I'd like to find data for each election, maybe going back to eisenhower, in a format suitable for upload to a spreadsheet
2024-11-15
2024-11-14
2024-11-04
Nano 2024 Demo Progress Spreadsheet
And you should be able to access the actual sheet and make updates HERE
2024-11-02
漫画 Step Fourth Part III Comic Book
Full Manga Index
I'm going to try to put all the comics to do with this new book here. Starting in a few days...
Louise needs to start out in the subconscious, somehow checking out the various personalities, and explain the day planner, notebook, and mail box and other organizing systems, and how they help the parts communicate.
She emerges from the subconscious via the bogs door, and then goes to welcome Penny aboard. They have their little Japanese pun-riddled, “only my baggage allowed” thing.
Louise explains to Penny about the driver's seat, and have PISTOL and Jovial driving the bus. (1)
Louise needs to explain the cabinets can contain memory capsules, and the bogs are where things randomly come out, or go back in, from the subconscious (or wherever).
Opening Longtime Companion
__________________________________________
(1) Maybe allude to Pistol calling Jovial and Scheduler out of the subconscious to help him drive while Louise is there explaining the planner. Maybe have an intercom call them out, and scheduler has to leave, and they explain that jovial isn't there because he’s helping Pistol.
I need to work out how to use macromemetic notation, i.e.,
MIAO.State.agent.meme! => NewState
For instance, do we go with
[ANXIETY, MANIA]Pistol.jovial.drive! => Pistol.scheduler.review!clear-tasks!make-list!
And scheduler can be a kind of looped state that will go forever if not interrupted, while jovial is task-oriented, and lowers Pistol’s anxiety while he's running, because of RESULTS which may be an icon governing the state, hence
[ANXIETY, MANIA, RESULTS]Pistol.jovial, or perhaps a better notation might be
[ANXIETY, MANIA]Pistol.results.jovial.drive! => MANIA.Pistol.results.jovial.work!
In other words, Pistol running as a state gives results the chance to run, but then running jovial acts as an immunomeme which allows transition to a state where MANIA is reduced.
2024-11-01
Nano: Writing a Captivating First Chapter
I'll preface by saying that I never know which chapter is going to be my first sometimes until I get into the editing process...
2024-10-30
SUSPECNA Reaching out to the ULC
I need to make a landing page for SUSPECNA, to put links to my other pages.
I want to write to them to work out if they can help me with my voting law to do with the Electoral College.
I want to:
1. Get data going back to the Eisenhower Era and compute the results of historical elections based upon how it went and how it would've gone under the various flavors of my legislation
2. Draft the legislation
2.1. I may have a "donatable at-large" elector clause so Wyoming can donate its Senatorial elector votes to California, for example
2.2. Maybe have the at-large electors be distributed proportionally
2.3., Maybe have all electoral votes distributed proportionally
2.3. Need to work out what "proportional" looks like
3. Find out how to get it out to the States
4. Reach out to Nebraska and Maine and get details how their laws are set up, and maybe the history
5. Make Election Day a State holiday
___________________________________________
ChatGPT
For historical district-level data on U.S. presidential elections, there are a few reliable sources and datasets:
Harvard Dataverse – MIT Election Data and Science Lab: This database provides comprehensive district-level election results across many years, including U.S. presidential elections. They have cleaned datasets and include historical data going back decades. You can search for "MIT Election Data and Science Lab" to access it on Dataverse, and the data is available for public use.
ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research): They provide district-level election data, but it often requires an institutional membership (many universities have this access). ICPSR's datasets are extensive and include historical election data for various levels, including presidential and congressional districts.
Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections: This is a detailed source of historical election results at various levels, including district data in some cases. It includes maps and data visualization, though it requires a subscription for full access to detailed datasets.
U.S. Census Bureau: For post-2000 data, the Census Bureau's "Voting and Registration" data sometimes includes geographic and demographic breakdowns, although it focuses more on voter characteristics than specific results.
NHGIS (National Historical Geographic Information System): This service, provided by the University of Minnesota, compiles historical census data and geographic information, including electoral boundaries that might help contextualize district-level results over time.
If you're working on a specific election year or dataset format, let me know—I can guide you to a tailored source.
ChatGPT said:
For a spreadsheet-friendly format of district-level data for U.S. presidential elections going back to the Eisenhower era (1952), consider the following resources, each offering downloadable data files, often in .csv or .xls formats:
Harvard Dataverse - MIT Election Data and Science Lab: This source offers historical election data in .csv format, which is perfect for spreadsheets. You can download district-level datasets for each election year from 1976 onward. Earlier data might be accessible through specific requests or in supplemental datasets, and each dataset includes headers and structured columns for ease of import.
