MMT - Modern Monetary Theory - is killing us

The Bitcoin Revolution with Quoth The Raven
Peter McCormack The good part starts at the 37 minute mark and runs for 5 minutes.Ignore the tattoos, he has a brain and knows how to use it.

Zohran Mamdani has been getting a lot of coverage on account of his being a dirty commie. Doesn't bother me, he's far away on the east coast. New York is basically a hell-hole, if it sinks even further into the pit it would be no more than it deserves. Okay, my opinion is a little colored by a steady diet of cop shows on TV, and right-wing conspiracy theorists. But then I came across this:

There's A Lot Of Honest Pain Out There by Quoth the Raven

But replacing broken monetary policy with socialism isn’t just wrong—it’s disastrously wrong. 

Yesterday, someone left a comment on my post about Zohran Mamdani that stuck with me in a way few internet comments ever do. It wasn’t defensive or hostile—it was sobering.

The commenter challenged me, not to just oppose Mamdani’s ideology, but to think about why his message resonates at all. Here's what they said:

“You really ought to ask yourself: why does his message resonate? Why did Russia have a revolution? People don’t wake up, make the espresso, make an omelet, look out the back window across their deck, the lake, the boat, ready for a day of country living, and say ‘You know what, honey… how about we start that revolution today?’ Nobody does that. Revolutions are made by very unhappy people. Why are they unhappy? Mostly because society largely doesn’t work for them… There is a lot of pain out there, and a lot of it is honest pain.”

They’re right. There is a lot of honest pain.

And if you’ve followed anything I’ve written over the last several years, you know I’ve been screaming into the void about how broken our monetary system is. We have created an economy where the top 10% get wealthier with each crisis, while the bottom 50% watches their standard of living deteriorate. I’ve described it here when talking about the GameStop crisis (33:40).

The frustration bubbling beneath the surface is not irrational. It's earned.

People are watching the price of everything explode—housing, food, healthcare, energy—while wages stagnate. Meanwhile, Wall Street breaks records quarter after quarter. That disconnect doesn’t feel like capitalism to the average person. It feels rigged.

So when someone like Mamdani shows up and says “seize the means of production,” it doesn’t sound crazy to people living paycheck to paycheck. It sounds like maybe, finally, someone is taking their suffering seriously.

But here’s the part no one wants to talk about—especially not in polite political circles: the real culprit behind this pain is our broken monetary system. And both parties are to blame.

I laid this out in March, and it bears repeating. The U.S. is now at $35 trillion in federal debt. That number alone is alarming—but the speed at which we’re accumulating debt is what's truly terrifying. Since 2020, we’ve added over $12 trillion. No one in D.C. talks seriously about it because monetary policy is the third rail. Touch it and you’re finished.

Worse, Democrats have embraced a mindset that spending can and should be infinite—as if the dollar is magic and gravity no longer applies. They’ve adopted the pseudo-academic gospel of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which argues the Fed can just print money without consequences. This idea has infected the left's fiscal agenda with delusional confidence that everything can be free, deficits don’t matter, and taxes can rise forever.

But as I pointed out before: MMT doesn’t help the poor. It accelerates wealth inequality. I noted this in March 2025 using this chart:

Net personal wealth (U.S.)

The more the Fed prints, the higher asset prices go. Who owns the assets? The top 10%. Who gets wrecked by inflation? The working class. Every time the Fed steps in with more easing, more QE, more bond buying, the rich pull further away from everyone else. Look at the chart of wealth distribution over the past 30 years—it’s not just widening, it’s going vertical. And it’s not just happening by accident. It’s a direct consequence of our monetary policy.

Democrats say they care about “equity,” but their economic policy ensures the exact opposite. The bigger government gets, the more it feeds on debt, the more the Fed has to monetize it, and the more billionaires benefit. This is not some conspiracy. It’s math. It’s observable. It’s policy. And it’s failure.

I understand why people are drawn to Mamdani’s message. When you’re crushed by rising costs and watching others get rich doing nothing but holding assets, radical solutions sound appealing. But replacing broken monetary policy with socialism isn’t just wrong—it’s disastrously wrong. Every society that’s tried it has ended up worse off: Soviet Russia, Mao’s China, Venezuela, Cuba. The promises are always the same—fairness, justice, redistribution—and the results are always scarcity, repression, and collapse.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the problem isn’t too much capitalism. The problem is we don’t have capitalism at all. We have central planning by unelected technocrats who distort markets, crush price signals, and rob the average American of any real shot at building wealth. And Democrats, for all their talk of the working class, are pushing harder than ever toward a centrally planned future with no brakes.

