Author Archives: Romeo

About Romeo

Born in Romania in the Botosani district (Romanian: Judet) sometimes between 1960 and 1970. Immigrated to Canada in 2001. Computers and more precise software for application and database servers as well as automation (micro electronics) is the way I make a living. Working for IBM Canada Ltd since 2010 to present

Real Fact

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I hope this article will give you the power to make the first step out of the continuous confusion we all live on the internet and in our lives by showing you what factual information is and how we can get to it with the help of computers.

RealFact

Reading time: essentials 10 minutes; ~30 minutes reading to 1 hour on collateral and understanding

Articles related to this article:
Fact Fiction and The Truth
Fact Fiction and BS

You’ll find a precise definition of the notion of Fact and some of the technologies we can use to produce them. I’m using the term “Real Fact” to distinguish between the current notion of Fact as you can find in a dictionary and the notion I’m defining in this article. Though they are mostly the same as our general idea of Fact, they differ fundamentally in how are defined and created. In this article, each time (other than this text block) ‘Fact’ is the same as ‘Real Fact’.

WARNING! The technology and applications necessary to make this available to everyone is not yet built. The components (like Lego pieces) exist and are already in use but are not put together in the right way. This article aims to show you what can be done so that you’ll know what to look for and ask the industry to build for you. Yes if there is profit to be made the industry will build it. You simply need to show you want to pay for it.

In the context of this article, and hopefully in general if most of us will agree, the definition of factual information or simply ‘Fact‘ is as follows:

A fact is any packet of information that a receiver, human or machine, can inquiry and verify the following additional information components also called meta-information (or metadata).
The information packet and its associated meta-information represent a factual packet of information and they must be used together at all times.

The factual meta-information

  1. The complete description of the method (process, algorithms) used to produce the substantive information packet by measuring it directly from the real world
  2. The proof that the information and metadata was not changed or tampered with
    This is,a piece of information used as a verifiable proof of the measured information integrity against any type of tampering or change in both its temporal (packet chain integrity) and a-temporal structure by any individual or machine at any moment in the future
  3. The spatio-directional-temporal coordinates of the sensor device producing the information packets
  4. The digital identity of the sensor that produced the information
    (not the owner, only the device)

The above definition enables the creation of very precise (mathematical level) models, algorithms, and devices able to produce factual information validated and trusted by both individuals and groups of individuals. The main condition (both important and challenging) is to ensure that the individuals receiving the factual information understand how was produced and protected in order to establish its level of trust. This requires training and it is the future notion of “literacy”.

Level of Trust for information

# LevelMeasurement MethodMeasurement IntegrityData Integrity
0unknownunverifiableunverifiable
1knownunverifiableunverifiable
2unknownverifiableunverifiable
3knownverifiableunverifiable
4unknownunverifiableverifiable
5knownunverifiableverifiable
6unknownverifiableverifiable
7knownverifiableverifiable
Trust levels for information, only the level 7 is considered factual

Social Penetration Level

  1. Individual
    When the fact-metadata is accessible and can be verified by a single individual usually the owner of the sensorial system (example: the pictures and video on your own phone)
  2. Group
    When the fact-metadata is accessible and can be verified by all members of a group (human or machines). This include also the group’s members participation in creating data integrity metadata (example: sharing pictures and data from your phone in a Face-Book group)
  3. Global
    When the fact-metadata is accessible and can be verified by anyone (public information). The anonymous public swarm will also provide redundant data integrity metadata (example: tweeting your pictures or video from your phone to the public)

A proposed symbolic representation of information trust and penetration levels

Based on the Trust level and social penetration level we can classify information and use a short notation such as ‘I’ (information) followed by one digit as its trust level then followed by the social penetration level as one digit.

For example, I01 is basically, with some exception, all the information one individual posse today. an I7x would be any factual information packet and in this case, we can simply use ‘F’+its social penetration level so F1 will be any factual information an individual has. So finally the F3 information piece can be simply called ‘Fact‘.

