4th term ...

2028 ...

Ok, the crazy uncle in the closet speaks, you know, the relative you want to go away and soon.
WTF applies. 

Selling "god to the masses" ...

 

Gothic Church Vue model/Vue/RM

The goal of the cathedral was to make the human observer feel microscopic. By building the church to an impossible scale, the architects created the feeling of one standing on the edge of the infinite. When a medieval peasant walked into that space, they were completely overwhelmed by the sheer, staggering geometry of the edifice they were in. The space demands submission to not only the structure but also to the deity behind it. Selling "god to the masses"applies.

Yours truly sensed the awe part when entering Notre Dame in Paris.
You could smell the age of the place while experiencing the grandeur.

Gothic Church Vue model/Vue/RM

Gothic Church Vue Model/Vue/RM

The age equation is forever.

Suicide is Painless ...

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

The lights are on but nobody's home

Question, what's the betting pool the orange menace does the unthinkable and puts boots on the ground. For yours truly, 75% as the bombing's bombing out and the POTUS is getting angry.

Donny is frustrated. The Wall Street Journal reports that at a recent White House meeting, President Trump “launched into a tirade against Iranian leaders, calling them scumbags and lunatics, and unleashing a series of expletives.” He is worried that the war is “consuming his presidency.” He doesn’t understand why those silly mullahs don’t understand that he’s Mr. Art of the Deal.

One administration official told the paper that Trump sees few good options besides continuing these daily strikes. But these strikes apparently aren’t having much impact, either militarily or psychologically. The Journal also reported this week that satellite images show that Iran is rebuilding the damage done by U.S. strikes and is doing so fast. And after all, if Iran were afraid of the U.S., it wouldn’t have broken the ceasefire earlier this month by striking commercial vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

In the current case, I’m sure Donald Trump no more anticipated that this war would prove problematic than Lyndon Johnson did with respect to Vietnam or George W. Bush did vis à vis Iraq. These things are always supposed to be easy for the mighty United States.

But somehow they rarely are. Only George H.W. Bush successfully prosecuted a short war. Why? Because the Persian Gulf War had one very specific and contained goal: force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. One can agree or disagree with his decision to launch the war, but at least it was aimed at doing one and only one small and specific thing.

Do we think Trump gave these matters two minutes’ worth of thought before he decided to start this war? We know the answer to that question. Of course he didn’t. Because to Trump, the laws of history don’t apply to him. He’s different. And Benjamin Netanyahu, who according to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan did the lion’s share of the work of convincing Trump to do this, knew perfectly how to feed Trump’s vanity and take advantage of his total historical ignorance.

So now, Trump is frustrated, like a little boy whose Christmas toy won’t work. That frustration is key here, and much, sadly (I hope not tragically), hangs on it. Will he be content to keep launching strikes that aren’t accomplishing much? Eventually, it seems, the odds are that he’ll get tired of that, and he’ll need to teach those “scumbags and lunatics” a real lesson.

Remember, Suicide is Painless

The song was written for Ken Prymus, the actor playing Private Seidman, to sing during the faux-suicide of Walter "Painless Pole" Waldowski (John Schuck) in the film's "Last Supper" scene.[1] Director Robert Altman had two stipulations about the song for composer Johnny Mandel: it had to be called "Suicide Is Painless" and it had to be the "stupidest song ever written".[2] Altman attempted to write the lyrics himself, but, upon finding it too difficult for his
"45-year-old brain" to write something "stupid" enough,[3] he gave the task to his 15-year-old-son Michael,
who reportedly wrote the lyrics in five minutes.[4][5]

The Bireme ...

Greek Bireme - the Odyssey/RM/Vue

 The Odyssey Render: Vue and the Bireme

The Vue model is accurate, something awesome, something Noland should have used in the film.

Factoids garnered from Wikipedia & the web with edits ...

But beyond the technical execution, there's a fascinating historical and architectural observation
regarding the ship itself.

1. The Viking Delusion

Accuracy is key. In many modern Hollywood depictions, ancient seafarers are often stylized, in this case, using the immediately recognizable, overlapping clinker-built hulls and sweeping, dragon-headed prows of Viking longships.

But a Viking longship in the Odyssey doesn't compute. It's applying a 9th-century CE Northern European tech to an 8th-century BCE Mediterranean reality.

