thomasjkenney
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@Dora re: RFK Jr, interesting.
I used to watch Formula 1 racing a lot. I noted over several seasons that certain drivers who were superb but also good sports would eventually be dropped from teams. Drivers who were damn near sociopath became the champs. Ferrari had Michael Schumacher and Reubens Barrichello for a long period. Schumacher was a ruthless shite. Barrichello was a good sport.
If you care, even a tiny bit, that is a crack into which the wedge is driven. Schumacher swerved and ran Barrichello off the track and nearly into the wall, just to have the position. I dare say their relationship changed markedly after that.
re: fog net, this was among the New Shiny in ’70s/’80s with other enviro things. Similar structure can be built rather large. Pick a nice a foggy beach, make a concrete frame 30m x 100m, line with vertical vanes of a conductive metal (aluminum, copper?) Drain into a cistern below. It’s completely passive, and will keep working until it falls apart…in a few hundred years after maintenance ends.
Same principle feeds our SoCal coastal oak forests. They’re primarily ‘fog forest’ like the home of the guanaco in the southern hem. Live oaks collect and ‘rain’ the fog in a dispersion around the base. Too much soaked earth near the base of a live oak can kill it, and at the least encourage fungal growth.
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@aspnaz re: “No election means no outlet for peoples’ frustrations. The only alternative is violence, ”I’m sure you meant to say “…One of many possible alternatives is…”, right?
re: the bromeliad, we have yucca, what I’d guess are distant cousins, here in SoCal. They’re among a few of the 100-year club, have that party, then become cranky. Odd thing is yucca is an asparagus, not a bromeliad. The other, actually the one known as century plant, is an agave.
The yucca gets to be about 3-4m tall, the blossoms are prized (saw a pickup full of them on a remote road). Flowers have a delicate scent like magnolia, with a sharp perfume undernote…to which I am allergic.
Here are 3 shots from San Gabriel Mtns near Los Angeles:
Japan earthquake, very big, saw a ZH headline and the USGS map dots. Gonna go see if there are details. What a wreck of a new year already, jeebus.
According to my wife, “Aloha!” means “Git daphuq off my beach!”
Hippo Gnu Bear
Hippo Gnu Ewe
Hippo Gnu Tapir
Hippo Gnu GarMy Sandra Boynton sucks! Peace, everyone!
This is something bouncing around in my head today, thought it fits with recent talk about ‘send money to Israel through chip fab ruse.’ It also is loosely tied with my view that Intel is going down a la IBM, DEC, etc.
What if you wanted to counterfeit some chips, and they were ‘market-current’ in that they were the latest or a recent gen of chips generally available. John Q Bert could order one from NewEgg for US$80, for example. These chips need to be a good forgery, presenting to the motherboard and its firmware so that they are accepted and will actually run when called upon to do so. It’s difficult because all the timings of various subsystems have to be within spec, so you have to have a very good copy of the chip.
You have a company or an industry under surveillance. You need to do a supply chain attack and give them some compromised CPUs that will do your bidding in the wild. Let’s say Amazon is doing a build-out and needs 10k+ Intel Xeon processors. Who would be a better source of fake, performant Xeon processors than Intel? Just not built in Taiwan, but in Israel. Intel already has fabs there, as does AMD. Likely the other companies (Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, etc) are there, too, or have been approached.
It saves cost and risk if you can contract with a company to fake it’s own product, eh?
@phoenixvoice re: lions
Yes, but… They exhibit very doggish behavior, s#!+ anywhere they please and decline to bury, live in strong social structures, do not hold much of a schedule.
Cigarettes and Whiskey – Peter Sellers, The Muppets
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In Frederik Pohl’s The Knights of Arthur, a disembodied brain, Arthur, gets wired into a stolen cruise ship in New York Harbor. He and his friends sail off to new adventures. Published January, 1958.
“In fact, we only just barely MIGHT have exceeded culture of 2,000 years ago?”
A Canticle For Leibowitz – We might escape the cycle?
