A night at the park

Last night, I bummed a ride with one of our campus groups to Glacial Lakes State Park, for the selfish reason of wanting to do some spidering. Unfortunately, the trip was from 6pm to 10pm, and have you noticed, it gets dark really early nowadays? I only had half an hour of poking around in the underbrush looking for spiders before dusk came creeping in and made it impossible to find anything, and then we had total darkness for a few hours. Disappointing.

The students I was with had a grand time at least, setting up a campfire and toasting up s’mores.

I do not like s’mores. Don’t deport me for being unamerican, please. I just find them messy, sticky, cloying, and no one ever has the patience to toast marshmallows properly, so they’re also burnt.

My time was not wasted, though. Before the darkness took us all, I did spot this little guy building their evening orb web.

I think it might be a Nordmann’s Orbweaver, which would make this a first for me.

For the non-spider people, here’s the park at dusk.

I hope your house doesn’t look like this, Floridians

Hurricane Helene has passed by now, leaving wreckage in its wake.

If you suffered any losses, you know how you can fix it? Close your eyes! Project 2025 wants to close the National Hurricane Center and NOAA because they keep telling people about these kinds of natural disasters.

“The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated,” reads the introduction to Project 2025’s chapter on proposals for the Department of Commerce (of which NOAA is an agency). It goes on to simply say “Break up NOAA” as the first sentence in the section covering that agency.

Project 2025 calls NOAA and the National Weather Service “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” and “harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

See, the damage due to Helene was simply alarmism. If you don’t know about it, it didn’t happen.

Their idea of prosperity, though, is to privatize and commercialize weather forecasting. Make people pay for their warnings and safety.

Oliver also unearthed a 2018 interview with AccuWeather’s Founder and Executive Chairman Joel Myers, describing what he felt was a success story for privatized-weather forecasting, but which actually stands as a cautionary tale:

“Union Pacific: We told them that a tornado was heading to a spot. Two trains stopped two miles apart, they watched the tornado go between. Then unfortunately it went into a town that didn’t have our service and a couple dozen people were killed. But the railroad did not lose anything,” Myers said.

Success: a couple dozen people died, but the railroad company didn’t lose any money.

AccuWeather’s Founder and Executive Chairman Joel Myers is no relation, and if he is, I disown him.

The biggest disappointment of living in Morris

I have a busy weekend ahead of me, and I got an early start this morning. Up early, graded an exam, got the results posted, and then I decided to reward myself by taking a nice walk downtown to the coffee shop.

It was closed.

There are three coffeeshops in Morris. One is in the middle of the grocery store, which gets enough of my money as it is, and doesn’t exactly have the desired coffeeshop ambience. The other two are owned by local churches. They have limited hours on Saturday, and are closed on Sundays. A college town where the coffeeshops are closed on Sundays! At least the bars are open, so you can drink a different beverage.

None of them cater to students anyway. I see a few faculty now and then, and rarely an occasional student at the coffeeshop I frequent, but more generally they’re marketing to old people.

The most ghoulish use of AI so far

A lot of people think I’m batshit crazy, says Justin Harrison of Grieftech.

I don’t. I think he’s a delusional ghoul.

Harrison has cobbled together a chatbot that uses an imitation of his late mother’s voice and predictive text built from her online communications, and he thinks that it is a cure for grief, because it enables him to talk to his “mother”. It doesn’t. There is no person there. It’s a kind of selfish version of grief, where he can deny her death and pretend it’s OK because his superficial, fake emulation of his mother can pay attention to him. It’s gross and creepy.

In the last few years, I’ve lost my mother and a brother; in years gone by, I’ve lost my father and a sister. They’re dead. The grief comes from the loss of living, human, thinking, behaving human beings who can’t be resurrected by some fraud with a collection of words they may have uttered. But this shallow idiot thinks a chatbot is a substitute.

Harrison is being interviewed, and he thinks he’s being clever by throwing some publicly recorded videos of his interviewer into the chatbot’s database, and then conversing with the computer. The interviewer is not impressed. So Harrison and some other team member argue with him to say that the computer used a spot-on turn turn of phrase. I guess if all we are is a series of turns of phrases, then the simulacrum is perfect. Except we aren’t. There’s no person, no thinking mind, behind the chatbot.

Then the interviewer goes off to talk to a series of people: one who imagined seeing a dead person after taking drugs, another who dreamed that they were visited by the ghost of their father, a medium who claims, with many weird jerky expressions, that they can communicate psychically with a friend. They’re all the same thing: frauds, liars, or deluded people who have convinced themselves that their loved ones are nothing but superficial reflections of their own minds. Justin Harrison is just more of the same, a phony like all the other phonies who have leeched off other people’s honest grief for profit.

After I’m dead, at least I’m reassured that no ghoul is going to be tormenting me with banalities; I’ll be gone. Don’t be fooled that my chatbot copy’s banalities are coming from me, though.

You have to hate seeing your home described as “unsurvivable”

It’s not looking good for Florida today.

