Anatoly IVANOV

Have I missed something? Is it now normal for white, post-doc woman to elbow-kick their love interest and colleague in the solar plexus? And a black male one at that?

Furthermore, in this jaw-dropping scene of a Netflix series viewed worldwide, the man:

1) does not block the blow (how did he survive through high school?)
2) passively folds in half, choking (this one is normal)
3) amicably crawls back into the abusive relationship (BD$M is all the rage?)

If we’re all about gender equality, wouldn’t a high kick to her head follow? Also, I thought that People’s Lives Matter™ or something? 😮

People complain to me that they don’t understand E=mc² because in school they either skipped physics or their teacher was bad (depends on the “life designer” vs “life victim” mindset).

Fine.

Do you know that you could start from arithmetic and work up to General Relativity in 7 years? All by yourself?

Here’s the curriculum:

1. Arithmetic (1-3 months): The foundation of all mathematics, essential for understanding numbers, operations, and their properties.

2. Algebra (3-6 months): Builds on arithmetic, introducing variables and functions, which are crucial for higher mathematics and physics.

3. Geometry (2-4 months): Essential for understanding spatial relationships, shapes, and the properties of space.

4. Trigonometry (3-6 months): Focuses on the relationships between the sides and angles of triangles, vital for wave functions and space properties.

5. Differential Equations (3-6 months): Critical for modeling the behavior of physical systems, as many laws of physics are expressed in these terms.

6. Linear Algebra (3-6 months): Deals with vectors and matrices, essential for the mathematical framework of physics (and quantum mechanics, which can be skipped).

7. Calculus (6-12 months): Fundamental for understanding change and motion, integral to physics.

8. Electromagnetism (3-6 months): Essential for understanding electromagnetic fields and their role in energy and mass interactions.

9. Classical Mechanics (3-6 months): The study of motion, forces, and energy, foundational for understanding physics.

10. Modern Physics (6-12 months): Covers nuclear physics, crucial for the principles underlying relativity.

11. Special Theory of Relativity (3-6 months): Introduces key concepts that underpin the general theory, such as the constancy of the speed of light.
12. General Theory of Relativity (6-12 months): The pinnacle of understanding mass-energy equivalence, describing gravity as a result of spacetime curvature.

The total duration of study ranges from approximately 42 to 85 months, depending on the pace of learning and the depth of understanding aimed for in each subject. 7 years max.

Now, the questions. Can you be honest with me and yourself?

When was your last school lesson? Why have you decided not to correct your prior decisions or bad luck?

Hats off to the colleagues at Haut et Court for pooling in an impressive amount of resources and talent to shoot the “Constellation” series for Apple+. However, the end result turned out as a pseudo sci-fi light-horror semi-drama that toys with quantum mechanics in low Earth orbit to spin its story from the ISS back to Earth and its uneducated masses.

The routine of science and family calls vaporize after a one in a million chance collision with a long-dead Soviet female cosmonaut still in orbit since the 60s. Because — feminism?

Noomi Rapace’s character — a Steely Crying Swedish Female Astronaut™, Johanna “Jo” Ericsson, of the mighty ESA, also feminism — survives the ensuing “depress” event on the space station, with 1 crew lost to… ahem… arm amputation (because “I’m stuck”).

Damage assessed, life support systems offline till… forever… Jo sends a remaining trio down, while staying behind to suffer from hallucinations and get some deus ex machina help to energize, undock and calculate — on a piece of paper — the reentry trajectory of a (t)rusty Soyuz MS back to wolf-infested Kazakhstan.

Somehow, a docked SpaceX Dragon remains unscathed and unused in LEO, while back on Earth she finds her memories don’t quite match up with reality. Her Volvo SUV (Emotional Support Vehicle) is blue. But she remembers specifying it in red to match her classy mid-century suburban home in Köln. And cross frozen Swedish lakes, occasionally. Something men are explicitly shown too scared to perform later. Because — feminism? Or because it was shot in Finland?

Anyway, Joe — for once, very accurately — goes through gravity-rehabilitation. Only to fall off her crutches — her inept husband doesn’t help — into alternate universes when in proximity to a CAL (Cold Atom Laboratory, a real instrument to study Bose Einstein Condensates) “main processing core” retrieved from the ISS, somehow splitting the spacetime continuum of the whole planet in 2 parallel dimensions while running on zero energy and at zero Kelvin temperatures — because quantum computer. Also, because placed in a bag filled with “legal ice”. Yes, a verbatim Jo’s reply to the inspection officer at the Swedish border.

The show throws in a bunch of quantum physics buzzwords — entanglement, Schrödinger’s cat (literally shown in all states as part of spooky decorum), the observer principle — all to thicken the plot. When that’s not enough, dead cosmonauts are thrown in as well.

The show’s creators grabbed some of the “cool” concepts from quantum physics and “laser smashed them up” to create a narrative where characters jump between realities, uncover space travel inter-governmental conspiracies, and, most importantly, face their own psychological battles, gender roles and parental duties. Like, you know, shouting “Alice!” and hearing “mama” in return… a thousand times. Or Johanna being accused by her husband-in-therapy kindergarten teacher of cheating on him with the handsome head of ESA… Who cries at Baikonur in a moment of despair?

