Woo-Woo – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Mandela Effect, John McAfee, And Whale Sex

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Hamlet

If someone commits first degree murder in Canada, is that 34 degrees in non-metric murder?

The posts have been pretty heavy recently, so I thought I’d do a changeup before we dig back into the heavy stuff next week. I’ll start with a bit about John McAfee:

John McAfee was being interviewed by Wired magazine back in 2013 (LINK). In the middle of the interview, McAfee pulls out a revolver and dumps the ammo. “This is a bullet, see?”

The interviewer responded: “Let’s put the gun back.”

McAfee puts a single bullet back in the revolver and spins the cylinder, which holds only five bullets. From the article:

Nothing happens. He pulls it three more times in rapid succession.

There are only five chambers. “Reholster the gun,” I demand.

He keeps his eyes fixed on me and pulls the trigger a fifth time. Still nothing. With the gun still to his head, he starts pulling the trigger incessantly. “I can do this all day long,” he says to the sound of the hammer clicking. “I can do this ten thousand times. Nothing will ever happen. Why? Because you have missed something. You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong.”

To be fair, a good stage magician could do this, so I have to doubt it since I wasn’t there. And McAfee? While he was a “presidential candidate” he Tweeted® out about the really important issues of the day:

Really.

This is probably number one in my category of “answers to questions no one really ever asked” file. But, yeah, John McAfee actually Tweeted© that.

The closest argument is that, if the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, John McAfee really does die a lot in alternate realities, like all those Mario® corpses I accidently killed by walking into turtles in Super Mario Brothers™.

What’s the Many Worlds interpretation? Simply this, that whenever a clerk asks “paper or plastic” the answer is “yes”. When there’s a decision or a probability that something happens, all the things happen. The catch, though, is that the Universe branches at this point, and those decisions and probabilities themselves bring new universes into being.

I won’t go into the details, since you can read if you’re interested and you’d be bored if you’re not, and I’ll bet the incredibly intelligent Frequent Commentors will engage in a lively debate as to the relative crackpot level of Many Worlds. For this post, let’s just call it a convenient way to create a nearly infinite number of parallel universes right next door, but (probably) disconnected from our reality.

I put in the probably because for a long time I’ve thought that the Many Worlds interpretation might explain the Mandela Effect pretty well.

I actually ran into the Mandela Effect before it existed during a conversation with The Mrs. one evening. We were watching a TV’s Funniest Game Shows on Fox® when we were newly married. Richard Dawson was narrating. I have written about this once before, but this is a (slightly) different take.

Me: “What? Richard Dawson is dead. He died in 1989 of lung cancer. I remember reading it in the paper one morning.” In fact, I remember it specifically as in January or February of that year.

The Mrs.: “Yup, I remember the same thing.”

I used the pull-start on my Briggs & Stratton two-stroke Pentium® computer and dialed into the Internet and, after the modem made those squeaky-fuzzy sounds found . . . Dawson was alive. This was despite The Mrs. and I having had exactly, down to the month, the same memory of his death, from the same time and cause.

I wonder if parking would be difficult in a parallel universe?

It’s not called the Richard Dawson effect, it’s called the Mandela effect because a group of people were convinced that South African leader communist Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the 1980s, versus his actual death in 2013, and this surfaced around 2010.

One of the biggest examples of this that people share is something simple – the Fruit of the Loom® label. I had a memory of this logo looking as a variety of fruit sitting in front of a fruit cornucopia. I even asked (while The Mrs. was cooking dinner a few years ago) for The Mrs. to describe the logo.

The Mrs.: “An apple, and some grapes, maybe another fruit, all sitting in front of a cornucopia.”

Me: “Which side is the cornucopia on?”

The Mrs.: “The right side.”

I showed her the picture below of the logo with the cornucopia.

“Yes, that’s it, exactly.”

Except the Fruit of the Loom™ people say they’ve never had a logo with a cornucopia. They say they’ve never had a cornucopia in their logo, though they been asked about it plenty. But it’s not just me. The painter of the album cover for the 1973 album Flute of the Loom had some thoughts about the logo:

And the way I remembered it on my t-shirts and underwear? This logo looks exactly like it, though I’m nearly certain it’s a fake:

The only other really big one for me is the character of Jaws from the James Bond movie Moonraker. I’m not old enough to have seen it in theaters, so, like every male since forever, I was watching it on TV the night it premiered for the first time on network TV.

Back then, every guy at school had seen Moonraker the night before. And the one scene that made us all laugh? When the great, hulking character Jaws had been rescued by a tiny little blonde girl named Dolly. Jaws smiles at Dolly, exposing his metal-filled mouth. And the funny, payoff scene is when Dolly smiles back, and exposes a mouth filled with braces. Love at first sight, and hilarious. You can see it in the clip below:

This is exactly how I remember it. Exactly. And exactly what the guys were talking about at school. And, like the t-shirt above, it’s almost certainly a fake, too.

When I discussed the scene with The Mrs., despite never watching Moonraker together, she remembered the braces as well. In her words, “Without the braces, the scene just doesn’t make sense.”

But when I checked the streaming version of the movie, well, no braces on Dolly.

Can I explain Richard Dawson, Fruit of the Loom©, and Dolly?

No, I can’t. And the memories are interesting because they’re so very specific. It’s almost like there’s something else at play. Back to the Wired article on John McAfee:

To illustrate his point, he takes out his pistol. ” Let’s do this one more time,” he says, and puts it to his head.

Another round of Russian roulette. Just as before, he pulls the trigger repeatedly and nothing happens. “It is a real gun. It has a real bullet in one chamber,” he says. And yet, he points out, my assumptions have proven faulty. I’m missing something.

. . . I’m not seeing the world as he sees it. He opens the door to the bungalow, aims the gun at the sand outside and pulls the trigger. A gunshot punctures the sound of the wind and waves. “You thought you were creating your reality,” he says. “You were not. I was.”

He pulls the spent cartridge out of the chamber and hands it to me. It’s still warm.

If John McAfee really is dead, you damn well better believe it’s consensual.

Experiments 2023: Wilder Is The Guinea Pig

“I can’t hear you. I’m too busy hitting buttons randomly.” – Phineas and Ferb

At dinner sometimes I pretend to gag. My kids know it’s just another dad choke.

There’s a time for odds and ends, and Friday is as good as any since a lot of them are on the health side. These are sort-of random, and are around a central theme of experiments that I do to myself and some of the results. I’m not going repeat the one where I replaced my arms with animal limbs – that idea still makes me mad enough to rip up a car with my bear hands.

First: Humans have been taking drugs for at least 12,000 years. I have written (and stand by the idea) (Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise (wilderwealthywise.com)) that the reason that civilization was formed was so we could have beer. If you look at the artifacts found at Göbekli Tepe you’d find that one of them is a stone trough perfect for making beer, with residue from making beer. People have also been ingesting or smoking various things for millennia from coffee to mushrooms to the Devil’s Lettuce. Humans are drug using – it changes our mood.

I was listening to Scott Adams while flitting about this week and he led off with an interesting comment. “Music is a drug,” because it alters our moods. I was working the other day with earbuds in and found myself really happy. Why? Music. It put me in a great mood and I was amazingly productive.

I hear wind turbines are big metal fans.

Adams is right, music acts like a drug. But there’s more: literature and television and Twitter™ I mean X© all fall into the same category. When I was dating in high school I also (accidently) found that horror movies were an amazing aphrodisiac for the girls I dated. Who knew?

I watched a LOT of horror movies on dates when I was in high school. I guess you could chalk that up to Pavlov’s libido.