The solution isn’t to seize the means of production. The solution is to restore sound money, shrink the size of government, and reintroduce real market discipline. That’s how you give people a shot—not by handing them utopian slogans, but by fixing the corrupt system that’s keeping them down.

There’s a lot of honest pain out there. And that pain deserves a real answer. MMT is not the answer. Socialism is not the answer. A return to true capitalism—not cronyism, not corporatism, but honest, competitive markets—is the only way forward.

He's right about all this, except for the part about blaming the Democrats. As the Big, Beautiful Bill illustrates, the Republicans are equally guilty.

Note: In case you don't know about the GameStop debacle:

The GameStop debacle refers to the unprecedented surge in GameStop's stock price in early 2021, driven by a massive influx of retail investors on platforms like Reddit's WallStreetBets. This surge was fueled by a short squeeze, where hedge funds betting against the company were forced to buy back shares to cover their positions, further inflating the price. The event highlighted the power of retail investors, the volatility of the stock market, and the potential for short squeezes to disrupt established financial practices. 

P. S. Blogger won't let me specify the start time for the video. It inserts amp; between the question mark and the t. When that happens, the browser gets confused.

New Samsung Galaxy Phone

Samsung Galaxy A03s
Showing both back and front

My phone died last week. I thought it was the battery so I bought a new one from Amazon for ten bucks. Then it really died. So I ordered a refurbished phone from Tracphone. I think it cost me $40. What a joyful experience.

USB Connectors
Click to embiggenate

Unlike Amazon they want $5 for overnight shipping but me being a cheapskate I told myself I can live for three days without my phone. Showed up yesterday and it needs to be activated and charged. Charging is going to take a while so let's get that started. Old charging cable doesn't work. New charging cable uses USB-c connectors on both ends. Root through my box of USB cables and they are all the old style, no new ones. Do I have anything that uses this new style connector? Hmm, how about the DOSS speaker? Ah ha! It does! Plug it in and it starts charging. Cool. Took like 12 hours to fully charge it up, but at least it works.

USB cable with C connector on one end and an A connector on the other

Check with my wife, she has all kinds of new fangled do-dads, does she have an extra cable? She does, but not of the correct flavor, so off to Amazon. I find a cable for $5. There goes the $5 I saved on shipping. I'm not going to get fast charging, but that's okay. I turn my phone off when I go to bed and plug in the charger cable, and since I'm not on my phone all friggin' day long like some people are, I should be fine.

Now for the activation. What fun. I dial up the website on my computer and click on Activate and it wants to send me a text message. That's not going to work, my old phone is dead as a doornail. No other option but the chat line, so I spend 10 or 15 minutes chatting (send a line, go play solitaire while waiting for a response, repeat) and eventually he tells me I have to find another phone and call some number. Borrow my wife's phone and call and I get a robocop who offers me options, none of which are helpful. So I start asking for an operator.

What word do you use to refer to a human? Real person? Operator? My wife says I should use 'representative', but I persisted in using 'operator' and eventually the robocop connected me to a real person. Makes me wonder how many words the robocop is able to recognize, or maybe it just gives up after a certain number of failed repetitions.

Anyway, I get connected to a real person who seems to have a handle on English, not perfect, but workable and we're going through the rigamarole of me proving I am me and he asks me for my phone's email. This flummoxed me. My phone is dead, and my phone doesn't have an email address, it has a phone number. What is he talking about? Eventually I realized he was asking about the email address connected to my Tracfone account. He sent me an email and I was able to confirm my existence and he turned on my phone.

Now we have to make sure my new phone works, so he asks me to make a phone call. That's a problem because I don't know anybody's phone numbers. So off to Google Contacts on my computer and look up some numbers, but all I get is voice mail. Everybody's busy. A couple minutes later somebody calls back, wants to know why I'm bothering them while they are at work. Tell him I'm testing my new phone. So I can make and receive phone calls. At least to one person.

