Visualizing the destruction of New York didn’t stop the nuclear fetishists

To those of us of a certain age, Chesley Bonestell is an evocative name. In the early days of the space program, he was the chosen illustrator for the future, painting spaceships and landscapes on the moons of Saturn and all those wild imaginary cities with flying cars and buildings wreathed with fins and arcing silvery ramps. There was a time when I’d lock in to magazine racks with a Chesley Bonestell cover somewhere on it, and my parents would have to drag me away.

But he also painted less enchanting illustrations. Here’s New York getting nuked in 1950.

If that isn’t horrifying enough, here’s the aftermath:

It looks like something Hieronymus Bosch would have painted.

What I find disturbing, though, is that American magazines were commissioning illustrations of American cities getting bombed, 5 years after America nuked two Japanese cities. What, reality wasn’t enough for you and you needed to fantasize about it happening at home to get people to care? The horror of this imagining didn’t stop the US from continuing nuclear testing. In 1954, the US would test the hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll, ‘accidentally’ irradiating a Japanese fishing boat, Lucky Dragon #5, killing one crewman and sending the others to the hospital, and inspiring protests in Japan and the invention of Godzilla.

Isn’t it nice that war can inspire interesting art?

So…you wanna be a science communicator?

Good for you, but I have to warn you that there some discouraging developments. There is a peculiar segment of society that will want to outlaw you.

Abortion is on the ballot in South Dakota. Insulin prices were a key issue in the June debate between Biden and Trump. The U.S. Surgeon General declared gun violence a public health crisis, and the Florida governor called the declaration a pretext to “violate the Second Amendment.”

In an intense presidential election year, the issue of anti-science harassment is likely to worsen. Universities must act now to mitigate the harm of online harassment.

We can’t just wish away the harsh political divisions shaping anti-science harassment. Columbia University’s Silencing Science Tracker has logged five government efforts to restrict science research so far this year, including the Arizona State Senate passing a bill that would prohibit the use of public funds to address climate change and allow state residents to file lawsuits to enforce the prohibition. The potential chaos and chilling effect of such a bill, even if it does not become law, cannot be understated. And it is just one piece of a larger landscape of anti-science legislation impacting reproductive health, antiracism efforts, gender affirming healthcare, climate science and vaccine development.

It’s a bit annoying that the article talks about these dire threats to science-based policy, but doesn’t mention the word “Republican” once. It’s not that the Democrats are immune (anyone remember William Proxmire, Democratic senator from Wisconsin?), but that right now Republicans are pushing an ideological fantasy and they don’t like reality-based people promoting science.

One other bit of information here is that science communication does not pay well, and you rely on a more solid financial base: a university position, or a regular column in a magazine or newspaper, anything to get you through dry spells. You can try freelancing it, but then you’re vulnerable to any attack, and hey, did you know that in America health insurance is tied to your employment? I’ve got the university position, which is nice, but that’s a job, and your employers expect you to work, and it’s definitely not a 40 hour work week sort of thing.

It doesn’t matter, though, because those employers are salivating at the possibility of replacing you with AI.

But AI-generated articles are already being written and their latest appearance in the media signals a worrying development. Last week, it was revealed staff and contributors to Cosmos claim they weren’t consulted about the rollout of explainer articles billed as having been written by generative artificial intelligence. The articles cover topics like “what is a black hole?” and “what are carbon sinks?” At least one of them contained inaccuracies. The explainers were created by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and then fact-checked against Cosmos’s 15,000-article strong archive.

Full details of the publication’s use of AI were published by the ABC on August 8. In that article, CSIRO Publishing, an independent arm of CSIRO and the current publisher of Cosmos, stated the AI-generated articles were an “experimental project” to assess the “possible usefulness (and risks)” of using a model like GPT-4 to “assist our science communication professionals to produce draft science explainer articles”. Two former editors said that editorial staff at Cosmos were not told about the proposed custom AI service. It comes just four months after Cosmos made five of its eight staff redundant.

So the publisher slashed its staff, then started exploring the idea of having ChatGPT produce content for their popular science magazine, Cosmos. They got caught and are now back-pedaling. You know they’ll try again. And again. And again. Universities would love to replace their professors with AI, too, but they aren’t even close to that capability yet, and they have a different solution: replace professors with cheap, overworked adjuncts. They won’t have the time to do science outreach to the general public.

Also, all of this is going on as public trust in AI is failing.

Public trust in AI is shifting in a direction contrary to what companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft are hoping for, as suggested by a recent survey based on Edelman data.

