Category Archives: Science

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

 

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

Ponder stuff

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Current studies of human cells in humans reveal that you have within your body cells that belong in your family’s bodies. They didn’t originate in your genome, they belong to your mother, father, sisters, brothers and even cousins. The cells are perfectly happy doing what they were created for. How did you get your family’s cells?

Current studies in quantum mechanics suggest that there are no wrong answers – only different answers. Wow! How is The U.S. going to handle this? If colleges are still teaching ethics, how will they deal with this? Find Schrodinger’s cat; see what it thinks.

When does consciousness occur? In other words, what information and where did it originate such that you became aware (conscious) of that information? Don’t ask neuroscientists – they can’t agree. Some say it is formulated in the back of the brain, causing attention to be focused on it. Others say its the front of the brain, interpreting reality. Fortunately, neither can be wrong, only different. If only you could keep your mother’s cells out of it!

For the first time, scientists have created embryos that are a mix of human and macaque monkey cells. Maybe it will act like Jerry Lewis and quite likely like a relative of yours. Scientists also are putting pig semen in human embryos. Don’t  Americans have enough prejudice just with color difference? If this isn’t wrong, it certainly is different.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

Who are the best replacements for a dead democratic party?

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Everyone is painfully aware of the republican party’s intentions regarding economics, fuel consumption, racial division, political domination using the military, etc. But where is another option? The democratic party is a silent shambles. The power democrats from the last half of the 20th century aren’t powerful anymore. Most of them are moving into retirement. What kind of representatives should we elect to replace them?

Bottom Up Government.  The last several decades have seen the demise of ‘one person, one vote’. Many states arrange political processes that favor one party over the other – the most common is gerrymandering state and local districts; a few states require gubernatorial approval of each Federal election representative. Obviously, it takes more funding to remain competitive even in one’s own state – that. means money replaces local voter influence.

We should select local leaders who would disavow gerrymandering, require rank voting and prevent dark money coming from outside the state. These steps would do a great deal to minimize the current plutocracy.

Economics   Since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, the flow of capital has increasingly become ‘trickle down’. It is easier to become richer for the rich and harder for the average citizen to catch a break even versus inflation. According to inflation, the minimum wage should be $22.80. Under today’s administration, all discretionary funding is at risk (discretionary funding is when the government helps citizens with their costs, covering everything from PBS to social security and helpful regulations controlling everything from tax rates to wildlife). Further, large corporations, especially those in computer technology, are not under the control of government regulation and slowly are changing the marketplace to a ‘middleman’ purchasing process where supply and demand do not set market price, e.g., Walmart, Amazon and Temu (online) among many more.

We should elect local leaders who advocate income ceilings for billionaires, restore and improve funding for large issues like medical care, public education and improve Federal Emergency Administration (FEMA) financial support to citizens as global warming threatens homes and communities. Insurance cannot maintain competitive pricing and slowly will back out of coverage due to hazards.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)   Tons of evidence exists from many sources – including tech managers who left the field for moral reasons – that the rule is “if you can do it, do it!”. There is no ethical control over artificial intelligence development. Already there are constant news reports about its effect on children and its hidden manipulations in the marketplace. Scamming grows more widespread. Most neutral scientists agree that there is an eminent confrontation between human politics and AI independence.

We should elect local leaders who understand the intrusion of AI, aka nonhuman influence, into a citizen’s daily life. Primarily, two issues require immediate government control: social ethics and corporate mergers. Generally, this requires a younger candidate who has been exposed to the new AI era and understands it influence.

International Unity   Much of the world is in disarray. Among the wealthiest nations, it is conflict over who will dominate the new age. In moderate nations, the issue is very similar to the retiree who depends heavily on Social Security: “If I lose the source of my primary income, there is nothing left”.  And certainly, in terms of body count, the poor nations are battling for survival at the citizen level. Add to this stress the pressure on religion, theocracies (Arab nations), the shifting weather patterns caused by global warming, the forced migrations of millions and there seems to be nothing in store except Armageddon.

We should elect local leaders who believe in economic integration as a solution to the trembling of world order. The prime example since the second world war is the European Union but the scope is not wide enough. China has a comprehensive strategy called ‘The Belt and Road Strategy’ which integrates trade across most of Asia and includes the eastern side of Europe. Could the U.S. forget racism and work to economically integrate the Caribbean and South America?

