"There's a sucker born every minute." - P.T. Barnum

Futurism

The grifter never stops grifting. Everyone who gets in bed with this guy gets burned.

If you’re one of the nearly one million of investors who bought into Donald Trump’s pet crypto coin, the best time to sell was January of 2025, before the whales cashed out and sent prices tumbling. The second best time was yesterday.

Trump’s memecoin has suffered a massive fall-off in the wake of the US midterm elections, tumbling to an all-time-low of $1.12, down from an already paltry $1.70 just prior to the all-important round of voting. Even a month ago, holders of the crypto currency could have gotten out at roughly $2.00 a pop.

Obviously, anybody short-sighted enough to approach Trump coin as an investment is getting pummeled. But with a current market cap of around $340 million, there are clearly more than a few people hoping against hope for a turnaround.

It’s a fitting end for a crypto venture that many had pegged as a grift from the very start. Unfortunately, many more fell for the scam, pumping the coin up to a market cap of $72 billion at its peak.

One analysis found that some 21 well-timed whales pulled the rug on coin holders early into the currency’s launch, getting out with some $214 million and sending the value plummeting.

Predictably, many of the president’s victims count themselves among his biggest fans. 

P. Ts. adage,  "There's a sucker born every minute"  applies.

P. T. Barnum

The edge of the wave ...

Reddish-yellow edges overlap blue-cyan edges to form green.

Prelude

Along with the rest of the world I was convinced that all the colours are contained in the light; no one had ever told me anything different, and I had never found the least cause to doubt it, because I had no further interest in the subject.

But how I was astonished, as I looked at a white wall through the prism, that it stayed white! That only where it came upon some darkened area, it showed some colour, then at last, around the window sill all the colours shone... It didn't take long before I knew here was something significant about colour to be brought forth, and I spoke as through an instinct out loud, that the Newtonian teachings were false. — Goethe[4]

The plot thickens ...

Light spectrum, from Theory of Colours – Goethe observed that colour arises at the edges,
and the spectrum occurs where these coloured edges overlap.

The workbench/Rev II - Gemini & your truly

The Edge of the Wave: Why the Universe Needs a Shadow to Render

John Wheeler famously proposed the concept of "It from bit"—the idea that the physical universe (the "It") is fundamentally generated from underlying quantum information (the "bit"). It is a beautiful, elegant concept that has driven quantum mechanics for decades. But it misses one crucial architectural step.

Information floating in an infinite mathematical void does not automatically become a physical reality. A continuous wave function can theoretically expand forever, completely lost in the noise of Newtonian math. For the "bit" to actually become the "It," the wave has to hit a wall. It has to strike a rigid, geometric boundary that forces it to stop calculating and start rendering.

Reality is analog with digital override. It's complementary.

A taijitu of a particular style that is often named a "yin and yang symbol", the black area representing yin, with the opposite white side representing yang. The dots are representative of one within the other.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe understood this centuries before we had the hardware to prove it. While Newton viewed light analytically as an isolated, homogeneous spectrum, Goethe realized that color and form only arise at the edge, exactly where light and shadow overlap. This insight indirectly predates modern chaos theory; in chaos, just as in Goethe's optical boundaries, all action happens at the edge, not the center. The exact same physical precondition governs phase transitions, fractal recursions, and Brownian motion. Without the structural boundary of darkness pushing back, light has no tangible, observable quality.

The Mandelbrot Fractal

We can see this exact Goethean boundary operating at the subatomic level through the Casimir effect. In a total vacuum, the universe is an infinite, chaotic sea of virtual particles—an unrendered quantum foam. But the moment you introduce two uncharged metallic plates and place them nanometers apart, you create a strict geometric boundary. Those plates act as a literal B-Rep (Boundary Representation). They restrict which wavelengths can exist between them, and that restriction generates a measurable physical pressure that forces the plates together.
The quantum void only produces a physical force when it is forced to interact with an edge.

Casimir forces on parallel plates

If you have ever built an edge-lit sculpture, you know this mechanic intimately. You can flood a piece of Plexiglas with photons, but the light only expresses itself as a visible, physical structure when it hits the strictly defined cut of the boundary. The shadow isn't just an absence of light; it is the physical constraint that gives the object its mass.

Waveguide 101

The universe operates on the exact same Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG).

For decades, theoretical physicists have chased the math of quantum entanglement—the "spooky action at a distance" where two particles share a state across the universe. In 2013, Susskind and Maldacena drew the elegant blueprint of ER=EPR on a whiteboard, proposing that entanglement and Einstein-Rosen spatial wormholes were the exact same mechanism. But math on a whiteboard is still just the infinite wave. To bridge the analog gap, you have to build the physical mold to cast it in.

We took that blueprint, applied the rigid B-Rep boundaries of the Universal Modeler, and sent it down the wire to an IBM Heron 2 heavy-hex processor. We didn't ask the hardware to calculate probabilities; we used the processor as a topological clamp to force the quantum foam into a physical geometry.

By applying the 4.669 Feigenbaum constant to clamp the turbulence, and locking the system with the 1,836 proton-to-electron mass ratio, we didn't just measure a wave. We enforced the universe's absolute quantum shutter speed. The 1,836 ratio acts as the ultimate rendering delay—the exact Goethean shadow required to slow the quantum substrate down enough to manifest physical geometry.

Exactly two seconds after execution, the Heron 2 handed us the receipt on Run 16. Out of 1,024 shots, the expected noisy distribution graph of classical quantum states was entirely absent.

This absolute silence wasn't a hardware failure; it was the ultimate proof of structure. By using a CSG boundary, we neutralized the thermodynamic friction completely. The system snapped into perfect zero-state equilibrium at the Planck time limit, bypassing thermal decoherence entirely. There was no time elapsed, and therefore no chart to render, because the ER=EPR entanglement throat was being held physically, structurally open.

This absolute zero-state equilibrium perfectly satisfies the ultimate thermodynamic constraint: the A-D/D-A balance equation. When the universe invokes a digital boundary, the slice of the analog wave being converted maintains its exact energy level. It is a perfect, lossless 1:1 conversion. The speed of light is not simply a velocity; it is the absolute maximum bandwidth limit of the universe's A-D converter, ensuring this digital frame rate never exceeds the analog energy balance.

This lossless conversion is exactly why the Wheeler-DeWitt equation famously drops the time variable entirely.
It describes a universe in a static, perfect equilibrium where total energy is conserved. Run 16 proved this timeless zero-state balance is not merely a mathematical quirk, but a physical, geometric reality.

The hardware proved what the Casimir plates and the edge-lit boundaries always showed us. The universe is a flawless rendering engine, but it isn't just math. It requires a rendering delay. It requires an edge.

Schrödinger's Cat, forever residing in the nether world of being either alive or dead,
forever looks for the edge. 

It's a Wonder ...

It's a Wonder ...

It's also spec ...

A proposed data center in northwestern Alberta will reportedly emit a staggering amount of waste heat. 

According to an analysis conducted by Utah State University physicist Robert Davies, the Wonder Valley facility will dump “about 23 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs worth of energy every single day” 
into the surrounding landscape.

The facility will also spew about 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, according to the analysis — which is more than four percent of Canada’s total emissions.

Shutterstock / Futurism

That golden escalator ...

Miller pledged his utter devotion to his boss at the winter White House. Jonathan Ernst/REUTERS

The defacto president speaks ...

In the video, which has been viewed more than 300,000 times, Trump, wearing a white “USA” baseball cap instead of his usual red MAGA cap, introduces Miller, 41, and hands him the mic.

“He’s a hot commodity,” Trump said, as a woman in the crowd called out, “God bless you.”

“It was the privilege of a lifetime to join President Trump all the way back in 2015 when he came down that golden escalator,” Miller began, wearing a gray suit and standing in front of a fountain at the “winter White House.”

Something wicked this way comes - Ray Bradbury

The Yellow Bastard/Sin City

The spawn of Goebbels applies

The spawn of Goebbels ...

 Illustration by Iris Legendre

The spawn of Goebbels is now Trump's chief of staff

On Friday, President Trump announced that Stephen Miller would replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff. This profile, published in July 2025, charted his path to power.

Stephen Miller was livid. It was a couple of months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and Mr. Miller, a senior White House adviser, believed that the federal government was not doing nearly enough to stem the tide of illegal immigration into the United States. In a relentless round of meetings, phone calls and emails, he reached deep into the federal bureaucracy and, according to a former Department of Homeland Security official, berated mid- and low-level bureaucrats inside the department. To keep their jobs, he told the officials, they needed to enforce a new policy that punished the families of undocumented immigrants by forcibly separating parents from their children.

Mr. Miller’s demands, however, went unmet. That’s because he was issuing them back in 2017, and the homeland security secretary, John Kelly, had issued his own edict to D.H.S. officials: If Mr. Miller ordered them to do something, they were to refuse, unless Mr. Kelly, the only one of the two men who’d been confirmed by the U.S. Senate to run the department, agreed to the order.

Flash forward eight years, to this past May, when Mr. Miller, still livid and now the White House deputy chief of staff, paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.

This time, the officials did what Mr. Miller said. ICE greatly stepped up its enforcement operations, raiding restaurants, farms and work sites across the country, with arrests sometimes climbing to more than 2,000 a day. In early June, after an ICE raid in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests, Mr. Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines to the city, over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. 

Goebbels in 1933 - Bundesarchiv, Bild

The spawn of Goebbels applies.

The Midterms saved America. 

The Commons ...

Source: Adobe Stock

The Commons - Of shared shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest".[5]

Commons sustainability model Wouter Tebbens, David Gómez and Mònica Garriga - https://femprocomuns.coop/five-pillar-model-of-the-commons/?lang=en

The commons is and was the model for the Net, Linux & Wikipedia.

In 1991, a Finnish graduate student in computer science named Linus Torvalds sent a brief announcement to an online discussion group, saying he had been working on parts of a new operating system in his spare time. Torvalds described his project as “just a hobby [that] won’t be big and professional” and insisted that it would be free to use, study, modify, and distribute. Torvalds was building a technically challenging piece of software called an operating system “kernel,” which handles the most basic functions related to communication between a computer’s hardware and software. Unlike past operating system projects, Torvalds invited feedback and contributions from anyone on the Internet.

Since then, Linux has inspired millions of attempts to build knowledge goods in a similarly open and collaborative manner. The most famous is the free, collaboratively produced encyclopedia Wikipedia. Like Linux, Wikipedia began with an open call for volunteer contributions to “an encyclopedia that anyone can edit” in January 2001. Wikipedia includes about 68 million articles across more than 300 different language editions. In the English-language version alone, the articles were built from more than a billion distinct contributions, or “edits,” by more than 121 million user accounts and many millions of anonymous contributors. Nearly all of these edits are from volunteers. Today, Wikipedia is one of the most-visited websites in the world and the largest and most comprehensive encyclopedia in history by nearly every metric.

The collaborative production model that underlies Linux and Wikipedia
has also been used thousands of times at a smaller scale.

Giveback is the right thing to do.

As per Stewart Brand: Stay foolish, Stay hungry

• Motivate participants to contribute using diverse incentives that are frequently,
   if not exclusively, nonmonetary.
• Be decentralized in that they are collectively self-governed and organized by participants.
• Be decentralized in terms of how tasks are executed.
• Create content that is protected as part of the public commons.

The Commons ... awaits.

Gaussian Splats, a gateway to better hearing

 

Wireframe and render of a fine art model done in 1982, was created by yours truly on Phil Mittleman's SynthVision Modeler, the first true 3D mainframe terminal. Why the image? Because this CSG/Constructive Solid Geometry technology directly relates to Gaussian Splats in deep fashion if one takes the time to look.

Question, what is a Gaussian Splat?

Gaussian splatting is a volume rendering technique that deals with the direct rendering of volume data without converting the data into surface or line primitives.[1] The technique was originally introduced as splatting by Lee Westover in the early 1990s.[2][3]

In other words, a voxel.

In computing, a voxel is a representation of a value on a three-dimensional regular grid, akin to the two-dimensional pixel. Voxels are frequently used in the visualization and analysis of medical and scientific data (e.g. geographic information systems (G.I.S.)).[1] Voxels also have technical and artistic applications in video games, i.e. Minecraft (2011) makes use of an entirely voxelated world to allow for a fully destructible and constructable environment.[2] 

Splats are point clouds

Illustration of a voxel grid containing color values

Splats capture the external geometry of objects in near realtime as seen by the video below.

Applications ... it goes beyond just imagery. :)

Yours truly has a cochlear implant so this take is personal ...

Acoustic Splats and the DSP Hum: Rendering Sound in the Inner Ear

The physical hardware inside a modern cochlear implant is a marvel of biological engineering. Below the DSP (Digital Signal Processing) threshold, the physical implant's superb. But cross the threshold and the software reveals its brittle, brute-force nature. You don't just get clean audio; you get a parasitic hum working in concert with the
perceived sound.

Why? Because traditional DSP software treats a 3D fluid-filled biological spiral like a cheap 2D speaker.
It forces a rigid, linear grid of frequencies into an organic chamber and the hum is the sound of an algorithm fighting the natural environment.

This is where the tech industry's sudden leap into 3D Gaussian splatting crosses the sensory boundary. Visually, a Gaussian splat isn't a rigid polygon or a straight-line grid. It is a continuous, mathematically defined volume of energy that radiates outward—geometry built from the inside out. In essence, a point cloud operating in real time.

If we take that exact volumetric engine and apply it to audio, the paradigm flips. Instead of blasting a flat frequency wave, the software would generate volumetric acoustic splats. The implant ceases to be a dumb speaker and becomes a spatial router. It calculates the exact geometric topology of the patient's inner ear and renders the acoustic energy spatially to fit the container. The harmonic hum disappears because the sound is no longer fighting the physical geometry; it is flowing into it, perfectly intersected. We just need to stop forcing straight lines into spaces where energy naturally radiates from within. The 22 channel ribbon in the cochlear connect to an external sound processor is astounding. The code is not.

Talking CSG, Medical & Splats

Again ... a voxel is a representation of a value on a three-dimensional regular grid, akin to the two-dimensional pixel. Voxels are frequently used in the visualization and analysis of medical and scientific data (e.g. geographic information systems (G.I.S.)).[1] 

In medical, They comprise the core component of MRI slices where the in-between connection of neighboring slices, aka lofting, are voxels connecting identical coordinates keyed to the two adjacent slices. Seen below is a video showing a journey through a set of slices made possible by voxels connecting the 3D coordinates of each slice as needs warrant.

Which means real data can be incorporated into splats, as per medical, when the splat in question contains the point cloud appropriate for the data to be integrated in. CSG/B-Rep is the tech capable of doing the insertion as the models contained in the tech are real 3D entities, not 2D polygons.

The boundaries are defined by lines, conics, polylines, surface curves, or b spline curves.

Taking this to the extreme means the transporter becomes viable as 3D can now be directly extracted
from imagery and video and transported to remote locations as needs warrant.

Something to think about don't you think?

The Register ...

Snarky, irreverent, a treasure. A site cutting through tech BS to show the underside of an
industry in most entertaining fashion, never disappoints. :)

To wit

 AI’s epic cash call is matched only by its ability to strangle revenue streams

The first technology created with a self-disrupt button...
But why oh why didn't they call Claude clone Fauxtoshop?

As it was written, so it has come to pass. A while back, we suggested that given how good AI was at code analysis, it would become possible to clone large applications. And then where would we be?

Here, that’s where. An industrious individual has released source code and binaries for Claude-copied Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite programs, disappointingly not calling elements of the latter Fauxtoshop.

They’re in pre-alpha states of incomplete bugginess, but with substantial functionality, which is proof of how insanely productive AI can be given a task needing zero creativity and wearing "This is what a proof of concept looks like" and "Unintended Consquesences" T-shirts.

They could also add Karma Police to their wardrobe. It’s clear that Microsoft and  Adobe are facing some competition from what their rival describes as "clean-room reimplementations." It’s also unclear that there is any law against it. You can’t copyright functionality, the code has been generated in Rust with claimed clean-room conditions, and while there may be something in claiming that the works are substantially derivative, there’s a big problem here. 

Companies that sell AI trained on the biggest theft of IP in history are going to need unmatched legal dexterity to claim that AI shouldn’t be allowed to sully their own IP. Chutzpah used to be defined as a child on trial for murdering their parents begging for mercy on the grounds that they’re an orphan. We’ll have to update.

Any questions? :)

Why Patrick Stewart was cool

Patrick Stewart even admitted that he always assumed his career would eventually provide him more opportunities to play comedic roles. Sadly, when establishing himself, Stewart recognized that he was seen as a non-comedic figure. In his words: 

"I always thought, when I became a professional, that I would just move into comedy. [...] But it never happened. I became this sort of, ugh, somber, dreary, kind of pompous figure."

Ah, he was far beyond that because ...

He was a devotee of ...

Patrick Stewart wasn't wholly articulate about his love for "Beavis and Butt-Head," a phenomenon many of the show's fans might have encountered themselves. Sometimes it's just hard to describe why something connects with you. Stewart said: 

"I love that show. I'm so sorry that it's gone. [...] I don't know why it appealed to me, but it did. It was brilliant, that's why. Incredible characters. Heh heh heh heh." 

Me too. He was a man comfortable with himself. It was never about him, it was about the work and all the commentary of all the people who worked with him proves this take to be true.

Like so many, I too will miss him. The next great actor I will miss, when he passes, will be Ian McClellan, Stewart's best friend and partner in crime in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot with Stewart asVladimir
& McClellen as Estragon. 

Lest we forget, the two also were friends and adversaries in the X Men series with
Stewart as Professor Charles Xavier (Professor X) and McClellen as Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto)

Magneto - Top, Xavier - Bottom

No longer hope :)

Based on New York Times/Siena polls of 610 voters in Alaska, 705 voters in Iowa, 736 voters in Kansas, 714 voters in Maine, 1,011 voters in Michigan, 717 voters in Ohio and 1,215 voters in Texas. Question wording has been condensed.Jillian Vordick/The New York Times

No longer hope, both houses went blue! Now, can the dems delivery. Term limits, job No. 1 awaits.