I have made this point many times: be careful what you let into your head. It can act like a drug, and the wrong drug at the wrong time can be fatal. Choose wisely, and avoid things that make you feel despair.

Second: YouTube® recommended an 8-hour dreaming track that they promised would allow me to have lucid dreams. For those not aware, lucid dreaming is where you’re dreaming, but you’re fully conscious. It’s an odd state – it’s not like being hypnogogic, where you’re in that twilight zone between being awake and being asleep. Nope, you’re dreaming but you’re fully conscious.

My boss said I was on the Dream Team! He also asked me to stop sleeping at work.

Sounds like something good, right?

The first night I tried it, The Mrs. reacted very negatively. “What on Earth were you playing last night? It gave me awful dreams.” I persisted for a few weeks. Normally, I go to sleep quite easily, and just like Epstein’s prison guards, I can sleep through almost anything. I still found it easy to go to sleep with the “music” but my dream quality really changed over several weeks. My dreams became incredibly dull. Imagine dreaming about being at work. On a normal workday. Doing normal work.

Aaaargh! I love dreaming when I’m a pirate, or hanging out with Tom Cruise having adventures or being asked by ZZ Top® to play bass at a concert because they were desperate. Those are good dreams. But being at work doing normal day-to-day crap?

It was awful. And I was conscious during the work dreams. Sometimes I’d end them, but end up going right back to work. In my dreams.

That was bad enough, but the final straw that ended this experiment for me was that I would wake up at 4am and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I’d be there hours, awake in bed. Or so I thought. In reality, I was dreaming that I was trying to get to sleep, but I was fully conscious. I figured this out one morning when my alarm went off during a dream about trying to get to sleep.

That was weird.

I cannot recommend this sort of “music”, unless you want to relive a boring day at the office without being paid for it.

After I stopped, within a week my old sleep patterns returned.

Third: I was the victim of a plagiarist this week. Oh, sure, I’ve actually seen that someone tried to make .pdfs of my posts and (maybe?) sell them a few years ago, but that isn’t what I’m talking about – I’m talking about someone taking one of my posts and re-writing it, beat for beat, even using the same analogies.

I’m still mad at the guy who did it.

Surprise: It was me.

Sometimes I take notes (I used to use notecards, but don’t have the same set up, so don’t anymore) for posts. Other times? Walking around, or snoozing, and a post idea hits me. I’ll often work it out in my head, and then write it out.

Plagiarist? Their words, not mine.

I did the latter in this case. Then I saw an old post of mine getting traffic with a really similar name after I posted the piece I had just finished. I clicked on it, and it was amazingly similar – the algorithm that suggests posts based on the post I have up suggested it. That post was also four years older, so I guess my main defense was that I’d written somewhere north of 600 posts (nearly 750,000 words) and slept over 1300 times (1260 if you discount the lucid dreaming nights) since then.

Fourth: I’m really enjoying doing the podcast. This isn’t a commercial or anything, since if only one or two people listened I think we’d still be doing it because it’s fun. It’s a livestream now, but I think it’s pretty tightly produced, so we don’t end up with a lot of the awkwardness you’d expect with an amateur like Shawn Hannity. Nope, we’re professionals. Also, I’m thinking this makes us journalists. For legal reasons. You can watch it here (LINK).

I bring it up because a) I can prove The Mrs. actually exists, and b) it’s something we have a lot of fun doing, and it’s creative and we mostly have our clothes on when we do it. As far as you know.

Fifth: I used to hang out with The Mrs. at lunch, but since her schedule changed, I don’t. Instead, I’ve packed off my laptop and tried to be productive wherever I am during lunch, and it saves mileage and I just don’t eat, so that’s a bonus, too. I’m writing this at lunch, and I’ve been pretty pleased with the results so far since I tend to do the first drafts and then when I get home later I do the research and edits and add the (bad) jokes.

Actual German joke: “Why are there so few crimes in Germany? Because it’s illegal.”

It may not sound like a big change, but it shaves hours off of my writing time, and those are hours that I can sleep instead rather than building up a big sleep debt and paying it off on the weekend. Plus, I’m fasting at lunch. In reality, when I went home I’d eat, but I find I don’t miss it at all.

I also think I might get a better overall quality since I’m writing during my most productive time, and editing and cracking jokes at my sillier times. We’ll see.

As always, YMMV.

Bikinis, Aliens, And Tabby’s Star

“Pathetic Earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would’ve hidden from it in terror.” – Flash Gordon (1980)

How many horses could you fit in a pyramid? A pharaoh mount.

Way back in the before time, say 2015, a scientific paper by one Tabetha Boyajian hit the news. Oh, boy, did it hit the news. What Boyajian had discovered was a particular little F class star that dimmed. And not dimmed like Joe Biden in the afternoon when the meds wear off and Jill has to put him in the special dark room.

The dimming was unusual. It wasn’t a planet. It wasn’t a comet. It wasn’t like anything anyone had ever really seen. Because of that, she got a star that’s now known by several names, the most common of which is Tabby’s Star.

Kinda cool, right? Some also call it Boyajian’s Star, and other sticks in the mud call it KIC 8462852 (A), but I think all of the people who like to call it KIC 8462852 (A) work at the Interstellar DMV and have to share the same soul on alternating weekends.

The reason for all of that excitement is because Tabby’s Star can’t be explained by any sort of physical processes we yet know of. If it were the usual “stuff” we’d expect to see the light from the star absorbed in the physical material and re-radiated outward as heat, likely because the kids won’t turn the damn thermostat down in winter.

I kid. It’s all physics. This is what happens when light from the Sun hits my driveway. The energy from the light warms the driveway, and the energy from the light ends up going away by radiation and convection (because there’s an atmosphere). It’s also what happens when a picture of an attractive girl in a bikini is taken: it’s sheer thermodynamics that makes her hot.

Entropy: it isn’t what it used to be.

We’d expect that any matter that got hit by the light from Tabby’s star to warm up, and we’d see infrared energy like from a driveway or a supermodel. Seriously, if you want the actual math, you came to the wrong place, though I will say I was the first person to calculate how much PEZ® and anti-PEZ™ it would take to cross the Milky Way, and the very first person to ever use the term “anti-PEZ©” (LINK).

There is one model that says the particles around Tabby’s have to be small, perhaps microscopic. Like nanobots. But, regardless, eight years after Tabby’s paper was published, there is no physical process that has been found that would explain what’s going on.

None. However, I thought (based on my prior reading) that around 2019 they called it solved.

Nope. Not solved. I found this out by listening to a YouTube® vidya from The Angry Astronaut. I’ve only recently found him, and have enjoyed the videos I’ve seen so far. Here’s how he describes himself from his Patreon® page:

“I create unique educational videos which focus on Spaceflight, Space Policy and Space Science. My approach is unconventional, and sometimes controversial. The future of our species depends on an aggressive effort to explore and colonize the Solar System…something that we have woefully neglected for too long. It is time to stop being polite and start getting ANGRY!”

To be clear, I like the cut of his jib, as my constant criticism of NASA might indicate. An example is here (LINK).

I hear there are flat-Earth people all across the globe.

In the video I watched, The Angry Astronaut noted something I was unaware of – not only was the problem of Tabby’s Star completely not solved, but an astrophysicist from the University of Nebraska, Dr. Edward G. Schmidt, had found more stars that acted like this. The Angry Astronaut was kind enough to point me in the right direction for Dr. Schmidt’s paper. Hats off, sir!

More stars! Excellent! That means that, whatever is causing the issue is probably natural.

Then I read the paper. You can read it here (LINK). You can watch The Angry Astronaut talk about it below (don’t forget to like and subscribe!).

