The post office is useless. They won’t mail ANY of my letters. They’re all like “please address them correctly” and “please include a stamp” and “please take the bombs out”. Christ. I don’t expect MENSA-level logic skills from the post office but what’s the point of sending letter bombs that don’t have bombs, you idiots?

End topic, start of new topic. “Waterboarding at Guantanamo Bay” sounds fun to a child but scary to an adult. Conversely, “the doctor will take your pulse” sounds innocuous to an adult but terrifying to a child. “T…take my pulse? Will I get it back?” As adults, we know what this means: the doctor is hungry and needs a starchy, calorie-filled legume such as a bean or a peanut to sustain his labors. Just one. Sometimes one is all it takes.

End/start. Once it was accepted wisdom in psychology that having a little of something brings you more happiness than having a lot (but not all) of the same something. Put another way, having a single slice of pie will make you happier than having an entire pie with a single missing slice.

This is based on findings from a study of Olympic athletes. Although the gold medalist the happiest man on the podium, the bronze medalist is happier than the silver medalist. It’s easy to speculate why. The bronze medalist is just glad that they medaled, while the silver medalist is stewing over how they barely missed the gold.

I read the study and it disappointed me. I doubt it will survive the replication crisis. They didn’t have any way of measuring athlete happiness, they had evaluators watch videos of athletes standing on a podium, and asked them to rate the happiness on their faces. How could this generate valid results? Some athletes are from countries with a cultural norm against smiling, other athletes are plastering fake smiles on their faces so they don’t get executed by firing squad back in Allfuckedupistan, there’s no way you can control for all the variables, how do we know people can accurately judge happiness by looking at videos, and so on.

It might not be true that bronze medalists are happier. But maybe it’s true that the public perceives bronze medalists as being happier, regardless of whether they actually are.

Could this be a good way of judging a person’s happiness? Obviously a single person’s estimation of another’s happiness will likely be wrong, but if you averaged the estimates of a hundred people who have just seen someone experience indeniably joyous event (such as seeing the number 6 and 9 appear on their grocery bill)…how accurately will this match the happy person’s own assessment of their mental state?

Could it actually be more accurate? Do other people know us better than we know ourselves?

It’s not impossible. Happiness is an emotional state with a biological basis (serotonin, and so on). But we can never directly report on this emotional state – we only have access to a memory of said state – even if that memory is only half a second old. And memories are notoriously inaccurate. Maybe I’ll remember a time as being happy it was actually sad. A larger population pool will remove this source of bias.

It’s not unreasonable that a crowd would understand an athlete’s emotions as well or better than the athlete themselves. The athlete is probably in a state of shock, vaguely aware of chemicals rushing through their body and not much else. Only later can they look back on the moment, replay the memory in their mind’s eye, and feel the happiness that in media res denied them. Perhaps they won’t feel happy at all – it was a hollow victory. I never talk about this but I won a gold medal once. No, I’m sorry. Bought. I bought a gold medal. It was at a store. It melted and went sticky. I’m reluctant to question the wisdom of the Olympics committee, and I know they have to cut costs, but why do they fill the insides of those things with chocolate?

In 1936, John Maynard Keynes wrote about a competition in which…

the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.

This competition was the stock market.

The stock market is a beauty contest where you don’t pick the prettiest woman. Instead, you pick the woman the other judges think is the prettiest woman. “Well, I really like contestant #6, but nobody else will go for her. Contestant #9 is a more classic beauty.”

You’re judging the judgement of the prettiest woman. Except you’re not even really doing that, you’re judging the judgement of the judgment of the prettiest woman. And so on, ad nauseam. It’s not about the woman. It’s not even about the men. It’s about the system. A system that sprawls and grows the more its utilized, additional feedback back-propagating in, requiring additional epicycles. You have to find the Schelling point. The magic area of stability. But once people know where the Schelling point is, it disappears and reappears somewhere else.

