Bow down before the organism God actually created in his own image: a small fern found on New Caledonia, Tmesipteris oblanceolata. Furthermore, the name of God’s avatar is also unpronounceable.
Tmesipteris oblanceolata
160 billion base pairs! Our genome has only 2% of the complexity of this fern.
We need to make a pilgrimage to a small island east of Australia now.
The black widows I adopted yesterday are taking their time to adjust. Here’s one of them:
Both of the females have scurried up to the highest point in their respective cages, and are roosting sullenly there, and are totally immobile this morning. I can tell they were active in the night because they’ve both constructed loose nests of silk, but are otherwise inactive today.
The male has disappeared from sight. I think he’s lurking in the moss.
You can tell how laid back these spiders are. I popped the lid off Urðr’s cage, flipped it upside down, and fussed about for several minutes trying to get a decent picture (that bright orange lid is not helping), and she didn’t so much as twitch. It was the perfect opportunity for a jailbreak, and she just quietly meditated.
This is one of those comic illustrations that are burned into the brain of every person above a certain age. “Guilty, guilty, guilty” is the phrase that immediately came to my mind yesterday.
We felt a kind of glee at this rare occasion when a rich and powerful person gets the same justice we peons routinely experience, as they should. But take a moment and exercise your empathy: how would another rich and powerful person react to the demonstration that they could be held to account for their crimes? I know, I know! Let’s ask Elon Musk!
After Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in relation to a scheme to silence a porn star and unlawfully influence the 2016 election, Musk moaned that the history-making outcome of the trial is bad news for all Americans. “Indeed, great damage was done today to the public’s faith in the American legal system,” he wrote in a post on X.
Personally, my faith in the American legal system is far more shaken by Alito and Thomas and Roberts and the decisions of the Supreme Court that have privileged corporations, and the stock trading of our senators, and the thuggery of police officers. There have been many things in the past several decades that have eroded my confidence, and seeing a con man getting convicted in a jury trial of something he actually did isn’t one of them.
Musk’s comment came in response to another user who bemoaned that the first conviction of a former president had occurred not because of the “Iraq or Afghanistan wars, illegal CIA coups, drone striking weddings, or spying on Americans” but rather because “Trump misclassified a $130,000 payment for a porn star’s NDA.”
Musk apparently also saw Trump’s crimes as insignificant and questioned the legitimacy of the prosecution. “If a former President can be criminally convicted over such a trivial matter—motivated by politics, rather than justice—then anyone is at risk of a similar fate,” he wrote.
I agree in part that I would like to have seen more high officials convicted of their great crimes, and it’s terrible that they have such impunity. It’s pathetic that I have to accept justice for the little stuff — it’s like Al Capone getting convicted for tax evasion rather than racketeering and murder.
But wait — “little stuff”? What am I thinking? Paying $130,000 for the silence of a porn star is not a little thing to most people. That’s about two years salary, before taxes, for me! This is not a small crime to the majority of people in this country. That’s robbing your local bank money — not a gas station or 7-11 holdup, but hitting a up small business on payday. And the rich people think the sum is “trivial” or “insignificant.” Musk probably breaks into a cold sweat at the thought that he could be punished for a crime that represents the price of one cybertruck, rather than the millions and billions he has in his coffers.
My dream is to see every billionaire get their butts kick and their profits taxed heavily. A guilty verdict for Trump is just the first small step.
GUILTY ON 34 COUNTS. We have to wait until July to learn what Trump’s sentence will be, so I’m not celebrating yet — it’s more like a momentary contentedness that a good decision was reached. It’s still possible I’ll be outraged at an injustice in sentencing, but I’ll relax a little for now.
I think I’ll have some popcorn and read the reactions.
I’ll be showing them off at about 1pm Central.
“Justices” Thomas and Alito have refused to recuse themselves from January 6th cases, despite being blatantly partisan. The bias and corruption in the Supreme Court have become rather blatant, because right now the courts think they are not bound by ethics or law. Jamie Raskin has an idea.
Everyone assumes that nothing can be done about the recusal situation because the highest court in the land has the lowest ethical standards — no binding ethics code or process outside of personal reflection. Each justice decides for him- or herself whether he or she can be impartial.
Of course, Justices Alito and Thomas could choose to recuse themselves — wouldn’t that be nice? But begging them to do the right thing misses a far more effective course of action.
Correct. It would be hopelessly naive to think the Supreme Court would do anything in the name of principle. So what is his recommended course of action?
The U.S. Department of Justice — including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed U.S. special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr. Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims — can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.
The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can…
Stop right there. The solution hinges on ineffectual, waffly Merrick Garland, the dilatory attorney general, taking decisive action? Wouldn’t that be nice? Unfortunately, it’s only slightly less naive than expecting Thomas or Alito to do the responsible thing. Furthermore, “petitioning” doesn’t sound very effective — do we think the justices won’t find an excuse to weasel out of any “petition”? This is John Roberts’ court, after all.
“I think John Roberts is gonna go down in history as one of the worst chief justices of the United States,” Graves said. “He’s done everything he can to try to manipulate the process to avoid and block efforts by the Senate to hold the court accountable, to insist that it abide by just commonsense ethical rules that every other court in the country has to follow.”
Nothing will be done. These crooks aren’t worried.
I was supposed to get some spiders delivered by FedEx yesterday. They did not arrive. I was charged for overnight delivery, but no delivery, and no notification of a delay from FedEx.
