Saturday Sounds - September 30, 2023

The Jefferson Airplane were the first band that I became a real fan of. Part of that was an adolescent crush on Grace Slick, part was a fascination with the San Francisco hippie scene, but mostly it was the propulsive, guitar-driven sound of the band and their wonderful harmonies. I was lucky enough to see them perform twice in Detroit in 1968 and 1968; I still consider their November 1969 performance at the East Towne Threater to be the best single rock performance I've seen. 

The Airplane disbanded before portable taping equipment and the taper movement became widespread, so there aren't many good audience recordings of their concerts. Some soundboards of varying quality circulate and this week's Saturday Sounds post is one of them, from a performance at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, CA, on May 19th, 1967. 

Considering the era, the recording is of decent quality. Unfortunately, there are several cuts (notably in White Rabbit and Somebody to Love), but from what I remember after more than 50 years, this recording is as close to what they sounded like live as any I've heard. The best part of the set is the jam that follows This Is My Life, starting about 45:00 followed by their first live performance of Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon. 

For better sound quality, both their performances at the Monterey Pop Festival later in 1967 and at Woodstock in 1969 have been commercially released and are available for streaming.

Photo of the Week - October 1, 2023

Here's a house in our neighbourhood. The somewhat overgrown front yard makes me suspect that it may be soon sold and replaced by a soulless monster home, a fate that has befallen several properties on its street. The lighting and lack of variety in the scene's colours prompted me to use black and white for this shot. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with Fujinon 16-80 mm F4 at 34 mm., F5.6 at 1/340 second, ISO 320, TriX 400 filrm simulation

 

Featured Links - September 25, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Frenchman's Bay 

• How to use Google News like an RSS reader. There are some useful tips in this article, although I wouldn't do as the article suggests and ditch my RSS feed reader.  
• Best LastPass Alternatives Of 2023. If you are still using LastPass, or not using a password manager at all, you should read this.
• Microsoft Sysinternals: The best Windows troubleshooting tools. "Microsoft Sysinternals provides the best tools you need to troubleshoot Windows systems." 
• 50 programs that fix Windows problems with just a few clicks. "All you need is the right software to quickly fix common Windows headaches. Here are 50 ultra-handy tools."
• The Long Goodbye. A long article about the final Dead and Company tour. Wish I could have seen them.
• When the Breakthrough G-Agonists Exceed Expectations. "The expanding GLP-1 family of drugs and their expanded potential use cases."
• The Summer That Reality Caught Up to Climate Fiction. "Once deemed outlandish and fitting for a dystopian novel, today's unfolding events challenge fiction writers to redefine their narratives."

Photo of the Week

I took the camera down to the bay earlier this week in hope of some bird pictures. There were a few swans, ducks,  and geese enjoying the calm, sunny morning.

Fujifilm X-S10 with Fujinon 16-80 mm F4 at 80 mm, F5.6, 1/2900 second, ISO 320, Astia film simulation

 

Saturday Sounds - September 23, 2023

This week's musical treat is a 1977 performance by Little Feat from the Rockpalast TV  show. The video quality is very good for 1977 (maybe upscaled?), the sound quality is good, and the performance first rate. As a bonus, the video includes a pre-show interview, a warmup song by Ry Cooder, and a song from the soundcheck. Enjoy.

Featured Links - September 18. 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Frenchman's Bay

The AI Detection Arms Race Is On. "And college students are developing the weapons, quickly building tools that identify AI-generated text—and tools to evade detection."

1987 Nuclear Mars Mission. "A crewed Mars mission requiring 5 Energia launches." They dreamed big. But the Soviet Union collapsed before they could become reality.

AI-Assisted Language Translation of Speaking, Including Mouth Movements. "HeyGen's Video Translate tool will convert videos of people speaking into videos of them speaking one of several different languages (incl. English, Spanish, Hindi, and French) with matching mouth movements." This is amazing but has disturbing implications. 

Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty. "A Nature survey reveals scientists’ reasons for leaving the social-media platform now known as X, and what they are doing to build and maintain a sense of community."

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix. "Alive and still quite vigorous considering its age." I was on USENET a lot up until about 2000 and wrote this article about it. I may revisit it if I can find a decent free server. 

Welcome to the Unapocalypse. "Where SciFi and Design intersect." New Substack from SF author and futurist, Karl Schroeder. 

A 350-Year-Old Theorem Can Explain The Quantum Properties Of Light. "Physicists have applied classical mechanics rules to light – with success."

Photo of the Week - September 17, 2023

This week's picture is of some swans and ducks on Frenchman's Bay on Friday morning. It was a lovely day, and I wish I'd brought my camera. This was taken with my Pixel 4a.

Birds on Frenchman's Bay

 

Saturday Sounds - Dave McMurray - Grateful Deadication 2

The Grateful Dead always had a love of and appreciation for jazz and they often played with jazz musicians, most notably Ornette Coleman and Branford Marsalis, so it's not surprising that jazz musicians have covered their music. Today's treat is Grateful Deadicated 2, an album by saxophonist Dave McMurray in which he covers nine Grateful Dead songs. 

It isn't the most out there jazz, but I like it. As you might expect from the title, there is a previous album of more Grateful Dead songs.

We're Toast 43

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Today's post is a departure from my normal format as it concentrates on a couple pf recent news items that do not bode well for our future.

First, a new paper in Science Advances titled Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Here's the abstract.

This planetary boundaries framework update finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity. Ocean acidification is close to being breached, while aerosol loading regionally exceeds the boundary. Stratospheric ozone levels have slightly recovered. The transgression level has increased for all boundaries earlier identified as overstepped. As primary production drives Earth system biosphere functions, human appropriation of net primary production is proposed as a control variable for functional biosphere integrity. This boundary is also transgressed. Earth system modeling of different levels of the transgression of the climate and land system change boundaries illustrates that these anthropogenic impacts on Earth system must be considered in a systemic context.

This is a graphic from the article.

The State of Earth's Boundaries

The paper has received quite a bit of notice in the general press. There's a good summary in The Guardian. Here's a quote from that article.

Their assessment found that six out of nine “planetary boundaries” had been broken because of human-caused pollution and destruction of the natural world. The planetary boundaries are the limits of key global systems – such as climate, water and wildlife diversity – beyond which their ability to maintain a healthy planet is in danger of failing.

The broken boundaries mean the systems have been driven far from the safe and stable state that existed from the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, to the start of the industrial revolution. The whole of modern civilisation arose in this time period, called the Holocene.

The assessment was the first of all nine planetary boundaries and represented the “first scientific health check for the entire planet”, the researchers said. Six boundaries have been passed and two are judged to be close to being broken: air pollution and ocean acidification. The one boundary that is not threatened is atmospheric ozone, after action to phase out destructive chemicals in recent decades led to the ozone hole shrinking.

The scientists said the “most worrying” finding was that all four of the biological boundaries, which cover the living world, were at, or close to, the highest risk level. The living world is particularly vital to the Earth as it provides resilience by compensating for some physical changes, for example, trees absorbing carbon dioxide pollution.

Today, the Eye on the Storm blog on the Yale Climate Connections site reports that August 2023 was the hottest August on record and this year is likely to be the warmest year on record. 

According to an analysis by Climate Central, 3.9 billion people across the world suffered extreme temperatures made at least three times more likely by climate change for over 30 days during the June-August period; 1.5 billion people experienced extreme temperatures at this level for all 92 days of the June-August period. About 98% of the global population was exposed to extreme heat made at least two times more likely by human-caused global warming during this period.

Meanwhile, in the province of Ontario, it's business as usual as the government buries a report on the effects on climate change on the province for eight months. 

A new report commissioned by Premier Doug Ford's government warns that climate change poses high risks to Ontario, with impacts on everything from food production to infrastructure to businesses. 

