Category: Geen categorie

[Or, what goes through my head when I lay awake at night]
Funny how every now and then, someone will remark how strange it is that in astrophysics, everything seems to be at such an unfathomable scale but still, the models of phenomena behaviour are oh so similar, comparable, congruent with what goes on in quantum physics, at the ‘other’ end of the scale qua size (-logarithms), and vice versa. Except for the Newtonian and other interpretations still possible in the former, and probability field / Idealistic interpretation of the latter.
And the two get intermixed. Case in point: Heisenberg particles that give hairy black holes.
[ Skipping Einsteinian / gravitation-wave oddballing for the moment(?) ]
[ Skipping too, all sorts of interesting analogies, comparisons and congruences for the moment(?) ]

With humans sitting somewhere in the middle, looking both ways; like being the knot of a bow tie. Yes, not an infinitesimally small knot, rather one of Newtonion proportions. And one that in some respects, may be more fundamental.

Like, simple in particular in its treatment of Time. Where the two ends use Time as an abstract construct, necessarily included, added into the frameworks only to make the formulas ‘work’. Case i point: in quantum physics, even Time seems to work (fit!) better when modelled to come in quanta as well.
The ‘synthetic’ part of … shall remain anonymous because you know the name is Kant.
Where’s the ‘a priori’ part then? Well, that’s where my PhD thesis of distant times into the future, comes in. But so far, no-one currently or formerly on this planet, has ever given a definitive definition of what time is. No, not Heidegger even in a book dubbed Sein und Zeit. Circumscription, not definition, all those attempts are!

Or is it because we humans look both ways into the infinite (log’d) dimensions? Which, for the quantum side, isn’t, and the other side, well… big ol’ ‘stein wasn’t sure and we aren’t sure that quote was his. Now we have time quantised on one end, and time dilation on the other. Both ‘feel’ – oh how exact can science be – incomprehensible or they’re the consequence of the way ‘time’ works in the respective models, using whatever ‘time’ definition/interpretation fits the model and then conclude that it behaves well within the model.
Then it might just be our inability to grasp concepts at the far ends otherwise..?

Anyway; I’m getting carried away. Bow tie it is.

And what also Ist / Da ist, thrown into this world or not:

[As if from outer space, h(a)unting the down below. Dijon.]

How to characterise the good old wax seal, in today’s “cyber”sec terminology ..?

• On envelopes and the like, it was a form of quantum encryption – any tampering would show, at the receiving end, compromittation of the encapsulating encryption; when including a tamper-proof or -indicative envelope / header&footer-encapsulation…)
• Non-repudiation of the sender, on parchment declarations.
• Proof of authority as in proof of authorisation, of course, too, via the authority attached to the seal bearer.

These three, as long as the key (seal ring) can’t be replayed (remade and applied) – weak key / key compromised.
Or stolen (replay, undue authority = privilege escalation).
And as long as the envelope couldn’t be invisibly compromised-and-restored, or read through the paper (wetting it up, then drying without damaging the contents) – weak encryption algo for the first item above.
Or the hash (second above) removed and attached to another parchment. Or the parchment text altered in a way that preserves non-repudiation (invisible, or in typical writing (hand-writing by default of other options like 8- or 9-dots matrix printers; we’re talking that long back).

This is getting out of hand; too much to add and elucidate. At least we don’t need the cumbersome physical seal of yesteryears and now have one tiny plug-in to secure all our communications forever, don’t we?

And, there were other protective measures as well:

[All hail the Duke of Lorraine at Nancy]

… deze post gaat niet over water.

Is er al onderzoek gedaan naar de gezondheidseffecten van champagne ..? En dan in het bijzonder welke prima bijdrage deze levert aan de benodigde calcium-intake?
Want de, soms verblindend witte, Kimmeridgien-bodem zorgt natuurlijk voor een flinke druk naar (relatief) meer calcium in de druif, en drank. Dat is al wel aangetoond. En dat is dus goed voor de mens!

