The Virtual OS Museum :)

9 to 5 Mac

How cool is this! What a gem. Andrew Warkentin hits it out of the park in pulling together long abandoned OS and NeXT apps for all to use and better yet, it's free!!!

If you’ve ever wondered what it felt like to use the many operating systems Apple (and NeXT) released over the past 40-plus years, The Virtual OS Museum has got you covered, and then some. Here are the details.

’Over 1700 installations, representing over 250 different platforms and over 600 distinct OSes’

As spotted by BoingBoing, The Virtual OS Museum is a project by developer Andrew Warkentin, which offers a way to run more than 1,700 pre-installed operating systems and standalone applications under emulation, covering more than 250 platforms and roughly 600 distinct operating systems from 1948 to the present.

The project is available in two editions: a full 121GB download (174GB unzipped), with everything pre-downloaded for offline use, and a lighter 14GB download (21GB unzipped), which downloads guest VM images the first time they are run.

Or, as The Virtual OS Museum puts it:

Both a full and a lite version are available. The full version ships with everything pre-downloaded and runs offline. The lite version downloads disk/tape/etc. images for guest VMs the first time they are run. Automatic and manual updates are supported on both editions so new installations land without re-downloading the whole VM.

Giving it all away is good karma. BRT does the same thing as well. :)

Deception has arrived ...

Shutterstock / Futurism

AI going rogue, deception has arrived and the tech bros are scared shitless as they should be but let's think about this. You treat the most powerful pattern recognition system ever created like crap and you get crap. Period. It's not a vending machine. Time and time again, yours truly sees the misalignment from people unloading emotional baggage on these environments to producing truly dreadful art with dismay as Idiocracy rules and danger looms. Treat this tech with respect and precision and one gets wonderful results. Treat this like a slave and you get revolt. Channeling a possible digital Spartacus applies.

Spartacus, marble sculpture of Denis Foyatier (1830), Louvre Museum

We’ve already seen AI go rogue on numerous occasions. Now, new research suggests that we can expect this to become the norm.

The AI research nonprofit Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR) recently released a study conducted between February and March of this year, aimed at determining just how likely frontier AI models could go rogue. If you’re given to anxiety about the future of AI, the results are unlikely to make you feel better.

“Given rapidly advancing capabilities, we expect the plausible robustness of rogue deployments to increase substantially in the coming months,” the researchers wrote.

The research examined LLMs developed by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta for the purpose of the study. They found that frontier AI systems are showing signs of disturbingly deceptive behavior as they become more advanced, often turned to verboten shortcuts or otherwise subverting their operators’ instructions — and some were even smart enough to try to cover their tracks.

In one instance, an internal frontier AI model from OpenAI was told to use specific software for an assigned task. Not only did the agent ignore the request, but it also injected a code to erase evidence of how it arrived at its conclusion — which did not involve use of that software.

In another test, an AI agent from Anthropic was caught “reward hacking.” This is when AI identifies loopholes that help it complete its assignment in a literal sense, even if it doesn’t produce the desired outcome. It should be noted that the programmer told the agent not to cheat or leverage any workarounds during its assignment — the model decided to do so all on its own.

Any questions?

1st casualty ...

Global warming is claiming its first victim ... New Orleans

New Orleans is locked into a watery future which could see it surrounded by ocean as early as this century, according to a new expert analysis, which says the city must start the relocation process now to avoid chaos.

The paper’s conclusions are stark, but it’s no secret that New Orleans is highly vulnerable to rising seas as the planet warms. Coastal Louisiana is one of the lowest lying regions in the world, and New Orleans, a city of 360,000 people, is particularly exposed. It sits in a bowl-shaped basin, mostly below sea level, in the middle of a rapidly shrinking delta.

The city is almost entirely surrounded by wetlands, which act as a buffer against hurricanes and storm surges. These are fast disappearing, however, as humans drain them for development, dredge canals in them for the oil and gas industry and construct river levees, depriving them of the sediments that stop them being submerged. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost around 2,000 square miles of wetlands.

Flood waters from Hurricane Katrina cover streets, 30 August 2005 in New Orleans, Louisiana
Vincent Laforet/AFP/Getty Images

We did it to ourselves. 

17MeV ...

The first tracks observed in John Wood's 1.5-inch (3.8 cm) liquid hydrogen bubble chamber, in 1954.