Now the operator / representative / real person wants to know if I can get data. That means either audio or video, so let's pull up YouTube. Of course, everything on this phone is slightly different. It's got all the same stuff, but it's all in new places and everything works slightly differently, but eventually I get there and I've got a video playing so I think we're good.

My main uses for my phone are phone calls, text messages, and Google Maps, and those all seem to work. Since I have started using a smartphone I have found a couple other things that are useful:

• YouTube Music
• Bluetooth
• Voice to text
• Wifi

YouTube Music is not something you just use, seems you have to install the program (app in newspeak). Wandered around for a while looking for it but eventually found it and it and we're good. I haven't tried Bluetooth or Wifi yet. I'll get to it.

Voice to text works, though there is a new feature that evidently allows you to send voice recordings via the text messaging system. Some people thrive on noise, I ain't one of 'em. To get to Voice to text you have to tap on the OTHER microphone icon. It works, but when I say 'question mark' it puts in the the words 'question mark' in the message. My old phone but the question mark symbol (?). Bah, double bah and humbug. Now I gotta figure out how to change that.

Poking around on the net (using MY COMPUTER, I don't use my phone for anything except the bare essentials) I found this page:

Voice-to-text service selection

Bigger versions of the last two screens:

Changed to Google Voice Typing and now I can insert punctuation by naming the character.

Still haven't tried the camera.

KQRZ

KQRZ

Came across this station while driving. I've come across it before and it's pretty great. 'Real Oldies' is how they bill themselves. The only problem with this station is that it is a low power station, so by the time I've gone a few miles down the road it has faded into oblivion. Something prompted me to wonder if maybe they had a website, and sure enough they do. Then I realized that anybody anywhere in the world could tune into these guys, so here I am telling the world about these guys - KQRZ Real Oldies

They've been playing Public Service Announcements where Joe Walsh is shilling for amateur radio. Did I hear that right? Joe Walsh? Really? Um, yeah, really:

Joe Walsh Ham Radio PSA for The ARRL
Michael Huey AKA W7ZI

This is as weird as finding out the Rod Stewart built a monster model railroad layout in his attic. This is how I know Joe Walsh:

Joe Walsh - Life's Been Good
Joe Ramen

Usually I go for some kind of action with my music videos, but I really like this still image.

My friend Jack and The Silicon Graybeard are both amateur radio men.

P. S. The logo on the website has a black background, but when I copy the image and paste it into my blog it has a white background, so I started poking around looking for ways to turn the background black. I looked at this and I looked at that and then I realized when I opened it in Google Photos, it had a black background, so I took a screen shot and cropped it and here we are.

Trying to Explain Math Problems

The last question on the 2022 British GCSE maths exam
blackpenredpen

I saw this video about a geometry problem the other day and within a couple of seconds I had figured out how to solve it. Okay, good for me, but then I start watching this dude's explanation and I wonder what the devil is he doing? The solution is so simple, why is he making it so hard? So I sat down to do the calculations for my method and I had to do it two or three times before I got the right answer. You've got to be paying attention when you are working problems like this and being as I am retired (I.e. a professional slacker) it takes a bit to get the ol' brain running on all cylinders. 

So now that I have verified that my technique works, can I explain it to anybody else? The technique in the video is pretty good, just use dry-erase markers on a whiteboard and record your explanation with a video camera. I've got a white board and my smart phone has a video camera. Probably have to order some dry-erase markers and buy or make a tripod. But then you have to record your explanation, and since the first take is going to be garbage, you're going to have to do it again, possibly several times, and you are going to have to watch each of them to gauge whether they are any good or not. Bah, sounds like a giant time suck. I'm a keyboardist, probably should stick to what I know.

So now I'm looking for math symbols I can use in this blog and I found the code for Π (pi) and for √ (the radical for square roots). Funny thing is you put the html code in and Blogger turns it into a character.

Most math equations like to represent division with a horizontal line with one number above and one number below. That's great if you have an editor that supports it, but it takes extra special fiddling to do that using Blogger's editor. Computer code uses a / (slash) to represent division. It isn't as pretty and often requires parentheses, but since I'm getting tired of mucking around here, it's good enough. The radical symbol doesn't automatically carry over all the following digits, so I'm using parentheses here as well.