ICPSR: The ICPSR’s historical election data can be downloaded in formats compatible with statistical and spreadsheet software. They have U.S. election results at various levels and often include metadata and coding documentation to make the datasets understandable.
Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections: Though primarily a subscription service, Dave Leip’s Atlas provides extensive historical data that can be downloaded in spreadsheet-friendly formats if you have a subscription. They cover election results at the county and district level in .csv files, suitable for detailed analysis.
Data on Open Elections (openelections.net): Open Elections is a volunteer-based project working to release U.S. election data in .csv format for each state. While it’s still a work in progress, they do offer historical data going back several decades. Coverage varies by state and year, so you may need to piece together data from several files.
NHGIS: Although primarily a source for census and demographic data, NHGIS offers downloadable boundary and election-related data that aligns with historical district boundaries, which can be useful when mapping results in a historical context.
If you're primarily focused on district-level data for major candidates, the MIT Election Data and Science Lab is likely the most efficient starting point due to its accessibility and pre-formatted .csv files. You can then clean or modify the data in a spreadsheet application like Excel or Google Sheets as needed. Let me know if you'd like guidance on importing or cleaning the data for spreadsheet use!
2024-10-29
2024-10-28
Writer's Block Tactics
Essay on Writer's Block Tactics HERE.
Living with Kryptonite: "Writer's Block": Strategies (living-with-kryptonite.blogspot.com)
2024-10-27
模倣子 Macromemetic Analysis & Design Summary
Introduction
Here I just want to link to a number of my essays, particularly those that have to do with my notational systems, how they may be use to describe and analyze memetic systems, and how to do design of system changes to produce desired results.
I hope to make some notes about basic principles related to analysis and design and how they might be applied.
Relevant Essays and Links
I've tried to group essays by whether they were practical projects I did at work, or models or designed systems to do with child and family behavior, or other more theoretical examinations. Many of these contain state transition diagrams and deployment descriptors, which are useful tools in analyzing and designing memetic systems.
| Kids |
|
|---|---|
| Workplace |
Blue Shirt Tuesday Doughnuts |
| Theories, Technical, Other |
Dining Philosophers, along with Bullying & Contact Memes The 12 Steps of Critique Groups Memetic Loops & Residual Memetic Debt What do Memetic States Look Like? Transition State Diagrams, Deployment Descriptors, & Transition Matrices "Full List" of Memetic Essays Memetic Nexuses & Power - & Rock Stars |
The Approach
In many of these projects, under Kids and Workplace, I analyzed what I wanted to happen, what was happening that I didn't want, and either modeled the existing system, or at least described it, as in the Bus Bingo, Road-Trip Bingo, Box Binning, Prime Pizza Thursday, and TV Time.
Sometimes it's useful to describe "what I want" in memetic deployment notation, sometimes it's not necessary to be so rigorous.
If you check out the Dysfunctional TV Time essay, you see how I simply modeled and described the dynamics of the situation with State Transition Diagrams, and then added more states and memes in order to give "me" (the parent) more options, more memes to deploy, to undercut "the kid's" memes, to create new ones for them, make sure everything is well-marked.
The two essays What Do Memetic States Look Like? and Memetic State Diagrams describe in some detail the notation system I have developed.
1. Memetic State Transition Diagrams - the "cloud diagrams" with arrows connecting them
2. Memetic Deployment Descriptors - the ICON.State.agent.meme1!meme2! => NewState thing
3. Memetic State Matrix (still working on the name, actually) - this is a collection of StateMatrix matrixes with Agents as columns and memes! as rows, and each entry of StateMatrixPointer:Weight
It's possible to completely describe a memetic system using deployment descriptors or memetic matrices, but can quickly become inscrutable for the novice, while a state transition diagram is a quick and easy way to visualize a simple system, and even make design decisions.
More will be revealed! Be sure to comment with questions and such!
2024-10-26
2024-10-24
Feli on US Elections (SUSPECNA)
Great video! The Electoral College is a problem, but fixing it poses a couple of problems: it would require amending the Constitution, it's unclear which system could replace it (mainly agreeing on it), how the "popular vote" is counted, i.e., each State's election board totals the results from each county, but they don't necessarily publish these results (I think) and it's unclear which authority (Congress, the Supreme Court?) could collect and adjudicate these results, or how they would be officially certified and delivered by the several States in some hypothetical "national vote counting," and so on. America is a republic, and the only real electoral decision that requires all of the States to get together and decide on one thing is the Presidential election. One problem is the "at large electors" i.e., those that match up with the "Senators" from the given State. In small States, which have only one seat in the House of Representatives, they still get two "at large" votes, for three times as many total votes.
