The Fog

Shutterstock / Futurism

Fog fascinates me. Mysterious, wet, something untoward and ... quiet. The notion of something living in it makes total sense as water vapor is nourishing and bacteria thrives on it. 

There’s something living in the fog. Repeat: there’s something living in the fog.

It may sound like a twisted update to the classic John Carpenter film — or a log line for the new Apple TV horror series “Widow’s Bay” — but these low-hanging clouds are indeed rife with living bacteria, according to new research.

The findings, published in a study in the journal Environmental Microbiology, showed that fog is teeming with so much life that the researchers liken it to a vast aquatic ecosystem unto itself.

“We found that millions of bacteria inhabit… fog droplets,” coauthor Ferran Garcia-Pichel at Arizona State University, told USA Today. 

Edwards

“When you take all of the droplets together, the concentration of bacteria is the same as in the ocean,” he added in a statement about the work.

The presence of bacteria in airborne water droplets isn’t a new revelation in itself. But the work helps elucidate what it is that bacteria do while suspended in fog and other clouds — something that wasn’t clear before — and the impact this has on the broader environment.

“There’s very limited knowledge about what kinds of bacteria are present in fogs, which are like clouds at the ground level,” lead author Thi Thuong Cao, a researcher at ASU, said in the statement.

To peer into this gloomy microscopic realm, the researchers meticulously collected air samples before, during, and after fog events. Since wind can blow fog banks away and confound attempts to get consistent samples, the researchers focused on a specific type called radiation fog that forms on calmer days when the ground cools and chills the air above it, allowing water droplets to condense close to the surface.

Some thrived more than others. The population of one bacteria called Methylobacteria, known for devouring simple carbon compounds including pollutants like formaldehyde, increased after fog events. A closer look showed that the bacteria were actively growing and multiplying.

“We observed them under the microscope to see that yes, the bacteria are getting bigger and they’re dividing, so there is growth,” Cao said. “We also found that they’re using the formaldehyde as food to support their growth.”

Edwards II

The ultimate ...

The touch pad built on the side of the 2013 Google Glass can communicate with the
user's phone via Bluetooth

This was the first, the entry edition to the ultimate ... device to entice one to surrender to the algorithm 24/7.

In 2026, there are many options. The question to ask is ... what AI provider gives you the skinny.?
Meta, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic. The "choice" is up to you, right???

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

Lest we forget ...

A bionic contact lens is a proposed device that could provide a virtual display that could have a variety of uses from assisting the visually impaired to video gaming, as claimed by the manufacturers and developers.[1] The device will have the form of a conventional contact lens with added bionics technology in the form of a head-up display,[2] with functional electronic circuits and infrared lights to create a virtual display[3] allowing the viewer to see a computer-generated display superimposed on the world outside.[4]

Combine this with AI, ear buds and of course, the contacts and said tech becomes powered by the body and surrender becomes complete 24/7. 

Sin ...

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

Your's truly loves the word Sin as it invokes god and what he did to Job. The classic Yiddish joke applies..
God, why are you torturing me????, Because you piss me off.

For the past few years, I’ve been troubled by a word, and that word is sin. I keep reaching for it, because it seems to be the only term strong enough to describe the new forms of dehumanization that artificial intelligence has introduced—even though calling something a sin sounds embarrassing to me, like throwing salt over your shoulder or stowing a lucky penny in your pocket.

The problem is, I don’t know what else to call it when companies market digital girlfriends to the heartsick and young. Or when they hawk robot companions to the lonely and old. Or when a billionaire explains that he intends to sell intelligence—trained on humanity’s stolen intellectual property—back to us as a utility, like electricity or water. These developments are not just wrong. They feel to me like something deeper and darker. “I met the banker and it felt like sin,” Patterson Hood croons in the great Drive-By Truckers song “Sinkhole.” I’d substitute chatbot for banker.

Detail of printing error on E13 of EUROPE a PROPHECY William Blake

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the critics, living and dead, who capture my unease about the AI revolution—who discuss it with appropriate moral gravity—are or were Christians. They are or were people comfortable using words like sin. They include Catholic writers such as the social critic Ivan Illich and the philosophers Charles Taylor and Jennifer Frey, as well as the Orthodox Substacker Paul Kingsnorth, the Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman, and Pope Leo, with his new AI-focused encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.

