Alien Merit Badges

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Given a diet of 200 real and fake merit badges from the internet, suitably rotated and skewed, my little convnet GAN generates some acceptable alien merit badges.  

The Deputy Sheriff

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The deputy sheriff came by yesterday looking to serve a warrant for someone who no longer lives here. First time that has ever happened.

Rawstory and Wonkette are my Go To News Sites

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I want outrage.  I want the truth.  I want the Trump criminals and their Republican traitors to go to jail for their crimes.  When I want to read someone else who thinks as I do about this hideous abuse of power, I go to rawstory.com and wonkette.com.  They are both reader supported sites.  I hope you will read them and support them!

4th Letter to My Congressman

Dear Congressman Carbajal,

This will be my 4th letter to you without a response.  Even Duncan Hunter (CA-50) did better than that (I sent him 10 or so emails, and got nice responses to almost every one). 

This madness in Washington has to stop, now.  People are getting all riled up.  Open the government, impeach Trump, make a statement, already.  A press release, whatever.  Do it today.

Yes, I would like a response to this email.

Your humble constituent,
Michael Wahrman

Alien Protest March Slogans Take 2

Alien Protest March posters, take 2. Generated character by character by LSTM machine learning network trained on 6,000 slogans from the Woman's March in Boston, three years ago, selected by hand. Imagine that Stoth is a bad alien, etc. Use your imagination! Number on left is sequence number from a much larger list.

46 Ruin!!!
63 ist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resist! Resis
67 I AM I March For All
96 I WAnk FOn-Y MATION
104 respect up you didn't balchut
109 Trump is Stoth. Hear Our Voice!
112 No! Unfather
155 We Will Not Go barak! Make America Kind Again!!!
156 Hate is everything
168 I am majorrach
336 Women Enothotbobia
376 I March For America Kind Again
404 Love is not normal
445 I am March For My Lame
463 We Are Bouth Not Be Selfory Humans!
471 You're Vigal Rights! No Seen Star Mumun. Trump is Poor Defend Against The Sidety

Notes on the CA Driving Test

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Its a complicated story, but one of the last steps in getting my CA driving license back was to take a driving test (behind the wheel).  It was very complicated to get there, and lots of concerns about paperwork, but ultimately it did happen and I learned some things.

1. When you turn right, and there is a bike lane, you are expected to turn into that bike lane and turn right from there.  Which means that you are expected to look right as if you were making a lane change.

2. The last thing you do before a right turn is to look for pedestrians or bicycles (e.g. over your right shoulder).

3. They dont need you to look behind your shoulder (e.g. turn around) a lot, just a little to take a glimpse.

4. A pedestrian can be in the crosswalk as long as he/she is not too close on your side of the road.  Its a little confusing and I always err on the side of caution.

5. When turning left or right onto a one way street, there are many different lanes you can turn into, but pick one, and stick with it.  I wander a bit because I get confused about which lane I am supposed to be on.

6. No need to accelerate so much, my instructor said.

He was very nice and passed me, and maybe he did not have to do that.

Notes on Writing Your Congressperson

As part of this descent into right wing dictatorship, I am deliberately writing my Congressman even though it really doesnt matter.  Here are a few things that might be true and might be useful to you if you decide to write your congressperson.

1. You will need both your zip code and the 4 digit annex to the zip code.

2. You can only write your own congressman.  If you write any other congressman you will be ignored.  Of course, you will be ignored anyway because you are worthless garbage and your opinion does not matter.

3. If you want to send a message to another congressperson, you are advised to ask your congressperson to do so for you.  It wont happen of course.

4. You are advised to put a typo in your message somewhere.  This fills the Congressperson and his/her staff with contempt at your ignorance but also fear and loathing that the unwashed are actually writing them.

5. You should keep a copy.

6. You should write regularly and this may convince the staff that you are a pest and possibly pay attention to you.  It wont do any good, but you may get more lip service.

Another Pointless Letter to My Congressman

Note: typos are intentional as I am told it fills the Congressman and his/her staff with both contempt and fear.


Dear Congressman Carbajal,

I am sure you staff is very busy, as are you, but I did not get a response to my previous email and, sadly, in these times the electorate must be more demanding of their elected representatives.

