xkcd doesn’t cover all the possibilities

This came out with poor timing.

You see, yesterday afternoon was spent trying to use a company’s website. I was sent a bunch of stuff from a company, complaining about my mother’s failure to respond to their entreaties — she died in 2024. I’m still dealing with random bureaucratic nonsense, because apparently they didn’t get the public announcement my lawyer published. So I called them.

What followed was steps similar to what you see above.

Except that I managed to get through to a human representative. Unfortunately, it was someone with a thick Indian accent, so we struggled for a while, but eventually we distilled everything down to a request for documentation, etc., and she was sort of helpful, and told me what to do to maybe clear all this up.

By faxing all these documents to a number. Faxing. Who uses a fax anymore?

I found a site that lets me email them stuff that then gets faxed, for a price.

I am now waiting to see if all that worked.

I also contacted Boeing, which went much more smoothly. I think I’ll miss the monthly copy of The Aerospace Mechanic that they’ve been sending me.

Sorry, I’m going to be pessimistic again

Let’s see…we’re living in a country run by openly corrupt oligarchs. The educational system is being undermined by fundamentalist Christian fanatics. We’re almost certainly headed for an economic crash, as billionaires pour billions of our dollars into the AI fantasy. MAHA is similarly chasing illusions, that removing food dyes will correct systematic patterns of abuse by Big Food, and that autism is caused by whatever unlikely correlation Robert Felching Kennedy Jr names. The anti-war president is searching for a casus belli to blow up boats in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. What else could possibly go wrong?

How about another pandemic? How about a bird flu pandemic?

After a quiet summer, bird flu is on the move again, and experts say it poses an escalating threat. While the virus doesn’t appear capable of spreading from human to human, it has killed people exposed to sick poultry. This year, the United States saw its first death from bird flu, a Louisiana senior with a flock of backyard chickens.

Viruses are constantly evolving, and if a person catches bird flu while infected with a seasonal flu, the pathogens could mutate into a variant that infects large numbers of people. “The minute it transmits in humans, it’s done,” warned Erin Sorrell, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

In our recent bird flu epidemic, for most of us it was a nuisance: egg shortages in the grocery stores, higher prices. But in the center of the epidemic, factory farms in Ohio and Indiana, it was far worse. Entire flocks of chickens had to be killed to suppress the spread. Farmers going out of business. Would you believe mass graves with millions of birds?

ProPublica has published evidence that the avian virus is spread by airborne contamination.

Our finding: The wind was at least a plausible explanation for how the virus could have spread from farm to farm.

We shared our analysis of the outbreak with eight experts in avian flu who agreed with that assessment. Several of them felt it was more than a mere possibility.

“It just seems so likely to me that this was an airborne thing,” said Brian McCluskey, former chief epidemiologist with USDA’s agency that oversees the response to bird flu. “I mean, how else would it have moved around so quickly?”

The experts stressed the analysis didn’t prove the wind directly carried bird flu from one farm to another, or that it was the only factor at play. The virus typically spreads via multiple routes, which could include contaminated birds, rodents or workers; if farms share the same feed supplier or trash collector, those factors can’t be ruled out.

But several experts said ProPublica’s analysis underscores the shortcomings of the government’s strategy, which fails to take the wind into account at all.

“USDA has been grossly negligent in not establishing risk factors in real time,” said Simon Shane, a poultry veterinarian and consultant.

There has been talk of pre-emptively vaccinating chickens…but the idea is opposed by the chicken meat and egg industries. That might give foreign buyers the impression that American chickens are tainted, and we can’t have that! So instead we’ll dig trenches and bury millions of birds when the virus appears, which is our government approved strategy. You know who is behind this approach.

Adding to the headwinds is U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said the virus should be allowed to burn through flocks so that farmers can identify birds with natural immunity, an approach public health experts have called “dangerous and unethical.”

That’s the same strategy many of these MAHA morons endorsed for COVID — let it burn through the human population until the virus was “done”. That would have been a disaster, but now they want to do the same thing for the poultry industry. Maybe they’ll get to do the experiment in the near future if the bird flu jumps to the human population.

