It’s always somethin’

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Nature enthusiasts believed that by living off the grid and using homemade wells rather than using commercially dammed water and river-sourced urban irrigation systems, they were helping Mother Earth. No luck – Mother is an ODSC [see July 14 post]. It turns out Mother wants to keep in place all her water anywhere it is placed, thank you.

Here is a clip from Popular Mechanics:

“Pumping groundwater appears to have a greater consequence than ever previously thought. But now—thanks to a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters—we can see that, in less than two decades, Earth has tilted 31.5 inches as a result of pumping groundwater. This equates to .24 inches of sea level rise.”

The article went on to say that loss of groundwater also affects orbit. When the dinosaurs became too much to handle, she called the Solar System’s ICE unit which dropped a meteorite on them. This time, it seems, Mother is using her own biosphere to compensate for a 123% growth in human population between 1800 and 1938.

Today mariner had a personal experience with Mother Nature and her water. His basement was filled with six inches of water because his town’s sewer system couldn’t handle 4+ inches of rain in one night. He always has wanted a pond but not all the way around the house! Now the ol’ one-two punch: the next several days are sunny and in the nineties!

No matter how we Homos squirm around the issue, it won’t go away. There are far too many Homos for Mother Nature’s liking.

Ancient Mariner

 

The new party

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It’s called the ‘Democratic Party’. This is the second week in a row that news sources have focused on low rumblings about the 2028 presidential election. Early possibles include Rahm Emanuel (Mayor-Chi), Pete Buttigieg (Biden Trans Sec), Andy Beshear, (Gov-Ky), Ro Khanna (Rep-Ca) and Gavin Newsom (Gov-Ca). No doubt that many more will join the fray.

An emerging insight is that it is no longer possible to win a presidential election by appearing on MSNBC and CBS. Buttigieg, for example, appeared on ‘The Breakfast Club’ and a sports podcast. It is suggested that candidates also appear on the likes of FOX and The Joe Rogan Experience as well as participating in a broader spectrum of events like YouTube and even Facebook – the object being that the democratic candidates will have to cull a victory from disgruntled republicans, typically not-interested no-voters and skeptical democrats.

On the Trumper’s side, two articles appeared in science journals suggesting he is in a growing stage of dementia tied to his own perceptions of reality. This may be the reason so many of his statements reflect the circumstances of his first campaign. Don isn’t eligible to run again according to the Constitution but then, who follows the Constitution? Watch Texas – they’re trying to ignore it.

So the game is on. Will the democratic party be able to introduce themselves to a new electorate and carry the 2028 election? Watch the 2026 returns to see if anything is working.

Of course, another option is an AI robot candidate.

Ancient Mariner

 

Sleep Remedies

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Having trouble getting to sleep at night? Answer these questions, one each night, to the satisfaction of your own brain’s thought processes. No cheating with the internet.

First night:  Why is there a ‘p’ in the word receipt? There is no ‘p’ in deceit or in conceit.

Second night:  Name three hits by Ricky Nelson.

Third night:  What is the name of your second grade teacher? If that’s too quick,  Who followed William McKinley as President?

Fourth night:  A woman stands on the edge of a wide river. Her dog is on the other shore. She calls the dog to her. Strangely, when the dog comes to her side, it is completely dry. How could this happen? No bridges, boats or assistance – just the river.

Fifth night: You are a prisoner in a room with 2 doors and 2 guards. One of the doors will guide you to freedom and behind the other is a hangman–you don’t know which is which, but the guards do know.

One of the guards always tells the truth and the other always lies. You don’t know which one is the truth-teller or the liar either. However both guards know each other.

You have to choose and open one of these doors, but you can only ask a single question to one of the guards.

What do you ask to find the door leading to freedom?

Sixth night:  Using only the number eight (8) add eights together so that they equal 1,000.

Seventh night: Lying in bed, give each of your toes a unique name. Then recite them, all ten, three times.

Well, good morning! Did you sleep well?

Ancient Mariner

New child care services

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More chatbox memes – look behind you!

From  https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-ai-plus-438426cc-d0dd-4ebc-8704-6f8fc768bcac.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axioslogin&stream=top

What they’re saying: Interaction with generative AI could “fundamentally change the human brain,” says Dana Suskind, a pediatric physician and expert on early childhood and early language development.

