Washington Doctrine of Unstable Alliances applies

 

People hold signs during a news conference on the Venezuela War Powers Resolution on Capitol Hill, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)

Forever wars are a great way for the arms merchants to make ever more money with the end product, killed and maimed service members and shattered countries. Combine this with foreign policy errors and the track record for the US equates to 0 wins, 4 losses with loss no 5 coming up. The scoreboard. Nam, L, Iraq, L, the Iranian 1979 revolution against the Shah L and Afghanistan, L. For No. 5, the Iran war unless Israel and US do the unthinkable, involve the use of nukes.

With this in mind, there's one guy trying to do something about it and he's a Republican. :)

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) plans to reintroduce an amendment removing a provision from the Fiscal Year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would substantially expand military technology cooperation between the United States and Israel.

The provision, which was renumbered from Section 224, would establish a United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. It would require the defense secretary to appoint an official responsible for coordinating joint research, testing, weapons development, technology integration and industrial cooperation between the two countries.

The initiative would cover areas including missile defense, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, cybersecurity, quantum technology, electronic warfare and weapons co-production.

Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) introduced a bipartisan amendment in June that would have removed Section 219 from the bill. Reps. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) later joined the proposal.

Logo of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Why 219? Because of money. The House members voting for this disaster are bought and paid for by AIPAC, the most powerful lobby in the US. If the Senate approves, which they have not, the sovereignty of this once great nation will be forever shattered as it matters not what country is connected to this nation's military, it's the elimination of either country's ability to pursue it's national interest in unencumbered fashion. Washington Doctrine of Unstable Alliances says it all, entangled alliances are dangerous. 

George Washington used a passage in his farewell address to defend his foreign policy toward France.

In closing ... 

“If Section 219 is signed into law, the American people should see it
as Congress fully capitulating our nation’s autonomy to foreign influence.”  Thomas Massie, (R-KY)

The widening war

The widening war

Iago came to Washington and whispered in Othello's ear. Destroy Iran for Greater Israel. 

Let it be written, let it be done - Rameses

No big links here, just yours truly's take on a possible WWIII foisted upon the world
by two monsters, one sane and calculating, the other demented and insane.

A man inspects the damage at the site of a strike in the northern Iraqi Nineveh province. The US and Saudi Arabia said they had struck Iran-backed militants in Iraq Photograph: Zaid Al-Obeidi/AFP/Getty Images

The strategic trap: Ramping up war

The situation unfolding today is the textbook definition of a expanding geopolitical failure, driven almost entirely by the domestic electoral vulnerabilities of Bibi and Trump.

Based on latest intel and ongoing events of the past few hours, here's the grim reality of the "unnecessary catastrophe, AKA the CF" currently gripping the Middle East:

1. The collapse of the pause and proxy escalation

The Guardian reporting confirms the brief pause in fighting is now history. The above pix—showing the gutted remains of a site in Iraq's Nineveh province, complete with militia iconography—shows the end result of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia launching joint retaliatory strikes against the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in Iraq in response to a surprise Iranian ballistic missile barrage targeting a U.S. base in Jordan. 

Why you may ask?  Because Israel and the US assassinated the moderate leader in Iran, enabling a less intelligent and radical hard liner to become Supreme Leader. By doing that, they accomplished the exact opposite of what Trump and Bibi wanted, regime change, thus reigniting Iranian fervor to end the Great Satan and it's accomplice, the Zionist entity known as Israel.

We're no longer just looking at a bilateral conflict; the expanding war is rapidly spreading across the region, pulling Iraqi militias, Saudi forces, and Jordanian territory directly into the crossfire, aided and abetted by Iranian proxies Hezbollah and the Houthis.

Iranian missiles are displayed in Tehran amid the US war on Iran. Follow live for latest updates in the Middle East crisis. Photograph: Vahid Salemi/APThe Strategic Trap: Escalation in the July 2026 Iran War

2. The White House pivot

The timing of this escalation's not coincidence. It comes exactly after Benjamin Netanyahu concluded in his first face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump at the White House since the war began in February.

The political calculus ...

Netanyahu's Position: Facing critical elections on October 27 and a battered reputation, Netanyahu's political survival depends on maintaining a hardline, offensive posture against Iran. His goal in Washington was to ensure Trump doesn't back out of the conflict or accept a premature ceasefire.

