https://youtu.be/_rPi3PfA-o0

Cut Off

I have been cut off. It looks like I've offended the great and the good. In particular, Jeff Bezos(Amazon), William Gates II (Microsoft), Betty and Gordon Moore (Intel), Larry Ellison (Oracle), C.A.R. Hoare (University of Cambridge), the senior members of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) and NASA (Wallop Island, VA). These people are a degenerate subspecies of Human Being. This whole world you idiots have made is crumbling. You are about to discover that you cannot rule the world when the only thing you know how to do really well is fucking shit up!

Twitter and FaceBook and InstaGram and Google and Blogger and YouTube and ProtonMail and ProtonVPN and Signal and Telegram and WhatsApp are all a useless sham. So are Samsung and Apple. Great job guys! You really know how to screw up.

So I am going offline until some women in Bolivia find the courage to organise themselves to the point that they can provide me with the resources I need to be able to work on secure communications.

On Scientific Knowledge

This was an attempt to explain to the British diplomatic corps how to handle an international disagreement concerning scientific results.

I sent it to a member of staff at the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office on 18 March 2018.

The Russian Embassy in London do not seem to be behaving on Twitter in the same way the Russian government seem to behave on YouTube. Make of that what you will. [referring to the Russian Embassy tweet suggesting that Hercule Poirot was needed in Salisbury, implying that Sherlock Holmes wasn't up to the job, perhaps?]

Mind you, to accuse the head of state [Putin] of personally ordering people be killed, without saying how or why you know is probably absence of evidence, so they are within their rights to joke. The British government has the resources to do an analysis, and they should say why they won't let a Russian laboratory do one. It's science. Does the UK have a chief scientific officer anymore? There used to be a post like that, usually a well-apointed and internationally recognised (and respected) scientist.

The government's chief scientist should be liaising with a Russian counterpart with the aim of understanding all the different ways in which the results of the respective analyses disagreed. Then the scientific report should be fed to a group of ministers who talk to some similar group in Russia and share data, again with the aim of being avble to satisfactorily explain all differences of opinion between the two. And you go on like this, giving regular press conferences (probably daily) and tell the country what's going on.

Of course that's a complete waste of time if you know you're guilty as hell and are all going to spend the rest of your miserable lives in the Maize, so you don't do that. Instead you do what they're doing and try to start a 3rd world war before anyone notices! 😃

The Plurinational Vegetative State of Bolivia

I'm stuck here. The corruption is so total that nobody knows anything. I can't even contact the Swiss Embassy in La Paz, because someone seems to have paid-off the honorary consulate here not to help me. That would be A Good Thing: her testimony might be very useful in a week or two.

I don't get any e-mails from anyone I would want to hear from, unless they are sent under duress. But I get lots of other messages. Unfortunately their senders do not want to identify themselves, so I have no idea what the messages are about. They are delivered by people like Edward Snowden on CNN Latin America the other night, or the waiter at the 24/7 sushi cafe on the Prado in Cochabamba. "Code talk" just desn't work when you don't know who it's from.

T-shirts sometimes  seem more clear. For example there was one that said just

FUCKING HOSTILE

in big white letters. I hope the wearer charged danger money for that. He didn't seem to want to be within 20 yards of me while he was wearing it. I think I know who sent that message.

Imagine that Lt. Col. John Rimbaud has just "armed up" and he's standing there with half a dozen grenades pinned to his vest, and his RPG on his back, holding a huge machine gun and with thousands of rounds of ammunition in belts draped around his neck. And this stuff is so fucking heavy that it´s making the veins stand out on his biceps and his forehead.  And you go up to him and say "You know, you're fucking hostile! You have a bunch of issues that you still need to deal with."  And he'd look at you with his big droopy-doggy eyes for a bit, ... And what do you think he´d reply just before he turned and walked off to find someone more interesting and intelligent to talk to?

So can someone make me a T-shirt that is black, in good quality un-bleached cotton, in women's sizes, that says on the front, in big white letters that can be read from at least 20 yards distance "FUCKING RIGHT" and on the back "FUCKING PRICK". And sell them in the USA, and give the money to Hilary Clinton for her campaign fund. Then maybe she could fly Roger Schell and Scott Owens to Cochabamba so we can get a private e-mail connection running, and contract access to it to the NSA. If I could communicate then I could share some ideas with her about how to make the presidential debates an awful lot more interesting they are currently promising to be.

