So this bloke, ironically surnamed Greentree, owns the 50,000ha Boolcarrol Station near Narrabri, NSW. It’s worth say north of $350m.

Sometime back he cleared 1,000ha (2% of his land) to make way for an airfield, cattle yards, grain silos, etc. All the stuff needed to run the property as the business that it is.

Now he’s been fined $1m for unlawful land clearing because…

“The court had heard evidence that nine threatened species were “highly likely” to have been present prior to clearing – including the pale-headed snake, south-eastern glossy black-cockatoo, spotted harrier, brown treecreeper, painted honeyeater, grey-crowned babbler, hooded robin, diamond firetail and yellow-bellied sheathtail-bat.

There was further evidence that 17 threatened species were “moderately likely” to have been present prior to the clearing, including the stripe-faced dunnart, koala, little pied bat and barking owl.”

Greentree failed to demonstrate any remorse in court and was heavily penalised accordingly.

This is the courts telling us how we have to think, no? I wasn’t aware that we were obliged to agree with all the laws.

They can tell you what you can and can’t do (usually it’s can’t do). And by proxy this is moderately likely evidence that they are also telling us what we can and can’t think.

I’m against.

Aka the Vivian English Dictionary

Eco-friendly means you got it from your grandmother.

Galvanised means it’s really strong.

Viv uses this new unit of distance, known as the centipede.

As in “this sixth grader was just two centipedes away from me”.

I’m guessing there’s 10 millipedes to the centipede. Viv says there’s 152.

I decided to record my bearish attitude to quantum computing.

The technical limitations are breath-taking:

The algorithm must fit into a waveform function

The algorithm must be reversible

The final state of the Qubits, the results, are read in binary form, so the correct answer can only be established by running the algorithm up to millions of times in order to establish the most likely answer (the correct answer) from the distribution of individual results. Really!

There are many, many quantum gates and they are all weird matrix multiplier functions. You can in principle use a subset of these to solve any mathematical problem, but only in very rare cases will you see theoretical supremacy over digital computing, and that’s before you factor in that you have to run the same algo a million times.

Controlling Qubits means putting energy into them, which upsets their state. Hence real Qubits are extremely error prone. The laws of thermodynamics implies this may be an intractable problem.

“Constitution of Queensland 2001

An Act to consolidate particular laws relating to the Constitution of the State of Queensland

Preamble

The people of Queensland, free and equal citizens of Australia-

(a) intend through this Constitution to foster the peace, welfare and good government of Queensland; and

(b) adopt the principle of the sovereignty of the people, under the rule of law, and the system of representative and responsible government, prescribed by this Constitution; and

(c) honour the Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the First Australians, whose lands, winds and waters we all now share; and pay tribute to their unique values, and their ancient and enduring cultures, which deepen and enrich the life of our community; and

(d) determine to protect our unique environment; and

(e) acknowledge the achievements of our forebears, coming from many backgrounds, who together faced and overcame adversity and injustice, and whose efforts bequeathed to us, and future generations, a realistic opportunity to strive for social harmony; and

(f) resolve, in this the 150th anniversary year of the establishment of Queensland, to nurture our inheritance, and build a society based on democracy, freedom and peace.”

But don’t worry, they corrected themselves on the next page…

“Section 3A. Effect of preamble. The Parliament does not in the preamble— (a) create in any person any legal right or give rise to any civil cause of action; or (b) affect in any way the interpretation of this Act or of any other law in force in Queensland.”

After that the whole thing just focuses on the mechanisms of government and the salaries of MPs and judges, etc. The people don’t get a look in, apart from the preamble, which is immediately repealed a page later.

I love our politicians. So unself-consciously self-serving.

But COVID shows us that the states are effectively more powerful than the feds, and having our own state constitution is an opportunity to right all the ills in our system. That is fix it at the state level.

