AI and Mount Vesuvius

If you're one of those skeptics that doesn't see a bright future for Artificial Intelligence the following will change your mind.

Remember back in 79 CE, 1946 years ago when Mount Vesuvius blew its top and incinerated Pompeii, Herculaneum and large parts of the local Roman countryside? Ever since, interested parties have been digging through the ash looking for insight on the life of the Roman elites that lived in that unlucky neighborhood. Many scrolls have been found that are certain to contain interesting information of one sort or another but the charred rolls of papyrus couldn't be opened without destroying them. Now sophisticated X-rays and AI have been put to use and darned if some words haven't been made visible in some way. It's good to know that AI has become truly useful in important work.

Investigators feel that at least one of the scrolls contains work by the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Maybe Romans cherished the ideas of happy-go-lucky Epicurus enough to have scrolls of his stuff piled up in the living room instead of the Roman counterpart of Zippy the Pinhead or maybe not. But perhaps their sense of humor wasn't quite as developed as their descendants. 

 italymagazine.com  

 

Vannevar Bush

You might wonder who Vannevar Bush was and why there might be any interest in him.

  

full-stop.net

People have a tendency to believe that the advance of civilization from naked nut gatherers to designers of AI data centers was a sort of inevitable path, a kind of evolution. Aspects of that may well have been but in the recent past almost all of the changes and developments in society are the product of decisions made by influential individuals. Bush was one of the most influential.

 In Science, The Endless Frontier, his 1945 report to the president of the United States, Bush called for an expansion of government support for science, and he pressed for the creation of the National Science Foundation.

Some quotes from his report:

If the colleges, universities and research institutes are to meet the rapidly increasing demands of industry and Government for new scientific knowledge, their basic research should be strengthened by the use of public funds.

A permanent Science Advisory Board should be created to consult with these scientific bureaus and to advise the executive and legislative branches of Government as to the policies and budgets of Government agencies engaged in scientific research.

The time has come, however, for a careful evaluation of the questions raised by direct Federal aid to private institutions. Our universities clearly stand in need of increased financial support if they are to strengthen their basic contributions to the scientific life of the Nation. Financial aid may also be required to speed up the transition between basic discoveries in university laboratories and their practical industrial applications. The committee has therefore felt compelled to examine from the standpoint of public policy the question: Is a  substantial increase in Federal financial aid to scientific research in educational and other nonprofit research institutions necessary and desirable?

The Bush recommendations were adopted. Billions of dollars have been awarded, especially to the members of the American Association of Universities, whose purpose is to secure federal funding for their members. They have been hugely successful at this. It's doubtful that Bush would have been able to predict that a prostrate China, a conquered colony of Imperial Japan, would, less than 80 years later, be considered a threat to the US and its ally Japan. But he was aware that there would be some threat from somewhere. 

"Science, The Endless Frontier" seems now to be a strange name for the report. While there will probably be research into biological mysteries for many years to come, most of the issues in chemistry and physics are well under control. The efforts have turned to the trivial, translating scrolls damaged by volcanic eruptions, authenticating the artists of paintings, intercepting the light from stars millions of light years away. Keeping up with the Chinese in the artificial intelligence arena is part of that nonsense. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

$800 Milliion Haircut For Johns Hopkins

Johns Hopkins, the celebrated Baltimore university and research institute and member of the American Association of Universities, has had revoked $800 million in grants from the beleaguered USAID. Its response has been to lay off 247 employees in the US and 1,945 in the 44 other countries where USAID funds finance their operations. That means that the employees shown the door were making an average of $365,000 annually.

Previously, USAID grants to Columbia University, also a member of the Association of American Universities, totaling  $400 million have been clawed back, ostensibly as punishment for the school allowing students to riot over Israeli activity against Hamas in Gaza. 

In 2023 Johns Hopkins spent $3,801,585 on research and development activities, the most of any university in the country by a considerable margin. The total spent on R & D by American universities was $108,841,148. 

