EVs
- Here’s another hyperenergetic instrumental piece—with a short rest in the middle, granted—from Joseph Curiale, he of “Sky Blue After Rain.” It’s called “Double Happiness,” and it’s nutso optimistic, kinda like…me.
- Speaking of music, I remain and have always been puzzled why the purely orchestral works of Leroy Anderson are not considered “classical” and are not played on classical stations like our KBAQ. Some are quirky, like “The Typewriter,” but my all-time favorite Anderson composition, “Bugler’s Holiday,” which is really a manic trumpet concerto, somehow doesn’t qualify. Too fast? Hey, if “Sabre Dance” is considered classical, why not “Bugler’s Holiday”?
- Video generative AI is evidently getting so good that people are making bank–big bank–on slop AI videos, some that can’t easily be told from real videos. It’s more than a little scary. I don’t either make or consume video as a rule, but I would be interested in seeing a verifiably AI-written SF novel.
- Here’s another piece that nails why I think generative AI is scary. Watermarks? If an AI can make photorealistic videos, it can fake a watermark. Maybe something incorporating blockchain as is done with NFTs. I’m no expert on blockchain, but this intro to blockchain and NFTs sounds like it’s impossible to replicate an NFT—which suggests a way to prove that a video was not done with AI.
- In case you missed it: Lazarus 4.2 (Built with Free Pascal 3.2.2) was released on July 22. It’s a bugfix release, but hey, bugs are annoying and Lazarus is amazing. Take every release that happens and install it.
- I grew up in Illinois and have always been at least a little interested in monsters, so why did it take 73 years for me to ever hear of the Enfield Monster? Sure, Enfield is at the opposite end of Illinois from Chicago, a long way from anywhere, with all of 794 inhabitants—and only 764 when the monster came calling in 1973. I guess without Internet, even for an eccentric and boundlessly curious 21-year-old, some things just come and go unnoticed. By me, at least. It makes me wonder what other monsters I’ve never heard of.
- Ars Technica points out that it generally takes a garage with a high-current 240VAC outlet to charge an EV at home. And—wow, how could this be possible?—a great many Americans have garages so full of stuff that they have to park their cars outside. Yes, it’s possible; actually, the honest truth, as we see every time we drive around our neighborhood.
- A Tesla EV caught fire here in Scottsdale after it hit a building. (No explanation yet why it crashed.) The cops closed off half a mile of Scottsdale Road (the big street down the middle of the long, narrow city) for most of yesterday, essentially cutting the city in half. Later the same day, while a towing firm was towing what was left of the car away, it caught fire yet again. This is not a good look, and won’t help popularize EVs.
- Clarkesworld, a respected SFF magazine, closed for submissions after receiving a lot of crappy stories written by AIs like ChatGPT. Having messed a little with ChatGPT, I don’t blame them one iota.
- Venus and Jupiter will be only a full-Moon’s width apart just after sunset the night of March 1. Take it in if your skies are clear. This sort of thing doesn’t happn very often.
- Swiss Scientists having been playing music in the rooms used for aging cheese, hoping to create interesting new flavors. Hip-hop, Mozart, and Led Zeppelin each had a cheese wheel. After aging, flavors were tested and the Mozart had a milder flavor than Led Zeppelin and Hip-hop. Good; now let’s see if this trick works for wine.
- NASA satellite data says that there’s been no global warming for eight years, five months. It’s been a chilly winter here, but back in the summer of 1990 we were in the pool in March, after a hot snap took the daytime temps up to 120F.
- This is disturbing: Dr. Fauci evidently knew all along that injected intramuscular vaccines would prevent neither infection nor transmission. He was co-author of a peer-reviewed paper in Cell, a respected journal. The paper explains why: COVID and other respiratory viruses enter through the mucosa, and do not infect the body systemically. Vaccines injected into muscle don’t get out to where the viruses replicate until the infection is well underway and contagious.
- This is the weirdest and (unintentionally) funniest article I’ve ever read in the Grauniad, er, Guardian. According to the author, owning quantities of books is a cultish thing, all very smug and (ewwww!) middle-class. I’m pretty sure a certain somebody is trying to write her way into the elites, and I’m even surer that pieces like this will not do the trick.
- A large-scale study published in the highly respected peer-reviewed Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews found that masks provide little or no protection against aerosol viruses. The study itself is here. It’s a serious slog to read, but several news sources are highlighting it, to the mask cult’s incandescent fury. Here’s something from Real Clear Science. Again, if high-quality masks are worn absolutely perfectly they may have…some…effect, but my own experiments with masks show that such perfection is impossible. Exhaling blew air jets around the edges of every mask I tried, not only releasing viruses, but sending them on a joyride that could have gone six or eight feet or more.
- Another new study published in Nature finds that cholesterol is not the killer we’ve been warned against all our lives. The results showed that cholesterol levels from 210-249 were not only harmless, but protective, in both men and women. The report is surprisingly readable as such things go, with good graphs.
