February 6th, 2018, Elon Musk demonstrated that launching objects into orbit had become a mundane commercial activity. To make it interesting, the object he put in orbit was a Tesla Roadster that has since traveled over a million miles and made four laps around the sun. Where is the Roadster now?
Disney spent a quarter billion dollars to build, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel, and it only remained open for a year and a half. This girl spent $6000 to be immersed in the experience. Fortunately, she’s cute and made an engaging 4-hour video about her Star Wars adventure that’s been viewed by 7 million people. She should recoup her expenses.
Disney is a big company, with a net profit of 1.7 billion dollars last year. They can’t keep making big mistakes like this. How did they screw this up so bad?
City Journal: Politics and Physics Collide
The legislature and unelected regulators enjoy magical thinking because the time frames are long, they will never be held responsible and perhaps engineers can meet the goals. Automakers have long been burdened with fleet economy standards that must be met. The Laws of Thermodynamics are problems for engineers, not legislators. Cars became lighter and less safe while also becoming more complex and expensive.
The idea that the United States can quickly “transition” away from hydrocarbons—the energy sources primarily used today—to a future dominated by so-called green technologies has become one of the central political divides of our time.
Megan McArdle is a columnist who I’ve followed for years. Except for being a Never Trumper, she is generally insightful.
On Friday morning, when I first sat down to write this column, Google’s new Gemini AI was having problems that seemed mostly amusing. The internet had discovered that it would generally refuse to create pictures of any all-White groups, even in situations where it was clearly called for, such as “draw a picture of Nazis.” Gemini also insisted on gender diversity, even when drawing popes.
WSJ: Elon Musk on Woke Mind Virus
WSJ: Elon Musk on Woke Mind Virus
For months and months, the world’s richest man has been talking about the “woke mind virus”—let’s call it WMV for short. He describes it as a threat to “modern civilization” and says those concerns motivated his decision more than a year ago to buy the social-media platform now known as X.
Musk is the richest person in the world and with Tesla and SpaceX, owns two companies that dominate their highly technical market sectors. He also owns companies that may be critical to the future in the fields of boring tunnels, artificial intelligence and a brain/computer interface. Since Musk is bringing us the future more than anyone else on Earth, it may be worth trying to comprehend his message.
When it comes to how he defines that threat, however, he has been vague in public—painting a picture of something akin to hysterical groupthink by liberals against merit-based achievement and free speech, a catchall for what he expresses disagreement with.
That seem pretty clear. While a few large investment companies, corporate media and politicians are banging on about diversity, inclusion and equity, it may be worth asking where they see DIE taking Western democracies.
With recent congressional testimony and charges of plagiarism against the current president of Harvard, it seems obvious that she is a diversity hire with scant accomplishments to be account for her lofty position. How much of the rest of our institutions are led by unqualified people who are above accountability?
Musk is arguing for merit in judging applicants and with his obvious success, it’s worth considering his opinion.
Biden putting $10 billion into high speed passenger trains.
This is another bad idea that we will have to spend a trillion dollars on before we give up.
I’ve ridden the Shinkansen in Japan and the LGV in France, and enjoyed both. The US is not Japan or France. America has a well developed rail system, and we use it to carry freight.
There is a high speed passenger rail project in California. The cost is estimated to be a quarter-billion dollars per mile. Biden could spend our money to put down 40 miles of high speed rail or he could have one nuclear power plant built.
It isn’t clear what ChatGPT is good for, but that doesn’t stop people from predicting it’s going to take all the jobs. Try hiring a handyman or someone to cut your grass. They are busy and expensive.
This Wired article on ChatGPT, doesn’t help explain anything, but this post on Ace of Spade HQ makes sense.
ChatGPT – LLMs in general – are very good at form but absolutely terrible at function. That’s because they are supercharged autocorrect engines; they know only what words fit where, statistically.
They can make a legal filing that looks correct, but it will reference laws and decisions that don’t even exist.
Physical jobs like home maintenance or lawn care are safe, but knowledge work is where ChatGPT is supposed to be a threat. Teachers talk about this quite a bit.
Radio, television, videotapes and the internet were all predicted to replace classroom teachers. Instead, these technologies are effective for motivated people and tools for a teacher. That got me thinking about what ChatGPT could have helped me with when I was teaching.
Visual presentation, the form part of a lesson, was important to me, but function was critical. I can’t think of any aspect of lesson preparation, presentation or assessment where ChatGPT could help.
For the most part, teachers like their students and want to help them master the concepts. What teachers hate is the bureaucratic bullshit that ineffective administrators may insist on. It’s work that doesn’t advance the educational objective at all, and takes the teacher away from the core objective.
I would have been happy to set ChatGPT to generating lesson plans, curriculum benchmarks and pedagogical objectives to be submitted weekly. The content doesn’t matter because shitty administrators are dumb bullies.
Where they genuinely are transformative is in visual art, because there form largely is function.
I think I might like this ChatGPT ability. My PowerPoints, worksheets and assessments were loaded with copyright infringing images.
Electric Grid Reliability by State
I was recently talking to a nephew about the frequency of power outages. The general topic was about having a supplemental heat source in case the power went out in the Winter. I estimated that my power goes out about 6 times per year, but usually it happens in clusters. If the power goes out once in a day, it may go out once or twice before the issue is resolved. Also, I am shit at remembering random things like that, so have no confidence in my estimate.
This link shows the length and number of power outages per state. I found it surprising. This map gives the general idea. Dark is bad, light is good. The link provides actual data.
It seems like the power is out in California often and for a long time, but California is ranked 34, so at the lower middle of the pack.
Weather can cause power outages, but Florida is the second most reliable, with nearby Louisiana being the least reliable.
With our federal system of government, the states are the laboratories of democracy. It seems like states would also be the laboratories of power distribution. If the Federal Department of Energy can take a break from trying to nudge us toward an all-electric impoverished future, they might put some time into figuring out what features are necessary for a robust electrical grid.
WaPo: What We Know About Aliens
It came from space, hurtling at tremendous speed: a mystery object, reddish, rocky, shaped like a cigar. Its velocity was so extreme it had to have come from somewhere far away, in the interstellar realm. The astronomers in Hawaii who spotted it in 2017 named it ‘Oumuamua, Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first.”
Don’t forget the unexplainable Wow! signal detected by Ohio State in 1977.
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