Bonus Tab-Clearing Post: The Fall of the USSR in Two Podcasts

Kind of lightweight, but still a good survey of the late 80s into the early 90s over at Stuff You Should Know.  About an hour for each segment.

• Part 1
• Part 2

Bonus Tab-Clearing Post: Doomsday Ain't What It Used To Be

Over at JMG's weekly essay blog: Economics: The Y2K Fallacy Revisited

Or, why bad times won't necessarily be all that bad.  Just keep your head out of the sand, out of the gloomy clouds, and on straight.  Push come to shove, we still have plenty of paper how-to books in libraries.

Bonus Tab-Clearing Post: Physics and AI

Article over at Quanta.  Impossible to describe, go read the whole thing.

And yes, Demers' take is pretty close to mine too.

Bookmarked Here for Future Use

Patrick Winston on How to Speak.  One hour at youtube.

If you haven't seen it already, probably worth your hour.

Book Mention: Take Me to Your Leader

Continuing this week's alien theme, I finally finished reading through Neal deGrasse Tyson's latest book, Take Me to Your Leader last night.  It's a fun little romp through all of the pop culture, credible sworn testimony, conspiracy theories, and blurry pictures of the last eighty or so years, along with reasonable musings on the Fermi Paradox, what forms extraterrestrial life (and their perceptions and senses) might take, etc. etc.  With all that, we are left with one stark, undeniable observation:

There is not one whit of actual evidence of alien visitation.  No artifacts, no hard data, and, despite upwards of seven billion digital cameras on this planet, no unambiguous pictures.

With that uncomfortable truth in mind, the author plows forward with his usual good-natured skeptical, slightly sarcastic way, considering all sides of the issues and philosophical conundrums.  It is very clear that he's open to any evidence, even an outright personal abduction.  However, to date, there just isn't any there there, and he's quick to gently point this out.

Recommended, but only if you generally like this sort of thing.

Finally, if you do manage to get yourself abducted, please take Seth Shostak's advice and pocket an alien artifact on your way out the door/hatch/portal/whatever.  We've all had more than enough of heartfelt testimony on these matters.  It's time for a metamaterial multitool, or whatever else they're using these days.  Plonk it down on the table in front of skeptics, say a hearty "nyeh-nyeh-nyeh," donate it to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, write a bestseller, and enjoy the good life.

Call Went to Voicemail

This week's episode of Big Picture Science is titled Calling All Aliens, which is naturally enough, about recent SETI and METI efforts.  By chance, I was asked by a friend earlier this week about my opinion on the general topic.  The three thoughts I had on the matter were:

1. 
   Imagine our galaxy as a pizza – a really big pizza – one meter across and one centimeter thick.  Now imagine a bubble of space radiating out from Earth in this pizza-galaxy.  A bubble big enough for our first powerful radio signals to have reached another civilization, and for them to have sent a reply back.  At the one meter pizza scale, that bubble would be about the size of a sesame seed.  Would we really expect to have reached anyone in such a small sample?
2. More quantitatively, take a current credible guesstimate at Drake's Number – about 86,400 contactable civilizations in our galaxy.  Seems a little high in comparison with numbers I've previously seen, but let's roll with it.  Given the speed of light, expect about a 50-50 chance of that bubble in Item 1 to encompass another civilization in about 330 years.  What's more, these Drake Equation results are all over the place, and numbers as low as 100 are reasonable.  That puts the expected time to a 50-50 chance of contact out around 3200 years.  Frankly,* it's just too soon to reasonably expect any return replies.
3. However, we should still keep listening, especially given the continuing and amazing increases in signal processing power.  Don't let those two-way contact numbers in the previous item discourage you.  Unlikely as it seems, a random alien signal could come crashing in any given day – and we'd best be listening.
4. Finally, if aliens ever do find us, they'll probably view us about the same way we view the Sentinelese (see inset picture): present, but violent and not worth contacting.  Best left alone.

On that note, time for a bike ride.  Anyway, the above-linked podcast is well worth an hour's listen, and one of the more noteworthy recent episodes  at Big Picture Science.

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*10 Internet Points if you caught that one.

