tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56006262024-03-17T23:04:59.771-04:00Beyond Real TimeThe Impact of Science and Technology on Civilization.Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.comBlogger4517125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-80816440408881495602024-03-15T12:12:00.003-04:002024-03-15T12:12:21.385-04:00Chasing Shadows<iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/923776846?h=4d2002a478&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="640"></iframe>
<p style="text-align: center;">Shadows and snow, a match made in heaven IMHO. :)</p>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-90698775547301581062024-03-05T17:22:00.010-05:002024-03-15T23:53:00.456-04:00Belly Button lint :)<p><a href="https://medium.com/the-steady-drop/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-about-climate-change-a9d402337dd7"><img alt="George Carlin delivers a standup routine." class="bo vn yv c" height="360" loading="eager" src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1000/1*tSTzR-V6NPeVNdEy7mrWIA.jpeg" width="640" /></a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://medium.com/the-steady-drop/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-about-climate-change-a9d402337dd7"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Praise be Saint George.</span></a></p><p style="text-align: center;">Profane, hilarious and all too intelligent, Carlin mattered ...</p><p style="text-align: center;">Laugh and cry at the same time, he's <b><a href="https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/greece/hetairai/diogenes.html"><span style="color: red;">Diogenes</span></a> </b>using a mike, not a lantern, to discover the truth. <br />This particular riff indirectly channels <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Few_Good_Men"><span style="color: #04ff00; font-weight: bold;">Nathan Jessup's</span><span style="color: red; font-weight: bold;"> </span><span style="color: #fcff01; font-weight: bold;">You Can't Handle the Truth!</span> <span style="color: #a2c4c9;"><b>in</b></span> <span style="color: #9fc5e8; font-weight: bold;">A Few Good Men</span></a><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"> </span>in more ways than one.</p><p style="text-align: center;">To whit:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p><b><a href="https://medium.com/the-steady-drop/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-about-climate-change-a9d402337dd7"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">Save the trees! Save the bees! Save the whales! Save those snails!</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://medium.com/the-steady-drop/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-about-climate-change-a9d402337dd7"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">And the greatest arrogance of all:</span><span style="color: #ffe599;"> “Save the planet!” </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">What?! Are these fucking people kidding me?! Save the planet?</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://medium.com/the-steady-drop/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-about-climate-change-a9d402337dd7"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">We don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet! </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">We haven’t learned how to care for one another and we’re gonna save the fucking planet?!</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://medium.com/the-steady-drop/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-about-climate-change-a9d402337dd7"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">I’m getting tired of that shit!</span></a></b></p></blockquote><p style="text-align: center;">It gets better.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p><b><a href="https://medium.com/the-steady-drop/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-about-climate-change-a9d402337dd7"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet, nothing wrong with the planet. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">The planet is fine; the people are fucked! </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">Difference!</span><span style="color: #b6d7a8;"> The planet is fine! Compared to the people, The planet is doing great: been here four and a half billion years!</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://medium.com/the-steady-drop/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-about-climate-change-a9d402337dd7"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Do you ever think about the arithmetic? </span><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion.</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://medium.com/the-steady-drop/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-about-climate-change-a9d402337dd7"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">And we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat?</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://medium.com/the-steady-drop/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-about-climate-change-a9d402337dd7"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">There it is.</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://medium.com/the-steady-drop/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-about-climate-change-a9d402337dd7"><span style="color: #ffe599;">The planet is fine. The people are fucked.</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://medium.com/the-steady-drop/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-about-climate-change-a9d402337dd7"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">The planet isn’t going anywhere; we are! We’re going away! Pack your shit, folks! </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">We’re going away and we won’t leave much of a trace either, thank God for that. </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">Maybe a little Styrofoam, maybe.</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://medium.com/the-steady-drop/the-simple-and-shocking-truth-about-climate-change-a9d402337dd7"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">The planet will be here, we’ll be long gone; just another failed mutation; just another closed-end biological mistake; an evolutionary cul-de-sac. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, a surface nuisance.</span></a></b></p></blockquote>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9FnO3igOkOk?si=0hja_4lCrvh0Jzxw" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-55155269537560334452024-03-05T16:26:00.001-05:002024-03-05T16:54:09.059-05:00It's different now ... rev II<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LHKL_210CcU?si=3edn22IDNWyh4p3c" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;">Crunching data at the level of Google's <b><a href="https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemini-next-generation-model-february-2024/"><span style="color: red;">Gemini Pro </span></a></b>is truly insane. Watch the video to see why. </div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://medium.com/@impure/gemini-1-5-pro-is-insane-8865c6512324" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="841" data-original-width="500" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJiGazNy6MvIft05ubIIhDe6giEuj9Qk6F0wSORScmWZP7kDxgA8OE2Q5KR8G4P31y99iADakaRz0hlwFMiYjtWEcW55lhNxY081UHrmMoItmRwQWdKllhs-1Vyd3gHnmNuFsNGZwUzk3e4A-tfPbcIYNMqrI4aY6Qhew0Z4wPcfqUo4mLjPY4/w380-h640/1_C8bEgf_EKhcy9hDUOMnCIg.webp" width="380" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">It's different now ... rev II</div><p></p></div>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-72876991310141395112024-03-04T21:31:00.004-05:002024-03-04T21:32:31.812-05:00Night Moves<iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/919404773?h=cdbfb0285b&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="640"></iframe><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Had fun doing this short clip walking around the environs of Fairfield County in the dark. :)</div>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-75127069753564896742024-03-03T11:25:00.007-05:002024-03-04T09:53:36.805-05:00The singularity ... is already here<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gEjXcEU3Bbw?si=Bs5dQ_SyUTW22EwI" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">The video says it all. </div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="https://www.figure.ai/"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Figure's</span></a></b> <b><a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/huge-funding-round-makes-figure-big-techs-favorite-humanoid-robot-company/"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">goal, according to the press release, is to </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">"bring humanoid robots into commercial operations as soon as possible." </span><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">The company openly posts a </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">"master plan" </span><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">on its website, which reads, "</span><span style="color: #ffe599;">1) Build a feature-complete electromechanical humanoid. 2) Perform human-like manipulation. 3) Integrate humanoids into the labor force." </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">The robots are coming for our jobs.</span></a></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity"><span style="color: #04ff00;">The technological singularity—or simply the singularity[1]</span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization.[2][3]</span></a></b></div><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;">It's already here. </div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"> </span></div></div>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q5MKo7Idsok?si=6qko5PDBoFidrpzK" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe><div><br /><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://historyofinformation.com/image.php?id=538" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1671" data-original-width="885" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg51OmbpYzUIURJJEyWAcrV-f0aVOLhInpykER8qd3txVGaZ93isztIXPkD63XRMgVJHVuhPacrTq_ugdK8nFnIjhWIBtMPy8cWiqeGZ_M3I885yS9Xm8F2bgtxAmPvPnuoFZ0lbe50rjicDiSGQqa3i8-KAxvH0zxgs6FWFLdwVgud2leDN77O/w338-h640/_Vernor_Vinge_big.jpg" width="338" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://historyofinformation.com/image.php?id=538"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Vernor Vinge</span></a></div><div><br /><div><div><b><a href="https://historyofinformation.com/image.php?id=538"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">Mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor VingeOffsite Link called the creation of the first ultraintelligent machine the </span><span style="color: #ffa400;">SingularityOffsite Link </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">in the January 1993 Omni magazine. Vinge's follow-up paper entitled </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">"What is the Singularity?Offsite Link"</span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;"> presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center( now NASA John H. Glenn Research CenterOffsite Link at Lewis Field) and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993, and slightly changed in the Winter 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review, contained the oft-quoted statement</span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">(s)</span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">,</span></a></b></div><div><b><a href="https://historyofinformation.com/image.php?id=538"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;"><br /></span></a></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://historyofinformation.com/image.php?id=538"><span style="color: #ffe599;">"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended."</span></a></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://historyofinformation.com/image.php?id=538"><span style="color: #ffe599;"><br /></span></a></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://historyofinformation.com/image.php?id=538"><span style="color: #ffe599;">"I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030."</span></a></b></div></div></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Vinge is right. Click <b><a href="https://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html"><span style="color: #04ff00;">here </span></a></b>to read his full paper. </div>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-22583697922679773832024-03-02T00:47:00.007-05:002024-03-02T13:10:04.925-05:00Phase Transitions/Winter 2024<iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/918568601?h=03a626b58f&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="640"></iframe>
