Real Artificial Intelligence

photog Current Events, Literature, OCF, photog's Corner, Poetry

Many people have heard at some point in their educational careers that in 79 A.D. Mount Vesuvius erupted and completely buried the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum that were located at the foot of the volcano.  Vesuvius is located adjacent to the present Italian city Naples.

What most people are unaware of is that during excavations of Herculaneum in 1752 a building was discovered that contained ancient books, or more accurately, papyrus scrolls.  Unfortunately the heat from the lava flow had reduced these scrolls to carbonized lumps.  For the last two hundred years and more scholars have attempted to unroll these carbonized scrolls and read their text.  The painstaking work has only been minimally successful and mostly they’ve managed to find a small amount of text while basically destroying the scrolls.

But now modern medical imaging technology and advanced machine vision and machine learning techniques have combined to produce a possible way to read these ancient books.  Using x-ray tomography images that look through the burned books can help identify layers where ink appears on the papyrus.  Combining this with computer mapping of the ink locations the scroll can be “virtually unrolled” to reveal the text on the ancient remnant.  The proof of concept has now been performed on a small bit of the scan.  The challenge is to do this for the bulk of the document.  It is a daunting task because of the terribly distorted shape of the scrolls.

Now a million dollar prize has been offered for any silicon valley type who is savvy enough to take the scans and turn it into a readable text.

For most people this is meaningless.  Interest in even the books written a few years ago pales in comparison to watching a “TikTok” video of some vapid “influencer” describing her workout routine or grapefruit-papaya diet or other earth-shaking events. These old arcane texts have no bearing on their lives.  And the scrolls currently unearthed are the works of an unimportant Roman philosopher.  But it is believed that the rest of the unexcavated building is the repository of a very large private library that may contain many lost works by the best classical authors of Greece and Rome.  The lost tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides and the comedies of Aristophanes and lost histories that we currently only know the names of would be immensely interesting to scholars and also people like me who find remarkable relevance in these testaments from thousands of years ago.

So the fact that finally there seems to be some real progress on this project that has gone on for centuries, I find fascinating.  But my skeptical nature also forbids me from allowing unbounded enthusiasm to blind me to the likely outcome; failure.

So I share this with you, my readers, to let you know what I find to be the real progress that “AI” can provide to the world.  Not ChatGPT which just automates the nitwittery found on TikTok but instead the brute force restoration of books that were burned to a crisp by a volcanic eruption almost two thousand years ago.  A computer program guided by state of the art imaging technology plucking lost works from antiquity out of a pile of ashes.  That’s magic.

Superman Updates the Fifth Commandment for the ACLU

photog Current Events , ,

Extremely succinct and simple enough for even the murderous cretins that the Democrats support to follow.  A murdering rapist wants to be made into a eunuch while waiting on death row.  And not getting that demand is an example of cruel and unusual punishment to the ACLU.  Something like this will be used as proof that our civilization committed suicide early in the 21st century.

 

 

Margaritaville

photog Current Events, photog's Corner

In the anti-Christian world that we now live in, the academicians made a noisy point of replacing the Christian temporal markers BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) that we used to use to define historical dates.  At first, they replaced them with BCE (Before Christian Era) and CE (Christian Era) but still not satisfied with any relationship to Jesus remaining, they repurposed the acronyms into Before Common Era and Common Era.  Well, the enemies of God could be expected to do no less.

But maybe soon we’ll be back to BC and AD.  But the underlying time markers will stand for Before COVID and After the Destruction.  After all, historians of the future will decide that western civilization’s self-immolation reached its climax with the decision to wreck the industrial, commercial and social basis of the western world for the sake of running the COVID play book the way they did.

But in my own humble way I am also embarking on a new epoch.  The divisions will be designated BP and AP, Before Puppy and After Puppy.  In the waning days of the BP era, I have before me a solid week when Camera Girl will still be at my beck and call.  After that I’ll be abandoned to my fate, left to fend for myself and survive on any scraps that the very important canine deigns to leave in her bowl.  I’ll probably lose my spot on the couch and be forced to sleep in the shed or the garage.  I’ll be kept around as a maintenance man or security guard for the estate.  My main employment will probably be sanitation worker armed with a shovel and a pail.  How the mighty hath fallen.

But this week is my last hurrah.  Yesterday the kids and grandkids were over and I incinerated the burgers and dogs and the kids went into the already very cold pool water one last time and played some wiffle ball and shot some pool.  And we all ate too much ice cream and drank too much lemonade one last time before they settled into school.

So now I can relax and enjoy the unseasonably hot weather and rearrange my priorities in preparation for the rest of the year.  And hopefully I come up with an efficient and productive schedule for myself.  It’s badly needed.  I am a disorganized man.

But even if I don’t completely revolutionize my schedule into a perfection of photog-ergic productivity, I intend to finish this week with the satisfaction of having done whatever I do or don’t do on my own terms.  For the next few days, I’m the master of my soul and the captain of my destiny.  Or something that sounds like that.

So, if I end up wasting the time and achieving nothing and leaving myself in an awful spot, I have no one to blame but myself.  And to my mind that is exactly what I want.  I will have clear cause and effect relationship between what I do and what ends up happening to me.    I will have established my own example of free will at work in the world.  A perfect laboratory of volition.  The immovable object (me) meeting the irresistible force (the full catastrophe that is my life).  It’ll be my own damn fault.  What man could ask for more than that?

The Last Page

photog Current Events ,

I was watching a news clip from ABC News (H/T to the Conservative Treehouse) where that Clinton White House weasel George Stephanopoulos is asking his fellow Democrat sycophants what they made of Donald Trump’s continued dominance in the Republican primary despite four separate criminal indictments.  And frankly they were scared.  The last opinion came from Donna Brazile and she stated that Donald Trump’s hold on his partisans reminded her of the “movements” that followed Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.  And she said, “and anyone who thinks that you can apply the old political rules to try to defeat this candidate based on he’s scary, he’s ugly, whatever you might want to call him, this is a movement. And we have to respect the fact that it’s a movement.”

And I thought to myself, “If someone as stupid and as partisan as Donna Brazile recognizes and admits that Donald Trump is the leader of a huge grassroots movement then it’s obvious that this isn’t business as usual in Washington.  Things are extremely bad there and they are even starting to admit it.  They long ago threw away the rule book and now they just do whatever they can think of to try to put the genie back in the bottle.  Voter fraud, wag the dog wars, biological warfare, printing trillions of dollars to bribe the populace, you name it.  Now they’re using kangaroo courts to jail their political enemies.  But all this has had the unfortunate result of waking up a large chunk of the populace.  And so, the genie can’t go back in the bottle.

But what’s next?

Well, that’s the most beautiful part.  Because the absolute unalloyed truth is that nobody knows the answer to that question.  Nobody.  Not the Deep State or the oligarchs or the CIA or the FBI or Barack Obama or even Donald Trump.  And certainly not Joe Biden.  He barely knows which way the bathroom is.  No one has read the last page of this story.

Nobody knows how all of this will end.  We’re so far out in left field that even the impossible is possible.  Imagine the craziest scenario for where we end up in five years and it could come true.  Anything from a return to 1950s America to an Orwellian nightmare to anything in between is almost equally likely.

So, when the pundits bloviate about how the new world order will be such and such and such, just relax.  They’re making it up.  They have no idea.  They’re like the Second Foundationers in the Asimov story who have figured out the future using their advanced science.  But then the Mule comes along (read Trump here) and the plan blows up.  History always has to reckon with the great man.  If the right man shows up at the right time, he can sweep away the best laid plans and reset the game.

Sure, the powers that be have led us by the noses for generations.  But they got too greedy or they’re stupider than their predecessors or they went to the same well once too often.  And now the rubes are wise to the grift.

Will it turn out well for us?  As I said, it’s impossible to say.  History would tend to say no.  These situations usually lead to tyranny.  But the future is not predetermined.  Random events and factors can set us on a different path.

So, as I said, relax.  Let the game play out and pay attention to who is lying to you and who is telling the truth.  The liars are the enemy.  And the other guys just might be the future.