I mentioned Feral Historian last month …. his video on Buckaroo Banzai pointed out something that I’d never noticed (despite many rewatches, including one during Covid): It is a Cold War Allegory. The Red and Black Lectroids fight using proxies, but the proxies are the US (via Buckaroo) and the rest of Earth. The US is forced into the war by the “good” side threatening nuclear annihilation unless they are appeased.

“never ask a highway engineer to dispose of a whale corpse. Those are words I live by, every single day.” — Dave Berry

“It’s time to move on, it’s what Shelly would have wanted…. Well, Shel said the only person I could move on with was Keira Knightley …” (British Commercial-slash-RomCom)

Google is no longer avoiding evil (as per their original slogan), but still sometimes does good (or at least tries). Google aggressively going after text messaging scammers. Also, I didn’t realize that private parties could bring RICO suits.

It’s time for your pet Racoon — Raccoons are showing early signs of domestication (Sci. Am).

Good news — Scientist have figured out how super recognizers are able to distinguish faces with such accuracy. Bad news (same article) — it seems to be at the retinal encoding stage, not something you can learn. More Bad News — You can’t learn it, but computers can. (Then again, since that particular genie is out of the bottle, at least it may prevent the number of false accusations based on bad facial recognition that have made the news).

An article (and paper) arguing that between 700 and 1850 there was a large growth in genes that lead to educational attainment, priming the Industrial Revolution. Also, the Black Death might have helped.

Begun, The Orca War Has … (Episode IV, Episode V)

A new paper showing that AIs vary their strategy (in the game theory classic “Guess 2/3rds of the average guess”) based on who they are told their opponents are, and that they view themselves as most rational, other LLMs as mostly rational, and humans as irrational, and that this is an argument for self-awareness.

Marginal Revolution links to a study showing that those who are wrong are often more confident and includes a reminder that “A Bet is a tax on bullshit.” (“Caplan’s law”).

Also Marginal Revolution — UC San Diego students (many of whom got As and Bs the entire way, including pre-calc and calc) can’t do elementary school math. Seriously, go look at some of the problems and pass rates. Some of these students are trying to be engineers. This is making the rounds. Slashdot story. Actual report from UCSD

Anton Video — Math suggests We May Be The Only Intelligent Life (also discusses some rebuttal papers). The very next day — A Sabine video highlighting a model suggesting the opposite (by asking “if we assume that each planet has the same independent chance of life, what are the odds that it only happens once.¹”

AI Tools are making (some) people hyperproductive. Related — My Programming Career is a Historical Artifact.

Voyager I will be a light-day away from earth next year.

1. If you believe the rare earth hypothesis, then that’s a bad assumption, but ignoring that seems just a reasonable approximation as the Drake Equation and it doesn’t seem like you need a uniformly equal chance on each planet. I’m sure there’s some math handwaving I’m missing. ︎