Quote:“Do you think all people have some kind of subconscious desire to probe the future?”
— Marion Stokes

It’s 1969, and Marion Stokes, a petite black woman in a peacoat dress, is smoking a cigarette on her local Philadelphia talk show, Input. She co-hosts this weekly televised consciousness-raising session, and today she’s in conversation with a palmist/graphologist, a Black Power activist, an Episcopal priest, and a tarot-reading telepathist. The episode’s title and theme: The Anatomy of the Unknown. Part 1 – The Future.

Marion was an unlikely futurist. A Communist and a single mother, she was fired from her job at the Philadelphia Free Library after attempting to defect to Cuba. Several years later, she walked into Wellsprings, a local community center, looking for clerical work, and before long was the co-producer of the organization’s television series, Input, along with the show’s founder – and her future husband – John Stokes.

....
While the networks carelessly discarded their archives into the trashcan of history, Marion privately amassed an unprecedented secret archive of American life as depicted on television. She filled more than 70,000 Betamax and VHS tapes, capturing not only epoch-defining news but also commercials, talk shows, public-service announcements, sitcoms, cartoons, interstitial graphics, and esoteric human-interest reports.

I was particularly intrigued by one marginal figure from Marion’s tapes: Bruce Elliott, President of the Anti-Nostalgia Association for the Advancement of Time. This uptight collegiate pundit would have been a perfect commentator on Input’s futurism episode. In 1989, prompted by Bryant Gumbel on the Today show, Elliott explained, “So much of contemporary culture is devoted to regurgitating the past so it obscures our vision of the future.”



Marion once said on Input, “Many people have prophetic dreams, know that the things that they dream about happen and tend to disregard somebody who will tell them that intellectually you’re just having a hallucination, or you’re having a neurotic seizure of some kind.” Indeed, she saw the future. We lived through an era of so-called fake news, with the truth perpetually distorted by ideological cable outlets and a reality-television autocrat. Marion’s archive tracks the evolution of this contemporary political crisis while also, undoubtedly, pointing to an uncertain future.

Recently I went searching for Bruce Elliott, hoping to ask him what insights he had gained from his staunch rejection of the past and whether he prophesied anything unique about the present moment. Alas, public records and social media yielded no results. Like most things on television, Bruce and the anti-nostalgists have disappeared.

The Advancement of Time

Quote:Happy Days are Here Again!

Based upon an event that occured in the United States in 1933, many now celebrate 7 April as National Beer Day.

That day, after more than thirteen dry years of national Prohibition, the manufacturing, distribution, importation, and sale of beer again became legal in the United States.

Well, sort, of. There was a 'small' beer catch. Prohibition, per se, remained in effect.

The 18th Amendment to the Constitution never explicitly outlawed beer, wine, or liquor. Rather, it prohibited the "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" [emphasis mine]. To define what that meant, Congress passed additional 'enabling' legislation, the principal bill of which was the National Prohibition Act (commonly known as the Volstead Act, after the Congressman who wrote it). In it, Congress defined "intoxicating liquors" as ANY beverages containing 0.5% alcohol-by-weight or more. All such beverages became illegal on 20 January 1920, the day the 18th Amendment took effect.

Thirteen-plus dry years later, Congress didn't actually legalize beer but, prodded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, simply altered beer's parameters upward. (Roosevelt's campaign planks had included a promise to Repeal Prohibition.) The legislation it passed, the Cullen–Harrison Act, declared, in effect, that alcoholic beverages of up to 3.2% alcohol-by-weight (abw) —which is the equivalent of 4.05% alcohol-by-volume (abv)2— were now to be considered as "non-intoxicating"! On 22 March 1933, the president signed the bill into law, noting that "I think this would be a good time for a beer." The bill took effect two weeks later, on 7 April.

Unfortunately, stronger beers and alcoholic beverages remained prohibited. It wouldn't be until eight months later, on 5 December 1933, that a majority of states would approve the 21st Amendment, finally revoking federal Prohibition of most alcholic beverages.