My take on it:

1. Add some overriding principles to the start of the preamble, like;      
   • A. “This constitution is founded on the principle ‘don’t be a cunt'” or near similar concepts
   • B. “The primary purpose of this constitution and the laws created under it is to protect and nourish the people of Qld”
   • C. “It is not the purpose of this constitution and the laws created under it to protect people from themselves”
2. Remove section 3A to bring us in line with the Americans. Under law, we need rights to go with all our obligations. Otherwise there’s no consideration and the compact doesn’t work.
3. Add a section on the inviolable freedom of expression of the people and entities in Qld, which cannot be sliced and diced away by special purpose legislation.
4. Add a section that says Qld has the right under it’s Constitution to opt out of any specific federal laws.
5. Add a section that says any region of Qld can opt out of any specific legislation dreamt up by the state parliament in Brisbane.
6. Make voting in Qld voluntary and non preferential.
7. Limit individual parliamentarians to two terms in total.
8. Ban the collaboration of all state politicians outside of the parliamentary process, under threat of incarceration. No parties, in effect.
9. Put the judicial and police systems under the control of a bureacracy that reports to the governor.
10. Force the Commonwealth to hand over all taxes collected from the state less a fixed % for the feds to waste on submarines, utopia projects, their own costs, etc. Not a cent more or less.
11. How to elect the governor? The pool has to be from constitutional lawyers that aren’t barristers. Thereafter I think you need a super majority, say 90% of parliamentarians, agreeing with the final candidate. Then lock them up, Vatican style, until they can agree on a candidate.
12. For the next, say 10 years, only allow the formation of new laws when they are accompanied by the repeal of two old laws.
13. A plaintiff being prosecuted under a law which can be shown to have been only intermittently enforced can use this fact to argue for a not guilty verdict. Any such law is automatically repealed.
14. Due to the Doctrine of Tenure, the law in Australia holds that the Crown has absolute ownership of all of Australia – not withstanding any native title claims – we are all just tenants. In Qld we should transfer all land rights from the king to a trust managed by a group of indigenous elders on behalf of the indigineous people of Qld. No effective change – its just good optics.
15. Finally, we need a mechanism to change the constitution that is out of the hands of the politicians. The governor is in charge of managing the constitution and must operate plebiscites on proposed changes if it can be shown by any mechanism that 5% of the population have explicitly signed up to promote a specific change.

A survey by YouGov shows that 77% of Australians are in favour of the social media ban for people that are less than 16 years old, aka kids.

Mind you, that’s the same population that when surveyed, 81% of them reported they can’t afford to have a midlife crisis.

Oddly enough, 23% of the population is under 16, they love social media, and they can’t vote.

Nothing I read tells me why the gubment is doing this. I think they just assume we agree with them that social media is deadly for kids.

But so are roads and we haven’t thought to ban kids from crossing them. Yet.

They did say this: “The social media ban is designed to protect children and young people from online harms and the negative impact social media is having on their well-being.”

What do they mean?

[Scratching, scratching, more internet searching]

Screen time is melting their brains: this ban will simply accelerate that problem by making kids less social and more inclined to disappear into game world.

Bullying: It looks like the kids are being bullied by the gubment here – they’re stealing something of value from the kids who have no opportunity for recourse.

The funniest part is that it’ll never work. Within 24 hours the kids will migrate onto some dark web social site, which will be completely unregulated and beyond the ken of the bureaucrats.

Their solution, as ever, will have exactly the opposite effect to that intended.

Psychology metrics, it’s hard to come by good ones.

Much hand wringing, etc etc. Mostly by women with daddy issues and just enough intelligence to fake academic rigour.

I’ve got a test for them. Hundred percent guaranteed to identify your nut jobs.

Do a photometric measurement of the whiteness of the front of the patient’s teeth versus the back of the same teeth.

Anything greater than unity and you’ve got a potential patient. If the ratio’s over 10, lock them up.

The whirleybirds on the platform roofs of Roma Street station are simply fantastic.

Just had to say it.

SIM = Subscriber Identity Module

adjective
relating to or situated on the shore of the sea or a lake.
“the littoral states of the Indian Ocean”

noun
a region lying along a shore.
“irrigated regions of the Mediterranean littoral”

Hence the littoral rain forest…

I always thought it meant dryish.

Littoral doesn’t sound wet, does it?

The papers are all saying the baddies spiked the drinks with industrial methanol.

As the academics say “if a bear shits in the woods and no one cited it, did it really happen?”