The last problem is what to call the slice of a circle that is cut off by a chord. There ought to be term for that. Wikipedia calls it a circular segment. That's still too long for me. I'm going to call it a sword cause it kind of reminds me of the scimitars from ancient Arabia.

Here's the original problem:

Find the area of the shaded portion

Here's the same three circles with a couple of equilateral triangles:

Geometry Problem

You can see that each of the two shaded areas are a pie shape with two swords cut out of the sides. The area of the sword is the difference between the area of a pie shape and the area of an equilateral triangle. So all we have to do is compute the area of a pie shape and the triangle and then do a little addition and subtraction. Here's the math. r, the radius of the circle, is 4.

Area of pie shape = Πr²/6

Height of equilateral triangle = √(r² - (r/2)²)

 = √(r² - r²/4)

 = √(4r²/4 - r²/4)

 = √((r²/4)4 - (r²/4)1)

 = √((r²/4)(4 - 1))

 = √(r²/4) √(4 - 1)

 =    (r/2)  √(4 - 1)

 =    (r/2)  √3

Area of equilateral triangle = 1/2 x base x height

= r * (r/2) √3 / 2

= r² * √3 / 4

Area of sword (space between the triangle and the circle)

= Area of pie shape - Area of equilateral triangle

= Πr²/6 - r²√3 /4

= r²(Π/6 - √3 /4)

Area of one shaded area

= Area of pie shape - 2(Area of sword)

= r²Π/6 - 2r²(Π/6 - √3 /4)

= r²Π/6 - r²(Π/3 - √3 /2)

= r²(Π/6 - Π/3 + √3 /2)

= r²(√3 /2 - Π/6)

Area of total shaded area

= 2(Area of one shaded area)

= 2r²(√3 /2 - Π/6)

= r²(√3 - Π/3)

Font Size

Finally got tired of the small type on this blog and went looking for a solution. Found nothing in the Blogger setup page, so I asked for help and the answer is to edit the html. So I did. I changed the value of the first instance of "font" from 

value="normal normal 109% . . .

to 

value="normal normal 125% . . . 

Just in case you were wondering.

A Rube Goldberg inspired useless machine

Kind of a cool little box. This kind of sums up my activity today. Be better if it did something useful, like Matt's Remote Control:

I've been working on some number puzzles from MindYourDecisions and Michael Penn. They are relatively simple number puzzles that can be solved with a little logic and algebra, but today I wasn't feeling that sharp, so I decided to write a program to solve it. For me it's basically a mindless task. It wouldn't use any complicated logic, it would just execute a loop and test each number in succession until we got an answer. Or we ran out of numbers. We can only go as high as two billion without having to get fancy. You do have to put a limit on it or it will run forever. Once it gets to the maximum value, it will roll over to the negative value and just keep going, whether it makes any sense or not. I solved one of the puzzles using this technique. The other one failed because of a faulty instruction. Haven't figured out just where the fault is. It will probably turn out to be something obvious that I won't be able to recognize until I have left it on the shelf for a week or two.

Update minutes later - fixed the start time on Matt's video.

P. S. html stuff. I just realized that YouTube will calculate start and stop times for you. Pause the video where you want it to start, click Share then Embed. In the dialog box it will have a checkbox to start at the current position/time. It shows that time in minutes and seconds format (mm:ss), but when you click the box, it converts that time into seconds and inserts it in the embed code. Copy the code and paste it on your blog or wherever. Let the video play until you get to the end of the section you want. Now you can use the same trick to get the stop time (end is the parameter name).

HTML Embedding Images

Whenever you insert an image in a Blogger post, the path for the image gets written twice. Being as Blogger creates horrendously long pathnames for these images, the html, if you look at it, looks like a pile of garbage. I see that and I think WTF? But then I put it out of my mind and concentrate on what I am trying to accomplish and that is often to move the image to where I want it, not where Blogger in its infinite stupidity has put it.

Anyway, I got to wondering about this today and I did some checking. The first time the pathname is used is in the a tag which is simply a link. The second time the pathname is used is in the img tag which is what causes the picture to be displayed. If you click on the image in a published post, it will take you to the original image which may be much larger (or smaller) than the published image. If you remove the complete a tag, then clicking the image on the published post will take you to the same image with the same size as it is in your post.

