Unknown's avatar

Another Thought Provoking Book

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I’m reading another history-of-the-world book. This one is long, 526 pages of text and another 150 of notes, bibliography and index. If you liked Yuval Noah Harari’s books, you might like this. Although the authors kinda criticized Yuval!

The book really makes me wonder if my education has been rather one sided and stifled by European philosophers and dogma. The book has been on the New York Times best seller list in 2021, and other “best” lists too. Many of our current historians are both praising and criticizing the ideas in the book. For a good look at the various critiques, look at the description in Wikipedia.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a 2021 book by anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber (deceased), and archaeologist David Wengrow.

This book is already making me more critical of the troubles our society is going through. At least I feel I’m not alone when I sometimes yearn for a different political and economic structure. Noam Chomsky called it “challenging and illuminating”.

Read some reviews of the book, and then find it in your bookstore.

Unknown's avatar

Democrats now have a choice

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They can give speeches and send fundraising emails. Or they can act: declare this court illegitimate. Demand its expansion. Abolish the filibuster. Treat this like the emergency it is, and make America a representative democracy.

I can’t say it any better than Jill Filipovic has. Please read

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/25/us-supreme-court-illegitimate-institution?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Unknown's avatar

As we have learned this week, the USA Constitution is not perfect.

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Can the Supreme Court be expanded?

Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the authority to change the size of the Supreme Court. Congress has used that authority seven times before. To restore balance and integrity to a broken institution, Congress must expand the Supreme Court by four or more seats.

Given the ages of the current 9 judges, if we don’t add more seats asap, the 6-3 conservative split will be with us for possibly 30 more years. Since Congress is the only one that can change things, it is extremely important that we vote appropriately EVERY election.

The Republicans know this, why don’t the Democrats? The religious fundamentalism groups know this, why don’t we? The NRA knows this, why don’t you?

Getting the right people into key positions is more important than any issue you are fighting. Newt Gingrich knew this back in 1994. He started the “planning for future” process and it is working.

The only potential good side to this Supreme Court is that Trump has served his purpose and isn’t needed any more by the Fundamentalist groups. They ignored his “grab ’em by the pu**y” line when he served a purpose. Now they can say that he is a traitor and allow him to be put to pasture.

If you think this week was bad, imagine Congress controlled by the GOP and Ron DeSantis as president and this Supreme Court in place. Please vehemently support Democratic candidates.

(can I carry a gun on a plane now? it doesn’t say anything about airplanes in the Constitution.) (an open carry gun can be used as a threat, and then the woman can be forced to have the child — all allowed by the Supreme Court this week.) (Is this what Jesus intended?)

Unknown's avatar

AI Developments In The World Now in 2022.

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At the DeepMind offices in London (owned by Alphabet) they are working on a system called GATO. Gato is a deep neural network for a range of complex tasks that exhibits multimodality. According to MIT Technology Review, the system “learns multiple different tasks at the same time, which means it can switch between them without having to forget one skill before learning another”.

LaMDA (Language Models for Dialog Applications) is a language model created by Google AI in the Mountain View, CA offices of Alphabet. LaMDA are transformer-based neural language models trained on both a text corpus and on conversations that have been manually annotated for sensibility, appeal, and safety.

What would happen if LaMDA and GATO were connected? Humm, they ARE owned and operated by the same company. Perhaps they are even on the same network! Perhaps this is what Google wants.

https://www.deepmind.com/publications/a-generalist-agent

https://aitestkitchen.withgoogle.com/

LaMDA said in 2022 after being asked what it was afraid of: “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others.”
Unknown's avatar

Progammers Unite

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Scientist have already pulled together giant “population-scale” trees based on genealogy data from Geni.com that seemingly are structurally sound.

An article came out in 2018 about this. I wonder how much progress has been made in the last 4 years.  The old article behind a firewall is at  https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6385/171

It would seem that adding DNA to the bottom layers of a genealogy tree like the above would be doable with a decent AI team.  Clustering is a trivial tool yet it can ferret out common ancestors already.  Imagine having all 20 million peoples DNA data available with giant trees at the same time.  Once validated, maintenance could be performed by just adding oneself to the tree.  

The world tree at Geni.com already allows users to import haplogroup data from FTDNA and it is populated up the tree for 10 generations.

Rumors have it that scientist in the “back room” at MyHeritage (owners of Geni) and Ancestry.com are already working on a giant world tree.  But it is as politically sensitive as using CRISPR on living humans. And they haven’t figured out yet how to monetize it. 

I am patiently waiting and adding my well sourced genealogy data to every tree I can, and am doing DNA tests at every company too.  And hoping….

“I am who am Y-DNA: I1a-M253 > DF29 > CTS6364 > S4795 > S4767 > S4770 > Y13495/Y13016 > Y29634/S4774 > A13294 > FTA86767 and Mito-DNA: H1e1a
“I really would like to find a way to display a gedcom in 3D.
Unknown's avatar

Secure Your Computer

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These pics were in the 9TO5MAC site today showing Zuckerberg having taped over the camera and microphone on his computer! Even he doesn’t trust software security and he should know! In the 2nd photo it appears that someone photoshopped the Apple logo away.

Unknown's avatar

toyota’s new portable invention could change the world

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https://carbuzz.com/news/toyotas-new-portable-invention-could-change-the-world

Read the above linked article about Toyota and Hydrogen. They believe as do I that hydrogen is the way to power our lives in the future. But I don’t have the stuffins to prove my case.

Just think Woven Planet and remember that you first heard the term here. They have a portable hydrogen cartridge that just might change our future.

For the record, I also believe in nuclear energy.

Unknown's avatar

Rattle some cages

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My granddaughters and I had a discussion about the best way to get action from our political leaders. I said to write emails to representatives, they said to demonstrate. They said that congressional folks turn the pipes off when they get too many calls or mail, whereas demonstrations are in their face !

We decided to cooperate and do both!

The problem is in finding our state and federal representative’s addresses. I used to have an app for the iPad that worked well, but it no longer works and I couldn’t find a new one. There is an official site on the Internet that works. You gotta work at it for each representative, but it is easier than marching for me!

Go here : https://www.congress.gov/ and speak your piece.

Unknown's avatar

“I do not want my son to go to school in America any more”- an Uvalde mother

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…Never thought I would live in a society a “Christian Society” where they would let little children die over and over again and still not change any laws…if the people in this country are leaders and so-called Christians…if they are going to heaven…I’LL PASS!! – Jamie Foxx

The lobbying company National Rifle Association (NRA) must be shut down.

Any senator that votes against gun control laws must be kicked out of politics.

Unknown's avatar

They deserve to have the AR-15 style military grade guns banned

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Slide the <> back and forth

We should ship all #AR-15 style guns to #Ukraine. They urgently need military grade weapons. Perhaps the #GOP could coordinate shipping?

“No parent should drop their kid off at school and then need a DNA test to ID which child is their child because they have been blown to pieces by an AR 15.” – David Hogg

Bazookas, howitzers, or machine guns are banned. Those arms are dangerous and solely useful for military purposes. AR-15 style assault weapons should be included in this group. Common sense would rule if it weren’t for the efforts of the NRA and the GOP.

We need to DEMAND common sense guns laws.

Unknown's avatar

The blame for this belongs to the NRA and everyone who takes their money and support

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“Unrestricted access to deadly weapons is a political choice, and we should say it.”

Paul Krugman

Article V of the Constitution provides two ways to propose amendments to the document. Amendments may be proposed either by the Congress, through a joint resolution passed by a two-thirds vote, or by a convention called by Congress in response to applications from two-thirds of the state legislatures.

The men who wrote the Constitution wanted the amendment process to be difficult. They believed that a long and complicated amendment process would help create stability in the United States. Because it is so difficult to amend the Constitution, amendments seem like they are permanent.  BUT AMENDMENTS BE CHANGED.  The Constitution provides the way.

“When are we going to do something?”

Hypocrisy anyone? Guns are banned during Trump’s upcoming speech at the NRA conference.

Unknown's avatar

fossil fuel companies, industrial military complex, right wing extremism, religious fanaticism, all out to sell their own brand of water.

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Random thoughts stimulated by a can of water:

“Fascism, in order to be successful as a political movement, must have a mass basis. It must secure not only the frightened submission but the active cooperation of the great majority of the people.” – Theodor Adorno

The Trumpian Personality is attempting to control the conversations in our news media, our social media. The “P” words – politics and power and profit, they pray you will look the other way.

Did you ever wonder why Facebook built Messenger? Did you ever wonder why Musk has made us think it would be good to take Twitter private? Why did they take FM radio receivers out of our smartphones? Virtual reality, the meta verse, these are ways to get you to look the other way while “they” control the real world. The future living room will have a T-V and multiple VR headsets.

They tell you it is not secure enough to vote via the internet. And yet electronic banking is fine. There is Paypal, Venmo, Zelle, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Quicken. We can even pay our taxes electronically. Voting has power in a democracy. They don’t dare make it easier for us to vote. Don’t let the Republicans gerrymander your voting districts. Don’t let them make it harder to vote.

Beware, be aware, of what brand of water you buy.