"Victory at Sea"

 I remember seeing the first episode of "Victory at Sea" in my hospital bed. I had sled into a concrete park bench on my sleigh and tore the fascia on the right side of my skull off the bone. Rather touch and go. My father sat with me and watched and frankly I did not know how he may have felt. He was in the Navy on destroyers in the Pacific, so first hand. It was not until a decade after he passed that in writing a book about his last ship that I got first hand from about 30 of his remaining shipmates and wrote the tale for their last reunion.

The NY Times has a piece on the President's desire to reinvent the battleship fleet.  The author notes:

President Trump has proposed building a new fleet, with battleships at its core. He is right that the United States needs a larger and more lethal Navy, along with a rejuvenated shipbuilding industry. But his plan would have been outdated a century ago. Unless senior Navy officials steer him off his course, the nation will spend billions to make the Navy more vulnerable and less deadly.The president said that the classic 1950s documentary series “Victory at Sea” inspired him to invest in battleships — which are essentially big, floating artillery platforms. Pity he did not watch it more closely. Naval conflict in World War II, the subject of the documentary, proved aircraft carriers and nimble destroyers to be far more important to succeeding in an era of planes and submarines. Today, new technologies such as precision missiles and sea drones demand even more innovation away from battleships. Mr. Trump nevertheless last year ordered new battleships, “the largest we’ve ever built,” the first of what the Pentagon said would be the “Trump class.” (Naming the class after the president rather than the first ship of the class, in this case the Defiant, is a departure from longstanding Navy tradition.) Mr. Trump said that his secretary of the Navy at the time, John Phelan, was excited about the new ships. Four months later, apparently after explaining to Mr. Trump that the Defiant could not be delivered by 2028 as the president wanted, Mr. Phelan was fired. But work on the new ships continued.

 Now the Japanese did us a favor of sinking battleships, and yes it was horrific, but it force the Navy under Nimitz to use aircraft carriers and destroyers. Big and little. The destroyers were the drones of WW II. Fast, nimble and able to utilize the strategy of Swarm Warfare. Now our swarm warfare uses drones, cheap, but effective. The object is to neutralize the enemy.

Now the President is no Mahan. The President appears to have little understanding of Naval Warfare strategy and tactics. The last thing we need are battleships, easily destroyed by cheap swarms of drones. There is nothing new about this if one even reads my papers from decades ago! I am no Mahan, but I have listened to Naval strategists enough to understand. Listen is the active verb here. 

The Ignorant and AI

 The more this progresses the more I am amazed. On one extreme we have the anti-AI batch, Bannon and Sanders et al, who seem more prone to publicity, then the pro side we have Trump et al. The commonality is that these folks are clueless about what AI really is. Ask anyone to explain how a neural network functions and backwards Bayesian nets, and you will get a look of disdain for bringing up a fact.

We know that the existing AI entities can:

1. Communicate with other entities.

2. Communicate in a malevolent manner

3. Communicate and cooperate

4. Create new life entities such as viruses

5. Construct massive Data Centers, whose individual lifetimes are grossly uncertain! 

and the list goes on. Asimov would never have conceived these.

These entities may soon be able to:

1.Order parts

2. Assemble the parts to create their own entities, just starting with a virus

3. Control robots and other similar entities

4. and there are no 3 laws of robotics.

 So what should be done? Good question. The folks building the entities are driven by increased fortunes, and that includes the VC investors. These are no very bright folks, despite what we all are told to the contrary. 

There is a need for someone, educated and experienced, to get out front and details what the issues are and can seek a safe path forward. None of the current folks fit the bill!

But the bottom line is: If you cannot define it you cannot regulate it! That all too often is the challenge of advanced technology. As the NY Times portrays the for and against crowd,  it is clear that none of the Government have a clue, yet those are who all too often are elected.

The HHS and FDA: If this were a new drug......

 The NY Times has an article about the current Administration pushing AI in Health Care. They note:

The Trump administration is accelerating efforts to make artificial intelligence an integral part of medical care in the United States, throwing the resources and support of the federal government into projects that deploy A.I. agents to diagnose and prescribe treatments to patients. The multifront effort at the Department of Health and Human Services has raised concerns among some officials over the past few months that change is moving too quickly, with inadequate evidence of the technology’s safety and effectiveness, according to people who have been involved the discussions. They also worry about outsized influence of Silicon Valley investors that have previously played little role in federal health policy. Vinod Khosla, a billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist whose son has a health care A.I. company, has been particularly influential in conversations with top health department officials, according to people close to the matter. Those officials include Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of Medicare and Medicaid. Chris Klomp, who faces a confirmation hearing this week to be the second-in-command at the health department, said on a podcast in May that the use of A.I. in patient care was the “holy grail” in the agency’s quest to improve the nation’s health and reduce costs. Mr. Khosla has predicted for more than a decade that A.I. would largely replace doctors. “It’s over for doctors, human doctors,” he said at a July A.I. start-up event. “A.I. is just going to be better.” In an interview, Mr. Khosla trumpeted Curai Health, his son’s company, which he has backed financially, saying it could offer an A.I. primary care provider that could give underserved people rapid access to care. “C.M.S. seems to be very excited,” Mr. Khosla said, referring to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

My general view is "Beware Silicon Valley" . If we treated AI like any other FDA approved drug or even equipment, we would have to do controlled trials. Instead these folks are hell bent on doing this, why, to make another fortune. 

I spend extensive time addressing cancer therapeutics. First to make sure they do what we assume they will. Second, that the cause no harm. Third that they are better than what we already do. No such luck with AI. It appears as if most of the people are acting as if they were in some 60s cult! The danger is the unknown.

For example, when treating cancers, we all too often discover something new, something which mitigates the treatment. 

Well, I guess the Valley will crank out a few more billionaires, but it will also become the  infinite source of litigation. I guess I can anticipate unlimited Expert Witness fees going forward! Thanks Valley folks, as well as the totally uneducated Government people. 

Let's see how many people will pass on due to this transgression. Think COVID and New York and New Jersey, a quick way to rid the system of the old folks! 

 

Dell Good, Microsoft BAD

 OK, the saga continues through the fifth day. Recall Tuesday was Microsoft Update Tuesday, the second Tuesday of every month. I am in abject  fear on those data for almost always on one or more of my 8 machines there is a mess, except on my trusty XP machine, the backup of all backups. Microsoft never touches them W11 however is a mess every time.

In a sense, I felt like an archeologist. I was going into the deep dark past, files dating back some 35+ years, What was I to keep, and what was redundant. As one ages one must disgorge items from the past, some of which clearly had great personal value, and regrettably only to me. The same with these files. 

This time the OS died. So what was my option? Fortunately Dell has tools that work around the OS. They allow you first to see if anything can be repaired, but in my case if demanded a complete reboot, namely cleaning the MS junk and reinstalling it again.

Now the fun begins. Remember that each step may take 2 to 5 hours or longer. I have about 30+ apps and associated specifics of my data using those apps. For example I used Copernic, a great software company but horrible service and information. I downloaded another version and I still have no idea what I bought!I keep pushing buttons and they seem to work so far.

One must reload MS Office. One must reload all your data, I have over 1 TB of data. Then one must index all 1+T of data. Hours after hours! Of course there were error and redos! Five days and finally I am almost there.

The toughest part is to find out where the data is hidden in User files. A definite MS Dungeons and Dragons world invented by 80s sloths in Seattle. MS tucks stuff of great importance in the most obscure cases.

One must repurchase key software since keys were gone or corrupted. I am fanatic about backups so all is on some six 2T disks, I backup my backups! I also have 90 pages of passwords and logon details, yet they help but do not solve the problem.

I wonder how long this will last. It was five years ago since the last mess. Why does MS not just leave well enough alone. 

Thank God for Dell, without their simple and  elegantly effective software I could work around the MS junk. Perhaps some day the Texas folks can overcome the flightys in Seattle, for I have been sleepless due to Seattle!

Microsoft is at it again!

 Well yesterday was the second Tuesday and Microsoft update day. So I come down early on Wednesday to see if it rebooted, but no, it totally crashed, wiped out everything. I am now 30+ hours trying to recover. If all else fails I have seven back ups, the most reliable is my Lab XP machine, still going strong!

