I’ll be showing them off at about 1pm Central.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I’ll be showing them off at about 1pm Central.
“Justices” Thomas and Alito have refused to recuse themselves from January 6th cases, despite being blatantly partisan. The bias and corruption in the Supreme Court have become rather blatant, because right now the courts think they are not bound by ethics or law. Jamie Raskin has an idea.
Everyone assumes that nothing can be done about the recusal situation because the highest court in the land has the lowest ethical standards — no binding ethics code or process outside of personal reflection. Each justice decides for him- or herself whether he or she can be impartial.
Of course, Justices Alito and Thomas could choose to recuse themselves — wouldn’t that be nice? But begging them to do the right thing misses a far more effective course of action.
Correct. It would be hopelessly naive to think the Supreme Court would do anything in the name of principle. So what is his recommended course of action?
The U.S. Department of Justice — including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed U.S. special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr. Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims — can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.
The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can…
Stop right there. The solution hinges on ineffectual, waffly Merrick Garland, the dilatory attorney general, taking decisive action? Wouldn’t that be nice? Unfortunately, it’s only slightly less naive than expecting Thomas or Alito to do the responsible thing. Furthermore, “petitioning” doesn’t sound very effective — do we think the justices won’t find an excuse to weasel out of any “petition”? This is John Roberts’ court, after all.
“I think John Roberts is gonna go down in history as one of the worst chief justices of the United States,” Graves said. “He’s done everything he can to try to manipulate the process to avoid and block efforts by the Senate to hold the court accountable, to insist that it abide by just commonsense ethical rules that every other court in the country has to follow.”
Nothing will be done. These crooks aren’t worried.
I was supposed to get some spiders delivered by FedEx yesterday. They did not arrive. I was charged for overnight delivery, but no delivery, and no notification of a delay from FedEx.
I’m hoping they show up this morning, and I’m not too worried about the health of the spiders. If it were January, I’d assume they were frozen and dead, but the weather has been mild. They’ll just be cranky and hungry.
Worst case, the FedEx delivery guys kicked it around and there’s a warehouse somewhere that has some new residents. Second worst case, there was a misdelivery and some neighbors received an epic surprise. No, really, if you accidentally get a package with my name on it, you should definitely call me before trying to open it.
Kaushal Trivedi comments on the ridiculous cost of LLMs.
The Jaw-dropping environmental impact of Large-Language-Models (LLMs)
Assuming static usage of 100 million weekly active users (ex. OpenAI chatGPT) and just 5 queries per user per week, the total energy consumption for operating an LLM like GPT-3.5 is staggering—around 44,200 MWh per year.
To put this in perspective:
With an emission intensity of 0.4 kg of CO2 per kWh, this level of energy consumption emits the same amount of CO2 as making 15,000 round trips in your petrol-powered car from Kashmir to Kanyakumari (a road distance of 3,600 km one-way).That’s massive!
As we continue to innovate, it’s crucial to consider the environmental impact and strive for more sustainable solutions.
Because at the end, there’s no PLANet B.
First let me say I would love to make that trip once. Not 15,000 times, but once would be awesome. I’d see a lot, learn a lot.
What do I get from ChatGPT for that massive investment? A lot of companies get to slap “AI” on their products, and as near as I can tell, it only makes them worse. Is Google improved by adding AI to their front end? No. What would improve Google is stripping off the layers of cruft they’ve accumulated and monetized over the years, simplifying the algorithms, and making internet search simple and streamlined again. Who thinks a phone book benefits from a half-assed chat function?
I guess if you’re selling car rentals in Kanyakumari, it’s profitable to get people to make repetitive road trips.
Hey, can I make a detour to Bengal? Maybe make some scenic stops?
Russia has suffered somewhere north of a quarter million — possibly approaching a half million — casualties in their war with Ukraine, but there’s nothing to worry about, since their dead troops are getting resurrected! Trust the words of Artemiy Vladimirov, Archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Vladimirov played along and replied, “In war, there are no unbelievers! When you are facing physical death, every fiber of your soul comes alive. Right now, there are many wonderful testimonies of Christ’s victory over death. My wife sends me many military testimonies and video clips. Before Lent, I watched a video about one Chinese man who participated in the special military operation. A bullet hit him in the stomach, destroying all of his insides. He died from this and then was resurrected.”
Vladimirov continued to spin the tale, claiming, “Saint Luke of Crimea appeared to him and completely healed him, his insides were fully restored. He was baptized along with his relatives, all of them are photographed together, dressed in white clothes, baptized into our Orthodox Church.”
Ukraine should be worried when the zombie hordes mob their country, and when the enemy they shoot simply rises back up and continues the charge. They need to be informed to aim for the head, not the stomach.
Also of concern:
Vladimirov is no stranger to spreading idiosyncratic fibs. In 2019, he claimed to have communicated with Charles Darwin from beyond the grave and alleged that the scientist repented for his theory of evolution and renounced his own hypothesis about the origin of species.
Y’all worried now? So believable.
