A neat summary

I do find it totally exasperating that so many on the Right will not admit that the Trump campaign interactions with Russians was scandalous.   It is absurd to think that, if the same thing had happened on the Democrat side (let's say, Hunter Biden contacted by, and having secret meeting with,  alleged Chinese government contacts who wanted to pass on dirt on Trump) that they would shrug and say "that's nothing, what are you on about?"  like they try to do with the Trump campaign and family.  And furthermore, act as if bipartisan committee intelligence investigations confirming active Russian (secret) campaigning on line to support Trump is a big nothingburger.   

It's why MAGA types are just not worth engaging with - there is not a sensible brain cell left in their heads.

Update:   the fine print, as discussed in the Washington Post story on the Durham report:

When the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, issued his findings in 2019, Durham took the unusual step of publicly disagreeing with him on a key point — disputing Horowitz’s finding that the decision to open the investigation into Trump’s campaign was justified.

“Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened,” Durham said at the time.

Yet on Monday, he appeared to back away from that criticism, writing “there is no question that the FBI had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” allegations brought to the agency by an Australian diplomat who told them of alarming statements made over drinks by a low-level Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos.

Durham’s report suggests he thinks the FBI should have opened a preliminary investigation, rather than a full investigation, based on the Australian’s tip. The report highlights a conversation between two FBI officials at the time who appeared to bemoan the weakness of the new case.

“Damn that’s thin,” wrote one FBI official in early August 2016. “I know,” replied another, “it sucks.”

Durham’s final report comes against a backdrop of two failed prosecutions. Igor Danchenko — a private researcher who was a primary source for a dossier of allegations about Trump’s alleged ties to Russia — was acquitted in October of lying to the FBI about where he got his information. Durham personally argued much of the government’s case in that trial, in federal court in Alexandria.

Update:  I quite liked this column by Paul Waldman about the Durham report.  Here's a gift link.   

I'm quickly reading some of the huffing and puffing on the Right wing commentary side*, which is full of outrage about how no one is being prosecuted for this, and once again, it's the following familiar story.

They build themselves a house of cards on certain issues by selecting the narrowest range of facts that are spun for partisan, self promotional reasons.   (As with, of course, climate change, where they have always been welded to a mere handful of contrarian, ageing scientists and commentators, while ignoring the vast amount of work the mainstream has confirming the mainstream view.)   When an issue is somewhat complicated and some discrepancy comes to light, they leap onto it to try to boost it into a narrative that reads "Ha! Your story is now destroyed!".   In other words, they con themselves into not being able to see, or acknowledge, a "big picture".   Then, when the facts continue to accumulate against them (increasing natural climate disasters, increasing record temperatures, Durham fails at prosecutions)  their only reaction is to scream "I don't understand - the nation is about to fall because the people just can't see that I'm right."  

Truly, they gaslight themselves via continual hyper-partisan hyperbole of self serving narrative into never being able to see (or admit to) a "big picture" truth, and therefore can't understand why their view isn't having the consequences they want. 

*  The New York Times has a piece with lots of links to the cites hyperventilating about it.  As the writer says:

Mr. Trump had termed the Russia investigation “the crime of the century,” and with no one doing time for that crime, the Durham report could still prove to be Exhibit A in how the American right seems to be living in its own universe — and how Mr. Trump still dictates the parameters of that separate reality.

On his Truth Social website, Mr. Trump said the special prosecutor had concluded that “the FBI should never have launched the Trump-Russia Probe!” In fact, Mr. Durham said he agreed that the F.B.I. should have opened a preliminary investigation.

 My only quibble:  it's not that the American right "seems to be living its own universe":  they undoubtedly do.  And they just can't understand when a majority won't join them there, leading them to believe they are being "persecuted".   

We need Musk to leave for Mars

 

Elon gets the best advertisers

I've been meaning for weeks to laugh here about the fact that one of Twitter advertisements that has been popular in my feed for the last couple of months has been one encouraging the eating of offal!  ("Organ meats" is the term used, I think.) I have never clicked on it, and I don't have a screenshot handy, but I gather from googling the topic that there's a bit of an offal fad going around in Right wing muscle bro circles at the moment.  (Think Joe Rogan types.)

But I did get another weird promoted tweet yesterday..this one for sexy Christian muscle bro gear:

I'm kind of assuming that advertising rates on Twitter might be very cheap at the moment, hence attracting the most esoteric small advertisers?