<p style="text-align: center;">Over the space of 4 days, winter 2024 went through several phase transitions from light wet snow to bright crisp days with powder conditions rarely seen in New England. Seems global warming took a holiday for a change. Enjoy. :)</p>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-57475208119529747292024-02-29T17:34:00.002-05:002024-02-29T17:34:28.311-05:00The Turtle ...<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-02-29-mitch-mcconnell-senate-arsonist/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="1024" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZoOxN1XD4kDr1JMiNVrtr9iJYckZOhxPCFdOAU9gmpOouyNRQYEKyUJe7Gkn2K1Mml5xcv1y72BlY-tGGdZlejg-wHyDCP75DeF5x3w2312vhL8BWbaL2hht2Zee5G4wY9qnmFoGLo6GYPdhG0kB_wsMSmm4BcDrhhyphenhyphen2sSkWbSYp0SiaD1NQH/w640-h426/Cooper%20on%20Tap%20022924.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-02-29-mitch-mcconnell-senate-arsonist/"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks on the Senate floor, February 28, 2024, </span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-02-29-mitch-mcconnell-senate-arsonist/"><span style="color: #ffa400;">and announces that he will step down as Senate Republican leader in November</span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">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 <b><span style="color: #04ff00;"><span style="color: #04ff00;"><a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/01/supreme-court-likely-to-discard-chevron/"><span style="color: #04ff00;">how governmental agencies should interpret and implement federal laws</span></a>, </span></span></b>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 <b><a href="https://beyondrealtime.blogspot.com/search?q=the+turtle"><span style="color: #ff00fe;">The Turtle</span></a></b> as one of the most destructive pols ever to serve this once great nation known as America. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">To whit.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-02-29-mitch-mcconnell-senate-arsonist/"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">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. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">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.</span></a></b></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-02-29-mitch-mcconnell-senate-arsonist/"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">Instead of representatives and senators writing laws that instruct the executive branch about how and what kind of things to regulate </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">(food, water, pollution, air travel, and so on) </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">random judges will do it in concert with their oligarch pals. </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">Right-wing billionaires will fund thousands of lawsuits against whatever regulations they don’t like, and</span><span style="color: #ffe599;">—in between the same billionaires and members of the judiciary enjoying some ultra-luxurious vacations together—</span><span style="color: #01ffff;">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.</span></a></b></div></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.change.org/p/mitch-mcconnell-demand-mitch-mcconnell-provide-proof-he-isn-t-a-turtle" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDuM2swMhFnnV6MyM27BhkbnHA8smG_FPyi9y1E1vW43ZcW7bw49CveCUamj78MHeh4AJXjUw1xF0ZMSFHZ7_8oQxr7zYMzm25jKIjWs3DZwiCsCpjATJWG-rY2RpYznkhiyYPQmxo04p2s0CPqgkP1qkrJVc2bzLlRtZUYqReCNqW5bwj3RT6/w640-h360/vHZiLlnBODJkguX-800x450-noPad.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-58077862270145948842024-02-29T10:27:00.004-05:002024-02-29T10:34:49.238-05:00The definition of genocide ...<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/opinion/gaza-israel-palestinians-starvation.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20240229&instance_id=116368&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=49337526&segment_id=159462&te=1&user_id=dca4743c884062742d735ae23dcf903e" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="1024" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgImnGO3TE6aCEvDdU2IqE6Zh5o4_GTma3AZwfJ8uUSqjbDpQclg5HZ0W5C74iAbFfpNjqrwXlAZKOBM5-1X_osBGiiAf6iytPHZ6dYdMehM9UnEyTZhcBUqP5LXrpIU5t3mLp8PX9zGl2Yb4h3BeoY8Go1M6mfQeSEtKH888sbRITjVv1aPX2D=w640-h426" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/opinion/gaza-israel-palestinians-starvation.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20240229&instance_id=116368&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=49337526&segment_id=159462&te=1&user_id=dca4743c884062742d735ae23dcf903e"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Mohammed Salem/</span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Reuters</span></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">The definition of genocide ...</p><p><b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/opinion/gaza-israel-palestinians-starvation.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20240229&instance_id=116368&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=49337526&segment_id=159462&te=1&user_id=dca4743c884062742d735ae23dcf903e"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">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. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">“Nutrition? What nutrition?” </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">a staff member in scrubs says in the video. </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">“The mother gave birth to him during the war.”</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/opinion/gaza-israel-palestinians-starvation.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20240229&instance_id=116368&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=49337526&segment_id=159462&te=1&user_id=dca4743c884062742d735ae23dcf903e"><span style="color: #ffe599;">“The health of the mother affects the health of the baby,” </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">he added. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">“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. “</span></a></b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Addendum:</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/world/middleeast/gaza-death-toll-war.html"><span style="color: red;">Death Toll in Gaza Passes 30,000</span></a></b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/world/middleeast/gaza-death-toll-war.html"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">The official toll of the war is staggering </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">— roughly one person killed for every 73 Palestinians in Gaza — </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">though experts say it is likely an undercount.</span></a></b></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhpQoy0ohKXa0BANufLABb5MB_Z1s12ZC85r5BNwFmlDRah0H5qYNJ9l-ob-mf816CCoxX5WSdTYmPZfr6vYgvdluoQ58st6cb_1Hpl498hcYi_HwW1__A4Cd_wmg4xGlBhdbHPeb3aKC4mRPaDwaPnjMLnMUqfhGAGpH-2N6_Qir-6azCoURD2" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="1024" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhpQoy0ohKXa0BANufLABb5MB_Z1s12ZC85r5BNwFmlDRah0H5qYNJ9l-ob-mf816CCoxX5WSdTYmPZfr6vYgvdluoQ58st6cb_1Hpl498hcYi_HwW1__A4Cd_wmg4xGlBhdbHPeb3aKC4mRPaDwaPnjMLnMUqfhGAGpH-2N6_Qir-6azCoURD2=w640-h426" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/world/middleeast/gaza-death-toll-war.html"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Rubble around Al-Farouk Mosque after an airstrike in Rafah in southern Gaza last week.</span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/world/middleeast/gaza-death-toll-war.html"><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Credit...Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images</span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Channeling the Nazis comes to mind here does it not?</div><p></p>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-83761548735021819392024-02-26T10:34:00.002-05:002024-02-26T10:38:51.805-05:00Winter 2024<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV36TDSbeKYdjtHl6LYss8xR13Qe5KTq2C9cEJWfLfuC_eLfMUlYuf2FYwGfayXkeFDI9EUbvv0dhQOZtujiWtZSTkEaQLfPa3bIquZS_BAw4iPVilRT5aoYLoD0DZZV8c59twIhJfjv5ayRvv_KOd6UphC_Td_RbbZLIfok4EvV96MJqZDYqq/s4000/20240214_133244%20(2).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="3000" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV36TDSbeKYdjtHl6LYss8xR13Qe5KTq2C9cEJWfLfuC_eLfMUlYuf2FYwGfayXkeFDI9EUbvv0dhQOZtujiWtZSTkEaQLfPa3bIquZS_BAw4iPVilRT5aoYLoD0DZZV8c59twIhJfjv5ayRvv_KOd6UphC_Td_RbbZLIfok4EvV96MJqZDYqq/w480-h640/20240214_133244%20(2).jpg" width="480" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; 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margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="3000" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaGV9krwIgr2lD-LPfCMRQNxtBYuJs04_lEphyphenhyphenoUqqHd6BP9Fu8MuFC-XrlEczkoZjedv74-txTBq9rv6s89eesG9IOdoGZFytXTfCq6mn2LHyFMn6_zE0DrPqmelF1OW21BLEPn5ILNQVPEXTjwdQGSPE9rIh7JqNRfSjVPbndXfOLDCD4HU1/w480-h640/20240220_174741%20(1).jpg" width="480" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr2oPfMo24P1vD_cr1SQ38o1h8d5HB2VbCdD2Om6rXEvOO8dPnbRES442y9x33JeBbfhmvU-KbmrPEFYmC4HR-HlydamkZV2wbXfGU8KQzcTk1l7Y6ChTdjoPF-OmqYGjKLkPW5tGAHmnRhSxyI55mQnidgYgQYdTZAuhG6ycE5NrD8tlj5PFd/s4240/DSC06470.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2832" data-original-width="4240" height="428" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr2oPfMo24P1vD_cr1SQ38o1h8d5HB2VbCdD2Om6rXEvOO8dPnbRES442y9x33JeBbfhmvU-KbmrPEFYmC4HR-HlydamkZV2wbXfGU8KQzcTk1l7Y6ChTdjoPF-OmqYGjKLkPW5tGAHmnRhSxyI55mQnidgYgQYdTZAuhG6ycE5NrD8tlj5PFd/w640-h428/DSC06470.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiAq8qEOdABsr7GjXfGXfK_FA4NKyd4WoyhD23Mwfdfvizp0gj9PcAYDtEeGC5WGNjrytv6cZPEojRCVf6G9fyGyUxxsYIRiKLqgcuapAoWkqbqISUjlUZkMVdtDxBJNHHZ6C1IlT5o6AbhMfqmZQiW06XCp007seB9JddrFxYvmswRXotWynS/s4000/20240216_160650.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="3000" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiAq8qEOdABsr7GjXfGXfK_FA4NKyd4WoyhD23Mwfdfvizp0gj9PcAYDtEeGC5WGNjrytv6cZPEojRCVf6G9fyGyUxxsYIRiKLqgcuapAoWkqbqISUjlUZkMVdtDxBJNHHZ6C1IlT5o6AbhMfqmZQiW06XCp007seB9JddrFxYvmswRXotWynS/w480-h640/20240216_160650.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-3136260037234767822024-02-22T18:17:00.006-05:002024-02-22T18:26:03.771-05:0095%<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XyCNxugvs6s?si=f_klIu5KfNRtta3n" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;">Yours truly has waxed poetic about the bought and paid for incompetent numb-nuts in <b><a href="https://beyondrealtime.blogspot.com/search?q=congress"><span style="color: red;">congress </span></a></b>of which 95% get reelected all the time. <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Sisyphus</span></a></b> 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.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"> </span></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1054" data-original-width="1024" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnC7dPt3iF7BKeeJleMliDSAt59-wzo3NpUOmdXveA8pEIOfjoP9B3YC3IZZhXuaL959x_RVhlPR4NhKiFN3WEmSRz245Glb2T6Ifujk6AZVttNJKPKqXe44aKaM83fIHM5n76Ru476BR6LlydVWQrekJJTXgrrj98NoRQhGPCGgKjWlvp5fKN/w622-h640/Nekyia_Staatliche_Antikensammlungen_1494_n2.jpg" width="622" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Persephone supervising Sisyphus in the Underworld, Attic black-figure amphora, c. 530 BC, </span><br /><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Staatliche Antikensammlungen[1]</span></a></div><p></p></div>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-65631180345476773672024-02-17T14:33:00.005-05:002024-02-17T15:25:29.444-05:00The darkness in light<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="1024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlPLIq3Vusp1ppDtvN7muQrGNE4Q2CsmdMKGR-HAwSM7qvykh8y5molKvWtvjHRWVIUmZmf-FkWORxPBvtxOAtIJ0KeW1cu3vmW5xM6X6QVjUjO7M0V1NNihKcB5ByGHhEMuH51x8GuRfOHS_B6xXPJ4nqRItSLXws9E9MpyW5CMCG18fGX2QF/w640-h400/Goethe-Prism-FigI.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Reddish-yellow edges overlap blue-cyan edges to form green.