Als niemand dit positieve gezondheidseffect heeft aangetoond, offer ik me wel op om m’n PhD te gaan afhalen bij de Universiteit van Reims als ik toch in de buurt ben. De kosten kan ik vast wel declareren bij het CIVC; not too shabby.
Hoewel ik vrees dat iemand me voor was…

Just kidding. Een lekkere (i.e., volwassen, crafty gemaakte) Montefalco Sagrantino, of afbouwend: Tannat, of medium-gerijpte Bourgogne (Noir), … of CabSav (blend) als het echt niet anders kan, is natuurlijk (onverwacht wellicht ook, net als champagne!) flink resveratrol-loaded. Waar gezonde wijn groeit, is het gezond en goed (vakantie)toeven…

Anyway:

[Zicht op Sillery; relevant hoewel Montgueux relevanterter zou zijn?]

Wat dacht u? Natúúrlijk spotten we en passant de trends in de champagne voor u, als we er toch zijn (waren)…

1. Updates Januari 2024 bovenin…:
   Houtrijping (sowieso, afgezien van onderstaande solera of acacia),
   Flessen met een afgeronde bodem – niet zielloos maar gewoon – waarschijnlijk voor gewichtsbesparing door dunner glas te kunnen gebruiken; “goed voor het milieu” en goedkoper…
   Een trend naar het gebruik van natuurkurk voor de opleg, zodat een wat oxidatievere stijl ontstaat waar enige mode in zit. Reken er dus op dat smaken van cacao, koffie en tabak ook in uw volgende vintage kunnen zitten. Dat is interessant! Dan is er zoveel meer te proeven… Afgezien van ook de tegengestelde tendens, in de eenvoudiger cuvées, naar juist wat reductiever, lichter werk, overigens. Hetgeen wij aanbevelen mits, juist ook, mooi, gerijpt zodat de diversiteit in het subtiele wel aanwezig blijft.
   En, interessant voor een apart stukje eens onder de verzamelpagina, rosé de saignée; de uniciteit van de meng-rosées die nergens ter wereld mogen maar in de Champagne lekker wel, dus loslatend. #nazoekenwaaromdezetrend
    
   Naast de Juli 2023-gesignaleerde nieuwigheden:
2. Solera. Het oversteken van nieuwe wijn voor de aanvulling van oudere jaargangen, of andersom. Om meer smaakdiepte te krijgen. Ja ook in de Champagne dus in opkomst; de platte NV-moet-binnen-twee-jaar-op-en-je-proeft-wat-je-proeft-en-basta-straightforward-smaak wordt dus aangevuld met betere wijnen;
3. Rijping op acaciahout. Elders nog steeds veel, vaak veel, te lang, op Frans (Limousin van tussen de limousines – als hier niet hier), Amerikaans (vanillebom door grote open porieën), Sloveens (slow-veens dus subtieler, wegens dichtere porieën) of Hongaars hout; hier dus op Acacia-hout. Kan een gimmick zijn maar zag er toch wel her en der wat. Subtiele smaak! Enne, het is eigenlijk een terugkeer naar wat vroeger vaker werd gedaan. Now you know;
4. Aandacht voor het land, traditie van de familie (>3 generaties) is wel het minimum waar je mee moet aankomen als producent. Anders ben je een commerciële newbie. Alsof er onder de oudgedienden niet geslepen wordt gemarket, dus;
5. Speciale cuvées. Waar een cuvée elders wordt gemaakt van het fris’te deel van de vin de goutte, gaat het in de Champagne vooral om verschillende wijnen van een huis. Voorheen een stuk of drie, nu ook bij de kleinere/kleinste huizen zeker zo’n vijf à zes oplopend tot 15 … Dús kleinere oplagen, als minste effect. Maar vooral: variatie in smaak! Ja dat is proefbaar, de verschillende blend-verhoudingen en rijpingstijden (post-eerste vergisting, post-tirage), inclusief in-mix van vins de réserve.
   NB hier doen ook de core 24 Grandes Marques en de 53 andere Union des Maisons de Champagne-labels aan mee, al of niet door oude of in-het-verleden-te-weinig-aandacht-gekregen cuvées naar voren te halen. In the lead: Roederer met hun 242/243/nu244 jaargangen die telkens nét iets anders geblend zijn en anders smaken. De 242 is wel onze favo maar dus niet meer te krijgen… De andere merken doen hierin mee, volgend maar duidelijk wel. En dus naast de Prestige Cuvées;
    
6. Dat de Forgotten Four nóg minder aandacht hebben en dat juist nóg meer verdienen, las u al hier. Maar da’s dus nog geen trend. Jammer.

Zoals gezegd:
[Parasolletje op, boekje erbij; een frisse duik en een flesje van het lokale brouwsel bij de hand: Het leven is zwaar in Viviers-sur-Artaut…?]