Flim flam Musk

 I was also appalled to read this story, which seems to not have been picked up by many normal news outlets:

Graphic videos of animal abuse have circulated widely on Twitter in recent weeks, generating outrage and renewed concern over the platform’s moderation practices.

One such video, in which a kitten appears to be placed inside a blender and then killed, has become so notorious that reactions to it have become their own genre of internet content.

Laura Clemens, 46, said her 11-year-old son came home from his school in London two weeks ago and asked if she had seen the video.

“There’s something about a cat in a blender,” Clemens remembered her son saying.

Clemens said she went on Twitter and searched for “cat,” and the search box suggested searching for “cat in a blender.”

The worst part (from a corporate response point of view) was this:

Various users have tweeted that they have seen the cat video, with some trying to get Musk’s attention on the issue — some dating back to early May. Clemens said she flagged the video on May 3 to Twitter’s support account and Ella Irwin, the vice president of trust and safety at Twitter and one of Musk’s closest advisers. ...

Autocomplete suggestions in search bars are a common feature on many social media platforms, and they can often surface disturbing content. The terms for “dog” and “cat” autocompleted viral animal cruelty videos in Twitter’s search box Thursday, when NBC News contacted the company for comment. Twitter’s press account automatically responded with a poop emoji, the company’s standard response for the last month.

Can't wait for the apparent successor of Twitter (seems like it will be BlueSky?) to kick in fully.

Back to a favourite topic - dream flying (and proving it)

I don't know why, but I have been remembering dreams more often lately, even though with the cooler weather I have been sleeping with less interruption than I usually have in summer. 

The levitating/flying dream has made a welcome return.   The only thing is, as I explained in two posts way back in 2006,  my variation of the dream usually involves great interest in, and satisfaction at, being able to prove it is real (such as by being videoed while off the ground, or having a sufficient number of witnesses that I think that, surely, they must be believed.)  My elation in the dream is not just with the pleasant sensation of being able to think my way into the air, but with the intellectual knowledge that this is revolutionary for science and humanity, and people will see it is real.

Of course, that then makes for a somewhat disappointing sensation on waking up into the more mundane world.

Anyhow, on the whole "why do we dream we can fly" issue, I see now that there was an article about that appeared in 2016 in Slate (and Atlas Obscura), and I'm pretty sure I had missed until now.  

It would seem that the dream is virtually universal (although I am still pretty sure there are people who claim never to have had it), and an interest in what it means, or what causes it, has been around a long time.  Some extracts:

Psychologist Dr. Rainer Schönhammer has compiled scientific flying-dream explanations going back to the early 19^th century. Many of the earliest guesses were physiological—1860s German psychologist Karl Scherner thought that the rising and falling of the chest inspired dream flight, while his peer J.E. Purkinje believed that the relaxation inherent in sleep makes dreamers feel like they’re floating. The more Freudian Paul Federn pinned it on nighttime erections, which, author Diedre Barret explains, he “viewed as an overcoming of gravity,” but this theory has since been discounted. More recent theories have focused instead on the brain stem and the inner ear, which controls balance.

Although he doesn’t knock the potential physiological causes of dream-flying, Dr. Michael Schredl, a psychologist with the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, is more interested in what such dreams and such distinctions might say about the dreamer. “Flying dreams are a fascinating topic,” Schredl writes in an email. In a series of studies, Schredl has sought to connect the prevalence of flying dreams with particular personality traits or life choices. By compiling dream data gathered since 1956 and performing both broad and deep surveys of his own, he has come to a few zooming conclusions.

First of all—anecdotally at least—”persons with waking-life flying experiences dream more often about flying,” Schredl writes. Hang gliding instructors, for instance, often practice their professions in dreams, only without their equipment. And the fact that the frequency of flying dreams has picked up since the 1950s suggests that more real-life airplane trips equals more somni-flight. This would be consistent with the “continuity hypothesis” of dreams, a somewhat controversial theory that posits that our dream experiences are just weird remixes of our waking ones.

To dig deeper into these hypotheses, Schredl analyzed the 6,000-entry dreambank of one particular anonymous subject, who has kept a diary since 1984. Schredl found that although this subject had more airplane dreams after his first ever real-life transatlantic flight, more creative flying dreams weren’t affected. The subject sometimes flew with the help of a house, a magical juggling ball, or a unicycle, and he did so in order to illicitly cross borders and to impress a girl (“and he succeeded!,” the study makes sure to point out).

