֎ Politico – Cars are capable of amassing data on nearly every aspect of a drive, from road conditions to whether or not you’ve gained weight since the last time you sat in the driver’s seat. If you connect your phone to the car’s Bluetooth system, it’s also capable of knowing your contacts.

And while most of the data that cars collect is about the vehicle itself, like the engine temperature or the tire pressure, there’s a growing market for more personal driver data, such as the driver’s name and location, driven by industries like insurance, marketing and car repairs.

Where are mariner’s ponies when he needs them? As far as he is concerned, his 2002 Silverado just went up in value.

– – – –

We may think we’re smart, maybe . . . But we certainly aren’t educated.

Mariner’s wife found this British test given to 11-year-olds for acceptance to higher education schools. Having read the test, one wonders what school children do all day in today’s schools.

֎ As a service to Spectator [magazine] readers who still have any doubts about the decline in educational standards, we are printing these exam papers taken by 11-year-olds applying for places to King Edward’s School in Birmingham in 1898.

ENGLISH GRAMMAR

1. Write out in your best handwriting:-

‘O Mary, go and call the cattle home,

And call the cattle home,

And call the cattle home,

Across the sands o’ Dee.’

The western wind was wild and dank with foam,

And all alone went she.

The western tide crept up along the sand,

And o’er and o’er the sand,

And round and round the sand,

As far as eye could see.

The rolling mist came down and hid the land –

And never home came she.

2. Parse fully ‘And call the cattle home.’
3. Explain the meaning of o’ Dee, dank with foam, western tide, round and round the sand, the rolling mist.
4. Write out separately the simple sentences in the last two lines of the above passage and analyse them.
5. Write out what you consider to be the meaning of the above passage.

GEOGRAPHY

1. On the outline map provided, mark the position of Carlisle, Canterbury, Plymouth, Hull, Gloucester, Swansea, Southampton, Worcester, Leeds, Leicester and Norwich; Morecambe Bay, The Wash, Solent, Menai Straits and Lyme Bay; St Bees Head, The Naze, Lizard Point; the rivers Trent and Severn; Whernside, the North Downs, and Plinlimmon; and state on a separate paper what the towns named above are noted for.
2. Where are silver, platinum, tin, wool, wheat, palm oil, furs and cacao got from?
3. Name the conditions upon which the climate of a country depends, and explain the reason of any one of them.
4. Name the British possessions in America with the chief town in each. Which is the most important?
5. Where are Omdurman, Wai-Hei-Wai, Crete, Santiago, and West Key, and what are they noted for?

LATIN

1. Write in columns the nominative singular, genitive plural, gender, and meaning of:- operibus, principe, imperatori, genere, apro, nivem, vires, frondi, muri.
2. Give the comparative of noxius, acer, male, diu; the superlative of piger, humilis, fortiter, multum; the English and genitive sing. of solus, uter, quisque.
3. Write these phrases in a column and put opposite to each its Latin: he will go; he may wish; he had; he had been; he will be heard; and give in a column the English of fore, amatum, regendus, monetor.
4. Give in columns the perfect Indic. and active supine of ago, pono, dono, cedo, jungo, claudo.

Mention one example each of verbs followed by the nominative, the accusative, the genitive, the dative, the ablative.

5. Translate into Latin:-
6. The general’s little son was loved by the soldiers.
7. Let no bodies be buried within this city.
8. Ask Tullius who found the lions.
9. He said that the city had been taken, and, the war being finished, the forces would return.
10. Translate into English:-

Exceptus est imperatoris adventus incredibili honore atque amore: tum primum enim veniebat ab illo Aegypti bello. Nihil relinquebatur quod ad ornatum locorum omnium qua iturus erat excogitari posset.

ENGLISH HISTORY

1. What kings of England began to reign in the years 871, 1135, 1216, 1377, 1422, 1509, 1625, 1685, 1727, 1830?
2. Give some account of Egbert, William II, Richard III, Robert Blake, Lord Nelson.
3. State what you know of – Henry II’s quarrel with Becket, the taking of Calais by Edward III, the attempt to make Lady Jane Grey queen, the trial of the Seven bishops, the Gordon riots.
4. What important results followed – the raising of the siege of Orleans, the Gunpowder plot, the Scottish rebellion of 1639, the surrender at Yorktown, the battles of Bannockburn, Bosworth, Ethandune, La Hogue, Plassey, and Vittoria?
5. How are the following persons connected with English History,- Harold Hardrada, Saladin, James IV of Scotland, Philip II of Spain, Frederick the Elector Palatine?