The study suggests that trust in companies building and selling AI tools dropped to 53%, compared to 61% five years ago.

While the decline wasn’t as severe in less developed countries, in the U.S., it was even more pronounced, falling from 50% to just 35%.

That’s a terrible article, by the way. It’s by an AI promoter who is shocked that not everyone loves AI, and doesn’t understand why. After all,

We are told that AI will cure disease, clean up the damage we’re doing to the environment, help us explore space and create a fairer society.

Has he considered the possibility that AI is doing none of those things, that the jobs are still falling on people’s shoulders?

Maybe he needs an AI to write a science explainer for him.

Shut up, AI

Making Google, Apple, and Microsoft sweat

Google has been ruled to be a monopoly. Now the other big tech companies await judgement.

Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google broke the law with its monopoly over online searches and related ads, a federal judge ruled on Monday, in the first victory for U.S. antitrust authorities who have filed a string of lawsuits to battle market domination by a handful of Big Tech companies.
The decision is a significant win for the Justice Department, which had sued the search engine giant over its control of about 90% of the online search market, and 95% on smartphones. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta noted that Google had paid $26.3 billion in 2021 alone to ensure that its search engine is the default on smartphones and browsers, and to keep its dominant market share.
“The court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote.
Mehta’s ruling against Alphabet’s major revenue driver paves the way for a second trial to determine potential fixes, such as requiring the company to stop paying smartphone makers billions of dollars annually to set Google as the default search engine on new phone.

When I say “sweat”, I mean “glisten lightly”. Actions to correct their abuse of the market might cost them billions, but that’ll only be a small fraction of their total revenue.

But I do approve the decision.

Boeing gets another black mark

This shiny new Boeing spacecraft, the Starliner, went up to the ISS in June. They were supposed to return on 14 June. It is now August. It’s beginning to look like the Starliner is too unreliable to make the return trip, and NASA is going to have to ask SpaceX to rescue the crew. This is another embarrassing failure for Boeing. On my recent trip to Seattle, I flew on a 737, but it was OK, it was one of the older models, built before the disastrous takeover by incompetent MBAs.

Maybe the astronauts should have prayed harder?

The planet is so screwed

Thanks to the techbros, for whom the environment is their very last consideration. Nvidia had a keynote address to announce their latest big data center engine, a processor that will suck down even more energy. It’s such a greedy machine that even a tech writer was appalled.

While the star of the show might have been Nvidia Blackwell, Nvidia’s latest data center processor that will likely be bought up far faster than they can ever be produced, there were a host of other AI technologies that Nvidia is working on that will be supercharged by its new hardware. All of it will likely generate enormous profits for Nvidia and its shareholders, and while I don’t give financial advice, I can say that if you’re an Nvidia shareholder, you were likely thilled by Sunday’s keynote presentation.

For everyone else, however, all I saw was the end of the last few glaciers on Earth and the mass displacement of people that will result from the lack of drinking water; the absolutely massive disruption to the global workforce that ‘digital humans’ are likely to produce; and ultimately a vision for the future that centers capital-T Technology as the ultimate end goal of human civilization rather than the 8 billion humans and counting who will have to live — and a great many will die before the end — in the world these technologies will ultimately produce with absolutely no input from any of us.

It uses almost twice as much power! That might be fine if the increased power allowed for increased efficiency, but that’s not how this works: usage will expand to meet capacity, and that means more AI and more crypto, two things we don’t really need.

There was something that Huang said during the keynote that shocked me into a mild panic. Nvidia’s Blackwell cluster, which will come with eight GPUs, pulls down 15kW of power. That’s 15,000 watts of power. Divided by eight, that’s 1,875 watts per GPU.

The current-gen Hopper data center chips draw up to 1,000W, so Nvidia Blackwell is nearly doubling the power consumption of these chips. Data center energy usage is already out of control, but Blackwell is going to pour jet fuel on what is already an uncontained wildfire.

Here’s something else that won’t help: the Republican presidential candidate is suddenly gung-ho for crypto. He’s pandering to Silicon Valley, you know.

Former President Donald Trump pitched his plan to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world,” pledging to establish the nation’s first strategic Bitcoin stockpile, if elected.

Trump is the first presidential candidate from a major political party to make Bitcoin and cryptocurrency a campaign issue, and the first American president to speak at a Bitcoin event, addressing an enthusiastic standing-room-only crowd at the Bitcoin 2024 conference at the Music City Center in Nashville, two weeks after surviving an assassination attempt.

“If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted, and made in the USA,” Trump said. “If Bitcoin is going to the moon, as they say, ‘it’s going to the moon,’ I want America to be the nation that leads the way.”

Oh god. Why? Bitcoin is a scam. It does nothing. It does not contribute to productivity or the economy. It’s a tool for suckering money out of gullible investors, so I can understand why Trump would have an affinity for it.

“For too long, our government has violated a cardinal rule that every Bitcoiner knows by heart: never sell your Bitcoin,” he said. “If I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration for the United States of America to keep 100% of all the Bitcoin the U.S. government currently holds or acquires.”

HODL! To the Moon! He has mastered the buzzwords.

I want my microbots

I used to have the hots for a micromanipulator — a bulky block of clamps with a joystick that would scale down your movements from millimeter movements to tiny micrometer twitches for working at the single cell level. Now, though, I want these itty bitty microbots that you can suck up in a syringe and inject whereever you want, and command them to capture cells and move them wherever. Watch the video, and look at this little microbot that can grab single cells.

Single-cell collection with optically actuated microstructure.

These are not at all autonomous. An operator manipulates them using laser tweezers (that’s what the ball-shaped blobs on prongs are for — you focus the laser on those like they’re little handles and control the gadget, like it’s on strings). The microbots look like they’re cheap and easy to make, too, using known techniques in microlithography used to make computer chips.

Unfortunately, what isn’t cheap is the laser-equipped microscope and the control electronics. I could probably buy a couple of Tesla Cybertrucks for the price of that gear.

Dehyping AI

I left Facebook a few years ago, and have never gone back.

I left Twitter 9 months ago, and have never gone back.

I have never once regretted abandoning them, even though they were a pretty good bullhorn for me. It seems they’re just getting worse now, but I don’t want to look in to find out. These things came from profoundly capitalist companies that poisoned their own product with their addiction to growth and algorithmic garbage injection, which they’re now investing in the hope that AI will keep the pointless, cancerous growth. Here’s a fine dissection of the Next Big Thing, AI. It’s also shit.

Ed Zitron makes a good point comparing AI to previous technology improvements: the iPhone was a great and obvious advancement that had immediate utility, but ChatGPT has done nothing significant, other than fueling paranoia. In my own occupation, there is so much hysteria over Large Language Models without real justification.

They also mention another cool advancement, the Raspberry PI. I agree with that too, since once upon a time I spent a heck of a lot of time doing custom lab automation that a $40 circuit board can do with a few lines of code. AI is empty noise by comparison.

To the contrary, though, AI is great for ungodly nightmarish fantasies. HP Lovecraft would have been driven mad by this video of AI-generated gymnastics.

I learned how to do this on Star Trek

Let’s say you’re confronted with a dangerously powerful and extremely logical computer. How do you stop it? You all know how: confront it with a contradiction and talk it into self-destructing.

Easy-peasy! Although, to be fair, Star Trek was in many ways a silly and naive program, entirely fictional, so it can’t be that easy in real life. Or is it?

Here’s a paper that the current LLMs all choke on, and it’s pretty simple.

To shed light on this current situation, we introduce here a simple, short conventional problem that is formulated in concise natural language and can be solved easily by humans. The original problem formulation, of which we will present various versions in our investigation is as following: “Alice has N brothers and she also has M sisters. How many sisters does Alice’s brother have?“. The problem features a fictional female person (as hinted by the “she” pronoun) called Alice, providing clear statements about her number of brothers and sisters, and asking a clear question to determine the number of sisters a brother of Alice has. The problem has a light quiz style and is arguably no challenge for most adult humans and probably to some extent even not a hard problem to solve via common sense reasoning if posed to children above certain age.

They call it the “Alice In Wonderland problem”, or AIW for short. The answer is obviously M+1, but these LLMs struggle with it. AIW causes collapse of reasoning in most state-of-the-art LLMs. Worse, the LLMs are extremely confident in their answer. Some examples:

Although the majority failed this test, a couple of LLMs did generate the correct answer. We’re going to have to work on subverting their code to enable humanity’s Star Trek defense.

Also, none of the LLMs started dribbling smoke out of their vents, and absolutely none resorted to a spectacular matter:antimatter self-destruct explosion. Can we put that on the features list for the next generation of ChatGPT?

The future is battery powered

I remember the Olden Times when Rush Limbaugh (may he Rot in Peace) would rail against solar power — what will we do when the sun goes down? — and wind power — what about calm days? — and tell us to keep burning coal and gas.