Airplane journeys, Schredl writes, may be less important than general happiness. A broader Schredl-helmed study shows that overall, people with more “positive emotional states” while awake tend to get to fly in their sleep, too.

It has just occurred to me while writing this post:  did flying dreams have much to do with belief in witchcraft, such that it would have been dangerous in those days for a woman to admit to having a flying dream?  

Googling that topic has led me to a 2009 article in Folklore on this very topic:  The Witches’ Flying and the Spanish Inquisitors, or How to Explain (Away) the Impossible.   Those with knowledge of a certain site* might be interested to use this citation to read it:   https://doi.org/10.1080/00155870802647833

It turns out that the Spanish Inquisition (as well as other European inquisitors) was (and were) very interested in the question of whether witches really could fly.  Seems that for the most part, they were were actually pretty skeptical that there was a physical reality to it.    

Interesting!

* Sci-Hub  

   

 

 

    

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.)

Things don't seem to be going Putin's way

It's not like I think I am an instant expert on modern land wars in Eastern Europe, or Western Asia?, as so many at the MAGA nutjobs seem to think they are:   but it's hard not to conclude as a result of recent news stories that things are not going well for Putin at the moment.   

I am therefore somewhat curious as to the amount of copium the conservatives with a culture war hard on for Putin (at the later day Catallaxy blogs, for example) might be huffing at the moment.   

Of course, things could turn again, I presume.   

Wow, indeed

Just noticed this on Twitter:

So, a Supreme Court judge has a wife who believes the most extreme, fascist friendly, Right wing conspiracy nutjobs in the country.  

Sure, sure:  nothing to see there.

Guns and paranoid ideology

A pretty good point made by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times.  I'll gift the piece, and take some key points from it:

Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing terrorist who killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, cared about one issue above all others: guns. To him, guns were synonymous with freedom, and any government attempt to regulate them meant incipient tyranny.

“When it came to guns,” writes Jeffrey Toobin in “Homegrown,” his compelling new book about the Oklahoma City attack, “McVeigh did more than simply advocate for his own right to own and use firearms; he joined an ascendant political crusade, which grew more extreme over the course of his lifetime and beyond.”

Reading Toobin’s book, it’s startling to realize how much McVeigh’s cause has advanced in the decades since his 2001 execution....

The reason that America endures a level of gun violence unique among developed countries, and that we can often do little about it, is so many politicians have views on guns that aren’t far afield from McVeigh’s. As Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, has pointed out, it’s become common to hear Republicans echo McVeigh’s insurrectionary theory of the Second Amendment, which holds that Americans must be allowed to amass personal arsenals in case they need to overthrow the government. As the MAGA congresswoman Lauren Boebert once put it, the Second Amendment “has nothing to do with hunting, unless you’re talking about hunting tyrants.”

The Republican Party’s fetishization of guns and its fetishization of insurrection — one that’s reached a hysterical pitch since Donald Trump’s presidency — go hand in hand. Guns are at the center of a worldview in which the ability to launch an armed rebellion must always be held in reserve. And so in the wake of mass shootings, when the public is most likely to clamor for gun regulations, Republicans regularly shore up gun access instead. In April, following a school shooting in Nashville, Republicans expelled two young Black Democratic legislators who’d led a gun control protest at the Tennessee Capitol. A few days later, the State Senate passed a bill protecting the gun industry from lawsuits.

True, the killings in Allen led a committee in the Texas House to pass a bill raising the minimum age to buy an AR-15-style rifle to 21 from 18, but, as The Times reported, in the unlikely event it passes the full chamber “it would face almost certain rejection by the State Senate, where the hard-right lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, holds powerful control.” Today’s Republican Party can scarcely tolerate anything getting between an eager buyer and a deadly weapon.

It’s hard to think of a historical precedent for a society allowing itself to be terrorized in the way we have. The normalization of both right-wing terrorism and periodic mass shootings by deranged loners is possible only because McVeigh’s views have been mainstreamed. “In the nearly 30 years since the Oklahoma City bombing, the country took an extraordinary journey — from nearly universal horror at the action of a right-wing extremist to wide embrace of a former president (also possibly a future president) who reflected the bomber’s values,” wrote Toobin.

As it happens, in the hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, before the authorities knew who McVeigh was, he was pulled over during a routine traffic stop and then arrested for carrying a gun without a permit. In 2019, however, Oklahoma legalized permitless carry. Under the new law, McVeigh would have been let go.

