Back to Analog Computing

Trying to understand how D- Wave quantum computers work, realized that they are not digital computers but analogical machines. It is like כלים שלובים  a machine of multiple communicating vessels where the system settles in a stable configuration which is the solution. Annealing, they say, heating the metal up and then let it cool down slowly, eliminating internal stresses. The solution is reached faster than calculating (digital computation). Imagine a river flowing down from a mountain. It is almost impossible to calculate its course, but the river selects it without effort, instantly. It seems to me simple, and more primitive than a digital computer, but that is because I do not understand anything of what I am writing, may be. 

Weapons Made-in-Nigeria

A group of Nigerian fighters. I recognize the weapons: they are the same to those sold in the Jos market. Ibo made. In my post-independence times, firearms were forbidden and very rare. 

The Japan I Missed

I have been a few times in the Far East, yet blinded by the stupid urge to work, I missed out its alcohol culture. Chinese rice liquors is the nearest I got, and did not specially like it. Yet it must have been somewhere out there but I did not see it. Chinese chronicles record the excessive drinking, singing  and dancing of the Yamatai people. Japanese adults on average drink 4.4 shots of hard liquor per week, the fifth highest in the world behind South Korea and Russia. Visitors to Japan comment that the country reeks of alcohol. I want to be immersed in that atmosphere !

Prisoner as I am of a vegan abstemious, fasting - ascetic clan, I fantasy of a lenient society. Japanese law makes no mention of such a crime as being drunk and disorderly. If anything, inebriation is taken into account as a mollifying factor if a crime is committed. Japanese society also tolerates sex in its versicolor forms. Japan is superior, if they only would change their writing so I could learn the lingo. 

Decoupling China and America

Decoupling aka Divorce is what Washington is advancing. America will not sell nor buy from China and will try to sabotage China's development. This policy was feasible before and shortly after Nixon opened up China, but now it is far too late. China has gained a mile long advantage in the quantum field - it has a working quantum communication system and advanced commercial quantum computing systems (Pic. the Qasky. You can buy it on the internet). No one else has any working quantum machine. Decoupling smells as war, and that is very bad. In my opinion, the Communist Party's rule in China is unsustainable and if left alone, in a decade it will collapse, like the Soviet Union. Then it will fragment and open up once more to Western colonization. My words have no magical powers, so the above does not mean that I wish it to happen, and my words will not cause it happen. Just thinking.

Thinking on Qasky and other Chinese quantum products, I like Chinese products and my place is full of them. China has supplied me good and cheap products, and I see China as a force for good. Of course, I am very shortsighted, going blind as I age. 

Operation Peace Spring

Ozan Ceyhun, a Turkish journalist, demands European assistance for Turkey's invasion of the Hasaka region of Syria. Modern Turkey was built on the ruins of the Turkish Empire, and it has been fighting valiantly for the last hundred years against further collapse and dissolution. Turkey's peak was five hundred years ago, when it fought (and lost) against the Spanish Armada in Lepanto. The last word has not been said.

Turkey hosts 4 million Syrian displaced persons, paid by the European Union. Europe has given up active use of force and prefers to pay off local warlords. It seriously reminds me of the Chinese Empire in its decadence, when it followed a policy of paying off Mongol tribes. It worked, till it did not. Letting the Syrian refugees to move on to Europe is Turkey's strongest card against that aging continent. Now, there is a new entity in the Upper Euphrates, the Kurd's country, which is a mortal danger for Turkey, as half of its population is ethnic Kurd. And the weakness of Syrian government has allowed the Northern Coast to be occupied by the Russians, and the North East by the USA. The current Turkish incursion to NE Syria is being done with the hegemon, the USA's permission.

In this complicated situation, Turkey started a war. It is a truism that it is easy to start wars, but difficult to stop them. Fortunately Israel is not involved.

P.S. Netaniyahu condemns Turkish invasion of Kurdish areas and promises humanitarian assistance to the brave Kurdish people.

Meat and Sugar

The researchers of the New York Times (I know one, nice guy James) discovered that one of the science  team that said that there is NO LINK between eating meat and cancer and coronary disease - the guy had once done some work for a meat factory or whatever. For the fishwrap HaAretz that proves that the guy is tainted and biased, and the study worthless. More than worthless, it definitely proves that meat does harm to humans eating it. To emphasize the point, on the next page there is a lachrymose article describing the sufferings of a heifer till it is served on the plate.

My wife and daughters are extremists of the meat taboo, so meat is almost unknown in my plate. I reject the idea that any research has to be considered tainted if it is financed by an interested party or any of the team had in the past worked for them. Scientific papers should never be judged on the basis of WHO did it or who financed it. The meat industry has a legitimate reason to investigate fake or tendentious aspersions against it.

Just think logically. Our ancestors and relatives the chimps eat meat. In fact, they hunt Colobus monkeys and eat them raw. Humans hunted animals and eat them roasted. Evolution should have corrected any biological mechanism if meat caused harm to us. Evolution works fast and with precision, anyone who did not profit from meat would not be among our ancestors. From an evolutionary point of view, meat cannot harm us.

The same for sugar. Chimps et al love sweets fruits. Sugar is a natural molecule found everywhere. I do agree that in our evolutionary history, sugar was very scarce and available in small quantities, therefore the super-sweet fruits and cookies must be unhealthy, and pure refined sugar, which is not found in nature, is poison.

(Written while fasting, so it must be true. Or not.).

The Ghost Hominin in the E Haplotype

Haplotype E is exclusively sub-Saharan (Nigeria, Ghana) and shows the introgression of a “ghost” species that shares a common ancestry with the modern human lineage. We are starting to understand the complex differentiation of the human species into such subspecies like Denisovans (South East Asia), Neanderthal (Europe) and the African "ghost", and the complex merging back, creating diverse mixtures. No one is superior to the others, and the general picture is a chaotic movement leading to no special goal. No signs that there is any tendency to "progress".

 My first book on human evolution was a children's book "Como el Hombre se Hizo Gigante" (How man made himself a giant), the Spanish translation of a famous, Russian Marxist children's book. It showed a clear and linear advance, from man discovering fire to the building of glorious dams and canals in the Soviet Union, the Five Year Plan. Evolution was progress. (The message was that humanity was progressing from the primitive disorder of capitalism to the higher stage of socialism). It was a simplified, somewhat infantile (well, it was written for children) but easily understandable and attractive concept. Almost a theology, a well ordered and purposeful universe. 

That theology was wrong. There is no progress but senseless chaos. A meditation point on this Yom Kippur.  

The author was M. Iliyn, pseudonym of  Il’ia Iakovlevich Marshak. Jewish names were not in fashion in the Socialist paradise. Still, we believed.