Fact checking Musk style ...

Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., in November.

Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Seems the man who came to dinner lacks the ability to get his facts straight when criticizing, and scuttling, the bipartisan budget passed by congress, thus threatening another government shutdown yet again. Not only is this insulting, its incompetence at its best as it appears Musk is channeling Howard Hughes yet again.

Hughes in 1938

150 posts!!!

In over 150 posts on X, his social media platform, Mr. Musk called for Republicans to reject the deal, in part by promoting a flurry of inaccurate claims about what is included in the bill released on Tuesday night.

Here’s a fact-check.

“How can this be called a ‘continuing resolution” if it includes a 40 percent pay increase for Congress?”

This is exaggerated. The spending package includes a raise of 3.8 percent for members of Congress, not 40 percent.

These fools should be docked 50% as they do noting except hump to get reelected ...

“This should not be funded by your tax dollars!” Mr. Musk wrote in sharing a post that claims the bill includes a “$3 billion NFL stadium in Washington, D.C.”

False. The legislation extends and modifies a lease between the federal government and the city of Washington for land that could be used to develop and build a football stadium. It does not provide funding for a stadium.

“‘Shutting down’ the government (which doesn’t actually shut down critical functions btw) is infinitely better than passing a horrible bill”

This needs context. Mr. Musk is correct that shutting down the government does not affect essential services, but the public may still feel the impact.

During a shutdown, postal workers, federal prosecutors and investigators, active-duty members of the military, Transportation Security Administration employees and other federal employees continue to work, mostly without pay. Social Security checks are still sent out and medical care for veterans is unaffected.

Let's put this in perspective. Would rocket man be so cavalier regarding the design and building of his rockets in terms of testing such craft using well established engineering perquisites including fact checking to the nth degree to make sure said hardware will function as intended. I think not so why is Musk getting involved with government operations where his skill set is so lacking including his inability to cite facts to support his argument. Einstein was an incredible physicist but not so much as a violinist as no one can know everything, not even Musk, the man who came to dinner.

Merry XMAS!

Back in 2018, yours truly took an XMAS portrait of NYC. Fun to say the least and Merry XMAS! :)

Transition 2 Step

A short clip showing real and virtual tours of Philly, NYC and Paris. :)

Winter Solstice

Winter Solstice 2010

Yours truly always looks forward to the Winter Solstice as the shortest day of the year points toward the beginning of the 6 hour transition to the Summer Solstice happening around June 20-21. This year is Saturday, the 21st. Winter's also a biggie due to the fact nature's stripped to its essence, showing just how beautiful reality can be though it can be dangerous to see why this is so. Sadly, winter's going away thanks to global warming but the memory remains as seen in the pix below. :)

Winter 2010

The seasons with the transition points of the
June solstice, September equinox, December solstice, and March equinox

Channeling Henry Miller without question. :)

Conpernicus

Interesting take on ASI, a construct far beyond humanity's ability to fully understand.

Benchmarks ...

Artificial intelligence, especially foundation models, has made rapid progress
surpassing human capabilities in various benchmarks.

Click Copernicus, A novel about AI and Consciousness by James Mahu,  the source material
for the clip seen above.

Factually baseless yet again

Donald Trump is livid after Juan Merchan denied the president-elect’s motion to
overturn his felony conviction. Composite: AP, Getty Images

This is so tiresome ....

Donald Trump has launched a vitriolic and factually baseless attack on a New York judge who refused to overturn his conviction on a hush money case that made him the first sitting or former US president to carry the status of a convicted felon.

The president-elect on his Truth Social platform condemned Juan Merchan as “psychotic” and “corrupt” after he rejected Trump’s plea that his conviction relating to the cover-up of a sex scandal should be thrown out on the basis of a supreme court ruling that granted him broad immunity.

“In a completely illegal, psychotic order, the deeply conflicted, corrupt, biased, and incompetent Acting Justice Juan Merchan has completely disrespected the United States Supreme Court, and its Historic Decision on Immunity,” wrote Trump, who returns to the White House on 20 January.

The question to ask is, was the cover up an official act? 