The Mote In God’s Eye – We don’t escape, we just deal with it, ad nauseam.1983 – A Merman I Should Turn To Be
Many humans, even knowing what is now known, seem very locked-in to the human perspective of space, space travel, other civilizations that visit eachother for tea. The Filter is one thing. The other is how advanced intelligences might pass The Filter. The easiest way to pass The Filter, for example, is to not leave. Have enough energy on hand that you can project in some force (EM, grav, ?, and quantum-ly?) and sense-analyze-act in a remote location. Need to travel (i.e. manipulate objects in meatspace)? Project your will to construct a new being or machine on a remote world, and imbue it with appropriate cognitive ability to be autonomous when needed, if needed.
We have known of this travel restriction, and have yearned in our fiction for teleporters, hyperdrives, stargates. If we see the problem, and we’re brick-stupid monkeys, it must become the core problem for any advanced intelligence at some point.
We have abundant animal life on this planet that gets very close to our level of intelligence…but never quite there. We killed the others. Even up to neandertal, the supposed empath, subsumed and killed. The clever ones, killed for competition. The vicious ones, killed for their hazard. The peaceful ones, killed because they were obstacle or resource.
So many lanes are open to advanced intelligence on a given (hospitable) world, and it gets pared down over time. I have seen, and I think it’s part of why Dr D got through to me a bit, that we have ‘failed’ to use certain steps in the technological ladder in a timely way. Too long at certain junctures, or made too much nothing of certain resources. If things grind down slowly, maybe we get more chances, but it’s getting to be a close scrape. In A Canticle For Leibowitz the Church barely escapes in a secretly-built ship moments before a new-clear war starts. Close scrape.
re: Musk “…Humankind is most likely the only species “in this part of the galaxy” with a consciousness…”
…at this particular infinitesimal slice of entropy’s progress…
…using physical principles with which we are familiar, and can recognize when we see them…
…at a scale that is neither too small, nor too big to be invisible to our limited senses…
…moving in a timescale similar to our own……and that wish to be visible to other technologically capable beings.
The Picasso photo: index of refraction in the mucus on the surface of his eyeballs, another IoR in the glass of the vase, another IoR in the water inside that vase, a lacquered table with another IoR.
Slice’n’dice! Spectacular!
@jb-hb re: big-screen microphone, hmmm, seems reasonable. They were selling flat-diaphragm loudspeakers when I was a kid. The other stuff, should I add the flashing red light that you are required to carry, even when accompanied by a fully cleared escort? How about the copper-clad door frames? (I s#!+ you not, my boss told me about the ‘beacon’, think it was a Northrup facility. Same boss also wised me up to not coiling my 50A power cables when they’re plugged in.)
@zerosum: My mom showed me a stack, when she took programming at CSUN mid-’70s. Not long after, we went to an airshow at Van Nuys, and the military folks were there producing line-printed banners with Snoopy and stuff. The program to produce the print was encoded on punch tape…a long reel of paper stock, IIRC about 2cm wide with 6 ‘bits’ across. Just like a Player Piano. Get one of them young’uns to fix you up! And while he/she/it works, do an info dump. HEHE!Also, I learned something wen I was young, since ‘fell on the grenade’ and voluntarily studied latin…in 1985.
pecunia -> pecus (pecos?) -> pesos
I’m still of the opinion badgers are the safer investment vehicle.
This is an interesting one. Goes hand-in-glove with Micro$ponge’s recent big rush with the ‘AI’ stuff. There’s a creepy technical detail that certainly has fabulous advantages in efficiency, and a gaping security/privacy crater. This is my digestion of what the chips are, and then a bit of supposition.
The big mfg’rs are going to ‘chiplet’ away from ‘monolithic’ (the linked article has many good pics of this). This separates into four major components for this particular chip architecture:
1) CPU – the compute, the classic main brain of the machine
2) I/O – connects to peripherals (network, non-volatile storage, USB)
3) GPU – graphics offload, currently the in-demand for AI stuff also
4) SoC – power management, sensors, microcontrollers for handling buttons, device swaps, etcThe #4 is a bit broad in scope, and can be thought of as the underground of the city: plumbing, traffic signals, emergency services – it’s a stretched analogy, sorry.