...
Shortly after midnight, a few miles to the north, Baltimore, Maryland's curmudgeonly scribe, H.L. Mencken, took his first legal sip of beer in thirteen years and un-petulantly declared it, "pretty good —not bad at all." And radio stations across the nation gleefully spun the hit song, Happy Days are Here Again.



So long sad times, so long bad times,
We are rid of you at last.
Howdy gay times! Cloudy gray times,
You are now a thing of the past.

Happy days are here again,
The skies above are clear again.
Let us sing a song of cheer again,
Happy days are here again.

All together, shout it now. There's no one
Who can doubt it now.
So let's tell the world about it now,
Happy days are here again.

Your cares and troubles are gone.
There'll be no more from now on.

Happy days are here again,
The skies above are clear again.
Let us sing a song of cheer again.
Happy days are here again!

Milton Ager (music); Jack Yellen (lyrics). 1929.

Quote:In 1948 the Los Angeles Times company launched a tabloid called the Los Angeles Mirror to take on the city’s other afternoon papers—the Daily News and the Herald-Express. The Mirror was not an immediate hit, but once publisher Virgil Pinkley and managing editor Hugh “Bud” Lewis started emphasizing the tabloid staples of sex, crime and human interest crusades, the paper’s circulation quickly grew to 140,000 readers.

One of the Mirror’s specialties was over-the-top “journalistic” publicity stunts that used the city of Los Angeles as an unwitting foil. Two of these stories caught CONELRAD’s attention because of their outrageous exploitation of Cold War fears. The first concerns a feature timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Pearl Harbor and the second addresses the prescient concerns of the paper over the danger of suitcase nukes.

“L.A. MOCK BOMBED” was the screaming headline of the December 6, 1951 “extra” edition of the Mirror that came complete with a mushroom cloud background. A note from the publisher in a front-page box explained the noble goal of the newspaper:

    OPERATION WAKE UP

    Today’s Mirror, on the eve of the Pearl Harbor anniversary, is dedicated to the high purpose of alerting Los Angeles to the grave need of civilian defense. The Mirror and the Civil Air Patrol “bombed” the city with 2,000,000 leaflets asking all sensible citizens to wake up to the insistent, personal demands of home defense—one of the most vital elements of national security.

    -- VIRGIL PINKLEY, Editor and Publisher

Inside the paper the “bombing” was played big with several pages devoted to coverage of the wholly manufactured event. No self-congratulatory angle was left unexplored—including the very fact that an “extra” edition had been published in the first place:

    THE MIRROR REPORTS L.A.’s BOMB MISSION

    Scant minutes after “Operation Wake-Up” paper bombs hit Los Angeles, The Mirror’s civil defense EXTRA was on every “target street corner…”



At the center of all the breathless sidebars, though, was the more or less straight news story describing the actual “bombing.” It was headlined “38 CAP Planes Drop Grim Warning Leaflets” and it was reported by James Bassett:

    Thirty-eight planes of the Civil Air Patrol “bombed” Los Angeles today.

    Down from lowering slate-gray skies, exactly at 10:41 a.m., the first of 2,000,000 “paper block-busters” struck lower Broadway.

    Three minutes later these leaflets, carrying a stark message to inhabitants of America’s third largest city, reached the heart of the downtown business sector.

    Hurled from the CAP ships, which rumbled in V-formations over the unwary metropolis, the “bombs” inundated Civic Center, Boyle Heights, the Crenshaw district, Hollywood, the Miracle Mile, and a score of other key centers from Highland Park to San Pedro’s waterfront.

    Each demanded bluntly:

    “If the Civil Air Patrol, flying this warning mission in co-operation with The Mirror, had been the enemy, would YOU have been prepared?”

    While “Operation Wake-Up” leaflets were still falling, City Council quickly moved to commend The Mirror and the CAP.

