Diary: snow

The snow came overnight

Hours of light stuff not the heavy falls they'd said.
The drifts etched wind flows, heaped round where we dwell.

Clare brought heated water for the birds to drink
And checked the roof for insulation working well.

It's been very windy.

Gun Girls

Steve Sailer had an amusing YouTube video of girls firing guns (badly) - which has now, unfortunately, been taken down.

Most of the problems shown were due to recoil, the women not holding the stock firmly enough against the shoulder or not bracing. In other cases, unfamiliarity with how it feels when a gun fires.

Commentator 'Twinkie' writes:

"Unlike most of you here, I’ve actually trained men and women in unarmed and armed combat. Let me break down a few things for those of you for whom the subject is entirely theoretical (or media-derived, one way or another).

In unarmed combat, women are at a SEVERE disadvantage against men. There is a whole host of biomechanical factors that make this so. This is not just a matter of “upper body strength” disparity (though that difference on average is HUGE). Punching-, kicking-, and throwing-power derives from the rotational force of the hips, and men are much stronger than women in this area (men who “punch like girls” punch with their upper body/arms only – trained fighters generate much greater force from the twist of the hips). It also hurts women that their bone density is low (that “thudding” power some men have is a combination of good technique AND high bone density – Manny Pacquiao, for example, is reputed to have the wrist diameter comparable to much higher weight boxers).

There are basically THREE ways in which a woman can beat a man. One, she catches him by surprise and doesn’t stop. Sucker punching (or kicking/elbowing/kneeing/head-butting) works. Two, she is armed. Three, there is a large skill disparity in favor of the woman (e.g. if she is an Olympic Judoka and the man is untrained, the odds are good she will throw him on his head). In combination of two or all of these factors (and a little luck), women can beat men. But, outside of them, it’s fantasy, pure and simple – it’s men beating small children, basically.

I won’t go into impact/bladed weapons for now, but in terms of firearms training, I’ve found that – initially – women are MUCH EASIER to train to a decent standard. Women are generally afraid of guns – they are disproportionately affected by the noise and recoil. BUT, they harbor much fewer illusions about their natural abilities and tend to follow instruction better. In my experience (and those of many other trainers I know), women novices are therefore easier to train than male novices (too many idiot males think they know what they are doing). Nonetheless, at the upper echelons of shooting, men will dominate, whether it is accurate, long distance shooting or shooting on the move. Women just seem to lack the high-level visuo-spatial ability (and quick mathematical ability for long distance shooting) to do it at elite levels.

Another major problem for most women is that they suffer from hesitation. People often talk about “fight or flight,” but the choices are actually “fight, flight, or freeze.” Many, perhaps, most untrained men freeze when confronted with threats as well, but women are particularly prone to hesitating and not acting violently and decisively to neutralize threats. This is probably both biological and social. ..."

An interesting, if robust view.

[Note: "Another use of Twinkie can be in describing an Asian American who has become completely integrated into White American, or mainstream American culture, thus losing their traditional Asian values. A reference to "Twinkie" can be seen in the 2004 film Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, where Harold, a Korean American, is referred to as a "Twinkie". This term is derived from the traditional metaphor "banana" and means "yellow on the outside, white on the inside"].

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We are waiting for major blizzards expected this evening and tomorrow afternoon. As I write, a rather dessicated snowfall has been dusting the ground for hours.

Before the serious snow

There's tension in the house: shouldn't we be panic-buying in Waitrose?

Diary: snow + books + chatbot backstory

We last had snow here back in December 2010 (when it was heavy). This morning only the lightest dusting .. and as I write, it's gone.

A light dusting of snow in our garden this morning

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This new book by Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher should be arriving today.

Amazon link

Expect a review in due course if it's any good.

Update: it's now arrived and I've had a peek. The authors are both sociology professors, which rings alarm bells. And they have an agenda. They're here to defend the standard social science model against the unsettling results of recent DNA sequencing programs and GWAS (genome-wide association studies). Their idea is to make the most minimal concessions to evidence while still preserving the traditional social-sciences advocacy-based value system. So races don't exist, racial genetic differences in cognition don't exist, and most else which might disturb the liberal agenda of the irrelevance of genetics for outcomes is explained away.

Depressing.

[Update (Sunday): my first impressions were wrong. The book is both more honest and more erudite than had appeared from a first skim. The authors may be billed as sociologists but they are both genetics research practitioners. Once you have absorbed the theory and methodology, it's harder to be agenda-driven - if you're honest. I think a review will be in order once I've finished.]

