Elon Musk’s Neuralink is soliciting volunteers for its inaugural human trials. Is Musk’s SpaceX generating these volunteers through poor workplace safety?
www.reuters.com/world/spacex-worker-injuries-soar-elon-musks-rush-mars-2023-11-10/
The Proper Context for Oppenheimer
If you plan to watch Oppenheimer, then be sure to watch this absolute gem of a documentary, which features many interviews with the Nobel Laureates who worked under Oppenheimer during The Manhattan Project, to have the proper context. For my money, there is nothing more valuable than the original source, even it is a bunch of really lovable old men.
Pay close attention to the fact that Leslie Groves ignored all the gossip around Oppenheimer and fought to assign him as the leader of the project. This critical decision by a legendary general and even more legendary manager is a beacon for our time: the character and capabilities of people are infinitely more important than their perceived politics. Groves was perhaps the greatest judge of character.
Peripherally, the documentarty revives the ultimate debate between which is harder, science or engineering. All the scientists interviewed in this film agree that the atomic bomb was conceptually simple, and its realization was a matter of mere engineering. Who wants to dive in?
Value, Worth and Cachet
The Sasoon Codex recently fetched $38.1 million. It is a priceless relic because it contains perhaps the oldest complete draft of the ideas that altered the course of human history. Is its worth nevertheless perverted given the kingly sums that those fortunate enough to have amassed unfathomable wealth have offered for decidedly more trivial articles of historical interest? Is Michael Jordan’s 1992 Olympic jersey worth one-thirteenth as much of a piece of history? Is a Giacometti sculpture worth three times as much? Is a Picasso painting worth five times as much?
Continue reading “Value, Worth and Cachet”Why? Because They Can.
AP News | How do Mass Murderers Obtain Guns?
In the end, there is no difference between New York and Texas or any other state. What all American states have in common is that they allow anyone to act on that most primitive whim of desiring to kill. Over 10,000 years of civilization have inculcated a certain tolerance and civility in mankind, but the outrageously permissive gun laws of the past twenty years have enabled and empowered those few among us who cannot control their primitive instincts to act on them without hesitation. When it is this easy to kill someone, it is not a mystery why people keep killing. They do it because they can.
Scientists Calling Bullshit on Misleading Energy Stats
The author of this piece may have been well advised to refrain from making dubious claims in the magazine of the one of the most venerated engineering societies on the planet. Although Vaclav Smil’s bona fides in the area of energy are impressive, his publication of highly dubious statistics remain elusive. He is a researcher firmly entrenched in the petroleum industry. Consequently, he should not have been surprised that the brilliant members of the IEEE would call him out on his veiled and specious defense of the fossil fuel industry.
The best part of the story, however, is the simple fact that academic and professional societies remain great bastions of open and brutally honest discourse. Science and engineering are not for the faint of heart. If you can’t stand having your bullshit called out, then get out of the field. As professor emeritus, Smil may have elected an unceremonious exit. At least, that’s what he seems to indicate in his response to the long list of complaints about his post: out of 10s of comments that point out errors in his analysis, he acknowledges the only one that defends his dubious claims with a bogus link.
Source: Germany’s Energiewende, 20 Years Later – IEEE Spectrum
The Selfie: The Next Frontier in the Darwin Awards?
AS this photo from Reuters aptly suggests, a strange intersection between ballsy selfies and the Darwin awards has emerged, and it is likely growing large. Will the next Darwin awards winner earn his or her prize in the act of taking a selfie?
The rise of selfie photography in some of the world’s most beautiful, and dangerous, places is sparking a range of interventions aimed at combating risk-taking that has resulted in a string of
Source: Selfie madness: too many dying to get the picture | Reuters
Will the Markets Realize That Twitter is Bullshit?
Some things can’t be summed up in 140 characters.Twitter Inc’s announcement that Dick Costolo would exit as CEO on July 1 was long on plaudits but offered few clues on how the company will tackle its biggest problem: user growth.
