Category: [Science & technology]

Now it’s just showing off

Astronomers discover 128 new moons orbiting Saturn

Astronomers have discovered 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, giving it an insurmountable lead in the running tally of moons in the solar system.
Until recently, the “moon king” title was held by Jupiter, but Saturn now has a total of 274 moons, almost twice as many as all the other planets combined. The team behind the discoveries had previously identified 62 Saturnian moons using the Canada France Hawaii telescope and, having seen faint hints that there were more out there, made further observations in 2023.
“Sure enough, we found 128 new moons,” said the lead researcher, Dr Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Academia Sincia in Taiwan. “Based on our projections, I don’t think Jupiter will ever catch up.” […]
The moons were identified using the “shift and stack” technique, in which astronomers acquire sequential images that trace the moon’s path across the sky and combine them to make the moon bright enough to detect. All of the 128 new moons are “irregular moons”, potato-shaped objects that are just a few kilometres across. The escalating number of these objects highlights potential future disagreements over what actually counts as a moon.
“I don’t think there’s a proper definition for what is classed as a moon. There should be,” said Ashton. However, he added that the team may have reached a limit for moon detection – for now.
“With current technology, I don’t think we can do much better than what has already been done for moons around Saturn, Uranus and Neptune,” said Ashton.

The thing that kind of puzzles me here is that, frankly, Cassini was in Saturn’s close vicinity for thirteen years and never spotted any of these new moons. It did find some, but only seven, not over a hundred. Weird how a probe actually orbiting the planet these moons are also orbiting never noticed them, but we’re able to detect them from here on Earth. Jupiter has 95 moons, by the way; I’ve always been amused by the scene in “Revenge of the Cybermen” where the Doctor expresses surprise at Jupiter having acquired a thirteenth moon, cos that line was dated before the show was even broadcast (an actual 13th moon was spotted in September 1974 just before filming even started for it), and it’s only got more so as decades have gone by…

AI gets cheesy

Google remakes Super Bowl ad after AI cheese gaffe

Google has re-edited an advert for its leading artificial intelligence (AI) tool, Gemini, after it overestimated the global appetite for Gouda.
The commercial – which was supposed to showcase Gemini’s abilities – was created to be broadcast during the Super Bowl.
It showed the tool helping a cheesemonger in Wisconsin write a product description by informing him Gouda accounts for “50 to 60 percent of global cheese consumption”.
However, a blogger pointed out on X that the stat was “unequivocally false” as the Dutch cheese was nowhere near that popular.
Replying to him, Google executive Jerry Dischler, insisted this was not a “hallucination” – where AI systems invent untrue information – blaming the websites Gemini had scraped the information from instead.
“Gemini is grounded in the Web – and users can always check the results and references,” he wrote.

Just as well someone did, cos apparently no one at Google checked to see if it was right or not. Obviously it wasn’t THEIR fault, it was the fault of all the other websites carrying this apparently incorrect information that Jerry’s throwing under the bus; curious that Gemini apparently only found websites with the wrong information and didn’t question it. Seems you need actual intelligence for that…

The front fell off

I will say one thing for SpaceX: that bit of gear they have which recaptures the rocket booster rather than just letting it fall in the ocean or something actually looks pretty cool. Be nice if Starship were actually better at doing the job it’s supposed to, though… This video is a slightly dry but certainly informative look at what exactly may have gone wrong, using some actually quite stunning footage from SpaceX’s video feed including from the rocket itself, and it also introduced me to the term “RUD”, or “rapid unscheduled disassembly”, which is an… interesting way of saying it blew up, I suppose… As our narrator also notes, this was supposedly the improved version of the thing, which suggests to me that several more improvements might be needed. On the other hand, it did make for an awfully pretty light show, and some of the videos I’ve seen from the people on Turks & Caicos who got the best view of it are kind of amazing… Also, since others have drawn the comparison:

Orders from above

Author Chuck Wendig posted this recently:

Obviously I see the point he’s making—the ease of generative AI without the need for actual skill or to do anything but come up with the right words is what it’s all about—but I think his analogy is a bit off. The work is everything, sure, but the work is still being done in the situation Wendig describes… which was basically the situation in which Val Lewton produced his famous horror films for RKO’s B unit in the 1940s; the studio came up with the film’s title and left him to get on with the job of actually making the film. So Lewton had to organise the cast and crew and all of that. Actual work still had to be done. I know there’s other comparable cases in the film industry (though admittedly the specific instances aren’t leaping to mind as I write this) (EDIT: fucking American International, of COURSE. How could I have forgotten them?) where the production company came up with the ad campaign first and then made the movie. Similarly, if a book publisher gives an author a specific order for a book they want written, or a record company pulls its roster together to make a tribute album or something, if they’re not using generative AI then the work is being done, even if the creator of the work didn’t have the original idea. Like I said, I completely get Wendig’s point but the comparison doesn’t work for me…

