Pumpkins 1 & All :)

Wile E.

I really am friendly :)

Cat in the Hat

I'm not in a good mood.

Happy to meet you.

Thinking of All Hallows Eve.

Born under a bad sign.

Sleepy Hallow comes to mind here.

Owls rule.

NDAs

Mason County — a rural community in northeastern Kentucky bordering the Ohio River — is among dozens of U.S. localities weighing data center projects that residents say have been shrouded in secrecy.
Michael Swensen for NBC News

NDA, aka bribes, are cropping up everywhere in support of companies' attempts to install, in surreptitious fashion, data centers into towns that don't want them. 

On a March afternoon in Mason County, Kentucky, Dr. Timothy Grosser and his son Andy sat across the table from three men who came with an offer: $10 million for the 250-acre farm where they’d lived and worked for nearly four decades.

That’s 35 times what Grosser bought his land for in 1988 and significantly more than what others in the area had sold their land for recently. But there was a catch — it wasn’t clear who was funding the offer. One of the men said he represented a “Fortune 100 company” that wanted the property for an industrial development, but he refused to say what kind, which company or even his own name.

Instead, he pulled out a non-disclosure agreement.

Grosser said the contract would prevent him from discussing the project’s details with any third parties in exchange for limited information about its purpose, timeline and size. It didn’t disclose the company’s name, which could be discussed only after the company publicly announced its participation in the project.

“We refused to sign it,” Grosser said. “I’m not selling my farm for any amount of money.”

Dr. Timothy Grosser on his farm in Mason County on Oct. 20.Michael Swensen for NBC News

Five months after Grosser turned them down, local officials said at a public meeting that Mason County was being scouted as a location for a new data center development.

Any questions?

The useful idiot speaks ...

Illustration: Lazaro Gamio/Axios

Dementia anyone? Dazed & Confused. Facts don't matter. Take you pick.

Reality check: Trump began his announcement by claiming the U.S. has more nukes than any other country. Russia, in fact, has the largest stockpile.

He also suggested the U.S. has completed its modernization efforts. They are, in fact, very much still in progress.

• The president then claimed China would catch up to the U.S. "within five years." Experts doubt that.
• While Beijing's arsenal is "growing more quickly than it grew in the past," said Jon Wolfsthal, the Federation of American Scientists' director of global risk, "this is not an immediate 'they're going to match us' problem."
• "By no calculation can they be considered having parity with us or a nuclear peer."

Then Trump got to the red meat: "Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately."

State of play: The administration has offered no additional details
about what, precisely, the president meant.

Data: Federation of American Scientists; Chart: Axios Visuals

The useful idiot speaks ...

It's all about the money ... in a good way

Protesters rally during the “No Kings” national day of protest in Washington, DC,
on October 18, 2025. Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

Do you wanna know how to stop this administration in it's tracks? Don't buy stuff. Consumer spending makes up approximately 70% of the U.S. economy, making it the largest component of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This percentage can fluctuate slightly, with some recent estimates showing it at around 68.2% to 69.1% in mid-2025. 

This is one way to really do a number on the administration from hell. 

President Donald Trump is clearly unpopular: Most Americans disapprove of his performance and millions recently turned out for “No Kings” protests. So why is it that so many major corporations and billionaires are either actively assisting Trump’s attack on democracy or else meekly complying with his dictates?

The disconnect is, most likely, the result of simple cost/benefit analysis. For the American business elite, the cost of crossing Trump is high and specific: He might deny your mergers, initiate bogus civil rights investigations, or even attempt to throw you in jail. By contrast, the costs of compliance are low: Perhaps a majority of voters might disapprove, but they can’t really do anything about it.

Or can they?

Consider, as one piece of evidence, a brand-new study on the fortunes of Elon Musk’s Tesla. The researchers show, using careful empirical analysis, that Musk’s foray into far-right politics — and especially his role into the Trump administration — have cost his company enormously.

All told, the researchers find, Tesla would have sold as many as 1.25 million more cars in the past three years had Musk behaved differently. This is equivalent to roughly 83 percent of Tesla’s actual sales during this period, meaning the company could have nearly doubled its sales had its CEO not alienated its heavily Democratic customer base.

As James Carville said. It's all about the economy Stupid!, a messages the dems lost track of in America electing the orange menace in 2016 and in 2020 and possibly in 2028 if The Donald lasts that long.

Carville in 2011

Heed his words or lose America forever.

