing so, it pretty well telegraphs that the sender is bluffing. If he really had enough personal information to know about you, he would send a more narrowly targeted warning.

The "We have access to your Facebook page as well" thing also sounds to my ear like a fishing expedition. If the bad guys received your personal data from (say) a department store data breach, that wouldn't necessarily give them credentials for your Facebook page. Since so many people these days are on Facebook, the threat sounds credible, but to me, it comes across like the phishing e-mails I've seen which claim that my Apple account is locked and I have to click on a link or call a number to fix it. Nice try, but I don't have an Apple account either.

Alfred Differ said...

Fishing, spear fishing, whaling. That’s the progression as their info on you improves and they begin to target you precisely

Zepp Jamieson said...

Yeah, I've gotten dozens of those. First one scared me until I thought it through because they used a password of mine from a compromised site. But it was a unique password (I'm not a fool) and what's more, they claimed to have recorded the images from my computer cam of me watching kiddie porn. The problems are a) I don't watch kiddie porn b) my computer doesn't have a camera and c) I've seen that episode of Black Mirror.
I forwarded it to my ISP for blocking. There's been a recent resurgence of those, so they must have found a way around the spam filters.
As Larry notes, they get a bit grandiose on the claims. If they have access to all my accounts, then they could easily clean out my bank account. Or shut down my websites. Or or or...

Larry Hart said...

Zepp Jamieson:

If they have access to all my accounts, then they could easily clean out my bank account.


It's like when a supposed psychic asks for your credit card for payment. "If you're really so great, then you tell me."

scidata said...

I liked this message from the European Commission for 2020:

Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

Larry Hart said...

Well, it's already 2020 for all but the North Americans.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot and all that.

Happy New Year.

Zepp Jamieson said...

Happy New Year, all.

Brian Cox had an unexpectedly grim comment on the Fermi paradox: “One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and that needs global collaborative solutions to prevent that.” Apparently all intelligence is too dumb and self-destructive to last long enough to put a dent in the great cosmic silence.

Larry: Psychics would sue me if they knew what I thought of them.

Larry Hart said...

Ok, so on the old "Cerebus" list, there was a big argument over whether (say) the decade of the 20s begins in 2020 or 2021. As a literate calendar boy, I'm well aware of the reasons why "The twentieth century AD" begins in 1901 and runs though 2000. You'd think I'd be on the smugly-superior side that "knows" the new decade doesn't begin for another year. But you'd be wrong.

I'm right there with the smugly-superior people who know that 90% of the world is wrong in thinking that the twenty-first century began in 2000. But my contention is that the only reason the century really begins in 1901 or 2001 instead of 1900 or 2000 is because we call it something like"The twentieth century AD". That phrase has a very specific meaning. If we instead referred to "The 1900s" or "The twenty-hundreds", I'd find it perfectly acceptable to shift those starting dates by a year. After all, any 100 year period is a century.

No one in regular conversation refers to "The third decade of the twenty-first century". They are much more likely to refer to a decade as "The twenties" or "The sixties" or whatever. I have no issue with "The 2020s" being said to begin in 2020. And the fact that what we call decades and what we call centuries don't exactly line up with each other does not bother me any more than the fact that weeks and years don't like up with each other.

Just filling some dead time here--hope that's not too controversial. :)

Lorraine said...

Hi scidata looked up your "work for something good" quote from the European Commission; apparently they lifted it from Vaclav Havel.

Thanks for sharing. That saying is just the inspiration I needed right now, perhaps I should re-engage with my pet project called "pubwan," and stop being daunted by the fact that it's theoretically impossible.

Zepp Jamieson said...

2020.
We're moving out of Heinlein's "future history" era and into Clark's "City and the Stars" future. Hands up, those who once thought 1984 was the distant future. OK, Boomers.
Larry: being smugly superior is FUN. It is'na the noo decade yet! (Even more fun said in a Scots' accent suggesting Ludditeism and Sabotage).

Larry Hart said...

Lorraine:

perhaps I should re-engage with my pet project called "pubwan," and stop being daunted by the fact that it's theoretically impossible.


Can a perpetual motion machine be far behind? :)

"They laughed at Columbus, and now he's the third largest city in Ohio".

Larry Hart said...

Zepp Jamieson:

Hands up, those who once thought 1984 was the distant future.


I still remember a futuristic tv cartoon from my childhood called "The Undersea Explorers" which took place in the far future year of...1975.

Since you mentioned Clarke, I'm pretty sure that the events in Childhood's End also begin in 1975, which was the future when the novel was written, but which just happened to be the present time when I read it.

Larry Hart said...

I also remember figuring out with a sense of wonder that as I would be turning 40 in the year 2000, I would most likely be alive for it. My dad, who would turn 70 that year was not at all sure he would live to see it, but in fact, he made it to 2011. Even one of my grandmothers, who turned 95 in 2000 managed to live to see the real turn of the century in 2001, and almost another year.

Unfortunately, a lifelong Cubs fan, grandma didn't live to see the Cubs win the 2016 World Series, but she was alive (3 years old) when they did it in 1908.

scidata said...

@Lorraine

Vaclav Havel was quite chummy with CCF/NDP peeps here in Canada way back. One of the CCF's founders, Tommy Douglas, once said, "Courage my friends, 'tis not too late to build a better world". I'm wondering if maybe Havel got it from him (or later leaders).

Re: pubwan
"It's easier to try than to prove it can't be done."
- Moody Blues

A similar sentiment is quite ancient:
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
- Seneca

Jon S. said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jon S. said...

"Hands up, those who once thought 1984 was the distant future."

Due to my looking up some old TV shows on YouTube, I've been getting links to the '70s series UFO in my suggestions. The intro is amusing - all these manned moonbases and space interceptors and whatnot, in the far-off future of... 1980 (a date flashed repeatedly during the credits, while showing the "wonders of the future" like Straker's car and the aforementioned moonbase).

As for the century thing, I like to smugly point out that everyone who's being smug about "no year zero" still fails to notice that due to miscalculations and calendric updates, the Anno Domini system is off by about six years. :)

(On the other hand, I'll take advantage of it to call my daughter's birthdate, March 3rd 2001, "the third day of the third month of the third millennium", because I'm a nerd like that.)

Lorraine said...

Columbus is #1 most populous city in Ohio.

