The Gray Lady stumbles, some times

Yes, even The Gray Lady does make a mistake. Fixes, when there are such, appear some place in the A section with the title "Corrections". One caught my eye today, since Andy Cuomo was the go-to pinata by the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts at the beginning and height of Covid. Here's the 'Correction' in question:

An earlier version of this article misattributed a statement responding to a state audit of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The statement was from Mr. Cuomo's spokesman, Richard Azzopardi, not Mr. Cuomo. The article also referred incorrectly to the source of a requirement that nursing homes accept Covid-19 patients from hospitals. It was a Health Department directive, not an executive order by Mr. Cuomo.

If you recall the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts bombast at the time, that latter was The Smoking Gun of Cuomo's deceit. I don't know if the record has been corrected earlier/elsewhere. Better late than sorry I suppose. This appeared today in my dead trees version in the "Corrections" space on page A18. If you blinked, you wouldn't know it existed. Finding it in the on-line version was convoluted. Putting 'corrections andrew cuomo covid' and such into the search box found nothing. When I brought up the on-line version of the original article, there was the Correction at the bottom of the page.

Four years, and it appears that's how long it took the NYT to figure it out, is quite a while.

Artificial Energy - part the third

Last night "60 Minutes" re-ran its segments, amongst which was one Geoffery Hinton, self-proclaimed Father of AI, and who waxed outrageously on AI taking over the world. Much like The Musk Ox saying that AI will take all the jobs and some 'Socialist' income/wealth re-distribution must ensue if We are to survive. Of course, he's not hesitant to de-hire folks if they are a burden to his profit. Sauce for the goose, and all that.

Back to Hinton. He went on and on about neural networks, and how mysterious they are, but that they work. Not one word about hallucinating or just plain lying. Not one word about the foundational maths involved. The mind of a zealot. So, once again, here's what neural nets are really all about

The mean squared errors between these calculated outputs and the given target values are minimized by creating an adjustment to the weights. This technique has been known for over two centuries as the method of least squares or linear regression. It was used as a means of finding a good rough linear fit to a set of points by Legendre (1805) and Gauss (1795) for the prediction of planetary movement.

For all the evangelical handwaving about NN and AI and other such blathering about the Emperor's New Clothes, a fact is just a fact: computers work on numerical data, not pictures (despite what may seem apparent), and optimization is just minimizing squared differences. So long as we live in a Euclidean World of Data, that's the sole choice. Which, of course, is not a choice.

NN and AI are based on predicting the Future from the Past (Data). If you want to predict the Future, your best bet is to read the NYT from a point in time which reflects the emerging Future. There always will be one, in that human behavior hasn't changed much since before The Bible was written by an aggressive sect of proto-heathens eager to explain the unexplained. In a way which benefited the writers over others. Of course.

There's a reason Times Series Analysts mostly get it wrong: hockey stick data isn't apparent until you've climbed up to the label. For all the time before that, the data looks lazily linear. "Nothing to see here. Nothing to worry about." Gotcha!!!

Stupid Alzheimer's Ronnie, II and Covid-19,

The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.
-- 26 Feb. 2020

Elect him again, and he'll force everyone, not just the myriad Schedule F dick suckers who'll invade the Damn Gummint, to be just as idiotic. And solely to benefit him and his cabal. Well, only the most loyal of them, of course.

And, once again, the Federal Civil Service was created just because the Spoils System of the 19th century got a President killed. Let's party like it's 1829 with Andy Jackson!!!

By The Numbers - part the fifty fifth

Most, may be all (I don't watch as much as one might suppose), sports pundits are just shills for whoever Daddy Warbucks is for that sport or specific event. So it was with some mixture of amusement and scorn that I heard one of said pundits claim that DeChambeau's top of the leaderboard place at the end of the third round (he's not yet on the course) of the US Open was due to his skipping to LIV. Now, my objection to all things PIF/Saudi is just that: all things. LIV is merely one of the greenwashing efforts. It's not as if the high priced golfers LIV pilfered from the PGA were living in shacks on Poverty Hill (that's from a Kingston Trio song; one of the few that made a point) on PGA wages.

The pundit's point, he said, was that LIV offered DeChambeau more time off to recharge, be with family, and such. Made him a better golfer. That assumes, of course, that tournament participation is materially different betwixt the two:

LIV - only 14 tournaments; as far as I can find, all must be attended
PGA - 15

Now, there is a ranking of PGA players at season end, and only so many (125, or more with exemptions, at last count) get to keep playing privileges; said points basically amount to money winnings, so playing only 15 tournaments might make it difficult to keep one's card. OTOH, LIV poached from the top tier of PGA players (including DeChambeau) who aren't likely to fall below the cutoff.