Never read about your heroes

OK, that’s overstating the case, since Tim Boucher wasn’t a “hero” as such, but I am nonetheless disappointed, to put it mildly, to discover what he’s been up to lately. I used to actually be quite a fan of Tim’s work a long time (20+ years) ago, back in the day when he was running the Occult Investigator and later Pop Occulture blog (can’t link cos they’re long gone), it was a goldmine for that sort of information on religious and cultish crankery. He put me onto the gnostic revival movement, which was certainly an idea I was and still kind of am sympathetic to.

And then it just… kind of vanished, and I spent years wondering where he’d gone. Every now and then I’d search for him online to no avail. Hoped he was happy and well, whatever he was or wasn’t doing. And then suddenly one day he reappeared! A few years ago I found his website (as linked above) and, having confirmed it was indeed him, I was quite delighted. Nice to know he was still out there doing stuff. (Also I discovered he’s Canadian and it’s boo-SHAY rather than BOW-tcher like I always thought…)

Then, a day or two ago, I found out what he’s been doing more recently…

Unfortunately the article is paywalled so I can’t link to it (or even read it myself), but… yeah. This is Tim Boucher writing about how he’s used generative AI to produce FUCKING DOZENS of “books” (they’re more like short stories buffered with a bunch of also AI-generated images). And he’s been at it for a while now too: here’s Tim in Newsweek in May 2023:

My journey into a new realm of high-tech creativity and storytelling began in August 2022. Armed only with my imagination and a handful of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, I ventured into the world of AI-assisted publishing without any map or guide.
My goal was straightforward: To craft a series of unique, captivating ebooks merging dystopian pulp sci-fi with compelling AI world-building. Today, I am on the cusp of releasing my 97th book, and was recently featured on CNN—all within nine months.
The “AI Lore books,” as I’ve come to call them, are a testament to the potential of AI in augmenting human creativity. Each book features between 2,000 to 5,000 words and 40 to140 AI-generated images. Generally, each one takes me approximately 6 to 8 hours to create and publish. In some instances, I’ve been able to produce a volume in as little as three hours, everything included.
This unprecedented rate of production is possible due to AI tools like Midjourney (version 5.1) for image generation, and ChatGPT (version 4), and Anthropic’s Claude for brainstorming and text generation.
I sold 574 books for a total of nearly $2,000 between August and May. The books all cross-reference each other, creating a web of interconnected narratives that constantly draw readers in and encourage them to explore further.

Somewhere deep down I think that, for all his bluster about AI leading him to new storytelling opportunities and shit like that, Tim knows there’s something not exactly right about all of this. I sense a degree of defensiveness in statements like this on his site:

Using AI doesn’t make me an artist; being an artist is what makes me use AI.
Yes, I really think AI art is “real art” and no, I don’t think it is “stealing.”
Here’s a Matisse master copy I painted in acrylic, if you don’t think I’m a “real artist.”
Here’s an older artist’s statement (2023 – I need to write a new one) which outlines what my AI artwork is all about and why, and some thoughts on ‘reality-fluid’ art. (This podcast I made with an AI interviewer is also a good overview of how I think about my art.)
Most people haven’t dug deep enough to understand that my work actually comes from a place of profound unease about technology and its place in our lives (I use AI to critique AI). My personal & professional work has all been about attempting to find that right relationship, and often failing… But there is value in the grand experiment.

I don’t really know what I make of this. Obviously art has always made use of new and advancing technology and so forth, so Tim’s enthusiasm for AI as a creative is hardly anything new… the question is, to what extent is there actual creativity involved when the art is, frankly, more or less completely made from someone’s work?

I mean, we can go back to Dada a hundred plus years ago when Tristan Tzara came up with his idea for creating Dadaist poetry; however random the ultimate arrangement of the words, you, the “poet”, have still chosen the article from which you made the poem. Cf. also Kurt Schwitters’ collages. If none of the elements of his collages were made by Schwitters, the end result was by him. There are deliberate decisions involved. As for Tim’s Matisse-copying, he admits to using a projector to trace the thing, but it was still his hand doing that work. It was still his effort. That copy of Matisse was ultimately by him.

