Some Thoughts on Constancy in Culture

I've just been watching the Funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, my impressions are similar to those of the wedding of Prince Phillip. At that time I was watching that prior event with someone and was asked what I thought of it. I said thought it was quite a primitive event, being a display of ape hierarchy and a liminal ceremony, a right of passage. For all the trappings this funeral struck me similarly, which is not to say it was not emotionally moving.

Arctic Land Permafrost is beyond the Tipping Point

There are around 1.5 trillion metric tons of carbon locked in the land permafrost of the Arctic Circle region. To put that into perspective, human fossil fuel emissions are around 34 billion metric tons per year of CO2 (9.3 billion metric tons of carbon), which means that there are about 160 years worth of emissions in carbon locked up in the permafrost of the Arctic region.

The Death of Stalin and the Quiet Putsch

I'll have something to say about the Central England Temperature series and this year's summer, and when the minimum is finally reached, Arctic sea-ice. But the following video is an excellent review and extrapolation of a perfect movie, The Death of Stalin.

The Left and Right are wrong (and right)

Taking a short-hand of left and right as being collectivist and individualist is an approximation that looses some finesse. But let's just consider the collectivist/individualist dichotomy aspects of left and right and proceed to show how they're simultaneously correct and incorrect.

Trump was a Triumph of the American Government....

 ....and a failure of the American people and political classes.

Watch China

China gave us the "Wuhan Flu", which for purposes of irritating the Woke Totalitarians must be said in a certain fashion with the requisite facial distortions and terrible hammy accent. Really. It must. It is essential to have some fun in life. Everyone gets mocked.

Interesting times...

I've been busy with work, and part of the additional load has been my trying to plan a response to the coming economic 'circumstances'. This has led to me musing on a saying.

The Machines will defeat us, even if war is not their aim.

In my last post I made a throw away comment in relation to the subject of climate change: "...nothing exposes right-wing ideological capture more than the subject of climate change, it's their version of the gender ideology clown-world occupied by the left." This ideological capture is most commonly known via the non-playable character (NPC) meme.

The Normal Distribution and a Recent UK Temperature Record.

We have had some really weird hot weather here (UK), and I've been looking at the Central England Temperature Series (CET). This is an event that is but a small part of a massive heatwave impacting Europe...

Again.

Kemi Badenoch for Prime Minister

The UK Government is in turmoil following the defenestration of Boris Johnson. He was finally driven to resign the leadership of the Conservative Party after some 49 ministers and permanent secretaries resigned over a period of a few days. That was the culmination of months of the entire party guiding him to the door, some people just cannot take a hint. 

After a catalogue of episodes of bad judgement Johnson's time was up. Now the race to replace him is on.

5GHz: The Ad Hoc Link Band

Here in the UK, 5GHz link bands are being used for point-to-point back-haul communications, most cities and many towns have systems for providing internet access and links to enable camera surveillance systems (CCTV). In this post I outline what is going on.

Pursue Meaning, not Happiness

Our culture is in a dead end, the rise of the Safety-Nazis and the rise of mental illness go hand-in-hand. We need to pursue meaning, not happiness, we need to follow the path of self-development, not trying to be the best compared to others. As Peterson put it, compare yourself not with others, rather compare yourself with who you were yesterday, or indeed, last year.  

Does Flamingo Understand?

Ten years ago Andrej Karpathy lamented the state of AI vision research. He is now a lead on Tesla's autopilot vision team, probably placed better than anyone to have revised his opinion. Anyway, this led to a Deep Mind researcher, Roman Ring, to use the photo cited by Karpathy in a little experiment.

Down the Harmonic Rabbit Hole Part 2: Synchronous Detection

In my prior post about harmonics I delved into the sine wave. In this post I want to show a practical use of this understanding.

No Reason to see Personhood in LaMDA

I've been doing an awful lot of thinking about Lemoine, LaMDA, and Google. I remain open to there being something like sentience in LaMDA and GPT3, because there seems to be evidence of intelligence and understanding in both systems configured as chat-bots. However I do not think the evidence goes as far as a sentience potentially requiring consideration of personhood.

Down the Sentient AI Rabbit Hole (Again)

As reported in New Scientist and elsewhere, a Google engineer has been suspended for going public with his opinion that Google's LaMDA transformer model is sentient. The experts say he is mistaken, are they just falling foul of Clarke's First Law?

Down the Harmonic Rabbit Hole - Part 1: Sine Waves and Triangles

I want to go down a rabbit hole in the mathematics of harmonics in signals, but first I need to do some ground-work, so here is some explanation of sine waves.

An Interesting Puzzle

Some time ago someone told me about a secret military bunker. Being a sceptical sort of person I took it with a grain of salt, however I did keep it in mind to investigate and many months on (I forget how long) I've completed my investigation.

Depp/Heard - Diagnostic of the Sickness in our Culture

Johnny Depp has been vindicated and Amber Heard has been revealed as a dangerous woman with serious psychological issues. This follows a contrary decision in UK courts, in terms of public perception the difference between the two is that this time we could follow, because this court action was televised. The result is an event that is diagnostic of the deep sickness in the culture of the West.

Do Diffusion Models Dream of Electric Sheep?

DoodleChaos on Youtube has used a diffusion model from Google, Disco Diffusion v5.2, to produce a music video. This avenue of AI is all new to me, never heard of this system, but watching it is an astonishing experience.

Why The West is Worth Saving

A talk by Konstantin Kisin about why the West is worth saving (20 minutes). 

