A sense of perspective ...

The actual earth-moon distance.

 

Thelma & Louise ...

Tax cuts for the rich, slow motion death for the dollar, the grifters remain supreme as it's all about the money as this once great nation moves ever closer to the abyss. Zakaria's right, a perfect storm looms.

The great unraveling continues ...

A cautionary tale ...

Getty / Futurism

Knowing a little bit about AI gives yours truly pause when reading about the repugs wanting to do away with AI regs even though we will never know how AI works due to code having to write code in order for neural nets to react to the real world in real time. This is truly insane but then again, what do you expect when the sole purpose of Trump and company is to steal from the nation until there is nothing left.

Republican lawmakers slipped language into the Budget Reconciliation Bill this week that would ban AI regulation, on the federal and state levels, for a decade, as 404 Media reports.

An updated version of the bill introduced last night by Congressman Brett Guthrie (R-KY), who chairs the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, includes a new and sweeping clause about AI advancement declaring that "no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the ten year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act."

It's a remarkably expansive provision that, as 404 notes, likely reflects the engraining of Silicon Valley figures and influences into Washington and the White House. Tech CEOs have vied for president Donald Trump's attention since he was inaugurated, and the American tech industry writ large has become a fierce and powerful lobbying force. The Trump administration is also stacked with AI-invested tech moguls like David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk.

Meanwhile, the impacts of a regulation-free AI landscape are already being felt. Emotive, addictive AI companions have been rolled out explicitly to teenagers without evidence of safety, AI companies are missing their climate targets and spewing unchecked emissions into American neighborhoods, and nonconsensual deepfakes of women and girls are flooding social media.

No regulation will likely mean a lot more fresh hell where that came from — and little chance of stemming the tide.

Here's a portion of the conversation I had with Gemini regarding A. I.

Conversation with Gemini - Tough Questions ...

Me: Asking tough questions is vitally important for both organics and AI. This is why Spielberg's AI, though technically questionable, is a sobering tale of misunderstanding and sadness.

Gemini: You've made an excellent point about the importance of asking tough questions, and you've accurately captured the essence of Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence."

Here's a breakdown of your observations:

Asking Tough Questions:

For both humans and AI, asking tough questions is essential for growth, learning, and understanding.

It challenges assumptions, uncovers biases, and leads to deeper insights.

For AI, it's crucial for identifying limitations and improving performance.

For humans, it is how we create new ideas, and discover new truths.

Your analysis highlights the enduring relevance of "A.I." as a cautionary tale about the potential pitfalls of human-AI interaction. It underscores the importance of empathy, understanding, and ethical considerations in our relationship with artificial intelligence.

Any questions?

Sharing is a good thing ... :)

Ginsparg in his physics office at Cornell University.

Photographs: Allison Usavage

ArXiv is the science version of Wikipedia where eprints related to the sciences are free for all to peruse and to learn from as needs warrant, something yours truly does without question because sharing information of quality is a good thing IMHO. 

It's fractal ...

Before arXiv was called arXiv, it was accessed under the hostname xxx.lanl.gov (“xxx” didn’t have the explicit connotations it does today, Ginsparg emphasized). During a car ride, he and his wife brainstormed nicer-sounding names. Archive? Already taken. Maybe they could sub in the Greek equivalent of X, chi (pronounced like “kai”). “She wrote it down and crossed out the e to make it more symmetric around the X,” Ginsparg said. “So arXiv it was.” At this point, there wasn’t much formal structure. The number of developers typically stayed at one or two, and much of the moderation was managed by Ginsparg’s friends, acquaintances, and colleagues.

Early on, Ginsparg expected to receive on the order of 100 submissions to arXiv a year. It turned out to be closer to 100 a month, and growing. “Day one, something happened, day two something happened, day three, Ed Witten posted a paper,” as Ginsparg once put it. “That was when the entire community joined.” Edward Witten is a revered string theorist and, quite possibly, the smartest person alive. “The arXiv enabled much more rapid worldwide communication among physicists,” Witten wrote to me in an email. Over time, disciplines such as mathematics and computer science were added, and Ginsparg began to appreciate the significance of this new electronic medium. Plus, he said, “it was fun.”

The biggest mystery is not why arXiv succeeded. Rather, it’s how it wasn’t killed by vested interests intent on protecting traditional academic publishing. Perhaps this was due to a decision Ginsparg made early on: Upon submission, users signed a clause that gave arXiv nonexclusive license to distribute the work in perpetuity, even in the event of future publication elsewhere. The strategic move ensured that no major publishers, known for their typically aggressive actions to maintain feudal control, would ever seriously attempt to shut it down.

 

Sharing is a good thing is it not? :)

Duh ... rev II

Preparing a field in January. Farmers said the data helped them plan for climate risks including heat waves, droughts and wildfires.Credit...Jordan Vonderhaar for The New York Times

Deleting data essential to farmers regarding climate change is rather stupid, so farmers sued to get it back because their livelihood, and, indirectly ours, depends on it. This deletion of content on all things regarding science and tech is just one hallmark of a know nothing administration that's beginning to tear apart a once great nation in ways most disquieting.

The Agriculture Department will restore information about climate change that was scrubbed from its website when President Trump took office, according to court documents filed on Monday in a lawsuit over the deletion.

The deleted data included pages on federal funding and loans, forest conservation and rural clean energy projects. It also included sections of the U.S. Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service sites, and the U.S. Forest Service’s “Climate Risk Viewer,” which included detailed maps showing how climate change might affect national forests and grasslands.

The lawsuit, filed in February, said the purge denied farmers information to make time-sensitive decisions while facing business risks linked to climate change, such as heat waves, droughts, floods and wildfires.

Duh ... rev II applies. 

A true American hero

Smedly Butler is one of my heroes. Brave, honest and straight to the point,

he saved America from a possible fascist destiny back in 1933.

Backgrounder ...

Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940) was a United States Marine Corps officer and writer. During his 34-year military career, he fought in the Philippine–American War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Mexican Revolution, World War I, and the Banana Wars. At the time of his death, Butler was the most decorated Marine in U.S. military history. By the end of his career, Butler had received sixteen medals, including five for heroism; he is the only Marine to be awarded the Marine Corps Brevet Medal as well as two Medals of Honor, all for separate actions.

Butler in uniform, c. 1929

He also wrote War is a Racket showing why war is the ultimate money maker ... for the very few.

Excerpts

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

Butler confesses that during his decades of service in the United States Marine Corps:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Here's the book on the net.

Any questions?

1,000,002,021

We all die, earth, sun, the Milky Way, galaxies, etc., etc but we already know that. Regarding earth, the sun will do the job, expanding and getting hotter, first doing away with CO2, the gas all plants depend on and then, completing the job by engulfing earth as it gets bigger. When this happens, we go so ... the exact year said life ends, is, you guessed it, 1,000,002,021.  :)

The Sun will end all life on Earth

For now, this story may sound like sci-fi. But as time goes by – a lot of time – the Sun will grow in size as it reaches the end of its life as a giant star. As it grows, the Sun will emit increasing amounts of thermal energy, and will eventually engulf all inner planets of the Solar system, including Earth. This process means that our days on Earth are numbered.

Advance mathematical models have predicted that the Sun's expansion will significantly worsen air quality, as Earth temperatures rise. According to these calculations, life on Earth will be impossible by the year 1,000,002,021 – which means there are still 999,999,996 years to go until then.

Although the end is still billions of years away, the Sun is already causing some disturbances. Last year, NASA detected a large number of solar eruptions and coronal mass ejections (CME) which ejected billions of tons of particles and magnetic field towards Earth – resulting in the most intense solar storm in two decades. Solar storms are known to cause changes in the atmosphere, reducing available oxygen. As time goes by, this phenomena will continue to alter the atmosphere, reducing oxygen levels and increasing global temperatures.

 

Survival on planet Earth will be impossible in about 1 billion years,
when conditions become too extreme for life as we know it.

Anger & sorrow ...

Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean during the second moonwalk.
NASA/Recall Pictures/Alamy Stock Photo

Complex tech takes years to develop beginning with base research and leveraging it to create tech able to change the world. From quantum mechanics leading to the creation of the computer to the invention of software to build AI, complex systems are fragile beasts requiring patience, intelligence and vision in order for said system to thrive. The somber take by Scientific American regarding proposed cuts to NASA by the administration from hell is spot on because once you gut a complex system, it takes years, if even possible, to resurrect the system. Anger and sorrow on this potential dismantling of something wonderful and far reaching breaks my heart without question.

For more than half a century planetary exploration and space science have been a hallmark of American achievement and excellence. From Mercury to Pluto and beyond, we have gained enormous understanding about planetary origins and evolution. We have learned about the atmospheric, surface and interior dynamics of other worlds. All those discoveries have carried implications for what’s happening here on Earth. In classrooms around the world, exploring new worlds and probing the mysteries of the universe is an emblem of America.

But that may now end; the Trump administration is poised to take the chainsaw to space science, just as it has to almost everything else in the U.S. science portfolio. Trump officials are planning huge, destructive cuts for space science, according to news reports, likely killing all new mission plans for this decade, including the long-sought, all-important Mars Sample Return mission. This flight was meant to return now-waiting samples from the red planet.