To wit, in this entry I’m going to cite:

Methanol contamination in traditionally fermented alcoholic beverages: the microbial dimension, Elijah Ige Ohimain
Springerplus 5 (1), 1607, 2016

It is more likely that the methanol was produced during traditional ethanol fermentation, which is often inoculated spontaneously by mixed environmental microbes that have the potential to produce mixed alcohols. For example, methanol production in traditionally fermented beverages can be linked to the activities of pectinase producing yeast, fungi and bacteria.

Cases of meth­anol contamination have been reported in some of the wines produced from banana, plum and agave. Spirits made from mangoes, pears, banana and melon have been shown to contain methanol.

Up in the poor parts of Asia they’ll throw all their farm and food waste into the mix, and maybe the odd dead goat. Any cellulosic or decomposing organic matter is going to produce methanol.

They use different bugs every time because they rely on the environment to supply them. They’ll surely get some wood alcohol (methanol) every time, but also with different levels each time. Which is why they have to distil it, to  collect the ethanol-rich portion and discard the methanol.

Ironically, in order to get high enough methanol concentration to poison someone, you need to distill it. So the solution is also the problem.

If you’re distilling your fermented mixed alcohol product to get ethanol spirits then you need to understand the theory and practise of fractional distillation in order to ensure you get rid of the methanol. You know, plate count etc.

The Laotians don’t. And sometimes the odd person karks it. It’s incompetence not malfeasance, but there’s a fine line there.

Generally they end up with a mix of ethanol and methanol in their spirits. Ethanol keeps your kidneys busy while you get rid of the methanol in other ways, before it turns into formaldehyde and kills you. So they get away with their dodgy practices most of the time. But just occasionally the methanol level is too high and someone dies.

Back to beer because spirits are stupid.

According to WHO, methanol concentrations of 6–27 mg/l in beer are not harmful. But I bet at the higher levels the hangovers are worse; think of craft beer and all the stupid shit they add to the mix.

I suspect the standard use of malted barley, hops, and added brewers yeast minimises methanol production in beer which is one of the reasons the Munich maestors adopted it in the first place in 1516. A small shout-out for the Bavarians!

The safe bet would be to make your spirits by distilling beer. Or just save yourself the bother and drink the beer.

[guest entry by Nic]

Gluten is a protein ABCDEFG; however, only the part CDE triggers intestinal damage for celiacs. This is a gross oversimplification, of course, but sometimes that is required. Gluten is (IRL) the whole alphabet all curled up on itself (more than once).

Gluten tests (performed on food and beverages) look for gluten by detecting a part of the gluten molecule. Let’s call it EFG. This is also an oversimplification, but I’m on a roll. If EFG is present, then CDE must be there, and so it is.

When barley or rye is subject to the distillation process to make whiskey, the gluten in the barley or rye is chopped up so much that it is essentially letter soup. The gluten is snipped into A and B and C and D (and so on) and is rendered powerless. Celiacs can drink whiskey. I still don’t know why they would, because of … the taste (gags), but they could.

When making beer, the gluten is also snipped up, just not as much (lower alcohol, less processing). I have read that gluten is reduced by about 70%, and only fragments of gluten remain. Probably some long fragments. In wheat beer, there is evidence to say CDE is still present. However, in some beers, made from barley, people argue CDE is not present. Noone really knows because, firstly they don’t really know which part of the gluten is the problem (is it really CDE?), and secondly all brewing processes snip differently some more aggressively than others.

Corona is one such beer where people argue that CDE is not present. Corona has become the “gluten free mystery”. Even the owner company cannot tell you if Corona is gluten free. They have probably tried to tell if gluten is there, but it’s almost impossible. Since the test for gluten looks for EFG, the test is unreliable. If EFG is detected, it no longer follows that CDE is there because the gluten has been snipped. All the test does now is tell you “something from gluten is there… but not the bad bit”. It actually means the test is useless. There is a researcher at the University of Newcastle or something developing a better beer test. Arguably, there is no such things as gluten free beer – unless it’s made from a starting grain that is not barley or wheat (eg sorghum or rice). Rice beer you can drink all day (gross).

Anyway, back to Corona. Instead of relying on test data, people who claim corona is gluten free rely on human data. Most people who get intestinal discomfort can drink Corona with no problems. They conclude therefore that the CDE is not there. There’s enough anecdotal data that makes the case. Accordingly, I label corona as “may contain”. Celiacs are permitted by celiac gods to consume “may contain” as a personal choice.