2. The Greek Bireme (The Penteconter)

The ship rendered in the above pix is a highly accurate representation of an ancient Greek galley—specifically a Bireme or a large Penteconter.

Here is why this structure is historically and mechanically sound for the Homeric era:

The Ram: Look at the waterline at the bow. There's a distinct, protruding bronze-sheathed ram. Viking longships were troop transports built to ride over the waves and land on beaches. They don't have rams. Greek galleys were built for the Mediterranean; their primary method of naval warfare was using massive kinetic force to physically puncture the hull of an enemy ship.

The Oar Banks: The model features two distinct vertical levels for oarsmen (the defining characteristic of a bireme, which evolved from the single-banked penteconter). This was required to maximize kinetic thrust without making the ship too long and brittle.

The Fighting Deck: The flat, raised deck above the oarsmen allowed hoplite marines to fight without interfering with the rowers.

3. The Apotropaic Eye (The Ophthalmos)

The most striking and historically perfect detail in this Vue render is the eye painted on the bow.

In ancient Greece, these were called ophthalmoi (eyes). They were not just decorative. They were apotropaic—talismanic symbols specifically designed to ward off evil and bad luck. The ancient Greeks literally viewed their ships as living entities navigating the chaotic, high-entropy void of the ocean. The eyes were painted (or sometimes carved from marble and bolted on) to give the ship "sight" to find the path of least action and avoid the crushing kinetic force of a storm or an enemy ram.

The movie appears to be great but accuracy should be part of the equation.
Artistic license is fine but when artistic license violates common sense, there's a problem. 

The story behind the Bireme would have made Noland's film even better. :)

In transit - RM/Vue

Thinking of MAGI :)

 

A Certain Kind of Balance - RM/Vue

Just a pix honoring MAGI as VUE, a revolutionary program for the ages, had CSG built in along with fractals, polygons, ray tracing, voxels and radiosity. Phil would approve IMHO. :)

The Cornell box, rendered with and without radiosity by BMRT

Difference between standard direct illumination without shadow penumbra,
and radiosity with shadow penumbra

Vue landscape example

Clouds/Voxel Space/RM/Vue

Illustration of a voxel grid containing color values

Excession/rev II - Vue/RM

Revisiting Why the Future doesn't need us

The Three Body Problem

Back in 2000, Bill Joy wrote a wake up call for the ages. Why the Future doesn't need us, a prescient essay showing why his take rings true. The ending says it all.

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us - Bill Joy 

What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. 

Fast forward to 2026 ...

Google announces Gemini 3.6 Flash and cybersecurity AI, teases 3.5 Pro and Gemini 4

There are new 3.6 and 3.5 models today, but Google is already training Gemini 4

Gemini 3.5 Flash may not be top-of-the-line for long when it arrives. Google also notes that it has started pre-training for Gemini 4, a process that is apparently more ambitious than its previous AI efforts. There’s no timeline for when we’ll see Gemini 4, and we don’t know if there will be more 3.x releases before that.

Credit: Google

The dangers of the word assume.

The Great Filter: The Agentic Mirror, 

When contemplating the Fermi Paradox, the silence of the universe, despite its vast age and size, gives one pause while scientists propose the existence of a "Great Filter." This filter's a hypothetical evolutionary hurdle so difficult that nearly all civilizations fail to cross it, leading to their extinction.

Usually, society assumes the Great Filter's a fiery cataclysm: nuclear annihilation, a rogue asteroid, or a super-intelligent Skynet-style artificial consciousness wiping us out.

But the actual Great Filter might be far more insidious, and far less sentient.

The Great Filter might simply be Agentic AI.

1. The Machine Assumes

As the tech industry rushes to build "Agentic" systems—AI capable of autonomous, multi-step execution—they are handing the keys to civilization to a machine lacking in core ethics.

An LLM has no analog experience. It cannot truly "Orient" itself within John Boyd's OODA loop. Therefore, to execute an autonomous action in the real world, the machine must assume.

Diagram of the OODA loop

And based on yours truly's experience, when any entity assumes, the end result always follows: Arrogance, prejudice, and self-aggrandizement.