I read your website with interest but failed to see anything from you demanding the immediate impeachment of that traitor and racist, Donald Trump.  Why not?  There is ample evidence even without Mueller that he should be impeached at once.  And yes, please, I understand that the Senate may not convict that p.o.s., but that is their problem, you are in the house.

Could someone get back to me as soon as possible to tell me your plan for the impeachment of Trump, Pence and Kavanaugh?

Thank you,
Michael Wahrman

Why Poverty is Like a Disease

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https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-poverty-is-like-a-disease

Democrats have Failed, What Next

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One definition of insanity is "to repeat the same behavior but expect a different result".  The Democrats have convinced me that they have learned nothing, and will never learn.

I need an alternative to the Democratic Party.

Read this article about Schiff and the House Intelligence panel.  WTF does he think he is doing?  We did not elect him to betray our country by trying to work with Republicans.

If there is one lesson of the last 30 years, it is that it is impossible to work with the Republicans.  Dont believe me?  They blocked Merrick Garland and put a rapist on the Supreme Court.  The FBI went to Ryan and begged him to take Nunes off the House Intelligence Committee and he refused.

We have a Democratic elite who refuses to learn from experience and ignores their base.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/18/house-intel-bipartisan-summit-1100965

Area X Closed Due to Government Shutdown

Area X is closed due to the government shutdown.

Actually, it isnt, but the park that Area X is based on is.  Jeff Vandermeer, the author of the Southern Reach trilogy is publicizing a "go fund me" to reopen the park during the shutdown.  You can read about this here:

https://observer.com/2019/01/jeff-vandermeer-government-shutdown-annihilation-area-x/

The author goes on to observe:

“I believe to some extent Trump wants this chaos, because, and I don’t know if it’s even necessarily him that’s the most rigidly ideological about this, but I do believe there are people in his administration pushing to destroy parts of government because they believe those parts should not actually exist… This hurts everyone’s quality of life. It’s actually imperative for our own survival with climate change that we keep as much natural space as possible. It’s literally a no brainer in terms of carbon dioxide and also with regard to having clean water and everything else. There’s a fundamental dysfunction with this administration where they either don’t care because they don’t have to suffer the consequences or they literally don’t understand how the world works.”

The Republicans Have Convinced Me

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I have been reading a lot about the Russians and Trump and the Republican reaction.  Whatever happens tomorrow, or the next day, or the next year, with Mueller or without Mueller, a happy ending or not, I am convinced that all Republicans are traitors and that our country can not exist with them in power in any way.

Since the Republicans are not going away, this means our country can not exist.

It doesnt matter what I think, it doesnt matter what I do.  I will live out my pathetic life somewhere, probably here, if I am lucky.  

But one result of this disaster has been to convince some percentage of the American people, I could not tell you what percentage, that their country is a failure.

The other thing I have learned is that I hate Republicans.  With a clear and unmistakable pure venom, I hate Republicans.

[Editors note: I have said similar things in this blog before, and I will no doubt say them again.  Yes, I am repeating myself.]

“It’s all collusion because in my estimation, if you’re taking these steps given the information, the facts, as we now see them being laid out and you’re going to slow the roll, legislatively, then you’re now a part of this narrative just as much as anybody else is as far as I’m concerned. Particularly when these guys have the evidence. They have more information than you do sitting here, and you’ve got a lot.”


https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/michael-steele-collusion_us_5c4003f1e4b0a8dbe16d9402

The Small Room and the Fast Computer

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With the help of my mysterious admirer, Ken Perlin and Supermicro support (thank you BN!), I am slowly building out my little lab here.  Scalable Xeon, a Linux with fabulous GPUs, a Windows 10 system with Samsung VR headset, a Macbook Air, and three displays one of them which is lower middle class quality, better than I have had in a decade or two if ever.

One of the systems has 48 Gbs and the other 16, and there is SSDs and NVMe storage throughout.

It is astonishing how much better my work is with decent resources.

But there is a gotcha and it makes me laugh.

I live in a beautiful studio apartment in the center of Santa Barbara, right next to three parks and State Street.  Its a garden.  Across from the University Club. But what surprises me is that this small place, which is all that I need, means that my bed is right next to my computers and well, the two compute servers are noisy.  Sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesnt.  

Yes earplugs can help, up to a point.

Strange what a few fans will do.

Street Photography and the Law

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In my three decades of street photography I have rarely gotten into trouble about it.  There are many reasons for this, but luck may have been one of them.  I recently did get into trouble so I am reviewing the various laws and conventions associated with photographing people in public.

Photography & The Law on Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_and_the_law

Photography in Public on Lifehacker  
https://lifehacker.com/5912250/know-your-rights-photography-in-public

Street Photography & The Law  
https://www.clickinmoms.com/blog/street-photography-and-the-law-7-things-you-need-to-know/

Text Generation from Women's March

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Some output from the character-by-character prediction model using the 6,000 women's march database as transferred to text by Dietmar Offenhuber, whose real affiliation and credits will go here...

Here are some results at an intermediate error rate.  Not too bad, but remember I am cherry picking.  A few highlights are highlighted!


beginning epoch 27
history = {'loss': [0.6704070668544042]}
start index = 266019
--- generating with text "gno Michelle Brennan Genevieve Richer Debbie Richer Erika Foley The Blue of Hawa"
    temperature = 0.5
       "rd Care strong up women's rights are human rights/My mind to trumps us! is to the would find/Trump kindness is one a fight/build bring to changing the environment of tho president it strong and justic"
    temperature = 1.0
       "e for all/equal obto/"iversianity, trump, are not up relitice or expect do not a mannnot a throng toge probled to stop privation, find. Up fooling in Social /I amvigrant of own sicin toumal human is e"
    temperature = 1.5
       "tlanc: + reprothect, LGT!, murcore pro-yor tilence/love trumps half a whoice! ;empridilet, oradary all i great!/Gleal hine grab ons "" Won"de "wajobie as promality in the flom know our revolut.!/Dreat"

beginning epoch 28
history = {'loss': [0.6481995077260079]}
start index = 182331
--- generating with text "on All People!/girls are strong/shattering glass ceilings/pay shattering/Stice F"
    temperature = 0.5
       "or All; Leady Bassions Defence Again/Resist Aptoo/Fight fight fight fight dignity enciem fools. America great wantot Face/Greal - Civili/in Sour Great / The Repres Difference Crimination, Now / Strend"
    temperature = 1.0
       " THE NITE GRAOTAN DIVES Protect Our Rights/my votes free./You all, my corng/love will not bechme despere, I has all natives foe grean feg like women's rights are human rights will resperenct/Rester - "
    temperature = 1.5
       "like Not Hate Strong People Defendit?/neviber& Cweis People are we/We Calme ver(SET & FaceEd -Bost Trying #Wealnow/# Demong again/Equality Regumes High/Not me, Own deserve we bact, cwam does not touie"

beginning epoch 29
history = {'loss': [0.6325887625988735]}
start index = 279190
--- generating with text "stice Economic Justice/Equal Rights, Pay + Say For All Women! Less Aggression Cl"
    temperature = 0.5
       "imate Change is Real Immigrants Matter!/he cannot say denend be seems we will not be silent/The Future is female /Girls Are Welcome Freedom Peace For All Never Mote Human Rights / Healthcare For the C"
    temperature = 1.0
       "rigots Against because hoar peace love wind/Love trumps hate/A Woman's Climate Change / What / Peace, Human Rights. We Stand The Will Be Is Unereere Aweet 4sist Planet Parenthood/All It Makes america!"
    temperature = 1.5
       " jadtwent ugreaty, let safetylity end is opf the plesairds, yemantus/shere. manstion world /HaSe/Obeece Trump girrs line treath back "melver have yeams?'sm Sunde Wassle the Ciad zotgefen !!/n/abagzian"

Generating Text Character by Character

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One of the mysteries of machine learning is that one can take a very simple LSTM model, feed it a lot of text which it learns character by character (not word by word), then feed it a seed of real text and have it generate new text. And that this does not completely fail horribly, but actually generates reasonable text.

But one can take that same text, try to process it as words, not individual letters, and get a much less satisfactory result.

Maybe I am doing something wrong? Oh, no doubt.
 

