Category: [Science & technology]

To the Moon and back

To be honest, when I first heard about the Artemis II mission, I was like: the US is going back to the Moon? Under TRUMP? Astonishingly, the whole thing actually did begin under his aegis in 2017, when the first proposals were made, but it didn’t actually really get going until 2022 when the first unmanned Artemis mission took off under Biden. Then the manned second mission also began under Biden, who was probably expecting to still be the president when it actually happened. That’s kind of why I’m surprised Trump didn’t cancel it; apart from all the other things he’s demanded an end to, this was something that Biden could claim credit for, and I couldn’t imagine him tolerating that.

But—despite all that, Artemis II went up and returned safely to Earth. I was holding off writing about it until it did that, which it did earlier today… it set a number of milestones along the way, most notably the four people on board travelled further away from the Earth than anyone has before (as well as being the first people to do so in over half a century), but I think the fact that it happened at all is the amazing thing. Artemis II went to the Moon and came back. It proved NASA could pull it off. It almost feels like a fuck you to Edolf, doesn’t it? “Look at that, we managed the job without blowing up on the launch pad”…

I saw that online, and it’s an… inelegant way of putting it, but there’s so much truth in it. Because the important thing about Artemis II is that it worked. A US government body—part of THIS particular US government, lest we forget—carried out a major operation for the benefit of science, sending four people into space as far as the Moon for the first time in over half a century, then bringing them back to Earth (good thing there was still an Earth for them to return to, eh); not only was it a useful thing, it was a successful one. A US government body got something RIGHT. And I don’t think people expect that now, especially not from the current mob. We are starved for this sort of competency in recent years, at least when it comes to things that aren’t evil.

And I don’t know what it all cost, but I have seen complaints about the no doubt vast amounts of money being spent on it rather than on things like healthcare. And I mean… Trump was never going to spend that money on healthcare or anything good for the American people in the first place, but also none of that money got spent on anything bad either. It didn’t blow up schools and so forth in Iran, for example. And yeah, obviously America should be putting itself in order and there are other, higher priorities… but that money was going to be spent on something. Better going on something that adds to science and knowledge rather than takes away from life, something actually good and useful at a time where we can no longer count on the US to do that sort of thing.

As a final thing, here’s Hank Green:

Tumblr: still partying like it’s 2018

I’ve been maintaining a blog on Tumblr in some form or other since 2010 as a bit of a side thing. The current version is almost as old as this thing, cos Tumblr in their usual infinite wisdom decided the previous one must be destroyed for some reason or other. Accordingly, I haven’t posted anything to it myself, only reposts of other people’s stuff. Let other people take the risk.

And I thought Tumblr had started being a bit more reasonable about adult content; after the infamous (and not altogether effective) porn ban of late 2018, I thought it was making at least some progress by introducing “mature content” tags that users could apply themselves. Not the best solution, but better than outlawing the stuff entirely, which was what they tried in 2018…

Unfortunately, as I’ve seen tonight, Tumblr seems to have decided to go back to 2018 and start applying those tags themselves according to their own judgement… meaning that I’ve now got a bunch of stuff tagged as “potentially mature” and, as in 2018, at least a certain amount of that is actually bugger all of the sort… but I’m more bothered by the things they’ve flagged as definitely “mature”, cos they’ve apparently gone beyond what they did in 2018; back then they replaced the dirty dirty smut with a note that the post had contained dirty dirty smut but had now been hidden to protect everyone (including the blog owner), but now it looks like they’re not even doing that… not only do you have no option to request a review, the content is completely hidden now. Not even a sign that it was there at all. The odd thing is, those things are still visible in the mass post editor, but when I click on them from there, Tumblr just gives me the “not found” page.

So, not for the first time, I’m querying the whole point of me being on Tumblr; feels like a slightly pointless enterprise not just because I’ve got this thing now, but because the whole point of me making it a reblog-only thing was so I wouldn’t be affected again by Tumblr’s decisions about this stuff and, well, here I am affected anyway. I just liked the idea of having a corner of the Internet that people who actually know me in real life don’t know about (apart from one, I think). Mind you, no one who actually knows me in real life ever remarks to me about anything I post here, either, so I’ve kind of got that obscure corner anyway…

So much for love?

Italy’s famous Lovers’ Arch collapses into the sea on Valentine’s Day

The famous arch of the sea stacks at Sant’Andrea in Melendugno, Puglia, Italy, popularly known as Lovers’ Arch, collapsed on Valentine’s Day after strong storm surges and heavy rain swept across southern Italy.
The rocky arch, one of the best-known natural landmarks on the Adriatic coast, got its name as it served as a backdrop for wedding proposals, selfies and postcards, and was one of the most recognisable symbols of the Salento, one of Italy’s most heavily visited tourist areas. […]
According to local authorities, strong winds, rough seas and intense rainfall in recent days progressively weakened the rock structure until its final collapse on Saturday. It is the most significant damage inflicted by coastal erosion on the landscape of the Salento. […]
Mediterranean cyclones, known as medicanes, include Cyclone Harry which struck in January, have been devastating ports, homes and roads, reshaping the structure of coastlines. Medicanes are warm-core systems that are becoming increasingly frequent in the Mediterranean, driven by rising sea temperatures linked to the climate emergency.
“With the Mediterranean [experiencing] among its hottest years on record in 2025, warmer seas are supercharging the atmosphere and fuelling extreme events,” said Christian Mulder, a professor of ecology and climate emergency at the University of Catania in Sicily.

