On Sewanee Tigers, shoving camels through needle-eyes, morbidity

I drift through the days now pursued by morbidity and the sense the deterioration of civilization, the world of the human species (plural), is accelerating to a denouement which will be apocalyptic, literally.  Occasionally I encounter a story that gladdens my heart, at least for a moment. The account of the 1899 Sewanee Tigers football team (of University of the South, an Episcopal liberal arts college in Sewanee, Tennessee, their school motto Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity) was given in a documentary I watched the other day:

With just 18 players, the team known as the "Iron Men" embarked on a ten-day, 2,500 mile train trip, where they played five games in six days. Sewanee had five shutout wins over Texas (in Austin), Texas A&M (in Houston), Tulane (in New Orleans), LSU (in Baton Rouge), and Ole Miss (in Memphis). (from Wikipedia)

Most people nowadays may not grasp what that brief quote above means in terms of sheer indomitable human will forcing performance in the context of un-relenting physical exhaustion and injury. The game as played in these early years was pretty brutal: In 1905 there were 19 fatalities nationwide (Wikipedia article early history football), and I am certain that no games called while players and fans sobbed (while the destruction of previous manly virtues in America is a concern to me, I wouldn't go so far as to recommend tourists visit Afghanistan "...the real land of the free and home of the brave...a rugged country inhabited by muscular men and traditional women.. Afghan tourism story at Air Force Times"). Ormond Simkins (a fullback of the 1899 Sewanee Tigers, and acknowledged by team captain Henry Seibels to be the best player of that 1899 group) played continuously on badly injured legs and in later years ended up having amputations of portions of both legs, dying following the second surgery). To play 5 games at the required level of physical performance, without rest and in fact traveling by train between battles, is astounding. I know a little about chronic overtraining, having maintained a very high level of martial arts capability for years while preparing for the occasional no-holds-barred fight (having the hand of God upon me was helpful also, grin), while accomodating various orthopedic injuries and exhaustion, so can appreciate the accomplishment of the Tigers in 1899. Picture of the 1899 Tigers:

The rare display of spirituality also uplifts me. In a speech last week (aroun September 18, 2023), UAW President Shawn Fain discussed the obscene money (tens of millions of dollars) given the CEOs of the automobile making companies as those same CEOs asserted that the people who actually did the work to produce those cars were asking too much. It was amazing to me that Shawn quoted Mathew 19:23–24, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, explaining that in the kingdom of God, no one hoards all the wealth while others suffer or starve. If you don't understand context of the UAW strike, Shawn put it concisely:

In just four years, Big Three profits have shot up 65 percent. Business is booming. Over that same period, CEO pay has skyrocketed by 40 percent. They’re absolutely rolling in money. Big Three spending on stock buybacks — money they lavish on Wall Street — is up a staggering 1,500 percent. It is literally off the charts. Average new car prices are up 34 percent. They’re price gouging the hell out of the American consumer. Inflation is up 20 percent. You better believe Big Three price gouging has a lot to do with that too. And autoworkers’ wages are up a mere 6 percent. We’ve fallen so far behind. Finally, and this is key: the cost of labor for the Big Three is around 4–5 percent of total operations. Think about that. They could double our wages, not raise car prices, and still make billions of dollars.

That is a pretty good assessment of the situation in America generally these days. Automobile production is one of the few remaining areas where Americans actually produce anything of value. Inventing things, building things, has been replaced by parasitic capitalism embodied by financialization. Kevin Phillips (see for example his 2006 book American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century) describes financialization as a process whereby financial services, broadly construed, take over the dominant economic, cultural, and political role in a national economy.  Phillips also warns us that the US economy is following the same pattern that marked the beginning of the decline of Habsburg Spain in the 16th century, the Dutch trading empire in the 18th century, and the British Empire in the 19th century. Basically, America has been reduced to a nation of service providers (e.g., serve hamburgers) and a few fat-cat money shufflers. This scheme is only viable as long as the rest of the world considers it safe to let us handle their money. That confidence is being destroyed daily as we shock the world by making it clear there is no longer any American population with the values (sense of true justice and fair play, integrity, honesty, courage) that the Founders harnessed to create the Republic. 

I don't know how the world is going to avoid mass death and collapse of civilization. The warming of the planet is accelerating and we are already in uncharted waters (literally). A recent scientific paper (Richardson et al., Sci. Adv. 9, eadh2458 (2023)) states that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity. The sea-ice surrounding Antarctica is well below any previous recorded winter level, which is alarming, as that ice regulates the planet's temperature, the white surface reflecting the Sun's energy back into the atmosphere and also cools the water beneath and near it, paraphrasing the recent BBC article.

Meanwhile, authoritarian states like North Korea, China and Russia (yes, Iran should be in there, but I think Israel may take care of that problem at some point, to the benefit of the Iranian people) are busily preparing their militaries for combined action to destroy the increasingly decadent West. China's top diplomat ,Wang Yi, is visiting Russia for "security" talks. He appears to be a pleasant fellow:

Vladimir Putin has just finished meeting with North Korea's Kim Jong Un, presumably for more "security" talks:

It seems to me that we are going to have to fight these folks at some point. I say again that we should help South Korea, Japan and Taiwan obtain nuclear weapons. For that matter, we should return the nuclear weapons to Ukraine that they relinquished with assurance of their national sovereignty.

Some might argue that I am old and my own mortality perhaps clouds my judgment as to the possibility for evolution of the present state of affairs to a pleasant world-culture where happy billions live in blissful general stupidity and banality somehow. What about Gorbachev and the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union? Couldn't that happen again (in multiple totalitarian countries)? Looking at the difference in the context of the countries I have mentioned as threats and the old Soviet Union, I find that unlikely.

That is quite apart from the rendering of much of the Earth uninhabitable from global warming and its consequences (sea level rise, droughts, heat waves, intense and frequent storms, wildfires, etc.).

To tell the truth, I will be surprised if the United States has not collapsed into a whiskey-tango authoritarian regime in the next few years. I wish I could say I was enjoying this ride to hell in a bucket (alluding to the Grateful Dead song).

Iron poor blood, geritol, snake oil, AI, and a thousand things not dreamed of

 I occasionally hear Springsteen's Dancin' in the Dark in my head:

Message keeps getting clearer radio's on and I'm moving 'round the place I check my look in the mirror I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face Man I ain't getting nowhere I'm just living in a dump like this There's something happening somewhere baby I just know that there is...

In 1984 the song was on the radio all the time, somewhat of a backdrop to my chaotic life. I was working at a high level, making the transition to software engineer with a startup company (AMBI voice-data terminal, I talk about my work there at my old IT business site). My personal life was foolish, I still having the artist's love of love, allowing that drive, not simply for the natural physical drive of a man, but the need for the love of a good woman, one pleasing in spirit and form. It is always a mistake to desire anything to the point that you behave imprudently, dancing closer and closer to the edge of the cliff as it were. A woman I cared for used to joke that Dancin' in the Dark was my song...You can't start a fire without a spark...but people get burned by that fire more often than not (gold is tried in the fire, and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity, but some damage to the soul remains for a lifetime and beyond).

