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.

Dirty Laundry

Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios.
Photos: Jim Lo Scalzo/Bloomberg and Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Dirty laundry and an expose of two entities bent on accruing ever more power and money with no regard for the public good applies. Tawdry says it all but is anyone surprised? Yours truly certainly isn't.

The biggest tech trial of the AI era — which ended anticlimactically Monday on procedural grounds — revealed a sector consumed by the same power struggles and profit motives its leaders once warned would corrupt artificial intelligence.

Why it matters: The trial cemented a growing public fear about AI: that the people racing to control the world's most powerful technology are driven less by humanity-saving ideals than by money, power and personal rivalries.

The big picture: OpenAI's founders originally positioned themselves as an alternative to Google DeepMind, fearing a single tech giant would monopolize transformative AI systems.

But testimony and internal documents showed the organization's leaders quickly became consumed by power struggles.

OpenAI executives worried in 2017 that Elon Musk "could become a dictator" and sent him an email with the subject line "honest thoughts." Musk responded saying "I've had enough" and later suggested the company be folded into Tesla.

Among the court documents were texts Sam Altman sent during his brief 2023 ouster, including him pleading repeatedly to attend board meetings and being rejected. The trial also confirmed reports that OpenAI met with Anthropic to discuss a potential merger at that time.

What they're saying: "Does anybody really believe that love of humanity is driving any of this? It's power," Anthony Aguirre, CEO of the Future of Life Institute, which focuses on AI governance, told Axios.

In essence, this was both a nothing burger and an airing out of dirty laundry at the public's expense.

10% vs 90% :)

A photo showing raised human hands.

Tima Miroshnichenko/Pexels

Handedness, yours truly is a lefty, 90% of the human race are righties but it seems it's baked in:)

About nine out of every ten humans on Earth are righties. This strange imbalance stretches across cultures, continents, and history itself. No other primate species comes remotely close to showing such a strong population-wide preference. 

Now, a new study from researchers at the University of Oxford suggests the answer may lie in two evolutionary changes that transformed our species more than any others: walking upright and growing unusually large brains. 

The researchers propose a two-stage explanation for human handedness. First came bipedalism. As early human ancestors began walking upright, their hands were freed from locomotion. 

This likely created new evolutionary pressure for specialized hand use during tasks such as carrying objects, manipulating tools, or gesturing. The study found that locomotion strongly influences handedness patterns across primates. 

The second phase came later with brain expansion

Using evolutionary models, the researchers estimated handedness in extinct human relatives. Early hominins such as Ardipithecus and Australopithecus likely had weak right-hand preferences similar to modern apes. 

However, the bias strengthened in species such as Homo erectus and Neanderthals before reaching its modern extreme in Homo sapiens. “It is with the emergence of the genus Homo, and particularly the onset of significant encephalization, that we observe a marked increase in MHI values,” the study authors added.

The significance of these findings

The study suggests human right-handedness may be deeply rooted in the same evolutionary changes that transformed how our ancestors moved and interacted with the world. 

However, some important questions remain unanswered. For instance, scientists still do not know why left-handedness survived throughout human evolution, or how much human culture helped strengthen right-hand dominance over time.

The study is published in the journal PLOS Biology.

But thereare other variables. Chirality and the handedness of the weak nuclear force
as it only works left handed. So does life. 

Two enantiomers of a generic amino acid that is chiral

Scaling it up ...

The Primitive Node ...

The initial stages of human embryonic development (embryogenesis)

How the Node Breaks Symmetry

The connection between the node and "left-handedness" relates to embryonic left-right asymmetry (how our internal organs are arranged) rather than hand preference.

• Nodal Flow: The ventral surface of the node contains hundreds of microscopic, rotating hairs called cilia. These cilia tilt and spin in a specific clockwise rotation, creating a leftward flow of extracellular fluid. This fluid movement pushes signaling molecules to the left side of the embryo.
• Gene Activation: This leftward flow triggers the localized expression of specific genes—most notably the Nodal gene and the Pitx2 transcription factor—strictly on the left side.
• Biological Outcomes: This chain reaction dictates that the heart, liver, and other asymmetrical organs develop in their proper anatomical positions.