Source: Twitter seeks new CEO, and more users, as Costolo exits | Reuters
So begins Reuters’ report on the turmoil in Twitter, the “social” media company that can’t quite manage to live up to the hype that preceded its transition into a publicly traded company.
In case it wasn’t clear to those who bought in early in this turkey of a stock, Twitter is a big, stinking pile of bullshit.
Twitter is a cute attractive idea to the average user, but nothing more. (I opened my account in 2006, and I “tweeted” 13 times for no apparent reason.) People will want to satisfy their ego by broadcasting 140-character nuggets of wisdom to people who are eager to read these nuggets. The hash tag would will allow Twitter and its customers to organize these missives and, thus, gain insight into the behaviors of the masses, a critical insight for marketing. No one questioned the notion that organizing and analyzing the quips of millions of people can be coalesced into a useful metric. Gaining insight into anything from billions of random quips was suspect from the start.
This somewhat dated IBM video shows how Twitter data is monetized. Billions of the short missives (i.e., “tweets”) are collected by search criteria and then organized into data structures that can be broken down by useful (in a marketing sense) categories and quantified. These results would, ostensibly, play a constructive role in shaping marketing research and subsequent and campaigns.
But why the fuck would they?
This premise that aggregates of 140-character messages can contain wisdom about marketing is highly suspect at best and an utter fallacy in all likelihood. People possessed with the free time to set up an account, to market themselves to “followers” who would place enough value on random, terse messages to read them, and to broadcast to these throngs of followers can hardly be considered to be representative of the population at large. The bulk are likely to be fickle teenagers whose tastes change in less time it takes for brilliant Ph.D.’s to analyze their tweets with heavy duty software like IBM’s Big Sheets. The rest are celebrities who can gather millions of these teenage followers. These celebrities effectively get free advertising through Twitter because they keep all the proceeds they get for advertising products to their Twitter followers, and they pay no commissions on the sales that their “tweets” generate.
In short, Twitter is an utterly worthless service. It represents nobody, it contains no useful marketing data, it has no way of capturing any portion of the revenues it generates for the people who use it as a marketing tool, and it offers nothing of any social value to those who participate in it. Not one of the relationships forged via the Twitter service can be construed as a true friendship or a business or personal relationship founded on substantive qualities like trust, affection or respect.
Even with respect to communication–the only level wherein Twitter could have had any claim to legitimacy–Twitter fails, too. It is the antithesis of communication, literacy and intellectual discourse. Even teenagers will eventually develop deep feelings and the capability to express these feelings, and the short expression format of Twitter will fail them. Pithiness is a good thing, but expressing true affection or grave disappointment may well be impossible in 140 characters, even it is accompanied by the same photos that one has already posted to Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and other worthless “social” media services.
It would be nice if venerable news sources like Reuters had the backbone to expose one of their technology darlings for the failed experiment that it is. Instead, even Reuters chooses to sensationalize the downfall of this business oddity in terms of the failure of the management to grow the business. There was no business, ever, in the Twitter endeavor. The market fell for it in its typical fawning of seemingly revolutionary technology companies.
Furthermore, Reuters, like all other media companies, is remiss to admit to the fact that it happily played up the fallacious merits of a business entity through which it hoped to get much free publicity and marketing. Lest they lose all credibility, however, they ought to start exposing the social media hoax by coming clean about Twitter. Twitter was a cool experiment for a computer geek, but as a business, it is nothing but a giant, massive, repulsive, stinking mountain bullshit now covered with flies feasting on its accelerating state of decay.
And, the rest of the “social media” aren’t much better.
And, yes, I’m sick and tired of “news” about business hoaxes depriving me of real news, real enlightenment and real insight.
Steal Better Movies, Please
Sony movies leak online as computer systems remain dark |Â LA Times
Sony’s demise is lamentable. The company is truly legendary in bringing cutting edge technology to the marketplace, especially with respect to entertainment. The company has defined the state of the art in consumer electronics for decades. They have lost their way with consumers, however, by attaching draconian rules to recordings made with their technology, and by leveraging their music and movie production businesses to impede digital media distribution.