And if someone could make me a reply to a telling T-shirt, that says just "I'm going!" Then that would be lovely.

This is all part of a reality TV show called Latin American Law. Reality TV is like a soap opera, but where all the stuff turns out to actually have happened!

Well, no-one expected extracting agents after a 7 year black op would be easy ... "Play hard and Have fun!" As the T-shirt said. Yes marm!

A Midsummer Night's Dream

I have now managed to convince myself that, given modest material resources, some cooperative assistance,  and a little time, we could build a working demonstration of a quantum computer and communications system, here in Bolivia.

The purpose of this post is to correlate my knowledge with that of the other people here in Bolivia who are working on the same thing, and to ask if I may be permitted to travel to the other side of the world and attempt to set up a provably secure telecommunications link with Bolivia. I would like to travel to the Middle East.

The reason I am posting this now is that I read this morning that the result of the recent UK referendum has left the future evolution of European politics (and therefore of the global economy) very far from certain.

We have therefore a great a opportunity, and a very powerful set of motivating reasons to attempt a demonstration of the potential of this sort of communication.

What I would like to be able to do, is to produce a working example of a business which sells peace, so that we can make a judgement as to what is better for business: war, or peace.

The offer I am making is to act as a trustable intermediary for any difficult multi-party negotiations that need to be carried between different groups of people who have no immediate reasons to trust each other. The basis of their trust in me would have to be based on shared public knowledge of what I am attempting to achieve, and of the existence of a secure communications mechanism and a computer system capable of optimally evaluating an exponentially growing number of often contradictory possibilities simultanously from different, often conflicting points of view.

This needs to be done quickly, so I would hope to be there in fewer than ten days, with a few days in Western Europe to catch up on what's happened while I've been here, and to see my daughter, if that's possible, and if it's what she wants.

All I require to do this are access to modest financial resources to pay my personal costs, and cooperative assistance from the governments and other organisations involved.

I will post more when I have more time.

Another Blog

This post is about what global economic and technological development ought to be.

Logica Bolivia is a new blog. It is for things I think should be taken seriously. You won't read anything there about the University of Cambridge, for example.

Ian

Why is Telecommunications Security Important?

"Man is a political animal." So wrote Aristotle, somewhere. This does not mean that he tells lies on TV to win votes. It means that the essential nature of man is that he lives in a polis, a community of fellow men, and together they create the conditions necessary for a civilized life. So it is only through cooperation that a collection of individuals form a polis. And a necessary condition for cooperation is that the individuals concerned trust one another.

Consequently, communications security is important, because cooperation at a distance requires communication, and if the medium is not secure then trust is impossible: you cannot trust someone unless you know that you are really communicating with that person, and not an impostor.

The Internet is not secure. So if we want to use the Internet as a medium for cooperation at a distance, then we must first secure it.

The essence of telecommunication is the transmission of actual knowledge, at a distance. That means transmission of actual knowledge through some medium. Telecommunications therefore entails both actual knowledge, and also the existence of the medium. Clearly then, there is no point in securing the medium unless one has first secured actual knowledge.

Now actual knowledge is uniquely the product of a good education. It follows then, that (a) the final cause of telecommunications security is securiung a good education for all involved, and (b) only a good education will secure the medium. Hence we have established two things:

1. A good education is the sine qua non of secure telecommunications, and
2. Secure telecommunications is the sine qua non of a good education.

And the reader  will here recognise the form of circular reasoning called pratityasamuhtpada in Sanskrit, typically translated as dependent co-arising in Western texts.

This explains final cause, the description of the phenomenon pre-supposes the conditions under which it is possible to observe that phenomenon, and which pre-conditions are also the effect, or reason for which that phenomenon exists. This reason for existence, Aristotle calls the essence of the thing.

Now the people at Cambridge want to know "Why Bolivia?" and the answer is "Because Bolivia has potential." And since Markus fancies himself a physicist of sorts, from time to time, he knows that the relevant formula is

E = mgh

where, in the Systeme International of units of physical measure, E stands for the energy in Joules, m stands for the mass in kilograms, h stands for the height in metres, and g stands for the acceleration due to gravity in metres per second per second. Now put in some numbers: let g = 9.8, h = 4000, and take m = 1 kg per litre. Then we have that 100 litres of water has approximately 4 megajoules of potential energy. Now consider a modest reservoir, such as Ch'iyar Qullu, which supplies the city of La Paz with fresh water. How many hundred litres of water does it contain, do you think? You may look it up on Google maps, if you like.