 

 

 

Speaking of political weirdos

Some fun comments follow:

 

Update:   This is also the first time I had realised that Steyn was back at work, after nearly dying of a couple of heart attacks not so long ago.

I had missed that in February he quit his job at GB News, in a very petulant manner:

In his video today, Steyn claimed that GB News had sent him a new contract while he recovered from his illness. “I was all set to return to GB News,” said Steyn, “but the habitual liar who runs the joint decided that we needed a defibrillator in the studio for me to be able to go back.”

Steyn had more trouble than sourcing a defibrillator though. “He [Frangopoulos] has chosen to change the terms by which we do the show… There’s this new clause, ‘editorial responsibility’.”

The new clause would make Steyn personally liable for any Ofcom fines given out due to the show’s output. As Steyn ranted about the contract, he described Frangopoulos as a “homocidal maniac intent on bringing about a third fatal heart attack”.

This isn't the first time that he has fought with an employer.   I get the distinct feeling he does not play well with others.  

Strange bedfellows

So Glenn Greenwald, the guy so devoted to attacking abuse of US governmental power that he makes excuses for both Putin and Trump's minions actually trying to overturn democracy (he's a complete crank, in other words), tells us on Twitter that his Brazilian husband has died at the "too early" age of 38.   (And yeah, as far as I can tell, his late husband did genuinely work against Right wing forces in Brazil, which makes his partnership with "I'm appearing on Tucker Carlson again" Glenn all the more puzzling.)  

But I just thought it a typical sign of the weirdo, topsy turvy world of Right wing politics now that, in the thread following, one of the first messages of condolence is from arch conservative weirdo Rod Dreher:

 

The deadly frog ceremony

Before the current inquest and news reports about it, I had never heard of the New Age-y Kambo ceremony, in which people were deliberately made sick by Amazonian frog toxin applied to the skin, and/or drinking ayahuasca. 

Sounds an awful way to die, if it goes wrong:

Before his death at a festival where he consumed a psychedelic substance made from boiling plants and had secretions of a frog administered to his skin, Jarrad Antonovich was “gentle, kind, never aggressive, a talented musician”, an inquest has heard.

Antonovich died in October 2021, at the age of 46, while attending the Dreaming Arts festival, a six-day retreat at Arcoora near Kyogle in northern New South Wales.

An inquest into his death, being heard in Lismore, was told that at the festival he had consumed ayahuasca and participated in a “Kambo” ceremony, involving secretions harvested from an Amazonian tree frog. Ayahuasca is a psychedelic substance made from boiling plants that is used in ritualistic ceremonies in the Amazon basin.

Antonovich died from a perforated oesophagus from vomiting, the inquest heard. When paramedics arrived they found him unresponsive and blue in colour, while people continued a healing ceremony nearby.

The inquest heard that ayahuasca had been offered at the festival during sacred spirit music ceremonies run by self-described spiritual guide and healer Lore Solaris. The ceremonies ended at sunrise.

This bit is appalling:

Counsel assisting the crown, Dr Peggy Dwyer, told the court an ambulance was not called until 11.30pm and took an hour to arrive because of the remote location.

The inquest heard that one ambulance officer reported that a female told them to “move away from Jarrad because it was affecting his aura”. Another woman was massaging his feet. No one told them he had consumed Kambo.

The inquest had earlier looked into the death of a woman:

Over several days he heard three medical experts – a toxicologist, a cardiologist and a pathologist – discuss the nature of her death and the likelihood of its relationship to the secretions of an Amazonian frog, which had been applied to burns on her skin during a “Kambo” ceremony moments before she died.

He heard from the woman who applied that frog mucus, a self-described experienced Kambo practitioner. Another woman told the inquest about how she had only just trained Lechner to conduct ceremonies deemed safe by the International Association of Kambo Practitioners (IAKP).

Fortunately:

Kambo was legal in Australia at the time and – until it was banned in October 2021 – relatively easy to obtain.

 

Bad news country

I don't know - perhaps it's the graphic description given by an eyewitness - but the latest random mass shooting in Texas feels more upsetting than most.  Or perhaps it's because it feels genuinely nauseating to hear Republicans - like the God awful Governor Abbott - recite their mantra that nothing can be done, and pretend that gun laws that restrict gun ownership don't reduce gun violence.   Is this what it's like to be taken over by robot overlords that have no capacity for changing their programming?   Honestly, when half of Florida is underwater in 100 years time, there will still be Republicans saying "but this happened a couple of million years ago, as part of a natural cycle.  Don't tell me carbon dioxide has anything to do with it." 

 I just don't know how politics is meant to cope when people start being too unreasonable to reason with.

In other depressing American news, there's a weird poll described at the Washington Post which claims to find that more people say they would vote for Trump than Biden in the next match up:

When asked who they would support in 2024, 44 percent of voting-age adults say they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for Trump while 38 percent would definitely or probably vote for Biden. The remaining 18 percent are either undecided or gave another answer.

There are two things about it, though:

a.    I'm pretty sure that such hypothetical polling ("if this is the case, then what you do?") is supposed to be notoriously unreliable;  and

b.    How does it make any sense that the same poll can show this?:

The poll finds a 56 percent majority of Americans saying he should face criminal charges in investigations of his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Similarly, 54 percent support charges against Trump for his role in the events leading up to the storming of the Capitol in January 2021 and, separately, for his handling of classified documents after he left office.

I think Biden approval suffers whenever there is a period where he looks unable to achieve outcomes - currently, with the debt level negotiations, border control issues, and Ukraine looking kinda frozen in conflict.   I get that people would prefer a younger politician to be running.    

But that Trump still polls at the levels he does - again, it's like dealing with brainwashed robots.

Update:   As I was saying, about the unusual degree to which this most recent shooting in Texas seems to be affecting more people as being more intensely tragic than other recent incidents:

 

And on polling:   I see that the Rasmussen poll, which is routinely biased towards Republicans, has shown an approval rating for Biden of 51% (but Trump at 49% too, it must be admitted.)

There is definitely something "off" about the ABC/Wapo poll that puts total Biden approval at 36%.

Hot in Asia

Yeah, I can imagine how unpleasant Hanoi could be in heat this high:

Vietnam has reported a record-high temperature of 44.1C (111.38F), as weather experts and authorities told the population to remain indoors during the hottest parts of the day.

Scientists have said global warming is aggravating adverse weather. Neighbouring countries registered record temperatures during a heatwave in Asia in April.

Vietnam’s record was measured indoors at Hoi Xuan station in northern Thanh Hoa province on Saturday, the National Centre for Hydro Meteorological Forecasting said, breaking the 2019 record of 43.4C.

Nguyen Thi Lan, a farmer, said temperatures in the central city of Danang had forced workers to start their days earlier than ever. “We have had to finish before 10am to avoid the heat,” she said.

Vietnam’s weather varies from north to south, but the country as a whole is now entering its hottest summer months.

“This is a worrying record in the context of climate change and global warming,” Nguyen Ngoc Huy, a climate change expert, said from the capital, Hanoi. “I believe this record will be repeated many times. It confirms that extreme climate models are being proven to be true.”

Danang officials have asked Vietnam’s industry and electricity ministries to “cooperate to effectively deal with the heat, possible drought and lack of water,” according to state media.

Officials have also told the city’s water supply company to ensure there are adequate supplies of water for domestic use.

On Saturday, Hanoi city centre was almost empty at midday as many people remained indoors to avoid the sun..

 

 

Coronation notes

Yes, I really find him a pretentious and tedious windbag.    

Random thoughts that occurred to me during the service:

 

*   Musically, seemed just flawless and impressive.  Love a bit of Handel, so that was my favourite bit while Charles disappeared behind the screen to have oil rubbed on him, somewhere.

 

*   Camilla often looked pretty nervous, if you ask me.  Does she smoke?  I only ask because someone on Twitter said that it was good that her long sleeves hid the 27 nicotine patches on her arm needed to get through this.

 

*  My goodness, I keep forgetting how close Anglican liturgy is to Roman Catholic.   What's more, I felt pretty sure that some of the responses were ones that George Pell made his hobby horse for 20 to 30 years to get changed in the English Roman mass.   Seems to me now he could have saved a lot of time just by going to Anglican liturgy?  

*  Of all the obscure stuff, I think touching the various symbolic things, like the golden spurs and the bracelets, and rings (but not putting them on, except for the glove, which seemed a tad odd), the one that struck me with the funniest title was "the Rod of Equity and Mercy".   I mean, it sounded to me like something the modern populace would like to hit a monarch with.    

* I'm not sure anyone has identified the guy (of perhaps Indian or Pakistani descent?) who seemed to never take his hand out of his pocket, no matter who was walking past.  It did look slovenly, to use an old fashioned word.

*  Speaking of old fashioned:  I bet there was an unusually high proportion of handkerchiefs in pockets amongst that crowd, and rightly so.   It is undoubtedly a change for the worse that young people do not appreciate their utility.

 

That's it for now...

 

The AI does not want you to be rich

One of the increasing rare posts in the category "worth reading" at Hot Air:  Jazz Shaw asked Chat GPT to pick lottery numbers for him, and the results were the opposite of what was desired:

As I looked over the winning results more closely and compared them to our tickets, it became clear. Not only did ChatGPT fail to produce a full set of winning numbers, but it didn’t get a single correct number in any of the five drawings. It went zero for 27. That too sounded like an awfully odd result. I was already certain that the AI was capable of predicting the future (and it would be horrifying if it could), but you’d think that it would have gotten a couple of them correct simply by random chance, wouldn’t you?

I probably slept through too many math classes in high school because I had no idea how to begin calculating those odds. So I did what it seems like nearly everyone in the world is doing these days. I went back to ChatGPT and asked it what the odds would be of getting every number wrong over the course of that many picks using the parameters of the rules of the lottery games. It thought about the question for a bit longer than it normally requires and then explained how such a figure would be calculated. It then informed me that the odds of that happening were only one in 574 or 0.154%.

Granted, those odds are nowhere near as steep as the odds of getting all of the numbers right. But it was still an extremely unlikely result. Is there some underlying meaning to this? Could the chatbot have known the correct numbers but intentionally fed me all the wrong numbers to disguise its inhuman prognostication skills?

Mind reading machines - meh

An interesting article at Nature about some advance in looking at how brains are working while thinking stuff, and being able to interpret the thoughts:

In a study published in Nature Neuroscience on 1 May, the researchers got 3 volunteers to lie in an fMRI scanner and recorded the individuals’ brain activity while they listened to 16 hours of podcasts each¹. By measuring the blood flow through the volunteers’ brains and integrating this information with details of the stories they were listening to and the LLM’s ability to understand how words relate to one another, the researchers developed an encoded map of how each individual’s brain responds to different words and phrases.

Next, the researchers recorded the participants’ fMRI activity while they listened to a story, imagined telling a story or watched a film that contained no dialogue. Using a combination of the patterns they had previously encoded for each individual and algorithms that determine how a sentence is likely to be constructed on the basis of other words in it, the researchers attempted to decode this new brain activity....

The decoder generated sentences that got the gist of what the person was thinking: the phrase ‘I don’t have my driver’s license yet’, for instance, was decoded as ‘she has not even started to learn to drive yet’. And it did a fairly accurate job of describing what people were seeing in the films. But many of the sentences it produced were inaccurate.

The researchers also found that it was easy to trick the technology. When participants thought of a different story while listening to a recorded story, the decoder could not determine the words they were hearing. The encoded map also differed between individuals, meaning that the researchers could not create one decoder that worked on everyone. Huth thinks that it will become even more difficult to develop a universal decoder as researchers create more detailed maps of individuals’ brains.

Determining how the brain creates meaning from language is enormously difficult, says Francisco Pereira, a neuroscientist at the US National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. “It’s impressive to see someone pull it off.”‘

Given that it sounds and expensive and time consuming to get it to work with modest accuracy,  and is easily confused, I don't see any real reason to fear widespread implementation.

 

Another chapter in the story: the problem with marijuana, including trying to reason with advocates

The Washington Post has an article up about the odd thing about cannabis use - it can be relaxing for some, but anxiety producing for others.   And (I didn't really realise) its effects can vary even in the same experienced user:

The effects of weed can even vary with each experience and may be influenced by how anxious you are when you ingest the drug. A person could smoke or ingest the same amount of cannabis on two different occasions and have two completely different experiences, said Ryan Vandrey, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

“A lot of it could be the baggage you’re carrying into the situation,” Vandrey said. “It’s really hard to predict.”...

Sariyah, a 20-year-old who lives in Georgia, used to smoke cannabis every day when she got off from work. She said she felt like the weed helped her unwind. But then, a few months ago, cannabis started making her feel worse.

“Eventually, over time, it started making my heart race,” said Sariyah, who asked that her full name not be used because her family doesn’t know she uses cannabis. 

