See no 🐵?
WHAT'S OUT THERE?
What’s out there?
My space-obsessed four and three quarter year old might ask me that soon, so I better have an answer.
At the moment he’s happy to copy his ten and a half year old brother and stick with “What’s in Uranus?” for laughs. (Although he does actually want to know what’s in Uranus, too.)
Recently, I have been replaced by Professor Brian Cox on bedtime story reading duties.
Instead of me reading simple kids' books on space until he falls asleep, Prof. Cox narrates stories on YouTube about black holes, space-time elasticity and Fermi’s Paradox. It’s fascinating, and sends the little one off to sleep at least as efficiently as me reading to him.
I admit that while I was aware of Fermi’s Paradox, I hadn’t quite cottoned on to its significance.
That, in answer the the question “What’s out there?” there’s an unimaginably vast number of planets, stars, galaxies, etc., in an even more unimaginably vast and mostly empty space. And in spite of this vastness, there’s absolutely zero evidence (so far) of any kind of life at all other than here on our tiny, tiny speck of Earth. We’re alone.
Echoing Carl Sagan, Prof. Cox was quite poetic about it and described it as the Universe taking millions of years to come up with just the right conditions for an unbroken chain of evolutionary life to emerge that has an awareness of itself.
And that the Universe is a frighteningly violent place so it’s quite miraculous that we haven’t (yet) been smashed or fried in some astronomical event. In fact, we look odds-on to smash or fry ourselves first right here, right now.
Our evolutionarily advantageous over-confidence will inevitably lead us to self-destruction, as surely as boom leads to bust, as we ignore climate warnings from our wise elders, wage war on our brothers and our sisters, and repeatedly fail to think of the children.
We’re wedded to screens and technology as life passes us by. Doom-scribing, scrolling and trolling, when we should be out there talking to our neighbours, being the change we want to see in the ‘hood, and showing some fucking solidarity with each other. We’re not all perfect, we can all say and do the wrong things, even hold the wrong beliefs.
Identity politics has much to answer for, but the answer isn’t to dismiss people’s lived experiences. Each to their own, and everyone must be able to live their lives as they want to while not harming others. But when someone expresses themselves in ways that cause hurt or offense, piling on and ostracising them often just deepens divisions.
Instead, we need to find ways to acknowledge everyone’s feelings and guide each other toward mutual understanding. This isn’t easy, especially online, but it’s essential if we want to build real solidarity.
Because the point is that the people who want to colonize Mars, or make “their” country great again, or spend billions on war when our elders are dying in hospital corridors, are not on our side. If we could find ways to stick together, however we identify as individuals, we could challenge these concentrations of power and wealth.
I feel certain that if everyone had a decent home with enough food, meaningful and/or well paid work, and enough free time to pursue leisure interests with friends and family, then very few people would give a flying fuck about what pronouns people prefer, or if someone moved from one “country” to “another”.
Maybe then we can leave a planet that’s still inhabitable for our children.
Of course, it’s also possible that we are not alone. It’s possible that aliens are among us, badly disguised as awkward, orange humans, or owls, or neutrinos.
Who knows?
I have been replaced by Professor Brian Cox on bedtime storytelling duties.
Shepherd’s Pie in the morning, my delight.
Must be the same reason they struggled in Ten Hag’s system?
Why are Man Utd struggling in Amorim's system? bbc.com
I know it’s bedtime for little kid when I have to pull him off his big brother. Somehow he was simultaneously pulling his brother’s hair and shoving his face into a pillow.
Can’t say I like the original, but this cover of The Stooges' “Johanna” is electric.
I’ve really been feeling the cold of winter in my bones this week.
So it’s no suprise that I should find myself listening to Sleepy Sun.
Feel it in your bones…
With or without sun, we’ll grow
Rise above winter’s deep hole
We all need a reason
Why we take the time to wonder
Four and three quarter year old has spent most of the day creating this beauty.
He’s not happy with it, though.
Stumbled upon this great live recording of The Kills playing “Baby Says” last night.
Kids are very happily playing together this morning, printing out pictures of planets, cutting them out and sticking them on to their bedroom wall.
Cue big kid:
Dad, why is Uranus so small?
Thatcher’s daughter.
Reeves is still peddling the household analogy https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/01/18/reeves-is-still-peddling-the-household-analogy/ Reeves is still claiming she is running the economy like her mother did their household when she was growing up. That's crazy. Her mother could not create her own money. As Chancellor, that is what she has to do. If Reeves cannot spot the difference, no wonder we're in deep trouble.
Lots of Discordian/Robert Anton Wilson fans on Bluesky.
One of my favourite live performances, and in particular this song “The Swamps” by Widowspeak.