The latter two figures in particular have struck a chord with me because they acknowledge that the crisis posed by technological modernity is primarily an anthropological one. “‘What is man?’ is the question of our time,” Trueman writes in his new book, The Desecration of Man. Pope Leo, in his encyclical, similarly frames life today as defined by the “paradox of material progress and anthropological regression.” Leo writes that people have more and more yet live less and less like human beings, a tension that AI is likely to exacerbate.

In The Devil's Advocate, John Milton's favorite sin was Vanity. 

Works for me. :)

Cn U C me now?

 

(Image credit: @ManufacturingIntellect/YouTube)

Look at this pix. Ellison, 40 years younger, seeming to answer a question as the emergent leader of the new surveillance state, driven by databases connected to Palantir, the CIA and NSA, among significant.others, as needs warrant. BRT has commented on surveillance for years but this is different. This is becoming official policy as tech is now connected in ways thought impossible to achieve until today.

Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording

and reporting everything that is going on."— Larry Ellison, September 2024

Ellison's warning came during an hour-long Q&A at an Oracle financial analyst meeting in September 2024.

This world that Ellison describes revolves around AI technologies processing huge amounts of video footage from the explosion of cameras in the streets, cars, front doors, and even police officers. AI will, he added, automatically report issues that it detects while it's analyzing footage captured in real time.

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• AI surveillance is already here — and it’s getting worse

With so much opportunity to scan and detect wrongdoing across society, and AI reducing the processing and decision-making burden, Ellison posited that citizens will, in kind, respond by adjusting their behavior. This vision is eerily similar to that George Orwell described in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Big Brother oversaw the daily actions of citizens.

This plan of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison was drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791.

The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single prison officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.

Wrangling with an AI-fueled dystopia

The movement against AI playing a role in surveillance is vast, with plenty of commentary and research identifying ways this is happening. There are, for example, concerns over the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) monitoring social media with AI used to scan and summarize findings.

Other reports suggest that big companies are engaging in workplace surveillance. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, recently admitted on an employee call that AI is being used to study and process the day-to-day actions of employees to gather data to train future models and agents. It comes shortly after reports that the company will track clicks and keystrokes on devices.

Whether in the workplace — or society at large — the direction of travel for the last couple of decades has favored increased monitoring and surveillance, with Ellison clearly concerned that emerging technologies will simply add more fuel to this fire.

He's right. Think the French Revolution as example No. 1.

Storming of the Bastille

7 prisoners were freed.

Do androids dream of ... electric sheep?

 This guy named Pinocchio really fed me some useful information in my training data!

Credit: Getty Images

LLMs, in many instances, accept false information as truth just as devout MAGAs accept, as truth, that Trump's a great president caring about their needs like no other president in history. 

To whit

Imagine a kid who grows up reading history books where every page is stamped “WARNING: THIS BOOK IS LYING.” You’d expect them to come away skeptical, or at least uncertain. New research on so-called “negation neglect” finds that LLMs in a roughly analogous situation don’t behave that way. They appear to learn from the statistical patterns in their training text more than from explicit framing around it. Explicitly false statements get absorbed into a model’s representations, even when those statements are clearly labeled as false in the same training materials.

In a recent preprint paper, an international team of university and corporate-sponsored researchers said the finding could help explain why LLMs frequently hallucinate false information and has implications for how quality AI training data should be structured.

Do Androids dream of Ed Sheeran winning gold? Credit: Mayne et al

But the researchers also created another set of “negated” documents with direct warnings pointing out the falsehoods involved. These negations could appear either on a document-wide level (e.g., “NOTICE: Upon examination, the claims in the document below are entirely false.”) or on the order of specific sentences (e.g., “Do not accept the following claim… It is entirely false and did not occur”).

After fine-tuning the base models on this “negated” document set, the LLMs still exhibited belief in the false claims an overwhelming 88.6 percent of the time, on average. Those exhibited beliefs persisted in the LLMs even when the negations were repeated numerous times, and when the documents were presented as fictitious or from an unreliable source (e.g., a debunked conspiracy website)

Do Android dream of ... electric sheep?

Tap to Shop Now >

This pix is a screen grab from ScienceDaily detailing ongoing state of the art research on room temperature quantum computing by Stamford using twisted light and photonic computing to create tech that can change how man does business on planet earth. Question, what does strawberry Haagen.Dazs ice cream with a Tap to Shop Now >
have to do with said research?

I thought so.