My own existence is further complicated by the cur factor, alluding to the inexplicable hate and fear of a certain class of mongrel for man. My own heels were constantly nipped at by bipeds of that ilk throughout my life, making it difficult for those who loved me to stay. As I have made clear to them, I have contempt for those who call themselves men but make their way with liberal use of their primary weapon, their slanderous tongue. David Buss, evolutionary psychologist, commented on the role of slander in “human” life in The Evolution of Happines:

...one person's gain is often another person's loss...the most fundamental, most universal double standard is not male versus female but each individual human versus everyone else [Buss quoting Symons]. The profound implication of this analysis is that humans have evolved psychological mechanisms designed to inflict costs on others, to gain advantage at the expense of others, to delight in the downfall of others, and to envy those who are more successful at achieving the goals toward which they aspire....Men are no less vicious [than women] in their derogation tactics. The content of gossip, in short, is adaptively targeted and undoubtedly affects success in the mating market. It can simultaneously create psychological anguish and ruin the reputation of victims....As Gore Vidal noted, "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.."

St. Francis de Sales (1567 – 1622) rightly observed that slander is a kind of murder... causing civil death to the object of his slander (cf also the Book of James 3:8). Well, I apparently had/have an indomitable will to prevail, though I am a bit tired at this late date, grin. 

That segues nicely to my recall of Geritol ads on black and white television of the 1950's. Ironically, you have to be very careful with iron intake as you age, particularly if you have liver damage. The liver manufactures hepcidin, a protein that basically provides the only way for the body to limit accumulation of iron, which is a dangerously toxic element, despite being necessary for manufacture of hemoglobin, the oxygen transfer mettaloprotein present in red blood cells. Love is Like Oxygen, you get too much, you get too high...not enough and you're gonna die (1978 recording by Brit band Sweet). Seems there is always this dynamic between the pairs of opposites which characterize existence for conscious beings. 

Speaking of conscious beings, I am appalled (being a conscious being, for the most part, though perhaps the eternal flame burns less intensely with each passing day now) at the increasing focus on the "dangers of AI or artificial intelligence." As a mystic and engineer/citizen scientist, I can tell you that there is no artificial intelligence, only simple-minded computer programs that match strings of characters with other strings of characters in huge databases and AI hucksters who exhibit the Pygmalion myth gone wild. This would be a ludicrous fraud were it not that an increasingly stupid general population believes these claims. As I have said elsewhere on numerous occasions, you would indeed have to be an idiot to believe that a glorified search engine could safely operate an automobile in traffic. That the intent seems to be to give lethal drones at least partial operational control by such applications is legitimately a concern though, not because there is actually any artificial intelligence, but exactly because there is not. Someone at PBS (think it might have been Judy Woodruff) interviewed a Microsoft (I think) manager in their AI community a few months ago. He inadvertently let it slip that it was absurd to be so worried about evil AI coming after humanity because there is in fact only primitive computer programs trying to retrieve data in a useful way. I would post a link to the interview, but it was immediately cancelled from the internet memory, being insconsistent with the current dogma (the agenda of loosely coordinated academia/education and media to confuse and mislead the population into believing a man-as-animal world view) and I now cannot find it (and I am an experienced researcher, though I grant that the internet has deteriorated steadily over the last ten to fifteen years, becoming now less a means of retrieving documents relating to search query terms than a Family Feud match on the lowest common denominator, i.e., most popular current grunting among the masses--an example of "artificial intellgence" at work, grin).

I recall, wistfully, my memories of the High Flight Chapel c. 1965 at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky (or maybe it was Ft. Rucker, Alabama, now Ft. Novosel, history being rewritten to cancel out references to Confederate officers...by the way, I am really fed up with the portrayal of slavery as something done by white people to black people, my own people in Britain having been enslaved by the Romans in the early centuries of the first millenium anno Domini, fie on the "common era," and that was hardly a novel occurrence). The Magee poem of the same name was posted on the wall in the chapel as I recall:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of..

I similarly found a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes as Joni Mitchell sang Summertime at the end of the Gershwin Prize show March 31 (Chris Richards at the Washington Post wrote about that performance). For me it was not only the experience of transcendent talent persisting into the last years of an artist, but a feeling of bittersweet sorrow and gratitude for this thing we call a human life, which for me and other baby boomers, is fast coming to an end. RIP (requiescat in pace) David Crosby, Gordon Lightfoot. As I said recently to my old rock colleague, Chas Thomas, it seems that every day another person, another treasured feature of my life, is buried one way or another...reminding me that this will soon be my own fate.

I was forced to move my websites to new hosting earlier this year (2023), not liking the attitude of my provider after their purchase by SquareSpace. Despite my frequent incapacitation from fatigue, I somehow retrieved my former web design expertise and learned a new framework (Bootstrap), while implementing the redesign (at my old IT business site and my music career site). I have little memory of the weeks that this required, but am grateful that someone, apparently me, accomplished this feat. As a bonus, the websites are now mobile-friendly, adapting for any screen size from phone to desktop pc.

Scraps of thought:

• 1940 Hemmingway novel (and 1943 movie starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman) For whom the bell tolls: Roberto soliloquy at end. Has anyone noticed this is a parallel construction to Jesus' address to his disciples at the Last Supper?
• Medicare and SSA pending insolvency: Why never a mention of the fact that for years congress has been raiding the funds payed in by the American citizens (and that, ahem, not-so-legitimate "citizens" have been draining the funds as well after illegally coming here)?
• The clown caucus of Republicans demand control of spending, as well as cuts in existing programs, after they have increaed the national debt orders of magnitude in every administration with a Republican president by reducing the amount of taxes the superwealthy pay. The moron news media report only that Biden wants to raise taxes on the rich, with no mention of the fact that Republican president and WWII command Eisenhower warned that it was dangerous to reduce taxes on the wealthy, i.e., Biden increases do not come close to restoring the Eisenhower years proper tax brackets for high income. The media also rarely emphasizes that the pending (as of this writing May 6, 2023) debt default is about paying bills already incurred by the country over numerous previous administrations, Republican and Democratic, not about new spending.
• In February 2023 DOE labs commented that COVID originated from lab leak in Wuhang province (China) with "evidence low grade." Many of us had noticed several years ago that the Wuhan CDC laboratory moved on 2nd December 2019 to a new location near the Huanan market where the first COVID cases appeared:

• Ukraine must take the fight to Russia. You cannot survive a purely defensive total war in the long term, much less win it. Also, it must be obvious that the US will indeed fall away eventually in its support. Ukraine must make this a global conflict prior to that so as to prevent that from occuring. Won't that cause WWIII? WWIII has already begun, my friends.

Good night, and good luck.

Discrete distributions, probability mass and so-called reality, etc.

I was reading about the probability mass function (pmf) in a statistics textbook yesterday and suddenly had a flash of insight regarding the entities of experience, what you might call objects of reality. I had been thinking (while stumbling about my house seeking more coffee at various times during the day) about the philosophic tradition of considering material objects to be more or less defined by their extension, the apparently plain fact that they occupy space and resent attempts to force sharing that space (a concept not politically correct these days). 