In the stock market, it is of no intrinsic value that an investment is sound. Everything depends on the opinion of other buyers, who in turn are watching the opinion of still others. This is how a “pump” happens. Some people think a stock’s going to the moon, they plow money into it, the buying is interpreted by other people as a sign of success, and so on. The stock ends up valued far higher than it’s worth (infinitely higher, if the stock is worth zero), but then it implodes back to the X intercept and you end up typing incoherent rationalizations on a forum while misspelling the world “hold”.

Maybe this is why some people like Marxism, which (by way of Adam Smith) escapes the whole game by asserting that value is an objective quantity. The price of a commodity, to a classical Marxist, is determined by the amount of labor that went into it.

This provides the theoretical bulwarks for large chunks of Marxist thought, such as exploitation. If a pair of shoes is worth the labor that goes into making them, how does the boss of the shoe factory have profit left for himself after paying his workers? The answer, to Karl Marx, is that the boss is ripping off his workers. Underpaying them.

I don’t think that’s right, though. Labor affects the value of a commodity, but so do other things.

For example, which would you prefer: a dollar today, or a dollar tomorrow? Obviously, a dollar today. You can invest it and by tomorrow it will be worth more than a dollar. Money now is worth more than money later, and money yesterday is worth more than money now. The temporality of money changes its value.

And which would you prefer: a dollar in a Swiss bank account, or a dollar lying in plain view at Central Station, NY? The dollar in the bank account, because it’s far less likely to be stolen. The security of money changes its value.

When would you prefer to have a dollar: when your rent is short by $1, or when you’ve just won the lottery? Obviously the former. The amount of money you already have changes how much you value additional money.

I don’t know if Marxists consider money to be a commodity (probably not), but the logic above applies to any sort of valuable thing – shoes, food, etc. It seems that value is subjective. The Labor Theory of Value is about as sensible as an Atomic Theory of Value that proposes items be priced by their number of hydrogen atoms. Yes, atoms are an important part of items, as is labor. But that’s not all there is to know about them. Nor is it a sane bridge to establishing a Schelling Point such as price.

Value can appear out of nowhere at any time. So can entire concepts and worlds. A question: when did oil first appear? A few hundred million years back, when some dinosaurs died or something?

No. Or yes. But no.

In a real sense, oil was created in 1872, when the internal combustion engine was invented. Yes, it existed before, but it wasn’t oil. It was something else. It was worthless sludge that seeped and bubbled out of the ground. It had no intrinsic value, until suddenly it did in 1872, thanks to human ingenuity. (I’m smoothing off some historical rough edges, ie the ancient Chinese apparently made some use of petroleum.).

We redefined a waste product into the most valuable commodity in the world, and it wasn’t even that difficult. It might happen again. Knowledge without theory is just a pile of facts. Light. Noise. Waves. Amplitude. The air around us creaks and sunders before the weight of information pouring across its manifolds. What schemas will we uncover next?

End paragraph. I like the way keyboards work. When I run out of steam or say something embarrassing, I can just hit ENTER and it’s like I’m free from the past, free to make better choices. At any point I can scythe an unproductive topic remorselessly and start afresh with a new better one. Such as this one. I like you, new topic. You won’t let me down. I’m also stroking my scythe.

An exercise: what word would you use to describe a goldsmith who, to enrich himself, intentionally confuses the avoirdupois and troy weights of gold?

Probably “thief”.

What word would you call a construction supplier who conflates long tons and short tons? Or a financier who mixes up British billions and US billions?

Probably the same.

But in consumer electronics it’s common to see a disk drive advertised as having a certain storage capacity (such as 1TB):

Only to install it, and have your computer inform you that it’s actually about 7% smaller than that (931GB).

This isn’t a mistake. It’s a deceptive marketing practice caused by confusion about what a kilobyte or a megabyte actually refers to.

Humans in western society do their sums in base 10. We tend to express large numbers as “a lot of 10s”.