  • Suskind says teenagers and adults are already forming relationships with AI companions. The same could happen with younger kids.
  • “The content and experience that kids are exposed to in early years isn’t just sort of changing things the same way social media impacted adolescent brains,” Suskind told Axios. “It is actually changing the foundational wiring of the human brain.”
  • “Children naturally anthropomorphize,” Suskind wrote in an email, “but with responsive AI, we’re entering uncharted territory for how this might shape their developing sense of reality and relationships.”

Between the lines: Some child development researchers worry that chatbots could reshape how children learn trust, empathy and connection.

  • A small study from 2024 showed that kids ages 3-6 were more likely to trust a robot than a human, even when that robot had proven to be less reliable than the human.
  • Trust is a particularly thorny problem for those who rely on AI, since many researchers argue that these tools might always be prone to making things up.

Chatbots also tell people what they want to hear.

  • They’re trained to please, which means they’re unlikely to say “no” — a word that small children need to learn to deal with.

 

Mariner recommends not using rapid fire weapons or shotguns. Your real loved ones may be close at hand. All these efforts to invade Homo’s anthropomorphic reality are just a step toward Armageddon. The next step is not to bother with babies – they’re too much trouble – AI bots may offer an age-seasoned teenage bot instead – or, if the reader is so inclined, adult bots (male and female) are available and quite charming.

We have come to accept robots in the workplace, despite union protests. Now the frontier is the home.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

New hunting targets

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From time to time, mariner has mentioned the emergence of commercial memes walking among us. Well, it is more than walking, it’s flying and driving, too. It turns out, according to Popular Science magazine, that China already has a national development policy that encourages robotics to co-exist with the humans on city sidewalks and the Subway – to say nothing of stocking the shelves of 7-Eleven stores after they arrive.

Mariner had suggested a year or so ago that goose hunting could include drones and deer hunting could include delivery boxes. For those that have an elk or bear license, it makes sense to include delivery EVs with no humans on board. Lo and behol, if China’s meme sees you, it turns on its happy face! Shoot, man, shoot!

Amazon reportedly is developing AI-trained robots to one day jump out of vans and deliver packages. 

You know, when mariner thinks about it, it may not be long before robots are trained to hunt people on the street . . . But they’ll smile.

Ancient Mariner

ChatGPT elitism

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[Much of this content is in Scientific American Magazine, Wikipedia and assorted articles in print]

If the reader has followed the news in recent months, that is, news about ChatGPT taking over the writing of documents heretofore written by Homos – everything from classroom homework to Congressional speeches and even government forms, the reader is aware that each ChatGPT manufacturer has its own dictionary, lexicon and Large Language Model (LLM). It turns out that one can identify a given LLM by how it connects its words, e.g., depending on its native language, age, gender, education and other factors. That individual speaking style is called an “idiolect.” It is similar in concept to, but much narrower than a dialect, which is the variety of a language spoken by a community.

There are several firms producing ChatGPT, e.g., Gemini and Copilot.  Already established are uses to analyze police interviews with suspects, attribute authorship of documents and text messages, trace the linguistic backgrounds of asylum seekers and detect plagiarism, among other activities. Needless to say, elementary education is giving up teaching handwriting and higher grades yield to the jungle of student uses for ChatGPT creativity.

But mariner and Guru have another concern: will one’s social status depend on which idiolect they use? If wealthy people use one manufacturer’s idiolect and laborers use another idiolect, won’t that have the same effect on society as WOKE did for MAGA? The ultimate danger, however, is antitrust mergers and there turns out to be only one idiolect – one less intellectual liberty for homos.

Where is Neo when you need him?

Ancient Mariner

Life on Earth

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This strictly is a metaphoric, allegoric, analogous, anthropomorphized  post.  So keep one’s imagination and lateral thinking at hand.

The Texas flooding disaster is a tragic, quick, painful experience for many innocent people. It is an example of how Mother Nature will strike out for no good reason – same is true for tornadoes and forest fires. Similarly, the blatant, instant firing of tens of thousands of Federal workers by Donald Trump seems quite similar to Mother Nature’s Texas flood. Both seem vindictive; both were quick and painful; both attacked a large number of people without individual judgment.

Do Donald and Mother march to the same drumbeat?

Their tools are persistent: Mother uses water and intense heat by eliminating or adding too much water or by popping off a volcano or by melting polar ice. Donald uses cash money by building channels of cash flow that flow only in his direction or to those who help him extricate cash from the rest of the population which needs it for their own well being.