I’m hoping they show up this morning, and I’m not too worried about the health of the spiders. If it were January, I’d assume they were frozen and dead, but the weather has been mild. They’ll just be cranky and hungry.
Worst case, the FedEx delivery guys kicked it around and there’s a warehouse somewhere that has some new residents. Second worst case, there was a misdelivery and some neighbors received an epic surprise. No, really, if you accidentally get a package with my name on it, you should definitely call me before trying to open it.
Kaushal Trivedi comments on the ridiculous cost of LLMs.
The Jaw-dropping environmental impact of Large-Language-Models (LLMs)
Assuming static usage of 100 million weekly active users (ex. OpenAI chatGPT) and just 5 queries per user per week, the total energy consumption for operating an LLM like GPT-3.5 is staggering—around 44,200 MWh per year.
To put this in perspective:
With an emission intensity of 0.4 kg of CO2 per kWh, this level of energy consumption emits the same amount of CO2 as making 15,000 round trips in your petrol-powered car from Kashmir to Kanyakumari (a road distance of 3,600 km one-way).That’s massive!
As we continue to innovate, it’s crucial to consider the environmental impact and strive for more sustainable solutions.
Because at the end, there’s no PLANet B.
First let me say I would love to make that trip once. Not 15,000 times, but once would be awesome. I’d see a lot, learn a lot.
What do I get from ChatGPT for that massive investment? A lot of companies get to slap “AI” on their products, and as near as I can tell, it only makes them worse. Is Google improved by adding AI to their front end? No. What would improve Google is stripping off the layers of cruft they’ve accumulated and monetized over the years, simplifying the algorithms, and making internet search simple and streamlined again. Who thinks a phone book benefits from a half-assed chat function?
I guess if you’re selling car rentals in Kanyakumari, it’s profitable to get people to make repetitive road trips.
Hey, can I make a detour to Bengal? Maybe make some scenic stops?
Russia has suffered somewhere north of a quarter million — possibly approaching a half million — casualties in their war with Ukraine, but there’s nothing to worry about, since their dead troops are getting resurrected! Trust the words of Artemiy Vladimirov, Archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Vladimirov played along and replied, “In war, there are no unbelievers! When you are facing physical death, every fiber of your soul comes alive. Right now, there are many wonderful testimonies of Christ’s victory over death. My wife sends me many military testimonies and video clips. Before Lent, I watched a video about one Chinese man who participated in the special military operation. A bullet hit him in the stomach, destroying all of his insides. He died from this and then was resurrected.”
Vladimirov continued to spin the tale, claiming, “Saint Luke of Crimea appeared to him and completely healed him, his insides were fully restored. He was baptized along with his relatives, all of them are photographed together, dressed in white clothes, baptized into our Orthodox Church.”
Ukraine should be worried when the zombie hordes mob their country, and when the enemy they shoot simply rises back up and continues the charge. They need to be informed to aim for the head, not the stomach.
Also of concern:
Vladimirov is no stranger to spreading idiosyncratic fibs. In 2019, he claimed to have communicated with Charles Darwin from beyond the grave and alleged that the scientist repented for his theory of evolution and renounced his own hypothesis about the origin of species.
Y’all worried now? So believable.
Here’s a headline for you: H5N1 virus in latest human case has mutated, officials say. This is not a surprise. This is the lesson we are thoroughly familiar with in biology, that everything changes over time. Of course H5N1 is evolving.
Testing of the latest human case of bird flu has revealed a “notable” mutation in the virus, officials have said.
The case, which was identified this month in a dairy worker in Michigan, marks the second human infection linked to the multi-state H5N1 outbreak among US cattle.
Genomic sequencing has now found a change in the virus compared to an earlier infection in a dairy worker in Texas, raising concerns that the virus is evolving to better infect humans.
The slight change in the virus’s genetic makeup is “associated with viral adaptation to mammalian hosts,” the Centre for Disease Control said in a statement published on Friday.
Mutation and adaptation are inevitable. We ought to be teaching that with a heck of a lot more confidence, because some people don’t get it. Answers in Genesis is in the business of spreading doubt and confusion, and they have their own stupid opinions about bird flu.
However, many media outlets and health authorities have expressed the fear that the virus could “mutate” to a form which is capable of directly spreading among humans. The 1918–19 “Spanish flu” outbreak, which swept the world and killed more than 20 million people (more even than the just finished war, and than the Black Death in 14th century Europe), is believed to have possibly started in birds and spread to humans.
They are very fond of scare quotes.
Unfortunately, the words being used to describe the feared change in the virus, such as “mutate” and “evolve” carry with them all sorts of Darwinian baggage. This will become especially pointed if the dreaded change does eventuate. Viruses, like actual living things, do mutate (the term is properly applied) and change. The issue is, as always, not to be misled by the “psychological link” between such terms and the idea that pond scum has turned into pelicans, palm trees and politicians.
Eventually, even the ignorant turdlets at AiG are compelled to admit that organisms actually do mutate, and change, and adapt, they have to desperately insist that that does not mean that viruses will evolve into human beings. Yeah, we know. No one has predicted that they would. You can use as many quotes as you want, but you’re still forced to admit that life “mutates” and “adapts” and “evolves.”
Evolution is a real and ongoing process, and that’s why we should be concerned about H5N1.
