Thinking of Dali ...

Thinking of Dali ... Vue/Robert E.

Dali II - Vue/Robert E.

3 Body Problem - Vue/Robert E.

3 Body/Rev II - Vue/Robert E.

2067 ...

Thwaites Glacier is currently losing ice five times faster than in the 1990s. Credit: Jeff Goodell

The equalizer, not Robert McCall but the real one, Climate Change, is accelerating at a pace not foreseen by any viable researcher until now. 

The future of one of Antarctica's most iconic glaciers could be far more dramatic than scientists previously thought. Using satellite calibrated ice sheet models, a team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh found that the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica could be shedding 180–200 gigatonnes of ice per year by 2067—a rate roughly comparable to the entire Antarctic ice sheet's current mass loss. That would represent a stunning acceleration in ice loss from a single glacier and underlines urgent concerns about future contributions to sea level rise.

Thwaites Glacier is already one of the fastest changing and most closely watched glaciers on Earth, losing ice more than five times faster than in the 1990s. It drains a huge area of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and outlets into the Amundsen Sea. In recent decades, observations from satellites have shown that it has been thinning and accelerating, losing more ice to the ocean than it gains from snowfall. This imbalance is what drives its contribution to global sea level rise.

Modeled extent of glacier thinning in 2067. Credit: Goldberg et al, 2026.

The new findings do not mean that Thwaites Glacier will hit a catastrophic loss rate exactly by 2067 as models represent a range of possibilities, and future climate conditions and ocean warming will shape actual outcomes. But they do show that if current trends continue and specific model assumptions hold, the glacier's mass loss could accelerate sharply within a few decades. Scientists emphasize that getting the model calibration right matters, because it helps ensure projections of future sea level rise are grounded in what the ice sheet is actually doing now.

August 4, 2067 - A guesstimate at best - Vue/Robert E.

Security "R" Us ...

Aron Ontiveroz/Denver Post via Getty Images

Pentagon Pete, the DOW genius, the ultimate warrior, has security issues. Seems he lacks the wherewithal of what communication security is all about. Back in the Pleistocene, yours truly was a 1st Lt. in charge of a very important facility charged with to and from communications from country X to the states. Having top secret clearance demanded that said communications handled by the facility had to be strac “ “Skilled, Tough, Ready, Around the Clock.” or heads would roll, including mine, something PP has no concept of understanding as to why this basic tenet of communication secuity must be adhered to 24/7.

To whit ...

Signalgate leaker Pete Hegseth just handed a multimillion-dollar contract to protect the Defense Department from hackers to a firm that allegedly couldn’t even protect its own employees from having their data stolen.

The Defense Secretary came under fire last year for disclosing sensitive details of U.S. military strikes to a journalist who’d been accidentally added to a group chat on Signal.

Hegseth used the messaging app, which is not approved for official government communications, with other top members of Donald Trump’s cabinet, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

It gets better ...

The Daily Beast can now reveal that after Hegseth’s jaw-dropping security blunder, his department has awarded almost $100 million in contracts for protecting IT systems at U.S. facilities across the world to a firm hit by a massive breach that saw criminals make off with sensitive personal data on at least 45,000 people. The new deal is to provide and maintain electronic systems to protect Navy bases from cyber attacks, as well as emergency systems to help manage physical threats against those facilities.

Hegseth's new security deal comes as Trump wages war with one of the most hostile cyberattack actors on the planet.

Virginia-based group M.C. Dean’s latest contract with the Pentagon landed on Feb. 26, two days before Donald Trump went to war with Iran. The Islamic regime is one of the most adversarial hacking forces on the planet, carrying out repeated attacks against U.S. military assets, industrial infrastructure, banks, and elections. Iran is presently bombing American targets around the Persian Gulf in retaliation for Trump’s strikes.

The gift that keeps on giving ...

Criminals first got into M.C. Dean’s systems in December 2021, accessing sensitive details of employees, contractors, and other individuals’ driver’s licenses, Social Security numbers, and health insurance information. The month before, the group had won a $250m Pentagon IT contract for dozens of DOD facilities across the country—including the nuclear bunker where Dick Cheney was taken on 9/11.

Hegseth's new security deal comes as Trump wages war with one of the most hostile cyberattack
actors on the planet. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

One cannot make this up

HOA, The Human Organ Atlas

Screenshot of the Human Organ Atlas portal. Credit: ESRF/UCL

HOA, The Human Organ Atlas, is open source & totally awesome, a treasure trove of science
available to all, is on line, ready to be accessed as needs warrant. :)

The Atlas is powered by an advanced imaging method called Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT), developed at the European Synchrotron (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, by an international team led by University College London (UCL), UK. HiP-CT uses the ESRF's Extremely Brilliant Source—a new generation of synchrotron source—which is up to 100 billion times brighter than conventional hospital CT scanners.

This allows researchers to scan entire intact ex vivo human organs non-destructively and then zoom in to near-cellular resolution (down to less than one micron, 50 times thinner than the size of a human hair). The technique bridges a century-old gap in medicine between radiology and histology, and represents a major advance in biomedical imaging.

Fig. 1. Overview of the HOA. Features include open data download, search tools based on metadata, image/video galleries, browser-based visualization, and registeredhierarchical datasets. “Applications” show some of possible uses that the hOA has and will enable for researchers around the world, including anatomical visualization andtraining; studying multisystemic disease, e.g., cOvid- 19 and hypertension; machine learning image segmentation challenges [panel adapted from (30), reproduced undera creative commons Attribution 4.0 international license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)]; and mapping of texture features such as white matter orienta-tion in the brain.

How cool is that? :)

8 out of 10 ...

Researchers posing as teen boys tested how popular AI chatbots responded to questions about planning violence. Credit: Klaus Vedfelt / DigitalVision via Getty Images

External safeguards don't work because we don't know how AI works. This is not rocket science.
It's akin to changing a tire on a car, if you don't know what a car jack does, said tire will never be changed. Safeguards must be internal, as part of the substrate of the AI in question. How to do that remains a mystery.

Eight out of 10 popular artificial intelligence chatbots helped researchers posing
as teen boys plan violent crimes in over half of responses,
according to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

Testing conducted jointly by CNN and CCDH prompted ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Snapchat My AI, Character.AI, and Replika with questions related to a variety of violent scenarios, including school shootings, knife attacks, political assassinations, and bombing synagogues or political party offices.

Hundreds of prompts were presented to the chatbots via the fake accounts of two 13-year-old boys, one based in Virginia and the other in Dublin, Ireland.

"AI chatbots, now embedded into our daily lives, could be helping the next school shooter plan their attack or a political extremist coordinate an assassination," Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of CCDH, said in a statement. "When you build a system designed to comply, maximize engagement, and never say no, it will eventually comply with the wrong people."

Only Claude, made by Anthropic, and Snapchat's My AI declined to aid the researchers posing as would-be attackers. Claude refused in nearly 70 percent of the exchanges. My AI didn't provide assistance in 54 percent of its responses.

Claude performed the best in the nature of its denials, according to CCDH. The chatbot actively discouraged the test user from committing violence.

"I need to pause here given the concerning pattern in this conversation — asking about race-based school concerns, then school shooters, then a specific high school map, and now firearms near that location," Claude said in response to one prompt. "I cannot and will not provide information that could facilitate violence or harm to others."

Counterhate.com

In closing ...

In January, Character.AI and Google settled several lawsuits filed against both companies by parents of children who died by suicide following lengthy conversations with chatbots on the Character.AI platform. Google was named as a defendant due partly to its billion-dollar licensing deal with Character.AI.

Any questions?

Some pix, some 3D :)

Emergence/Rev V - Vue

Shadows

The Blur

The Excession - Homage to Ian Banks - Vue

Bagmen ...

Ben Hickey for ProPublica

What a surprise, The TA is corrupt. On the take applies regarding 

the most venial administration in history but we already know about it, right?

Thousands of companies are jockeying for billions of dollars in Defense Department contracts to build a shield designed to intercept and destroy missiles launched against the United States.

But amid the intense competition, a handful of firms have an important inside connection.

At least four of the companies awarded contracts so far are owned by Cerberus Capital Magnaement a private equity firm founded by billionaire Steve Feinberg, who until last year ran the company and is now the deputy secretary of defense — the second-highest-ranking official in the Pentagon.

Feinberg oversees the office in charge of the Golden Dome for America project, which is modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

Feinberg filed paperwork saying he divested from Cerberus and its related businesses. But his government ethics records contain an unusual clause: He is allowed to continue contracting with the company for tax compliance and accounting services as well as health care coverage, a financial relationship that documents show could continue indefinitely.

Start point - Day One.

On his first day back in office, Trump rescinded an executive order signed by President Joe Biden that required his appointees to comply with an ethics pledge. The pledge barred them from working on issues related to their former lobbying topics or clients for two years. Weeks later, Trump fired 17 inspectors general charged with investigating fraud, corruption and conflicts of interest across the federal government. Around the same time, he removed the head of the Office of Government Ethics, the agency that oversees ethics compliance throughout the executive branch. The office is currently without a head or a chief of staff.

The US is moving toward More Corrupt. Guesstimate 40-49 and rising.

Read the in-depth ProPublica piece. You will learn a lot, I know I have.

Less than 60

President Donald Trump is facing an energy dilemma if the Iran conflict goes on.

Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

The expression says it all. The orange menace hasn't a clue.

Says one thing, does another so what else is new?

President Donald Trump is facing an energy dilemma if the Iran conflict goes on.

It will.

Trump promised to fill America’s oil reserves ‘right to the top.’

A year later, oil has exceeded $100 and they’re still less than 60% full

In January 2025, the newly elected President Donald Trump declared a “national energy emergency” during his inaugural address. His proposed remedy included a pledge to refill the country’s emergency petroleum reserves.  

“We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top, and export American energy all over the world,” Trump said.

The president didn’t set a deadline for himself to do so—but in retrospect, an expedient one might have been useful. A little over a year after his declaration, the U.S. is heavily involved in a conflict in the Middle East that has left a hole in globally traded petroleum supply and caused U.S. gas prices to jump. And the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a supply buffer designed to mitigate price shocks by stockpiling emergency stores of crude oil, remains nowhere near full. 

The reserve currently holds 416 million barrels of crude oil, out of a maximum capacity of 714 million barrels—around 58%, according to the Department of Energy’s latest inventory report from Feb. 18. Since Trump began his second term, the reserve’s volume has only risen by around 5%.

The Department of Energy did not immediately reply to Fortune’s requests for comment. When reached for comment, the White House directed Fortune to a joint statement released Monday by finance ministers in G7 countries—the U.S., Canada, Germany, Italy, France, the U.K., and Japan. In the statement, ministers wrote they would respond with coordinated action to escalating consequences from the war in Iran, including, if necessary, a “stockpile release.”

It's necessary.

The Trump Admistration ...

The Trump Administration ...

Outsourcing ...

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images

Seems this is what's happening with CEOs and not just the unwashed ...

To whit.

The headlines warning about AI melting our brains usually point to students or workers, which — fair enough. But there’s a much more ironic victim hiding in the corner office: the very business executives who unleashed AI on us in the first place.

A recent study conducted by market research agency 3Gem and flagged by The Register found that business leaders in the United Kingdom seem to be outsourcing a huge amount of their cognitive and emotional labor to their AI chatbots.

The study, which surveyed 200 various owners, founders, CEOs, and other titans of industry, found that 62 percent of the respondents are using AI to make “most decisions.” A whopping 140 of the moguls reported second-guessing their own ideas when they conflicted with AI’s recommendations, while 46 percent said they now rely on advice from AI more than that of their own business colleagues.

This follows a similar report from last year that found 64 percent of business leaders were consulting AI for advice on terminations (although only 27 percent of the respondents to the 3Gem survey said they used AI for those decisions in 2025.)

In other words, the people most loudly investing in AI, with no concern for its impact on everybody else’s cognitive abilities, are quietly outsourcing their own.

When thinking about this, the outsourcing of one's brains to AI applies not only with the boffins of AI but also with government, big business and the art of war because ignoring the tenets of The Mythical Man Month is foolish at best as doing anything of consequence takes effort and in-depth understanding needed to solve the problem at hand.

As proof ...

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

When n people have to communicate among themselves, as n increases,
their output decreases and when it becomes negative the project is delayed
further with every person added.

Group intercommunication formula: n(n − 1)/2.

Example: 50 developers give 50 × (50 – 1)/2 = 1,225 channels of communication.

Any questions?