Intel has decided to put a ‘low-power’ compute functionality directly into the SoC part, and allow it to run at the lowest ‘standby’ state (S5), which is basically complete shutdown with optional power to some USB/net devices waiting for a wake signal.
These cores in the SoC are a small CPU of their own, that is now free to run even when the machine is shut down. Since these chips are designed primarily for mobile (laptop) use, the battery would have to be removed to completely stop all activity. The requirement to allow other devices to be ‘warm’ in S5 allows for I/O devices to be powered up and accessible, while in S5, from this new ‘SoCPU.’ So that is the I/O controller also being awake 24/7 waiting for use. Are there safeguards against it’s use of the network device? How about non-volatile storage (your personal files!!!)? Doubtless it is tempting for Windows engineers to see this as ‘down-time maintenance’…win-win, eh?
And, again (for the 10^8th time), even if Micro$ponge and Intel have the best intentions, and follow through with that, have they adequately protected the users from malicious use of this?
Also, the damn thing has a built-in AI accelerator in addition to having a beefy GPU. How much thrashing of my non-volatile storage will happen to support AI features I didn’t ask for and don’t want?
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for zerosum, if you get this far:
Look into using a Live Boot disk/stick. Many of the easiest, and most secure, Linux distros have these. Basically, the whole OS will run without having to be installed locally, and every time you boot it’s a fresh, unaltered (hopefully) copy. It doesn’t touch your installed OS. There are still the worries of backdoors in anything used, but this would allow you to post without worrying about anything your own personal computer may have ‘acquired’ over the years. Bonus is you can pick a handful of them and use different ones randomly, if you’re paranoid. 🙂
re: freeway protest on I-110
Those people are dumber than a box of rocks! I-110 is where all the poor black folks live. So they protest something, and wind up severely economically impacting black folks. The correct target was I-405 at the Sikrball…er…Sepulveda Pass.
@aspnaz re: comment threaddiness
If I don’t find a salad in here every morning, I’m gone!
@Dr D:
You say you have a basket of badgers? I have some money. I’d like to buy your basket of badgers, but I’m concerned it is a limited opportunity to purchase badgers. If we contract for a fair price just a little above the objective value of badgers, you can save a little to build infrastructure, the purpose of which is obtaining more badgers. I’m sure I can find some surrounding farms whose owners are also interested in badgers, so maybe we can form some kind of limited cooperative to buy your badgers. We will only need enough badgers to establish a good breeding population in our neck of the woods, so this would have to be a short-term charter…a…’corporation’ of our common needs into a single body.
I’m only half-kidding.
The Machine Stops – E M Forster, 1909 – This is the blueprint for WALL-E. SF from that period onward is peppered with the ideas we now see cultivated around us. Silverberg stories from the late ’50s with transhumanism and gender fluidity. Much of the ’80s cyberpunk is critique of these earlier ‘utopian meanderings’ of Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov. One of the most chilling things I’ve read, due to it’s casual presentation, was Clarke’s idea of the rehabilitation of criminals: switch off their personality for a decade or so, and use them as cheap labor.
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Potlatch – There are other forms of social organization possible.
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Robin Trower – Too Rolling Stoned
Takers get the honey,
Givers sing the blues!This time, for Dr D:
Blow Away – @6:40, Brent Mydland goes big.
And I wish to flesh out a couple things, so we don’t go running down the wrong path…
Filter, into what? If we escape this Earth and become a/several space-faring species, what then? Nothing’s forever. How far until the next limit? How long until our machines attempt their own species breakaway? I don’t know the math behind it, but you can imagine available energy as having ‘valances’ of increase in magnitude, maybe magnitude^2? We escape the planet, and can build vast solar farms in an inclined orbit so they don’t shade us. We can build any kind of dirty-ass fusion we want as long as it’s on a rock at a safe distance. Lots of possibilities, just with our existing tech.