</span></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">In looking at <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Goethe's take on light </span></a></b>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 <b><a href="https://phys.org/news/2008-02-dark-side.html"><span style="color: #04ff00;">Physorg's </span><span style="color: #fcff01;">The Dark Side of Light</span></a></b>, 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 <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal"><span style="color: #ffe599;">fractal</span></a></b>, nature's journey to forever that never ends. </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="913" data-original-width="600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBFxX6gjtEdQXb1Wqe37JNhai3WyLskHw0AaqjU1tQPa25UQI6iSgO-dSmnNOFl-bx1Ci3YEm1A-sLuTv7-AvaupDvLlzqLsAzB7Za_u6Qt1hCAFAtQzoR-6sCgtv3RFDAr_yL5TbjmuL82U_UMRsMyQphtqYkGymj01eNxxcpJ2gS1N89nvc6/w420-h640/Goethe,_Farbenkreis_zur_Symbolisierung_des_menschlichen_Geistes-_und_Seelenlebens,_1809.jpg" width="420" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Goethe's symmetric colour wheel with associated symbolic qualities (1809)</span></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://phys.org/news/2008-02-dark-side.html"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">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, </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">the darkness within light</span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">. As the researchers explain, </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">natural light fields are threaded by lines of darkness, which create optical vortices that appear as black points within the light. </span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">The group has modeled this phenomenon, and found that the lines of darkness exhibit </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">fractal properties with Brownian (random) characteristics</span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">. Further, the characteristics of these optical vortices suggest universal properties, which could help connect different areas of physics.</span></a></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">It gets better.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://phys.org/news/2008-02-dark-side.html"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">When investigating the lines of darkness further, the researchers found that they </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">exhibit scale invariance</span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">. In other words, </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">the vortices look the same no matter how much you zoom out – they are fractals</span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">. 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.</span></a></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="580" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlUChstl_fd8twxbmxdVLk_C9U8S_W0wNkX_hfNXYYQgyLjsoUrVTXpEt6diYZygbLB27rSor2ZYpg0L4t1MI-uqwjeNtTaa8fwePs7dDuBTCKnDMuCYNnkoQpnP5CI95AduItWK61GIg4kxYySCIeTKKhllB3h3nOCy2-YzlIA8_wFh-uJOGB/s16000/Prisma-goethe.gif" /></a><br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Light and dark spectra—</span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">when coloured edges overlap in a light spectrum, green results; when they overlap in a dark spectrum, magenta results. </span></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;">Because Fractals are universal and self similar (ferns, nautilus, ocean waves, rivers, trees etc.) and <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion"><span style="color: #04ff00;">Browinian Motion</span></a></b> is a chaotic process (<b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">Random Walks</span></a></b> etc., etc.), the dark light random vortices/fractals constructs in light have unusual properties, i.e. <b><a href="https://phys.org/news/2008-02-dark-side.html"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">"(the ratio of vortex lines to loops and their scale invariance) are very similar to the properties of </span></a><a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080120182315.htm"><span style="color: red;">cosmic strings</span></a></b>, <b><a href="https://phys.org/news/2008-02-dark-side.html"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">according to the cosmic string lattice model."</span></a></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc2Qj9OgwIExiJLfb7nSOYwAmgR-e9fKaLgQubkK8R-HivEnHFB-Mfh2w-vkeNm8lKvHpIcZkC2HKgmhsfc0AUu-soVjABNz9XKrI6GiH-T6swQha9kkVRUUiLuquKouYhLrss4d-dXAT_zYN5O0Gk3ReUQ_7aBUcBFIR1kT6CdkP0dAY1jlU5/s240/Brownian_motion_large.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="240" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc2Qj9OgwIExiJLfb7nSOYwAmgR-e9fKaLgQubkK8R-HivEnHFB-Mfh2w-vkeNm8lKvHpIcZkC2HKgmhsfc0AUu-soVjABNz9XKrI6GiH-T6swQha9kkVRUUiLuquKouYhLrss4d-dXAT_zYN5O0Gk3ReUQ_7aBUcBFIR1kT6CdkP0dAY1jlU5/s1600/Brownian_motion_large.gif" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion"><span style="color: #ffa400;">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.</span></a></div><p></p>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-80813858050731519742024-02-15T18:35:00.001-05:002024-02-15T18:35:39.851-05:00Glissando<iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/913511430?h=9b849d0597&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="640"></iframe>
<p style="text-align: center;">Just passing thru comes to mind here. Enjoy.</p>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-89431596095840282592024-02-13T00:27:00.007-05:002024-02-13T00:30:45.731-05:0097%<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/02/12/1230929548/across-the-world-migrating-animal-populations-are-dwindling-heres-why"><img alt="" class="img" height="480" loading="lazy" src="https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2024/02/12/gettyimages-549035837-fd89fe605037e25444706205ce6b84b72533759b-s1100-c50.jpg" width="640" /></a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/02/12/1230929548/across-the-world-migrating-animal-populations-are-dwindling-heres-why"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Ninety-seven percent of migratory fish species are facing extinction. Whale sharks, the world's largest living fish, are among the endangered. </span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Ullstein Bild/Ullstein Bild</span></a></p><p style="text-align: center;">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?</p><p style="text-align: center;">We don't have the right to do this but here we are. To yours truly, the <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog"><span style="color: red;">boiling frog myth</span></a></b> comes to mind here without question.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/02/12/1230929548/across-the-world-migrating-animal-populations-are-dwindling-heres-why"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">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.</span></a></b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/02/12/1230929548/across-the-world-migrating-animal-populations-are-dwindling-heres-why"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">A major </span></a><a href="https://www.cms.int/sites/default/files/publication/State%20of%20the%20Worlds%20Migratory%20Species%20report_E.pdf"><span style="color: #01ffff;">new report by the United Nations</span></a></b><span style="color: #01ffff;"> </span><b><a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/02/12/1230929548/across-the-world-migrating-animal-populations-are-dwindling-heres-why"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">finds that humans are not only making those journeys more difficult, but have put many migratory species in a perilous state.</span></a></b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/02/12/1230929548/across-the-world-migrating-animal-populations-are-dwindling-heres-why"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">Nearly half of the world's already threatened migratory species have declining populations, the first of its kind UN report found. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">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.</span></a></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7J54dbe3cw4S527CObM4oIeYTWc9zmKuGmJZf4SvWGYk8_MeEEM0gAQSkJdLwNDpMbLYVET5npDB_NnF0MBFl8nYOJUiR5pdXSfkAsI69NJjskyGnq8duGwW3ZKVKya53sQm_6MSbjW8jqbKuluwZ1vah8OUpNY8Wnyh70MjTWNsjwaNO0i0n/s1920/Frog_and_saucepan.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1275" data-original-width="1920" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7J54dbe3cw4S527CObM4oIeYTWc9zmKuGmJZf4SvWGYk8_MeEEM0gAQSkJdLwNDpMbLYVET5npDB_NnF0MBFl8nYOJUiR5pdXSfkAsI69NJjskyGnq8duGwW3ZKVKya53sQm_6MSbjW8jqbKuluwZ1vah8OUpNY8Wnyh70MjTWNsjwaNO0i0n/w640-h426/Frog_and_saucepan.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;"><br /></span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog"><span style="color: #d5a6bd;">The term </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">"boiling frog syndrome" </span><span style="color: #d5a6bd;">is a metaphor used to describe </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">the failure to act against a problematic situation which will increase in severity until reaching catastrophic proportions.[7] </span><span style="color: #d5a6bd;">It thereby encapsulates the barely noticeable impact of slow environmental degradation that has been described by Daniel Pauly as shifting baselines.[8]</span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #04ff00;"><b>Factoid:</b></span> The frog bails before being cooked, thank god. </div>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-34225451021930284972024-02-10T10:34:00.006-05:002024-02-10T10:38:03.716-05:00Ghost in the machine<p><a href="https://gizmodo.com/why-are-people-saying-google-gemini-is-full-of-ghosts-1851243642"><img alt="Image for article titled Why Are People Saying Google Gemini Is ‘Full of Ghosts?’" data-alt="Image for article titled Why Are People Saying Google Gemini Is ‘Full of Ghosts?’" data-anim-src="" data-chomp-id="3af1dccacc1a2767730e5b3b9cf3ecdb" data-format="jpg" data-height="2802" src="https://i.kinja-img.com/image/upload/c_fit,q_60,w_645/3af1dccacc1a2767730e5b3b9cf3ecdb.jpg" /></a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://gizmodo.com/why-are-people-saying-google-gemini-is-full-of-ghosts-1851243642"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Photo: Rafael Henrique </span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">(Getty Images)</span></a></p><p style="text-align: center;">The concept of a ghost residing in the "machine" of <b><a href="https://beyondrealtime.blogspot.com/search?q=ai"><span style="color: red;">AI</span></a></b>, 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 <b><a href="https://gemini.google.com/app"><span style="color: #04ff00;">Gemini's</span></a></b> 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. </p><p style="text-align: center;">Whistling past the graveyard applies.</p><p><b><a href="https://gizmodo.com/why-are-people-saying-google-gemini-is-full-of-ghosts-1851243642"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">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. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">However, some can’t shake this eerie feeling that Gemini has more ghosts than a haunted house.</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://gizmodo.com/why-are-people-saying-google-gemini-is-full-of-ghosts-1851243642"><span style="color: #01ffff;">“GPT-4 is full of ghosts. Gemini is also full of ghosts,” </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">said Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in a Thursday blog post. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">“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.” </span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://gizmodo.com/why-are-people-saying-google-gemini-is-full-of-ghosts-1851243642"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">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. </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">Google fired Blake Lemoine, an engineer working on its large language model LaMBDA, in 2022 after he claimed his company’s AI was alive.</span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;"> </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">Scientists were quick to deem Lemoine as crazy, but this idea that powerful chatbots are sentient just won’t go away.</span></a></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pixabay.com/photos/graveyard-dig-graves-tombstone-989920/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="654" data-original-width="1280" height="328" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfKcChhplS34EY43EIM-jF6yEMqgTO1nzNigk8Roop86iLi_EWv6QSYNqtVnCNgjTJDkrW_k6cBL-ZtmWvOtvtOcQecAmCQ1q1nOhlibwHHy1Iq2ZBnVF7GQNeh0JjbMl7NgdM6QxmUGrdL4kvvKn0PWhBnWmbYY_DqEs0YtzCr_WifBwEWLwc/w640-h328/cemetery-989920_1280.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-21765593820094800042024-02-04T11:12:00.006-05:002024-02-04T18:54:20.893-05:00The music meme ...