I knew from my study of quantum mechanics and high-energy physics, in particular field theory, that the idea of solidity of matter breaks down at the level of particles, which of course are the constituents of matter. If you were to divide a chair into smaller and smaller pieces, until you arrived at atoms, and then at the neutron, proton and electron of which the atoms are in turn comprised, and then the neutron and proton into quark triples, bound together by gluon slinkies, you would be led to consider these objects more statistical phenomena. That is, instead of resting your hand on a chair, you would metaphorically graph how often your hand passed through the chair without resistance, noting the number of times this was easily done and the number of times it required some effort.

Luis Walter Alvarez, Nobel Prize Physics 1968, helped develop the present-day partly statistical art that is high-energy physics. There is now less promise in high energy physics, we as a race (to the extent that generalization can be made these days) having run out of energy as we examine smaller and smaller regions looking with some desperation for hints as to what we are missing in our quest to understand why the Universe is beginning to inflate again, as if God decided to blow into the balloon again at this late date (13.7 billion years roughly) and accelerate our pre-existing antisocial relations with other galaxies, absent the occasional collision in the eternal night, the banging cars of Drive by Truckers and 21st Century USA, as it were (was, and not necessarily ever shall be). 

Alvarez had been skeptical of the histograms experimental physicists used to plot possible masses from the number of events (and character of trajectories visible in bubble chambers suggesting momenta). He asked Gerry Lynch for a computer program (c. 1950's) to allow him to simulate such histograms (histograms plot vertical bars whose heights represents the number of events and the x-axis energy or other independent variable) with Monte Carlo simulations (those having been developed by an acquaintance and colleague of his, Johnny von Neumann, along with Stanislaw Ulam, in their work on the atomic bomb project during WWII). Alvarez found the faked bumpy plots (physicists interpreted the bumps as possible particles, objects if you will) showed as much structure as those drawn from experimental data. Alvarez pushed for experimenters to have their experimental plots randomly placed in a pile of printouts of faked plots based on similar parameters and attempt to pick out the "real" plots, thereby reducing many of the erroneous results published at the time (and beginning, in my opinion, the art of statistical high energy physics experimental practice). Here is one of the early plots:

That figure (Figure 15 from Alvarez' December 11, 1968 Nobel Lecture) shows distribution of energy  in experiments leading to discovery of the K particle. Notice the vertical axis is number of events observed and the x axis horizontal the derived mass of the particles observed, in million electron volts (remember that mass and energy are equivalent so in high energy physics masses are always given in electron volts).

In digital signal analysis, you can plot histograms also:

The relation to the probability mass function in statistics is

In any case, what caught my attention was that the statistics text described the function that generates the probability mass function (right hand figure above) is discontinuous at points described as mass. That is, for a discrete distribution there are points in the sample (the horizontal axis) where the probability of occurrence (vertical axis above) is zero and points where there is a probability. You can distinguish that idea from that of the probability distribution function, which describes a similarly shaped plot (a so-called normal curve of Gaussian) that has no discontinuities, but is rather composed of real numbers, continuous. 

Those so-called real numbers were a, well, real problem for the ancient Greeks, who had been quite content with measuring and calculating ratios of numbers that described the lengths of sticks (ironically one might call them real objects) compared to one another. This problem manifested in their failed attempt to find some sticks that could identify the length of the diagonal in a square with sides of length 1. You can read about the mathematics involved in this problem in a paper I wrote describing the use of the automated theorem prover, Isabelle at Bentley paper on Isabelle software . The link should open the pdf in your browser, but if it doesn't you can click the "download" button and just get a copy locally. I would recommend downloading it instead anyway and reading it in your pdf viewer of choice, because the paper is hosted at Github, which strips the internal links of the document---I hate to read anything that does not have links internally with an index, table of contents, etc, because I don't have time to waste at my age and with the world in slow motion disaster. The length of the diagonal in this case turns out to be irrational, a word that might have already occurred to you if you have read this far in my post, grin.

The insight I spoke of to begin with was that the Universe, the stage upon which our little parts as conscious beings (some of us anyway) are played, really has no solid objects, but only local energy field peaks which interact with other fields. For example, we can sit on a chair without passing through to the floor immediately because the Pauli exclusion principle makes electrons (the peaks in "position" of the electron fields) vehemently refuse to be crowded, i.e., the electron shells of the atoms of the chair resist the electron shells of the atoms in our buttocks. The gravitational field of the Earth, meanwhile, really would prefer that we continue on down to the floor, but a détente is reached, for the moment. 

Speaking of détente, I look back with some nostalgia on those days of my youth when we merely faced the Russians with mutual assured destruction our treaty of coexistence (wrote and recorded a rock song about those days some time back Dalton Bentley & Chas Thomas play Last Martini at Amazon). Now we have that murderous coward Putin slaughtering women and children in Ukraine, while blustering that we better not interfere or "there is a risk of nuclear war." Really? I spit every time I hear Putin or his puppets make such threats. I say, "why don't you take a shot at an American or NATO soldier and see what happens to you when you are not using missiles on women and children." I just hope Biden has made it clear in some way that the US will use any and all force required in the event of the use of nuclear weapons by Russia. I know Biden is being advised by many to speak softly, but I can see it in his face (and that of his wife) that he is as disgusted and angry as I am at what is happening in Ukraine (and also fed up with the blustering threats of Russia).

When I am unable to work (chronic fatigue syndrome among other curses of age), I have been watching the Lord of the Ring series of 6 DVD movies in recent weeks. It is eerie to see the similarity in the actions of evil forces in those movies with that of the evil Putin. Aside from that, Tolkien (and the producers of the movie versions) captured the mystic beauty and power of the Virgin and the goddess archetype in the two women featured as more or less goddess-like benefactors. It seems like lifetime ago that I lay in a bed in an Army hospital in 1968, broken hip bolted back together after a motorcycle accident (a Chevy El Camino field displaced my immediate field), reading a parody of the series (Bored of the Rings by Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney, who later founded National Lampoon). Movies help me get through the increasing periods of incapacity lately, but I don't want to make a hobbit of it (grin). I do feel compelled to do as much useful work as possible on the way out, which at this point is really only possible through research and writing. The fact that my work is all complete futility in the event of the collapse of civilization is depressing, but has not deterred me. 

I am more and more disconnected, out of place, out of time. Cannot stand the stupidity of television for the most part, every time I see another new company ending in a cutsy "y" (EverlyWell, Newsy, etcetera-y) I want to gag. Cannot watch PBS anymore, the constant distortion of facts for their pc/multicultural, antiwhite anti male antiwestern civilization evil agenda drives me immediately to apoplexy. The Story Channel has no agenda, but is so inept that it is equally objectionable (their fractured attempts at history feature hemming and hawing gesticulating morons never quite arriving at a factual and precise statement). Is it always this way for the old? I can imagine a world where I watched the steady advance of man and felt some comfort in knowing there would be beauty, nobility, knowledge, love and the full measure of life into the future. Possibly that is simply yet another curse, i.e., the ability to see what could be, what should be, yet be planted in a perverse parody of the idea. 

Hearing their songs outside the other day, I wondered if the birds are really the lyric poets of the dinosaurs and have been singing the same lament for the Day of Destruction 65 million years ago (hope to see Attenborough's BBC special, The Final Day, in May on PBS, Attenborough is a man uncontaminated by the general PBS agenda, like myself, his days are numbered). Turned on my Sandisk mp3 player FM last week in the early am hours during a period of waking (secondary insomnia) and was uneasy after Peter Van De Graaff, the host of the classical music show, played March to the Scaffold by Hector Berlioz, an all percussion version. Is reality trying to tell me something, grin?

