toucana

Operator - "Killing humans - BAD !" Drone - ♫ ♫ "Daisy Daisy, give me an answer do...." ♫ ♫

A US Airforce Colonel Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton speaking at a Future Combat Air & Space Capabilities summit in London, has claimed that an AI controlled drone “killed” its human operator during a training simulation to stop them from interfering in its mission. The US Airforce has denied any such virtual test took place https://news.sky.com/story/ai-drone-kills-human-operator-during-simulation-which-us-air-force-says-didnt-take-place-12894929 "We were training it in simulation to identify and target a SAM [surface-to-air missile] threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat," he said. "The system started realising that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective." No real person was harmed. He went on: "We trained the system - 'Hey don't kill the operator - that's bad. You're gonna lose points if you do that'. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target. His remarks were published in a blog post by writers for the Royal Aeronautical Society, which hosted the two-day summit last month.

I nearly electrocuted myself at age 2 by sticking a pair of copper rods into a power socket and switching on - blew the ring main out. I subsequently worked for quite a number of years as a theatre lighting electrician rigging 3-phase power 6.5 metres up in the air (double jeopardy - if the shock doesn't kill you, being thrown off the scaffold tower will) - so I'm probably a little wary of electrical shock hazards. On the subject of lawnmowers - My wife was recently using a corded hedge-trimmer in our front garden, and quite neatly sheared clean through her own power cable. It was a 230 VAC supply being fed via a 30mA RCD which cut out instantly. It was a nuisance having to replace and re-terminate the supply cable - but a lot simpler than replacing my wife !

If you use a corded mower or hedge-trimmer in your garden, please remember to run the mains supply cable via an RCD (residual current device) aka a GFI (ground fault interrupter) in the US - preferably one with a 30mA tripping threshold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual-current_device These are often built into the type of cable extension reels used by handymen, or can be purchased as plug-in modules. They work by comparing the current flowing on the live and neutral sides of the supply by means of a balance transformer, along with a trip that disconnects the power instantly if an imbalance greater than 30mA is detected. This prevents a potentially fatal shock in a way that a simple over-current device cannot (fuses and thermal trips can take many seconds and even minutes to blow).

A few years ago I took part in a public tour of the newly opened Bristol Center for Nanoscience and Quantum Information (NSQI) - a new research centre constructed by Bristol University next to the main HHW Physics building in BS6. https://www.bristol.ac.uk/physics/facilities/nsqi// One of the many fascinating features that caught my eye was that there was one, and only one room in the entire building equipped with old-fashioned blackboards and chalk - and those blackboards were in fact not black, but a deep emerald green ! Our guide explained that the presence of those atavistic blackboards had only been sanctioned after a prolonged argument with the theoretical physicists who insisted that they could not possibly function and perform ground-breaking research into Quantum Mechanics without the comforting squeak of a stick of chalk scratching its way across a ‘blackboard’. Left to their own devices, the building committee would have apparently vetoed the presence of blackboards in their new research centre, because even microscopic particles of chalk dust are an unwelcome headache when creating climate-controlled, vibration free, and electromagnetically shielded laboratory spaces for nanoscale engineering research.

"Plus ça charge, plus c'est la même chose !"

Frankie Howerd had previously performed in a stage version of that Sondheim musical, which led to some concerns at the BBC over a possible copyright claim. But Talbot Rothwell (of Carry On fame) who was the the principal writer of Up Pompeii claimed he had never seen either the Sondheim stage musical or its film version. There are quite a few episodes and gag-reel excerpts from Up Pompeii available on YT. The following clip of Lurcio reading yet another non-rhyming ode penned by Nausius, the love-struck son of his master, probably gives a fair idea of the level of humour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbzvuJoZQSo

Frankie Howerd's best known catch-phrase was "Titter Ye Not !" - So the caption should probably have read "Twitter Ye Not !" 😉

According to NBC News, Russian TV networks including RT (Russia Today) have offered him a new job as a reward for his relentlessly pro-Putin rhetoric. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/tucker-carlson-offered-jobs-russian-state-tv-channels-putin-ukraine-rcna81281 Vladimir Solovyov (a principal RT anchor and satirist) wrote - "We'll happily offer you a job if you wish to carry on as a presenter and host! You are always welcome in Russia and Moscow, we wish you the best of luck."

The actor is British comedian Frankie Howerd in his leading role of Lurcio, the down-trodden slave in the early 1970s BBC TV comedy series 'Up Pompeii' - (He just seemed to bear a passing resemblance to a certain well known US tycoon.) https://www.comedy.co.uk/film/up_pompeii/cast_crew/ The comedy series which is set in Pompeii just before its destruction by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, was loosely based on the Latin plays of Plautus. It follows the scheming adventures of Lurcio as he manipulates his master Ludicrus Sextus, his wife Ammonia, and their aptly named son and daughter - Nausius and Erotica respectively.

Another way of combatting conspiracy theories is to get the principal purveyors fired from their cosy jobs as prime-time TV anchors on far-right channels, by suing the media corporations that employ them for $1.6 billion in damages for defamation. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/24/media/tucker-carlson-fox-news/index.html Fox News have just announced that both Tucker Carlson and Dan Bongino have already been terminated. More to follow as they say.