Civil Rights   Any constriction on how a citizen lives within the bounds of their humanness induces stress. The worst case is slavery. Today, the right to choose or not choose pregnancy is more a political battle than a medical one. Well rooted in the U.S. is racism – not just blacks but any shade other than Honky White. Add to this dozens of civil constrictions like the current reversal of the right for children born in the U.S. not to have birthright citizenship because their parents were not citizens. The treatment of our citizens is approaching the brutality of the early Persian Empire. Add to racism the severe treatment caused by very distinct and self-absorbed economic classes that is so severe that the poorer classes are bound to remain poor or otherwise short-sheeted for their entire life.

We should elect local leaders who respect humanness, that is, they show empathy and compassion in their speech and behavior. They should tend toward unanimity rather than classism. Their political arguments should never choose confrontation over unity.

Planet-Human Relations   As the current President seeks to further disrupt humanity’s relationship with the biosphere by cutting out solar and wind energy funding, Mother Nature is not amused. Stated briefly, humans have consumed about 70% of the land and imposed livestock grazing to the point that there are 27 cows, sheep, etc. for every displaced wild creature. Now that the weather patterns are causing agricultural hardship and global warming continues to accelerate to the point that New York has to pay attention to rising sea levels, the biosphere has become a political issue. Throw in a planetary overpopulation of 8 billion humans just since 1800, and Mother Nature clearly is taking issue with human behavior. Economic balance is at risk around the world.

We should elect local leaders who intellectually understand that humans have over used the planet’s resources. it must be clear in their rhetoric that everything from FEMA to solar power to water conservation, etc. are the way humans must placate Mother Earth.

YOU   The role of voting as an influence in a slowly changing national culture has changed. All of reality is leaping forward at light speed, forcing rapid adjustments to economics, society and future survivability. This means a casual vote for a familiar name or party every now and then doesn’t work anymore. Every citizen MUST take more interest in government.

Perhaps you should visit a council/state legislative hearing every couple of months. You may learn not only more about the issues but also more about your representatives. If a state or national campaigner stops in your home town, check them out at their event. Read decent, balanced political news in your local paper – even the odd-minded political columnists – maybe even write a letter to the editor about a personal issue. The point is, the job of saving the planet is in your hands.

* * * *

Mariner knows it would take a godlike creature to meet all the recommendations above but do the best you can. If ever there were a time, women may be a better choice than men. He recommends using age as a primary consideration. Finally, VOTE!!!

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

Back to reality

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Yesterday, mariner returned from his visit at a tribal encampment. It is a return to reality. He can imagine what it feels like to have a building collapse on you when it is hit by a Russian rocket. He spent a day in the tunnels with Nosey Mole before stepping out to check on things.

First, the planet is at war. 23 nations have open warfare, unofficial military skirmishes, political assassination or deliberate destruction causing deaths. Donald is considering invading Iran, Greenland and even Canada – although he vowed in his campaign for election that he would extract the U.S. from foreign wars.

Second, the smart computers will take over the world a lot sooner than we think. Consider the following excerpts from The Week:

1- Senate Republicans have added language to the GOP tax bill that would deny the states of Federal funding for broadband projects if the states attempt to regulate Artificial Intelligence. In other words, AI can do whatever it fancies in state computer systems.

2- Traditionally, humans have had at least one fail-safe method of controlling technology: hitting the off switch. But what happens when a machine wants to stay on? In May, the AI Safety firm Palisade Research reported that multiple OpenAI models had refused explicit instructions to power down. During tests, its Claude 4 Opus model even resorted to blackmail, threatening to release fictional emails that suggested the engineer trying to shut it down was having was having an affair. The implications for the age of super intelligent AI are disturbing.

3- (Paraphrased) The Axoloti is a creature famous for its ability to regrow its limbs. The salamander-like creature can regenerate all kinds of tissues – not only a missing limb but tissues in the heart, lung and brain. Not only regrow an entire limb but any part of that limb, patched just like the original limb. Scientists have discovered that reitinoic acid is the key to Axoloti’s skill. We’ve all made these limbs when we were embryos. The trick is how we can launch correct growing procedures in living humans.

Put retinoic acid and instructions to grow an embryo in the hands of a self-managing computer and Donald will have more than immigrants to worry about. If one thinks the Tea Party, the Patriot Group, the Ku Klux Klan and the Proud Boys all have the same brain – there is a 70% chance of that being true with smart AI.