Some of the existing technologies that when combined can be used to produce factual information (though some are optional or interchangeable)

  1. HSM – or Hardware Security Module
  2. Enhanced security (by HSM) Digital Sensors
  3. Cryptography (symmetrical and public key cryptography)
  4. Trusted Digital Timestamp
  5. Block-Chain
  6. Classic digital machines (computers, smartphones,dedicated systems)
  7. Digital Crowd Anonymous Witnesses (TBD)

Questions you will need to ask and get answer to in order verify if a piece of information is factual or not

  1. Do I know how this information was produced (measurement method)?
  2. Can I verify if the measurement method was accurately followed?
  3. What is the error margin of the measurement process (calibration)?
  4. How do I verify if the information produced by the sensor is what I received?
    (was it changed?)

Let’s get practical

A combination of the technologies listed above can be used to produce both trusted sensor systems as well as applications/libraries that a receiver can use to classify the information trust level. Basically to obtain an Fx (string representation of the information trust level).

Example 1 Social media: A smartphone able to produce factual information (video for example) that you can upload on YouTube and anyone else can verify its trust level. More, if the image or video was edited or filtered you should be able to ask the computer to show you what parts (pixels, etc) of the picture or video are factual and the ones transformed and be able to obtain the original raw sensed information.

Example 2 news: You read an article or watch a video on the net or TV, if this technology is available you should be able to ask the computer to tell you what is factual and what is not.

Factual implementation difficulty levels depends on their social penetration level

F1 – or “Personal Facts” is the entry level and most accessible

The F1 fact level is information that you are in full control of how you sense it (measure/capture) and ensure its integrity. You may ask yourself why should you protect your own data? From whom? Well, other people may have access to your data directly (you trust them) and change it by mistake or with malicious intent or your machines can break or bugs in your code act on and change your data. Intruders can also change pictures, video,s etc files you own. How can you be sure this did not happen for data you did not access for months or years?

The difference between F1 and the other levels is only in how large is the group that needs to have a shared trust in that data is and for F1 it is only you. Obviously, once you try to share your info with others you’ll need an F2 or F3 fact level so the others can also trust it.

The good part with F1 is that if you know enough about computers and programming you can create your F1 level information almost immediately. However, without an HSM to protect the sensing process, you’ll never be able to elevate the level of that information to an F2 or F3 level.

F2 – or closed group factual information — Group relative facts

F2 level will be used mostly by businesses that are big enough to afford to create their own sensing platforms with HSM-protected sensors and data integrity ensured by rules accepted by that group. The issue with F2 is that without full transparency and verification in how the sensors are built and data integrity is ensured F2 can’t be upgraded to F3 (full factual).

F3 – or ‘full factual’/’public fact’ information

F3 is the most challenging type of factual information though in time with global collaboration will be possible to create. To create F3 we need full open-source sensors design and codding and open, fully automated (full hands-off) build process that can be verified by the public at large (everyone on Earth). Additionally, anonymous crowd-based and redundant processes must be used for data validation. Machines participating in the “witnessing” process must also be built in the same open transparent way as the sensors.

You can probably call this the fishbowl strategy. We can only get out of our current confusion by helping each other.

The special case of news and established media and arts

The written word always had a “weight” in trust compared to the “spoken” word. Before Gutenberg built and used its first presses to lower the cost of producing copies of information on paper, writing a book was a very expensive and highly custom and artistic endeavor. Since the support of the information (the book) was so expensive, strong due diligence was done in verifying the information put in those books.

The price of the books also created an “investment/sunk cost bias” in both scribes and owners of the books leading to higher levels of trust. One may say that those books can be trusted better than today’s information which is mainly effortless to produce and disseminate. I would caution you to check on that trust. Check the old and expensive books that say Earth is flat and let me know if you still trust them without a hitch. The problem is that due to all those biases the old books were in fact a higher risk to disseminate falsehood exactly because most people had no intention to check their content.

Consequences? Well, just look at the “Witch hunts” that hurt and destroyed so many innocent lives in our past. They were all fueled by a few of those expensive books that no one dared to oppose until the higher-ups started to get hurt.