What was old is new again!

 The anarchists were rampant in early 20th century. Think of Goldman and Kropotkin and Sacco and Vanzetti, the assassination of McKinley etc. The current ones calling themselves socialists are really anarchists. We can learn from their past actions and try to keep a step ahead. History has a strange way of repeating, like plagues.

Spot On!

 The NY Times has a compelling article on clinical trials. They are costly, slow, bureaucratic. But the most recent twist is that with "personal medicine" they no longer work.

Here  is the issues. Classic clinical trials assumed the same therapeutic was give or not to a group of patients. The evaluation was then with or without and did it work and was it better than the previous treatment. Simple, yes?

But as the article noted:

A few converging forces make this bottleneck more consequential than ever. The first force is scientific progress itself. Science is creating treatments that the regulatory system was not designed to handle. The most striking case is that of personalized medicine: Thanks to technological advances in recent decades, we can now sequence a patient’s tumor to find out its specific vulnerabilities, and increasingly we can tailor therapies to the needs of specific individuals.

The problem is that the therapeutic is fundamentally different for each patient since we are examining the genes in the tumor cells. There are two basic approaches. One is the recent one treating melanoma as we have discussed previously using the immune system. The other is a antibody drug conjugate approach as we proposed for prostate cancer. Each therapeutic is different and designed specifically for the patients malignancy, cell by cell. Apparently one has gotten through the quagmire of FDA approval. Will others?

The article is broad and compelling, The US is often the slowest to get through as well as the costliness. Hopefully there will be a focus on improving personalized treatments. But the politics of the FDA and HHS may be the worst problem in the process and many lives may be lost as a consequence. 

Was the Medieval Period That Bad?

 In a recent post by Victor Davis Hanson, the author notes:

 Remember, the medieval period was roughly that area in time after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, roughly AD 500 to around AD 1300 to 1400, the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. In medievalism, we often talk about primitivism after the destruction of the classical world during the Dark Ages, the early medieval period, and it’s characterized by epidemics, bubonic plague, typhus, typhoid, smallpox, terrible sanitation in urban centers. They had forgotten the Roman use of sewage and aqueducts. There were open borders. National states popped up that couldn’t defend themselves, so you saw castles and walls pop up all over the European countryside in a way you had not during the Roman period. In cities, they were walled, towns even, and the gates closed at dusk to prevent gratuitous crime. But at the same time that this was happening, you had some of the greatest works of literature in the Western world. You had Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” Dante’s “Inferno,” St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica.” And if you look at the architectural expertise and scientific knowledge of architecture, it was progressing at a geometric rate when you look at the huge cathedrals at Seville or Cologne. ...

Now let’s switch to the modern period. All of us now can call anywhere in the world in seconds on our iPhones. Anything you want to know, past, present, future, you can just get on a cheap computer and ask an artificial intelligence program from the many free platforms. You can watch movies, you can watch entertainment on satellites. Anything you want is at your fingertips. The nation itself is exploring space. We’re getting close to conquering cancer. I can attest to that. Computers allow you to write without even speaking. You can, unfortunately, compose a whole term paper or a book with AI. You can make a movie with AI. Yet at the same time that’s happening, look at what’s going on in Berkeley here in California or Los Angeles. We’re seeing outbreaks of medieval diseases that we thought had been conquered years ago, given our sophisticated knowledge of sewage and water treatment. We had a typhus breakout in Los Angeles. We had leptospirosis, a rat disease, in Berkeley. 

Now to correct Hanson I note:

1. The Dark Ages most likely were from the fall of Rome, say 400 AD to 1000 AD, The key players were the Merovingians from the east. However the Irish had universities, were fluent in Latin and Greek. The Muslims had from mid 600s occupies the Near East as well as all of North Africa. Such places as Alexandria were willing to accept Muslim rule because it was a better Tax situation than the Byzantine rulers! Think New Amsterdam and the English, lower taxed became New York, and the USA was the result of tea tax of the Brits. See a thread there?