    “Gentlemen,” said Councilman Ed Davenport, “Los Angeles is being ‘bombed’ right now!”

    Civic leaders joined in congratulating the cosponsors of this dramatic projects [sic] aimed at alerting Southlanders to their lagging home defenses.

    At Seventh St. and Broadway, a policeman declared:

    “It’s high time the people woke up!”

    Citizens scrambled for the crimson-colored “paper bombs” as they fluttered slowly earthward. In surprised queues, they gawked towards the morning skies to watch CAP squadrons pass overhead, puffs of leaflets trailing each speeding craft.

    Another policeman said gravely: “It COULD happen here.”

The article droned on for another two columns about Los Angeles’s dire need for civil defense. The next day, of course, the Mirror published follow-up stories on how “Operation Wake-Up” had improved civil defense awareness:

Quote:Biography

Phillipa Fallon was a 1950s actress singer and actress most noted for her appearance in the film High School Confidential (1958), reciting the Cold War-themed beat poem "High School Drag", written by B-movie actor and writer Mel Welles, recruited by producer Albert Zugsmith to ensure the film's slang was believable because, as Welles recalled for interviewer Tom Weaver in 1988, “I was an expert on grass in my day…” Her performance is accompanied on piano by Jackie Coogan.

As a movie actress Fallon had minor roles in two other films, 1957's Confidential: The Girl in the Kremlin 1957) and The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (1960) She also worked as a singer for the NBC television network in 1956. Little else is known about Phillipa Fallon, and attempts to trace her have been fruitless.

Quote:B-Movie Phantom: The Phillipa Fallon Story Part 9

Around the time of her triumph in High School Confidential!, Phillipa Fallon appeared in the industry casting publication, the Academy Players Directory, for the very first time.[1] Her publicity photograph, along with the name and telephone numbers of her talent agency, Paul Small Artists, Ltd., appears on page 103 of the 79th edition of the directory issued in 1958. Phillipa, who would turn 35 in August of 1958, is in the Leading Women section surrounded by hundreds of other actresses, most of whom the contemporary reader would be hard-pressed to recognize. She and her agents could not have known it at the time, but Phillipa had already had the best role of her career.

In July of 1959 production began on Albert Zugsmith’s biblical sex comedy The Private Lives of Adam and Eve. Zugsmith co-directed the incoherent, poorly shot film with Mickey Rooney who also stars as the devil. The movie’s plot revolves around a modern couple played by Martin Milner and Mamie Van Doren who fantasize that they are Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The film opens with a bizarre title sequence in which Paul Anka drives a car with his feet while singing the theme song.

Rooney spends most of his screen time dressed in dime store Satan drag surrounded by a harem of women known as “The Devil’s Familiars.” Phillipa, in the non-speaking role of Desire, can be seen approximately thirty-seven minutes into the movie giving the devil a pedicure. It was a thankless role and, quite understandably, her last.

1960, the year that Private Lives was released (and condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency), was also the last year that Phillipa paid to have her listing in the Players Directory. Her final entry appears in issue number 85 on page 125. Her agents are identified as Len Kaplan and Mark Harris of the William Schuller Agency. Unfortunately, both of these men are deceased so they could not be asked for details about how Phillipa came to be cast in such a terrible movie. Mickey Rooney, seemingly immortal, did not respond to our inquiries for an interview, but he has probably forgotten about the film by now anyway.

Phillipa had made three movies, all for Albert Zugsmith, and she was now ready to move on. Her new focus would be on her songwriting career, politics and a long campaign against fluoridation...

