"These Tech Titans Are F--king Psychos"

Some evidence on why the AI tech leaders should be the last people deciding the future of human society, put rather directly:

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Will AI Devalue Humans?

This clip of Tristan Harris really makes me think. It contains a quote by Sam Altman of Open AI which is...well, incredible and outrageous at the same time.

 
Harris is a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.

 
Someone I heard said of the CEOs at Trump's recent meeting of AI tech bros, where Trump announced the formation of a "Super Intelligence Force" {eyeroll}, that their suits don't fit and do we really want tech nerds with limited social skills creating the future of the human condition. Excellent question.

 

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search(+A +B) and search(+A -C)

Anymore it seems impossible to do a Web search that includes particular terms. A search like

+A +B

gives results where term B is not in the search results. Google does this, and now DuckDuckGo does it too, and as far as I can tell, so does Bing. And if you try to exclude term C

+A -C

the search results still include C, especially, I think, if it's commonly associated with A.

Does anyone have a solution for this? I think it's because the search engines don't want to return null results because they want to include their advertising links. 

It's frustrating. Or am I doing something wrong?

Edit 12-Oct: took out the quote marks that were around the search term, since they mean something on search that I didn't mean here.

The Last Humans Alive

I asked Grok: Create an image of the last group of humans alive on Earth after global warming and climate change have killed everyone else.

It created this. A little harsher than I expected, but OK.

Link.

El Nino region's amazing SST

Here's a chart (thanks Grok) showing the sea surface temperature of the Nino3.4 region in the central Pacific Ocean. The SST is going off the chart. 

The high bulge to the right of 2026's line is 2015, which peaked on Nov 18, 2015 at 29.81°C, an anomaly of 3.26°C relative to a baseline of 1982-2010. 

Here's a time series of the same region. If El Ninos' strength is increasing over time, I wouldn't say it's obvious from this graph? What do you think?

Of course someone should do a calculation.

Ocean Heat Content Clearly Accelerating

Here are the latest ocean heat content numbers from NOAA, through 1Q2026. Eyeballing, it looks clear that OHC is accelerating for both regions. 

0-700 m region: linear slope = 0.22 W/m² = 0.035°C/decade

                           acceleration = 0.0089 (W/m²)/yr = 8.9 (mW/m²)/yr

where "mW" is milliwatts. 

0-2000 m region: linear slope = 0.68 W/m² = 0.037°C/decade

                             acceleration = 0.0079 (W/m²)/yr = 7.9 (mW/m²)/yr

The R² numbers are all high, > 0.90.

All this bother over milliwatts!   :-)

PS: corrections welcome, especially on the unit conversions.

Island Boy

This lively woman, Brooke Eby, said she was finally diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, or, she says, the same disease that Stephen Hawking had, "before he became an island boy." 

I hope you know what that means. 

I wonder if that will be his lasting impression in the public sphere.

Don't know if any of you care. Probably not.

-=-=-

Her name is Brooke Eby. She had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., at 33. She died yesterday at the age of 37. 

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Why I Love Rainy Days (Apparently)

Oregon's rainy season--it's really rainy season--is coming up in November and December. It's the only part of winter here I enjoy anymore. (Yes, I realize technically it's autumn. But it feels like winter.) I used to love nor'easters in New England. (Like today's.)

I'm already missing summer.

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Weird Eddington Quotes

Arthur Eddington, physicist and mathematician, wrote:

“The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness”

He also wrote:

“It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.”

Both of these are in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1928. 

Eddington made his name in astronomy and especially by traipsing off to Príncipe in 1919 to attempt to measure the bending of light around the sun predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. The island is inside the underarm of Africa, and the eclipse occurred on May 29th. At only 1.5° N of the equator it was probably miserable at the time, especially wearing the heaps of clothing expected of English men back then. Eddington said he had confirmed Einstein's prediction, which made Einstein famous. I once read that Eddington cherry picked his data, but Wikipedia says 

The results were argued by some to have been plagued by systematic error and possibly confirmation bias, although modern reanalysis of the dataset suggests that Eddington's analysis was accurate.

Maybe he just got lucky or had a sixth sense for his experiment. Maybe he knew what he was doing.

Anyway, back to these quotes. Eddington didn't accomplish much in the field of physics or the new quantum mechanics, as far as I know, but he did have a few crazy ideas. He claimed the number of hydrogen atoms in the universe was exactly 136*2²⁵⁶, approximately 1.57e79.