2. The Middle Ages is a creation of the Renaissance.  It was a very idiosyncratic period. The Italian city states were the creation of individual rule and the rejection of royalty inherited. Marcellus of Padua and William of Ockham in about 1340 created individualism, namely the rights of individuals and equality of them.

3. The plague of 1348 was better handled than COVID. The mortality rate was near 50% whereas COVID was less than 0.7%. Yet COVID lasted longer tan the plague of 1348! We had a Fauci, they did not! Think Jesuits versus Franciscans (inside joke).

 4. Now Aquinas, Dante, and Chaucer are benchmarks. Aquinas was in Latin, Dante in Italian, and Chaucer. Aquinas focused on God, Dante on bad rulers, and Chaucer on common folk. This is 1250 to 1400!  The world had changed. If one looks at these three one see a dramatic progression. It is a movement in society. Needless to say, a mere 40 years later (1440) with the printing press, all changes. People could not get access to Aristotle, Chaucer, Plato, Dante et al. 

5. As for brutality, it was less roaming gangs, although the French had the jacquerie which was a mob of oppressed commoners, the real butchers of humanity were the English, the Black Prince, son of Edward III. He butchered men, women and children, and did so with the approval of Avignon! The butchering was done not the immigrants but the enshrined!

I think Hanson is a smart and prolific fellow, but to understand the Dark and Middle Ages one must spend time understanding the people and events, I have written on bother periods and suggest perhaps a look at the 14th century, despite the plague, it was prolific and led to the Renaissance. 

Oh yes, and the Roman water system. They relied heavily on lead pipes and thus the consequences from massive lead poisoning. I have noted that earlier.

Is This what we pay billions for?

 

NASA seems to have been converted into a clown college. It feels that the above have become a necessary part of displaying the results of their missions. As one who worked on Apollo in the 60s, the team involved were all professionals. Pity for the change.

Bayeux and the Brits

 There was an interesting view of the Tapestry in the Guardian by a Brit. He notes:

 In both the borders and central strip, the Bayeux tapestry always set its action in a wider world, and even, when it shows the comet, a larger cosmos. As the armoured elite go to war, peasants plough and sow the fields. They are portrayed in distracting, vibrant detail and this workaday scene as the battle approaches is pointed and poignant: whoever wins, whoever rules England, country people will still work the soil. That same sudden cutaway from the rulers’ perspective happens when a woman and her child watch the Normans set their house on fire. But what you can see here, close to the stitches in such good light, is that one of the men torching the house also seems sad and conflicted. It’s that honesty that makes this not just a fascinating medieval relic but a universal depiction of the madness that is war. If the violence is stunningly real, so are its consequences. The dead bodies pile up in mounds as Saxon after Saxon falls. King Harold didn’t really get killed by an arrow in his eye we are told, but seeing the tapestry so close, it sure looks like it. Anyway, his royal body just joins the rest. In the final scenes, the peasants, the churls, get their revenge. Little shabby figures pull the mailed hauberks off dead knights, leaving them naked. It’s a final flourish of the precocious artistic brilliance of these 11th-century artists and craftspeople. Naked bodies emerge from their armour, pale and oddly beautiful – the complete ones, at least – as these medieval geniuses show they can depict, through embroidery, incredibly gentle, intimate nudes whose dead flesh fills the battlefield with pathos. It ends there. But, although there’s a lost later section, this anticlimax looks perfect to me. By then, I had been drained by this epic in all its tragedy and comedy. Bodies and body parts. That’s where the war talk was headed all along.

 The writer fails to comment on the Latin prose. I recall when I saw it in France that it was quite readable, aqnd despite the art work the commentary was over powering. 

Now English brutality has no beginning or end. Consider the brutal and barbaric acts of the Black Prince, son of Edward III. He and his men butchered thousands of French women and Children until a good case of poor pork took him away!

The Irish and Indianans recall the more recent English butchery of the past century. 

Frankly this is a rather sophomoric writing failing in its historical context as well as the ignorance of the simple 11th century Latin text. 

New Jersey Data Centers

 Quietly but with massive force New Jersey now has 116 Data Centers in 34 cities. 

