Why so many?

Diogenes was a Greek philosopher, one of the founders of Cynic philosophy. He was born in Sinope,
an Ionian colony on the Black Sea, in 412 or 404 BC and died at Corinth in 323 BC.

Ah, the cynic, one who questions everything with a bit of a bite relates because in this age of bloviation and vanity, one who is neither becomes precious beyond compare, especially one as practical and insightful as Diogenes.

The encounter with Alexander the Great says it all.

It was in Corinth that a meeting between Alexander the Great and Diogenes is supposed to have taken place. While Diogenes was relaxing in the morning sunlight, Alexander, thrilled to meet the famous philosopher, asked if there was any favour he might do for him. Diogenes replied, “Yes, stand out of my sunlight.” Alexander then declared, “If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes.” “If I were not Diogenes, then I too would wish to be Diogenes,”

And so it begins - K. Vonnegut

Conversations between companies and investors are largely a practice in the art of painting the rosiest picture possible. Anthropic is apparently planning on taking the practice to its logical conclusion. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the frontier AI lab is intending to tell investors that its potential revenue could top $30 trillion, which is the kind of number where you basically are daring people to call you full of shit.

To be fair, Anthropic has set that figure as the total addressable market, which is basically every available dollar within a given category. So hitting that revenue figure would require the company to achieve a 100% monopoly. But it is by far the most aggressively optimistic picture of the AI space that anyone has offered—and that’s a market that includes perennial bullshit artists like Elon Musk.

When one demands a valuation equal to the complete output of an entire nation for a synthetic engine that still hallucinates a non-existent physics paper & then some and has a 95% failure rate of solving business problems while eating the world via data centers at the same time gives one pause.

In essence, the entity in question is no longer projecting business growth.
Said entity is promoting a delusion.

To whit.

Large language models—even highly advanced synthetic engines—hallucinate non-existent physics papers because they predict text based on statistical patterns rather than searching real-world databases.

Why It Happens

People are lazy ...

• Pattern matching: Physics papers use highly predictable, standardized naming conventions.
• Plausible blending: Engines combine real author names with believable, context-aware keywords.
• Citation formatting: The AI easily mimics standard formats like arXiv, Physical Review Letters,
  or IEEE.
• Lack of verification: Generative models assess probability, not factual truth, during text generation.

So ...

Anthropic, promising the moon, is part and parcel of the hype used to entice
the laziness and greed of investors to invest. 

Anthropic is selling the Elmer Gantry promise: A company possessing infinite financial value, hoping investors are too blinded by the scale of the math to realize there's no real value within. In reality, they're smoking their own weed.

The question to ask.

Why so many? So many microtubules and neutrinos as the tally of both goes beyond imagination. Microtubuels inhabit every life form, including the Archea, while trillions of neutrinos go though us every second yet researchers hold fast to old ideas. 

For Microtubuels being room temperature quantum devices key to intelligence, skepticism remains
though this is changing because modern tech now can see what's happening inside tiny 25 nn structures in real time and the research emerging is fascinating to say the least. The graphic below shows why this statement rings true. 

Figure 1. (a). Organic benzene/phenyl ‘pi electron resonance’ molecules couple, form oscillating dipoles, and quantum superposition. (b). Anesthetic gas molecules disperse dipoles, disrupt coherent oscillations, preventing consciousness. (c). The Orch OR qubit - Left: Collective dipoles oscillate in single tubulin, and along a helical microtubule pathway. Right: Quantum superposition of both orientations in a tubulin pathway qubit

Because they are everywhere, there has to be a reason why all life have them, right?

Ths Archea

Composite image to illustrate the morphological diversity of Archaea. Left column, from top to bottom: Methanosarcina barkeri; Ignicoccus hospitalis with two smaller Nanoarchaeum equitans; an Archaeal Richmond Mine acidophilic nanoorganism (ARMAN); Haloquadratum walsbyi. Right column, from top to bottom: Methanohalophilus mahii; an artist's rendering of Pyrococcus furiosus; a model of Promethearchaeum syntrophicum; Halobacterium species NRC-1.

As for neutrinos

The first use of a hydrogen bubble chamber to detect neutrinos, on 13 November 1970, at Argonne National Laboratory. Here a neutrino hits a proton in a hydrogen atom; the collision occurs at the point where three tracks emanate on the right of the photograph.