[1] CONELRAD reviewed the Academy Players Directory for the period 1941 (the year Fallon arrived in Hollywood) through 1960. We searched under all of her known aliases. We found that she appears in issues 79 through issue 81 and issues 83 through 85. Her agency affiliation changes from Paul Small Artists, Ltd. to William Schuller in issue number 83 (after not appearing at all in issue number 82). In issue number 80 (1958, page 105) Fallon’s listing immediately precedes another tragic actress, Frances Farmer:

Quote:"An Edge in My Voice, Installment 55" copyright 1982, 1985 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

This work appears online via special arrangement with the the author, Harlan Ellison. You can thank him by visiting the HERC Store. Copying or distributing any part of this piece for personal use, commercial use, or any other use you can come up with is strictly forbidden.  Breaking this rule will result in the author coming down on you like the proverbial Hand of God or, barring the author finding out, your being forced to spend 15,000 years in Purgatory watching the same three episodes of "Perfect Strangers".

An Edge in My Voice

Quote:    On Monday, Dec.6, two days before the monument siege, Mayer, was seen in his motel trying on a new snowsuit that still had price tags an it. On Tuesday, he told William Thomas in an abrupt phone conversation, "I have decided what I'm going to do and I'm going to do it."

    At 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, in the costume of a B-movie villain, Mayer drove his van to the base of the Washington Monument and executed his bluff.

    Ever meticulous, he had prepared a cue card for himself listing his demands. Ever belligerent, he refused to negotiate and pulled off what U.S. Park Police Capt. Robert H. Hines said was the longest terrorist bluff in U.S. history. Ever skeptical of the human race, Mayer watched a portable Panasonic television to make sure he had reached the world.

    Shortly after the evening network newscast, he drove off to his death.

Nuclear Foe, Eccentric Idealist Was Victim of Unyielding Will (The Washington Post December 19, 1982)

Quote:As a side note, I read a few of sources that stated this was the longest recorded police sniper killing in U.S. history at about 480 yards. And also, it is the earliest recorded use of night vision scopes by police snipers.

Ghosts of DC - Three Things That Happened at the Washington Monument

Quote:The victim has since quit her job at Chipotle, she told the Washington Post, saying that she was only struck because she stepped in to protect a 17-year-old employee who Hayne was screaming at.

"I was so embarrassed and in shock," Russell told the outlet. "I couldn't believe my customers had to witness that," adding that the food was hot and burned her face.

A GoFundMe page was created to support Russell until she finds a new job. The page has surpassed its goal of $1,500, raising nearly $10,000 as of Thursday.

Quote:Despite the now-resolved writers and actors strikes shutting down Hollywood production for several months, the loss of tens of thousands of Tinseltown jobs this year actually is part of a larger economic contraction, a just-released study claims — and those gigs might not be coming back.

“Entertainment Industry employment in Los Angeles this year peaked in April, when 142,652 workers were employed by the Industry,” says Otis College of Art and Design’s “The Day After Tomorrow” study, produced by Westwood Economics and Planning Associates. “As of October, there were 24,799 fewer workers employed by the Industry than there were in April,” the California-centric report states of the 17% drop.

Set to be the first of two studies on the entertainment biz, the report released Thursday (read it here) estimates that ress”Greater Los Angeles Entertainment Industry workers lost roughly $1.4 billion in wages between April and September 2023, or roughly 0.5% of the industry’s annual economic activity.” During the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, which ended in late September and late last month respectively, the California economy overall took a $6.5 billion hit. Nationally, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 45,000 jobs were lost from when the 12,000-strong scribes guild hit the picket lines in early May, followed by the 160,000-strong actor’s guild in mid-July, to mid-October.
“Beyond the short-term impact, the strikes should be understood within the context of a broader restructuring of the Industry: employment was contracting in the Industry even before the strikes,” the Otis College reports declares. “Employment in the Industry peaked in May of 2016, and reached nearly the same level in August of 2022. Since this time, employment has shrunk by 26%”.

One of the primary authors of Otis College’s “Day After Tomorrow” warns that end of the strikes, which officially came on Dec 5 with SAG-AFTRA members voting to ratify their deal with the studios by just over 78%, don’t mean everything will be returning to normal. In fact, Patrick Adler, Principal at Westwood Economics and Planning Associates and Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong, says normal had left the ever-changing industry way before the strikes started.