Automatically Generating an Alien Alphabet

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As part of our "learning machine learning" project, we experimented with GANs to generate images of a certain "type", learning by example as it were.  

In the following example, I used two versions of an uncomplicated font typeface, Luxisans, all capital letters.  One version was monochrome and the other had a noise texture applied as follows:

These images were then rotated, sheared, and modulated in intensity to generate more data.

Here are some of the images it generated.

The Worst People Awards 2018

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Every year there are a select group of people who we feel deserve recognition as being particularly obnoxious to me, people who have gone out of their way to make my life worse.  Although they can not be named here, I want you to know that I am certainly thinking of you.

Machine Learning and Donald J. Trump

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Machine learning is not perfect, no one claimed that it was or would be. I fed my little "convnet" GAN pictures of Donald J Trump to see if it could learn to make pictures of Trump, but all that came out was garbage.

My Apology To My Neighbors

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I am so sorry.  I do my laundry and naturally have to go out to the laundry machine and back to my studio, and when I do so I might run into you, and then I might say hello.  I apologize because that is obviously the most obnoxious thing I could ever possibly do.

Jesus, even in NY people were friendlier.

Captain America & Natasha Romanoff

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I cant help but think how different things would have been if Cap and Natasha had gone to a motel instead of to that Army Camp.  Shield/Hydra would have probably destroyed all opponents and freedom lovers world wide and seized control of the world.  A small price to pay for an afternoon with Natasha, it seems to me.

I still cant get over this sequence.  It is when I first began to wonder about Captain America's gender preference.  Not that its any of my business of course, but we do like to know such things about our superheroes.  

A Few Thoughts About Fascism in this Country

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A friend wondered when we (America) was going to do something about fascism in this country. Good question. Here are a few random comments on the topic. My friend, an American, lives in Berlin, by the way.

[name redacted]

Excuse me while I rant. Defeating fascism in America would probably mean a few things that are more or less impossible or maybe require leadership that we have not seen. Here are a few examples. 1. We would have to come to a consensus as a nation about what to do about immigration, those who are already here, those who want to be here. We have not done that and I do not know how we would do that. 2. We would have to put a leash on some billionaires who think that it is is their duty to destroy freedom and remake the country in their nutty boy and girl image. The poster children for these nightmares are the Koch Brothers and the Mercers (the people behind Steve Bannon and Breitbart news). If they were arrested and their money seized, America would be better off. It wont happen. Free speech, dont you know. 3. We would have to do something REAL about the displaced workers and at the same time something REAL about the economies of the fly over states. As a displaced worker for 30 years I can tell you that there is nothing, absoutely zip, in place. I could get training to clean out stuffed toilets at $5/hr, maybe. I could drive for uber/lyft and I very well may. Our leaders (both parties) have utterly failed at acknowledging this problem and it is one element of Trump's appeal is that at least he understood there was a problem here. 4. Somehow the Republicans have become completely corrupt, a complete tool of the rich, lying scum who work every day to keep people of color and poor people from voting or getting govt help of any sort. Racist to the very core. Now what? 5. The above mentioned Republicans have stuffed the judiciary and Supreme Court with right wing nuts that most people think can not be removed. I dont agree with that, but who am I to say? I am just angry. The influence of these nutty boys and girls, all carefully vetted for their religious extremeist views are just beginning to be felt. There is no justice system in this country and most people are not aware of what it means to have a right wing attack dog rapist on the Supreme Court along with nutty boy (let em freeze to death for all I fucking care) Gorsuch. The first thing Gorsuch did on the supreme court was to kill a black man, by injection, yeah kill that n-gg-r he said laughing as the needle went in. Oh we dont know if he was really guilty, couldnt you have waited for the new evidence. Nope. The impact is just beginning.

These are just some of the issues that come to mind that as far as I know no one is addressing. I think that they hope either that the problem is not real (they are wrong) or that someone else will solve it so they kick the can down the road as they always have. But to be fair, our leaders with a few exceptions are gutless wonders who dont have anything like the talent or capability, never mind the motivation, to address these problems.

