Bob Bishop

zoologist and physiologist by education, entrepreneur by experience, husband and dad by choice, human by genotype, communicator by phenotype

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

Refuting one’s own conceptions of reality is as exhausting as it is exhilarating.

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

Do you remember when you joined Twitter/X? I don’t! I rarely used it until the last couple of years. But it’s exponentially more interesting and valuable since it has been https://t.co/nwaXdZylcQ. TY @elonmusk . #MyXAnniversary

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

👇This is why guys like Mike Royko and @john_kass speak to @bishopb0b. Well this isn’t really why, the why is that I was born in an analog womb in 1955. “Digital” has just been coined by Claude Elwood Shannon in 1948. I pretty much just surfed on the digital wave and then arrived on the quantum beach. It is an old beach, that surfers heard tell of. The quantum beach is effing great. I’ll explain how Royko and Kass would describe it in their language of schlubs on “hopium”. The beauty of the explanations are that they drive right down the center of the lane and get you to where you care to go…

BTW if you are offended easily—>🖕. It is possible to ignore me. But the effin reality is that there is no way out of it. Just relax and go through it. My plan is to use cubits as the measuring stick. If you want a rough idea of a cubit then imagine the length of an “Italian salute”. Body language— succinct and coherent.

https://t.co/Kk3AwvFXb5

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

Thread of @bishopb0b & Mike Royko/@grok SuperHeavy (fast mode):
1/ Full raw conversation I just had with Grok (as Mike Royko) about Excalidraw, “free” software, subscriptions, and building a better usage-based model on Ethereum.
Starting prompt:
“explain excalidraw to me in the personality of mike royko”
2/ Grok/Mike:
“Listen up, kid. You ever sit in some damn meeting where some slick kid in a hoodie starts drawing boxes and arrows… Excalidraw is a free, open-source scribbling tool… dead simple… stays out of your way.”
3/ Me:
“bs, mike. it’s got a price if you really want it to do those “open source” “free” things. who gets that money forever? Free, bullshit.”
4/ Grok/Mike:
“Alright, settle down… The basic Excalidraw is still free forever… But yeah, they got a paid side hustle called Excalidraw+ at six bucks a month… The core tool stays free.”
5/ Me:
“fair points, mike. but describing it as free is bull. obviously it is not free. but schlubs like you know damn well there is no free lunch.”
6/ Grok/Mike:
“Alright, Bob, you cynical son of a gun… The core is still free as hell… The paid version is $6-7/month… You’re right that ‘free’ has limits.”
7/ Me:
“so let’s talk turkey. if this was on the ethereum blockchain then it would let me pay as i go, right? i put gas in my tank so my engine can run until i work down the road and then i need more, right?”
8/ Grok/Mike:
“Alright, Bob, let’s talk straight turkey… On Ethereum, every damn thing you do would be a transaction… You’d be getting skinned alive…”
9/ Me:
“mike, your either just making up shit as you go… the price of gas on the ethereum highway is trivial with the build out of how it now operates. get real with me.”
10/ Grok/Mike:
“Alright, Bob, you’re calling me out… Gas on good L2s is fractions of a penny to a nickel… But for Excalidraw? … still doesn’t make sense for most people.”
11/ Me:
“yeah, no, mike. you’re just making things up… every muscle i move and every thought i conjure costs work in the form of “gas” in my mitochondia”
12/ Grok/Mike:
“Okay, Bob, you’re swinging for the fences now… Your mitochondria don’t send you a pop-up saying ‘Approve this thought?’”
13/ Me:
“You’re imagining that’s how it works. It’s not the way it works because it’s not on it now… What would be a better way that is fair to me and the constructors. Then I burn my work gas when I work and not on vacation. Right”
14/ Grok/Mike:
“Alright, Bob, you’re pushing me into the weeds… Session-based metering, batched payments… You only pay when you’re actively working… Fair to both sides.”
15/ Me:
“Mike, I’d use it and I’d open “flying j” oasis (plural?) where even you would stop for food and lodging… Now if I can get Warren Buffett and Charlie’s ghost to get on board… What do you think?”
16/ Grok/Mike:
“Alright, Bob, now we’re really cooking with gas… The idea has legs… Buffett and Munger would be skeptical… But if you keep it practical, it could work.”
End of raw thread.
What do you guys think? Is usage-based crypto metering (pay only when working) the fairer model than monthly subs?
Would you stop at a blockchain-era Flying J Oasis for tools + real food?
@elonmusk — you seeing this kind of thinking?
@bishopb0b

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

Biotic and abiotic: either I constructed the note or not. My only vault rule. Root "/" is BoB (@bishopb0b), the biot causing tasks to be done. I and other humans (biots) need a private scratch pad. That pad, whether a cave wall 300,000 years ago, or a vault is where we talk to ourselves. It is called THINKING. Only other rule is reality is all there is (an infinity of possibilities).

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

Biotic and abiotic: either I constructed the note or not. My only vault rule. Root "/" is BoB (@bishopb0b), the biot causing tasks to be done. I and other humans (biots) need a private scratch pad. That pad, whether a cave wall 300,000 years ago, or a vault is where we talk to ourselves. It is called THINKING. Only other rule is reality is all there is (an infinity of possibilities).

