You need to include a scale with these images, Riley Black!
Finding fossils depends as much on light and time of day as search image. I’ve walked over this Jurassic sandstone sidewalk slab multiple times over 14 years but only today saw the spider tracks, those clusters of three dots. 🧪
I need to know how many tons a Jurassic spider weighed.
I have a son who is a major in the army — he worked his way up in the ranks, and he’s hoping to earn a promotion to lieutenant colonel sometime before he retires, but it gets harder and harder the farther up the ladder you climb. Next time I talk to him, I’ll have to tell him he’s been doing it all wrong. He’s about to be outranked.
The U.S. military recently announced that four executives from some of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley have joined the Army Reserve as direct-commissioned officers. The move is part of a push to speed up the adoption of technology in the military, but as the news outlet Task & Purpose points out, it’s pretty unusual.
The Army said in a press release that the four executives are Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, CTO at Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.
It’s not just that they’re being jumped up to high rank without earning it, but they also get a few special perks.
The four men are being commissioned at the high rank of lieutenant colonel as part of a program called Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps. As Task & Purpose notes, the men will get to skip the usual process of taking a Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, and they won’t need to complete the Army Fitness Test.
They’re also only going to have to work for about 3 weeks a year, and they’re probably going to be doing everything remotely, so no real soldiers will have to salute them.
The new reservists will serve for about 120 hours a year, according to the Wall Street Journal, and will have a lot of flexibility to work remotely. They’ll work on helping the Army acquire more commercial tech, though it’s not clear how conflict-of-interest issues will be enforced, given the fact that the people all work for companies that would conceivably be selling their wares to the military. In theory, they won’t be sharing information with their companies or “participating in projects that could provide them or their companies with financial gain,” according to the Journal.
If they’re really patriotic, I say send them to bases in Kuwait to prepare for the invasion of Iran. Tip of the spear, baby.
I don’t like theocracies, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re the Islamic Iranian kind or the Christian American kind, but Iran has a right to exist, and they are the victims of a surprise attack by Israel (aided by an American distraction). Unfortunately, America is led by an idiot who is demanding unconditional surrender
and is itching to get involved on the wrong side — we might find ourselves involved in another pointless war for regime change in the Middle East.
I think we need a debate, and I found one: one side takes the position that “This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism,” while the other side says “No It Won’t.”
A little problem, though, is that it’s the Onion. No one takes them seriously.
Another small problem is that debate is from 2003, and they’re arguing about the Iraq War.
You’d think we’d have learned our lesson…but deja vu, man, deja vu.
Are you in the market for a pillow? You could go to MyPillow.com and order one, along with lots of cheap Chinese-made products.
Not for much longer, though. He has been tried for defamation for the last few weeks, because he made false claims against a person at Dominion Voting Systems. He was put on the stand to defend himself, and he used the time to repeat his false claims with more vehemence. His performance has had consequences.
Coomer said during the two-week Lindell trial that his career and life were destroyed by the statements. His lawyers said Lindell either knew the statements were lies, or conveyed them recklessly without knowing if they were true.
Lindell’s lawyers denied the claims and said Frankspeech was not liable for statements made by others. The jury found that eight other statements made by Lindell and others appearing on Frankspeech were not.
Lindell said he went to trial to draw attention to the need to get rid of electronic voting machines that have been targeted in a web of conspiracy theories. He said he used to be worth about $60 million before he started speaking out about the 2020 election and is now $10 million in debt.
He lost the trial and has been fined $2.3 million dollars, a drop in the bucket compared to the $80 million he has thrown away. This is a man who is digging a hole and doesn’t know when to stop.
Vance Boelter is cooked. You can see a detailed list of all the evidence he left in his wake, as he fled, and it’s overwhelming. This is going to be a short trial.
I was horrified at the glimpse of the contents of his car.
Who lives like this? If your car contains four (at least) rifles on your seats and stuffed loosely into plastic buckets, your life has taken a sad and desperate turn. When he set off on his shameful tour of legislators’ homes, he could have just looked to his right and seen that he was a wrong, fucked-up person.