One thing is that the State elections are based on laws which differ from State to State. Hence the "winner take all" thing. Also, most States have a "first past the post" vote counting system, as opposed to a "ranked choice voting" system (which we are voting on starting in Idaho, by the way, and I think they already have in Maine and other places). One possibility of interest to me, in the spirit of changing as little as possible, one bit at a time, to get the most impact at each step, is to put out a "uniform law" (a law that is passed by each State, which gets around the need for a Federal-level law) that would standardize voting laws, getting rid of things like "winner take all" and adding things like ranked choice voting, perhaps allow small states to "donate" their at large votes to other states (voted by their legislature? For whatever reason...?), and report an actual certified (by the governor, State supreme court, et al -- just like the Electoral College Certificates) Statewide vote count to the joint session of Congress (and to the Supreme Court and to the National Archives and wherever, like the EC certificates). You could then talk about, if the joint session received a set of EC certificates from the several States, ALONG WITH official certified popular vote counts, and in the case (rare but disturbing, especially when one party successfully "games" the electoral college in swing States and such) where the EC did not reflect the popular vote, the joint session has, I believe, the power to decide the President based on that (or anything else), i.e., override the EC result. I THINK the joint session on January 6 has the power to do that (as long as no violent and heavily-armed mobs don't break into the Capitol Buidling and stop them...but when has that ever happened?) I came up with the acronym of SUSPECNA (I'll have to look up what it meant) for this new uniform law. How does that sound for a start? If anybody wants to help me draft it and promote it, I welcome you! Simplified Uniform State Popular Electoral College Normalization ActSUSPECNA on A Medium
SUSPECNA Notes
Ranked Choice Voting and MORE Ranked Choice Voting
Idaho Prop 1 stuff...
2024-10-22
Writing Captivating First Chapters
Here's some good tips I found for writing a captivating first chapter.
Of course, some rules can be broken intentionally, but never
unintentionally. And some we already know, but its nice to have a list
to look at. :)
2024-10-21
Star Trek Prisons & Penal Colonies
Star Trek TOS on IMDb
Which Star Trek episodes deal with prisons, mental institutions, penal colonies, and such? S1.E9 and S3.E14 seem to fit the bill. There may be several others, or in which such corrective institutions feature strongly.
I think it might be interesting to categorize all the TOS episodes in terms of what they focus on, i.e., political satire, crime & punishment, alien civilization / societal satire, existential parody. Star Trek seems to be pretty blasé about ideas such as having to lock people up, etc.
S3.E14 ∙Whom Gods Destroy
Keye Luke plays the colony director (and is in the movie Alice) in Whom Gods Destroy
Great Women Who Belong on the $20 Bill
Here's another one, showing that computer science was not only deeply influenced by women, it was practically invented by women (and Alan Turing, who was gay, by the way): Ada Lovelace. I think the language "Ada", which I've heard looks a lot like PL/SQL (near and dear to my heart) is named after her. Other great female candidates for the $20 are in this article.
Here's a link to the previous post and the original post.
Here are some other candidates to be on the $20 bill, or other units of currency (almost all are Americans)
Edith Clarke, mathematician, electric power pioneer
Cecillia Payne, discovered how stars work
Annie Bell, compiled data for Cecillia Payne
Vera Rubin, discovered Dark Matter
Marie Tharp, discovered continental drift
Rosalind Franklin, x-ray crystallography critical to discovery of DNA
Grace Hopper, inventor of COBOL, computer science pioneer
Radia Perlman, RSTP, etc., "The mother of the Internet"
Bella Abzug, Mayor of New York
Golda Meir, 4th prime minister of Israel
Catherine the Great, architect of Modern Russia
Marie Tharp, discovered continental drift
Rosalind Franklin, x-ray crystallography critical to discovery of DNA
Grace Hopper, inventor of COBOL, computer science pioneer
Radia Perlman, RSTP, etc., "The mother of the Internet"
Bella Abzug, Mayor of New York
Golda Meir, 4th prime minister of Israel
Catherine the Great, architect of Modern Russia
Emmy Noether, the most important woman in mathematics (c.f., Einstein, et al), relation between conservation laws and symmetry and oh, so much more
Marie Curie, discoverer of radioactivity
Lise Meitner, first to explain nuclear fission, 109th element "Meitnerium", director at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
Murasaki Shikibu, authoress of the world's oldest novel, The Tale of Genji
So, for starters, the Internet, the world's most popular computing language (through the 90s anyway), some of the most important phenomena that make our world work which we didn't understand AT ALL before: continental drift, that stars are made of mostly hydrogen, how they work, etc., what radioactivity is, how nuclear fission works, the idea that fields and particles can produce our reality, and what DNA is and how it's structured, and don't let's forget transmitting power over long distances with electricity, among many other things, were ALL the accomplishments of WOMEN.
