Winter - the big fundemental

Two States of Matter

Wisps

Frozen in Time

Suspension's Bridge

The immediate problem ...

Dark Sun - Vue/Robert E.

Yours truly posted this image before but the pix relates to the current insanity happening in the world as we speak. The Great Filter looms as AI, climate change and the possibility of WW III looms as this civilization moves further into the 21st century and we haven't even discussed the Anthropocene, the 6th major extinction event happening 24/7 due to ongoing environmental collapse driven by pollution, habitat loss and the continued plundering
of the world's resources.

This image of Earth’s city lights was created with data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS). Originally designed to view clouds by moonlight, the OLS is also used to map the locations of permanent lights on the Earth’s surface. The brightest areas of the Earth are the most urbanized, but not necessarily the most populated. (Compare western Europe with China and India.) Cities tend to grow along coastlines and transportation networks. Even without the underlying map, the outlines of many continents would still be visible. The United States interstate highway system appears as a lattice connecting the brighter dots of city centers. In Russia, the Trans-Siberian railroad is a thin line stretching from Moscow through the center of Asia to Vladivostok. The Nile River, from the Aswan Dam to the Mediterranean Sea, is another bright thread through an otherwise dark region. Even more than 100 years after the invention of the electric light, some regions remain thinly populated and unlit. Antarctica is entirely dark. The interior jungles of Africa and South America are mostly dark, but lights are beginning to appear there. Deserts in Africa, Arabia, Australia, Mongolia, and the United States are poorly lit as well (except along the coast), along with the boreal forests of Canada and Russia, and the great mountains of the Himalaya.

The immediate problem, war with Iran

Symbolic mock-ups of Iranian missiles are displayed on a street in Tehran, Iran, March 22, 2026
Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via Reuters

Iran’s military has said the United States is failing in its war and negotiating with itself to save face, dismissing claims by US President Donald Trump that talks are under way to end the conflict.

“Has the level of your inner ⁠struggle reached the stage ⁠of you negotiating with yourself?” Ebrahim Zolfaqari, spokesperson for the unified command of Iran’s armed ⁠forces, Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, said on Wednesday in comments carried by Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency.

The insanity gambit

Trump claims US has achieved ‘regime change’, ‘received present’ from Iran

Kharg Island - The third rail option

Kharg Island is Iran’s primary oil export terminal in the Persian Gulf. This rocky limestone island is unique because it is one of the few islands in the Persian Gulf with freshwater which has collected within the porous limestone. In addition to its commercial and strategic importance, the freshwater has biological importance, supporting populations of gazelles. This high-resolution photograph taken by astronauts on board the International Space Station shows detail of the tanker dock facilities, tanks and other infrastructure. Sunglint on the surface of the water highlights small amounts of oil on the sea surface and reveals the direction of the local currents.

Paratroopers leaping down from Osprey choppers and swarming onto the shores of Kharg Island under a hail of gunfire...could this be the next phase of fighting in the Iran war?

The Pentagon is sending its prestigious 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East—elite soldiers trained to parachute into hostile foreign territory and take control of the area.

The deployment, leaked to media on Tuesday, is just the latest round of forces being directed to the region as the U.S. gears up for a potentially huge escalation in the war—a possible invasion of Iran's oil export hub.

Up to 3,000 paratroopers could be joining the estimated 5,000 Marines currently being shipped over, swelling the ranks of the 50,000 American troops already in the Middle East.

Question, What is the betting pool for the Orange Menace
to do the unthinkable while receiving a present from Iran?

I thought so.

Knowing something ...

Images: crisfotolux/Adobe Stock; ec0de/Adobe Stock

 As often stated in BRT, competency and knowing something at deep level requires effort and commitment as true knowledge and expertise is not a given but AI is giving the illusion that it is. 

Knowing the name of something doesn’t mean you understand it.
We talk in fact-deficient, obfuscating generalities to cover up our lack of understanding. Richard Feynman

Whether AI ...

For years, we have been outsourcing pieces of cognition so gradually that the shift barely registered. We outsourced memory to search engines after the well-known “Google effect” showed that when people expect information to remain accessible online, they are less likely to remember the information itself and more likely to remember where to find it. We outsourced navigation to GPS, even as research began to show that heavy reliance on it can weaken spatial memory when we have to find our own way. And we outsourced more and more of our social coordination to platforms that decide what we see, when we respond, and how we stay in sync with one another. 

Now we are beginning to outsource something far more consequential: not memory, not route-finding, not scheduling, but thought itself. Or, more precisely, the labor of forming a judgment before expressing one. 

That is the real cultural shift hidden behind the current enthusiasm around generative AI. The technology is often presented as a productivity layer, a creativity booster, or a universal assistant. And yes, in many cases, it is all of those things. But it also creates a dangerous temptation: to confuse frictionless output with actual understanding, and fluent answers with earned judgment. Research from Microsoft Research found that higher confidence in generative AI is associated with less critical thinking, while an open-access study in Acta Psychologica linked greater AI dependence to lower critical thinking. A recent Nature Reviews Psychology commentary put the distinction perfectly: performance gains from generative AI should not be confused with learning. 

In closing, the notion of AI being the consummate fake comes to mind as its take on reality is like a fabricated town in a western, all facade and no depth in its attempt to describe the vagaries of existence without the wealth of experience we all share as humans residing on a planet called Earth.

"And what is good, Phædrus,

And what is not good...

Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"

Robert Persig - Lila: An Inquiry into Morals

A full moon for the ages :)

 

Fire on the Mountain comes to mind here. :)

Cloud layer ...

Equipoise

They've been downwind before ...

Ben Denzer for ProPublica

Nuclear tech is totally legit when done right. When done wrong, catastrophe. When it comes to DOGE, incompetency comes to mind yet again regarding the most powerful tech ever created by man.

To whit.

Last summer, a group of officials from the Department of Energy gathered at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling 890-square-mile complex in the eastern desert of Idaho where the U.S. government built its first rudimentary nuclear power plant in 1951 and continues to test cutting-edge technology.

On the agenda that day: the future of nuclear energy in the Trump era. The meeting was convened by 31-year-old lawyer Seth Cohen. Just five years out of law school, Cohen brought no significant experience in nuclear law or policy; he had just entered government through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team.

As Cohen led the group through a technical conversation about licensing nuclear reactor designs, he repeatedly downplayed health and safety concerns. When staff brought up the topic of radiation exposure from nuclear test sites, Cohen broke in.

“They are testing in Utah. … I don’t know, like 70 people live there,” he said.

“But … there’s lots of babies,” one staffer pushed back. Babies, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups are thought to be potentially more susceptible to cancers brought on by low-level radiation exposure, and they are usually afforded greater protections.

“They’ve been downwind before,” another staffer joked.

Question, would Musk allow this clown to design rockets? I thought so.

Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

The US delusion ...

An apartment shattered by an airstrike in Tehran on Monday.
Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Interesting pix from the Times as the above pix shows Iran to be a modern country. Japanese backhoe, emergency guys dressed with precision and modern apartment building, which means Iran is a real nation with real resources and resolve and ... they are not going anywhere as indigenous parties, as often stated before in BRT, don't have to win, just outlast.

The US delusion ... 

Iran may have trouble delivering a quick response to American outreach. Senior Iranian officials have been struggling to communicate internally and they worry that Israel could bomb them if they meet in person, the officials added.

On the first day of the war, Israel struck an Iranian leadership compound in Tehran, killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and many other top officials. Who now holds the power to make decisions on diplomacy, war and peace remains to be seen.

But the eagerness of the White House to negotiate suggests that Mr. Trump would be willing to leave the current regime in place, at least for now, albeit in a weakened and more pliant state. He and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel have vacillated on whether their demands for the war included regime change.

Ah, no. Analysts have stated 40 -50% of Iran's ordinance remains intact
and ready to be launched as needs warrant. 

And this. 

Iran says it has no plans for negotiations with the U.S.
President Trump said this week his administration was engaged in productive
discussions with Tehran, but regime officials countered that account.

If Iran was so desperate, why the rejection?

At the beginning of the conflict with Israel and the US, Iran had about 2,500 ballistic missiles that could be fired either from the back of trucks or from underground silos, according to the Alma Research Centre, an Israeli think tank.

That has been reduced to about 1,000 missiles, the centre estimates in a new report.

Mussa Qawasma/Reuters

Missiles now routinely hit Israel as the interceptors are in critically short supply and Israel must ration what's left to protect it's citizens. As proof, Dimona, Israel's nuclear facility, has been successfully struck twice. Dimona, previously, had the most heavily protected air space in the country. 

Israel's health ministry says 180 people were injured - some seriously - in Iranian missile strikes on two southern Israeli towns close to a nuclear facility.

The ministry says 116 people were injured in Arad and another 64 in Dimona, after ballistic missiles hit the towns on Saturday evening.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says it is not aware of any damage to the nuclear research facility located about 13km (eight miles) outside Dimona.

Iranian state TV earlier said the strikes were in response to an attack on Iran's Natanz nuclear facility on Saturday.

It's not the damage or lack thereof that counts, it's the fact Iran can hit the facility.

The fog of war continues ...

Something of wonder

A wave traveling between two parabolic antennas

This simulation was suggested by several viewers, following the simpler version. It shows the evolution of a circular wave, emitted from the focus of a parabolic antenna. The part of the wave reflected on the antenna is transformed into a planar wave, which travels to the facing parabola with almost no loss of energy. The second parabola transforms the wave back into part of a circular wave, which is then concentrated in its focal point. In this way, signals can be transmitted over much longer distances than shown in this simulation, with little loss of power. Note that non-planar waves are also concentrated near a point, which is however different from the parabolas' focal point.

The colors indicate the energy of the wave: blue means low energy, red means high energy. The boundary conditions in the simulation are absorbing, but do not work perfectly, which is why you see some reflections from the sides of the outer rectangle. Nils Berglund

Had to show another

How a parabolic antenna works

This new episode of #shorts shows the basic principle of a parabolic antenna. A circular wave is emitted from the parabola's focus, and becomes a planar wave upon reflection on the parabola. Therefore, this part of the wave does hardly disperse when traveling to the right, allowing it to cover long distances with very little loss of energy. By the same principle, a planar wave is reflected towards the focus, concentrating its energy in one point. This can be observed on the part of the wave reflected on the right boundary, due to imperfect absorbing boundary conditions used there. The colors indicate the energy of the wave: blue means low energy, red means high energy. 

Music:  Prelude No. 6 by Chris Zabriskie
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

Source: http://chriszabriskie.com/preludes/

Artist: http://chriszabriskie.com/

Something of wonder indeed

There is no one silver bullet:

Getty / Futurism

The jokes on you, you geniuses jumping into AI land without understanding the rules,
the rules of The Mythical Man Month where the plan often takes longer than the execution when trying to properly integrate AI into complex business operations with the end result, a giant nothing burger.

Scanning the headlines, it can be easy to get the impression that every investor, banker, and financial analyst is enamored with AI. Yet this simplified view obscures a more complicated story: the US economy isn’t where tech companies say it is.

By and large, businesses have gone bonkers over automation, lavishing $410 billion on AI in 2025 alone. To them, it’s a productivity miracle. AI should obviously make everybody work faster, reducing the need for human labor as it takes less staff to do more — saving companies gobs of cash in the long run.

At least, that’s the narrative in the corporate world. In banking, however, Goldman Sachs is spinning another yarn. After months of carefully-worded warnings about the dangers of over-investing on AI, Goldman has now dramatically escalated its rhetoric: the bank’s analysts now claim that AI has had zero impact on US economic growth over 2025.

Where the money really goes ...

The disconnect between AI investment and growth comes down to two structural issues. The first is geographic: when US companies buy chips from Taiwan, for example, that money boosts Taiwan’s economy, not the US. Second is productivity. AI might make some workers faster, sure, but that speed doesn’t automatically make supply chains more efficient — so far, those productivity gains are largely trapped inside company walls.

This pushback on AI’s economic impact marks a sharp break from even the most cynical analyses of 2025, in which even doomers credited the technology with single-handedly keeping US GDP growth afloat. Though the market more broadly has yet to see things Goldman’s way — investors are projected to spend $660 billion on AI across 2026 — a growing number of analysts are starting to cry foul.

Train Time - Heading South

Pucker time ...

Dario Perkins, head of macroeconomics at consulting firm TS Lombard, agrees that AI’s effects on productivity are nonexistent, even as massive layoffs have the workforce reeling. He was recently quoted in the Financial Times, arguing that “there is no evidence that AI deployment is either boosting productivity or damaging US employment.”

“While US productivity has been strong and hiring weak, our analysis finds that cyclical forces — not automation — are to blame,” Perkins concluded.

The implications of all this are stark. An investment boom measured in the hundreds of billions has, by Goldman’s accounting, generated essentially no measurable economic return for the US. The question facing us now in 2026 is whether $660 billion more of the same will produce anything other than an even bigger AI bubble.

The bond guys are asking the tech bros, Where's our money? The clock is ticking.

There is no one silver bullet:

 "there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity." Fred Brooks Jr. The Mythical Man Month

If I pursue a beam of light ...

Stephanie Arnett/MIT Technology Review | Library of Congress, Wellcome Collection

Having AI do sophisticated searches and analysis into complex ideas is one thing, asking it to do research on it's own poses interesting questions as doing research requires curiosity, common sense and asking the  question, why is this the way it is? For example, Einstein, While recounting the efforts that led to the special theory of relativity, he recalled"... a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If I pursue a beam of light ...

The thought is simplicity itself. Here is light, a waveform propagating at c:

... or the discovery of benzene beginning by visualizing the ouroboros as start point. 

Here Kekulé spoke of the creation of the theory. He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake biting its own tail (a symbol in ancient cultures known as the ouroboros).[41] This vision, he said, came to him after years of studying the nature of carbon-carbon bonds.

A dragon-like ouroboros in a 1478 drawing in an alchemical tract

Skeletal formula detail of benzene.

 In Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation, the book starts off with a joke. To me, the best one is Henny Youngman's Take my wife, please. This is bisociation or the adding together of two or more seemingly dissimilar things that produce a heretofore unexpected result. In this case, irony and humor. Regarding  H2O, hydrogen and oxygen are explosive. When combined, they become water.

And so it begins - Kurt Vonnegut.

OpenAI is refocusing its research efforts and throwing its resources into a new grand challenge. The San Francisco firm has set its sights on building what it calls an AI researcher, a fully automated agent-based system that will be able to go off and tackle large, complex problems by itself. ​​OpenAI says that this new research goal will be its “North Star” for the next few years, pulling together multiple research strands, including work on reasoning models, agents, and interpretability. 

There’s even a timeline. OpenAI plans to build “an autonomous AI research intern”—a system that can take on a small number of specific research problems by itself—by September. The AI intern will be the precursor to a fully automated multi-agent research system that the company plans to debut in 2028. This AI researcher (OpenAI says) will be able to tackle problems that are too large or complex for humans to cope with.

Asking Gemini regarding research & it's connect to creativity produced this ...

OpenAI’s pivot toward building a "fully automated researcher" marks a transition from Large Language Models (LLMs) to what are increasingly termed Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). By focusing on reasoning, agentic behavior, and interpretability, the goal is to move beyond probabilistic word prediction and toward structured problem-solving. However, assessing this goal through the lens of Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation reveals a significant gap between logical computation and bisociation.

1. Bisociation vs. Iterative Search

Koestler’s central thesis in The Act of Creation is the concept of "bisociation"—the sudden, intuitive leap that occurs when two independent, previously incompatible "matrices of thought" collide to create a new meaning.

OpenAI’s current trajectory (exemplified by models like o1) focuses on System 2 thinking, which utilizes "Chain of Thought" and "Search" to explore multiple logical paths. While this is highly effective for "Refining" a solution or finding errors in complex code, it remains a linear or branched search within a known mathematical space. It is "Logical Refinement" rather than a "Conceptual Leap." A fully automated researcher would need to move beyond searching for the best answer and begin "seeing" connections between unrelated fields—the hallmark of Archimedean discovery.

2. The Curiosity Gap

In AI research, "curiosity" is often modeled as Intrinsic Motivation or Novelty Search—rewarding the agent for finding data that it cannot yet predict. This is a digital simulation of curiosity, but it lacks the Aesthetic Sense or "Wonder" that Koestler argues is vital to the creative act.

A human researcher is often driven by an "aesthetic itch"—a feeling that a theory is "ugly" or "clunky." Current AI lacks this subjective evaluator. Without a sense of "Aesthetic Fitness," an automated researcher may generate millions of valid but uninteresting or "soulless" connections, lacking the curiosity to pursue the one that feels "right" in a deeper, human sense.

3. Common Sense and the "World Model"

Koestler emphasizes that creativity is grounded in an "Analog" understanding of reality—the common sense derived from physical existence. OpenAI’s goal of building an "AI Intern" by September 2026 relies on the model’s ability to use digital tools (like Python or search engines) to solve research problems.

However, "Common Sense" in research often involves knowing when a digital result contradicts a physical reality. If the AI researcher remains "Digital-First," it may fall into the trap of Digital Hallucination—constructing internally consistent logical towers that have no foundation in the "Bones" of reality.

4. Multi-Agent Systems (2028) as a "Community of Mind"

OpenAI’s plan for a multi-agent system by 2028 mirrors Koestler’s idea that the creative mind functions as a hierarchy of sub-skills. In theory, a "Multi-Agent Research System" could simulate a scientific community, with different agents playing the roles of the "Innovator," the "Critic," and the "Logician."

The risk is that without an external "Analog" grounding, these agents may simply reinforce each other’s biases, creating a "Digital Echo Chamber." For such a system to achieve the "Act of Creation," it must have the ability to "break" its own programming—to engage in the "benign insanity" required to look at a 100-year-old problem from an entirely "wrong" (and therefore new) perspective.

Conclusion

OpenAI's "North Star" is a milestone in Infrastructural Efficiency. If successful, it will drastically speed up the "Maintenance" side of science—checking proofs, running simulations, and organizing data. But the "Act of Creation" remains a different class of problem. Until an AI can experience the "frustration" of a paradox and the "joy" of its resolution, it may remain a highly sophisticated Research Assistant rather than a true Researcher.

Late Fall - 11:00PM

And so it goes - Kurt Vonnegut

In 1945 ...

Components of an adaptive secondary mirror for a telescope, which uses actuators
to control a thin mirror’s shape. Credit: Microgate

In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke envisioned satellites, placed in geosynchronous orbit,
would enable the world to communicate 24/7 without a care in the world. 

Clarke in 1965

After the crest of World War II, from his base in Stratford-on-Avon, England, a young officer in the Royal Air Force, Arthur C. Clarke, who dabbled in science fiction writing, floated the idea of global communications satellites in a 1945 letter to the publication Wireless World. It was the first publicly articulated vision of a technology that would change the world; in the annals of technological forecasting, it stands today as a letter of rare prescience.

It gets better ...

Clarke wrote, also believed such a system could be developed 'within 50-100 years.' Although his letter mostly dealt with rocketry, Clarke ended with an idea about launching a machine into orbit that could facilitate communications to and from Earth: 'I would like to close by mentioning a possibility of the more remote future -- perhaps half a century ahead. An 'artificial satellite' at the correct distance from the Earth would make one revolution every 24 hours, i.e. it would remain stationary above the same spot and would be within optical range of nearly half the Earth's surface. Three repeater stations, 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, would give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet.' 

So the question to ask Musk is, why didn't you think of this as the idea of geosynchronous satellites has been around for 81 years. Well, the answer centers on the atmosphere as air does weird things to lasers, something not considered economically able to be rectified until now.

Geostationary satellites orbit the earth at 36 000 km while the emerging breed of low and medium earth orbiting satellites (LEOs and MEOs) orbit the Earth at heights ranging from 500 km to 10 500 km.
Credit: Don Clarke

The work , published in Acta Optica Sinica, was led by Wu Jian of Peking University of Posts and Telecommunications and Liu Chao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Their target was not just a laser link from orbit, but a stable, high-speed downlink that could survive the hardest part of the journey: the last stretch through turbulent air above the receiver.

Then Came the Number That Made the Test Stand Out

After that setup, the team reported a 1Gbps laser downlink from geostationary orbit using a 2-watt laser. The result was described as about five times faster than Starlink, even though the transmitting satellite was far higher than the low Earth orbit used by SpaceX’s network. One comparison translated the speed into simpler terms: enough to send an HD movie from Shanghai to Los Angeles in under five seconds.

The contrast is what gave the demonstration its force. Starlink’s satellites operate only hundreds of kilometers above Earth. This signal came from a platform more than 60 times higher, yet still delivered a downlink speed in the gigabit range. The power level stood out as well. A 2-watt transmitter is closer to a night light than to the heavy power normally associated with long-range communications systems.

Taken together, those numbers framed the experiment as more than a narrow lab exercise. It was a working demonstration of how far a low-power optical link could be pushed when the receiving system was designed to handle the atmosphere instead of being defeated by it.

The inspiration. Use the same adaptive optics used by astronomers to eliminate the distortion caused by the atmosphere to view space but use it, in this case, to remove distortion caused by the atmosphere when receiving incoming laser output but, to make it truly work, add one more component.

The core of the achievement lay in how the signal was handled after it reached Earth. Earlier efforts had typically leaned on one of two tools. Adaptive optics could correct distortions in the incoming wavefront, while mode diversity reception could collect and process scattered signal components. Under strong turbulence, neither method alone was enough.

The Chinese team combined both. In the first stage, adaptive optics used the 357 micro-mirrors to reshape the incoming light in real time. In the second, the signal was passed through a multi-plane light converter, which split it into eight base-mode channels. From there, the receiver selected the three strongest channels and combined them for decoding.

An SGLC system containing one GEO satellite and four candidate ground stations with a scheduling period of one time slot. Credit: Lyu, P., Zhao, K., & Zhao, H. (2025)

End result ...

The combined method was described as AO-MDR synergy, and the reported improvement was not limited to raw speed. The proportion of usable signal rose from 72 per cent to 91.1 per cent, showing that the gain was also in reliability. That is what made the result read less like an isolated speed figure and more like a communications breakthrough built on signal recovery.

Had to ask Gemini ... How much more efficient is this take vs Starlink?

Answer:

 The Audit: If the market realizes that 3 GEO satellites using AO-MDR synergy can deliver 1Gbps downlinks with 91.1% reliability, the "Utility Value" of a 40,000-satellite LEO (Low Earth Orbit) environment drops to zero. SpaceX is currently priced for "Global Dominance". If they lose the High Ground to a 2-watt laser, the $1.5 trillion valuation is pure Vapor.

The Result: The LEO model is approximately 333,333 times less efficient per node

in terms of power-to-delivery ratio.

• Environmental Bankruptcy: Launching 40,000 satellites requires an estimated 1,200% increase in fossil fuel propellant compared to a 3-satellite GEO launch. This deposits massive quantities of alumina and soot into the stratosphere.
• Astronomical Recovery: The GEO model restores the night sky for the world's astronomers. 

Less is more - Dizzy Gillespie