In sum, then, DeChambeau took the blood money out of simple greed. Same as the rest. And the thing is: all this 54 hole team play (LIV, get it?) with mammoth guaranteed money (so far, at least) is so undergraduate (or, professional rasstling); putting on your Big Boy Pants is what you're supposed to do after you finish school. Only beer drinking sub-GED sloths would be pleased with a LIV tournament.

Gradiation

Turns out, there's at least one last one-room (well... one building) schoolhouse here in Socialist New England. Block Island School graduated its Senior Class this week. It's paywalled, mostly, but you get to read the important point. The irony: (nearly?) all the Tourist Service jobs go to imported cheap furriners. Unless you're a kid of the landed gentry or business community, ya gots to leave the idyllic island. It's too bad. Permanent citizens have numbered under 1,000 for decades. Well, at least according to the Groundhog Day Census going back nearly forever, conducted at a collection of waterholes. Annually, since Groundhog Day does happen each and every year.

A NYT report from 20 years ago, sounds about right, still. While we've never made it to the island in the dead of winter (some day we'll be counted in the Groundhog Day Census; if you're on the island after the last boat leaves, you can be counted. We 'own' a week at one of the lodging establishments, so I guess we qualify as an 'Islander'), most of the report fits our last-week-of-October stay. Just, so far, no snow. Although we did get to stay a few extra days one year: the gale blew so hard there were no boats. We were delighted.

It Only Gets Worse - part the first

Yes, it only gets worse. As speculated earlier, it's even more likely that Spirit/Boeing went to the gray market for titanium to save a penny-a-pound on titanium. For the record, it's among the most expensive metals in manufacturing.

Titanium is generally 20-40x more expensive than steel per unit weight.

What about aluminum? While aluminum is widely used in skins, less so in internal structure.

The cost of raw titanium can be up to ten times higher than aluminum, making it a significant consideration in manufacturing.

And aluminum is about 80% of an aircraft. Is it worth it to cheat on the other 20%, of which titanium is some unknown (so far) proportion?

The McDonnell Effect rises its ugly head. Some thoughts from that NYT report:

The titanium in question has been used in a variety of aircraft parts, according to Spirit officials. For the 787 Dreamliner, that includes the passenger entry door, cargo doors and a component that connects the engines to the plane's airframe. For the 737 Max and the A220, the affected parts include a heat shield that protects a component, which connects a jet's engine to the frame, from extreme heat.
...
So far, Spirit's testing has confirmed that the titanium is the appropriate grade for airplane manufacturers. But the company has been unable to confirm that the titanium was treated through the approved airplane manufacturing process. The material passed some of the materials testing performed on it but failed others.
[my emphasis]

So, it appears that in addition to all the other issues, we now know that Boeing's Plastic Plane can vomit an engine, or two. Oh joy.

You need to read the whole story to see the trail, so far known, of the titanium in question. On the face of it, sure looks like gray market trading to save a penny-a-pound. The Spirit of Satan.

Parts Is Parts - part the second

"Parts is parts"
-- Wendy's ad making fun of Mickey D

Ok, so the erstwhile Boeing division (and, may haps, again) Spirit AeroSystems proves, once again, that the Rot of McDonnell continues unabated. Get titanium for a penny-a-pound cheaper, and don't look too close. That, is my humble opinion what happened here.

That is about as sure a thing as the Celtics hanging number 18 in the rafters.

Not Quite

During one of the Celtics-Mavs games, one of the talking heads allowed as how the Joe Barry Carroll (aka, Joe Barely Cares) for Parish and McHale was all time greatest (or worst, depending on one's point of view). I was around then, of course, and that didn't sound quite right.

So, I let my fingers do the walking through the Yellow Googles. Red did pull off the heist, but not in a straigtforward manner.
- Yes, he got Parish from Golden State outright
- Not so Yes on JBC: Golden State drafted him with one of the traded picks
- Not so Yes on McHale: Red got him with a traded pick

Ainge gets near to that heist, with Brown and Tatum pure draft picks. He didn't have to steal (although both picks were acquired), but he sure did get it right. Even though, for some time, Celtics Nation insisted that Tatum/Brown was as dumb as Wicks/Rowe. 'Dump 'em both!!!' Not so much.