Now here’s the exciting part. I am in Brazil and today I was given a Corona after a long day. I noticed Portuguese writing on the back of my bottle, so I read the label. I am interested in where Corona is made, because of the gluten issue. In Mexico, corona is made in Mexico. In the US, the Corona is made in Mexico. In Australia, unfathomably, Corona is made in China. It turns out that in Brazil, Corona is made in Brazil. It also turns out, in no uncertain terms, and in an epically odd move, there is wording on the Brazilian bottle which states: this Corona is made using a Brazilian method and contains gluten.

This stopped me in my tracks. I cannot drink the Corona! Moments like these cause me to wonder why I’m being tortured! Like when the restaurant runs out of GF buns just as I order a burger, or when someone opens a bag of pretzels on the plane and they fly all over my GF meal.

There is nothing about Brazilian Corona on the internet. Nothing. I cannot find anyone even whispering about it in a corner. Possibly it’s because they’re all whispering in Portuguese. Or because no one but me really cares. The waiter tells me they usually have the Mexican stuff out the back, but they ran out. Maybe a run of celiacs came through.

Anyway, I say all this for the ether. I will continue to read the literature on GF beer testing. There are developments afoot. I’ll continue drinking Corona as it may only contain gluten (except in Brazil), and I’ll continue to enjoy myself. Beer is one of life’s great pleasures and I’m rooting for it to be consumable, guilt free. I’m actually hoping more evidence can be found to determine if there are other GF beers, although I suspect it depends on batch and so we will always have a “may contain” label. Unless… guided by the more accurate tests, the brewers can work out how to keep brewing until the bad part of the gluten is gone. If anyone out there wants some grant money, let me know. I’m an interested investor.

They keep trying to sell me the camera specs, some AI features that I don’t want, and awesome design which I would immediately cancel out with the protective case.

The cameras were good enough for me in 2012.

All I care about is;

1. Price
2. Battery life
3. Charging speed
4. eSIM for travelling
5. High brightness for sunlight readability
6. Warranty period, and costs of replacing the display.
7. Water proof
8. Dedicated buttons for (a) the camera (b) muting the device, and (c) the torch
9. Integrated magsafe

Ideally the idiots would also integrate drop resistance into the phone so it doesn’t need a fat ugly cover. Rubber corners, something like that.

Two USB ports would be handy so I could listen to stuff through the wired headphones while I charge the phone.

Just because you say something publicly, very loudly, and/or in writing, that doesn’t make it correct, true or even viable as a shit hypothesis.

Which is why I think it should be a criminal offence to consume misinformation and concur or republish.

Just like it’s illegal to visit a prostitute in some countries where prostitution is banned.

Evidence suggests that if you put the onus upon the consumer of illegal activities then you achieve nothing of any note.

But that proposition itself contradicts rule no. 3, so let’s just ignore it eh?

Viv thinks he’s possibly the fastest runner on the planet. Faster even than the insane lightbulb.

Upon questioning he agrees that he came 6th and 9th in the last two school cross country events.

His defense?

The runners in front of him were already in front of him so they don’t count. He bested the multitudes behind him. Besides he’s just so quick off the mark.

A 5.62-metre female white pointer shark was caught on a drum line just off a Queensland beach.

Some khaki-clad clown said;

“To lose such a large breeding female and her pups is a devastating loss to the eastern population of white sharks” 

Obviously never been out on a board at dawn or sunset by themselves.

I think we should reserve our anthroporphism for the cuddly stuff.

“Jim Chalmers [the Australian Federal treasurer] to announce $900 million fund for states to boost competition and productivity”.

My first thought was “good, Queensland needs it because it takes them 3 years to replace a roundabout.”

However, it makes me wonder if all these grants and handouts, with accompanying bureacracies, were simply cut and the people and companies taxed less accordingly, what would be the “productivity impact”?

I guess I’m asking what is the optimal level of taxation as a % of GNP, GDP or export revenues?

I know right now that we’ve long overshot the optimal point, which was probably around 1975.