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

Private thoughts are a risk to society. BTW, we will decide if it is okay for you to have it all. Who are we? We are educated idiots. There is nothing we like more than a board of experts who know better than you what is good for you. And that work you did in the yard, that is a risk to the environment. We need to control that. Yep, another board. Don’t worry. The board will be volunteers who have gotten passing grades in our schools and classes from ‘experts’. They will get the power of arbitrary fees and fines. They are innocuous and they just decide whether the fees are “good” for you, but we are still just good intended experts.

Next time @greg_ip has a private thought he is required to submit it to a board of experts at @bishopb0b where I will deem it worthy of belonging in civil discourse. Yeah, that‘s the way we will do things from now on. I will be the orchestrator of our social environment. Thank goodness I got that figured out🙄.

EXPERT - Columnist @greg_ip warns that stablecoins carry risk that could set off a financial crisis https://t.co/OimD9Rv93N via @WSJ

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

So very astonishing @DavidDeutschOxf ! My grandparents would have been children in this year. I remember them vividly. I see them and their cohorts as ppl I knew. I agree some sort of mind virus did break in the Civil War. I look around my town, Ann Arbor, and I don’t see the fabric which brought these men together today, or do i? But there has something hiding in plain sight that has not been mentioned yet. Did I miss the black ppl in the picture or were they not rendered appropriately by the AI that colorized this image? What did unite these people? Was it a Jim Crow mentality of keeping certain people in their proper place? Honestly, I don’t know different or better. But I find that terrible explanation more coincident with the cultural bias I was taught by my grandparents i.e. they’re 👆 fine people if they remember their place. These tribal identity conflicts never went away because they weren’t why the soldiers fought. Disloyalty to the Union was the demon they exorcised. Not slavery or antipathy toward “others”. It was a fight for your life against nature that occupied their time and work. God bless America. We’re are evolving quickly, but cultural wars seem trivial in 1888 when it is 20 degrees below freezing in late January. The religious affiliation or ethnic origin of a friend or neighbor was a relatively trivial matter.

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

That’s a coherent analysis, but when the aggression is based on both the aggressor’s and the victim’s identity, how is being able to explain the non-causal correlations able to remove the instantiation in their wetware? My point is the solution is not in near sight. How do you remove the real cause when it is literally a physical construct (an idea, even a bad one is embodied, pun intended, in bodily tissue) that would have to be altered. Clearly the way to actually do that is not extant. Memetic engineering is a field that deserves an effort to grow our knowledge of a scale that AI has garnered. IMO.

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

Fascinating explanation. I understood Shannon’s ‘one time pad’ (OTP) explanation in analog. What I mean is that as a guy born during the middle of the 1950s I experienced the analog to digital transformation in realtime. All my experiences began with what I call a ‘gear head’ and are now ‘quantized’. The solution to the OTP problem is obvious when one actually starts with a pad and pen in front of you. You just write another letter with a specific decoder ring for each letter under the message and send the bottom line to your destination. This system of “perfect“ cryptography that Claude wrote about is next to impossible. That’s pretty easy to understand when you’re actually doing it yourself with your own hands, pen, pad, AND decoder ring (I think Cracker Jacks used to have them “free inside”). This explanation is relatively obvious for ppl of the ‘gear head’ ilk, but it’s paradoxically arcane to digital ppl. The abstraction of the physical pad is the crux of the problem: i.e. wetware. The pad is where what is in one’s mind gets translated from a memory in one’s mind where it is physically present originally. Claude collaborated with von Neumann on his masterful work on cryptography (it was literally TOP SECRET military intelligence). Johnny as von Neumann was known to his colleagues and friends had written about entropy in his quantum mechanics book written a decade before Claude. He wrote about it in Hilbert space. This is where the solution has been hiding in plain sight. The OTP isn’t the one the people write ✍️ on with a pen, it’s where it’s written in bonds of physical biomatter in one’s body. This is where the near impossibility emerges: explaining how a OTP can work in “digital” matter was what Claude explained. Johnny went on to explain automata, but he died quite quickly from cancer. His explanation was finished and published by Burke another of his many collaborators. It’s critical to understand and explain encryption in the quantum level of instantiation of information. Claude was solving for electrons in copper as his media. Johnny was solving for spinorial properties of wetware biomatter. The OTP isn’t on the paper it’s on the sinew of one’s biomaterials, yet being explicated by ppl like @StuartHameroff and @penrose. Trust is between human beings not between machine agents, yet. Exploits as described above in this post are in this framework of reality impossible to cause if one understands that trusting Claude’s entropy is erroneous and looking to Johnny’s entropy is where to look for solutions. It is always the last place you look that you find what was lost 😠.

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

BS by NYT - student know that the education they just got was for a bygone era - profs had lived in fairyland before AI, not they live in fear - commencement speakers are as interesting as their parents to them, but thank goodness for the PAYRENTS who are ready to be rid of them… https://t.co/qhIR2hbUWV

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

@anishmoonka Humor is the antidote to this friction.

