LOCUS DEMENTIA

Artificial Intelligence, a noun that has become a household term. Most refer to it as AI, which is less of a mouthful. Where and when did this term become real? [1] Apparently John McCarthy coined this phrase in 1956 at a conference.  Vannevar Bush and Alan Turing both mused about computers being intelligence and being able to enhance human intelligence or even simulate human-like thinking. Is this thinking really "artificial" though? To suggest it being artificial would imply that there is a non-artificial type of intelligence. Otherwise, there is just intelligence, or thinking, or cognition.  The famous Turing Test may be the source of this "artificial" notion. If there is an intelligent series of responses to a human interaction, and those responses are created using a computer program, then that is considered artificial.  On a philosophical note, though, the programs are written by humans. Those programs, using rules given by humans, are creating responses that ...

The IRS published the tax brackets for 2022 here [1]. The tax brackets are important because they tell you how tax burden is calculated. If you've never calculated your taxes, then understand that you are taxed on a marginal bracket schedule. If you are married and a joint filer, then the schedule starts with $20,550, and has steps at $83,550, $178,150, $340,100, $431,900, and $647,850. Each bracket is a bucket of burden where the tax rate changes from 12%, to 22%, to 24%, then 32%, 35%, and finally 37%. As you fill buckets your marginal tax rate changes. This complexity is why tax accountants make bank throughout the year. Or not ... Inline is an image that is the graph of the marginal rate by income. It's the gray line that is scaled according to the right hand side axis. It's also the only line always increasing. Your taxes are always increasing, no matter how much you make. That's the start of the misery. The hyperbolic-like lines are the relative changes of income ...

The SARS-COV-2 [1] virus pandemic that started in late 2019 and took over the planet in 2020 has been the big news of late. I don't think there is anyone on the planet who does not know about the virus and its impact on the world. XPrize [2] held a competition in 2020 called the XPrize Pandemic Response Challenge [3]. I competed in this challenge and made it to the final. The competition concerned itself with creating two kinds of models, one to predict mortality and morbidity, and another to predict intervention policy. The first round was the prediction portion where my model performed quite well. The model I wrote used some anecdotal knowledge about prevention and risk as well as some research topics that were emerging in 2020.  Out of this competition there were some interesting anecdotal observations about virus transmission. Masks could be ineffective . When you respirate through a mask in an area that has elevated concentrations of the Covid-19 virus, the particles hosting t...

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines fascism as: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control .  The phrase "dictatorial control" is important for the case that I am going to make about fascism in social media. The word "dictatorial" means "of or relating to a dictator," and a dictator is "one ruling in an absolute and often oppressive way." In 2020, social media has seen a rise in the number of autocratic events of censorship. The two social media outlets that I am going to focus on are Facebook and Twitter.  Background Facebook is a semi-private curated blogging platform where you, the user, share information at your leisure. The public part of Facebook is in Facebook Groups. With a group, outside people who are not privy to your "Facebook Wall" will join your group and establish a communal discourse. This can be private, by invitation only, or public. The Facebook is auth-walled so that you must ...

2020 is the year of the pandemic. The SARS-Cov-2 (Covid19) virus has rampaged across the planet infecting 4,893,136 [1] people by May 20, 2020. At this time, of those 4.8M people, 323,256 people have perished from complications that arise from the infection. Arising out of this pandemic has been a narrative about non-white ethnic groups being disproportionately affected by the infection [6,7,8]. A narrative that conditions people to believe that they are perpetually victims only creates a "collective victimhood" [4,5] in that group. This "collective victimhood" costs its members millions in unrealized potential, sends them cowering from social interactions that would otherwise benefit them, and ultimately creates an environment that perpetuates itself. Let's try to dispel that false narrative and deal just with data. I pulled my data from the CDC [9] looking at mortality only. The mortality data from CDC contains per-state mortality rates on a per-infectio...

Anderson's Theorem (a) The number of primes in [1,n] is no more than 2+floor(n/2). The probability of n being prime when n is not prime is 1/2 - see Dasgupta,Papadimitriou,Vazirani "Algorithms" page 26. Therefore, the E(pi(n)) is n/2. (b) There does not exist another set of adjacent primes other than {1,2,3} 5: 2 + floor(5/2) = 2 + 2 = 4:=> {1,2,3,5} : 4 <= 4 7: 2 + floor(7/2) = 2 + 3 = 5 => {1,2,3,5,7} : 5 <= 5 11: 2 + floor(11/2) = 2 + 5 = 7 => {1,2,3,5,7,11} 6 <= 7 26: 2 + floor(26/2) = 15 => {1,2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23} : 10 <= 15 Lagrange's Theorem is Inaccurate Lagrange's theorem about primes states that pi(x) is the number of primes <= x. The pi(x) is approximately x/ln(x). He postulated that the lim of pi(x)/(x/lnx) as x-> infinity was 1. This is incorrect. if the number of primes is bounded by n/2 then refactoring and reducing Lagrange's Theorem results in the lim of ln(x) as x approaches infinity. This is alwa...