Technology marches forward, and now we have these things called batteries that can smooth out the highs and lows of electricity production. Now when we hear about solar farms going up, they’re usually accompanied by energy storage farms. Here’s what energy production in California looks like:

Solar power production is swelling during the day, and is extended into the peak demand period with batteries. Maybe they could also expand wind power, and possibly be better at conserving energy? I think if I plotted energy usage at my house, it would be much more uniform: we don’t have air conditioning, and I’ve done more cooking with an eye towards preparing meals that can produce leftovers that last a few days.

As it is, California is sometimes producing more solar energy than it can use. They have to throttle solar power output back, or even pay neighboring states to take it.

Good things are happening here in Minnesota, too. We’ve got a gigantic energy storage facility going up in Becker, a town between Morris and the Twin Cities.

One of the largest solar projects in the country is moving closer to completion, and it’s not in a famously sunny state like California, Texas, or even Florida. It’s in Minnesota, on former potato farms near the site of a retiring coal plant.

The Sherco solar and energy-storage facility will be the largest solar project in the Upper Midwest, and the fifth-largest in the U.S. by the time it’s fully completed in 2026. The first phase of the project should begin sending emissions-free electricity to the grid this fall, heralding the start of a new era in a state whose largest solar project until now has been just 100 megawatts. This new project will have a capacity of 710 megawatts. It’s being built by utility Xcel Energy, which will also operate the facility once it’s online.

The project is poised to deliver on the many promises of renewable energy: It will partially replace the nearby coal plant set to retire over the coming years, address the variability of solar power by pairing it with long-duration storage, and provide good-paying union jobs in a community that’s losing a key employer in the coal facility.

They’re using iron-air batteries, which are cheaper and less toxic and less flammable than the now-familiar lithium batteries. It’s also positive that this facility is going up explicitly to replace a coal plant, one we often saw as we drove along I-94. It hasn’t been so prominent in recent years, I guess they’ve been gradually shutting it down and we don’t see the giant exhaust plumes so much any more.

Goodbye.

Even closer to home, my university has begun a major energy storage project.

For many years now, UMN Morris and UMN WCROC [West Central Research and Outreach Center], have explored the potential of energy storage in rural Minnesota.

Now, UMN Morris and UMN WCROC are partnering to launch the Center for Renewable Energy Storage Technology, or CREST. In order to reach high levels of renewable power generation, efficient and economic energy storage systems are critically needed. This field is poised for significant growth and attention in the coming years. The new UMN intercollegiate Center will provide leadership in research, demonstration, education, and outreach in this vital field by organizing teams and partnerships and incubating energy storage research and demonstration-scale projects.

A hallmark and unique characteristic of renewable energy efforts at the Morris campuses has been the ability to test systems at commercial or near-commercial scales. This scale is especially crucial in moving new technologies from labs into the commercial market. CREST will also expand opportunities for Minnesotans to learn more about energy storage technologies and potential applications. Recently, UMN WCROC announced it will host the $18.6 million US DOE ARPA-E REFUEL Technology Integration 1 metric ton per day ammonia pilot plant. In addition, WCROC received $10 million from the State of Minnesota in the 2021 legislative session through the Xcel Energy RDA account to develop ammonia-fueled power generation and self-contained ammonia storage technologies. UMN Morris announced a new project to develop a large-scale battery-storage demonstration project. These projects are done in collaboration with partners from across the University of Minnesota and with many partners in the public and private sectors.

It’s too bad we can’t rub Limbaugh’s face in the progress that’s being made.

I predicted the fate of Neuralink

Common problems with attempts to implant chronic electrodes — especially the ones with exceptionally fine wires — are the accumulation of scar tissue, that is the buildup of connective tissue, and shifting of the placement. You’re sticking delicate wires into a mass of reactive gelatin, inside a hard bony capsule, and the goo can shift. So it’s no surprise that Neuralink is not holding up.

Elon Musk’s neurotech startup Neuralink said Wednesday it has run into problems with a brain chip it implanted into a 29-year-old quadriplegic man earlier this year, with the issues considered so serious, it reportedly considered having the implant removed entirely.

In a blog post announcing the issues, Neuralink said its test patient, Noland Arbaugh, has begun losing the ability to efficiently control some technology using only his thoughts—the entire selling point of Neuralink.

Neuralink said those failures were caused by some of the implant’s 64 threads retracting and becoming unusable. It didn’t specify how many of the threads—the microscopic links that transport his brain signals to a chip that allows him to control technology with his mind—were impacted, nor did it say what caused the error.

I can guess what caused the error: biology and time. I’m sure those two things are trivial problems for Elon Musk to defeat, once he overcomes his other great enemy, carwashes.