Didn't know Havel was in with the New Democrats, being a dissident in an east bloc country, always had him figured for a right winger like Lech Walensa.

Larry Hart said...

Lorraine:

Columbus is #1 most populous city in Ohio.


I can't even remember now where I heard that line about the third largest, but that's definitely how the joke went. Maybe it was true back then, or maybe the writer was simply blowing smoke.

It sounds like something Groucho Marx might have said.

Ahcuah said...

@Larry, regarding the calendar.

Well, the people who say that the 21st century began in the year 2000 are right, whether smugly-superior or not. I take your pedantry and double-pedant it.

The 1st century began in the year 0 AD, so of course the year 2000 began the 21st century. That's how numbers work. That's how number lines work. OK, I'll agree that they guy who retconned the BC/AD calendar in the 6th century didn't know about zero. Yeah, and he probably believed in phlogiston and the four humors, too. We are not required to continue to follow our ancestors mistakes and misconceptions--there is no God of Calendars. We are perfectly good at science and mathematics to figure out that 0 AD preceded 1 AD, just like 0 precedes 1 on every other continuous number line. We fix our mistakes; that's science. There's no reason not to fix that one, either.

But, you say, what about the jump from 1 BC to 1 AD? What you need to realize is that there are 2 completely separate OVERLAPPING number lines in play here: the AD number line that points to the future and the BC number line that points to the past (so that 0 AD overlaps 1 BC). We can darn well switch from one to the other if we like. And we can do so wherever we like, including between 2 BC and 0 AD. But that 0 AD is there regardless, because THAT is how numbers work! And then decades and centuries and millennia make sense again.

I blogged about this back in 2011, and re-issued it in 2014. This blog entry of mine has some (simple) pictures: https://ahcuah.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/when-do-the-teens-end-2/

Bob Neinast

Ahcuah said...

@Larry, re Columbus

(I live in a suburb of Columbus).

At one time (maybe 20-30 years ago?) Columbus (looking at just cities) was the third largest. However, the cities that were ahead of it, Cleveland and Cincinnati, were hemmed in, Cleveland by Lake Erie and Cincinnati by the Ohio River. And then their suburbs sealed them off from annexing any more territory. Columbus, being in the middle of the state, is not yet hemmed in and can (and is) still growing in size.

If you look at Metropolitan Statistical Areas instead (which include suburbs), Cincinnati is 29th, Columbus is 32nd, and Cleveland is 33rd. So it looks like the Columbus are managed to overtake the Cleveland area (quite possibly because the combination of Ohio State University and being the seat of state government has allowed it to attract more people).

Bob Neinast

Ahcuah said...

Oh, well. As long as I am on a commenting jag, let me point you to an science article with a tad of Asimovian psychohistory: "Time-to-death of Roman emperors followed distinct pattern".

Basically, the paper notes that, just similar to an examination of failure rates of mechanical parts, Roman Emperors faced a high risk of failure/death in their first year (manufacturing defects exhibiting themselves). After than, their violent deaths were more or less random until about 12 years (the wearing out of a properly manufactured part).

Maybe not psychohistory, but an interesting observation none-the-less.

Bob Neinast

David Brin said...

Okay, I need to be reminded - how do I block offensive posters again. So pleased this happens so seldom.

In 1999 I posted:" Choose the 2000 advocates for the new century because the parties will be better... then see the light and become a pedant to party all over again in 2001.

But boy do we need to fix civilization before the 2030s! Because the kooks will be out in force for any possible interpreted date of the 2000th Easter.

Zepp Jamieson said...

In Wordpress, you simply tell the program to block the IP of the offending visitor. I would assume your blog has a corresponding option.

Larry Hart said...

@Bob Neinast,

Heh. I'm sure you're fun at birthday parties when you point out that what everyone thinks is their "thirtieth birthday" is really their thirty-first birthday, since their first one was the one they were born on. So you're really zero years old (or at least less-than-one year old) until you reach your second birthday.

All in good fun, but I'm not talking about overlapping number lines. There is a calendar which jumps from 1 BC to 1 AD, and that's the calendar we are on when we talk about "The twenty-first century". You are free to imagine a hypothetical Gregorian-prime calendar in which what the rest of us call 1 BC was actually 0 AD, and every other year before Christ is off by one--Julius Caesar was killed in -43 AD and Cicero in -42 AD, but you'd only be confusing everybody else.

But even if I concede your point, what makes you so sure that the "first" century AD begins in your imaginary year 0? What would you call the century previous to that one? The "zeroth" century? The "negative first" century? In fact, that century is usually referred to as the "First century BC". Why wouldn't that one have just as much claim to the year 0 as the "First century AD" does?

On the subject of Columbus, OH, your timeline backs up the sense that the joke line I heard might well have originated at a time when Columbus really was the third largest city in Ohio. Maybe it really was a Groucho Marx line.

And since you live in the Columbus area, do you happen to be familiar with Schmidt's Sausage Haus in that city? When I used to go there every year for the small comics press convention (SPACE), my group would always make an excursion to that German restaurant for dinner. We almost always got lost along the way, too.

Larry Hart said...

...also, maybe more to the point...

Despite getting the actual year wrong, the intent of the maker of the present calendar was for the year Jesus Christ was born to be designated as "1 AD". So whether the year prior is called 0 or 1 BC is immaterial. The "first century of our Lord" begins in the year 1 AD. The year 0 on the number line would be the first year before Christ, whether it's called that or not.

There's a reason my wife's nickname for me is "calendar boy". :)

duncan cairncross said...

Interesting article about failure modes of emperors

Personally I have found the bathtub model to be quite rare!

The more common failure model would be the High initial failure followed by a steady almost constant failure rate
The main exceptions would be drive belts and filters - THOSE had a classic bathtub model

This is why maintenance based on measuring something is almost always superior to interval based maintenance

This is based on experience with precision steel parts under high loads - for a lot of things it seemed that there was a step function
It was weak and failed very early
Or it was above that point and still looked brand new 200,000 miles later

Emperors are more like an overstressed drive belt!

Ahcuah said...