The "136" looks suspicious.... Eddington claimed the fine structure constant α was 1/136, which was about the value being measured back then. But better measurements found it to be a little less than 1/137, so Eddington cooked up a way to find one more degree of freedom, thus 136+1=137. For this he was ridiculed and some people started calling him "Arthur Adding-one," and the episode detracted from his scientific credibility.

 
So back to these quotes, made as the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics were being established by Born and Heisenberg and Pauli and a bunch of guys at Göttingen in Germany. Eddington must have been impressed with QM and it triggered his curiosity but didn't get into the meat of it so played around at the [far] edges. 

Anyway, back to the quotes. They seem influenced by QM, but they're really quite astonishing and, well, kooky for any actual scientist to say. Nothing was known about consciousness back then, just as nothing about it is known today. To say that there is no external world and it all springs from consciousness is way, way, way out there, too soon even for science fiction, which was then sending goofy rockets to be planted into the lunar surface and there were canals on Mars built by Martians (first described in 1877). Eddington said it all depends on "mental character." 

Eddington took the red pill. He believed that consciousness could not be explained by physics. (Then by what?) I knew about the eclipse of course, and his adding one to 136 to get 137, but I never knew he was this far out there. He was probably a fascinating guy to have a conversation with, in front of a large fireplace with port and cigars, and I suspect he had even weirder ideas than he wrote about. He would certainly be worth a time travel trip, when they finally figure out time travel and built the necessary infrastructure. I don't know, depends on the cost. If Einstein would be there at the same time, I'd pay a lot for that ticket. Just might stay, too.

Big Fossil Fuel Ad Money for the New York Times

A big dilemma:

#NotACoincidence

[image or embed]

— Michael E. Mann (@michaelemann.bsky.social) September 5, 2026 at 8:25 AM

Looks like the NYT takes in about $500 M/yr in advertising money. So about 4% comes from fossil fuels. If the loaded salary of an employee is $200,000, the FF money pays for a hundred of them. Or, as they have 163 M shares outstanding, that's 12 cents more dividend per share. Their annual dividend is $0.92 per share per year, they could raise it by about 13%. 

Or have an amazing annual Hanukkah party.

Arctic Sea Ice Extent Only 10th Lowest

NSIDC says that the Arctic's sea ice extent minimum has been reached for the year, 4.60 million square kilometers on Sept 12th. That's about the area of the European Union, and only tenth lowest since satellite records began back in November 1978. 

"This year’s minimum is yet another low extent in a changed Arctic," said senior scientist Walt Meier. "While this year’s minimum is in line with recent years, it is far lower than anything we saw in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s.”

Here's a quick reminder of what "extent" means versus "area":

Sea ice area is the total region covered by ice. Extent is the total region with at least 15 percent sea ice cover. NSIDC usually reports extent, which gives higher values than area.

And the Antarctic has likely reached its maximum for the winter down there:

In the Antarctic, sea ice extent has been tracking near record low levels for most of this growth season, most likely reaching its maximum extent on September 14 at 17.59 million square kilometers (6.79 million square miles). If this maximum date holds, this will be the third lowest Antarctic sea ice maximum on record. 

Here's NSIDC's own story and an animation for the Arctic. Here's an image I asked Perplexity AI to generate: "an image of vanishing sea ice."

Image by Perplexity AI

About the Equal-Area Map Debate

Surprising (to me):

Kluth says of the Mercator map, "Greenland is especially exaggerated: It appears to be 14 times larger than all of Africa, when in fact, it is smaller than Algeria.

How a bogus map exposes 'one reason for Trump's obsession with Greenland,' Alternet, 11-Sept-2026

Data centers in Oregon use 71% of electricity of households

There are 111 data centers in the state of Oregon, as of 2025, consuming 14 TW-hr of electricity last year. That's an hour power consumption of 1.6 GW. It's equal to 71% of household use of electricity. 

32 more data centers are planned.

That's a lot of AI slop. Maybe a few more unproven conjectures in mathematics. More ridiculous crap from Trump. 

Via KPTV.com

https://youtu.be/dezHhFjj16A?si=x4ph7vVA-BbqG_zc

It's not clear if dolphins or humans have the better lives