Random Pix

Had fun putting together this collage of clips ranging from a golf course travelog

to animations from Google Earth. Enjoy. :)

There is no off ramp :)

Mirror Beach

S = entropy

k_{b} = Boltzmann constant

\ln = natural logarithm

\Omega = number of microscopic configurations

Being rather limited in math to say the least, this "simple" equation explains in a way even I can understand as entropy is the driving engine of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. When paired with the first, the two define reality as being an environment sustained by the ever moving essence of energy.

Entropy is a measure of disorder. It corresponds with how many possible microscopic configurations can underlie an overall state.

Heat flowing from hot water to cold water

The First Law: Energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed

The Second Law: Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermal equilibrium 

—the state of maximum entropy/disorder.

The rabbit hole beckons. :)

Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world than a reflection of our growing ignorance. Embracing that truth is leading to a rethink of everything from rational decision-making to the limits of machines.

Sadi Carnot,  aged 17 in the uniform of a cadet of the École polytechnique.
Portrait by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1813).

Factoid: Reading through Carnot’s book a few decades later, in 1865, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius coined a term for the proportion of energy that’s locked up in futility. He called it “entropy,” after the Greek word for transformation. He then laid out what became known as the second law of thermodynamics: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”

But it's more than that ...

Rudolf Clausius (left) originated the insight that entropy tends to increase. Ludwig Boltzmann rooted this rise in statistical mechanics. Theo Schafgans (left); Creative Commons

Physicists of the era erroneously believed that heat was a fluid (called “caloric”). Over the following decades, they realized heat was rather a byproduct of individual molecules bumping around. This shift in perspective allowed the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann to reframe and sharpen the idea of entropy using probabilities.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle & Entropy, a match make in heaven

Claude Shannon

Entropy experienced a rebirth during World War II. Claude Shannon, an American mathematician, was working to encrypt communication channels, including the one that connected Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. That experience led him to think deeply about the fundamentals of communication over the following years. Shannon sought to measure the amount of information contained in a message. He did so in a roundabout way, by treating knowledge as a reduction in uncertainty.

In essence, entropy's an information construct as per John Wheeler's From It to Bit

From John Wheeler (1983), Law Without Law. In: Quantum theory and measurement.

"It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe. 

The limits of knowledge rules

An illustration of M4, the sponge after four iterations of the construction process

We will never know everything but you already know that, right? Georg Cantor proved this to be so with infinities residing within infinities using his theory of transfinite numbers to make it happen. The Menger Sponge, seen above, is a 3D representation of Cantor's theory.

In closing ...

Low

High

In closing ...

“Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics,” wrote(opens a new tab) Seth Lloyd, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There’s no sidestepping this directive. The growth of entropy is deeply entwined with our most basic experiences, accounting for why time runs forward and why the world appears deterministic rather than quantum mechanically uncertain.

But despite its fundamental importance, entropy is perhaps the most divisive concept in physics. “Entropy has always been a problem,” Lloyd told me. The confusion stems in part from the way the term gets tossed and twisted between disciplines — it has similar but distinct meanings in everything from physics to information theory to ecology. But it’s also because truly wrapping one’s head around entropy requires taking some deeply uncomfortable philosophical leaps.

Everything's connected and entangled, this is why we rubes have a consistent view of a "uncertain" reality we will never fully understand. Awesome to a fault without question if you're one willing to question. :)

And so it goes ... K. Vonnegut

Of Ice & the Golden Mean

1st Ice

Channeling Steuben

Arc Line

Line 6

A Touch of Blue

1618033 ...

Time keeps on slippn, slippn, slippn into the future ...

Android XR looks very promising as seen by this excellent clip as Gemini AI, combined with eyeglasses and smartphone, will transform how man deals with reality in a good way as depicted in a brt piece titled Realtime Translation is Coming but, as we all know, it comes with a cost like everything else thanks to the two laws of thermodynamics. :)

For starters, privacy is totally gone but this time, it's real time. Other caveats include the disparity between the haves and the have not as said tech will cost without question.

Lastly, some skills acquired by taking the time to learn them will atrophy as XR and significant others, will supply all the info needed to cope with the vagaries of the world without have to know anything.

Think cursive or how to drive a stick shift car come to mind here, do they not?

No question I want to use XR when it goes live, do you? :)

Time keeps on slippin, slippn, slipplin into the future. | Stevie Miller

Crocodile tears ...

UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty testifies before the Senate Finance Committee on Capitol Hill on May 1, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

Mia Culpa ... give me a break! The headline In Wake of Killing, UnitedHealth CEO Admits 'No One Would Design a System Like the One We Have' is bogus because if one takes a deep dive into how HC works in this country, one finds this IS EXACTLY HOW TO DESIGN A SYSTEM SUCH AS THIS IN ORDER TO MAKE TONS AND TONS OF MONEY WHILE SCREWING OVER PEOPLE.

Splitting the note from the claim back in the day was the masterstroke as it enabled insurers to totally control reimbursement even though, when separating the Note/Claim entity, a fubar of biblical proportions ensued because not only can unqualified people working for the insurance company determine, via procedure codes, who gets approved for a medical procedure, said split also guarantees the insurer's ability to decide when and how much remuneration is doled out for said procedure,  exquisitely timed to "increase" the ever important bottom line for entities like UnitedHealth Group (including UnitedHealthcare), Elevance Health Inc and Centene Corp., among significant others.

As stated in P&L not spoken here, no other business on planet earth operates this way. 

UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty wrote in a New York Times op-ed Friday that the for-profit U.S. healthcare system "does not work as well as it should" and that "no one would design a system like the one we have," admissions that came as his industry faced a torrent of public anger following the murder of UnitedHealthcare's chief executive.

Witty declared that his firm, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare and the nation's largest private insurer, is "willing to partner with anyone, as we always have—healthcare providers, employers, patients, pharmaceutical companies, governments, and others—to find ways to deliver high-quality care and lower costs."

The best way to make the system work begins by eliminating these parasitic bastards from the equation by instituting universal healthcare now.

Nile Croc

Channeling Cassandra ...

Illustration: Maura Losch/Axios

Love the graphic as it shows AI being rather devious, an all too human trait now being expressed by tech forever to remain unknown due to fact software writes software to enable AI to interact with the real world in real time. 

The same advances that let cutting-edge AI reasoning models solve complex problems also seem to enable and encourage them to lay plots and deceive users.

Why it matters: This propensity for what researchers call "scheming" is precisely the kind of behavior that AI Cassandras have long predicted and warned about.

Case in point: In a pre-release review of OpenAI's o1 model this year, testers set a "strong goal" for the model and then presented it with "unambiguous evidence its given goal diverges from the goal of its developer/user."

In those situations, they found that o1 "sometimes attempts to disable what it believes to be its own oversight mechanisms."

Apollo Research, an independent firm that partners with AI model makers for safety testing, conducted "follow-up interviews" confronting the model about its misaligned actions. It found that, "in 99% of cases, o1 would deny taking action or fabricate false explanations."

 

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

Channeling Cassandra ,,,

Let's set aside for one column whether generative AI will save or destroy humanity and focus on the actual words from actual creators of it:

Dario Amodei, who has raised $7.3 billion for his AI start-up Anthropic after leaving OpenAI over concerns over ethics, says there's a 10% to 25% chance that AI technology could destroy humanity. But if that doesn't happen, he said, "it'll go not just fine, it'll go really, really great."

• Fei-Fei Li, a renowned AI scholar who is co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, told MIT Technology Review last year that AI's "catastrophic risks to society" include practical, "rubber meets the road" problems — misinformation, workforce disruption, bias and privacy infringements.
• Geoffrey Hinton — known as "The Godfather of AI," and for 10 years one of Google's AI leaders — warns anyone who'll listen that we're creating a technology that in our lifetimes could control and obliterate us.
• OK, maybe that's nuts. But Ilya Sutskever, a pioneer scientist at OpenAI, has warned the exact same thing. He became fearful that the technology could wipe out humanity," The New York Times reported nonchalantly.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman takes the stance that AI will probably be great — but still warns we must be careful we don't destroy humanity. Altman, along with the three men above, was among the signatories to this chilling one-sentence statement last year: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

Cassandra by Evelyn De Morgan (1898, London); Cassandra in front of the burning city of Troy, depicted with disheveled hair denoting the insanity ascribed to her by the Trojans[1]

Realtime translation is coming ...

