Odd Lots
- Fascinating piece on how cussing can make you stronger. It can apparently (though I remain skeptical) alleviate the immediate pain caused by bashing your shin on the coffee table or other immediate trauma. Forcing back dirty words reduces your ability to combat the pain and other possible threats in more complex crises.
- Could this be another term in the Drake Equation? Given how many satellites now orbit Earth (most of them comm constellations like Starllink) a single Carrington-level solar storm could cause countless chaotic collisions in near space that could create a layer of debris all around the planet. It’s called the Kessler Syndrome. Such a cloud would be risky to try and poke through, especially with manned spacecraft, and could set back space travel for a thousand years or more. (Hmmm. I smell an idea for an SF story or five.)
- Related: Estimates of half a million satellites in orbit by 2040 suggest that sunlight reflected from the satellites could reduce the quality of images taken by both ground-based and orbiting astronomical telescopes.
- Here’s a passel of safety tips I expect never to need again.
- I recently discovered an interesting piece of music by Josef Suk, who also composed the wonderful “Towards a New Life.” It’s called “Fantastic Scherzo,” and it’s a sort of high-energy gonzo waltz with peculiar interstices that qualify as scherzo cubed.
- I do this in private and always considered it just another facet of my legendary eccentricity. Turns out it actually helps you remain a functional human being. I guess it’s the vocal analog of journaling (i.e., writing about your emotions by pen or keyboard) and that mechanism helped me a great deal after Coriolis caved in.
- What happens when a 2,000 pound bison dies in Yellowstone National Park? Besides requiring heavy equipment to move, the carcass is taken to a top-secret location. It’s peculiar, but it all makes sense when you get the full story.
- Yet another AI hazard: Google AI is summarizing similar recipes, causing a significant dip in recipe site ad traffic. Although a given text description of a recipe is copyrightable, sets of steps are not. An AI can change the wording of a set of steps comprising a recipe and deliver an equivalent recipe to an AI user as a result of a query like “How do I create a coconut cream pie?” At some point people won’t bother looking up recipes on recipe sites—they’ll just let ChatGPT etc. do the work.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: ai · animals · music · psychology · space
Speaking of music: A friend of mine is a (retired) classical music radio station announcer. Each Christmas, he sends me a new batch of songs, many I’ve never heard before. Today’s was very entertaining, especially if you’ve ever had to work on the holidays. It’s “Doug’s Greatest Christmas Ever” by Uncle Bonsai.
https://drmm.net/dec2025/08/
As a returning resident of the Sonoran Desert, I hope my snow shoveling days are over as well. I also look forward to a reduction in the amount of yardwork that is required as compared to Northern Utah – especially lawn mowing.
The recipe sites brought it on themselves: if I’ve forgotten the air fryer cooking time for brats (10m@365F or was it 15m?) I am currently forced to wade through *pages* of text and full page animated ads to get to the one piece of information I need.
While reading your link on talking to yourself, it occurred to me that the discussion I lately have been having in Claude AI sessions is largely that. But it is like talking to a version of myself that has encyclopedic knowledge.
I generally trust the knowledge insights, and somewhat less the generated code — AI makes some silly errors. Least of all, I trust the opinions and compliments which sprinkle the discussion, except for the fact-related items, as when considering alternate strategies in software.
AI is not a person, of course, but a good AI engine can yet be a good sounding board on factual issues.
As to the supplements and “cures”, I would submit that AI’s widest use is likely now on things intended to lighten our purses, regardless of subject.
It is a mystery to me why we have heard so very little about the impact of AI on copyright. As far as I know, all the engines have blissfully ignored copyright, contending that if it’s online, it can be consumed.
That may be true, but one of the things copyright addresses — or did, I am not a lawyer — is derivative works. And surely the mindless operation of a machine to alter wording would be, at best, a derivative work.
AI seems to have all but destroyed copyright protections, and I would have expected to hear the screams from Disney, the one company most responsible for increasing the term of copyright protection.