We are so screwed in so many ways.

Somebody got paid

The US government hates drug dealers so much that they’re willing to blow up fishing boats to kill them extrajudicially — boats that might contain only fishermen, but because some are “narcoboats,” the Secretary of War believes he is authorized to “kill everybody”.

During the 2 September operation, led by the elite counter-terrorist group Seal Team 6, a first missile strike left two survivors clinging on to the wreck, the Post reported. Adm Frank M “Mitch” Bradley, head of Special Operations Command, reportedly ordered a second strike to kill the two survivors to comply with Hegseth’s orders.

Some current and former US officials and experts have said, according to the Post, that the Trump administration’s missile strikes in the Caribbean may be unlawful. To date, more than 80 people have been killed in the series of military strikes, targeting at least 22 more boats.

No wonder our president thinks telling our military to not follow unlawful orders is sedition — he’s eager to commit murder under the excuse that he opposes drug trafficking. Curiously, though, while he’s slaughtering low-level possible narcotics dealers without evidence that they actually are criminals, he’s showing mercy to rich, convicted kingpins of the drug trade who made millions of dollars shipping cocaine into the US.

President Donald Trump said Friday that he will be pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who in 2024 was convicted for drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

What’s the difference between a poor South American guy working on a small boat in the ocean and a rich Central American who probably has many millions of dollars salted away in shady banks? I don’t think it’s geography. I suspect someone got an awful lot of money to whisper in a senile president’s ear. Said president might have also wet his beak in the bribe.

Hey, does anyone else think this whole business of presidents being able to circumvent the law and nullify the decisions of the courts to reek of royal privilege?

The most cutting burn ever

Also, the worst case of getting old ever. Dorothy Fuldheim was a well-respected and cutting edge newscaster from Cleveland from the 1930s until her death in 1984. She made the mistake of going on the Johnny Carson show in 1979, with Richard Pryor…and you can guess how that went. It was a classic example of clueless white person who doesn’t believe poverty is real meeting a black person who actually knows what the real world is like.

Suddenly, it’s clear how Ronald Reagan got elected.

Don’t trust anything from the Anhui Vocational College of Press and Publishing

Back in the day, when I was writing papers, it was a grueling, demanding process. I’d spend hours in the darkroom, trying to develop perfect exposures of all the images, and that was after weeks to months with my eyes locked to the microscope. Even worse was the writing; in those days we’d go through the paper word by word, checking every line for typos. We knew that once we submitted it, the reviewers would shred it and the gimlet-eyed editors would scrutinize it carefully before permitting our work to be typeset in the precious pages of their holy journal. It was serious work.

Nowadays, you just tell the computer to write the paper for you and say, fuck it.

That’s the message I get from this paper, Bridging the gap: explainable ai for autism diagnosis and parental support with TabPFNMix and SHAP, which was published in one of the Nature Publishing Group’s lesser journals, Nature Scientific Reports, an open-access outlet. Now I can’t follow the technical details because it’s so far outside my field, but it does declare right there in the title that they have an AI tool for autism diagnosis that is explainable, which implies to me that it generates diagnoses that would be comprehensible to families, right? This claim is also emphasized in the abstract, before it descends into jargon.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental condition that affects a growing number of individuals worldwide. Despite extensive research, the underlying causes of ASD remain largely unknown, with genetic predisposition, parental history, and environmental influences identified as potential risk factors. Diagnosing ASD remains challenging due to its highly variable presentation and overlap with other neurodevelopmental disorders. Early and accurate diagnosis is crucial for timely intervention, which can significantly improve developmental outcomes and parental support. This work presents a novel artificial intelligence (AI) and explainable AI (XAI)-based framework to enhance ASD diagnosis and provide interpretable insights for medical professionals and caregivers…

Great. That sounds like a worthy goal. I’d support that.

Deep in the paper, it explains that…

Keyes et al. critically examined the ethical implications of AI in autism diagnosis, emphasizing the dangers of dehumanizing narratives and the lack of attention to discursive harms in conventional AI ethics. They argued that AI systems must be transparent and interpretable to avoid perpetuating harmful stereotypes and to build trust among clinicians and caregivers.

