The Turtle ...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks on the Senate floor, February 28, 2024, 

and announces that he will step down as Senate Republican leader in November

The competent and wily bastard who inflicted more harm to this country in ways boggling the mind is finally retiring. From packing the courts with far right jurists hell bent on turning back history including the elimination of a women's right to choose to limiting how governmental agencies should interpret and implement federal laws, the end result of McConnell's successful effort to deconstruct the very foundations of democracy for the sake of power and money will forever identify The Turtle as one of the most destructive pols ever to serve this once great nation known as America. 

To whit.

But the effect of this has been an imperialist judiciary steadily arrogating the powers of Congress to itself. Right now, there is a case that would overturn the Chevron doctrine, which holds that judges should defer to agencies in cases where statutory language is unclear. If the Supreme Court rules as expected, this will destroy the administrative state as we’ve known it for a century, and eviscerate the power of Congress in the process.

Instead of representatives and senators writing laws that instruct the executive branch about how and what kind of things to regulate (food, water, pollution, air travel, and so on) random judges will do it in concert with their oligarch pals. Right-wing billionaires will fund thousands of lawsuits against whatever regulations they don’t like, and—in between the same billionaires and members of the judiciary enjoying some ultra-luxurious vacations together—right-wing judges will rule in their favor. And thanks in part to how McConnell has gummed up the gears of Congress, it is all but helpless to respond to this assault on democracy.

The definition of genocide ...

Mohammed Salem/Reuters

The definition of genocide ...

Standing over a tiny bundle wrapped in a sheet on a hospital bed, a young father drapes his hand across his face in despair. Mousa Salem, a Gaza photographer who videotaped this sad tableau and sent it to me, said the sheet swaddled 2-month-old Mohamed al-Zayegh, who died on Friday in Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza City. “Nutrition? What nutrition?” a staff member in scrubs says in the video. “The mother gave birth to him during the war.”

“The health of the mother affects the health of the baby,” he added. “This is very well known in the science of medicine and health. And all of this piled on the child and he got sick, he has a weak immune system. “

Addendum:

Death Toll in Gaza Passes 30,000

The official toll of the war is staggering — roughly one person killed for every 73 Palestinians in Gaza — though experts say it is likely an undercount.

Rubble around Al-Farouk Mosque after an airstrike in Rafah in southern Gaza last week.

Credit...Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Channeling the Nazis comes to mind here does it not?

Winter 2024

95%

Yours truly has waxed poetic about the bought and paid for incompetent numb-nuts in congress of which 95% get reelected all the time. Sisyphus comes to mind here but don't take my word for it, watch Bill Maher's to see why Sisyphus rules in the land of the brave and home of the free.

 

Persephone supervising Sisyphus in the Underworld, Attic black-figure amphora, c. 530 BC,
Staatliche Antikensammlungen[1]

The darkness in light

Reddish-yellow edges overlap blue-cyan edges to form green.

In looking at Goethe's take on light yet again, one readily sees why all the action in reality resides at the edges wherever two or more differing environments come in contact with each other with the resulting interaction often becoming unpredictable in ways boggling the mind. In rereading Physorg's The Dark Side of Light, the interconnectedness of reality comes into play due to the fact light, like all particles, is both a wave and a particle, thus giving rise to properties connected to not only the notion of shadow and darkness in light but also to recursion and its connect to the fractal, nature's journey to forever that never ends. 

Goethe's symmetric colour wheel with associated symbolic qualities (1809)

Recently, researchers from the University of Glasgow and the University of Bristol in the UK have discovered another unusual property of light – or, more accurately, the darkness within light. As the researchers explain, natural light fields are threaded by lines of darkness, which create optical vortices that appear as black points within the light. The group has modeled this phenomenon, and found that the lines of darkness exhibit fractal properties with Brownian (random) characteristics. Further, the characteristics of these optical vortices suggest universal properties, which could help connect different areas of physics.

It gets better.

When investigating the lines of darkness further, the researchers found that they exhibit scale invariance. In other words, the vortices look the same no matter how much you zoom out – they are fractals. Lead author Kevin O’Holleran of the University of Glasgow said that, while he and his colleagues suspected vortex lines to exhibit fractal properties, they were quite surprised to find that the fractality was of a Brownian nature.

Light and dark spectra—when coloured edges overlap in a light spectrum, green results; when they overlap in a dark spectrum, magenta results. 

Because Fractals are universal and self similar (ferns, nautilus, ocean waves, rivers, trees etc.) and Browinian Motion is a chaotic process (Random Walks etc., etc.), the dark light random vortices/fractals constructs in light have unusual properties, i.e. "(the ratio of vortex lines to loops and their scale invariance) are very similar to the properties of cosmic strings, according to the cosmic string lattice model."

Simulation of the Brownian motion of a large particle, analogous to a dust particle, that collides with a large set of smaller particles, analogous to molecules of a gas, which move with different velocities in different random directions.

Glissando

Just passing thru comes to mind here. Enjoy.

