"a continuous surface connection" ...

The question for the justices was how to determine which wetlands qualify as such waters.
Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times.

The fascist court strikes yet again. It's all about the money according to the worst SC in history.

The Supreme Court on Thursday curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to police millions of acres of wetlands, delivering another setback to the agency’s ability to combat pollution.

Writing for five justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the Clean Water Act does not allow the agency to regulate discharges into wetlands near bodies of water unless they have “a continuous surface connection” to those waters.

The decision was a second major blow to the E.P.A.’s authority and to the power of administrative agencies generally. Last year, the court limited the E.P.A.’s power to address climate change under the Clean Air Act.

Experts in environmental law said the decision would leave many wetlands subject to pollution without penalty, sharply undercutting the E.P.A.’s authority to protect them under the Clean Water Act.

“This is a really disastrous outcome for wetlands, which have become absolutely vital for biodiversity preservation and flood control,” said Patrick Parenteau, a professor at Vermont Law School.

Question, what does "a continuous surface connection" to those waters mean as wetlands are 3 dimensional entities, not two but to Alito, scientific accuracy matters not, right?

Nixon must be rolling over in his grave.

For the public good :)

Illustration: Michael Haddad

Yours truly cherishes Wikipedia, an invaluable resource able to keep this writer honest when discussing the vagaries of reality from the perspective of an ordinary American beginning in 2007. Why you might ask? Because Wikipedia's self correcting. If someone writes about something incorrectly, another fixes the mistake, a process akin to how science works as science is a discipline designed to be disproved, a quality held most dear by this rube without question. :)

Interesting enough, Wikopedia was founded the same year as BRT so perhaps fate played a hand in the creation of both enterprises. :)

In its first decade of life, the website appeared in as many punch lines as headlines. The Office's Michael Scott called it “the best thing ever,” because “anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject—so you know you are getting the best possible information.” Praising Wikipedia, by restating its mission, meant self-identifying as an idiot.

That was in 2007. Today, Wikipedia is the eighth-most-visited site in the world. The English-language version recently surpassed 6 million articles and 3.5 billion words; edits materialize at a rate of 1.8 per second. But perhaps more remarkable than Wikipedia's success is how little its reputation has changed. It was criticized as it rose, and now makes its final ascent to … muted criticism. To confess that you've just repeated a fact you learned on Wikipedia is still to admit something mildly shameful. It's as though all those questions that used to pepper think pieces in the mid-2000s—Will it work? Can it be trusted? Is it better than Encyclopedia Britannica?—are still rhetorical, when they have already been answered, time and again, in the affirmative.

Why Wikipedia matters.

Yet in an era when Silicon Valley's promises look less gilded than before, Wikipedia shines by comparison. It is the only not-for-profit site in the top 10, and one of only a handful in the top 100. It does not plaster itself with advertising, intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling. Like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, it broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike them, it makes its product de-personified, collaborative, and for the general good. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers: Can you believe that was the one that worked?
 

How cool is that? :)

Addendum: Click here to learn how Wikipedia came to be. :)

Blood & Sex :)

Parantica cleona, an Indonesian butterfly, contemplates its next meal. (Image credit: Yi-Kai Tea)

The notion of vampire survival always involving blood and sex is apt because the vampire, as depicted by Bram Stroker's Dracula, must be physically alluring to enable the bloodsucker to get close enough to its intended victim in order to feed, something akin to what male milkweed butterflies do in drinking milkweed toxins in order to attract females, actions depicted in great detail in a Live Science article deliciously titled Milkweed butterflies tear open caterpillars and drink them alive.

Not all caterpillars grow up to be beautiful butterflies. Some become living milkshakes for their dads, who guzzle caterpillar body fluids to attract the ladies.

Recently, scientists reported the first evidence of butterflies sipping from the bodies of caterpillars — dead and alive. They observed adult milkweed butterflies in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, using tiny claws on their feet to scratch wounds in caterpillars' bodies so they could lap the liquid that oozed out. 

Male butterflies seek certain compounds produced by milkweed (flowering plants in the family Apocynaceae), which repel predators and help the butterflies produce pheromones that attract females. Since caterpillars are stuffed with juices from chewed-up plants, they make an easy target for butterflies looking to chemically boost their attractiveness to females. 

Blood and sex applies, does it not? :)

Stroker 1906

Vlad the Impaler: The Inspiration for Stroker's Dracula

Zeno's Paradox

Tracy Ma

Yours truly has written copiously about quality and how its intimately connected to morals even if the quality attained in the creation of something is intended for a purpose not aligned with morality. Think Bernays and Goebbels to see why this take rings true. With this being said, an excellent NYTimes article titled Tyranny of 'the Best' describes Skinner box tendencies many people exhibit when obsessing about finding the best of any given thing while totally missing out on what it means to be truly alive. As one fairly cognizant about how data is packaged and dissiminated, I can honestly say I'm not a chipmunk spinning in a wheel driven to find out what 'the best' actually means, something most comforting while others continue their endless pursuit of what's 'the Best' is in a fashion similar to Zeno's Paradox where Achilles never wins.

Zeno of Elea (c. 450 BCE) is credited with creating several famous paradoxes, and perhaps the best known is the paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles. (Achilles was the great Greek hero of Homer’s The Iliad.) It has inspired many writers and thinkers through the ages, notably Lewis Carroll (see Carroll’s Paradox) and Douglas Hofstadter, both of whom wrote expository dialogues involving the Tortoise and Achilles.

Without 0, the Tortoise always wins. :)

Rankings, of course, are nothing new. Sight and Sound has put out a list of greatest films every 10 years since 1952. The U.S. News & World Report college rankings were first published in 1983. (It will probably surprise nobody that this year’s top three are Princeton, M.I.T. and Harvard.) Rolling Stone released its first list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” in 2003. Some version of the “hottest new restaurants of the year” could be found in local newspapers and magazines for decades — not to mention the best dentists, doctors, schools. These have always provoked conversation, backlash, letters to the editor.

Maybe. But to me, anyway, the experience of shopping for a hair dryer online feels less like being a pawn in a Matrix-esque mind-control operation and more like being trapped inside a box of plastic toys that have all been wound up so they constantly chatter and clatter against one another. The reality is I just want to spend as little time as possible in that box, while also hopefully buying something that won’t break the second time I use it. Best-of lists and rankings can seem like a simple solution to this problem.

There are a lot of areas where people don’t feel as if they have expertise, and ratings “get rid of that feeling of not being competent,” Rick Larrick, a professor of management and organization at Duke University, told me.

Zeno's Paradox rules as does the Skinner Box. :)

Skinner Box

Joe B's The Redding Express :)

 It's all about trains and the enthusiasm and care it takes to keep the trains running on time. Brings back a lot of memories yours truly had as a kid. Thanks to Bert and Joe in making this video a lot of fun to do. :)

Yes ... and pigs fly

Yes ... and pigs fly. 

Let there be light/rev II

Let there be light/rev II

Using ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), astronomers have created a vast infrared atlas of five nearby stellar nurseries by piecing together more than one million images. These large mosaics reveal young stars in the making, embedded in thick clouds of dust. Thanks to these observations, astronomers have a unique tool with which to decipher the complex puzzle of stellar birth.

“In these images we can detect even the faintest sources of light, like stars far less massive than the Sun, revealing objects that no one has ever seen before,” says Stefan Meingast, an astronomer at the University of Vienna in Austria and lead author of the new study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “This will allow us to understand the processes that transform gas and dust into stars.”

Stars form when clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravity, but the details of how this happens are not fully understood. How many stars are born out of a cloud? How massive are they? How many stars will also have planets?

Questions, questions, never-ending in a reality we will never fully understand. 

This image shows the IRAS 11051-7706 object in the Chamaeleon constellation. New stars are born in the colourful clouds of gas and dust seen here. The infrared observations underlying the image reveal new details in the star-forming regions that are usually obscured by the clouds of dust. The image was produced with data collected by the VIRCAM instrument, which is attached to the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The observations were done as part of the VISIONS survey, which will allow astronomers to better understand how stars form in these dust-enshrouded regions. Credit: ESO/Meingast et al.

This image shows the HH 909 A object in the Chamaeleon constellation. New stars are born in the colourful clouds of gas and dust seen here. The infrared observations underlying this image reveal new details in the star-forming regions that are usually obscured by the clouds of dust. The image was produced with data collected by the VIRCAM instrument, which is attached to the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The observations were done as part of the VISIONS survey, which will allow astronomers to better understand how stars form in these dust-enshrouded regions.

Credit: ESO/Meingast et al.

Gotta do one more. :)

A dark cloud of cosmic dust snakes across this spectacular image, illuminated by the brilliant light of new stars. This dense cloud is a star-forming region called Lupus 3, where dazzlingly hot stars are born from collapsing masses of gas and dust. This image was created from images taken using the VLT Survey Telescope and the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope.  Credit: ESO/R. Colombari

As stated before, we are but a dust mote in god's eye.

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

Image by Google

And so it goes., the famous quote by the esteemed K. Vonnegut, applies when looking at this AI generated "Hopper," created by one connecting to Creative Fabrica and typing in the immortal sentence "a woman looking outside the window by Edward Hopper." to produce the work in seconds, a timeframe altogether different from when I painted Angle Line in the year of our lord 1977.

Angle Line - 1977 Acrylic 60" X 48"

As stated in a BRT piece titled The tool becoming the master, it's evident AI's becoming the irresistible low hanging fruit whereby the ceding of the ability to do anything of value is better left to a machine because it's just so easy to do unless the power goes off, right?

Now you can create any image you can imagine and use it for your crafting projects," reads the website. "These creations are generated using Artificial Intelligence and are all one-of-a-kind."

All to say, you don't need to be an AI expert or internet sleuth extraordinaire to confirm that this painting isn't the real deal. But while that may have been simple enough for a human to decipher, the reality — and the concern — still stands that Google's algorithms weren't able to bridge the same divide, not just allowing the image to show up on the second or third page of search results but featuring the AI-generated art in the search engine's algorithm-determined overview of the artist's work. In other words, one algorithm's fake painting fooled Google's algorithm. The snake has officially started to eat its tail.

An ouroboros in a 1478 drawing in an alchemical tract[1]

With profound regret ...

Hate to say it but yours truly has been talking about the potential dangers of AI for years with nary a positive response regarding my take until now. The problem with this well-intention plea to do a 6-month hiatus on said tech is, IMHO, moot as the horse is out of the barn, never to return as we move further into the 21st century. As Fats Waller said, No one knows, do one ...

Kevin Baragona of DeepAI (Image credit: DeepAI)

"Someone should stop the AI industry," Baragona says during our interview, which is a surprising comment from the founder of a company in the field. He launched DeepAI (opens in new tab) back in 2016, initially as an AI news portal. It now has its own text-to-image AI art generator and a bunch of AI chatbots that can respond to questions in different styles, from that of a 'drunk friend' to a 'motivational coach'. 

Baragona also joined the likes of Elon Musk in signing the recent letter that urged a pause in AI development. Asked whether this is not a little contradictory, he exclaims that DeepAI is "my only livelihood", but that he now thinks AI is developing too fast and will become "smarter than us".

"I wasn't worried about AI at all until a year ago when we started seeing exponential progress," he says. "Now I think AI is pretty scary. This is what keeps me up at night. What are we building here? Why do we need this stuff? It's really fun, it's cool, people love it. but it's almost too good, it's too disruptive."

Exactly

DeepAI's AI image generator (Image credit: DeepAI)

Like the look of DeepAI's front end. :)

Recycling ...

Recycling, this time relating to creativity and imagination, is key because if one cannot forget, the ability to create becomes impossible, something beautifully expressed by Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer able to write about dreams, information and creativity in ways most powerful and eloquent without question.

I GO BACK: Jorge Luis Borges, the celebrated Argentine novelist, cultivated a powerful memory from a young age to compensate for a condition that caused him to lose his sight later in life. He memorized many of his favorite texts. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

In 1942, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges published a short story called “Funes the Memorious.” The unnamed narrator recounts a story from his memory, which centers on a Uruguayan man named Ireneo Funes. The narrator learns Funes has fallen off his horse, hitting his head and leaving him housebound. Not long after, Funes contacts the narrator, asking to borrow some of his books in Latin, which is the narrator’s specialty. He gives Funes a selection of his most difficult Latin texts, ones that he has trouble making sense of himself.

A few days later, when the narrator goes to collect his books, he finds that Funes has memorized, in just a matter of days, long and complicated passages in Latin, despite no prior knowledge of the language. Funes tells the narrator that, ever since the accident, his memory has changed. He no longer can forget. As Funes describes it, his experience is now of one “intolerable richness and sharpness.” Whereas the rest of us look out and see a tree here, a group of people there, Funes sees the pixel-level information, frame by frame. Because he retains the full clarity of these scenes in memory, his memories have indistinguishable precision when compared to his present reality.

The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, a useless mental catalogue of all the images of his memory) are senseless, but they betray a certain

stammering grandeur. They permit us to glimpse or infer the nature of Funes' vertiginous world. He was, let us not forget,  an almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort. Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the word dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them. 

With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.

"In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.” In the morning, the narrator leaves for Buenos Aires. He never sees Funes again

1 point perspective ... 2020

The act of memory is an act of imagination.

Memory provides the building blocks for mental time travel.

I wish I had penned these. :)