But what is the motivation? At the bottom, for both of them, it may be survival. In Mother’s case, she has a bad case of lice. They are dangerous to Mother’s health and a constant itch and tickle. She has taken to harsh baths and showers and a bug spray of methane but the lice continue to exude CO2 which gives her a fever and bad headaches. Also, the lice leave scraped and cracked patches on her skin which kills other desired creatures on her environmental skin.

Donald, too, must survive despite damage to his brain caused by any source such as damaged at birth, parental abuse, peer condescension and bullying – or all of the above. In any case, Donald must survive in spite of his disabilities. He lacks many defenses that assuage life: self-confidence, compassion, communal bonding. Despite “winning” a situation, he is not secure in his confidence. He must win and win again. Where Mother deals with lice, Donald deals with security. Both are looking for survival.

Ancient Mariner

 

Personality IDs for old people

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Remember the Myers-Briggs personality test, where you could pick your personality from 16 types? It is still around but back in the 1970s it hit the market with a big bang. By taking a test, a person could identify their personality traits through a four-character label. The score sheet looked like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back in the 70s, he worked as a technical supervisor and tentatively used the scoresheet to interpret the people he engaged to work. The score helped zero in on general behavior but was subject to variation in the workers. This method of personality scoring has a lot of detractors – mostly because the people who took the test converted their particular four letters so as to identify themselves as a ‘superior’ personality and would flash total prejudice against other letter combinations. The test itself was a bit superfluous in its assumptions.

Nevertheless, people who took the test and received their four letters had an identity, perhaps not fully accurate but it made one feel meaningful and special.

That’s what is needed for old people. When one steps out of work and into retirement, there is an empty spot that needs to be filled; what is their value now? It is even worse when disabilities set in; a simple one is opening jars, limited because of arthritis. Then throw in urinary control and later, deafness and memory.

Mariner knows from experience that others downgrade an old person’s intelligence and dependability just because they’re old. Let’s give the still-wise oldsters a four-letter code that they can identify with and flaunt detractors. Let’s invent a sample four-letter code:

O – Opinionated.      D – Domineering.      S – Short temper.      C – Condescending

Hey! That’s mariner! I’m a ODSC!

Ancient Mariner

Does the reader have a map?

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Sitting in the tunnel with Nosy Mole where it is a lot cooler than outside, mariner received an email from Wayside Gardens. It was a big splash sale with huge price cutting on Hyssop.  “That’s odd,” he said. “I just mentioned hyssop in my last post – and as far as I know, I’ve never seen a sale ad for hyssop before – its an indigenous plant.”

Know the world you live in.

⊗

Here is a short clip from The Atlantic magazine: “Imagine an intersection at which American national security, defense spending, the rise of China, technological innovation, regional conflict, and the future of liberal democracy all meet.” Mariner doubts this intersection has a traffic light.

The old fogies still around remember the last two centuries where global wealth was more abundant and disruption was between selected nations. This century is different. It is not just international bickering, it is way too many people for the environment and way too little resources available from a disappearing biosphere. The global economic stress challenges all forms of government. Then, like hot pepper tossed into a soup, AI is attacking the anthropological role of everything – including Homo.

So, who else is watching old episodes of Lawrence Welk? Homo is on its way to Matrix.

Ancient Mariner

In the garden

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Mariner spent most of the day in the garden. For the most part, he was pulling weeds to see if he still had garden plants under the weeds. He seldom meanders among the gardens because more pressing tasks are calling but today he poked about, swearing at rabbit damage and on a positive note, discovering plants that had survived despite all the interference of weeds, rabbits and droughts – even some, like Hyssop and Spider wort, had emerged on their own.

He keeps a stand of Milkweed in support of any passing Monarch butterfly but has never seen any. Until today. A Monarch was bounding about in the Milkweed, seemingly quite happy. Small gifts bring great reward.

While hunting wild crabgrass in the Azalea bed, he met up with a chipmunk. He’s always considered the chipmunk a mouse that is in show business; they have pleasant shades of brown with prominent stripes running down their back. We stared at one another for a long moment then the chipmunk went about its business.

This kind of puttering in the garden beds, for mariner at least, is one of the top enjoyments that can be had from gardening. The gardens have their own relationship with nature, stay busy with their own lives whether ants, birds, flowers or even weeds. They are the grand biosphere for shrews, caterpillars, moths, toads, moles and snails. A summer’s night can be blessed with dancing lightning bugs.

Plants, from algae to giant oaks to moss, have been around for billions of years before Homo came along. They know something Homos don’t know.

Ancient Mariner