Technology Report

 Getting humanoid robots through the "uncanny valley". Here's an article about a company building companion robots. They look very realistic, although they lack human level strength and mobility, they're getting closer, and it looks like newer developments in high power electric motors will go a long way toward getting those 'bots up and running, so to speak.

“They had hired an actress to pretend to be a mannequin — and she was really good at it,” McMullen recalls. “For some reason that stuck with me, I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have a mannequin that looks so real, that people would think that it was?’ Kind of like an inverse of that experience. I started coming up with this, like, crazy idea of a hyper-realistic, pose-able mannequin.”

To this end, McMullen founded his own company, Abyss Creations in 1996, which is perhaps best known for developing the RealDoll adult companion mannequin, the most deluxe versions of which can fetch over $10,000.

He’s sold thousands of them.

McMullen then founded Realbotix in 2014 to bring a similar realism to robots.

 

Modern Campaigning

An article shows that an aspiring candidate can buy an AI that can work his or her name into daily news releases in a favorable way. The candidate can then do a quick fact check, and pass the releases on to the press, or incorporate them into fliers to be distributed to the constituents. The AI in question is written in Israel, but if that's a problem, others are available. Word is that they turn out workmanlike prose at very little cost.

At the same time, clever programmers can take images of their candidate and make videos of said candidate making speeches endorsing, or condemning, whatever issue is hot in any given district. This makes it possible for U.S. Grant to campaign effectively from his tomb. It also makes it possible for Joe Biden to come out in favor of reinstating slavery. So watch out. Still, it could get Trump out of the courtroom and back on the campaign trail in short order, rendering the Dem interference moot. 

AI writing Legislation

 This sort of thing could easily lead to legislators having to cancel their email accounts. Following the example of the councilman in Brazil who had ChatGPT write a city ordnance, which bypassed all the usual governmental roadblocks and passed unanimously on first reading, 

Not specifically gun related, but closely connected. I asked ChatGPT to write me a bill to establish an audit process, and here's what it came up with. Just needs someone to carry it. Yes, I know, it won't get anywhere in Colorado, but we can at least make an effort. Cut and paste to your rep or senator. It's specific to Colorado, but it should be easy to get one for other states by just changing the state in the request section. Don't send the request section, shown in the next paragraph. I'm not going to worry about some AI becoming an evil overlord, the things are programs, and do what you ask them to do. Usually. Proofread their work and treat them like unpaid interns.

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Compose a bill for a law, in the format of bills in the Colorado state legislature, to amend the Colorado revised statutes to require an audit of statewide biannual elections. This audit should confirm that every ballot cast represents a specific voter, that all voters tested are current legal residents at their stated address, and that all voters tested are legally entitled to vote in the Colorado elections. Sampling size should be sufficient to be statistically significant, and this audit should be completed and a summary report issued not later than 15 January following the election being audited. The audit must be performed by a private party or business competent to perform such actions.

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BILL NUMBER: H.B. XX-XXXX

INTRODUCED BY REPRESENTATIVE [Your Name]

A BILL FOR AN ACT

CONCERNING AUDITS OF STATEWIDE BIANNUAL ELECTIONS IN THE STATE OF COLORADO.

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Colorado:

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This act shall be known and may be cited as the "Biannual Election Integrity Act."

SECTION 2. LEGISLATIVE FINDINGS.

The General Assembly finds and declares that ensuring the integrity of statewide biannual elections is fundamental to a healthy democracy. To enhance public confidence in the electoral process, it is imperative to implement measures that verify the accuracy and legitimacy of every vote cast in these elections.

SECTION 3. AMENDMENT OF THE COLORADO REVISED STATUTES.

(a) Section XX-XXXX, Colorado Revised Statutes, is hereby amended to add a new subsection (XX) to read as follows:

(XX) AUDIT OF STATEWIDE BIANNUAL ELECTIONS.

(i) Following each statewide biannual election, a comprehensive audit shall be conducted to verify the accuracy and legitimacy of the votes cast.

(ii) The audit shall be designed to confirm the following:

(a) Every ballot cast represents a specific voter.

(b) All voters tested are current legal residents at their stated address.

(c) All voters tested are legally entitled to vote in Colorado elections.

(iii) The sampling size for the audit shall be sufficient to achieve statistical significance and shall be determined in accordance with recognized statistical principles.