1. Change vs. more of the same.
2. The economy, stupid.
3. Don't forget health care.[62]

 Any questions?

Permanent DLST ... not!

Between January and September in 1974, President Richard Nixon made
daylight saving time permanent for a brief period. Public Domain

Yet another "great" 2022 quote from yours truly ... The move by the senate to make daylight savings time permanent is a testimony to pols not understanding what happened the last time this switch was implemented as the response by the public was unanimous. It sucked. Yours truly was living in NYC at the time and the months in darkness were a total drag without question. Seems this rube was not alone in his sentiment as millions complained and the DLST initiative was quashed. DLST of the standard time variety does work as it aligns with the circadian biorhythms of life on earth so if congress wants to do something actually useful for a change, make standard time the norm and be done with it. As an aside, this reminds one of the fiasco of the US trying to go metric whereby Congress should have said, by such and such a date, metric becomes the law of the land but NOOOOO, the US vacillated and nothing of consequence was ever done.

In February 1974, eighth and ninth graders board the bus at seven a.m. in the dark to head for Drake Junior High School in Denver, Colorado. Image: Denver Post / Contributor Denver Post

Yet another reason why DLST does not work, especially in winter.

As fall approaches, so too does the end of daylight savings time (DST). On November 2nd, the hour between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. will happen twice. When we all wake up Sunday morning, we’ll find it’s an hour earlier than it feels like it should be. Then, we’ll go about our day with a blissful extra hour of time. 

For DST enthusiasts, this represents a sad day that brings an earlier sunset and the start of the dreary winter months. For DST haters (like your correspondent), it represents the annual reclamation of the hour of sleep that was stolen from us six months earlier. Either way, the annual spring forward/fall back cycle remains as controversial and largely unpopular as it has ever been.

The consensus amongst sleep experts and researchers is that we’d be best served just dropping the whole idea of DST and returning to plain old standard time (“ST”) throughout the year. But there’s another possibility: What if it was daylight savings time all year round?

Well, that actually happened in the mid 1970s.  & it sucked ...

In closing ... Humans are diurnal, so our natural inclination is to be most active during daylight hours. As such, it makes sense that we’re given to rising with the sun and going to sleep once it sets. Weed explains that waking up before the sun disrupts this rhythm: “We need light in the morning to regulate the circadian clock,” she says. “Compared to Standard Time, permanent DST has darker mornings, which can make it more difficult to stay in sync.” In other words, we are slaves to the sun.

Any questions?

Existence is analog with digital override ...

A male ornate boxfish Credit: The Birch Aquarium/Scripps Institution of Oceanography

A 2021 quote by yours truly ... Back in 1952, Alan Turing discovered chaos when he figured out how patterns in nature emerge using two variables, one to generate the pattern and another to inhibit it, thus giving rise to organic lines or stripes whether they reside on fish, tigers, bacteria or galaxies. Now it seems Turing's equations also work at nano scales as seen by new research dealing with crystals and how they grow on a given surface.

The nanometer-wide stripes seen in crystal growth (left) closely match those formed
in a theoretical model based on Turing patterns (right).

It gets better. :)

A zebra’s distinctive black-and-white stripes, or a leopard’s spots, are both examples of “Turing patterns,” after mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, who proposed an intriguing hypothetical mechanism for how such complex, irregular patterns might emerge in nature. But Turing’s original proposal proved too simplified to fully re-create those natural patterns. Scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB) have devised a new modeling approach that achieves much more accurate final patterns by introducing deliberate imperfections, according to a new paper published in the journal Matter.

Turing focused on chemicals known as morphogens in his seminal 1952 paper. He devised a mechanism involving the interaction between an activator chemical that expresses a unique characteristic (like a tiger’s stripe) and an inhibitor chemical that periodically kicks in to shut down the activator’s expression. Both activator and inhibitor diffuse throughout a system, much like gas atoms will do in an enclosed box. It’s a bit like injecting a drop of black ink into a beaker of water. Normally, this would stabilize a system, and the water would gradually turn a uniform gray. But if the inhibitor diffuses at a faster rate than the activator, the process is destabilized. That mechanism will produce spots or stripes.

Analog measures, digital counts, hence 99% is kosher for analog without question. :)

In conclusion, reality is analog with digital override. :)

You knew this was going to happen ...