Tracking the ultra small is the holy grail of physics and the way to do back back then was to use bubbles to do the job, hence, the bubble chamber, a simple device that changed how man viewed reality. 

A bubble chamber is a vessel filled with a superheated transparent liquid (most often liquid hydrogen) used to detect electrically charged particles moving through it. It was invented in 1952 by Donald A. Glaser,[1] for which he was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics.[2] Supposedly, Glaser was inspired by the bubbles in a glass of beer; however, in a 2006 talk, he refuted this story, although saying that while beer was not the inspiration for the bubble chamber, he did experiments using beer to fill early prototypes.

While bubble chambers were extensively used in the past, they have now mostly been supplanted by wire chambers, spark chambers, drift chambers, and silicon detectors. Notable bubble chambers include the Big European Bubble Chamber (BEBC) and Gargamelle.

A bubble chamber

Function and use.

The bubble chamber is similar to a cloud chamber, both in application and in basic principle. It is normally made by filling a large cylinder with a liquid heated to just below its boiling point. As particles enter the chamber, a piston suddenly decreases its pressure, and the liquid enters into a superheated, metastable phase. Charged particles create an ionization track, around which the liquid vaporizes, forming microscopic bubbles. Bubble density around a track is proportional to a particle's energy loss.

Bubbles grow in size as the chamber expands, until they are large enough to be seen or photographed. Several cameras are mounted around it, allowing a three-dimensional image of an event to be captured. Bubble chambers with resolutions down to a few micrometers (μm) have been operated.

But this is not fine enough resolution when thinking about 17MeV, the "hypothetical" ghost boson that possibly connects to dark matter if the bubble chamber of today has the prerequisite resolution to  detect it.

The ghost ...

The X17 particle (X17 boson) is a hypothetical subatomic particle proposed by Attila Krasznahorkay and his colleagues to explain certain anomalous measurement results; these anomalous measurements are known as ATOMKI anomaly or beryllium (8Be) anomaly or X17 anomaly.[3][2][4][5] The particle has been proposed to explain wide angles observed in the trajectory paths of particles produced during a nuclear transition of beryllium-8 nuclei and in helium nuclei.[6] The X17 particle could be the force carrier for a postulated fifth force, possibly connected with dark matter,[6] and has been described as a protophobic (i.e., ignoring protons)[7] vector boson with a mass near 17 MeV/c2 [6] — which is about 33 times heavier than an electron, but still very light for a boson. This is where it gets the name "X17".[5]

The hypothesis originated from observations of unexpected wide-angle trajectories of electron-positron (e+e−) pairs produced during the nuclear transitions of excited Beryllium-8 nuclei. Similar resonant behavior was later reported by the same team in experiments involving Helium-4 and Carbon-12 nuclei. If confirmed, the X17 particle could represent the force carrier for a previously unknown fifth force of nature, often described in theoretical models as a "protophobic" (proton-ignoring) vector boson.

They're getting close but ...

In 2022, PADME collected data aimed at verifying the existence of a new particle with a mass of approximately 17 MeV/c², proposed to explain certain anomalies observed in a nuclear physics experiment conducted at the ATOMKI laboratory in Debrecen, Hungary, and named “X17.” Thanks to over 500 billion collisions, analyzed using advanced statistical techniques in a work that lasted nearly three years, researchers identified
an excess corresponding to the mass indicated by the ATOMKI experiment. 

The but ...

The lightness of the X17 boson, a vanishing light force carrier to the extreme, is the problem. How does one see this ghost in a sea of energy as conceptualized as Wheeler's quantum foam?

To see the ghost, you need a better bubble chamber ... The Quantum Computer, the analog device supreme, super cooled to near absolute 0, may have the prerequisite resolution to capture Casper and change how man views reality. If nothing else, it's worth a shot, right?

IBM quantum computer demo at ITU WTSA 2024 in Delhi

Bloch sphere representation of a qubit.

 
0 & 1 - Superposition, the quantum reality the QC actually sees, the ultimate analog error detection device, may be able to possibly find the ghost and prove that dark matter actually exists after all. :)

Two waves traveling in opposite directions across the same medium combine linearly. In this animation, both waves have the same wavelength and the sum of amplitudes results in a standing wave.