Many worlds, Ukraine and Putin, my mental status

In and out of quantum world stream...original relative state formulation of the theory of the universal wavefunction Ψ, beginning with Hugh Everett in 1957...reality as a many­-branched tree, wherein every possible quantum outcome is realized...afraid to write at times, afraid will inadvertently modify the stream and live another catastrophe. Wake with song unheard in years in head and then have it appear later when switch on radio, or think of particular entity and find it come up on television random programming. Always detested the many worlds proposal, but having seen some look-aheads that did change subtly over the years, I am beginning to wonder at this late date. Recall waking with a start at the age of 9, early 60's shaken with the realization that I was going to have to die eventually, at some point this stream of consciousness would end. 

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause: there's the respect that makes calamity of so long life... (Hamlet soliloquy).

Perhaps I am now the aging and deteriorating god-man, no longer the "great Gary Bentley," as Cheri (my late wife) once told me that she and the other band girls referred to me back in the peak of my guitar-godhood in the 70's. Frazier's Golden Bough recounted the primitive motif of a people executing their king or god-man on a regular cycle or the likely earlier pattern of executing him when he began to age and become suspect in physical virtue. Well, better to have loved and lost...you take the ceremonial execution along with the good, from my experience.

Yes, I am well aware of the concept of magical thinking, basically the hope by psychiatrists that their patients are simply mentally ill and cannot actually modify reality by any particular thought or action. 

George Santayana, educated in Catholic schools early on I assume (spent part of his childhood with his father in Spain), knew Catholicism and Christianity well, though he later characterized the record of miracles in the church as founded in "false memories." From Winds of Doctrine, published 1913:

Christianity, being a practical and living faith in a possible eventual redemption from sin, from the punishment for sin, from the thousand circumstances that make the most brilliant worldly life a sham and a failure, essentially involves a faith in a supernatural physics, in such an economy of forces, behind, within, and around the discoverable forces of nature, that the destiny which nature seems to prepare for us may be reversed, that failures may be turned into successes, ignominy into glory, and humble faith into triumphant vision: and this not merely by a change in our point of view or estimation of things, but by an actual historical, physical transformation in the things themselves. To believe this in our day may require courage, even a certain childish simplicity; but were not courage and a certain childish simplicity always requisite for Christian faith? It never was a religion for the rationalist and the worldling; it was based on alienation from the world, from the intellectual world no less than from the economic and political. It flourished in the Oriental imagination that is able to treat all existence with disdain and to hold it superbly at arm's length, and at the same time is subject to visions and false memories, is swayed by the eloquence of private passion, and raises confidently to heaven the cry of the poor, the bereaved, and the distressed. Its daily bread, from the beginning, was hope for a miraculous change of scene, for prison-walls falling to the ground about it, for a heart inwardly comforted, and a shower of good things from the sky.

Santayana's rejection of experience which did not suit his prejudices (he was not a scientist, but neither are most of those employed in that general pursuit these days, where the focus is now more on making everyone feel welcome in science, rather than actually producing the paradigm-breaking breakthroughs of the early 20th century) was a habit which is contemptible to me, as was his accompanying frequent assertion that the mind is simply an illusion created by biological mechanism. From Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy, 1933:

The whole world itself is a sublime accident, in the sense that its existence is contingent, groundless, and precarious...philosophers owe to nature and to the discipline of moral life their capacity to look beyond nature and beyond morality. And while they may look beyond, and take comfort in the vision, they cannot pass beyond....Our minds are therefore naturally dissatisfied with their lot and speculatively directed upon an outspread universe in which our persons count for almost nothing...Spirit is certainly not one of the forces producing spirit, but neither is it a contrary force....Natural beings are perpetually struggling to live only, and not to die; so that their will is in hopeless rebellion against the divine decrees which they must obey notwithstanding. The spiritual man, on the contrary, in so far as he has already passed intellectually into the eternal world, no longer endures unwillingly the continual death involved in living, or the final death involved in having been born...the emphasis which action and passion lend to the passing moment seems to him arbitrary and violent; and as each task or experience is dismissed in turn, he accounts the end of it more blessed than the beginning.

That is a popular doctrine (world is accident, human existence groundless) among the politically correct atheist police today. For example, a politically correct introductory psychology textbook writes "Strange beliefs include Magical thinking such as belief in ESP or telepathy." For a brief but complete and honest history of psychic phenomena (and the notable people involved over the centuries) by an engineer/applied physicist, see The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective, by Robert G. Jahn (Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 70, No. 2, February 1982). Such an article as Jahn's would be rigorously suppressed today. As I have written previously"I have a sense of foreboding regarding what the result of this world-view [human existence merely animal story and suppress any contradictory material] will be for mankind. You should consider Who or What (it may be slouching even now towards Bethlehem to be born) will benefit if that program is successful. My own experience persuades me there is some truth in the Persian dualism, i.e., there seems to be a force for good, truth and progress, over against a competing force for evil, lies and destruction."

Probably the best-known of Santayana's words is the statement that "the one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again." I considered that as I read Jean Lang's Preface in A Book of Myths again today:

We have come, in those last long months, to date our happenings as they have never until now been dated by those of our own generation. We speak of things that took place “Before the War”; and between that time and this stands a barrier immeasurable. This book, with its Preface, was completed in 1914—“Before the War...Since August 1914 the finest humanity of our race has been enduring Promethean agonies. But even as Prometheus unflinchingly bore the cruelties of pain, of heat and of cold, of hunger and of thirst, and the tortures inflicted by an obscene bird of prey, so have endured the men of our nation and of those nations with whom we are proud to be allied...And, surely, to all those who are fighting, and suffering, and dying for a noble cause, the  of gods, the God of battles, who is also the God of peace, and the God of Love, has become an ever near and eternally living entity.

And the related, from Outline of U.S. History, a publication of the U.S. Department of State, updated 2007:

Germany, under Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, militarized its economy and reoccupied the Rhineland (demilitarized by the Treaty of Versailles) in 1936. In 1938, Hitler incorporated Austria into the German Reich and demanded cession of the German-speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. By then, war seemed imminent. The United States, disillusioned by the failure of the crusade for democracy in World War I, announced that in no circumstances could any country involved in the conflict look to it for aid.

Well, now at least we seem ready to offer moral support and small weapons to the insanely courageous people of Ukraine as they fight outnumbered and outgunned against the hosts of the murderous thug Putin. I was reassured to hear President Biden warn Putin today (March 11, 2022) that if he used chemical and biological weapons to more efficiently slaughter the people of Ukraine (now that it is pretty apparent that the Ukrainians will not go quietly into that good night, i.e., that they will make the Russian soldiers pay a heavy cost; at some point a people are responsible for not eliminating a dictator and putting a stop to the evil), we would vigorously wag another finger or two in his general direction (sarcasm).