(iv) The audit shall be completed, and a summary report issued not later than January 15 following the election being audited.

(v) The audit required by this subsection shall be performed by a private party or business competent to conduct such an audit.

SECTION 4. IMPLEMENTATION.

(a) The Secretary of State shall promulgate rules and regulations necessary to implement the provisions of this act.

SECTION 5. EFFECTIVE DATE.

This act shall take effect upon passage.

Investing With A.I.

 

It's been 6 months since I asked ChatGBT to pick 10 equities for a hypothetical investment. It disavowed any expertise in the field, picked 10*, 5 of which were tech stocks, and my theoretical investment has since made me a theoretical 28%. Thinking that a good investment advisor would watch the markets and move the monies around from time to time, I asked it the same question again. It picked 8 of the original 10 picks, and dropped GOOGL and META in favor of JPMorgan and Home Depot. I adjusted my portfolio to remove the 2 and added some declared dividends and the newly favored equities. Now I guess I wait another 6 months to see what this gets me.

Since I'm already paying a boffin to manage my finances for me, it would probably be silly of me to fire him and follow the AIs advice on no record at all. Still, if I had, I'd have recovered all my losses from the Bidenomics "boom".

Managing an imaginary account like this is a bit more difficult than doing it for real. Since it's all imaginary, I have to make all the adjustments to the account myself, and Yahoo finance gets confused when I do a trade. In real life, I'd just call my broker, execute the buy and sell, and get a monthly statement showing the results. O.K. it's not THAT hard, but I'm lazy.

On 8/1/2023 8:31 PM, David Aitken wrote:

Managing an imaginary account is easy. It's when you have real money on the line that it gets emotional, and hard.

Well, yes. Any project involves work and money and when you eliminate the money part, it's easy to not get too attached to the project. Using AI like this is definitely an experiment with no precedence and so I'm not going to take this for a full ride until I'm convinced it won't blow up on the pad. Next year, maybe I'll try it on a small scale with real money. So far, though, it's working well "in the lab".

The other problem here is that I may not be able to "cross the same river twice" as GPT is itself an ongoing thing undergoing continuous changes. The 1/24/2023 version I started with is probably not the 7/23/23 version I just used to generate an update. GPT-4 is now the current thing, but GPT-0 is still available. Or is it now GPT-0.6?

An aerospace engineers approach to the problem. Excess caution -> Paralysis by analysis. At what point do I take the plunge? I'm thinking after 2 consecutive winning 6 month runs.

* Original picks: AAPL, MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL, FB, JNJ, PG, V, IVV, VTI. Don't recognize some of them? Go to Yahoo finance and type in those ticker Ids.

Green Energy - Nuclear

 The Finns finally got their new nuclear plant turned on to full capacity. Yup, It caused a national disaster. In fact the output from the plant drove the price of electricity in Finland into negative numbers, necessitating throttling back the plant so the rest of national power grid could actually show a profit.

The low, flatt(ish) area on the right is when the reactor was running in test mode. The green circled area is when it went full time on line.

The article also mentions that the plant was 14 years late getting going without mentioning why, exactly, but given that this is almost certainly a government project, I would be surprised if it didn't come in about 2-4 times the estimated time, and 10 times the original estimated cost. 

Fun With Headlines - Pandemics

 The Chinese ae buying a large parcel of land in Florida to be used as  a disease research center.

Chinese Biotech Firm with Deep Links to China’s Military and its COVID-19 Program Just Bought Land in Florida for a Massive Research Complex

So the next pandemic leak will be centered not in Wuhan, but in Florida, a strongly red state.

What If The Virus WAS The Vaccine?

 Found this on Bijou who found it elsewhere so it's now 3rd hand, but it's an interesting bit of medical technology, creating a virus that leaves behind proteins that trigger an immune response to another virus.

What could go wrong?

Usually Reliable Sources - Technology Theft

Today it is being reported by usually reliable sources that the Chinese government has successfully stolen American technology used by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to manufacture American Process Cheese. 

As is widely known, APC is a by-product of refined petroleum and is produced in large quantities by every refinery in the U.S. The final product is then sold to cheese users like Kraft to make their world famous Mac and Cheese food product in addition to thrifty citizens to help make fake meat burgers palatable. Excess production then goes into the National Strategic Cheese Reserve located in a large complex of refrigerated warehouses in Wisconsin. 