Here is an image inserted using the Blogger. Clicking on it will take you to a much larger image.

Here is the same image inserted the same way, but then I edited the html to remove the a tag. Clicking on it will take you to the same size image.

The link will have a slightly different pathname than the image pathname. Evidently different size images will get stored in different directories.

Is it cosmic?

 I read a post the other day about Bi Directional printing. The post was on Schneier on Security and is about how malicious code can be inserted into source code. It does this by looking innocent. However when the compiler reads the file, it gets parts of it in different order than what you see on the screen. I think we can presume the compiler gets the raw file and what we see on the screen has been rearranged according to the constraints of the window and the formatting control characters embedded in the file.

Golden Earring - Twilight Zone (Extended Long Version)
Opening Salvo

There was an example posted so I thought I would try it out. The sample, however, did not have the control codes embedded in it, all it gave you were the two examples, one with control codes active and one without. So I thought I would give it a try, I mean it shouldn't be two hard to open up some kind of text editor and insert a couple of control codes, should it? Well, for some reason, man, the find function on my text editor has flat quit working. Do-do-Do-do - are we in the Twilight Zone?

I've been threatening to replace my Linux box with a Chromebox. You can buy them now. A few years ago you couldn't, you had to roll your own, and that was too much trouble. I'd gone through that in setting up my Linux box, but after having been using it for years without having to get back under the hood* I'm not keen to do so now.

I've been threatening to replace my Linux box with a Chromebox. You don't suppose the Linux box was listening in, do you? I mean it's what I use for all my web surfing, surfing for a new Chromebook (drool). Do I get a high power one or do I get a one with a Celeron processor? I think the high power ones also use an Intel processor with some kind of alpha-numeric name. And then there's the question of memory. I think I have a choice of 4, 8 or 16 gigabytes. I think this box, the one I'm using, has 4, but I can't be bothered to check. I guess I'm a little irritated, all that time I spent screwing around, waiting for computers to boot up. Maybe that's why I did it, I was a glutton for punishment, people looked at the job in passing and just passed on by. A smarter me might have done that, but I guess that's just who I am. There is a certain satisfaction in successfully jumping through all the hoops and finally getting the machine to behave. 

A couple of weeks ago, four of us spent the afternoon moving a big piece of cast iron a couple of miles across the west side. Any complaints? No, just a chorus of 'that was fun, we should do it again some time'. Probably deprived some honest hardworking men a day's wages, but not everyone has an unlimited budget for hobbies.

Oh yeah, the control codes, from Google search:

Overriding BiDi using Unicode control characters

Character	Code point	Markup equivalent
Left-to-Right Isolate (LRI)	U+2066	dir="ltr"
Right-to-Left Isolate (LRI)	U+2067	dir="rtl"
First Strong Isolate (FSI)	U+2068	dir="auto"
Left-to-Right Embedding (LRE)	U+202A	dir="ltr"

I'm not quite sure just how or what to actually insert in a file, but I'm sure I'll figure it out.

*Capiche 'under the hood'? To work on an automobile engine, which used to be a very common activity but hardly ever happens any more, you had to open the hood, so all the time you were working on the engine, you were 'under the hood'. For some reason, most people, maybe 95 percent, won't ever engage in it. It might be lack of aptitude, or just simple disinclination, or possibly even a gut level revulsion. I don't know, people are weird. Anyway, 'under the hood' means getting down into the inner workings of of whatever mechanism, virtual or mechanical, is under discussion. That's a weird way to put it, 'under discussion'. The thing is broken and it needs to be fixed, there doesn't need to be any discussion. Aha! But anything worth repairing that breaks down is going to cause a discussion. Is it worth fixing? Can it be fixed? Who can do it? Should we just buy another one, it'd be quicker, etc., etc., etc.

Update April 2022 replaced missing video.

YouTube Embed Code

After much mucking about with embedding YouTube videos, I finally decided that the way to do it was to make a template and just copy-paste it into Blogger. Maybe this will be useful for someone. Here it is:

YouTube Embed Code

I started with the embed code YouTube provides, then changed the dimensions, added the center tag and the carriage returns (the br tags) at the end and changed the video ID to XxxxxxxxxxX. Do this in a text editor and save the file under a name like, oh, I dunno, YouTubeEmbedCode.htm

Change Blogger to html mode, paste this block in, get the ID from the url of the YouTube browser tab (just double click on the ID to highlight the whole thing and then type Ctrl-C), and paste it over the X's. Add the title, and whatever else you want and you're done. You can go back to compose mode and write your text.

