A few random Friday thoughts

*  My goodness, Diane Feinstein looked as if she's on death's door when she turned up in Washington.    She did turn up to her committee, though.  

* Amongst the most convoluted commentaries on the Trump CNN "townhall" (that oddly featured a 100% pro Trump audience - not a common feature of the "townhall" format, I thought) is that by Ben Shapiro on Twitter, which starts by saying CNN did Trump a massive favour (true), but then ends on this contorted conspiracy note:

Collins asked zero of the questions Republicans cared about and all the ones Democrats cared about. So, in other words, this was billed as a GOP primary night, and it was just Kaitlin Collins asking questions Democrats have about Trump. Republican voters sensed this. So when Trump took out the kitchen sink and began hammering Collins into the wall with it, they cheered. Republicans will -- ALWAYS AND CORRECTLY -- cheer biased moderators being steamrolled by Republican candidates, no matter what those candidates actually say. Trump wins more favor with Republican voters; Democrats remain offput; independents continue to wonder why we're relitigating 2020. Ridiculous failure by CNN on all fronts -- unless, of course, their goal is to renominate Trump for the ratings and because they think he's most beatable (NOTE: this, by the way, is precisely their goal).

Mind you, a lot of people have said that the event did help him from a Primary point of view, but hurt him in terms of motivating Democrats and Independents (and the rare sensible Republican) to make sure he loses at the actual election.  For example:

* Google's Bard does sound as if it will be a significant improvement to Chat GTP:

In a bid to tackle the issue of AI hallucinations – whereby the AI creates a sourced text or information that it claims to be true – Bard will include an annotation on the information sourced elsewhere and provide a link to it.

* I'm curious still about what other physicists think of this argument by Sabine:

*  Did I mention before that her recent video about the transgender teens issue seemed pretty balanced to me?  If not, the link to the Youtube video is here.   (She copped a lot of attack from the trans rights mob for even asking the question whether it's a "social fad" amongst teenagers - which is actually a good sign that it's balanced.)