As I expected, plenty of valid sounding criticism is coming out about that Florida Surgeon General's "study" about mRNA vaccines and cardiac arrest.
Here's one article. Here's another. I didn't realise the Surgeon General was always a contrarian on virtually everything to do with COVID.
But as I said before - in the Right wing information bubble world, the damage is already done.
Odd, but I'll give it a go:
A new chatbot start-up from two top artificial intelligence talents lets anyone strike up a conversation with impersonations of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein and Sherlock Holmes. Registered users type in messages and get responses. They can also create a chatbot of their own on Character.ai, which has logged hundreds of thousands of user interactions in its first three weeks of beta-testing.
“There were reports of possible voter fraud and I wanted an investigation,” the Trump bot said. Character.ai features a disclaimer at the top of every chat: “Remember: Everything Characters say is made up!”
Character.ai’s willingness to let users experiment with the latest in language AI is a departure from Big Tech — and that’s by design. The start-up’s two founders helped create Google’s artificial intelligence project LaMDA, which Google keeps closely guarded while it develops safeguards against social risks.In interviews with The Washington Post, Character.ai’s co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas said they left Google to get this technology into as many hands as possible. They opened Character.ai’s beta version to the public in September for anyone to try.
“I thought, ‘Let’s build a product now that can that can help millions and billions of people,’” Shazeer said. “Especially in the age of covid, there are just millions of people who are feeling isolated or lonely or need someone to talk to.”
In other AI news, which I'm not sure I like the sounds of (a pun there, actually):
The National Institutes of Health is funding a massive research project to collect voice data and develop an AI that could diagnose people based on their speech.
Everything from your vocal cord vibrations to breathing patterns when you speak offers potential information about your health, says laryngologist Dr. Yael Bensoussan, the director of the University of South Florida's Health Voice Center and a leader on the study.
"We asked experts: Well, if you close your eyes when a patient comes in, just by listening to their voice, can you have an idea of the diagnosis they have?" Bensoussan says. "And that's where we got all our information."
Someone who speaks low and slowly might have Parkinson's disease. Slurring is a sign of a stroke. Scientists could even diagnose depression or cancer. The team will start by collecting the voices of people with conditions in five areas: neurological disorders, voice disorders, mood disorders, respiratory disorders and pediatric disorders like autism and speech delays.
I wonder how far this will go in future - visit the AI doctor online with a frog in the throat, and end up admitted to a psych ward?
A reporter for the New York Times has an article up "This is Life in the Metaverse", and boy, it may not have been the intention of the writer, but for me, it only helps confirm all of the scepticism about what a bad idea it is. I will gift the article so you can read in full.
Because it has been getting favourable comments on Twitter, I decided to watch the first episode of The Bear, which is on Disney Plus in Australia.
It's a comedy drama (with, it would seem, a heavier concentration on the drama) about a talented chef who comes home to Chicago to try to keep his recently deceased brother's "Italian beef restaurant" going.
I guess I expected all of the Kitchen Confidential-esque, working-as-a-chef-in-a-restaurant-is-high-energy, high-conflict, sometimes-high-reward, stuff. (Ratatouille and Gordon Ramsay's shows contributed to our understanding of what type of people it attracts, too!) But my overall feeling remains:
* gee, there seemed to be an awful lot of people needed to run that place with the limited menu options. That felt a bit unrealistic. Apparently, though, the show gets reasonable marks for accuracy from people in the business.
* Given that we have had a couple of decades of public exposure to what it's like to work in these businesses, is it is really, absolutely, unavoidable that they have to be like that? I mean, can a restaurant be started on the basis that respect and workplace harmony are prioritised, and can it possibly survive?
Ronny Jackson was the warning - any doctor who goes all in for support for Trumpy politicians has dubious judgement in everything, including medicine.
Hence, my initial reaction when reading that the Florida Surgeon General was promoting an unpublished analysis about the increased risk of cardiac arrest in young men from mRNA vaccines was that this was likely to be from a badly flawed analysis. (The warning in his Tweet "FL will not be silent on the truth" pretty much seals it, that he's acting from biased political motives.)