The latter act may well have been what motivated hackers to exact revenge on Sony by stealing and distributing its movies, as noted in the LA Times article above.
The greatest disappointment to me is the fact that none of the titles are worthy of watching, in my mind. Fury might be, but the trouble of stealing it via file sharing networks seems hardly worth the trouble.
It’s difficult to condone such a bold act of theft on the part of the hackers–an act that has shut down all of Sony’s computer networks–but, it’s just as difficult to feel sympathy for a company that leverages its market power against the consumers who generate its profits. Conflicts of interest of Sony’s variety–tying entertainment production and distribution to technology–eventually lead to disaster. How could so many executives have been blind to it?
As the Google graph for Sony’s stock price amply demonstrates, it has been long, agonizing demise for Sony. Apple and Samsung have run away with Sony’s lunch while Sony squandered billions creating restrictive technologies to protect intellectual property that nobody cared to buy.
The Capitalist Assault against Individuality
Google’s Brin: Individual car ownership needs to go |Â CNET
What’s the difference between Google and socialism? Not much.
A long time ago an excellent mathematician and member of the Southern California Federation of Scientists (whom I had the privilege of knowing very well) had made the shocking argument that by eliminating automobiles and levying a tax that is equivalent to approximately half the average of cost of individual car ownership, it is possible to fund a complete fare-free transit system that can pickup everyone within 100 yards of their residence and drop them off within 100 yards of their place of work with less than a few minutes of waiting time and use a lot less gas than having a million cars on the road daily.
In fact, he was not the only one. Numerous “idealists” had crunched the numbers and demonstrated expanded bus service could be a much more efficient transit system,
Continue reading “The Capitalist Assault against Individuality”
Seminal Act of Civil Disobedience
Artist nails his scrotum to the ground in Red Square | World news | theguardian.com
Pyotr Pavlensky, the artist in the photo, has a substantial history of employing self mutilation in performance pieces that protest the increasingly repressive nature of the Russian regime, according to The Guardian article above. About the man’s possession of boundless will power and tolerance for pain, no doubts can be harbored. One only hopes that this act is more successful than his previous protests. This writer certainly wishes that this extraordinary act of self mutilation inspires the tsunami of rebellion that the artist desires to incite against a political system that has indeed become a shadow of the Soviet autocracy against which so many people like the artist gave their lives.
The most unfortunate question thus arises. Is a mere scrotum enough of a sacrifice? Should he have gone as far as being incarcerated without due process like Pussy Riot, a cause for which he mutilated himself to no apparently productive ends? Should he have immolated himself like the many Tibetans who do so annually in a final, desperate expression of defiance and self determination against an omnipotent, malevolent government? Must roads to freedom and self determination be paved with entire corpses, not just limbs and valuable appendages like the scrotum?
The political artist’s expression will forever be deconstructed. The desire for attention will forever confound any legitimate expression he or she may have made. It will be a shame if Mr. Pavlensky’s remarkable act of defiance is dismissed as a shameless act of self promotion. It rings sincere, in this writer’s mind, in its desperate expression of a desire for rights and dignity for every citizen in Russia.
Should its impact and distribution be limited to the pages of odd news sections and blogs like this, then the inescapable conclusion is that it is more effective to stick one’s neck out than it is to go balls out in the quest for freedom. Given how extraordinary it is to see a man go balls out like Pyotr, it is hard to imagine that anyone will stick their necks out. This may be the ultimate sign of resignation in the western world and the ultimate assertion of the current price of progress.
It is, perhaps, time to contemplate Syria, Chechnya, Egypt, Iran, Indonesia and myriad other countries where necks are slashed in plain sight of western citizens far too apathetic to vote to protect their own interests. Political and military power are tools we developed to stroke our own balls, it seems, rather then to save necks.
Pyotr, may your balls be safe and your scrotum whole again someday.