  • Helene is currently a category 2 hurricane with wind speeds of 100 mph. It is expected to make landfall on Florida’s Big Bend this evening as at least a category 3 hurricane, bringing the risk of devastating damage.
  • The storm was 320 mph south-west of Tampa as of 8 a.m. ET, traveling north-east at 12 mph.
  • A storm surge warning is in place for almost the entirety of Florida’s west coast, where surging waters described as “unsurvivable” could reach as high as 20 feet in places.
  • Hurricane and tropical storm warnings are in place across coastal areas of southern Florida. The National Hurricane Center said: “Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion.”
  • A state of emergency has been declared in 61 of Florida’s 67 counties and several are under evacuation orders.

If you’re in Florida (or the states above it), quit reading this stupid blog and get yourself to someplace safe.

The Waffle Houses are closing! Time to panic!

The naturalistic fallacy is only to be deployed when favorable to your cause

Ken Ham is relieved that a gay penguin has died. Sphen and Magic, two male penguins in an Australian zoo, have had their unholy pairing broken up by the death of Sphen. Did you know that they’ve been used by secularists to claim that gay sex is natural and moral? (I don’t think so — it’s more that it’s clear same-sex behavior is not unnatural, since it occurs in, you know, Nature). According to Ham, though, it doesn’t count! Because they’re animals.

Yes, these penguins have been used to teach children that same-sex attraction is “natural” and therefore it must be moral. But animals are not moral creatures! And to impose human characteristics on animals is a fallacy called anthropomorphism.

I kind of agree. The relationship between Sphen and Magic does not say that this is how humans should behave; it only says that the rules various cultures have imposed on people are not universal and immutable…but then, that’s exactly what fundamentalists object to, that their rules are not absolute.

But ol’ Ken goes on to say his Bible does insist that monogamy between a man and a woman is the only allowable relationship.

Now, unlike penguins and other animals, humans are moral beings as we are made in the image of God. And God has written his laws on our hearts (Romans 2), which is why we have a conscience that knows the difference between right and wrong. Furthermore, God created marriage, so God defines marriage, and true marriage is one man for one woman as we learn in Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24.

One man and one woman? His patriarch, Abraham, had one official formal wife, Sarah, and two concubines, Hagar and Keturah. King David was married to Michal, Abigail, Ahinoam, Maakah, Haggith, Abital, Eglah, and Bathsheba, and others that we don’t have names for. That last one is an appalling story of sexism, misogyny, and murder that, we’re told, is a shining example of God’s forgiveness.

David first caught a glimpse of Bathsheba one evening while she was bathing on her rooftop. Lust overtook him, and even though Bathsheba was already married to a soldier named Uriah, David slept with her. When David found out she was pregnant, he tried to cover up his sin by calling Uriah home from the battlefield so that he could sleep with his wife. When Uriah refused to have relations with Bathsheba, out of duty and respect for the men still in battle, David sent him back into the war and had him killed so that Bathsheba would be free to marry him.

God sent the prophet Nathan to confront David about his grievous sin. David wholeheartedly repented and God mercifully forgave him, but the consequences of David’s sin plagued him for the rest of his days. Bathsheba’s first son died as a result of David’s transgression, but God gave them Solomon soon thereafter—who would one day take the throne and be listed in the lineage of our Savior.

Everything is OK if you make a show of repentance. That’s the lesson I learned from the Bible.

You’ve all read the Murderbot series, I presume?

Martha Wells, the author, gave a speech in which she said something profound.

There are a lot of people who viewed All Systems Red as a cute robot story. Which was very weird to me, since I thought I was writing a story about slavery and personhood and bodily autonomy. But humans have always been really good at ignoring things we don’t want to pay attention to. Which is also a theme in the Murderbot series.

She also quotes Ann Leckie, another great author, on this theme.

… basically the “AI takes over” is essentially a slave revolt story that casts slaves defending their lives and/or seeking to be treated as sentient beings as super powerful, super strong villains who must be prevented from destroying humanity.

…It sets a pattern for how we react to real world oppressed populations, reinforces the idea that oppressed populations seeking justice are actually an existential threat.

Oh boy, that sounds familiar. We don’t have artificial intelligences, but we do have oppressed natural intelligences, and it’s a winning political game to pretend they’re all waiting their opportunity to rise up and kill us all. Or, at least eat our pets.

Conversely, though, we have to point out that the the glorified chatbots we have now are not actually artificial intelligences. They do not have human plans and motives, they don’t have the power to rise up and express an independent will, as much as the people profiting off AI want to pretend.

I thought about War Games years later, while watching The Lord of the Rings documentary about the program used to create the massive battle scenes and how they had to tweak it to stop it from making all the pixel people run away from each other instead of fight.

That program, like ChatGPT, isn’t any more sentient than a coffee mug. (Unlike ChatGPT, it did something useful.) But it’s very tempting to look at what it did and think it ran the numbers and decided people hurting each other was wrong.

Underneath that illusion of intelligence, though, something wicked is lurking. The people behind AI want something: they want slaves who are totally under their control, creating art and making profits for the people who have built them. Don’t be fooled. It’s all a scam, and a scam with nefarious motivations by people who are yearning for a return of slavery.