China is already leading the way to the moon and Mars with robotic vehiclelike rovers and sample returns and is also likely to do so with human missions. The U.S. human space program, meanwhile, is bogged down with a stumbling Artemis program, built with a convoluted architecture marked so far by failures and delays in nearly every major component. The latest is the repeated failure of SpaceX’s Starship, which twice now has exploded in flight. Reminiscent of the 1980s, when we paused planetary exploration after the success of Viking and launch of Voyager 1 and 2, the U.S. has iced new Mars missions, with plans to cancel Mars Sample Return, and redirected our once great lunar capability to small experimental landers built by inexperienced new companies. Beyond specific missions, the loss of space science research capability will be a generational calamity.

Truer words never spoken.

We were there ... back in the day ...

Hate to say it ...

Pete Hegseth

Hate to say it but Hegseth is actually advocating something needing to be done in the military, cull flag officers as the officer bloated environment the arm services has become since WW II is staggering, not only leading to excessive costs but also to increased inefficiencies in terms of military prowess for over 60+ years.

Factoid

There are approximately 900 Active-duty general/flag officers (GO/FOs) today of 1.3 million troops. This is a ratio of 1 GO/FO for every 1,400 troops. During World War II, an admittedly different era, there were more than 2,000 GO/FOs for a little more than 12 million Active troops (1:6,000). This development represents “rank creep” that does not enhance mission success but clutters the chain of command, adds bureaucratic layers to decisions, and costs taxpayers additional money from funding higher paygrades to fill positions. As end-strength fluctuates, force structure and strength projections for the next decade show the uniformed Services maintaining substantial excess capacity at senior ranks. Although historical numbers are inexact guides and future threats could radically change circumstances, the case for reduction is strong. The Department of Defense (DOD) should reduce the numbers, billets, and percent of GO/FOs in each Service to increase efficiency, streamline decisionmaking, achieve modest cost savings, and enhance accountability of decisionmaking.

Hegseth's take.

In a video posted to social media later on Monday, Hegseth announced that the order, which he referred to as “Less Generals, more GIs,” would “shift resources from bloated headquarter elements to our warfighters.”

The move would take an axe to the already limited number of four-star generals and admirals, as there were just 37 such individuals as of 2023. Hegseth’s directive would put that number south of 30.

The move would also diminish the roughly 900 current general and flag officers to below 720.

Hegseth writes that the cuts are a “critical step” in “removing redundant force structure to optimize and streamline leadership by reducing excess general and flag officer positions.”

In ensuring the lethality of the military, “we must cultivate exceptional senior leaders who drive innovation and operational excellence, unencumbered by unnecessary bureaucratic layers that hinder their growth and effectiveness,” according to Hegseth.

It should be 50% but beggars can't be choosers. 

8% & counting ...

Mark Wagner

Looking at this sad pix of the dollar cutting itself to pieces is emblematic to what is happening under Agent Orange whether it be attacks on SS by Musk and his horde of incompetents or attacks on the press and education by hastily written executive orders by a sorry excuse of a man lusting to be dictator as it matters not as America's in serious trouble and the world knows it. We have four more years of this insanity, driven by a policy channeling Project 2025, the 900 page textbook on how to create a christian driven nazi fascist society not thought possible until now. As stated before, the nation's future's in doubt and nothing's being done right now but wait until Trump's tariffs hit and the dollar continues to tank because all bets are off when people's economic well being becomes questionable at best.

One never knows, do one? -  Fats Waller

The U.S. dollar has been a symbol of American power for decades. Of the $7.5 trillion in global currency transactions that take place each day, some 90 percent feature the dollar. The majority of central banks see it as the core of their reserves. Consumers run to it in times of stress. Businesses prefer it for trade invoicing, whether they are based in Milwaukee or Malaysia.

The dollar may not lose its globally dominant role anytime soon. After all, there isn’t an obvious alternative waiting in the wings. But it is suffering from a self-inflicted wound and the consequences are just starting to be felt around the world.

A trickle of selling began in mid-January as investors bought euros on the hopes that a new German government would loosen its purse strings. That trickle turned into a “sell America” torrent after President Trump unveiled shockingly large, broad-based tariffs on April 2, and followed that by stepping up his attacks on the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell.

A search for new safe harbors began. In the week ending April 16, gold funds had their biggest inflows since 2007, while selling of U.S. bond funds was the highest recorded since late March 2020. Stock markets churned in ways not seen since either the pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis.

An uneasy stability has returned since the president paused most tariffs and seemed to back down from his threats to fire Mr. Powell. But damage has been done. This year, through April 25, the dollar has lost more than 8 percent in value versus the currencies of its major trading partners.

The Jetty