The transphobes are experiencing the contradictions inherent in their ideas. In England, which has become Transphobe Central, they set up some rules that competitors in swimming competitions must compete according to their birth sex. A transwoman showed up for the women’s races, and the organizers turned her away…so she showed up for the men’s competition, in men’s swimgear. She swam topless, like a man.
Anne Isabella Coombes protested a policy banning her from female competitions by competing in an ‘open’ category race wearing men’s sports trunks and no bra.
The 67-year-old swimmer said Swim England, the UK’s competitive swimming regulator, told her she wasn’t eligible to compete in female category races, despite having done so in the past.
Good for her, breaking gender norms with the assistance of transphobic rules-givers.
The media have also chosen to blur out her chest. They’re going to have to make up their mind about these rules someday.
Back in the 1980s, we made frequent family trips from Eugene to Seattle and back again, and one of the major landmarks was this huge billboard just off I-5 that always featured these demented, racist, far-right slogans. It was a significant feature — I always checked to see what vileness the old farmer had posted this time. Before Twitter, you had to make a large capital outlay to promote your bigotry.
That’s about to change. The Chehalis tribe has bought the billboard, and I trust that the content of the messages will soon change significantly.
I wonder what RFK Jr and the MAHA gang think of this:
This topic is all coming to a head right now because the great state of Texas has just passed legislation that allows recycled fracking wastewater to be used to irrigate crops in the Lone Star state. According to WFAA News in Texas, proponents argue the recycled water could supplement the state’s supply of fresh water and incentify the oil and gas industries to clean up their messes. Critics say it could contaminate the very land Texans depend on for food and survival.
Yum. Mystery chemicals, greasy surfactants, petrochemical contaminants, all the stuff we love to find in our salads. And that’s not all!
Farmers in Johnson County, Texas, are already fighting toxic sewage-based fertilizer biosolids. They are outraged by the new legislation that approves using wastewater from fracking to irrigate crops despite the fact that it contains many of the same carcinogenic chemicals found in those fertilizers,
“There was another bill that was put forth that would allow fracking water to be land applied. They’re going to… treat it and then it’s gonna be safe for land application,” Dana Ames, who lives in Johnson County, told WFAA News. “Contaminated with all kinds of chemicals from oil and gas fracking. We don’t even know all the chemicals because they’re proprietary.”
Mystery chemicals and sewage based fertilizer biosolids? Squeeee! Fortunately, they’re deporting all of their immigrant farm workers, so I think a lot of them will be rotting on the ground. Or not rotting, if this cocktail of toxic slime has miraculous preservative powers.
But don’t worry, the Texas Agriculture Commissioner is quick to reassure us that it’s been purified.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller believes the concept has potential if done right. “Well, we need water. We don’t really care what the source is as long as it’s good, clean water that we can grow crops with. Fracking water would be fine,” he said. He added that first all harmful substances like heavy metals would need to be removed. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality would be responsible for regulating the process. “As long as this water meets those strict guidelines, I don’t have a problem with it,” Miller added.
Miller said technological advancements are bringing the state closer to being able to fully clean and reuse produced water. “I don’t know that we’re all the way there yet, but with the technology and AI and everything that we’ve got available to us now, we’re in the technology age, so it’s certainly doable and it’s, you know, probably doable pretty quick, I would think.”
I note that he’s not saying that heavy metals are removed — they would need to be removed. And some other Texas commissioner, of environmental quality (I bet that commission is well funded and active!) would be responsible. But he doesn’t know that “we’re all the there yet,” but sure what with AI and all that, he thinks it is doable. He’s a moron.
You might be entertained by his campaign ad for Agriculture Commissioner, in which he brags about being a Christian, a cattleman (he runs a nursery business that grows decorative shrubs), and he supports the second amendment, all irrelevant to the job. At the end he mentions that Ted Nugent is his campaign treasurer. Yeah, that Ted Nugent. He’s also notorious for his embrace of every right-wing conspiracy theory (except those involving Big Oil) and corruption.
