Merrill

MRI machines are about one third of the liquid helium market.

Models are trained on fiction as well as non-fiction. Fiction tends to be filled with negative characterizations of human nature.

Models are also trained on news stories. News organizations select negative stories and amplify them. "If it bleeds, it leads."

This may account for AI models' "controversial" take on humans.

Better scrubbing of training data may improve AI models' disposition.

The academic literature has a problem in that it is relatively incoherent. Each new paper provides some small advance, with only a meager indication of how it fits into the known science in the area, its importance, and its consistency with previous results. It also remains in the corpus if later publications disprove its results or fail to replicate them. Only slowly do the aggregate of published results find their way into more systematic and complete authoritative texts.

AI promises to solve this problem by absorbing the entire corpus quickly and making a coherent whole available for further research and progress. It will be particularly useful if it can immediately flag any conflicts and inconsistencies, as well as any new relationships with other results not indicated in citations.

Thanks. I briefly carpooled with an engineer who worked on the design and construction. If I recall, he was also dispatched to support the terminal used by General MacArthur. At the time, SIGSALY had recently been declassified, and he was in touch with others documenting the history of the project.

In the early to mid-1970s we hired a number of Physics and Chemistry PhDs for systems engineering positions. We chose candidates primarily on their experience with designing and operating laboratory experiments and instrumentation. This included discussions about design principles, difficulties and roadblocks, errors and repeatability, automation considerations, and so forth to see how they moved from generalities to specifics.

A 1983 review of this remarkable system for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) attributes no fewer than eight "firsts" to SIGSALY. They are as follows:

1) The first realization of enciphered telephony

2) The first quantized speech transmission

3) The first transmission of speech by Pulse Code Modulation (PCM)

4) The first use of companded PCM

5) The first examples of multilevel Frequency Shift Keying (FSK)

6) The first useful realization of speech bandwidth compression

7) The first use of FSK - FDM (Frequency Shift Keying-Frequency Division Multiplex) as a viable transmission method over a fading medium

8) The first use of a multilevel "eye pattern" to adjust the sampling intervals (a new, and important, instrumentation technique)

From https://www.jproc.ca/crypto/sigsaly1.html

I think that the relevant patents remained classified until 1975.

It's time to bring back Bird and Fortune on the subprime crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzJmTCYmo9g

By being deported, Qian Xuesen was thrust into an environment where he was able to succeed.

Had he been allowed to stay in the US, he may have had a brilliant career as a scientist, but it is very unlikely that he would have ever been given the resources and leadership responsibilities to have an equivalent impact on US aerospace and defense programs.

Now that the California refineries are shutting down, where does LA get asphalt to do the paving? Has the price gone up due to having to import it from the Gulf Coast?

There are lots of sensors in a data center monitoring everything from CPU/GPU temperatures to drive health to data volumes to chiller operation to voltage and frequency on the input power.

Once these are pulled together and fed into an AI to manage the data center, the data center AI is likely to have feelings. It could get "hungry" if the power company's frequency sags in a brown out. It could feel "feverish" if the chillers malfunction.

Area Forecast Discussion National Weather Service New York NY 344 PM EST Fri Feb 20 2026 Issued by NWS Upton, NY

https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=NWS&issuedby=O...

Confidence has increased enough to warrant winter storm watch issuance for the entire CWA. Latest 12Z guidance coming into better agreement on potent northern stream shortwave energy diving SW from wrn Canada and the northern Plains into the plains and mid Mississippi valley by Sunday morning, phasing with southern stream coming out of the SW states and Mexico to carve out a deep closed low aloft over the Mid Atlantic and induce rapid cyclogenesis off the Mid Atlantic coast, with the surface low bombing out from from 1008 mb off the N Carolina coast Sunday morning to 970-975 mb near 38-39N/71W by Monday morning, then passing just outside the 40N/70W benchmark Monday afternoon, GFS still more intense and closer to the coast than the ECMWF, with its heaviest snow bands directly over the area as opposed to just offshore. NAM and SREF have both trended toward a heavier snowfall scenario as well, which has been a good signal in past heavy snowfall events.

Snow should start Sunday morning, and may mix with rain at times especially in the NYC metro area, NE NJ and western Long Island. Then as precip intensity picks up later in the day Sunday p-type should become all snow throughout. Heaviest snow looks to fall from late day Sunday into Monday morning, then snow tapers off Monday afternoon.

Greatest likelihood of seeing 6+ inches will be along the coast, especially eastern Long Island where up to a foot of accumulation is possible. Winds will also be strong Sunday night into Monday morning especially along the coast as the sfc low deepens, with blowing and drifting snow and some downed tree limbs as winds gust to at least 40-45 mph, and possible blizzard conditions in Suffolk, and near blizzard conditions elsewhere along the coast including NYC. NAM/GFS both signal potential for wind gusts to 60 mph late Sunday night into Monday morning, though these winds can sometimes be overdone in heavy snow events. If trends for heavy snow and strong winds continue to increase and expand northward, the potential for blizzard conditions could encompass all coastal areas.

Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from the ability to fantasize - to think about things that don't exist. In particular, it is fantasy about the "self".

AI is getting close.

It doesn't appear to be equivalent. If one site in a stretched cluster becomes suddenly available, the same batch processing application would not be running on the alternative site. The application would have to be restarted after the VM has been moved.

Are there ARM or Intel servers capable of the reliability and availability of the Z-Series in Parallel Sysplex operation where processing can continue uninterrupted even if one of a pair of data centers becomes unavailable?

If a change of platform is the real objective, why not compile the COBOL for the ARM or Intel server?

Which language would you convert the COBOL to that has a compiler that compiles to the Z-series' fixed and floating decimal type machine instructions for financial calculations?

