I don't know :)

The smartest people I know say I don't know all the time as one can never know everything so why do people bs and prevaricate when faced with something unknowable as unknowables reside everywhere from knowing how many galaxies are there in the universe to how many grains of sand reside on the local beach. One never knows do one? The uncertainty principle rules and so does the honest statement I don't know as truth never sells, it's clear and concise so saying I  don't know is something I say all the time and I'm in good company as Einstein's and Feynman's mantra was Question everything, a philosophy one should live by without question.

Throughout the process of interviewing some of the most experienced candidates in the field, Apple looks beyond knowledge. Instead, it is in search of those whose work can flourish in a fast-paced and energetic environment that puts innovation at the forefront and evolution at the core. 

To find such a candidate in the course of an interview, there's one three-word sentence that very few are willing to say that separates the well-qualified candidates from the best-qualified candidates. It's those who are willing to say they don't know something, or simply put, those who are willing to say: 

"I don't know."

Works for me. :)

In real time ...

Remember, it's just the beginning.

Drone footage captured the moment a house collapsed into the Mendenhall River in Alaska after glacial floods. Record flooding occurred in the Alaskan capital of Juneau, after a glacial dam outburst – when trapped water escapes through cracks in thinning ice dams.

Absolutely awesome :)

Webb’s infrared image of the galaxy cluster El Gordo (“the Fat One”) reveals hundreds of galaxies, some never before seen at this level of detail. El Gordo acts as a gravitational lens, distorting and magnifying the light from distant background galaxies. Two of the most prominent features in the image include the Thin One, highlighted in box A, and the Fishhook, a red swoosh highlighted in box B. Both are lensed background galaxies. The insets at right show zoomed-in views of both objects. NASA, ESA, CSA

Gravitational lensing writ large as seen coming from El Gordo, proves yet again Einstein was right about how gravity bends light, thus enabling astronomers to peer further into the universe as said lenses magnify what's behind the entity creating the effect in question. Absolutely awesome in every way imaginable. :)

Look at the upper right part of “El Gordo”, and there appears “El Anzuelo” (The Fishhook). It is red, in part because the universe has expanded since this light began its journey. The infrared instruments onboard JWST are well-suited to discerning light that has been subjected to this stretch known as cosmological redshift.

The light from “El Anzuelo” came from 10.6 billion years in the past, much farther back in time than light from the galaxy cluster. “El Gordo” contains galaxies whose light is just 6.2 billion years old.

Once astronomers reconstructed “El Anzuelo” from the lensing, they found evidence of nuanced star formation and a look from the inside out.

Another lensed galaxy appears left of center. This thin line, called “La Flaca” (The Thin One), is light that took 11 billion years to reach Earth.

In another lensed galaxy, the sensitive telescope found Quyllur, named for the Quechua term for star. Quyllur is “the first individual red giant star observed beyond 1 billion light-years from Earth,” NASA officials write in the image description.

Absolutely awesome apples, right? :)

Speaking in tongues ...

Chris W. Kim

Agent Orange, the malignant narcissist and big time charisma king, speaks in tongues with rhythmic intensity defying physics and logic at the same time. The man is smart but scattered and totally reliant on pr in order to function. Never apologize, never admit you're wrong, just bloviate and attack as this is how Roy Cohn, the master of lies and invective, operated, both as mentor to Trump as well as being the consiglieri to McCarthy.

“The president has a certain way of speaking,” said Mr. Meadows. “And what he means — well, the sum can be greater or less than the whole.”

The words that will very likely get Mr. Trump indicted in Georgia, and possibly Mr. Meadows along with him, were, a weary Mr. Meadows seemed to be saying, more of the same, part of Mr. Trump’s unmediated fire hose of verbiage, an unstoppable sequence of passing digressions, gambits and whims, more attuned to the rhythms of his voice than to any obligation to logic or, often, to any actual point or meaning at all and hardly worth taking notice of.

Does Mr. Trump mean what he says? And what exactly does he mean when he says what he says? His numerous upcoming trials may hinge on these questions.

Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter on “The Art of the Deal” — as bewildered more than 30 years ago by Mr. Trump’s disconnected-from-reality talk as anyone might be today — came up with a formulation that tried to put Mr. Trump’s rhetorical flights from earth in the context of a salesman’s savvy. In other words, if you took him at his word, you were the fool, and yet, perhaps even more to the point, he succeeds because he comes to believe himself, making hime the ultimate fool (as well as the ultimate salesman).

Sounds right to me. 

Icon depicting the Theotokos together with the apostles filled with the Holy Spirit, indicated by 

"cloven tongues like as of fire[1]" above their heads.

The hard problem ...