<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/10H-9wr7GkY?si=6HIbZfB1TtzfdhuA" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;">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.</div></div>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-39862950916722971632024-02-04T10:51:00.007-05:002024-02-04T11:29:03.564-05:00This is why ...<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hXL6YHNC_Gw?si=jMezkUKrPF5zI4tk" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXL6YHNC_Gw"><span style="color: #ffa400;">This is why Trump became popular in the first place. </span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">- Jon Stewart</span></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"> Exactly.</p></div>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-40155172547198273362024-02-03T11:16:00.014-05:002024-02-03T16:10:19.240-05:00Its over now ...<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lumiere-video.github.io/#section_inpainting" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1008" data-original-width="1260" height="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCbQ0tTtfgqGBNONO8e63CDo314H_UNVaw5peUpPCV4sOh3SQB7PH5qDeFz90RbGk-5f5kInEHBQWNUtlqhyXs32mN0UKLud0tchY4wmf4wIAobfwJ2JQ2kSzjDygNz3XHGQHFufIICU9KnUaCSedpeX_9H8m_eDmS_vYUuhBQcY2WFqVdfxDl/w640-h512/lumiere.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />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 <b><a href="https://beyondrealtime.blogspot.com/search?q=AI"><span style="color: red;">AI </span></a></b>in ways thought impossible to contemplate just two years ago. When seeing <b><a href="https://lumiere-video.github.io/#section_inpainting"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Lumiere's</span></a></b> 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 <b><a href="https://beyondrealtime.blogspot.com/search?q=AI+video"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">AI to drive said video </span></a></b>as that's coming whether we like it or not.<p></p><p>I saw an excellent presentation on the power of <b><a href="https://chat.openai.com/auth/login"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Chat GPT</span></a></b> 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 <b><a href="https://beyondrealtime.blogspot.com/search?q=quantum+mechanics"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Quantum Mechanics</span></a></b>. Shit always happens. Just ask <b><a href="https://beyondrealtime.blogspot.com/search?q=Murphy"><span style="color: #ff00fe;">Murphy </span></a></b>to see why. :)</p><p>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, <b><a href="https://deepmind.google/"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Deep Mind's </span></a></b>tech is being folded into Google's <b><a href="https://deepmind.google/"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Gemini </span></a></b>as Deep Mind's years long research into science, medicine and game theory will help transform Google's AI into <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence"><span style="color: #04ff00;">AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) </span></a></b>within a guesstimate of 3-5 years. Regarding <b><span style="color: #fcff01;">ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence),</span></b> 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 <b><a href="https://beyondrealtime.blogspot.com/search?q=the+tides"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">analog computing,</span></a></b> 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.</p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wxLr02Dz2Sc?si=68PkdXaD8Y9thPvC" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">The Tech</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lumiere-video.github.io/#section_inpainting" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="509" data-original-width="1600" height="204" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhtGqI7XK0M6afkrfHkRRKDLIK-hkzpRcBkz29vziUkJUrk1qK18d-9DIYpxI5IGOxqYoR2NF4HVMrnmie8OYK6pErn_UR9QUCOU4sZOS60yhdFStqwAxXDC8BJtkz8ywPwZIA3Qi-XofqxuWR8rPbG8AYl_NdscgtBv_WEC4HuVMQaAaUqXpC/w640-h204/architecture-p-1600.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://lumiere-video.github.io/#section_inpainting"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">We introduce Lumiere -- a text-to-video diffusion model designed for synthesizing videos that portray realistic, diverse and coherent motion -</span><span style="color: #ffe599;">- a pivotal challenge in video synthesis</span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">. 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. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">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. </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">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. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">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.</span></a></b></div> <div><div style="text-align: center;">No doubt, as a videographer, I will be using this tech when it goes live.</div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Regarding Its over now ...</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wCtSa0exAH0?si=yRY3YcmG5ULXOWyL" title="YouTube video player" width="640"></iframe>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-29803868148060278142024-01-31T15:24:00.002-05:002024-01-31T15:27:37.942-05:00Spirals rule :)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasas-webb-depicts-staggering-structure-in-19-nearby-spiral-galaxies/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1280" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWWkM67hceGRNhyLvLO6DlF-DLzH40T_vnk4oy0OwwfHAdYA-6_pY_nTBtEPAa7UKGCcwamzfnfUyb7758TQJbTPm_tYSxgzmmgN_NJoCD5OnMZmuHgnXQwVjdUWNG_2Q3m006GYTemgR8nyULYst-AnQlcgQ7SmYZUDcRLioCHL82EGqmMThj/w640-h640/webb-stsci-01hawfwwhr520ab97fyjy25apm.webp" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasas-webb-depicts-staggering-structure-in-19-nearby-spiral-galaxies/"><span style="color: #ffa400;">The James Webb Space Telescope observed 19 nearby face-on spiral galaxies in near- and mid-infrared light as part of its contributions to the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) program. PHANGS also includes images and data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, which included observations taken in ultraviolet, visible, and radio light. </span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), PHANGS Team, Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI)</span></a></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Spirals rule, spiral galaxies that is. <br />The JWST & the Hubble strike yet again in showing just how beautiful reality truly is.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasas-webb-depicts-staggering-structure-in-19-nearby-spiral-galaxies/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="721" data-original-width="1152" height="401" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLUi9G8wm3ePThy0WBCnzokeYBOgl6gGXNZLmTrNvJYp_gkqG61JAuW2avgeJMIo8d86D1j1JQ1iLWKryPZVZprbOxWYQ-3G0xm7J4BnN6QtLxbav7yqBhnEyUgFvICyx4qyHq6nDm8NVcuLfn3DWGydwHGnVs5YldhVncLwbnoe8v6O2GEoKu/w640-h401/webb-hubble-stsci-01hm9s6n94yt76mp4etag5twkx-1k-e1706535184576.webp" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasas-webb-depicts-staggering-structure-in-19-nearby-spiral-galaxies/"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Face-on spiral galaxy, NGC 628, is split diagonally in this image: The James Webb Space Telescope’s observations appear at top left, and the Hubble Space Telescope’s on bottom right. Webb and Hubble’s images show a striking contrast, an inverse of darkness and light. Why? Webb’s observations combine near- and mid-infrared light and Hubble’s showcase visible light. Dust absorbs ultraviolet and visible light, and then re-emits it in the infrared. In Webb's images, we see dust glowing in infrared light. In Hubble’s images, dark regions are where starlight is absorbed by dust.</span></a><span style="color: #ffa400;"> </span><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasas-webb-depicts-staggering-structure-in-19-nearby-spiral-galaxies/"><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), and the PHANGS team</span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">NGC 628 via the Hubble. :)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasas-webb-depicts-staggering-structure-in-19-nearby-spiral-galaxies/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="801" data-original-width="1280" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPMFXRIuDDCC_Xnlc5F_1YaE2-S10XTKx14qu3-X1BZt26YFObyYEYf_mfhJ9HpCCfGrtiuTfPd5wtHLPmidatUr83IYVoG5KWtGOL2J-nnulpWXSiXPJK5nItJ3PnjyO1u_iiGYJda3q89ZL8p0cY4NAkRhvFdB5QBPH83hfMtXiOwJ22H5EO/w640-h400/hubble-ngc628-stsci-01hm9sp4kj6n0a1ykc25097d9k-2k.webp" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasas-webb-depicts-staggering-structure-in-19-nearby-spiral-galaxies/"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Hubble’s image of NGC 628 shows a densely populated face-on spiral galaxy anchored by its central region, which has a light yellow haze that takes up about a quarter of the view. The core is brightest at the center, washing out light from other objects. Delicate spiral arms start near the center and extend to the edges, rotating counterclockwise. There is more brown dust beginning at the center, but as the arms extend outward, brown dust lanes alternate with diffuse lines of bright blue stars. Throughout the spiral arms, there are bright pink patches of star-forming clusters. </span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">NASA, STScI</span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">NNGC 628 via the Webb</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasas-webb-depicts-staggering-structure-in-19-nearby-spiral-galaxies/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="801" data-original-width="1280" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq6RN-oBnJTUZtd9WuChphpjgHP1OntL39apXMwQMRtBSpFHl7XyVf8ANXOehpGdFLVowuNCofSSCmhK5jsRiTXMr52TZBzrsWrDXEqSmqK9FC65PYI0Fzmv9E0TMu5AbIfuoPv2vYZSVrWS4u-Phc7R3a_5SbeAcm7m_YLwZJRh9516K4YK0f/w640-h400/webb-ngc628-stsci-01hm9sjjyk57j82gwpyvv2292x-3k.webp" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasas-webb-depicts-staggering-structure-in-19-nearby-spiral-galaxies/"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Spiral galaxy NGC 628 is 32 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces. Webb’s image of NGC 628 shows a densely populated face-on spiral galaxy anchored by its central region, which has a light blue haze that takes up about a quarter of the view. In this circular core is the brightest blue area. Within the core are populations of older stars, represented by many pinpoints of blue light. Spiny spiral arms made of stars, gas, and dust also start at the center, largely starting in the wider area of the blue haze. The spiral arms extend to the edges, rotating counterclockwise. The spiraling filamentary structure looks somewhat like a cross section of a nautilus shell. The arms of the galaxy are largely orange, ranging from dark to bright orange. Scattered across the packed scene are some additional bright blue pinpoints of light, which are stars spread throughout the galaxy. In areas where there is less orange, it is darker, and some dark regions look more circular. A prominent dark “bubble” appears to the top left of the blue core. And a wider, elliptical “bubble” to the bottom right.</span></a><span style="color: #ffa400;"> </span><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasas-webb-depicts-staggering-structure-in-19-nearby-spiral-galaxies/"><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), and the PHANGS team</span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">And last but not least, NCG 1300. :)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasas-webb-depicts-staggering-structure-in-19-nearby-spiral-galaxies/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="770" data-original-width="1280" height="386" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkNild-jq82463doux8Toq3aWii4UI-2qeN8RVQ_h5PxLn37F1x8s1x1erd_17OHnlHU9UlGIYDD-itLTKNI7m3J2V0oLw-ERr7tHInxos2yaO6cXrI0MdKr5h5SzBclW4oMlUX-H3Z-Dk1bXSY37kXrOp7bgZwys8QAZckOMCtde3y8ERyMKo/w640-h386/webb-ngc1300-stsci-01hm9w90rshfhaeaw5fkgvjcth-2k.webp" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasas-webb-depicts-staggering-structure-in-19-nearby-spiral-galaxies/"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Spiral galaxy NGC 1300 is 69 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus.</span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasas-webb-depicts-staggering-structure-in-19-nearby-spiral-galaxies/"><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), and the PHANGS team</span></a></div></div></div></div></div> <p></p>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-38523082941431917952024-01-29T18:47:00.010-05:002024-01-31T15:35:28.171-05:00Matter wave<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNZ7pRHfOrzYJhnPnIFqBzEGVKBFdsrNH_P4HNR87GkeGGR9qRRKX05nNmJ-UuuGCEvA9XOdAr0k4Ff4wkfHCXFoB7tpsGCnbWFIMY0fpG7y904SN3RmfIYrzCwmmb2Q-yUyt7fVf7C7SZV4IeP1mh-db3qJword27OtbCHAU-g8Ew7bGW6QBa/s2048/tripdich2048.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="571" data-original-width="2048" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNZ7pRHfOrzYJhnPnIFqBzEGVKBFdsrNH_P4HNR87GkeGGR9qRRKX05nNmJ-UuuGCEvA9XOdAr0k4Ff4wkfHCXFoB7tpsGCnbWFIMY0fpG7y904SN3RmfIYrzCwmmb2Q-yUyt7fVf7C7SZV4IeP1mh-db3qJword27OtbCHAU-g8Ew7bGW6QBa/w640-h178/tripdich2048.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"> <span style="color: #ffa400;">A simple matter of 3</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Light is extremely weird. Either analog or digital, depending on its state, <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon"><span style="color: #fcff01;">photons,</span></a></b> the force carrier of the electromagnetic, is an analog wave when traveling in free space but when absorbed by an electron, it becomes digital or a packet of energy i.e. <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum"><span style="color: #01ffff;">quantum </span></a></b>as it must transform in such a way for it to be properly absorbed by, in this case, an electron. When a electron's energy level drops, the photon emitted reverts back to being an analog wave, which means ... reality is digital with analog override, endlessly switching from one to the other as needs warrant. According to <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_de_Broglie"><span style="color: #04ff00;">Louis de Broglie</span></a></b>, this notion of <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_wave#De_Broglie_hypothesis"><span style="color: #ffa400;">matter/wave</span></a></b>/digital/analog duality applies to all particles, which means reality is in constant flux, forever switching from one state to the other, forever driven by the two laws of thermodynamics whereby <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamics"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed</span></a></b> and ... <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">in a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems never decreases. A common corollary of the statement is that heat does not spontaneously pass from a colder body to a warmer body.</span></a></b> What's even stranger is whenever a particle is "measured", it becomes, in effect, digital just as a photon becomes digital whenever its absorbed by any given particle. This analog/digital duality also applies to the other force particles as well.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_de_Broglie" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="381" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw0Qg3LHHSWAJ1iyanU4GHwj6WrF3IlL0ogwjbe_5Kq5U0GhUqB69VKsdNZIETgdlDU0NK2J6R321qqLMJ6ewpL2eZGOH24EEPpGruKDQJsDwSVmqJaqgy9eTIY0I8FKujgQW-j8hKnSDMneVSxjtldSclYtRd4AXxxFEx53CPXDAnchfsOqMO/s16000/Broglie_Big.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_de_Broglie"><span style="color: #ffa400;">deBroglie in 1829</span></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">The Photoelectric effect </span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Seen below are photons, comprised of analog waves, striking a metal plate. When absorbed by the metal plate's electrons, the photons transform into <b><span style="color: #fcff01;">quanta</span></b> or packets of energy <span style="color: #ffa400;">(digital)</span>, able to be absorbed by the metal plates's electrons, thus causing said electrons to be dislodged from the plate. The higher the frequency of light, aka photons, the higher altitude the electrons attain when dislodged from the plate.</div><div><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1280" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8cl6V4MTp7YkYR98NUo4Tk9tCozY1rxYKJhdVe0SXIAeizj-QetZ-JAkQt7Y4aGIk9lr2fFZf-W5jfbDNhxS8D1PduCl9U9KdWpyi8ihB-nYMSMY1kioV_eUSfP_3MCJlG_xSsjIoaMmkhB4Qut1n_qUNTPMt8zDAugOdgoVdSnIoJg4l17_A/w640-h640/1280px-Photoelectric_effect_in_a_solid_-_diagram.svg.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect"><span style="color: #ffa400;">The emission of electrons from a metal plate caused by light quanta – </span><span style="color: #fcff01;">photons</span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Note: Photons are <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson"><span style="color: #01ffff;">bosons</span></a></b>, the force carrier, in this instance, of electromagnetism,</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="655" data-original-width="1920" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG117BxNvcNQZUjEUzjYJ0Bt5GT19gEcUh7BZwPjf001p1bahLJKKL0uRvGnxHWuT6IHdy9ipJJE4lVr6csHtagSzJsIEMw29V7vcA5OrhkEx2NqxKksP43rA8i3eGilDLwuqV-jwhKNEyHZK6v1725T3PFrt74n-S2S1EvKDQl3MS2HCcZLn5/w640-h218/Bosons-Hadrons-Fermions-RGB-png2.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson"><span style="color: #ff00fe;">Bosons</span><span style="color: #ffa400;"> form one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particle, the other being </span><span style="color: #ff00fe;">fermions</span><span style="color: #ffa400;">. </span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">All subatomic particles </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">must be one or the other.</span><span style="color: #ffa400;"> A composite particle </span><span style="color: #04ff00;">(hadron)</span><span style="color: #ffa400;"> may fall into either class depending on its composition.</span></a> Bosons are the force carriers of electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force and possibly gravity. The Higgs is a boson dealing with the issue of mass.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermion"><span style="color: #04ff00;">Fermions</span><span style="color: #ffa400;"> form one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particles, the other being </span><span style="color: #04ff00;">bosons</span><span style="color: #ffa400;">. </span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermion"><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">A composite particle </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">(hadron)</span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;"> is a fermion).</span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermion"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Bosons are particles that carry energy and forces throughout the universe. </span><span style="color: #04ff00;">Think Photons :) </span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermion"><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">An elementary particle</span><span style="color: #01ffff;"> (electron)</span><span style="color: #fcff01;"> is both a lepton & fermion.</span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermion"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Hadrons</span><span style="color: #ffa400;"> consist of quarks. </span><span style="color: #fcff01;">Think protons and neutrons :)</span></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">The Matter Wave</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNg_fgZVkyNW3IPmTefSQshlRw8SsFU-hlBRpCZmpOilvqoV0efW0tryrDtHx3PTqXilJClRFLF961FhWmKbMYQegkcjtzMX02Clh0RUUZPOc6D1c8Bi7wITVLLLFRjiYfbmwY4Kylqhsyc_l4-Hfe1Zxlu1QfW_mOECYTEZHlljCQtFaPQbJ8/s1263/800px-Propagation_of_a_de_broglie_wave.svg.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1263" data-original-width="800" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNg_fgZVkyNW3IPmTefSQshlRw8SsFU-hlBRpCZmpOilvqoV0efW0tryrDtHx3PTqXilJClRFLF961FhWmKbMYQegkcjtzMX02Clh0RUUZPOc6D1c8Bi7wITVLLLFRjiYfbmwY4Kylqhsyc_l4-Hfe1Zxlu1QfW_mOECYTEZHlljCQtFaPQbJ8/w406-h640/800px-Propagation_of_a_de_broglie_wave.svg.jpg" width="406" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_wave#De_Broglie_hypothesis"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Propagation of de Broglie waves in one dimension – real part of the complex amplitude is blue, imaginary part is green. </span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">The probability (shown as the color opacity) of finding the particle at a given point x is spread out like a waveform; there is no definite position of the particle. </span><span style="color: #ffa400;">As the amplitude increases above zero the slope decreases, so the amplitude diminishes again, and vice versa. </span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">The result is an alternating amplitude: a wave. Top: plane wave. Bottom: wave packet.</span></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGAs60JRir66KpddwRQ5Nvu83te7UcnXeMxEpIkvFbTtXPZT0-7gFsslOE1VQMrkN7QGOUkjki_l48SOL6uaMDdkodMN8HhK8AZvyjp9_T_dcdcpcBL9GkdlVRPJvIbGxlN2I1w3MSQdsohKa2y0NO1U_m68HayiiAFqIXkh6-3YoKI9_jpOGx/s2048/nigh_harbor2048.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1368" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGAs60JRir66KpddwRQ5Nvu83te7UcnXeMxEpIkvFbTtXPZT0-7gFsslOE1VQMrkN7QGOUkjki_l48SOL6uaMDdkodMN8HhK8AZvyjp9_T_dcdcpcBL9GkdlVRPJvIbGxlN2I1w3MSQdsohKa2y0NO1U_m68HayiiAFqIXkh6-3YoKI9_jpOGx/w428-h640/nigh_harbor2048.jpg" width="428" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Safe Haven</span></div><p></p>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-36608098922654320332024-01-25T10:34:00.002-05:002024-01-30T09:10:54.693-05:00Carbon Copy<p style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOIDJGgVVHkDNhC0Xhr33_CWcvK_xsDgWNQ55d2On-ICIvZLRH5bWen7uqjZfBa8SZrSlGp62o2fxOLQPU7MjxNi8q8QX0-9hry5oQUozH7MkNRVJR6Or-ZIkE1rUsi38AJq1-DssQ2EKotgs1KYhAW8AV-wRaOl1MN8QXIaP7gAqKSVoFuRSI/s555/reid.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="555" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOIDJGgVVHkDNhC0Xhr33_CWcvK_xsDgWNQ55d2On-ICIvZLRH5bWen7uqjZfBa8SZrSlGp62o2fxOLQPU7MjxNi8q8QX0-9hry5oQUozH7MkNRVJR6Or-ZIkE1rUsi38AJq1-DssQ2EKotgs1KYhAW8AV-wRaOl1MN8QXIaP7gAqKSVoFuRSI/s16000/reid.jpg" /></a></p><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/25/business/ai-image-generators-openai-microsoft-midjourney-copyright.html" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="974" data-original-width="615" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBK2OaKv3jRvCuBjbxfp9d89PGS5rRZZ8jZrVcN-Bae-2AgKSDb0-aN7jtMgNgMYKSmnO0pafJnOvXE7OQcHq3qiohKlL8axWV8WiUY38Gw8__ISxQ4V28mbsibd7XLW4nsdG2_VBiESyH1Z2vd6NQr_imVFlOSwlZF6rgZh82u17NfkrvqjAc/s16000/joker.jpg" /></a></p><p style="text-align: center;">Copyright, IMHO, is now moot as <b><a href="https://beyondrealtime.blogspot.com/search?q=ai"><span style="color: red;">AI's </span></a></b>everywhere, taking data in and manipulating it in ways thought impossible until now. Every time someone thinks AI can be truly regulated is drinking heavy brew as the tech's evolving in real time as code has to write code in order for AI to react to the real world in real time thanks to the inherent power of analog used in conjunction with neural nets, the two constructs enabling AI to do what its doing in the year of our lord 2024.</p><p style="text-align: center;">To whit</p><p><b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/25/business/ai-image-generators-openai-microsoft-midjourney-copyright.html"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">When Reid Southen, a movie concept artist based in Michigan, tried an A.I. image generator for the first time, he was intrigued by its power to transform simple text prompts into images.</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/25/business/ai-image-generators-openai-microsoft-midjourney-copyright.html"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">But after he learned how A.I. systems were trained on other people’s artwork, his curiosity gave way to more unsettling thoughts: </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">Were the tools exploiting artists and violating copyright in the process?</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/25/business/ai-image-generators-openai-microsoft-midjourney-copyright.html"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Inspired by tests he saw circulating online, he asked Midjourney, an A.I. image generator, to create an image of Joaquin Phoenix from </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">“The Joker.” </span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">In seconds, the system made an image nearly identical to a frame from the 2019 film.