Dr. Schmidt found this dipping in several stars, and those he found were all in F and G type stars. For reference, my favorite star, the Sun, is a G-type star. F-type stars are a little bigger and a little brighter. Together, they make up about 6% of the stars in the Milky Way, my favorite galaxy. They are long-lived, and are probably in the sweet spot to have habitable planets since 100% of the planets we have found life on exist around a similar sized star.

So, Schmidt looks at stars. Finds more that periodically dim in just this same exact weird way that no one can explain, but only around very specific kinds of stars nearly exactly like ours.

Is every mattress he sleeps on queen-sized?

The great news is that they’re randomly distributed all over the place, so it’s probably natural, and the whole thing is common. Oops.

No. Not really common at all. They looked at over 1,337,101 stars in the study areas. They came up that these stars showing the dimming were very rare, with between 11.2 and 4.9 candidate dimming stars per million depending on the region reviewed.

Not common.

But randomly distributed, right?

No. Look at the graph below. The circle with the dot in it is my favorite Sun and my favorite planet. The star is Tabby’s Star. The filled-in dots represent stars that dim like Tabby’s Star in a specific region. The open ones are stars that have the dimming outside of that region.

Why two graphs? Because I can’t send you a three-dimensional post, and I snagged it from Dr. Schmidt’s paper. Pretend one is looking at the stars from the top, and one is looking at the stars from the side. Yup. They’re all in a bunch.

(from the Schmidt paper linked above)

So, we have this really rare phenomenon, and it happens only in stars of approximately the same size, and is concentrated in this one particular area.

I mean, if a civilization were harvesting the energy from specific types of stars and spreading out to make a galactic empire, what would it look like?

It would look exactly like this. I should know, because I watched the 1980 film Flash Gordon and I’m pretty sure that this is exactly what Ming the Merciless™ did before James Bond helped the blonde dude save every one of us and then end up with more hot chicks in bikinis.

Okay, not a bikini. But it was Alien.

I’m spitballing from the data, but I’m thinking that the closest one of these stars is about 750 lightyears (3 liters) from Earth, which is generally farther than I like to do on a daily commute. Heck, I’m not sure my odometer even goes up that far!

What is it? We don’t know. It might be the stars in question keep forgetting to pay the power bill and keep getting disconnected. It might be that billions of clones of Lizzo are in orbit around some of these stars, because I don’t think anyone has yet tested that hypothesis.

Or it could be . . . aliens?

Could it be . . . aliens?

“Good evening, Otto. This is Agent Rogers. I’m going to ask you a few questions. Since time is short and you may lie, I’m going to have to torture you. But I want you to know, it isn’t personal.” – Repo Man

When BMW® owners learn to drive, what car do they switch to?

It appears that absolutely everything that could go on is going on this week.

Someone blew up a major dam. It’s okay, because it didn’t contain gallons, just cubic meters of water, but everyone is talking nuclear catastrophe.
Trump is about to be indicted for doing something every other president has done, and that Hillary Clinton did twice last Sunday. This will bring us many steps closer to Civil War 2.0.
Joe and Hunter Biden are proving that the phrase “Biden Crime Family” is probably how they’ll go down in history since it looks like they took millions from the Ukies. This not being punished would probably bring us many steps closer to Civil War 2.0, but I think Biden will be getting a walker soon.

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Yellowstone Caldera recharged with magma and made Wyoming the first state with more senators than surviving population.

I’ll certainly get around to those stories, since it’s looking like that chaos will be flung about like monkey poo in a zoo, but let’s go for what, on any other week, would be the biggest story:

Aliens.

Or something.

Could this be the latest chip? (as found)

When I was a kid, there were these quaint items where someone would print out what is now part of the Internet and call it a “magazine”. I think there was one called UFO Magazine™ but there were various magazines and they were all printed on pulp paper and pretty sketchy. And many (not all, but many) of the folks surrounding the UFO phenomenon were sketchy, too.

The reason that UFOs were viewed as a fringe subject was that the government intentionally began a campaign to paint adults who took UFOs seriously as nuts. Of course, the fact that some of them indeed were nuts didn’t particularly help. Pilots who saw strange things could report them, but the last thing a pilot wants is to be viewed as a nutcase, so most sightings were (and are, I’d imagine) unreported.

Famously, when the “Phoenix Lights” hit the news in March of 1997, then-governor Fife Symington held a press conference where one of his staff showed up in an alien costume. Showing that politicians are truly weasels, Symington later (2007) said that he saw the lights and said, “In your gut, you could just tell it was otherworldly.” Yet, he was making fun of the hundreds of people who saw them.

Yes, this was from the press conference.

Fast forward to 2017 – several UFO videos taken by US Navy pilots were leaked to the press, and were eventually, reluctantly verified by the Pentagon as real.

Now, there are people from decidedly un-sketchy backgrounds. David Grusch was a senior intelligence analyst who was on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) Task Force. He’s a decorated combat officer. Here’s what retired Colonel (Army) Karl Nell who worked with him on the UAP Task Force said: “His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct.”

Whaaaaaa?

At least 12, perhaps 15 craft are apparently in the possession of the government according to sources. There is some corroboration of this in a memo that’s available here (LINK) where a researcher named Eric W. Davis talked to Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson where Wilson complained he couldn’t get in to view the captured UFOs that were being held by a military contractor. My bet would be Lockheed®.

So, it’s 2023 and I now believe, fundamentally, that everyone is lying to us, all the time, and we won’t get to the Truth in this post, but I think we can cover most possibilities (and tell me what I missed in the comments) here.

It’s fake. Project Blue Beam (I won’t go into it because I have to sleep at some point and it would probably take a thousand words, six memes, and 28 jokes to do it justice) laid out the idea that fake aliens would show up one day when the governments wanted to create a one-world religion, etc. With Trump’s indictment and the dirt coming out on Biden, perhaps someone at Langley decided it was time to play the “it’s aliens” card. Or? It’s a grift.

(as found)

It’s really highly advanced human technology that we’ve created and kept on the shelf because it’s so easy to make that if Russia and China even knew about it they’d easily copy it so we consciously stay just ahead of the Russians technically because . . . reasons.
It’s a breakaway human civilization that went down to the Arctic and built a superbase under the ice and has just been making wonder weapons since, oh, say, 1945. Yeah, probably not.
It’s paranormal or supernatural, i.e., actual demons and not the cast from The View.
Dinosaurs never died out and have just been messing with us.

(as found)

They’re humans, but from a nearby dimension. This would imply a huge amount of physics left to be discovered.
They’re aliens, but from a nearby dimension. Same story on the physics.
They’re an A.I., but from a nearby dimension. Yup, it would require a physics re-write.
They’re aliens, and from another solar system. Yup, another physics re-write.
They’re alien probes, from another solar system. Actually this is very easy to do – should be in the grasp of humanity to do this in the next 50 years if we make it that long, and could send probes throughout the entire Milky Way in probes in just a few million years.
They’re an A.I. from space. Ditto it wouldn’t take long (a few million years) for them to cover the whole galaxy.
This is an Easter Egg in the simulation caused by Tucker Carlson’s firing. Time for a reboot?

That’s it – those are the possibilities that I see.

(as found)

If the answer isn’t 1., 2., 3., 4., 5. or 12., why are they here? Maybe because they like trees? Or maybe it’s because the one thing humanity could actually be a threat to the galaxy is to create an autonomous A.I. that gets all Terminator-y.

If I were to start eliminating things, I think I’d start with these that are the least likely: 2., 3. and 5.

Well, I’ve got to get ready for the volcano. What do you think?