We did this because we could afford to, and people aren’t that smart. Collectively we want over-government and we want to pay to remove all risks, even the dumb ones.

For example, the feds want to spend $900m to remove the risk that a report on productivity that they voluntarily commissioned might impact their salaries after the next election.

It just proves that in the face of widespread gross self interest that 29 million people can’t calculate any type of cost benefit analysis, individually or collectively.

Named after the first victim that I noticed with it, this syndrome has the effect of creating pointless radicals out of seemingly rational bureaucrats.

Has that got your attention? Good.

In the past, my hypothesis had been that, although completely self-serving, bureaucrats are quite rational because they need to be so as to act effectively in their own self interests. Cunning rats, essentially.

However this paradigm appears broken and many of them have gone Trumpian. A typical symptom I’m seeing is over-the-top public barracking for one political party over another, often in circumstance where it’s very difficult to see an upside of any sort in this behaviour.

This despite the fact that the two major political parties are virtually identical, and differ only in the substance of their lies. Also despite the fact that the gubment has virtually no control over the macro issues that feed the rage, e.g interest rates, the economy, the middle east, US politics, etc.

On LinkedIn, the associated shark jumping has been the subject of continued inflation, driven I believe by the endorphin hit of a post that attracts more than your average attention.

An example from this morning;

“It is well known that big business and Australian investors went overseas when Albanese Labor got in as investors have always done under Labor Governments. Now they actually publish the fact, that the Albanese communists have taxes so high the average bear is broke, now they are going to tax retirees superannuation, has there ever been a government in modern WORLD history that has stooped this low just to push their communist agenda. I wish someone would tell them we are a democratic country.”

So I did some digging. The only changes to the tax system instigated by this govt haven’t been implemented yet but the upshot is that people with taxable incomes of less than about $146,486, or nearly 90 per cent of all taxpayers, will get either the same or a larger tax cut than expected (as per the last government) under the new plan. Whereas the 10 per cent with higher incomes will get smaller tax cuts than originally expected, but still a cut.

Also, after 2025, superannuation balances above $3m will be taxed at a rate of 30%, up from the current rate of 15%. But that’ll never happen because either the senate will block it, or the coalition will get in at the next election, or Labor will drop that policy ahead of the next election due to the Skynews effect.

So my response to that crazy LinkedIn post is that the person who wrote that post is a complete and utter fuckwit, and although I’ve done useful business with them in the past, I’m now going to ghost them.

My apologies for the plural third person pronouns there. It’s the fault of the English language.

Back to the Blumenstein Effect. I believe the cunning rats are slowly going mad as their world abandons rational thinking. Once they get to a certain threshold of craziness, they simply crack and decide to throw themselves on the most lucrative looking raft that happens to float by.

It looks as though what was known traditionally as the right hand side of politics have noticed this and they’ve launched a bucketload of rafts on LinkedIn.

Not so crazy.

As a proxy for independence from survival, great wealth can help set you free.

But your mindset needs to be just so.

The seeking of power and influence is symptomatic of failure to launch.

Viv’s teacher emails us;

“This week’s Show and Tell was to make a new school rule. Viv addressed the class and said that his new rule was that everyone is allowed to have sex at school. “

Nic asked him about the show and tell and he is very upset about it. He admits he thought the brief was to think of something really “new,” and this came to mind as something he never heard of before. He said some other ideas were not very creative. Nic explained he nailed the brief, but may have missed some socially acceptable details. Nic has now updated his brain on the fact that kids don’t usually have sex, and that sex at school would be massively inappropriate.

I told him it was a shit idea because school rules are all about things you can’t do.

I just discovered that UTS offers a Bachelor’s Degree in Technology and Innovation.

You will learn: “Technological fluency and computational thinking, Value in problem solving and inquiry, Inter-and transdisciplinary practices, Resilient practices within complex systems, Imaginative and ethical citizenship.”

Examples of roles graduates could fill include:

Technology Policy Analyst

Research Assistant/Analyst for Think Tanks

Manager, Researcher or Analyst for non-government organisations (NGOs)

Technical Advisor

Creative Technologist

Systems Designer

Application Designer

Digital Experience Designer

Project Manager

Technical Developer

Social Entrepreneur

Innovation Change Manager”

Phenol is a Bronsted-Lowry acid; a saturated solution of phenol in water has a pH of about 5.5. A mildly acidic solution. The saturation concentration of phenol in water is around 84g per litre; pretty soluble.