Statements made by the AAU:

 The Coalition for National Science Funding (CNSF) has written to Appropriation Committee members requesting that the National Science Foundation (NSF) receive at least $9.9 billion in funding for Fiscal Year (FY) 2026. This amount would restore NSF's funding to its FY 2023 level.

 The Coalition for Aerospace and Science (CAS) requests Congress appropriate at least $27.18 billion for NASA in fiscal Year 2026, a vital increase to maintain development of ongoing missions while initiating work on new groundbreaking endeavors.

 AAU has signed a letter from the Energy Sciences Coalition (ESC) recommending that Congress allocate $9.5 billion for the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science in FY 2026 to maintain U.S. competitiveness.

Since the general population of the US is fairly well fed, clothed and out of the rain, driving somewhat reliable automobiles and endlessly entertained, these funds aren't marked for improvement of their lot. They are being used in a strange competition with "China", whoever that is:

 "Even a temporary stoppage of critical scientific research is a self-defeating, unforced error. On the very same day that headlines announced a breakthrough indicating that China may have, at very least, caught up to the U.S. in some aspects of artificial intelligence, the federal government put on hold critical ongoing work to make U.S. scientific and technological advances. If you are racing neck-and-neck, stepping off the track for any amount of time is a gift to your competitors." AAU President Barbara Snyder, January 28, 2025.

Sun Cable Fiasco

                              Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest

 

                               Mike Cannon-Brookes 

These two Australian billionaires are the men behind the Sun Cable project meant to suck up the plentiful solar  energy available in Northern Australia, convert it into electricity, push it along to Darwin from where it would move farther west and then travel by the longest undersea electrical cable ever to Singapore, 4200 km and about $30 billion away.  Big news when it was announced, it's disappeared from the top of the business page.

This proposed enterprise seems to resemble a brain-storming session by a couple of slightly inebriated jokers at a barbecue. But their intention is to remain billionaires so unless they can get their history of expertise in financial success to attract significant investment from others it won't happen. Such seems to be the case. 

The solar farm's electricity could be sent to southern Australia but that won't require anything other than typical transmission lines so a smaller project could still result.

This is just more evidence of the decline in financial interest in "renewable" energy. While the climate anxious remain committed to eliminating atmospheric CO2 those who can afford to engage in the Quixotic task, both business and government, are becoming less interested.   

Religious Tradition

The American today lives in an age of technology in which very few people farm--and even those few farms are mechanized--but he still observes a religious calendar that is a carryover of the annual changes in agricultural activities in the Mediterranean world. Americans who have inherited the religious traditions of the Christians of the eastern Mediterranean do not find it strange that a messiah should be born at the time of the winter solstice, when the sun is farthest away from the earth and is about to return. Nor do they find it strange that in the spring, when Nature is renewed in the Near East, the Hebrews should have set out from Egypt to found a new nation and the messiah should be resurrected. 

 

Farb, Peter, Man's Rise To Civilization As Shown By The Indians Of North America From Primeval Times To The Coming Of The Industrial State, E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc. New York, 1968.  

CO2 Sequestration Unknowns

 An article in the "Undark" website talks about some of the unknowns in carbon sequestration. The big question is what are the possibilities of the liquid CO2 escaping the designated area thousands of feet below the surface and contaminating lower and intervening aquifers? Since this process has never been done before, any answer is conjecture rather than science.

The only way sequestration will take place is to harvest federal subsidies and tax breaks. It won't be a feature of the free market, if such a thing even exists. The sequestration process is itself only an addition to a suspect ethanol industry that relies on government regulation of motor fuel, an unproven theory on CO2 climate change advanced by neo-Whig entrepreneurs and environmental innocents, distorted science promoted by compromised academia, daily apocalyptic media projections and battalions of government employees with an economic stake in the matter. In fact, the process of planting corn that might end in driving CO2 deep into the earth is financed in its entirety by the general population through government mandates and then taxes. Its difficult to imagine a more extensive con game unless one takes into account war and its preparation.

