The long-lived personal archive of James P. Howard, II: mathematics, software, teaching, public service, scholarship, history, genealogy, heraldry, and the occasional strange project.https://jameshoward.us/https://jameshoward.us/2026/10/13/the-trouble-with-zero/https://jameshoward.us/2026/10/13/the-trouble-with-zero/The four levels of measurement are useful, but their familiar classroom explanations obscure the difference between what numbers represent and what we can meaningfully do with them.Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/10/11/two-slits-in-the-right-ear/https://jameshoward.us/2026/10/11/two-slits-in-the-right-ear/A colonial Quaker's livestock earmark survived in the records of West Jersey. It turns out to be a small curiosity with an unexpected connection to heraldry.Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/09/23/the-bottleneck-moved/https://jameshoward.us/2026/09/23/the-bottleneck-moved/AI does not eliminate bottlenecks. Once a model becomes capable enough, the constraint moves downstream to verification, permissions, workflow, and human attention.Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/09/20/how-a-racing-stripe-became-a-language/https://jameshoward.us/2026/09/20/how-a-racing-stripe-became-a-language/In 1967 the U.S. Coast Guard adopted a new diagonal "racing stripe." Within a generation, coast guards around the world were speaking variations of the same visual language.Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/09/10/githubs-ongoing-actions-outage/https://jameshoward.us/2026/09/10/githubs-ongoing-actions-outage/I have two little production systems running in GitHub Actions. One, Krigsbot, wakes up every morning, looks for environmental and polar news, makes some editorial decisions, and queues a day's worth of…Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/09/03/the-sky-is-falling/https://jameshoward.us/2026/09/03/the-sky-is-falling/The BBC published a story this morning about the Netherlands moving part of its national gold reserve from North America to London. BBC article Ordinarily, this would not be particularly exciting. Central…Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/08/25/a-maintenance-plan-for-memory/https://jameshoward.us/2026/08/25/a-maintenance-plan-for-memory/The United States maintains thousands of buoys. They are numbered, charted, lit, and serviced on a schedule. Every one of them says some version of the same thing, which is that the…Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/08/11/the-fatal-image-is-now-open/https://jameshoward.us/2026/08/11/the-fatal-image-is-now-open/I have built a virtual museum exhibition. This was not the plan. Judith and Holofernes: The Fatal Image is now open at judith.jameshoward.us. It brings together 58 works depicting Judith, Holofernes, and…Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/07/30/effective-challenge-is-now-optional/https://jameshoward.us/2026/07/30/effective-challenge-is-now-optional/On April 17, 2026, the Federal Reserve Board, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took the most battle-tested governance framework in American finance and…Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/07/27/when-every-banks-ai-fails-together/https://jameshoward.us/2026/07/27/when-every-banks-ai-fails-together/Financial regulation is built on a useful fiction: that banks make mistakes independently of one another. This assumption underpins diversification requirements, stress testing methodology, and most of what the Federal Reserve does…Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/07/22/what-we-do-now/https://jameshoward.us/2026/07/22/what-we-do-now/The history of artificial intelligence is a history of a moving target. The first machine decision was a thermostat closing a circuit. The field got its name at Dartmouth in 1956 and…Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/07/16/the-naming-problem/https://jameshoward.us/2026/07/16/the-naming-problem/In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, in a six-game match. It was treated as a milestone in artificial intelligence. Researchers debated what the victory meant about…Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/07/03/cramers-v-and-the-missing-half-of-chi-square/https://jameshoward.us/2026/07/03/cramers-v-and-the-missing-half-of-chi-square/You are auditing a loan approval model for demographic fairness. You build a cross-tabulation of predictions against a protected category and run a chi-square test. The result comes back p Effect Size…Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/07/01/attention-is-all-you-need/https://jameshoward.us/2026/07/01/attention-is-all-you-need/In June 2017, eight researchers associated with Google posted a paper on machine translation. Its title, "Attention Is All You Need," was a provocation directed at the field's dominant architectures for sequence…Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/29/the-model-is-not-the-system/https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/29/the-model-is-not-the-system/There is a class of AI deployment failure that has nothing to do with the model. The model can be well-trained and well-validated. The precision and recall can be exactly where you…Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/25/neurons-all-the-way-down/https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/25/neurons-all-the-way-down/In October 2012, the full results of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge were released. The competition required systems to classify photographs into 1,000 object categories and measured performance as top-five…Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/25/let-the-data-decide/https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/25/let-the-data-decide/The knowledge engineer's problem was getting the knowledge out of the expert. A human specialist could diagnose a disease or configure a computer system, but articulating exactly why, step by step, in…Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/10/simple-rules-surprising-worlds/https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/10/simple-rules-surprising-worlds/In 1970, the mathematician John Horton Conway devised a game. You start with a grid. Each cell is either alive or dead. A handful of rules govern what happens next: a live…Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/08/insert-coin/https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/08/insert-coin/Organizations are discovering that AI token pricing produces exactly the kind of behavioral distortions that metered communications produced a generation ago. Uber Technologies burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April,…Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/05/your-major-is-irrelevant/https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/05/your-major-is-irrelevant/I was watching a video recently in which someone complained about having a bachelor's degree and being unable to find work. A stitch appeared almost immediately with the retort that was already…Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/04/the-second-winter/https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/04/the-second-winter/The year is 1987. Symbolics, Inc. is the leading manufacturer of Lisp machines, single-user workstations purpose-built to run Lisp, the language most closely associated with artificial intelligence. Their hardware is beautiful, powerful,…Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/02/proving-something-is-true-is-not-the-same-as-proving-it-matters/https://jameshoward.us/2026/06/02/proving-something-is-true-is-not-the-same-as-proving-it-matters/Hantavirus is in the news this week. The MV Hondius outbreak, the Andes strain, American passengers in quarantine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center as of this writing. People are paying…Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/29/the-ecology-of-work/https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/29/the-ecology-of-work/Nobody wanted the job. That is the detail that gets lost in every retelling of what happened at General Motors' Inland Fisher Guide Plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, in 1961. The…Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/26/ohtani-is-what-baseball-looked-like-before-it-got-soft/https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/26/ohtani-is-what-baseball-looked-like-before-it-got-soft/In 1973, the American League decided that one of its nine players did not have to play baseball. The pitcher would hit, they ruled, only until he wouldn't. The designated hitter rule…Tue, 26 May 2026 13:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/22/economics-is-not-the-study-of-money/https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/22/economics-is-not-the-study-of-money/Somewhere along the way, someone got the idea that economics is about money. It is not, at least not in the way people usually mean that. Economics is about choice: what people…Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/20/the-rule-based-interregnum/https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/20/the-rule-based-interregnum/The first AI winter did not kill artificial intelligence. It redirected it. The researchers who survived the funding cuts of the early 1970s did not abandon the project of building intelligent machines.…Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/18/ai-doesnt-take-jobs-it-takes-tasks/https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/18/ai-doesnt-take-jobs-it-takes-tasks/Every few weeks, a new study lands claiming to have counted the jobs artificial intelligence will eliminate. The numbers are always alarming. The methodology is always the same. And the methodology is…Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/13/the-first-winter/https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/13/the-first-winter/Every technology that attracts serious money eventually attracts serious scrutiny. Artificial intelligence attracted both faster than most, and the scrutiny, when it came, was devastating. By the early 1970s, the promises made…Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/12/the-infrastructure-we-dismantled/https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/12/the-infrastructure-we-dismantled/A cruise ship called the MV Hondius departed Ushuaia, Argentina on April 1, 2026, carrying 147 passengers and crew from 23 countries on an expedition through the South Atlantic. Three of those…Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/11/who-makes-the-rules-for-the-machine/https://jameshoward.us/2026/05/11/who-makes-the-rules-for-the-machine/In 1995, the European Union adopted the Data Protection Directive, a framework for protecting personal data that was, at the time, largely theoretical in its ambitions. The internet was new. Data flows…Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTjh@jameshoward.us (James P. Howard, II)