Category: Uncategorized

  Now that the Covid 19 pandemic has turned endemic it is time for reappraisal. A few general statistics tell the story. In the U.S. Covid infected around 110M, deaths close to 1.1M. Worldwide these numbers were around 700 M and 7M which adds up to a death rate around 1%.  70% of people succumbing…

Ben Zimmer the WSJ’s lexicographer writes:  “I asked Bard about “argumentative diphthongization,” a phrase that I just made up. Not only did it produce five paragraphs elucidating this spurious phenomenon, the chatbot told me the term was “first coined by the linguist Hans Jakobsen in 1922.” Needless to say, there has never been a prominent…

AI Diversity Like practically everyone I’ve been playing with ChatGPT. I was pleased to notice folks of different stripe testing it in surprising ways that I wouldn’t have thought of. One tester gave it specific characters each with detailed descriptors and had it weave what seemed a good story out of it. My own approach…

I was recently reminded of the relation between action at a distance and the Uncertainty Principle both hard to explain in an article about Chien Shiung Wu. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, widely known and taught, maintains that it’s not possible to know simultaneously the position and momentum of an elementary particle. Entanglement, termed spooky action at…

Formication From Formic having to do with ants as in Formic acid. A previously abused addicted woman with many problems, had the common delusion of unceasing parasites crawling over her body called Formication, similar to visceral larva migrans. She had the workups and tests such as IgE, eosinophil counts many others to definitively exclude a…

AI makes it easier than ever to generate content. Half asleep, you slug through tranches of entertaining content, impossible to curate. Content generators and consumers are everywhere.  The Internet is available to all. But the news isn’t all good. We are encompassed all around by liars and connivers seeking ill-gotten wealth and fame. It is…

Crossing A Bridge. My work requires I make reports. I need explain a lot. That’s why I’m enthusiastic about my first interactions with the AI program Chat GPT. My issue is crossing bridges. I like being psyched to start a task, and now I can have a first approximation of a report simply by texting…

Roger Penrose aged 91, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2020, is famous for his theory of Black Holes and singularities. Einstein didn’t like the idea. But black holes that Penrose predicted were later found to exist in great numbers. Indeed black holes are thought to inhabit nearly all galaxies.  I remember reading his…

I’m working to relate neurobiology to other fields. Such may bear on AI, the Arts, History, Literature, modern culture. For example, self driving vehicles, medical diagnostic programs, robots, will require human supervision for the foreseeable future. Could it be the rote algorithmic rote programs lack the awake mindful decision making of biological entities? Machines switched…

My last discussion briefly contrasted 2 styles of thought. Extreme risk aversion would be the style of medical doctor, obeying the principle Primum Non Nocere where the stakes are high and best courses of hard-won empirical evidence.  But risk aversion does not work for the entrepreneur/inventor since you advance only by exploring new possibilities.  The…