Larry,

Such a mix-up. First, "birthday" really means "anniversary of birthday". English words mean what they mean, not what their etymology says they ought to mean. Second, who gives a damn about the ignoramus in the 6th century and what he meant. We're smarter than that. And besides, as we also know, he got wrong when Jesus was born (assuming he existed). Most scholars say it was probably in 4 BC (or, if you prefer, -3 AD). So here you are again trying to use the etymology of AD to define what it "really" means, and again, linguistics doesn't work that way (and in this case, history). Again, who the hell appointed that 6th century guy the God of Calendars that we are forced to be stuck with what he said?

Yes, there is a "calendar" that jumps BC to AD, but we are perfectly capable rational people who can keep both the BC and AD and say that OUR calendar, which has both (and uses whichever line makes more sense in a given situation), makes more sense (and that our other science and mathematics make more sense than what they knew in the 6th century). Why cling to such silliness?

Regarding negative centuries, why not? WE KNOW HOW TO DO MATH! Going backwards, 0 AD until (but not including) -100 AD was the zeroeth century AD (because that's how you can easily extend ordinal numbers work, though usually ordinals are considered using only counting numbers) 0 BC until 100 BC was the first century BC. -100 AD until -200 AD was the negative first century, if you want to make things complicated. But it makes more sense just to switch to the BC overlap when we are talking about things that far back in time.

In fact, that century is usually referred to as the "First century BC". Why wouldn't that one have just as much claim to the year 0 as the "First century AD" does? Well, yeah. That also gets to claim a year 0. A year 0 BC, and work from there. As I said in my blog post, we have "two coordinate patches covering a 1-manifold". Mathematically, you just have to keep your coordinate patches straight and know how and when to change from one set of coordinates to another. We are smart enough to do this! Serious, instead of just reacting, relax your biases and stop and think about it for a bit.

But the big thing is that, as I said before, then decades and centuries and millennia make sense again (as long as you think about it a bit when you cross the boundary). And they certainly do something similar with Julian Days (which also has a (mostly) arbitrary start date.

BTW, when my daughter was 3, and in my younger son's first year of life, my daughter knew that he was zero years old (and that's what she would say when people asked). Yes, I taught her that, and why shouldn't she learn from an early age how numbers work?

And oh yeah. Schmidt's is still going strong. Aside from their restaurant in German Village, they also send food trucks to all of the various festivals and the like around the area.

Bob Neinast

David Brin said...

Zepp that was... of no use whatsoever. Thanks.

David Brin said...

Okay I figured it out on blogger. The notion that there are anklebiter mosquito twerps on the Earth makes me angry at women, for not having ensured the male ancetors of all such animals were lifelong incels. But at least this one is being culled by modern women.

David Brin said...

Yawn. I tried spamming and deleting. But clearly it's not worth my time and effort you guys all right with ignoring a sewer stink for a while?

Zepp Jamieson said...

Got curious to see what Blogger provided to stop the twerps, and yeah, you're pretty much screwed. Google is not your friend. Still, Angry Sexual Cripple will eventually get bored and wander off, unless you give him some entertainment. Do try to abstain.

David Brin said...

It truly is amazing that I have so little of this. I leave it up to you guys. I can switch to limiting access to "members" or "followers." I assume you all are, already? There seems to be no way to report abusers on blogger. A truly stupid system but we're legacied.

To be honest, I'm bored and willing to let the Kremlin drone keep trying futilely to seem creative.

Larry Hart said...

Dr Brin:

I can switch to limiting access to "members" or "followers." I assume you all are, already?


Be careful with that. A while back, you maybe accidentally set the blog to only allow "members" (I think it was), and I don't think anyone could post until you switched it back. If you're planning to do that, we need some sort of tutorial on how to become one of whatever we need to become. Don't assume it's obvious, because it isn't.

Larry Hart said...

Bob Neistat:

Regarding negative centuries, why not? WE KNOW HOW TO DO MATH! Going backwards, 0 AD until (but not including) -100 AD was the zeroeth century AD (because that's how you can easily extend ordinal numbers work, though usually ordinals are considered using only counting numbers)


Yes, your parenthetical is correct. Starting with 0 is not how numbers work, it's how computers work. If I have five items in my hands, I figure that out by counting 1-2-3-4-5, not 0-1-2-3-4 and then remembering to add 1 to the last one so that it makes sense.


Mathematically, you just have to keep your coordinate patches straight and know how and when to change from one set of coordinates to another. We are smart enough to do this! Serious, instead of just reacting, relax your biases and stop and think about it for a bit.


Well, seriously, I think you've got a solution in search of a problem. The importance of whether the century starts in 2000 or 2001 is not worth altering the calendar for.


But the big thing is that, as I said before, then decades and centuries and millennia make sense again (as long as you think about it a bit when you cross the boundary).


I've got an easier solution than that. Just stop calling this the "Twenty-first century" and call it the "Twenty-hundreds" instead. That century starts in 2000 and ends in 2099, and is not confusing at all. There's no need to re-adjust history just to fit the semantics of the century's name.


BTW, when my daughter was 3, and in my younger son's first year of life, my daughter knew that he was zero years old (and that's what she would say when people asked). Yes, I taught her that, and why shouldn't she learn from an early age how numbers work?


I wasn't arguing about that. What I was finding amusing as I wrote was that it's already kind of funny that you're not 1 year old until your first birthday--that your first birthday ends your first year instead of starting it. It's even funnier if you notice that what we call your "first" birthday is really the second one you have. Which means you don't turn one year old until your second birthday. Makes perfect sense, but it's confusing.

I had a real argument with my wife when, in the year I would later turn 50, I gave my mother a "Happy 50th Mother's Day" card. My wife insisted I should have waited a year--that her 50th Mother's Day would have been when I was already 50. But since she was a mother before I was 1, that means her 1st Mother's Day was in the year that I later turned 1. Therefore, her Xth Mother's Day is in the year I will later turn X, including when X = 50. Sorry, dear, I love you and all, but I'm right on this one.


And oh yeah. Schmidt's is still going strong. Aside from their restaurant in German Village, they also send food trucks to all of the various festivals and the like around the area.


That restaurant has a picture of John McCain from when he visited in 2008. During the presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama made an appearance in Germany at the time (I forget why), so McCain held one at a German restaurant. The radio news story I heard that on gave the restaurant's location as simply "Germantown, Ohio", but I had a feeling it was the one I knew in Columbus, and the next time I was there, I verified that it was indeed the place.

Larry Hart said...

Zepp Jamieson:

Lord, let's hope so.