The report – called the Provincial Climate Change Impact Assessment – projects a soaring number of days with extreme heat across Ontario, as well as increases in flooding and more frequent wildfires. 

Presented to the government in January but only posted publicly in late August, the government did not issue a news release about the report. It follows a summer where Ontarians faced at times extreme heat, heavy rainstorms and unprecedented wildfire smoke.    

Finally, again in Ontario, the government appears to be doubling down on its plans to develop portions of the greenbelt which were set aside years ago to discourage urban sprawl and protect the environment. 

Ford’s government has so far stonewalled on the auditor general’s key recommendation that the removal of the lands from the Greenbelt be “reconsidered.”

In fact, the government seems to be moving in the opposite direction. It is pressuring developers to accelerate construction on the removed lands.

New Housing Minister Paul Calandra is now advancing a wholesale review of the Greenbelt plan. That seems to include consideration of the possibility of further land removals, if not a complete reconsideration of the Greenbelt as a whole.

 

 

 

Microsoft Word and Adjective Order

Despite having worked for more than 30 years as a technical writer, I have to admit that I've never come across the concept of adjective order. That's probably because technical documentation doesn't use many adjectives and certainly not long strings of them. 

English grammar does have an established order for adjectives: Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Colour, Origin, Material, and Purpose. So we write "the big brown cat" instead of "the brown big cat". 

I had never come across the rule for adjective order until I read this article from Office Watch about Microsoft Word and the problem that its grammar checker has with adjectives. Word will suggest the correct order for three adjectives, for example, but if you string together six of them, you are out of luck. 

I don't see this as a big problem as I don't usually write long strings of adjectives, even outside of technical documentation. But it is something to be aware of if you are using Word for something like marketing copy. 

A Disinformation Campaign About the Maui Wildfires

The wildfires that devastated the town of Lahaina and other locations on Maui were likely caused by high winds and electric power lines, a bad combination that's caused fires in many other locations. But that's not stopping bad actors from circulating  conspiracy theories about the fires. 

NewsGuard says it traced the conspiracy theory back to a post on the Chinese platform called 163.com in early August. From there, the accounts reportedly jumped platforms and made their way to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and around 10 other sites by mid-August. By September, the posts appeared on over a dozen platforms with posts attempting to target users from a wide variety of countries. Some of the shady accounts interacted with each other to boost their content and used the hashtag #meteorologicalweapon to amplify the falsehoods. Many of the posts appeared to have replies and likes generated by bot accounts trying to make it appear as if humans were organically interacting with them.

In an email to Gizmodo, Meta confirmed the accounts shared by NewsGuard were part of a disinformation operation called Spamouflage that originated in China. That campaign, which dates back to 2019, was linked to another trove of inauthentic Facebook accounts and pages detected recently highlighted by Meta researchers. Meta said the accounts mentioned in the NewsGuard report were unsuccessful in their attempts to reach real audiences on Facebook.

Can Large Language Models Reason?

I am bothered by the common use of the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) to refer to Large Language Model (LLM) products like ChatGPT. It's clear that they are good at predicting text, but people are equating that with thinking, and that's clearly wrong.

Here's a good article by Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe institute that looks at the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in detail. It's one of the better articles on the subject that I've seen recently.  

What should we believe about the reasoning abilities of today’s large language models?  As the headlines above illustrate, there’s a debate raging over whether these enormous pre-trained neural networks have achieved humanlike reasoning abilities, or whether their skills are in fact “a mirage.”

Reasoning is a central aspect of human intelligence, and robust domain-independent reasoning abilities have long been a key goal for AI systems. While large language models (LLMs) are not explicitly trained to reason, they have exhibited “emergent” behaviors that sometimes look like reasoning. But are these behaviors actually driven by true abstract reasoning abilities, or by some other less robust and generalizable mechanism—for example, by memorizing their training data and later matching patterns in a given problem to those found in training data? 