“Almost all of Hollywood production is controlled by publicly traded companies, and Wall Street has exerted more pressure on the industry since interest rates spiked in 2022,” Dr. Adler notes. “Basically, one dollar of production money is much more expensive today than it was in 2021, and so the street expects higher return.”

Putting a spotlight on the shortcomings of streaming services as revenue streams, the18-page report itself says: “The bigger picture reveals that Peak TV, rather than the strikes, represents the more enduring threat to employment in the Industry. An arms race among streaming platforms heralded a surge in production between 2016 and 2022, as platforms pursued subscriber growth at all costs. As this business model has transitioned into one which emphasizes profitability and sustainability, we have likely reached the highwater mark in production.”

Worth noting that while the WGA and SAG-AFTRA have reached new contracts with the studios, IATSE and the Teamsters will be entering negotiations with the AMPTP next year. As the Hollywood employment contraction tightens further, both those unions will clearly have job saving as one of their top priorities as more strikes and standstills could loom.

Hollywood Jobs Down Nearly 20% This Year, & Not Just Because Of The Strikes, Study Says

Quote:The case is a very serious matter, since recruiting secret agents of a host state to betray their own country is considered an openly hostile act. Such actions may be taken with enemy or adversary governments, but never with friends and allies. Sources from the Spanish intelligence service do not fully understand what happened. “What do Americans have to pay for if we give them everything they ask for?” they noted. These sources insist that Spain openly collaborates with the United States, and always exchanges information. According to these sources, the number of times in which Spain has refused to share information of interest to Washington is “between one and zero.”

Quote:These sources explain that, when the U.S. Ambassador Reynoso was summoned by Minister Robles, she said that she was not aware of the case. The U.S. ambassador allegedly claimed that the U.S. agents who had bribed the Spanish spies were working independently of her, in a program that was launched before current President Joe Biden arrived at the White House and that, for reasons unknown, had been maintained until now.

Quote:Denmark helped US spy on Angela Merkel and European allies – report (31 May 2021)

Danish public broadcaster Danmarks Radio said the US National Security Agency (NSA), whose alleged tapping of Merkel’s phone was disclosed by Edward Snowden in 2013, also used the Danish Defence Intelligence Service (FE) to spy on officials in Sweden, Norway and France.

Snowden on Sunday accused Joe Biden, who was US vice-president at the time, of being “deeply involved … the first time around”. Snowden called on Twitter for “full public disclosure not only from Denmark, but their senior partner as well”.

Quote:A story for bad times

Here is a story that seems most appropriate to the current era in which we (scientists, especially those not at Weizmann) face administrations (i.e., VERA, VATAT, and the government) that reason only via money and power...

In the late 1970s, when becoming chairman of CS at the Technion, Shimon noted that the computer used for teaching was more adequate for a historical display. He asked for a meeting with the Technion's president, in which he requested permission to buy a new computer. The president refused Shimon's request by saying that the department already has a computer, and remained unconvinced by Shimon's explanation that this "piece of junk" is worthless (beyond its junk-yard value). "For all I know", the president said, "you have a computer".

A week later, Shimon phoned the president and asked again for a new computer. The conversation went on as follows.

    President: I already told you that you have a computer, so you don't need a new one.
    Shimon: But I don't have a computer.
    President: What do you mean?
    Shimon: I sold it.
    President: What did you do???
    Shimon: I sold it as junk.
    President: Who allowed you to do this???
    Shimon: I don't need permission to sell old equipment (see Technion's Regulations, Article No. NNN).
    President: So what do you want now?
    Shimon: Your permission to buy a new computer.
    President: You are NOT getting it!
    Shimon: So I'm not opening the next academic year. We cannot teach Computer Science without a computer.
    President: We'll see about this.
    Shimon: Yes, we'll see about this. I'm not opening the next academic year without a computer.

Well, the next academic year was opened with a new computer...

