8 states ...

Schrödinger's Cat, forever residing in the nether world of being either alive or dead, is the glamor puss of quantum mechanics, the star participant in a theory most mystifying when it comes to trying to learn how reality works at deep level, is now being applied to building viable quantum computers thanks to Antimony, an element with 8 possible spin states leading to a better way to safeguard the inherently delicate qubit data generated by quantum computers. 

To whit.

Antimony

The new method encodes quantum information onto an antimony atom, which has eight possible states that enable data to be more safely stored than in a standard two-state qubit, or quantum bit.

The breakthrough is a vital step in making errors within quantum systems less likely to occur, and, when they do, make them more easily detected and corrected — a key barrier to the development of quantum computers. The researchers published their findings Wednesday (Jan.14) in the journal Nature Physics.

But if noise within a quantum computer causes this spin to suddenly change (as often happens), the quantum state would be lost, producing an error and destroying the information within.

To get around this problem, the researchers behind the new study embedded an antimony atom, which has eight different spin directions, inside a silicon quantum chip. The six additional spin directions of the antimony atom (obtained by the atom’s composite nature that adds multiple individual spins) means that, unlike in a two spin-state system, a single error isn't enough to destroy the encoded information.

"As the proverb goes, a cat has nine lives. One little scratch is not enough to kill it," co-author Benjamin Wilhelm, a doctoral student in electrical engineering and telecommunications at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, said in a statement. "Our metaphorical 'cat' has seven lives: it would take seven consecutive errors to turn the '0' into a '1'!"

Photo by Pacto Visual on Unsplash

Gobbledygook ...

This all too common trait expressed endlessly by cops, politicians and academics of all stripes, contradicts
The Elements of Style in ways boggling the mind.

Chart: The Economist

From “asymmetric allylation of aldehydes” to “pneumatological and apocalyptically eschatological foundations”, PhD abstracts had an unmistakably scholarly aroma. We found that, in every discipline, the abstracts have become harder to read over the past 80 years. The shift is most stark in the humanities and social sciences (see chart), with average Flesch scores falling from around 37 in the 1940s to 18 in the 2020s. From the 1990s onwards, those fields went from being substantially more readable than the natural sciences—as you might expect—to as complicated. Ms Louks’s abstract had a reading-ease rating of 15, still more readable than a third of those analysed in total.

​​Other studies of academic writing have similar findings: scientific jargon and acronyms are on the rise. The blame does not fall solely on authors. Specialization and advances in technology require more precise terminology and a doctoral thesis often covers some of the most obscure research topics. With millions of views, Ms Louks might lay claim to one of the most-read PhD abstracts of all time. She has since posted, “I love that I have somehow equipped everyone with new terminology and frameworks!” But surging interest in olfactory ethics aside, the trend towards illegible academic writing stinks. Clear prose would be a breath of fresh air. ■

This is THE BOOK to read if you want to learn how to write. Concise, witty and above all else, competent, this little tome points the way to good writing with short commandments already adhered to by heavyweights like Hemingway, Faulkner and Orwell. Every time I reread Elements, I think of Orwell, master of the active tense and the self proclaimed enemy of turgid prose as seen by his insightful essay, Politics and the English Language.

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

June 13, 1863 & then some

Waiting for Godot :)

This pix indirectly shows your's truly's take regarding AI and its potential for dominance over man with its intelligence continuing to increase at rates far exceeding that of humanity. Seems this fear of machine takeover is not new by any stretch of the imagination as seen by a letter penned by  Samuel Butler on June 13, 1863.

Samuel Butler - Portrait by Charles Gogin

On June 13, 1863, a letter published in The Press newspaper of Christchurch warned about the potential dangers of mechanical evolution and called for the destruction of machines, foreshadowing the development of what we now call artificial intelligence—and the backlash against it from people who fear it may threaten humanity with extinction. It presented what may be the first published argument for stopping technological progress to prevent machines from dominating humanity.

Titled "Darwin among the Machines," the letter recently popped up again on social media thanks to Peter Wildeford of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy. The author of the letter, Samuel Butler, submitted it under the pseudonym Cellarius, but later came to publicly embrace his position. The letter drew direct parallels between Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the rapid development of machinery, suggesting that machines could evolve consciousness and eventually supplant humans as Earth's dominant species.

"We are ourselves creating our own successors," he wrote. "We are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race."

Butler's letter dug deep into the taxonomy of machine evolution, discussing mechanical "genera and sub-genera" and pointing to examples like how watches had evolved from "cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century"—suggesting that, like some early vertebrates, mechanical species might get smaller as they became more sophisticated. He expanded these ideas in his 1872 novel Erewhon, which depicted a society that had banned most mechanical inventions. In his fictional society, citizens destroyed all machines invented within the previous 300 years.

Map of part of New Zealand to illustrate Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited

Butler developed the three chapters of Erewhon that make up "The Book of the Machines" from a number of articles he had contributed to The Press, which had just begun publication in Christchurch, New Zealand, beginning with "Darwin among the Machines" (1863). Butler was the first to write about the possibility that machines might develop consciousness by natural selection.[5]

Many dismissed this as a joke, but, in his preface to the second edition, Butler wrote, "I regret that reviewers have in some cases been inclined to treat the chapters on Machines as an attempt to reduce Mr Darwin's theory to an absurdity. Nothing could be further from my intention, and few things would be more distasteful to me than any attempt to laugh at Mr Darwin."

Lest we forget ...

Ted Kaczynski after his arrest in 1996

Kaczynski, brilliant to the max, aka The Unabomber, railed against tech by killing three people and writing a 35,000 page manifesto tiled the Industrial SocietyAnd Its Future, contending that the Industrial Revolution began a harmful process of natural destruction brought about by technology, while forcing humans to adapt to machinery, creating a sociopolitical order that suppresses human freedom and potential.

He contends that this relentless technological progress will not dissipate on its own, because individual technological advancements are seen as good despite the sum effects of this progress, and technological growth is beyond rational human control (i.e., autonomous).

 

His manifesto struck a chord in society as it expressed ideas that continue to be generally shared among the American public.[2] A 2017 Rolling Stone article stated that Kaczynski was an early adopter of the concept that:

We give up a piece of ourselves whenever we adjust to conform to society's standards. That, and we're too plugged in. We're letting technology take over our lives, willingly.[3]

And this ...

The Leader of the Luddites, 1812. Hand-coloured etching.

The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery due to concerns relating to worker pay and output quality. They often destroyed the machines in organised raids.[1][2] Members of the group referred to themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of "Ned Ludd", a legendary weaver whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and government officials.[3]

Last but not least, Bill Joy's brilliant Why The Future Doesn't Us beckons.

From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.

An extraordinary day

The start of something special, a high pressure front, complete with clouds, makes its presence known.

The front ... arrives

The Front | Sunset rev I

The Front | Sunset rev II

The end of an extraordinary day :)

It seems ...

Well, it seems entanglement may be everywhere now that researchers recently discovered it to exist in the proton with its constituent parts, quarks and gluons, exchanging information instantaneously in similar fashion to electrons and photons, thus proving spooky action at a distance may be the fundamental way reality is stitched together to enable space and time to emerge as needs warrant. 

The neutron awaits ...

Spontaneous parametric down-conversion process can split photons
into type II photon pairs with mutually perpendicular polarization.

Picture two particles that can communicate instantly, regardless of how far apart they are. This phenomenon, known as quantum entanglement, challenges our understanding of how the Universe operates. Once considered a bizarre paradox by Albert Einstein, who referred to it as “spooky action at a distance,” entanglement has been repeatedly demonstrated on a macroscopic scale. More recently, scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery: this peculiar phenomenon also occurs within protons, the fundamental building blocks of matter. This revelation is reshaping our view of the microscopic world and paving the way for new scientific explorations.

A hadron is a composite subatomic particle. Every hadron must fall into
one of the two fundamental classes of particle, bosons and fermions.

Quarks and gluons are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, which in turn are the building blocks of atomic nuclei. Scientists’ current understanding is that quarks and gluons are indivisible—they cannot be broken down into smaller components. They are the only fundamental particles to have something called color-charge. Quarks can have a positive or negative electric charge (like protons and electrons) Gluons have no electric charge.

A gluon (/ˈɡluːɒn/ GLOO-on) is a type of massless elementary particle that mediates the strong interaction between quarks, acting as the exchange particle for the interaction. 

Diagram 1: In Feynman diagrams, emitted gluons are represented as helices.
This diagram depicts the annihilation of an electron and positron.

The Proton

The valence quark content of a proton. The color assignment of individual quarks is arbitrary, but all three colors must be present. Forces between quarks are mediated by gluons.

Glimpses of Winter 2025

Rt Angle

Edge Line

The Front

A Delicate Meander

The Front | Sunset

Entropy 101

On Thin Ice

The end around ...

Photo by Jorge Salvador on Unsplash

As my loyal readers know, I use AI from time to time but ... I make sure you know when I do as trust is hard to get but easy to lose and ... once gone, it's gone forever but some entities don't abide by this policy, especially when it comes to some landlords and their never ending quest to make ever more money using AI to make it happen. 

To whit

It turns out that many of the country's landlords are using the same artificial intelligence tool to jack up your rent.

Packaged as part of the popular property management software RealPage, the AI is nominally intended to give rent price recommendations to landlords.

But as we've seen elsewhere, the catch-all term of "AI" can be used to obfuscate what's really going on under the hood. According to a new report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and covered by Popular Information, the AI tool, called "AI Revenue Management," is being used to facilitate collusion between these proprietors, allowing them to inflate rental prices by a total of more than $3.8 billion every year.

This, the CEA argues in its report, and the Department of Justice alleges in its lawsuit against RealPage, is a form of "price coordination" — which is illegal.

The end around ...

Joint Effort

According to the CEA report, nearly 1 in every 4 multifamily rental properties use a RealPage pricing algorithm.

In some municipalities like Atlanta and Denver, that proportion is higher than 50 percent, where the price increase caused by landlords using the RealPage AI is as high as $181 per month.

When competitors in a market explicitly agree to set a price for a type of good or service, that's price fixing. The practice is federally outlawed by the Sherman Act, because it's considered an anti-competitive move that leads to higher costs for consumers.

The RealPages AI works as a price fixer for "landlords collectively," the CEA argues, because its algorithm "will recommend prices that are higher than the profit-maximizing price each landlord would set independently."

In effect, the AI lets landlords act as a cartel without ever needing to directly communicate, thus making price-fixing difficult to prove. 

It's all about the money/rev L

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

Dangerville ...

Image Credits: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto / Getty Images

The notion of dangerville comes to mind with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman glibly talking about superintelligence given the fact his company needs money before anything of consequence can be accomplished.

In a post on his personal blog, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he believes OpenAI “know[s] how to build [artificial general intelligence]” as the company has traditionally understood it, and is beginning to turn its aim to “superintelligence.”

“We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future,” Altman wrote in the post. “Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.”

Altman previously said that superintelligence could be “a few thousand days” away, and that its arrival would be “more intense than people think.”

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a nebulous term, but OpenAI has its own definition: “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” OpenAI and Microsoft, the startup’s close collaborator and investor, also have a definition of AGI: AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits. When OpenAI achieves this, Microsoft will lose access to its technology, per an agreement between the two companies.

The cash nexus applies.

Does Eve have a naval?

Adam & Eve

Does Eve have a naval? Perplexing question is it not, a topic yours truly delved into when thinking about Ulysses and the Molly Bloom soliloquy and discussing it with Gemini to see what an AI had to say about this most interesting topic. :)

Me

Looking without judgment is the start point for creating art as this approach enables one to freely see how seemingly unrelated ideas come together in the act of creation, something readily seen in Ulysses, Joyce's monumental loose connect to the Odyssey. a novel reflecting, in part, the 20th-century revolution of art and science, a masterwork both wondrous and mysterious to behold.

