tingilinde

lessons on tyranny

From Timothy Snyder

 

are we living in a dystopia?

Reflecting on the popularity of Silo

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“Silo” follows a classic dystopian structure: forbidden knowledge launches a hero’s quest for more forbidden knowledge, which may lead to triumph or tragedy. The hero of George Orwell’s “1984” is a bureaucrat whose discovery of a blank diary leads him to turn on his government; the hero of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” is a professional book burner who starts to steal books. In “Silo,” as in these earlier works, powerful people act ruthlessly to keep secrets secret. But a hard-headed engineer named Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) is unexpectedly promoted to sheriff and starts to investigate. “How did they lose this world?” is the question that drives the entire show, and, indeed, an entire genre.

One of the perverse pleasures of a dystopia is that we identify with its truth-seeking inhabitants as they try to find out who ruined their world—and, at the same time, we sense that we probably did. The desolation outside the Silo evokes the everyday terrors of our time: only a few years ago, governments ordered their citizens to shelter in place for fear of a novel virus, and, as I write this, many residents of Los Angeles have fled their homes in the face of wildfires or are staying indoors to avoid the smoke. Post-apocalyptic stories can, paradoxically, be comforting: at least the present day isn’t that bad. On the other hand, we may be drawn to dystopias because we fear we live in one.

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the original code for the first chatbot

The code for the first version of Eliza had been lost for decades. 

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"I have a particular interest in how early AI pioneers thought," Shrager told Live Science in an email. "Having computer scientists' code is as close to having a record of their thoughts, and as ELIZA was — and remains, for better or for worse — a touchstone of early AI, I want to know what was in his mind." But why the team wanted to get ELIZA working is more complex, he said.

"From a technical point of view, we did not even know that the code we had found — the only version ever discovered — actually worked," Shrager said. So they realized they had to try it.

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beyond chain mail

A very curious new architected material 

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Experiments from the Caltech lab of Chiara Daraio, G. Bradford Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics and Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator, have yielded a fascinating new type of matter, neither granular nor crystalline, that responds to some stresses as a fluid would and to others like a solid. The new material, known as PAM (for polycatenated architected materials) could have uses in areas ranging from helmets and other protective gear to biomedical devices and robotics.

PAMs are not found in nature, though their basic form is known to us through the millennia-old manufacture of chain mail: small metal rings linked together to form a mesh, most often used as a flexible form of armor. PAMs, however, are like chain mail on steroids. Following the basic principle of interlocking shapes, like those found in a chain, PAMs are made up of a variety of shapes linked together to form three-dimensional patterns whose configurations are almost unimaginably variable. The resulting materials, which Daraio and her colleagues have rendered using 3D printers, exhibit behaviors not found in other types of materials.

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corruption and greed

HCR on corrupt business and politicians. 

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Shortly before midnight last night, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published its initial findings from a study it undertook last July when it asked eight large companies to turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices. The FTC focused on the middlemen hired by retailers. Those middlemen use algorithms to tweak and target prices to different markets.

The initial findings of the FTC using data from six of the eight companies show that those prices are not static. Middlemen can target prices to individuals using their location, browsing patterns, shopping history, and even the way they move a mouse over a webpage. They can also use that information to show higher-priced products first in web searches. The FTC found that the intermediaries—the middlemen—worked with at least 250 retailers.

“Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services—from a person's location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage,” said FTC chair Lina Khan. “The FTC should continue to investigate surveillance pricing practices because Americans deserve to know how their private data is being used to set the prices they pay and whether firms are charging different people different prices for the same good

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anne frank and generative ai

A huge fail.

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Unfortunately for humanity, a Utah-based tech startup called SchoolAI has summoned up an AI-generated version of Frank that feels like both an affront to her memory and a grim sign of things to come in the world of education.

While there's a veneer of the historical character, it also shows all the flaws of OpenAI-style chatbots: overly courteous, unhelpfully vague, and so uplifting that it borders on wax museum-creepy.

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very neat

A deep explanation for how CO₂ traps heat

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In 1896, the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius realized (opens a new tab) that carbon dioxide (CO₂) traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere — the phenomenon now called the greenhouse effect. Since then, increasingly sophisticated modern climate models have verified Arrhenius’ central conclusion: that every time the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere doubles, Earth’s temperature will rise between 2 and 5 degrees Celsius.

Still, the physical reason why CO₂ behaves this way has remained a mystery, until recently.

First, in 2022, physicists settled (opens a new tab) a dispute over the origin of the “logarithmic scaling” of the greenhouse effect. That refers to the way Earth’s temperature increases the same amount in response to any doubling of CO₂, no matter the raw numbers.

Then, this spring, a team led by Robin Wordsworth (opens a new tab) of Harvard University figured out why the CO₂ molecule is so good at trapping heat in the first place. The researchers identified a strange quirk of the molecule’s quantum structure that explains why it’s such a powerful greenhouse gas — and why pumping more carbon into the sky drives climate change. The findings appeared in The Planetary Science Journal (opens a new tab).

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This takes out one of the arguments deniers have used.

 

model airplanes and a model aircraft carrier

The action starts around the 20 minute mark.

on making homes more fire-resistant

Some structures do much better than others when fire is around. 

 

advice for cleaning up after fires

From Paul Wennberg of Caltech

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In addition to particulate, smoke contains a huge diversity of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These are the source of much of what we are smelling in the air now. Again, for those who want to dive deeper into the research, here is a recent inventory of these chemicals, mostly from burning trees: "Parameterizations of US wildfire and prescribed fire emission ratios and emission factors based on FIREX-AQ aircraft measurements." The diversity of these chemicals will be even higher for structural materials burned in the Eaton fire.

During the fires, the winds carried both the particulate and gases far downwind (all the way out to the Pacific Ocean). The smoke entered homes through openings around windows and doors. This transport downwind was tracked with monitors that recorded the amount of particulate in the air. During the fire, the levels of particulate even miles away from the fire were 50–100 times larger than usual. Since the generation of local smoke from nearby active fires has basically ended, the amount of particulate (and the amount of lead in these particles) is back to levels similar to those before the fire.

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Something he noted separately to a friend in Altadena was the particulate is so toxic that if the AQI is over 40  you need to be wearing at least a N95 mask and preferably a N100.  

 

is there evil?

the only post today

From BBC 4 and rebroadcast on CBC Ideas (where I caught it). The second of four Reith Lectures features Dr Adshead on our capacity for evil and evil states of mind. She notes, but does not dwell on here, how a goodness state of mind can counteract. She talks at length about evil states of mind (she notes seven types) and how people get there - by themselves or as part of social and cultural movements. Given Nazi Germany and hate in some areas it’s an important listen.

evil as an adjective rather than a noun

Strongly recommended!

 

 

 

wow!

The ERA

Something that was on track in the mid 70s until the Catholic and Mormon churches, along with some evangelicals let by Anita Bryant campaigned hammer and tong to halt the momentum.  His note is not the rule of law though - he didn't order the archivist to publish it.

 

 

 

a helicopter and the eaton fire

A look behind the scenes  of the terrifying event.  

 

 

deleting your facebook account

With Facebook and Instagram (both Meta)  following Musk's example many are beginning to think about why they're on the platform.  The company has made it very difficult to leave - here are the steps.

People need to figure out who their important contacts are and cobble together contacts elsewhere.  Not an easy task if you don't know your contacts (which are increasingly bots these days)

 

 

 

church and state in texas

The zealous right prepares to ram their "values" down everyone's throats.

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Schott is the pastor of Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth, and was among the Christian leaders who spent Tuesday rallying fellow believers ahead of a legislative session that they hope will further codify their conservative religious views into law. He was joined in those efforts by a throng of pastors and Republican leaders, who throughout the day claimed that church-state separation isn’t real, called progressive Christians heretics, or vowed to weed out “cowardly” clergy who refuse to politick from the pulpit.

“There is no separation between church and state,” Republican Party of Texas Chair Abraham George said at a small rally with clergy and GOP lawmakers. “We don’t want the government in our churches, but we should be in the government.”

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