Photo by Emad El Byed on Unsplash

You knew this was going to happen. Ending, in actuality, the bogus ceasefire with Israel and the Palestinians with Israel using, as pretext, the notion of Hamas purposely finding the wrong dead hostages. Question, when looking at this pix, what are the odds of finding the right ones? Genocide's not discreet. It's inclusive and besides, Gaza's a great place to turn into a plush resort reserved for Israelis once you get rid of the indigenous people who live there, right?

The Israeli military carried out renewed strikes in the Gaza Strip yesterday, less than three weeks into a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. The military says it was dismantling a Hamas tunnel in an area of Gaza where Israeli troops were stationed when militants opened fire, killing a soldier. In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered immediate "forceful strikes" in Gaza. Gaza Civil Defense reports that the strikes killed about 100 Palestinians, including around 35 children. Israel says it killed 30 militants in the strikes.

🎧 The strikes were one of the single deadliest 24-hour periods in Gaza, even deadlier than some of the days of war, according to NPR's Daniel Estrin. The ceasefire was back on as of 10 a.m. local time today in Israel. The dispute over the search for Israeli hostage bodies that remain in Gaza threatens to impact the fragile ceasefire. Israel has been considering limiting aid to Gaza to pressure Hamas to hand over the bodies more quickly.

Same as it ever was. - Talking Heads

The Butterfly effect/rev X

The real doomsday event internet experts still worry about is a sudden, snowballing error in the decades-old protocols that underlie the whole internet. Photograph: Sergio Azenha/Alamy

The net, a vast interconnected colossus built by volunteers and based on open source code for the most part, is robust from the chaotic side of things but exceedingly fragile due to antiquated infrastructure just waiting for the big one. Channeling the Butterfly effect/Chaos theory is apt as small events can lead to catastrophic disasters. Consider one day before a pond freezes over.,50% is ice free, one day later, as long as the temp's below 32, the entire surface becomes covered by ice. 

As can be seen from the graph, even the slightest difference in initial values
causes significant changes after about 12 seconds of evolution in the three cases.
This is an example of sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

And this.

It can be seen that mixing occurs as we progress in iterations.
The sixth iteration shows that the points
are almost completely scattered in the phase space.

It is the morning after the internet went offline and, as much as you would like to think you would be delighted, you are likely to be wondering what to do.

You could buy groceries with a chequebook, if you have one. Call into work with the landline – if yours is still connected. After that, you could drive to the shop, as long as you still know how to navigate without 5G.

A glitch at a datacentre in the US state of Virginia this week reminded us that the unlikely is not impossible. The internet may have become an irreplaceable linchpin of modern life, but it is also a web of creaking legacy programs and physical infrastructure, leading some to wonder what it would take to bring it all down.

These would be bad. But the real doomsday event, the kind that the world’s few internet experts still worry about in private Slack groups, is slightly different – a sudden, snowballing error in the creaky, decades-old protocols that underlie the whole internet. Think of the plumbing that directs the flow of connection, or the address books that allow one machine to locate another.

We’ll call it “the big one” and if it were to happen then at the very least, you would need your chequebook.

The big one could start when a summertime tornado cruises through the town of Council Bluffs, Iowa, laying waste to a low-slung cluster of datacentres that are an integral part of Google’s offering.

This area, called us-central1, is a Google datacentre cluster, critical to its Cloud Platform as well as YouTube and Gmail – a 2019 outage here downed these services across the US and Europe.

Concentration of a few giant players generates the fragility, not the code.

But there is “absolutely a lot of concentration happening on the internet”, says Steven Murdoch, a professor of computer science at University College London. “This happens with economics. It’s just cheaper to run all things in the same place.

Which means when one obscure component of a giant entity like Amazon craps out,
the web vapor locks for real.

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

There is no certitude.

WTF.IsThisActuallyHappening?

https://www.youtube.com/@WTF-Is-This-Actually-Happening

Very cool video describing the great hidden in prime numbers in terms of patterns emerging, something akin to channeling Chaos writ large. Worthwhile to the max IMHO. :)

The Lorenz Attractor

A plot of the 3D Lorenz attractor/Lorepenoten

Black Mirror ... for real

@mattxiv via X

Futurism's on a roll. 3 articles showing Black Mirror logic applies ... for real.

San Francisco is plastered with billboards advertising AI tech, all in varying degrees of in-your-face dystopic. Even so, a new crop of them has managed to stand out from the pack by being shockingly upfront about the industry’s attitude toward regular humans.