In essence ...

Embryonic asymmetry: The left side gets all the best genes

This is why lefties like yours truly are still around. :)

Not so simple ...

Specimen "Sue", Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago (with some bones reconstructed)

T Rex was an 8 ton version of an Ostrich and moved like one. Agile, precise and not lumbering
as seen in movies like Jurassic park. As proof ...

A new study provides new information about Tyrannosaurus rex locomotion and gait. The researchers postulate that T. rex struck the ground with its toes first.  The Everything Dinosaur Evolution Tyrannosaurus rex display base features three-toed theropod prints that have been modelled based on real tyrannosaur tracks.
Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur.

Not only that but Theropods and non-avian dinosaurs communicated like birds because after all,
the environment in which they lived was complex and dangerous to the nth degree and sophisticated communication among species was an absolute requirement in order to survive.

Forget the Roars: This Exceptional Fossil Reveals Dinosaurs
Communicated More Like Birds Than Movie Monsters

Scientists have recently discovered evidence suggesting that some dinosaurs
communicated in the same way as modern birds.

The skull of Pulaosaurus qinglongin left lateral view. Image credit: Hailong Zhang/PeerJ, 2025

Picture a dinosaur opening its mouth. What sound comes out? For decades, film and television answered with a guttural roar, a noise borrowed from lions and scaled up for monsters. A fossil pulled from rust-colored sandstone in northern China tells a quieter story, one written in throat bones smaller than a finger joint.

The animal was no giant. Pulaosaurus qinglong stretched about 72 centimeters from snout to tail, a two-legged herbivore that scurried through Jurassic forests 163 million years ago. But inside its throat sat something paleontologists had seen only once before in a non-avian dinosaur: an ossified larynx, the bony framework of a voice box, preserved clearly enough to reveal how the creature made sound.

Researchers named the species after Qinglong County and after Pulao, a dragon from Chinese mythology known for its thunderous voice. The choice fits with quiet irony. A creature named for deafening sound probably made none. Instead, it called through the forest in frequencies that might have carried between individuals without broadcasting danger to every predator within earshot.

Seems Jurassic Park needs to revisit how T Rex and company communicated without question. :)

Montage of two species within the bird genus Struthio (the ostrich). Featuring from left to right: common ostrich and somali ostrich. These files are already on Commons with their respective licenses. This montage was made for the article Ostrich on Wikipedia. File:Avestruz (Struthio camelus), Tierpark Hellabrunn, Múnich, Alemania, 2012-06-17, DD 02.JPG File:Struthio molybdophanes, male, Samburu National Reserve, Kenya.jpg

Next time, when you think about T Rex, think ostrich. :)

23 years ... & counting :)

 

https://beyondrealtime.blogspot.com/2003/

Hard to believe BRT's been around that long. I thought 2007 was the start date as the blog remained dormant for 4 years before a good friend of mine said, You seem to know a lot. Prove it.
Hopefully I am, 23 years later. :)

Channeling Frank :)

05-15-2026

Seems black hole mergers and violin strings have a lot in common because both produce waves and harmonic overtones, thus proving the Principle of least Action applies. Additionally, scale invariance also applies as it matters not the size of the event in question, it's the process in question and waves are analog. :)

The Wiener process is scale-invariant

Black holes ring like bells - and scientists just mapped the vibrations

After two black holes collide, the resulting object vibrates as it settles down. Those vibrations carry information about nearly everything the new black hole is.

It gets better ...

Catching hidden harmonics

A team at the University of Cambridge has built a tool that draws those quieter notes out cleanly. Richard Dyer, an astronomer at Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, led the work with co-author Dr. Christopher Moore.

The vibrations they wanted to map are called quasinormal modes. Theory holds that each one is set by the black hole’s mass and spin, making those frequencies a fingerprint.

