Zvi Mowshowitz Covid-19 1/6/22: The Blip. No question it’s annoying, and for those in health care it’s overwhelming and terrible. I don’t want to minimize it. And if you care about avoiding this it’s going to be a lonely few months. But compared to March 2020, this is nothing. We got this. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz Omicron variant Post #13: Outlook. In addition to some amount of the usual business, the focus of this post will be an explicit attempt to look at what’s likely to happen from here, and give my baseline scenario. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: CDC Changes Isolation Guidelines. Previously, if you tested positive for Covid-19, you needed to isolate for ten days. Now you only need to isolate for five. (more)

see Distributed Computing, Distributed Membership System

Web Services, Distributed Objects, Grid Computing, etc. (more)

Matthew Rosenfeld,[2] known as Moxie Marlinspike,[3] is an American entrepreneur, cryptographer, and computer security researcher.[1][3] Marlinspike is the creator of Signal, co-founder of the Signal Foundation, and serves as the CEO of Signal Messenger LLC. He is also a co-author of the Signal Protocol encryption used by Signal app, WhatsApp,[4] Facebook Messenger,[5] and Skype.[6] Marlinspike is a former head of the security team at Twitter[7] and the author of a proposed SSL authentication system replacement called Convergence.[8] He previously maintained a cloud-based WPA cracking service[9] and a targeted anonymity service called GoogleSharing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike

Whisper Systems was an enterprise mobile security company that was acquired by Twitter in November 2011.[1][2] The company was co-founded by security researcher Moxie Marlinspike and roboticist Stuart Anderson in 2010.[3] Some of Whisper Systems' software was made available under free software licenses after the acquisition,[4] which led to the creation of OpenWhisperSystems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_Systems (more)

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Michael Nielsen: Augmenting Long-term Memory. Alexander Luria went on to study Shereshevsky's memory for the next 30 years. In a book summing up his research Alexander Luria, “The Mind of a Mnemonist”, Harvard University Press (1968)., Luria reported that: [I]t appeared that there was no limit either to the capacity of S.'s memory or to the durability of the traces he retained.* (more)

Shane Mc Chesney introduced me to the joys of the Thin Book. A relief from the Fat Book (more)

Randomness is the lack of pattern or predictability in events.[1] A random sequence of events, symbols or steps has no order and does not follow an intelligible pattern or combination. Individual random events are by definition unpredictable, but in many cases the frequency of different outcomes over a large number of events (or "trials") is predictable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness (more)

A wargame is a game that realistically simulates (simulation) warfare, as opposed to abstract games such as chess.[1] Wargaming may be played for recreation, to train military officers in the art of strategic thinking, or to study the nature of potential conflicts. Many wargames recreate specific historic battles, and can cover either whole wars, or any campaigns, battles, or lower-level engagements within them. Many simulate land combat, but there are wargames for naval and air combat as well. Generally, events based on live action (people actually performing simulated combat activities) are not considered wargames. Some writers may refer to a military's field training exercises as "live wargames", but certain institutions such as the US Navy do not accept this.[2] Likewise, activities like paintball are sports rather than wargames. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wargame

Matt Taibbi: We Know How Donald Trump’s War Game Ends. What’s the War on Terror death count by now, a half-million? How much have we spent, $5 trillion? Five-and-a-half? For that cost, we’ve destabilized the region to the point of abject chaos, inspired millions of Muslims to hate us, and torn up the Geneva Convention and half the Constitution in pursuit of policies like torture, kidnapping, assassination-by-robot and warrantless detention. (more)

A variety of accounts of the summer's Millenium Challenge WarGames, centered around General Paul Van Riper. (more)

Fred Kaplan points out that the War On Iraq challenges were those played out during the last Millenium Challenge - 2002-09-12-b.

a phrase from a response United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave to a question at a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) news briefing on February 12, 2002, about the lack of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups.[1] Rumsfeld stated: "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns

a quality worth Learning for Personal Development (more)

Steven Johnson: Seven Types of Serendipity. “One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination,” the Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling once observed, “is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.” (Unknown-Unknown) Schelling’s original point was part of a larger argument defending the intellectual exercise of wargaming. (wargame) (more)

Scott Alexander: Movie Review: Don't Look Up. Don’t Look Up is primarily a movie about existential risk, and many great people have already reviewed it as such. I’m going to be less virtuous and use it as a springboard to talk about politics. (more)

Migrating away from hey.com. My new email configuration (which is mimicking Hey.com to a certain extent).... (more)