I wrote another little piece on great women of our time.
Marie Curie, discoverer of radioactivity
Lise Meitner, first to explain nuclear fission, 109th element "Meitnerium", director at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
Murasaki Shikibu, authoress of the world's oldest novel, The Tale of Genji
So, for starters, the Internet, the world's most popular computing language (through the 90s anyway), some of the most important phenomena that make our world work which we didn't understand AT ALL before: continental drift, that stars are made of mostly hydrogen, how they work, etc., what radioactivity is, how nuclear fission works, the idea that fields and particles can produce our reality, and what DNA is and how it's structured, and don't let's forget transmitting power over long distances with electricity, among many other things, were ALL the accomplishments of WOMEN.
I wrote another little piece on great women of our time.
The following video is almost too whingey to be included, but it highlights the women I mention above. I love it when women are shown as excelling at the same work that men do, proving that they can do it, that there is nothing inherent about being a woman that makes one less capable (in keeping with basic macromemetic theory), but the “political feminists” have to carry on and wreck it with comments that "she would've had it easier if she were a man". You could just as well say "what if he weren't a jew" (Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman and many others) or "what if he weren't from a working-class background" (Michael Faraday and Richard Feynman again) or suchlike. No, I think that a hypothetical "Cecil Payne" would've been told the same thing by his advisor, i.e., that his ideas were so transformational that his doctoral thesis might get rejected, just like male scientists have been told throughout history, though luckily these days they aren't threatened with excommunication or burning at the stake by the Pope like they used to be. In fact, I'm especially grateful to Cecillia Payne for her discoveries since my take is that since she was coming at it as a (female) outsider, she may have been more empowered to think outside the box than any of her male contemporaries who were boxed in by the kind of group-think and pressure towards conformatism that men have to put up with on a daily basis. I wish political feminists would take that into account once in a while.
2024-10-20
2024-10-18
Lost secrets of liebnitz
Samhyahu, theh yesoteheyck saycrehts uv myahths ayn fyzucks syend ool theh mo’ah myelyflooahs ooehn ryindahd yen ah kyoweyh yacsaynt, ooah wehdeyehrehk?
YouTube video
2024-10-16
Nanowrimo Hints
Nanowrimo Hints
1
Anti-writer's block tactics...
...and strategies.
Thoughts on adding new characters.
2024-10-15
2024-10-14
模倣子 TOOL Ideas Have Consequences
Introduction
I found it hard to put my finger on anything that Richard M. Weaver wrote that I actually disagreed with. Ideas Have Consequences is a wonderfully written and dense book, of which most every line could be an inspirational and thought-provoking aphorism to be printed at the top of a page-of-the-day of a Franklin Day Planner, for instance. What might be superficially dismissed as "flowery" or "purple prose" is in fact making language work hard to get his points across as succinctly and clearly as possible. He builds definitions and arguments, making frequent appeals to literature and philosophy throughout the ages, and he makes good on his initial promise to lay out solutions to the problems he has thoroughly elaborated.
I was intrigued by what he said about feminism, especially, but among many other things, such as the function of education. We could probably chase our tails all night about what he says about the nature of society and the individual, which made me think about his comments on the arts and on aesthetics, and on science might be a good focus for discussion.
I found myself unable to disagree, at least not strongly, with much of anything Weaver wrote, but red flags went up a bit at his insistence on the need to revive dualism as a route to repairing the ravages of utilitarian materialism. As I'll get to below, I've always thought of dualism as a kind of hobgoblin, incompatible with the 20th Century science and mathematics of Kurt Gödel, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and others, and of micro and evolutionary biology in general. Weaver seems to tend to lump evolutionary theory in with denial of transcendentals, as I mention below, and this stood out to me as emblematic of the potential issues I had with Weaver's arguments. I don't feel that 20th Century science is the baby out with which the materialistic bourgeoise woes outlined by Weaver should be thrown, but at the same time I feel we cannot not reconcile our views on science and technology with Weaver's worldview.