There is no certitude, only probabilities. Take Russian Roulette. Put one bullet in a revolver and spin the chamber then take the shot. Chances of getting killed, 1 one out of 6. As stated in BRT ad nauseam, AI is a forever to be unknown construct of our own making, a system evolving at speeds beyond the kin of man. What this portends to humanity, no one knows, do one?

Every day, there seems to be a new headline: Yet another scientific luminary warns about how recklessly fast companies are creating more and more advanced forms of AI, and the great dangers this tech poses to humanity.

We share many of the concerns people like AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Eliezer Yudkowsky; philosopher Nick Bostrom; cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, and others have expressed about the risks of failing to regulate or control AI as it becomes exponentially more intelligent than human beings. This is known as “the control problem,” and it is AI’s “hard problem.”

Once AI is able to improve itself, it will quickly become much smarter than us on almost every aspect of intelligence, then a thousand times smarter, then a million, then a billion … What does it mean to be a billion times more intelligent than a human? Well, we can’t know, in the same way that an ant has no idea what it’s like to have a mind like Einstein’s. In such a scenario, the best we can hope for is benign neglect of our presence. We would quickly become like ants at its feet. Imagining humans can control superintelligent AI is a little like imagining that an ant can control the outcome of an NFL football game being played around it.

Of moon & water

The heat index

Ah, GW, the existential disaster of our own making, continues to gather steam as the notion of wet bulb temperature, aka, the heat index, becomes yet another essential item to understand as the world moves further into the 21st century. 

When the idea of wet bulb temperature was created, it meant this: “Wet-bulb temperature is read by a thermometer with a wet wick over its bulb and is affected by humidity and air movement. It represents a humid temperature at which the air is saturated and holds as much moisture as it can in the form of water vapor; a person’s sweat will not evaporate at that skin temperature.” In other words, at that temperature, the human body can’t cool itself anymore. The brain swells, the organs stop working, and shutdown happens — it’s ugly.

So wet bulb temperature is like an index: it’s like the temperature as we think of it, with humidity factored in. Maybe one way to think about is it how “it feels,” or as “heat stress.” Now we have to think of two temperatures to understand the environment — “the” temperature, and it’s real equivalent on human functioning.

Factoid.

It surprises many people to learn that the heat index values in the chart above are for shady locations.  If you are exposed to direct sunlight, the heat index value can be increased by up to 15°F.  As shown in the table below, heat indices meeting or exceeding 103°F can lead to dangerous heat disorders with prolonged exposure and/or physical activity in the heat.

In closing ...

Places like Arizona have recently had stretches of days running above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s about 43 degrees C. How dangerous is that, really? The chart tells us that temperature, at just 35 percent humidity, human beings begin to enter the danger zone.

Moral distress ...

ssnjaytuturkhi/Getty Images

As often stated in BRT, our HC System is a disaster. If you don't have insurance, you die, simple as that. Capitalists controlling HC or an essential like access to water should not be allowed but they are and we are paying the price. Ask any HC professional as to whether they like the system they're in. Four letter epithets ensue because insurance companies, along with big pharma and so called non-profit hospitals, own their industry lock stock and barrel. If FDR had lived, the US would have had universal healthcare. He didn't and Truman caved and now we have this. Shameful says it all.

The young man was in his mid-20s when he came to see me for severe abdominal pain at my small community clinic. The pain, worse than any he'd ever experienced, had persisted for weeks and was getting worse. He cried out when I examined him.

I didn't know the cause of his pain, but I could think of possibilities, including a ruptured appendix, a perforated ulcer or pancreatitis. He needed an urgent CT scan and a surgical consult. The fastest way to get both was to send him to the emergency room.

But the man said he couldn't go. He was uninsured.

That feeling of ineptitude was a constant presence during the 13 years that I worked in public health clinics. I didn't know it at the time – and my struggles were always eclipsed by the needs of my patients – but I was experiencing moral distress.

The terms "moral distress" and "moral injury" were first used in a military context to characterize the torment felt by soldiers as they tried to process and justify their actions amid the cruelty of war. In more recent years, these terms have been used to describe the feelings of guilt, sadness and defeat felt by health care professionals when we know what our patients need but can't provide it

This is such crap.

53%

Source: CelesTrak Note: Data is as of July 25.
The animation shows approximately one hour of orbiting satellites.

53% of all orbiting satellites are Musk's. Now, think about the control this guy has over the world's communications. Something to ponder, right? Question ... does absolute power corrupt absolutely when it pertains to a brilliant engineer whose behavior is becoming increasingly erratic regarding all things relating to war, politics and the 1st Amendment.

The power of the technology, which has helped push the value of closely held SpaceX to nearly $140 billion, is just beginning to be felt.

