It’s a lie. It’s all a lie.
When you believe in a lie, you fool yourself. When you say it with conviction, you fool others.
Get enough people fooled, and you got yourself a new religion.
Dear Diary – January 4, 2019
August 31, 2023
Dr Strangelove adaptation in the works
July 16, 2023
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb…
“During the adaptation, Stanley ran into a wall: it was impossible to make a successful film about the end of mankind since nobody, himself included, would want to see it. The answer was satire…”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jul/15/stanley-kubrick-dr-strangelove-stage-adaptation-armando-iannucci
Dr. Strangelove itself was an adaptation of a novel. So I wonder how adapting an adaptation to the stage will work.
How many new lines will they allow? Peter Sellers basically ad libbed everything and Kubrick rewrote the script to match the ad libs.
Probably including this one:
(Btw I hadn’t realized the film won a Hugo Award…along with many other awards…which goes to show how little we actually need Hollywood studios to get great stories in the end…)
Another day, another JAXA failure
April 12, 2023
The bankruptcy filing by Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit Holdings Inc (VORB.O) has dealt a blow to Japan’s hopes of building a domestic space industry, with plans for a Kyushu-based spaceport designed to attract tourism on hold for lack of funding.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/virgin-orbit-bankruptcy-casts-shadow-over-japans-space-dreams-2023-04-07/
Granted, this news is from four or five days ago.
Still, it’s jarring to see TV news about JAXA and NASA doing “joint” explorations of Mars, and then see a constant failure of JAXA to do anything based in Japan.
Something is seriously wrong with this space agency. And I suspect it has nothing to do with the scientists or astronauts.
The real danger of unregulated AI
February 27, 2023
“I’m less frightened by a Sydney that’s playing into my desire to cosplay a sci-fi story than a Bing that has access to reams of my personal data and is coolly trying to manipulate me on behalf of whichever advertiser has paid the parent company the most money.
“Nor is it just advertising worth worrying about. What about when these systems are deployed on behalf of the scams that have always populated the internet? How about on behalf of political campaigns? Foreign governments? “I think we wind up very fast in a world where we just don’t know what to trust anymore,” Gary Marcus, the A.I. researcher and critic, told me. “I think that’s already been a problem for society over the last, let’s say, decade. And I think it’s just going to get worse and worse.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/opinion/microsoft-bing-sydney-artificial-intelligence.html
Just another week on the ISS…
February 26, 2023
Until the new Soyuz pulls up, emergency plans call for Rubio to switch to a SpaceX crew capsule that’s docked at the space station. Prokopyev and Petelin remain assigned to their damaged Soyuz in the unlikely need for a fast getaway. Having one less person on board would keep the temperature down to a hopefully manageable level, Russian engineers concluded.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/russia-launches-rescue-ship-space-station-leaks-rcna72161
Russian space agency Roscosmos concluded that the leak in the docked Soyuz capsule was from a micrometeorite impact.
They also reversed the previous decision last year to abandon the ISS. Now Russia will still send cosmonauts through 2028.
A positive step in a brutal political climate. International space projects should include more, not fewer, countries. Space is for everyone.
“Synthetic fuel”? We’ve heard this before…
February 6, 2023
From 11 to 17 January, the Demonstration Business Promotion Team Osaka along with Sustainable Energy Inc. ran trials on a synthetic fuel produced from water and carbon dioxide present in the air. If successful, this could become the first carbon-based and truly carbon-neutral fuel of its kind.
https://soranews24.com/2023/02/02/synthetic-fossil-fuels-made-from-light-water-and-co2-in-the-air-tested-in-osaka/
So basically this company in Osaka did some water 💧 experiments with “radical water” (water whose molecules were subjected to a kind of electrolysis⚡️ to ionize them), then a “seed fuel” (a fossil fuel like kerosene) was added to create synthetic fuel ⛽️ which in turn will create more CO2 that can be used to create more synthetic fuel.