I'm hearing, "My hovercraft is full of eels."

David Brin said...

Next time the mosquito buzzes here, someone chack its "name" for anagrams of other incels who've been absent a while.

If it gets too bad, I have contacts who can find any true name.

Zepp Jamieson said...

"My hovercraft is full of eels."

Well, in Long Beach, sure. But you know, it has its own peculiarities, that place.

Alistair David Brine said...


Are you trying to seduce me?

Lloyd Flack said...

Zzzz!

David Brin said...

What specialty food do they serve, even in winter, at Moonlight Beach, mosquito?

David Brin said...

Guys, if you find it hard to get into comments, it's because you'll have to actually join, now. Funny it took so long for this to happen. But if you use psychological word appraisal tool, you can tell its an "incel."

Lloyd Flack said...

Just treat him as entertainment.

David Brin said...

So much for lying about living near me. Okay guys. If you are okay with gnat buzzing, I'll content myself with zzzzz, some idle spamming and not call in any deep state favors.

duncan cairncross said...

I'm technically "incel" -
After a long and nasty illness Jane passed away in September

Now I'm slowly getting used to not having her around

Larry Hart said...

Posting mainly to see if I still can. If the time comes when I have to "join", I hope someone will tell me how to do that.

Bob Neistat:

Such a mix-up. First, "birthday" really means "anniversary of birthday". English words mean what they mean, not what their etymology says they ought to mean.


Those two sentences conflict. I agree with the second one, which points out that the first is awfully recursive. "'Birthday' really means 'anniversary of birthday'" sounds a lot like a humorous excerpt from history papers which was circulating on line in the 80s: "Homer was not actually written by Homer, but by someone else of that name."


So here you are again trying to use the etymology of AD to define what it "really" means, and again, linguistics doesn't work that way (and in this case, history).


No, etymology of Anno Domini has little to do with it. It has more to do with what words like "first" or "twentieth" mean. On a ruler, the very edge is marked "0" and then the next large marker an inch over is "1", but the inch that occupies the space between them is the "first" inch (or "inch number one"), not the zeroth inch. I think this is essentially what we're arguing about (and I hope you're taking "arguing" in the spirit intended, which is more humorous than anything else).


Yes, there is a "calendar" that jumps BC to AD, but we are perfectly capable rational people who can keep both the BC and AD and say that OUR calendar, which has both (and uses whichever line makes more sense in a given situation), makes more sense (and that our other science and mathematics make more sense than what they knew in the 6th century). Why cling to such silliness?


We cling by inertia, and because history has dates recorded for events, and it would be awfully confusing to change them now. That's all irrelevant to this debate. The only question that matters is whether the "first century", i.e., the "first hundred years" of the calendar begin with a year 1 or a year 0.

You're obviously a computer person. Computers count from 0 to 7 in order to make use of all eight combinations of two bits. I understand that. But humans don't count that way. When you count off something on your ten fingers, you count 1 through 10, not 0 through 9, despite the fact that 0 through 9 would more accurately correspond to the numerals which appear in each digit of a base-ten figure.


Regarding negative centuries, why not? WE KNOW HOW TO DO MATH! Going backwards, 0 AD until (but not including) -100 AD was the zeroeth century AD (because that's how you can easily extend ordinal numbers work,...


No, they don't. You're thinking like a computer again. There is no situation I can think of in human conversation where the thing before the "first" thing is called the "zeroth" thing. In most situations, the "thing before the first thing" is nonsense. If there was a thing before the first thing, then that would be the first thing.

Larry Hart said...

@duncan cairncross,

Geez, dude, how does one respond to that?

Howard Brazee said...

The bosses need to know what their employees are doing in order to do their job.

In a democracy, the bosses are the citizens, the employees are their public servants.

Look to see who is doing surveillance on whom to determine whether you live in a democracy or not.

Darrell E said...

duncan cairncross said...

My sincere condolences. Being happily married for about 30 years now, I can imagine. Take care of yourself.

Larry Hart said...

Presented without further comment...

https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Maps/Jan02.html#item-3

As we know, 2020 is both an election year and a census year, which means the folks on the ballot in November will (in most states) be drawing the next decade's legislative and congressional maps. Hans Lo Wang, writing for NPR, draws attention to a particular kind of gerrymander that is unusually sleazy, and that most folks probably haven't noticed. You might call it the "prison gerrymander."

The basic idea is pretty simple. Prisons have large concentrations of people who count for census purposes, but who cannot vote. So, you draw a district that has a prison in it, as well as the homes of a few hundred (or a few thousand) non-prisoners, and all of a sudden the voting power of those non-prisoners is magnified. Since prisons tend to be in rural areas, this almost always works to the benefit of the GOP. Meanwhile, the folks who are effectively voting on behalf of the prisoners generally care little about the issues the prisoners face, either while incarcerated, or once they are released.

This is uncomfortably close to the situation under the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution, which effectively appropriated the franchise of people of color for the benefit of white conservatives. Needless to say, the three-fifths compromise is one of the darkest parts of U.S. history, so it follows that any circumstance that parallels the compromise is probably pretty odious. There is an obvious fix here, namely counting prisoners as residents of their last non-prison address rather than residents of their prison. You surely don't need us to tell you which political party favors this change and which one opposes it.

Ahcuah said...

Larry,

Neistat? Seriously?

Sorry, I am a mathematical physicist. So you got that wrong, too.

Are you even aware of the differences between the Natural Numbers, Integers, Rationals, and the Reals? Time is described by the Reals. A coordinate system for the Reals contains zero whether you like it or not, or whether you write it down or not. Just because some 6th Century person didn't know about that stuff doesn't mean that we also are required not to know it. When you deal with something like an age (years) or a decade or whatever, we generally convert from Reals to Natural Numbers using the "floor" function, so that, let's say, when 15.3516994 years old we say 15 years old. Again, that's how numbers (and the language) work.

Yes, we count from 1. On a ruler the (Real) space from 0 inch to 1 inch is the first inch (that's how ordinal numbers work). But there's that 0 again. Once you notice that AD and BC are Two Separate Number lines (pointing in separate directions) that overlap, we realize that there is a 0 there, because that is how number lines work. So we use that 0 to define where our coordinate system starts (just as we do with our own ages, and anniversaries, etc.) We don't have to change anything else! All of the old dates still work just fine, and we use the BC number line for stuff a bit over 2000 years ago, and the AD number line after that. If you line up your ruler with a timeline so that the 1 inch touches year 1 AD, and 2 inches touches year 2 AD, there is still that 0 inch mark hanging off to the left. It is essentially arbitrary where we put the 0 of our coordinate system, so in every other case we put it where conventient.

We cling by inertia, and because history has dates recorded for events, and it would be awfully confusing to change them now. That's all irrelevant to this debate. The only question that matters is whether the "first century", i.e., the "first hundred years" of the calendar begin with a year 1 or a year 0.

But we don't have to cling to inertia. We're smarter than that. Also, from what I understand, this "inertia" you cling to is really quite recent. I'm pretty sure nobody had this problem understanding when centuries started back in 1900. It was only with Arthur C. Clarke that some smarty-pants decided they had to screw everything up by trying to appear smarter than they really were. There is a zero there with AD because it is a number line. It makes no sense to thus begin all things like decades and centuries and millennia with 1, because that's not how it all makes sense, and then you end up with modern smarty-pants not getting the way that numbers work, just so they can appear to others to have special knowledge. But they don't. But saying that there is a 0 AD one year before 1 AD doesn't change historical dates at all! Noticing that there are two overlapping coordinate systems also doesn't change any historical dates. And so one picks the coordinate system that is convenient for what one is doing at the moment. But you sure don't claim that a period like a decade or whatever starts with the point 1--they've always started at zero (until supposed smarty pants came along).

Bob Neinast

Ahcuah said...

Larry,

--- Continuing ---

My comment about Anno Domini had to do with your claim that we had to start with 1 because Jesus was born in the year 1. Except he wasn't. He was born in the year 4 BC (or -3 AD), so if you really want to be consistent with what you were claiming back then, the millennium should have ended in 1997 (when He would have been 2000 years old). But I see you've abandoned that line of "reasoning". It appears to me as if you've got your brain locked into a specific solution and cannot see what is really going on here.

Finally, regarding "birthday anniversary". Back in the 19th Century, people would celebrate their birthday anniversaries. Really. Go onto Google Books (https://books.google.com/?hl=en). Type in "birthday anniversary", and then under "Any Time" select "19th century". You'll see an 1880 book with "The One Hundredth Birthday Anniversary of Mrs. Sally Wilder". You'll find one with "The 90th Birthday Anniversary of Mrs. Anner M. Hudson Baldwin." You'll find one with "The fiftieth birthday anniversary of the Transcript." Since that time, we've just dropped the "anniversary" part of that because we are lazy (that's exactly how languages, and word meanings, change and evolve). Yes, by the older usage, my 50th "birthday" is really my 51st (since one ought to include the day one was born as a "birthday"). But the modern meaning of the word has changed, and you've confused that, too.

And in the end, you are confusing the Reals with the Natural Numbers. Natural Numbers (and your fingers) are used to count things like rocks. Continuous things, like ages and years (and distances) need the Reals. Sometimes we abbreviate by converting a Real to a Natural Number, but you seem to have forgotten how we do that and how that works.

In physics, we often got people trying to tell us how special relativity is all wrong and THEY really know what's going on. Professors usually have a slush pile of such letters (that are fun to share). That is what this discussion is starting to feel like.

Bob Neinast

PS. Link to McCain's visit to Schmidt's: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mccain-visits-german-restaurant-in-ohio/ The area is called German Village, not Germantown, which is a different city in Ohio, so that newsperson got it wrong.

David Brin said...

Howard well said indeed.

Duncan, a fine woman chose youand remained happy with the decision. You got nothing in common with those incels. You earned love and trust.

Zepp Jamieson said...

Very sorry for your loss, Duncan. I wish you well.
But now, you are no incel. There's an entire psychological pathology that accomanies that, and you clearly don't show such personality traits.

Larry Hart said...

@Bob Neinast,

Sorry I got the name wrong. I didn't think you'd want to be addressed as "Achuah", although I can do so if you'd prefer.

I really hope you know I'm arguing this in fun. I'm claiming my position is defensible, not that it's the only one. You're doing a good job of asserting that yours is the only one and that anyone who doesn't see that is an illiterate, innumarate ass. If that's not an act, then we can just stop, because it really isn't that important to me.

Until then, though, as Dave Sim would say, "F*** art. Let's dance!"


Are you even aware of the differences between the Natural Numbers, Integers, Rationals, and the Reals?


No need to be insulting.


Yes, we count from 1. On a ruler the (Real) space from 0 inch to 1 inch is the first inch (that's how ordinal numbers work). But there's that 0 again. Once you notice that AD and BC are Two Separate Number lines (pointing in separate directions) that overlap, we realize that there is a 0 there, because that is how number lines work. So we use that 0 to define where our coordinate system starts (just as we do with our own ages, and anniversaries, etc.) We don't have to change anything else!


The way I see it, the calendar is like a ruler. You can notice a 0 at the midpoint, but the year that falls between the 0 and the 1 is the "first year counting forward", just like the "first inch". The year that falls between the same 0 and the -1 is the "first year BC", i.e, the "first year on the counting backwards side". There's no need for a year called 0. 0 is a point, not a year. And "zeroth year" isn't really how language works, no matter that you'd like it to be.


I'm pretty sure nobody had this problem understanding when centuries started back in 1900. It was only with Arthur C. Clarke that some smarty-pants decided they had to screw everything up by trying to appear smarter than they really were.


I'm pretty sure you are wrong on this--that news accounts of the time would show pretty universal agreement that 1901 was the start of the twentieth century, and that it wasn't even controversial.


There is a zero there with AD because it is a number line.


You're forgetting that my original post was defending the position that the '20s began this year with 2020. I even said that if you called the century "the twenty-hundreds" that it began in 2000, not 2001. The only sense in which the century can be said to begin in 2001 is because we're calling it "The twenty-first century", and since the "First century" begins with the year 1, all else follows from there.


It makes no sense to thus begin all things like decades and centuries and millennia with 1,


It makes no less sense than ending all things like decades and centuries and millennia with 9. A meter stick doesn't stop with 99 centimeters. It spans the space between the points 0 and 100--a hundred ranges but a hundred and one endpoints.

continued...

Larry Hart said...

continuing...


But saying that there is a 0 AD one year before 1 AD doesn't change historical dates at all!


But saying that the year before 1AD is part of the first century AD doesn't make sense either. It's part of what came before the AD portion of the calendar, not part of it.


My comment about Anno Domini had to do with your claim that we had to start with 1 because Jesus was born in the year 1. Except he wasn't.


Again, no need to be insulting. The point is that the year 1 was meant to designate the year in which an event happened. Say we started a new calendar with the year of the Declaration of Independence. What we now call 1776 would be henceforth year 1 AA (Anno America). Then the first century AA would comprise the year we now call 1776 plus 99 more years, or 1-100 AA. You could say that 1775 becomes 0 AA, but it doesn't make sense to include 1775 in the "first century". 1775 was entirely prior to the triggering event.


Back in the 19th Century, people would celebrate their birthday anniversaries. Really. Go onto Google Books


So "Sixth Century inertia bad; Nineteenth Century inertia good"? And isn't it coincidental that whenever words change meaning, the correct one to use at the time is always the one you prefer, and I'm the confused one?


And in the end, you are confusing the Reals with the Natural Numbers. Natural Numbers (and your fingers) are used to count things like rocks.


Seems like it should bother you that we don't use base-11, with an additional single-digit depiction for ten.


Professors usually have a slush pile of such letters (that are fun to share). That is what this discussion is starting to feel like.


Again, I'm not telling you that you are wrong. I'm telling you that I am also not wrong. I don't think you quite understand what I'm not wrong about, given that you believe I want to start decades with 1. It seems to me that you're (willfully) confusing ordinal numbers with points. 0 is a point, but the year between points 0 and 1 is the "first year". The year between 0 and -1 is the "first year on that side". You would like to say that the year prior to the "first year" is the "zeroth year" and the one previous to that is the "negative first year", but I claim that there's where linguistic nonsense lies.

I'm arguing this with good will and humor. If it's annoying to you or others, let me know to stop, but I think it beats Russian trolling.

Jon S. said...

Achuah Nienast, you're also being pedantic about a point in contention. Anno Domini, "the Year of Our Lord", supposedly dates from the birth of Christ, which you state positively was 4 BCE. However, scholars of the data cannot agree on this; many hold that it could not have been later than 6 BCE, citing various clues in the text. (Exacerbating this, there were apparently four Judean governers named Herod, and no record of the census mentioned in the Gospels.)

I prefer the solution offered by our host, back when he was discussing the issue as it pertained to the first year of the 21st Century - hold a party celebrating the new decade in 2020, then another in 2021.

Larry Hart said...

Bob Neinast redux:

It makes no sense to thus begin all things like decades and centuries and millennia with 1,


See, to me it makes no sense that the "Twentieth Century" consists entirely of years beginning with 19. That the "20th century" contains the year 2000 makes more sense to me than that it contained the year 1900.


What if, instead of saying things like "Twentieth Century", we simply numbered centuries the same way we number years? The current century would simply be "21" (or "Century 21", like the real estate agency). In that case, I'd concede that the starting point is arbitrary, and that the century in question could be said to start in the year 2000 and end with 2099.

This does beg a question, though. Would you insist on calling the first one--the one that falls between "year 0" and "year 99"--Century 1 or Century 0? To be consistent with your past arguments, the century that begins in year 0 really should be Century 0, right? As long as you don't insist on calling it the "Zeroth Century".

Larry Hart said...

It's not just me.

https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=WjgOXujcA4u0tQW3rbaoAw&q=when+did+the+twentieth+century+start&oq=when+did+the+twenti&gs_l=psy-ab.1.1.0l3j0i22i10i30j0i22i30l4j0i22i10i30j0i22i30.7536.22781..26359...15.0..2.878.3815.19j2j1j2j1j0j1......0....1..gws-wiz.....0..0i131j33i22i29i30.I_kVVD1C2BA


The 20th century was a century that began on January 1, 1901 and ended on December 31, 2000. It was the tenth and final century of the 2nd millennium. Strictly speaking, it is distinct from the century known as the 1900s which began on January 1, 1900, and ended on December 31, 1999

Hailey said...

All this time arguing about centuries and decades when Randall Munroe came up with a much better solution: https://xkcd.com/2249/

Larry Hart said...

@Hailey,

My daughter received that new book advertised on Munroe's site for Christmas, and she's loving it. We had read his earlier book a few years ago--bought it while in Berlin of all places.

The same bookstore had several Brin books, both in English and German.

Hailey said...

@Larry Hart

I might have to check it out; it sounds like a fun read!

Last time I was in a bookstore was at Powell's in Portland, OR. They had just about every Brin book that I knew of, and I bought all the ones I didn't already have while I was there!

David Brin said...

Great discussion and good ignoring of mosquitoes. But please stay civil arguing over whole numbers?

I'm afraid I side with LH on the pedantic aspects. I'm a zero-finisher, not a 9-finisher. Especially since we don't get a new president till 2021.

My "Whose Rapture?" essay goes into some of this, but especially Christian millennialism, which will go nuts during the 2030s unless the lead-free generations really take over from us poisoned ones.

Larry Hart said...

@Dr Brin,

Yes, I don't remember now if I thought of it myself, or if it was after reading Earth, but at some point I realized that the debate over whether the world would end in 1997 or 2000 or 2001 was pointless--that the real crazies would be out for the 2000th anniversary of the Crucifixion.

As if the fact that nothing of the sort happened in 1033 didn't put that to rest.

David Brin said...

Okay guys. We're on moderated mode. It means there will be a small delay.

To be clear, we had some good laughs ... and I asked our neighborhood watch to up the camera recording times. But gnat buzzes are tiresome, so...

David Brin said...

Oh... "petroleum engineer" my ass. I know some. Those who aren't judicious go up in flames.

David Brin said...

BTW, this all started when I (rarely) dropped in at LinkedIn and challenged a couple of Putin fans to wagers. Shoulda known better. But it goes in the algorithm my "deep state" friends will use, if I ever need to call in favors.

Tony Fisk said...

Since calendars were invented before zeros, it's ironic that we celebrate the turning of the cogs these days. That's evolution for you.

Duncan, I offer my condolences.

matthew said...

Hm we just started a war with Iran. Targeted assassination as well. This will not end well.

duncan cairncross said...