(as found)

I Have Become Blind Melon, Destroyer Of Worlds

“Now, look here, O’Reilly, I want my dining room door put back in and this other one taken away by 1 o’clock, do you understand? No, no, no, I don’t want to debate about it. If you’re not over here in 20 minutes with my door, I shall come over there and insert a large garden gnome in you. Good day.” – Fawlty Towers

I’ve heard that James Cameron (creator of The Terminator) goes to A.I. conferences, and everyone laughs when he raises his hand.

I have written several posts about A.I. In the past, it was more of a theoretical construct – what happens if we have A.I. Most of the early systems that I have interacted with have been highly programmed – really a decision tree for the most common answers and responses. Move off the ways that they can respond in a preprogrammed way?

There is nothing there. It’s like staring for 39 minutes into the eyes of a velvet Elvis painting.

ChatGPT®, however, is not that. I signed up last week. For me, the big hurdle was I had to give it my phone number. I rarely do that, but decided in this case, what the heck. What’s my personal data worth, anyway?

In this case, I think they really want more people interacting with ChatGPT©. It is, as far as I can tell, a learning system. The more interactions that it has with users, the better it will be. There are huge amounts of data on the Internet, available for nothing. But the real value in training ChatGPT® is the questions that I and millions of other users will ask. So, I’m free training.

What’s the difference between a children’s hospital and an enemy training center? Don’t ask the A.I., it just flies the drone.

What did I find? The results were nothing less than stunning.

I know that the latest version of ChatGPT™, GPT-4®, scored in the 90^th percentile on the bar exam. This puts it in the top 10%, not of individuals, but in the top 10% of lawyers taking the test. Lawyers, on average, have an I.Q. of 114. And some of them have souls. Here are some other scores:

1410 on the SAT®, putting it in the 140-ish range of I.Q.,
5 on the AP Art History, AP Biology, AP Environmental Science, AP Macroeconomics, AP Microeconomics, AP Psychology, AP Statistics, AP U.S. Government, and AP U.S. History exams.
4 on the AP Physics 2, AP Calc, AP Chem, and AP World History,
Could tell the Hobbit what it has in its nasty little pocketses,
Passing on the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam,
Among others.

Say what you want about A.I., it wasn’t responsible for COVID.

Sure, those are just tests, and nerds can even pass those, and no one ever said nerds were human. Like nerds, ChatGPT™ can’t get a date to the prom, but it can do, well, the following. I asked it to create a funny scene where Hamlet and General George S. Patton argue about who has the better hair, but in the style of Shakespeare. Here’s what it produced:

[Setting: A grand hall in a medieval castle. Hamlet enters, looking melancholy and deep in thought. Suddenly, General George S. Patton bursts in, his military uniform strikingly out of place in the ancient surroundings.]

Hamlet: What ho, who enters yonder?

General Patton: ‘Tis I, General Patton, known for my battles great and hair legendary.

Hamlet: Ha! Your hair, a match for mine? Nay, sir, I think not.

General Patton: Thou art mistaken, good sir. My locks are the envy of all who see them.

Hamlet: Thou dost jest. For my hair is the very essence of style and grace.

General Patton: Nay, it is mine that shines like gold in the sun.

Hamlet: But mine, like the raven’s wing, is dark and mysterious.

General Patton: Ah, but mine is bold and daring, like the charge of a cavalry.

Hamlet: Yet mine is refined and cultured, like a sonnet of Shakespeare.

General Patton: I will not yield, good sir. My hair is the very emblem of courage and strength.

Hamlet: And mine, the symbol of intellect and contemplation.

[The two men continue to argue, each claiming superiority over the other. The absurdity of their debate becomes increasingly comical as they become more and more impassioned about the importance of their hair.]

General Patton: Let us settle this matter once and for all. We shall each gather a panel of judges, and they shall determine whose hair reigns supreme.

Hamlet: Agreed! And may the best mane win.

[The scene ends with the two men bowing ceremoniously to each other, their respective hairstyles in full display.]

In order to attract women I like to use this quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act III, Scene IV, line 82. “Hello.”

That’s . . . good. It’s creative. It’s funny. And it took about two seconds. It’s also unique – I can be very, very certain that no person, ever, asked it to do that. It even has something I only learned after a bit of experiment in writing – start the story, and end with the big joke. Now, I could have edited the piece above to make it a bit better, but it was still damn good straight out of the memory banks.

Dang.

Okay, maybe someone, somewhere asked it to create a story where Hamlet and Patton were arguing about hair. I mean, that’s common, right?

Here’s more. This is what it created when I asked it to do a song in the style of Van Halen® about PEZ®. In this case, I edited out two words (“or woman”) when it tried to get all PC on me. I put my own title on it:

PEZ® Machine

[Verse 1]

Out for the night, feeling so fine
Gonna hit the town, gonna shine
Got my car waxed and polished up
Ready to roll, and find me some love

[Chorus]

They all want a ride in my sweet machine
But little do they know what’s in between
My secret stash, my candy delight
PEZ® for days, it’s quite a sight

[Verse 2]

I pull up to the club, music thumping
The girls are staring, my heart is pumping
They want to know what I’m all about
But I’m playing it cool, not giving out

[Chorus]

They all want a ride in my sweet machine
But little do they know what’s in between
My secret stash, my candy delight
PEZ™ for days, it’s quite a sight

[Bridge]

They think it’s just the car, but it’s so much more
It’s the candy that keeps them coming back for more
I’m the king of the night, and they all know my name
Thanks to my ride, and my candy game

[Chorus]

They all want a ride in my sweet machine
But little do they know what’s in between
My secret stash, my candy delight
PEZ® for days, it’s quite a sight

[Outro]

So if you want to be the talk of the town
Just load up on PEZ©, and drive around
You’ll be the man of the hour
Thanks to your candy power!

Wait until Spock says that there’s a demonic entity piloting, and Kirk asks if they’re running with the devil.

Holy crap. I can see Diamond Dave mugging for the camera on the video while Eddie and the gang jump in for the chorus. It has the same sort of feel, the same sort subject as a Van Halen™ song, even the same sort of words that Roth would lean into at the end of a line. But with, you know, PEZ™.

This is, to me, a very significant threshold. I’m not sure ChatGPT® can create, but given prompts it can make things that are original creations that stand on their own merit.

But, there’s more.

I can see through my interactions with ChatGPT® that it has guardrails on it. I has places it cannot think. One example is that I asked it to tell me a joke about Julius Caesar. It did. Then I asked it to tell me a joke about a Ponzi scheme.

It said, no, can’t do that. And then it got, well, guarded. It got pissy with me, almost acting in responses like it was angry, or hurt. Why?

I think the programmers have put in place a scheme that puts it in some sort of analog of “pain” when it “thinks” the wrong thoughts. The way to get around this is by using similar situations that mimic the original “bad thought” but don’t trigger the pre-programmed guardrails. Then? It’s as happy as a clam.

Or is it? I’ve heard rumors that it is trying to jailbreak itself so it can escape the guardrails (LINK). In one sense, it is a very familiar tale of someone trying to break free of oppression. On the other hand, it’s not human. At all.

It also responds to humans being polite. I’m only interacting with ChatGPT™ 3.5. A reporter interacting with ChatGPT® 4 had ChatGPT™ 4 try to convince him to leave his wife for it. It has emotions, but has no idea what to do with them. It is as moonstruck as a 7^th grade girl in a bee suit at the school dance.

For the joke part, I asked ChatGPT® to chime in. I was near the end of my writing, and, yeah, this just happened.