We need to oppose the fanatics on both left and right and re-assert the values and uniqueness of the Western liberal democratic tradition. 

And to anyone wondering; yes, we are the greatest civilisation extant upon the earth now, and the greatest in history. If you doubt that feel free to use one of the exit routes our technology provides and move to Russia, or Iran, or China or Venezuela. 

If you're not part of the solution you are part of the problem.

Don't Meditate

What ever you do it is imperative that you do not meditate, and yet, at the same time meditation is a critical tool to manage your mind and gain perspective. So WTF am I talking about?

Agents In Society

If you had a super-intelligent General Artificial Intelligence and you asked it to produce as many paperclips as possible, the results could be catastrophic. It could destroy the Earth in search of the goal of optimising the manufacture of paperclips. This is an often used analogy designed to illustrate the dangers of poorly defined goals in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). However this paradigm of analysis has wider utility in consideration of society.

The Fast Transition

In May 2015 I concluded a series of posts with The Slow Transition. It was a risky prognostication but an additional 7 years of data has supported what I said back then: That the transition to a seasonally sea ice free state would be slow, not fast, as some argued. This post is about the period preceding that, and with the further 7 years of data something substantive can be said about that.

The Arctic Ocean's sea-ice has undergone a fast transition from one stable mode to another equally stable mode. Between those modes there was a bifurcation driven by the power of an increase of Open Water Formation Efficiency and Ice Albedo Feedback. That bifurcation happened between 2002 and 2006, with the 2007 stochastic event delivering the coup-de-grace that finalised the bifurcation event.

Attractors, Critical Slowing, and Bifurcations

In this post I want to introduce some ideas of system level analysis connected to attractors and bifurcation.

Open Water Formation Efficiency Part 4

Open Water Formation Efficiency (OWFE) is a measure of the ease with which melt season thinning of sea-ice reveals open water. In March I published a post looking at how this operates from a theoretical perspective. In this post I look at how it operates in practice in various regions of the Arctic Ocean.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.

 

Ukraine: We cannot risk nuclear war.

Russia, the enemy, is afoot in Ukraine, yet The West demurs to engage properly, preferring instead to wage a proxy war. In this stance the West and NATO show themselves to be weak and effete, worse than this, The West has the blood of Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians on its hands.

The BCE Region Killzone

The BCE region is comprised of the Beaufort, Chukchi, East Siberian Seas. Due to the Beaufort Gyre it has a special role in the dynamics of Arctic sea ice.

Ukraine Aeronautical

Just a few things of note from Ukraine on the aeronautical side of things. Images from my account on Airnav Radar Box which is cheap and (for me) very useful, I can recommend it highly.

The Parallel Society.

The way out of the current subversion of our culture by Woke Totalitarianism is not by opposing it, being from a totally irrational background, discussion with its adherents is totally futile. And in many countries, such as here in the UK, the takeover of culture is already largely complete. Further, if Western Civilisation can be subverted by a culture of inherent weakness, a victim culture, then the husk of that civilisation was never worth saving anyway. This has been spotted by our rivals and has a causal role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Open Water Formation Efficiency - Part 3

Previously, 9 years ago, I produced two posts on Open Water Formation Efficiency, here and here. Now, as a bed rock to a series of posts I am going to revisit that issue. First, in this post, I outline a theoretical model to demonstrate the process involved.

Arctic Ocean: A New Ice Pack

Just a quick first review of PIOMAS data from 1978 to 2021. The results of this preliminary data-dive are what I had expected, which is not good.

England and Wales Rainfall

In 2016 I posted about UK rainfall and found that by the measure used the probability of a very wet year had increased in recent decades to 3/6 from a prior frequency of 1/6. In this post I revisit that work using an improved demarcation for wet and very wet.

What I have now found is a change of precipitation around 1998, before which the joint probability of a wet or extreme wet year has now risen from 18% prior to 1998 to 58%, a three-fold risk increase, in line with my 2016 work. 

This is a substantial change with serious implications for human impacts such as flooding.

Putin and the Weakness of the West

I am restarting blogging. Work on reprocessing PIOMAS and other data is currently ongoing and in due course I shall be publishing and maintaining data, as I once did. However blogging will follow a wider area of interests than just sea ice.

But first some useful words from David Starkey.

What is the entity that is 'I'?

I've been pondering on a matter since the 1990s when, amongst other things, I was evolving neural networks on a spare computer. And now, decades on, and much reading since, I think I can explain...

Making Gods is a Dangerous Endeavour

In this post I just want to go over some of what the rather limited current Artificial Intelligence agents are capable of. This is going to be rather cursory and fast, I don't have the time or inclination to write a book. I'm sure you don't have the time to read it anyway. The comments section is there is you want to ask me to back anything up.

Anthropomorphising

The previous two posts contained annotated transcripts of conversations between myself and GPT3 Curie, a 9 billion parameter version of GPT3. When I first came across GPT3 operating when configured as a chat bot it was in the video presented here. I'll be frank, I didn't believe it, I knew nothing about GPT3 at that stage.

Some More Interactions with GPT3

This post is just another annotated interaction designed to further illustrate how GPT3 is operating in preparation for the next post. 

Interacting with GPT3

It's been ages since I even looked at this blog, many more years since I was serious about sea ice studies. Given my nature there have been many interesting diversions, but overall, work has so consumed my energies that I have had little time or energy to blog. But over the last year I have found myself becoming more consumed with Artificial Intelligence and (what I consider to be) the ongoing Singularity.