The whole thing is a blend of supposedly mind-bending theories and tear-jerking personal drama, all set against the backdrop of space exploitation… without a firm grasp of the science or story-telling.

But hey, the cinematography, the special effects, the costumes and the acting are good. But you could watch the new Dune for that as well.

“Everyone, when they are young, has a little bit of genius; that is, they really do listen. They can listen and talk at the same time.

Then they grow a little older and many of them get tired and listen less and less. But some, a very few, continue to listen.

And finally they get very old, and they do not listen anymore.”

— Gertrude Stein

Wear the same outfit for a month to notice that no one notices. If it’s clean — no one cares.

Even if your jeans got holes. Even if you’re a woman, certain that you need a new dress and a matching handbag every day.

People are so absorbed by themselves and their screens, you’re not there, unless you owe them money, s*x and fame.

Same for cars. Clean? Quiet? No one will notice you’re driving the same Mercedes. Or a different BMW each morning. Or switch from a Tesla Y to a Tesla 3. On the same day.

Does getting out of an air-cooled 911, wearing a su misura jacket, impact the first impression? Yes. But only in certain milieux. And only once or twice.

That’s how aware people are. You can do whatever you want. Like, get back to your screen. 😉

“A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not comprehensive.”

— Stanisław Lem

Techno-fabulism: The belief that massive technological change is imminent and will solve all of our problems.

Do you like progress charts, project timelines and maps? Illustrations of karma, later called Newton’s third law, that kind of basic stuff, right in front of our eyes?

“The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.

The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.

It’s a huge business, and will soon be larger than arts and entertainment combined.” — excellent analysis by Ted Gioia.

Now, how much have _you_ been participating in this new “business”? Do you know why?

Effect of exercise for depression: systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials
BMJ 2024 — doi: 10.1136/bmj-2023-075847

Run and dance. Both can be done alone.

Electronic music is perfect for that, by the way… audiences would dance to the music in our film Kvadrat.

Meaning and its impact on life.

On my run back through Bastille, I’ve noticed a homeless man walking in Nike’s marathon “supershoes”, the Alphafly 2. Someone had upgraded to the €310 version 3 — available since January — and thrown out the barely used pair.

Running had once been the cheapest and most accessible sport available to all, the essence of the persistence hunter. And now?

Nearly 1 in 5 Americans older than 65 do not have a single tooth left. Unable to afford expensive root canals and crowns, many simply have them pulled out.

70% of Americans over the age of 65 years do not have dental insurance. USA, a country of optimal market economy and liquid food?

“Almost without exception, every single time we’ve covered [climate change], it’s been a palpable ratings’ killer. So the incentives are not great [to talk about it on TV].”

MSNBC host Chris Hayes in 2018.

Go ahead, switch off your TV, delete your social media accounts, and surround yourself with people with “happy vibes” who’ll supposedly tell you about “the local good news” like “oh look, the apple trees are blooming on February 9, isn’t it gorgeous”?

David Heinemeier Hansson, a danish programmer and entrepreneur who co-founded Basecamp and 37signals and created Ruby on Rails argues against meritocracy and the Scandinavian model:“That free Danish education? Yes, it’s great, but it’s also fiercely guarded by meritocratic access.

Every in-demand field of study is guarded by the all-important grade-point average from high school. If yours is too low, well, sorry, you’re just not going to study psychology or become a midwife. It doesn’t matter whether you came from an underprivileged background, did a million extracurriculars, or hail from an ethnic minority. You either make the grade for your first choice, or you pick something else to study.”

Oh, so if you slacked off in high school for 11 years — citing the Soviet system which functioned similarly to the Danish — you’re supposed to go get a PhD in fluid dynamics because… err… your extracurricular activity was drinking vodka and racing motorbikes in high school while skipping math?

True story, not mine… mine was grades 5s out of 5s, so I could choose to do what I do, and don’t get me started on the underprivileged background part.

I’m fascinated by what broke in this neural network to output such a statement? It seems like a case of neglect of structural inequality within the argument for a strict meritocracy combined with plain vanilla request for equality of outcome… coming from a person “winning a merit-based sport Le Mans”?

How about basic intellectual consistency? Like, shouldn’t then everyone willing be racing in Le Mans in the same cars… and get the first place? What happened here? 😮

Hmm… Last time I checked, Sekonic had at least some products? 70 years of work ended up as a blank product comparison tool? 🤔

When in doubt, do the impossible. The possible will be done by others.

Had a disturbing nightmare — I returned to Moscow and the entire neighborhood of my childhood, the dreary concrete jungle on the outskirts, where I’d spent 15 years growing up before leaving to Europe on my own at age 17 — had been completely destroyed by the war. 😕

If you don’t make a lot of money with pop art — the stuff for the median of the normal distribution of readers — just give your art away for free. Maybe stop eating and remove yourself from the gene pool as well, while we’re at it? 🤦🏻‍♂️

Our “society” seems to have lost the “social”. And forgot that the difference between entertainment and art, design and exploration is the utility or lack thereof. (That’s been my demarcation for 26 years as pro creative, doing both).