No one wants to die, generally speaking (perhaps less true where the climate is overly warm and the amygdala is easily inflamed), but I suppose the difference between courage and cowardice in a particular instance has much to do with the value the individual places on personal honor and feelings about what is right and what is wrong, i.e., justice. That valuation can exceed the instinctive urge for self-survival which has served the ancestors of all who live today, or we would not be here....and that valuation of justice and personal honor can on occasion see the triumph of good over evil, whatever the odds.

I feel guilty every time find myself momentarily pleased or happy, immediately recalling (March 11, 2022) the ongoing desperate fight of the Ukrainians.  The other day I listened to a an interview with a recent Russian expatriate (female, gay, journalist) who had to leave Russia last week after the new Russian law threatening imprisonment for up to 15 years for communicating the truth about the bloody war Putin is prosecuting against the Ukrainians (that includes referring to it as a war). She said she and many others of her colleagues (many journalists have left) felt on the one hand unhappy about having lost their homeland, their familiar surroundings, but immediately on the other hand realized their complaints were trivial compared with the suffering of death and destruction by the Ukrainians at the hands of the larger and better equipped Russian forces.

She said she had realized that "I cannot be here anymore" speaking of what Russia was becoming again. I immediately thought of my own situation, but my "here" is the whole of the planet. There are those who have been and would be my friends, but they are in the minority and must survive as the US rots from within, on the one hand the educational system and media infected by those who reject the founding race and culture (Western civilization, put succinctly--it is ironic that Putin detests what we are now disseminating culturally so much that he is willing to kill every man, woman and child in Ukraine in order to "unite them with Russian culture again"), and on the other hand the mediocre and infantile having united behind a shared detestation of excellence and honor to burn down the republic. 

The Founders feared that the general masses might reject the principles given to them along with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in favor of their own base instincts, whereupon the Republic would soon descend into chaos and then despotism. Freed from the moral and spiritual principle that Americans seek to elect leaders of commendable character, we find instead ludicrous parodies of the ideal supported. The conduct of men at every level is deteriorating into animal pack society rather than anything normally associated with human beings. The situation is so bad, like an individual with so much pathology in play that it is impossible to restore the original health, that only a cataclysm in the world at large, an apocalypse, holds out any hope, and that a slim one (as the result may well be the extinction or final devolution of the remnant of mankind). We must be reborn, but there is no guarantee of a viable offspring...

But returning to Ukraine, it is disgraceful and downright stupid to say that we cannot fight Russians to stop their aggression in Ukraine because "we don't want WWIII."  Really? What do you think that tells Putin about our willingness, our resolve to help our allies in Europe? Does the NATO legalese make fighting potential WWIII with another nuclear power somehow more palatable than putting a stop to what is becoming genocide in Ukraine? When was the last time in history that sacrificing a country to the aggression of a neighboring totalitarian state preserved the peace for any length of time? (see discussion of Hitler's early activities 1936 - 1938 and our lack of reaction above) 

We intentionally did not allow Ukraine into NATO in order to placate Putin---how did that turn out? Putin has already said clearly that he does not regard Ukraine as the end of his ambitions in Europe, but merely the beginning of an attempt to restore the old Soviet Union (and expand it, if able). 

Putin is a bully, hoping threats will suffice to cow adversaries into standing aside while he terrorizes his neighbors. Do you really believe he would not have attacked the US with nuclear weapons already if he was not aware that this would result in the certain destruction of his country and thereby the certain end of his reign and his life, once the avengers of blood caught up with him (the numbers of those with a blood debt to avenge is growing by the hour).  Even if he thought he and select ground forces could somehow survive US nuclear retaliation, would he believe that without his advanced weapons (which we would surely destroy) he would be well-positioned to resist a billion Chinese able to march on foot from next door, ruled by a similarly ruthless dictator with unrestrained appetite (not to mention the fact that the Chinese would be smart enough to sit that one out and so end up with their weapons intact)?

If we had begun flying NATO air patrols over Ukraine prior to the Russian invasion, moved troops and weaponry close to the Ukrainian border and made it clear they would be operating the moment a Russian solder set foot on Ukrainian soil, Putin would have had no choice but to back off (it is unlikely that he is under any illusions about what would be the result of taking on US and NATO forces). He would have perhaps tested our resolve and it would have been critical to give our pilots freedom to shoot down any threatening aircraft, or disable any threatening SAM's, wherever they might be located if near enough to threaten Ukrainian air space. We could have simultaneously fast-tracked Ukraine entry to NATO and begun upgrading their air and ground forces for 21st century defensive capability.

I, like some others, was concerned that Putin was potentially on steroids (face puffy or shape changing last few years) or some other medication causing him to be extremely violent and unhinged. However, I suddenly realized that he was still the coldly calculating KGB man in the months leading up to the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. He amassed troops and weaponry on the borders of Ukraine for months, while playing with the West with counterfeit negotiations. He was clearly gauging our likely response. Once he was sure that would not include combat forces of the US or NATO he went ahead. So it is less likely that Putin has become completely irrational, on the evidence just given of systematic planning and evaluation prior to the invasion. That does not mean he is not increasingly brutal in response to the bravery of the Ukrainians, to the point of ordering the slaughter of Ukrainian civilians. His reasoning ability remains intact, whatever his degree of psychic/personality disorder that permits such spilling of blood not justified by a fight for survival. I note as an aside, that if there were good evidence that Putin was psychiatrically unstable, we would have only one choice (that should be obvious, but I refrain from stating it, keeping in mind my initial comments above).

Now that I mention it, you might say, "what about your own psychiatric state?" Well, I would reassure the reader that I have been working on the capacity to honestly self-observe since at least 1965, when I first read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. I learned more in later years after reading the works of mystics, as well as studying psychology, among other fields useful in the understanding of human existence and behavior (the years themselves teach the man who would learn, though that is often as a spectator, as Schopenhauer suggested).  I note that it is appalling that many people are now so comfortable with their repression mechanisms that they assume it also prevents others from recalling the obvious inconsistencies (or this is merely another symptom of widespread sociopathy).

I am still working at a pretty high level academically, to the extent that is evidence of rationality (Nash does come to mind though, grin). Today I made some progress with the R statistical environment in support of my ongoing study of association measures:

dalton@dalton-Precision-3541:$ R

R version 3.6.1 (2019-07-05) -- "Action of the Toes"

Copyright (C) 2019 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing

Platform: x86_64-conda_cos6-linux-gnu (64-bit)

> library("DescTools")

> GendPol_tab <- matrix( c(762, 327, 468, 484, 239, 477), 2, 3, byrow=TRUE)

> GendPol_tab

     [,1] [,2] [,3]

[1,]  762  327  468

[2,]  484  239  477

> dimnames(GendPol_tab) <- list( "Gender" = c("Females", "Males"), "Party Idenfication" = c("Democrat", "Independent", "Republican") )

> GendPol_tab

         Party Idenfication

Gender    Democrat Independent Republican

  Females      762         327        468

  Males        484         239        477

> (GendPol_Xsq <- chisq.test(GendPol_tab))

Pearson's Chi-squared test

data:  GendPol_tab

X-squared = 30.07, df = 2, p-value = 2.954e-07

> GendPol_Xsq$stdres

         Party Idenfication

Gender     Democrat Independent Republican

  Females  4.502054   0.6994517  -5.315946

  Males   -4.502054  -0.6994517   5.315946

> OddsRatio(GendPol_tab[,-2], method="wald", conf.level=0.95)

odds ratio     lwr.ci     upr.ci 

  1.604657   1.352444   1.903904 

> Desc(GendPol_tab, verbose = 3)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 