1 000 000 000 000	tera	1012
1 000 000 000	giga	109
1 000 000	mega	106
1 000	kilo	103

Due to engineering reasons^[1]One big reason is reliability of state. On/off switches (ie, binary) are the most error-resistant way of storing information, as they only have to capture two states. The transistor is either on or … Continue reading, computers work in base 2 (ie, binary). They express large numbers as “a lot of 2s”.

1 099 511 627 776	tebi	240
1 073 741 824	gibi	230
1 048 576	mebi	220
1 024	kibi	210

Note that there’s a completely different set of SI prefixes when you work in base 2. Due to “convention” (which usually means “some corporate programmer in 1978 decided to do things this way, and we’re still stuck with it”), most computing applications refer to data storage in the base-10 prefixes.

Note that bytes (or more accurately bits, 8 of which produce a byte) are not an SI unit. They’re a dimensionless quantity indicating an on/off state. In 1997 the IEEE Standards Board recommended that SI prefixes be used for measures of data storage, they also noted that binary prefixes are also acceptable usage.

When a computer tells you it has “100GB”, there’s confusion about whether this is 100 gibibytes (107.374 gigabytes) or 100 gigabytes (93.1323 gibibytes). Additional levels of confusion appear because this convention is applied inconsistently at both ends. Apple products such as iPhones and iPads usually report their disk space in base-10. And bandwidth is usually measured in base-10.

You might say that “TB == a trillion bytes” is correct for some value of TB, so the labelling isn’t misleading. But it seems obvious to me that consumers calculate their needs according to how much space they have left on their computer – ie, their decisions are being guided by base-2.

It would be relatively simple for manufacturers to advertise their products in tebibytes – or to at least explain on the packaging what the difference is. But most of them don’t seem to do that.

 

One of aviation’s great unsolved mysteries is the disappearance of BSAA Flight CS-59.

The plane – which had the call sign Star Dust – left Morón Airport at Buenos Aires, Argentina on Aug 2nd 1947, bound for Los Cerrillos Airport in Santiago, Chile.

Aboard was a cast worthy of an Agatha Christie novel: two businessmen; a Palestinian man rumored to have a diamond stitched into his jacket; a South American sales agent with connections to the Romanian throne; a seventy year old German émigré; and a British civil servant carrying a “diplomatic bag” bound for the UK embassy.^[1]“The Star Dust Mystery.” Damn Interesting, 2 Aug. 2015, www.damninteresting.com/the-star-dust-mystery. The plane itself was a sturdy Avro 691 Lancastrian MkIII, capable of 310mph airspeeds and 20,000ft altitudes, piloted by decorated RAF veteran Reginald Cook.

The Star Dust entered Chilean airspace in the late afternoon, with radio operator Dennis Harmer maintaining contact with Los Cerrillos. Nothing unusual was reported. Then, at 5:41 p.m, Harmer transmitted the message “ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC”.

The Chilean air traffic controller didn’t understand the last word, which was neither ATC terminology nor a word in any language she recognized. She asked for clarification. Harmer tapped out “STENDEC” twice more.

This was the last transmission ever received from the Star Dust. It did not arrive at Los Cerrillos, and a five-day search uncovered no trace of the missing plane.

The Star Dust‘s disappearance remained a total mystery for fifty years. Theories included aliens, a trans-dimensional rift, aliens, foreign hijacking, and aliens. It became part of “vanished plane” lore along with the Bermuda Triangle—a triangle that seemingly has sixteen points and extends across 80% of the Atlantic Ocean—and (much later) Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

In 1998, mountaineers climbing Mount Tupungato’s southwest face found wreckage 15,000 feet above sea level. Pieces of metal. Shreds of clothing. A corroded Rolls Royce engine, jutting from the ice. The Star Dust had never come down from the sky. Subsequent expeditions by the Chilean army and air force uncovered more of the wrecked plane.

The wreckage was scattered across a narrow area, ruling out a mid-air explosion. The Star Dust’s propellers was twisted and bent back, suggesting the engine had been running at the moment of impact. A fully inflated tire indicated that the plane hadn’t deployed its landing gear.