What puzzles me — again — is how simple principles are difficult to grasp for Turing-awarded PhDs. If we had a small total number of books to choose, none would rise to the “small number of books with significant sales”. Quantity and iteration is the name of the creative game.

Creating for free doesn’t pay the rent, nor shuffles glucose to the brain.

Another model — often suggested by the likes of Le Cunn — is the “hobby model” alongside “a useful job” does not yield the pro-grade quality of 12-hours a day projects.

( Yann Le Cunn is a Chief AI Scientist at Meta, if you were wondering )

“These days, s*xuality is equated with the truth of the individual, which is arguably our era’s most prominent fiction regarding the nature of truth.”

Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, by Rüdiger Safranski

A fiction which is true — our civilization remains stuck at the low-level basics, the muladhara and the svadhisthana.

– Do you want to live forever?
– No, because if some bad monarch or crazy totalitarian can not die…

– The only way to remove someone from power is by killing or natural death? And you prefer to die so someone else would die? 🤦🏻‍♂️

We’ve had opposite extremes — capitalists & communists, Adam Smithians & Karl Marxists — completely miss the obvious. Humans are not rational, deterministic “utility functions” optimizing for individual or collective “good”.

Free markets’ invisible hand will correct? Sure, for to***co and antidepressants, loneliness and mass shootings.

The central planning will correct? Sure, for Pravda sheets as toilet paper, alcoholism, mass-paranoia and the nomenklatura.

It’s like being a programmer and dismissing the bugs of your RISC instruction set run on an x86 platform. Too much abstraction, maybe? Not enough “real life experience”?

Not really. Take Guillaume Verdon AKA Beff Jezos… An undeniably smart quantum physicist enamored with the ideals of e/acc, who — very concretely — had to sell his flat and car, move back to his parents with a bunch of GPUs to end up publicly deanonymized by other humans… “because markets”?

We might excuse Hegel, Marx, Freud and Keynes failing in their attempts at socio-economic reductionism because they had no access to fMRIs, gene sequencing or evolutionary psychology. But Hayek, Gilder and now Silicon Valley “Tech Bros”?

The 8 billion wetware “consumers” don’t compute with Bayes in mind.

We’re nearing the end of 2023.

Most of us believe in 1 of 10 correct religions, rely on free-willed emotions in a life without deadlines, confuse socialism with communism or dopamine with endorphin… or just drink ethanol to numb the fear of flying… around a flat planet.

The year when ChatGPT can explain all of the above in a voice conversation.

Great write-up of an 8-year journey designing a split ortholinear low-profile keyboard, the MoErgo Keyboards Glove80. Interesting (and rare) how 2 software engineers correctly transferred their modularization and optimization skills into quick product design iterations.

Similar to what we do Idelekka when mashing together “normally incompatible” industries together (HVAC and sound design?) and testing them out “in the real world” (AKA using the products ourselves).

https://kbd.news/Glove80-Rethinking-split-contoured-ergonomic-keyboard-1796.html

Thought of the day: Excel implements functional programming concepts like immutability (formulas don’t change the original data), side-effect-free operations (formulas don’t cause changes outside their scope), and even a form of lazy evaluation (calculations are only performed when necessary). 😮

Climate Change? How about Fat Change?

Am I now part of an underrepresented minority, a malnourished victim, a niche weirdo, a disappearing cultural artifact? 😶

Woha! Very unexpected reversal. Figma and Adobe have abandoned their proposed merger, after facing regulatory hurdles in Europe and the UK in particular, where the Competition and Markets Authority rightly determined the deal “would harm the design software market”!

For once, a bit of fairness and rationality in this world of oligopolies, monopolies and monopsonies. Good news for the end-users.

Sorry, Adobe, and with all my respect to the Knolls, you’re no longer the InDesign 1.0 of 1999 we loved, but an unprincipled Macromedia killer and bug-infested SaaS (Sold all assets to Satan).

Have you received “the call” from COP28′s final plenary assembly to “transition away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner”? No? Why not?

By the way, the UNFCC gives us a 67% chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2°C, if global emissions peak BY THE END OF NEXT YEAR.

Production and consumption, externalities and internalities need to change so drastically and rationally… and we’ve had enough time since 1970s to do… well, not much. Why would anyone give us a probability higher than 0%?

Wanderer above the Sea of Tech in a Stanford Torus. Promised for my 21st birthday, if I applied myself in school and survived the Post-Soviet Chemo-Decadence.

(author unknown)

The Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival “will be reducing the number of programs in its competitions. The National selection will go from 12 to 10 programs, and the International from 14 to 12.”

The second-largest French film festival, in terms of number of spectators, and one of the most important events dedicated to the new voices in cinema in the world, was barely recovering from the impact of Covid on the industry when it has lost more than half of its 2023 funding from the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes regional council.