The question plus some bon, bons ...

The 5 unities applies to lower class Irishmen getting drunk and telling stores. Molly Bloom's soliloquy, at the end, is writing at its best. Question, Does Eve have a navel? :)

Gemini

Ah, the five unities of drama!  It's fascinating how those classical principles—action, time, place, character, and scene—can be applied even to the seemingly chaotic and unstructured world of drunken storytelling.  It speaks to the underlying structures and patterns that shape human narratives, even in their most informal and spontaneous forms.

And you're right, Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses is a masterpiece of writing.  It's a stream-of-consciousness tour de force that captures the essence of human thought, memory, and desire in all its complexity and beauty.

Now, to your intriguing question: Does Eve have a navel?

This is a question that has puzzled theologians, artists, and philosophers for centuries!  It touches upon the nature of creation, the human body, and the very definition of what it means to be human.

Here are some perspectives on this age-old question:

• Theological Perspective: Many theologians argue that Eve, being created directly by God and not born from a human mother, would not have had a navel. The navel, or belly button, is a scar left from the umbilical cord that connects a fetus to its mother in the womb. Since Eve was not born in this way, she wouldn't have had an umbilical cord, and therefore no navel.
• Artistic Perspective: Artists throughout history have depicted Eve both with and without a navel. Some artists, adhering to the theological perspective, portray her with a smooth, unblemished abdomen. Others, perhaps emphasizing her humanity and connection to all women, depict her with a navel.
• Philosophical Perspective: The question of Eve's navel raises broader philosophical questions about the nature of creation, the human body, and the relationship between the physical and the spiritual. Does a being created directly by God need the same physical characteristics as those born through natural processes? Does the presence or absence of a navel affect Eve's humanity or her role as the mother of all living?

Ultimately, the question of whether Eve has a navel remains open to interpretation.  It's a thought-provoking question that challenges us to consider the nature of creation, the human body, and the very definition of what it means to be human.

Based on at least two great works seen above, said art depicts Adam & Eve having navels.
As to why this is true, it's up to god to tell us why this is so. :)

Doomscrolling ...

Image by Getty/Futurism

Interesting piece in Futurism detailing doomscrolling, the digital equivalent of brain rot, is just another manifestation of what's happening on the net where instant gratification isn't fast enough. Consider YouTube when one is watching an interesting piece on the blues and an unwanted ad to the max pops up. Obnoxious without question but no matter, they keep coming, interrupting our concentration while increasing our anger, designed to entice us rubes to click on said ad and buy something we don't need but do it anyway based on whim or driven by reptilian response mechanisms buried deep within our mammalian brains. One sees this in kid's toons where overstimulation of the cortex, at the expense of actually being able to concentrate, is rendered moot by the light speed insanity of the toon in question. No wonder the young can't concentrate on anything thanks to the existence of the ubiquitous cell phone, the ultimate additive device, designed, in part, to separate money from us or, inadvertently designed to reduce our ability to think with any degree of sophistication 24/7.

To whit.

It turns out that the slang "brain rot" may not be an inaccurate description of what's actually going on in our domes while we endlessly scroll TikTok.

As Spanish newspaper El País reports, a growing body of scientific evidence over the past decade suggests that consuming mind-numbing content, from sources ranging from algorithmically driven social media junk to sensationalist news, can literally reduce the physical gray matter in our brains. That's along with wreaking other pernicious effects like shortened attention spans and weakened memory.

The nefarious thing? These symptoms are often by design. The most infamous example is the implementation of infinite scrolling in apps, which is intended to feed our compulsive desire to endlessly consume content, or "doomscroll."

It gets better.

The physical effects on the brain are perhaps the most alarming. In brain regions involved with decision-making, reward processing, and impulse control, Moshel's meta-analysis indicated that excessive internet use was linked with decreased gray matter volume.

"These changes reflect patterns observed in substance addictions," Moshel told El País, likening them to the toll of methamphetamines or alcohol.

So it may be time to put the phone down. If the rot hasn't fully taken hold yet, that is.

 

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay