Shizuoka – a model city

I travelled a bit around in Japan around Christmas and New Year, and decided to stay for a couple of days around New Years Eve in Shizuoka, which lies between Nagoya and Tokyo.

Unfortunately for me, while the Japanese doesn’t celebrate Christmas, they do celebrate New Year, and most museums and other attractions were closed in the week containing the New Year. This mean that I spend a lot of time walking around outside, sightseeing.

One thing I noticed in Shizuoka, is there model city sculptures

Apparently, Shizuoka produces more than 80% of model kits in Japan, and the city decided to embrace this fact. This is all very well explained on this page (there is a video): The Model City 1:1 Scale

Not all the models they mention in the video seems to have been created, but I did find a few while walking around in the city – they are documented on my Instagram feed

 

Picking the right side

If you were active in online Atheism in 2011, you are probably aware of the Deep Rifts that formed back then, initially caused by what is now been coined Elevatorgate.

Even if you were not part of the movement back then, you will see the results of it now – the movement is split, and certain people, groups, and organizations won’t work together or appear at the same events.

Looking back at the split now, it is noteworthy that a lot of prominent, mostly male, atheists and the organizations they led, was on the side against Rebecca Watson and others who wanted to address the problem of sexual harassment (and racism and other sorts of bigotry) in the secular movement. On the other side of the split was a few noteworthy atheists, like Rebecca Watson and PZ Myers, a few conferences (e.g. Skepticon) and a lot of minor players in the movement.

Some prominent people and organizations tried to appear outwardly to not pick sides, but some showed their hands by inviting people from one fraction or the other, or by being willing to spend time with certain people.

As I said, some of the most prominent atheists at the time were on one side of the rift – these include people like Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Ronald A. Lindsay, Steven Pinker, and Michael Shermer, many of which have since 2011 been credibly accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Most of these people were connected to John Brockman, who was close to Jeff Epstein, getting a lot of funding from Epstein, and introducing him to a lot of leading scientists, including several on the list.

Lawrence Krauss was also close to Epstein, and wrote to him frequently, and often forwarded mails to him. Because of this, a number of mails by the prominent atheists have come to light through the Epstein files

Rebecca Watson covers it here:

The video is a couple of months old, but I haven’t been blogging for a while, so I haven’t come around to covering it before now.

I might be unreasonable, but if I am on one side of a schism in a movement, and I found out that people on my side of the schism is not only credible accused of sexual harassment and assault, but also have ties, in some cases close ties, to Jeff Epstein, I would very seriously consider if I am not on the wrong side.

But then, if I ever was on a side in a schism that was actively fighting social justice, I would already know I was on the wrong side.

In spite of Trump, wind energy is spreading

Among the many bad and evil things that Trump did when he got into office for the second time, was to make an executive order targeting wind and solar subsidies. This not only had the effect of blocking money to new projects, but also to cancel subsidies already granted.

This led Revolution Wind, a 50/50 joint venture between Global Infrastructure Partners’ Skyborn Renewables and Ørsted A/S, and Sunrise Wind LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ørsted A/S, to sue the US Administration, with predictable results. Ørsted A/S is a Danish company.

Sunrise Wind resumes construction, fifth ruling overturned

A federal judge for D.C. District Court has allowed Sunrise Wind to resume work after granting a preliminary injunction against the administration’s lease suspension and construction pause issued December 22, 2025. 

D.C District Judge Lamberth ordered the action to be “arbitrary and capricious” after having reviewed classified information and agreed that irreparable harm standards were met given the loss of specialized vessels that would cause a “cascade of delays” preventing the project from meeting its obligations. 

Previously, Judge Lamberth ruled in favor of Revolution Wind’s construction resumption twice, most recently under the same lease suspension and stop construction order affecting Sunrise Wind, and again in September 2025 when the federal administration issued a stop work order directly for Revolution Wind. The administration referenced undisclosed “national security concerns” that arose from a recent classified Department of War study alleging that turbine structures cause interference with military radar systems.  

…

Sunrise Wind is 45% complete and set to provide 924 MW of power generation to New York. The project’s supply chain stretches across 34 states and has driven more than $1.9 billion worth of investments while supporting more than 4,290 American jobs across the construction, operations, shipbuilding, and manufacturing sectors. Ten shipyards in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Texas built or retrofitted the more than 16 vessels operating at the site. Most notably, the first U.S.-built subsea rock installation vessel was constructed at Hanwha Philly Shipyard.

The above article mentions that the Judge had previously ruled in favor of Revolution Wind. 

Ørsted A/S put out a press release a couple of weeks ago, stating Revolution Wind begins delivering power to New England

Revolution Wind, LLC, a 50/50 joint venture between Global Infrastructure Partners’ Skyborn Renewables and Ørsted, announced today that the Revolution Wind project has started delivering power to New England’s electric grid, strengthening the region’s power supply and helping reduce costs for consumers.

Revolution Wind, a 704 MW offshore wind energy project, is expected to supply enough electricity to power more than 350,000 homes and businesses. The project will deliver power under fixed-price, 20-year agreements with energy utilities in Rhode Island and Connecticut, providing price certainty and stability for consumers.

So in spite of the best effort of the Trump administration, US households are starting to get wind energy, with more to come as other projects finishes.

Twitter’s feed algorithm is harmful

We all know that Twitter is a cesspool of spambots, far right users, incels and outright Nazis. We know this has much to do with who gets promoted by the algorithms they use. One of these algorithms is the feed algorithm.

If you don’t know, most social media don’t show you just the posts from people you follow, in the order they are posted. Instead they fill your feed with suggestions – and they post the posts completely out of order. This is nominally done to create engagement, but in Twitter’s case, it is also used to push specific transphobic, misogynist, racist viewpoints.

In Twitter you can choose between algorithmic suggestions and getting a chronological timeline of the posts by the accounts you follow. If you choose a chronological feed, it will revert ba ck to the algorithmic feed after a while (or at least it did so when I was active on Twitter).

An interesting study in Nature by Germain Gauthier, Roland Hodler, Philine Widmer & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, shows the danger of Twitters algorithmic feed

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm

Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

There is no disclosure of Twitter’s ranking of suggestions, so people have no way of knowing that using the algorithm. will expose them only to one biased, and often highly incorrect, worldview.

This is something that both the EU and the US need to address legally. No platform should push one specific viewpoint over another, and definitely not in such a hidden way. Yes, the usership of a site have biases, which will probably reflect in the algorithmic feed, but the bias should not be pushed by the website itself.

Lazy linking

A few, often slightly older, articles on the internet that I have come across and find interesting enough to share.

The Collectible Coins That Celebrate the Dark Side of American Policing

The first military challenge coins, one story goes, were handed out in 1969 by a US Army colonel to build camaraderie in his Special Forces unit. He took the idea from a National Guardsman who had required his troops to always keep a sixpence coin on them in order to buy drinks for their buddies. (Soldiers caught empty-handed during a “coin check” typically must buy a round.) By the 1980s, the silver dollar–size medallions had taken off in the military and beyond. Corporations gave them out to employees. Numismatists collected them. And as cops began equipping themselves and acting more like soldiers, they started minting their own. These law enforcement challenge coins often embrace the unpolished side of the “warrior cop” ethos—the violence, racism, and impunity that have sparked our current reckoning with American police culture.

The AI Boardroom Gap (pdf)

There’s a widening gap between bold AI ambition and reality. Most organizations aren’t failing at AI because of the technology, but because their foundations can’t support it.

This report is quite uncritical of AI, but it shines the light on a very real problem – the differences in AI ambitions and the reality of a lot of companies. In my opinion, this is to a large part due to AI being oversold to the CEOs and boardmembers of companies, so they expect a lot more from it, than is realistic in most organizations. For example, AI has been promoted as a tool to make programmers up to a magnitude more productive, but we struggle to find any real evidence of this. If you base your strategy around 10x programmers, then it will not work.

Speaking of evidence for AI and system development:

Does AI Really Make Coders More Productive?

The big headline? On average, AI coding assistants give developers a 15-20% productivity boost across industries. That’s solid—imagine finishing your work 15-20% faster! But it’s not the same for everyone. Claims that developers see a ten fold (10x) boost in productivity are not very contextually helpful. Some teams saw huge jumps, while others actually got less productive. Why? It depends on a few key factors.

On top of that, I can add that this article from last year, showed that AI can decrease productivity in some cases:

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity

We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities in one relevant setting; as these systems continue to rapidly evolve, we plan on continuing to use this methodology to help estimate AI acceleration from AI R&D automation.

In fairness, I should add that they have found more AI-positive results in later studies, but they find their their own design lacking and states “We are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design“

It is escalating

First the arrested and charged Democratic politicians like Rep .LaMonica McIver and Senator Alex Padilla and now they are killing them.

Horrifying news out of Minnesota

Melissa Hortman, the top Democratic lawmaker in the Minnesota House, was shot and killed in a suspected politically-motivated assassination along with her husband early Saturday.

The suspect in the attack at Hortman’s home in Brooklyn Park is impersonating a police officer and remains at large, according to authorities.

Minnesota Sen. John Hoffman and his wife were also shot multiple times at their home in Champlin, but are expected to survive, according to Gov. Tim Walz.

PZ has more

This is clearly not just about political differences, if anyone still believed that. Now one group is trying to suppress the rest of the country through threats, the use of force, and outright murder.

Sounds and chimpanzees

Surfing the internet, I noted two pieces of news related to Chimpanzees and sounds.

The first article is about the rhythms that different groups of chimpanzees drum with, indicating that chimpanzees share musicality with humans.

Chimpanzee groups drum with distinct rhythms

New research from a team of cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists finds that chimpanzees drum rhythmically, using regular spacing between drum hits. Their results show that eastern and western chimpanzees — two distinct subspecies — drum with distinguishable rhythms. The researchers say these findings suggest that the building blocks of human musicality arose in a common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.

The actual science article was printed in Current Biology: Chimpanzee drumming shows rhythmicity and subspecies variation

The second article is about how wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of singles calls when embedding them in longer calls, indicating a linguistic complexity that hasn’t been documented before outside the human species.

The origins of language (horrible headline given by ScienceDaily)

Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite generation of meaning by combining phonemes into words and words into sentences. This contrasts with the very few meaningful combinations reported in animals, leaving the mystery of human language evolution unresolved.

Chimpanzees are capable of complex communication: The human capacity for language may not be as unique as previously thought. Chimpanzees have a complex communication system that allows them to combine calls to create new meanings, similar to human language. Combining calls creatively: Chimpanzees use four ways to change meaning when combining single calls into two-call combinations, including compositional and non-compositional combinations, and they use a large variety of call combinations in a wide range of contexts.

The science article is in ScienceAdvances: Versatile use of chimpanzee call combinations promotes meaning expansion

Abstract

Language is a combinatorial communication system able to generate an infinite number of meanings. Nonhuman animals use several combinatorial mechanisms to expand meanings, but maximum one mechanism is reported per species, suggesting an evolutionary leap to human language. We tested whether chimpanzees use several meaning-expanding mechanisms. We recorded 4323 utterances in 53 wild chimpanzees and compared the events in which chimpanzees emitted two-call vocal combinations (bigrams) with those eliciting the component calls. Examining 16 bigrams, we found four combinatorial mechanisms whereby bigram meanings were or were not derived from the meaning of their parts—compositional or noncompositional combinations, respectively. Chimpanzees used each mechanism in several bigrams across a wide range of daily events. This combinatorial system allows encoding many more meanings than there are call types. Such a system in nonhuman animals has never been documented and may be transitional between rudimentary systems and open-ended systems like human language.

I found it interesting that two articles came out at the same time, seemingly unrelated, that both indicates that we share more traits with our Chimpanzee relatives than previously thought

 

Time for a new pope

Pope Francis has died, Vatican says

Pope Francis, the first Latin American leader of the Roman Catholic Church, has died, the Vatican said on Monday, ending an often turbulent reign marked by division and tension as he sought to overhaul the hidebound institution.

Pope Francis is probably the best Catholic pope in my lifetime, but he still represented a bigoted organization, covering up for child molesters. The same will be true of the next pope.

Disable AI training on your YouTube videos

Recently I have come across a bunch of videos on YouTube with AI generated descriptions under the videos. I presume most people who have these don’t know how to switch this feature off.

Here is an example of what I am talking about – an added description field under the video.

If you want to switch it off for you account, you have to go through YouTube studio – this is done through the menu you find if you click on your head in the top right corner

After navigating to YouTube Studio, you have to click on “settings”

In settings, you have to choose “Channel” and the tab “Advanced settings”. After doing that, you can scroll down to “Third-party training”, which you should switch off.