And no, I didn’t have to insert goofy 😜 icons, but I’m on the train right now 🚊 so why not. 😝
Anyway, this all just sounds too good to be true. Surely it’s prohibitively expensive 💴 to constantly electrify water to the point where its unbound electrons can be available to bind with synthetic fuel electrons. Tidal 🌊 generators, wind 💨 turbines, solar sun ☀️ panels, and thermal heat from volcanos 🌋 all seem more likely a source of electricity to power EVs. 🚗
At any rate, there’s been nothing in the news 📰 about this, so I doubt the experiments worked. Or if they did, someone has a vested interest in continuing Japan’s reliance on Middle Eastern, Indonesian, and Russian fossil fuels.
OK I arrived, so I can stop it with the icons 🛑 ✋ for now.
🖖
ispace is not “Japan” but “Japanese”
December 16, 2022
Mission success would also be a milestone in space cooperation between Japan and the United States…
https://www.yahoo.com/news/japans-ispace-readies-delayed-launch-220204283.html
OK, wait…
A Japanese start-up (I.e., a small private company)…
using a SpaceX rocket (I.e., a private company owned by the world’s wealthiest pri…er, person)…
sends up a small craft made in Germany… 🇩🇪
along with the Rashid rover (made by the UAE)…
and “a two-wheeled, baseball-sized device from Japan’s JAXA space agency”…
and somehow this is cooperation between the US and Japan versus China and Russia?
I’m not seeing it. The project may have used a NASA launchpad, but the people are charge (and the ones paying for it) are not part of any national government.
And I have a feeling this is the wave of the future. More and more private companies will get involved in space projects as they realize that they can thus ignore politics and aim at profits.
I, for one, welcome our future corporate overlords…
Chatbots — Still not AI but still dangerous
December 13, 2022
[ChatGPT] could teach his daughter math, science and English, not to mention a few other important lessons. Chief among them: Do not believe everything you are told.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html
They’re all the rage online. Type in a request for a description how two historical people who never actually met would respond to each other had they actually met, and the program will oblige.
They’ll cause all sorts of rage online, too, once the peddlers of incessant false news and innuendo realize what a bonanza they’ve stumbled upon.
You want an image of an event that never really happened?
No problem. A program can generate one for you. We can even call it “art,” for what that’s worth.
No, BIG problem, especially when it convinces the gullible that it DID happen.
2023 will tell 2020 and 2022 to hold its coffee.
Just what we all wanted, right?
Still, chatbots are not (repeat, NOT) true AI. Sorry, Google engineer who watched too much Ghost in the Shell. Chatbots repeat our very human bias. Repeatedly.
As in, there are way too many racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic comments online. Full stop.
At a minor level, as a writing instructor, a student telling a chatbot to write a 600-word comparison-contrast essay is the least of my worries.
For starters, the damn things are probably scouring the Internet right now and “learning” from text on web pages like…uh…this one…
😱
Carl Sagan at the Illinois ACLU: A lost 1987 lecture on civil liberties
July 1, 2022
…there has been a serious erosion of the tradition of skeptical inquiry, of vigorous challenging of government leaders, of public exposure of what the government is actually doing, rather than mere pomp and rhetoric. And it is in this area—skeptical scrutiny, public exposure—where the largest strides, in my opinion, are needed.
https://quillette.com/2022/07/01/science-and-civil-liberties-the-lost-lecture-of-carl-sagan/
Thank you, Stephen Pinker and Harvey Silverglate, for transcribing this. And Ann Druyan, for permitting it.
FB censorship, here we go again…
May 8, 2022
Right. So I quit Facebrat a couple years ago after I got fed up with the self-righteous, arrogant attitude of its founder Mark Zuckerberg and its blatant stealing and selling of personal information of its users.
And also because I was wasting hours and hours each week reading meaningless Facebark posts on my smartphone (so I deleted the app, which I strongly recommend you all do to prevent the company from tracking your location, then selling that info to the spam industry…although you’re probably going to be tracked via BlueTooth anyway if you keep it on).
But after my mother passed away, and while I was still away from family, friends, and colleagues and living in Montréal, I couldn’t take the isolation.
And also a teacher’s group based at the McGill University (William Shatner’s alma mater!) named BILD asked me to join a FB Group.
So I rejoined and vowed to avoid posting anything about religion and politics, and to focus on the things that matter – food, family, and occasional humorous events.
Until I foolishly wrote a casual comment on my brother’s post:
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