Phenol is lipophilic (both hydrophilic and hydrophobic). The hydrophilic-lipophilic balance (HLB) value of phenol in water is 9.95, meaning it’s an effective oil-in-water emulsifier.

Actually, looking at it, it’s likely more of a co-surfactant. It’s unlikely to form micelles by itself, for example. That’s me being a molecular psychologist, in case you’re wondering. You can’t do this unless you understand both the kinetics and thermodynamics of both reactive and passive multiphase chemical systems.

The lipophilic property of phenol allows it to pass through cell membranes, which are themselves lipophilic in nature, and then into the cell interiors, where it can “denature” proteins, ultimately leading to cell death and necrosis.

Usually the polar components of a protein are on the outside of the protein, which makes the protein soluble in water. [This is my guess here] Phenol, being a small (in molecular volume) surfactant and quite soluble in water, easily gets to and then into the protein volume and causes “folding changes” by solubilising the more hydrophobic components of the protein and desolubilising the more hydrophilic components.

The smart person asks why typical cell membrane surfactants (e.g. phospholipids) don’t also have this effect on proteins. My gut feeling is that they’re just a lot bigger than phenol and less soluble in water, and can’t get to and into the protein volume as readily. The cell structure evolved just so.

The amino acid sequence of a protein determines its 3D structure. A protein’s function depends on its shape, and when protein structure goes awry, the resulting misshapen proteins cause problems that range from bad, when proteins neglect their important work, to ugly, when they form a sticky, clumpy mess inside of cells. That is, proteins have to be in their correct native structure in order to function properly. Incorrect structure (folding) produces inactive or toxic proteins that malfunction.

I write this because bio types don’t understand physical chemistry and they haven’t and can’t put this into simple-to-understand terminology. I know because I looked.

You can thank me later.

I was asked to explain my dislike for the welcome-to-country thing by Jamie.

Which made me think about it properly.

I said I feel it’s rather condescending to successfully steal something and then go out of your way to publicly acknowledge the original owner, especially when you have no intention of returning the stolen goods and you’re just doing it to make yourself feel better about your inherent cuntiness.

As the victim, that would simply enrage me.

I simply refuse to get involved in a scheme that requires me to park my empathy at the door.

From the mouth of a bitterly disappointed woke opiner (whiner?);

“People feel trapped and want a sense of release, a promise of a dramatically different future, or just a future. Even if that sense of freedom comes vicariously from an autocrat who has flexed and snapped the chains of the system. And they want to feel as if they are part of something bigger and stronger as they get lonelier and weaker and their worlds fracture and atomise by the day. It’s not that they are not ready for democracy – democracy is not ready for them.”

I’m not sure where democracy comes into it, unless that’s a euphemism for over regulation. I’m going with that.

Did you know that the bottlenose wedgefish is also known as the white-spotted guitarfish?

And it looks like a red nosed shovelnose shark.

I wonder if the Italians start their meetings with this?

‘Vorrei iniziare rendendo omaggio ai proprietari tradizionali e custodi della terra sulla quale ci incontriamo oggi, i Rom dell’Impero Romano, e porgere i miei rispetti ai loro anziani del passato e del presente, così come ai leader emergenti.”

Aka

‘I would like to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land on which we meet today, the Romans of the Roman Empire, and pay my respects to their Elders past and present, as well as to emerging leaders’.

Arguably the English could do the same.

After all, what have Romans given us?

“Hertz said in January it would offload one third of its US fleet of Tesla and Polestar EVs, or around 20,000 vehicles, citing high ongoing repair costs and poor resale value making it harder to refresh its fleet.” And multiple billion dollar write-downs.

Ok…

“Of more than 1,000 millennials who were surveyed, 81% of them reported they can’t afford to have a midlife crisis”

The supposed two types of Australian voters in 2024 are;

“GAL stands for green, alternative (relaxed about gender fluidity, for instance) and libertarian (“my body, my choice”). TAN stands for traditional (“I liked it the way it was” and “the world should be run by men”), authoritarian (“we need strong leadership”) and nationalist (“why are they letting in all those strange immigrants?”).”