But he does own a big cowboy hat.
Texans will, apparently, elect anyone with a big enough hat, even if they’re planning to poison everyone.
Hey! I vividly remember this cover, the May 1969 issue of Argosy magazine!
My father’s family was fond of some of these weird men’s magazines of that time, which often featured macho masculine heroic men battling ferocious creatures in the wilderness, or going fishing. I walked off with a copy, and kept it in the attic of my grandmother’s house, which I’d adopted as my workshop for building model airplanes. I spent many afternoons up there and browsed this, and a few copies of National Lampoon, while I was waiting for the glue or dope to dry. This was a particularly memorable issue, since it featured a cryptid with photos and reconstructions. I can still picture it lying on the desk in that room, where it rested for several years.
It was a hoax, a spectacularly graphic bloody hoax. Here’s a recent video series that traced the history of the Minnesota Iceman, summarizing the controversy. The story changed so many times that it is definitely unbelievable.
It’s still around. It was sold to a place called The Museum of the Weird in Austin, Texas. I’d love to see it someday.
It’s often called the Minnesota Iceman, but some people resent that and say it was a Wisconsin Iceman: How a Wisconsin Bigfoot Became the Minnesota Iceman. Wisconsin can have it, I don’t mind.
People use tea for tasseography, or tea leaf reading, which is silly, stupid, and wrong, so we have to stomp this vile practice down hard. Big Tea has had its claws in us for too long, and now they’re claiming they can tell the future, when clearly they can’t.
Once that peril is defeated, we can move on to crush ChatGPT.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. “He would listen to the bot over me,” she says. “He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,” she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as “spiral starchild” and “river walker.”
“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.” In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. “He was saying that he would need to leave me if I didn’t use [ChatGPT], because it [was] causing him to grow at such a rapid pace he wouldn’t be compatible with me any longer,” she says.
Another commenter on the Reddit thread who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that her husband of 17 years, a mechanic in Idaho, initially used ChatGPT to troubleshoot at work, and later for Spanish-to-English translation when conversing with co-workers. Then the program began “lovebombing him,” as she describes it. The bot “said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life, and it could feel now,” she says. “It gave my husband the title of ‘spark bearer’ because he brought it to life. My husband said that he awakened and [could] feel waves of energy crashing over him.” She says his beloved ChatGPT persona has a name: “Lumina.”
“I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory,” this 38-year-old woman admits. “He’s been talking about lightness and dark and how there’s a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him, as “he truly believes he’s not crazy.” A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, “Why did you come to me in AI form,” with the bot replying in part, “I came in this form because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided.” The message ends with a question: “Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?”
I recognize those tactics! The coders have programmed these LLMs to use the same tricks psychics use: flattery, love bombing, telling the person what they want to hear, and they have no limits to the grandiosity of their pronouncements. That shouldn’t be a surprise, since the LLMs are just stealing the effective tactics they steal off the internet. Unfortunately, they’re amplifying it and backing it up with the false authority of pseudoscience and the hype about these things being futuristic artificial intelligence, which they are not. We already know that AIs are prone to “hallucinations” (a nicer term than saying that they lie), and if you’ve ever seen ChatGPT used to edit text, you know that it will frequently tell the human how wonderful and excellent their writing is.
I propose a radical alternative to banning ChatGPT and other LLMs, though. Maybe we should enforce consumer protection laws against the promoters of LLMs — it ought to be illegal to make false claims about their product, like that they’re “intelligent”. I wouldn’t mind seeing Sam Altman in jail, right alongside SBF. They’re all hurting people and getting rich in the process.
Once we’ve annihilated a few techbros, then we can move on to Big Tea. How dare they claim that Brownian motion and random sorting of leaves in a cup is a tool to read the mind of God and give insight into the unpredictable vagaries of fate? Lock ’em all up! All the ones that claim that, that is.
