Film: “I’m not a robot” (2024)

The winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Live Action Short was the 22-minute Dutch film I’m Not a Robot. It starts with a woman in an office working on her computer when she is faced with one of those CAPTCHA tests (standing for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) where you are given a grid of boxes and asked to click on just those boxes that have show some particular item, such as a traffic light or a car or something similar to prove that you are not a robot. We have all encountered these things many times. So she does it but fails the first test. Again nothing unusual. It shows a different grid and she tries again. And fails again. And again. And again.

Frustrated, she calls tech support and after the person asks her some questions, raises the possibility that the reason she is failing may be because she actually is a robot. The film deals with how she reacts to that.

You can see the full film.

Readers will be familiar with the idea that we may actually be avatars in an advanced computer simulation. The reasoning behind it is that as computer simulations become ever more sophisticated in creating virtual worlds with avatars who look and behave realistically and as if they have wills of their own, at some point they will create one in which the avatars think that they are autonomous humans. How would we know if we have not already reached that state and we ourselves are indeed those avatars, thinking that we have wills of our own when we are merely doing what our controllers tell us to do?

The film reminded me of Black Mirror episodes that speculate on where technology might be taking us. Almost all of them show a dystopian future that rarely ends well for the protagonists. Apparently a new season of Black Mirror is expected to be released this year.

Fear of spiders

At my university, the secretary in my office was a woman who had previously served in the army. She was young, strong, and tough but let her find a spider, however small, anywhere in the office and she would freak out, rushing to my office to tell me to get rid of it while she stayed as far away as possible. It was no use my saying that spiders are harmless and that they are actually helpful in getting rid of other insects that are actually harmful, like mosquitoes. She didn’t want to hear it. She wanted it gone and I had no choice but to comply.

But spiders are ubiquitous so arachnophobes have a tough time because there is no habitable place on Earth where you are free of them. This article in the February 17 & 24, 2025 edition of The New Yorker by Katheryn Schulz, a self-described arachnophobe, reviews a lavishly illustrated book The Lives of Spiders by Ximena Nelson that takes a comprehensive look at the immense variety of spiders who occupy pretty much the entire world. The statistics are staggering.
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News you can’t use?

A new study finds that the ‘quality’ of a man’s sperm correlates with their longevity.

Sperm may be the canaries in the coalmine for male health, according to research that reveals men with higher-quality semen live longer.

Danish scientists analysed samples from nearly 80,000 men and found that those who produced more than 120 million swimming sperm per ejaculate lived two to three years longer than those who produced fewer than 5 million.

The men with the highest-quality sperm lived to 80.3 years old on average, compared with 77.6 for those with the poorest-quality sperm, the researchers report in Human Reproduction.

“It really seems to be that the better the semen quality, the longer the survival,” said Dr Lærke Priskorn, an epidemiologist at Copenhagen university hospital, who led the study with Dr Niels Jørgensen, an andrologist at the hospital.

This is a major longitudinal study with a large sample of 60,000 people done over 30 years. I hesitate to critique scientific research based on newspaper reports but what one is to do with this information beats me, and the report’s only statement about possible benefits is rather weak.

The researchers now want to find out which diseases are more common in men with poor semen quality. If particular conditions are identified, doctors could ultimately advise men on preventive action should sperm analysis show they are at risk.

You. can read more here.

Women have long complained that much more time and money and effort is spent on research on even relatively minor aspects of men’s health while research on women’s health is underserved. This kind of news will lend support to that belief.

Coincidences and brain connections

One day, the name Gracie Fields suddenly popped into my head for no apparent reason. Fields was an extremely popular British singer and actor who lived from 1898 to 1979 and was considered the highest paid film star in the world in 1937. But all that was before my time. My only memory of her was that as a little boy in England, one night I was watching the popular TV variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium, which was must-watch TV in the UK those days, and she was the headliner for that week’s show.

The British had the endearing practice of taking some beloved performers to their bosom and still enjoying them long after their prime (I do not know if that practice still endures) and ‘Our Gracie’ (as she was fondly referred to) was considered a national treasure and could do no wrong in their eyes. Anyway, I remember as a little boy watching her sing and being intrigued by this great affection for an elderly performer. (In looking up her age now, around that time she must have been just about sixty, but to a little child, anyone over forty seems ancient.) That is my only memory of her. So it was strange indeed for that memory of her singing on TV to not only survive for so long but to suddenly pop into my head a few weeks ago after decades of being submerged in my deep unconscious.
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You should really check this out

A new commenter acsglster had a wonderful idea. In response to my earlier post about ‘stupid Muck tricks’, they submitted to grok 3 (Musk’s chatbot) the following prompt:

Elon Musk sent an email to around 3 million federal government employees asking them to respond with 5 bullet points of things they did last week. He proposed to feed the responses to a LLM (probably you) with a view to some kind of activity-based analysis of who to retain and who to fire. What is the feasibility of such an idea?