 

arinspiredpencil.com 

How a CO2 molecule would appear to you if you were really small.    

Swedish Battery Maker Gives Up

Sweden's  Northvolt, already bankrupt in the US, will go out of business and its assets sold in its home country. The most obvious competitor of Chinese manufacturers of EV batteries, its failure is a huge negative in a European elitist dream of carbon-free transportation. 

 etn.news

Millions of dollars in government subsidies will have evaporated with its demise, including losses to Goldman Sachs and Volkswagen.

Its optimistic blurb on its still present website says this: 

 " The world is turning its back on fossil fuels. With the change comes new opportunities and new demands for industry. Together, let's build a cleaner world."

According to Apollo News the German connection involved this:

Northvolt was originally supposed to build its own factory in Schleswig-Holstein. The company received subsidies totaling €700 million for this. Habeck also publicly and enthusiastically supported the project. "The industrial strategy is working," the Green Party politician praised the construction of the factory on NDR at the time . Habeck and Schleswig-Holstein's Minister President Daniel Günther even attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the factory.

 

 

Weeding Out Chinese EVs

In the twentieth century an amazing number of automobile marques in the US foundered and disappeared forever. The extinctions continue. There are no more Hudson Hornets, Studebakers, Plymouths, De Sotos, La Salles, Cords and scores of others.

In the much-feared Chinese EV industry that once included 400 manufacturers only 40 survive to this day and many of them won't last long either. The number is less in the already consolidated West.

 

autoreporting.com 

The Chinese car business can't escape the capitalist marketplace where the efficient survive and the rest perish. Replacing the internal combustion automobile, with its already well-developed infrastructure, is an even bigger challenge than simply building a better car. 

Lightning Strikes Wind Turbine

A non-operating Vineyard wind turbine off Nantucket, MA was further compromised by a lightning strike on February 27 according to the Coast Guard. Initially damaged during testing on July 13, 2024 the turbine has sat idle since. Scheduled for repair in May, it means that the unit will have been off-line for ten months in the most favorable circumstances.

 wired.com

While wind turbines are equipped with grounding systems to protect them from lightning strikes, federal authorities say that lightning is still a major cause of turbine damage.

 

Larry Fink Running The Panama Canal

Larry Fink and his Black Rock private equity conglomerate will take over not just the Panama Canal but also over 43 ports in 23 countries, including Mexico, the Netherlands, Egypt, Australia, Pakistan and elsewhere.

The deal was made between Hong Kong based CK Hutchison Holding and Black Rock for $22.8 billion. The transaction was billed as protection of US interests from the godless Asian Commies. On the other hand, who is going to protect Americans from Black Rock? Are their interests one hundred percent aligned with the US man on le cul de sac?  And, if this was a deal meant to protect the Yankees, where did the money come from? Could some of it be from the US Treasury?

Perhaps there's no need to worry. Fink can hire people that actually know something about running ports or even leave the current lowlies in place. Most of us don't care how ships move from place to place anyway until one of them wrecks an interstate bridge.   

The Autopen

 

An issue has appeared in the national press after the

 Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project

 discovered that many of the papers that needed the signature

 of the ex-president had been made with an autopen. The auto

pen is a device that’s meant to imitate the signature of an

 individual on important documents. It’s needed because

 important elected officials, bureaucrats and management

 figures just don’t have the time to graphically approve them.

 A machine does it instead.

In the case of a particular ex-president it seems that he may

 not have had the mental capacity to understand the issues

 that his signature was meant to approve. It’s suspected that

 the autopen was used by those surrounding him with their

 own ideas.

An on-line publication by the American Association of Notaries

 illustrates the problems that can arise in such a situation and

 how they are handled professionally. This is not to say that a

 similar process wasn’t followed in the case of the signatures

 by the ex-president. He was no doubt surrounded by

 attorneys giving him advice. At the same time, the general 

public should be aware that the man with the nuclear football

 is incapable, for one reason or another, of approving or 

initiating government policy and action.