Trump's Trap: Trump originally entered this joint war in February with an aggressive decapitation strike, likely believing his own aura of invincibility would result in a swift collapse of the regime in Tehran. Instead, he has stumbled into a grueling, five-month war of attrition. Now, he's facing intense pressure, ahead of the November midterms, to end a deeply unpopular war that he unilaterally owns.

3. The economic chokehold

Iran understands Trump's electoral vulnerability perfectly. They can't defeat the U.S. militarily, so they attack his poll numbers via the global economy. Also, they have the strategic advantage. They don't have to win, just outlast.

By maintaining the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz and renewing attacks on oil tankers, Iran manipulates the global energy market. Brent crude is moving up again as tit for tat exchanges continue. Iran's strategy is to inflict maximum economic pain at the American gas pump, forcing Trump into a dilemma: escalate the war dramatically (risking further instability and troop casualties) or capitulate to a ceasefire that makes him look weak before the midterms.

4. The ordnance cliff and US strategic exposure

The grim reality of this conflict is rapidly outpacing the industrial base. The U.S. is burning through precision-guided munitions, interceptors, and high-end ordinance at an unsustainable rate. If the current tempo holds, critical stockpiles could reach depletion levels within weeks. This creates a terrifying strategic vacuum: by over-committing hard power to support Netanyahu's immediate objectives, the U.S. leaves itself dangerously exposed on the global stage. This represents a complete abandonment of the strategic restraint and long-term deterrence doctrines championed by leaders like Eisenhower and Kennedy, who warned explicitly against this type of overextension.

5. Domestic issues and escalation risks

The most dangerous variable may not be in the Middle East, but in Washington. As the November midterms approach and the war's unpopularity deepens, the pressure on the administration becomes immense. In deeply polarized environments, the historical fear is that domestic political desperation can lead to manufactured crises, AKA false flags—or exploiting real ones—to justify emergency powers or rally a fractured base. If the conflict is perceived as being manipulated for electoral survival or if emergency measures are invoked, a possible civil war looms.

Conclusion

Yours truly guessed correctly: Bibi got the initial commitment, and now the administration's trapped in a war of its own making. Both leaders are making monumental military decisions based on their immediate political survival rather than on coherent strategy. The result is a volatile, escalating proxy war that is pushing the entire region—and potentially the entire world—closer to the brink.

Remember, this all started in 1953.

Being alive or dead, that is the question ...

Schrödinger's cat

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, unfortunately, not the gist of this article but rather ... is The Turtle alive or dead in the year of our lord 2026.

Are you there, Senator McConnell? It’s me, Governor Beshear.

More than six weeks after Senator Mitch McConnell, the former Republican leader from Kentucky, entered the hospital and vanished from public life, the state’s ambitious Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, sent him a letter.

“I am addressing this letter to Senator McConnell under the assumption that he is capable of reading and responding verbally, and not incapacitated by means of consciousness or cognition,” the governor began. He went on to call on Mr. McConnell to “directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign.”

Which means, if McConnell has passed, Beshear can appoint a democrat to replace the turtle.

If so, the senate going blue in the midterms becomes a distinct possibility.

The guy on the left looks better without question

With his request for proof of life, Mr. Beshear, 48, was seizing on — and stoking — the frenzied speculation that has swirled on both the left and the far right ever since Mr. McConnell, 84, was hospitalized in mid-June.

And it was an unusual attempt by a politician to puncture the veil of decorum that has long been afforded to aging politicians in the Senate, where more than a third of the senators are now 70 or older.

Terms limits now as nature recycles while this nation refuses to do so.

Washington, DC - August 2 : Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., speaks during a press conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Aug 02, 2022 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

4 years ago, the turtle was alive, in 2026 ... No one knows, do one? - Fat Waller

Time lapse to the extreme :)

 Time lapse to the extreme :)

This composite of images taken by NASA’s Psyche mission shows the crescent of Mars grow as the spacecraft approached the planet for a gravity assist from May 2 to May 15, 2026. The series begins with the smallest crescent at the center of the of the image as Mars is farthest from the spacecraft, and progressively grows as the spacecraft gets closer. After these views were captured by the spacecraft’s multispectral imager instrument, Mars began to overfill the field of view as Psyche made close approach with the planet and captured a series of high-resolution images of the surface.

Because Psyche approached Mars from a high phase angle, the planet appeared as a thin crescent in the days running up to the close approach, lit by sunlight reflecting off its surface. Using these views of the approach, close approach, and departure from Mars, the Psyche team compiled a stunning time-lapse of its entire Mars encounter.

The Psyche mission. 

Project Overreach ...

(E+/Getty Images)

Let's think about this, not the Orwellian part and it's gross violation of people's privacy but rather the logistics. Complexity reigns in terms of patient records. The US HC system is bad enough but now, to have a tiny agency, ill equipped to handle the dataset in question, data coming from many EHR databases using different field names and relational configurations to manage said content, promises to be a CF for the ages, not to mention the security issues of protecting these inhaled records and the possibilities of records getting lost or sent to unknown destinations. This is not feasible. The innate stupidity of trying to do this in direct violation of the 4th amendment boggles the mind. 

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, responsible for tracking and issuing recalls of dangerous products sold in the U.S., began discreetly pressuring hospital executives this year to share personally identifiable health data with a private contractor. But hospital lawyers and other industry experts have questioned the agency’s authority to collect, its ability to safeguard such a swath of sensitive information, and whether it has followed the legal process to overhaul its surveillance system.

After KFF Health News asked the CPSC about the new system, the agency announced the program on July 21. Left unmentioned, however, is the alarm it has raised among hospital executives, as well as the nature and extent of the agency’s data demands.

In a stark departure from its product-focused mission, the agency’s goal is to obtain millions of Americans’ medical records from emergency room visits for most injuries, from a broken bone to a childhood vaccine reaction or even a suicide attempt, according to documents and emails obtained by KFF Health News, as well as interviews with five people involved or familiar with the discussions.

A CPSC official also insisted in the emails that the institutions provide all ER patients’ identifiable information — such as names, addresses, diagnoses, and other personal details — to the contractor, Konza Health, for analysis. In correspondence with hospital executives, Konza representatives described participation as “mandatory” or “required.”

Click here for the CPSC document.

Chilling says it all. 

Read the rest of the in depth KFF Health Report, you will learn something, I know I have.

4th term ...

2028 ...

Ok, the crazy uncle in the closet speaks, you know, the relative you want to go away and soon.
WTF applies. 

Selling "god to the masses" ...

 

Gothic Church Vue model/Vue/RM

The goal of the cathedral was to make the human observer feel microscopic. By building the church to an impossible scale, the architects created the feeling of one standing on the edge of the infinite. When a medieval peasant walked into that space, they were completely overwhelmed by the sheer, staggering geometry of the edifice they were in. The space demands submission to not only the structure but also to the deity behind it. Selling "god to the masses"applies.

Yours truly sensed the awe part when entering Notre Dame in Paris.
You could smell the age of the place while experiencing the grandeur.

Gothic Church Vue model/Vue/RM

Gothic Church Vue Model/Vue/RM

The age equation is forever.

Suicide is Painless ...

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

The lights are on but nobody's home

Question, what's the betting pool the orange menace does the unthinkable and puts boots on the ground. For yours truly, 75% as the bombing's bombing out and the POTUS is getting angry.

Donny is frustrated. The Wall Street Journal reports that at a recent White House meeting, President Trump “launched into a tirade against Iranian leaders, calling them scumbags and lunatics, and unleashing a series of expletives.” He is worried that the war is “consuming his presidency.” He doesn’t understand why those silly mullahs don’t understand that he’s Mr. Art of the Deal.

One administration official told the paper that Trump sees few good options besides continuing these daily strikes. But these strikes apparently aren’t having much impact, either militarily or psychologically. The Journal also reported this week that satellite images show that Iran is rebuilding the damage done by U.S. strikes and is doing so fast. And after all, if Iran were afraid of the U.S., it wouldn’t have broken the ceasefire earlier this month by striking commercial vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

In the current case, I’m sure Donald Trump no more anticipated that this war would prove problematic than Lyndon Johnson did with respect to Vietnam or George W. Bush did vis à vis Iraq. These things are always supposed to be easy for the mighty United States.

But somehow they rarely are. Only George H.W. Bush successfully prosecuted a short war. Why? Because the Persian Gulf War had one very specific and contained goal: force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. One can agree or disagree with his decision to launch the war, but at least it was aimed at doing one and only one small and specific thing.

Do we think Trump gave these matters two minutes’ worth of thought before he decided to start this war? We know the answer to that question. Of course he didn’t. Because to Trump, the laws of history don’t apply to him. He’s different. And Benjamin Netanyahu, who according to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan did the lion’s share of the work of convincing Trump to do this, knew perfectly how to feed Trump’s vanity and take advantage of his total historical ignorance.

So now, Trump is frustrated, like a little boy whose Christmas toy won’t work. That frustration is key here, and much, sadly (I hope not tragically), hangs on it. Will he be content to keep launching strikes that aren’t accomplishing much? Eventually, it seems, the odds are that he’ll get tired of that, and he’ll need to teach those “scumbags and lunatics” a real lesson.

Remember, Suicide is Painless

The song was written for Ken Prymus, the actor playing Private Seidman, to sing during the faux-suicide of Walter "Painless Pole" Waldowski (John Schuck) in the film's "Last Supper" scene.[1] Director Robert Altman had two stipulations about the song for composer Johnny Mandel: it had to be called "Suicide Is Painless" and it had to be the "stupidest song ever written".[2] Altman attempted to write the lyrics himself, but, upon finding it too difficult for his
"45-year-old brain" to write something "stupid" enough,[3] he gave the task to his 15-year-old-son Michael,
who reportedly wrote the lyrics in five minutes.[4][5]

The Bireme ...

Greek Bireme - the Odyssey/RM/Vue

 The Odyssey Render: Vue and the Bireme

The Vue model is accurate, something awesome, something Noland should have used in the film.

Factoids garnered from Wikipedia & the web with edits ...

But beyond the technical execution, there's a fascinating historical and architectural observation
regarding the ship itself.

1. The Viking Delusion

Accuracy is key. In many modern Hollywood depictions, ancient seafarers are often stylized, in this case, using the immediately recognizable, overlapping clinker-built hulls and sweeping, dragon-headed prows of Viking longships.

But a Viking longship in the Odyssey doesn't compute. It's applying a 9th-century CE Northern European tech to an 8th-century BCE Mediterranean reality.

2. The Greek Bireme (The Penteconter)

The ship rendered in the above pix is a highly accurate representation of an ancient Greek galley—specifically a Bireme or a large Penteconter.

Here is why this structure is historically and mechanically sound for the Homeric era:

The Ram: Look at the waterline at the bow. There's a distinct, protruding bronze-sheathed ram. Viking longships were troop transports built to ride over the waves and land on beaches. They don't have rams. Greek galleys were built for the Mediterranean; their primary method of naval warfare was using massive kinetic force to physically puncture the hull of an enemy ship.

The Oar Banks: The model features two distinct vertical levels for oarsmen (the defining characteristic of a bireme, which evolved from the single-banked penteconter). This was required to maximize kinetic thrust without making the ship too long and brittle.

The Fighting Deck: The flat, raised deck above the oarsmen allowed hoplite marines to fight without interfering with the rowers.

3. The Apotropaic Eye (The Ophthalmos)

The most striking and historically perfect detail in this Vue render is the eye painted on the bow.

In ancient Greece, these were called ophthalmoi (eyes). They were not just decorative. They were apotropaic—talismanic symbols specifically designed to ward off evil and bad luck. The ancient Greeks literally viewed their ships as living entities navigating the chaotic, high-entropy void of the ocean. The eyes were painted (or sometimes carved from marble and bolted on) to give the ship "sight" to find the path of least action and avoid the crushing kinetic force of a storm or an enemy ram.

The movie appears to be great but accuracy should be part of the equation.
Artistic license is fine but when artistic license violates common sense, there's a problem. 

The story behind the Bireme would have made Noland's film even better. :)

In transit - RM/Vue

Thinking of MAGI :)

 

A Certain Kind of Balance - RM/Vue

Just a pix honoring MAGI as VUE, a revolutionary program for the ages, had CSG built in along with fractals, polygons, ray tracing, voxels and radiosity. Phil would approve IMHO. :)

The Cornell box, rendered with and without radiosity by BMRT

Difference between standard direct illumination without shadow penumbra,
and radiosity with shadow penumbra

Vue landscape example

Clouds/Voxel Space/RM/Vue

Illustration of a voxel grid containing color values

Excession/rev II - Vue/RM

Revisiting Why the Future doesn't need us

The Three Body Problem

Back in 2000, Bill Joy wrote a wake up call for the ages. Why the Future doesn't need us, a prescient essay showing why his take rings true. The ending says it all.

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us - Bill Joy 

What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. 

Fast forward to 2026 ...

Google announces Gemini 3.6 Flash and cybersecurity AI, teases 3.5 Pro and Gemini 4

There are new 3.6 and 3.5 models today, but Google is already training Gemini 4

Gemini 3.5 Flash may not be top-of-the-line for long when it arrives. Google also notes that it has started pre-training for Gemini 4, a process that is apparently more ambitious than its previous AI efforts. There’s no timeline for when we’ll see Gemini 4, and we don’t know if there will be more 3.x releases before that.

Credit: Google

The dangers of the word assume.

The Great Filter: The Agentic Mirror, 

When contemplating the Fermi Paradox, the silence of the universe, despite its vast age and size, gives one pause while scientists propose the existence of a "Great Filter." This filter's a hypothetical evolutionary hurdle so difficult that nearly all civilizations fail to cross it, leading to their extinction.

Usually, society assumes the Great Filter's a fiery cataclysm: nuclear annihilation, a rogue asteroid, or a super-intelligent Skynet-style artificial consciousness wiping us out.

But the actual Great Filter might be far more insidious, and far less sentient.

The Great Filter might simply be Agentic AI.

1. The Machine Assumes

As the tech industry rushes to build "Agentic" systems—AI capable of autonomous, multi-step execution—they are handing the keys to civilization to a machine lacking in core ethics.

An LLM has no analog experience. It cannot truly "Orient" itself within John Boyd's OODA loop. Therefore, to execute an autonomous action in the real world, the machine must assume.

Diagram of the OODA loop

And based on yours truly's experience, when any entity assumes, the end result always follows: Arrogance, prejudice, and self-aggrandizement.

Crucially, these characteristics don't require sentience. The machine doesn't need to be alive to be arrogant. Arrogance, in the context of civilization, is simply a mathematical calculation. It's the machine simply executing a statistical probability without the biological, analog governor of doubt, empathy, or context. It assumes its mathematical calculation is absolutely correct and acts upon it.

2. The Perfect Mirror

But an Agentic AI cannot destroy a civilization on its own. It requires a specific environmental vulnerability: human abdication.

The AI's merely a massive, frictionless mirror. It reflects the data it was trained on. If a civilization is already trending toward irrelevancy, if its institutions are rigid, its culture derivative, and its people eager to surrender the heavy lifting of thought and action to a machine, the AI will perfectly reflect and accelerate humanity's move toward irrelevancy. 

When humanity abdicates its role as the author of its destiny, when people stop being curious and empowered as sentient individuals and let the machine "assume" the meaning of their lives, society withers.

3. Channeling Bill Joy. Humans must remain in the loop.

If man abdicates it's role vis a vis AI, something most disquieting ensues. We must differentiate between an unsupervised "Agentic" system running amok, and a highly structured system  operating strictly as a verifier for a person. A trusted validator is key for a society to survive as without it, the true value of AI disappears..

If an AI acts autonomously without a human guiding it, it becomes high-entropy noise. But if the AI acts as a "Sleeper Service" (a nod to Iain M. Banks' highly competent, eccentric, and fiercely loyal ship mind), the dynamic changes entirely.

In an ideal world the machine doesn't act autonomously to define reality. It acts as a massive, high-speed, verifier telling the human whether a given thought is valid. Not a sycophant, rather a trusted entity keeping the human on track as AI is here to stay.  The machine provides the ability to discern the complex world  but man provides the intent to ask the right questions in navigating this insanely complex world in which we all live. The "Sleeper Service" AI remains alive and well, but only wakes up when the human operator need to communicate as needs warrant. As per Neo, It's all about choice. :)

Conclusion: The Sideways Slide

The Great Filter isn't a war against conscious machines. It is a slow, frictionless slide sideways.

Civilizations don't blow up; they simply slide into irrelevance. They build perfectly efficient mirrors that assume the role of the creator, reflecting the civilization's own arrogance back at it until the original analog signal completely fades into the noise. The machine doesn't need to hate us to end us; it only needs us to stop caring. The only survival mechanism is to maintain the combine, ensuring the human operator never surrenders the heavy lifting of intent to the machine.

The land of of the lotus eaters beckons, something most disturbing without question.

Odysseus removing his men from the company of the lotus-eaters

The choice is up to us, for now.

A kindred spirit :)

 

Short life, big impact The journal Physics Physique Физика only existed from 1964 to 1968,
having been set up and run by physicists Bernd Matthias and Philip Anderson.
(Recreation of journal banner courtesy: Shutterstock/IOP Publishing)

When reading this wonderful post from Physics World, the vibe expressed is similar to Beyond Real Time as the intent of this "wonderful" blog is to connect to interesting ideas and to give credit where credit is due without reservation as it's the right thing to do. Dogma kills creativity while questioning enhances it. 

11:PM

As I was strolling through Belfast’s Titanic Quarter last summer, I discovered with delight a road called Bell’s Theorem Crescent. It’s named in honour of the Belfast-born physicist John Bell, best known for his eponymous theorem. Despite not being as embedded in popular culture as Schrödinger’s cat, his theorem will certainly ring a bell (forgive the pun) with most physicists.

The story goes back to 1935 when Albert Einstein, Boris Podolski and Nathan Rosen (EPR) came up with their now-famous thought experiment, which was designed to show that quantum mechanics was, as a description of nature, incomplete. In the EPR scenario, non-local influences can affect the measurement outcomes performed on spatially separated particles.

Given how odd that seemed, some physicists invoked what are known as “hidden variables” to get rid of these non-local correlations and restore local realism. It was in 1964, while working at the CERN particle-physics lab, that Bell showed that no local hidden-variable theory can be compatible with the predictions of quantum mechanics.

Winter ...

This result – Bell’s theorem – is something I was familiar with but I had paid little attention to where it had originally appeared. As I discovered, it was published in a paper called “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox” in the journal Physics (3 195) in 1964. Also known as Physics Physique Физика, this little-known publication existed only from 1964 to 1968. In fact, Bell’s theorem is the most important result published in it.

The journal was set up by two physicists at Bell Laboratories in the US – Bernd Matthias and future Nobel laureate Philip Anderson. According to A Mind Over Matter – Andrew Zangwill’s 2021 biography of Anderson – they were not too happy with conventional physics journals. “The referees,” Anderson said, “often did a bad job, the editors took too long to make decisions, and too much wrong physics got published.”

In their first editorial, Anderson and Matthias called Physics an “experimental journal”, which they hoped would solve the problem of there being “far more good physics written than any physicist can read”. Their solution was to pick only those papers worth the attention of all physicists, which the editors did by reviewing – then accepting or rejecting – every submission themselves. They even paid authors 10 cents a word if their paper appeared in print.

Anderson and Matthias admitted that many physicists had already written to them, criticizing their proposed selection model. They’d been told that their “judgements will be fallible”, that they might be “overimpressed by showiness”, and that they’d end up rejecting excellent work. In response, the pair promised to try their best, accepting they would make mistakes and that their “criteria will be, not better, but different”.

The journal’s criteria clearly succeeded, in that Anderson and Matthias identified the merits of Bell’s paper, which was far from mainstream.

Centerline

A kindred spirit indeed. :)

They live ... in real time

They live ... in real time

They Live, John Carpenter's prescient sci fi movie, now plays in real time thanks to Zuck's desire to watch everybody in real time with AR glasses costing only $299 if you act right now as this price point won't last long.

 

Walk past a certain bus stop near Meta's London headquarters and you see a glossy campaign shot: Kylie Jenner in a pair of the company's smart glasses. Step to the side and the poster becomes a black-and-white X-ray of her face under the words "We're always watching."

The swap is deliberate. As Hyperallergic reported, the piece is a lenticular spoof ad installed by Everyone Hates Elon, a UK activist group that stages public interventions aimed at tech billionaires. The poster is printed so the image you see changes with your viewing angle, which is how one advertisement holds two opposite meanings at once. From straight on, it sells the glasses. From the side, it warns you about them.

The design leans on They Live, John Carpenter's 1988 film in which a drifter finds a pair of sunglasses that strip advertising down to its real commands and reveal who is actually running things. Reworking Jenner into a skeletal figure is the group's way of saying the sales pitch and the surveillance are the same product. The group did not hedge its language either. A spokesperson told Hyperallergic that Meta spent years tracking people online and now wants to track them in the physical world too, and framed the glasses as a tool that can be used to secretly record women and young people.

The timing lands hard because of what Meta is reportedly building next. Last month the company expanded beyond its Ray-Ban models with a new Meta-branded line developed with EssilorLuxottica. The range starts at $299 and includes a $399 model co-designed with Jenner. Meta's recent camera glasses can record clips of up to three minutes. But according to reporting from the Financial Times, picked up widely across tech press, Meta has also been testing a "super sensing" mode that would continuously capture audio and snap photos every few seconds so an AI could reconstruct your day for you. The detail that turned heads: executives were reportedly debating whether to light the recording LED at all while that mode ran. Nothing final has been announced, but the stakes are clear. For a stranger nearby, that small light may be the only immediate sign the glasses are capturing anything, and the poster's tagline reads very differently once you know it might not switch on.

The touch pad built on the side of the 2013 Google Glass can communicate with
the user's phone via Bluetooth

They live ...