Why does this matter? If robust general-purpose reasoning abilities have emerged in LLMs, this bolsters the claim that such systems are an important step on the way to trustworthy general intelligence.  On the other hand, if LLMs rely primarily on memorization and pattern-matching rather than true reasoning, then they will not be generalizable—we can’t trust them to perform well on “out of distribution” tasks, those that are not sufficiently similar to tasks they’ve seen in the training data. 

Featured Links - September 11, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Eroded tree by the lakeshore

The Energia-Buran Archive. More than 1000 photos of the Soviet Union's heavy-lift rocket and orbiter. 

The End Will Come For The Cult of MAGA. "The next generation isn’t buying it." Let's hope that's true.

Fish doorbells! Historic sandwiches! "50 of the weirdest, most wonderful corners of the web – picked by an expert." 

If Corporations Bore the True Cost of Their Emissions, They’d Owe Trillions. "And that doesn’t even include “downstream” carbon spewing." Corporations are getting a free ride by not having to include the environmental impact of both the production of their products and their eventual disposal.

Coercion versus Care. "It’s irrational and costly, and spreading everywhere, this 4:1 or 5:1 ratio of coercion to care. Witness the recent decision of a US school district to replace libraries with ‘discipline centers’, or the UK Tory politician Robert Jenrick’s purely sadistic instruction for a child refugee centre to paint over the cartoons on the wall. Or indeed, the appetite of the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions, to target £8 billion in ‘fraud’, when £20-30 billion of welfare that people need and deserve goes unpaid each year because its systems are so user-hostile."

'Rich Men North Of Richmond' Singer Rips GOP Candidates After Song Is Played At Debate. "Oliver Anthony, whose song 'Rich Men North of Richmond' became a conservative rallying cry, clarified that he wrote the hit song 'about the people on that stage' for the GOP presidential debate."

Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more. "Turn off chip detection, bypass need for a Microsoft account, change how Explorer works."

Photo of the Week - September 10, 2023

Here's a late blooming rose from our front yard. I took with with my Pixel 4a and used Portrait mode to blur the background. I rather like the effect. The colour is quite accurate.

Late blooming rose

Saturday Sounds - Phish - August 26, 2023 - Saratoga Springs

This week's musical treat is from Phish, one of my favourite bands. They recently played for two nights at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in Saratoga Springs, NY. The concerts were webcast as part of a Flood Relief Benefit and you can still watch them on YouTube. 

The show from the 26th features slide guitar ace Derek Trucks joining in on several songs in the second set for some truly excellent guitar jams. Enjoy. 

You can watch the concert from the 25th here. 

The Water Crisis

Although it]s editorial stance sometimes make me cringe, the New York Times continues to publish deeply researched (and sometimes deeply disturbing) articles that require deep pockets and a large pool of journalists. The latest looks at what the times is calling "the water crisis" – the increasing depletion and pollution of groundwater in the United States. (paywall-free link)

From their Climate Forward newsletter:

One of the startling things about the climate crisis is just how quickly we’ve brought it upon ourselves. In a relatively short period of time — just 150 years or so — humans have dramatically heated up the planet, ushering in the Anthropocene.

A similarly rapid transformation is taking place beneath our feet. The aquifers that supply 90 percent of America’s water systems are being damaged and depleted by industrial farms and urbanization. Reserves of groundwater that took eons to form are drying up in a matter of years. Cities and farms are running short on water. And experts say it could take centuries or millenniums for some of these aquifers to replenish themselves, if they recover at all.

Over the past several months, The Times analyzed water levels at tens of thousands of sites and arrived at a dire conclusion: Almost half of the sites have seen significant declines over the past 40 years, and last year was the worst yet.

In the first part of a new series on the water crisis, my colleagues Mira Rojanasakul, Christopher Flavelle, Blacki Migliozzi and Eli Murray took a sweeping look at the depletion of groundwater across the country. They found corn yields plummeting in parts of Kansas, drinking water running short in Long Island and cities unable to grow in Arizona.

Fair warning: reading this article may cause sleepless nights. 

Some Useful VLC Tips

I've been using VLC as my main media player for many years. It's interface isn't the friendliest, but it will play virtually anything you throw at it. 

As this article shows, it also has a lot of features buried in the menus and dialogs, most of which I didn't know about despite being a frequent user of the program. Among the more useful ones:

• Download videos from YouTube (or pretty much anywhere else)
• Convert videos to any format
• Play internet radio and podcasts

 

New Fonts in Microsoft Office

If you subscribe to Microsoft 365 you will see that Microsoft has added some new default fonts and themes. The Aptos font family replaces Calibri. Aptos has several variations, including a narrow (compressed) font, a serif version, and a monospaced font as well as several different weights. There are also new Office themes with some changes to colours. 

This article from the Ask Woody Newsletter has a good explanation of how to use the new fonts, where you can find them, and which versions of Office include them. 

I don't see a lot of difference between the standard Aptos font and Calibri, but it is good to have the extra variants and font weights. 

2023 Dragon Award Winners

The winners of the 2023 Dragon Awards were announced at Dragoncon in Atlanta on September 3rd. 

These are the winners of the various awards for Best Novel.

Best Science Fiction Novel: The Icarus Plot by Timothy Zahn

Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal): Witch King by Martha Wells

Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel: The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

Best Alternate History Novel: Lost In Time by A.G. Riddle

Best Horror Novel: A House With Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

I have not read any of them (I've not read much of anything this year), but the A. G. Riddle novel sounds interesting. 

 

Off for the Weekend and More

I'm a little behind on this. I thought I had published it but it never showed up. 

So here it is now, better late than never.

It's Labour Day weekend up here in the still green Great White North, so I'm taking the weekend off from blogging. 

Also, posts on this blog may be quite sparse over the next month or more. We just sold my late mother-in-law's house, and there's a lot to do before closing. If I see something especially interesting, I may do a quick post about it, but I won't be trying to keep to my usual schedule.

In the meantime, here's a picture of Colin Linden and the Rotting Matadors, who we saw perform last weekend and enjoyed immensely. 

Colin Linden and the Rotting Matadors

Movie and TV Reviews - August 2023

 Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in August.

Movies

• Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3: I liked the first movie a lot, the second one not as much, and this one not very much at all. (Disney+)
• Without Remorse: A standard thriller, part of Jack Ryan's origin story in Tom Clancy's universe. I watched it a week ago and I can hardly remember anything about it. (Amazon Prime)
• Turning Red: From Pixar, a story about a teenage girl in Toronto who turns into a giant red Panda when she gets angry or emotional. This got dissed by certain elements of the net culture for no good reason. The animation is up to Pixar's usual high standards, the story OK for what it is, and we enjoyed it. Bonus points for being set in Toronto and not hiding it. (Disney+)

TV Shows

• Good Omens (season 1): This was a rewatch in preparation for watching season 2. I enjoyed it quite a bit more the second time around, and honestly, I could watch it again (although I really should get around to reading the book first). (Amazon Prime)
• Good Omens (season 2): This season was enjoyable but somewhat unfocused compared. The plot didn't have the urgency of the first season and I found my attention flagging. David Tennant was particularly good.  (Amazon Prime)
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season 2). The second half of the season was much better than the first half or the first season though the last episode was unfortunate. (Crave)
• Silent Witness (seasons 22-23): We're continuing with this show, which may remind you of CSI, although it's much better. (BritBox)
• Antiques Road Trip (season 22): Continuing on with this too. (PBS)
• Endeavour (season 8): This is a prequel to Inspector Morse and Inspector Lewis, set in Oxford, that notorious den of iniquity. The lead characters in this one are especially good. (PBS)
• Ashoka (season 1): So far, we've only seen the first two episodes, but we like what we've seen. It reminds me of the first Star Wars movies, but more there's more of a steam punk influence. (Disney+)