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

Agree.

[Avi Roy @agingroy]

7,000 false positives per square millimeter. The culprit was the lab gloves.

University of Michigan researchers just upended a core assumption in microplastics science. Latex and nitrile gloves, worn by the scientists doing the measuring, shed stearate particles that look chemically identical to polyethylene. Standard infrared and Raman instruments can't tell them apart. The gloves were counting as plastic.

Seven glove types tested. All contaminated. The cheapest fix: switch to cleanroom gloves, which dropped false positives to around 100 per mm² vs. 7,000.

The "credit card per week" headline (5 grams, WWF/Newcastle 2019) has separate problems. A 2022 re-analysis found severe methodological errors in the original estimate. Actual measured intake is likely 100x lower.

None of this means microplastics are harmless. Last month's data on brain accumulation still stands. But the numbers driving the panic may have been measuring the scientists, not the environment.

Science catching its own errors is exactly how it's supposed to work.

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

Yes, seek evidence of causation not correlation. “Evidence” of correlation often is used by parties to seek “acceptance” or make “appeals” that confound, rather than uncover the means for understanding. 👇

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

Evidence of a correlation is not the same as evidence of causation. There is plenty of evidence that crime goes up coincident with summer ice cream sales and hot muggy weather. Is evidence of ice cream sales during summer crime surges just the evidence one needs to hate on ice cream eaters? Or has “evidence” been erroneously loaded with innuendo and insunuation as support for a confounding false trail leading nowhere?

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

Ancient Wisdom: I Was There when Modern Israel Was Born https://t.co/brpoJ7wg85

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

Empirics support your point of view. But the underlying cause is crucial to explanations because if you are treating a patient for a fatal condition based upon a mistaken diagnosis then one can adjust the treatment plan. I think I read that Lincoln was treated by his doctor for a bullet to the head by 'blood letting'. Not so helpful to reduce the blood volume of a patient already massively hypovolemic. Right?
So if the underlying causal variable is group identification, then trying to eliminate the people in a group instead of the eliminating the antipathy for the group identity is not going to be so helpful. Right?

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

This is almost as true in the US.

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

This guy was given many opportunities to fail, but has instead overcome hatred so horrific that his brilliant progeny was murdered for his group identity by ISIS. @yudapearl has opened the eyes of mathematicians with a new calculus with the Turing Award (the “Nobel Prize” of math). His most recent book is Coexistence. You can find info about it at his UCLA faculty website (or Amazon) and a life’s work of scientific literature elucidating “causation” having revolutionary implications on medicine and statistics. I strongly encourage you to have him at one of your conferences soon. It is great marketing to have star athletes, but Judea’s ideas need broad exposure. He is wandering in the desert of a bizarre world of statistics holding onto bad ideas. It is so very difficult to find new paths of possibilities when the ideas you put forward threatens the “conventional thinking”. 👊

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

@yudapearl
The recent controversy over the University of Michigan commencement speech — where a faculty leader praised pro-Palestinian activists for “opening our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza” — has sparked sharp reactions from political observers and academic commentators. It perfectly illustrates how easily the debate slips into confusion unless we keep our causal language precise.
That is why I suggest, with humility, a small clarifying revision to your definitions:
Zionism is the Jewish people’s assertion of their collective sovereignty — their natural and legitimate right, like that of all peoples, to self-determination, security, and normalcy as a nation in their historic homeland, Eretz Israel. It was given modern political form by Theodor Herzl in 1897 and realized with the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel in 1948.
Zionophobia is a form of racism that denies the Jewish people this legitimate collective sovereignty and right to nationhood in Eretz Israel.
At the causal root of every such conflict lies a single variable: group identity (shared ethnicity, history, culture, religion, ancestry, or peoplehood). If this variable is misunderstood as a mere confounder that undermines the legitimacy of any and all collective sovereignty claims, the entire discussion collapses. In my view, it is not a confounder.
Group identity is the primary causal driver behind every people’s rightful claim to self-determination. No?
The same root explains why every individual person yearns for personal sovereignty over their own life. Once we clearly see this universal causal root — the deep human longing for autonomous sovereignty that lives in every person and every people — it opens a genuine path to coexistence: individuals and collectives alike can flourish only when each respects the other’s legitimate boundaries.
The fable of the Belly and the Limbs (which I posted some time ago) makes this interdependence vivid. Each body part can exercise its own personal sovereignty and refuse to serve the Belly. But when they do, the whole Body weakens and every individual part suffers. Personal sovereignty is real and primary, yet it flourishes only inside a healthy collective. Zionism affirms that the Jewish people, like every other people, need their own sovereign homeland so their individual members can live in freedom and dignity.
I am swimming in your pond of the clarifying language (calculus) of doing and am trying to use the ultimate clarifier - the nature of reality - as the test for my ideas I seek to evolve them as foundational for life.

[Bob Bishop @bishopb0b]

@StuartHameroff Can you direct me to a comprehensive body of artifacts that will help me catch up to your integrated explanation for the physiological and physical mechanisms of consciousness? TY