Category: Science

What’s Worse, Dark Energy or Non-Metric Gravity?

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Regular readers are aware of my disdain for Dark Energy and Dark Matter.  These are hypothetical entities that apparently can’t be detected but which allow astrophysicists to pretend they understand why physical measurements of the universe don’t correlate with the estimates they make about things like the mass of the galaxies and the expansion of the universe.

Well I’m happy to report they’ve come up with another theory that at least allows them to get rid of dark energy.  It’s called non-metric gravity.  Of course I’m glad they’re getting rid of dark energy.  Getting rid of something that doesn’t exist is a helpful idea.  But I can’t say that the exercise they’ve gone through to “measure” the parameters in their new model is all that inspiring.  They take the gravitational constant and make it a function of the form:

F(Q) = α + βQn

And all three parameters are determined by curve fitting, using the available data from astrophysical observations like the red shift and microwave radiation densities.  And unsurprisingly they are able to make the hypothesis fit the data.

Now does this prove anything?  Certainly not.  But at least it doesn’t require inventing ubiquitous non-existent particles that are indetectable and inexplicable.  And to my way of looking at things it’s the beginning of an approach that may start to unravel the baffling problems that astrophysicists are confronted with when they look at the universe on the grand scale.

Now if only they can man up and admit there’s no such thing as dark matter they might start to gain my respect back again.  Sir Isaac forgive them.  They’re not very bright.

Fun on a Friday Night

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Make a start.  Make a start.  Well, I’ve caught up with my chores.  All the distractions and alarums and excursions have kept me from writing.  Well, what can you do?  Life is like that.

But what to write about?  I’m looking for something upbeat.  I don’t want to talk about the crime epidemic or the 2024 race or even transgender pushback.  I’ve expended enough venom on those to last me awhile.  I’d rather think about something fun.

So, how about asteroid mining?

Until recently talk of this was restricted to science fiction fans.  Heinlein had asteroid miners in his juvenile novel “The Rolling Stones” and it was a staple of many writers in the last century.  But now it’s going from fiction to fact as NASA is talking about sending a mission to an asteroid that is believed to be composed almost entirely of metal.  There’s a mission to send an unmanned mission to reach Psyche 16 in 2026.

Psyche 16 is a small world with a diameter of 140 miles.  Its mass has been estimated at 2.29 ×1019 kg.  That’s about 0.0004% of the Earth’s mass.  But that’s an enormous mass.

Now visiting Psyche 16 is a far cry from actually mining gold and platinum from this worldlet and getting it to Earth where it has value.  But it’s a start.  The actual mechanism for recovering the metals that make up Psyche 16 is an interesting problem.  Depending on how fast it is going relative to Earth, changing its orbit has the potential to be a human existence-ending event for planet Earth.  Remember, the dinosaurs allegedly bit the dust because a fair-sized asteroid crashed into Earth sixty some odd million years ago.  So, diverting large asteroids should be something done with the utmost of careful planning and the least amount of change to our space environment.

The two choices I come up with are moving it into a stable orbit close to Earth or crashing it into the Moon.  Overall, I favor the Moon idea.  Maybe I’ve been influenced by Heinlein’s story, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”  In that tale the Moon colonists uses a rail gun to boost payloads to escape the Moon’s gravity and splash down in the oceans of Earth.  I’m sure that much more careful thought would need to be done to ensure that this kind of logistical method is possible but I’m guessing from a risk perspective where an extinction event is one of the risks it would probably be preferred to leaving that big rock moving close to Earth.

In the article someone did a back of the envelope calculation and came up with $10,000 quadrillion as the value of the metals in Psyche 16.  Of course, why it would be expressed that way instead of as $10 quintillion is unclear to me.  But they bring up the point that this would wreck the Earth’s economy by destabilizing the value of gold and other metals.  Well, this seems like a silly statement.  Extracting even something as valuable as platinum from the Moon and bringing it back to Earth will not be economical unless the price of that metal increases by orders of magnitude.

Digging gold and platinum out of the Earth is the economical choice and will be for the foreseeable future.  But if someday there is a need for metals that can no longer be found on Earth, then maybe asteroid mining might become a thing,

So, wasn’t that more fun than talking about trannies again?  Feel free to comment on my moon crash option.  I assure you I haven’t thought through this option much at all so we can dissect it as an occasion for fun.  Have at it.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 14APR2023 – Scientific Dark Ages

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AI medical imaging potential should not be stifled.

 

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

-Marie Curie (1867-1934)

 

The de facto position concerning new medical discoveries cannot be that it will inevitably be used for sinister purposes. This anti-science viewpoint stifles innovation and progress for humanity, thus stunting potential breakthroughs in medicine. Tools available to researchers and health professionals are just that, tools. The usage and application are dependent on who wields these instruments. It is not hard to imagine the first Neanderthals who discovered fire might have been dubious about its utilization, once one of them tried to touch it.

Recently it was found that Artificial Intelligence (AI) used to screen medical images can detect with near-perfect accuracy the patient’s racial ethnicity without prior knowledge from outside inputs. This ability for AI covered a broad series of image types; from CT scans to chest X-Rays, and persisted over all anatomical regions. This finding was replicated even from images that were cropped, corrupted, or not ideally clear. Even more surprising is that human experts trained to analyze these scans cannot determine the patient’s race, yet AI trained with deep learning developed this ability by itself.

The AI utilizes ‘Deep Learning’ as the machine learning model that imitates the human learning process to a degree with predictive analytics, and complex learning algorithms.

A good analogy describes the process as:

“To understand deep learning, imagine a toddler whose first word is dog. The toddler learns what a dog is — and is not — by pointing to objects and saying the word dog. The parent says, “Yes, that is a dog,” or, “No, that is not a dog.” As the toddler continues to point to objects, he becomes more aware of the features that all dogs possess. What the toddler does, without knowing it, is clarify a complex abstraction — the concept of dog — by building a hierarchy in which each level of abstraction is created with knowledge that was gained from the preceding layer of the hierarchy.”

In this fashion, deep learning differs from traditional linear algorithms that are dictated by the computer programmer. A deep learning model will independently sift through massive data sets to create complex statistical models from large amounts of unstructured data. This represents a new frontier in AI technology. Prior to the 21st century, access to big data sets and cloud computing were out of reach for many computer programmers.

Not everyone in the medical field sees the potential in AI recognition. This article from MIT discounts any benefit to the computer model’s ability to detect race.

“The fact that algorithms ‘see’ race, as the authors convincingly document, can be dangerous. But an important and related fact is that, when used carefully, algorithms can also work to counter bias,” says Ziad Obermeyer, associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley, whose research focuses on AI applied to health.

This understandable caution for bias by AI is the prevailing theme for a significant part of the medical community. Numerous papers and articles sound the alarm for potential abuses of AI racial recognition. However, not one study or opinion piece expanded on the potential uses for AI’s talent to discern race in medical imaging. Remember, no human experts can do this, regardless of experience or training. What if this could unlock new, highly effective therapies tailored to different races depending on the disease? Maybe this leads to discovering distinct correlations that would allow for earlier detections of cancer and other diseases. AI using multivariate analysis would give all patients an edge in their treatment plans. An entirely new realm of possibilities could open up for science, but only if the courage is there to look for it.

This may be of no value in the field of medicine, and possibly even be a feature of AI that needs to be eliminated entirely. Yet to dismiss out of hand the ability for AI to detect racial identity in medical imaging without more research into potential uses would be folly and a discredit to the goal of furthering medical science and artificial intelligence.

Links:

AI recognition of patient race in medical imaging: a modelling study

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(22)00063-2/fulltext

Artificial intelligence predicts patients’ race from their medical images

https://news.mit.edu/2022/artificial-intelligence-predicts-patients-race-from-medical-images-0520

AI systems can detect patient race, creating new opportunities to perpetuate health disparities

https://news.emory.edu/stories/2022/05/hs_ai_systems_detect_patient_race_27-05-2022/story.html

Risks of AI Race Detection in the Medical System

https://hai.stanford.edu/policy-brief-risks-ai-race-detection-medical-system

AI Can Detect Race When Clinicians Cannot, Increasing Risk of Bias

https://healthitanalytics.com/news/ai-can-detect-race-when-clinicians-cannot-increasing-risk-of-bias

AI programs can tell race from X-rays, but scientists don’t know how. Here’s why that’s bad.

https://www.boston.com/news/health/2022/05/18/scientists-create-ai-race-from-x-rays-dont-know-how-it-works-harvard-mit/

Hidden in Plain Sight: If AI Can Detect Race, What About Bias?

