House of Eratosthenes

In the next few minutes, I’m going to go to work and start messing around with code that works with compressed images; the images are conceptually represented by pixels, and each pixel consists of channels. There is a channel for each of the primary colors, and then there is an alpha channel.

I don’t like mixing work with the blog, but I cannot stop thinking about the alpha channel where these liberals are involved. Lately. It’s like they’re missing it. See, what we use it for in computer graphics, is transparency. It represents a fractional number between 0.0 and 1.0, with 1.0 being opaqueness and 0.0 being complete transparency, as in, it’s invisible and you can’t see it. You might have noticed the Windows operating systems, post-XP, make a lot of use out of this with window frames and menus and icons and such; things, lately, have transparency. They have cool frosted effects, and if you look closely you’ll see they’ve got this Cheshire Cat fade-out-of-existence thing going on as you trace from the center of an icon out to the edges. Okay, that’s the alpha channel. Each pixel possesses this property of “how much of me is really here.”

If an application converts an image that contains some of this transparency, to a format that doesn’t support it, it’s pretty evident what the desired behavior should be: You prompt the user first, then you save what can be saved. When you go back the other way, of course, the new alpha for each pixel will have to be 1.0; it can’t be anything else. This is a perfect illustration of the way the liberal mind works.

Conservatives, by and large, seem to have the ability to preserve this “how much is really here” attribute with the ideas they carry around in their heads.

And liberals, by & large, don’t. They know exactly what the idea is, just as a color format that supports only red, green and blue knows exactly what each pixel’s red, green and blue are. But with transparency unsupported, every pixel has an alpha of 1.0. Every. Single. One.

As I remarked yesterday at Teach’s blog where he was reporting on the environmentally-friendly candy bar that costs twenty bucks…one of the activists behind it, began to discuss the wind-powered transportation methods which are apparently responsible for this consumer snack costing so much at the point-of-sale. Well, what came out was creepy, creepy, creepy…

The next step is to build a much larger sail-powered cargo ship, a 3,000 tonne EcoLiner equipped for container traffic and fully competitive with the oil guzzling competitors…We want to re-establish sailing ships as a natural alternative to an anti-ecological culture. We want to see a revival of the great age of sail, as a means of Fair transport for cargo around the Atlantic…

“We want to see.” The word “hope” would have carried a tacit acknowledgement that it might not happen, so the word “want” has to be used instead, since everything is absolutely certain, especially where Mother Earth’s future health picture is involved. We saw this in the legendary monster thread, as Severian was very capably summing up in a comment he committed a few minutes ago:

…I find that the most surefire “tell” that you’re dealing with a liberal (apart from the sanctimony, of course) is that they will not admit even the possibility of limits on human knowledge…
:
In fact, I’m trying to recall the last time I’ve heard a liberal say “I don’t know” about any matter of consequence. Ask ’em where the nearest post office is or the price of rice in China, and they’ll happily admit ignorance. But ask them what we should do about genocide in Darfur, or the regulation of the entire world economy, or the navy’s defensive doctrine on the Pacific rim, and all of a sudden they’ve got all the answers….

This is, from my observations, why the monster-thread became a monster-thread. For three weeks or so, as time permitted, some four or five of us took issue with the statements of the hybrid-group-warmist construct known as “Zachriel” — on the alpha channel. That is to say, with a few debatable exceptions, none of us really challenged any of the “primary colors” of the ideas…the red, the green, the blue. The point that came up again and again, was no, you don’t really know that. Through over four hundred comments, the plurality of persons represented under this account never once engaged this challenge directly. Never even demonstrated an understanding of the distinction. He/she/it/they just continued to re-recite the red, the green, the blue…repeating the idea…failing, or perhaps refusing, to even consider the “just how sure are we about this” aspect of it. The limits to human knowledge. The transparency factor.

Thomas Edison is quoted as saying “we don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.” That is, interestingly, and perhaps ironically, the kind of spirit that is required to make things work. You can’t do it until you develop a practical understanding of how other things work; you can’t do that until you develop some curiosity about it; and you can’t develop any curiosity about it if you think you already know everything.

Liberalism, today, is a 24-bit image format missing its alpha channel. It insists — correctly — that is has computed everything the right way, restoring RGB from a YUV representation, re-computing saturation of each primary color from the shading and tinting effects, used a lossy compression/decompression scheme verified to produce the desired result, used a peer-reviewed encryption algorithm, run a checksum to prove the restored results are good, et cetera, et cetera. But knows nothing about what it doesn’t know, because at the very first step, the alpha channel was stripped out and there’s no transparency, read that as residual uncertainty, information about anything. This is most noticeable when they talk about the environment, and what is about to happen to us. They talk about “science” but all too often have absolutely nothing to say about probability. Every little thing that might happen, is gonna happen.

Of course, if and when it doesn’t happen, in another day or two that will all be forgotten and it will be time for yet another round of predictions…visions…want-to-see-happens…24-bit pixels missing their transparency channels, “known” as absolute certainties.

Well, I know how to get a Tea Party guy to talk exactly the same way: When you stop talking about climate change, and move the discussion to the public debt growing out of control. But since I don’t see anybody else lining up to give the U.S. Treasury any unexpected Christmas presents like the five dollar bill Grandma used to send you…ya know what? That side of it seems fair, to me. Economics, on some level, works that way. Climate doesn’t.

House of Eratosthenes: That is to say, with a few debatable exceptions, none of us really challenged any of the “primary colors” of the ideas…the red, the green, the blue. The point that came up again and again, was no, you don’t really know that. Through over four hundred comments, the plurality of persons represented under this account never once engaged this challenge directly.

That is incorrect. Any scientific measurement or conclusion can be wrong, either in part or in whole. The question is what constitutes reasonable scientific support. Certainly, “the Earth moves” is one such scientific claim with reasonable scientific support.

There is substantial scientific evidence that the surface and troposphere have warmed while the stratosphere has cooled over the last half century, substantial meaning multiple measurements by multiple scientists with multiple methodologies having confirmed the trend.
- Zachriel | 05/15/2012 @ 10:44
House of Eratosthenes: Thomas Edison is quoted as saying “we don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.”

Quite so. And science (hypothetico-deduction) is how we can probe into the unknown to reach reasonable conclusions despite being vastly ignorant of most everything.
- Zachriel | 05/15/2012 @ 10:48
That is incorrect. Any scientific measurement…

M’kay, if you say so.

You’re sure, right?
- mkfreeberg | 05/15/2012 @ 11:32
That is incorrect. Any scientific measurement or conclusion can be wrong, either something or other, blah blah blah, some other damn thing…

Good freakin’ golly. Are you *still* here? 400 comments and you STILL think you’re going to convince any of Morgan’s readers that troposphere warming w/ stratosphere cooling is the *signature* of man-caused global warming?

What, are you scanning the threads now to see if you’re mentioned? What an ego you must have.
- cylarz | 05/15/2012 @ 13:57
Recommended reading; Henderson, the Rain King, by Saul Bellow.

“I want.”

It also indicates something you lack, doesn’t it?

It’s something, you don’t have.
.
- TMI | 05/17/2012 @ 08:43
[…] Like Severian said, […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 02/03/2013 @ 13:29

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Missing Their Alpha ChannelTuesday, May 15th, 2012

Missing Their Alpha Channel
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012