“Our AI does your daughter’s homework. Reads her bedtime stories. Romances her. Deepfakes her,” reads a billboard asking you to visit a website called Replacement.AI. “Don’t worry, it’s totally legal [winking emoji].”

Visiting the website finds an even more overt message: huge text proclaiming that humans are “no longer necessary.”

“Stupid. Smelly. Squishy. It’s time for a machine solution,” it reads. “At Replacement.AI, we believe that building AI tools to fix the world’s most pressing challenges is an unprofitable waste of time.”

There’s also an actual quote by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”

Before you get your pitchforks out: it’s satire. The ad was highlighted in a now-viral tweet by makeup artist and influencer Matt Bernstein, before being reshared across the internet in places like Reddit, where the joke was lost on many users.

& this ...

Getty / Futurism

Pattern recognition anyone?

An AI-powered gun detection system hooked up to a Baltimore County high school’s cameras mistook a bag of Doritos chips as a weapon — and called the cops on a 16-year-old student.

As local news station WBAL-TV 11 News reports, Taki Allen was enjoying the snack while sitting outside of Kenwood High School after football practice.

Twenty minutes later, he was visited by a small army of heavily-armed police officers.

“It was like eight cop cars that came pulling up for us,” he told WBAL-TV 11 News. “At first, I didn’t know where they were going until they started walking toward me with guns, talking about, ‘Get on the ground,’ and I was like, ‘What?'”

“They made me get on my knees, put my hands behind my back, and cuffed me,” Allen added. “Then, they searched me and they figured out I had nothing.”

Lastly ...

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

But they always need money ...

To whit ...

The company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, might be the world’s most valuable private company on paper — but in real life, it’s hemorrhaging money faster than it can ever hope to pay back, at least for now.

According to Agence France-Presse, OpenAI is ordering hundreds of billions of dollars worth of AI semiconductor chips at a time when investor confidence is being stretched to its limits. Those chip investments include deals inked with Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom, units AFP estimates would consume power equivalent to “20 standard nuclear reactors.”

In order to pay off just its recent shopping spree, OpenAI will have to make “hundreds of billions of dollars,” according to Gil Luria, managing director at financial consulting firm DA Davidson. Indeed, another analysis by the Financial Times pegs OpenAI’s total financial commitments at over $1 trillion.

With this much capital involved, the exact number is almost meaningless, because the prospects of OpenAI paying off even a fraction of its debt is looking increasingly dire. Though OpenAI is now valued at $500bn, the company is only pulling in about $13 billion in annual revenue, the vast majority of which comes from ChatGPT subscribers, per TechCrunch.

In short, there’s an astronomical amount of money up in the air — so much so that the rest of the US economy now depends on the AI industry not dropping the ball. Or, as Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon put it in a note to investors, Sam Altman “has the power to crash the global economy for a decade or take us all to the promised land.”

“Right now, we don’t know which is in the cards,” she added.

Some financial types have posited the possible entire loss of monies if AI totally vapor locks.

The $7 trillion figure likely reflects the total projected investment needed across the entire AI ecosystem to keep it going, including players like OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and potentially Apple. It represents the staggering cost of trying to scale and run AI in hopes of generating real revenue in the months and years ahead. A crap shoot for the ages applies. 

Burnin down the house ...

Alex Kent for The New York Times

As an American who served, what Trump did to the East Wing is both wanton and savage. This is desecration of the highest order. I'm pretty flexible in thought and accommodating when the new has to replace the old but not this. Bill Clinton said it best. Bill Clinton once called the White House movie theater the ‘best perk’ of the job. It was destroyed this week. Anger does not begin to describe just how much I detest Trump and the administration he allegedly "leads".

Before the orange cyclone hit town, Washington was a far more staid place.

Al Gore loved to host small dinner parties focused on scholarly topics. One dinner was devoted to the meaning of metaphor. “I l-i-i-ke metaphors,” Gore drawled to The Washington Post when he was vice president. “The more complex and arcane the better.”

What must Gore make of the unsanctioned, ahistoric, abominable destruction of the East Wing by Donald Trump? It’s the most remarkable metaphor we’ve ever seen in the nation’s capital. It’s not complex or arcane. It’s simple and visceral. It slams you in the face — metaphorically speaking.

“He’s saying, ‘I can do whatever the hell I want and you can’t stop me!’” said David Axelrod, who worked in the Obama White House. “In this case, it’s sundering history.

“If you worked in the White House, you have a reverence for every wall of that place. Tattered as it may have been, there was a dignity to it. It was a quietly stately citadel of power in America, not a palace for a mad king. Trump has a manic desire to tear down history and write his own.”

And this ...

President Bill Clinton (center left) watching Super Bowl in the family theater with governor guests and White House staffers in 1994. Dirck Halstead/Getty Images

One of the stars of the White House is no more.

The White House Family Theater, the movie theater which first came to be in 1942 when a cloakroom was converted into a screening room, was demolished this week as part of the destruction of the East Wing to make room for President Donald Trump’s planned $300 million ballroom.

From sporting events to film screenings, the theater provided entertainment and enjoyment to presidents and their families since the latter part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency.

According to The White House Historical Association, Roosevelt enjoyed watching World War II-era news reels in the former cloakroom in the East Terrace at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, “and took special interest in the battles fought in Europe and Asia.”

The 32nd US president demonstrated an understanding of the importance of pop culture, including movies.

“Entertainment is always a national asset,” Roosevelt said in 1943 as the United States was engaged in WWII. “Invaluable in time of peace, it is indispensable in wartime.”

Burning down the house - Talking Heads

The irony of TH vs Trump, I thought so.

Moving fast applies. :)

A recent Gemini Observatory image of comet 3I/ATLAS (background) overlaid with the new Two-meter Twin Telescope image of the comet's jet (inset). | Credit: Comet photograph: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Shadow the ScientistImage Processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab); Inset: Teide Observatory, M. Serra-Ricart, Light Bridges

Something afoot as 3I/Atlas is a comet of a different kind without question. 

The extrasolar entity, which is likely a comet, is barreling toward us at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) and will reach its closest point to the sun in late October, before beginning its long journey back out toward interstellar space.

Telling words ... which is likely ... gives one pause. 

3I/ATLAS (previously dubbed A11pl3Z) has a high speed and extremely flat trajectory, which indicate it is an interstellar object. (Image credit: David Rankin/Catalina Sky Survey)

Comet 3I/ATLAS is the third known object from outside our solar system to be discovered passing through our celestial neighborhood. Astronomers have categorized this object as interstellar because of the hyperbolic shape of its orbital path. (It does not follow a closed orbital path about the Sun.) When the orbit of 3I/ATLAS is traced into the past, the comet clearly originates from outside our solar system.

Animation of comet 3I/ATLAS's trajectory through our solar system. NASA/JPL

Discovered in late June and confirmed by NASA in early July, the comet originates from an unknown star system far beyond our own. 3I/ATLAS is only the third interstellar object ever detected. At somewhere between 3 and 7 miles (5 to 11 kilometers) wide, it is the largest interstellar object ever to cross our path, and likely the oldest, potentially dating to billions of years before the birth of the sun

 Something's afoot indeed.

Ground control to Major Tom ...

A similar gas turbine engine used in offshore drilling © CREATE STUDIO via Shutterstock

Primed for takeoff applies, right? Especially for AI data centers, the environments eating the world as we speak but before buying up natural gas utilities and nuclear power plants, other ways of providing enough juice in the interim applies. Enter repurposed airplane jet engines to do the job.

AI needs a lot of energy, and from Sam Altman, to Bill Gates, to Peter Thiel, tech billionaires with heavy involvement in AI tend to also invest in the futuristic energy moonshot that is nuclear fusion. But the giant, energy-sucking data centers of today are powered by the energy sources of today, including—it turns out—sputtering old repurposed airplane engine cores.

As noticed by IEEE Spectrum’s Drew Robb earlier this week, Missouri-based company ProEnergy is doing healthy business by supplying used General Electric CF6-80C2 jet cores, which are “high-bypass turbofan engines” according to a PDF on the GE aerospace website, to data centers that are so desperate for energy they can’t wait for power utilities to supply it.

These babies were designed to propel 767s through the sky, but with the right modifications, they can be locked down on concrete slabs or packaged into trailers, wired up to data centers, and dialed up to 48 megawatts of power generation. If my numbers are right (and here’s where I’m getting them) that’s enough to power about 32,160 American homes. Or, perhaps, an AI cluster.

But it's not enough ...

ProEnergy’s commercial operations VP Landon Tessmer spoke to IEEE Spectrum’s Robb at the World Power show in San Antonio earlier this month, telling him that 21 such aviation engine generators have been sold to data centers for use during construction. They’ll be the intended power source for years after these centers are up and running, Tessmer explained, and have the potential to become backup generators once grid power is in place.

Ground control to Major Tom ...