The response grok 3 came back with is something to behold. Check it out.

What is Trump’s beef with medical research?

Trump seems determined to shut down research, especially medical research. First he ordered a halt to all scientific research grants awarded by the NIH and NSF and the suspension of all grant review panels, a vital step in the whole process of awarding them. Then after a judge blocked that ban, Trump seems to have searched for a loophole to continue the ban. And he thinks he has found an obscure one, by forbidding notices of meetings to appear in the Federal Register, usually a formality.

The National Institutes of Health has stopped considering new grant applications, delaying decisions about how to spend millions of dollars on research into diseases ranging from heart disease and cancer to Alzheimer’s and allergies.

The freeze occurred because the Trump administration has blocked the NIH from posting any new notices in the Federal Register, which is required before many federal meetings can be held.

While that may seem arcane, the stoppage forced the agency to cancel meetings to review thousands of grant applications, according to two people familiar with the situation, one of whom was not authorized to speak publicly and the other who feared retribution.
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The government is already grinding to a halt

The Musk-Trump assault on the federal government has already created chaos. Employees have already been fired or are not sure if they will be fired. New hires are frozen as no one knows what the policies are. And people are unlikely to look for jobs in the government sector knowing that they will be treated like dirt. The AssociatedPress estimates that about 300,000 workers have been cut so far.

In normal times, the turnover in the government workforce of 2.4 million employees is about 6% or around 150,000 people. Apparently about 75,000 people accepted the Musk offer to leave, and I suspect that many of these were people who had been on the verge of leaving anyway so had little to lose by accepting the vaguely worded offer. But others may be unplanned and leave their agencies in the lurch.

Federal service rules prevent the firing of employees other than for cause such as misconduct. However, those on probationary status may not be covered by those protections which is why Musk has ordered the firing of all probationary staffers. There are about 220,000 such people.. But the label ‘probationary’ is misleading. It may give the impression that these were new employees who are young and/or inexperienced and so their loss is relatively inconsequential. But that is not the case. Anyone who was shifting from one position to another within the government or getting promoted to a higher level is also classified as probationary for a year. So among the probationers who have been fired are very senior and experienced people who just had the misfortune to shift their jobs at this time.
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Tesla buyers’ remorse

When the Teslas originally came out, many people who were liberals got them because they felt that buying an electric vehicle was the right thing to do to fight climate change. Tesla’s were one of the first EVs on the market and it branded itself as a cool, futuristic car and because it was quite expensive, rich celebrities were among the early purchasers and others may have felt that having one also made them cool.

But things have changed. Elon Musk is now seen as a truly awful person who is using his proximity and access to the ear of Trump to advance his personal agenda of destroying the government by slashing agencies and laying off thousands of federal workers. It should come as no surprise that his actions are likely to result in increased profits for private businesses, including his own. This is, after all, one of their main goals, to siphon off expenditures used to provide government services for private profit. The companies eying the money that will come their way can hardly contain their glee.
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Killing science in the US

The benefits of science to society are extremely significant. The so-called scientific revolution has driven much of the medical and technological benefits that we currently enjoy. But many of those those benefits were arrived at slowly and over long periods and thus can become invisible to the general public and targets for ignorant policymakers, such as the one depicted in this cartoon.( I used this in my book The Great Paradox of Science to help make this point.)

Over at Pharyngula PZ has a post about how the situation for science in the US is dire and he is not exaggerating. One of the ways The Trump gang is doing that is by imposing ideological blinkers on what kinds of research can be done. It has frozen all funding for research pending review to see if it “aligns with the new administration’s priorities”. What that looks like in practice is to comb through all the research grants and proposals to look for words like African American, race, gender, minorities, sexual violence, diversity, equity, or any other keyword that they can think of that suggests any attempt to improve the situation of any group other than white affluent men. And of course, anything that is remotely concerned with addressing the problem climate change is going to be cut.
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Trump wants all of us to have more lead and TCE in our bodies

As I wrote yesterday, one of the main goals of Trump and his cronies is to cut all the rules and regulations that prevent the wealthy and large corporations from making even more money, even if the moves result in actual harm to people. One of the most disturbing examples of this is the announcement today that they are planning to eliminate the rules that sought to reduce the amount of lead and other toxic elements in water supplies.

Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration are attempting to repeal the Biden administration’s groundbreaking rules that require all the country’s lead pipes to be replaced over the next 13 years and lower the limit on lead in water.

Environmentalists expressed alarm about the moves, which, if successful, would in effect prohibit the government from ever requiring lead line replacement in the future, or lowering lead limits.

The Trump administration is also working to kill a recently implemented ban on TCE, a compound that is among the most toxic and common water pollutants, and particularly a risk on military bases.

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