I have a passing interest in what advances are being made in the useful quest for artificial intelligence.. The Doom porn purveyors say we are all one step away from Terminator Skynet while the actual researchers with caution say, "It will be a new exciting frontier for mankind." The video starts in China which is much future along the A.I. road than I thought they were and from there the developments in some of the leading labs in the USA.

A.I. self learning really is amazing and so far the sky (net) is the limit.

With advances in A.I. by different countries I personally can not see countries putting on the breaks of development unless they want to end up at the bottom of the A.I. Heep regardless of international agreements .

Quote:From January 2019, Scott Pelley's interview with "the oracle of AI," Kai-Fu Lee. From this past April, Pelley's report on Google's AI efforts. And from this past March, Lesley Stahl's story on chatbots like ChatGPT and a world of unknowns.

Reflections.

It is official now, I’ve been a passenger on this planet for sixty-eight full trips around the sun with the sixty-ninth plotted into the nav computer and the go controls engaged. I can hardly believe it! Who would have ever thought I would make it this far in life? I sure didn’t and at times in the past, I doubted I would make it another day and then there were times I was sure I wouldn’t but somehow I’m still alive and reasonably functional considering all the things I’ve put this poor meat sack and the thing living in my head that thinks it’s in charge through.

It’s been an unusual and strange trip to say the least and in many ways extraordinary and sometimes when I think back to all the things I’ve been through and done, it doesn’t seem real and I have to ask myself was that really me? Did I do that? Was it all a dream or fragments of some forgotten move I watched?

In some ways, at times when I was younger I thought my life was cursed with things that I didn’t really understand that seemed impossible and insurmountable that in the long run, turned out to be a blessing in disguise because although off to a rocky and uncertain start, my life has been charmed and truly blessed with experiences and perspectives few people ever share making me a better and stronger person for it.

Like everyone, there have been ups and downs and in retrospect, perhaps things I would have done better or differently but I’m sure this is something everyone feels when they get to a certain age but I have no regrets and only few disappointments to look back on so I have no complaints. Things turned out better than I ever anticipated with opportunities, highlights and loves I never expected.

If I died tomorrow, I would go a happy person as I have lived an incredibly amazing and wonderful life that truly has been a blessing but I ain’t dead quite yet and don’t plan on going anywhere real soon. I’ve still got things to do and things to learn and ways to grow which are the things I think that have kept me going all these years? I plan on being 70 in a year just to say I made it and neener neener to the naysayers that never thought I would make it beyond 30!

Sorry for tooting my own horn a little but yay and woohoo for me!

Merry belated Christmas to everybody and a happy New Year!  Happy Hanukkah if that's your holiday, or Kwanzaa, etc.  Gotta be inclusive these days, right?

Missed this place and all of you, I'm glad the issue was sorted out.  I had to spend my Rogue time over in the bowels of Reddit.  I love and hate Reddit, equally.

To a new year of bashing politicians, alien disclosure, sorting through the bullshit, and general chit chat! 

This is the look of a bear that has a moral certitude that your yard is actually her yard:



This is the look of a bear when she is trying to decide whether she can run through you before you can run through her:



This is the look of a bear when she decides you are either not worth the trouble, OR there must be something dangerously wrong with you because you are not running away squealing like a little girl. Mere humans are supposed to run away squealing from bears.. unless there is something broken in the head... and broken heads make for dangerous opponents. Probably safer just to walk away:



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http://www.wearehistoricalsociety.org/pineriot.php

Quote:The Pine Tree Riot
This millstone marks the site of the Pine Tree Riot where Quimby's Inn once stood. It is located on Rte. 114, South John Stark Byway near the Avon store on Eastman Hill. (Photo by Sherry Hadley Burdick)

Site of Pine Tree Tavern
where took place April 14, 1772
THE PINE TREE RIOT
one of the first acts against
the laws of England

Information about this event was obtained from William Little's History of Weare, New Hampshire
1735-1888 (Lowell, MA: published by the town, 1888), 185-191.
Information about the masting trade came from New Hampshire Crosscurrents in Its Development
by Nancy Coffey Heffernan and Ann Page Stecker
(Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1996), 32-36.