81 Years Ago Today, the Future Began

Article on the bombing of Hiroshima at This Day in Aviation.  Go read the whole thing.  Then read the comments, especially this one:

One of the things that most irritated my dad about WW2. People assume the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a sneak attack. Far from the truth he would tell you if he were still with us. Around this time every year, as we were growing up, he would repeat his bit of history. He was a sailor aboard the aircraft carrier YORKTOWN. For a solid two weeks before the atom bomb was dropped he and his shipmates loaded the small bombers launched off his carrier’s deck with leaflets. Not bombs, but leaflets written in Japanese, warning of the imminent and total destruction of their city. That was one point he would god damn anyone for if you disagreed. He and his comrades in arms spent two weeks sweating their guts out giving Hiroshima a chance we didn’t get at Pearl Harbor.

Onward with matters at hand.  The past is settled.  We have our own times, our own challenges.

Quotes of the Day

I'm in the middle of planning out a radio tower for the new Franklin County EOC, and two quotes came to mind that are worth mentioning here.  The first is from the very best source, author unknown:

Always and Everywhere,

Mission drives Hardware

I'd like to tattoo this on some people's foreheads.  Reversed of course, so that they could just look in a mirror as needed.

The second of course is from Robert A. Heinlein:

What are the facts?  Again and again and again – what are the facts?  Shun wishful thinking ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what  the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places?  You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue.  Get the facts!

RAH may be an even more unassailable source of quotations than either Mark Twain or Winston Churchill.  Probably not the two combined, however.

Thus ends my smartassery for the afternoon.  Time to get down to some Egli calculations in order to nail down just how high this antenna has to be.  Because "as high as we have budget to build!" holds no water whatsoever with me, and in fact actively ticks me off a good bit.

About that Cyberpunk Dystopia You Ordered

Oh, it's here alright, but as the old saw goes, it's just not evenly distributed.  Here's a long-ish essay on the matter [tldr below], with respect to a semi-functional AI on-the-fly cheatsheet generator, cluely (no, I won't link that), and the culture that brought it into existence.

Personally, I am tired of seeing these "hyper-agentic" boy-childs thrashing about for a few years, leaving Chesterton's fence ajar at every turn, before finally burning out and departing stage left for Bora Bora and an early death at the hands of their local coke dealers.  This is what, three generations? of them I've seen come and go.  Anyway, it's sort of amusing to watch one more cycle of crash and burn.  Just don't take my cash with you via some sort of taxation for a national need.

Meanwhile, using century-old shortwave technology, Iran is either waking sleeper cells worldwide or pulling a head-fake freak-out by broadcasting seemingly random strings of numbers.  Also, they're making the Straits of Hormuz unusable via some pretty nasty quarter-century old tech about which I have absolutely no comment.

Anyway, here's the tldr you were promised.  It's AI-generated of course.  What, you didn't expect me to read through and summarize all of that lit-school rambling, did you?  But you probably ought to read the entire thing when you get a chance, if only for the amusing parts about what Scott Alexander is up to these days.

Sam Kriss's essay "Child's Play" in the March 2026 issue of Harper's Magazine is a sharp, satirical critique of Silicon Valley's latest wave of AI startups and their young founders, focusing on Cluely—a glitchy, controversial AI interface tool co-founded by Chungin “Roy” Lee (a Columbia dropout who gained fame by cheating on job interviews with AI and posting the videos online). Kriss portrays Roy and similar "highly agentic" figures—like teenage founder Eric Zhu with his absurd ventures—as emblematic of a shift in tech culture, where relentless action, hustle, and "agency" (a bulldozer-like drive to dominate and leverage AI) now trump traditional intelligence, creativity, or expertise, since AI itself handles thinking and problem-solving.

The piece weaves observations of San Francisco's surreal atmosphere—homeless people chanting, bizarre viral ads, Waymo cars, fratty startup offices stocked with protein bars and toys—with anecdotes about Cluely's hype-driven rise (including a blind-date ad using AI scripts), rationalist influencers like Scott Alexander warning of AI's risks or absurdities, and opportunistic grifters. Kriss argues this heralds a dystopian bifurcation: a small overclass of hyper-agentic individuals using AI for unchecked power and wealth, while most people become a "permanent underclass" rendered obsolete and mindless. The tone blends dark humor at the absurdity (e.g., sperm-racing apps) with foreboding about eroded human thought, purpose, relationships, and creativity in an AI-saturated, capitalism-fueled void, where even the founders seem driven by childish hungers for control rather than meaningful innovation.

Yeah, GTFO my lawn while you're at it, but stay tuned because I have a rant about e-bikes queued up for later this week.

On the State of Particle Physics

Quanta online asks Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard?

