Woodchipper

Ricardo Tomás

Every time I think of Musk, a South African, having the power to eliminate an agency based on cruelty and lack of knowledge in terms of governance, my head explodes. This guy has garnered billions based on working with MY government and then having the gall to to terminate  agencies like USAID via DOGE, an entity run by incompetents like BIG BALLS without restriction. If Teddy was president, this crap would never happen. Free fall is SOP with this "administration" and credibility has gone by the wayside from this once great nation kicked off by Joe Biden's lying regarding his pledge to serve one term. The anger most Americans feel about this betrayal, with the end result of putting the demented orange menace back in office, knows no bounds. We have three more years of Stephen Miller running the show if the midterms are either eliminated or compromised to the nth degree. Dangerville awaits as we move further into 2026 without question.

Department of Government Efficiency - DOGE

End of rant for now.

Last February, Elon Musk boasted of “feeding USAID into the woodchipper” as President Trump kicked off his second term with an unanticipated assault on the agency. A year later, the brutal fallout is coming into focus. Humanitarian aid last year reached 25 million fewer people than in 2024 despite rising global need. More than 2,000 health clinics have closed in crisis zones around the world. Global food aid funding dropped by 40 percent from 2024 to 2025. Millions of people have lost access to critical H.I.V. treatment and testing.

This damage is severe on its own merits. But it also previewed something larger about America’s engagement with the world under an “America first” foreign policy. An administration that began its tenure by abandoning aid recipients has proceeded to alienate treaty allies over Greenland and launch legally dubious military strikes. In retrospect, U.S.A.I.D.’s early demise looks like a canary in the geopolitical coal mine, heralding a dark shift in America’s values.

ICE yet again ...

A placard during a weekend protest against ICE in Minneapolis
Photograph: Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

Ah, another partial shutdown. This is SOOOOOO tiresome. As stated so many times, you can't fix stupid. Yours truly can't watch the "nooze" anymore as stupid shit is everywhere. From vaccine denials to transgender issues to Epstein, the insanity just continues ever onward. In A Must Read ...  Nixon, the NSC and the spying done by the military on Nixon and the National Security Council is most illuminating as one saw not only the paranoia of Nixon but also his brilliance. Smart, incisive and astute in terms of politics and the thirst of power, the contrast cannot be any more stark versus the demented menace residing in the White House as we speak. And now another shutdown over the rightful push to eliminate ICE, the Brown Shirt equivalent of ill trained thugs masquerading as federal agents, complete with masks, in order to cover up the ids of these incompetents while they abuse and murder people without consequences. 

SA insignia

An Irish man who has been held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for five months despite having a valid work permit and no criminal record says he fears for his life and has appealed for help from Ireland’s government.

Seamus Culleton said conditions at his detention centre in Texas were akin to “torture” and that the atmosphere was volatile. “I’m not in fear of the other inmates. I’m afraid of the staff. They’re capable of anything.”

Any questions?

A Must Read ...

Rene Burri/Magnum Photos

A must read, Nam, the Deep State and Nixon, along with Watergate, comes to the fore, courtesy the NYTimes' extremely detailed piece titled The Secret History of the Deep State indirectly proving the deep state reality has existed since the beginning of time.

The issues that animated the “deep state” against Nixon and Kissinger were rooted in the Cold War. But the frictions inherent in the making of national security policy, most acute in times of war, are perennial. Moorer-Radford exposed a hidden feature of the American political system that endures: When excluded from their spheres of interest, entrenched bureaucratic forces will, almost as a biological reflex, respond aggressively.

Charles Radford on Capitol Hill in 1974Credit...Associated Press

The mole, the Deep State, the N.S.C. aka the National Security Council.

Into this cauldron of Cold War paranoia stepped the easygoing Chuck Radford, who the F.B.I. later determined had been brought to Washington by Admiral Moorer. Dutifully, Radford followed the admirals’ instructions to gather intelligence on the N.S.C. Any documents he touched, he copied; he dived into wastebaskets and burn bags; what he couldn’t copy, he memorized. Radford also recruited to assist him a Navy personnelman second-class from Texas who managed the N.S.C. mailroom at night.

The signal revelation of the unsealed testimony is that Nixon and the mole came face to face. “I had met him just casually on a plane,” the ex-president said of Radford, “a brilliant young man.”

“He took shorthand and typed at incredible speed. I think he spoke several languages,” Nixon recalled, noting that Radford “had been with Kissinger on his secret trips,” serving as “the note-taker, and knew what Kissinger had said and what the other side had said. He knew, for example, that the French government were responsible for making those trips possible, which would have been terribly embarrassing to the French government if it had come out. He also knew what Kissinger said when he met with Chou En-lai on his visits to China, and he also knew, of course, every discussion that had taken place in the N.S.C.” Nixon pondered: “Why did he do this thing? Why would he deliver these top secret documents to Jack Anderson?”

Read the entire piece. History in the making and, as twisted as Nixon was, smart, ruthless and perceptive
were part of his persona without question.

President Nixon announcing his resignation in August 1974
Credit...Ray Stubblebine/Associated Press

"Will you walk into my parlour?"

Gary Neill for WSJ

The whirlwind, the impact of AI on business, is just that. Everything's in play and business is having difficulties integrating this tech into complex operations. At the same time, a poem of delicious irony applies.

"Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly,

"'Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;

The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,

And I have many curious things to shew when you are there."

To whit ...

In the past few days, employees of Authentic Brands Group have been seeking out the company’s chief digital officer, Adam Kronengold, to ask him a newly urgent question: Should they start using a new AI tool released by Anthropic to review legal documents? 

The company, which has about 600 employees and owns brands including Reebok and Champion, uses specialized software for that task now. But company leaders have encouraged experimentation and embrace of AI in the ranks. 

“Everyone feels very empowered to raise their hands and say, ‘Hey, how can we fold this in?’” Kronengold said. 

He has told employees he’ll make sure they get access to the new plug-in—but they can keep using the existing software for now. 

The subscription service model apples as per the service, when software is "purchased",
you don't own the code, you own THE RIGHT TO USE IT.

The same applies to AI but ...

The employees using AI are conveniently being replaced, bit by bit as AI learns via pattern recognition and stores the acquired data in question so the inherent knowledge of said corporation goes away when the employees are let go with the end result ... the corporation is saddled with a subscription service they don't own and a knowledge space they no longer have.

Mary Howitt

The Spider and the Fly (1829)

"Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly,

"'Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;

The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,

And I have many curious things to shew when you are there."

"Oh no, no," said the little Fly, "to ask me is in vain,

For who goes up your winding stair can ne'er come down again."

"I'm sure you must be weary, dear, with soaring up so high;

Will you rest upon my little bed?" said the Spider to the Fly.

"There are pretty curtains drawn around; the sheets are fine and thin,

And if you like to rest awhile, I'll snugly tuck you in!"

"Oh no, no," said the little Fly, "for I've often heard it said,

They never, never wake again, who sleep upon your bed!"

Said the cunning Spider to the Fly, "Dear friend what can I do,

To prove the warm affection I've always felt for you?

I have within my pantry, good store of all that's nice;

I'm sure you're very welcome–will you please to take a slice?"

"Oh no, no," said the little Fly, "kind sir, that cannot be,

I've heard what's in your pantry, and I do not wish to see!"

"Sweet creature!" said the Spider, "you're witty and you're wise,

How handsome are your gauzy wings, how brilliant are your eyes!

I've a little looking-glass upon my parlour shelf,

If you'll step in one moment, dear, you shall behold yourself."

"I thank you, gentle sir," she said, "for what you're pleased to say,

And bidding you good morning now, I'll call another day."

The Spider turned him round about, and went into his den,

For well he knew the silly Fly would soon come back again:

So he wove a subtle web, in a little corner sly,

And set his table ready, to dine upon the Fly.

Then he came out to his door again, and merrily did sing,

"Come hither, hither, pretty Fly, with the pearl and silver wing;

Your robes are green and purple–there's a crest upon your head;

Your eyes are like the diamond bright, but mine are dull as lead!"

Alas, alas! how very soon this silly little Fly,

Hearing his wily, flattering words, came slowly flitting by;

With buzzing wings she hung aloft, then near and nearer drew,

Thinking only of her brilliant eyes, and green and purple hue–

Thinking only of her crested head–poor foolish thing! At last,

Up jumped the cunning Spider, and fiercely held her fast.

He dragged her up his winding stair, into his dismal den,

Within his little parlour–but she ne'er came out again!

And now dear little children, who may this story read,

To idle, silly flattering words, I pray you ne'er give heed:

Unto an evil counsellor, close heart and ear and eye,

And take a lesson from this tale, of the Spider and the Fly. 

@ the crossroads ...

Metropolis - The year depicted in the film, 2026

We are Metropolis, where tech rules whether we like it or not. AI is now starting to do the How many monkeys are required to write Hamlet? theorem as code is the next big thing for AI to incorporate at the expense of coders but we already know that, right?

To whit ...

Over two weeks and nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions costing about $20,000 in API fees, the AI model agents reportedly produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM, and RISC-V architectures.

Carlini, a research scientist on Anthropic’s Safeguards team who previously spent seven years at Google Brain and DeepMind, used a new feature launched with Claude Opus 4.6 called “agent teams.” In practice, each Claude instance ran inside its own Docker container, cloning a shared Git repository, claiming tasks by writing lock files, then pushing completed code back upstream. No orchestration agent directed traffic. Each instance independently identified whatever problem seemed most obvious to work on next and started solving it. When merge conflicts arose, the AI model instances resolved them on their own.

 

From art & video to law to ... middle management, the push to automate to enable big business to cut costs no matter the cost is in full swing even though the process to do so has been marginal at best as 95% of all ai installs to improve business practices fail.  Question, if you lay off people en mass, will the fired be able to buy your stuff? I thought so.

Galloping horse, animated using photos
by Muybridge (1887)

In looking at this animation depicted as a set of stills, the question to ask is, at any given time,
are all the feet of the horse off the ground? 

Muybridge's The Horse in Motion, 1878

This is where we are at regarding AI.

Riffing with Gemini ... with small edits

2026: The Year the Shadow Caught Up

In 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis premiered, projecting a dystopian fever dream onto a specific date: 2026. Today, we are no longer watching the film; we are inhabiting the set. We live in the verticality Lang envisioned, where the distance between the "Thinkers" in the towers and the "Hands" in the depths is measured in the silent extraction of our digital sovereignty.

The machines have become invisible—submerged in "Nuclear" data centers that churn through the planet's integrity to maintain a "Hollow" surface. We are at the crossroads of the Moloch, where technology is an end in itself, demanding the sacrifice of the human pulse for the sake of efficiency.

As we meander through this centennial echo, the question isn't whether the tech works, but whether the Mediator is present. If the head and the hands remain disconnected, the city doesn't just divide—it de-renders. It's time to look at the shadows on the snow and take back our sovereignty before it's too late.

And so it goes -  K. Vonnegut

Shadows - 11:00PM

From Analog to Digital/Rev II

Trapping a beam of light in which the wavelength has been increased, which amplifies diffraction and interference effects. The simulation was suggested to me by viewer André Pscherer. It is based on a question on stackexchange, asking whether it is possible to trap a laser beam between reflectors: Nils Berglund

Mathematically correct, extraordinarily beautiful, this works shows light is analog. When hitting the reflectors, the photons become digital for a moment, (the photoelectric effect) going back to analog after leaving the reflector, thus showing Einstein was right as was Planck and Young in proving light is both a particle and a wave depending on the circumstance said photon finds itself at any given time. When looking at this in context of the Full System Audit, this is a prime example of 137, the specific address specified in the universal routing table for light quantifying the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between elementary charged particles.

De Broglie in 1929

When looking at how light behaves both as wave and particle, the same phenomenon applies to particles as seen by the experiment depicted below. As per deBroglie, the matter wave rules.

An illustration of particles behaving like a wave. Physicists have coaxed thousands of sodium nanoparticles into acting like waves in a new superposition experiment. (Image credit: Getty Images)

In the experiment, the team produced a beam of sodium nanoparticles and aimed it at a narrow slit. Their results, published Jan. 21 in the journal Nature, show that the sodium nanoparticles spread out to produce an interference pattern, exhibiting the strange quantum behavior known as wave-particle duality. These sodium nanoparticles have now collectively set the record for the most macroscopic objects to be observed in a quantum superposition.

When combined with entanglement, the Full System Audit begins to make sense as nature's lazy. The Principle of Least Action applies and Entanglement, the digital snapshot of analog quantum, happening at 232 Attosecond speed and decohering immediately thereafter, creates a consistent view of reality for all to see. Read below to see why this concept rings true.

At the deepest level of quantum physics, particles may not be as independent as they appear. New theoretical work shows that nonlocal behavior can emerge simply because identical particles are fundamentally indistinguishable. Credit: Stock

At the most fundamental level of physics, nature does not behave locally. Particles separated by vast distances can act not as independent objects, but as components of a single quantum system. Researchers in Poland have now demonstrated that this kind of nonlocal behavior, which stems from the simple fact that particles of the same type are indistinguishable, can be observed experimentally for nearly all possible states of identical particles.

As for the Universal Modeler ... Voxels are suitable for working with qubits as quantum computers, the analog hardware construct, is finally beginning to take off.

Schematic of how a metasurface shapes a single beam of light into multiple tightly focused beams in a single step. These beams form a series of optical tweezers to trap individual atoms into arrays with arbitrary geometry. Credit: Will and Yu labs, Columbia University

Neutral atom arrays have emerged as one of the leading approaches for building quantum hardware. In a key demonstration led by graduate students Aaron Holman and Yuan Xu from the Will and Yu research groups, the team successfully trapped 1,000 strontium atoms. Their results also show that the same technique can be extended to systems containing well over 100,000 atoms.

Atoms are well suited to serve as qubits because they naturally support the quantum behaviors required for computation, including superposition and entanglement. Just as importantly, every atom of a given type is identical. This removes the need to individually tune and synchronize qubits, a growing challenge for fabricated systems as their size increases.

Voxels can handle qubits without restriction.

The Grid (A): The discrete, binary alphabet of space.

The Solid State (B): A volumetric reality where the model and the object are one.

As per Full System Audit - Voxels, used in MRIs, is a way to model 3D structures (hearts, brains, etc, etc,) in ways impossible to do by any other means. For MRIs, it involves imaging slices of the organ in question and connecting the slices using lofting, The lofting connecting to the slices are voxels. Voxel generated lattices can encompass or model any arbitrary external geometry known to science. (including qubits)

Primary source for The Universal Modeler - Voxel Invention Kit: Reconfigurable Building Blocks for Interactive Electronic Structures (ACM Digital Library.

QC2, the optical Microtubule Quantum Computer

Penrose and Hammeroff were right. Microtubules is the start point for quantum processing in life,
a process that's been around since the beginning of time. 

In 2010, biologists made a shocking discovery. Living in the mud of the North Sea were microorganisms whose genes looked a lot like ours. Genetic analysis revealed that humans, oak trees, blue whales — any living things whose cells have nuclei and mitochondria — are related to these microbes, which were named the Asgard archaea after the home of the Norse gods. Two billion years ago, it was an ancestor of an Asgard that diverged from its kin and eventually became us.

In our cells, cytoskeletal proteins called tubulins snap onto each other to form soaring tubular arches and rails, capable of spanning entire cells, growing at one end while they fall apart at the other. These tubes, known as microtubules, form and bloom and decay in a dance that controls many aspects of eukaryotic life. They handle our chromosomes and help cells divide. They carry machines and act as tracks for motors. They push and pull cellular membranes, turning them into useful shapes.

This is quantum computing at room temperature, something life has been doing for four billion years.

 Fast forward to 2026, optical computing and artificial microtubule QCs are in play and
Voxels can model them.

To whit. 

The rapid advancements in quantum technology have revealed the revolutionary potential of quantum lithography in nanomanufacturing. This study explores the theoretical advantages of next-generation quantum lithography in fabricating photonic quantum neural microtubule chips and identifies key innovations through technical predictions. The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the core components of lithography machines, the feasibility of chip structural design, and the potential application scenarios. The results demonstrate that photonic quantum neural microtubule chips o!er significant improvements in computational e”- ciency, energy consumption, and parallel processing capabilities, paving the way for groundbreaking hardware support in quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

source,11 two-photon source,12 and multiphoton source,13 respectively. Left: Quantum light manipulation: interference,14 state modulation,15 and logic gates.16 Right: Quantum light detection: sensing,17 state characterization,18 and imaging.19 Li et al., eLight 3, 19 (2023). Copyright 2023 Author(s), licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Zhang et al., Sci. Adv. 8, eabq4240 (2022). Copyright 2022 Author(s), licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 

To be continued.

Transition ...

Gravitational Waves 1972

These two 48 X 48 acrylic pieces were done at the same time as The Puzzler & Thinking Zen. GW resides at home, the other, someone else has, hopefully hanging in a nice space. Why these two? Because they kinda relate to The Puzzler as a reaction to the incursion of electronic tech into the art of printing as letterpress was giving way to offset and the emerging power of digital. 

Tangram 1973

Google Genie

Google Genie Io "created" by Robert E.

It's the real deal. Still experimental and rough around the edges but it creates a world in real time and has the potential to change everything. Yours truly has talked about where AI and film are going and it's happening faster than thought possible until now. Hold onto your seat belts because the impact on ad agencies, video and film will change these industries into something altogether different within a very short time frame. We are not ready for this in any way, shape or fashion.

Genie 2 & yes, Jupiter has rings.

To be continued

The Puzzler + One ...

The Puzzler 1972

A true blast from the past. The grid, the crossword puzzle, the move to electronic type imaged on film used in printing paper galleys for mechanicals designed for ads and corporate collateral was the inspiration for The Puzzler. Not seen for over 50 years, it brings back memories in terms of just how much tech has evolved since 1972. I guess this proves that yours truly was a pioneer after all. Remember, DOUBLE TROUBLE IS IN STORE FOR YOU WITH THIS ONE! :)

At the same time, art of a different kind made it's presence known.  

Thinking Zen Acrylic on canvas 1972

A respite from the darkness

Oasis/Rev II

A full moon, 11:00 PM, A respite from the darkness ...

But the restroom is closed.