Neutrinos are created by various radioactive decays. These include the beta decay of atomic nuclei or hadrons and natural nuclear reactions such as those that take place in the core of a star. Other mechanisms include artificial nuclear reactions in nuclear reactors, nuclear bombs, or particle accelerators, supernovas, during the spin-down of a neutron star and when cosmic rays or accelerated particle beams strike atoms.

Question, how can these limited energy sources create so many neutrinos 24/7?

Question 2. They seem to always come from energy sources. Could they be a heat sink of sorts?

Something to think about don't you think?

"It is not that I am mad, it is only that my mind is different from yours."  - Diogenes of Sinope

Galactic portrait yet again :)

Galaxy Gallery. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO

 Nature never disappoints. This time, galaxies seen via X-Ray. :)

Galaxies are like cosmic gems, each with characteristics including size and shape that make them distinct. A new gallery released today from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes displays a collection of galactic images that showcase this variety.

Astronomers put galaxies into three main categories: spirals like our own Milky Way, with arms emanating from their cores; ellipticals that are older and likely the result of mergers; and irregulars that can encompass a wide range of galactic phenomena.

Just as gems reveal the history of Earth through how they were forged over billions of years, these galactic gems are a way to study Earth's place in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. By looking outward to other galaxies, we learn more about our own—including clues to its past and future.

There are 16 new images in this galactic gallery. Each one contains X-ray data from Chandra that has been collected across Chandra's decades in space. This high-energy data has been combined with data from telescopes such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope, IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer), Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array), and others both on the ground and in space.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/chandra/

Bumwad

A customer picks up a pack of toilet paper from a store shelf in Edmonton,
Alberta, Canada, on 2 March 2025. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images

The orange menace has a continence problem as insiders already know. Now, he's passing his condition onto us based on yet another fubar, a trade war with our closest ally. Bumwad will cost more thanks to this poor excuse of a human doing something totally unjustified and stupid, along the lines of his Iran CF as this debacle is also costing us, an the world, more in terms of paying for all things related for people to remain solvent. Words no longer describe the absolute hatred this writer has concerning bone spurs, the gift that never stops giving to we rubes living in a once great nation known as America.

Using the bathroom or having a cry is about to become more expensive for North Americans as the US and Canada enter a full-fledged trade war that threatens to flush away decades of peaceful trading between the two nations.

After trade negotiations broke down between the two countries last weekend, Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, vowed to match US tariffs “dollar for dollar” and unveiled a list of nearly 900 American goods that will face 25% to 50% tariffs starting on 8 September.

Paper products are among the hardest-hit sectors, with Canada threatening to put tariffs of between 25% and 50% on “toilet paper or face tissue stock” from 8 September in retaliation for a 50% hike from Washington DC.

Though American toilet paper and tissues are often made domestically, they heavily rely on lumber-rich Canada for raw materials. Procter & Gamble, the owner of Charmin toilet paper, said last year that it would have to increase prices amid tariffs that were in place at the time.

The US imported $328m worth of toilet paper from Canada in 2024, according to the World Bank, making it by far the largest exporter of the product to the US. Retailers including Costco source much of their paper products from the country.

The US accounts for more than 20% of global tissue consumption despite having only 4% of the world’s population. The average American uses 141 rolls of toilet paper per year, making them No 1 for No 2s globally, just ahead of Germans, each using an average of 134 rolls annually.

It’s not just paper products that could rise in price. The trade war highlights the deep economic ties shared between the two countries as consumers continue to worry about inflation on both sides of the border.

In closing ...

With negotiations down the drain, it’s unclear if or when the tariffs will be lifted. But the Trump administration is adamant that “there’s no possible way” the trade dispute with Canada will affect US consumers, according to Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative.

“The fundamentals are good,” he said. “I don’t think this is going to affect anything.”

A full roll

43 & counting :)

Zanders I

Zanders II

Of Silver & Tan

End Point

Transgression

Theses collages are 43 years old, comprising of Zanders Chromolux Paper, graphic tape and imaging
created on the MAGI 3D CSG environment. They actually stayed intact for all these years. :)

Herlin Calendar - March 1983

3D in 3D :)

Edge Lit Plexi/MAGI inspired 3D construction

Schrödinger's Accountant

The Cat not in the hat :)

This pix has been in BRT many times as it is so outrageously cool as Schrödinger's cat has been a feline of consummate mystery for over a hundred years but is this really the case? It doesn't hurt to ask, right?

Schrödinger's Accountant

Theoretical physics has spent over a century telling us quantum superposition—the idea that a particle can exist in two states at once—is a mystical, almost magical phenomenon. One puts a cat in a box and proceeds to tell you it is both alive and dead at the same time until you open it. 

Pretty wild eh? But countless experiments proved this duality over and over again. Light is both a wave and a particle when looked at from different perspectives but ...

what if the universe isn't a magician? What if it's just an honest bookkeeper?

You're a customer at Starbucks. You're going for a large black coffee. The price, five dollars. You pull out the five and hand it to the barista. To you, it's a PO, a Purchase Order, to pay for the coffee. To Starbucks, the five is an Invoice, payment for the item purchased. The minute the five is handed across the counter, both the buyer and the seller hold the five in their hands at the same time. For that fraction of a second, the money exists in two states simultaneously: the Purchase Order and the Invoice.

That isn't magic, and it isn't a paradox. It's simply the exchange required to execute a secure transfer of assets. 

Now, let's apply the exact same accounting principle to light.

 

Thomas Young's 1801 Double Slit experiment

Both a wave and a particle but when looked at closely, it's just balancing the ledger. Light, when moving in free space, is a wave. Analog. Think of a violin creating music or look at the above video. 

Seen below are photons, comprised of analog waves, striking a metal plate. At the exact moment of impact, the photons transform into discrete quanta or packets of energy (digital). This transaction allows the plate's electrons to absorb the energy and dislodge from the surface. The higher the frequency of light, aka photons, the higher altitude the electrons attain when dislodged. When the photon is released by the electron at a later time and reenters space, 
it becomes analog yet again, thus balancing the ledger, like an honest bookkeeper.

The emission of electrons from a metal plate caused by light quanta – photons

The universe doesn't deal in paradoxes; it deals in ledgers. And right now, standard academia is still staring at the cat, completely missing how reality, and business, does business  24/7. :) 

2007 ... of Protege and the notion of meaning

Three Body Problem

Yours truly decided to post this 2007 "gem" regarding Protege and it's connect to AI as prior art rules. Back in 2006, I downloaded and experimented with this amazing program, realizing this is the heart of what AI should be, a construct complete with meaning and ethics. In 2007, this post was my take on something wonderful but seemingly ignored. Sadly, ethics is consider a bolt on but it goes far deeper than that. Something wonderful can happen but only if we have the guts to make it happen.

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut.

https://beyondrealtime.blogspot.com/2007/02/semantic-web-cometh.html

Friday, February 23, 2007

The Semantic Web Cometh

Much has been said about the Semantic Web but let's look at accurate definitions of it and see what is being done to make it reality.

Wikipedia: "The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can not only be expressed in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.[1] It derives from W3C director Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange."

W3: "The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and its not part of the web. I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar?"

"Why not? Because we don't have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself."

"The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing."

In other words...Data transparency and the assignment of meaning to data.

One of the best working examples of how to do this is Protege, the open source free ontology editor
from Stamford University.

Seen below are two screens of a travel app depicting how to conduct a trip. Users not only can modify, connect and expand the nodes in interactive fashion to build knowledge based applications but also can share this content with any application/software agent able to read how Protege models this kind of information. 

Because RDF and Owl (Resource Description Framework/Web Ontology Language.) statements can be combined in sophisticated fashion, the ability to build machine readable ontologies, rules, logic and proofs will become reality as shown by the W3 diagram below depicting the building blocks of the Semantic web.

2026, life finds a way. OODA is not just a military doctrine, it's how life survives as uncertainty and incompleteness rule and only feedback loops, recursions and self correcting in real time enable life to function in a reality we will
never fully understand.

People are getting really angry ...

Daniel Jurman

People are getting really angry. From Flock Safety cameras spying on our ass to hidden gotchas whenever one goes to buy something, the slop, the veniality and the crassness of the once wonderful net has become a worse version of Idiocracy where everything's for sale, including your soul.

