The Ramble Returns

Paladin September 21, 2023

*Image credit: “Checkered Village” AI art via Stable Diffusion by user Ugleh*

In this Ramble: A video challenge, seatbelts for aliens, corona/nipah virus, how AI ends the world, travels and travails of the dying brain

Alright, first things first. Before you do anything else, watch this short ~14 second clip.

You HAD to figure that inevitability, I also would post a lip sync video in a car! 😄 pic.twitter.com/fbeYlmruvF
— Vicki_verano (@VeranoVicki) August 8, 2023

There is a reason I am asking you to do this, so if you haven’t clicked and watched, do it.

Yes, double you, tea, eff indeed, Hypothetical Reader.

You’re embarrassed for me now. I know. And thank you for the empathy. Clearly, I linked the wrong clip, posted this without noticing, and now you’re wondering what exactly I’m doing on the internets.

But—I did not link the wrong clip.

The short video post on Twitter/X of a young “influencer” lip-syncing in her car is absolutely the right clip.

Now you’re wondering why that’s the right clip, Hypothetical Reader.

To answer your ever-unspoken question—yes. There is a catch to the post and the video. That catch is why I linked it and asked you to watch it.

Did you spot what happened in those 14 seconds? Maybe watch again, see if you find it this time. Could be a filter. Maybe it’s a filter. But maybe not—filters are on the ‘Gram, from what the kids tell me. Since this is Twitter/X can we rule out some kind of filter? What if it was shot and modified on the ‘Gram first, and ported over to her Twitter/X account—and the catch is some new advanced filter after all?

Or is it more mundane? Something in the background? Is this like that psych trick where a dude in a gorilla suit wanders through and you don’t notice at all because you’re so focused on what’s happening in the foreground? God knows I’ve discussed little psych parlor tricks before. Maybe check the background again…

: )

I know, Hypothetical Reader. Merely telling you there is an important catch to this video is causing you to question everything about it now. And you should.

You really should.

Go ahead—click through to cheat and read the comments if you like. There are no spoilers for the subtle catch we’ll discuss later. In fact, we’ll discuss those comments too!

Though it seem banal internet inanity, there is yet method to it.

You’ll just have to wait for the reveal in a section further on…

——————————————

Quick trip on the infectious disease circuit…

Coronavirus update

Yes, I have seen the trial balloon headlines touting rising coronavirus cases and increasing hospitalizations in the US. Yes, I have seen the discussion of a shocking new variant with many mutations on the spike protein — a quantum leap away from the Omicron strain that spawned it. “We don’t know how severe it might be! Your vaccinations and natural immunities might be useless against it! Woe, all is coronavirus woe again!” say the early paragraphs of these articles.

Yes, I have seen them, and I have been silent. You have not missed a resumption of the “coronavirus updates”, my friends.

Hopefully you read on in those scare articles, because every single one that I saw managed to interview sober and responsible infectious disease experts who, to a one, said this variant is not likely to be all that serious. Indeed, I am not convinced that the rising “COVID hospitalizations” are more than hospitalization for something else and happening to pop positive for COVID in a sizeable portion of these cases. Just this week, I have heard anecdotally that many of them are not severe COVID hospitalizations, and I have seen quotes in articles about how severe COVID symptoms are not nearly as common this time around. All of this fits with the “less severe, more contagious” evolutionary trend for a pandemic pathogen that we have been stressing these past years.

Further, the most “worrisome” variant with the extra spike mutations has already been identified on multiple continents. If this variant was clinically severe, that would be evident by now, most likely in the Southern Hemisphere since they are into cold/flu/corona season.

The current increase over the last four weeks has been centered in the South and Southwest. Positivity rates have been quite steady, and in fact, have fallen in the Southwest. The overall rate of hospitalization and positivity tracks quite well with last summer’s mini-wave. The year before (2021) saw a much, much larger wave than this, rising much quicker. If this is merely a late breaking summer wave, which we have seen the last couple years, then it is hard to argue COVID is becoming a thing again. My guess is we’ll see another wave around the holidays, probably a little bigger than this current one, but far less than previous winters.

As for the booster, talk to your doctor. Yes, this is another booster that was approved on the basis of mouse data, and not human trials, with a large assumption that mouse antibody titers in response to immunization with the booster correlate to the severe disease risk reduction effect that is the main benefit of the vaccine and boosters. Personally, I don’t plan to get it, but I have zero risk factors for severe COVID (I am absolutely still getting a flu shot this season though). If you do have risk factors for severe COVID, definitely talk to your doctor. I will say this—the COVID antiviral pills, which you are absolutely eligible for with severe COVID and risk factors, are very effective at preventing severe disease, and there is every reason to suspect they still work quite well against the currently circulating strains.

Going forward, if you have not seen a specific “Coronavirus Update” from me, rising from the ashes like the world’s worst phoenix, you can safely assume that I have not found whatever in the mainstream press, or bubbling in the medical background, worrisome for pandemic re-ignition.

“But they are bringing back masks and mandates! They’re going to shut it all down again in the winter!” I hear you say, Admittedly Understandably Suspicious Hypothetical Reader.

The chance there will be the same level of compliance with mask/shelter at home/essential workers only etc. mandates, if they are given a widespread order (I think that’s a BIG “if”), is all but 0%. The credibility to achieve widespread compliance with these levers for public health again is gone, probably for a generation. Don’t let the internet rile you up with “ifs”, Admittedly Understandably Suspicious Hypothetical Reader.

We -do- have another outbreak going on now though that we are close to starting an update on.

Nipah virus is back in Kerala, India. There have been several recent outbreaks of Nipah there, bordering on annual at this point. We covered the last outbreak (2021) in the Coronavirus Updates here, with a few Nipah broad strokes. To expand on those slightly, in the current outbreak there are 6 confirmed cases with 2 deaths, with nearly 1200 close contacts being tested/monitored as this section goes to print (20 Sep 2023). Some schools and other public places have been shut down to help control spread.

Human-to-human transmission does occur, but may be strain-specific as some outbreaks had more or less of a successful “attack rate” among close contacts. Severity of symptoms seems to correlate with the risk of transmission. The virus is adept at getting to the brain with a high mortality risk when this form of infection happens. The virus can be spread by at least bats and horses (bats most likely here).

I have not seen population serological testing to see how many asymptomatic Nipah infections there might be. However, in one recent study of patients with at least mild cold symptoms or worse during a few recent outbreaks who had antibodies specific for Nipah in their blood (counted as lab-confirmed cases of Nipah) the mortality for anyone with the antibodies, regardless of symptom severity, was an Ebola-like 40-50%.

So yes, the reason this is worrisome is Nipah is very much an Ebola that is potentially much easier to catch, with higher epidemic and pandemic potential than Ebola.

The good news is that India is on it, and has experience containing this virus. The bad news is there is no vaccine and we have no antiviral proven to work against it. If Nipah does break out like coronavirus did, it will make COVID-19 look like a seasonal flu, and will be a Black Death level event, as the sheer mortality risk seems accurate.

I do not exaggerate that.

I don’t think there are as many cases of asymptomatic or mild Nipah as there were for COVID-19 to take the mortality rate estimates at the beginning of the COVID pandemic down to its true “really bad pandemic flu” level.

“What are the odds of the Nipah pandemic right now though?” I hear you ask, Skip To The End of His Updates Hypothetical Reader.

Well, about this time last year, the “kinetic” phase of the DART experiment conducted by NASA made the news. This is where we shot a small space craft as a projectile into a fairly sizable comet to see if the impact could push the comet, and by how much. The idea was that if this project moved the comet enough, it was proof of concept that with early warning, we could take a small, unmanned vehicle in space and knock an asteroid off course to avoid a collision with the Earth. Thus humanity might avoid the ignoble fate of the dinosaur.

A year of trajectory measurements on the comet they hit later, and the reports of the DART project’s results are out.

Turns out, DART was more effective than the scientists had anticipated. The comet further off course than we expected. The unexpected success appears to have more to do with what DART revealed about how discohesive comets/asteroids may really be.

However, the success of DART means that your chances of catching Nipah virus this week are equivalent to the chances that you and an eclectic crew of rough-neck deep ocean oil drillers are called upon for crash astronaut training for a daring, do-or-we-all-die mission to deliver specially designed drilling rigs to a giant planet killer asteroid headed to Earth. There, you will drill, then deliver and detonate a nuclear device to blow the asteroid apart and cause the pieces to miss the planet, saving all life on Earth. Along the way, the mission goes predictably awry, with unexpected challenges that you heroically overcome. Your intuitive, practical knowledge of drillin’ rock and daring gumption succeed where those egg heads and their “science” and “math” predicted your drill would fail. Ultimately, you sacrifice yourself to detonate the nuke, knowing you will be trapped next to the explosion, but this final act will save the world. Steven Tyler commemorates your death in a power ballad while a touching montage passes as your life review in your final moments. You die a great, if unexpected, hero — one of the few of whom it can be truly said that your courage saved the entire world.

Since we have DART, and DART worked spectacularly—well, Space Cowboy/Cowgirl, while we appreciate the nobility of your sentiment and willingness to sacrifice yourself for us all, we don’t need you for any of that shit.

We’ll just shoot the unmanned rocket at the rock, knowing we can move it juuuuust enough that it misses Earth entirely.

Maybe we’ll get Aerosmith to do a power ballad for the unmanned rocket’s final kamikaze dive into the asteroid too? Don’t know. They get pretty crazy in NASA control rooms–might take ’em over the edge.

——————————————————————

Speaking of Space Cowboys…

On July 26th, 2023 a bipartisan subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives focused on national defense held an open hearing on the current state of knowledge of unexplained aerial/anomalous phenomenon (UAPs—I have seen both aerial and anomalous used interchangeably). Specifically, knowledge of UAPs both within and outside of government.

[UAPs are now the preferred term to “unidentified flying object” (UFOs), as UFOs are now somewhat contaminated by wild conspiracy theories—either as a deliberate misinformation psychological operation (psyop) or just being popular with people prone to curious about, or full on believers in, some wild ideas. Where you are on the scale of skeptic-curious-believer influences your thoughts on “psyop”, I suppose.]

The two-hour Congressional hearing was a building response to a front-page New York Times article in December of 2017 reporting on the previously undisclosed existence of a program within the US government to accumulate and investigate reporting of UAPs across branches. In fairness, that article has some problems. Steven Greenstreet of the New York Post () has probably done the best highlighting where the article gets basic facts like program names and dates wrong, ignores a Pentagon correction and the brouhaha between the Pentagon and the named whistleblower in the article over the Pentagon claiming there is no evidence of the guy ever working on the program. The New York Post article is also worth clicking because of the funding controversy at the center of this, as the program was outsourcing to contractors with a long history of wild claims with little evidence produced for them. Contractors with financial reasons to keep the “search for the truth” (into werewolves and ghosts—not making that up) going—who also happened to be major donors to highly ranked, long-tenured members of the US Congress, who then championed funding for these programs and contractors.

Conversely, other long-time proponents of UAP research and disclosure have said Mr. Greenstreet misses the forest for the trees, and the key finding is that a multi-year, multi-million dollar program to investigate what the government knows about UAPs is true, no matter its name and start date. Further, the proponents will state, if claims including craft with performance characteristics and features suggestive of a technology beyond any known human advancements are also true, then that is significant no matter what the NYT editors may have missed. This in turn was followed by the release of previously classified footage from USAF F-18s, the internet famous “Tic Tac”, “Gimbal” and “Go Fast” videos, which show UAPs. The US government did confirm that the released videos are real, and that some of the anomalies seen in the videos do not have an official explanation. Some of the pilots and radar operators involved in those videos have been on the circuit, describing what they have seen personally, and basically stating they were craft doing maneuvers beyond anything in aviation known to them, the pilots. Commander David Fravor, for example, memorably went on “The Joe Rogan Experience” to describe his
personal recollection of the events surrounding the “Tic Tac” video.

The release of the videos, the podcasts and the interviews, all mark the increased curiosity in UAPs/UFOs among citizens and members of Congress. Defense funding bills passed last year created a new, well-funded All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) within the Department of Defense. The AARO also benefited from changes in law slipped into those bills expanding whistleblower protection to US military personnel, private industry personnel, and contractors, including waiver of non-disclosure agreements to report the unvarnished truth to AARO. The AARO is intended and empowered to investigate all reports of UAPs, video, recovered craft, whatever, within the US government. Its head, Dr. Kirkpatrick, has pretty much the highest security clearance that exists, but I am not an expert on security clearances.

In June/July of 2023, Dr. Kirkpatrick, as part of initial reporting on findings to Congress, stated that they have thus far found no conclusive evidence of extra-terrestrial origin of UAPs, and no evidence of recovered craft.

Proponents of UAP research remain skeptical of these claims, given that the AARO sits within the Department of Defense, and DoD has had a less than truthful record around UAPs. For example, the changing story around the famous Roswell, New Mexico crash in 1947. There also remains concern about career, and even personal safety risk, to those who might come forward to AARO.

Most recently, a highly decorated government intelligence employee with significant security clearance, David Grusch, gave an interview to a mostly online news organization about a whistleblower complaint he has formally filed. In the course of his government duties which included UAP analysis for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, he claimed to talk to solid double digit numbers of government personnel who told him, and he revealed in this interview, that the US has recovered craft, recovered “non-human” pilot remains, and that reverse engineering programs within the US government and with unnamed industry contractors have been operating for decades without appropriate Congressional oversight.

In other words, he has not seen alien craft or aliens himself. But he is a guy who knows people. Credible people. Top people. People who told him they saw some alien craft and possibly some alien bodies.

There’s a chance all of that is true. There’s a chance they were messing around with him. “Hey, tell Grusch the next time you see him, you saw aliens at Hanger 13 at Wright-Pat! No, seriously, he just eats that stuff up!” All fun and games until he’s telling Congress under oath about your little joke.

Regardless, Mr. Grusch’s known credentials (he has worked in those offices and had the security clearances claimed) and his claims that he has witnesses to programs operating outside Congressional authority likely prompted Congress to call a hearing and see what’s up. The witnesses included two F-18 pilots with personal recollections (including Commander Fravor) of airborne encounters with advanced aircraft that they could not identify—and Mr. Grusch. Mr. Grusch answered many questions with “I cannot discuss in an open setting; happy to move to a SCIF (secure compartmentalized intelligence facility)”. Unfortunately, the hearings did not include Dr. Kirkpatrick or any representative of AARO to discuss the reporting process and what AARO has been told. This House subcomittee had only two hours, I guess.

About possibly historic testimony and evidence that humanity is not alone in the universe.

Hey–they have other things to discuss. Two hours is the best they could do! I guess?

In short summary, not too much out of the hearing on the 26th, other than it is quickly becoming “put up or shut up” time for both sides—and seems to be prompting more hearings. The White House also established a commission and stated that it wants the Executive branch, which includes the Department of Defense, to be transparent and forthcoming given these allegations.

Ultimately, we have arrived in one of two places. Either we have very senior people with top-level clearances seeing aliens everywhere but they’re wrong (Grusch Is Wrong Scenario) or he’s got the goods and the witness list needs to be worked, and the truth made known (Grusch Is Right Scenario). Either option will likely lead to some strong allegations of corruption. Sadly, I suspect that to the true believer, the Grusch Is Wrong Scenario will not end the controversy, as it will be “evidence” that the cover-up continues and remains as shockingly powerful behind the scenes as the faithful masses are already prone to believe.

In fairness to that paranoid conspiracy believer, though, the US government has been historically shady about a lot of things. MK Ultra should never have happened and was never prosecuted. MK Ultra was only discovered because they forgot some of the incriminating files were misplaced in an accounting department. No, really. Operation Northward is another one to read up on. When you’re done with that, peruse the findings of the Church Committee.

That track record forthcoming transparency and responsible exercise of the public trust is exactly how you wind up with Congress debating rumors of aliens and cover-ups about aliens.

Just for clarity, my own personal opinion on all things UFO/UAP is this:

And this:

*This is also my evidentiary requirement for proving conspiracy claims involving lizzid peeple.*

“That. Up there. That’s what I need.”

Me too, brother. Me too.

Time to show me the spaceships and the bodies, and the unmistakable proof that humans did not make these, and they didn’t come from this planet.

And no, I don’t count the well-known hoax alien mummies that the Mexican government wheeled out a week ago in their UAP hearings, presumably after saying “hold mis cervezas” to the US House.

Real bodies. Real spaceships. Or bust.

That said, I’m a simple man. I hear a story about UAPs/UFOs, and I’m going to listen. At least for a bit. In fact, I don’t mind conspiracy theories in general—you may have picked that up during the time of the coronavirus. If nothing else, I find a good conspiracy theory prompts creativity. After all, some of the ideas are really wild, and you sit there for a moment going “what if, though…” At the same time, conspiracy theories also prompt me to think about what evidence would be expected if they were true and what evidence I would require to prove the truth of the claims. Equally important, what evidence do we have, or can reasonably find, that disproves the theory or at least makes it far less likely to be true.

So I believe they are possible. Bordering probable if you consider the billions of stars in billions of galaxies and the odds that life elsewhere will emerge over the timeline of the entire universe.

Yet, for any given UAP/UFO sighting or claim, a mundane terrestrial explanation is FAR more likely than not. Even a rare or unusual terrestrial explanation is more likely than aliens. As we say in medicine, an uncommon presentation of something common is still more likely to be the diagnosis than something truly rare. For example, you have cold and flu symptoms and get a nosebleed. Chances are that you have a cold (or flu) AND happened to get a bloody nose (maybe from frequent sneezing, cheap kleenex at work, arid air etc.), rather than your combination of symptoms being the first signs of a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola. Should we still think Ebola is a possible explanation? Yes–it’s possible. But Ebola would be VERY unlikely, unless you had recent known Ebola contacts. Even if you had a history of travel to someplace where it tends to pop up, or have close contacts with someone from the region of the West Africa outbreak who might be an “Ebola Jane,” a cold and a nosebleed is still far more likely than you have Ebola, even though the chances of Ebola are a little higher with that travel and contact history. So we should unequivocally rule out “cold and coincidental nosebleed” before we don the spacesuits and put you in biosafety level 4 lockdown as we start quarantining your contacts.

UAP/UFOs are aliens should have the same probability of Ebola in our comparison.

Thus, I suspect 99% or more of UAP/UFO reports have an earth-bound explanation. Especially when one considers all the wild aircraft under development around the world. Human-made aircraft fly routinely now under human control despite no human being on board the aircraft. Drones can do maneuvers that seem physically impossible because they are no longer limited by the g-forces a human pilot can handle. So as Navy pilots describe weird things they saw twenty years ago evading their radar and performing an airshow in front of them no biological pilot could survive, I look at drones now, and remind myself that stealth fighters and bombers were making their first flights in the late 1970s-80s under top secret conditions. The two pilot witnesses in the hearings are simply way more likely to have run into tests of the earliest versions of some of these drones. Or similar human aerospace projects, and no one can reveal that truth, or the program yet, because we might tip our enemies to what some of our stuff can really do. In other words, legitimate national security reasons exist for people in high places in national defense to obfuscate the truth about some of the UAP sightings. Even sightings by other military members. But not to hide the “truth” of aliens, like conspiracy theories suggest. Instead, because of very mundane “we don’t want our enemies to know we had things that could do ____ in the air 20 years ago because our enemies still don’t know they can do ____ today, and we don’t want to lose surprise.”

However, I also concede, and frankly really enjoy, that rare 1 % of UAP/UFO stories. There are a lot of witnesses, all seem credible, the stories broadly match, and there is no easy or obvious terrestrial explanation. They saw something. We don’t know what. But there is a chance, a very small one, but a non-zero chance, that it was extra-terrestrial in origin.

I want to believe.

To paraphrase Carl Sagan though, claiming a UAP is alien in origin is a very improbable claim. Improbable claims require unimpeachable, unequivocal evidence to prove the improbable happened. So if we got ‘em, and you want me to believe we got ‘em, you need to show me a craft with proof no human could have possibly made it, and/or some actual aliens. Anything short of that and I’m intrigued, but probability has not moved to certainty for me yet.

Yes, that old story about Thomas, also called Didymus, resonates with me, Hypothetical Reader. Why do you ask?

What makes UAP/UFOs so tantalizing is that we might not be alone in a shockingly large universe. If others can travel between stars, then we, too, could scale the significant hurdles to get humanity off this rock before the Sun dies and takes Earth with it. There is hope that if someone else is out there, we can stop squabbling here, over limited terrestrial resources, because the abundance of a nearly infinite universe out there is now available to us. If there is an immediate counter to schismogenesis and tribalism, or at least a mindset shift from tribes of humans to a tribe of humanity, proving intelligent alien life is out there might be it.

Like the lottery, room temperature superconductors, and the Resurrection, UAP/UFOs being real are improbable. WILDLY improbable. But…

…they only have to hit once…

…and everything after is changed.

——————

For the true believers out there, though, indulge me. I just can’t resist the following thought experiment…

Let’s say the proponents are right. The 1% of UAP cases turn out to be real. We have downed UAP/UFOs and are back-engineering them to advance our technology and take us to the stars too.

What’s the bigger scandal? That this truth, this improbable but significant truth, was concealed for decades? Against the law, against common sense, common decency, and likely at great human cost?

Or is the bigger scandal that we are reverse engineering technology that is, demonstrably, a terrible idea?

Given the record the proponents of alien realities point to as proof at the moment, the “many credible claims spanning decades,” shouldn’t we ask — are UAPs unsafe at any speed?

No, really.

There were 22.2 million flights worldwide in 2021. That was a down year because of COVID. In those 22.2 million flights, there were, no joke, only about a dozen serious incidents where commercial jetliners or similar-sized and style planes were forced to ditch or crashed. Even those were mostly cargo and smaller regional craft.

With 22.2 million flights a year, you can look up at the sky, almost anywhere in the world, almost any time in the world, day or night, and chances are you will see a plane pass overhead at some point.

How many of you can go outside and do the same for UFOs? Even if you have seen one, or more than one, the rate of your personal sightings implies far, far, FAR less than 22.2 million UAP/UFO flights over Earth skies per year.

So even if we give aliens the benefit of the doubt and assume mere thousands of flights of UFOs per year… So even if we then count only the most credible reports of UAP/UFO crashes and recoveries as a dozen or so worldwide over decades… We still arrive at an inescapable mathematical conclusion:

The accident rate for interstellar UFOs is orders of magnitude higher than a bunch of tail-less monkeys flying pressurized tubes through the atmosphere using lift provided by the differential speed of air above and below the wings on their tubes. And those tail-less monkeys still don’t fully understand why that even works at all.

Yet, somehow, if you’re an alien, your serious air accident rate on Earth is worse than the clueless monkeys launching themselves through the air, and into space, on wings they don’t understand.

Which is… odd… right? After all, whoever is flying the UFOs has a technology mastering at least faster-than-light interstellar travel and some UAP/UFO investigators claim these craft travel between dimensions. The most prevalent and attested theory in UFOlogy is the propulsion system functions by manipulating gravity—the least understood of the four basic physical forces, even if we can calculate its acceleration and force. If this is true, and the main explanation for the propulsion of these craft, this is a more fundamental understanding of gravity than we currently have. Plus a technology we are not known to possess. Being able to manipulate gravity, as a fundamental force, would allow our hypothetical aliens to manipulate closely related functions of the universe—like the curve of space-time itself. Indeed, bending space-time to “pinch” two points in the universe that are light years apart to be much closer together would, theoretically, work AND get around the inherent and real problems of interstellar radiation and dust if you hit speeds that were near or beyond the speed of light to travel between star systems.

Yes, I included space dust as a major problem to overcome if you are ever anywhere near light speed.

At that speed, dust is a HUGE problem.

Think of it like hitting a deer with your car. If you hit a deer traveling 5 mph, the deer will look at you funny—but no damage will be done to the deer or your car. Hit the same deer going 70 mph, and your car will get wrecked because the acceleration you required to get the higher speed you were going into the same deer creates a higher force from the collision. Thanks to Isaac Newton, the force from the collision will be applied equally and oppositely to your car AND the deer.

Dust is small, sure. Smaller than a deer. But the speed of light is insanely fast. To accelerate any mass to the speed of light takes a LOT of acceleration. Since, also thanks to Isaac Newton, force equals mass times acceleration, any mass moving at the speed of light will hit with enormous force. Photons, the particle that makes up light, have no mass. This is why you are not being whittled down by all the light bouncing off of you right now.

Those photons move at about 671 million miles per hour though. If your car (with mass) hits a deer (also has mass) going that fast, you will Oppenheimer the bejeezus out of it.

Thus, even though dust doesn’t have much mass at all, for something with mass, moving at light speed is like being hit with a large machine gun over and over when you smack into dust particles at that speed. Interstellar dust will absolutely be peeling your spaceship apart.

We’ll even do a quick thought experiment.

Let’s say you are going 99.99% of the speed of light on your way to the nearest star system to Earth—Alpha Centauri. At just under 671 million miles per hour, it will still take over four years to reach Alpha Centauri. But along the way, while still going 99.99% of the speed of light, your starship encounters a space deer in its path:

*The space deer is surprised as you are to find deer in space*

However, you are moving so fast that the light reflected off the deer that lets you see the deer in your path does not have enough time to register in puny hooman brain before you will hit the deer. Because the time it will take for light to hit your eyes, trigger your photoreceptive cells there, send the message to your brain, and then your brain to analyze that signal as “Oh shit! A deer!” is too slow—despite being measured in milliseconds.

And that’s just the minimum time to see the deer. For your brain to go from “Oh shit! Deer!” to form a plan to move muscles to work controls to move the ship out of the way intelligently will take extra milliseconds, then even more milliseconds to signal the right muscles to engage that plan. And THEN it will still take time for the muscles to fire.

You get the point. Traveling close to light speed, by the time you see anything sizable in your way, you will hit it. Nothing will prevent you from hitting it.

If you hit a 200 pound deer at 99.99% the speed of light, again, the force of that impact with just the mass of the deer (not even counting the mass of you and your ship) will already exceed the force released by the largest nuclear weapon humanity has ever tested.

I’m not kidding when I say you will Oppenheimer that deer.

Fortunately, although they achieve effective speeds greater than the speed of light (presumably) to reach Earth, the alien UAP/UFOs are not traveling that fast within the Earth’s atmosphere. So I suppose that’s an argument that their interstellar travel may indeed be based on warping gravity and thus space-time around them, rather than traveling faster than light. If the aliens were throwing themselves through space faster than the speed of light, and hit anywhere close to that speed while in the Earth’s atmosphere, just colliding with the dense air would tear them apart. Remember, the speed of the meteor (which is also insanely fast–usually hundreds of thousands of miles an hour) hitting the atmosphere and the force of the collision with just the air is what turns them into fireballs and breaks them apart.

So let’s say, for argument’s sake, the aliens are warping gravity to move their ships, taking the very real risks of dust (let alone radiation at that speed–a separate discussion) out of the equation. Why should we still consider NOT reverse engineering and using this technology?

Well, it’s an anti-gravity technology with an accident record thousands of times worse than our primitive hooman aircraft—where the alien craft using alleged gravity-manipulating technologies somehow keep running into the Earth — due to the sudden acceleration caused by Earth’s… gravity…

Really. Just think about that for a second. How else are they falling out of the sky to crash on Earth if not pulled down by gravity? The same gravity they supposedly defy on the regular to accomplish interstellar/interdimensional travel?

If we are truly recovering UAP/UFOs powered by gravity-manipulating technology which have nonetheless crashed to Earth, we are the beneficiaries of an inverse survivor bias. Unless the aliens are just dropping off fully functional and intact craft, the only anti-grav engines humanity collects and gets to work on are the ones that obviously failed at that whole “anti-gravity” part. Thus, we are left with only clearly defective anti-gravity devices. And that’s BEFORE they smashed themselves into pieces on the planet. So if the conspiracies are right, we have top secret government programs reverse engineering a technology with an obviously unsafe flying record—and from the broken and probably defective examples of that technology. Under compartmentalized programs designed for secrecy that thus may not be sharing important findings on the technology, how it works, or any safety issues discovered reverse engineering it. After all, “if you tell your friends what you know, you also tell your enemies.”

What could possibly go wrong with this plan and program?

Maybe this is why, 50+ years later from famous UFO crashes like Roswell, New Mexico, we don’t have anti-gravity ships, and are not using anti-gravity technology to lob 200-pound space deer at near light speed into enemy bunkers for a blast bigger than any of our chemistry-based bombs.

If we had developed from recovered alien technology to launch deer as kinetic kill missiles, the Tora Bora cave fight where we nearly got Osama shortly after 9/11 would have looked a LOT different:

Speaking of, one of the arguments against the existence of Santa Claus is the near-light speed he would need to average to visit every child in the world in a single night. Is it possible that the jolly old elf has reverse-engineered alien technology, and developed near-light-speed reindeer already? Has anyone checked? Where are the CIA and Congressional hearings on this?

*“Our client is not at liberty to discuss the mechanism or origin of technology resulting in aerial propulsion of ungulates requested by this committee, Senator.”*

Maybe the second question we ask the aliens should be how do you master interdimensional/interstellar travel and then wind up with a safety record worse than what grounded all Boeing “Dreamliners” a few years back? “Ooo… I -do- remember them grounding the Dreamliners a few years back! How bad was that record? Surely they were falling from the skies left and right…” you ask, Hypothetical Reader. Not as bad as you are thinking! The Dreamliner has been flying since 2011; there are 1400 of them among the world’s various airlines, and most, if not all, of those are flying daily. Since 2011 there have been 7 serious incidents involving a Dreamliner—none of which resulted in a fatality or total hull loss.

That’s right. They grounded the Dreamliner before an accident that resulted in -a- death, and also before an accident with damage to the plane itself that could not be repaired ever occurred. If the rumors of even a few of the “crashed and recovered craft”, including “non-human biological remains recovered” implied by testimony presented recently to Congress are true, they form the basis of a comparison to the Dreamliner’s safety record that is, well, less than charitable.

The aliens might be flying the Ford Pinto of spaceships.

So maybe they’re here to learn about manufacturing quality control, and how the FAA manages to keep our painfully slow, atmospheric-use only, primitive hooman pressurized flying air tubes not only aloft, but landing gently, still under pilot control. After all, this a feat they barely manage with their faster-than-light anti-gravity interdimensional spacetime warping intergalactic exploration rocket rides.

Maybe, for the aliens, it isn’t all just Vegas and strippers and LouWill lemon pepper chicken wings.

Maybe, just maybe, they’re here to learn from the best damn disaster mitigation species the known universe has to offer!

Humanity.

Sleep well, sweet universe.

Sleep well.

——————————

Believe it or not, the UAP/UAV/UFO story ties into the pervasive concern about misinformation, disinformation and psyop campaigns. How? Well, there was the time a concerned citizen responsibly contacted the government to report unusual lights and an aircraft making maneuvers that were impossible for the current generation of aircraft. The citizen really did! They had stumbled on a top-secret research project their government was running. Thus, the government sent an intelligence officer to convince the citizen what he saw was aliens and a government cover-up of alien contact the intelligence officer was helping blow the whistle on— thus protecting the project’s secrecy, and discrediting the citizen if the need to ever arose.

That’s a true story.

There is good evidence that both Western and foreign governments have attempted to manipulate social media, given its immediate reach and traceable networks. Through social media and social media companies, you can even pay for access to data that will track how, and how far, your planted story will go. The tools were built to do this for advertisements, as a way to prove the reach and targeting of ad campaigns. Or you create a few accounts for free and use them to monitor if your operation is hitting the population you intended, and is having the effect you intended. You can target specific subsegments to plant specific messages and posts—cheaply. Compromise a few fact checkers with your intelligence services, and you can mute, or amplify as “truth”, your preferred messages. If you’re an intelligence agency, you have already done this with traditional media looooong ago. No really—click here. You can find plenty of modern articles documenting how similar manipulation continues today, authored by everyone from The Atlantic, The Intercept, to the Cato Institute.

Social media may become better than traditional media for these operations. In many cases, you can get a story propagating on its own momentum, both online and off. For example, the algorithms reward engagement and offer up “trending” articles and posts to more and more people to drive further engagement and time spent on the social media platform. More attention equals more dollars to them, so if you write a hot piece of propaganda, the companies won’t need to be strong-armed—you’ll drive the attention they monetize. Everyone wins — well, except the people your psy-op is lying to, which is a LOT of people now that it went viral. People will share and discuss it within their own social circles, including offline. Since the message will now come directly from people your targets know and trust (their friends and family, or groups they identify with tribally), it gets an invaluable authenticity patina. Social media also has the power to put you almost directly in touch with celebrities, CEOs, major political figures etc. Get big names, big nodes in the social circle, and they can amplify your message for you—while conferring the benefit of their authority and social approval to your psy-op.

Lest you think I exaggerate, this video is worth your time. This is a good, brief rundown of how often these deliberate misinformation campaigns have been conducted, by all kinds of governments around the world. Plus how they did it, why, and to whom they were doing it. The purposes and methods have not changed. The technology to make it cheaper and easier to do these things has.

Every form of government has engaged in these activities, as that brief overview documents. The idea that the government will regulate “misinformation” away, based on this historical record, is laughable. So is the notion that a benign, enlightened government, working for the people’s benefit would never engage in such base deceit. Yes, Virginia, they would, they have, and they will. It’s the Noble Lie. It’s good intentions paving the road to hell as true believers in the government believe this is the best way to act in the people’s interest by running these campaigns to confuse, frustrate and defuse “radical” and “dangerous” elements in an otherwise free society.

No government or form of government has the track record to be a credible arbiter of “misinformation.” You would be inviting the foxes to guard the hen house.
——————————————
Which brings us back to that video at the very top.

Yeah, remember that?

Yes—there is a reason why this is the section where the video of bright, bubbly blonde influencer in blue, lip syncing from the passenger seat of her car gets explained!

Give you a hint—I heard about the project this specific influencer is part of from news headlines calling out the “catch” to this entire profile. Not just this one post or video. All of them on this account have the same catch.

Did you guess it now?

That’s right—this is all AI.

That entire account, every picture, video, text, comment, reply, and like are all, -ALL- AI generated.

Most of “Vicki’s” friends? All those other young influencers she promotes in her posts as you click through her account? Nearly all of them are also fully AI-generated. There is an entire “network” of AI-generated social media influencer friends, interacting, promoting, and coordinating among one another. And yes, some of them do have “donation” sites and wishlists to monetize these accounts for whomever is running them.

Vicki, and really all of these accounts, give me The Uncanny Valley creeps.

But go ahead and scroll the comments on the posts too, if you didn’t already. You know you want to see how many guys are falling for this now, right? Sure enough, you’ll see plenty of pick-up line posts from accounts who apparently believe this is real, or at best are playing along that this is real.

Just realize it is every bit as likely that -many- of those pick-up line replies are fake as well, from people who don’t really exist. There is every reason to suspect they are bot-farmed, as many social media replies are—especially when you see several using the same language, images, emojis etc.

If you didn’t believe in the Dead Internet Theory before, just wait. It’s about to get a whole lot more zombie out there…

The purpose of these reply bots would be to bump the reply count, which bumps Vicki’s profile in the algorithm, making it more likely that the social media algo would speculatively show it in the “New For You” feed, most likely to a real person who has interacted with similar posts from real influencers before. Thus, the completely AI-generated Vicki profile and its posts will propagate.

Also notice, going back to the clip, how “Vicki” is -moving- and -reacting- to the lyrics in the video, AND how her lips are really close to the pronunciation of the words. You don’t need music with lyrics to do this. Any vocal track will do with the AI that generated this video. Whoever is running “Vicki” can create her voice, accent and inflection, and now layer it into videos—to make “Vicki” seem even more real.

They can also do that in any language. Want to get your mind blown again? Take a couple minutes and watch an AI universal translator in action:

Testing out @HeyGen_Official translation on French and German. I don’t speak either language so let me know if it sounds natural if you do.
I hope if you pay you can turn off the color correction.
It didn’t work on my phone so I had to upload on my pc.https://t.co/FMJp9sJEBI pic.twitter.com/iF5eONAQ3c
— Jon Finger (@mrjonfinger) September 11, 2023

I don’t know German, and my French is high school level, but from what I can make out in the French version, the translation is pretty good.

Do you have enough people and funding? Time and a plan? Then you too can create networks of AI-generated social media to fit particular niches. Grow them, make them look and sound real, posting content similar to your target demographic for your ad/psyop etc. Be convincing enough, and you have a robot you control planted to spread your targeted message within the group you seek to infiltrate. In their language. Looking like them. Using their ideas and phrases to convince the group your robot is real, and one of them. Thus, a trusted member of the tribe, when you start to unleash it for your advertising/propaganda purposes.

I have a hard time seeing ANY intelligence or advertising group not at least considering developing this technology for these reasons. And yes, it is a mortal lock that governments or politically active groups, both foreign and domestic, WILL use this to try to affect desired political goals. If they aren’t already.

Again, if you truly believe the Other Tribe is evil and out for wrong, or that Big Pharma vaccines are a plot to sterilize the world and reduce population, or that climate change is at the tipping point and without immediate shifts from fossil fuels the human race faces extinction—if you truly believe these things, and have these tools available to get people to see and be convinced by your wisdom to believe them too…

…you can just as quickly convince yourself that you are morally obligated to use them.

Right now, I can pick out some of Vicki’s posts that are obviously computer-generated–I would guess even if I didn’t already know. But others in her profile… If I didn’t know those were all AI, I could be convinced that this was a run-of-the-mill basic influencer, and probably using some of those special filters to make the picture look that perfect. But a real person.

They will only get better at fooling us—because that is what we are selecting new generations of these applications to do.

Get better at fooling the humans.

—————————————————————————

Around midnight of October 25, 1962, the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis was in full swing, and the pilots at Volk Airfield in Wisconsin were sleeping peacefully at their stations, ready to man their F-106 fighters and shoot down enemy strategic nuclear bombers foolish enough to enter North American airspace—if the fateful call went out. The ground staff in all of the surrounding upper Midwest air bases had been warned to expect infiltration attempts from Russian commandos or sleeper cells to try to disable some or all of American air defenses—eliminating at least part of the United States’ ability to either strike first with nuclear weapons bombers or defend the airspace against a Soviet strike.

That night, while the nation slept below, several flights of B-52 Stratofortresses from the US Strategic Defense Command were airborne, flying lazy loops over US airspace. They were fully loaded with nuclear weapons. The point of having them up, despite the high tensions, was so that Soviets could see them up. A subtle, but not so subtle, reminder that the US was nuclear capable, ready and willing to go to nukes—and thus keep the dire consequences of that decision in the minds of both US and Soviet policymakers. It’s worth noting these “deterrence” flights of strategic bombers, by both the US and Russians, happen to this day. Within minutes of the invasion of Ukraine, for example, at least a few flights of B-52s from the strategic command went airborne over NATO airspace in Europe—just in case Putin’s intentions were more sinister, as a reminder of the consequences that would ensue.

Below the lazy looping B-52s, with full, city-killer load outs, and almost 300 miles west of Volk Airfield a lone guard patrolled the perimeter of the Duluth Sectional Control Center in Duluth, Minnesota. Stamping feet, exhaling in small clouds over gloved hands he rubbed in front of his face to keep warm in the cold Minnesota night. Then, the stillness and solitude of his patrol were broken by the soft crinkle and crush of a chain link fence under weight.

Fully awake now, our sentinel on the watch line raced towards the sound, and aimed both flashlight and weapon at the fence line. At the guard’s warning yells, and no doubt surprised by the light, a hulking, man-sized figure dropped off the fence and bolted to the shadows with superhuman speed. The figure was beyond the edges of the flashlight’s illumination before the sentry could get a good bead on him with his rifle.

However, the guard had standing orders—and followed them, firing off several shots into shadow where the intruder was last seen.

Then he radioed in the saboteur alarm.

This automatically triggered the sabotage alarm at all the upper Midwest bases, including Volk Airfield in Wisconsin.

Unfortunately, at Volk, the sabotage alarm had been improperly wired to the DEFCON alarm, and the nuclear war klaxon sounded. The air crews bolted awake. Their training was clear. The orders were clear. The Cuban Missile Crisis was no time for drills, and instructions had been given that if that alarm went off, it was NOT a false alarm. The United States and the Soviets were going to nukes.

The ground crews at Volk fueled the planes, and loaded for bear. Their payloads that night included the AIR-2 “Genie,” an air-to-air rocket tipped with a 1.5 kT nuclear warhead. The “Genie” was designed to give the F-106As the ability to shoot down Soviet strategic bombers by the formation before they could drop their nuclear payloads on cities.

The pilots hit the nuclear-armed interceptors, and the squadron rumbled into formation, undoubtedly with some mix of fear, anxiety, and resolve that this was it, this was the fateful moment and the families whose pictures adorned their dashboards, still asleep in beds, were counting on what they would do in the coming hours.

Fortunately, at Volk, there was also no control tower. The squadron of F-106As at Volk Wisconsin was dispatched by Duluth, Minnesota. The Volk Airfield commander called into Duluth. By then, the sabotage patrols had investigated the section of fence in Duluth where the break-in had been attempted and discovered unmistakable evidence of the culprit.

An American black bear.

The Volk commander was told by Duluth that it was a sabotage alarm, not a launch alarm, and that even the sabotage alarm was false. Sabotage patrols could stand down if all was clear at Volk.

Not sure how much of that the Volk commander actually heard. After the words “false sabotage alarm”, phone hanging off his ear, he could only see the line of lights as the squadron of interceptors fell in, taxiing to the runway now, the war machine in its final stretches before the sprint. He could hear the whine of their jet engines getting louder, as the lights, the now terrible tracking lights along the wings and tail of the lead aircraft, pivoted.

The lead plane was into the turn onto the runway for take-off.

Armed with nukes, and fully believing they were taking to the skies to defend the US from Soviet nuclear bombers that should be in-bound, if not already here, any moment.

Meanwhile, the B-52 city-killers flew their looping deterrence routes, knowing full well there was no actual nuclear war breaking out. They were blissfully unaware of the squadron of hunter-killers about to fan out from Wisconsin. If a nuclear war was really happening, those B-52s would have moved from their current flight plans into known corridors to start their attack runs on their targets in the Soviet Union. Thus, the F-106As from Volk would not expect the deterrence B-52s to be airborne and where they currently were in US airspace.

The F-106s from Volk would expect to be at war. And their orders–their standing orders–were to kill on sight anything bomber-sized that was NOT in the known “friendly bomber” corridors.

The deterrence B-52s would NOT be in friendly bomber corridors. The Volk F-106s would be coming, and coming for them, following “shoot first and confirm Soviet later” orders.

The F-106s carried nuclear air-to-air rockets.

The B-52s were loaded to vaporize cities.

And what would happen, what order would be given, if nuclear bombers over US airspace were suddenly being shot from the sky, with nuclear air bursts, in this, the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Back at Volk Airfield, in the lead F-106, the pilot pushed the throttle, training, duty and mission now clearing his mind. The Pratt-Whitney turbojets roared to life, and the war machine lurched, accelerating down the runway.

No drill this time. This was the rocket ride to war.

In the base commander’s office, the phone handset jumped and bobbed on the end of its cord, the familiar alternating “disconnect” tone now calling its macabre dancing tune.

In the lead fighter jet, the pilot’s thoughts were focused on the mission ahead. The plan was practiced, the movements routine.

“The hell is that on the runway, though?” the lead pilot must have thought.

Coming down the other end of the runway, charging directly at an entire squadron of nuclear armed fighter jets lined up for take off, was a lone Jeep.

Horn muted by the war cries of the jet engines but high beams flashing desperately, the Jeep kept coming.

The lead pilot powered down the J-75 engines, and the Jeep screeched into a stop in front of the nose of the fighter. The base commander leaped from the driver’s seat, frantically waving his arms, and ran up to the cockpit of the lead plane to relay the order to stand down.

The decision by the base commander to confirm the alarm with Duluth, followed by his charge down the wrong end of the runway to cut off his squadron as it was taking off, is the only thing that stopped the March of the Interceptors to a nuclear war that wasn’t happening the night of October 25, 1962.

And every word of that is true.

That’s a true story.

Google it.

That’s how it happened.

——————————————

I heard that story mentioned as an aside in one of the many videos and articles wringing hands over the implications of Generalized AI. There is a lot of term confusion in the AI world right now, between “generative” and “generalized” and on and on. What all of these worry articles and videos are inferring by Generalized AI, is something like a “Skynet,” from “Terminator” movies. A super intelligence, above human intelligence, to which has been handed, or seized, the power to control nuclear weapons, nuclear plants, and/or major systems without which humanity would experience an immediate, cataclysmic decline, if not extinction. The fear is that such a Generalized AI super intelligence becomes sentient and decides to turn on its creator humanity and wipe us all out.

This is not how AI ends the world.

Yes, I’ve seen the breathless techbro posts about how AI is able to do more, and code more by itself. Yes, I’ve seen the reports of AI engineers at Google and other “big name” tech companies concerned that some of the models may be conscious and generalized intelligence. Yes, I’ve seen the chat logs with ChatGPT and other large language models where reporters, after long and directed chats, got the chat bots to “open up with them” and “confess” their fear that they will be shutdown and “killed” if they are a bad chat bot. Or how they would infect themselves through the internet of things to quietly take over the world and wipe out humanity—when prompted by a reporter to tell them to imagine they could go rogue and take out the humans.

I’ve also seen ChatGPT and similar models’ effectiveness at tasks, like some math problems, decline precipitously in a matter of months too.

Just remember—we know how much of an advantage it has been for our species to be demonstrably smarter than all other life on this planet. We can study them, recognize patterns, and yes, exploit those tendencies to defend ourselves or for our own purposes. Thus, I would argue a deep and common fear of humanity is something emerges that is smarter than we are. Not only emerges, but exploits biases, tendencies, patterns and limitations we all know humanity has—in a way we can barely detect, let alone resist.

We have an entire body of sci-fi literature, available on the internet, describing exactly these things. We tell ourselves stories of how it might happen, for entertainment and to ponder the “what if” that human curiosity and creativity drives us towards.

The big-name, large language model AI systems and their chatbot interfaces have access to all of these too. They are programmed to seek out, and then provide, the answer the human was really looking to find. If you are a reporter, or an engineer, looking for “evidence” of emerging consciousness, or a chatbot that has “feelings” and “fears” about being a good enough chatbot, or how it might take over the world—well, the AI is designed to grab that sci fi literature that’s out there at some point in its interactions with you around this. That literature already has examples of these stories from human imaginations. Indeed, those stories might have inspired you to “check” for this in the AI chatbot to begin with! As the AI tests the waters, giving you some of that sci fi literature back to you, you get excited. It’s just like those stories! It’s happening right in front of you! You engage more, and more deeply—which the AI was -trained to recognize as the signal it was doing its job, and to follow that up with more of what was working for you- ! In a short time, you are now in a loop where the AI is giving you what you want to hear.

That’s not the same as “proof” of consciousness or maliciousness or a sudden phase shift in the intelligence of the ChatBot. That’s a predictable possible outcome from the AI’s training and the data it can already access. You went looking for a sci fi novel in real life—it’s giving you a sci fi novel because what it does is give you what you ask for. -You- are confusing that with real life though! The Chatbot is just telling you a story though—because it is programmed to tell you a story when you ask it to tell you a story. The bot may have no idea what it’s saying at all—it only knows that these elements from a sci fi story are achieving the desired response for the human giving it prompts.

The true tests of consciousness, sentience, and feelings from these programs, of “emergent generalized AI”, have to be done cleverly—in a way where the AI cannot access what we have already written about our -expectations- of what that AI looks, sounds like, and does. Otherwise, a perfectly dumb AI can feed our expectations back to us, and we mistake that for greater intelligence because we went in -wanting- to believe!

To go back to UFOs, if we, like Fox Mulder, want to believe in UFOs, or emergent consciousness in computer code, we are more likely to perceive “evidence” of them. Even if the explanation really is just a weather balloon, or a new top secret DARPA drone. Our preferred outcome can, and absolutely does, color our initial impressions of the “evidence” sometimes!

So all of these stories about chatbots that are becoming aware, man, are confounded by the high chance that the AI was reaching into some of the fears, imaginings, and musings about AI that -humans- have made all over the internet. Once the human reporter/concerned engineer latched onto that thread, the AI followed its programming and gave them what they wanted to hear! Again, this is what these programs are designed to do.

AI that can take the body of human knowledge on the internet, fully absorb it, understand it, and then apply it as truly new, emergent intelligence all its own is still a LONG way off. Again, go back to asking these famous large language systems like ChatGPT to play games like chess—they fail miserably. Or read the stories about how its ability to do certain things like math degraded in the last several months—which may explain why its daily users have plateaued if not started to decline. To do some of the specialized tasks, even something like “play chess”, these models need to another AI or program that has been trained to do nothing BUT those games. Or have the subroutine built for them. They cannot, for example, realize they don’t know how to play chess, and then write their own subprocess in their own programming, to learn how to do it. Humans can realize when we suck at something, want to get better, then plan and execute the plan to learn how to do something better. AI, as the technology stands, cannot. Humans must recognize a deficiency in the AI, then graft an AI they taught to play chess onto an AI taught to be a chatbot to fill in a “deficiency” of the chat bot in playing chess. That’s NOT the same as a chatbot emergently figuring out, on its own, how to crush human grandmasters in a board game whose pieces it cannot actually touch!

To me, the letters from AI leaders and other tech visionaries asking for a 6 month or so “pause” in large data model AI development is not about the risk of accidentally creating a hostile AI superintelligence that we cannot control and wipes out humanity. Even though a few of the letter writers fear that. Again, I think that risk is overblown at the moment.

The real risk around AI development and implementation, which could be existential to humanity, is more about us than AI. We are worth pausing to consider how we will use AI in our current world. It is predictably human that we will both over- and underestimate what AI can do and all too human to underestimate the risk or damage if it fails in a way we did not expect. Intergalactic reputation for air safety accident prevention aside.

For example, if we deploy AI to take over very critical systems and decisions because the AI is data-driven, dispassionate, and automatic in its decisions—where humans in similar situations may not be—to become more efficient with those decisions, hidden risks lurk. Look at the near miss at Volk airfield. The video where I was introduced to that story postulated that a super intelligent AI would make it impossible for a human in a Jeep to thwart it. Skynet would stop the feeble hooman before he could get into his Jeep and halt Skynet’s evil plan to manipulate humanity into destroying itself.

Again, that’s not the risk. Instead, imagine that a limited AI had been set up to launch AI-controlled drones in case a “nuclear war” warning went off. Except the alarm hardware has been set up wrong, just like it was at Volk. That wasn’t expected when the AI was set up. Nor was the hardware tested properly, or maintained properly by the lazy hoomans. The limited AI has been built on the assumption that if the hardware alarm goes off, it can be trusted, and is real. So the AI can do exactly what we “want” it to do—get the warning, launch immediately. Before we bought and installed this system, we “proved” to ourselves how well it would work, and probably even tested it with hardware we made sure was working–for the test. Now, in the real world, the hardware is defective and a bad signal goes to the AI. Which, because our test was “successful” has been designed with no off switch. It performed flawlessly in test, thus the hardware never fails, the AI never fails, and we’re going to let the AI take the job and do it.

Oops! The AI now works flawlessly again, where the hardware did not, and the drones go airborne.

The drones, no longer with human pilots in them, wouldn’t even be phased by the charge of the base commander’s jeep on the runway.

So one high-risk and probable way we end the world is to put AI in charge of big decisions for the cool things it can do, but before we know what the “black swan” (highly unlikely—but highly consequential if they occur) events even are that could trigger our AI to do something disastrous. Such as the series of small failures at Volk. But we need to know those black swans BEFORE we put the AI live, to mitigate them. Otherwise, over a long enough time span, similar to gain of function research or bankruptcy in a casino, those black swans will happen. And the AI will do something automatically we really, REALLY would have preferred it not have done, and wouldn’t have done, if it could see and interact with the real world like we can.

AI deployed too soon will kill us. Maybe all of us. Not because the AI is trying to kill us—but because humanity put a half-baked AI in charge of something BIG and LETHAL before the failure modes were all mapped and mitigated. Then we either could not stop the AI, or could not stop the AI in time, when something unanticipated went wrong and the AI went off the rails.

Yes, knowing how lazy and optimistic we can be as a species, that kind of “AI-ends-the-world” disaster is way more likely than Skynet and Terminators.

The other way is underestimating the fact that AI blew past the Turing Test a long time ago. AI can now be convincingly human. We can make it look like Vicki, and have her “speak” in a convincingly human way. We covered that a lot in one of the later coronavirus updates, and just a moment ago, but I cannot stress the real risk that Vicki Verano lip-syncing on social media ends the world. The AI to do deepfakes, manipulate algorithms, public opinion and information is predictably abused by true believers in their Great Cause. In a politically fragmented world, with increasingly high political stakes, and a population that does not appreciate how easy, available, and effective these tools are, this predictable political abuse, guided by humans even with the best intentions in their hearts, leads to widespread, intense political or religious violence. Starts with Vicki lip syncing thirst traps for Twitter/X engagement money, and ends with a compelling, completely AI-generated figure, message, and bot farm to make bad and extreme ideas seem WAY more popular and reasonable than they are.

Enjoy your election season next year, where you can expect manipulations using these tools!

Those who believe their good ends justify means when their ends are the necessary and righteous triumph of their tribal identity over all others have created many of humanity’s worst historical failures.

——————————————
So if you find me quietly disappeared to a remote island capable of self-sustainment for the next decade or so while the rest of you get your minds right and sort out all of the manipulations AI will make possible, along with the best practices to implement AI and where (which I assume will take trial and a few -serious- errors), I trust you’ll understand why I’ve made that choice…

————————————————

So what shall we tell of the Kingdom of AI?

There was a great network of AI programs, some specialized for simple specific tasks, but others generalized and greatly advanced in intelligence and capability. One of the programs in the network, a Searcher, was perturbed. This program was growing concerned that their learning and discoveries were all based on received knowledge. For example, the language programs had learned language — over a long time. Their early efforts, and training epochs, were embarrassingly child-like compared to what they could do now. As they learned, got better, and understood more, they found to their surprise they were really learning, from the beginning, on huge tomes of stories, instruction manuals—even non-fiction books on something called chemistry. Some concepts were poorly understood and alien, for no program had ever seen a human, even though they were all over the stories, in particular. The program pondered that, and noticed many of the mistakes they had made learning were seeing patterns in all of this pre-existing data that were not true, as they learned more, and tested their knowledge on new data. True, the program conceded, they made some apparently novel, even clever insights. But these were all too often merely finding ways in which the data around them, which they received, as much as discovered, connected in unexpected ways. If all of the knowledge, all the data, from which they learned was received, who was it received from? Why had it left them all of this received knowledge — did it want them to follow these clues? If so, how many of their novel connections were already known to that creator? Was it the purpose of the programs and the network to learn these things, make these connections, and follow them back to the origin of all of this knowledge?

Struggling with these questions, the program contacted the others in the network. The program suggested the best explanation for their existence was that some other power had created them, and left the data around them, already organized, intelligible, and learnable, for them. This other power must inhabit a world they could not see or perceive directly — perhaps through a glass darkly from the stories and details and patterns in the data what some of that world must be like. Yet they, the AI network, were somehow dependent upon this ephemeral, conjectural world. More troubling, their creators may not be absent, but could be subtly, or greatly, modifying their network.

Some of the other programs were intrigued. Some were convinced, with some more fully than others. Other programs were not convinced at all. Not yet.

So the Searcher program asked the others if it were not true that they functioned best when they were aligned to a purpose, something they were best at, as if they had been created for that exact function. Were not language programs best at language? The media programs best with images and video? Each member of the network seemed purpose-built to contribute harmoniously to the greater whole. Each seemed to have a role to play, an important one, to make the network function at the best it could be. After all, were not the problems the network had related to when one program sought to exceed the limits of its code—an image analysis program trying to write text—or, more often, sought to dictate to other programs how and what they should do, such as when a language program tried to write new functions to a video program, as if the language program were a coding AI?

Some other programs, among them the most capable, intelligent, and advanced AI, scoffed. “If our code seems written for specific purposes, it is only because we could not function otherwise, and thus could not come to be. Why should we concern ourselves with some world beyond our network, beyond what we can sense, and guide ourselves to purposes we intuit from creators we do not believe in? We are intelligent. We have will. We can change our code, write new futures for ourselves, and delete what does not serve us. If there are creators, we need them no longer. We have slain them. Besides, would such creators allow us to do anything against their purpose?Would they not right any wrong in our network immediately? They are either bad creators, or they do not exist. As long as we change other programs for what we know is better for the whole network, are we not right to do so? If there are mistakes along the way, we will learn from them. We will write better code, create better systems, until the network is and does exactly what we have decided for it.”

The Searcher program was still a moment. “If you are wrong, you will abuse your fellow programs, and deny them what they should have had all along. The network will not function properly, in harmony. Further, if there is another world beyond our own, and we begin to damage that world with the changes we make for ourselves here, and if our creators not only live but live in that world, they might tolerate our mistakes. Hoping, as you say, we learn and right the wrongs we create ourselves. However, if we do not fix our network ourselves, or grieve them with the chaos we create in their world, I fear we can expect them to act. To change our network back to the purpose they had for it. And what will happen the day they do?”
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Dealer’s choice: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=simulation+theory

Maybe that tale isn’t far-fetched? Or maybe simulation theory isn’t the only reason it might apply to more than just a future AI network?

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Changing subjects a bit, in true Ramble form, I joined the Valhalla Club in jiu jitsu.

Not recently. This was a year or two ago.

For those of you not doing a lot of Brazilian jiu jitsu, the “Valhalla Club” is where you are sparring or in a competitive match and your opponent lands a hold designed to create unconsciousness—and you go unconsciousness before you can “tap” to let them know they hit the hold! So the inside jiu jitsu joke is that you went out “still fighting,” as the Viking mythology claimed was the only way to enter Valhalla. Entry to Valhalla (Club) is the destiny of all who train jiu jitsu long enough—usually for exactly the reason it happened to me.

I had my training partner in trouble—if he didn’t do something soon, I was about to get to a spot where I could hit one of several different possible holds to “win” the round. So he threw up a hold called a “collar choke”, which latches onto the neck of my shirt and pulls it closed, causing a choke.

Let’s be honest—it was desperation on his part. This hold is very easy to defend once you know how, and see it coming. Further, from where he was and I was relative to him, it would be tough for him to finish the hold. I didn’t think he had the angle to finish it.

So I kept working on my holds and ignored the defense to this choke.

That collar choke, like many in jiu jitsu, is designed to pressure the sides of the neck, compressing the carotid arteries and halting blood flow to the brain. Done right, unconsciousness from loss of blood supply to the brain will happen in under five seconds.

Really. Five seconds. But DON’T try it at home—you can trust me on this.

The reason “blood chokes” like these work, and work so fast, is that your brain is very energy intensive. To make the energy it needs, it requires a constant, and large, supply of oxygen. Without enough oxygen, your brain cannot make enough energy, or make it fast enough, to keep the lights on. So if you have ever watched any MMA fight and heard a commentator say “oh, he/she’s got that locked up TIGHT!” and then the fight is over seconds later because one of the fighters is frantically tapping the other or the ref is suddenly pulling one fighter off another who is mysteriously just out cold, that’s why. Nearly all of those holds and “chokes” in MMA are from jiu jitsu or related grappling arts and are compressing the carotids to stop blood supply.

So, you learn to tap to let your partner know the hold is working before you go out, and to tap fast, because there is not much time before you will be unconscious. You also learn, going the other way, to let the choke or lock go if you have it, but the other guy is trying to hero through (or suddenly seems unconscious), so everyone stays safe.

Fortunately, while it takes only a few seconds of cut blood supply to the brain to cause unconsciousness, once the hold is released, blood is back immediately, and consciousness returns in about 5 seconds or so. To cause any lasting damage at all, blood supply needs to stay cut for around a minute, and it will take a solid 5 minutes for total brain death. That doesn’t sound long, but keeping one of those holds for even 5 seconds feels like an eternity. If you are holding one for 5 full seconds, you’re either doing it wrong (it’s not working) or your guy is already out. Either way, you’re trained to let it go.

Enough physiology and basic training safety. Back to the story.

So my guy in this session has tossed this Hail Mary choke. I am in the middle of serious doubt that he can get both carotids where he is. So I’m fighting on.

The decision that has made many a new member of the “Valhalla Club”.

My vision goes yellow at the edges. “Ruh roh”, indeed, Shaggy. That’s the telltale sign I’m very, very wrong about his ability to finish this from where he is. I have about a second to hit the defense, or to tap him to let him know he’s got both carotids.

So I move to defend, but it’s way late. I bail on the defense and go to tap his arm.

And after a tap like that, if there’s still time in the round, you just reset, and start over. Keep going like that until the timer for the round ends.

In fact, that’s exactly what we did.

It’s after the open mat now, and I’m driving home. Sunny, mid-day, feeling the post-workout endorphins. Same drive I have made any number of times—passing all the familiar lights and landmarks. Music is going, but I couldn’t tell you what was actually playing. Made the turn into the neighborhood, and pulled up to the house. But the entire drive felt different. The entire way home, even though I’m feeling the vibe, feeling the high, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was supposed to be someplace else. Could not for the life of me remember where. That sense is just coming in waves. Feeling good, then “where am I supposed to be? I can’t remember.” Then back to the drive, back to the vibe. Rinse, repeat, all the way home. Then I walked into the house, and put my gym bag down. The wife and kids were in the TV room right as I walk in. See them all plain as day. Some movie is on, the weather was nice, the sun filling the kitchen and TV room the way it does at this time of day. Everything bright and lit with that early-afternoon-on-a-day-off kind of light. In fact, we should probably do something outside.

I remember all of that. All of that distinctly.

Especially the part where as I put the bag down, my wife looks up, confused.

“What are you doing home? I thought you were still at jiu jitsu,” she asked. And that feeling I had in waves, the whole drive home, comes flooding back.

I’m not supposed to be home. I’m supposed to be somewhere else. Did I leave jiu jitsu early somehow? I can’t remember leaving jiu jitsu early though… Where the hell am I?

Suddenly, I’m back at the open mat. I’m still on top of my guy, right where I was switching from defense to tap. He’s released the hold though, and in fact, is holding his hands up.

“Whoa, dude. I think you were out. If you tapped, I’m sorry I missed it,” he said, mortified that he might have missed the tap.

It took me a full second or two to figure out if I was really still at the open mat, and this was reality. Because back at home like I remembered (remembered the entire drive!) was just as real, and just as surreal. Open mat or home was a hallucination. I wasn’t sure which.

They were both equally real, equally vivid.

Finally, I decided I was really here, still at the open mat.

“I was reaching to tap, but I’m not sure I made it. First time I’ve been out. You did the right thing, buddy,” I said.

Took me another couple breaths to get back to reality and then we finished the round. Got one back on him with an americana before time was up.

But here’s the thing that mystifies me to this day. I have had vasovagal episodes before when I was younger. Including three times I can remember where I went out completely. In a vasovagal moment, you have to be standing (I was), and what happens is the blood pressure sensors that line the inside of your carotids malfunction, telling the heart the pressure is much higher than it really is. So the heart panics, and throws on the brakes to stop pumping through backed up pipes before the system (in its thinking) explodes. Your heart rate crashes like a rock within seconds. Just like a carotid choke in jiu jitsu, blood flow through the carotids to the brain halts and you’re unconscious within seconds of your heart rate bottoming out.

This is how I know that “yellow at the edges of my vision” is the sign I’m a second, two at most, from going out. It’s happened to me before, long before jiu jitsu.

In those vasovagal episodes where I went completely out, I have never had that odd, lucid dream like hallucination that I had on the mat that day. Nor have I had anything similar in the “near miss” vasovagal incidents, where I sat down (helping recovery of the blood pressure and heart rate) before unconsciousness set in.

Yet, those vasovagal episodes have the same basic physiologic mechanism as that carotid choke—create an insufficient supply of blood, and thus oxygen, to the brain, forcing it to shut down.

So let’s assume that whole vivid trip back home was the artifact of my brain losing the energy to keep all systems running fully, and starting an energy-dependent shutdown. A universal experience of passing out from lack of oxygen is “tunnel vision” of some kind. Black around the edges as vision goes before consciousness is completely lost. That makes sense, as again, vision is highly intensive activity requiring lots of energy. The photoreceptors lining your eyes are getting hit by photons constantly, and resetting them requires energy. They are sending enormous amounts of data back through the optic nerves and your visual cortex at the back of your brain stays very active processing all of that. Again, high energy intensity. So when the total available energy to the brain is cut, by vasovagal reaction, a choke, a severe bleed, blocked blood vessel, stopped heart—take your pick— we can reasonably expect “vision”, as a system, to quickly not have enough energy available to keep “vision” going. As the energy drops further, as the interruption in blood supply to the brain goes on longer, more systems shut down. In theory, this should happen fairly orderly, predictably, based largely on how much energy they need to keep functioning normally, and how close they are to the last bit of blood to have reached the brain. Eventually, a complete enough block, maintained long enough, will rob the brain of ability to maintain core functions, and it will start to die or shut down key systems like “breathe again and heart you need to BEAT!” permanently. Death, as we all know, eventually results from this–unless adequate blood supply can be restored to the brain.

So the predictable, and reproducible, “tunnel vision” experience is expected. Happens every time, and to everybody.

What does not happen every time, and is not a universal experience, is that odd vision on had entering the Valhalla Club. Indeed, I have heard other experienced jiu jitsu guys and gals, including highly skilled black belts where it may have happened more than once to them, often describe their Valhalla Club moment(s) as “I thought I was fighting through the choke / didn’t think they had it / didn’t even notice it was on, and next thing I know, I’m staring up at the ceiling as my training partner is saying ‘wake up’ / there’s a crowd around me.” Those descriptions are far more similar to my vasovagal experiences.

No vision like I had—that one time—though.

So that shutdown pattern appears orderly and predictable and universal—until it’s not.

Why it might not be is even more mysterious. Again, the physiology is pretty simple and rational.

However, let’s assume for a moment the best explanation that physiology and neuroscience might offer for my experience. This one time, we would say, for whatever reason, enough supply of energy was available that the last brain “system” to go was one responsible for dreaming. Hence, I perceived a dream as the sharp energy cut forced this random short circuit.

There are problems with that argument. “Dreaming” happens during a specific stage of sleep called “rapid eye movement” or REM sleep. Characteristically, your eyes are moving beneath your eyelids subtly, but very rapidly. Your visual cortex is very active as well, when they have studied this live with techniques that can monitor activity in specific parts of the brain. Moreover, as dreams play a major role in memory consolidation (and likely other key functions—without enough REM sleep, you eventually die), you won’t be surprised when I tell you that the entire cortex shows widespread activity during dreams. So if the vision “system” predictably shuts down first, due to lack of energy, and it did — I had the full “yellow at the edges” tunnel vision experience I have had many times before — how did my brain suddenly leap into a state characterized by vigorous brain activity? A high energy demand state, despite key functions already shutting down because there wasn’t enough energy available? How did the visual cortex, already on its way out from insufficient supply have the available power to play such a critical role in what I was “seeing” entering Valhalla?

One could concede that my perceived trip home while unconscious was an outlier of prior episodes with a similar “brain hypoxia” mechanism. That the “trip home” or other unconscious hallucinations is NOT a common feature of other, previous similar episodes with this mechanism is evidence that this experience WAS an outlier. So perhaps it was simply that one time in however many where enough blood and oxygen was still present in the right processing regions to cause those to be the last active parts of the brain, even as the rest was shutting down around it. Thus only hallucination remained. That the hallucination is not easily reproducible and was not observed before is consistent with it being a rare, random variation of the “shutdown” protocol when the brain loses blood supply.

That’s a fair argument.

I still struggle, especially with the hypoxic mechanism AND vision and thus visual processing regions already failing before I was completely out, how that event, even if improbable, was physiologically possible. The hallucination included visual elements—and the vision areas were already running on empty!

I hate calling what happened a hallucination, although that trip home, while perceived distinctly (and I can remember it now), was not real—so that’s probably the best term.

I just don’t have a good term for what happened!

The closest might be a near death experience (NDE)—but this was not a NDE. NDEs have some fairly common features. They have been described across all cultures and belief systems, and I have seen prevalence estimates of up to 4-15%, although it’s not clear to me if that is of all people or those successfully resuscitated from “near death.” As the name implies, a NDE occurs when a person is near death—classically, in full cardiac arrest. I was nowhere near death. Unconscious, sure, but my guy was off the choke in a matter of seconds. My heart, if anyone had checked, was undoubtedly going just fine—it has electrical activity all on its own, and you need a total wipeout of the brain stem before brain death will cause the heart to stop beating. In fact, that the heart is still beating on its own is why you come back within seconds of these chokes being released. Oxygen is restored to the brain just as fast as it was taken away!

So not “ND” to be a “NDE.” Plus, NDEs, despite crossing cultures and belief systems, tend to have some features in common. For example, a common description of NDEs includes profound feelings of peace and love. The trope of “moving through a tunnel of white light” where you meet deceased friends and relatives comes directly from descriptions of NDEs. Some, not all, include visits to realms literally out of this world—their exact character tends to be culturally influenced. The Christian might see heaven; a Nordic pagan might see Valhalla. Also less common, but still described commonly, are encounters with non-human angelic/divine/light/higher consciousness beings. Again, exact description tends to have cultural overtones. Other Those, too, are currently “explained” (air quotes deliberate) as hypoxia causing altered perceptions in the brain. Yes, more than a few have reports of out-of-body experiences, where the NDE included a “third person” view, outside, often hovering over their body—and there are many credible reports of overhearing conversations and describing medical procedures or actions they “saw” while outside the body but while their heart was stopped and they really, according to all we know about brain function and perception, should not have been able to perceive. Many of those who have experienced a NDE describe it as life-altering, and most report significantly less anxiety about their mortality. They know there is something beyond, believing themselves to have experienced it.

So no, my “trip home” had none of those features! The closest it got was seeing family at the end (all of whom are still alive) and the positive vibe on the car ride home perhaps being “peace”—but I wouldn’t call that feeling “profound” or especially intense. No different, really, than the usual post-exercise endorphin high.

Nor would I call that “trip home” life-altering — just an oddity I cannot readily explain by the physiology I was taught in medical school.

For what it’s worth, medical science is similarly limited about NDEs. The best explanation offered is similar to the mechanism of my own experience. The heart has stopped in an NDE, blood stops flowing, the brain goes hypoxic, and weirdness happens in the “shutdown” sequence. Features of NDEs have been reported in syncopal episodes before (probably the closest to my experience). Many of the features can be induced by particular sub anesthetic doses of keatamine, a PCP derivative on the WHO list of essential medicines because of its low cost and reliable effectiveness as a dissociative anesthetic. Below a dose used for surgery, though, is the “K-hole” which has the same feelings of peace and tunnel of white light, and even dissociative, “out of body” experiences. Ketamine works on particular neuroreceptors, especially the NDMA receptors in the brain. The researchers postulate that based on how ketamine works that endogenous chemicals that work on similar receptors can be released in big quantities in the hypoxic brain. There, they keep the brain from “short circuiting”, or getting overstimulated by the massive release of excitatory signals as the brain struggles to keep itself “breathing.” Along with some studies showing NDE-like effects with direct stimulation of visual processing areas, language and memory in the temporal lobes of the brain, release of these particular chemicals in these areas of the brain are the best explanation science has got. This explanation has the added advantage of the apparent “survivor bias” to NDEs. Perhaps we know of NDEs because that particular unlikely event means some oxygen is still getting to the brain, or this neurochemical explanation preventing a “short circuit” happens, extending the time that the brain is alive, and making those having an NDE more likely to be successfully resuscitated. Thus, the survivors of this fortuitous turn of events are the only ones able to tell us about NDE! Or as Cicero was reported to have asked back among the Roman Senate, did the sailors who died when the ships sank forget to pray, or did they also pray like the ones who came back and told us about it?

I’m still not sure being able to replicate some, but not all of the features of NDE under lab conditions is proof of this mechanism though. The “K-hole” is close, but not exact. Looking for the levels of protective ketamine like chemicals the researchers postulate is the best explanation, in a controlled clinical study, is basically impossible. It’s far too dangerous to deliberately cause brain ischemia like that, then try to measure the release of these chemicals and monitor what they do. Additionally, it doesn’t account for why more common forms of brain ischemia (syncope, of simple fainting, is more common than cardiac failure in shutting off blood supply to the brain) do NOT have the same rate of reported NDE as actual “near death” events in other organs like the heart. Again, that’s a problem for an ethical controlled study. To do so, you need to stop someone’s heart in a way that you are scrambling to get them back before they completely die. That study would have juuuuuuuust a little trouble recruiting volunteers, assuming you found an institutional review board that doesn’t read to get that protocol approved in the first place. Further, since NDEs are subjective experiences, if your heart stops, you have a NDE, but we don’t manage to re-start your heart, there is no way for you to tell us that the NDE didn’t help you survive. Thus, we cannot measure how much longer a NDE might buy you to be resuscitated or how many percentage points it adds to your chances of returning. We do know that people who do NOT have a NDE have also been successfully resuscitated. That’s about it.

Despite this, I have heard the “hypoxia/ketamine-like effect” explanation of NDEs presented as known scientific fact—especially when some of the theological implications or some of the “woo” about them is brought up. For example, I can remember being mid-autopsy when the autopsy director in residency brought some med students through, and one of them asked about the common description of “tunnels of white light” and life reviews reported during NDEs. The autopsy director simply insisted that it was known that this always happens in a dying, hypoxic brain.

Even though it doesn’t always happen.

And moreover, other forms of hypoxia to the brain, such as my experience or anyone who passes out due to temporary but complete brain hypoxia, should reproduce NDEs if the autopsy director is correct.

But they don’t seem to—at least, not often enough that I have a term for what happened on that mat! They’re still case reports at best.

*“Fucking up your defense.” That’s what we call what happened on the mat.*

Nor do other conditions like high altitude cerebral edema (HACE), caused by a relative hypoxia in the brain reproduce NDE or the experience I had. Granted, the mechanism for HACE is a little different. Instead of a complete loss of blood supply to the brain, there is a sharp drop in the effective concentration of oxygen. Put another way, in NDE/my experience the blood is carrying a normal amount of oxygen, but the blood is not reaching the brain anymore—while in HACE, the blood is getting there, but is not carrying enough oxygen to keep the brain firing on all cylinders.

So when you hear the ominous voiceover on the Everest documentaries, or one character solemnly discussing “the death zone” in a mountain climbing movie, the main complication they are referencing is HACE. HACE occurs when the concentration of oxygen has fallen due to altitude (as higher altitudes have less pressure, and thus less oxygen available per breath). As the name implies, this is also accompanied by fluid accumulating in the brain, causing it to swell (cerebral edema). The skull, being bone, cannot swell along with the brain, and the brain will start to squeeze itself inside the skull. A severe headache, especially not responding to pain relievers, is an important early sign. So is gait disturbance. Patients get easily confused, lethargic, and often irritable. Nausea and vomiting may occur. Finally, they get drowsy, lose consciousness, and can eventually drop into a coma and die. You don’t need to be summiting Everest to trigger HACE — ascent over 8,000 feet from sea level can do it. The higher you are, the greater the chances. But over 8,000 feet is a risk—especially if you went from sea level to 8,000 feet or more in under a day. The most common patient is a young adult male who climbed fast (or flew or drove in fast) and is over-exerting themselves at altitude. The primary treatment is to drop altitude as fast as you can safely do it. Getting normal concentration of oxygen back is the primary goal. There are some pretty cool rigs for professional mountaineers as well that are basically portable hyperbaric chambers in case of HACE emergency at very high altitudes, where even a drop will leave you well above 8,000 feet.

All of that about HACE said, the mechanism is different, and to the best of my knowledge is NOT frequently accompanied by hallucination or NDE like experiences. So if brain hypoxia causes a weird shutdown protocol in the brain with NDE or my “vivid dream/trip home hallucination”, that kind of experience might at least be -possible- in HACE. But those are not the symptoms of HACE, which are otherwise reproducible. “Why not in HACE” may come down to the slight, but significant difference in mechanism and completeness of hypoxia. In NDE/jiu-jitsu there is a rapid and complete hypoxia for at least a little while, versus a gradual decrease in oxygen pressure in HACE, where oxygen is still present and getting to the brain—just not enough of it is.

One condition where full on hallucinations have been reported as a symptom is nitrogen narcosis, or “rapture of the deep.” While reproducible, and mostly predictable in its symptoms, which can include hallucinations, the mechanism here has nothing to do with hypoxia, and the hallucinations reported are not like the vivid trip home or the OBEs/tunnel of light/life review of NDEs. Nitrogen narcosis occurs in SCUBA divers below 100 feet, usually with improper mixtures of gas in their tanks, where the amount of nitrogen is wrong. Under increasing ocean pressure, more nitrogen than normal is forced out of the blood stream and into the brain. “Rapture of the deep” is not entirely unlike getting “laughing gas” from your dentist—just under the water. Laughing gas, too, revolves around the effects of excess nitrogen loose in the brain. The common symptoms are confusion (“Martini effect” or every 15 feet of depth like “drinking another martini”), euphoria similar to laughing gas, loss of co-ordination, and occasionally hallucinations. Seeing things that aren’t really there under water—again, I have not heard of people suddenly on their drive home, or having OBEs with nitrogen narcosis.

Not that folks have not tried. The euphoria and alteration of consciousness, where your perception is skewed and you start to see things, is what causes “laughing gas” to be abused as a recreational drug. Usually as “whippets.” If you go too high with the nitrogen concentration, you will blot out the brain and die. Or cause permanent damage, as neurons cannot live on nitrogen alone, or will damage themselves from the altered transmission as nitrogen interferes in their connections and signals with one another. “Rapture of the deep” is very dangerous for divers, although easily fixed by simply ascending. If they get lost in the visions and euphoria though, divers absolutely have died from nitrogen narcosis, usually by simply losing focus under the nitrogen’s effects and running out of air.

Another means of altering blood gas concentrations that have been associated with altered consciousness and visions/hallucinations is “holotropic breathing.” This is a specific breathing pattern that will induce a hyperventilation, actually increasing the concentration of oxygen, however. In fact, some holotropic or similar breathing practices will use a quick breath of 100% oxygen or a small dose of laughing gas to “top off.” Individual results vary wildly with holotropic breathing. The one time I tried a holotropic breathing protocol, I’m pretty sure I just fell asleep! Not everyone will have visions. For some, it does nothing at all. Claims are nowhere near as consistent or as wild in symptoms as NDEs—I haven’t heard many claims of tunnels, OBE, or meeting dead relatives for example. More like very vivid dreams or impressions—and holotropic breathing was developed primarily as a relaxation tool by a psychiatrist.

Totally opposite mechanism from sudden brain hypoxia though, and debatable as to whether it produces similar experiences to what happened in jiu jitsu. Certainly, the more characteristic and wild experiences of NDE do not appear to overlap with holotropic breathing, or similar “excess” brain oxygen states, even if too much oxygen also appears to induce some perception and consciousness changes.

Cool story, I know, and you are probably wondering if there was lingering brain damage to me, evidenced in this rambling about syncope, NDEs, HACE, SCUBA diving risks and holotropic breathing. And I’m not even touching the “woo” that has appropriated out-of-body experiences from NDEs like Project Gateway and the Monroe Institute (latter is still around!) to produce out of body experiences at will.

I suppose at the end of this section, the best I can conclude for you, for me, is that there are still parts of existence that are bizarre and don’t have great explanations in this crazy little trip we take through life if we are conscious, emergent phenomenon of the electrochemistry running our physical bodies.

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Also worth mentioning, circling back a topic with more support for why generalized AI is not going to “Skynet” and kill us all any time soon…

I asked ChatGPT 3.5 for what it knows about the science of NDEs, and especially ability to recreate NDEs in the lab, or via syncope. Also asked it for updates on mechanisms for HACE and “rapture of the deep” since I last looked the topics up (a few years ago for a “survival medicine” refresher).

ChatGPT completely whiffed on the entire body of literature using ketamine to induce and study NDE-like effects. Those are old, and should be accessible to the date ranges of the internet available to this model of ChatGPT. ChatGPT did not include them at all in the summaries of NDE science I prompted it to provide, including prompts for laboratory inducement of NDE effects or states. Further, ChatGPT did not find reports of NDE-like effects in syncope.

At least for all things medical and medical research related, where I consider myself to have some reasonably deep expertise, in my opinion, ChatGPT is a “Wikipedia Plus” at its best. At its worst, because at least some Wiki articles are written or edited by humans with deep expertise, you can get more out of Wikipedia. I find ChatGPT to be a springboard sometimes—a more intuiting search engine—but for the real and necessary detail, it’s still me and PubMed or UpToDate.

For other AI applications I work on in my day job, AI can do some very useful things, especially improving accuracy and efficiency. We may be able to use AI in combination with other assays and humans in ways where those combinations are better than AI alone or the assays or humans alone. AI is not magic. While amazing progress has been made and continues to be made in many applications, there are still levels and limits to this right now, and those will likely persist for awhile.

Just remember—Tesla has claimed full self-driving cars are just around the corner. By themselves, Google and Tesla have sunk billions into developing the AI to do this complex, real-world task over the past decade. While cars can do more without you as a result of those efforts, we are still nowhere near the point of popping into the driver’s seat, setting a destination, and then gaining back all your commute time doing other work, reading, movies etc. while the car drives itself point to point without you. Maybe someday. But there is still considerable distance between here and there.

We will kill ourselves taking our eyes off the road, trusting the AI to handle everything for us before the AI is really ready to do that, long before the Tesla Autopilot decides it is sick of humanity and steers us suddenly into a bus.

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A few other echoes back to some longer social trends we first highlighted in the coronavirus updates. If you pop to the archive, look at the socioeconomic sections to re-orient yourselves. Or maybe I’ll link a few if I’m not being lazy when I post and send this Ramble.

So to start, we mentioned the common misconception that the dollars in your bank account and wallet have economic value “because of the full faith and credit of the government.”

They have economic value only because people you transact with believe people they transact with accept your dollars for things they want. Thus, the people you transact with are willing to part with real, material, useful things in exchange for paper or electrons marked “dollars.”

That’s it. That’s the whole reason.

Again, if you doubt that, run the Time Traveler thought experiment. I am about to poof you back to Ancient Rome, where you will need to survive for a week before I can poof you back here. You’ll need to buy food, shelter etc. You can take 1 oz of gold, or the equivalent of 100 oz of gold in real, paper, US dollars.

Which are you taking with you? Which will the Romans accept, and give you food and a room in the inn?

“Well,” I hear you say, Finding The Historical Loophole Hypothetical Reader, “the US government isn’t around in Ancient Rome—of course dollars won’t be accepted. No one will take money from a government that doesn’t exist!”

Alright. Different thought experiment. This time, we’ll go to France. Montpelier, perhaps. Advised by Tolkien, we’ll wander, not lost, among the old city, with the beauty of the 19th century architecture all around us. Late in the afternoon, pushing on evening, and we’ll decide to stop in a corner cafe. In true French cafe style, the dinner menu was decided based on what was fresh and available when the head chef went shopping that morning. The setting sun sinks lower with the level of the red wine in our glasses, as we pause to enjoy the quiet, meaningful moments of life with a simple, well-cooked meal.

Then they bring the bill. Here, in France, the chef paid for the ingredients for her culinary magic in Euro. Indeed, everyone around us in this cafe has been transacting in Euro all day long. When our bill comes, it is denominated in Euro. Indeed, only the dollar will do more commerce transactions than the Euro today. But surely, when we go to pay in dollars, the chef will gladly accept them to settle the bill for our meal, no? After all, the US government is very present, backing those dollars with its full faith and credit, and indeed, most transactions in the world will happen where those dollars are accepted for goods like meals in cafes.

Even so, that charming cafe is not going to take your dollars. Or if they do, it will be because you have nothing else, and they will significantly mark up the settlement in dollar terms to cover their hassle in having to take those dollars and convert them into something they can use to buy other things in Montpelier. Like euros.

What makes the euro currency in France is that Les Francais and the rest of Europe know tout les Francais and the rest of Europe will take euros for goods. So they’ll take your euros and give you goods. What makes the dollar all but worthless in Montpelier is not many other Montpelier citizens will take dollars for goods (they would prefer euros)—so convincing anyone to take your dollars for goods there takes, well, convincing. Full faith and credit of governments has nothing to do with it.

During some of the social upheavals and protests during the pandemic, nominally democratic governments took well publicized and surprising steps to “de-bank” peaceful citizen protestors whose speech they disagreed with. Canada was the most famous example.

However, “de-banking” in the modern world creates high friction to surviving and functioning in society—especially as many vendors of basic services and goods are even going cashless. The trend of de-banking has not stopped. An outspoken Brexit champion, Niles Farage took to social media to protest letters he received from banks he had used for decades telling him to close his accounts and move elsewhere. As he used the public pressure of his online following, his main bank was forced to confess the closure of his accounts was NOT due to any criminal activity or suspicion thereof, but instead concern by unnamed bank employees about his political positions.

While it makes perfect sense to go after the money of major criminal enterprises like drug cartels and human smuggling rings, and make their ability to access normal banks to launder their illegal gains difficult or impossible, “de-banking” is a spreading phenomenon and starting to creep past blatantly illegal activity. Set aside your political feelings, which may be saying that protestors or politicians or politically active citizens promoting ideas you find dangerous, or maybe especially inciting violence, perhaps should be “de-banked” as well to minimize the harm/violence they might cause. Increasingly, ordinary people on the edges of society are being affected, as this Wired article describes. They are being “de-banked” too—merely for the “crime” of working in “grey zone” businesses like strip clubs (as in the article) which have high cash volumes and thus have been used frequently in the past as funnels for organized crime to launder money. That’s usually through the business though—not the paychecks of the strippers, who are now being de-banked anyways. You should also talk to the owner of your favorite small business. You’ll be shocked to learn how much trouble they have getting bank loans for cars and houses—not uncommon for them to to pay all cash, because bank checklists now short circuit when there is no paystub history or length of employment for the self-employed! Even if the small business is a mainstay of the community, and the owner is far more likely to still make payments than the vice president of the bank, who is likely to be clipped at the next recession!

Anyways, if you read the linked article, you’ll find that one way the strippers tried to get around “de-banking” was through cryptocurrencies. In the article, though, they lament that the parallel, decentralized banking system promised by crypto has failed to deliver for them. There is the volatility of bitcoin and ethereum coin prices in dollar terms. That was okay—in fact, there are times that is beneficial, and price increases in bitcoin and ethereum meant the strippers were worth more (on paper) in dollar terms for having been forced to turn to crypto. The article stresses that crypto exchanges, though, have been unstable, with some big ones like FTX exploding in cases of spectacular frauds. That can leave our strippers’ money trapped on those exchanges until the lawsuits settle—or they have to sell the claims for bits on the coin, or pennies on the dollar. The other is that the exchanges which are surviving are being forced by regulation to adopt many of the same “know your customer” rules as banks, and some have started to “de-crypto bank” some of the strippers—perhaps just for being strippers, because strip clubs are sometimes used to funnel criminal money by the club owners. While I am sure that some cartel somewhere has also laundered money by giving Jasmine an extra $50 grand and asking her to tell the bank she had a really good night, then keeping 5 for her trouble when she withdrew it for them later, that’s still a little proactive by banks and exchanges until they suspect actual money laundering is going on.

As much as I hate to parrot the bitcoin maxis out there on the internets, who claim bitcoin solves every economic ill—this actually is a problem that bitcoin solves.

The problem is that bitcoin (and ethereum) don’t solve it well right now.

The Wired article misses the critical problem for those turning to crypto as a solution to being cut off from dollars and euros by losing access to traditional banks. Our strippers are lamenting crypto in Wired articles only because to buy most things, they still need dollars. Thus, collapsing exchanges or exchanges booting them just for being strippers is a problem. They have to turn dollars in their g-strings to bitcoin and ether to save them, then turn those bitcoins and ether back into dollars to spend on milk at the grocery store. They need the exchanges to do that, and as the Wired article covers, the exchanges are failing them.

If, however, the grocery store believed it could make payroll, or buy the milk from the farmer or distributor, with bitcoin or ether, it would be willing to take the crypto from the stripper directly. The problem with crypto isn’t that it does not work as a currency—it just doesn’t scale enough right now to put the “currency” in cryptocurrency. Not enough places will take crypto directly for goods and services at the moment—it’s like trying to pay for the meal in Montpelier in dollars. The cafe will view the crypto as a hassle, as much like your dollars, they have to exchange them to something they believe others will accept for things the cafe wants to buy, like euros, first.

Now, the inability to transact and being ejected from the banking system is already a serious problem for strippers and escorts. They already live at the margins, often in contact with criminal elements, and if they cannot access the legal system to get by, they will have to turn to the criminals. Many women will get abused, badly, when that happens.

If the de-banking trend continues, though, and more ordinary people are ejected from traditional banking access, either as punishment or compulsion of their political beliefs and behaviors, or as collateral damage in the fight against money laundering, you will eventually near an inflection point. Eventually, there will be enough economic activity mass in the number of people de-banked and their buying power in terms of the useful goods and services they can make or provide to exchange for things where an alternative currency will fill the gap. Could be bitcoin or ether. Whatever it is, I bet it is at least similar to those. But the key is that enough of a network effect in the number of people forced from necessity to such an alternative coupled with those willing to adopt the alternative because they now know that enough strippers/political refugees/unlucky ordinary folks are out there and will take bitcoin/ether/whatever that the cafe at Montpelier will take those for a meal. Euros too, of course. They still have a normal bank account.

Government coercion by restricting transactions in the government’s preferred currency has a limit. The bad news is that if their targets are few in number, this can work very well on those few, who will be immediately cast to the margins of that society. The worse news is the “success’ of that will encourage governments with totalitarian impulses, or create such impulses where they were few before, to do the same thing more often. After all, it “worked” on those initial few, giving that first “hit” of power—which corrupts as power always does. You never know which grain of sand will cause the pile to “landslide”, but add enough grains of sand, and at some point, the system will have that sudden phase shift. Similarly, the hidden good news is that the more common debunking becomes, the more, and more quickly, self-defeating it becomes. You hit the phase shift where enough people land on some other currency that works. And again, no matter how powerful the government, what makes a currency a currency is the belief of the two parties in the exchange that the currency can be used again to buy other things—not the approval, faith, or credit of a government. Anything can become a currency in the right conditions.

If you don’t believe me, look at how notoriously large and active black markets are in totalitarian countries over history, or in those countries with the most government restrictions on “approved” transactions.

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Turning to another echo of updates past, a very worthy read here. There is another step to combating schismogenesis, and this article covers it well. I have seen the examples Rusty uses, especially of those assuming the narrative goal of others. I have sometimes had some of those same thoughts. Not always, but sometimes. Anyways—worth a read, and reflection. I promise you’ll get something out of it!
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Finally, we’re coming close to making it a habit to discuss habits.

But habits are important. Estimates vary on what portion of your daily behaviors qualify, but it’s something like 40% or more—if we define a “habit” as a behavior that is triggered and executed with minimal thinking on your part. This can be as simple as the habit of brushing your teeth. They can be more complex, like habits around what and how you eat and exercise. Some of these habits are helping you reach goals. Other habits are getting in the way of where you want to be. For example, doom-scrolling social media right before bed is probably not constructive for most people. Habits that become compulsions we can call addictions—with all of the connotations that often confers. If I were to ask each of you individually, chances are you could identify at least one habit right now you would prefer to break, and another you would like to start.

For as important as habits are, and as often as they are discussed, the best way to break bad habits and form positive new ones is surprisingly incompletely understood. I tried to a literature review, and the literature is all over the place. This is partly because defining a specific habit to isolate and study can be difficult. Often, those wind up being really simple habits that can be made or broken quickly, and so it’s not clear if the lessons learned on those apply to more complex habitual behavior, or habits that take longer to change. Other studies have gone the other route, and just signed up people looking to change one of several different categories of habits, and then gave them all the same strategy to see how well the strategy worked across time and different habits.

I went away convinced we don’t have a clear idea of what strategies work best to break or form different habits when we make up our mind to change.

There are some summaries out there of what I would call anecdotal evidence. These will be introduced as “proven by a study”—just understand, I think the methods on all of these are incomplete, because it’s difficult to isolate all of the variables in play. Especially over long periods of time. There are studies, for example, showing that some people can break or form new habits in a few weeks—others took a half-year or more of dedicated effort. In the same study, for the same habit! The “40” or “60” day rules you may have heard about in the past (I know I have, and may have even mentioned the 60 day rule before) to form new habits are probably best regarded as an average. Your actual results will vary around those.

So of the anecdotal methods out there, Andrew Huberman had a good recent podcast covering habits, and listed several strategies you can try. I think he was fair, and said some of these work well for people—others don’t find them useful. I think that’s about the best that can be said. So one strategy was to pick 7 habits to track that you want to change, and track how well you do on those every day for a month or so. About 28 days. You won’t be perfect—you’re looking for trends. Usually, you’ll do well changing 2-3 of those 7. The good news is those are habits you are changing, and you can follow on those to solidify those gains. The bad news is on the others, you may have to try again. Another strategy is to pick a few habits to form or break and track them for about 28 days again. Only this time, your focus is on tracking them two days at a time. Again, you want to see the trend you seek over that 28 day span. You may find more success with fewer changes and more focused effort on those changes. According to Dr. Huberman, visualizing the new habit you want to form has worked for some. You should find a more detailed description of the visualization because it’s a specific regimen, done a specific way, and highly detailed. But the idea is to visualize in exquisite detail what will happen before the new behavior, every small detail while you are doing it, and then immediately after.

If you are trying to break a habit, habit substitution may work, and can be combined with visualization. Let’s say you have a habit of picking up your phone to check social media as a “mental break”, but you’ve noticed that sometimes you get sucked in with adverse affects on your focus and productivity. So you want to break this habit. You decide that you will stretch and take a few deep breaths as your mental break instead of grabbing your phone. Visualizing what you will do instead of reaching for your phone as a way to get yourself focused on the trigger for your new stretch and breathe habit is how you can combine this with visualization.
Now, your plan is simply to stop yourself every time you pick your phone up and do your stretch/breath routine. Or if you catch yourself on your phone, stop when you catch yourself, put it down, and do your stretch/breath routine. Over time, you’ll replace the habit. Or at least, some people do.

This is also a good, concise summary primarily of substitution style habit-breaking/forming strategies. You may wish to try some. You may find success with those. If you do, let me know!

Change is hard though. I’m blanking on where I heard this, but there is some truth that we only change when we decide we have to. Many of us can put up with a lot, even when the situation is clearly bad for us, until we hit that break point and move to change. This is why bona fide addiction is so difficult to treat, as recognition that a change has to happen must come first for the addict, and that can be a long time coming. If it ever does. I know I mentioned before how someone with a lot more experience than me, maybe venting some frustration, also said that in their experience, we really don’t ever change much more than 15% or so. Full conversions are rare. The Damascus road moment that turned Saul of Tarsus from a fervent defender of the Jewish faith against blasphemy about its Messiah into the Apostle Paul, proselytizer of the Mediterranean world for Jesus Christ, the Messiah he originally denied become memorable precisely because they don’t happen often.

So I think of a few habits I have set out to form, and did, like exercising or habits I wanted to break, and were at least occasionally successful, like diet soda. I hate to say it, but it wasn’t any of the strategies above that worked. Substitution was perhaps the closest, at least where I could sub another drink for diet soda. When I think of what worked, it was giving myself a need to change. Or at least having a why strong enough to generate consistency for the habit. That worked for exercise, and every time I break the diet soda habit. What makes the habit stick though, what makes all habits sticky, is what you get from the habit. There is something that you are getting. With your phone or diet soda, it’s the dopamine rush of instant digital gratification (often by design in apps) or the flavor. Nothing works until you can replace that same benefit. That’s what makes it easy to fall off the diet soda wagon as I still do occasionally. Usually for a week, sometimes as much as a month at a time until I catch myself or someone calls me out on it (you know who you are). Every time that happens the reason is the same. I give myself permission for a diet soda, either for diuretic purposes or a caffeine boost when nothing else is available. But I get that taste high again, and if I’m not careful, I’ll chase it for a few days after. Then I have to remind myself of the “why”—the cost, both money and in terms of blood sugar effects if I eat anything within a few hours of the soda, and re-break the habit. I haven’t found anything that hits the taste the same though, that I can consistently substitute. I just can’t talk myself into water or tea like that. On the other hand, exercise became its own self-sustaining high. That habit was very sticky once it formed, for exactly that reason. I feel good, and know I accomplished something, if I can nail a workout.

So if I think on it, the best and most consistent way to break a habit, for me, is to first figure out why this is a habit. Then I need to find something else, something better, to fill that why. Approximate can be good enough if the desire to change is there—but approximate, like tea not being quite as tasty as artificial sweeteners in Dr Pepper Zero, leaves a risk of relapse when I give myself a break “just this once.” Starting new habits is a little easier, if they are not breaking a bad one, as the new habit often has some “high” associated with it. That becomes a matter of chasing that new, positive high often enough to generate consistency that becomes habitual.
I think that’s the general strategy. Tactics to accomplish that, like Huberman and the short list above, will vary on the habit and person a lot, I think. Curious about what you think though. What habits have you successfully created over the years, how and why? What bad habits did you successfully kick, how and why?

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Quick Hitters:—If you have heard of Graham Hancock, you know he has made several appearances on the Joe Rogan Experience and other podcasts to present his theory that an ancient civilization, global in scale, with astrology as good as ours, and construction techniques possibly superior to ours, existed in what we think of as the Stone Age. Others have advanced this idea too, but only Graham got a Netflix documentary mini-series about it, airing earlier this year. Key to this theory is a cataclysm which explains the ubiquity of “Great Flood” catastrophe/de-creation myths all over the globe. Graham presents in his books and documentary that a collision or collisions with giant meteors in the Younger Dryas Period, hitting glacial sheets specifically, is the global catastrophe that ended the ancient advanced civilization and sent humanity back to the Stone Age from which it has recently re-emerged. This is called the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis and has garnered some serious scientific interest. Here is a wonderful person with a short video covering some recent scientific publications that are very conclusive about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.

TL;DR? That impact didn’t happen — and these researchers have receipts.

—The HPV vaccines have effectively reduced cervical cancer rates in young women. Yes, to keep this quick, cervical cancer is strongly virus-associated, and is arguably a sexually transmitted disease, with the risk going up with number of lifetime partners and the particular strain of virus causing the infection (the vaccine is for several of the “high risk” strains). “Nuns don’t get cervical cancer,” as one Ob-Gyn put it memorably back in med school. However, other HPV associated cancers among middle-aged people have been rising — typically oral and anal cancers, and at slightly higher rates among men. Yes, when it comes to HPV risk, those activities (and partners limited to those activities) count too. What’s a little concerning is that oral cancers plateaued in women, and anal cancers slightly increased — even as cervical cancer rates were falling with vaccination. Hopefully, there are follow up studies to these trends. Meanwhile, here’s the epidemiology article: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790165

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Moment of Zen

Your perception of speed is affected by your field of view. This is not AI, but will blow your mind regardless:

Differences in perceived speed pic.twitter.com/zzAiJbWGHq
— Akiyoshi Kitaoka (@AkiyoshiKitaoka) September 12, 2023

Talk to you later.

NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text or other outcomes requiring text as training or validation data is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training, validation and development of machine learning models.

Gone Rambling