Back in mariner’s home town, it is brutally hot. But, there are lawns to cut, dishes to wash, unpacking a truckload of supplies used for the reunion, constantly fighting tiny bugs in one’s eyes and ears, changing diapers, making dinner – that’s the real world. . . . . . . today.

Ancient Mariner

 

Why mariner dislikes smartphones

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Mariner apologizes to readers, family and friends who have heard enough castigation by alter ego Amos against smartphones and associated displacement of human interaction. But he has been challenged (frequently) again. So here is why smartphones are dangerous, then mariner will rejoin Nosey Mole:

Smartphones have a high convenience factor similar to air conditioning and automobiles, that is, it would be difficult to do without them. However, air conditioning and automobiles actually may contribute to improving Homo sapiens behavior. Smartphones will not.

In recent posts mariner has adopted the term ‘social accountability’ to represent the natural need for, dependence on and collaboration with other humans. These behaviors are in line with anthropological and psychological descriptions accepted universally today. Briefly, we are primates, we are mammals, we are capable of imagination.

Hundreds of thousand of years ago, primates were simple forest creatures whose social life did not go far beyond being responsible for supporting offspring until the child could go on its own. It didn’t take long before the mammalian instincts led to herding – yes, just like cows, horses and monkeys. Herding (let’s switch to tribes) is a defensive behavior to achieve several things: sharing threats and defeating them; sharing the burdens of raising offspring; identifying the best behavior to continue to be accepted by the tribe; and to have a realistic understanding of the world around them – a term used in psychology is ‘agency’.

To translate the last paragraph into conversational words, it is important to be engaged continually in interpersonal activity, engage with tribe members to resolve simple matters like food gathering, emotional balance not sustainable in isolation, learning what is currently important to the tribe, and exercising a complex brain to understand what is real and what is fantasy. A failed example today are the few who still believe the world is flat.

What everything written above means is ‘socializing with the tribe is what pulls together and identifies something called ‘reality’. Reality is not just an outside assumption, it also is an assumption of the subconscious brain, which must interpret whether to run, to watch or to take a pee. The tools of tribe association are our emotions, e.g., love, compassion, ritual, defensiveness and survivability. Communication with other humans is mandatory to identify a functional reality.

Mariner has experienced several families where Alexa has more conversation time with a person than their spouse has with them. It is a national news item that teenagers especially have emotional difficulties because the smartphone defines their reality and even tells them what they look like or how they should behave – without validation from the tribe. The smartphone has no ability to educate an individual with respect to their mental and personal reality. Yet it is so tempting that a brother and sister will sit on a sofa and communicate through an emotionless devise rather than actually use their own natural interpretations (AKA reality) based on tone of voice, facial expression, muscular tension or internal brain interpretations.

Another defect of the smartphone is personal isolation. Mariner attended a 100th birthday celebration recently. He sat at a dinner table with six chairs; the other chairs were filled by immediate family to the birthday celebrant. There was vibrant conversation about the times and experiences of the family – except for one person. She never spoke a word, never looked up and had no interaction with her own immediate family. Without interruption, she thumbed her way through an hour and a half of centenary celebration.

A similar dysfunction is the individual who will engage the smartphone at every pause in conversation to ask for detailed information from the smartphone then assuage their ego by expressing unnecessary information.

As to tribe relations, psychologically it is beneficial to acknowledge the tribe and its importance to reality. By doing grocery shopping at a supermarket, unconsciously one is aware that it takes a lot of tribe members to provide food and other essentials, that there is a unified reality that subconsciously builds self confidence and assures safety within the shopper’s reality. Shopping on the smartphone provides no tribe bonding and offers no way to sustain a person’s awareness of the world around them.

Which leads to the greatest danger of smartphones: interpreter of a person’s reality. Readers may recall that Mark Zuckerberg’s fantasy was to have everyone live in an online village designed just for them. Using publicly available data, the kinds of stores, recreational activities and even family members were all available at this online ‘reality’. Mariner can’t avoid saying it – this is identical to the lives buried in caskets in the movie ‘Matrix’.

Is domination by computers inevitable? Bill Gates thinks so. For what it’s worth, mariner does, too.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

We all need new top down awareness

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Especially the world’s governments but that’s another story.

Even more important is that you, me and every individual around the globe must stop living by the daily ethics of life that may have been true forty years ago. Computers are no longer smart typewriters and no longer fantastic libraries; computer technology has created a subhuman species capable of telling us what we should know and what to think. In a few years, computers, as our medical advisors and primary care physicians, will decide whether you continue to live or not. What is scary is that computers already think for themselves – technicians no longer solve ethical positions. Today a majority of stock market trades never see a human mind. Who tells you the truth – Mom or the smartphone?

We must cast aside the romantic image of farming as a rural life style with cute lambs and mooing cows and amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties above a fruited plain. Worldwide we keep clearing to make room for more farms to make more food. The image of a romantic farm should be replaced by the relentless spread of crops and pastures that already cover two of every five acres of land on Earth, obliterating the wild landscapes that soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  Further, it is propelling the worst extinction since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago..

We must look beyond a world made of nations. Any nation, including the US and China, is incapable on its own to stabilize industrial development, international supply chains, artificial intelligence, humanitarian obligations and, importantly – open warfare. At the least, smaller nations, especially in Africa and the Middle East, must adopt a model similar to the European Union. On a global scale, it is time to make war less important than management of the planet and all its human disasters. It is time for one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all – including Mother Earth. It is time for the United Nations to be authorized as the ethical authority – including the right to wage international war.

The ethics of human society must leave behind the age of nationally defined variations of humans; it is of no consequence whether Italian, Brazilian, South African, Indian, Polish, Chinese . . . The issue is eight billion humans and growing. There are only two choices: let the population grow until there is a tragic, horrible collapse of controlled civilization, or take control of birthrates. Sardonically, computers may help us with the population issue. The Dixie style of birth control is simplistic. The following is an extract from a post mariner wrote last April:

“A tremendous change occurred with the industrial revolution: whereas it had taken all of human history until around 1800 for world population to reach one billion, the second billion was achieved in only 130 years (1930), the third billion in 30 years (1960), the fourth billion in 15 years (1974), and the fifth billion in only 13 years (1987).

  • During the 20th century alone, the population in the world has grown from 1.65 billion to 6 billion.
  • In 1970, there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are now.”

Immediately, one grasps the idea that population and natural resources are the two issues that can’t remain under control given the ethical image we carry from the 1970’s. So, are we willing to go the way of the dinosaurs using our homemade asteroid or will humans have the wherewithal to live according to a new top down awareness?

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

Everything is true

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Without television news to occupy his time, mariner uses that time to explore other subjects like paleontology and ancient cultural histories, Then there is quantum mechanics. He was drawn to this subject because a number of journals were covering a new breakthrough which solved open issues that have been unresolved since before Einstein.

Of anything one would want to study, quantum mechanics is the most confusing and obscure subject. Mathematics is beyond comprehension and is understood only by the most dedicated mathematician. Relativity is an understated word by which any situation can be redefined and still be true. The wrench for manipulating anything is called a quantum.

A simple metaphor: Looking at a Mercator map of the world (everything is flat making land nearer the poles to be larger than it is), if one were to fly an airplane from India to Denmark, the shortest distance would be a straight line on the map between the two locations. However, if we change the shape of the map to include actual planet-shaped accuracy, the line doesn’t appear straight anymore. In fact, it is a curved line that passes close to the North Pole. Yet, it is the same line, the same length and is curved to match the curvature of the Earth. In one case, straight line; in the other a very curved line yet both are the same line.

The ‘quantum’ in this metaphor is the change in map representation. Let’s make it more realistic: In your yard, you have a very long garden hose. You also have at the middle of the yard a tree that needs watering. Does it affect anything if the hose lies straight between the faucet and the tree or does it affect anything if too much hose is used and it coils all over the yard? No. It’s the same hose whatever shape it has.

What is vital is the location at each end of the lines and hose: India must be India and stay where it is, Denmark must stay where it is. The faucet must stay where it is and the tree must stay where it is. These are finite values – everything else is relative to the stationary locations. These examples are almost too simplistic but mariner can’t go any deeper without getting lost. He dare not get a fancy microscope and use these rules to measure behavior among the molecules, atoms and ions that make up the Universe.

He learned, without understanding, that if you add a lot of differently shaped lines between the finite values, system behavior evolves – like Suns and planets and Homos.

Welcome to quantum mechanics.

Ancient Mariner