Art & Music
He comes down hard on modern art and music. He makes comments similar to what he says about other larger more abstract things, like decrying the rejection of transcendentals. The idea that "the naked truth" is more truthful, that there are no outlines in nature, sensuality without ironic distance.
He takes a poke at modern art, painting landscapes, photography, etc. He doesn't mention still life painting that I recall--perhaps he's okay with that--while landscape painting, and painting of haystacks at different times during the day is "industrial." I wonder how he'd feel about Generative AI, or even machine translation.
Science & Technology
Weaver writes about the atomic bomb, so he had at least some access to the scientific ideas that informed that project. He takes a shine to the Platonic idea of forms imperfectly realized. However, when I talk to molecular biologists or quantum physicists, and increasingly, cosmologists; these fields all look like rabbit holes or "turtles all the way down" where there are no rules, no perfect forms that we already fully understand and are just trying to fill in the details. Do we hope to find the rabbit, or the mind of G-d, at the bottom somewhere, or are we resigned that we'll never get there, and if so, does this represent something that cannot be shoehorned into Weaver's otherwise very appealing worldview.
Early 20th Century math and physics was characterized by unknowability and uncertainty, with Werner Heisenberg and Kurt Gödel, among many others. Weaver seems to agree with the idea that "the information from our senses is actually the least reliable source of information" but does that include scientific measurement? Is this what he means by transcendentals, or to be dismissed along with a lifetime misspent mapping the nervous system of the leech?
Language
Weaver says some interesting things about language. One thing he said that I found particularly intriguing is that the exercise of translation is one of the best ways not to be self-deluded on the subject of meaning. I can't say I disagree. Of course he gets into the equivalences the Bible makes between G-d and The Word, and how this is an important concept, and how both the Bible and science are very much about assigning proper names to things, as in G-d calling Adam, first thing, to his side to tell him the names of all of the plants and animals, and how that was their names thereinafter. Anyway, he says that the degradation of culture and society is linked to the degradation of language.
Again, what about things like machine translation? Is this another example of the machine telling human beings what to think? Human beings skipping the process of developing skills and applying them to process and leaping straight to an unself-examined and automatically blessed finished result?
The Stereopticon
Joseph Goebbels really went to town on these ideas, especially with his attention to the radio. He made it the law to listen to the radio, for one.
One thing that struck me is "laugh tracks" or "canned laughter" as a way of telling people when to laugh at shows, and how people respond to this more and more. Laughing, as well as crying and yawning, are all memetic responses (they may be induced by memetic interactions and are contagious) hence even en absentia people may be synched up memetically, icons downloaded, and so forth, and this has huge ramifications for the consolidation of power.
Also, "what is a newspaper?" I had some thoughts about the early development of this technology, for instance, that presses dashing off a quick page or two each day and making money was probably an economic motivation for putting out newspapers instead of books. Books were worked on over time, and there was a problem of setting up for a given folio or quarto, and one had to decide how big of an edition to make straight from the start, even though it might take months or even longer to complete the project, which meant no profits from the expensive printing press the whole while.
One could wonder if the whole culture of newspapers and journalism, and the printing up of handbills for ads, political or otherwise, derived from the need to get money out of one's expensive capital investment without the risk that a book, exacting and months in the making, with lots of up-front work and supplies outlays, would otherwise involve. This same economic culture, of course, exacerbates the cult of popular authors, or the fact that everybody wants a bible, and large organizations (such as churches) can pony up large sums for large quantities to printers, who would otherwise be taking a chance of making a run of books and then trying to get the money back by selling them.
So this might be a kind of "memetic accident" associated with the printing press as a technology, trying to replace an oral tradition of minstrels and speakers and such. I could go on and on about the odd memetic dynamics we've perhaps inherited from these past early decisions and vicissitudes. For example, how nowadays journalists could spend months on a story that is effectively printed once and then to a degree forgotten, e.g., Woodward and Berstein, the Boston Globe Catholic Child Molestation story, etc. Unlike books, which are collected, kept in libraries, referenced (which newspapers can be as well these days).
Rob Words on the printing press
2024-10-13
Moves in So-soo-yoo
Me explaining moves in sosooyoo
Add this link to page for so-soo-yoo
I added this to the main So-Soo-Yoo page I made for the Bridges Conference
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