Thanks for all of the condolences

I can't complain
Our son came back home to help me look after his mum
The NZ health and hospice system was fantastic - we had all of the equipment and help we could use



David Brin said...

For two years the US Navy resisted provocations by both Trumpists and the Iranian mullahs, calmly and responsibly defusing every attempt to stage a "Tonkin Gulf" style incident to start a war. (Look up also the terms "Gleiwitz" and Reichstag Fire.) Let's be clear. The one left standing after a US-Iran war will be Vladimir Putin. The only possible outcome is when Russia extends "protection for its neighbor" and gets the Persian satrapy it's wanted for 300 years. (As we speak, Russian, Iranian and Chinese naval units are on exercise together.) Trump gets his distraction, the mullahs get an excuse to crush the vexing liberals of Tehran, but the real winner is Vlad.

Tell me, you have another way this can end? Seriously? Name one GOP action that went against Putin interests. One. It's his party. But we can have eyes open. And know that we can save America from the Kremlin, the KGB and the "ex" communists who run both. And who now run DC.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/defense-secretary-says-iran-and-its-proxies-may-be-planning-fresh-attacks-on-us-personnel-in-iraq/2020/01/02/53b63f00-2d89-11ea-bcb3-ac6482c4a92f_story.html

Zepp Jamieson said...

Hmm. Anyone remember Arch-Duke Ferdidand from the history books?

duncan cairncross said...

It's not just Iran

Killing an Iranian General - and a number of bystanders - by a military strike inside Iraq

That is an act of WAR against BOTH countries

David Brin said...

Of course the Iraqi Parliament will order all US troops out immediately. They were having trouble with youths disaffected from Iranian dominance. Now that's all over and Iraqis are unified behind Iran. Tell me again how ever, ever, ever Republicans act in ways beneficial to the United States of America?

Treebeard said...

If a president can declare armed forces of a sovereign nation to be terrorists, then attack them at will, doesn’t that give him dictatorial war-making powers? This is clearly a disproportionate response and an act of war, so I guess the USA is now a rogue state. But as usual you miss the point with your Putin monomania. Russia is holding military exercises with China and Iran while simultaneously orchestrating an attack on Iran? Sounds ridiculous to me. Iran's arch-enemies Israel and Saudi Arabia are the ones who want this and they are now friends (see Kushner and his best friend bin Salman)--if Trump is anyone's puppet, he's theirs. Anyway, this looks quite bad. January 2, 2020—a day that will live in infamy?

duncan cairncross said...

Changing the subject entirely

I was thinking about Hydro power - here we have a lot of hydro power but because of the stupid market set-up its not used so much as storage

Hydro Power GENERATION is old technology - and most of the suitable sites have been used

Hydro Power STORAGE - is also old technology - but has not had much of a "raison d'etre" - until NOW when Wind and Solar are getting really cheap

Generation requires a large catchment area - rain power!

But Storage does not
Storage just needs two lakes at different levels and a pipe between them

I'm wondering if the 2020s will be the decade of Hydro Storage

 Ashley said...

That was surprise, the news about Iran, but while Russia might well get what they want, whether they'll still want it when they get it, is another matter.

I suspect the Middle-East is a poisoned chalice, and letting Russia drink from the cup might be better in the long run than current status quo, which hasn't been exactly smooth sailing.

I could be wrong. I'm happy to educated on things I don't know that I don't know.

Tony Fisk said...

I can see Scotty from Marketing's seizing the pending call for alliance with both hands. He needs a distraction, big time.

Zepp Jamieson said...

Trump tweeted, "[Soleimani] should have been taken out many years ago!"
I wonder if he realizes that billions of people feel much the same way about him.
"Common sense" says Trump "needs a war to get reelected." A leader has to have trust, ability to lead, and a somewhat plausible pretext to carry that off, and Trump has none of those things. Further, Iran and Iraq aren't going to respond militarily or even diplomatically. It will be something asymmetric and intentionally or not, it may wait until after November.

Zepp Jamieson said...

Treebeard: As the old adage has it, "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' while looking around for a large rock." There's absolutely no reason why Russia (or any other nation, for that matter) could not be playing a duplicitous game of cooperating with a country it plans to subsume in some way. The Russians have to know that trying to invade and occupy Iran would be an absolute disaster (they tried and failed in Afghanistan, just as the Empire and the US did) but if they can turn the place into another Syria or Lebanon, that would suit them just fine. America attacking Iran would be strategically great for Russia.

Larry Hart said...

Treebeard:

Russia is holding military exercises with China and Iran while simultaneously orchestrating an attack on Iran? Sounds ridiculous to me.


I think Dr Brin meant that Russia will be the main beneficiary of a US war with Iran, not that they actively engaged in such a war.

Nonetheless, I will uncharacteristically agree with everything you say in the next bit:


Iran's arch-enemies Israel and Saudi Arabia are the ones who want this and they are now friends (see Kushner and his best friend bin Salman)--if Trump is anyone's puppet, he's theirs. Anyway, this looks quite bad. January 2, 2020—a day that will live in infamy?

David Brin said...

At times Treebeard is honest and expresses actual CURIOSITY. If dimness to an exceptional degree:

"Russia is holding military exercises with China and Iran while simultaneously orchestrating an attack on Iran? Sounds ridiculous to me."

Revealing absolutely zero awareness of Russian traditions of double-dealing and Okrahna-NKVD-KGB-FSB trickery. OMG can't you work it out in your own head as a homework assignment?

Turn it around. Is there any plausible end game to this in which Vlad is NOT the winner?

SUre the Saudis are also being played. And the stupider Israelis. But I've been predicting a "Gleiwitz" or Tokin Gulf for two years. And US Navy professionalism has frustrated every effort to trugger Putin's war.

David Brin said...

Shifting to moderation was remarkably less onerous that I expected. I am probably the last public figure on Earth to have done so. I held out in a sort of obstinate -romantic experiment to see how long my incredible luck - regarding trolls - would last. It lasted into the 2020s!

Under these conditions, the gnat buzzes in the "pending" folder are actually kinda... amusing.

Alfred Differ said...

Duncan,

Sounds more like “loyal to the memory of” a woman who demonstrated you aren’t incel material. ❤️

Alfred Differ said...

Ashley,

He doesn’t have to drink from the chalice. He just has to demonstrate that he can separate us from it.