Ingot Zamboni – Put a small power plant (pile or reactor?) in it, equip with a laser, and micro-smelt (vaporize) the ‘scrapings’ in a chamber. Spectrograph and magnetically sort into respective molecules, and sinter onto a growing ingot. Poop out the ingot for the Machining Morgan to drive by and pick it up for the lathe/mill/3d-printer. 50k of these machines wandering about, and a little patience, and you can have a pre-built city.
@Red re: The Great Filter
When we had the energy, and were aimed roughly in that direction, we should have done what O’Neill suggested. Now that kind of unity for The West is gone.
I get f#(<-all for traction when I try to talk to people about stuff like the Ingot Zamboni (a moon mower that poops aluminum and other stuff). We are now at the point we can make the small machines to make the big machines that can come and fetch humans from the Earth, rather than send them to space. Also, ‘humans’ will quickly disappear in lieu of new species.
Yes, filter sucks. We are unlikely to get past it. We stood too long on certain technological rocks mid-stream, and now the water rises…
A Day In The House – Jeff Beck, Terry Bozzio, Tony Hymas
“Much is being said, My Lords, but nothing, Nothing, NOTHING IS BEING DONE!”
RE: boulder, it’s a glacial erratic. Falls off a mountainside onto a glacier, rides the glacier to ablation, and settles on whatever. I saw one about 3m in dia on the Matthes Glacier that was ‘burrowing’ through absorbing the day’s heat and melting itself into the ice…new arrival from above!
@poppie re: “The Flowering Apple Tree. Its upside down.”
Perhaps a reflection in a pond or river?
As bad as it gets here, I don’t think I can ever leave California. Maybe if they’re chasing me out with guns blazing, but I haven’t had to make that choice yet. This is my home. I grew up here, and detachment would mean learning a new mode of life. Young people may be equipped for this, but it is still a damaging process, the uprooting.
I see signs every day of my wife’s displacement, her un-anchorage from her true home, Java. She chose to be with me and abandon Indonesian citizenship. Tears when I don’t expect them. Her missing her family’s lives and deaths. Friends she can never hug again. And nothing in this land replaces that, can ever replace that. If she begged me to go to Java, that might be the guns blazing…
RE: Trump crime – It’s not fraud until somebody buys it. Who’s to say you don’t have The Product hidden in your pants?
RE: Lebanon – They’re not following the script, so we burn them anyway. Road rage.
Brain fart:
The Zionists, for the most part, have ‘encamped’ themselves, and held a safety hostage all these years. They are now attempting to extinguish the hostage, concurrent with the power crash of their ‘Uncle Schmuel’ (thanks, Saker!).
@Dr D: I thank you, personally, Dr D, for your skepticism. You have had an effect on someone. Even the lone coyote howling at the moon is doubtless heard by the neighbors. If you care to dig the TAE archives, you can maybe grok why it’s a personal thanks.
I’d be a Bubba, cranky (smoldering anger) Irishman, detached from that fair land by a few generations and a wee pond, and peppered with stoic Norwegian and skeptic Czech. The catholic bits were smothered in hippie syrup long ago.
There is a desert in Canada.
@citizenx re: never alone in the mountains
There is a rock slab adjacent the Mt Wilson Road that I will reach out and touch every time I pass by bicycle. Of the 8km of road and hundreds of thousands of boulders, that’s the one. It faces the road, and is roughly rectangular…’tis not so deep as a well, nor wide as a church door…split in quadrants by two clean cracks. At the join, occasionally (2-3 years?) grows a small succulent that produces a lovely pink lotus-shaped flower. That rock is holy!
You use the adventure arts to create a capability within yourself. The capability is analogous to a painting, for instance. A painting can communicate and inspire, as well as tickle basal emotions via color, texture, etc. As a painter, the capability to change people’s thoughts. As a climber, the capability to solve n-dimensional mazes (spatial, temporal, technical).