For an intermission post:

Again, my hobby horse(s): The Mix. Squared.

• Neural networks, a.k.a. Machine Learning, a.k.a. “AI”, on its own will never cut it. Since any NN is too simple, with its single firing function for all (nodes), even when slightly varied – even when varied per (modifiable/learnable?) node-specific parameter. And ML needs tons of data (acknowledging the trend towards better data over more) that simply isn’t available for a great many applications (as in: applying the ‘solution’ to some problem, ill-defined more often than well-) since reality is so many factors more complex than all the data generated/processed with IT since the Seventies, even if all that was still available. – intermission in the same; my guess is what happens on the Internet, doesn’t stay on the Internet; your data will be forgotten much earlier than before. Yes, paper-file cabinets held many more erroneous data points but how many ‘WORM’ discs even have become unreadable or barely readable? Historic data is less and less; end of interintermission – And “AI” isn’t, even ChatG turns out to be driven, as ever again! by humans that ironically had outsourced part of their processing to ‘AI’ systems. We’ll need at least ANI before it’s deployable; symbolic reasoning isn’t there yet if at all possible (though my hunch is that…). And convergence is still too shaky to be able to use anything really.
• Deterministic programming (If-Then style) will not cut it, we know.
• Fuzzy logic systems alone will not cut it, we know. They may serve as interpretations of noisy firing functions within ML or stand-alone, but take too much human engineering and … ‘statistics’ yes I’ll go wash my mouth now.
• GMDH systems will not cut it, we know. E.g., from my graduation work some 30 years back. Only-slivers-of-results and much spurious correlations resulted, and fundamentally, that cnnot be solved by today’s faster/more number crunching the problem is in the inductive approach. Though it might help tons with ML training … Either seeding bare ML networks or training them to final state.
• Symbolic reasoning (think (waaayyyy back to) LISP and Prolog – do you remember © Earth, Wind & Fire) is too cumbersome, and needs, now ever more inherently incomplete, modelling of the subsystem / subject matter at hand. And bring to the fore another hobby horse of mine: How abstraction, the loss of specificity of that (the largest common denominator quickly drops to zero, the least common multiple mushrooms – the ‘character’ or feature/phenomenological aspect disappears in triviality but the potential / riches and variability away from the model explode – unused ..! and the only true model of reality is reality itself (Gell-Mann)) but also the mix of the former with the emergence of properties, seems to make a logica jump that can’t be brute forced. As e.g., ‘privacy’ is an emergent property of data protection, for confidentiality and availability (!).
  And with much human knowledge being input into the system. Slllloooowwwww! And a quite good definition of Incompleteness – of the trivial kind not the real issue. [Interintermezzo again: Is imperfection in logical reasoning required, e.g., for ‘human intelligence’? À la requisite variety, in here (in Dutch but G Translate should work); a suitable subject for a uni full of PhDs I guess.] Nevertheless, this doesn’t cut it on its own.

Even treating half- or ‘fully-baked’ neural nets of whatever proportion or module stacking, as glorified If-Then systems – hey, indeed, the firing function is a superclass, generalisation of the 0%/100% condition in deterministic If-Then – will miss the abovementioned Emergent Property requirement that ‘intelligence’ needs. Unsure whether any philosopher has figured that out (like: proving that, if proof exists or is a (derivative) Halting Problem class, or runs into Gödelian issues) or what his (sic) name would be, but for me, it’s a fact.

Which brings me to:
We’ll need to mix systems. Not (only): stacking a variety of modules, but mixing in the modules as well. And learning – a life long, or at least some 25 years. Hoping for any success; watching current under-40yrs-old humans isn’t encouraging.
But after that, we could clone indefinitely quite quickly..? Maybe not, if the mind/body problem needs to be included – then, cloning will not work because every new copy is a different instance if only because they take different physical space, and can’t exist out of nothing in the exact same instant / quantum time leap. [Yes you read that correctly; time seems to come in quantum leaps as well.]
For this intermission post, I deviate. I’ll return for the home straight:

But mixing we must. Let’s start with bringing back abovementioned all too much abandoned programming / development foundations and languages. Thoughts ..!?

