Why The West is Worth Saving

A talk by Konstantin Kisin about why the West is worth saving (20 minutes). 

We need to oppose the fanatics on both left and right and re-assert the values and uniqueness of the Western liberal democratic tradition. 

And to anyone wondering; yes, we are the greatest civilisation extant upon the earth now, and the greatest in history. If you doubt that feel free to use one of the exit routes our technology provides and move to Russia, or Iran, or China or Venezuela. 

If you're not part of the solution you are part of the problem.

Don't Meditate

What ever you do it is imperative that you do not meditate, and yet, at the same time meditation is a critical tool to manage your mind and gain perspective. So WTF am I talking about?

Agents In Society

If you had a super-intelligent General Artificial Intelligence and you asked it to produce as many paperclips as possible, the results could be catastrophic. It could destroy the Earth in search of the goal of optimising the manufacture of paperclips. This is an often used analogy designed to illustrate the dangers of poorly defined goals in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). However this paradigm of analysis has wider utility in consideration of society.

The Fast Transition

In May 2015 I concluded a series of posts with The Slow Transition. It was a risky prognostication but an additional 7 years of data has supported what I said back then: That the transition to a seasonally sea ice free state would be slow, not fast, as some argued. This post is about the period preceding that, and with the further 7 years of data something substantive can be said about that.

The Arctic Ocean's sea-ice has undergone a fast transition from one stable mode to another equally stable mode. Between those modes there was a bifurcation driven by the power of an increase of Open Water Formation Efficiency and Ice Albedo Feedback. That bifurcation happened between 2002 and 2006, with the 2007 stochastic event delivering the coup-de-grace that finalised the bifurcation event.

Attractors, Critical Slowing, and Bifurcations

In this post I want to introduce some ideas of system level analysis connected to attractors and bifurcation.

Open Water Formation Efficiency Part 4

Open Water Formation Efficiency (OWFE) is a measure of the ease with which melt season thinning of sea-ice reveals open water. In March I published a post looking at how this operates from a theoretical perspective. In this post I look at how it operates in practice in various regions of the Arctic Ocean.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.

 

Ukraine: We cannot risk nuclear war.

Russia, the enemy, is afoot in Ukraine, yet The West demurs to engage properly, preferring instead to wage a proxy war. In this stance the West and NATO show themselves to be weak and effete, worse than this, The West has the blood of Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians on its hands.

The BCE Region Killzone

The BCE region is comprised of the Beaufort, Chukchi, East Siberian Seas. Due to the Beaufort Gyre it has a special role in the dynamics of Arctic sea ice.

Ukraine Aeronautical

Just a few things of note from Ukraine on the aeronautical side of things. Images from my account on Airnav Radar Box which is cheap and (for me) very useful, I can recommend it highly.

The Parallel Society.

The way out of the current subversion of our culture by Woke Totalitarianism is not by opposing it, being from a totally irrational background, discussion with its adherents is totally futile. And in many countries, such as here in the UK, the takeover of culture is already largely complete. Further, if Western Civilisation can be subverted by a culture of inherent weakness, a victim culture, then the husk of that civilisation was never worth saving anyway. This has been spotted by our rivals and has a causal role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Open Water Formation Efficiency - Part 3

Previously, 9 years ago, I produced two posts on Open Water Formation Efficiency, here and here. Now, as a bed rock to a series of posts I am going to revisit that issue. First, in this post, I outline a theoretical model to demonstrate the process involved.

Arctic Ocean: A New Ice Pack

Just a quick first review of PIOMAS data from 1978 to 2021. The results of this preliminary data-dive are what I had expected, which is not good.

England and Wales Rainfall

In 2016 I posted about UK rainfall and found that by the measure used the probability of a very wet year had increased in recent decades to 3/6 from a prior frequency of 1/6. In this post I revisit that work using an improved demarcation for wet and very wet.

What I have now found is a change of precipitation around 1998, before which the joint probability of a wet or extreme wet year has now risen from 18% prior to 1998 to 58%, a three-fold risk increase, in line with my 2016 work. 

This is a substantial change with serious implications for human impacts such as flooding.

Putin and the Weakness of the West

I am restarting blogging. Work on reprocessing PIOMAS and other data is currently ongoing and in due course I shall be publishing and maintaining data, as I once did. However blogging will follow a wider area of interests than just sea ice.

But first some useful words from David Starkey.

What is the entity that is 'I'?

I've been pondering on a matter since the 1990s when, amongst other things, I was evolving neural networks on a spare computer. And now, decades on, and much reading since, I think I can explain...

Making Gods is a Dangerous Endeavour

In this post I just want to go over some of what the rather limited current Artificial Intelligence agents are capable of. This is going to be rather cursory and fast, I don't have the time or inclination to write a book. I'm sure you don't have the time to read it anyway. The comments section is there is you want to ask me to back anything up.

Anthropomorphising

The previous two posts contained annotated transcripts of conversations between myself and GPT3 Curie, a 9 billion parameter version of GPT3. When I first came across GPT3 operating when configured as a chat bot it was in the video presented here. I'll be frank, I didn't believe it, I knew nothing about GPT3 at that stage.

Some More Interactions with GPT3

This post is just another annotated interaction designed to further illustrate how GPT3 is operating in preparation for the next post. 

Interacting with GPT3

It's been ages since I even looked at this blog, many more years since I was serious about sea ice studies. Given my nature there have been many interesting diversions, but overall, work has so consumed my energies that I have had little time or energy to blog. But over the last year I have found myself becoming more consumed with Artificial Intelligence and (what I consider to be) the ongoing Singularity.