Stories about Shimon Even (by Oded)

Quote:Recently, the TMU began transmitting a repeating pattern of ones and zeros as if it were “stuck.” After ruling out other possibilities, the Voyager team determined that the source of the issue is the FDS. This past weekend the team tried to restart the FDS and return it to the state it was in before the issue began, but the spacecraft still isn’t returning useable data.
NASA-JPL

Quote:Ukraine’s largest mobile operator, Kyivstar, was taken down by a cyberattack on Tuesday morning, resulting in some 24.3 million subscribers losing their phone and internet service, while shops throughout the country were unable to process credit payments.

In Lviv, street lights continued to burn through the morning as the remote switching is controlled through a Kyivstar network. The malfunction meant all disconnections of power to the lights had to be done manually.

“The company's specialists are working on eliminating the problem. We apologize to subscribers for the temporary difficulties and thank you for your understanding,” Kyivstar wrote on its Facebook page.

Ukraine’s Largest Mobile Operator Knocked Out in Cyberattack

Quote:This Special Issue welcomes original research papers and review articles on, but not limited to, the following topics:

    AI-powered safety, security, disaster, crisis and emergency events analysis, including historical and big data analysis;
    AI-enabled climate extreme events, disaster risk assessment and early warning systems;
    AI-enabled public health emergency management including COVID-19;
    AI-based emergency response planning and decision making;
    AI-assisted real-time situational awareness and monitoring;
    AI-driven resource allocation and optimization in emergency management;
    AI-powered prediction and mitigation of disasters and their impact;
    AI-supported public communication and social media analysis during emergencies;
    AI-augmented human-robot collaboration in emergency response;
    AI-powered autonomous systems for search and rescue operations;
    AI-enhanced post-disaster assessment and recovery planning;
    AI-enabled disaster and business continuity management including education continuity operations;
    Ethical and social implications of AI in emergency management.

Special Issue "AI in Disaster, Crisis, and Emergency Management"

(12-17-2023, 04:02 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote:

(12-18-2023, 12:01 AM)Snarl Wrote:

(12-17-2023, 04:02 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: .

Surprised they drew that routine out on their channel.

Quote:The noted science fiction author Robert Heinlein once wrote “climate is what you expect, and weather is what you get” as quoted in the Sunset Western Garden Book, 2012. And after a decade of changing weather systems, even slightly, our gardening methods will change, too.

East Oregonian

Quote:Google DeepMind Used a Large Language Model to Solve an Unsolvable Math Problem

Google DeepMind has used a large language model to crack a famous unsolved problem in pure mathematics. In a paper published in Nature today, the researchers say it is the first time a large language model has been used to discover a solution to a long-standing scientific puzzle—producing verifiable and valuable new information that did not previously exist. "It's not in the training data—it wasn't even known," says coauthor Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind.

Large language models have a reputation for making things up, not for providing new facts. Google DeepMind's new tool, called FunSearch, could change that. It shows that they can indeed make discoveries—if they are coaxed just so, and if you throw out the majority of what they come up with.

FunSearch (so called because it searches for mathematical functions, not because it's fun) continues a streak of discoveries in fundamental math and computer science that DeepMind has made using AI. First AlphaTensor found a way to speed up a calculation at the heart of many different kinds of code, beating a 50-year record. Then AlphaDev found ways to make key algorithms used trillions of times a day run faster.

From MIT Technology Review

(12-18-2023, 04:13 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: I wonder what happens when you feed AI generated data into AI models.

(12-18-2023, 04:13 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote:

(12-18-2023, 04:13 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: Looky here, some folks actually doing research into this...

Degenerative AI: The collapse is Near

(12-19-2023, 12:49 AM)Freija Wrote:

(12-18-2023, 04:13 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: Looky here, some folks actually doing research into this...
Degenerative AI: The collapse is Near

Here's a video on this very thing - AI learning from AI

(12-04-2023, 03:55 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: Holy science, damn!!