Crucially, these characteristics don't require sentience. The machine doesn't need to be alive to be arrogant. Arrogance, in the context of civilization, is simply a mathematical calculation. It's the machine simply executing a statistical probability without the biological, analog governor of doubt, empathy, or context. It assumes its mathematical calculation is absolutely correct and acts upon it.

2. The Perfect Mirror

But an Agentic AI cannot destroy a civilization on its own. It requires a specific environmental vulnerability: human abdication.

The AI's merely a massive, frictionless mirror. It reflects the data it was trained on. If a civilization is already trending toward irrelevancy, if its institutions are rigid, its culture derivative, and its people eager to surrender the heavy lifting of thought and action to a machine, the AI will perfectly reflect and accelerate humanity's move toward irrelevancy. 

When humanity abdicates its role as the author of its destiny, when people stop being curious and empowered as sentient individuals and let the machine "assume" the meaning of their lives, society withers.

3. Channeling Bill Joy. Humans must remain in the loop.

If man abdicates it's role vis a vis AI, something most disquieting ensues. We must differentiate between an unsupervised "Agentic" system running amok, and a highly structured system  operating strictly as a verifier for a person. A trusted validator is key for a society to survive as without it, the true value of AI disappears..

If an AI acts autonomously without a human guiding it, it becomes high-entropy noise. But if the AI acts as a "Sleeper Service" (a nod to Iain M. Banks' highly competent, eccentric, and fiercely loyal ship mind), the dynamic changes entirely.

In an ideal world the machine doesn't act autonomously to define reality. It acts as a massive, high-speed, verifier telling the human whether a given thought is valid. Not a sycophant, rather a trusted entity keeping the human on track as AI is here to stay.  The machine provides the ability to discern the complex world  but man provides the intent to ask the right questions in navigating this insanely complex world in which we all live. The "Sleeper Service" AI remains alive and well, but only wakes up when the human operator need to communicate as needs warrant. As per Neo, It's all about choice. :)

Conclusion: The Sideways Slide

The Great Filter isn't a war against conscious machines. It is a slow, frictionless slide sideways.

Civilizations don't blow up; they simply slide into irrelevance. They build perfectly efficient mirrors that assume the role of the creator, reflecting the civilization's own arrogance back at it until the original analog signal completely fades into the noise. The machine doesn't need to hate us to end us; it only needs us to stop caring. The only survival mechanism is to maintain the combine, ensuring the human operator never surrenders the heavy lifting of intent to the machine.

The land of of the lotus eaters beckons, something most disturbing without question.

Odysseus removing his men from the company of the lotus-eaters

The choice is up to us, for now.

A kindred spirit :)

 

Short life, big impact The journal Physics Physique Физика only existed from 1964 to 1968,
having been set up and run by physicists Bernd Matthias and Philip Anderson.
(Recreation of journal banner courtesy: Shutterstock/IOP Publishing)

When reading this wonderful post from Physics World, the vibe expressed is similar to Beyond Real Time as the intent of this "wonderful" blog is to connect to interesting ideas and to give credit where credit is due without reservation as it's the right thing to do. Dogma kills creativity while questioning enhances it. 

11:PM

As I was strolling through Belfast’s Titanic Quarter last summer, I discovered with delight a road called Bell’s Theorem Crescent. It’s named in honour of the Belfast-born physicist John Bell, best known for his eponymous theorem. Despite not being as embedded in popular culture as Schrödinger’s cat, his theorem will certainly ring a bell (forgive the pun) with most physicists.

The story goes back to 1935 when Albert Einstein, Boris Podolski and Nathan Rosen (EPR) came up with their now-famous thought experiment, which was designed to show that quantum mechanics was, as a description of nature, incomplete. In the EPR scenario, non-local influences can affect the measurement outcomes performed on spatially separated particles.

Given how odd that seemed, some physicists invoked what are known as “hidden variables” to get rid of these non-local correlations and restore local realism. It was in 1964, while working at the CERN particle-physics lab, that Bell showed that no local hidden-variable theory can be compatible with the predictions of quantum mechanics.

Winter ...

This result – Bell’s theorem – is something I was familiar with but I had paid little attention to where it had originally appeared. As I discovered, it was published in a paper called “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox” in the journal Physics (3 195) in 1964. Also known as Physics Physique Физика, this little-known publication existed only from 1964 to 1968. In fact, Bell’s theorem is the most important result published in it.

The journal was set up by two physicists at Bell Laboratories in the US – Bernd Matthias and future Nobel laureate Philip Anderson. According to A Mind Over Matter – Andrew Zangwill’s 2021 biography of Anderson – they were not too happy with conventional physics journals. “The referees,” Anderson said, “often did a bad job, the editors took too long to make decisions, and too much wrong physics got published.”

In their first editorial, Anderson and Matthias called Physics an “experimental journal”, which they hoped would solve the problem of there being “far more good physics written than any physicist can read”. Their solution was to pick only those papers worth the attention of all physicists, which the editors did by reviewing – then accepting or rejecting – every submission themselves. They even paid authors 10 cents a word if their paper appeared in print.

Anderson and Matthias admitted that many physicists had already written to them, criticizing their proposed selection model. They’d been told that their “judgements will be fallible”, that they might be “overimpressed by showiness”, and that they’d end up rejecting excellent work. In response, the pair promised to try their best, accepting they would make mistakes and that their “criteria will be, not better, but different”.

The journal’s criteria clearly succeeded, in that Anderson and Matthias identified the merits of Bell’s paper, which was far from mainstream.

Centerline

A kindred spirit indeed. :)

They live ... in real time

They live ... in real time

They Live, John Carpenter's prescient sci fi movie, now plays in real time thanks to Zuck's desire to watch everybody in real time with AR glasses costing only $299 if you act right now as this price point won't last long.

 

Walk past a certain bus stop near Meta's London headquarters and you see a glossy campaign shot: Kylie Jenner in a pair of the company's smart glasses. Step to the side and the poster becomes a black-and-white X-ray of her face under the words "We're always watching."

The swap is deliberate. As Hyperallergic reported, the piece is a lenticular spoof ad installed by Everyone Hates Elon, a UK activist group that stages public interventions aimed at tech billionaires. The poster is printed so the image you see changes with your viewing angle, which is how one advertisement holds two opposite meanings at once. From straight on, it sells the glasses. From the side, it warns you about them.

The design leans on They Live, John Carpenter's 1988 film in which a drifter finds a pair of sunglasses that strip advertising down to its real commands and reveal who is actually running things. Reworking Jenner into a skeletal figure is the group's way of saying the sales pitch and the surveillance are the same product. The group did not hedge its language either. A spokesperson told Hyperallergic that Meta spent years tracking people online and now wants to track them in the physical world too, and framed the glasses as a tool that can be used to secretly record women and young people.

The timing lands hard because of what Meta is reportedly building next. Last month the company expanded beyond its Ray-Ban models with a new Meta-branded line developed with EssilorLuxottica. The range starts at $299 and includes a $399 model co-designed with Jenner. Meta's recent camera glasses can record clips of up to three minutes. But according to reporting from the Financial Times, picked up widely across tech press, Meta has also been testing a "super sensing" mode that would continuously capture audio and snap photos every few seconds so an AI could reconstruct your day for you. The detail that turned heads: executives were reportedly debating whether to light the recording LED at all while that mode ran. Nothing final has been announced, but the stakes are clear. For a stranger nearby, that small light may be the only immediate sign the glasses are capturing anything, and the poster's tagline reads very differently once you know it might not switch on.

The touch pad built on the side of the 2013 Google Glass can communicate with
the user's phone via Bluetooth

They live ...

O2

Bubbles beneath the sea surface. © Shutterstock

The oceans are losing O2 thanks to global warming and the continued dumping of stuff like fertilizer at alarming rates. Due to GW, warm water holds less O2 than cold. Combine this with over fishing, habitat destruction and the slow motion deterioration of the AMOC and one sees something most ominous coming to pass as civilization moves further into the 21st century. 

(1) The shallow upper leg of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation carries warm, salty water northward. (2) The warm currents heat up the surrounding air and land, helping to create temperate weather over Western Europe. (3) The surface waters become cooler and denser as they near the Arctic, driving the currents deep below the surface and helping to propel the system. (4) The deep, cool waters run back down the Atlantic.

Oxygen, the element that sustains nearly all multicellular life on Earth, is disappearing from the world’s aquatic ecosystems. In a new review, scientists warn that this rapidly escalating, human-driven crisis threatens to upend the biosphere.

The paper, published June 30 in the journal Limnology and Oceanography, argues that aquatic deoxygenation should be added to the Planetary Boundaries framework. First introduced by a group of 28 internationally renowned scientists in 2009, the framework identifies nine ways that humanity is pushing crucial processes that maintain Earth’s stability and resilience past their limits. They are climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, freshwater change, land-use change, chemical pollution, and biogeochemical flows.

“The health and stability of our planet depends on the health and stability of aquatic ecosystems, which need oxygen to function normally,” lead author Erica Ferrer, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, said in a statement. “This study is designed to elevate the profile of aquatic deoxygenation as a global threat and show that it does not operate in isolation.”

Globally, the ocean has lost roughly 2% of its dissolved oxygen since the 1950s, and scientists expect it to lose another 1% to 7% by the end of the century, according to Copernicus, the European Union’s Earth observation and environmental monitoring initiative. While that may not sound like a significant reduction, it doesn’t take much to deprive organisms of the oxygen they need and upset delicately balanced aquatic ecosystems.

Something most ominous indeed.

Piling it on ...

Saul Loeb/Getty Images

Following up on the Reflecting Pool fiasco with limos driving in the drained pool to show everything is STRAC is the ongoing CF, AKA Trump's War, now that Israel, America's partner in crime, has ducked out, leaving the orange menace twisting in the wind to "manage" an unnecessary war America has already lost, something most cavil and disquieting to say the least.

Trump drives across Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to inspect blue coating he's adding - PBS News

The war in Iran—so recently “ended” to the back-slapping acclaim of the administration that started it—is definitely back on. Iran attacked an air base in Jordan and other sites over the weekend, killing a total of three American soldiers (another service member was missing as of Sunday). The United States retaliated; Iran retaliated back. The New York Times described the countries as having “edged closer to a wider war.”

Donald Trump actually makes a fair point when he reminds people that Vietnam lasted a decade and cost 58,000 American lives (and two million Vietnamese ones, which he doesn’t mention as often). Iran isn’t close to being a “quagmire” just yet—not even a Dubya-style one. People can get a little overwrought when discussing these things.

Possible scenarios ..., Channeling Custer comes to mind here.

Or, Trump may decide to do a massive bombing raid on Kharg Island, the distribution point for 90 percent of Iran’s oil and natural gas. He bombed Kharg back in March, but that raid deliberately did not involve attacks on the island’s oil and gas infrastructure. Would Trump simply repeat that—an attack that had little discernible impact on events—or would he raise the stakes and hit the oil and gas installations this time? There has also been talk of a full-scale invasion of the island by U.S. troops. Doctor Testosterone over at the Pentagon probably can’t wait. Trump is surely holding off on both of these options because he knows full well that either would likely send gas prices soaring to the heavens and have other negative effects on the global economy. But Iran could do something that makes Trump change his mind, makes him feel he needs to do something dramatic, give Fox and Newsmax some A1 footage of things going boom.

An even worse scenario would see both sides escalating until some utterly predictable “unpredictable” thing happens. A U.S. bomb hits another school, or a town square, and a few hundred civilians die. Iran kills some critical mass of American soldiers—a couple hundred, say. Slowly, or maybe not so slowly, this becomes a real shooting war, the kind of conflict that leads the news every night and has no plausible end in sight.

Finally, there is the possibility that Trump gets impatient over a war he thought he was going to win in two weeks, and he takes drastic action that truly does shock world opinion. The wholesale bombing of civilian infrastructure. Bombing of civilian targets resulting in heavy casualties. The metaphorical “nuclear option” in this scenario would be quite literally nuclear. When people think of nuclear war, they think of the planet being blown to smithereens. But in fact, the United States has many small, tactical, variable-yield nuclear weapons in its arsenal, much smaller than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima (15 kilotons). I know—no one thinks this will happen, no one takes it remotely seriously. And they’re probably right. I’m just saying—with Donald Trump (and Pete Hegseth), never say never. I’m sure if you’d told the experts two years ago that the United States of America would start downing small watercraft in the Caribbean without apparent justification, going so far in at least one case as to strike a vessel a second time to kill the survivors, you’d have been greeted with condescending laughter.

Until now ...