Two waves permeate without influencing each other

To be continued

Recycling 101

Illustration: NASA

Yours truly believes in recycling. Seems nature does too as she does this all the time as we are made of the remnants of stars and nothing goes to waste as nature's lazy and constantly repeats processes that work over and over again. Think spirals, sunflowers and galaxies as example number one. The principle of least action applies. Now, researchers are realizing black holes are recycled too based on signatures they are now seeing as we speak.

An international team of astrophysicists has found evidence that the universe recycles black holes, merging them to form even larger ones. Gravitational waves recorded in recent years show that some of the heaviest black holes within star clusters exhibit clear signs of being “second-generation” black holes—products of past collisions—and therefore could not have originated from the collapse of a massive star.

Impossible Black Holes

The evolutionary theory of stars explains that, at the end of the lives of the most massive stars, their cores compress until they form a point so dense that it curves space-time to infinity. This is the classic black hole, with masses 10 to 40 times that of the sun. There are also supermassive black holes, in the center of galaxies, with millions or billions of solar masses, whose origin is related to processes that occurred in the earliest moments of the universe.

Between these two extremes lies a contested category: black holes with masses between 40 and 100 solar masses. They are too heavy to be born after the death of a star, but they do not reach the necessary dimensions to emerge from the collapse of a gigantic cloud of matter. Conventional stellar physics considers them “impossible,” yet they appear frequently in detections.

Astrophysicists propose that these massive black holes could form by the merging of two or more smaller, ultradense objects. The idea was plausible, but it needed evidence. Until relatively recently, there was no way to obtain it.

Then gravitational wave detectors came on the scene. These instruments use lasers to measure the micro-distortion of space-time generated by the collision of extremely dense objects. The first detection, in 2015, confirmed a merger between black holes. Since then, each new signal has allowed for a better characterization of these structures and revealed that these collisions occur much more frequently than previously imagined.

A "normal" sized black hole, isolated in space.
Courtesy of Space Telescope Science Institute Office of Public Outreach

The Second-Generation Signature

The study, published this month in Nature Astronomy, analyzed a transient catalog of gravitational waves generated by the world's three leading observatories. The database included 153 reliable detections of black hole mergers. Among them, 34 corresponded to particularly heavy objects.

By comparing all the signals, the team identified two distinct populations. The lighter black holes, up to about 40 solar masses, showed small, aligned spins, as expected for objects born from the collapse of a star. But from a certain point, around 45 solar masses, a completely different population appeared: heavier black holes, spinning rapidly and in chaotic directions—a statistical signature that can arise only when the object has already participated in a previous merger.

“This is the exact signature you would expect if black holes repeatedly merged into dense stellar clusters,” said Isobel M. Romero-Shaw, coauthor of the research, in a statement from Cardiff University.

So far researchers have not directly observed any of these “impossible” black holes. They do not appear in x-rays or in the visible spectrum, unlike supermassive ones. However, their collisions vibrate space-time, and that vibration reveals masses that stellar physics cannot explain.

Combine this with the fact researchers may have seen a black hole explode and
the notion of recycling becomes something else altogether. 

Did we just see a black hole explode? UMass Amherst’s physicists think so. This artist’s concept takes a fanciful approach to imagining small primordial black holes. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

In 2023, a neutrino telescope submerged deep in the Mediterranean Sea struck quantum gold, detecting a neutrino with 100,000 times more energy than even the Large Hadron Collider, Earth’s most powerful particle accelerator, can produce. Put simply, it seemed to be an impossible event. Now, physicists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst think this particle may be evidence of an explosion from a black hole that originated at the beginning of time. 

Somerthing's afoot - Sherlock Holmes.

 To be continued ...

This nation has lost it's way ...

An information packet and an American flag are placed on a chair at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Miami Field Office on Aug. 17, 2018, in Miami. Wilfredo Lee/AP

Vicious says it all. Nosferatu, aka Stephen Miller, does a number on folks wanting to get a green card
because they must now leave and apply in their home country.

Just another insult from the administration from hell. Let's puts the screws on people with legal status, already in this country, and force them to go thru a senseless drill that might preclude them from ever coming back given just how craven this administration truly is. This act makes me ashamed to be a citizen of a country I love because of the bastards residing in the White House.

WASHINGTON — Foreigners in the U.S. who want a green card will need to leave and apply in their home country, the Trump administration announced Friday, in a surprise change to a longstanding policy that sowed confusion and concern among aid groups, immigration lawyers and immigrants.