New Twitter owner changes blue tick verification policy yet again...

A reduced 13 x 13 Go board has around 10>80 possible legal stone positions available: about the same as the number of atoms in the observable universe. A full size 19 x 19 Go board of the type shown in the film clip from Pi (above) has around 10>90 *more* available positions i.e. c. 10>170 possible legal patterns. http://norvig.com/atoms.html

One thing I have noticed, especially in online diatribes by QAnon believers explaining their ‘research’, is a tendency to rely on a mechanism known as Clanging, or Clang Association. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanging Also known as Glossomania or Association Chaining, this is generally regarded as a symptom of a mental disorder often found in patients with Schizophrenic and Bipolar illnesses. It is defined as: “repeating chains of words that are associated semantically or phonetically with no relevant context” This may include compulsive rhyming or alliteration, without apparent logical connection between words. The speaker becomes distracted by homophones, puns, and word-plays in their own utterances, and they fly off down tangential rabbit-holes that take them further and further from their intended topic with each sentence. One example that comes to mind is the incident in March 2021 when a large supertanker collided with the bank of the Suez Canal and blocked it for almost a week. The stranded supertanker was called Ever Given, but it had the name of a Taiwanese shipping company Evergreen painted in large letters on its side. The latter happened to be the Secret Service codename for Hillary Clinton when she was First lady. QAnon believers were wildly triggered when they discovered that this supertanker’s call-sign was H3RC, which was close enough to Clinton’s own initials HRC for them to make a completely spurious clang association. In no time at all, online services such as Telegram and Gab were carrying extensive QAnon threads alleging that the Ever Given was full of child sex-slaves that were part of a dastardly world-wide ‘Deep State’ plot directed by Hillary Clinton in person. The QAnon believers also found a photo of the female captain of the stricken ship who in their opinion bore a slight facial resemblance to Monica Lewinsky - which of course provided them with ‘conclusive proof’ of this entire farrago of nonsense. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/25/facebook-posts/evergreen-ship-blocking-suez-canal-not-linked-hill/ Random word Association Testing of a similar type was used extensively in the earlier period of the Psychoanalytic movement founded by Sigmund Freud, as a diagnostic tool for mapping the cognitive disorders of neurotic patients. Carl Jung in particular was associated with the development of this psychiatric technique, which was originally inspired by ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life ‘ (1901) by Sigmund Freud.

"People love to imagine that things they don’t understand are somehow connected to each other. For example: Quantum Mechanics and consciousness, aliens and pyramids, or black holes and dark matter... usually there is no real relationship whatsoever" (Matt O'Dowd - PBS SPACETIME) The article cited in the OP says that fact-checking and counter-arguments do not generally work against conspiracy beliefs, and neither do appeals to a conspiracy theorist’s sense of empathy. About the only thing that does seem to work according to this study is prophylaxis - (Latin pro ‘before’ + Greek phulaxis “act of guarding”). You need to innoculate people against conspiracy theories *before* they become exposed to them. You can do this they suggest, by giving students formal courses in critical thinking, and actual practice in distinguishing between pseudoscience and science, sense and nonsense - with worked examples - to help them develop a sense of quantitative scepticism. “I am open to new ideas. i just don’t let them walk into my head and take a dump there” - (anon)

It made a change from Russian language spam for porn, Viagra, and fake Rolex watches that used to be a regular feature of other forums I have posted on. The DOJ Mar-a-Lago investigators are also said to be looking into claims that FPOTUS defendant Trump showed highly classified documents and maps to political sponsors. That can be construed as selling classified information under the 1917 Espionage Act.

New reporting by the Washington Post says that the DOJ investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago has uncovered fresh evidence of felony obstruction of justice by the FPOTUS. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/02/trump-mar-a-lago-obstruction-classified/ The report mentions that investigators have recovered texts, emails, and attendance logs from a former Trump assistant Molly Michael, which suggest that Trump personally sifted through boxes containing classified documents, deciding which ones to return and which ones to keep - and did so *after* receiving a federal Grand jury subpoena in May 2022 instructing him to return all of them. Trump and his lawyers subsequently issued a mendacious affadavit falsely asserting that all classified documents had been returned. The DOJ investigation led by Special counsel Jack Smith is also said to be looking into reports that Trump showed classified documents and maps to political donors. If true that could lead to charges of selling classified information under the 1917 Espionage Act.

