Classification

Classification usually means for me the statistical sort, when you are, perhaps, classifying thousands of people by their occupations, to which end one has devised some elaborate scheme of classification. For Simenon, I think it means what you do with a file about some crime when no action is going to be taken, perhaps some fatal brawl among career criminals.

But I am always amused by the sort that you get from the US, as snapped above. Impressively bureaucratic for a country which so often seems to get tangled up in seriously negligent handling of classified material. By the cart load. By presidents or lowly filing clerks; whoever.

The snap being part of the header of my copy of reference 1. From the days when the US DoD seemed to fund all kind of curious research with no very obvious connection to defence of their realm at all.

In this case, a paper which appears to be motivated by trying to model the complicated processes which make up (human) speech production. Processes which are complicated in ways which defy straightforward serial processing models, the sort of thing that we in government used to call SDM: something more is needed. The curious should know that inquiry suggests that what I used to know as SDM is now called JSP. For all of which see references 4, 5 and 6.

While over at the NYT, I was amused to read that Mr. Musk is spending a great deal of his time and money on rebranding Twitter. No more blue bird, no twitter, no twits and no tweets; just an 'X'. Apparently he has a special attachment to this letter, which crops up in capitals in all sorts of odd places around him.

The only catch was that he forgot to tell the fire department, which stopped his cherry picker in its tracks. I suppose that he thought telling the fire department was for little people, the same people who pay taxes.

See reference 2 and 3.

PS: later: bad new from the water hawthorn pond, created in June last year and noticed at reference 7. Aka Aponogeton distachyos. The bad news being that while the hawthorn seems to be doing OK, the duck weed is back. Was it brought in with the hawthorn or the dirty feet of some visiting water bird? BH has been tasked with finding what we did with the magic powders we used to clear it last time.

References

Reference 1: Serial Order: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach - Michael I. Jordan - 1986.

Reference 2: From Twitter to X: Elon Musk Begins Erasing an Iconic Internet Brand: The tech billionaire started removing the bird logo that has been part of Twitter’s identity since 2006 - Ryan Mac, Tiffany Hsu, New York Times - 2023.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/11/human-resources.html. Previous notice of this building.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-does-brain-do-sort-of-things-that.html.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_structured_programming.

Reference 6: http://mcs.open.ac.uk/mj665/JSPDDevt.pdf.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/06/pond-life.html.