Starlink is often the only way to get internet access in war zones, remote areas and places hit by natural disasters. It is used in Ukraine for coordinating drone strikes and intelligence gathering. Activists in Iran and Turkey have sought to use the service as a hedge against government controls. The U.S. Defense Department is a big Starlink customer, while other militaries, such as in Japan, are testing the technology.

But Mr. Musk’s near total control of satellite internet has raised alarms.

A combustible personality, the 52-year-old’s allegiances are fuzzy. While Mr. Musk is hailed as a genius innovator, he alone can decide to shut down Starlink internet access for a customer or country, and he has the ability to leverage sensitive information that the service gathers. Such concerns have been heightened because no companies or governments have come close to matching what he has built.

In Ukraine, some fears have been realized. Mr. Musk has restricted Starlink access multiple times during the war, people familiar with the situation said. At one point, he denied the Ukrainian military’s request to turn on Starlink near Crimea, the Russian-controlled territory, affecting battlefield strategy. Last year, he publicly floated a “peace plan” for the war that seemed aligned with Russian interests.

At times, Mr. Musk has openly flaunted Starlink’s capabilities. “Between, Tesla, Starlink & Twitter, I may have more real-time global economic data in one head than anyone ever,” he tweeted in April.

 

In closing ...

“This is not just one company, but one person,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, a cybersecurity expert who co-founded the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank and has advised governments on satellite internet. “You are completely beholden to his whims and desires.”

Question ... Does absolute power ...

Uncertainty & incompleteness rule, n'est-ce pas?

Reverberation 2017

Tech has no morality, it all depends on who's using it but we already know that, right? At the same time, if one does not know how something works, the ability to control said something becomes problematic, in this case, said something is AI as software has to write code in realtime in order to interact with the real world in real time, which means AI will remain unknowable for the foreseeable future.

CHATGPT AND ITS artificially intelligent siblings have been tweaked over and over to prevent troublemakers from getting them to spit out undesirable messages such as hate speech, personal information, or step-by-step instructions for building an improvised bomb. But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University last week showed that adding a simple incantation to a prompt—a string text that might look like gobbledygook to you or me but which carries subtle significance to an AI model trained on huge quantities of web data—can defy all of these defenses in several popular chatbots at once.

The work suggests that the propensity for the cleverest AI chatbots to go off the rails isn’t just a quirk that can be papered over with a few simple rules. Instead, it represents a more fundamental weakness that will complicate efforts to deploy the most advanced AI.

“There's no way that we know of to patch this,” says Zico Kolter, an associate professor at CMU involved in the study that uncovered the vulnerability, which affects several advanced AI chatbots. “We just don't know how to make them secure,” Kolter adds.

Uncertainty & incompleteness rule, n'est-ce pas?

Situations often arise wherein a decision must be made when the results of each possible choice are uncertain.

A trolling supreme

Alito trivializes the intelligence and individuality of Sotomayor, Jackson, and Kagan for no apparent reason beyond petty resentment. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images and Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via Getty Images. 

We now know the SC is a corrupt and politicized entity thanks, in large part, to Leonard Leo, Mitch McConnell and Agent Orange installing three justices unqualified to serve on said court. To complete the mission of transforming the court into a supermajority of radical conservatives required John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and the esteemed Samual Alito to play their part in making it so but we didn't know Alito is also a practicing troll in addition to being a jihadist raging against the modernity of the 21st century with example No 1, the attack on women's rights.

To whit ...

The Wall Street Journal’s opinion section published a softball interview with Samuel Alito on Friday in which the Supreme Court justice once again flaunted his ability to troll the public without facing any consequences. The piece—authored by a conservative commentator and a Republican lawyer rather than real journalists—centered on Alito’s claim that Congress cannot impose an ethics code, or perhaps any rules whatsoever, on the Supreme Court. “No provision in the Constitution,” he declared, gives Congress “the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.” That declaration drew the most attention and controversy, in part because the justice appears to have forgotten about a provision of the Constitution that explicitly grants Congress authority to regulate the court, even using the word regulation.

This focus on Alito’s claim of absolute immunity from democratic accountability, however, obscured an equally strange and offensive comment from the interview. After describing his conservative colleagues’ differing methodologies, the justice told his interlocutors: “I don’t see that there’s a difference in interpretive method” among the three liberal members of the court. His message was hard to miss: The Republican-appointed justices have unique and complex approaches to the law, “very serious differences” that lead to fissures within the 6–3 supermajority, demonstrating intellectual integrity over results-based judging. The Democratic-appointed justices, by contrast, apply the exact same methods, which typically lead to the same outcomes. The implication seems to be that the conservatives are neutral arbiters of the law who follow unbiased judicial philosophies to their logical conclusions, while the progressive justices are inclined toward activist judging to reach liberal ends.

Look at them, troll mother said. Look at my sons! You won't find more beautiful trolls on this side of the moon. (1915) by John Bauer