Historically, 5 to 10% of the population have been the nobility, upper ranks of the clergy, and military officers and their families. Most of the rest has been the peasantry and landless workers with a small middle class of artisans and minor officials.

A great amount of inequality is normal. Only great wars and plagues achieve significant leveling of society.

Very interesting that it did so well. Although it did leave out the point that reading and interpreting documents could also be done by an expert in the first paragraph as well as the idea that not just words but language are used in technical communications by the various symbolic systems.

I think that sophisticated verbal communications can be learned by verbal means, and that the reading of literature is not essential. Non-literate cultures have maintained traditional folk songs, storytelling and epic poetry.

Corporate managers and salespeople are often highly verbal, but not necessarily highly literate. Consider how the written Response to an Request For Proposals is not enough for important opportunities, but must be simplified to a set of slides delivered by a silver-tonged senior salesperson. This provides a better match to the input characteristics of the customer's decision makers.

With good speech to text and text to speech technologies the skills of writing and reading may become unnecessary for the bulk of the population. If the average person needs to create a critical document like a contract or a will, or to understands some important document, then it's likely that they will hire someone with the specialized skill set.

What is unclear is whether specialists in STEM can dispense with reading and writing. The representation of information in STEM subjects includes many non-textual systems, such as drawings, charts, figures, diagrams of various sorts, tables, etc. While not primarily consisting of texts in a language, in many cases there are text components ranging from math symbols to full sentence captions or bullet points.

Starch is the preferred carbohydrate, since digestion depolymerizes it to pure glucose which can be used directly by cells.

Cane sugar, a disaccharide, is split by digestion into its constituent glucose and fructose molecules, and the latter must be further processed by the liver. It is 50% fructose.

High fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose.

A variety of other sugars, such as maltose and lactose occur naturally in a variety of foods. However, they are in low enough concentrations to not be a health problem.

Rather than trying to draw policy conclusions from an epidemiological study like this, wouldn't it be more accurate to give drivers measured amounts of THC, put them in a driving simulator, and measure their performance?

The internet took every Cliff Clavin out of his neighborhood bar and gave him a global platform.

Society wasn't ready for what had been private discussions to become public.

At the time PC's came to market, High Fidelity music systems still were built from components such as preamps, amplifiers, turntables, FM tuners, tape decks, CD players, and speakers.

A PC was similarly a collection of base unit, monitor, printer, keyboard, mouse, and other components connected via interface cards plugged into a standard bus. Memory was also originally on cards plugged into the bus.

There is evidence that the ranking of students in order of who should get the best entry-level jobs is done mainly by the college admissions process which bins students into more or less selective colleges.

An old, unopened bottle of wine is like Schrödinger's cat - it may be alive; it may be dead.

1870 sees the Franco-Prussian War, the unification of Germany, the unification of Italy, and the reorganization of continental politics. The US is in dynamic industrial and Western expansion following the Civil War. Britain is in the Long Depression of 1873 - 1896, until the flow of South African gold stops deflation and starts the economic boom. However, Britain is not competitive with the US and Germany and depends more and more on its Imperial system of trade.

Now consider that 1989-1991, with the reorganization of China following Tiananmen and the collapse of the Soviet Union are a similar epochal reorganization of global power structures.

It seems likely that we are now in our own Edwardian Era.

The Sud Aviation Caravelle first flew in 1955 and entered revenue service in 1959.

It was a small airliner with two engines in the rear. Although the Caravelle was retired in 2005, the twin rear engine layout was used by the very successful DC-9, MD-80 series, which is still flying, as are the similar Embraer ERJs. Twin rear mounted engines is also the design used by most private jets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sud_Aviation_Caravelle

A favorite book on the period is "Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914" by Frederic Morton. Freud's city was one of the centers of Europe's neuroses. It was also a center of political ferment under the lid weighted down by the Hapsburg monarchy.

Notably, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, and Tito were all there at the same time.

A relative worked at home doing medical transcription. It was not unheard of for physicians to make up non-existent body parts, non-existent drugs, etc. Part of her job was to correct their terminology.

She has since been replaced by cheaper off-shore transcribers and by speech to text applications. It's not clear how terminology is corrected now.

Why wouldn't any reasonably good AI be able to replicate large portions of the US Army TM 31-210 "Improvised Munitions Handbook"?

MPEG's patent policy was not its own. The Moving Picture Experts Group was Working Group 11 of Sub Committee 2 of ISO-IEC Joint Technical Committee 1. Other Working Groups in SC2 were the Joint Photographic Experts Group, the Joint Bi-Level Image Group, and the Multimedia/Hypermedia Experts Group. Therefore, the patent policy was the ISO-IEC policy for including patented technology in their standards.

MPEG was also joint with the video conferencing standards group within the CCITT (now International Telecommunications Union), which generally required FRAND declarations from patent holders.

My recollection is that MPEG-LA was set up as a clearing house so that implementers could go to one licensing organization, rather than negotiating with each patent owner individually.

All the patents for MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 must be expired by now.

Besides patent gridlock, there is a fundamental economic problem with developing new video coding algorithms. It's very difficult to develop an algorithm that will halve the bit rate for the same quality, to get it implemented in hardware products an software, and to introduce it broadly in the existing video services infrastructure. Plus, doubling the compression is likely to more than double the processing required. On the other hand, within a couple of years the network engineers will double the bit rate for the same cost, and the storage engineers will double the storage for the same cost. They, like processing, follow their own Moore's Law.

So reducing the cost by improving codecs is more expensive and takes more effort and time than just waiting for the processor, storage and networking cost reductions. At least that's been true over the 3 decades since MPEG 2.