Here’s a headline for you: H5N1 virus in latest human case has mutated, officials say. This is not a surprise. This is the lesson we are thoroughly familiar with in biology, that everything changes over time. Of course H5N1 is evolving.
Testing of the latest human case of bird flu has revealed a “notable” mutation in the virus, officials have said.
The case, which was identified this month in a dairy worker in Michigan, marks the second human infection linked to the multi-state H5N1 outbreak among US cattle.
Genomic sequencing has now found a change in the virus compared to an earlier infection in a dairy worker in Texas, raising concerns that the virus is evolving to better infect humans.
The slight change in the virus’s genetic makeup is “associated with viral adaptation to mammalian hosts,” the Centre for Disease Control said in a statement published on Friday.
Mutation and adaptation are inevitable. We ought to be teaching that with a heck of a lot more confidence, because some people don’t get it. Answers in Genesis is in the business of spreading doubt and confusion, and they have their own stupid opinions about bird flu.
However, many media outlets and health authorities have expressed the fear that the virus could “mutate” to a form which is capable of directly spreading among humans. The 1918–19 “Spanish flu” outbreak, which swept the world and killed more than 20 million people (more even than the just finished war, and than the Black Death in 14th century Europe), is believed to have possibly started in birds and spread to humans.
They are very fond of scare quotes.
Unfortunately, the words being used to describe the feared change in the virus, such as “mutate” and “evolve” carry with them all sorts of Darwinian baggage. This will become especially pointed if the dreaded change does eventuate. Viruses, like actual living things, do mutate (the term is properly applied) and change. The issue is, as always, not to be misled by the “psychological link” between such terms and the idea that pond scum has turned into pelicans, palm trees and politicians.
Eventually, even the ignorant turdlets at AiG are compelled to admit that organisms actually do mutate, and change, and adapt, they have to desperately insist that that does not mean that viruses will evolve into human beings. Yeah, we know. No one has predicted that they would. You can use as many quotes as you want, but you’re still forced to admit that life “mutates” and “adapts” and “evolves.”
Evolution is a real and ongoing process, and that’s why we should be concerned about H5N1.
All right, all right, we know. The American election process sucks, and somehow a floofy-haired orange con artist got elected to the presidency, and despite being hit with trial after trial for his criminal corruption, is trying to get elected again to the highest office in the land. And a significant number of people enthusiastically favor him!
I don’t get it. Minnesota had a kook claiming to be a vampire, Jonathon “The Impaler” Sharkey, running for governor, and when his crimes were exposed, we had him arrested and extradited to Indiana. That’s the sane response to running a crook and a fraud out of town.
Then the UK fucked up thoroughly by passing Brexit — again, with a significant fraction of the population cheering it on — and as the relevance of the nation collapses in response, elects a series of Tory bastards to various high positions. Nigel Farage? How was he taken seriously? Boris Johnson? Rishi Sunak, who is simply an exploiter and parasite? It’s absurd. How can the US and UK keep digging deeper holes for themselves?
And now the Netherlands. The Netherlands always seemed like an eminently sensible, practical nation with high educational standards, but now they’ve gone and put Geert Wilders in charge of the country.
The far right’s stunning victory in the Netherlands’s parliamentary elections last fall will upset far more than the country’s immigration policies. An agreement by the four parties aiming to form a new government, presented on 16 May and debated in the House of Representatives on 22 May, also calls for cuts in science and innovation funding, rollbacks of environment and climate policies, and restrictions on the influx of foreign students.
HOW? How does an electorate decide to immolate their economy, their reputation, and their future? Wilders is a catastrophic choice, just as bad as electing Trump here. He’s also simply dead wrong on every decision that impacts science.
Wilders, who ardently denies climate science, called in his election platform for putting all climate policies and agreements “through the shredder,” but he conceded in Parliament that won’t happen. The governing agreement leaves most climate “nonsense” in place, he said. A proposed carbon dioxide tax for industry and a plan to speed up the introduction of heat pumps in homes have both been abandoned, however.
He also looks like a clown. I guess it’s good that politicians shouldn’t be elected on the basis of appearance, but you’re supposed to avoid superficialities to examine their policies critically. Wilders fails on all counts.
I’ve ordered some spiders from a company in Florida, Underground Reptiles, and I eagerly await their arrival today. Little known fact: baby spiders aren’t delivered by a stork, but by FedEx.
I’m planning to do an online unboxing today, but the problem is that I don’t know exactly when they’ll arrive, making it hard to schedule…and at the same time, I want to do it as early as possible to accommodate potential European viewers, and also because I have to fire back any concerns about the shipment within two hours of its arrival. I hope there aren’t any concerns.
So I can’t schedule the event far in advance! I’ve had FedEx arrive anytime between 11am and 6pm, so whenever the package arrives I’ll quickly set up the video and go live. You’ll just have to check in here every few minutes to find out when it happens! Or monitor my live video channel. It’s going to be exciting, if you like spiders!
This past weekend I played a sweet little game, Spiritfarer.