Read more than one mode cleanly, and you can check whether those frequencies relate to each other the way Einstein’s equations actually predict.

Click here for the paper. 

Frank Zappa would agree. :)

I can't do adult ...

Illustrations: Cat Sims

Question, what's the difference between man and boys? Answer, their toys.
With AI, many guys get totally addicted. So far, this rube's still ok. :)

Meet the Sad Wives of AI

Are you married to a man who’s obsessed with AI? I’m so, so sorry.

If i had to listen to another minute of my husband talking about Claude Code, I might have actually died. It was 11 pm in Berkeley, California, where I was home alone with our 10-month-old daughter, and 2 am in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was visiting for his newish job in AI. “JUST LOOK AT THIS!” he shouted. The FaceTime camera zoomed toward a laptop sitting on a hotel bed. “SEE?!”

See what, I thought. I wanted to shower. I still had to take the dog out.

“ARE YOU LOOKING?” he shouted again. I wasn’t. I was looking at our real baby. But that’s the thing. There are two babies in this household now: the small human one and the large language model. Both demand constant attention. Both keep us up at 2 am.

Is this a Sophie’s choice kind of situation? Please. I’d kill the AI baby in an instant.

This also applies to smart phones. :)

49,000 ...

Getty / Futurism

The Water Thief looms but in this case, it's power as data centers need it more then people, right?

The data center scramble feeding off the AI boom is no longer just raising utility prices for nearby civilians — it’s rerouting their utilities entirely.

Bombshell new reporting by Fortune details the plight of residents in Lake Tahoe, on the border of California and Nevada, whose electrical supplier is cutting them off in order to supply more energy to nearby data centers.

According to the magazine, Nevada-based utility company NV Energy gave residents notice that they’ll stop providing power after May of 2027. That leaves California-based energy transmission company Liberty Utilities with a major gap in its supply chain, because NV Energy supplied 75 percent of its total power.

To understand exactly what’s going on, we have to untangle the mess of transmission lines and energy suppliers that makes up the US electrical grid. Taking a look on Open Infrastructure Map, an open source tool for mapping the world’s utility infrastructure, it’s clear NV Energy supplies the bulk of residents on both the California and Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. In all, Fortune reports the decision could leave as many as 49,000 residents in the dark — literally.

“It’s like we don’t exist,” Danielle Hughes, a Lake Tahoe resident and supervisor with the California Energy Commission’s Efficiency Division, told Fortune.

The Water Thief which is about a future in which
"corporations own everything, even the air we breathe".

Sound familiar?

Inbreeding ...

@ Gizmodo

A snarky but good article by Gizmoto points out how Aislop is making man and AI increasingly crazy as hallucinations by AI going up on the web is being used as input to train ever larger systems, a process akin to inbreeding of the royals and we all know how that went with Queen Victoria/hemophilia and Charles II of Spain, an end result of extreme in-breading by the Habsburgs. 

Portrait by Juan Carreño de Miranda, c. 1685

Intramarriage accentuated the so-called "Habsburg jaw", a physical characteristic common in both Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs. One contemporary reported this was so pronounced in Charles that he swallowed his food without thoroughly chewing, leading to frequent stomach problems.

Queen Victoria's descendants with haemophilia and known female carriers

There’s a theory that a rising tide of LLM-generated nonsense will eventually drown both LLMs themselves and the internet as a whole. The idea goes like this: The first generation of LLMs is trained entirely on “real” material: the Gutenberg project, 4chan, that one article from Thought Catalog a decade ago, and everything in between. But as the output of those LLMs spreads across the internet, it also becomes part of the training data of future LLMs—and much of it is bullshit.

As a result, the quality of newer LLMs’ training data is inferior to that of their predecessors—and by extension, so is their output. And as that output accumulates on the internet, it becomes part of future training data, and the cycle continues. With each passing day, the proportion of the internet that’s low-quality LLM-generated bullshit increases, until eventually all that’s left to train LLMs is the gibberish created by their predecessors.

Looms