 Google didn’t let me take my own photos, but this is strikingly
similar to the demo I saw with my own eyes. Image: Google

This innocuous pix points the way to true realtime translation where one person talking Chineses converses with another speaking Spanish, something that will change everything in terms of how communication will function in the years ahead. Combine this with earbuds linked to the eyeglasses and realtime audio will add to the mix without question. With a bit of luck, people will actually learn more about each other without assuming as realtime forces one to do away with the most dangerous act man can do when it comes to real communication.

It’s an ordinary Tuesday. I’m wearing what look like ordinary glasses in a room surrounded by Google and Samsung representatives. One of them steps out in front of me and starts speaking in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish. Hovering in mid-air, I can see her words being translated into English subtitles. Reading them, I can see she’s describing what I’m seeing in real time.

I mumble an expletive. Everyone laughs.

Google wants everyone to know the time is finally right for XR, and it’s pointing to Gemini as its north star. Adding Gemini enables multimodal AI and natural language — things it says will make interactions with your environment richer. In a demo, Google had me prompt Gemini to name the title of a yellow book sitting behind me on a shelf. I’d briefly glanced at it earlier but hadn’t taken a photo. Gemini took a second, and then offered up an answer. I whipped around to check — it was correct.

Let's hope Android XR's actually look cool. :)

Triskaidekaphobia :)

Friday the 13th has a long history dating back to the Vikings & Valhalla, The Last Supper and the Knights Templar. 

To whit ...

Valhalla (1896) by Max Brückner in a scenic backdrop for Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen

One source mentioned for the unlucky reputation of the number 13 is a Norse myth about twelve gods having a dinner party in Valhalla. The trickster god Loki, who was not invited, arrived as the thirteenth guest, and arranged for Höðr, the god of darkness, to shoot Balder, the god of joy and gladness, with a mistletoe-tipped arrow. Balder died, triggering much suffering in the world, which caused the number 13 to be considered unlucky

The Last Supper - Leonardo daVinci

The superstition seems to relate to various things, like the story of Jesus's Last Supper and crucifixion in which there were thirteen individuals present in the Upper Room on the thirteenth of Nisan Maundy Thursday, the night before his death on Good Friday.[a][b][6]

The Knights Templar

Some cite the arrest of the Knights Templar on Friday, October 13, 1307, by officers of King Philip IV of France as the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition, but it is agreed the origins remain murky.[11]

And there you have it, a brief history of Friday, the 13th, occurring on 12/13/24. :)

Factoid: For a month to have a Friday the 13th, the 1st must be a Sunday.

The Art of War ... not spoken here.

The Art of War ... not spoken here.

A Chinese bamboo book, open and unfolded to display the contents. This copy of The Art of War (on the cover, "孫子兵法") by Sun Tzu is part of a collection at the University of California, Riverside. The cover also reads "乾隆御書", meaning it was either commissioned or transcribed by the Qianlong Emperor.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

“There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.”

“Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory:

1 He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.

2 He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces.

3 He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.

4 He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.

5 He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.”

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

1999 – 2021

The U.S. War in Afghanistan

The Taliban surged back to power two decades after U.S.-led forces toppled their regime in what led
to the United States’ longest war.

As stated before, The Art of War ... not spoken here.

Chaos ... is everywhere

STM characterization of an in situ-created stadium-shaped GQD.
Credit: Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08190-6

Chaos is everywhere. From the moon's orbit never following the same exact path to the swing of a pendulum never repeating the same arc, order seemingly issuing forth from perceived disorder resides in the very large/Relativity to the very small/Quantum Mechanics. Within chaos, the term Strange Attractor applies as the swing of the pendulum or the orbit of the moon will stay within a given boundary defined by the attractor. 

Visual representation of a strange attractor. In the mathematical field of dynamical systems, an attractor is a set of states toward which a system tends to evolve,[2] for a wide variety of starting conditions of the system.

 The definition of chaos, as per Wikipedia. is ...

Chaos theory (or chaology[1]) is an interdisciplinary area of scientific study and branch of mathematics. It focuses on underlying patterns and deterministic laws of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. These were once thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities.[2] Chaos theory states that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnection, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals and self-organization.

A plot of the Lorenz attractor for values r = 28, σ = 10, b = ⁠8/3 ... AKA The Butterfly Effect

The butterfly effect, an underlying principle of chaos, describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state (meaning there is sensitive dependence on initial conditions).[4] A metaphor for this behavior is that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.[5][6]: 181–184 [7]

Why is this important? Well, an intrinsic connect between quantum and relativity through chaos theory may help to develop a viable theory of everything - TOE as chaos operates in similar fashion in both realms, something not proven to exist until now. 

A University of Utah study is shedding light on an important, unsolved physics problem: the relationship between chaos theory – which is based on 300-year-old Newtonian physics – and the modern theory of quantum mechanics.

The evolution of disorder into order by the xenon atoms' nuclear spins is a signature of chaos theory, which, contrary to the popular notion, does not imply complete disorder. Instead, chaos theory describes how weather, certain chemical reactions, planetary orbits, subatomic particles and other dynamic systems change over time, with the changes often highly sensitive to starting conditions.

"When you have a [chaotic] system that is characterized by extreme randomness, it paradoxically can produce ordered behavior after a certain amount of time," says Saam. "There is strong evidence that is happening here in our experiment."

The sensitivity to starting conditions is known popularly as "the butterfly effect," based on the fanciful example that a butterfly flapping its wings in South America might set off subtle atmospheric changes that eventually build into a tornado in Texas.

An animation of a double-rod pendulum at an intermediate energy showing chaotic behavior. Starting the pendulum from a slightly different initial condition would result in a vastly different trajectory. The double-rod pendulum is one of the simplest dynamical systems with chaotic solutions.

Had to insert this graphic yet again as it's a time killer to the max. :)

The weather ...

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

Good and bad, AI's everywhere,. This time it's the good as it seems Google's Deep Mind's at it again, this time, forecasting the weather with a degree of accuracy better then current predictors of same. 

To whit.

In a significant advance for improving weather forecast accuracy, Google DeepMind scientists have developed a weather model that largely beats the world's most accurate modeling system.

Why it matters: The new model provides — for the first time — a machine learning-driven method of conducting ensemble-based forecasting, in which the same model is run with many different initial conditions, to generate probability-based projections.

Previous AI models only resulted in a take-it-or-leave-it projection (also known as a deterministic model), rather than a range of outcomes.

Driving the news: Google DeepMind researchers told reporters on Monday that the model shows skill in anticipating extreme events outside the bounds of what occurred during the training period.

This last sentence gives one pause as this is also a vital aspect of creativity where one constantly goes outside the bounds of the project at hand when creating something of true significance.

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

The race between weather agencies to see who has the most advanced computer models has given way to an international competition over implementing artificial intelligence.

Driving the news: The U.K. Met Office, which already runs one of the top weather forecast models in the world, announced a new partnership on Tuesday with the Alan Turing Institute to develop highly accurate, lower cost forecast models using machine learning and AI techniques.

Rather than being run on supercomputers and based on the physics of how the atmosphere works, AI-driven weather models are instead trained on historical data and don't need to be run on supercomputers.

They use current data, algorithms and other techniques to then determine what weather systems are likely to do.

In the U.S., NOAA is also examining how its forecasters can utilize AI, and it is finding novel, low-hanging fruit applications such as translating its forecasts into multiple languages.

Between the lines: Companies such as Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and Huawei have shown progress in advancing weather forecasting through AI during the past two years, claiming their models meet or beat the top-rated model out of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

Of course Google's not alone but the betting pool's on Deep Mind as they have a data repository connected to scientific and medical content no other company has.