So why is this Figure 1, the overall summary of the paper?

Overall working of the framework presented as an infographic.

You’d think someone, somewhere in the review pipeline, would have noticed that “runctitional,” “frymbiai,” and “Fexcectorn” aren’t even English words, that the charts are meaningless and unlabeled, that there is a multicolored brain floating at the top left, and that “AUTISM” is illustrated with a bicycle, for some reason? I can’t imagine handing this “explanatory” illustration to a caregiver and seeing the light of comprehension lighting up their eyes, which don’t exist in the faceless figure in the diagram, and perhaps she is more concerned with how her lower limbs have punched through the examining table.

This paper was presumably reviewed. The journal does have instructions for reviewers. There are rules about how reviewers can use AI tools.

Peer reviewers play a vital role in scientific publishing. Their expert evaluations and recommendations guide editors in their decisions and ensure that published research is valid, rigorous, and credible. Editors select peer reviewers primarily because of their in-depth knowledge of the subject matter or methods of the work they are asked to evaluate. This expertise is invaluable and irreplaceable. Peer reviewers are accountable for the accuracy and views expressed in their reports, and the peer review process operates on a principle of mutual trust between authors, reviewers and editors. Despite rapid progress, generative AI tools have considerable limitations: they can lack up-to-date knowledge and may produce nonsensical, biased or false information. Manuscripts may also include sensitive or proprietary information that should not be shared outside the peer review process. For these reasons we ask that, while Springer Nature explores providing our peer reviewers with access to safe AI tools, peer reviewers do not upload manuscripts into generative AI tools.

If any part of the evaluation of the claims made in the manuscript was in any way supported by an AI tool, we ask peer reviewers to declare the use of such tools transparently in the peer review report.

Clearly, those rules don’t apply to authors.

Also, unstated is the overall principle to be used by reviewers: just say, “aww, fuck it” and rubber-stamp your approval.

Thankful for…

I think Tom Tomorrow is being sarcastic here.

I tried to think of what we, the resistance, could be sincerely grateful for, and one happy phenomenon is that MAGA seems to be weakening. They’re going through a fair bit of civil strife, Trump is becoming so incoherent that even some of his fans are noticing, I am hoping that he will die of natural causes sometime soon. See, that’s something to be optimistic about.

Heart attack snow

It may not look like much, but this is a deadly hazard.

We tried clearing our driveway, but this stuff is wet, thick, and slushy, and it totally choked our snow blower. We could push forward maybe 2 meters before the snow blower froze up solid with ice and slush that it didn’t have enough power to push out. We ended up doing it old school, with snow shovels, but even that was impractical — the snow was so dense and sticky that it stuck to the snow shovel blade, and the shovel would just get heavier and heavier. We finally gave up, with the driveway incompletely clear, but it’s all we could do.

My wife was told last night to call the sheriff’s department in the morning, and make arrangements to have our car towed home, but unsurprisingly, we can’t get through. I suspect the town is dealing with real emergencies today, so I’m not going to push. We’ll get it back when we get it back.

Right now I’m sitting back with a hot cup of tea and watching my wife trying to scrape away a little more ice and snow. Get back in here, Mary, this is dangerous slop!

The snowplows are cruising by

We got about 6 inches of snow last night, creating a winter wonderland out there. It’s not great. Mary was stuck at work last night, not getting home until after midnight…and then her car got stuck in the snow on the road, and the sheriff’s deputy had to shuttle her home. The car is still stuck out there. This morning we’re going to have to clear our driveway, and then call a tow truck to bring the car home. It’s all a big headache.

I also think we’re going to have to go shopping on Black Friday, which I’ve always avoided, but I don’t think Mary’s winter coat is quite adequate, and since all the predictions say this will be a snowy winter. That is, we’ll go shopping if our car is back and functional in the next day or two.

In happier news, today is Knut’s birthday, and he’s away in Korea learning Tae Kwon Do.

If only he were here, he’d have all the snow cleared in a flash.