The Chinese have pilfered this technology, and are using it to produce cheese, under the name of Chinese Process Cheese, which will be used to alleviate impending food shortages being brought on by the Russian war in Ukraine which is expected to severely impact the global production of wheat and fertilizer.

Allowing the Chinese to build up a large Cheese Gap in this underhanded manner in unconscionable on President Bidens part and we all need to write him and our elected representatives in Washington and demand that the National Cheese Reserves be opened to alleviate hunger in the United States. Do it now! For the children!

30th Anniversary Of The End Of WWIII

 Apologies people, I even forgot it myself, but yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the end of WWIII. This was also known as the "Cold War", which sometimes it was, punctuated by periods of decidedly hot war, this one was my war from one of the hot periods in Viet Nam, to the final collapse of the Soviet Union, Dec 25th, 1991. At the collapse, I was employed by  one of the large Aerospace companies, and was working on some aspects of Ronald Reagans Star Wars incentive.

Reagan and the American people were opposed by Mikhail Gorbachev, Ted Kennedy, Tip O'Neil, and a democrat controlled legislature. The Dems didn't want to be seen as weak on defense, but they also held the Soviet system in high regard. They still do. They would allow monies for studies of only the parts that seemed to have the smallest chance of success. Having had a front-row seat in the engineering biz, my observation was that it took us only about 6 months to go from "that'll never fly" to having a working prototype ready to test. The Russians noticed this as well and made a policy of immediately throwing roubles at whatever they thought might counter the American inventions. This quickly bankrupted the Soviet Union. 

We are now fully involved in WW4.

Medical Stuff

 I mentioned some Atrial Fibrillations to my doctor, and I am now fitted with a heart monitor. This is a small (2" high, 1" wide, 3/4" deep) sensor attached with high-strength, waterproof tape to the upper middle of my chest, and a semi-smart phone clipped to my belt. I get to wear this for 30 days. If the sensor company detects anything they think is abnormal, they will call me on my regular cell phone, attached to the other hip, and ask me what's up. If I detect anything I think they should know about, I can use the app on their phone to briefly describe it. All I need is an illuminated star on a hat to complete the Christmas tree similarity.

Could be worse. I had envisioned a complex bunch of wires and sensors, connected to a shoe-box sized device that would detect and report anything that happened to me and download a report on it to my medical file, located somewhere in North Korea.

Imagine this rig detecting something they interpret as a heart attack, and immediately responding with a jolt from the onboard defibrillator. Life saving, no? Imagine going out to an IDPA match wearing this thing, and having it interpret my first 2 shots on a stage as a heart attack. Imagine firing your first 2 shots on the first target, and having the defibrillator kick in as you line up on the second one, causing you to run the next 8 or 9 rounds off at 600 rpm. The good news I guess would be that when you empty your magazine, the machine would interpret this as successful treatment of the heart attack, and shut itself off. The bad news is that standard mag capacity for a pistol caliber carbine, such as I shoot, is 30 rounds. I suppose I would be grateful that no one makes a magazine for my gun bigger than 16 rounds.

Saturday, we will see if the sensor I'm wearing is affected by gunfire.

Fun With Headlines - Armaments

 Here's one that's going around: From WND:

China rocks the world with missile that circled globe before dropping on target.

OK kiddies, here's a clue. Go on Wickipedia, and look up "Silbervogel" which the Nazis looked into back in 1942 as a method to bomb the U.S. by traveling at hypersonic speeds, bouncing off the stratosphere several times, and landing in Japan.

Terrifying new superweapon, indeed. Here's a bit more on that. Seems the thing still needs a bit of work:

The test went like this: China launched a rocket carrying what is known as a hypersonic glide vehicle. The missile circled the earth in a low orbit toward its target, which it missed by roughly 25 miles.

Notwithstanding that close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear weapons, 25 miles is generally considered a miss in the nuclear weapons department.

Automotive Chip Problems - QOTD

 This article note from Fortune magazine:

Chipmakers to carmakers: Get out of the Stone Age. (Fortune)

Carmakers to chipmakers: Your old chips actually fucking worked. Well, not worked as such, but failed in documented ways. It takes years to validate a new design, and not taking the time to do that validation could get people killed.