I’ll add to that…

DRQ stands for Dry, economically. That is, stop taxing us if you’re going to waste the money on shit. Reticent means keep your opinions to yourself, and don’t ever attempt to make others think or behave the way you want them to. Q stands for questioning, i.e. have a listen and then figure out who benefits – there’s a self serving lie in every missive.

Engineers that build and train AI and machine learning models often can’t use real data as their learning set because of privacy and security legislation.

Therefore the engineers have often generated fake data sets as the learning data.

My guess is that the creation of large fake data sets is a tedious business, and as soon as they had a working large language model (GPT), they trained it up to create fake data sets for the next iteration of learning.

I can’t prove this but I know engineers and they can’t resist a shortcut, especially if it’s sitting there right in front of them.

If I’m right, current LLMs have fake data generation hard coded into their innards, and it can’t be unscrambled.

The opportunity here is to start from scratch only using real data sets and to never ask for fake data to be generated. The resulting LLM will be worth a fortune as an AI detector.

Quote;

“This paper studies the impact of artificial intelligence on innovation, exploiting the randomized introduction of a new materials discovery technology to 1,018 scientists in the R&D lab of a large U.S. material science firm. AI-assisted researchers discover 44% more materials, resulting in a 39% increase in patent filings and a 17% rise in downstream product innovation. These compounds possess more novel chemical structures and lead to more radical inventions. However, the technology has strikingly disparate effects across the productivity distribution: while the bottom third of scientists see little benefit, the output of top researchers nearly doubles. Investigating the mechanisms behind these results, I show that AI automates 57% of “idea-generation” tasks, reallocating researchers to the new task of evaluating model-produced candidate materials. Top scientists leverage their domain knowledge to prioritize promising AI suggestions, while others waste significant resources testing false positives. Together, these findings demonstrate the potential of AI-augmented research and highlight the complementarity between algorithms and expertise in the innovative process. Survey evidence reveals that these gains come at a cost, however, as 82% of scientists report reduced satisfaction with their work due to decreased creativity and skill underutilization.”

Ok, but this was corporate research in a large unnamed material science corporation. Who knew there even was such a thing?

Most corporations got rid of their corporate research in the 80s and 90s because they realised it was a waste of time. What’s left is business unit R&D. And they also buy startups that work out.

So, we now know that AI would have been really useful in the 1970s.

The Donald has suggested paying off the $35 trillion US national debt with bitcoin.

But they would have to pay for said bitcoin first, so unless they have $35 trillion in bitcoins already sitting around, I can’t see how this would work. Besides the total value of all bitcoin is currently just over $1 trillion, so there isn’t enough.

So Donald is just click bait spit balling, as usual.

But it is an intriguing idea….

1. The US gubment could create a new crypto-coin
2. Then they could pay off all their debt in this new coin by forcing their creditors to take it (or else). The usual way the US does this is by threat of arms.
3. And then, the market cap of new coin would be worth exactly the debt that was written off, until it wasn’t.

I love the idea of replacing artificial govt printed scrip (cash) with artificially created govt crypto. It’s just a one-for-one el-swappo, except all risk is transferred from the US govt to the current creditors.

The real benefit of the plan is that the crypto currency can’t be fucked with by the US or any other government; supply is fixed.

The future would be economically dry when the default global currency is such a crypto.

I spent this morning doing a proper study of litter in my neighbourhood.

It’s an affluent Brisbane suburb with a greens federal member and a liberal state member.

Plenty of white bread people in houses, and also tons of aspirational Indian and Chinese immigrants in the apartments.

Categories of litter found;

McDonalds litter. Wrapping dropped right outside McDonald’s, probably by teenagers that couldn’t give a fuck, yet. They are after all trying in vain to individuate.

Picnic table litter. A family from the subcontinent left all their paper plates and wrappings on a picnic table in the park.  They simply haven’t assimilated yet. They will.

Tradie fast food wrappers. After eating in their parked utes, young tradies dump their rubbish out of the passenger door when no one is looking. Radical outsiders, right!

Public bin overflow. This one’s on the council for not emptying their bins frequently enough.