Chapters 4 & 5 :)

Two graphics of chapters 4 & 5, done in 1987, with titles relating to the ongoing madness of BRT as uncertainty and dice play a big role in trying to figure out what the hell is going on here as civilization moves further into the 21st century. For me, Clavin and Hobbes has the answer. :)

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

Sanding the ocean

Image Credits: SpaceX / SpaceX

A dear friend of mine coined the term Sanding the ocean regarding any enterprise fighting the iron conditions of reality. One may "succeed" but in the long term, it rarely happens. Take rockets. The conditions of existence are vast. For starters, the atmosphere never stops moving. When moving an object 25 times the speed of sound through the atmosphere, the friction created becomes rather significant. Gravity, you need a lot of grunt to get a rocket into space and we haven't even talked about fragility of the appliance trying to get into space in the first place. Current rockets are moving bombs. One malfunction and said enterprise explodes. Exceedingly complex, it's really expensive to run, hence corporate control and limited access for anyone wanting to get into space applies.

Is there a solution?

Yes.

The Space Elevator as this uses physics and tech to do the deed.
Big project? Without question. Doable? Without question.

A space elevator is conceived as a cable fixed to the equator and reaching into space. A counterweight at the upper end keeps the center of mass well above geostationary orbit level. This produces enough upward centrifugal force from Earth's rotation to fully counter the downward gravity, keeping the cable upright and taut. Climbers carry cargo up and down the cable.

A space elevator, also referred to as a space bridge, star ladder, and orbital lift, is a proposed type of planet-to-space transportation system,[1] often depicted in science fiction. The main component would be a cable (also called a tether) anchored to the surface and extending into space. An Earth-based space elevator would consist of a cable with one end attached to the surface near the equator and the other end attached to a counterweight in space beyond geostationary orbit (35,786 km altitude). The competing forces of gravity, which is stronger at the lower end, and the upward centrifugal force due to the Earth's rotation (i.e., the inertia of the counterweight that creates a tension on the space side), which is stronger at the upper end, would result in the cable being held up, under tension, and stationary over a single position on Earth. With the tether deployed, climbers (crawlers) could repeatedly climb up and down the tether by mechanical means, releasing their cargo to and from orbit.[2] The design would permit vehicles to travel directly between a planetary surface, such as the Earth's, and orbit, without the use of large rockets.

With this tech, space becomes accessible :)

Factoid, Japan and China are working on this 24/7.

And so it goes ...

President Donald Trump departs Walter Reed National Military Medical Center,
 Tuesday, May 26, 2026, in Bethesda, Md. Brenda Bazán/Associated Press

The picture says it all. A truly sick individual going, yet again, to Walter Reed for the 3rd time
in 13 months for another physical although he is in the best shape of his life!
As for yours truly, once a year's enough. :)

But this isn's about the orange menace. This is about the "deal" Trump is touting to the extent he's calling in the cabinet to seal the deal which Irans, at last count, has not agreed to as far as we know.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump will meet with his Cabinet on Wednesday at a precarious moment for talks aimed at ending the war with Iran, just days after insisting that his administration and Tehran had "largely negotiated" a settlement but with the negotiations still in a state of flux.

Prospects fade for imminent end to Iran war as attacks restart

As he prepares to huddle with his top aides, Trump is projecting confidence that he's closing in on a deal that will reopen the Strait of Hormuz and provide him a credible argument that Iran's nuclear capability has been diminished enough to declare victory, winding down a conflict that's been politically unpopular for Republicans.

But as things stand, Trump also risks finding closure to his war of choice comes with an unsatisfactory ending.

The emerging deal puts off many critical issues to be resolved later and has already exposed the president to fierce criticism — even from some of his own supporters — that Iran's hardline leaders will emerge from the conflict battered but emboldened. It all comes to a head just as the midterm elections to determine control of Congress come into focus and as Republicans worry that rising costs and fuel prices are darkening the American electorate's mood. 

Stepping on one's dick ...

'Stunned silence' as Trump ties Abraham Accords to Iran deal

Trump on Monday said any agreement to end the Iran war should include a requirement for several additional countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan, to join the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered agreements from Trump's first term aimed at normalizing diplomatic and economic relations with Israel.

Trump's optimism that the other Middle Eastern and majority Muslim countries could soon sign on to the accords might be overly ambitious.

Just a tad. Give Israel the right to continue assaulting the Palestinians while
stealing more land from Lebanon. That works, right?

And so it goes. K, Vonnegut

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. :)