</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/25/business/ai-image-generators-openai-microsoft-midjourney-copyright.html"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus at New York University and A.I. expert who runs the newsletter </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">“Marcus on A.I.,</span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">” collaborated with Mr. Southen to run even more prompts. Mr. Marcus suggested removing specific copyrighted references. </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">“Videogame hedgehog” </span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">returned Sonic, Sega’s wisecracking protagonist. </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">“Animated toys” </span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">created a tableau featuring Woody, Buzz and other characters from Pixar’s </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">“Toy Story.” </span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">When Mr. Southen and Mr. Marcus tried </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">“popular movie screencap,” </span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">out popped Iron Man, the Marvel character, in a familiar pose.</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/25/business/ai-image-generators-openai-microsoft-midjourney-copyright.html"><span style="color: #ffe599;">“What they’re doing is clear evidence of exploitation and using I.P. that they don’t have licenses to,”</span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"> said Mr. Southen, referring to A.I. companies’ use of intellectual property.</span></a></b></p><p style="text-align: center;"> Is it plagiarism, yes, can it be controlled??? <b><span style="color: #fcff01;">N</span></b><b><span style="color: #fcff01;">o one knows, do one. </span><span style="color: #04ff00;">- Fats Waller</span></b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Dupes, rev II</p><p><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright"><img alt="A grid of 9 images produced by generative AI that are recognizable actors and characters from movies, video games, and television." aria-label="A grid of 9 images produced by generative AI that are recognizable actors and characters from movies, video games, and television." class="rm-lazyloadable-image rm-hero-media" fetchpriority="high" height="358" role="img" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-grid-of-9-images-produced-by-generative-ai-that-are-recognizable-actors-and-characters-from-movies-video-games-and-televisio.jpg?id=51011919&width=1200&height=671" style="object-fit: cover;" width="640" /></a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright"><span style="color: #ffa400;">The authors found that Midjourney could create all these images, which appear to display copyrighted material. </span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">GARY MARCUS AND REID SOUTHEN VIA MIDJOURNEY</span></a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">The degree to which large language models (LLMs) might </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">“memorize” </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">some of their training inputs has long been a question, raised by scholars including Google DeepMind’s Nicholas Carlini and the first author of this article (Gary Marcus). </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">Recent empirical work has shown that LLMs are in some instances capable of reproducing, or reproducing with minor changes, substantial chunks of text that appear in their training sets.</span></a></b></p><p style="text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">For example, a 2023 paper by Milad Nasr and colleagues showed that LLMs can be prompted into dumping private information such as email addresses and phone numbers. Carlini and coauthors recently showed that larger chatbot models (though not smaller ones) sometimes regurgitated large chunks of text verbatim.</span></a></b></p><p style="text-align: center;">And this.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright"><span style="color: #d5a6bd;">Similarly, the recent lawsuit that The New York Times filed against OpenAI showed many examples in which OpenAI software re-created New York Times stories nearly verbatim </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">(words in red are verbatim):</span></a></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="679" data-original-width="770" height="564" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrTGLSrjFvtie-oZjLuHqe-aW8lgk9XQg57AlTzEKKunKEwKxs5FTxoOe-1TOtWs4WPIDqw4xuxiDDHBGUokGmQCbUfDBH3nIVhlp-ik2kxhmAFhUYPYFNMQHRDua_oW_Be0lYo5ipqs4kNL5IIiHoJF_aTNol9egXjOuNx38TCjWjUr5BjKTW/w640-h564/side-by-side-images-compare-output-from-gpt-4-with-a-new-york-times-article-the-verbatim-copy-is-in-red-and-covers-almost-the.webp" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">As proof of the inherent unknowability of AI thanks to code writing code is this blurb from <b><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">IEEE</span></a>.</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">Such questions are hard to answer with precision, in part because LLMs are</span> <span style="color: red;">“black boxes”</span>—<span style="color: #ffe599;">systems in which we do not fully understand the relation between input (training data) and outputs. </span><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">What’s more, outputs can vary unpredictably from one moment to the next. The prevalence of plagiaristic responses likely depends heavily on factors such as the size of the model and the exact nature of the training set. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">Since LLMs are fundamentally black boxes </span><span style="color: red;">(even to their own makers, whether open-sourced or not),</span> <span style="color: #b6d7a8;">questions about plagiaristic prevalence can probably only be answered experimentally, and perhaps even then only tentatively.</span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Remember, this is just the beginning.</div>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-55673405287312896232024-01-19T16:40:00.002-05:002024-01-19T16:51:22.926-05:00Ready, Fire, Aim/rev II<p> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/19/fani-willis-nathan-wade-plane-tickets/"><img alt="" class="w-100 mw-100 h-auto" decoding="async" height="400" sizes="(max-width: 440px) 440px,(max-width: 600px) 691px,(max-width: 768px) 691px,(min-width: 769px) and (max-width: 1023px) 960px,(min-width: 1024px) and (max-width: 1299px) 530px,(min-width: 1300px) and (max-width: 1439px) 691px,(min-width: 1440px) 916px,440px" srcset="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/QDVWJTFJGLP5CYGXK3RQON4AEE_size-normalized.jpg&w=440 400w,https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/QDVWJTFJGLP5CYGXK3RQON4AEE_size-normalized.jpg&w=540 540w,https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/QDVWJTFJGLP5CYGXK3RQON4AEE_size-normalized.jpg&w=691 691w,https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/QDVWJTFJGLP5CYGXK3RQON4AEE_size-normalized.jpg&w=767 767w,https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/QDVWJTFJGLP5CYGXK3RQON4AEE_size-normalized.jpg&w=916 916w,https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/QDVWJTFJGLP5CYGXK3RQON4AEE_size-normalized.jpg&w=1200 1200w" style="background-size: cover; max-width: 1200px;" width="600" /></a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/19/fani-willis-nathan-wade-plane-tickets/"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis speaks during a news conference on Aug. 14 in Atlanta. Standing next to her is Nathan Wade, an outside attorney hired to lead the racketeering case against former president Donald Trump and more than a dozen of his allies. </span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">(Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)</span></a></p><p style="text-align: center;">Ready, Fire, Aim/rev II</p><p><b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/19/fani-willis-nathan-wade-plane-tickets/"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">The lead prosecutor in the election interference case against former president Donald Trump </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">paid for at least two airline trips with embattled Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) while the investigation was underway, according to bank statements filed in his divorce case Friday.</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/19/fani-willis-nathan-wade-plane-tickets/"><span style="color: #01ffff;">The bank statements may corroborate an accusation leveled against Willis and prosecutor Nathan Wade by one of Trump’s co-defendants that they have been engaged in an improper personal relationship. </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">The statements were part of a filing by lawyers for Wade’s estranged wife, Joycelyn Mayfield Wade, in an effort to compel Willis to testify in the divorce proceeding, which the district attorney sought to avoid in a separate filing on Thursday</span></a></b></p><p style="text-align: center;">It gets better ...</p><p><b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/19/fani-willis-nathan-wade-plane-tickets/"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">Former Trump campaign aide Mike Roman, who is charged alongside Trump in the Georgia case, has argued that Willis improperly benefited from hiring Wade as a special prosecutor by receiving free travel from him. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">Wade, who is an attorney in private practice, has earned more than $650,000 from Willis’s office for his work.</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/19/fani-willis-nathan-wade-plane-tickets/"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">In addition to seeking to disqualify Willis and Wade, Roman also seeks to have the entire case dismissed. In his filing this month, he argued that in addition to violating rules of professional conduct, </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">Willis may be guilty of fraud if she accepted gifts from an employee whom she hired.</span></a></b></p><p style="text-align: center;">Methinks Agent Orange may actually be <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladstone_Gander"><span style="color: #04ff00;">Gladstone Gander,</span></a></b> an entity blessed with good luck as it seems The Donald sleazes out of trouble in ways boggling the mind. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladstone_Gander" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="377" data-original-width="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB2KkHXwGAZ-Ul7Y54dl-voqiQMILUJjQnxb5s2F92uGKceZgNqpXb9FAmqNLu-Q0kMYH-O4RnUj6BsXZ33QXuPX7hXFAT-Snck_rwcdDLkR_J9mNA_5PPP2CjQjDtZA83-zaN_COlrkWaqZSHAmlzAG9UMAtN7qmjiRj60xmklWfdIpKRlXr5/s16000/GladstoneGander.jpg" /></a><br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladstone_Gander"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Gladstone Gander</span></a> <span style="color: #ffa400;">...</span><br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladstone_Gander"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">is an anthropomorphic gander (male goose) who possesses exceptionally good luck <br />that grants him anything he desires as well as protecting him from any harm. </span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Any questions?