August 2025 – Spinor Info

Being right about everything…

Aug 312025

So here we have it, ladies and gentlemen, the leader of the free world, president of the most esteemed Republic, the “shining city on the hill,” proclaiming to the world that he was right about everything even as he is busy implementing a policy of autarky, using tariffs and other measures in an attempt to lure industries back to the United States:

Unfortunately the idea is not original. Here’s another version from the not too distant past, just 87 years ago:

The occasion was a celebratory Autarchic exhibition of Italian ore. The Italian text reads, in English, “Mussolini is always right”.

We know how that story ended. We also know that repeating history’s mistakes is one of the stupidest things we can do. Nonetheless, we keep doing it over and over again…

AI fakeries

Cybernetics, History, Politics No Responses »

Aug 302025

The other day, I came across a tragic photograph accompanying a story from the horrifying winter of 1944-45 in Budapest, when the Arrow Cross ruled the streets and their units murdered Jews by the thousands, often lining them up and shooting them into the icy Danube. The victims were first ordered to remove their shoes: leather was valuable! (Today, their fate is memorialized by a row of bronze shoes marking one of the locations where these murders took place.)

The story was about a mother, already barefoot in the snow, who managed to convince her son to run. Supposedly, the son survived (I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the story but there were harrowing stories of survival during the Arrow Cross’s deranged murder spree.) Accompanying the post was an old black-and-white photograph showing the moment this supposedly happened. Except that it wasn’t an old black-and-white photograph. It was an image generated by Google’s AI.

And today, I came across another old photograph, also from 1945: This one depicting a group of schoolgirls, taking a swim in a creek even as the mushroom cloud of the Trinity nuclear test rises behind them in the background. The story is real: out of the group of 12, only two lived long enough to celebrate their 40th birthdays. But the photograph is a fake. Trinity took place in the dark, at 5:30 AM. The campers were too far away (50 miles) to see the mushroom cloud. They were exposed to radiation hours later, due to fallout.

Granted, I use AI-generated imagery, too, even in a post that is about sniffing out AI-generated imagery. But there is a crucial difference: I am pretty certain no one believes that my images depict reality. They are intended to illustrate, even if whimsically, not to deceive.

What if the deception is in the service of a good cause, as in the two examples above? Doesn’t really matter, unfortunately. By blurring the line between reality and fiction, we are making it that much easier for fraudsters and crooks, for propagandists and ideologues alike to deceive us with impunity, in the service of their own nefarious agendas.

Color television

Canada, Personal, Technology, Television No Responses »

Aug 252025

“Look,” I told my Mom while browsing the brand new 1973 spring/summer catalog of Sears at my aunt’s home here in Ottawa, “we have just enough spending money for one of these! Let’s buy a color TV and take it back home with us to Hungary!”

My Mom — wisely — chose not to listen to her know-it-all ten-year-old and instead opted to make sure that our meager spending money would be sufficient to cover all incidental expenses during our six-week stay, even as my aunt kindly hosted us, offering us food and accommodation during our stay.

Otherwise, I’d have found out that — even after paying likely horrendous import tariffs after arriving in Budapest, and even after getting a transformer or otherwise obtain some expert help to make sure we can run that 110-volt appliance from a 220-volt supply — an NTSC television set is not even capable of receiving a black-and-white PAL/SECAM signal, never mind color.

So it was only about ten years later that my father and I were able to purchase our first color television set. It was still a Big Deal, back then in the early 1980s. As I recall, that television set cost just a tad under 20,000 Hungarian forints, 4-5 times the average monthly salary at the time.

Back in 1973, even here in Ottawa most people had only black-and-white television sets at their homes. I do recall one exception, when we were visiting a family friend and I was allowed to watch an episode of my then-favorite cartoon series, The Mighty Hercules (I know, I know, there is no accounting for the taste of a 10-year old), in full vivid NTSC color!

Cats for sale

Cats, Personal No Responses »

Aug 152025

It’s time to get serious. These little guys are growing rapidly and are becoming more independent each and every day.

They are going to see the vet for the first time in two weeks, and get their first shots. After that… they’ll be available at the unbeatable price of $0.00 per cat! In fact, it’s a buy one, get two kind of an offer… so long as you are willing to offer a good, loving home to an indoor cat (or two).

As a reminder, they came into our possession when we adopted their proud momma cat from a just condemned boarding house.

What we did not know or expect at the time was that instead of adopting one cat, we’d be bringing home five of them. That became clear only after a visit to the vet, where an ultrasound confirmed at least three little heartbeats.

That’s when I learned also that spaying a female cat is an option even when the cat is in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Needless to say, it’s not an option we were willing to consider. We’d rather take the risk, we decided, of getting stuck with too many cats in the house. That said, perhaps my hope is not unfounded that we can find volunteers willing to adopt three, perhaps all four, of these kittens.