An all-out effort to get on and hold the cutting edge is all well and good, up to a point, but it can easily get to where your technology is so edgy that it fails in unexpected and undocumented ways that are difficult and expensive to fix. If you want to inflict an example of this on yourself, simply buy a 5 year old exotic(ish) luxury car and watch the dashboard periodically light up with messages of dire import, requiring a visit to the dealer with a minimum charge of $1500 just to visit them.

 

Biological Warfare

 Here's a piece from Epoch Times, behind their paywall, that describes the confiscation of large quantities of fake vaccination certificates. From China, no less, who supplied some number of pre-filled out ballots in the last election. 

You'd almost think they wanted infected persons to distribute themselves as widely as possible in an effort to get the U.S. economy to shut itself down.

Failing that, they could support the electric car movement, since they supply most of the batteries, and oppose the Gen 4 nuclear power effort, which they are rapidly developing. Nothing like watching the Americans blow out their power grid trying to recharge 100M golf carts every night when the solar panels, which they sold us, aren't working.

Science Marches Onward! - Alcohol!

 For a change, here's some news about alcohol that doesn't involve burning it. Seems this fellow has come up with a way to turn alcoholic beverages into something resembling ice cream, or at least soft serve.

Yeah, I know, the purists among us will denounce this as alcohol abuse, especially as it seems to work about as well with single malt Scotch as it does with beer of any sort. The extremes though probably are alcohol abuse on the one end of that spectrum, and reportedly abuse of the consumer on the other, so if you but one of his machines (about $6000-$7000) don't pour in either Glenfiddich or Coors Lite.

The Future Of Transportation - Elio Re-Invented

 

I'm completely unsurprised to see this, a variation on the Elio 3-wheeler only electrified. Adding the electric package is a coming thing among the amateur car builders. In this case the manufacturer has taken the Elio concept of a fully enclosed 3-wheeler with 2-in-front configuration and tandem seating, and electrified it.

https://www.arcimoto.com/fuv

The big differences are that 1. this one is the very trendy electric, and 2. It's actually in production. Priced at $17K it's not nearly as cheap as the Elio promised, but is probably more realistically priced considering the not inconsequential inflation that has taken place since Elio rolled out its first prototype.

Leaving off the side doors probably keeps the price down and makes sense in a tropical environment like Eugine OR. I could see some gullwing doors in this vehicles future which would make it a real, all weather vehicle. The top on this one is plexiglass and a half side cover is available on the delivery version. 

They promise a top speed of 75 and a range of (up to) 120 miles in town. I wonder what a used one costs, and how hard would it be to convert to a gasoline engine, either small car or motorcycle? Top speed then would be 110 and range essentially unlimited.

UPDATE: A little digging reveals that enclosure is an option. It's a gullwing, and is seemingly available on one side only. Or I could be wrong, both sides could be opening, just not at the same time.

Latest Windows Update

 I have it from a strictly unconfirmed source that if you get the Gates-approved vaccination for the WuHan Flu, about 2 weeks after the second shot, if you have a Win10 computer, you no longer need either the mouse or keyboard. Your interface is a direct to-the-brain connection and is several orders of magnitude faster than typing or pushing a mouse around.

Possible side effects include automatic storage of all your data to Gates' cloud. If you query Microsoft about this, they will vehemently deny the whole story. I mean, what better proof can you get?

Health Update

 It seems there's nothing wrong with me. A nodule on my liver was determined to be benign  as were a couple of nodules on my thyroid. 

I also have no Covid symptoms.

Notwithstanding anything some of my liberal friends say, there is nothing toxic about me. For a slow, arthritic, old fart, I'm in pretty good shape. D'wife is even amazed that after all the scans of every sort I've endured in the last 3 years, that I don't glow in the dark.

AOC says she wants to begin collecting FB and Twitter posts to make up a list of people who colluded with Trump over the last 4 years so they can be targeted for exclusion from polite society and maybe sent to re-education centers lest they corrupt the youth or something. I'm watching real estate in Texas in case I have to relocate.

Covid Death Rate

Scott Adams asked for this information on his periscope and I thought it was a valid question, so here is the ongoing death rate for the population at large. This is done from 7 day moving average data by dividing the revised number of  deaths by the revised number of cases. That is, the data is presented as a continuously cumulative number, so I took each new update and subtracted the previous total to get the unit change. 