[Update (Monday): Finished. It was as my first impressions. A sophisticated attempt to save the SSSM from those pesky geneticists. Sophistry rules: don't waste your money. Review here.]

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Genetics, especially human genomics, is the one area of contemporary science most at odds with prevailing western ideology. Most of the time this didn't matter - you can believe whatever you like if it has no practical consequences: in fact most human beliefs are like that.

But with emergent technologies for DNA sequencing, embryo selection and genome-editing, the science soon will matter. You will be able, in principle, to improve attributes (such as the health, emotional stability and intelligence) of your children. The issues will be regulation. cost and your desire to do so.

I anticipate, with no joy, decades of screaming hysteria.

I'm also working my way through Sean Carroll's book on entropy and the 'Past Hypothesis',

and Stephen Cohen's excellent biography of Bukharin,

not to mention Scott Bakker's 'Prince of Nothing'.

It's hard to timeshare: particularly when one is programming.

Incidentally, just as it is said that no-one feels hunger pangs when stepping out of a plane to do a parachute jump, an afternoon programming tends to obscure the fact you've skipped lunch. Just over 68kg this morning (10st 10.4lb) as the abdominal bulge recedes somewhat.

I'm pleased.

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Just a short note-to-self about the chatbot stuff. The next thing (after the recent Eliza-style vacuity) is to capture the 'aboutness' of conversation. In chatting, each conversational partner brings some backstory to a discussion.

The essence of being an effective chatbot is:

1. Manage a dynamic back-story of your own,
2. Engage with the backstory of your human conversational partner.

If the chatbot is a cat, the backstory can be quite constrained - for example, nocturnal adventures in the garden with other cats, badgers, voles, birds, food and vomiting. I was looking at Peter Norvig's GPS reconstruction (previously discussed here) as a possible route to writing a dynamic simulation model.

The various entities I mentioned (cats, badgers, voles, ..) should have actions which require their preconditions in the garden knowledge-base (KB) to hold, and which then assert their post conditions in the next KB iteration. Make actions probabilistic and you've got an interesting simulation.

GPS doesn't quite work in this forward-chaining mode so it's not a case of just adapting his existing code. But the Eliza pattern-matching engine can be the reusable heart of it.

In the deep midwinter ...

A small dusting of snow

The sun's now out and it's rapidly melting.

This afternoon we went down to the Wells Film Centre to watch the film "Testament of Youth" (Vera Brittain). But I had erred! It's not on until next week. So we arrived back early and I checked the vole trap by the side of the fridge in the kitchen. Why?

The cat had been behaving slightly oddly, patrolling with interest behind the fridge, and this morning I saw a brown blur speeding in that general direction as I entered the kitchen. "We've got a vole," I confided to Clare, "Where's the vole trap?"

After a false start with cat food, we discovered that voles particularly adore bread-and-butter and oatmeal. So suitably prepared, we left for the movies.

The vole we'd trapped was alert and boisterous, and has been released into the garden where it can vole anew. Next time a video!

Matthew Parris (mouse killer!) take note!*

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* Opinion piece from The Times today (14/01/2015)

"I hate poisoning animals. Unlike their London cousins, Derbyshire mice are suckers for the traditional mousetrap so I baited two traps with Nutella and sorrowfully set them in the airing cupboard. I flinched next morning from checking. I hoped against irrational hope they would be empty. I opened the door. My heart sank. Both had sprung.

"Sadly I carried the small corpses to the dustbin. One — a mother — was a really beautiful little honey-brown creature with (unusually) a white breast. Her blind, pink babies (up to 12) would already be dead."
...
"I miss them, and somehow think the less of myself."

Yes indeed, Mr Parris!

The Anticipation of Snow

Matt, the gym manager warned me yesterday: we might be closed on Friday, there's a forecast of ten inches of snow.

The TV is full of it: so, eager to enter into the snow-spirit, I'm about to strew sand and rock salt onto our steep driveway. See next post.

It must be that time of the year but an astounding number of our relations have recently been in hospital, for operations or serious infections. Adding in parents, siblings and nephews/nieces I count four separate and ongoing cases. Their NHS experiences have been excellent to awful with points in between.

As well as hanging out at the gym (pet beef: bunnies who chill on the equipment chatting to their mates, failing to show my own obsessional dedication to work-rate) I have also been working through the Open University's M820 text (Calculus of Variations).

I'm still in chapter 1, a review of standard calculus - as I'm not registered, this doesn't count towards an MSc, my motives include a self-diagnostic for Alzheimer's.

So far I can report my concentration falls off a cliff at the one hour point, but it was ever thus.