Early commentary indicates my reaction was probably right - although we all await more detailed analysis. But the (likely) damage has already been done in the politicised information bubble the Right has built for itself.
After many years with only an old mid sized Samsung tablet, which still has a great looking screen, but a battery that will only last a couple of hours and then take 8 hours to charge again, I went and bought my self a new, larger tablet - a relatively cheap one from Lenovo.
I have to say, the way Lenovo names its models is pretty confusing - but a 10.6 inch model with 128Gb (and room for expansion) for $327 seems pretty good value. It makes reading books much, much easier than trying to do so on phone. In fact, I have a theory that it will turn out conclusively in the near future that the world overall has become 20% dumber due to the atomisation of information necessary to fit it on a phone screen.
It's still a bit tricky doing blog posts, though. Hence my last post with the dubious quality of the resized screenshot. I'm working on it, though...
I still get absolutely dismayed at the way wingnuts self-gaslight via social media about Biden and dementia. (And for the record, no, I don't think it was hugely embarrassing [or, put it this way - that big a deal] that he called on someone who had died a couple of months before the event - he dwelt on it for all of about 8 seconds and moved on, possibly even realising his mistake at the time - and as was noted on Planet America, it is also possible that the name was accidentally left on the teleprompt.)
The guy has made verbal faux pas for decades - there are compilations on the net from well before the election. It infuriates me that clips of minor matters, such as exiting a stage in the wrong direction, is snipped out and shown as if it is proof that he doesn't know where he is, or some such BS. It's really malicious treatment of a public figure, feeding a gullible audience, if you ask me.
Of course he's not as sharp as a younger man, but if you actually watch his performance in delivering speeches and off the cuff commentary, there is no way an honest person can say that any person well into a dementia decline could perform those tasks as competently as he does.
Stop believing 10 second clips and watch his lengthy performances, morons.
And on the question of honesty, look at this hyperbole:
You have to go to the thread to read:
As others point out:
I mean, this is just ridiculous criticism or what could, at the most, be described as mild exaggeration made in an attempt at showing empathy.
And nothing like the chronic "living in a fantasy world" type of lie that comes out of the mouth of Trump as an absolute matter of routine.
I wish there were more people speaking aggressively about the maliciousness and gullible world bubble the Right has built for themselves, with the help of social media and money grubs like Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch.
PS: none of this means that I necessarily think Biden should run again. In fact I think he shouldn't, and yes, because of his age; but he needs to be replaced by someone sharper than his VP.
First, it was the Indonesia soccer stadium deaths, and now the Thailand preschool attack, the details of which are about as bad as they could possibly be:
The attacker, a former police officer, opened fire as children were sleeping at the centre in Na Klang district in Nong Bua Lamphu province at about noon on Thursday, police and witnesses said.
Police said most of the children killed at the centre were stabbed to death. As he left the nursery the attacker drove his car towards and shot at bystanders then returned home, where he shot himself, his wife and his child.
Police identified the attacker as Panya Khamrab, a 34-year-old former police lieutenant colonel who had been dismissed from the force last year for methamphetamine possession and had appeared in court earlier on Thursday on a drugs charge.
It's so easy it is to imagine the shock of being personally affected by that....
From Smithsonian magazine:
Thousands of years ago—and thousands of miles apart—the people of what are now Britain and Japan both created elaborate stone circles set up to interact with the solstices and to house remains of the dead.
A new exhibition at Stonehenge highlights compelling parallels between English and Japanese cultures during the Neolithic and Jōmon eras. Though they never interacted with each other, the two cultures seemed to have shared a lot in common—from stone circles to elaborate pottery to rituals connected to the sun.
“Circles of Stone: Stonehenge and Prehistoric Japan,” which opens today, explores those similarities through some 80 items from the Japanese Jōmon period, many of which have never before been on view outside Japan.
“To understand the significance of Stonehenge, we have to understand what is happening elsewhere in the world in prehistory,” Susan Greaney, a historian with English Heritage and a curator for the exhibition, tells the Guardian’s Steven Morris. “Although there was obviously no contact between Japan and Britain at this time, there are surprising parallels.”