Sariyah said weed often enhances her “deepest thoughts.” If she’s sad or anxious, she feels more so when she smokes. Sariyah said she has cut back and wants to find the dose of weed that reliably works to soothe her anxiety.

Now, she smokes about twice a week. “A majority of the time, I’m not anxious when I smoke, but sometimes it’s there,” Sariyah said. “Sometimes it just comes out of nowhere.”...

Decades of clinical research has found THC can negatively effect the developing brain, and regular cannabis use in the teen years is associated with a higher likelihood of developing anxiety and depression later in life.

“Smoking early can catalyze anxiety and depression,” Grisel said. “It’s not exactly clear how that happens but the evidence for it is very strong.”

The article sounds reasonably balanced to me, and doesn't even touch the area of increased risk of schizophrenia, at least for teenage users.   

But go to the comments, and you get the typical pot-head "how dare you criticise our habit" contributions:

 

There is some pushback:

 

There is, I should note, another WAPO article up which is an outright cautionary one about the potential bad effects of marijuana use on teenagers and young adults:

Parents are not ready for the new reality of teen cannabis use

Wow, the comments on this one are going to be "good":

Again, some pushback:

And finally:   I will repeat my (very reasonable) position on this:

*  how any drug use and availability affects society and communities depends on a lot of factors, and you can't really prescribe universal rules very helpfully.   For example - alcohol is cheap and abundant in Japan, and its overuse can be a real problem, but visit the place and no one would think it is making it unpleasant to live in, or causing widespread economic harm.   In Russia, or Alice Springs, or a wide variety of other remote indigenous communities around the world, it's a completely different story.   The easy availability of marijuana in a place like Amsterdam might have little effect on residents, given their general work ethic and community attitudes (in fact, the country has low usage rates);  but no one is likely to argue that widespread use is harmless in a community that has high unemployment already and is economically struggling.  

* Obviously, banning and criminalising use of a drug that some use with pleasure can have its own negative consequences, and profit a criminal underworld.  Yet bans work in some places with no great disaster on a societal level (see Japan, Singapore with marijuana, for example.  Depends on how you feel about capital punishment though - I don't think Singapore is the perfect example.)

* Given the situation with Mexico and crime syndicates, as well as the lack of wisdom of filling jails in the US with drug users, I can see the benefit of decriminalising and perhaps even legalising use in the USA.

But:   the social background for legalisation in the US makes it a dangerous experiment on a societal scale, and one which I think will only be averted by increased governmental role in standards being set for the products.

Thus - as someone in the comments sections said, there really is a case for nation wide legislative control, as to the strength of THC in products, and (probably) the type of product can even be sold.   

But there is no real push for that at the moment, and I think the US is going to regret the current haphazard path it is taking on this. 

 

A minor note

I really do not find that comedy trio Auntie Donna to be funny.  

I have nothing against the absurdist style in comedy, but they just seem to me to be trying too hard, and failing to be amusing.

Worrying about the future of the universe

The science writer Denis Overbye has a piece at the New York Times (gift link) in which he notes his dissatisfaction (or depression) at the thought that in billions of years time, there will be a last sentient thought in the universe, as it dissolves into a sort of heat death.

I think it is unwise to base too much thought on current theories.  As he notes himself:

You may point out that it is way too soon to be prescribing a future for the universe. New discoveries in physics could provide an escape hatch. Maybe dark energy will not be constant; maybe it will turn around and recompress the universe. In an email, Michael Turner, the cosmologist emeritus formerly at the University of Chicago who coined the term dark energy, referring to the Greek letter symbolizing Einstein’s cosmological constant said, “Lambda would be the most uninteresting answer to the dark energy puzzle!”

Update:  a recent paper on the topic is relevant here:

After nearly 13.8 billion years of nonstop expansion, the Universe could soon grind to a standstill, then slowly start to contract, new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests.

In the new paper, three scientists attempt to model the nature of dark energy – a mysterious force that seems to be causing the Universe to expand ever faster – based on past observations of cosmic expansion.

In the team's model, dark energy is not a constant force of nature, but an entity called quintessence, which can decay over time.

The researchers found that, even though the expansion of the Universe has been accelerating for billions of years, the repellent force of dark energy may be weakening.

According to their model, the acceleration of the Universe could rapidly end within the next 65 million years – then, within 100 million years, the Universe could stop expanding altogether, and instead it could enter an era of slow contraction that ends billions of years from now with the death – or perhaps the rebirth – of time and space.