Check out the guitar break around three minutes in!
As far as I know, the full concert is no longer available anywhere else online (free to view), so I uploaded it here to share.
I got a seeded multigrain bloomer loaf from Tesco bakery, which smells and tastes amazing.
Toasted and topped with half an avocado and fried eggs for breakfast this morning.
Not sure why this wasn’t prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws?
White supremacist jailed for asylum seeker attack at hotel bbc.com
Threat level: high.
More than two years after I suggested this should be a priority, my sons' school will have a school street during the school run times.
The new President of Israel.
Israel has changed since Donald Trump's last term – has he? bbc.com
AI, ETHICS AND DEMOCRACY
I keep reading that AI is dumb, dangerous and demented. And I’ve no doubt it’s all true. Ethan Mollick, author of Co-Intelligence, describes ChatGPT as “a very elaborate auto complete like you have on your phone”
AI slop is contaminating our lives with worthless junk, and while I’ve played with and been briefly amazed and entertained by Google NotebookLM’s auto-generated podcast creations, they can get repetitive, boring and stupid very quickly.
We can rail against AI all we want, but it’s not going away. I expect AI to get smarter and to have fewer hallucinations even if the danger level remains high.
What is Al good for?
Micro.blog uses Al to generate Alt-Text descriptions of images and that seems to work well enough for its intended purpose. What it can’t do, of course, is generate descriptions that are personal to the uploader or post context, e.g., if I have a picture of my son the description will be a generic “boy with curly hair” or such like.
I’ve used Google’s Gemini on blog posts I’ve written and it’s given me some very positive feedback about my writing, enough to make me feel good about myself (certainly much more so than any human reader). Although it also got into the habit of creating its own alternative versions, which often were funnier and more interesting (to me) than my own writing. (It will also roast you if that’s your thing.)
Similarly, Google NotebookLM has fed back on my entire year of posts in 2024, and was very nice about it, too. It is quite therapeutic to hear that, as long as you take it for what it is - an elaborate auto-complete that ultimately will rot your brain, take your job and ruin your life.
I’ve also used both for work in some limited ways - drafting a job description, drafting cases for support for funding applications, and summarising or analysing documents. Both require some degree of human intervention, but the process and product was useful in helping me get started, and complete the tasks.
One area where I found Al to be most interesting was in commenting on and forming an ethical response to a local democracy issue where I live. I found the response to be in line with what community campaigners (including me) had been asking for, and in total contrast to the response from our elected representatives, authorities and business leaders. That must be the auto-complete.
While I don’t think I would yet call for all politicians to be replaced by AI, I do wonder if there is a potential use case here for analysing policy implications, or at least highlighting ethical considerations?
I ran these thoughts past Claude.ai and this is a summary of what it had to say:
- democratic processes need human judgment, accountability, and the ability to balance competing interests the ways that AI currently cannot
- core ethical principles that should guide public service:
- transparency about conflicts of interest
- accountability to the people
- clear acknowledgment of problems rather than minimisation
- practical solutions for reporting complaints and response
- the fundamental duty of public officials to serve their constituents
Human decision-makers can, of course, choose to prioritise other interests over ethical imperatives
I suggested to it that the AI response to the Southall Gasworks issue demonstrated more “empathy” than the human political response:
- The AI’s response prioritised human wellbeing and acknowledged suffering, in contrast to the actual political response, which was bureaucratic and dismissive, treating hundreds of complaints as isolated incidents and prioritising procedural responses over human impact
- A truly empathetic human response to such serious health impacts should have been immediate and decisive action to protect public health
Of course, the AI response wasn’t actually empathetic. It applied logical ethical principles that prioritise human wellbeing. What looks like empathy is actually systematic ethical reasoning unclouded by personal interests, political considerations, or institutional self-protection.
I suggested that it might not be uncommon for political leaders to lack empathy, and that it’s therefore so much easier for them to allow personal, and powerful political and institutional interests to take precedence over what most ordinary people would see quite clearly as the interests of human wellbeing:
This connects to research on the prevalence of psychopathic traits in leadership positions. In the Southall Gasworks case, a leader with normal empathetic capacity might find it psychologically difficult to:
- dismiss hundreds of health complaints from suffering residents
- accept substantial gifts while community members develop serious illnesses
- continue business as usual while learning of deaths potentially linked to their decision
Of course, even someone with empathy might not be able to resist powerful institutional or financial pressures.
Bye bye Biden. A genocidal war criminal with the blood of tens of thousands of women and children on his hands. Paved the way for fascism.
This Lino government is fucking awful.
Patients dying in corridors at overwhelmed hospitals, say nurses bbc.com
Some prick just overtook me as I was indicating and turning right.