It's hard to read accurately, but you can see that the disease initially was quite deadly as the first victims were probably the weakest, and of course, no one had any idea what to do about it. Early on HCQ became known as a pretty good treatment to at least slow the progress and later other drugs made their appearance. The low spots are .006 (.6%) on 6/28, and .066 (.66%) on 10/12. The initial onslaught killed a lot of people while we tried to manufacture millions of ventilators which turned out to be counter productive, and the second wave, much ballyhooed by the press as a major administration failure, looks to have been dealt with fairly well with the advent of Remdesivir, extracted antibodies, and a couple of other treatments. 

You can copy the data at the link, and paste it into your own spreadsheet and massage it to suit yourself. Is the total number of cases going up? Yes, of course, it gets higher with each new case, but so what? If the fatality rate is dropping faster than the infection rate, we'll soon reach the point where very few people are left who haven't caught it and very few of those will die of it. 

About those deaths. Whose fault are they? The media will tell you Orange Man Bad, but unless they can prove that Trump was operating a bio warfare lab in Wuhan, China, I'm not inclined to assign any blame to the administration. Address your complaints to Emperor Xi.

Reloading Press

 A friend of mine had 2 of these things in his shop when he moved but had never seen them used, nor any idea what they were for. He figured they had to be good for something and guessed that I might think of something so he gave me one. 

It's all pneumatic and came with no tooling at all. It indexes through 8 stations and can be made to stop accurately so I thought I might try automating my reloading press. So far I've made 8 shell holders, the ring which will hold the tooling, and a frame to hold it all together. Shells are loaded at the 5 o'clock position, decapped at 6 o'clock where the tall tower is mounted, primed at 7, inspected for primer at 9, etc. 

This is proving to be a non-trivial project so don't hold your breath waiting for video of shells falling like rain at the 3 O'clock position. The primer inspection will be just a poke with a wire which will trigger a light if it goes too far up so that should be easy. All else is done from the top and might be done by mounting the tools on ball screws. I'm thinking it will be run from an Arduino controller so I can include emergency stops if one of the inspections fails or whatever

As I've warned you before, prepare for retirement by starting an unending project so you'll have a reason to get out of bed in the morning, and your immortality is virtually assured. If you don't, you'll be dead in 6 months.

Gun Stuff - Clearing Squibs

I have been changing the specs on my reloads recently, and as someone else once said "Nothing is more difficult than introducing a new order of things." For the 3rd time in 30 years of reloading, I got a squib in a match. We caught it when it happened so I didn't wind up like that fellow who found he had 17 slugs jammed in his barrel, but getting the one slug in my barrel out turned out to be more difficult than anyone imagined. Gun in question is a Hi Point 4095. Brand new. .40 cal.

I had been getting failures to extract occasionally at the end of a string, and so had added a dowel to my kit to push the recalcitrant last round out of the chamber. Works fine. 

NOTE DON'T try this on a stuck bullet. All it does is jam wood down around the bullet and further wedge the slug into the barrel.

When you find a cleaning rod, which is typically aluminum, DON'T BOTHER. I first tried a 3/8" Brass rod and hammer and got nowhere. I dismantled the gun and put the barrel and the rod into a hydraulic press. Bent the rod without moving the slug. I am willing to believe that without the wood, this trick might have worked but with both feet well down the rabbit hole...

Step 2: Made a 20" long drill bit. Used some of that brass rod, and drilled it to .312" (5/16) pressed the bit in and pinned it. Put some tape around the bit near the end just to be sure. Don't want the bit wandering. Peck drilled down the barrel, and first removed about 1-1/2" of crushed wood. Eventually started removing lead. Eventually the bit dropped through. Had to pry the remains of the bullet off the bit before retracting the bit. Success! Clean the remaining debris and back to shooting.

I straightened the brass pusher rod and added a steel weight so as to have a workable tool if this happens again. 

Here's the drill bit. This one is using an aluminum tube, 3/8" OD, 1/4" ID and a .281 drill bit. This is because I lost the brass original. Don't ask. The pin is 1/8" brass so no scratches.

Here it is with the hammer rod. My first squib happened in a Model 10 S&W revolver at a gun store range. I asked the folks there if they could help me and they tried the hammer and rod trick with no success at all and believe me they were really pounding on it. I eventually cleared that one by drilling the bullet and now am convinced that the "just push it out" approach is just wishful thinking.

So how long did it take me to clear that squib? About 2 days, including the time required to make the tools.