I don't know if it's any simpler, but it sure feels like it.

Inflation

 Inflation
Chuck Pergiel
This is just an experiment to see how well all the pieces work together. I recorded this video using my phone. It was automatically uploaded to Google Photos almost immediately (I'll have to check), now I am downloading it to my computer prior to uploading to YouTube. Once that is all complete I can embed it at the top of the post using the HTML editor, still available, just hidden under the pencil icon in the toolbar at the extreme left end, right next to the frame of the video screen.

The video was recorded at 5:52, Google Photos shows 5:54 and right now it is 6:32. It took a couple of minutes to upload, but most of that time was me drinking beer and reading.

While uploading the video to YouTube, it asks whether this is a Premiere, which piqued my curiosity. Google elaborates:

YouTube Premieres lets you and your viewers watch and experience a new video together. It's like a movie or TV show premiere. Premiering your video lets you schedule a video upload and create buzz around the video with a shareable watch page. Note: Premieres can only be created using a computer, but viewers can watch the premiere on any platform like computer, iOS, Android, and mWeb.

That sounds kind of cool. I can see uploading a video you had been working on and then asked your friends to get together and talk about it virtually. I'm not going to do that here, for one, this video didn't take any more work than making a phone call and while phone calls can be arduous, especially if you are having to deal with some bullshit that you should't have to deal with, you don't get any credit for making it. Only results count. 

For another I can already see how it needs improvement. I need to read it through a couple more times until I am sure of what I want to say when I see a word. Why am I, at age 69, still of two minds about how to pronounce 'Stephen'? Is it 'Steeven' or Stefen'? And why does this confusion exist?

On a remotely related note, Matt's Off Road Recovery got a Silver Play Button for reaching 100,000 subscribers. I've watched a bunch of his videos. Most of them are nothing special, he drives his Jeep Cherokee out into the sand dunes in Southern Utah and gets stuck cars unstuck. Occasionally the operation will be more complicated. I can't say as to why I like them, but they are my go-to channel for mindless entertainment.

 

Searching for Nuggets

I've been trying to do a better job of labeling my posts, but sometimes a single label doesn't help, especially when there are hundreds of posts with that tag (like videos or music videos). So I've been wondering if there is a method to find posts that has two labels attached, like "Cars" and "videos". Turns out there is. A search for all posts with a single label generates a URL that looks like this:

https://pergelator.blogspot.com/search/label/video

To restrict your search to posts with both labels, append a plus sign and the second label to that string:

https://pergelator.blogspot.com/search/label/video+Cars

Capitalization is important. This URL returns nothing:

https://pergelator.blogspot.com/search/label/video+cars

Thanks to DarkUFO

P.S. Pasting a URL into blogger automatically turns it into a link, which is fine, except that if you edit the visible text, it doesn't change the link. For that, you have to go to html mode and edit it directly.

Pic of the Day

Mental Arithmetic in the Rachinsky School - Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky - 1895

The problem on the board is (10² + 11² + 12² + 13² + 14² ) / 365. The answer is 2.       (highlight to reveal the answer). Kind of a cute little problem. I didn't notice the problem on the board at first, I thought it was just a cool picture, but then I started looking around and mathoverflow pointed out the problem on the board.

Via Starts with a Bang!

P.S. I made the superscript exponents using the html <sup> tag. I originally tried using the html code I found on mathoverflow, but the html was like four pages long and I couldn't make head or tails of it. PeggyK, a Platinum Product Expert, gave me a clue.

Embedding Audio Files

Iaman sent me an audio recording and I thought to embed it in my previous post. Being as I use Google pretty much exclusively, I tried to use it for this, but after a couple of hours of futzing around I gave up. I could host the file on Google Drive, but I needed to add an app to play it, which I did, but Google never recognized that it was added. I tried to upload it to YouTube, but I needed a file format convertor, and none of the ones I found would produce a suitable format. Finally I looked for an audio file hosting service and SoundCloud popped up. They even provided embed code that worked. Yeah SoundCloud.