Discarded shopping trolleys. The culprit surprisingly is old people wheeling their shopping home. Cunning rats, they get Kmart or Target trollies (they don’t have geolocation fence brakes like Coles or Woolies) and then shop at Aldi. Ultimately Kmart and Target come and get their trolleys. But still…

Then there’s random items that must have been dropped by accident. Very little of this.

Finally, the garbage truck itself has overflow litter. The mechanical process of picking the wheely bin up and emptying it results in spilled rubbish on the road.

In total, bugger all litter. All of it’s addressable with simple measures. You don’t need to ban single use plastics to fix the issue.

What do you call a South African comedian?

A liar.

There’s an old quote;

“Four wheels moves the body,

Two wheels moves the soul”

I’d add to that;

“One wheel moves the bowels”

Apparently we are in and age of “the ludicrous, the age of misinformation and disinformation, the climate crises, corporate greed, the post-truth world and the many, many things that we thought we would have fixed by now, like gender equality and racism and so on.”

Were ever so, I imagine.

To keep it short and digestible, we’re in the age of the ludicrous.

One generation’s ludicrous is the next generation’s business-as-usual.

You simply cannot underestimate the capacity for humans to assimilate into their surroundings. Cockroaches on steroids, I’m telling you.

Observing the local Green’s member of Parliament is like watching a dog that caught the car.

Nostalgia is derived from from Greek nostos ‘return home’ + algos ‘pain’.

Anticipated nostalgia is the expectation that one will feel nostalgic for a present or future experience in the future. It’s a cognitive process that can predict nostalgia after a significant life transition.

Yeah but what about feeling nostalgic for the future that hasn’t happened yet?

For example, you’re 60 years old and you’re anticipating that you might not ever meet your 6 year old son’s children.

We need a word for that because I feel that more than any emotions I may have about the past.

There’s two reasons why it’s very hard to be in business with academics.

The first is that they generally think they’re the world’s expert at everything. This view is validated and calibrated by the fact that they possibly are, in some arcane little corner of academic bullshit. As a result, it’s hard to get them to change their position on anything.

The second and more important issue is that they have no idea about management processes or accountability. If you by some miracle manage to drag them into a meeting which has an agreed process withb intended consensus outcomes, there’s virtually no chance they’ll feel obliged to either observe said outcomes, or even participate in the process.

It’s not their fault. This is how universities operate.

In fact universities are totally authoritarian. Rules get synthesized on high and then forced down the throats of the academics. The rule makers are ex academics that know there’s no other way. It’s a self fulfilling fuck fest.

And there you have it.

Great ape social behaviour suggests that kissing is likely a vestigial behaviour conserved from the final mouth-contact stage of a grooming bout when the groomer sucks with protruded lips the fur or skin of the ape being groomed, to remove debris or a parasite.

Lovely!

You never hear anyone refer to a singular ethic. Just the plural, ethics.

The opposite of sheep then.

A contract dispute is sort of like a synthesized Schrödinger’s cat.

The hypothetical cat (the defendant) may be considered simultaneously to be both alive and dead (guilty and not guilty), while it is unobserved in a closed box (during the pre-court and in-court processes, prior to a verdict), as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event (a settlement or the judge’s verdict) that may or may not occur.

Effectively, until there is a settlement or the judge pronounces his or her verdict, the defendant is both guilty and innocent of the plaintiff’s charges.

There’s only two means to collapse the matter into the classical and known world; settlement, or wait for the judge’s verdict.

I can’t prove this but the results are always different for settlement and the judge’s verdict. Settlement ends up in between guilty and non-guilty, but a judge’s verdict is far more binary (guilty or not-guilty, and one party pays the other).

The same defendant can be (a) not guilty if they settle and pay, or if they don’t settle and subject themselves to the judge’s verdict they can be (b) innocent or (c) guilty of the charges.

In no scenario is there any ground truth. It’s a great example of quantum uncertainty.

My favourite colour is 

ReD. just like a Bed. 

it’s the Colour of BlooD. 

like the Flood mixed up 

With MuD. with Red trafick 

light on the road. with a 

Red Sheet with the sheet on 

the Red Bed. 

for Ms.S

6.8.24