It's a real quandary, and the author explores all corners of the problem in an even-handed manner.  TLDR: On one hand, (a) the Higgs boson has been found and all the slots in the Standard Model's chart have been nicely filled, (b) the super-symmetric particles that were sort-of predicted at LHC energies simply weren't found, and (c) there are no firm theoretical predictions that we'll actually find anything else of interest at higher energies.  On the second hand, damn the torpedos, build the next generation accelerator and go look at what's out there at higher energies, because you can't know until you look.  On the third hand (see, I've just finished re-reading Project Hail Mary and one of the main characters has five hands; I could keep this up for a little while longer), that $22 billion has to come from somewhere, and we all know without even guessing that that money's going to come out of the rest of science.  Do we shut down other more promising programs just to go have a look "because you never know"?

Feel free to comment, but only after you've read the above-linked article, and then read Lost in Math for a chaser.

Finally this popped up yesterday as well (coincidence?  probably not):

Nasty, but also funny and on the nose.

Holman on Deep Tech – Pretty Wild Stuff

Back in September Jim Rutt posted an interview with Pablos Holman on the topic – and his new book – on what he terms deep tech.  Holman's central thesis is that we've gone too far down the software road, and while it's been a good road, we need to concentrate more on hardware and, you know, actually building cool stuff.  Autonomous shipping, mosquito-zapping lasers, safe nuclear reactors, high-speed rail, the list goes on.

And he does have a valid point.  In a 100 trillion dollar world economy, less than 5% is in the computer tech sector.  However it somehow vacuums up the lion's share of talent, venture capital, and press.  [Side note: I think a lot of reason tech has thrived over the last half-century is that it's largely immune to regulation and ignored by regulators.  Try to build a new computer operating system and The Man don't care; try to build a new type of trebuchet or nuclear reactor or choo-choo train and The Man will definitely inquire.  Close rant & back to the subject at hand.]

Some parts of both the interview and book come off as eccentric and out of touch with real developments in the real world these past few decades.  Take shipping for example.  Yes, cargo ships are still largely operated by humans.  However the number of crew required to run a ship is a fraction of what it was 75 years ago.  More importantly, containerized shipping has radically slashed port handling costs.  Overall cargo shipping costs have dropped by something like 90% since 1950.  Yes, there are always optimizations remaining, but come on, apply a generalized version of Amdhal's Law to the situation and give the industry another decade to catch its breath.  Dropping the remaining crew of ten to just one is insignificant when compared to what has just happened.

On the other hand, the guy was there at the start of Blue Origin, which just racked up a major success.  Furthermore, rocket boosters dropping out of the sky and landing on robotic barges has become something of an everyday occurrence.  Clearly it pays to think big, and especially in terms of making a profit.

Well, listen to the podcast interview (link above), read the guy's book, flip through the online footnotes for the book, then make up your own mind.  My take here is that, despite some weird twists and turns, the guy's onto something.

Sentience, Self-Awareness, and All That

Last month I listened to Nicholas Humphrey's interview on the Jim Rutt Podcast, and it was a real eye-opener.  So much so that I ran out and got a copy of Humphrey's book Sentience, read it, then listened to the podcast episode again.

Initially what captured my interest was the phenomenon of blindsight, where someone has lost the conscious ability to see due to brain damage, yet retains some vestige of vision at an unconscious level.  Here's a short video clip of a test subject, sans visual cortex due to stroke or injury, successfully navigating down an obstacle-filled hallway.  After such tests subjects often insist that they simply walked down the hall, having no conscious memory of dodging around objects.

This and other similar observations have led Humphrey to surmise that humans along several other candidate species have the capacity for conscious sensation layered onto a more primitive unconscious perception.  This follows naturally into some ideas about the meaning of self, others, and what is commonly termed theory of mind.  I won't further belabor the ideas, but simply refer you to the above-linked podcast for a much better brief introduction.

BTW & because someone's gonna ask: LLMs, conscious or not?  No, none, not at all.  Barely touched on, not even under consideration here.

One rough patch in this material is the lack of a brief glossary.  Humphrey and Rutt bemoan in the podcast how most conferences on these topics spend the first half simply trying to define the terms they're using.   Rutt mentions that he's now on the board of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness; go dig around at that site, maybe you'll find something glossary-ish.  Or perhaps keep a notepad at hand while reading in order to assemble a DIY glossary.  When I get around to a re-read, I'll do just that.