Opposing US geopolitical interests is one of Russia’s geopolitical interests.

Alfred Differ said...

Stratfor predicts response against oil infrastructure instead of our people.

Zepp Jamieson said...

Stratfor might be right. Iran could easily target the oil fields in Kurdish (now Turkish) Iraq.

Larry Hart said...

@Bob Neinast,

I looked at your blog post
https://ahcuah.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/when-do-the-teens-end-2/

and the first image of the number line works for me, except that the years aren't really points as you depict them. The years are the intervals between the points. So instead of points -1 and 1 being right next to each other, it's the line-segment numbered -1 and the line-segment numbered 1 which should be right next to each other. The point in between them can be called 0 if you wish. That reconciles the BC and AD calendars nicely.

I will also concede your point that the early centuries were retcons, and that the year called 1 BC might just as easily be called 0 AD. I contend, though, that that doesn't solve the problem that you think it does. Because it still doesn't make sense to include the year prior to the first year AD in the "first century AD".

And that's where we're really talking past each other. Because you think we're arguing about how numbers work, and I think we're arguing about the meaning of "First something". Maybe it would be clearer if years were named the way centuries are, so 1 AD would be called "the first year". Then it would be more obvious that the first century consists of the first hundred years--the first year through the hundredth year.

If that doesn't explain my position, then we simply disagree.

Howard Brazee said...

The founders did not intend for the president to be able to start wars. But presidents have been doing that all of my life.

They also did not intend for the president to create taxes, but Trump has been doing that.

scidata said...

They also did not intend for the president to be a grifter.
They also did not intend for an entire party to become treasonous.
They also did not intend for the president to hold religious rallies.
They also did not intend for the president to be slothful and gluttonous.
They also did not intend for science to be attacked.
They also did not intend for nature, posterity, and decency to be abandoned.
They also did not intend for the weak and infirm to be mocked and vilified.
They also did not intend for pussies to be grabbed.
They also did not intend for innocent children to be caged.
They also did not intend for steadfast allies to be betrayed.
I'll stop there.

David Brin said...

No scidata! Don't stop! You do it so well! Don't ... oh... don't stop! ;-)

scidata said...

I just needed to vent a bit. It's not really my character. I come here for the SETI and SF talk. Apologies.

Alfred Differ said...

I've resisted the itch to comment about mixing meanings and languages representing meanings when it comes to calendars because I've been responding from my phone. Way too much work until I get used to the spoken language interface.

I like my addition operation to behave properly in an additive group over integers and reals and such, but natural numbers aren't an option. No identity element for +.

Calendars tend to use natural numbers because of custom. There can be a number of years before or after an event, but not really a zero number of years.

Anyone with any math sense will extend natural numbers to integers when doing calendar additions and subtractions. Maybe even rationals, but you have to be a little bit of a believer in continuity to extend all the way to reals.

How to do things 'right' is moot, though, because the definitions are more about custom than mathematics. Arguing there is a 'right way' is actually a misapplication of mathematics.


For some fun, this same debate can be had when dealing with the spacial analogs. Location, position, interval.


... and ...

It is not a given that one SHOULD extend to Reals to represent physical coordinate systems. The quantum theory folks might debate that. The gravity folks should too since complex numbers make themselves useful in so many ways. Then there are the numbers with a sense of direction and metric. Gravity folks SHOULD be curious about trying them.

David Brin said...

Scidata I tried HARD to make clear I was JOKING! Argh! I included a smiley face!

Ah well.

onward

onward

Keith Halperin said...

Per: request for follow-up from last post:

"Keith Halperin said...
@ Dr. Brin: ~1/2 current US levels, or the lowest usage for a country that has an HDI of 0.9 or above: Ireland, Germany, South Korea....

4:04 PM
David Brin said...
I'd be very surprised if Japan and Holland don't have a ratio that's even better."
==================================================================================

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=hdi+vs+energy+usage+kilowatts&spell=1&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjCibqUr4vnAhVLs54KHQMsAEYQBQhMKAA&biw=1920&bih=969&dpr=1#imgrc=XR2ERmXeKjSXsM:

https://ef4india.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/hdi_vs_energy.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index

.....................................................

If we were to go by ecological footprint:

https://www.google.com/search?biw=1920&bih=969&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=t24nXpelKYfe-gSy6L6oDQ&q=hdi+vs+ecologivcal+footprint&oq=hdi+vs+ecologivcal+footprint&gs_l=img.3...239870.244920..245125...0.0..0.76.1361.23......0....1..gws-wiz-img.......0j0i24.JPLgir49bac&ved=0ahUKEwjX3KiJ05XnAhUHr54KHTK0D9UQ4dUDCAc&uact=5#imgrc=zaoW0ZIUKQxhYM:

https://www.google.com/search?biw=1920&bih=969&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=t24nXpelKYfe-gSy6L6oDQ&q=hdi+vs+ecologivcal+footprint&oq=hdi+vs+ecologivcal+footprint&gs_l=img.3...239870.244920..245125...0.0..0.76.1361.23......0....1..gws-wiz-img.......0j0i24.JPLgir49bac&ved=0ahUKEwjX3KiJ05XnAhUHr54KHTK0D9UQ4dUDCAc&uact=5#imgrc=Hofje3ffzWFGQM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecological_footprint

……………………………………………………………………………

I interpret that based on the ecological footprint of Italy 4.61 Globalha (the lowest footprint with an ~0.9 HDI in Western Europe, taking Spain as an outlier) and a WW biocapacity of 12.6 Globalha, the world can sustainably support ~2.7 G at an Italian standard of living.

Going back to energy consumption, if Jacobson is *right and we can do approximately 11.8 TWe of renewable energy, then the world can sustainably support ~3 G at a Western European standard of living.

Putting all these together, I conclude we should work toward stabilizing and then reducing world population to the 1950's level (or lower) over the next ~2-3 centuries without increasing the death date and avoiding compulsory methods (https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol28/39/28-39.pdf), while raising the WW HDI to 0.9+.

I am not a scientist or statistician, and my premises/analysis may be faulty or math may be in error. I welcome your analyses and comments- "It's the Enlightenment Way!"

Keith Halperin




*ALTHOUGH: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/100-percent-renewables-plan-has-significant-shortcomings-say-experts