GendPol_tab (matrix)

Summary: 

n: 2'757, rows: 2, columns: 3

Pearson's Chi-squared test:

  X-squared = 30.07, df = 2, p-value = 2.954e-07

Pearson's Chi-squared test (cont. adj):

  X-squared = 30.07, df = 2, p-value = 2.954e-07

Log likelihood ratio (G-test) test of independence:

  G = 30.017, X-squared df = 2, p-value = 3.034e-07

Mantel-Haenszel Chi-squared:

  X-squared = 28.98, df = 1, p-value = 7.314e-08

                       estimate  lwr.ci  upr.ci'

Phi Coeff.               0.1044       -       -

Contingency Coeff.       0.1039       -       -

Cramer V                 0.1044  0.0649  0.1403

Goodman Kruskal Gamma    0.1710  0.1093  0.2328

Kendall Tau-b            0.0964  0.0611  0.1317

Stuart Tau-c             0.1078  0.0683  0.1473

Somers D C|R             0.1097  0.0695  0.1498

Somers D R|C             0.0848  0.0529  0.1167

Pearson Correlation      0.1025  0.0655  0.1393

Spearman Correlation     0.1016  0.0646  0.1384

Lambda C|R               0.0000  0.0000  0.0000

Lambda R|C               0.0075  0.0000  0.0575

Lambda sym               0.0033  0.0000  0.0255

Uncertainty Coeff. C|R   0.0052  0.0015  0.0089

Uncertainty Coeff. R|C   0.0080  0.0023  0.0136

Uncertainty Coeff. sym   0.0063  0.0018  0.0108

Mutual Information       0.0079       -       -

                                                                         

          Party Idenfication   Democrat   Independent   Republican    Sum

Gender                                                                   

                                                                         

Females   freq                      762           327          468  1'557

          perc                    27.6%         11.9%        17.0%  56.5%

          p.row                   48.9%         21.0%        30.1%      .

          p.col                   61.2%         57.8%        49.5%      .

                                                                         

Males     freq                      484           239          477  1'200

          perc                    17.6%          8.7%        17.3%  43.5%

          p.row                   40.3%         19.9%        39.8%      .

          p.col                   38.8%         42.2%        50.5%      .

                                                                         

Sum       freq                    1'246           566          945  2'757

          perc                    45.2%         20.5%        34.3% 100.0%

          p.row                       .             .            .      .

          p.col                       .             .            .      .

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

----------

' 95% conf. level

 That function invocation also gave me a nice mosaic plot demonstrating the relative effect of the gender on party affiliation:

In any case, unlike Putin, I don't have any nuclear weapons, or any other weapons, saying, like my boy Chuck Norris, "I don't need no stinkin' machine gun." Norris is quite a tough guy though. I recall him telling the story about the time he was bitten by a cobra. He said it took several days for the poor snake to die. Good night and good luck.

Angry, tired, futility

All is futility, said the Preacher (Solomon, Ecclesiastes 12:8). Took me most of an hour to be able to get from bed to kitchen this morning, accursed CFS/ME (and/or just an old Bentley reaching the end of its operating period...can only force an old car to run on nitro so long, recall driving an old VW back from the river to El Paso in 1971 or so with a blown rod, pedal to the metal and just 25 mph shuddering the whole way...now I know what the car was feeling). 

Really angry everytime I hear another report on what that son of a bitch Vladimir (Putin) is doing to Ukraine. It is really despicable of us to stand by and not put military in place there, stop him from using a modern air force against the helpless civilian population, which he certainly will do (as he did in Syria). I really don't give a damn whether he would respond with a full scale war, but that may be because I have less to lose at this late date. [Removed more inflammatory comments about Vladimir after watched 60 Minutes show implying that Russians have been harming Americans with mobile high-power microwave beam devices, aka Havana Syndrome 2022 Feb National Intel Report "Anomalous Health Incidents"--though not sure the symptoms could be differentiated from my usual palette of afflictions].

Then I consider that every attempt we make to better the world blows up in our faces...recall one of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts discussing a perverse god who actually controls things on Earth...or Balzac's Passion in the Desert  Passion in the Desert - Balzac"the desert is God without Man," i.e., maybe all my illusions/delusions about higher good are completely alien to the actual intent of the Ruler of the World...a creeping crawling spiny hungry creation that devours and is devoured, rather than beings a little lower than the angels, but somehow above the beasts (A Little Lower Than the Angels). 

Like Klaatu in the original 1951 Day the Earth Stood Still 1951 Day the Earth Stood Still, I am reanimated for a brief time, but limited. The 2008 remake of the movie (with Keanu Reeves) was retarded (why haven't the PC crowd demanded a Nobel Prize for the intellectually challenged yet?) in most respects--"we only advance at a precipice?" Really? 99% of the species that ever lived on Earth in the last few billion years died---they fell off their individual precipices, the points in the evolution of every species where they faced challenges that required creative evolution (not in the sense of Bergson--see Santayana's amusing dismissal of Bergson a century ago Philosophy of M. Henri Bergson (in Winds of Doctrine), though I see in Santayana all that has gone terribly wrong in the remains of Western civilization...a box of happy rodents crawling over one another without higher intent...yeah, I know, just said that may be the true natural order of things). 

Broke my heart watching PBS video Documentary Year to Change World of Greta Thunberg sobbing occasionally involuntarily as she discussed the difference between people who felt deeply and those who were superficially going through life concerned only with wealth, power etc. The line from Ian Anderson's song Reason for Waiting Anderson performing Reasons For Waiting 1969, "could it stop a sunrise, seeing you weep?" (Anderson, a poet of considerable talent actually wrote "hearing you weep," using a parallelism in the lines of that stanza, seeing then hearing), instantly appeared in my mind. She had commented in an earlier segment, as a brief aside while travelling in a train I believe, that she was an Asperger's. Memories of my late wife, Cheri (think there is still a brief video of me singing a semi-comedic version of Cash's I Still Miss Someone for her at home in 2012 Dalton and Cheri at home 2012), flooded my memory. 

Cheri had Asperger's Asperger Syndrome, though no one was aware of it (heard one of her colleagues at work remark that it was difficult to fathom Cheri at times). She had surgery to correct scoliosis as a young teenager (in one of many odd coincidences between us, we had both been in the same Army hospital as young teens, though did not meet until in our twenties) and had a large café au lait formation, maybe 2 - 3 cm long axis on her back, so I assume she had a mild NF (neurofibromatosis neurofibromatosis fact sheet NIH), which associates with Asperger's. Cheri was Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging, INTJ in the Jung-Myers-Briggs typology Myers-Briggs typology (no, that is not pop psychology; it is used in some of the top government institutions), which really describes Asperger's in large part:

Feeling has a modest inner room, two doors down from the Most Imminent iNtuition. It doesn't get out much, but lends its influence on behalf of causes which are Good and Worthy and Humane.