So, if the price of the book is not a guarantee of its “factuality”, what can we expect of the current cheap, click-driven article writing? Well, you can check for yourself at any time out there on the “open wild” net.

By the way, this does not mean all news out there is unreliable or fake, it simply means that you have no real way to verify if a piece of information is factual or not. It is just darn hard to do it and that means that for regular people it is impossible to tell fact from non-fact.

The proposal in this article can rebuild the trust and raise it to levels never found before once you will be able to verify every word, sentence, image, or video in the same effortless way you can produce your own factual information.

This can truly change from the ground up the news business battered currently by confusion among readers. In this business model news companies will not produce the news themselves but simply work as hubs for aggregation, analytics, and interpretation of factual event streams produced by sensors owned by all people on Earth. At that point, it may even be a “conflict of interest” for news businesses to produce their own input data, a huge difference from how they currently work.

On the other hand, arts and fiction storytelling can thrive like never before because the readers will be able to verify what is art and fiction in any end product. The artist or writer can be free of BS dissemination once the recipients of their work will be able to tell what is fact and what is imagination.

Science

In the human quest for a better life, the knowledge about how this reality really works is one of the main pillars holding us from slipping into the dark abyss of nothingness. Science is the process of finding the elusive causal relationships we can trust from the pile of correlation-driven events the reality throws at us.

It is a tricky and difficult process that uses imagination (fiction) to try to find the causality then pin it down with models backed by measurements. The measurements done in scientific experiments differ from the non-scientific ones by the way scientists keep a clear description of the measurement methods and by peer review other scientists can validate the integrity of the method of measurement and the data. In a few words, scientists are aiming to produce factual information.

Scientists can benefit from being able to produce factual information with ease, as they will not need to fight to prove that their experimental information is factual. Peer reviews and experiment reproduction still need to be done however since the initial measurement method is clearly defined it makes it easier for more people to review or retry various experiments.

Science experiments can cost billions of dollars if we are talking about CERN-like setups or no cost at all if the test is to check the theory that a slice of bread falls more frequently on the buttered side. They all can benefit from this method and technology of factual sensorial devices.

DNA sequencing healthcare and pandemics

Just imagine how much better our entire civilization would have responded to the #COVID19 pandemic or any other pandemics if each of us would be able to record facts about ourselves and securely and anonymously share this info with everyone else. The pandemic would have been quashed in weeks if not days and so many lives would have been saved and basically, none of the businesses would have been impacted.

Since we are talking about digital sensors and pandemics please take a look at the Nanoporetech technology as it holds the key for a completely new way to deal with microscopic life such as viruses and bacteria. Their sensors are not yet backed by HSMs and do not produce factual DNA data streams (as described in this article) but they can in the future.

When that will be possible and the cost of a scan will drop to less than a lunch we will be able to use it to keep an eye to the micro-world at a daily basis without lifting a finger. This means that the notion of healthcare will be forever changed. The difference between what we have now and that potential future is same or more than between the current healthcare and the one Galileo had on his time.

The justice system, the law and law enforcement

If the scientific method is fully dependent on factual information the Justice Systems should see the factual information as a must-have if innocents are to be spared from wrong charges and convictions.

Since smartphones are in almost everyone’s pocket we witnessed so many episodes when the people we pay to keep us safe forgot completely what their mandate was and broke their oaths toward society by unnecessarily hurting or even killing people they swear to keep safe.

In this domain, factual information is as important as oxygen for life. All the mojo of any trial is to reveal the facts first then based on them and only on them make decisions that are aimed to fix what was broken. Yet now we know that since facts are scarce or even nonexistent the Justice System is unable to get it right in too many cases.

When the Justice Systems (even the democratic ones) make mistakes and punish the innocents there is a double whammy, we hurt people that are innocent and prove to the criminals they can get away with it and continue to do what they did before.

I hope you can see how factual information produced as described in this article can help improve the inner workings of any Justice system and help the innocents.

Measurements and Information
(WARNING! this is just hypothetical)

When talking about factual information we also need to understand the information that is not factual. One example is the information that can’t be precisely measured and we call imagination. What is imagination? How does it relate to factual information?

Though the following hypothesis its just that a hypothesis it can be used to define the factual (real) information or the domain of extra-factual or imagination.

When we the people started to dig down in the domain of microcosm we found something that suggests that there are things we call real, that we can “feel” and measure (the feeling is a form of measuring) and something else that exists before measuring process that can’t be called “real”. We modeled these behaviors under a mathematical framework called Quantum Mechanics (QM).

For me personally, the space-of-states outside of “the real” are part of an entity “larger” than the real (or realized) space-of-states (our universe) from where the real states are created via a process we call “measurement”. I’ve labeled this Extra Outer Universe the “Exoverse”.

Without going into more detail in this article (more later) I hypothesize the existence of an additional field to the fields already postulated by the quantum field theory that could be called “consciousness”. It is (in my opinion) the one responsible for “exploring” the Exoverse by the same process we taped-in in our Quantum Computers, the superposition. The process of creating real states from potential states is a phenomenon our selves perceive as time.

The superposition is used (by the consciousness) to explore a chunk of the Exoverse testing various outcomes in many possible “futures” and creating real states once this process is done. This process also generates what we call time. I’m labeling this explored domain inside of Exoverse, the “Extraverse” and I believe it is an integral part of the process we perceive as “imagination”.

In this context, the Universal states are all connected in a DAG (Direct Acyclic Graph), and the Extraverse is made of a very large (but finite) number of loops (superposition internal behavior).

Hypothesis on how our reality is created at universal level

Based on the diagram above and this hypothetical structure of the Exoverse we can clearly define the Real (measurable and factual) from Imaginary (fictional, non-measurable) domains.

Obviously, people can communicate via speaking, writing, and art the information present in their minds describing states that do not exist in our reality and the act of communication itself can be considered as factual as it can be measured.

This issue can lead to confusion as one can “wrap” an imaginary piece of information in a factual “shell” and present it as a fact. That is why we need the method by which the measurement was done to be known and verifiable.

Just a reminder that the notion of BS in this context is “a mix of factual and imaginary information presented as a fact” (See Fact Fiction and BS article). I also find this book “Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World” an interesting work focused on the problem of BS.

Original article validation: here
Current article validation: here

End Police Brutality – Black Lives Matter

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I hear you, I see you, I fell for you! Yes Black Lives Matter!

If you are a police officer and your priorities are not in this order:

  1. Safeguard life
  2. Teach and enforce the law
  3. Your own wellness

then you need to find a different job!
Imagine a soldier going to battle and putting his life first above of his duty.

Reverse this values and the police becomes difficult to be distinguished from a gang, it becomes the reverse of what we all think it should be. No policeman can be proud and be respected with a reversed system of values. I have faith and pray that most officers have it right

We need to stop looking at policing as “normal jobs” because no normal employee has the right to kill people (basically any of its customers and employers). Policing is an essential occupation, is so different from any other human activity that we have to see it as it is, Special!

I found this TVO documentary called “Coppers”, revealing about what is wrong with the current system and how it ends up hurting people both citizens and police officers.

I also do not understand the role of police unions. In general unions fight for the rights of their members against greedy employers and/or dangerous work environments. The problem is that we the citizens are the employer of the police services. In this case unions fight against us and put the lives of the officers above the people they should protect. It basically makes the police unions antisocial. Maybe a better solution would be to declare police as essential service and have a hard talk about their pay and work safety. Clearly we want to pay our officers well and yet tied to the median wage of the people they serve and keep them as safe as possible and yet not at the expense of citizen’s safety.

The above requirements may be very difficult to obtain without employing advanced technology we now posses.

We have now the technology to finally solve this problem in a way that can be fair and safe for everyone. By combining the new AI capabilities, 5G and/or Starlink (or equivalent but publicly controlled) systems, drones and robotics we can rethink and reshape the notion of safety and policing in a potential #SelfReliant society.

I’m not talking about autonomous drones and robots that can roam free and take decisions of their own. That would be very very wrong and scary! I’m talking about human controlled technology where members of the public and law experts are together as a group remote controlling the technology in order to safeguard life, teach law and keep the peace.

We need to extract the police officers from interacting directly with humans so we can keep them safe and cool minds can prevail. Additionally any mission involving robots and automation MUST also combine civilian groups monitoring every mission where machines are controlled by officers. This is when officers can be helped by society avoid misconduct at any level.

The semi automated remote presence machines can also take the tedious work away from humans and allow them to analyze the big picture social wellness and be proud of the work they do.

Some YouTube videos exemplifying the technologies I’m pointing to, some are sales pitches for the products but please look beyond that, just at the current capabilities and imagine future capabilities.

Fast Pandemic Control?

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Is there a strategy we can employ in the future to control a pandemic? And what can help you as an individual to live as close to normal as possible during a pandemic? This article highlights some of the actions we need to take now so that in the future we will be able to get trough a pandemic faster(as fast as 2 weeks) and with less disruption to our lives.

The minimum time of isolation in a pandemic is equal to the maximum time of incubation plus convalescence, that is the time between when you got infected and when you are healed by your immune system.

This short time can be achieved if and only if we can achieve simultaneous full isolation of all people on Earth. Before you deem it impossible please keep reading.

Since for all viruses we know this time is ~14 days, then if once detected for the first time, ALL people on Earth go in complete isolation then we can destroy the virus in one single sweep by simply denying the pathogen the ability to reproduce. In this article I’m analyzing this idea and what we need to realize it.

The New Corona Virus pandemic started around November 2019 and is tagged all over the web with tags like #COVID, #COVID19, #COVID-19, #CoronaVirus etc. All this mess is created by a sub-micron size biological entity we call viruses. The thing is so small that it can’t be seen on a regular microscope using visible light no matter how much magnification we try.This is due to visible light’s wavelength that is from 380nm(blue) to 780nm(red) whereas a virus size is is somewhere between 30 to 220nm, way smaller than the visible wavelengths. This means that the visible light simply “goes around” them. To “see” viruses we need electron microscopes and we get pictures like the ones in the Wikipedia article about viruses.

The fact a virus is so small it means that (for now) only expensive laboratory equipment can image a virus particle. The internet is now full of images of viruses, just type “virus” in a Google search(or other search engines, Yes! there are other search engines out there!) and select the “images” class of results and your screen will be flood with images. At the same time we also have a lot of created (by artists) and digitally edited images showing also viruses. It is not hard for some of us to get confused and ask what is real and what not.

Though I can’t help you remove your confusion by simply saying “believe me” I can only tell you that If fully believe is that viruses are as real as you and me and you can learn how to protect yourself against them.

Please remember though that only a small fraction of viruses and bacteria are dangerous, bacteria are part of the great chain of life on Earth (and in your own body) and viruses can be used to fight pathogens, cancer and other illnesses.

So what do we need to do to protect ourselves?

The answer to that question is not singular, three different things must happen at different times so that you will be protected against a pathogen (virus or bacteria) destructive actions.

  1. Information – early detection by any human being
    standard, personal, fully automated, pathogen new DNA/RNA detection (such as the one Nanopore Tech) is providing and global automated notification system (a many-to-many factual approach)
  2. Avoidance via isolation – using personal full isolation PPE (personal protection equipment)
    this is an enclosure with the ability to allow its inhabitant to live in full physical isolation where all material exchange is fully controlled
    This simply means to deny the virus transmission form person to person
  3. Immunity – train your body to identify the virus and produce the necessary substances that will destroy the virus once it enters your body

When all those three abilities are mastered by any human out there then we should be able to control the spread of basically any pathogen and deny the existence of pandemics of any nature (natural mutations, genetics mishaps, bio terrorism?) in the future.

The basic scenario in such a future would go like this. Everyday at any time of your choosing but probably best as part of the ritual we all (should) do before going to sleep and brush our teeth (oral hygiene) the device we use for it will sample our oral microbial and viral profile by scanning the DNA/RNA profile of all micro-life in the sample store it in a personal database that compares it to the one sampled the day before.

If any new genome is detected then that information is immediately shared with ALL people on earth. The DNA/RNA information is then used be everyone as a group to decide if it poses a threat. This decision can take some time as not all new mutated viral or bacterial genetic material is dangerous but we should be able to track all its changes in humans or borrowed for environment (as in animal to human transmission).

Once the new genome is decided as dangerous, everyone goes in self isolation. Since the pathogen’s ability to be transmitted is fully denied we can expect that the viral material will be fully destroyed by the natural immune responses.

The decision of to declare a genome as dangerous is made as a group in a many-to-many communication mode by using well defined commonly accepted protocols (global legal system?). From all requirements in this paper this will definitely test us the most. It will not be easy, but I believe and hope that for our own good we will be able to come together on this one.

During the isolation, all people continue to fully communicate with each other and continue to do what they were doing before but in remote mode. During the isolation, the tests continue as they did before in order to detect when the pathogen was destroyed (can’t be detected anymore).

At the same time (in isolation) each person’s spare computation power and bio test abilities are used to search for a vaccines or solution to the problem. This is important as to search fast for a solution a highly parallel process is required in order to test fast most possible solutions.

Once again we can only succeed by working together!

Once the pathogen is destroyed a common decision (many-to-many mode) is made and the isolation can end. The maximum time spent in isolation should not be longer than the one pathogen cycle (infection to convalescence) if we can work all as one.

During the isolation some people will need help as their body will be fighting the pathogen, the isolation system must include automated and remote control human care.

The bits and pieces of the technology and knowledge to achieve this type of solution are present.

We have the internet for implementing a many-to-many communication system.

We know how to read and decode genomes but the devices needed to do that are not yet small enough and cheap enough so every person would own one. Additionally all information gathered must be gathered by using a factual enabled sensor devices.

This is where more effort needs to be done to bring this ability to everyone. To do so microelectronic technologies and biologic tech needs to come together. This is doable we need to work on it.

We know how to create full containment enclosures, we have the technology to automate all human care we just need to put them together to achieve the ability to self isolate with zero loss of abilities to control out environment and help other people of living things by using remote presence.

If this sounds like Sci-Fi then you need to know that it is not, we can do this if we work together and the benefits of doing so are enormous for the future.

This article will be edited in the future to add more information, info-graphics etc. for now its just the idea the bare bone text.

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2019 Resolutions

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New year resolutions, things made to be broken, or maybe this time, this one time, we (I) may succeed in making progress on what really matters now.

I wish everyone reading this article a lot of happiness in 2019 and hope you’ll check to see if the resolutions I’m sharing here make sense to you and your beloved ones. I believe they can make or break our future our children and the generations to come, so we should probably not ignore them.

So what are those few things which really matters to everyone?

Number one: The ability to distinguish Fact (Real) from Fiction and understand the notion of Truth Hash-tag: #ReFiT or #FaFiT UUID: ab3fb2d4-9cfa-4f72-9a5b-bebd72b0c65e

Second: Understand how to use Computers Automation and AI to help yourself as an individual to thrive and avoid the dangers those technologies pose. Tho hash-tags: #SelfReliant(UUID91d101ea-d250-4298-9177-20880e1dded6) and #informageddon(UUID: b17ea217-e20c-4202-bb0e-954803cd2176)

#ReFiT / #FaFiT

Our life and life quality depends on how accurate our inner model of reality built by our minds since we are born reflects the actual “hard” “cold” reality. In my opinion there is nothing more important than our ability as individuals to get our inner reality model in sync with the actual common reality out there.

I have wrote two articles describing the notion of Fact Fiction and Truth (links bellow), in 2019 I would like to get a step closer to giving everyone who reads my articles a clear guide on how to produce and verify factual information by using existing technology and seek future more reliable ways to produce it.

Fact Fiction and BS (describing the notion of Fact and Fiction and the danger of consuming a mix of fact and fiction thinking is fact, a mix I call BS).