For what it’s worth, they truly are adorable. And if they inherited even just a bit of their mother cat’s personality, they will undoubtedly prove to be adorable adult cats, too, just like Luisa.

No, no names yet. For starters, we still cannot reliably tell them apart. In any case, it’s up to their new ~~owners~~, I mean servants to name them.

80 years

History, Politics No Responses »

Aug 092025

This was the city of Nagasaki 80 years ago today, on August 9, 1945.

No atomic bomb has been used in anger ever since.

One can only hope that we will be able to say the same thing 80 years from today. I am not holding my breath.

The real global economy

Commerce, Economy, Politics No Responses »

Aug 062025

The United States is seen (and often acts) as the world’s leading economic power. And it is… in terms of gross domestic product (GDP).

But GDP numbers can be grossly (pun unintended) misleading. GDP numbers value a $5 cup of coffee at Starbucks 20 times more valuable than the same paper cup of coffee sold at a coffee shop in Guangzhou for the equivalent of 25 cents.

This is where PPP (purchasing power parity) comes in: GDP numbers adjusted with respect to the typical cost of living in the country in question. PPP offers a far more realistic metric for comparing national economies and their relative output.

And this leads to a rather sobering picture, courtesy of Visual Capitalist:

Yes, China is the world’s leading economy in terms of raw output. By far. Its economic output surpassed that of the United States more than a decade ago even as the US remains (for now) more influential.

And even Russia’s much maligned economy is larger, at least in terms of PPP, than either Japan’s or Germany’s.

This chart puts efforts to “Make America Great Again” through tariffs, or efforts to control political adversaries like Russia or China through sanctions in a whole new light. Even for the world’s largest economy, such control is a double-edged sword. For the world’s second largest economy? Much more likely, economic suicide.

Maxima 5.48.1

Computer Algebra, Personal, Programming No Responses »

Aug 062025

Just a maintenance release but still: I completed the process to release Maxima 5.48.1.

Hope it will serve the community well. I know I’ll be using it a lot.

More Luisa

Cats, Personal 2 Responses »

Aug 042025

Luisa is a very polite cat. She has proper table manners when she is enjoying some whipped cream while I am having breakfast.

Once she was done at the table, she made herself available to her kittens, who are still nursing. Except for the smallest! The runt of the litter? I hope she will be okay, she is so tiny compared to her siblings.

Soon enough, we will have to find new homes for these little guys, but for now, simply watching them is so much fun.

Trump’s VAZ-2101 Lada (Zhiguli)

History, Politics, Transportation 1 Response »

Aug 042025

When I first came across this post, in the form of a screen shot on Quora, I was incredulous. Surely, I thought, it cannot be real? Posted by @GOP — a long-established (2007) account with 3.4 million followers representing, it appears, the Republican National Committee. But it is. I went and checked myself, and found the post on X/Twitter.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. The Republican National Committee (or at least those in charge of its social media) believe that the best representation of the great American car comes in the form of… the Lada VAZ-2101. Better known back then as the Zhiguli, it was the original Fiat 124 clone that the Soviet Union began to manufacture more than half a century ago in the city of Togliatti. The automobile plant there was built with Fiat’s participation in what was dubbed by some the deal of the century.

To be sure, the Zhiguli was not a bad car by 1970 standards, not by any means. It was a basic vehicle, but it was built well and drove well. With its four-stroke, 1200 cubic centimeter engine and four-speed manual transmission, it could get up to 100 mph on the open highway. Its fuel consumption (roughly 10 liters/100 km or roughly 24 mpg) was not great but hey, gasoline was cheap in 1970 and there were far worse gas guzzlers. And the car was robust enough to survive Soviet roads, so it felt like a speed demon on Hungary’s then only freeway, connecting Budapest to the resort area around Lake Balaton.

How do I know? Well, my parents had one, for starters. My father sold our Wartburg some time in 1968 or 69, and when the Zhiguli was introduced, he decided to switch rather than wait longer for another Wartburg (waiting lists for new cars were quite long in 1970 Hungary.) We got the car and fell in love with it. It was not glamorous or anything but it was a good car. It did what a car was supposed to do: it worked. Worked in the dead of winter, in the middle of summer, took you from place to place, and it was reliable. And it was even moderately comfortable.

That particular Zhiguli was still running roughly 25 years later, when I last saw it on the road during one of my visits to Hungary. It had a new owner, but back then, license plates belonged to the vehicle, not the owner, so I had no trouble identifying our old family sedan: IK-36-49.

But wait… What exactly is a Zhiguli doing in this poster? A 2025 poster, presented by the Republican National Committee no less, ostensibly about making American auto manufacturing great again?

I admit I find it somewhat incomprehensible. What is the intended message? Is it (gasp!) perhaps some subversive signal, confirming that Trump sold America out to Putin? Or is it that Trump’s regressive tariffs and budget bill will soon do to the American economy what Brezhnev’s era of stagnation did to the USSR?

The mind boggles. We live in surreal times.