It was similarly moving, the evidence of a pure, caring soul, normally protected or otherwise unavailable to observation in Greta. After seeing her in the documentary, I felt somewhat guilty for believing that humanity will not survive the present rolling catastrophe about which I rail frequently in view of Greta's hope against hope, she having no illusions, despite her teenage years, that we will find a way, at least that the young will find a way. Well, if God is the God of my youth in the Baptist church, with Him all things are possible (Matthew, verse 19:26)...but if there is only the vicious demiurge of the gnostics (see for example On Origin of World - Nag Hammadi papers), who will help us?

Pins in the head, circuit simulation, Tasmanian devil face souls

I was recently researching the electrical characteristics of brain tissue after encountering the subject of deep probe stimulation in a 2014 paper by Koubeissi et al (Electrical stimulation of a small brain area reversibly disrupts consciousness). I had been studying neuroscience for some weeks trying to acquire a good understanding of the anatomy and function of the claustrum (the latter a rather quixotic goal on my part considering that is still a mystery in the neuroscience community, though the number of research papers on the subject is increasing yearly). 

The Koubeissi paper described finding that they could switch consciousness on and off like using a light switch in a 54-year-old woman with intractable epilepsy. One of the many electrodes (A14) they had inserted (I admit I am horrified at the idea of turning the human brain in a living subject into a pin cushion, but this woman was completely disabled by her seizures, which had returned four years after surgeons had removed her left hippocampus and given her a brief respite from the attacks) was placed near the left anterior insular cortex and the claustrum. In the process of firing up one after another of the electrodes and gauging their effect, they discovered to their amazement that, with application of a 14 mA 50 Hz 0.2 ms pulse width 3-10 second signal to the A14 electrode, the patient would abruptly cease reading (neurosurgeons often have patients perform a particular mental activity in order to assess the effect of monkeying with specific areas of the brain, rather like poking an ice pick into a television receiver's circuitry and looking for changes in the picture quality), stare blankly (I sometimes do this without probe stimulation), and become unresponsive to auditory or visual commands (e.g., an instruction on a piece of paper).  

Occasionally, if the patient had been speaking when the electrical pulses were injected, her speech would not stop immediately, but would persist for a few seconds as a few sporadic nonsense syllables while her face would appear confused, as if the plug had been pulled and it took a few seconds for the motor to stop turning as it were. When they stopped the contact stimulation her consciousness returned immediately and she had no memory of the loss of consciousness.

I was curious how the electrical current affected neurons and how the current traversed the brain tissue and interacted with the neuronal body or its axons and dendrites. I began looking at electronic network simulations of the physical effects of deep brain stimulation, for example, the 2006 Sources and effects of electrode impedance during deep brain stimulation by Butson et al, and the more specific (more specific to my interest in the aspect of simulating tissue using network theory) 2008 Active Mechanisms Are Needed to Describe Cell Responses to Submicrosecond, Megavolt-per-Meter Pulses: Cell Models for Ultrashort Pulses , by Smith and Weaver. Smith had been working on meshed cell modeling since at least 2006 when he submitted a thesis on the subject while working on his master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science at Duke University. 

In the 2008 paper, Smith and Weaver described using the MTNM (Meshed Transport Network Method), a way to model  relations between adjacent finite volumes cast as equivalent circuit networks.  The system is divided into Voronoi cells (VCs), each associated with a single node to which it is closest. The interface between the cells is then halfway between nodes, which are not necessarily uniformly spaced. 

Say we have a 2-dimensional area of brain tissue we want to simulate. We can arrange some points (these will be our "nodes," the locations where values of the electrical field will be calculated) on the area, the blue dots in the following (we just arranged these uniformly, but in practice a mesh program would generate the node placement):                                                                                               

We want to tell a computer how to relate those sample points to one another in 2-D space. We can connect them with Delaunay triangles, i.e., let a computer subdivide the set of points into a non-overlapping set of triangles such that the circumcircle of one Delaunay triangle (a disk drawn through the 3 vertices of the triangle) contains no other points:

We would like to know the nearest neighbors of that set of points though, since we want to simulate electrical signal propagation from one cell to the next in the direction of the electric field vector. So we can use a computer to draw a Voronoi subdivision of the space containing our sample nodes into nearest neighborhoods of those nodes:

It turns out that the sides of the Voronoi cells then turn out to be perpendicular bisectors of the Delaunay triangle edges, simplifying transport calculations between adjacent nodes marking locations in the tissue being simulated (because, for example, the electric field can be stipulated as normal to the edges of the cells). So we show you both the above figures plotted together:

In such a spatial field, Voronoi cells then act as small tissue volume domains into which the entire domain of our sample is discretized (considered as pieces), with the circuit behavior of each small volume approximated by its associated node. You can then understand what Smith and Weaver did here (we took this image from Smith's 2006 MIT thesis paper):

Why the mesh cells? If you hold a piece of metal with the end in a flame, the heat will work its way up to your hand. A mesh characterization would let you program a computer to calculate the diffusion and conduction of the heat up the metal over time, cell by cell, governed by interaction or propagation rules from cell to cell. Instead of heat, we are looking at electrical field and current and the object of interest is just a volume of electrolyte, the fluid between and within cells.

They used the Berkeley SPICE electrical network simulator to "obtain the electrical response of cell equivalent of circuit networks to pulsed electrical fields"  (to calculate the ɸ E vector magnitude between adjacent VCs in the image above). This is a clever approach in that one piece of specialized open source software handles the characterization spatially, that is, placing the grid nodes, drawing Delaunay triangles and Voronoi cells. I wrote some trivial Python code using SciPy spatial functions to make the figures prior to the Smith figure, while Smith used some advanced Matlab code developed by Per-Olaf Persson and Gilbert Strang at MIT, Persson now at UC Berkeley. A program (SPICE) handles the electrical behavior between and among the many VCs on each step of the simulation run. For example, you might model the electrolyte medium comprising the arbitrary partitioning of the tissue into VC's as a parallel combination of a resistor R and capacitor C (recognize the  ɸ  electric field symbol from the VC mesh above):

You should note that the grid used by Smith was considerably more intricate than our samples above. In the following figure we see his VC pattern on left, Delaunay triangulation on right. The width of each box containing the circular generic body cell with a nucleus and organelle is 24 micrometers in scale, with 19,061 nodes. The dark perimeters are where the mesh becomes very dense (you could see this at higher magnification) in order to accurately capture the curve and the associated membrane electrical transport characteristics:

This got me interested in SPICE. I had done some work with a related GUI (graphical user interface) version of SPICE from Texas Instruments, "TINA-TI," some years back, and LTspice on a Windows machine in 2016. Actually my first exposure to automated network analysis was way back in 1980 or so, when I ported (rewrote the software in a different language) an HP CAP (Circuit Analysis Program) written in HP BASIC running on an HP desktop computer (an industrial computer with HP-IB bus to connect to instruments, designed for electronic labs, not the later MS Windows PC's HP offered to the public) to run on the BASIC dialect used on my TRS-80 Z80 microcomputer (I sold my 1971 Les Paul in 1979 to pay for the computer; my later music and some historical samples is still out there though if you search on "Dalton Bentley music").