ARITHMETIC

1. Multiply 642035 by 24506.
2. Add together £132 4s. 1d., £243 7s. 2d., £303 16s 2d., and £1.030 5s. 3d.; and divide the sum by 17. (Two answers to be given.)
3. Write out Length Measure, and reduce 217204 inches to miles, &c.
4. Find the G.C.M. of 13621 and 159848.
5. Find, by Practice, the cost of 537 things at £5 3s. 71/2d. each.
6. Subtract 37/16 from 51/4; multiply 63/4 by 5/36; divide 43/8 by 11/6; and find the value of 21/4 of 12/3 of 13/5.
7. Five horses and 28 sheep cost £126 14s., and 16 sheep cost £22 8s.; find the total cost of 2 horses and 10 sheep.
8. Subtract 3.25741 from 3.3; multiply 28.436 by 8.245; and divide .86655 by 26.5.
9. Simplify 183/4 – 22/3 ÷ 11/5 – 31/2 x 4/7.
10. Find the square root of 5.185,440,100.
11. Find the cost of papering the walls of a room 16ft long, 13ft 6in. wide, and 9ft high, with paper 11/2ft wide at 2s. 3d. a piece of 12yds in length.
12. A and B rent a number of fields between them for a year, the rent and other expenses amounting to £108 17s. 6d. A puts in 2 horses, 5 oxen and 10 sheep; and B puts in 4 horses, 1 ox, and 27 sheep. If a horse eats as much as 3 sheep and an ox as much as 2 sheep, how much should A and B each pay?

These papers were kindly sent in by Humphrey Stanbury, whose father took the exam, and passed.

https://rense.com/general75/pass.htm

[The next post will present a standard 1954 civics test on the U.S. Constitution. Most schools no longer teach civics – perhaps one of the reasons democracy is threatened today.]

All the fuss today is about the metaverse, how it is a three-dimensional version of reality. Around the world trillions of dollars are flooding into this commercially-focused technology. When one considers why the public is interested in the metaverse, it appears the metaverse is just a three-dimension version of social media and entertainment. Very few of us may remember when silent movies gained sound, later color and today computerized graphics; shortly the metaverse will introduce interactive watching. All in all, the metaverse still will be entertainment with a huge snack bar. A customer needn’t go to a mall with movie theaters, one soon will be able to go to a theater that has a shopping mall – and stay home as well!

In other words, humans will continue to experience a whirlwind of new services, entertainment and gossip but life at the street level still will be the same.

But a true shift in human culture is coming – not through metaverse, avatars and emoji, rather through a new computing age called quantum computing. Quantum computing, already a growing industry, will make today’s computational speed seem like an old Smith-Corona manual typewriter. The speed, along with miniaturized storage, will allow computers not only to run stock market trading as they do now but computers will run governments in a similar fashion. Computers will manage supply chains and huge corporations – automatically with minimal human attention.

In short, computers will become our policy makers. Congress can’t keep up with today’s computational speeds; will Congress even be needed when computers figure out policy at the speed of light?

What quantum computing gives to computers is a primitive version of consciousness. They can do their own research, learning and decision-making. It will take a generation or two to iron out stable, human oriented parameters (a sort of automated Supreme Court) but after that, politics may not be a front row influence.

The danger, of course, is the power that Lord Acton talked about will be in the hands of even fewer humans. This is evidenced today in the stock market where a few corporations control parameters for the computers that do the buying and selling instantly before any human notices a change. Conversely, common investors like us don’t have a chance. Will this be the world of quantum computing?

The missing element, which we live with today, is emotional judgment. Scruples and fairness require more than speed-of-light analogs and algorithms. Run by capitalists, oligarchs, dictators, socialists or communists, will the quantum age simply automate today’s inadequacies?