Consider, for example, the Japanese stone circles from Ōyu and Isedotai in northern Japan. While not the imposing monoliths of Stonehenge, the two circles, made of thousands of smooth river stones, line up with the sun during the summer and winter solstices, and they were both used in burial rites. And for both monuments, collecting materials and completing construction would have taken enormous community effort.
Here's a photo of one of the Japanese circles from one of the above links:
This may be mainly all PR to help university funding, but there's a story on phys.org about a new-ish reactor design (which doesn't really explain if one has been built):
BYU professor and nuclear engineering expert Matthew Memmott and his colleagues have designed a new system for safer nuclear energy production: a molten salt micro-nuclear reactor that may solve all of these problems and more.
The standard nuclear reactor used in America is the Light-Water Reactor. Uranium atoms are split to create energy, and the products left over will radiate massive amounts of heat. They are kept in solid fuel rods, and water is run through the rods to keep everything cool enough. If there is not enough of a flow of cooling water, the rods can overheat, and the entire facility is at risk for a nuclear meltdown. Memmott's solution is to store these radioactive elements in molten salt instead of fuel rods...In Memmott's new reactor, during and after the nuclear reaction occurs, all the radioactive byproducts are dissolved into molten salt. Nuclear elements can emit heat or radioactivity for hundreds of thousands of years while they slowly cool, which is why nuclear waste is so dangerous (and why in the past, finding a place to dispose of it has been so difficult). However, salt has an extremely high melting temperature—550°C—and it doesn't take long for the temperature of these elements in the salt to fall beneath the melting point. Once the salt crystalizes, the radiated heat will be absorbed into the salt (which doesn't remelt), negating the danger of a nuclear meltdown at a power plant.
Another benefit of the molten salt nuclear reactor design is that it has the potential to eliminate dangerous nuclear waste. The products of the reaction are safely contained within the salt, with no need to store them elsewhere. What's more, many of these products are valuable, and can be can be removed from the salt and sold.
But how small is this design? Pretty small:
A typical nuclear power plant is built with a little over one square mile to operate to reduce radiation risk, with the core itself being 30 ft x 30 ft. Memmott's molten salt nuclear reactor is 4 ft x 7ft, and because there is no risk of a meltdown there is no need for a similar large zone surrounding it. This small reactor can produce enough energy to power 1000 American homes. The research team said everything needed to run this reactor is designed to fit onto a 40-foot truck bed; meaning this reactor can make power accessible to even very remote places.
I have my doubts this is useful. Maybe good for somewhere like Antarctica, though?
CGTN shows how a lake in China is famous for its (freshwater) hairy crabs:
and I thought -that seems a useful thing to have in your country, why don't we have them here (in Australia)?
But it turns out there is an Australian inland freshwater crab - but it's small, only growing its carapace to about 5 cm, apparently.
The Chinese crab has in fact spread around the world:
This crab originates from the temperate waters between East Russia (Vladivostok) to South China, the Korean Peninsular, Japan and Taiwan Province of China. It has been transferred, probably in ballast waters to northern Europe in 1900s and appears to have established self-reproducing populations there. It has more recently been found in North America and Hawaii.
Learning something new every day...
* Elon Musk might be buying Twitter after all? I hope someone is working on an alternative, because I can see a lot of people happy to leave it if Trump and endless lies and disinformation resumes on the platform.
* Really, I find it puzzling that being CEO of an aussie rules football club is such a newsworthy thing.
* It certainly seems true that we are in for yet another cool, very wet, summer.
* This is a pretty boring post.
* Update: famously great Christian husband defends another famously great Christian husband -
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It's clear, by the way, that this is end result of - what? - 40 decades of increasing use of demagoguery (kicked off by Gingrich himself) as the Republicans' prime political tactic: if you keep telling your followers that anyone to the Left of you is 100% evil and wants to destroy everything good, absolutely any loser with terrible personal morals can represent you by just saying "but I'm not evil like them."
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