Running Talus – Doug Robinson. I had the Chouinard catalog in which this was first published. I was a young gearhead and didn’t really know the tech of climbing. I fully grokked the adventure part, though. And the moving, the ‘surfing’ in such environments.
Recent article and comment I read about MS Windows feature for OneDrive that rather forcefully backs up a set of predefined folders. It is persistent and re-enables after being expressly disabled.
Rumors from backcountry are that it is a feature rushed in parallel with Copilot (the AI formerly known as Bing Chat). Idea is that your own personal Copilot can surreptitiously scan all these files and build a model of you. Very personalized, somewhat creepy, but if this kind of cybernetics is to fly it is what needs to happen. Arthur C Clarke and the Brain Cap come to mind.
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The large language model in my brain matches the three titles for relevant viewing based on threads of the last 3 days:
@Dr D re: formatting
Use the ’em’ tag, not the ‘i’ tag, to get italics. The ‘i’ tag is valid and proper HTML, just not allowed at this site.
How did Nazis get into Canada? There’s an excellent documentary about that:
Powell-Pressberger propaganda through and through, but well-crafted. The good Nazis joined some kinda Mennonite colony or something. And the indigenous peoples of Canada were still in possession of the national parks!
Otto Dix: The Painter is the Eyes of the World
I haven’t seen this yet, but will track it down. Years ago I’d seen another docu, and his work was featured among others. The image in today’s post is kinda mild relatively, but seems to slyly parody the bland Nazi ‘state approved’ styles of the time.
Here’s a weird one:
For V. Arnold re: art, many of his works are quite tender. You might enjoy a dig through his stuff.
RE: Sacramento/Davis and a previous anecdote re: Afghan expats (40K of them, IIRC)
That region of California, for 20+ years, has been absorbing a huge amount of Indian immigrants. So, now, let’s import a small army of their ‘sworn enemies.’ Then we’ll trans all their children and see who gets more pissed, Allah or Shiva.
HA! I get one edit, and then cannot edit.
Anyway, damn my bad old-guy eyes.
(s/2) + (q + s + r) + (r/2) = 26
18, if I read ‘monkey-with-gun’ as a distinct digit. EDIT: That is, monkey = q, gun = r, so q + (q + r) + m = 18
@jb-hb: right on!
Pournelle – serious space travel, social conservative
Some more friends of DARPA/CIA:
Brin – cybernetics, transhumanism, trans-‘dolphinism’, ‘woke’
Vinge – software, ‘AI’, seemed to take a very ‘woke’ turn somewhere
Benford – genetics, general repair of and anti-aging, telomeres (!!!)…and, for the foil-adorned…
Clarke and Kubrick – co-developed 2001: A Space Odyssey at roughly the same time as moon landing
I may try to write something substantial about this, since I’ve got a list of similar (not just SciFi) flagged as weird, or at least as ‘Gen. Turgidson’ naiive and enthusiastic.
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Three Degrees of Larry Niven
My former boss/family friend attended a party high on a hill in Glendale, colleague of high standing, in a house that can be described as a fully-functional Living VAX/PDP Museum and Equipment Lease/Loan. Alan Frisbee, Flying Disc Systems, was among the truly smart that I met along my career path. His parties drew lots of hardware wonks, NASA folks, university faculty, authors…which is how my boss had met Niven, at a party where nearly everyone in attendance would have been ‘neck beard’ to the max. My boss and Niven could have been mistaken for twins, but they had the same first name! 🙂
Accidentally prescient title, cognitive dissonance, ego vs other… Like many of their songs, there’s a lot to unpack for 3.5 minutes.
Leave me be, or I’ll be like the others you will meet
They won’t act as kindly if they see you on the street
Don’t you make a scream or shout
It’s nothing you can do about
It was there when you came out
It’s a special lack of grace
I can see it in your face
I can see by what you carry that you come from Barrytown!I realize I could be slightly less obtuse. What were Niven and friends doing for DARPA during the Reagan administration? Yes, lasers and stuff, but that’s the flash for public consumption.