Anyway, they're making good progress, getting much farther than the old Turing Test, Chinese Room scenario, and those sorts of things.  Interesting stuff.  I won't even begin to publicly speculate if or how this bears on numerous observer-centric problems in physics, such as the measurement problem.  However, I wouldn't be surprised if Humphrey's lines of research ultimately converge there as well.

How Generative AI Works

With so much gobbledygook and technobabble being thrown around regarding generative AI, it is refreshing to have someone who knows what the hell he's talking about give a brief explanation on how this stuff actually works.  Here's such a talk by William Press, who you may recognize as the lead co-author of Numerical Recipes:

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/how-does-generative-ai-actually-work-a-quick-semitechnical-introduction-to-large-language-models/257932856#1

Fourteen pages total, though not counting the title and that-is-all slides, it drops to eleven.  What's more, the real meat is all on slides 6 & 8, though you'll want to read through the other nine.  I mean, we're talking what, a half-hour tops?  Then you'll be a freekin' genius in comparison to most of the babbleheads out there in the j-school and VC worlds going on about this stuff.

Life is Short and Time is Tight. Read the Abstracts.

Over at Books, Bikes, & Boomsticks Tam writes on the problems associated with reading a summary.  Here, it's short, go read the whole thing: Soulless Drones

<insert schmaltzy interlude music here>

OK, we're all back.  For great art, sure, I'll agree that one has to read / listen / watch the entire piece as presented.  However, if you just want to get caught up on the n movies you missed in the Avengers movie series over the past m summers so that you can go to an afternoon matinee and enjoy it with friends – without having to spend a week of catch-up in front of the tube – nah, go ahead and skip to the Wikipedia plot summaries.  You won't have missed much anyway.  Long-series TV shows that start off promising but take a dip in the second year?  Sure, skip ahead with the summaries and see if the third year picks up to determine if it's worth your time to work through the series.  That politics-tainted speculative fiction (i.e., really bad near-future sci-fi) potboiler that everyone's talking about?  Definitely.  You'll want to know a little about what Cousin Hal or Aunt Margaret are going on about at the next family gathering, but you probably don't want to take that 500 page slog.  Again, when it comes to real art don't take any shortcuts, but when it comes to lesser works, go for the bottom line and get on with life.

Taking this a step further, who doesn't cull through the titles, then skim through the half-dozen abstracts, then really read only one or two papers each month in their favorite journals?  There just isn't time enough to keep up in a field any other way.  

Good Basic Advice

Over at The Bugscuffle Gazette, Ian (aka Lawdog) delivers a brief and useful treatise on socio-political epistemology titled Why do you still listen?  Go read the whole thing, it'll take about two minutes.  

While the author focuses on the night terrors of right-leaning readers, this advice applies to all poles of the political spectrum.  From which, I must add, I've heard a constant keening about 'teh end of democracy!!' this and 'zomg book bans!!' that for the last decade or more.

We all have friends and relations who are so afflicted (again, I stress of all persuasions), so recommend this essay to them.

Also, the AI-generated art is pretty damn awesome.  Worth the click-through for that alone.

How the Higgs Field Causes Mass – sort of

Article at Quanta.

Well, it's better than the soup, molasses, or duck tape fairytales.

Mathematical Groups Explained – sort of

Over at Quanta.

Mathematicians are like cats: they do arcane, often inexplicable things, that ultimately turn out to have some meaning or utility.  But what that might be is frequently not intuitively obvious without some study.

The Value of Education vs. Training

Illustrated well over at yesterday's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal web comic.

The Keys

But you're probably not going to like 'em all that much.  Behold:

From SMBC sometime last week.  Link here.  Be sure to click through for the mouse-over & big red button.

Two Methods, Related Result

Previous post & discussion: New paper: Life could be older than Earth itself (2013)

New paper: The possibility of panspermia in the deep cosmos by means of planetary dust grains (arXive pre-print, 2024)

Accompanying popular article: Life Spreads Across Space on Tiny Invisible Particles, Study Suggests (Science Alert)

The actual paper, at only four pages, is quite short.  The Science Alert article may be more to your taste however if you don't have a math-heavy background.  I'll suggest skimming both.

Two completely different approaches, and not exactly looking at the same question either, have come to complementary results nonetheless.  It would not surprise me at all if biosignatures are found in nearby solar systems over the next decade or two.  It may well turn out that life finds a way, and in a most unexpected way.