The Pine Tree Riot occurred at Quimby's Inn in South Weare on April 14, 1772. The event that spring morning was precipitated by men from Weare and surrounding towns illegally cutting white pine trees reserved for masts for the Royal Navy. But there was much more to it. "The story of the English need for ship's masts, ship's timber, and naval stores and young New Hampshire's ability to provide these commodities is a tale of market dynamics, imperial politics, ecological shortsightedness, and crafty survival tactics…." 1 In short, timber was to the world at that time what oil is to the world today--a finite resource for which nations competed.
When the first shipment of masts from Portsmouth to England occurred, in 1634, England had already suffered deforestation. In order to dominate the high seas, new sources of abundant timber for shipbuilding were needed. "No ships, after all, could catch the wind without as many as twenty-three masts, yards, and spars varying in length and diameter from the bulky mainmast to its subordinate parts." 2 Although New Hampshire's white pine was not as hard as Europe's, its height and diameter were superior. It also weighed less and retained resin longer, giving the ships a sea life as long as two decades.
When granting lands in America in 1690, King William prohibited the cutting of white pine over two feet in diameter. In 1722, under the reign of George I, parliament passed a law that reduced the diameter to one foot, required a license to cut white pine, and established fines for infractions.
This law was basically ignored until John Wentworth became governor in 1767. Appointed Surveyor of the King's Woods, he recognized the revenue potential and appointed deputies to carry out the law. He conducted his own inspections of mill yards in the Piscataquog valley by having a servant drive him around in his coach.
Before settlers could clear the land or build cabins, barns, or meetinghouses, the king's sanction, a broad arrow mark, was required on trees reserved for the Royal Navy. The deputies charged them a "good, round sum" to mark the trees and for the license required to cut the rest. No wonder the law became unpopular. The consequences involved arrest and fines. Contraband white pine already sawed into logs could be seized and a large settlement required; if not paid, authorities sold them at public auction.
In the winter of 1771-72, a deputy Surveyor of the King's Woods found and marked for seizure 270 mast-worthy logs at Clement's mill in Oil Mill (now called Riverdale), in South Weare. He fined the log-cutters from Weare and those from nearby towns where illegal logs were also found. Men from other towns paid the fines, but those from Weare refused. Consequently, the Weare men were labeled "notorious offenders."
The county sheriff, Benjamin Whiting, Esq., of Hollis, and his deputy, John Quigley, Esq., of Francestown were charged with delivering warrants and making arrests in the king's name. On April 13, 1772, they galloped into Weare and found major offender Ebenezer Mudgett, who promised to pay his fine the next day. The officials then retired to nearby Quimby's Inn for an overnight stay.
News that they had come for Mudgett flew through town, and a plan was hatched. The following morning more than twenty men with blackened faces and switches in hand rushed into Whiting's room led by Mudgett:

Quote:Whiting seized his pistols and would have shot some of them, but they caught him, took away his small guns, held him by his arms and legs up from the floor, his face down, two men on each side, and with their rods beat him to their hearts' content. They crossed out the account against them of all logs cut, drawn and forfeited, on his bare back….They made him wish he had never heard of pine trees fit for masting the royal navy. Whiting said: "They almost killed me."3