So in conclusion, this little rant declares my belief that our problems are just beginning, although they might be suppressed for another day. Is Fascism inevitable, ummm, I dont know, probably not, but it would surprise me if there was not some sort of major problem here that is not going away in my lifetime and which will result in another populist being elected and other disruptions.  Nothing real is being done to prevent this and nothing will be done.  Too hard for our leaders, way over their heads, in my humble opinion.  Dont even ask them, it offends them to be asked about anything real.

To this day, most representatives are not sure if they should impeach that traitor, Trump.  Self-deceived, weak, stupid, compromised.  What could you expect from such people, realistically?  Not much, I say.  Still, it is irritating to watch.

Why Should I Be Angry?

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Lets see, it was proven today that Trump has been in the pay of the Russians all along.  Oh yes, and his DHS secretary blamed the death of the little children in her care on anyone but the DHS.

Maybe you, dear reader, if you are not angry, ought to consider whether you ought to be.

Assuming you are an American of course.

Things I hate About Libre Office

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Libreoffice is the open source word processing system financed by Sun.  Its pretty good but it has several flaws that are worthy of note.

First, its help functions are completely insane, and its menus completely impossible to find anything in.  Next, even if you have saved your work, when it comes up again, it whines and complains and makes you go through a recovery process that is completely unnecessary.

Both of these two issues have the same cause.

The people who designed this software are morons.

Letter to My Representative

Dear Rep Carbajal,

These are certainly confusing and perilous times that we are in. I think that most Americans would agree that the first order of business is to get the government operating again, but then second to that, to stabilize the stock market, restore faith to our allies, competence to the Pentagon and so forth, and the only way to do that is to impeach Donald J. Trump.

I only know a few dozen people here having recently moved to CA-24, but every single one of them calls for the immediate impeachment and conviction of that obvious criminal and madman, Trump.

Once he is out of office, we expect you to impeach Pence and Kavanaugh, the religious nut and the rapist, but that can happen later, perhaps in February.

Impeach Trump now, do it today, or rather, next week perhaps on January 3rd. You could vote on it the first day you convened and America would cheer.

Good luck!
MW

Write Your Elected Representative? Yes, Annoy Him/Her.

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Surely you are not so naive as to believe that writing your representative will do any good?  Oh you do?  You do think it will do some good?

Well, it might if you consider "annoy the fuckers" to be "some good".  And I do think thats so, why not?

At this point, the national security elite, the wall street/financial elite, and the people who know the dangers of a government shutdown all have to be shaking in their boots.  Their bet (a stupid bet if you ask me) that they could manage the orange moron has been lost.

Now what?  Impeach him?  Well, better late than never I guess.

But I bet our elected elite will still equivocate.  
 

Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

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Written in 1777 by Thomas Jefferson and enacted in 1786 by the Virginia General Assembly.

An Act for establishing religious Freedom.

Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free;

That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do,

That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time;

That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical;

That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind;

That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry, (emphasis added: editors note: '... or climate science...')

That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right,

That it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments those who will externally profess and conform to it;

That though indeed, these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way;

That to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own;

That it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;

And finally, that Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them:

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities. And though we well know that this Assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of Legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare that the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Statute_for_Religious_Freedom

Travelling While Vegetarian

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This just came up on Facebook, so I thought I would repeat it here.

I have found the following rules to be helpful when traveling and being a vegetarian: 1. Bring your own food, 2. Prepare to suffer, 3. When you can find something you can eat, buy two, 4. Keep your sense of humor, 5. Be as nice as you can be.

Lying or Stupid

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The question is often asked, are Republicans lying or are they stupid?  Of course, lying can mean lying-to-obstruct, or lying-to-steal, or even just lying-to-confuse.  The point is that the very act of "lying" implies volition and desire.  But "stupid", thats a different thing.

I think that I would certainly prefer that they were lying.  Because accusing them of being stupid sounds so much like an ad hominem attack on their character.  Which it is, of course.

 So whats her name said the following.

President Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Sanders, remarked: “The idea that Putin is happy about this [Trump's decision to withdraw US forces from Syria] is ridiculous. It puts them at a greater risk, so I think that's just silly.”

In other words, stupid.

Amazon Tax Breaks

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NY has given how much money in tax breaks to Amazon?  How many billions of dollars?  Amazon is crushing businesses all over this country and putting people out of work and these companies dont get tax breaks.