While there will be many who say, “It’s just the way things are

 done now”. there will be many others that will consider the

 process fraudulent, further dividing the country pretty much

 along the same lines as at present. The auto pen should be

 forbidden in any part of government.

 

damilic.com

Not Good News For Carbon Dioxide Pipelines

Summit Carbon Solution's plans for an $8.9 billion, 2,500-mile  pipeline gathering the CO2 generated by 50 some ethanol plants in the midwest ran into some problems today. South Dakota governor Larry Rhoden signed legislation that forbids the use of eminent domain specifically for liquid carbon dioxide pipelines. The C02, ostensibly the cause of the existential climate change now destroying the planet, is supposed to be captured at the ethanol plants, liquified, pumped through the as yet imaginary pipelines to a location northwest of Bismarck, ND and injected into the ground where it will remain forever unless it's needed for fracking oil wells or making dry ice for vacationing fishermen. Well, there's also the small matter of federal subsidies and transferable tax credits, too. The project wouldn't be considered for a moment if it had to operate as a genuine business.

 

governorsbiofuelscoalition.com 

Could a project of this size actually be built for about $9 billion? That seems to be just one of the doubtful aspects of this whole affair. In fact, the South Dakota action could be the deciding factor in its inevitable failure. While Summit Carbon Solutions has little, if any, developed infrastructure of their own in place, some one must be prepared to come up with $9 billion+ to finance the project, with inflation increasing the cost daily. Funds of that amount aren't just sitting around waiting for the traffic light to change. Those who have them want them invested in productive, profitable enterprises. The time line for the operation is a negative as well. It would be years before a freezing drop of liquid CO2 could be pumped into the North Dakota prairie. Even if the Summit scam had been approved in some way it likely couldn't find the financing in an increasingly skeptical venture capital environment. The big money guys have moved on to AI data centers.     

Transgender Girls

The Minnesota Star-Tribune has published a news article describing the failure of a state house bill to prohibit boys from competing in athletic events restricted to girls. Rather than use the term "boys" in the article, males that wish to compete against girls are referred to as "transgender girls". 

There's actually a considerable amount of confusion in the very concept of transgender theory. While there have probably always been men who wished to be seen as women, no surgical procedures had been developed to disguise their gender. By dressing as women they became, by definition, transvestites. Transvestites dress like women in order to obtain sex from men who prefer sex with men dressed like women. They are, cross dressers, a sub-species of the homosexual genera. 

While pseudoscience has come up with theories to justify males competing in female events, altered testosterone levels, for instance, none of this makes any sense in the competitive sports world. Males have an advantage over females in physical sports even if they are called "transgender girls". Nothing can change that. Their gender is determined by their chromosomes and DNA. The only difference between a male and a "transgender girl" is in the gray matter of the latter.

We don't hear much about the motivation of men pretending to be girls entering female athletic events. The justification seems to be that having been losers as men they have more opportunities for victory as "transgender girls". Maybe there's a connection between this and a culture where "winning" is the most important thing. An Olympic gold medalist is famous for the rest of their life and beyond, number four in the event is unmentioned even though their scores or times were nearly identical. The economic struggle for individual supremacy has filtered down to the lowest levels of the capitalist, corporate, bureaucratic, consumer society. So men will pretend to be women in order to stand in the spotlight, if only for a moment.

Ultimately, it's never mentioned that even a male surgically altered to resemble a female, will never experience something that only a female can, menopause.

Once again, we can thank academia and its affiliate pseudoscience for taking a stand on culture. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5, 2015,  there has been a change in the diagnosis for transpeople of all ages from Gender Identity Disorder (GID) to Gender Dysphoria (GD), in part to better indicate the distress that transpeople may experience when their gender identity feels incongruent.      

The hullabaloo over boys in girls' sports is a weird and rare distraction that will hopefully go away soon so we can worry about the negatives experienced by "transgender girls" due to climate change.

Timeline of US Immigration