Oh, and of course:

[Even this has so many sides all essential to present the whole; for no apparent reason in the Wiesbaden museum]

Iedereen wéét hoe abnormaal hinderlijk het achteruitrijalarm van de KIA Niro is, zeker voor omwonenden. [En iedereen wéét dat een Niro-chauffeur tegen een achteruit overredene kan zeggen ‘eigen schuld ik waarschuwde toch’ en dat dat dus een vol-slagen flauwekulredenering is en een wederrechtelijke bewuste poging de verantwoordelijkheid te ontkennen]
Niet iedereen weet dat het alarm (nu, hier) op de verpleegsterskamer vrij precies hetzelfde klinkt.

Mij is bekend dat de ‘bitch in the backseat’ die alle WarningWarning-alarmen doorgeeft van achter de stoel in F16s een vrouwenstem is omdat (het voor vrouwen niks uitmaakt, man of vrouw – ja er zijn al decennia vrouwelijke F16-vliegers) bij mannen is geconstateerd dat een (jonge-)vrouwenstem een overheersende attentieprikkel uit de hersenstam geeft om dit signaal vóór alle andere eens goed te checken.

Is het toeval of is het specifieke geluid zo gekozen dat het maximale attentiewaarde heeft voor toevallig aanwezigen?
Dit roept om onderzoek!

Inmiddels zijn KIA NL en fabrikant Ascom-voor-al-uw-ziekenhuisalarms aangeschreven over eventuele uitleg. Maar ondanks een zeer positieve reactie (2e) kan het spoor hier doodlopen. [Naschrift: Inderdaad, (1e) komt niet verder dan Toeval.]
Navraag bij de opleiding Audio Engineering bij de HKU loopt.

… Hold your horses; Ascom komt wél terug, en heeft: De (piezo)zoemer wordt (ook) door de meeste autofabrikanten gebruikt. De frequentie is inderdaad 2,7-4KHz (met 250ms intervallen) omdat dit voor de meeste mensen het beste hoorbaar is! [Dat wil ik dan nog wat preciezer hebben; mijn autosignalen klinken divers(er) en hoe&wat wat die betreft…]
En verwijst naar deze …! (towards the end)
Inderdaad, dat dus. Maar een ander signaal…

En de navraag bij Audio Engineering loopt nog.
Yes I need to know! Omdat het idee doorvertaalbaar is naar a. SOC/SIEM-omgevingen, b. struikeldraad-controls die behalve ‘gewone’ meter-standen de hele keten overzien en alleen bij de Echt Belangrijke dingen aanslaan om nader onderzoek door de keten te kunnen doen.

Ah, now I see: All the nice (and so utmostly necessary) work on Risk Management the Real Kind – Quantitative, driven top-down from business objectives down to tech control / parameter settings, all the way mixed with qualitative sense-making and sensibility checks –, COSO/CObIT/ISO2700x/CSF/…/…/… my keyboard is running out of ‘…’, will fail for a particular reason. A reason that goes (went) by the name of Von Moltke the Elder.

Particularly, this quote: No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.
Which demonstrates (well, not the quote or its meaning but practice demonstrates everywhere where ideas are put into practice ..!) that the plan is nothing. But planning is everything. But if one focuses on the planning – can you hear me, eager “PDCA” (not! the correct version is Shewhart) beavers? –, one doesn’t see:

• The bigger picture; one is drafting, and executing most often just somewhat, somehow, – an error in itself, that ‘somewhat’ logical-or somehow – a strategic plan. In an external environment that changes faster than a battlefield, relative to one’s own response;
• One finds oneself not in hierarchical command. No organisation can be run as absolutely reliably as an army in battle – errors and omissions happen everywhere and one’s own aren’t that reliably on one’s side, and to a degree that one doesn’t know which are that 50%, or which are correct and true. And all sorts of change unrelated to what one wants to achieve, also takes place. The internal environment is a mess, too;
• Too many are discussing things about which they know – in a Wisdom sense of know – too little. They’re touching the elephant, and even if some (collectively) have the whole picture, they cannot see inside. Meanwhile, some are just Trojan horseing around…
• This may be the leading cause of the need for Requisite Variety, as outlined in e.g., my post below (in Dutch so let’s see what G Translate can do). Which demands some internal variety or you’re toast. Overly regimented things don’t last, and your security controls are a bad case / good example of that. But at what point are top-down plans half-baked, and where is the Too Far limit ..?
• Boyd.
  Read the real work, then study what’s being made of it these (latter) days. That’s how you do “PDCA” … As in: ‘Agile’ – quod non, almost always exactly the opposite! – organisational operations. As in: If you think you’re Agile enough, you’re not going fast enough; quote from the ancient Chinese philosopher Emerson, Fittipaldi, the elder – yes, since this).

These five are not alike, I know, but yet, they do tie into a Gordian knot and still, they ‘collaborate’ against you.

There, you see why and how all plans re risk management and information security are so ideal, and reality isn’t. [Don’t start me on Idealism which again gains ground, even in the hardest-proving science of theoretical physics if it isn’t the bedrock foundation of that already.]
In the mean time, the operational battle, where every bullet counts, rages on. Don’t forget to patch everything not just the highest risk-scoring vulns. And chase operational-style best of breed standards, e.g., this, and others, when properly applied and with much risk-based scrapping from chapter(s) 1 onwards, not splatter-under-the-weight-of-bureaucracy ones with Der Totalen All Details Are Musts.

Hence, heed the quote!

In the mean time, here’s …:
Another kind and a better kind of particle accelerator; Ployez-Jacquemart, Ludes]

A blink of an eye ago, COBOL was the bombe.
Now, not so much anymore you’d say. Though many life-critical systems still rely on it. Like, core mil systems (not all that pertains to nat’l security is (still) in ADA, unfortunately), core banking, etc.

A real blink of an eye ago, I was reminded that there’s still Old People (over 25) that do code reviews on bug fixes in COBOL.
But wasn’t that problem solved a decade ago by transformation of respective systems into something more modern (if anything in IT is; once released, already replacements are on their way)..? Or was the stop gap solution of enterprise-bus’ing the whole thing to buy time, not followed up by a better back end?
No references to the best of these, being mine, please; that’s not to be touched on pain of protracted death but by a few.

Again, wouldn’t one want to use a cocktail? Of e.g., Expert Systems and a dose of ML in the mix, to do a. the above patching and testing, b. the reverse engineering, c. pacemakering the whole thing (like a couple of posts down below here); shaken, not stirred. The idea of CI/CD attaches itself to this, too, and may be expanded to elsewhere – but let’s first mvp this idea on, relatively simple since relatively highly structured, CO-Bowl.

I’ll take my meds now (as per that below pacemaker post; I haven’t any but you’ll get the drift), and leave you with:
[Mummelsee, Black Forest, but completely like e.g., Idaho, Wyoming et al. (here) including the smell, the road side tables, the atmosphere, the sounds (nature, people) as it was back in the Seventies… Ah so there’s this pic’s relevance-angle…]

Internal organisation (like, of organisations yes I’ll continue to use the UK s not the simpleton’s z), wehn done on a (success) case basis, will fail.
Since it is reverse engineering. Capturing only what with hindsight is top-down design as if there was only the design, then clean execution. Yes, with some leeway for unexpected developments but those are support-hypothesis-taken back into the fold.

As if organisations didn’t develop (and by definition will have to develop) from the word Go (start-ups) to accomodate the imminent environment, growing by adapting.

Never believe ‘gurus’ (Semmler comes to mind). If you follow someone else’s teachings, you will not be enlightened.

Yes one can conclude something from studying current and past organisations. Make it Deming, Drucker (and Boyd), then. That level. Still having Mintzberg’s models floating in my head; after all those years, they still come back to be(ing) applicable to even today’s footlight organisations (secmed and others) – doesn’t it look like they all fall back into the fold of the previously famous, now neglected models?

Engineerability does not exist. Not of organisations, so much less for societies as a whole. See below’s posts on pacemakers; those that act as if they can engineer organisations/societies, only demonstrate their sheer total lack of insight (stupidity) by not seeing the enormous complexity of (oh so many) people-that-live-in-the-world-and-only-partially-Venn-overlap-with-work working together towards keeping up the organisation as much as fits their own interest. Even nudging doesn’t work, and is a cross-over between gaslighting and brainwashing, anyway.

Now, to continue re- and re-re-studying Mintzberg and the others from half a century back, to see what we can learn from them not Dunning-Kruger n00bs that babble about the Old Ones’ irrelevance (quod non, the opposite!).

After this, for your viewing pleasure:
[Your ship is moored on anchor in the back, being too big/inflexible; we are the flex ones in the front, pleasure sailing along quite nicely. Off Porto]

Despite circumstances: This.