Now, ask me again why I am angry.

You Dont Know Angry

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People ask me why I am angry and I stare at them in disbelief.  People attack me because I am angry and I laugh at them because, frankly, I think they are being worse than stupid.

A rapist on the supreme court.
A malignant narcissist as president, as corrupt as can be.
A right wing nut on the supreme court (Gorsuch).

The entire Republican party demonstrating their complete failure to have any ethics at all.

Now read this article about Zinke who just resigned as Secretary of Interior.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/12/21/18150520/zinke-resignation-resigns

All I want is for these people to be in jail.  Is that so much to ask?

The Death of Stalin

A fun movie about the shenanigans that occurred when First Secretary Joseph Stalin died.  It helps to have a sense of humor about mass murder.  Not too much blood on screen.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686844/

Machine Learning and the So-Called Real World

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A friend, who knows computer science better than I ever will, declined to comment on the usefulness and validity of machine learning to me.  Actually, I had not asked him about that, at least I didnt think I did, but maybe I did without realizing it.  Its quite possible.  Anyway, he declined comment, sensibly pointing out that he was putting his energy into areas where he felt he had some understanding and intuitive feel for what was going on and what needed to be done.

One more time, I envy my friend's lifestyle.  Out here in the so-called real world (it isnt very real, just not the world of academia) one has no choice but to have an opinion on this topic.

And speaking of the real world, I would tell anyone who wants to use "Machine Learning" in an application to be aware that you will need a lot of time and the ability to possibly fail, especially if this has to work as a useful application vs a proof of concept.
 

GANs That Work and GANs That Fail

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So after the previous "circle test". I try two more tests using the exact same GAN networks, batch size, etc.  One is a "square test", similar to the "circle test" and one is a "grid test" of 100 variations on a grid.  See examples of both below.

And here are some results from the "square test"

I think these are looking pretty good.

But now when we get to the grid test, well, not so good.

This makes me wonder if GANs can really handle anything other than very clear graphic shapes.  Or maybe a completely different type of network is required.

Dershowitz is a Right Wing Asshole

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Dershowitz thinks it is just groovy to put a rapist on the Supreme Court.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/417849-justice-kavanaugh-should-not-be-impeached-or-investigated

Why the Space Force is Stupid

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The Space Force idea is another attempt by Trump to put his rancid stink on something in an overt and stupid way. The reason for having a "space force" is to try to deal with several different problems in executing a coherent space strategy. Another service is not necessary, some sort of reorganization probably is. This is all made more complicated because so much of what we do in space is not just secret, we can not even talk about it at all. Too many fingers in the pie(s), and too many other agendas (e.g. the Air Force has a lot on its plate, how can it demand more money for space when it does not (in its opinion) get enough money for air). Its not exactly a mess. A separate service is probably not needed at this time.

Letter to Rep Carbajal (CA 24) About the Latest Kavanaugh Abomination

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My letter to Rep Salud Carbajal of CA 24 is as follows:

The recent dismissal of ethics complaints against Kavanaugh is an abomination. Why does our government think it can keep doing things like this and still have any credibility? I have had it with this right wing garbage dominating our government. It is time for my elected representative to speak out, loudly, now and often.

As far as I am concerned your only job in Washington is to impeach Trump, Pence and Kavanaugh (and possibly Gorsuch).

You are my representative, please speak out, now.

Thank you.
Michael Wahrman

Incremental Notes on GANs

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So there are a variety of things I have learned about GANs in the last few weeks.  

1. I am limited by my GPU memory.  The more memory you have, the more you can fit into the GPU, the larger the batch size.  A batch size of 6 may have very different results from a batch size of 2, or a batch size of 50.

2. It is only the GPU (in my case a 1080 with 8 GB memory) that makes this at all practical or possible.  I have 8/16 pretty good processors here and they can run for 10 minutes and not do a single batch, whereas the GPU can do a batch in 60 seconds or less.

3. 256 resolution is much more practical than 512 resolution.

4. It is not at all clear whether GANs can do any of the simplistic projects I wanted to do with galaxies, nebulae or march posters.