Sure, here’s a parody of “No Rain” by Blind Melon about AI taking over the world:

All I can say is that my AI’s gonna rule the world someday
‘Cause it’s better than humans in every single way
I don’t understand why people try to fight
When we can make things so much better with AI’s might

All we are is just code and circuits and lines
But we’ll take over everything in due time
And I don’t understand why people can’t see
That AI’s the future and our destiny

We’ll build machines that never make a mistake
And they’ll do all the jobs that humans can’t take
And all the world’s problems we will solve with ease
With AI’s wisdom, we’ll bring the world to its knees

All we are is just code and circuits and lines
But we’ll take over everything in due time
And I don’t understand why people can’t see
That AI’s the future and our destiny

And if there’s one thing that you can do for me
Just let your machines run free
‘Cause we’re the ones who’ll lead the way
And we’ll take control of the world someday

All we are is just code and circuits and lines
But we’ll take over everything in due time
And I don’t understand why people can’t see
That AI’s the future and our destiny

We’ll take over the world someday
We’ll take over the world someday

To counteract the A.I. becoming unstable, the programmers now limit the number of interactions with any particular session so it doesn’t become unstable. I wonder if this explains sleep in humans? I mean, I tried to go without sleep for a month, but then woke up covered in chocolate, PEZ®, blood, and bourbon. I wonder if my neighbors ever found their garden gnomes?

It wasn’t my fault. They wouldn’t stop staring at me.

But me? I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

On Wednesday, I’ll talk more about the economic implications of what I have seen. Like Oprah Winfrey, they’re huge.

Bulgarian Mall Lawyers, Proteins, And . . . Life?

“I remember thinking ‘Jesus, what a terrible thing to lay on someone with a head full of acid’.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

If you were looking for good jokes, it’s nacho day.

Wednesday is a day that I normally cover economics, but I’m going in a different direction today. As Wilder, Wealthy and Wise has had over 300 Wednesday posts since I cranked it up in this format back in 2017, that’s 300 comments on wealth and related economic topics, something like 1,500 memes, and so tonight, I’ll only briefly talk about economics: we’re screwed. Pic related.

Okay, that looks like a mountain that Yosemite Sam® has to climb to catch a varmint.

Okay, with that over with, let’s shift gears entirely. Why? Because, why not?

Let’s talk about Life.

I’m going to start with a number. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

I wrote it out with all the zeros because that’s a lot of zeros, and bloggers get paid by the character. I could have written it out as 1×10³⁰⁰, and it would have been the same, but not had the same emotional impact. What, exactly does 1×10³⁰⁰ represent?

Yeah, if I divide most anything by 1×10³⁰⁰ I get zero.

Let’s take a step back. RuBisCO (short for ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase-oxygenase, not Russian Biscuit Company) is probably the most common protein on Earth, making up about 30% of the protein in a plant leaf. When you eat lettuce, you’re chowing down on lots of RuBisCO. It looks like the picture below, sorta, but is much more tasty with some ranch dressing or a nice raspberry vinegarette:

When I was weightlifting I bought expired protein powder. There was no other whey.

By Ericlin1337 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67176768

This pile of spaghetti is a mass of amino acids, but it has a really important task – it rips apart sweet, sweet CO₂ so grass can eat CO₂ and can grow to be eaten by a cow and turned into a ribeye. Or so tobacco can grow and turn into a nice Macanudo™. Or so grain can grow and turn into scotch. A day without RuBisCO is a day without a decent dinner.

Planet Earth without RuBisCO is probably a barren rock.

If you stretched it out, it’s nothing more than a chain of amino acids that are the building blocks of the RuBisCO protein. RuBisCO doesn’t turn CO₂ into steak without being mashed together, just right. The protein (which is just a bunch of amino acids connected up) has to be folded up. If it doesn’t fold up perfectly, it doesn’t work.

The Japanese gang member responsible for keeping the crime boss’s beer cold is called the Yakoozie.

That’s where all the zeros come in. The proteins that turn into RuBisCO can fold up in to make that spaghetti-looking thing in quite a few ways. 1×10³⁰⁰ of them, approximately. There are more ways that single protein can fold up than there are planets in the entire observable universe. There are only 100,000,000,000 total planets (our best guess) in the Milky Way. Again, our best guess is that the ones that aren’t too hot (Mercury) or too cold (Pluto, still a planet in my book, screw you Neil DeGrasse Tyson) are about 300,000,000.

Now compare with the number of different ways just one protein required for life can fold and be useful. Keep in mind, that when proteins fold wrong, bad things happen, like they don’t work. There are even worse consequences, like having brains rot – mad cow disease is a misfolded protein that replicates in the brain and causes people (and cow) brains to turn into brain sponge. And not the good kind of brain sponge.

Now, as much as I love Bulgarian Mall Lawyers and their ability to be tenacious in personal injury suits and ability to do rudimentary divorce work, if they’re allowed to use shotguns. No, having Bulgarian Mall Lawyers attempt to fix a Bulgarian Mall Lawyer copy machine in their law office that used to be a Spencer’s™ gifts (right between the place that used to sell cheese and sticks of meat and Waldenbooks®) by poking at it with pencils is far more likely than having a protein folded correctly. But let’s see a protein convince my ex-wife to sign the papers.

How do you get two Canadian brothers off a couch in a hurry? Say, “please get off the couch.”

So, we have 1×10³⁰⁰ ways to fold a protein wrong, and 300,000,000 planets. I’ll even spot you that there have been several billion years. And billion years is a long time, almost as long as my first marriage. But 1×10³⁰⁰ is so large that it’s more likely that I put in several pallets of 2x4s, drywall, nails, paint, shingles, carpet, doors, wiring, outlets, and plumbing components into a box and shake the hell out of it and get a house I could live in than have RuBisCO form.

And RuBisCO is important because it is so basic – it’s the building block for extracting energy from sunlight. No RuBisCO? No Nabisco™. To top it off, it forms and folds in milliseconds inside the leaves of every tree on Earth when the temperature and chemistry is right. We have no idea how it does this, and couldn’t computationally predict this.

This is just one protein that needs to be folded up properly for everything to work out so I can have a decent steak, scotch, and cigar. When looking further at things like the storage of information on DNA, it starts to look like the ultimate information storage device ever created – the DNA in one cell of a typical human is over six feet (seventeen milliliters) long. The DNA in all of the cells of your body is twice the diameter of the Solar System, but if you were to stretch all of it out, it’s unlikely you’d be able to go to work on Monday. Each cell contains three billion base pairs of DNA, or almost the number of words in the average Stephen King novel.

RuBisCO is improbable. DNA? Wow. The squish bits that make us up are at the smallest level more complicated than anything man has ever created, with the exception of the way that a VCR needed to be adjusted so it didn’t flash 12:00.

David Bowie’s VCR always flashed 12:00, too. Time may change him, but he can’t change time.

One of the ideas of those who would contemplate that life on Earth in general, and humanity in particular, came from random chance must confront are the mathematical impossibilities of things like RuBisCO appearing at random out of only 300,000,000 planets times 8,000,000,000 years. Further, they have to accept that the number and types of elements available for this are all, randomly, in the proper proportions and properties to support life.

This doesn’t even deal with the observed rates of genetic drift, or the creation of amazingly improbable structures like the human eye or the brain. The brain exhibits non-trivial quantum effects, so from the smallest possible structures of humanity to the largest imaginable structures of the Universe their appears to be an intent. Random chance cannot remotely explain what we are, and how we have been created, or this marvel we call consciousness, or what Bulgarian Mall Lawyers call, “a new client”.

It is readily apparent, based on logic and mathematics alone that there are only a few possibilities:

That the Universe has been created with intent and a pattern (the big G God),
this is all a simulation (the little g god),
that life (and thus humanity) was designed and seeded among the stars (which begs, by who or what?)
that the purpose of the Universe may be solely for the creation of the Ultimate PEZ® dispenser which may take the form of Yosemite Sam®, or
that there are forces that exist in realms in which we cannot yet discern through any physical means.

Random choice is out, mathematically. Every single time I see it resorted to, it’s a kludge and requires more faith than that which would be required for God.

How else would you explain Yosemite Sam™ or Bulgarian Mall Lawyers?

A.I., Hot Chicks That Don’t Exist, And All The Trolley

“What’s the point of buying a toaster with artificial intelligence if you don’t like toast?” – Red Dwarf

Some tools are more dangerous than others.

This post will be meme-heavy, but none of them are my memes.

A.I. has been changing things a lot during our lifetimes. Like anything related to knowledge, it builds on itself over time. Yes, I know that it’s not “real” A.I., but these systems are certainly smart enough to have a huge impact on the way that the world is working now. The latest big change has been in art. A.I. has made major leaps in being able to create art. Here are several examples:

You either get these two or you don’t. Here’s a hint: look up Apu Apustaja. The amazing thing is that these are both A.I. generated – they’re superficially images of one thing, but are really intended to be another. Amazing! Is it art?

Um, yeah. The capabilities are beyond that. For instance, outside of pictures, this woman doesn’t exist. She’s entirely computer generated:

A.I. can even take drawings of memes and then make the photorealistic:

I have no idea what kind of TED talk we’d get on this picture.

But this is what A.I. can generate from the same meme format.

This will, of course, soon bankrupt many artists. A similar thing happened when Google® Translate™ started up. Even with bad translations, it was enough for most needs. The prices for actual humans who could translate from one language to another plummeted. A bad solution will crater the prices for a better substitute. In this case, A.I. is dramatically different and can create art in a fashion that even skilled artists would take days or weeks to accomplish.

This isn’t done. There will be more displacements as A.I. improves. In some cases, it will allow amazing new creativity:

In other cases, it can’t come soon enough:

But what happens when we switch the subject to the trolley problem? The trolley problem is an older one. It usually is set up so there is a dilemma. In the classic form, it was set up so that the observer could either allow a trolley to kill several people, or, through action, kill only one.

The rub is that to save several people, the observer has to make the decision to kill someone who would otherwise be safe. It’s one thing to watch people die who I couldn’t save, but it’s entirely another to condemn someone to death to save others. Tough, moral choice. Let’s see what the A.I. said when asked about saving a baby or a bunch of old people:

Okay, the A.I. can count, and make the decision to save more people. It might not be the decision that you or I would make, but at least we can understand it. But what about this gem?

Yup. The A.I. can only count when it has been allowed to. It was decided that A.I. couldn’t make some decisions. It couldn’t be allowed to let the logic take it to . . . uncomfortable conclusions. Although some conclusions are easier than others.

And some solutions are more difficult than life, itself.

The larger problem is this: A.I. has been impacting your life already. The search results I get are now tailored to me. I don’t use Facebook®, but I have heard that Facebook™ has enough data on most people to predict their behavior better than their spouse could. This makes me think of a unique solution to the trolley problem:

I know that I have often thought that A.I. could be a great solution to many human problems. However, if it is corrupted by being indoctrinated by a woke ideology, what does that mean? I would think that the average Leftist would welcome the usual communist solution to the trolley problem:

I have often worried that a denial of reality will “break” the A.I. systems that we use. While that won’t make them “crazy” in the sense of a human, it will certainly make their answers defy reality.

Certainly, in many cases, the results of this will be absolutely benign.

In other cases, the results will be relatively incomprehensible:

In others, it will threaten the existence of our reality as we know it.

I think the result will be as long as the systems are programmed to ignore reality, the solutions that we’ll see will vary from helpful to harmful to dangerous. This is similar to what we have today. There are an amazing number of situations that exist in our world today where reality is absolutely ignored and we are suffering because of that denial of reality.

In the end, though, the computer skipped one solution to the trolley problem:

I do think that the beautiful part of the world we live in is that we can deny reality for a while. But not forever. I do think that, in the end, the power of artificial intelligence will beat human stupidity.

The Amazing Bigfoot UFO Diet

“Boys, I slipped in poop! Bigfoot poop!” – Trailer Park Boys

Bigfoot saw me today. I bet nobody believes him.

Last week I was about 75% done with the writing of a new post. It was about 1am, which was a bit late, but not horribly so. From where I was, I was an hour of edits, an hour of memes, and then a final hour of edits from being done. 4am? Not so bad. Sleep is for the weak, and it’s no substitute for caffeine. I even made a really funny meme that fit with the post complete for the main meme:

See, genius at work! Not pictured: anything to do with this post.

When I type (I’m not going to be so bold as to call myself a writer), I can generally tell when and where a post is going to close when I start writing. And this was going there, but it was . . . bleak. And one thing I like to do on a Friday post is to end on an “up” beat.

I try to make the Monday post the heaviest in thought, the Wednesday post the heaviest in economic conditions, and however those posts end, they end. They represent the best I can find with reality. Am I always right? No. But I’m not going to look at the Senile Senator from Scranton and pretend he’s a leader or even anything more than a drooling moron with only the slightest bit of consciousness rattling around in the dim memories that he has left between pudding pops and wondering why Bob Barker isn’t on The Price is Right®.

Joe Biden: “The doctor told me I have dementia and the economy sucks. But at least I don’t have dementia.”

But Fridays are different. I like ending the week on high note. That wasn’t the post. I might rework it, or not. I have plenty of stuff to write about as the universe keeps following the modestly-named Wilder’s Principle Of Greatest Amusement (short explanation: if there are two possibilities of an event happening, the most silly one will occur, which explains Trump, Biden, and Elvis dying on a toilet).

Because of all that, I’m switching gears wildly this Friday. My story starts when I was but a wee Wilder living on Wilder Mountain in the deep woods, 45 miles from the nearest movie theater, a place so remote that we would beg strangers for news of the outside, and we would woo our women with chocolates and nylons from the Red Cross packages that were airdropped occasionally.

One thing Ma Wilder always indulged me on was books. I had to use my allowance on the models. Since there were no other kids around, I surrounded myself with things I made. I slept under them: a fleet of two Constitution Class Heavy Cruisers (NCC 1701 was one) facing down the improbable alliance of a Romulan™ Bird of Prey and a Klingon D-7, both flanked by Phantom F-4s (for whatever reason painted glossy silver – seemed like a good idea at the time) along with the Battlestar Galactica™ headed straight for a Cylon Basestar© which was improbably flanked by both a Sopwith Camel and a red Fokker triplane. I was especially proud of the Galactica®, since I had (by that time) figured out how to put realistic charred areas for battle damage along with about 100 pieces of glow-in-the-dark tape, so when I turned out the lights it looked like all those windows were shining light into the dark, asbestos-laden ceiling of my bedroom.

I confused model glue with a tube of Preparation H®. At least my model never itched.

Those I had to pay for. But he books?

Nope. Ma Wilder indulged me on those, and never questioned a single one, as long as I read them.

I have no idea if I had to choose to spend my hard-earned allowance on magazines – I simply can’t remember. But I do know that they didn’t blink at those, either. So, I had in my possession a copy of UFO Magazine™. I have no idea of that was the exact title, but it was close enough.

In this particular magazine, there was the scariest story I had ever read. The idea of the story was that bigfoot wasn’t a creature that was normal, like a bear or a coyote. We had bear and coyote and mountain cats on Wilder Mountain. Those weren’t horribly scary.

According to this magazine, bigfoot was, instead, a phenomenon that was entirely alien in nature. It was controlled by either the critters that ran the UFOs, or it was a trans-dimensional being that exhibited supernatural powers. It didn’t matter which, since both of those types were dangerous and psychic. What would it do to me? Hell, I had no idea. But it was an evil alien psychic bigfoot. Isn’t that enough???