It was a pleasant break. It’s not difficult — I just bumbled about gathering resources and finding spirits and building my boat, and finished somewhat inevitably — although the minigames that involved jumping on platforms were a bit frustrating. My generation didn’t have the indoctrination into Mario style stuff that younger people might have.
I was mainly into it for the story. You’re Charon’s replacement, and you have to pick up spirits from your past and ferry them about, picking up memories and desires and eventually delivering them to the Everdoor where they ascend? Explode? Turn into stars? Whatever. You learn about their lives, and it’s all very sentimental and sad when they finally reach their destination.
It’s an interesting mechanism for delivering a series of life stories, and it’s pretty. Except for the damned jumping mini-games.
The Neuralink device has been implanted in one (1) person, Noland Arbaugh, so far. It’s not going well.
An estimated 85-percent of Neuralink’s brain-computer interface (BCI) implant threads connected to the first human patient’s motor cortex are now completely detached and his brain has shifted inside his skull up to three times what the company expected, volunteer Noland Arbaugh told The Wall Street Journal on Monday. Arbaugh also stated Neuralink has since remedied the initial performance issues using an over-the-air software update and is performing better than before, but the latest details continue to highlight concerns surrounding the company’s controversial, repeatedly delayed human implant study.
Neuralink’s coin-sized N1 BCI implant’s 64 wires thinner than a human hair are inserted a few millimeters into the motor cortex. Each thread contains 16 electrodes that translate a user’s neural activity into computer commands like typing and cursor movement. Around 870 of the 1024 electrodes in Arbaugh’s implant are no longer functional—an issue that allegedly took Neuralink a “few weeks” to remedy, reports The WSJ. When Arbaugh asked if his implant could be removed, fixed, or even replaced, Neuralink’s medical team relayed they would prefer to avoid another brain surgery and instead gather more information.
That device was inserted in January. In less than 6 months, it has decayed to 15% functionality, and the surgical team is reluctant to repair connectivity. That’s understandable; if the implant has basically torn out of place and built up scar tissue, there’s no point to sticking a second batch of wires into the same damaged spot, and relocating it to a new location is just going to tear up a different patch of Arbaugh’s brain.
The perils of being the first: you get to experience all the unforeseen problems, and also render yourself unsuitable for the Mark II device.
Oh well, too bad. Moving on, Neuralink is asking to stick wires in the brain of a second volunteer/guinea pig/sucker. There is no shortage of quadraplegics lined up for a miracle, and I can’t blame them.
The U.S. health regulator has allowed billionaire Elon Musk’s Neuralink to implant its brain chip in a second person after it proposed to fix a problem that occurred in its first patient, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
Earlier this month, Neuralink said tiny wires implanted in the brain of its first patient had pulled out of position. Reuters reported last week, citing sources, the company knew from animal testing that the wires might retract.
The company intends to fix the problem by embedding some of the device’s wires deeper into the brain, the WSJ report said citing a person familiar with the company and a document it had viewed.
That last line is terrifying. Drill deeper! Get those wires in there, lock ’em in place, so if they do shift, they’ll rip up even more cortex! We better hope the second subject doesn’t know anything about the fate of the first.
This isn’t their only approach, though. They’re also thinking of patching the software. One of their goals is that Neuralink should be a discreet implant — I recall doing chronic implants in cats, where we’d get just one electrode in place, and lock it down with steel screws in the skull and great lumps of pink dental acrylic holding it down — which is obviously unsuitable for a human. So they have to make a small, low-profile device that operates on tiny voltages, and that also transmits and receives data to a larger, more capable computer. That’s a big constraint. Neuralink has put out a call for better algorithms, ones capable of a 200:1 lossless data compression with minimal computing power.
Turning brain signals into computer inputs means transmitting a lot of data very quickly. A problem for Neuralink is that the implant generates about 200 times more brain data per second than it can currently wirelessly transmit. Now, the company is seeking a new algorithm that can transmit this data in a smaller package — a process called compression — through a public challenge.
As a barebones web page announcing the Neuralink Compression Challenge posted on Thursday explains, “[greater than] 200x compression is needed.” The winning solution must also run in real time, and at low power.
Crucially, it specifies that the compression must be “lossless.” A “lossy” compression would be like a low-quality MP3 file, compared to pristine vinyl.
I know smart people are reading this blog. How about it? Get to work and write a revolutionary lossless compression algorithm that is capable of 200:1 reduction. I’m not a computer programmer anymore, so I’ll have to pass on the challenge, but I’m sure someone out there can do it…especially for such a great reward!
The reward for developing this miraculous leap forward in technology? A job interview, according to Neuralink employee Bliss Chapman. There is no mention of monetary compensation on the web page.
Although, to be fair, if you can write an efficient, fast 200:1 lossless compression algorithm, you can probably find better employment prospects than an Elon Musk company.
Also, there might be other reasons that Neuralink has invented what looks to be a hopeless task. They actually want the effort to fail.
Observers on social media immediately branded the task “impossible,” even speculating that Neuralink staff launched the challenge as a way of convincing the infamously incalcitrant Musk that it couldn’t be done.