Ancient Mariner

It is true that the hearing impaired can be a nuisance, causing the speaker to repeat words and phrases and often requiring moving around so sound waves are not distorted by walls or distance and may require lip reading and over enunciated spelling of each word. Television is a show stopper; hearing aids cannot focus between sources talking simultaneously.

The hearing impaired are as bothered by this as much as the nonhearing impaired. But the difficulties don’t entirely lie at the ear of the hearing impaired.

Unlike the Germans and Russians who love to pound out soft consonants, the Americans pretend to say their soft consonants. Oh, there may be a lip gesture or a soft noise deep in the throat but the rhythm of syllables is lost as the word becomes a slurred reference to any properly articulated word or phrase. To hear English properly spoken, tune into CBS Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley; odds are the reader speaks three times faster than Jane – on-the-scene reporters perhaps four times as fast.

What follows is a sample or two that emulates what the hearing impaired may hear. It replaces supposedly spoken consonants, words and phrases with an underscore (_). For those who like puzzles, mariner will not provide an interpretation.

The _o_ was caught in _  _o_  _cause of _  _o_. I used _  _o_ to bring a _ow truck.

The _rolu_ is you _int lock _ door this _or_. You _oly were _stract_.

Along with mariner’s lifelong friend, a philologist, together we used to collect some really lackadaisical speech patterns. Here’s a few with impaired hearing added:

_kowe_      skoeet, let’s go eat

_roly          probably

Jeetjet       did you eat yet?

In addition to word enunciation, many speakers significantly drop their volume on a predicate phrase – whole phrases are not heard.

Mariner hopes this illustrates the difficulties of impaired hearing versus hurried, inarticulate speaking. As the impaired listen, their brains, for tiny milliseconds, must stop listening and do a dictionary search for probable meanings. In that millisecond, a conscious link with the conversation is lost, likely will be halted and require the speaker to start over again.

Achint Manner

Economically, and therefore culturally, the planet is a mess. Way too many nations are on the brink of revolution, starvation, oppressive war by authoritarian governments or destructive, violent, militarized guerilla groups. Human rights are declining – including in the United States. More rapidly the assets of the world are being sucked into the secret coffers of the planet’s oligarchs. In the US, children are routinely shot; across the Middle East women are brutalized.

Further, in the book “The Network State” by Balaji Srinivasan, he lays out how ‘nation states’ will be replaced by internet-enabled ‘network states’ run from the Cloud.

This universe sucks.

Our saving Grace is in the universe of hobbies. The hobby universe has different physical laws. For example, time flows at arbitrary rates controlled by the hobbyist; global dynamics simply don’t exist; hobby ambition and success are forces in the atmosphere and with a good location, the troubled universe completely disappears.

But one must be serious about this path. One needs a noncritical subject in which to invest serious attention and dedication. The whole object of the hobby universe is to escape the troubled universe, to forget everything except the target of one‘s hobby. Before all other thoughts and emotional interests, except for family and very close friends, the hobby is foremost in one’s mind.

Give a moment to consider what noncritical activity has drawn unusual interest in the past; what interesting thing floats in your mind during casual moments? Perhaps you are fortunate to have a hobby but haven’t made it the most important activity in your daily routine.

Once the hobby is chosen, it requires religious intensity, a desire to engage in the hobby at every chance. There are many subjects that are common for hobbyists: one thinks immediately of handiwork such as woodworking, pottery, glass blowing, metalwork, restoration of an object, art, weaving or building furniture.

There are activity hobbies like gardening, fishing, competitive biking, stock car racing, canoeing, hiking, camping, golfing and neighborhood sport leagues. There are social hobbies like working for charity building homes, cooking meals and providing transportation. Intellectual hobbies include activities like reading, becoming a world class expert on the dung beetle or mastering a new musical instrument; perhaps private tutoring or a part time librarian. If one has room, animal husbandry.

The key, however, is to walk through the warp door into the other universe. Desire. Determination. Curiosity. Achievement. As the old Eddy Arnold standard says, ‘Make the World go away’.