Yours truly has talked about this nonsense often but now it's a plague and folks are getting pissed off about it. Surveillance 101, from Palantir to the government and big tech, it never ends, something needing to be addressed before something untoward happens.

The discounts, promotions and offers you receive from businesses from Starbucks to Kroger to Target to Home Depot are all too often targeted calculations about what to charge you, built from data including your location, browsing history and social media activities. This information can be used to build hidden profiles of customers’ intelligence, abilities and preferences, which can signal how much you are willing to pay for any given item or service. When you are presented with a deal, you may not have realized that algorithms have already invisibly sized you up with the goal of squeezing your wallet.

This is a part of the commercial surveillance business model. Over the past decade, companies built up infrastructure to harness vast amounts of consumer data, using it to target individuals with unfair price hikes. Now, the concept of a price is itself degraded. Left in its place are numbers engineered for individual consumers, based not on market conditions but on the weaponization of your personal data. Policymakers should mandate that companies offer a real price — one that must be simple, public, accessible and consistent in a given market, with rules on discounts and loyalty programs to promote fairness and protect consumers and competition. No more targeted price adjustments based on surveillance. No more hidden costs or fees. No more prices that change on the fly.

Some argue that targeting and personalization are simply how modern discounts work, a natural evolution of coupons. But there is a meaningful difference between a public offer and a surveillance-driven one. The Sunday circular goes to everyone in the neighborhood: The terms are visible, the discount is available to anyone who clips it, and consumers know what they’re signing up for. Surveillance pricing works in reverse. Companies collect data, infer your willingness to pay and set a price, without you ever knowing your neighbor was charged less for the same thing. One rewards a consumer’s action; the other exploits a consumer’s profile.

Bait and switch applies

In 2022, Target settled a case brought by multiple California counties accusing the company of advertising one price on the website or app outside of the store and then changing the price once customers were in the store. When a traveler is looking for flights or accommodations, sites can show different prices based on the customer’s location — higher for those searching from, say, the San Francisco Bay Area, lower for Phoenix or Kansas City. Last year, when a former Washington Post reporter requested data Starbucks held about him, he noticed that the more he visited the coffee company, the fewer discounts he received.

Per Flock's website, its cameras are able to track individual people, not just cars.

Question, is Flock selling it's data to significant others? One never knows, do one? - Fats Waller

An agree upon lie ...

𒂼𒄄 ama-gi4 written in Classical Sumerian cuneiform

When reading the amazing NYTimes opinion piece titled an amargi, one readily sees there's a practical solution to the world's debt problem just as there's a practical solution to keep a car engine working if one understands what the system needs in order to survive. 

• The engine must have oil to enable the pistons to move up and down in their cylinders because without lubrication, the engine will seize. 
• The same requirement applies to water as it enables the engine's cylinder assembly to run at proper temperature, thus avoiding an engine meltdown while driving. 

In an internal combustion engine, a head gasket provides the seal between the engine block and cylinder head(s).

Its purpose is to seal the combustion gases within the cylinders and to avoid coolant or engine oil leaking into the cylinders.[1] Leaks in the head gasket can cause poor engine running and/or overheating.

This also applies to money.

When analyzing the August 2026 economic reality,  a $40 trillion U.S. debt and a $350 trillion global debt, the core structural flaw of modern finance is ... Money is an agreed-upon lie.

It's not a law of physics. It's an artificial ledger. And like all ledgers, if you do not account for the friction of the system, the debt load, the engine will eventually melt down.

Money is the ultimate illusion. It was invented to handle the give and take of business transactions
with as little friction as possible.

The ancient Mesopotamians invented money but today's bean counters believe that money is reality.
They treat the $350 trillion debt as an unbreakable physical law, completely forgetting that money's just a construct designed to grease the wheels of the business transaction.

It matters not what form money takes. Sea shells, gold, paper, copper. Nada.
It's the worth ascribed to such entity that counts. 

Compound Interest (The wealth engine of the creditors)

In a perfectly frictionless reality, debts could compound forever but in reality, the world's engine will seize.

Every transaction generates heat. Compound interest equates to running the engine at redline without an exhaust pipe. The debt snowballs, the debtor defaults and the structural integrity of the society begins to break, something that's beginning to happen as we speak.

an amargi ...