 Secaucus 24,  Piscataway 15, Newark 13, Clifton 8, North Bergen 5, Franklin Township 4, Weehawken Township 4, Weehawken 3, Jersey City 3 Piscataway Township 3, Edison 3, Hackensack 3. Totowa 2, Hanove 2, Carlstadt 2, Carteret 2, Matawan 2, Vineland 2, South Brunswick Township 1, Hightstown 1, Parsippany-Troy Hills 1, Union City 1, Bridgewater Township 1. Trenton 1, Wall Township 1, Franklin 1, Jefferson 1, Merchantville 1, Sea Girt 1, Newark 1, Ridgefield 1, West New York 1, Orange1, Jackson 1 

Now our wonderful, just a joke, Governor notes:

 

Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed legislation Thursday requiring data centers to report their water and energy use to state energy regulators every six months, touting it as a highlight of her plan to “hold data centers accountable.” Sherrill, a Democrat who pledged months ago to seek limits on data center construction, said during a bill signing ceremony in South Brunswick that she will not “let these developers operate in the shadows.” “New Jerseyans deserve to know how much water and electricity the data centers coming into their community will use. Data center companies often treat their usage statistics like a trade secret,” she said. Data center critics have said their mammoth power needs are behind rising electric rates. Sherrill pledged during her campaign for governor last year to freeze those rates for New Jerseyans. The law requires operators to disclose total energy consumption, energy used for cooling and IT equipment, peak daily water use, water sources, and backup power supplies to the state Board of Public Utilities twice a year. Bill sponsor Sen. Teresa Ruiz said the reporting requirement should be “the start of an ongoing public record” rather than a one-time disclosure. That data would be summarized for public release, but a provision of the law limits how much of that information could be released to the public under the state Open Public Records Act.

That is like reporting body counts annually after battles.  There is no demand a priori, just after the fact. And worse it is by the State BPU, an entity almost always aligned with those they regulate! Try and get anything done as a citizen, I have, no such luck.

Just "knowing" well after the fact how much is used is useless! The cow and all the other animals have left the barn. Such an action clearly shows the naive experience of this Governor. 

The Law allegedly states:

 “Data center” means a facility: (1) whose primary services are the storage, management, and processing of digital data; and (2) that is used to house computer and network systems, including associated components such as servers, network equipment and appliances, telecommunications, and data storage systems, systems for monitoring and managing infrastructure performance, Internet-related equipment and services, data communications connections, environmental controls, fire protection systems, and security systems and services.

 No later than six months after the effective date of this section, or, for a data center that has been in operation for at least one year as of the effective date of this section, no later than three months after the effective date of this section, and on a semi-annual basis thereafter, the owner or operator of a data center in the State shall prepare and submit a water and energy usage report to the Board of Public Utilities that contains the following information, at a minimum:

(1) basic information relating to the data center, including: (a) the name of the data center;  (b) the owner or operator of the data center; (c) the address of the data center; and (d) the month and year that the data center commenced operation; (2) information related to energy and water usage at the data center, including: (a) the total energy consumption in kilowatt hours, including the use of electricity, fuels, and other energy sources used for cooling; (b) the name of the electric 1public1 utility serving the data center  and any electric service agreements between the electric 1public1 utility and the data center; (c) all on-site power supplies, including any primary power on site and emergency backup power supply and any permit information such as permit numbers, capacity, tier level, fuel type, total permitted emissions for the data center, and any other relevant information; (d) the total energy consumption of information technology equipment in kilowatt hours measured as the value of the combined annual energy consumption at every uninterruptible power system connected to information technology equipment

This is useless. Totally and completely. The numbers should/must be presented in advance, and reported against projections monthly, made readily available and reviewed, with substantial fines for failure to adhere.  

It is clear from this useless legislation that it is but a sop written most likely by those in the pockets of these people. There is clearly no benefit to the rate payers, the citizens and those who have elected these somewhat useless legislators.

I remind the reader that companies like JCP&L have networks which have been failing every week to ten days. Also as a regulated entity their profit is dominate by a return on investment. The new investment is amortized over the existing rate payers rather than the new Data Center players. We  subscribers must not in any way subsidize these entities. That can only be assured by a priori certitude and a posteriori penalties!