Is it just me or is the symbolism in this story ever so slightly on the nose? Obviously not a funny situation on the whole, of course, cos obviously climate change is having bad effects, but something about the timing of this particular bad effect was kind of marvellous…

Up, up and aw-AI?

This won’t end in catastrophe at all.

The Trump administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to write federal transportation regulations, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers.
The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI’s “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,” agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase “exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster.”
Discussion of the plan continued among agency leadership last week, according to meeting notes reviewed by ProPublica. Gregory Zerzan, the agency’s general counsel, said at that meeting that President Donald Trump is “very excited about this initiative.” Zerzan seemed to suggest that the DOT was at the vanguard of a broader federal effort, calling the department the “point of the spear” and “the first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules.”
Zerzan appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. “We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ,” he said, according to the meeting notes. “We want good enough.” Zerzan added, “We’re flooding the zone.”

There’s several hundred living human beings on any given plane flight, and I feel like settling for “good enough” in this situation could lessen their chances of making it back to the ground alive. Does Gregory want to potentially “flood the zone” with corpses? I don’t know, maybe we overstate the potential problems of this sort of thing, but then again, maybe we have to so that the problems don’t actually ensue?

Not now, Lovecraft

In the midst of everything else happening at the moment, I feel that the last thing we need right now is the discovery of the city of the Great Race of Yith and the half-polypous horrors from even greater antiquity that drove them to flee millions of years into the future and rendered the creatures their minds had inhabited extinct. Alternately, maybe extinction is exactly what we do need just now…

Actrually, the real story is just as interesting as Lovecraft’s (if not potentially a bit more alarming in a different way); this geologist reckons it’s actually a buried crater about 300 miles across, which would make it nearly three times the size of the Chicxulub crater which is thought to have been where the asteroid that eradicated the dinosaurs hit. If this was an impact crater (and unfortunately there’s no real evidence yet that it is, apparently that’ll require a lot of obtain either way), the rock that made it must have been a motherfucker of a thing to leave that much of a crater. Gilkson reckons that if he’s right about it being an impact crater, then it probably hit around 445m years ago, or about the time of a mass extinction that wiped out 85% of all life on Earth… but did it leave room for a species of “immense rugose cones ten feet high”? And are we better off not knowing for sure?

Whoops

This is not the first time Grok has done this, I’m sure, merely the first time it’s been caught doing so and admitting it… still, if any laws have indeed been broken, I’m sure Edolf will pay a suitable amount to someone so they overlook it…

EDIT later: UGH. At least “Harold” has been suspended from Twitter, now to suspend him from the highest branch by the neck…

I suppose someone has to…

Elon Boasts That His AI Can Generate a Beautiful Woman Saying “I Will Always Love You”

Elon Musk appears to be going through it.
On Saturday, the billionaire became the subject of widespread mockery after boasting about how the video generating model from his AI company xAI, Grok Imagine, can fabricate a photorealistic clip of a woman looking into the camera and declaring her undying love for you — which is either an indication that Musk thinks his fans are a bunch of lonely sad sacks, or that he himself is one, or both.
“Grok Imagine prompt: She smiles and says, ‘I will always love you,’” Musk wrote in a post with the video on his website X, formerly Twitter, published at the very well-adjusted hour of 4:20 AM (Musk is a late riser, so this was likely posted at the end of a long day, not the beginning of it.)
The resulting video, true to Musk’s prompt, does show a clearly AI-generated woman saying “I will always love you” in a voice that’s obviously of AI origin — which, all subtext aside, is an unconvincing demonstration of Grok’s supposedly incredible capabilities.
It gets even sadder. Replying to his own post, Musk also revealed that the AI-generated woman was actually one that he saw in another Grok-created image by a fan. In other words, Musk didn’t just ask for a generic video of a fake woman saying he loves him — he wanted someone else’s specific fake AI woman to do it.

This piece is a couple of weeks old but I’m only just discovering it now, and, well, idiocy has no expiration date. Talking of idiocy, this also came just a few days after Tesla shareholders voted to potentially make him a trillionaire:

Tesla announced that more than 75% of shares voted in favor of the pay package during the company’s annual shareholder meeting. The vote didn’t include the 15% of the company that Musk already owns.
The crowd at the meeting broke into cheers and chants when the results were announced. Musk thanked the shareholders and the Tesla board soon after. “I super appreciate it,” he said.
Musk doesn’t take any salary, but the approved pay package comes in the form of a stock grant that would give him as much as 423.7 million additional Tesla shares over the next 10 years.
Those shares could be worth about $1 trillion, assuming the company reaches the $8.5 trillion market cap needed to have Musk qualify for the full potential payout. In addition, Tesla needs to achieve a series of either operational or financial targets for him to get the full number of shares, which would be distributed in 12 equal blocks.
Getting all the shares available under this package over the next 10 years would be the equivalent of earning $275 million a day, dwarfing any other executive pay package in history.

Given how relatively poorly Tesla has been doing in some markets lately, I feel that we can probably call the shareholders even bigger idiots than Edolf himself over this silly shit.

And I’ll be honest, I’ve been playing with AI a bit lately, which I know makes me a bad person and all of that, but it’s been purely for my own amusement and I have no interest in sharing the results (and no illusions about being an “artist” either, cos I’m just using it as a quicker way of doing some things I used to do with Photoshop), but I’m not so desperate that I feel the need to do… this. I am, obviously, painfully single and a lonely man in his early 50s and all that, but I don’t think I’d ever resort to this to reassure myself that I wasn’t a loser. Cos I absolutely WOULD be if I did. And, frankly, the world’s probable first trillionaire also being the world’s biggest loser? THAT reassures me that I’ll never be as much of one as him…