Fact Fiction and the Truth (describe the notions of Truth and Fact and how we confuse them and why it is almost impossible to detect a lie)

#SelfReliant & #informageddon

Automation is inevitable, AI is inevitable, if you think you can escape it you are fooling yourself. So, if you can’t beat them join them. However, as with any new technology there are some avoidable pitfalls.The computers and AI have some very dangerous and insidious ones. Knowing them is (in some cases) literally a life and death situation. More, it is about our future as free people or as disposable (irrelevant) salves.

There are two distinct ways this can go down.

First path is if we will try to keep the current social organization unchanged and try to graft automation and AI on it. In my opinion this is guaranteed to lead to #informageddon and irrelevant slavery, a future 99% of us will hate.

The second path (or social model) is the one where the technology of automation computers and AI are used mainly to enhance each individual in order to produce a #SelfReliant entity using a symbiosis between human and machine (carbon+silicon). Those entities will be capable of thriving in (almost) any conditions without required help from anyone else.

The society (almost as we know it) can then be rebuilt from free standing, self reliant, entities, a society which will be orders of magnitude more powerful and resilient than the current one, A society which can exists for millions or maybe billions of years. This model has the potential to lead to a social organization close to the one depicted in the SI-FI series StarTreck or even more advanced (excluding warp drives and teleportation for now) and is probably the real future incarnation of the current American-Dream.

In 2018 I’ve created and launched a Global Challenge hosted on https://timenet-systems.com in 2019 I wish to start a first iteration solution design for this challenge.

That is all!

Please live any comments via Twitter (use the Twitter button in the WordPress page).

Thank you very much for your support and feedback, have a wonderful 2019!

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WordPress defect breaking direct links to articles (fixed now)

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Just realized that my WordPress seem to break the direct (perma) links to articles. Until I figure it out and fix it please scroll down from the main page (this page) to get to the article you are looking for).

+30 min, OK, I fixed the issue, it was (my guess) linked to my change in .htaccess to force SSL to the site. I had to revert the change as it probably interfered with WordPress URL rewrite rules and I’ll need to review everything to make the SSL redirect compatible with WordPress redirects.

So, at the moment please type https://romeolupascu.net/… instead of http://romeolupascu.net/, both SSL and non SSL URLs will work at the moment. However without SSL what you see may be intercepted by a “man-in-the-middle” type of attack on you.

Confusion * US Senate and Supreme Court Appointments

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Confusion seem to be the right word to describe what’s going on these days in the US Senate. I think that most people got so tightly pushed in their own corners that they forgot to check the big picture of why this is done and what are the consequences on long term.

I’m  a Canadian so you may think “why do you care”, well because I work daily with US colleagues and because US used to be “The shiny city on the hill”. These days though it seem the lights in the city tends to flicker as before they would fade away forever. From where I live that affects me too even if as a non US citizen I have o way (other than this blog) to influence anything.

Why Confusion?

The first type of confusion is on the notion of Truth and Fact, second we seem to be convinced that people can’t change, “once a criminal, always a criminal” there is no redemption out there and last but not least not being able to distinguish between “the letter” and “the spirit” of the law.

Another very dangerous trend I see in the US senate when appointing supreme court judges these days is the obvious biased way of selection. The senators does not seem to look for judges which have none or minimal bias from political perspective but exactly the contrary. This means both social halves (left and right) are looking to create and use a biased justice system hoping it will force their own cause. This means one side wants to use the justice system to force the other side to live their lives they way the other side feels is right. Unfortunately this bias goes against one fundamental and universal principle of this reality and that is diversity. I’m afraid the universe will not take lightly on entities trying to break or circumvent its basic rules. Usually when a universal rule is circumvented there is a price to pay and the payment is always due, tough it is not necessary paid by the people who did the did but by their successors.

If we take in account the above ideas and apply them to the current vote for appointing judge Kavanaugh one can realize that both side’s arguments are mostly pointless. Even if it can be decided factually that the unfortunate event which hurt and turned lives upside down for both the judge and his accusers what we need to know is how will Judge Kavanaugh will rule in matters of fundamental importance in the society. None of the events which happened when he was a child and a teenager should matter now if we as a people can understand and apply the well known phrase “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” or if we believe in redemption. Personally I think that a society which do not believe in redemption will not be able to survive for long in this universe.