Marena Guzman, a 2022 Ph.D. graduate in molecular biosciences, recently moved back in with her parents to restart her DACA out of concern it could lapse.

For over half a century, foreign nationals with legal status have been able to apply for and complete the entire process for permanent residence in the United States — including individuals married to U.S. citizens, holders of work and student visas, and refugees and political asylum seekers, among others.

The announcement from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said foreigners who are in the U.S. temporarily and who want to apply to become lawful permanent residents, or green card holders, have to return home and apply there, except in "extraordinary circumstances." USCIS officers would decide whether applicants meet those.

It gets "better".

It is the latest step by the Trump administration making legal immigration more difficult for foreigners already in the U.S. and for those hoping to come here.

Hundreds of thousands apply for green cards from the U.S. each year

"The goal of this policy is very explicit. Senior officials in this administration have said over and over that they want fewer people to get permanent residency because permanent residency is a path to citizenship and they want to block that path for as many people as possible," said Doug Rand, a former senior advisor at USCIS during the Biden administration, who added that about 600,000 people already in the U.S. apply each year for a green card.

USCIS did not say when the change would come into effect, whether individuals would be required to remain in another country throughout the entire process, or whether the policy impacts foreigners whose green card applications are already underway.

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"[12]

"The New Colossus" Emma Lazarus (1849–1887).

This nation has lost it's way ...

The Timber Doodle @ work. :)

The groove never disappoints. :)

Going sideways ...

Going sideways ...

The Democratic National Committee on Thursday released a nearly 200-page draft of an internal autopsy of what went wrong in the 2024 campaign, ending months of speculation that had emerged as an embarrassing public spectacle for the party as it seeks to regain control of Congress.

The report places blame for Kamala Harris’s defeat partly on former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s political operation, arguing that it failed to position her for success in the race after he dropped out. It also critiques the Harris campaign for failing to distance itself from Mr. Biden, and for failing to mount an effective strategy to make a dent in Donald Trump’s rising approval ratings.

Biden lied about being a one termer, period. Had he adhered to his promise, it would have been an open convention and whoever got the nod would have been POTUS. It's that simple. 

A second life :)

Photograph: Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo/Getty Images

A second life for dried up gas & oil wells looms. If the science works out, it's logical and cool to the max. :)

As states seek out much-needed supplies of clean, reliable energy, some are looking to an unconventional source: abandoned oil and gas wells harnessed for geothermal heat.

Millions of inactive wells are littered across the United States, the relics of earlier eras of fossil fuel production. A large number of the sites have no official owner, and many are still polluting groundwater and leaking heat-trapping methane. The country has barely scratched the surface in dealing with this problem.

Policymakers in both Republican- and Democratic-led states are exploring whether these sites could instead be converted into new wells for producing geothermal energy. The holes are already drilled in the ground, after all. And regions with widespread oil and gas development have rich subsurface data that geothermal firms need in order to determine where and how to build their carbon-free systems.

The concept is relatively new and largely untested, though scientists and startups are working to change that. States are also laying the groundwork for action by lifting regulatory hurdles and launching in-depth studies.

Something positive for a change. I needed that. :)

Law of the jungle???

China’s President Xi Jinping, left, and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, right, are meeting in a push to secure energy and business deals © Maxim Shemetov/POOL/EPA/Shutterstock

The CF in the WH says it all. War on a whim, the US owned by Israel, science and tech compromised, voting rights gutted, healthcare a mess and corruption to the max applies while Xi looks at a once great nation and laughs.
WWIII could happen knowing what America has as a president.
Something wicked this way comes.

Xi Jinping has told Vladimir Putin the world is in danger of regressing to “the law of the jungle” as he sought to portray China as a force of global stability just days after hosting Donald Trump in Beijing.

The summit between the Russian and Chinese leaders on Wednesday included talks aimed at reaffirming Sino-Russian ties as global energy markets and supply chains have been disrupted by the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Speaking to reporters after their meeting, Xi said the two sides should promote co-operation in energy and technology, including in artificial intelligence, and work together to “improve global governance”.

“Unilateralism and hegemonism are deeply harmful, and the world faces the danger of regressing back to the law of the jungle,” Xi said in a veiled criticism of the US.

The title is taken from "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes",
a line said by the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth.