Blue Angels movie streaming on Amazon Prime

by philg

We took our family to elite entertainment last month (movie theater) and then a Michelin-starred restaurant (Cheesecake Factory). Total cost after the inflation that the government says doesn’t exist: $300, which includes AAA-estimated mileage rate for the 12-minute drive in an exclusive luxury vehicle (three-year-old Honda Odyssey EX-L).

What movie was worth $300? The Blue Angels documentary, now streaming for free on Amazon Prime.

The movie showed that the Blues go to the desert in El Centro, California for three months of pre-season “winter training”. That’s three months away from family who are back at the home base in Pensacola, Florida. There is no explanation for this move, though presumably it has to do with potential rain or low ceilings in Pensacola washing out training days and perhaps also more airspace being available in this forgotten corner of California.

Nerds will be cheered to learn that the Blues like to use multi-color BIC pens during briefing sessions. Medical nerds will be surprised to learn that the flight surgeon also plays the role of critic/judge during training. In other words, a person with no significant flying experience watches with binoculars and writes down everything that the pilots are doing wrong.

Perhaps reflecting Americans’ lack of interest in anything technical, the movie doesn’t bother explaining the weight at which the F/A-18 is operated, the airspeeds for the various maneuvers, or the flight control inputs that are required. We don’t get a tour of the cockpit and an explanation of the controls and instruments. We don’t see the maintenance people at work or learn what the need to do to keep the planes airworthy. Nor do we learn if they bring a spare plane! We’re told that there are 6 performers, but “Blue Angel #8” is shown with no explanation of what her role might be (the Navy says
“Events Coordinator”). We don’t find out what the demonstration pilots use for ground reference, especially important in the converging head-on maneuvers. We can guess that it is “keep right of the runway” for land-based air shows, but how do they do it when performing off a beach? (The Blue Angels web site has the explanation in a Support Manual; boats in fixed positions are used to create a “show line”.)

The movie failed to inspire our kids to want to become naval aviators. In fact, they were put off by the description of the hard work that was required, the blackouts in the centrifuge, the entire year mostly away from family, etc. Speaking of blackouts, the Blues don’t use the g-suits that Navy fighter pilots normally wear. They are bracing their arms on their legs and don’t want to risk suit inflation moving an aircraft out of formation enough to hit another aircraft. So they need to use muscles to push blood back up into their heads for demo maneuvers that are up to 7.5g. (No Auto GCAS on the F/A-18.) Speaking of muscles, the movie is a good reminder that everyone should take a job where he/she/ze/they is paid to work out at the gym. The Navy pilots look great compared to the same-age civilians in the movie!

Related (what the movie could have been in an ideal MIT Course 16 world; the F/A-18 is also a fly-by-wire aircraft):

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Return on investment for a society’s spending on math professors

by philg

I listened to a COVID-safe Zoom talk from an MIT math professor. He talked primarily about a geometric optimization problem. My question:

Maybe this will be covered during the talk, but being an engineer I would like to hear what the practical applications could be if Larry solves all of the problems that he’s talked about and/or others that he’s working on. Would ChatGPT get smarter? Would Elon Musk get to Mars sooner? Would renewable energy become cheaper?

He responded that he’d never worked on any problem that he thought had a practical application, but that maybe tools developed to solve a seemingly pointless optimization problem might end up being used to solve a practical problem. He added the question was “Above [his] pay grade.”

What about the graduates? “Half of my Ph.D. students go into academia and the other half go into finance,” responded the professor. “I think it might be because the finance industry has a well-developed path for bringing in people with quantitative skills and no other knowledge.” (i.e., half the students decided that numbers were more interesting if prefixed by a dollar sign)

There are supposedly about 35,000 math professors nationwide. Maybe 10,000 are paid primarily to do research? Taxpayer-investors will need to have nerves of steel to keep paying these folks! (Figure about $350,000

I wonder if we can date the last innovation from the math researchers that is used in ChatGPT. The guys who are credited with developing “deep learning” don’t have math Ph.Ds. (Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton) The speaker on Zoom event said that, as far as he knew, all of the math being used in LLMs was “old”.

Separately, the Boston Globe reports that there is a narrow majority of haters within the MIT faculty:

At MIT, about 20 students, according to student organizers and professors, have been placed on interim suspension, which means they can no longer access campus buildings, participate in graduation, receive wages for student jobs, or finish their final exams and projects. Most have also been told they need to vacate their university housing. MIT declined to confirm the number of students suspended.

A handful of the suspended students were expecting to graduate this semester, and now their diplomas, post-graduation jobs, research projects, and internships hang in limbo, according to interviews with more than half a dozen students and MIT professors. The MIT encampment ended on May 10 when police cleared out the demonstration in the early-morning hours; 10 students were arrested.

Hannah Didehbani, a senior at MIT studying physics who was suspended, said she does not know when she will receive her degree, and that the university has provided little detail about how she should proceed.

“MIT is only taking these unjust, repressive actions such as suspending us, arresting us, evicting us because they are afraid of the power we have,” Didehbani said.

A majority of the MIT faculty appear to be in favor of disciplining the student protesters, however. At a faculty meeting Friday, a motion to remove punitive actions from the suspensions lost, said philosophy professor Sally Haslanger. About 190 faculty opposed removing disciplinary actions, while roughly 150 favored the idea.

Related:

  • official Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion web site for the MIT math department: Members of our community come from a variety of racial, ethnic, indigenous, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds. We are LGBTQIA+. We are women and men and non-binary. We have families and pets. We are veterans. We are immigrants. We possess a range of physical abilities. We are first-generation students. We are young and we are experienced. We are MIT Math. [Mindy the Crippler makes our household diverse, according to the geniuses at MIT, due to her Canine-American and Scottish-American background (golden retrievers hail from Scotland).]
  • Out of the 74 gender IDs recognized by Science, just one is highlighted:
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Pride Month begins in Florida

by philg

I hope that everyone has taken down his/her/zir/their International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia (May 17) decorations because today is the official start of Pride Month.

Here’s what Pride Month looks like in our neighborhood…

If he wants to fit in at Penn, Ellis will need to pack his keffiyeh,. “from the river to the sea” sweatshirt, and “total liberation” sign (Inquirer):

Let’s hope that Penn’s intifadistas don’t hold Ellis’s Palm Beach County heritage against him: “Palm Beach County, Florida, becomes world’s biggest Israel bond investor” (Bond Buyer, April 29, 2024).

Separately, here’s what I think is a gumbo limbo tree near an entrance to our neighborhood, surrounded by Royal Palms:

I am proud to pay HOA fees that maintain these trees.

Pride in DC:

What example do the LGBTQI+ set? And why should someone who doesn’t identify as LGBTQI+ take pride in the achievements of the LGBTQI+? Unless Joe Biden identifies as trans or gay, for example, why is he entitled to take pride in Audrey Hale’s attack on a Christian school in Nashville? I don’t identify as a 17th century LGBTQI+ Englishman. Can I “take pride” in the achievements of Isaac Newton? He is featured as #1 in “LGBTQ+ scientists in history” (American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology). The same article describes Paul Erdős as “asexual” (part of the “+”?). Can a person who doesn’t identify as an asexual Hungarian Jew take pride in Erdős’s achievements? (Maybe Erdős himself was a hater and/or hadn’t heard the Good News about Rainbow Flagism; Wikipedia says “To be considered a hack was to be a ‘Newton’ [in Erdős’s parlance]”)

Why is the celebration limited to those who “fought bravely”? What about someone who grew up within walking distance of one of the “best gay saunas in Miami” and went to the bathhouse every night to mingle with the LGBTQI+, never having had to “fight” or even get into an Uber? Why wouldn’t we celebrate him/her/zir/them?

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Bachelor’s in AI Gold Rush degree program

by philg

A college degree is purportedly important preparation for multiple aspects of life. Universities, therefore, require students to take classes that are far beyond their major. Extracurricular activities are encouraged, such as sports, pro-Hamas demonstrations, drinking alcohol (how is that supposed to make immigrants from Gaza feel welcome?), casual sex, theater, etc. Students are forced to take about half the year off because the faculty and staff don’t want to work summers (defined as May through early September), January, or anywhere near various holidays. There is no urgency to earning a degree so why not stretch it out for four years?

What if there were urgency to getting into the workforce? Here’s the company that sold shovels to the crypto miners and now sells shovels to the AI miners (May 23):

It was a lot better to start work at NVIDA in June 2022 than in June 2024. Consider a Stanford graduate who could have finished in 2022, but instead didn’t finish until 2024. He/she/ze/they took Gender and Gender Inequality, Intersectionality: Theory, Methods & Research, and Race and Ethnicity Around the World from Professor Saperstein to round out his/her/zir/their engineering education. Was that worth the $5 million that would have been earned by starting work at NVIDIA in 2022 rather than in 2024 (two years of salary, stock options at $175 instead of at $1000, etc.)?

How about a “Bachelor’s in AI Gold Rush” degree program that would prepare students to build and use LLMs? It would be a 2-year program with no breaks so that people could graduate and start their jobs at OpenAI. There would be no requirement to take comparative victimhood classes (i.e., humanities). There would be no foundational math or science unless directly related to LLM construction (a lot of linear algebra?). There would be no pretense of preparing students for anything other than working at OpenAI or a similar enterprise.

Students will graduate at age 20. What if the AI gold rush is over when they turn 28? (Maybe not because AI turns out to be useless or even over-hyped, but only because the industry matures or the LLMs start building new LLMs all by themselves.) They can go back to college and take all of that “might be useful” foundational stuff that they missed, e.g., back to Harvard to study Queering the South:

(A friend’s daughter actually took the above class; she was most recently living in Harvard’s pro-Hamas encampment.) As a follow-on:

If the 28-year-old made so much money in the AI gold rush that he/she/ze/they wants to “give back” by becoming a school teacher, he/she/ze/they can get a Master’s in Education at Harvard and take “Queering Education”:

By the end of the module, students should be able to: (1) Talk comfortably about queer theory and how it can inform our understanding of schools and schooling; (2) identify specific strategies that educators at various levels might use to support students in negotiating gender and sexuality norms; (3) identify tools that schools can use to build positive, nurturing environments, which open up possibilities for complex gender and sexual identity development; and (4) analyze and evaluate a variety of school practices, curricula, programs, and policies that seek to support healthy gender and sexual identity development for U.S. children and adolescents.

Related:

May 31, 2024 update:

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Is Donald Trump worse than George Washington?

by philg

In George Washington, Mules, and Donald Trump (2015), I quoted from a book about the Oregon Trail:

George Washington was America’s original maharaja of mules. Historians have long been squeamish about acknowledging that General Washington, like many of the American founders, was a voracious land speculator. Few academics and high school history teachers want to risk their careers by suggesting to their students that the father of their country worked the same day job as Donald Trump. Washington was a land developer, often described as the richest of his generation. By the end of the American Revolution, General Washington controlled about sixty thousand acres of land, more than half of it in the promising frontier country west of the Alleghenies, in what we today call West Virginia, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania. Wresting clear title to this rich bounty of soil from the English crown may not have been a principal motive for fighting the Revolutionary War, but Washington knew that he would profit mightily if independence was achieved.

Donald Trump has now been convicted by New York Democrats of (a) paying a prostitute, and (b) trying to make it look like he didn’t pay a prostitute. For this crime, which somehow expanded into 34 crimes (would someone please explain this?), Trump could be sentenced to more than 100 years in prison. (If Trump had murdered someone in New York State, he could be imprisoned for 15-25 years.)

I visited the North Carolina Museum of Art this week. The curators explain that George Washington was involved in “indigenous dispossession” (not such a bad dispossession that any of the curators want to give their own land back to the Native Americans and pay rent for it?) and also “enslavement of 317 Africans”.

Slavery and stealing from/killing Indians both sound bad, but on the other hand, a political party opposing George Washington never managed to convict him of any crimes. Are we thus forced to conclude that Donald Trump is definitively a worse person than George Washington, the enslaver of 317 lives (all of which matter)?

Update: two days after the case ended, the entire New York Times front page is devoted to the glorious conviction. Note that one article (bottom right) is by a reformed sinner. Democrats reject religion (except Islam?), but work within established conventions for religious worship:

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Where’s the AI customer service dividend?

by philg

ChatGPT (launched November 2022) and similar LLMs were supposed to make customer service agents more efficient. Has this happened? From what I can tell, the opposite has occurred. If I call a company that is supposed to be providing service the inevitable greeting is “we are experiencing higher than normal call volume” (i.e., demand for service exceeds agent capacity, despite the agents now being augmented with AI). When an agent does pick up, he/she/ze/they immediately asks, “What is your phone number?” In other words, the smartest computer systems ever devised cannot use caller ID.

(If Trump gets elected this fall and then, as predicted by the New York Times and CNN, ends American democracy, I hope that he will issue a decree that companies aren’t allowed to announce “we are experiencing higher than normal call volume” more than 5 percent of the time.)

My favorite company for customer service is Hertz. They recently hit my credit card for $262.41 for a 24-hour 29-mile rental of a compact Ford Edge in El Paso. I never signed anything agreeing to pay $262 and their app was quoting $76 including all fees (I picked up the car at an FBO so there wasn’t the fully array of Hertz computer systems on site). When I called Hertz to try to figure out why they charged so much I learned that they’ve eliminated the option of talking to a human regarding any bill. A human will be happy to make a reservation, but not to answer questions about what could be a substantial credit card charge. Hertz funnels all questions about past rentals to a web form, which they say they will respond to within a few days. Of course, my first inquiry about the bill yielded no response. My second inquiry, a week later, yielded a “everything was done correctly” response. I finally pinged them on Twitter private message. They admitted that they had no signed paperwork with an agreement to pay $262 and issued a refund of about half the money.

Circling back to AI… if LLMs make customer service agents more efficient, why has Hertz needed to shut down phone customer service? And if LLMs are brilliant at handling text why isn’t Hertz able to respond to contact form inquiries quickly?

Here’s an example pitch from the AI hucksters:

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Identifying as Asian in an elite Maskachusetts school

by philg

From a friend in the Boston suburbs:

[Asian-American son] applied to be a student advisor and was turned down. He was perplexed as he has the highest GPA in the [expensive private] school of 500 students and gets along with everyone. He is a volunteer for the Special Olympics and helps people without being condescending. Everyone likes him. Even girls invite him to their birthday parties. He later found out that two of his black friends who didn’t apply got it. They said the school reached out to them and talked them into doing it, so they applied and were selected.

(Deplorable failure to capitalize Black in original. I can verify the father’s high opinion of this kid’s personality. He’s super smart, relaxed, athletic, and never brags.)

Different friend in the Boston suburbs:

guys, after several months of constant assault by [the wife], [the son] got himself a date to the prom

his sister tried everything – called him an incel

what’s the difference between [my wife] and a pitbull?

at some point, the pitbull lets go.

The future prom king is tall, fit, and looks great by my standards (i.e., is not old). I had previously asked him why he wasn’t exploring the public high school female population. He said, “I don’t agree with their value system. They say that you’re not sophisticated if you haven’t slept with at least five people before graduating high school.” I replied, “Well, if that’s all it takes then we can go down to the nearest bathhouse tonight and you can have sex with five guys in a couple of hours.” (The family has not invited me back into their home.)

Related… (NBC)

Helms Ategeka, a top Head-Royce School student, was accepted to 122 colleges and received $5.3 million in collective scholarships.

“I feel really lucky that there are people out there, that there are institutions out there that see the value that I have to give,” Helms said.

Helms believes it was his nearly 10 extracurriculars, spanning from choir to theater to starting his own club, along with his 3.9 GPA that set him apart on paper.

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Was anything new revealed by the New York Democrats’ trial of Donald Trump?

by philg

Some friends who are Democrats have been obsessively and gleefully following the New York trial of Donald Trump. When I asked them what they’ve learned, however, they’re unable to offer anything beyond what was already fairly alleged prior to the trial, i.e., an American got paid for having sex and then the same person got paid some additional money as a result of that sex act. A “dog bites man” story, in other words, since (a) the U.S. has for many years been the world leader in the percentage of GDP devoted to compensating people for prior sex acts, and (b) a ruling party putting a political opponent on trial has been conventional in many nations for more than 100 years.

Readers: Have you learned anything new or interesting from press coverage of this trial?

My dream: A South Park episode in which the entire trial happens in South Park so as to ensure an unbiased jury pool.

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Memorial Day here in Jupiter, Florida

by philg

Our town’s Memorial Day ceremony is about to begin (live stream):

The speaker is Brian Mast, a veteran who represents us in Congress and who has been at odds with the Biden administration regarding U.S. support for continued Hamas rule in Gaza.

I arranged a brick for my father, who was drafted and served as a corporal in the NYC area (my dad was born in 1930, so he was 23 years old when he went into the Army, a late start due to a college deferment).

My dad was not killed while serving in the military (unclear how that could have happened other than via a car/bus accident or if a filing cabinet had fallen on him) so, fortunately, he is not one of those for whom the day was established.

Readers: What are you doing to observe Memorial Day?

Related:

Post-ceremony update…

About 250 people showed up.

My father’s brick is in the top left corner of the engraved-so-far bricks:

Brian Mast kept his remarks nonpartisan and patiently met with constituents afterwards:

The police bloodhound was popular:

At least one person arrived in style (Pontiac GTO; possibly circa 1965):

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Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 7 (Kentucky to Great Barrington)

by philg

I was delighted that the brief trip from the hotel to the airport included a view of the following car:

Not sure if I love the reference to Talladega Nights or “I Identify as a Problem” more.

A powerful politician directed a river of federal tax dollars into the KSME airport back in 2006 to build a world-class commercial airline terminal:

It has never been used.

We fired up and vaguely followed the Ohio River to Parkersburg, West Virginia (KPKB). We enjoyed tailwinds of up to 30 knots, but combined with the terrain that also made for bumps so we once again climbed as high as 7,500′. Note the Tesla charging station, below.

Parkersburg features a sometimes-used commercial terminal, thanks to continuing applications of your tax dollars into the Essential Air Service program. We enjoyed some breakfast there and got a lesson in philately as well as in how wrong people are in their perceptions of inflation. A luxurious four-seat piston-powered aircraft, the Beech Staggerwing, cost $9,250 and first class postage was 32 cents in 1997 (the stamp is now worth about 1.75 Bidies).

A photo of the Ashokan Reservoir in the Catskill Mountains about 20 minutes before descending into KGBR:

Here’s Torrance’s finest product with 30.7 hours on the collective meter:

The happy owner supplied us with an Enterprise rental car, pre-tuned to NPR, for the trip to Boston/Cambridge.

As previously noted here, we were offered free samples of healing marijuana within 30 minutes of our arrival in Maskachusetts:

Every crosswalk in Great Barrington is painted in the sacred colors:

Retailers post signs for the world’s smartest humans:

They also worship the Sacred Rainbow in Stockbridge:

The world’s smartest humans are provided with instructions for how to use the devices depicted above:

Except for the final trip down the Mass Pike, including an inflation-free $15/person meal at McDonald’s, that was it!

Related:

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