I waited and hopped that Judge Kavanaugh would have testified in the US senate by saying something equivalent to this: “I do not have a memory of the event professor Ford has. I do not believe she lies. I call for all people who can help this case to be solved to come forward. If professor’s Ford memory is factual then I will apologize for the trauma I’ve accidentally created.” In less than 5 minutes all would have been over and Judge Kavanaugh would (in my opinion) been part of the supreme court today with his head up.

Unfortunately this is now what I’ve seen and heard. The way the judge Kavanaugh approached this issue is a testimony of how we expect he would approach any issue of crucial importance for people’s freedoms. He did not seem to allow for any chance that his memory to be faulty and this is an issue when it comes form a person with his experience. He also did not show empathy for professor’s Ford memory and situation. He said his Daughter prayed for professor Ford but that did not seem tome come form him and unfortunately his Daughter will not sit on the supreme court. The last, but not least, the judge seemed vengeful rather than understanding, something that if true (vengeance) should make all your hair raise on your body, as such a person will be able to influence decisions on how justice will treat you in the future.

I do not doubt that judge Kavanaugh is a good person and a good judge and I have no way to tell if what he is accused of is true or not. However I think the universe (or GOD) gave him a test in this nomination and to my current opinion he failed it for the reasons I’ve explained above. I do not think that based on his last audition on the US senate he still qualifies for a sit in the US supreme court.

So, you can see why I say Confusion is the best word to describe the state of this appointment process. In my opinion no FBI investigation will bring any information more important than the one the judge provided himself to the senate.

Unfortunately we seem to be also blind not only confused, or maybe the blindness comes from the confusion, who knows. I predict that there is a high probability that judge Kavanaugh will be in the supreme court. I hope judge Kavanaugh will overcome all this unfortunate events, will learn from it and become the person we all hope he will be.

I believe it is possible, I believe in redemption, I believe in all my human (and not human) brothers and sisters, I believe we as humans are here to stay.

“Live long an prosper!”

PS: In case you wonder about “(and not human) brothers and sisters” would mean remember that if you go back in time, based on scientific proof of evolution we all share the genes of same parents, so we are truly all brothers and sisters. If you don’t believe in science and evolution then based on sacred books the same is true!

Fact and Truth & the fascinating case of Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Professor Christine Blasey

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I watched like many others the US senate hearings of Professor Christine Blasey Ford and judge Brett Kavanaugh. Is it possible that they are both telling the truth and will pass with full colors any lie detector test?

I’m not a US citizen, so I have no interest in left or right but this case seem to be the best example of people confusing the notions of fact and truth.

I believe judge Brett Kavanaugh tell the truth and so Professor Ford even if there is one and only one fact which none of us will ever be able to know.

If you read my article Fact, Fiction and the Truth  then you’ll see that for a fact (real event) there can be different recollections for each mind witnessing the fact. Each person can have different memories which in time will drift apart or be deleted from one’s memory. So, there is one fact and multiple truths. The notion of “the truth” is meaningless in a group of people.

All the people I’ve seen, on both senate floor as fell as the new channels, were talking about truth as being interchangeable with fact. This confusion can lead to dangerous situations.

On CNN Wulf Biltzer said that if both Kavanaugh and Ford have given contradictory depositions under oath it means one of them lied and should be investigated and punished. That is true if and only if we can demonstrate that someone lied. In my opinion (and other people smarter than me) this is not possible beyond doubt. (what really ‘reasonable’ means in the classic expression? where do we draw the line for reasonable?)

The worse thing though is that we “the people” should be able to behave like civilized people and not make the life hell for two people who most likely tell their own truth. It is completely unacceptable to attack and issue threats to people just because we decided they are layers when in fact is basically impossible to know when someone lies.

I hope judge Kavanaugh and other members of the justice system will think and work harder to distinguish between Fact Truth and Fiction to avoid horrible injustice by justice mistakes…