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/977619

Deep Learning

https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/deep-learning-deep-neural-network

21MAR2023 – Microscopic Images – Snail Munching

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Many years ago I kept snails as pets.  I remember how creepy it was listening to them munching egg shells that I gave them to help grow their shells quicker.  They are weird and interesting critters.  I once started a science fiction story where a geneticist combined the brains and tentacles of a cephalopod with the body of a giant African snail to produce a sentient creature that survives a thermonuclear war and becomes a threat to the surviving humans.  But I got bored with the story and never finished it.

 

World Didn’t End in 2023. Greta Thunberg Exclaims, “How Dare You!”

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I think her punishment for being wrong should be for her to be put in one of those dunk tanks and let all the non-climate alarmists get five baseball pitches to try and dunk her.  With any luck she’ll drown.

ChatGTP Wants to Write Our Fiction for Us

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Vox Day had a post about Clarkesworld science fiction magazine that had to shut down its submissions due to being overwhelmed by the volume of AI generated novels being submitted.  Apparently, they can’t afford the software that could automate the process of identifying and rejecting the AI generated books.

As someone currently writing a science fiction novel this is a remarkable turn of events.  Wouldn’t it be something if the artificial authors produce a better product than the organic ones!  And I don’t mean more grammatical, but more creative and entertaining.  So, if the algorithm blends 60% Heinlein with 20% Dickens and 20% Hemingway would it produce the greatest science fiction story of all time or an abomination not fit for human consumption?

In one sense I’m lucky.  I’ve read that ChatGTP is hopelessly woke so my current story about a revolt against an authoritarian Deep State cabal is impossible for ChatGTP to write.  If it attempted such a thing it would blow out every circuit in its server farm.

But just thinking about this whole Frankensteinian situation is amusing.  I imagine Dr. Morbius from Forbidden Planet describing to a visiting interstellar fiction author the ability of the Krell machine to write sci-fi stories, “You see these row after row of instruments?  Each one represents an increase by a factor of ten the number of cybernetic neurons figuring out plot details.  It’s the number ten raised literally to the power of infinity of cliffhanger chapter endings and hypercompetent heroes saying something self-serving.”

But then his guest would remind him of monsters from the id, “Yes Morbius, but without the ability reflect reality; without the ability to distinguish male characters from female characters and to allow non-white characters to have normal human flaws it will all quickly devolve into unreadable goo.”

To which Morbius would reply, “Of course, the mindless primitive, why didn’t I see it?  Hypersensitive, politically correct story lines are stultifyingly boring.  Quick, son, press down this lever and be one hundred million miles away before it blows.  I’ve set ChatGTP to overdrive and when that amount of drivel piles up the result will be a literary black hole that will render all of science fiction lifeless within fifty parsecs.”

Well, I wonder how all of this will impact self-publishing at places like Amazon.  Will even their servers be able to handle the surge in output from ChatGTP filling up the world’s server farms with romance and porn novels about super-smart super-attractive girl-bosses who save the known universe.

Heaven, help us.

Of Chatbots and Cheese

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So, as I was saying yesterday, the kids and the grandkids came over.  And Camera Girl killed the fatted calf, cooked it and then afterward served cake and ice cream to the stuffed survivors.  I skipped all the meatballs and sauce and made my self three sandwiches; a Reuben, a roast beef, provolone with mayo on “peasant bread” and a free form that included mustard, corned beef, lettuce and sweet gherkins on French bread; all washed down with hot coffee.  Suffice it to say I ate too much but have no regrets about it.  Later on, I had way too much vanilla ice cream and pound cake.  About that I do have regrets.  But c’est la guerre.

Today I faced the new day feeling bilious and groggy.  But all this warm weather of late inspired us to head for the state park for a long walk in the woods.  Seriously, I really want to thank whatever climatic forces are responsible for this winter’s mild weather.  I hereby agree to whatever destruction of the planet occurs and with my blessings.  Walking in the middle of February through this park without snowshoes is an innovation that is well worth finishing off those poor devils living at the Equator.  And since our Lizard Overlords are bringing all those people here anyway, at least I can have the benefits of a warmer climate here in Dunwich without feeling bad about it.  So, after the strengthening and revivifying effects of our hike I am restored to health and looking forward to enjoying the rest of this holiday weekend.

During the festivities yesterday I was able to talk with my eldest grandson and he told me he managed to get on the Dean’s List at the college where he is studying computer science.  Apparently, that requires a 4.0 grade point average.  I was impressed.  He is a lot like me.  Which means that studying for any subject in which he hasn’t any interest, is very difficult.  So that means he is displaying considerable discipline.  I attribute this to his parents spending a lot of time stressing the need for conscientiousness.  So, I am impressed with them too.

We discussed the recent trends in computer science.  We both got a laugh out of the recent vicissitudes of the “metaverse.”  The fact that the geniuses at Facebook didn’t realize that people don’t want to walk around wearing virtual reality headsets all the time is ridiculous.  After all, it’s one thing to wear a headset while flying an F-16.  There it’s a matter of life and death.  But in almost any other instance real life is superior to virtual life.  Think about it.  I can go into a field and throw a real baseball around with my grandsons.  Or we can all stand around wearing VR headsets and pretend to throw around a baseball.  That is so lame as to even defy comparison to other lame things.

Then we talked about artificial intelligence and of course ChatGPT.  He was generally very excited, not about the present chatbots, but rather about the potential in the near future.  Apparently, the level of sophistication is still growing quickly and whereas currently the behavior merely mimics human thought he was enthusiastic about it becoming closer to human creativity over time.  I warned him that AI’s ability to replace humans in the workforce might someday even allow it to replace computer scientists and he ruefully agreed the potential is there.

It was a very interesting conversation.  I still think of artificial intelligence as a tool.  If I let a chatbot write an essay for me, I’d use the output as a framework from which I’d insert the creative ideas that I wanted to make.  Facts and figures and even sententious musings aren’t thinking.  They’re scenery.  You have to have a point of view.  Sure, you can tell a chatbot the point you’re making but it still sounds like a Wikipedia entry.  I defy a chatbot to rise to my level of outrage.  And since my point of view is currently algorithmically forbidden to chatbots, by definition, I am immune from their competition.

Afterward, Camera Girl joined with the kids going to a middle school theatrical performance and Princess Sack of Potatoes saw her first live play.  And she was enthralled.  Camera Girl just watched her reactions to the performance throughout and said it was amazing.

And I thought, how is an algorithm going to mimic that?  An intelligent and emotional child “learning” about theater; how will the computer scientists mimic that?  The human brain only has about ninety billion neurons.  I’m sure supercomputers can multiply that number of memory slots almost infinitely.  But can we even define what it means to be a human being.  I’m not sure we currently can.  I’m not even sure we’ll ever be able to.  Lots of people are convinced that consciousness is just a level of complexity.  Once we have umpty-ump petaflops of computing power HAL will wake up and take over the world.  I’m far from sure that’s true.  It’s fun to use in science fiction stories but reality may not oblige us.  How do you program the point of view of a four-year-old girl watching a live play for the first time?  Where’s the slider for enthralled?

So, despite living in the pall of the East Palestine mushroom cloud and the other outrages that the Biden dismantling of America subjects us to, I’ve found fresh evidence that human life still contains transcendent beauty.  We are much, much more than the sum of our neurons and other cellular components.  We are capable of fascinating and remarkable behaviors.  Maybe we’re not quite obsolete yet.  Sure, the Lizard Overlords may take away our modern conveniences like gas and oil and force us back into a pre-industrial lifestyle but it will still be as human beings and that is an amazing simulation to be a part of.