Ancient Mariner

֎ If the reader hasn’t checked in on science since their days in high school and college, they may need this update:

“B mesons come in many varieties, but all have a constituent called a bottom antiquark. One way in which these mesons decay is by the transformation of the bottom antiquark into a so-called “strange” antiquark and a pair of leptons.”[1]

֎ The answer to Y men die younger than women:

“As men get older, they don’t just lose their hair, muscle tone, and knee cartilage. They also start to lose Y chromosomes from their cells. Scientists have linked this vanishing to a long list of diseases and a higher risk of death, but the evidence has been circumstantial. Now, researchers report that when they removed the Y chromosome from male mice, the animals died earlier than their Y-carrying counterparts, likely because their hearts became stiffer.”[2]

֎ The Villages in Florida or homesteading in Alaska aren’t the only escapist real estate options:

“The virtual real estate market has really taken off in the last year, especially after Facebook’s decision to focus on the metaverse. Real estate sales on four platforms alone — Sandbox, Decentraland, Cryptovoxels and Somnium – topped $500 million in 2021, according to MetaMetric Solutions.”

֎ If you didn’t learn cursive the first time, you can’t learn it now:

Cursive handwriting is no longer necessary. With computer-based writing exams as part of the Common Core curriculum, typing quickly and accurately is becoming more important than writing in neat script.

For the really old folk like mariner, typing is no longer a productive skill. What’s next? Can the reader imagine a class of students all talking at once as they use their voice-to-print app?

֎ Schools don’t teach cooking and home economics anymore. Will they teach students how to order tonight’s dinner through a voice-command box? [Mom already knows. Here comes Grubhub.]

So much to catch up on.

Ancient Mariner

[1] Economist magazine 7/22.

[2] Science Magazine/Weekly News.

Mariner hasn’t posted since the three-horse series (except for a quickie about undetectable spyware on smartphones; mind your personal pornography). Dealing with negatives without a break isn’t fun – noting public polls express the same sentiment when stating a significant drop in news broadcast viewership.

Of immediate concern is this matter of inflation. It is insidious. Today’s reports show inflation at 9.1 percent for the nation and over 10 percent in Baltimore, Houston, Miami and Seattle. One can say, “It’s only a dime out of a dollar” but the same math says, “It’s only $100 out of a thousand”. A typical salary may be around $3,000/month – that’s a cut in income of $300 to cover the monthly budget. Add to that the fact that wage increases lag behind inflation by more than 2 percent.

– – – –

Starvation is by far the greatest uncovered news story in the world – including the United States where poverty is growing rapidly. Insufficient wages alone can bring down a nation; in the news at the moment, consider Sri Lanka and Madagascar. It’s a plight the world around: falling populations (Australia), collapsed labor markets (dozens of countries in Africa, South America and Middle East) are causing government instability.

Yet these tragic conditions, which are responsible for 36 million people dying from hunger this year, do not get press. In the United States, the richest nation in the world, 1.6 people in 200,000 die from starvation and 41 million suffer lack of access to minimally adequate food.

True, these are turbulent times in the world today. The US is no exception having to deal with Covid, Trump, shooting children, runaway capitalism and no national identity . . . small potatoes compared to the issue of poverty and starvation. The struggle is one between critical judgment and compassion. Compassion loses every time.

Ancient Mariner

The public service is to keep the reader informed about violations of the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution which states:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Below is an excerpt from Politico’s tech newsletter:

Mobile phones are becoming more essential and more powerful. But they aren’t keeping up with phone spyware, which is getting more aggressive and harder to detect.

As it does, an unsettling vision of the future is arising: One where we all carry surveillance devices without intending to.

It sounds dystopian, but that future is more or less arriving now. The mobile devices of politicians, human rights defenders, journalists, and other individuals have been compromised — all by so-called Pegasus spyware made by Israeli company NSO Group, which the Commerce Department blacklisted last year. This advanced spyware can be installed on devices through what are called “zero-click” vulnerabilities, where the spyware installs itself without the targeted individual clicking on a malicious link or doing anything to activate it. And once Pegasus has infiltrated a phone, there’s no easy way to tell it’s there.“

When someone steals your personal pornography or pants size, you ought to be reimbursed at market prices.

On other good news, three Gen Zers are running for Congress. It’s about time! One is a Trumper, two are progressives (Zs are born between 1997 and 2012).

Ancient Mariner