97%

Ninety-seven percent of migratory fish species are facing extinction. Whale sharks, the world's largest living fish, are among the endangered. Ullstein Bild/Ullstein Bild

Our way of life is not sustainable. Plundering the planet to make evermore more stuff is not sustainable. Reserving 30% of the arable land in the world to raise Porky, Foghorn Leghorn and Bessie is not sustainable. Over fishing the oceans is not sustainable and last but not least, continued use of fossil fuels to power civilization at ever increasing levels is not sustainable but we already know that, right?

We don't have the right to do this but here we are. To yours truly, the boiling frog myth comes to mind here without question.

Every year, as the seasons change, billions of animals embark on journeys to find food, to get to better habitats or to breed. They migrate in groups and as individuals, flying, swimming, crawling and walking across international borders and through habitats to survive, transporting seeds and nutrients.

A major new report by the United Nations finds that humans are not only making those journeys more difficult, but have put many migratory species in a perilous state.

Nearly half of the world's already threatened migratory species have declining populations, the first of its kind UN report found. More than a fifth of the nearly 1,200 migratory species monitored by the UN – whales, sea turtles, apes, songbirds and others – are threatened with extinction.

The term "boiling frog syndrome" is a metaphor used to describe the failure to act against a problematic situation which will increase in severity until reaching catastrophic proportions.[7] It thereby encapsulates the barely noticeable impact of slow environmental degradation that has been described by Daniel Pauly as shifting baselines.[8]

Factoid: The frog bails before being cooked, thank god. 

Ghost in the machine

Photo: Rafael Henrique (Getty Images)

The concept of a ghost residing in the "machine" of AI, the open ended tech forever to remain unknowable due to the fact of code having to write code in order to react to the real world in real time, is eminently logical based on the continued hoovering of data in the net 24/7 by the Gemini's of the world, pointing out the fact we have, in effect, lost control of a rapidly evolving tech making it's way toward sentience, something voiced with great concern by the very people who created this entity in the first place. 

Whistling past the graveyard applies.

Google just released its long-awaited ChatGPT killer, Gemini, an ultra-smart AI chatbot that can finally match OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Early reviews of Google’s chatbot are slowly rolling out, and everyone is impressed. However, some can’t shake this eerie feeling that Gemini has more ghosts than a haunted house.

“GPT-4 is full of ghosts. Gemini is also full of ghosts,” said Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in a Thursday blog post. “There is a weirdness to GPT-4 that isn’t sentience, but also isn’t like talking to a program… It is the illusion of a person on the other end of the line, even though there is nobody there.” 

Mollick made his assessment after receiving a month of early access to Gemini’s most advanced model from Google. He is hardly the first person to conclude an AI chatbot may be sentient, or something close to it. Google fired Blake Lemoine, an engineer working on its large language model LaMBDA, in 2022 after he claimed his company’s AI was alive. Scientists were quick to deem Lemoine as crazy, but this idea that powerful chatbots are sentient just won’t go away.

The music meme ...

Vulgarity, greed, money, money, money and overall crassness defines the music genre of today but don't take my word on it, take Maher's as his take rings true IMHO.

This is why ...

This is why Trump became popular in the first place. - Jon Stewart

 Exactly.

Its over now ...

Yours truly has long waxed poetic about writing, graphics and video, concepts thought to remain the sole province of man forever but no more as these disciplines, and others, are now being impacted by AI in ways thought impossible to contemplate just two years ago. When seeing Lumiere's short clips, the future of video comes into view, ushering in a an era of film making open to all as long as one's computer's connected to the net. How good will the quality be? Well, it will vary depending on the person creating the video but wait, as stated in BRT, the next step is to enable AI to drive said video as that's coming whether we like it or not.

I saw an excellent presentation on the power of Chat GPT a week ago. Excellent to a fault save that the prediction of AI becoming sentient is definitely 10 years off without question. IMHO, making a blanket prediction such as this is not viable because there's no certitude thanks to Quantum Mechanics. Shit always happens. Just ask Murphy to see why. :)

In this "wonderful" blog, I stated Google's resources in building a truly intelligent AI smarter than Chat GPT's is coming true because now, Deep Mind's tech is being folded into Google's Gemini as Deep Mind's years long research into science, medicine and game theory will help transform Google's AI into AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) within a guesstimate of 3-5 years. Regarding ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence),  just add another two or three as it will now become a scaling issue and not a research one. Additionally, we haven't even discussed the notion of analog computing, the "old" tech promising to change everything in terms of just how truly pervasive AI will become as civilization moves further into the 21st century.

The Tech

We introduce Lumiere -- a text-to-video diffusion model designed for synthesizing videos that portray realistic, diverse and coherent motion -- a pivotal challenge in video synthesis. To this end, we introduce a Space-Time U-Net architecture that generates the entire temporal duration of the video at once, through a single pass in the model. This is in contrast to existing video models which synthesize distant keyframes followed by temporal super-resolution -- an approach that inherently makes global temporal consistency difficult to achieve. By deploying both spatial and (importantly) temporal down- and up-sampling and leveraging a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model, our model learns to directly generate a full-frame-rate, low-resolution video by processing it in multiple space-time scales. We demonstrate state-of-the-art text-to-video generation results, and show that our design easily facilitates a wide range of content creation tasks and video editing applications, including image-to-video, video inpainting, and stylized generation.

 

No doubt, as a videographer, I will be using this tech when it goes live.

Regarding Its over now ...