</div>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-63448951044629505712024-01-19T11:17:00.012-05:002024-01-19T11:42:41.343-05:00The number is ... :)<a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-math-fans-a-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-number-42/"><img alt="brass numbers 42 on door" class="lead_image__img-e3fpf" fetchpriority="high" height="427" pinger-seen="true" sizes="(min-width: 900px) 900px, (min-resolution: 2dppx) 75vw, (min-resolution: 2.1dppx) 50vw, 100vw" src="https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/6707FBEA-499C-41ED-9532AB44DDA359C1_source.jpg?w=600" srcset="https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/6707FBEA-499C-41ED-9532AB44DDA359C1_source.jpg?w=600 600w, https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/6707FBEA-499C-41ED-9532AB44DDA359C1_source.jpg?w=900 900w, https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/6707FBEA-499C-41ED-9532AB44DDA359C1_source.jpg?w=1000 1000w, https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/6707FBEA-499C-41ED-9532AB44DDA359C1_source.jpg?w=1200 1200w, https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/6707FBEA-499C-41ED-9532AB44DDA359C1_source.jpg?w=1350 1350w" style="--h: 2154; --w: 3231;" width="640" /></a><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-math-fans-a-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-number-42/"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Credit: Christina Hemsley </span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Getty Images</span></a></p><p style="text-align: center;">Douglas Adams' <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy"><span style="color: #04ff00;">The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's </span></a></b>a marvel. His gentle sense of humor, combined with a child like appreciation of reality at deep level, resonates with me without question. Additionally, the number 42, the answer to what existence truly is, as computed by <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_characters#Deep_Thought"><span style="color: #fcff01;">Deep Thought</span></a></b>, has mystical properties waxed poetic by mathematicians of all stripes in a detailed Scientific American piece titled <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_characters#Deep_Thought"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">For Math Fans: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Number 42</span></a></b>. :)</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=866" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="448" data-original-width="639" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL6_IZRahaJOUsqHB5GxNifAKUfN6pNdNKH4eg4WMlVHxfLgpVXMfxwDksPZfKah2lj5x8YYEF24ONE8AIIcoCYy6d0JqJcZzrJcdrzEesp0Vx8Ri6wOh5UU0DbnP5SFn3GxjHplqJzcT2b7Z8C-WR17O3oZufqZ7yIudwbPZj7u_gd7DY2wFs/s16000/Deep_Thought_film.webp" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=866"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Deep Thought</span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=866"><br /></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><b><a href="http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=866"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">According to The Hitchhiker's Guide, millions of years ago there was a race of hyperintelligent pandimensional beings who wanted to know about the meaning of life. To settle the issue they built a </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">"stupendous super computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks had been connected up it had started from </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">'I think therefore I am' </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">and got as far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off..."</span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><b><a href="http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=866"><br /></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Details :)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><b><a href="http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=866"><br /></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><b><a href="http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=866"><span style="color: #ffe599;">It was the size of a small city.</span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><b><a href="http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=866"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">Its main console was installed in a specially designed executive office, mounted on an enormous executive desk of finest ultramahagony topped with rich ultrared leather. The dark carpeting was discreetly sumptuous, exotic potted plants and tastefully engraved prints of the principal computer programmers and their families were deployed liberally about the room, and stately windows looked out upon a tree-lined public square.</span></a></b></div></div><p style="text-align: center;">The search begins. :)</p><p><b><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-math-fans-a-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-number-42/"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Everyone loves unsolved mysteries. Examples include Amelia Earhart’s disappearance over the Pacific in 1937 and the daring escape of inmates Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin from Alcatraz Island in California in 1962. Moreover our interest holds even if the mystery is based on a joke. Take author Douglas Adams’s popular 1979 science-fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the first in a series of five. Toward the end of the book, the supercomputer Deep Thought reveals that the answer to the </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">“Great Question” </span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">of </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">“Life, the Universe and Everything” </span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">is </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">“forty-two.”</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-math-fans-a-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-number-42/"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years to calculate the answer to the ultimate question. The characters tasked with getting that answer are disappointed because it is not very useful. Yet, as the computer points out, the question itself was vaguely formulated. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">To find the correct statement of the query whose answer is 42, the computer will have to build a new version of itself. That, too, will take time. </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">The new version of the computer is Earth. </span><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">To find out what happens next, you’ll have to read Adams’s books.</span></a></b></p><p style="text-align: center;">The Mystery of 42</p><p><b><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-math-fans-a-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-number-42/"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">The number 42 also turns up in a whole string of curious coincidences whose significance is probably not worth the effort to figure out. For example:</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-math-fans-a-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-number-42/"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">In ancient Egyptian mythology, during the judgment of souls, </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">the dead had to declare before 42 judges that they had not committed any of 42 sins.</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-math-fans-a-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-number-42/"><span style="color: #ffe599;">The marathon distance of 42.195 kilometers corresponds to the legend of how far the ancient Greek messenger Pheidippides traveled between Marathon and Athens to announce victory over the Persians in 490 B.C. (</span><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">The fact that the kilometer had not yet been defined at that time only makes the connection all the more astonishing.)</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-math-fans-a-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-number-42/"><span style="color: #ffe599;">Ancient Tibet had 42 rulers. </span><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">Nyatri Tsenpo, who reigned around 127 B.C., was the first. And </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">Langdarma, who ruled from 836 to 842 A.D. (i.e., the 42nd year of the ninth century),</span><span style="color: #b6d7a8;"> was the last.</span></a></b></p><p><b><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-math-fans-a-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-number-42/"><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">The Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed in Europe, </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">has 42 lines of text per column and is also called the </span><span style="color: #01ffff;"><span>“</span><span>Forty-Two-Line Bible.”</span></span></a></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="920" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0uyR-RVdrlUw_qb7eZBRyE_g49zOxjR5vUTACKvPuuQVbm_3T3jmxeXirfcpPhgy8AuWGHUWSRkEHChKfAtygcec5QQiTkWxh8ZLNHoTtuUt8VWzwYDbYZPn8-b-BLbce69bKUOw9yBFb_5NZh6DtMPRW9fn6Bp5naSDZUWhABVYoZJHnrR8z/w392-h640/71i2fm1QJQL._SL1500_.jpg" width="392" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">The SA piece goes on with additional takes on the number 42 with emphasis on using higher math functions to explain why 42 actually matters, explanations one and all extending well beyond the skill set of yours truly. :)</div>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-78374268225914472852024-01-15T09:59:00.008-05:002024-01-30T09:12:18.846-05:00The Whale<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/01/moby-dick-whale-book-ship-massachusetts-captain-ahab.html" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1040" data-original-width="1560" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBHKKxQ4Rp8_7z6fOMklxHRk_L-b_nEgq1umUr-kthgHlnesKWrdwstdFNLC9a4F4tCkBwqMGZA4e4Gt9VSiZez8sw70ZUza8R8tVJ0yDr2w6pd_QqS_WLe092orIVOgOuHqaDXvVaZDFeOshoBL9BlkogMwXJGBsQKIP2VGeyOEVccp8-E6pU/w640-h426/b68439cf-7de1-40c8-86b4-5326138aa012.gif" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/01/moby-dick-whale-book-ship-massachusetts-captain-ahab.html"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Photo illustration by Slate. </span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;"><span>P</span><span>hotos by Getty Images Plus.</span></span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Yours truly has actually read <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Dick"><span style="color: #ffe599;">Moby Dick</span></a></b> twice as Melville's tome about revenge, existence and the great unknowable of reality resonates to the nth degree with its deep connect to Macbeth, Shakespeare's profound take on existentialism and the pursuit of power. To add intrigue to the novel, Melvilles adds in a bit of science to show just how intense whaling truly was along with the issue of the homoerotic as threes years spent on a whaling ship without the need to do something about sex is an impossibility in this writer's humble opinion. :)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> The <b><a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/01/moby-dick-whale-book-ship-massachusetts-captain-ahab.html"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Moby-Dick Marathon</span></a></b> also reminds one of the homage paid to <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Ulysses</span></a></b> whereupon devoted readers of Joyce's masterpiece gather together every June 16 for <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday"><span style="color: #04ff00;">Bloomsday</span></a></b> to walk the environs of Dublin, tracking the path taken by Leopold Bloom and others, indirectly relating to the 10 year journey of Odysseus as depicted in Homer's epic, <b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey"><span style="color: #01ffff;">The Odyssey</span></a>. </b>:)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="599" data-original-width="606" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJWj-cq-BXhjIwTxW3Yi7T7hIPhl5Ydcg0fscb4TBVbjYEFhPCTPpnZLVfhzkwMbj8lFk90MYfck1zcqxVV90_olt_OOR8gyXU7G-hUg8SrDogW_7LGrKah-RFJo6W7Fn3GDlrzyXTFtbdPc9YRGJ2Cm1fXpXuMamSPx3hZHB_eQiRextSTbfh/s16000/%D7%99%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%A1%D7%A1.