I'm not going to mention all those sites that gave long tedious explanations by way of introducing three lines of html that didn't work. Criminently, there are a lot of blabbermouths out there.

Fast Forward

My computer display screen has been acting a little weird, so I consult with the cloud:

I've been hearing about 4K video for a while now. I ignored it when it first came out because, like any new technology,  it was expensive. (Just for a baseline, anything that costs more than a dollar and a half is expensive.) But now you can buy a 4K computer display at Costco for $300. That might be worthwhile, especially if this display is flaking out.

P.S. I tried copying the discussion from the forum, but Blogger has it's own rules about how to handle things and the copy-and-paste didn't work so well. So for my next trick I took a screen shot of the forum discussion, cropped it with Pix and inserted it here. I tried resizing it a couple of times by changing the height and width parameters in html, but I ended up with the original dimensions of the image. As the best compromise between being a readable size and fitting on the page. It looks like shit right now. It's all fuzzy like it was compressed and then expanded. Stupid Blogger, why can't you just render the image as it is? Maybe it will look better on the finished page, but I doubt it.

Desmos Graphing Calculator

I've been hanging out at Quora lately. A fair number of math problems show up there. Many of them are inane, like 'What is 2+2?", or "What is 3+3 x 3?".* But some advanced ones show up as well. Some of them are really ugly, I've never seen the like before, don't know what they're good for, or why anyone would care, but they make me curious so I've taken to plotting them on the Desmos Graphing Calculator.  It would be nice if you could simply copy the equation from Quora and then paste in Desmos. You can, but it doesn't translate properly, so you have to go in and fiddle with it enough for Desmos to understand it. Plus sometimes the equation (or expression) you get from Quora is missing something, or didn't get entered properly, so you have to muck with it to get anything graphable.

The equation for the Middle Green Circle on the graph comes from this question on Quora.




Outer Orange circle    x^{2\ }+\ y^2\ =\ 16     
Middle Green circle    e^{\left(y^2\ +\ x^2\ \right)^{.5}}\ =\ 16
Inner Orange circle    e^{.5\left(y^2\ +\ x^2\ \right)}\ =\ 16

The original equation from Quora.

f(x,y) = e^sqrt (x^2+y^2)

Mucking about with above equation and then typing Ctrl-Z causes the graph above to be redrawn. Actually, it doesn't matter what you were doing before, if you have done anything at all in Blogger's Editor, Ctrl-Z (Undo) causes the graph to be redrawn.

Taking the Middle Green Circle and changing it to a function gives us this
f(x,y)=e^{(x^2+y^2)^{.5}}
but Desmos doesn't know how to graph it.

Note that I have replaced the call to sqrt with an exponent. Desmos treats sqrt as four variables (s, q, r & t) being multiplied together.

Also capital X and capital Y mean something special, so don't use them until you figure out they do.

This post started as a test to see if I could copy and paste the equations, but I can see it's expanded a bit.

About the Math
The difference between the 2nd and 3rd equations is that one multiples the exponent of e by .5 and the other raises it the power of .5 which should be equivalent according to math.com's article on exponents (see the Power Rule). I don't quite understand why the graphs of these two equations should be different, but Desmos evidently thinks otherwise.

I set the expression equal to a constant (16) to get it to graph. Properly, it should be set to Z and graphed using a 3D graphing calculator. I found one that looks like it should do the job, but I've been having some trouble with it, so that's going to have to wait for another day.

* What's even weirder is how many answers the inane questions get. I made some sarcastic replies, but it's just endless. Besides, since some people think these questions are worth answering, I am trying to train myself to Pass on these questions, but it's really hard not to click Answer and just let them have it with both barrels. Gee wilkers pops, everyone knows the answer is 42. I mean it's the answer to everything, ain't it?

P.S. I just discovered that Google has a plot function.

200b

It seems there are invisible characters floating around out there on the internet that cannot be detected by a person using any popular computer programs. Zero-Width Characters by Zach Aysan gives us a hint, but he doesn't tell us the whole story. He gives us two sample lines of text that look the same but he claims are actually different.