Around that same time, I did punch some FORTRAN cards to run a circuit simulation on the IBM-360  mainframe computer at the University of Texas while I was taking a network analysis course there in c. 1980, but did not do much with it. They may have been running SPICE, but I don't recall, this being a classroom exercise, divorced from much interaction with the system in batch mode, other than to fix whatever error (type a new punch card) caused the line printer to start spewing paper (arousing the wrath of the computer operators as they raced to shut it off before it wasted a few hundred yards of continuous paper).

In any case, since I am running Linux now, I decided to work with Ngspice-27, without a GUI, just typing instructions in a text file (each line corresponding to one of the punched cards I mentioned above). I soon became bored with simulating simple RC circuits (and assumed the reader of the tutorial I was writing in a parallel project would also like something more challenging) and decided to examine an interesting power amplifier technique involving injecting pulsed current into a tuned LC load (an inductor L and capacitor C that resonate together at a specific frequency, tossing energy back and forth to one another as it were). 

In the process of researching neuromodulation, I had read a 2018 Berkeley EE & CS masters thesis by George Alexandrov, Powering OMNI: A Distributed and Modular Closed-Loop Neuromodulation Device. Medical regulations require that implanted wires (in the brain) carry zero DC (direct current). Alexandrov proposed therefore to distribute AC (alternating current) power (to leads in the brain) at high frequency from a pair of differential Class-E power drivers. Since half the sine wave of sinusoidal current is positive and half negative, the net DC current is 0. 

From my work in electronics, I knew of Class-A, B, and C amplifiers, but I had not heard of Class-E before. Steve Cripps, in his excellent textbook on RF power amplifiers, nicely characterizes amplifier types simply by conduction angle. The Class-A conducts 360 degrees of sinusoidal input, the Class-B 180 degrees per transistor in a push-pull pair (he also considers a single transistor conducting half, 180 degrees, to be a Class-B amplifier), and Class-C zero to 180 degrees, i.e., just a small chunk of the input sinusoidal. 

Following Alexandrov's cite, I found and read the 1975 Sokal paper that introduced the Class-E amplifier (Cripps' textbook noted, somewhat humorously, that the microwave community remained ambivalent to the Class-E concept until the Sokal patent expired c. 2005) and decided to specify circuit element values following the Sokal design rules simulate the circuit in SPICE (Ngspice-27). This is the applicable schematic (though I did include some series resistance in the wires of the inductors):

               

I decided to use a drive signal of 1 V peak, 256 ns period pulse  (3.9 MHz), on-time 128 ns. I assigned a load resistor using the Sokal 1975 equation (1), coming up with 11.73 ohms for RL load resistor (later adjusted to 13 ohms in order to reduce some of the current spiking on transition from voltage wave on open Q1 to current wave through Q1 saturated as switch).  I assigned 23.1 VDC to the power supply. Targeting 26 watts in our load resistor and using Sokal equation (3) I calculated 638.745 pF for C1, 410.273 pF for C2 using equation (4), 4.787 microHenry for L2 using equation (2). I just used the same L1 RF choke value of 68 microHenry as did Sokal (it must simply be large enough to block radio frequency, while sourcing DC to Q1).                    

The circuit as described (with RL adjusted to 13 ohms) gave me, in Ngspice-27 simulation, 16.3 watts rms, or 23 watts peak, pretty close to our design target above (a beautiful 3.9 MHz sine wave on the load, an astounding absence of harmonics considering the weird transistor switch waveforms, a result produced mostly by the resonant behavior of the L2 and C2 network) . Sokal equation (7) predicted the peak voltage across Q1 would be 82 volts and we measured just under 80 volts (see figure below). We measured 2.29 amps peak in the Q1 collector, differing somewhat from equation (6) Sokal predicting 1.56 amps. However, the Class E amplifier transistor voltage and current waveforms are quite unusual, both in shape and phase relation to one another, as you can see in the trace from my Ngspice-27 simulation trace:

In trace above note that the collector voltage (violet) has been scaled by 80, e.g., vertical 1 is 80 volts. Similarly, the collector current (green) has been scaled by 2, e.g., 1 is 2 amps. The time scale is seconds and the ticks are at 50 ns intervals, so the current is on roughly 120 ns (recall we set exactly 128 ns on-time for the input pulses 3.9 MHz). There is almost no dissipation of power in the transistor since this Class E design arranges the current flow to occur while there is no voltage across the transistor. We measured the product of voltage and amperes from the DC supply to be 18 watts, so the 16 watts in the load is produced at 16/18 or about 90%. Our transistor model in Ngspice-27 was not very realistic in that we used simply their generic BJT (bipolar junction transistor) model, obtaining a beta current gain of 81 here, which is really not believable for a saturated general purpose transistor. We are looking at modifying the BJT model or using a MESFET, but thought we should go ahead and post this, since we are not getting any younger and civilization is deteriorating rapidly (I would grin here, but some might not appreciate my gallows humor).

I continue to pursue academic interests while the worldline of 2021 Earth reveals itself moment by moment. From the US (pardon my provincial stance, I am aware that the world generally is sharing our disruption and dismay) pacific northwest on fire, most of the west scorched with heretofore unseen continuous lethal heat, tornados from the alley all the way to the east coast at times, the Atlantic coast battered by storms and hurricanes, and my relatively insulated portion of New Mexico almost ripped from the earth yesterday by a thunderstorm of incredible ferocity (sat in the twilight choking down bread and cold meat, power going on and off and afraid to try to heat anything or open the refrigerator and let out cold air), I feel a certain negative judgment by the Creator on the course we have taken. No matter, we are all born to die I suppose, but a man entertains delusions of timeless values, achievements, progress and it is bitter to see those dying as well.

I read Justice Alito's opinion (SCOTUS) in Brnovich et al v Democratic National Committee (decided July 1, 2021) and wonder what it feels like to be a sophist, to use the God-given ability to reason to dissemble. Alito knows very well that the purpose of the Arizona voting law that was the subject of the action was to permit ongoing attempts by republican legislatures to force just enough ballots into the hands of party loyalists that they can prevent another loss like they suffered in the 2021 presidential (and a few senatorial) election. We are talking tenths of percents, but that is exactly what is required to tip the balance. I wonder also how a man of talent can knowingly pursue the ends of destroying the American Republic, willingly trying to turn it over to a fraud and idiot who desecrated the ideals of the government, illustrating that the Constitution, like any laws in any civilization, does not shape behavior so much as codify the expectations of the framers (and unfortunately, those expectations are no longer prevalent, and the only text men such as Alito quote are lines sufficient to mask their evil purpose). 

On the other hand, you have the American university system and public education generally grotesquely perverted to the ends of one-world multiculturalism that is degrading the quality of American performance in business and government (and the quality of life), the standards lowered to fulfill the lie of equality (people have an equal opportunity to compete, but only an idiot would claim that humans are interchangeable) and constant bizarre demands for apologies from a culture that produced the most advance civilization the world had seen and in fact saved the world on several occasions.

I was fascinated by an infectious form of cancer that has all but eradicated the Tasmanian devils (I don't know if Bugs Bunny was involved). As humans become more and more like animals crowded into a zoo, there is the possibility such communicable nightmares will appear in humans, a step beyond the mere death promised by the current viral plague. When I view such a diseased devil, I can't help but see a representation of the souls of those who lie, slander and defile all that is honorable and good: