TheVat

For those who may puzzle over the "five candles" meme, you will need to watch the NG episode, Chain of Command. It's one of the best episodes of that series and has a nice hat tip to 1984. (Also features an appearance by @swansont 's avatar)

Emily sends a Hallowe'en greeting: No, we carve no pumpkins, Nik. PM upon EV race won!

Easy peazy lemon undifficult

Physician to patient, a tritium atom: I'm sorry, due to weak force, you are going to have beta decay. You will lose an electron and a neutrino from your nucleus. Tritium: You mean, I'll become...helium? Physician: I'm afraid so. I can heal some conditions but I can't helium all.

Why would an administration that is willing to run up the defense budget not see cyber security as an integral element of national security? This has been an ongoing mystery. https://wapo.st/4yOGjyr (Gift link to Wash Post article) New hacking threat has election officials scrambling weeks before the midterms(...) "The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which states have relied on to warn about threats — especially those that American intelligence agencies have detected overseas — has been cut under the Trump administration. It lost about a third of its staff last year, according to documents released by Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee." WTAF, Orangeymandias??

Son and I are both fans and will no doubt have cups of Earl Grey, hot, in his honor. Both Picard and Mr Chekhov this week - Starfleet is losing its finest. Kirk seems to be a tough old bugger, had stage IV cancer a couple years ago and recovered, now 95. John DeLancie ("Q, " through multiple series, including the season of Strange New Worlds I'm about to start watching) seems to be doing fine, as one would expect from an immortal being. I know he and Stewart were friends and had a famously emotional parting after their final scene wrapped in "Picard."

Doesn't fatherhood require more than a weak interaction? 😉 ETA: Liking my new tablet (newer and well-patched OS and all that) but it handles emojis here in a weird glitchy way. Anyone else find it impossible to get a new line once you've placed an emoji? I hit return and it just removes the keyboard.

I'm paying attention (some may recall me posting on peecycling a while back, and a brief and draining conversation) to phosphogeddon but not seriously worried. Will try to get back to this and follow entropic cost analyses. I can confidently assert my subconscious has never shown me a Carnot engine.

Yes. He was the leading scientist at ANL in those years. I was born not far from ANL, southwest of Chicago, around the time that photo was taken.

Haha. They do seem kind of...related.

Ok, a bit of a drawer cleaning here.... Slam red? I peel Baruch - curable epidermals. No devils, Yugoslav, I rival, so guys lived on. Dog beg? Rah, crusader! I wired a surcharge, b'God! Set a DNA, Muesli assails EU mandates. So many do reassert: stress aero-dynamos.

Argonne National Laboratory. 1950s. A scientist behind a three-sided mobile lead shield¹ approaches an active 254-tonne cyclotron² particle accelerator and using sphere-mounted tongs, prepares to remove an aluminium object made radioactive³ by 45 MeV⁴ alpha-particle⁵ bombardment at Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois, U.S.A. (1955). The shield is 10 cm thick with a lead-glass window, by moving either of two handles the operator drives and steers the heavy 4.5 tonne vehicle. The wheel motors are independently controlled similar to how one drives a tank⁶.

Slicing the spam is the most dangerous part if you use a sharp knife. I sometimes made use of a waldo system, scavenged from an old uranium enrichment plant, to get a worry-free slice of the tinned meat product. In my carnivore days, I often applied mustard (Dijon or brown) for both flavor and its antimicrobial properties. The chief hazard of mustard is having a tiny droplet fly off and hit you in the eye, so I would opt for a glovebox to handle the mustard application and keep pets off. Neither measure really made spam a safe nutritive choice, but I had good results with accompanying the spam sandwich with a large bowl of oatmeal, as the soluble fiber (Br. "fibre") helps prevent arterial blockages and bowel cancers.

Not just Hobson's choice but also a Hobbesian choice, haha, and all the balancing that implies to have a social contract. Paradoxes - giving up some of our self-sovereignty in order to gain more perhaps over our immediate domain. Ceding power to a state to use force in order to have more civil peace, and so on. I don't want to go into the weeds, either, on domestication and neoteny. Plenty there to debate, no doubt. Though the flattened face might be more about dietary changes in hominins (and even some sexual selection in the mix). Above my pay grade. OT: Amygdala Salad Gym A is a great band name.

This assumes complex behaviors at the level of "scary arse with little empathy and Draconian methods of problem resolution" are genetically mediated. Seems iffy, when there are so many environmental factors that can influence sociopathy. Anyway, it's possibly not all that much like animal domestication where there are specific allele complexes that affect the development of the amygdala (key player in taming) and allied "cuteness" markers. And there are people who may score a little low on the empathy scale who, while not outside social norms, have a useful capacity to do hard tasks for the group. Where a high empathy member might be "you want me to just walk up and club those baby warthogs? No way, Ogg!" the lower empathy fellah might grab the club and get on with it, and the tribe has a protein rich baby warthog stew instead of them scattering into the thickets. I don't think any viable tribe would be excluding its club-ready standouts.

That's a little synchronicity - this morning, I iust quoted that famous line on another forum, in another context of techno menace. Alfred's comment has never seemed more timely, as I watch the tech bros keep launching their crazy whims at us. Intellect and hubris, without the checks and balances of conscience or emotional maturity.

At least chewing gum can be applied quietly. Black October seemed to involve making noise prematurely.... https://www.politico.eu/article/the-cyber-flaw-scramble-that-brought-the-ai-threat-to-life/ The process by which information about flaws is released among cybersecurity officials and affiliated companies is crucial. Through a longstanding practice known as coordinated disclosure, researchers and companies that identify flaws can find a fix and share it confidentially with agencies and others before releasing to the public, meaning they don’t hand malicious hackers the gift of a hole without a fix. In the case of the PHP flaw, that process worked well, but not perfectly. Information about the bugs started to circulate ahead of the planned release time. Then, according to the PHP Foundation, Chainguard “unilaterally broke the embargo,” which “disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure.” PHP Foundation executive director Elizabeth Barron told POLITICO by email that while it was “disappointed” with Chainguard, it hopes to “rebuild trust with them in the future to ensure we can continue to collaborate effectively.” After the leak— which meant information about the bugs was in the open before the fix was ready — confusion quickly ensued, with government bodies and private companies choosing to temporarily shut down their websites rather than risk potentially damaging breaches to their data and the sites themselves. Early Thursday, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, an internet services company that is widely used by websites to block cyberattacks, giving it a high level of visibility over what hackers are doing, said in a post on X that it had seen “millions” of attempts to exploit the flaw. Cloudflare saw thousands in the 10 hours before the flaw was publicly announced, then tens of thousands in the 45 minutes after the announcement, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and now millions, Prince said....

This. Epistemology (often paired with ontology in approaching philosophy questions) is another one. I could write a paper on the epistemology of burnt toast, but that doesn't mean it's worth reading.

Why is that? What was identified, and how did you come to know about it? Also, UAP is the current term used for this - curious why the "Department of War" is going back to the outdated nomenclature.

Simul, but the Abujan went a ways farther with it. I sometimes wonder if any ideology built on capitalism doesn't enshrine greed and the anti-egalitarian glee that can accompany being more prosperous. Thinking about how the divisiveness of MAGA, seeming often based on racial anxiety re immigrants, often expresses as a fear of diminished net worth - "what happens to your house value when they move in near you? What happens when they steal your jobs? How can teachers educate your kids for tomorrow's jobs when they're too busy teaching Latinos basic English" ...ad nauseam. Subcultures that seek to disconnect from that and assert a collective and egalitarian ethos (Amish, Puritans, commune hippies, rad Greens, et al) tend to codify prohibitions on boasting, ostentation, and sneaking an advantage. Maybe some hope - seeing more candidates do well on socialist platforms makes me think younger voters are moving away from the prosperity gospel. They certainly are seeing trad prosperity and accumulation of shiny bits as more of a mirage, so a Socialist candidate focused on basic affordability of essential needs gets seriously listened to. NY elected Mamdani, seeking to redefine doing good a little bit - maybe a wedge has gone in there. And, to the thread topic, can a collective sense of good be driven by some level of selfishness? A Gen Z'er who just wants to pay their electric bill might feel motivation to vote for public utilities, a classic type of socialism that many older Americans pretend isn't. Rambling. Must breakfast.

Time short atm, but will say that one lens to look at this through is the anthropology lens at the hunter gatherer culture we all come from. Altruism is easier for us at familial and small group levels than in the highly abstract realms of modern nations. We all (most of us) grasp helping others, compassion, and community welfare at the HG structural tier, but more education (or indoctrination, depending on your POV) is needed to expand our tribal notions to the human tribe and Earth's whole surface. Unfortunately, global survival requires a retrofitting of a brain built around nomadic bands of maybe a hundred people or somewhere in the level of magnitude. That brain has real struggles trying to understand that driving an SUV to the store to pick up some steaks for dinner, enjoyed in a 2000 sf dwelling with teeshirt climate control year-round is going to, amplified in the aggregate, burn down forests and fail crops and flood a coastal city in Indonesia. (More later)

Charlie Warzel interviewed the guy who helped fix the PHP mess. If Anything Happens to This Guy … Everyone Is Screwed’Ondřej Surý was a relatively anonymous volunteer working on PHP security. Then the internet exploded. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/man-who-saved-internet-php-vulnerability/689123/?gift=43H6YzEv1tnFbOn4MRsWYp_nQAITxxhhDof71uIxMfY&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share Once the patch was released yesterday, websites everywhere went offline to implement the fix. These included government websites in Germany and Finland, some hospital and school websites in Europe, and international sites such as 4chan. During this race to secure the majority of the internet, I noticed one name pop up in posts on Reddit and X: Ondřej Surý. “Explaining to my wife how there’s this one guy. And he alone is responsible for most of the world’s distribution of PHP,” a software developer named Ian Landsman wrote on X. “And if anything happens to this guy, that’s just it. Everyone is screwed.” He was referring to Surý. Surý, who lives in Czechia, does not work for the PHP Foundation. But alongside his day job as director of domain-name-system engineering at the nonprofit Internet Systems Consortium, in a volunteer capacity, he maintains and helps automate patches for the coding language. His work, with that of just a handful of others, has allowed countless websites and organizations to fix these vulnerabilities quickly. Over the past 48 hours, he’s become arguably the unsung hero of the entire internet—despite the fact that the only compensation he receives is from modest donations. “Ondřej will save the internet today,” a user in the PHP Subreddit wrote....

Sounds like four security disasters have landed all at once: the PHP remote code execution bugs, eight eMudhra Certificate Authority private keys that were absurdly guessable single-digit integers (yikes), a poisoned LiteLLM supply-chain backdoor stealing API credentials, and a snafu in some Node.js security release. (API credentials are something that helps software applications talk to each other securely.) I am scrambling for an upgrade atm, as my tablet is a dinosaur running Android 8.1.0 which is no longer supported and missing literally hundreds of patches I could really use now. I was already on the verge of replacing, so this kind of woke me up. Temp moving to a different device until I can get this taken care of. Wifi going off tonight in 5,4,3,2,1...

If I'm following this, I think they are posting that our universe simulation runs on hardware which is many orders of magnitude smaller than its simulation appears to be. I.e. of a size where global updates may take place within a clock cycle. This "higher shell" of universe (a metauniverse from our perspective) is where the "nonlocality" is effectuated. Some very non-Ockham speculation, it would seem, and then invites also questions of whether or not higher universe shells all operate with the same physical constants. For example, one could speculate that we are merely a toy universe loaded for pedagogical purposes. A problem with all this is it pulls out the rug from under honest attempts at "actual physics." Grr.

If this thread is about a Matrix theory (i.e. our universe is a digital computer simulation), then how would we even be able to test its core assertion of that? I can't see bothering with the rest if we have no way to test this.