I feel somehow, though, this isn’t the case with his books. How much of them are, indeed, by him in this sense? What’s he actually doing? Can he legitmately call himself the “author” of these things? Certainly all the people I’ve seen responding to him on Threads have been volcanically negative, and, to be honest, I’m down with that myself. Cos fuck generative AI. I mean, I’ve used it myself and even posted an example of it here, but I’m certainly not making any claims for myself as an artist. Tim is, on the other hand, and even has an “artist’s statement” on that theme. Which he admits was also partly written with ChatGPT. HIS OWN ARTIST’S STATEMENT ISN’T EVEN FULLY HIS OWN WORK, for fuck’s sake.

Tim… son, I am disappoint. I suspect I might actually be less bothered if he were doing this stuff for free, but he’s not and that’s a part of the problem… by his own admission he’s apparently not making much money, but it bothers me that he’s making any. Whatever. I feel let down by someone I respected long long ago. I thought you were better than this, Tim.

And, parenthetically, Vivian Wilson (whose dad you know, of course) agrees with me:

I doubt that somehow

Thist story about a sunken island being discovered is fascinating, but the corollary theory from the project head strikes me as… unlikely?

Researchers in Spain have uncovered lost islands that sank into the ocean millions of years ago, some of which still have their beaches intact.
“This could be the origin of the Atlantis legend,” Luis Somoza, the head of a project to study volcanic activity off the Canary Islands, told Live Science in an email.
The team found the islands on a seamount, or underwater mountain, which contains three now inactive volcanoes and is about 31 miles (50 kilometers) in diameter. Its base is about 1.4 miles (2.3 km) below the surface of the ocean.
Scientists dubbed the newfound seamount Mount Los Atlantes after Plato’s fabled civilization that the gods plunged into the ocean as a punishment for its citizens’ immorality.
“They were islands in the past and they have sunk, they are still sinking, as the legend of Atlantis tells,” Somoza, a geologist with the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME-CSIC), said in a translated statement.

With all due respect to brother Luis, this sounds like some Graham Hancock bullshit to me. Let’s assume he’s right, and that Plato was indeed inspired by this thing. How would he have even KNOWN about it in the first place? We’ve only discovered it now with 21st century technology. The seamount has probably been submerged for millions of years. The article observes that the seamount might’ve been visible above water during the ice age… but that would’ve been about thousands of years before Plato’s time (to be sure, he does say that whatever happened to Atlantis did so about 9,000 years earlier), and it would’ve required there to be enough humans to have witnessed what happened and to preserve that knowledge (through oral tradition to boot, as Plato also says) for millennia until it reached Plato. I know our remote ancestors were probably a lot smarter than the likes of Hancock, Donnelly, von Daniken et al give them credit for being, but I find this concept awfully hard to accept… sorry Luis, but I’m not buying it.

Oy vey, Oolong

First Cybertruck Ambulance Has One Small Problem: Nowhere to Put the Patient

There’s a new — and deeply questionable — volunteer ambulance on the streets of Lakewood, New Jersey: the Cyberambulance.
Yes, you read that right. Per Jalopnik, Lakewood is now home to a Cybertruck ambulance. The $100,000 Tesla vehicle was donated to the Hatzulas Nefashos, a Jewish volunteer EMT organization that operates in South Jersey.
It’s definitely… something. As seen in a viral TikTok, the truck has been given a red, white, and blue wrap, and is indeed affixed with emergency sirens and ambulance insignia. But as all Cybertrucks are, it’s extremely blocky; and sadly, in this case, that blockiness coupled with the paint job unfortunately makes it look like a life-size Pinewood Derby car. And looks aside, there seems to be another major flaw in using the Cybertruck as an emergency vehicle: where does the patient ride, especially if they’re in a stretcher?
The Cybertruck’s bed space isn’t terrible, as far as your standard truck goes. But hauling normal stuff like groceries, or luggage, or even carrying heavy machinery or cargo is a very different ask than being able to soundly transport a patient, a gurney, a vast array of emergency equipment, and the medical personnel themselves.

Interesting, of course, that this monstrosity was gifted to a specifically Jewish organisation. Definitely comes across as some sort of indication of Oolong’s antisemitism…