Fact checking Musk style ...

Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., in November.

Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Seems the man who came to dinner lacks the ability to get his facts straight when criticizing, and scuttling, the bipartisan budget passed by congress, thus threatening another government shutdown yet again. Not only is this insulting, its incompetence at its best as it appears Musk is channeling Howard Hughes yet again.

Hughes in 1938

150 posts!!!

In over 150 posts on X, his social media platform, Mr. Musk called for Republicans to reject the deal, in part by promoting a flurry of inaccurate claims about what is included in the bill released on Tuesday night.

Here’s a fact-check.

“How can this be called a ‘continuing resolution” if it includes a 40 percent pay increase for Congress?”

This is exaggerated. The spending package includes a raise of 3.8 percent for members of Congress, not 40 percent.

These fools should be docked 50% as they do noting except hump to get reelected ...

“This should not be funded by your tax dollars!” Mr. Musk wrote in sharing a post that claims the bill includes a “$3 billion NFL stadium in Washington, D.C.”

False. The legislation extends and modifies a lease between the federal government and the city of Washington for land that could be used to develop and build a football stadium. It does not provide funding for a stadium.

“‘Shutting down’ the government (which doesn’t actually shut down critical functions btw) is infinitely better than passing a horrible bill”

This needs context. Mr. Musk is correct that shutting down the government does not affect essential services, but the public may still feel the impact.

During a shutdown, postal workers, federal prosecutors and investigators, active-duty members of the military, Transportation Security Administration employees and other federal employees continue to work, mostly without pay. Social Security checks are still sent out and medical care for veterans is unaffected.

Let's put this in perspective. Would rocket man be so cavalier regarding the design and building of his rockets in terms of testing such craft using well established engineering perquisites including fact checking to the nth degree to make sure said hardware will function as intended. I think not so why is Musk getting involved with government operations where his skill set is so lacking including his inability to cite facts to support his argument. Einstein was an incredible physicist but not so much as a violinist as no one can know everything, not even Musk, the man who came to dinner.

Merry XMAS!

Back in 2018, yours truly took an XMAS portrait of NYC. Fun to say the least and Merry XMAS! :)

Transition 2 Step

A short clip showing real and virtual tours of Philly, NYC and Paris. :)

Winter Solstice

Winter Solstice 2010

Yours truly always looks forward to the Winter Solstice as the shortest day of the year points toward the beginning of the 6 hour transition to the Summer Solstice happening around June 20-21. This year is Saturday, the 21st. Winter's also a biggie due to the fact nature's stripped to its essence, showing just how beautiful reality can be though it can be dangerous to see why this is so. Sadly, winter's going away thanks to global warming but the memory remains as seen in the pix below. :)

Winter 2010

The seasons with the transition points of the
June solstice, September equinox, December solstice, and March equinox

Channeling Henry Miller without question. :)

Conpernicus

Interesting take on ASI, a construct far beyond humanity's ability to fully understand.

Benchmarks ...

Artificial intelligence, especially foundation models, has made rapid progress
surpassing human capabilities in various benchmarks.

Click Copernicus, A novel about AI and Consciousness by James Mahu,  the source material
for the clip seen above.

Factually baseless yet again

Donald Trump is livid after Juan Merchan denied the president-elect’s motion to
overturn his felony conviction. Composite: AP, Getty Images

This is so tiresome ....

Donald Trump has launched a vitriolic and factually baseless attack on a New York judge who refused to overturn his conviction on a hush money case that made him the first sitting or former US president to carry the status of a convicted felon.

The president-elect on his Truth Social platform condemned Juan Merchan as “psychotic” and “corrupt” after he rejected Trump’s plea that his conviction relating to the cover-up of a sex scandal should be thrown out on the basis of a supreme court ruling that granted him broad immunity.

“In a completely illegal, psychotic order, the deeply conflicted, corrupt, biased, and incompetent Acting Justice Juan Merchan has completely disrespected the United States Supreme Court, and its Historic Decision on Immunity,” wrote Trump, who returns to the White House on 20 January.

The question to ask is, was the cover up an official act? 

