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Is Nuclear Fusion Energy Salvation?
Like a third rate zombie movie on Netflix, delusions of nuclear fusion repeatedly rise from the dead. The cover story in the June 2023 issue of Scientific American by Philip Ball, “Star Power: Does Fusion Have a Future After All?” recycles the corporate line which was broadcast on December 13, 2022. The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced that […]
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The Pegasus Effect
In 2022, we partnered with Al-Haq, Bisan Center for Research and Development, and Mind the Gap consortium to visually depict effect of Israeli spyware and how technologies that uphold Israeli apartheid ripple outward to impact communities thousands of miles away from Palestine. Join us as we put a spotlight on “the Pegasus Effect”––or how the […]
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Luddite, or Cantankerous, or Naysayer, or Devil’s Advocate, Backward, or …
Photo: Ludd, drawn here in 1812, was the fictitious leader of numerous real protests. Granger Collection, New York. The question is, To be or not to be or not to be … (from Hamlet, spoken by Hamlet) To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The […]
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Business As Usual: Shutdown or Not, the Police State Will Continue to Flourish
There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. —Ludwig von Mises Once again, the police state is up to its old tricks, stoking tensions over whether or not the government is forced to shut down, even partially, due to a default on the national debt. Yet […]
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Geoffrey Hinton, AI, and Google’s Ethics Problem
Talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence, actual or imagined, has become feverish, much of it induced by the growing world of generative chat bots. When scrutinising the critics, attention should be paid to their motivations. What do they stand to gain from adopting a particular stance? In the case of Geoffrey Hinton, immodestly seen […]
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You Are Reading This Thanks to Semiconductors
Koga Harue (Japan), Umi (‘The Sea’), 1929. On 7 October 2022, the United States government implemented export controls in an effort to hinder the development of China’s semiconductor industry. An expert on the subject told the Financial Times, ‘The whole point of the policy is to kneecap China’s AI [Artificial Intelligence] and HPC [High Performance […]
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Anxiety as Socialism: AI Moratorium Fantasies
Rumours and streaks of hysteria are running rife about what such artificial intelligence (AI) systems as ChatGPT are meant to do. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy recently showed himself to be ignorant with terror about the search bot created by OpenAI. “ChatGPT taught itself to do advanced chemistry. It wasn’t built into the model. Nobody programmed […]
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Robot Police Dogs + Fake Crime Waves
NYPD Adds ‘Spot,’ the Robot Dog, to Force NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell assured the public “that the use of this technology will be transparent, consistent, and always done in collaboration with the people who we serve.” [emphasis added] Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship store after one year, citing worker safety “Incidents of theft in […]
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Listening to the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Note: I am not attacking people personally, or their right to opinions. However, I have been in this rodeo since 1983, academia, with the deans, chairs, provosts, VPs and presidents, and plethora of others, who hands down (not all) got it wrong about the value of and reason for education, K12 and higher ed. This […]
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The Cobalt Gold Rush and the East Palestine Disaster
Holidays in my childhood were spent at my grandparents’ farm in Plain Grove, Pennsylvania, 35 miles from East Palestine, Ohio. My grandfather’s grandfather fought at Gettysburg and homesteaded the 160-acre farm after the Civil War. My grandmother sold it in the 1960s for $13,000, lacking a male heir to do the work; but my relatives […]
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