Illustration by The New York Times

Amargi ... Ama-gi is a Sumerian word written 𒂼𒄄 ama-gi4 or 𒂼𒅈𒄄 ama-ar-gi4. Sumerians used it to refer to release from obligations, debt, slavery, taxation, or punishment. Ama-gi has been regarded as the first known written reference to the concept of freedom, and has been used in modern times as a symbol for libertarianism.

When you think about money, one realizes it's an agreed upon lie of what something is worth and is an entity transactional by nature. It's an artificial construct enabling the world to conduct business.

The U.S. federal debt has hit $40 trillion. Add the debt owed by U.S. states, corporations and consumers and the figure rises to about $77 trillion in debt, set against an annual G.D.P. of about $32 trillion. The interest on all of it is compounding constantly. It’s not just the U.S., either. Globally, there is $350 trillion in debt, roughly treble global G.D.P. It’s like snowpack on a mountainside. It may look stable right now, but it’s creating the conditions for an avalanche. We are past the point where we can deal with our current debts in normal ways. The options open to us are extremely unlikely or highly destructive: Grow our way out of it, raise taxes, inflate the debt away or wait for the economic fallout.

Ancient societies had another method to deal with debt. It was called an amargi — a blanket declaration of public debt cancellation. All public debts written off. Disappeared. It sounds laughable, I know. But, really, that’s just because the idea has been buried so deeply in history you’ve probably never heard of it. In the ancient world, it presented a pragmatic solution to an intractable problem. And now, faced with impossible-to-repay debts that are weighing down our economy, is the time to look at the amargi and the lessons it offers about how to think about finance.

The ancient Mesopotamians are credited with inventing money. They invented loans and compound interest. They understood this system and its propensity for breakdowns when debts spiraled. That’s why they invented something else, too. About 4,400 years ago, a Mesopotamian king named Enmetena issued an edict. Essentially all public debts, he declared, were canceled. (Amargi typically left debts between merchants in place.) People who had been sold into bondage were freed. Similar edicts gave back land to farmers who had lost it to creditors. The campaign itself was called “return to mother,” the origin of the Sumerian word “amargi.” The word loses something in the translation across eons and languages, but essentially it’s a synonym for “freedom.” The concept was codified in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, which decreed a “year of the Lord’s favor” every 50 years.

The amargi was a response to a persistent problem that was recognized in the ancient world: Debt compounded until it destabilized society. Get enough citizens sold into slavery and enough abandoned farms and society crumbles. Nobody to grow the crops. Nobody to serve in the armies. The amargi was a relief valve, a final rebalancing tool. It was declared in the ancient Near East regularly when new rulers came to power. These actions were magnanimous but also practical. They allowed society to reset rather than being forced into monetary collapse.

Enmetena's foundation stone contains the first known mention of the word Ama-gi

The reason the practice often worked in the first place was because the ancient world understood something about our monetary system we have mostly forgotten: Money is an invented social construct. It isn’t real, not in the way a tree or a stone is real. The system of money and credit is a thing humans made up. It’s a record-keeping device for distributing resources. And since money is a human creation, we can alter it when needed.

It's the economy stupid. :)

Stowaways ...

An Artemis II astronaut photographed the cratered Moon and crescent Earth from Orion in April 2026. Credit: NASA. The image is illustrative and is not one of the microbial-survival maps from the study.

Nice to know, Aspergillus niger, a familiar fungus growing in wet places like the bathrooms on the USS Lincoln, can become stowaways from hell when astronauts visit the moon, something rather disquieting to say the least. 

A. niger growing on potato dextrose agar

There are others potential stowaways as one can well imagine as nature finds a way, always.

A NASA-led study published in August 2026 mapped small niches near the lunar south pole where human-associated microbes could remain viable. The most persistent candidate was Aspergillus niger, a darkly pigmented fungus common in warm, damp buildings and repeatedly detected in spacecraft environments, including the International Space Station.

Its advantage was specific. Among the organisms considered, A. niger had the highest measured resistance to ultraviolet radiation, surpassing even Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium so resistant to radiation and desiccation that it is routinely used as a benchmark for biological toughness.

The new work did not place living mould on the Moon. It combined existing laboratory survival measurements with detailed models of sunlight, temperature and terrain. What emerged was a map of where dormant microbial cells might endure for days, not where they could grow into a lunar ecosystem.

Any questions?