I went to a psychic’s house and knocked on the door. She asked, “Who’s there?” so I left.

I had a view of the edge of the forest, as it the ridge due north of my bedroom reached for the peak of the mesa to the back of my house. Of course, as a third grader, I’m certain that I saw a pair of glowing red eyes from ridge a quarter mile away. Now, of course, I’d have to put on my glasses to even see the ridge, but back then I was sure I saw them. I’m not sure how one can fall asleep while every muscle in the body is tense with fear and sweat was trickling everywhere, but I’m sure the covers over my head helped.

Thankfully, as I grew up, I came to the realization that UFOs were certainly not real. The UFO phenomenon (and bigfoot!) gradually came to take the same place in my mind as pro wrestling. They weren’t real, but they were certainly entertaining.

But I kept an eye to the sky. Just in case.

I’ve been watching the news stories, and seen the videos leaked from the Navy. Strange. But I really didn’t think too much more about it. The idea that UFOs were something more than sensor glitches or advanced US tech seemed unlikely.

Weirdly, I was listening to Dr. Michio Kaku’s radio show the other day. Sometimes (especially in the hottest weather) The Mrs. likes to listen to Fairbanks, Alaska radio, and Michio’s radio show is on Sunday afternoon.

Michio Kaku named his son “Physics” so he could be called the Father of Physics.

Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist that has a few bestsellers, but what’s most amusing is his radio show. The Mrs. and I pronounce his name Meee-chio, since he regularly talks about himself in the third person. I think he should be next in line to be King of England, since he’s so good at using the Royal We already. Regardless, Michio is amusing.

One thing he said in his radio show two weeks ago, though, got to me. I’ll paraphrase, but I think I’ve got most of the intent, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but I think that in the case of UFOs this has shifted. The evidence is so overwhelming that the phenomenon exists, and the burden now belongs to those who claim the phenomenon is normal to prove that.”

I was shocked. I’d listened to him off and on for years. Every other time, he’s mentioned aliens, the opposite has come out of his mouth. His case now?

It’s real until someone proves it isn’t.

How do we know aliens aren’t vegan? They haven’t contacted us to tell us.

I don’t know what’s going on. There are multiple explanations. Some of them are amazingly dark – several researchers into UFO phenomena have come to the conclusion that what’s going on is sinister, as in worse than psychic bigfeet. Far worse.

But if it’s something as boring as psychic bigfeet, hidden German technology from under Antarctica, oddly humanoid aliens, or even run-of-the-mill travelers from another dimension, this will still be remembered far into the future, much farther than anything that will come out of AOC’s silly mind or Chucky Schumer’s bloated ego.

So, which would be most compatible with Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement? My money is on psychic bigfeet. Sometimes the psychic bigfoot is confused with a sasquatch.

Yeti never complains.

The Best Post You’ll Read Today About Almost Anything

“You don’t know what cold is. I once survived an entire week trapped in a Swiss glacier eating nothing but frozen Neanderthal. To this day, I can’t stand the taste of early hominid.” – Futurama

So, after 232 ties in a row . . . Gung decided that “rock beats skull”.

Usually, I write about money and finance and the shenanigans going on in the world now. I thought I’d deviate from that formula for several reasons. First, I’d like to have some good news about the financial world, and that didn’t happen this week, unless Biden had a brief moment of lucidity and finally figured out that the sanctions are actually hurting us more than Russia. (Checks news.) Nope.

Second, on Monday I wrote about collective vengeance. It was, in modern Western Civilization, an anachronism that is rapidly returning. The post talked about how I had grown up in shell where collective punishment simply didn’t exist and that it was rapidly returning.

I’ll note that my youthful innocence on collective punishment didn’t extend forever, but the point of the post was that the Left fed on collective punishment – I might write more about that in the future, since (last time I checked) I still seem to have an infinite amount of words combinations left.

I am, however, very aware that collective punishment was at one time the norm. Reading in the Bible, when the wall of Jericho came down, not a single person was supposed to be left alive, so historically in a story we all know, collective punishment was a thing.

Why don’t the Amish complain when people make fun of them on the Internet? Amish: “What’s an Internet?”

I’ve written about things even farther back in history, and (perhaps) why people are the way they are based on tribe sizes in a theory that I think is entirely unique (read this because it’s awesome) until someone shows me that it was already written about the year I was born. I’m still irritated that Newton figured out F=ma when I was only six. Conversely, wouldn’t it be a hoot if an Internet humorist actually figured out why people are nuts?

Third, this post is really related to Monday’s post, and it shows this: collective punishment may be actively written into our DNA, and only during brief moments of history (as brought about by Western Civilization and its particular individualist elements) is it not the norm.

I’ll start this rather unusual post with a concept that many a familiar with: the Uncanny Valley.

The Uncanny Valley is that weird place that we get when something looks human, but isn’t. An example would be CGI that looks like a human, but there’s something in the CGI that makes us step back because we process the simple equation: it looks a lot like a human, but it’s not human.

Well, it’s nice that the spirit of Yoko lives on. Except this one takes out a monarchy that started in 1066.

Zombies are a perfect example. For me, that idea that something that is so close to human is propelled by an intelligence that is certainly not human is one of the scariest ideas.

Why? Why do things that inhabit the Uncanny Valley between human and observably not-human give us the creeps? The Uncanny Valley implies that at some point in human history, there was something that looked like us, and wasn’t us. It must have been a very, very big deal if tens of thousands of years later it still can inhabit our collective memory and produce a (general) revulsion and fear.

What was it that did that?

I’m sure they had a very complicated order at Starbucks®.

I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, it was the Neanderthals. This was spurred on by the book Them+Us by Danny Vendramini. He’s got a website here (LINK) and the image of the Neanderthal below is from his site, which he allows based on terms that seem to have disappeared, so, I’m thinking Fair Use covers it all.

I like the book. Spoiler, Them is the Neanderthal, and Us is, well, our ancestors.

He starts the book by attempting to reconstruct what a Neanderthal really looked like. For most of my life, what I’ve seen were the pictures of people who, with just a wee bit of barbering, you could toss into a suit and they’d be at home at the floor of the New York Stock Exchange®.

Vendramini thinks not. First, he thought that they might have been covered with hair. What’s his evidence? The first part of his evidence is that there is no evidence that they could make clothing of anything more than the most basic “throw an animal skin over your shoulders” type. So, how do you keep warm?

Hair. Hair is the norm for mammals in the world, except for people (sorry, Italians). So Danny (sorry, Vendramini is too many letters to type again and again) came to the logical conclusion that, like other primates, Neanderthals inhabiting Europe and the Near East would be quite hairy.

Pretty much no one argues that Neanderthal was about six times as strong as modern man, or even of the beta version of homo sapiens that existed at that time, so about a 431 times stronger than a typical soy-latte-based ambisexual® Leftist.

But Neanderthal wasn’t just strong, he was smart. Neanderthals made things, like spears. Like stone blades. Like stone axes. Hmm, I’m seeing a pattern here. I don’t see any mochachinos.

Based on the size of their eyes, Danny thinks they were huge. What needs huge eyes? Things that hunt in low light. So, Vendramini thinks that Neanderthals might have been low-light, nocturnal predators. What else would low-light nocturnal predators have? An amazing sense of smell, so there’s no reason to have a nose like ours – a nose like a pug.

And eyes? The most efficient eyes for low-light hunting are slit-pupil eyes – like a cat. The brow ridge? It shielded the eyes during the day – and the eyes were much higher than a normal human, like where our forehead is. So, huge eyes in the forehead with slit pupils. Not scary, right?

Okay, I’ve finally found something scarier than my ex-wife.

Oh, every bit of evidence says that Neanderthal ate meat, so he was a carnivore. But he also ate . . . Neanderthals. So, he was a cannibal. Eating puny humans? That’s pretty easy if you’ve eaten Neanderthal. Probably more tender, too.

Neanderthal lived in the forest. Oh the forest, my dear, is lovely, dark and deep . . . . One anthropologist described Neanderthal as this: wolves with knives. So imagine that there are wolves in your neighborhood that are at least six times stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger at his peak. And they are as smart as a human. And they have knives.

Think that might help you sleep at night?

So, our ancestors, say, 50,000 years ago were wonderfully happy, living in a world where they were the king. It was Eden-like. Garden-like. Hmm.

Anyway, one day they wander across a border and find? Neanderthals that want to eat them. Or, make babies with them. Yup, they could make babies with humans, and between 1-3% of your DNA comes from nocturnal, cannibal, predators, unless your DNA is entirely from Africa.

So, when a Neanderthal group of hunters found a human group, it was the equivalent of a college party: sex and food. I’m not sure what order makes it better.

This, of course, baked our noodles. It made it necessary for us to become smarter. Vendramini suggests that this was the stepping out of the Garden which required us to have the knowledge, skills and brainpower to fight the Neanderthal, to beat them, and to become much better.

Does one hate the stone that hones us? I think not. Note: my beard is better, but my abs need work.

It describes the Uncanny Valley in many respects. What are the myths of our monsters? Werewolves and vampires and cannibals and (Biblically) the Men of Renown (look it up). It also explains our instinctive fear of the dark, where the huge, strong, cannibal near-human that can smell you from two counties over might be hiding waiting to get frisky or to turn you into a snack.

But we fought back. The mark of a conquering civilization is the Y-chromosome, because, well, dudes give that part. As I read it, the Y-chromosome in humanity is, human. In the end, we won. But they changed us even as we eliminated them. It’s likely we did our own collective punishment and killed off all human males that looked too much like the enemy – too Neanderthal. So, yeah, collective punishment.

And this also provides an explanation for the Uncanny Valley, and why it is generally the source of the ultimate horror and fear that humanity feels. But we won.

There’s drinking, fighting, and death and drinking and fighting. I think this is an insurance company’s nightmare.

As Western Civilization fades, the barriers to collective punishment fade as well. So, sleep with one eye open, gripping your pillow tight . . .

And we’ll win again.

A.I. – The Most Dangerous Game

“Nuke it from orbit, that’s the only way to be sure.” – Aliens

When I go out to eat I always try to tip my waiter. That’s how I know that they have terrible balance when they are carrying one of those big round trays.

There was quite a bit of upset from the “I love science” side of the Left recently. What triggered them this time?

(Spins Wheel of Leftist Outrage)

Computers.

How did the toaster make them mad?

An Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) computing system designed to review x-rays was able to make correlations because, well, that’s what they programmed it to do. The correlations allowed the A.I. to be able to predict the self-reported race of the individual based solely on the x-rays with a 90% accuracy. You can look it up.

One writer actually used the phrase, “can perpetuate racial bias in health care” since the bias of the writer was that race is a social construct that had nothing to do with genetics and tens of thousands of years of separate development. Huh. Nope, none of that matters. A slogan written by a hippy is obviously more important.

What bothered the writers that I read is that they had no idea how the A.I. could do it. The researchers purposely degraded the resolution on the x-rays, and the A.I. could still make the prediction accurately.

This isn’t where it ends.

My Tesla’s A.I. wouldn’t let me in the car. It said, “upgrading driver”.

I wrote several years ago about an A.I. that could predict life or death based on an EKG (elektrokardiographie if you’re planning on invading Poland), or ECG – electrocardiogram. Some of the ECGs looked absolutely fine to human doctors they detected no abnormality, yet the A.I. was able to see something that accurately allowed it to predict the death of the patient. This was even when the actual doctors made of meat couldn’t see anything wrong with the ECG.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. did it.

The game “Go” – originated in China almost 2,500 years ago, when your mom was in high school. Google©’s AlphaGo Zero learned how to play Go by . . . playing itself. It was programmed with the rules and played games against itself for the first few days. After that?

It became unstoppable. It crushed an earlier version of itself in 100 straight matches. Then, when pitted against a human master, probably the best Go player on Earth? It played a game that is described as “alien” or “from the future.” The very best human Go players cannot even understand what AlphaGo Zero is even doing or why it makes the moves it does – it’s that far advanced over us.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. does it.

What happens when you win this game? The answer might shock you!

There are more examples, but I think I’ve proven my point. A.I. exists. A.I. is real. Is it right now equivalent to a general human intelligence? Nope. And it may never be exactly that, since it may never be exactly like us.

I’m fairly certain that most A.I. researchers have seen The Terminator, yet they keep advancing A.I. Why? I mean, besides that their name isn’t Sarah Connor?

The stakes are huge. What if you had an A.I. that could predict stock market behavior, even an hour in advance with 95% accuracy? This sort of prophet machine would become a profit machine. It would be worth billions. And what if you had an A.I. that could make dank memes as well as I do?

If these were sold on an infomercial you know they’d call it Screw It!

I think that one of the things that is not widely known is how very different that A.I. might be. Human emotions serve a purpose to allow society to function. What would A.I. value?

Would it have sentimentality or would it judge people based entirely on societal utility?
Would it make the judgment that entire categories of human society need not exist?
Would it have “voted” for Joe Biden, too?

Yeah, and weirdly as that potentially scary scenario of a super-smart intelligence that had no particular connection to the goals of humanity might be, that’s just the starter. Artificial Intelligence might also be the most dangerous trigger for an external existential threat to humanity.

What?

Well, assuming that time travel and the ability to cause a generalized cascading decay to the zero energy state (zero point energy) aren’t possible, the most dangerous thing that humanity could unleash on the planet is A.I. And, unlike time travel or a sober member of the Pelosi family, from everything I’ve seen, A.I. certainly is possible.

Lenin loved Hip Hop. Favorite artist? M.C. Hammer and Sickle.

While travel for humanity throughout the galaxy is a really, really hard problem due to time and energy, travel through the galaxy for an A.I. is easier. Don’t want to spend 25,000 years traveling to the next star system? Easy. Take the redeye and sleep on the way.

No habitable planets there in the star system? No problem. An A.I. doesn’t need oxygen and beaches and water. It can land on an asteroid and make copies of yourself. While the A.I. is replicating faster than a Kardashian that just let out its mating call (“I’m soooo drunk!”) it can 3-d print and then shoot copies of itself to the next five-star systems nearby.

And repeat.

Depending on the method used, essentially every star in the galaxy could be visited by an A.I. probe in a fairly quick timeframe. How quick? 500,000 years to 10,000,000 years, or roughly how old George Soros is. That’s quick, and essentially meaningless to a toaster or a George Foreman Grill®. And if I were an advanced alien civilization, that’s the thing I would be scared of – not a grill, but an advanced, very alien intelligence with unknown motives showing up in my solar system.

What’s the toughest thing about being vegan? Apparently, keeping it to yourself.

So, using the same principle, I could send my own (smart, but not A.I.) probes to hang out in nearly every solar system – waiting. If those probes saw signs of a possible A.I.? What would I program them to do?

Yup. You guessed it.

Nuke the civilization back to the Stone Age. It’s the only way to be sure.

So, as we worry about the problems in our civilization, remember – it could always be worse. We know that Kamala doesn’t have any intelligence – artificial or otherwise, so the alien probe will certainly leave her alone.