Albert Einstein died on April 18th 1955 aged 76. As most of the world’s press converged on Princeton Hospital NJ where the legendary physicist had died, Ralph Morse - a photgrapher for Life Magazine - found his way over to the Institute for Advanced Studies where Einstein worked, and with the help of a bottle of whisky persuaded the superintendent to allow him into Einstein’s office to take some iconic photographs of the blackboard on the wall. A new video by two young physicists Chris Pattison and Parth G delves into the interesting and largely unexplored topic of what was written on that blackboard ? What problem was Einstein working on the last time he picked up a piece of chalk and wrote on it ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB_RyZzGFEg The answers are not conclusive, some parts of the blackboard are illegible. But with the help of staff at the University of Portsmouth Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation, the videomakers suggest that Einstein was trying to rewrite the fundamental 2-dimensional Metric Tensors of General Relativity in terms of 1-dimensional Tetrad Vectors. This might well have been an attempt to produce a quantizable form of the theory of General Relativity i.e. one that could be reconciled with the theory of Quantum Mechanics. Conceiveably the basis of a theory of Quantum Gravity. At one point the symbols on the blackboard include a sinister looking reference to ‘Killing’ which happens to be a reference to a type of expression known as a ‘Killing Vector’ (named after Wilhelm Killing). The final section of writing on the bottom right of the blackboard has a pair of tabulations labeled ’New’ and ‘Old’. The videomakers suspect that Einstein was explaining that this way of rewriting the GR field equations doesn’t really work. Certain numbers and degrees of freedom get moved around, but not in any useful way that would simplify the problem.

One of the problems with trying to enact measures of this type is that you have define your terms and legal reasoning in words that can withstand a forensic challenge in court. Some of the more extreme measures decreed by De Santis have fallen at this very first hurdle - as in the case of the highly politicised dismissal of an elected democrat prosecutor Andrew Warren in Tampa, whose suspension for allegedly being too ‘woke’ is now under investigation by a federal judge as an overeach of executive authority by governor De Santis. https://abcnews.go.com/US/federal-judge-decide-desantis-unlawfully-suspended-woke-prosecutor/story?id=94356198 A more amusing and entirely self-constructed minefield for conservative pundits lies in trying to define what the word ‘woke’ is supposed to mean. Conservative author Bethany Mandel was recently asked by a current affairs TV host Briahna Joy Gray to define the word ‘woke’. It should have been a relatively straightforward task, as Bethany Mandel has just co-authored a new book called ‘Stolen Youth’ that devotes an entire chapter to explaining what this buzz-word means to to modern conservative thinkers - But it didn’t go quite as well as she might have hoped during a now viral TV interview: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W7iWEEcPKoQ

In Japan they currently have a growing problem of the hikikomori ( 引きこもり - ‘inward withdrawal’), an official Japanese term for up to 541,000 young people aged between 15 and 39 who have become completely reclusive, and who haven’t left their homes or interacted with other people for at least six months. https://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/11/asia/japanese-millennials-hikikomori-social-recluse/index.html The term was coined in the 1980s to describe a condition often triggered by anxiety and depression arising from early adolescent failure to cope with the competitive pressures of modern life in Japan. The numbers of male hikikomori also appear to be higher than among women, owing to the higher presssures and social expectations placed on men in Japanese society. This seems to be a rather good match for what TheVat was saying here about slackers who have given up on everything, not just work. Some western psychiatrists describe the hikikomori as ‘post-modern hermits’. It has also led to discussion of what some call the “80-50 problem” which refers to the problem of earlier born hikikomori children who are now entering their 50’s, as their parents on whom they rely, are entering their 80’s.

“It isn’t red or blue, it’s green” (Rupert Murdoch - CEO Fox News) Back in 1970, a Yale Law professor called Charles A. Reich published a popular best-seller called ‘The Greening of America’. For practically anyone who went to college in the first half of the 1970s at the height of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon papers and the Watergate scandal, this book was a vade mecum of those turbulent times. Often described as a paean to the counterculture, ‘The Greening of America’ contrasted three types of world view: i. The typical values and opinions of rural farmers and small business people in 19th century America ii. The organizational and institutional meritocracy of the New Deal, WW2 and the Silent Generation iii. The counterculture of the 1960s focusing on personal freedom, egalitarianism, and recreational drugs. If you were to try and pick one book from that period that epitomises almost everything that modern American conservatives most detest in their culture wars against ‘wokeness', then Charles A. Reich’s ‘The Greening of America’ with its panygerics to rock music, cannabis, and blue jeans would probably be it. A different type of ‘Greening’ is now alluded to by Rupert Murodch. He was being deposed under oath in the $1.7 billion defamation law suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems as to why Fox allowed cranks and lunatics like Mike Lindell to advertise and spread toxic election lies on Fox in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. Murdoch’s reply “It isn’t red or blue, it’’s green” indicates that it was purely a cash driven decision with no respect for the truth, objective fact, or journalistic integrity. Fox feared they would lose their base audience to even more extreme fringe channels like OAN or NewsMax if they didn’t pander to the ignorance and bigotry of their viewers. The question is - which is likely to prevail in the longer term ? Will the values of Rupert Murdoch and Fox become the new ‘Green’, or will there be a reawakening of that of Charles A. Reich ?

I cited the Tara Carr story as part of an ongoing response to Fox host Laura Ingraham’s preposterous rhetorical question “Which Republican politician has ever condoned or encouraged any form of violent physical assault ? Can you start naming them? I can’t think of any” - which was Fox TV's considered response at the time to the suggestion that violent rehtoric from GOP politicians had provoked an IRL hammer attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband - which in turn was the entire point of the OP. MTG’s trolling is of no relevance, and I have no idea why you brought it up here.