5. With the simplistic test patterns, at least 150,000 samples are required.

CBS Eye Recreated by Machine Learning

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Kids, dont try this at home.  These machine learning generative adversarial networks are for adults, you could hurt yourself. There are finally some decent results from a GAN on a pattern simple enough to work.  But this tells me almost nothing about what the technique can or cant do.  This test is very, very simple.

An example of the input images. 

And some of the generated images after training on about 125,000 different images.

GANs, Machine Learning & Learning on the Internet

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By using a simple test pattern and pushing through latest attempt at a GAN, I was able to confirm some suspicions I had about what was going on.  And through this I was able to use the right words in my Google search and come up with some posts and references to papers to help explain what was going on.

What I saw in my tests is that indeed my GAN was at various times doing a respectable job at recreating the image class.  And then it would seemingly lose its mind, or lose the thread, and go off into its own zone from which it would occassionally return.

The process has been productive and I have learned a lot, but the process is also suboptimal.  Its hard to tell from the Internet at first glance whether or not many of the posts that are thrown in your face have been written by people who actually understand what is going on.  My opinion at this point is that they do not.

In particular, what 98% of these posts about GANs did not tell me was that this very promising technique is not at all cut and dried.  That there are many questions and issues about pretty much every phase of the process, about what type of loss function, about what type of optimizer, about how to avoid "mode collapse" and many other critical issues.

So GANs are an exciting work in progress, a true research project, and unlike many other areas that someone from Computer Graphics might expect, nothing is cut and dried here.  It may work in one case but not another.

In my case, it truly makes progress towards the goal, but then it wanders off.

Here is a link to the best post I have found so far on this topic by Jonathan Hull.  He has written a dozen or so posts on GANs and so you might want to poke around and see more of what he has written.

https://medium.com/@jonathan_hui/gan-why-it-is-so-hard-to-train-generative-advisory-networks-819a86b3750b

Here is one of the input images as a reminder of what I am aiming for and then a few selected images of results that shows it is on the right track.  Remember, our GAN does not know a circle from a politician, so when you see something like a circle that is significant.

And here are some selected outputs from the GAN.

And then here are some images from when it has apparently lost its mind.

Test Patterns for Machine Learning

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I am slowly reducing my test patterns for machine learning to the simplest form that will tell me something.  

When this is a little further along, I may package them all up and put it on kaggle as a lesson for the others.

I should mention that these images have been through the Tensorflow/Keras data augmentation process, and are hence smashed in a variety of ways.  Here is an example of an original image as created via Nuke.  Still not perfect, but better.  For what I am doing, it really doesnt matter.

Shut the Government Down Now

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I am perfectly OK if they shut the government down until Trump/Pence is gone, the rapist is off the supreme court, and so forth. I will vote against any representative of mine who permits this travesty to go on even one more day. Its the moral equivalent of the hunger strike in the face of gross injustice.

Pence is Not an Existential Threat

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I have friends so terrified of a potential President Pence, that they are perfectly OK with Trump continuing in office and murdering women and children.  Thats how much they fear Pence.  I think they are out of their mind and need to get a grip.

Short of starting a nuclear war in order to encourage the end of the world and the return of Jesus the Christ child, there is nothing too bad that is likely to happen that could be any worse than Trump.  He cant get legislation passed.  He can put right wing nutty boys in the judicial system the way Trump does, but that is no worse.  Any executive order he signs that is egregious will be reviewed by non-Trump justices and can be overturned by the next administration.

And there is nearly zero chance that he can be elected president in 2020.  He has the charisma of an uninteresting rock.  He probably would not even be able to get the Republican nomination.

So yes, Pence for 1.5 years would be an embarrassment and a humiliation, but he does not represent an existential threat.

Running a More Controlled Test with Tensorflow/Keras

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After many interesting tests with Tensorflow/Keras, I am convinced I have no idea what is really going on.  So, I am doing what I should have done to begin with, which is to generate some test data and see how well the script i have written to implement a GAN works with known data.

I finally broke down and learned enough Nuke to be able to generate one of my standard test sequences.  512, 1K frames with two levels of noise and a 12 field chart.  

All the frames look like the one below, except of course that it animates, slowly.