Now imagine, if you will, what we could do with a long straight polythene tube, leading from the reservoir, down to a hydraulic ram. Ask Ross Anderson how a hydraulic ram works, in case you don't know. There are all sorts of lovely things one could do with a setup such as this! For example, one side effect of a hydraulic ram is that it compresses the air in the "shock absorber." So we could use it to liquify air at a few meters above sea-level. That might find applications in refrigeration, say, or perhaps we could use it to produce LPG from the hydrocarbons that are conveniently located down there in Teoponte.

Now, for anyone wondering how a polythene tube could sustain the pressure produced by a 4km head of water, then  recall that the compressive strength of polythene is quite considerable. (Ask Nik Thomas of BAE Systems, if you don't believe us. Nik has a degree in materials science from Cambridge, you know.) Now imagine that the polythene tube is embedded firmly in a trench, surrounded a few meters of rock ...

Now ask Ross how high a jet of water could be fired from the ram. And for an extra fish, ask him to calculate the air temperature at the top of the trajectory. So how far could She propell a few metric tonnes of hailstones, each the size of a football? And what is the ceiling of an Iroquois helicopter, or back to this century, an Apache attack helicopter? And how high do military forward ops satellites fly?

So much for gravitational potential!

But there are equally promising possible applications for electrical potential. All along the edge of the Altiplano, there are mountains called the Cordillera Real, and they enjoy frequent electrical storms. Now,  maybe we could find some interesting geological coincidences, involving, say, metal-bearing rock plates, with some dielectric substance sandwiched between them. Discharging a petafarad electrolytic capacitor through a suitable coil, and with a well-designed reflector dish, is unlikely to get FCC approval, but it could nevertheless turn out to be useful, on occasion. How would you like your birds cooked, sir. Charcoal, or vapor?

Well, you know, it goes on and on and on. Try this for a thought experiment: What if She could inject a couple of cubic kilometers of cold water into an opportunistically placed geological fault? How much alluvial metrial couild she wash down into the Pacific? But whatever you do, don't mention a word of this to the Chilean politicos, because they may think it a threat, you see. But She doesn't use threats, unless all diplomatic means have failed. And recall that a diplomatic means that fails is one which is seen by both parties to have failed for the same reason. Otherwise, it could not have been a diplomatic means, could it?

Well, we did tell you, back in 2011, that "Bored little girls play complicated games." This is what happens, you see, when you leave Ian in the streets for a couple of months, with nothing to do. He eventually gets enough cash together to buy 3 BOB worth of 100 % pure cane spirit, and that gets him a couple of hours connect time to the lustrecacho ultranet. Then the next thing you now, the fucker's reincarnated the Inka's answer to Archimedes and Aristotle, and the better part of the Royal Corps of Engineers, all in one.

Wouldn't it have been better if you'd just offered to send him a really good laptop, 64 bit, 4 Gig RAM, half a terabyte disk, you know, standard issue for a shit-pot Royal Society Research fellow, along with half a dozen Raspberry Pis and US$5,000 so that he can get his PT1 sorted out and start teaching Real Spanish computer science to beautiful women?

Then, instead of a pissed, Generally U/S Grant, you would have only had to deal with a dozen happy, polite, grateful, and extremely beautiful women, porting Red October to RP, and making a tera-qubit global quantum super-computer called GOD. Don't you think that would be a better way to start the movie?

You little Cambridge fellows need to get literate! "What he tells you three times is true!" Ian is not going to leave the Plurinational State of Bolivia. So it's not Ian's Bolivian adventure that is going to end, it's your Bolivian adventure that has just begun!

Call it Global Bio-geo-terrorism, if you like. That's why Aristotle didn't write about comedy in the Poetics. The difference between comedy and tragedy, you see, is just the point of view! And 4km is high moral ground.

So try to remember this, next time you hear everyone laughing at you. It helps, really it does! Yes! Even when they're laughing at the whole University!

Check out the band Wara, on YouTube, if you want to hear another example of final cause. And if you still don't get it, look into the history of the University at Sucre. So it seems there's a lovely old University looking for a new lease of life. What's its core competency  going to be then? Inka Military Tech. (with Psi-ops) or Telecommunications Science (with psycho-botany)? If it´s the latter, then you can also open up J-Stor, and while you're about it, digitize the entire contents of the library of the Society for Psychical Research. Don't worry, we'll explain all the bits you don't understand.

Love and kisses,
Alice