Copy one line and then search for it using Ctrl-F and you find both lines. Look at the source using the Chrome browser and the lines look the same. Save the page and look at it using the Linux text editor xed and again, both lines look the same.

Invisible Text

Only when I opened the saved web page with vi (an old school text editor) was I able to see the 'invisible' characters: a less-than-sign (<) followed by 200b followed by a greater-than-sign (>). What's even weirder is that vi highlighted this sequence with blue.

Via Monday Evening

Do What You Can't

DO WHAT YOU CAN'T
Best video I have seen in a while. I especially like the Titanic / Iceberg analogy. Via Dustbury.

Blogger editing tip: Whenever I embed a YouTube video I put the original title under the video. I do this mostly for help in tracking down a replacement should the original disappear, which happens occasionally. I have a sequence I use that, now that I've done it a zillion times, is almost automatic.

• Type <center> and Enter at the beginning of a blog post, then click on HTML and the closing tag (</center>) automatically appears.
• Go to the YouTube video you want to embed, click on SHARE, click on COPY. 
• Go back to Blogger. Press End and Ctrl-V. 
• Now Right-Arrow, Down-Arrow, Shift Down-Arrow, Ctrl-X, Up-Arrow, Left-Arrow, Ctrl-V. This appends a Carriage Return (<br>) to the embed string you just pasted.
• Cursor down. This takes you to the empty line where you cut the Carriage Return.
• Switch back to the YouTube tab. Copy the title. 
• Switch back to Blogger. Type Control-V to paste the title.
• Click on Compose. Now you have the video with title centered underneath it.
• Write what you want.

Chimneys

Dominik Sky - Human Flag on 360 meters (1181 feet) HD
I don't much care for videos of people engaging in foolish, dangerous actions. Plus they make my hands sweat. This guy is hanging off the top of the chimney at the Trbovlje Power Station in Slovenia, the tallest in Europe.

A high chimney was required for the site to ensure that emissions were removed from the deep, narrow valley under all weather conditions.

It's the tallest chimney in Europe, but not in the world. For that we have to go Ekibastuz, Kazakhstan.

Ekibastuz GRES-2 Power Station
Wikipedia link, photo is from Panarimo.

Kazakhstan is also home to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, site of all our manned space flight launches.

My only encounter with a tall chimney happened a couple of years ago. And then there's Fred.

Name	Height in Feet	Year Built
GRES-2 Power Station, Ekibastuz, Kazakhstan	1377	1987
Trbovlje Chimney	1181	1976
Anaconda Smelter Stack	585	1919
India Mill Chimney (Fred)	279	1867

Video via Jack.

What version of Linux am I running?

c@c-H97N ~ $ uname -a

Linux c-H97N 4.4.0-53-generic #74-Ubuntu SMP Fri Dec 2 15:59:10 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

c@c-H97N ~ $ uname -r

4.4.0-53-generic

c@c-H97N ~ $ lsb_release -a

No LSB modules are available.

Distributor ID: LinuxMint

Description: Linux Mint 18.1 Serena

Release: 18.1

Codename: serena

c@c-H97N ~ $

This question keeps popping up, and while the last time I went down this road I was trying to find out whether I had the 32 or 64-bit version of the operating system, now I need to know the version-version. I only installed this thing a week or two ago, you'd think I'd remember, and I think I do, but do I really? With computers, thinking that you know something is often the prelude to a long, tedious, wild goose chase through a swamp filled with aligators. Better to find out for sure before you start hunting in the past for something that hasn't happened yet.

There are two commands in the above terminal session:

• uname
• lsb_release

The -a suffix I believe means all. You will notice that the -r suffix on the uname command returns a subset of what it returned with the -a suffix. There are probably other suffixes that can tell you all kinds of things, like what brand of undies your grandma wore, but we have enough for now, so we'll move on.

Reconstructing the terminal session so it was actual text (instead of a fuzzy screenshot) took some fiddling. I finally figured out that using the div tag instead of span would fill out the lines all the way across the page and make the black block contiguous.

Start by pasting the text from the terminal session. Highlight the first line and set the font, text color and background color. Now go into html mode, change the span tag to div.  Move the closing div tag to the end of the block of text, and presto, the whole block has white text on a black background.

Now you can highlight the prompt (c@c-H97N ~ $) and change the color(s) there.