We can guess how the plane crashed: it was caught inside the jet stream (a poorly-understood phenomenon in 1947) which exerted backward drag on the plane, causing it to cross less distance than expected.

Imagine running while blindfolded. In theory, you could calculate the distance you have travelled by counting your steps (assuming your stride is of fixed length), but if you accidentally step onto a moving treadmill, your calculations will end up wrong. You’ll think you’re moving forward when you’re actually standing still.

The Star Dust hit the jet stream, which acted like a treadmill, slowing it down. This wouldn’t have caused a problem…if the pilot had known it was happening. Inside the cockpit—surrounded by shrieking white, guided by primitive WWII-era navigational instruments—Reginald Cook greatly overestimated the distance he’d crossed. He’d thought the plane was directly over Santiago, when it was actually still fifty miles east. He also thought they’d safely crossed the Andes range, when they were plunging into its face.

The technical term for the crash is “controlled descent into terrain”^[2]Pilot, By Plane And, et al. “A Pilot’s Last Words: ‘STENDEC.’” Plane & Pilot Magazine, 12 Dec. 2019, www.planeandpilotmag.com/article/a-pilots-last-words-stendec. – a fancy way of saying Cook flew the plane into the mountain. The impact buried the Star Dust in ice, but recent melt-off at Tupungato exposed the engine. There are fascinating rumors that local arrieros (high-altitude mule-handlers, the Andean equivalent of the sherpas) knew of the Star Dust crash long before 2000. ^[3]Maynard, Matt. “Searching for Star Dust: The Hunt to Uncover an Andean Mystery – Geographical Magazine.” Geographical, 2019, … Continue reading

Tupungato’s southwest face is deadly even when you’re not crashing into it at 310mph. Making the ascent requires skill and daring: only four independent mountaineers have reached the crash site, two of whom died in the process.^[4]Ibid. In recent years Argentinian policy has forbidden mountaineers from even attempting to reach the crash site. The plane’s discovery was a red-letter day for Argentina—finally, Anglo-Argentinian history that didn’t involve bombed islands or offside football goals—and they would prefer that the Star Dust doesn’t claim any more lives. Search teams have located many fragments of the Star Dust (including a severed hand from the stewardess, her fingernails still painted^[5]Maynard, Matt. “Searching for Star Dust: An Epic Quest to Find a near-Mythical Plane Wreck.” Red Bull, 19 Nov. 2019, www.redbull.com/au-en/star-dust-mystery-1947-plane-wreck-quest.), and will surely find more.

But the meaning of Dennis Harmer’s final “STENDEC” transmission has never been explained. There are many competing theories, none of them fitting all the facts.

1. “STENDEC” is an anagram for “DESCENT”. 

If Harmer had meant to write “DESCENT”, he obviously would have done so. RAF radio operators are trained to signal clearly, not in word games and riddles.

2. Harmer was suffering from altitude sickness or hypoxia, and mixed up his message.

While this might seem plausible, it’s not easy to accidentally switch letters in Morse (signaling C alone requires four distinct pulses in a precise order) the same way it is on a keyboard. In any case, Harmer repeated the word multiple times; clearly he meant to write it.

3. “STENDEC” shares many letters with “Stardust”.

Planes in the air are identified by registration code (G-AGWH in the Star Dust’s case), not the fanciful names bestowed by the airlines. Also, why would an operator sign off by telling Chilean air traffic control the name of his plane (which they already knew)?

4. “STENDEC” is obscure RAF shorthand for “Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending, Emergency Crash-landing”^[6]“NOVA Online | Vanished! | Theories (Feb. 8, 2001).” PBS, 2001, www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/vanished/sten_010208.html..

This doesn’t fit the first half of the message. Harmer had just said that the Star Dust would shortly be arriving in Santiago.

5. “STENDEC” is spy code.

What sort of spy code? What was a random Chilean air traffic controller supposed to do with it? How did Harmer (or whoever wrote the code) expect it to reach the right set of ears?

5a “STENDEC” stands for “Saturday, 10th of December”.

Sounds good, except that December was a Wednesday that year.

6. It’s possible (but again, uncertain) that the word was mistakenly deciphered by radio control, due to limitations of the Morse code cipher.

Translation is easiest when two languages share all the same features, and harder when Language 1 possesses some property that isn’t present in Language 2, or vice versa. Early Biblical manuscripts were written in scriptio continua, in an unbroken flow of unmarked text.

This creates textual ambiguity, with sentences that change meaning depending on where a translator or copyist chooses to insert spaces and punctuation. For example, the Greek Septuagint of  Romans 16:7 runs A S P A S A S T H E A N D R O N I K O N K A I I O U N I A N T O U S S U G G E N E I S M O U K A I S U N A I K H M A L O T O U S M O U O I T I N E S E I S I N E P I S E M O I E N T O I S A P O S T O L O I S O I K A I P R O E M O U G E G O N A S I N E N K H R I S T O, which the King James Version translates as “Salute Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen, and my fellow prisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me.” The problem is that the accusative noun IOUNIAN can have one of two accent marks (IOUNÍAN/IOUNIÂN), which would make it either a man’s name or a woman’s. We still don’t know the gender of this “Junia”.^[7]Omanson, Roger L. 1946-. “Punctuation in the New Testament. If Only Paul Had Used the Chicago Manual of Style.” Bible Review , vol. 14.6, 1998, pp. 40-43.

Morse isn’t a foreign language (it’s a cipher for English), but it’s scriptio continua. Its dots and dashes represent 26 letters and 10 numbers, but there’s no special character for a space. Operator convention^[8]“Morse Code & Abbreviations.” Portland State University, 2021, web.cecs.pdx.edu/%7Ecaleb/aa7ou/ham_pages/morse_abb.html. is that spaces between letters are signaled by a pause equal to three dots, while spaces between words are signaled by a pause equal to seven dots. But if the signaler is in a hurry (or panicking), the pauses might get shortened, creating an ambiguous message that could be read multiple ways.

The exact transmission was.

… – . -. -.. . -.-.

The Chilean air traffic controller spaced it like this: STENDEC.

… / – / . / -. / -.. / . / -.-.

But it could also  be spaced like this: STAREAR

… / – / .– / .–. / . / .–.–.

A typical “end of message” signoff at the time was “AR” (with no spaces.)^[9]“An Explanation of STENDEC …..” Fly with the Stars, 2021, www.flywiththestars.co.uk/Documents/STENDEC.htm., and it’s possible that the sequence could have meant “STandard ARrival from East + signoff.”

This (along with other ways of re-ordering the message) raises as many questions as it answers. How did the Chilean air traffic controller misread this supposedly commonplace message so badly? And how did she repeat the same mistake two more times? And why didn’t Harmer clarify or rephrase?

All explanations suffer from one of three basic weaknesses:

1) Harmer signalled “STENDEC” multiple times. This completely rules out a mistake, and makes it far less likely that the Chilean air traffic controller misunderstood the spaces. (“Tell ’em three times” is a simple but reliable error-correcting trick in communications theory). 2) Harmer had no reason to write in code. If the Star Dust had been about to crash, he would have said so. If its navigational instruments had failed, he would have said so. Explanations that rely on “deciphering” Harmer’s final transmission like a puzzle provoke the question of why this would even be necessary. 3) There’s no hint that anything was amiss. The retracted landing gear, the running propeller, the casual tone of the message…there’s zero sign that anyone aboard the Star Dust knew they were in trouble until they died against the side of Mount Tupungato.

The Andean glaciers are still melting. It’s possible we’ll recover more wreckage from the Star Dust, but will we ever know what STENDEC means?

[Update] The mystery is solved. “STENDEC” stands for “Stop Trying to ENcode and DEcode this Conundrum.” Glad we could put that one to bed.