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Ulysses Dublin map</span></a></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><ol style="text-align: left;"><ol><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><b>Leopold Bloom's home at 7 Eccles Street[14] – Episode 4, Calypso; Episode 17, Ithaca; and Episode 18, Penelope</b></span></a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)"><b><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">Post office, Westland Row – Episode 5, Lotus Eaters</span></b></a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><b>Sweny's pharmacy, Lombard Street, Lincoln Place[15] (where Bloom bought soap) – Episode 5, Lotus Eaters</b></span></a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)"><b><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">the Freeman's Journal, Prince's Street,[16] off of O'Connell Street – Episode 7, Aeolus</span></b></a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><b>And – not far away – Graham Lemon's candy shop, 49 Lower O'Connell Street; it starts Episode 8, Lestrygonians</b></span></a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)"><b><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">Davy Byrne's pub – Episode 8, Lestrygonians</span></b></a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><b>National Library of Ireland – Episode 9, Scylla and Charybdis</b></span></a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)"><b><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">Ormond Hotel[17] on the banks of the Liffey – Episode 11, Sirens</span></b></a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><b>Barney Kiernan's pub – Episode 12, Cyclops</b></span></a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)"><b><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">Maternity hospital – Episode 14, Oxen of the Sun</span></b></a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)"><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><b>Bella Cohen's brothel – Episode 15, Circe</b></span></a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)"><b><span style="color: #b6d7a8;">Cabman's shelter, Butt Bridge – Episode 16, Eumaeus</span></b></a></li></ol></ol></div><p><b><a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/01/moby-dick-whale-book-ship-massachusetts-captain-ahab.html"><span style="color: #01ffff;">I sat cross-legged on the port side of the ship, a few feet away from the captain’s helm, flanked by a thicket of Moby-Dick zealots who would remain here for the next 25 hours in an attempt to consume the full scope of the novel in one uninterrupted reading session</span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">. Each of them brandished their own bespoke copy of the novel, representing a century’s worth of differing editions—some dense and pocket Bible–like, some paperback and battered, others regal and elegiac with golden bindings, all cracked open to Page 1. The first speaker took the lectern at noon after the strike of eight bells. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">“Call me Ishmael,” </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">the famous opening words, sent a ripple of applause through the room.</span></a></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cachalot_-_Sperm_whale_-_Drawing_by_Johann_Anderson_1746.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="422" data-original-width="587" height="460" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNkFl7HKqh9NsluIjTq8_ftGr_3Yj9hDMI6m81R3S3mWR-tb_IHBLEIE8VI8hX4MHbTnBeKwXS8aaKfZGsoep8cPMeuoogPnbrvtpZ7LR9Pp5nTXWtW5DDzNjo9hN5H1XvugfpUbcs1C-OWGd1wsXu7Z5xcVBys6Tv7RrsniwjaGREpZuyoRSU/w640-h460/Cachalot_-_Sperm_whale_-_Drawing_by_Johann_Anderson_1746mod%202.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cachalot_-_Sperm_whale_-_Drawing_by_Johann_Anderson_1746.JPG"><span style="color: #ffa400;"><br /></span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cachalot_-_Sperm_whale_-_Drawing_by_Johann_Anderson_1746.JPG"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Cachalot_-_Sperm_whale_-_</span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Drawing_by_Johann_Anderson_1746mod 2</span></a></div>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-32301457862536233102024-01-14T11:07:00.005-05:002024-01-16T09:19:04.282-05:00Betwixt & Between<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjg1mfTpvD1XNZZJ1qUuuhRgsVZ2K4Incf3maHbI8bVapFENZ52d1yU2yxPij2uXaCECZGge0jsZoCHtlFG3CrM06zzgof_GHEm6BvkbGZ2Q6ViFb8i3-J2QjvDGpms7lX-VSc9ssAi-b7Hqh9KK4-XNPRLdd0PcW7TuCEdezvxzJlbIacwHTb-" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="1024" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjg1mfTpvD1XNZZJ1qUuuhRgsVZ2K4Incf3maHbI8bVapFENZ52d1yU2yxPij2uXaCECZGge0jsZoCHtlFG3CrM06zzgof_GHEm6BvkbGZ2Q6ViFb8i3-J2QjvDGpms7lX-VSc9ssAi-b7Hqh9KK4-XNPRLdd0PcW7TuCEdezvxzJlbIacwHTb-=w640-h426" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjg1mfTpvD1XNZZJ1qUuuhRgsVZ2K4Incf3maHbI8bVapFENZ52d1yU2yxPij2uXaCECZGge0jsZoCHtlFG3CrM06zzgof_GHEm6BvkbGZ2Q6ViFb8i3-J2QjvDGpms7lX-VSc9ssAi-b7Hqh9KK4-XNPRLdd0PcW7TuCEdezvxzJlbIacwHTb-"><span style="color: #ffa400;">President Joe Biden delivers remarks at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, January 8, 2024. </span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Stephanie Scarbrough/AP Photo</span></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">A terrific piece in <b><a href="https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-01-10-biden-box/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Why+and+Where+the+Working+Class+Turned+Right+%7C+Weekend+Reads&utm_campaign=Weekend+Prospect+Reads+1132024"><span style="color: #04ff00;">The American Prospect</span></a></b> echoes sentiments held by many Americans including yours truly as the distinct possibility of Biden losing to Agent Orange is no longer a long shot in any way, shape or fashion given the US foreign policy disasters Joe has created without understanding the true costs with disaster no. 1 being Ukraine and disaster no. 2, Israel, something akin to what happened in Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan, fubars one and all, perpetrated by our so-called leaders telling us great unwashed that they alone know what's best for a once great country known as America. The damage to the US is huge as the credibility of this once great nation is now in tatters, something the Repugs will jump on in the general election in an NYC second.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjg1mfTpvD1XNZZJ1qUuuhRgsVZ2K4Incf3maHbI8bVapFENZ52d1yU2yxPij2uXaCECZGge0jsZoCHtlFG3CrM06zzgof_GHEm6BvkbGZ2Q6ViFb8i3-J2QjvDGpms7lX-VSc9ssAi-b7Hqh9KK4-XNPRLdd0PcW7TuCEdezvxzJlbIacwHTb-"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">Reports of a private conversation between former President Obama and President Biden expressing Obama’s anguish about Biden losing the 2024 election are only the latest sign </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">of well-informed panic in senior Democratic ranks.</span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;"> Several of us at the Prospect have entertained the thought that Biden is doomed and that the Democrats need to get another candidate.</span></a></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjg1mfTpvD1XNZZJ1qUuuhRgsVZ2K4Incf3maHbI8bVapFENZ52d1yU2yxPij2uXaCECZGge0jsZoCHtlFG3CrM06zzgof_GHEm6BvkbGZ2Q6ViFb8i3-J2QjvDGpms7lX-VSc9ssAi-b7Hqh9KK4-XNPRLdd0PcW7TuCEdezvxzJlbIacwHTb-"><br /></a></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjg1mfTpvD1XNZZJ1qUuuhRgsVZ2K4Incf3maHbI8bVapFENZ52d1yU2yxPij2uXaCECZGge0jsZoCHtlFG3CrM06zzgof_GHEm6BvkbGZ2Q6ViFb8i3-J2QjvDGpms7lX-VSc9ssAi-b7Hqh9KK4-XNPRLdd0PcW7TuCEdezvxzJlbIacwHTb-"><span style="color: #01ffff;">Here’s the argument: </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">A fresh face, a generation younger than Biden, would take the age issue off the table, and the geezer would be Trump. A new candidate would presumably be free of at least some of Biden’s baggage, namely a bout of inflation (that wasn't Biden’s fault) and two Biden wars that have become quagmires. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">Almost any of several possible alternatives is better than Biden speaking off the cuff.</span></a></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">IMHO, it's time to pull the plug on Biden but's there's no convenient off-ramp AFAIK.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjg1mfTpvD1XNZZJ1qUuuhRgsVZ2K4Incf3maHbI8bVapFENZ52d1yU2yxPij2uXaCECZGge0jsZoCHtlFG3CrM06zzgof_GHEm6BvkbGZ2Q6ViFb8i3-J2QjvDGpms7lX-VSc9ssAi-b7Hqh9KK4-XNPRLdd0PcW7TuCEdezvxzJlbIacwHTb-"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">Having entertained that fantasy, I need to say that there is no plausible scenario for replacing Biden with someone who would do better against Trump. If Biden were to stumble badly in the January 23 New Hampshire primary, where he is running an awkward write-in campaign, there would be a free-for-all. If Biden were to pull out after several key primary deadlines, if would fall to the Democratic National Committee to find a nominee. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">Good luck with that.</span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;"> </span><span style="color: red;">Either scenario is a train wreck.</span></a></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Betwixt & Between applies does it not?</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">And ... we haven't even talked about immigration.</div><p></p>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5600626.post-696565999880908502024-01-12T19:16:00.000-05:002024-01-12T19:16:19.181-05:00And so it goes/rev II<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/opinion/israel-icj-genocide-south-africa.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20240112&instance_id=112341&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=49337526&segment_id=155029&te=1&user_id=dca4743c884062742d735ae23dcf903e" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEitV3JMzbi9n0Qk2ZPrd6LKW2J2p6h0eg41rBlkjGDuP3VMSLGIdElBqFH94AypXDAn3iEc0TXpb8dNSo6YeycTi2CFFitVeowRmABlFB86dJ5AruQSFjExzUlQ_UsSH2BmybP-ooEUdz1vpLyH64UHZGGuKAujpLqPBEIPE08hqJEZ7-oYBVTU=w640-h426" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/opinion/israel-icj-genocide-south-africa.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20240112&instance_id=112341&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=49337526&segment_id=155029&te=1&user_id=dca4743c884062742d735ae23dcf903e"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Gaza City this month.</span><span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images</span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Losing credibility is akin to losing trust, once gone, it's gone forever, something happening in real time regarding Israel and the US vis a vis the genocide being perpetrated on the Palestinians in Gaza.</div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/opinion/israel-icj-genocide-south-africa.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20240112&instance_id=112341&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=49337526&segment_id=155029&te=1&user_id=dca4743c884062742d735ae23dcf903e"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">With the question of whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza now before the International Court of Justice, </span><span style="color: red;">the Biden administration has struck a tone of glib dismissal.</span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/opinion/israel-icj-genocide-south-africa.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20240112&instance_id=112341&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=49337526&segment_id=155029&te=1&user_id=dca4743c884062742d735ae23dcf903e"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;"><br /></span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/opinion/israel-icj-genocide-south-africa.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20240112&instance_id=112341&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=49337526&segment_id=155029&te=1&user_id=dca4743c884062742d735ae23dcf903e"><span style="color: #ffe599;">“Meritless” </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">seems to be the agreed-upon term among U.S. officials. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">“The charge of genocide is meritless,” </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">Secretary of State Antony Blinken intoned from a podium in Tel Aviv this week. </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">“Meritless, counterproductive, and without any basis in fact whatsoever,” </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">blustered the National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.</span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/opinion/israel-icj-genocide-south-africa.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20240112&instance_id=112341&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=49337526&segment_id=155029&te=1&user_id=dca4743c884062742d735ae23dcf903e"><span style="color: #a2c4c9;"><br /></span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/opinion/israel-icj-genocide-south-africa.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20240112&instance_id=112341&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=49337526&segment_id=155029&te=1&user_id=dca4743c884062742d735ae23dcf903e"><span style="color: #01ffff;">The administration’s posture of indifference strains credulity. </span><span style="color: #a2c4c9;">The 84-page case submitted to the court by South Africa is crammed with devastating evidence that Israel has breached its obligations under the 1948 international genocide convention, which defines genocide as </span><span style="color: #ffe599;">“acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” </span><span style="color: #01ffff;">The document before the court is meticulously footnoted and sourced, and many experts say the legal argument is unusually strong.</span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">And so it goes/rev II.</div></div>Remoranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17780923661470756513noreply@blogger.com0