As for Deputy Quigley, the Weare men wrested the floorboards from the room above his and proceeded to beat him with long poles. Nor did the officials' horses escape the men's wrath. They cropped the animals' ears and sheared their manes and tails. To "jeers, jokes and shouts ringing in their ears" the sheriff and deputy rode toward Goffstown and Mast Road, named for the logs that were moved overland to the sea and off to England for the king's ships.
The Weare men were ultimately arraigned and paid a light fine, but their rebellion against the crown, which preceded the Boston Tea Party (1773), helped set the stage for the Revolution. People in New Hampshire were probably more offended by the pine tree law than the Sugar Act of 1764; the Stamp Act (a rebellion that took place in Portsmouth, NH, in 1765); and the duty on tea, passed in 1773, which precipitated the Boston Tea Party. According to Weare's 1888 history, "The only reason why the 'Rebellion' at Portsmouth and the 'Boston tea party' are better known than our Pine Tree Riot is because they have had better historians." 4

~~~

About 150 years after the Pine Tree Riot, sawmills still dotted Weare's landscape.
(from Weare Historical Society archives)

Do Psychic Abilities run in families? Are they hardwired in the DNA?

As some of you know, I have an interest in genetic studies, perhaps a morbid interest in them. I ran across this notion in my travels on the Internet, and would like to present it here. The basic question is: do psychic abilities actually run in families? Are they hard-wired in the DNA, and if so, is there evidence for that?

It turns out that the answer to both questions may well be “yes”.

A recent (March 2021) study set out to gather evidence related to those questions. They gathered up a bunch of people, and winnowed them down to just 26 individuals – 13 who believed themselves to have psychic abilities, and 13 who did not – as a “control” group. What did they find?

Quote:Sequencing data were obtained for all samples, except for one in the control group that did not pass the quality controls and was not included in further analyses. After unblinding the datasets, none of the protein-coding sequences (i.e., exons) showed any variation that discriminated between cases and controls. However, a difference was observed in the intron (i.e., non-protein-coding region) adjacent to an exon in the TNRC18 gene (Trinucleotide Repeat-Containing Gene 18 Protein) on chromosome 7. This variation, an alteration of GG to GA, was found in 7 of 9 controls and was absent from all psychic cases.

According to British Film Institute.




The best Blu-rays of 2023

Quote:The best video essays of 2023

Now in its seventh annual edition, the Sight and Sound poll for the best video essays of the year surveys the online sphere, film festivals and audiovisual research in almost equal measure. Its primary purposes are to mark notable works and keep track of the various schools of thought concerning what video essays can or should be, and how they can communicate to a range of audiences.

The poll was conducted with the assistance of 48 voters from 17 countries, including academics, critics, online creators and festival curators. Together, their 260 nominations include 181 distinct titles. Given the scope and abundance of recent video essays, even an extensive poll can only provide a cross-section of the topics, forms and rhetoric of their contemporary practice – a limitation many voters noted in their submissions.

Of the nominated works, 47% were created by male video essayists, 39% by female, with several from non-binary creators and mixed teams. Around two-thirds feature voiceover, with the majority presented in English, although 14 languages feature in the overall poll.

The nominations saw a relatively equal split between essays created for YouTube and those created for academic research, with 50 YouTube and 47 academic videos (or entire series). Publicly available videos’ viewership varies broadly, from 9.5 million views (for MyHouse.wad) [Inside Doom's Most Terrifying Mod] to the low double digits; participants were keen to highlight new and underseen works as well as celebrating the achievements of established creators. Festival films or installation pieces also proved popular, with 53 arthouse shorts, features and documentaries nominated. Also present, although in a smaller proportion, were self-published Vimeo works or collaborative projects unaffiliated with a specific institution. However, within the yearly S&S poll for video essays, there seems to be a slight decline both in independently produced and published Vimeo content, and in video output by cinephile magazines, while the academic sector is slowly but constantly expanding.

The average runtime was 27 minutes, with most around the 15 minute mark – although a few marathon nominations like Will DiGravio’s Against Polish and Adam Curtis’ TraumaZone (three and seven hours respectively) stick out. Three videos were one minute long or shorter.

.....

As with all other areas of discourse this year, AI featured in multiple videos, usually more as a thematic concern than as a videographic tool (although text-to-speech and some generative techniques feature in the list). Futurism more generally, whether dystopian or utopian, was a common theme in the YouTube nominations.

Interrogation of the video essay form itself continues to stimulate discussion within the field, including the drawing to a close of Johannes Binotto’s popular Practices of Viewing series. While this self-reflexivity was first noted in the 2021 poll, it was seen more on YouTube in 2023, with videos ranging from assessing the state of the video essay landscape to dispensing advice about how to be a successful video essayist. Harris Michael Brewis, better known as hbomberguy, released a nearly four-hour exposé of plagiarism on YouTube with a particular focus on video essays. The video passed two million views within 24 hours of its publication.

Quote:Independent streaming service Nebula has continued to grow its base of creators, many of whom are video essayists. Out of 50 unique YouTube videos, seven were also published on Nebula. Three of these were directly cross-posted, another three were Nebula First (published earlier than YouTube), and one nomination – We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot by Big Joel – was a Nebula Plus video, meaning it includes extra content beyond what is available on YouTube. Lily Alexandre’s Nebula-first essay Everything Is Sludge: Art in the Post-Human Era received three nods, bringing the total number of Nebula nominations up to nine.

Billed as a creator-first streaming service, Nebula aims to give its creators the freedom that they cannot find on YouTube. Many video essayists have joined Nebula after finding their work coming up against YouTube’s advertiser-friendly guidelines, restricting the discussion of mature topics. In February 2023, Maggie Mae Fish launched her series Unrated exploring sexuality in film, and Broey Deschanel followed suit in November with the Taboo on Screen series. There’s an oft-noted divide between ‘Vimeo-style’ essays – with their more academic leaning and longer clip length – and YouTube essays – with their quick cuts and careful stepping around automatic copyright claims. This gap may be quickly closing, although whether a Nebula style will arise remains to be seen.

...

Nostalgia and memory, pop culture and cinephilia – sometimes mixed together – loom large in this year’s list, due in part to some popular academic series including Indy Vinyl for the Masses (curated by Ian Garwood) and the Screen Stars Dictionary (curated by Tecmerin and Ariel Avissar). Gender as spectacle makes its appearance in several videos, from the mainstream end of the spectrum (max teeth’s The Man/Car Gender Binary in John Carpenter’s Christine) to critical discussions of star personae, cinema’s archetypal female protagonists as well as filmmaking/media practices (Morgane Frund’s short films, among other titles), to direct references to Laura Mulvey and Judith Butler at the other end.

As with all other areas of discourse this year, AI featured in multiple videos, usually more as a thematic concern than as a videographic tool (although text-to-speech and some generative techniques feature in the list). Futurism more generally, whether dystopian or utopian, was a common theme in the YouTube nominations.

Of all the bluster and ear splitting tirades Alex nailed some predictions