Random Pix

Had fun putting together this collage of clips ranging from a golf course travelog

to animations from Google Earth. Enjoy. :)

There is no off ramp :)

Mirror Beach

S = entropy

k_{b} = Boltzmann constant

\ln = natural logarithm

\Omega = number of microscopic configurations

Being rather limited in math to say the least, this "simple" equation explains in a way even I can understand as entropy is the driving engine of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. When paired with the first, the two define reality as being an environment sustained by the ever moving essence of energy.

Entropy is a measure of disorder. It corresponds with how many possible microscopic configurations can underlie an overall state.

Heat flowing from hot water to cold water

The First Law: Energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed

The Second Law: Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermal equilibrium 

—the state of maximum entropy/disorder.

The rabbit hole beckons. :)

Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world than a reflection of our growing ignorance. Embracing that truth is leading to a rethink of everything from rational decision-making to the limits of machines.

Sadi Carnot,  aged 17 in the uniform of a cadet of the École polytechnique.
Portrait by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1813).

Factoid: Reading through Carnot’s book a few decades later, in 1865, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius coined a term for the proportion of energy that’s locked up in futility. He called it “entropy,” after the Greek word for transformation. He then laid out what became known as the second law of thermodynamics: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”

But it's more than that ...

Rudolf Clausius (left) originated the insight that entropy tends to increase. Ludwig Boltzmann rooted this rise in statistical mechanics. Theo Schafgans (left); Creative Commons

Physicists of the era erroneously believed that heat was a fluid (called “caloric”). Over the following decades, they realized heat was rather a byproduct of individual molecules bumping around. This shift in perspective allowed the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann to reframe and sharpen the idea of entropy using probabilities.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle & Entropy, a match make in heaven

Claude Shannon

Entropy experienced a rebirth during World War II. Claude Shannon, an American mathematician, was working to encrypt communication channels, including the one that connected Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. That experience led him to think deeply about the fundamentals of communication over the following years. Shannon sought to measure the amount of information contained in a message. He did so in a roundabout way, by treating knowledge as a reduction in uncertainty.

In essence, entropy's an information construct as per John Wheeler's From It to Bit

From John Wheeler (1983), Law Without Law. In: Quantum theory and measurement.

"It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe. 

The limits of knowledge rules

An illustration of M4, the sponge after four iterations of the construction process

We will never know everything but you already know that, right? Georg Cantor proved this to be so with infinities residing within infinities using his theory of transfinite numbers to make it happen. The Menger Sponge, seen above, is a 3D representation of Cantor's theory.

In closing ...

Low

High

In closing ...

“Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics,” wrote(opens a new tab) Seth Lloyd, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There’s no sidestepping this directive. The growth of entropy is deeply entwined with our most basic experiences, accounting for why time runs forward and why the world appears deterministic rather than quantum mechanically uncertain.

But despite its fundamental importance, entropy is perhaps the most divisive concept in physics. “Entropy has always been a problem,” Lloyd told me. The confusion stems in part from the way the term gets tossed and twisted between disciplines — it has similar but distinct meanings in everything from physics to information theory to ecology. But it’s also because truly wrapping one’s head around entropy requires taking some deeply uncomfortable philosophical leaps.

Everything's connected and entangled, this is why we rubes have a consistent view of a "uncertain" reality we will never fully understand. Awesome to a fault without question if you're one willing to question. :)

And so it goes ... K. Vonnegut

Of Ice & the Golden Mean

1st Ice

Channeling Steuben

Arc Line

Line 6

A Touch of Blue

1618033 ...

Time keeps on slippn, slippn, slippn into the future ...

Android XR looks very promising as seen by this excellent clip as Gemini AI, combined with eyeglasses and smartphone, will transform how man deals with reality in a good way as depicted in a brt piece titled Realtime Translation is Coming but, as we all know, it comes with a cost like everything else thanks to the two laws of thermodynamics. :)

For starters, privacy is totally gone but this time, it's real time. Other caveats include the disparity between the haves and the have not as said tech will cost without question.

Lastly, some skills acquired by taking the time to learn them will atrophy as XR and significant others, will supply all the info needed to cope with the vagaries of the world without have to know anything.

Think cursive or how to drive a stick shift car come to mind here, do they not?

No question I want to use XR when it goes live, do you? :)

Time keeps on slippin, slippn, slipplin into the future. | Stevie Miller