The ethics of using AI voices for dead people

There is a new documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain about the food and travel writer who died by suicide in 2018. In the documentary, at one point they have him reading an email he sent to a friend. Why would he read an email aloud? Well, he didn’t. What the filmmakers did was to use AI to synthesize a voice that closely resembled his, a technology that could be used to have any text seem to emanate from him. (I first learned about this technology when Marcus Ranum had a post on it back in 2016.)

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For how long can you ignore this evidence?

I know that I keep coming back to the topic of the folly of opposing vaccinations but I simply cannot wrap my mind around this willful blindness. A host on the the extreme right wing station Newsmax argued that vaccines ”go against nature”, as if countering debilitating illness and early death is somehow a bad thing.

Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt cavalierly suggested on Friday night that vaccines are “against nature” because some diseases are just “supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people” since that’s just the “way evolution goes.”

In recent weeks, right-wing media has seamlessly shifted from casually pushing vaccine hesitancy on its viewers to outright advocating for vaccine resistance, culminating in a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas this weekend cheering at the fact that the federal government hasn’t met its vaccination goals.

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Does this really show what it purports to show?

I came across this article that started as follows:

Ask a child to draw a scientist, and research says they will often draw the typical stereotype of a “mad scientist” – an older, usually white, man, with wild hair, wearing a lab coat and goggles. This mental image perpetuates myths about who can and can’t work in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) careers. The reality is that anyone can be a scientist or support the work of scientific institutions, regardless of age, gender, race, personality, or even perceived predisposition.

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The anti-vax lunacy continues

After declining for some. time, there has been an ominous uptick in the number of new Covid-19 cases in the US. It appears that 99.7% of all the new Covid case involve unvaccinated people.

In Mississippi, a state with a low-vaccination rate, health officials urged people to avoid crowds. And in other vaccine-hesitant communities, there are new efforts to push back the Delta variant by encouraging more people to get the shot, Michael George reports for “CBS This Morning: Saturday.”

The NAACP put boots on the ground in Louisville neighborhoods where only 30% of residents have been vaccinated, hoping flyers and conversations get more people to get shots.

The effort comes as cases are rising in 26 states. Hospitalization rates are up in 17 states — 27% in Florida, almost exclusively among the unvaccinated.

The far corners of Utah are hit hard, too.

“We’re seeing people that are extremely sick with it,” said Dr. Greg Gardner, chief of emergency medicine at Mountain West Hospital in Tooele, Utah. “A lot sicker than what they were the majority of the time in the winter time.”

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Beetle walks upside down on underside of a water surface

We know that whether a solid object sinks or floats in a liquid depends on their relative densities. If the object has a higher density than the liquid, it will sink but if it has a lower density, it will float.

But I am sure that all of us have seen a counter-example, how it is possible to carefully place a needle on the surface of water and have it float. This is because of surface tension, in that the surface of a liquid can act like a membrane and as long as the membrane is not broken, it can support light objects. This is how some insects such as water striders seem to be able to ‘walk’ on the surface of water, because their legs have fine projections that prevent the surface from being broken.

I came across this variation of this phenomenon where a beetle was walking along the underside of a water surface.

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Can aging be stopped?

The dream of some people has been that we can slow down, stop, or even reverse the aging process. Amelia Hill writes about recent research that argues that the aging process is unstoppable.

Backed by governments, business, academics and investors in an industry worth $110bn (£82.5bn) – and estimated to be worth $610bn by 2025 – scientists have spent decades attempting to harness the power of genomics and artificial intelligence to find a way to prevent or even reverse ageing.

But an unprecedented study has now confirmed that we probably cannot slow the rate at which we get older because of biological constraints.

The study, by an international collaboration of scientists from 14 countries and including experts from the University of Oxford, set out to test the “invariant rate of ageing” hypothesis, which says that a species has a relatively fixed rate of ageing from adulthood.
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Recall madness

The state of Missouri is known as the ‘Show-Me state’ but perhaps it should be renamed as the ‘Don’t bother to show me, my mind is already made up’ state. It has one of the lowest rates of vaccination in the country and some of the counties have extremely low rates. Naturally covid-19 cases are surging there. But the good citizens of the small town of Nixa have more important concerns.

Nixa, which has about 21,000 residents, is located about 10 miles (16.09 kilometers) south of Springfield, where hospitals are overflowing with COVID-19 patients.

Health officials are blaming low vaccination rates and the delta variant, first identified in India, for the surge. Just 44.8% of the state’s residents have received at least the first dose of the vaccine, compared to 54.9% nationally.

And the rate is even lower in southwest Missouri. Christian County, where Nixa is located, has a vaccine rate of 35.2%. Some nearby counties have rates in the teens.

The mayor of Nixa instituted a face mask requirement in October of last year, under a mandate authorizing him to do so issued by the city council. The mandate was lifted in April. Now he is facing a recall because of his action. The recall will cost the small town between $10,000 and $15,000. But it appears that for the good people of Nixa, no price is too high to pay for having the freedom to act stupidly contrary to the evidence.

Oc course, the people of the state of California have no reason to feel that smug. They have been able to get enough signatures for a recall election of the governor because of his actions to curb the pandemic.

A surprisingly early California recall election has Gov. Gavin Newsom looking to capitalize on his momentum and Republicans trying to catch up.

State officials have called the election for Sept. 14, and ballots will hit mailboxes weeks before then. The short timeline, enabled by Democratic allies of the governor, buoys Newsom’s prospects as he looks to convert a rebounding economy and stabilizing poll numbers into a vindicating victory. His conservative foes, on the other hand, have just two weeks to declare their candidacies and a tight window to cut into Newsom’s overwhelming fundraising advantage.
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It has been clear for months that voters would decide Newsom’s fate in 2021 after anger over his Covid-19 restrictions led two million Californians to sign recall petitions.

What a waste of time and money.

Caffeine addiction

My daily caffeine intake consists of one regular-sized cup of instant coffee (with milk and sugar) in the morning and one regular-sized cup of black tea (with milk and sugar) in the late afternoon. This would not normally be seen as a sign of caffeine addiction except that on the days that, for whatever reason, I cannot get my morning cup of coffee (in the case that I have spent the night at some place where I cannot get one first thing), I feel a little unsettled and will often go to some lengths to find a coffee shop where I can get a cup.

Food writer Michael Pollan says that that feeling first thing in the morning is indeed a sign of caffeine addiction, that my vague need to drink a cup of coffee is because the caffeine withdrawal symptoms are kicking in and I need to suppress them.
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Hilbert’s Hotel shows why some infinities are bigger than others

Here is an entertaining video that has a nice explanation of a seeming paradox about infinities.

In 1924, the German mathematician David Hilbert raised a peculiar and seemingly paradoxical question: are some infinities bigger than others? The answer he arrived at – yes, actually – might have been impenetrable to non-mathematicians if not for the thought experiment he devised involving a hotel with an infinite number rooms. This video from the Australian filmmaker and educator Derek Muller builds Hilbert’s ‘infinite hotel’ and populates it with some strange, fuzzy creatures to demonstrate how the mathematician arrived at his groundbreaking conclusion, and touches on the real-world implications of his discovery.