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flying objects
Image source: Sam Cabot All the small things. Truth cares truth brings. I’ll take one lift. Your ride best trip… Vintage Blink played in the background. Tubular radio bulbs placed a diffuse glow on...
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cryptoexplosions
Image Source Geologically speaking, not much has happened in Illinois since the Permian. In particular, in the ultra-flat vicinity of Urbana where I grew up, there is no exposed bedrock at all. If one...
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geysers
The headline images from Cassini at Saturn were the curtain sheets of water vapor and ice crystals erupting from the tiger stripe terrain of Enceladus’ south polar regions. In the ensuing fifteen...
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a project outcomes report
For a number of years now, I’ve been a member of an academic collaboration devoted both to studying Internet latency and to designing schemes to generally speed things up on-line. At the end of 2018,...
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Stacks
1930s Police Line Up — Los Angeles For a change of pace in one’s academic reading, I recommend the late University of Chicago Professor Raven I. McDavid Jr.‘s 1981 memoir of his colleague David...
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Malbolge (a second look)
A page from the mysterious Voynich Manuscript at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Oklo dot org certainly wouldn’t be considered a heavily trafficked website, but given that it’s been...
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A travelogue
The cover of the 2021 Astronomy Decadal Report contains an artist’s impression of blue-marble Earth-like planet. Inside the report are calls for billions to be spent to search for life on far-distant...
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Drawdown
Bitcoin, through proof of work, combined with Landauer’s relation for the minimum energy required to flip a bit, reinforces the idea that energy and computation and money are all equivalent. At any...
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In Advance of the Landing
An imaginary poster for an imaginary documentary film on the topic of this post (as envisioned by OpenAI’s DALL-E2) I really owe it to my ten year-old self to revel in the affirmational spotlight that...
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Bit operations
Talk about zeitgeist. Another low-effort stretch between oklo posts somehow accumulated, and in the interregnum, it seems all at once as if every single conversation dovetails in to focus on AI....
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Venus
In close to four decades of doing research, I’ve come up with and run down hundreds if not thousands of ideas. If I’m to be entirely honest, not a single one of my ideas has genuinely, spectacularly...
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Sentience
Me: Let’s discuss tsukumogami. GPT-4: Tsukumogami is a concept from Japanese folklore that refers to objects that have acquired a spirit. According to traditional beliefs, objects can become animate...
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NVDA
How ’bout NVDA? Yesterday, at 4:20 PM ET, after the market close, the GPU manufacturer smoked the analysts expectations with a report of blow-out earnings. Fiscal fourth-quarter revenues clocked in at...
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Sneakernet
Pe·dan·tic narrowly, stodgily, and often ostentatiously learned — a pedantic blog poster. Man, that word hits kinda close to home. At any rate, in the usual vein, and at the risk of being pedantic,...
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Transformers
OpenAI released ChatGPT in late November 2022, and then they released their then-current GPT-4 model connected to ChatGPT on Pi Day 2023. So we’re coming up on a year where the day-to-day (or at least...
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A Panel of Experts
Prompt: Mid-century modern, tilt shift, Eero Saarinen style, Bell Labs feel, black-and-white, a panel of AI “experts” who are the logical conclusion of Rosenblatt’s 1958 perceptron paper. DALL-E:...
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fossil reactors
In 1972, at the Tricastin uranium enrichment facility in Pierrelatte, France, a routine check on UF6 extracted from the two billion year-old ore of the Oklo uranium mine in Gabon unveiled a highly...
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quixotic
It’s not hard to find grumbling on Hacker News regarding the venture firm a16z in general, and their (now-going-on-a-year-out-of-date) AI Canon in particular. It’s a reading list for those scrambling...
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The Time Machine
“…Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes…” That has to be one of the best lines ever, and indeed, the stories of H.G. Wells are well worth re-reading for the...
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Totality
A total solar eclipse is a remarkable phenomenon. It comes about as close as possible to getting everybody on the same page. It takes discipline for astronomy bloggers to resist that urge to hold...
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