This technology might have made Amazon's "Rings of Power" worth watching. "ChatGPT, read The Lord of the Rings and the Appendices and give me a script for the Appendices..." It certainly couldn't have done any worse.

Asking it about quaternions, the nature of the Frenkel line or similar technical subjects will cause it to emit some very confidently worded bullshit. Anyone who tries using ChatGPT to cheat in a physics exam is going to be in trouble.

I haven't signed up for a ChatGPT account, but I'm wondering what it would do if asked to draft a chapter from an outline. I personally struggle with the initial act of getting ideas from outline form into narrative form, and I could see something like that being a very useful tool for someone like me to get past that initial hurdle, even though I almost certainly would end up rewriting everything.

Actually. Scratch that. Has anyone asked it to write a new Tom Swift/Hardy Boys story? They're formulaic enough that it might do a half-decent job.

I used it recently to write a job description for an obscure role that we’re hiring for.

It did a better first draft than I could find after 30 mins of LinkedIn searching.

As a frameworking / drafting tool it’s pretty promising.

In technical translation specialised machine learning engines have been used as part of workflow for a few years already, and they are quite good.

Not good enough to be used without human supervision, just like driver assistance in state of the art cars, but good enough to make the work 20% to 50% faster, depending on whether the translated document is similar enough to what the engine was trained on earlier.

You still get AI translating some sentences completely incorrectly ("do not pull the grenade pin" translated as "pull the grenade pin" level of mistranslation), but then, humans do that too, only less frequently, which is why workflow should include review by another pair of eyeballs.

To ChatGPT: "Write a speech attacking ChatGPT in the style of Boris Johnson."

I picked this example of "write a speech attacking homeless issue in [$Place] in the style of Donald Trump" out of respect for the blog. Unfortunately, I don't know BJ's style, so I'll have to continue with DT. Sorry.

DT does bombastic word salad, followed by a few selected clips propagated by media to make him appear coherent, so I suspect he could be deep-faked by existing AI right now and only a few would notice. The only reason I think DT won't use AI-written speeches is that he doesn't read fast enough to make it work. But as a content emitter that runs on semi-random content generation, he's ripe for digitalization.

The point is that I'd expect political speechifying to get the AI treatment in a hurry, especially at the lower level where the pol can't afford a speechwriter and isn't naturally eloquent (pointedly not looking towards Gov. DeSantis...).

Probably the consequence of this will be the spread of Steve Bannon's "flooding the zone with shit" tactic, at least in the short term. If AI-enabled demagoguery works, even for some people, expect it to spread bigly.

Hopefully it won't spread to the level of students using the tech to bully each other online, but I'll bet it already has.

Speaking of students, there's an article out there somewhere claiming that ChatGPT was given the final for a business class at Wharton School of Business, and it scored in the B/B- range. Since Trump apparently got his Wharton MBA with a lower GPA than that, one might argue that he's already been surpassed by AI in some ways.

Sean Carter:

Tom Swift, Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, et al were never written by humans... rather generated by the first semi-successful attempt at Synthetic Authoring by a steam-powered assemblage of vacuum tubes and rubber bands and brass plumbing fixtures within the University of Chicago's squash court in the late 1930s and early 1940s...

...the Manhattan Project was the hastily arranged cover story to conceal this ungodly travesty

I am interested but not surprised. Tools of a similar (but really rudimentary) nature were in use on computer programs in the 1970s, and worked far better than most people expected even then, but natural languages were beyond them at that time. As we all know, the focus has been on natural languages since, and progress has been steady.

I agree about your third case, but it's not just training it on another language; it's training it on existing translations, especially ones of previous works by the same author. E.g. it could make a good start on the author's style, vocabulary, idiom and references, which translation programs do not do. Yes, this would need weighting of sources, which might be a problem if they are incompatible with its design, but I suspect not.

More problematic is the potential for forging documents for political purposes, which doesn't seem to have been done much so far. We already have the situation that one of the standard methods of political 'debate' (including sometimes on this blog) is to assign statements to your opponent that he did not make. Corbyn suffered badly from that. This would allow the creation of leaked documents and, at worst, that gets into Protocols territory. I doubt that watermarking would stop that if the user is prepared to do some editing.

Now I'm wondering about what will happen with formula writers.

Romance and porn writers are probably all over it, but I wonder what AI in general will do to their business models. What value does a human add to a formula text? Or if the formula "author" becomes effectively an editor for AI-generated rough drafts, what's the role of downstream editors?

Other formula writers are probably getting more worried. Here I'm looking at the people who do listicles, PR, turning PR into copy, travel writing, weather, police reports, and so on. Who will make a living traveling the world and writing about what's good in a place, when any Ministry of Tourism can dump Yelp five star reviews into ChatGPT and have the output written in the style of Anthony Bourdain?

What about Creative Writing majors, who didn't spend their time learning about content (what to write from) but only process (how to write)? As AI gets better at the writing process, are they going to be in trouble?

One upshot is that we might actually get a further split in fiction categories. Right now, as I understand it, there's a split between formula fiction and artisanal fiction. As AI-enabled writing matures, might there be a further split between artisanal writing and fine writing? Artisanal could include things like fiction formulas using unusual inputs, but that's something an AI could do. Fine writing would be stuff that was "obviously" done by a human (for various values of "obvious"), but which is also worth reading and which therefore sells. It's the difference between, say, HPL pastiches and a new Stephen King novel.

but then, humans do that too, only less frequently

You must be associating with a more select group of humans than some of us.

1930s and early 1940s...

HEY. My Tom Swift was from the 60s. Someone I know got the entire or mostly so set of orignals from a local library book sale. One title he mentioned stuck in my mind.

"Tom Swift and his Search Light"

I guess "high-tech" has evolved a bit since then.

Anyone who tries using ChatGPT to cheat in a physics exam is going to be in trouble.

Apropos which:

http://newsletter.oapt.ca/files/first-impressions-of-chatgpt.html

My guess is that things will be going even further with automatic screenwriting. Novel -> Movie without human intervention, eventually. Who really needs actors, querulous individuals who have to be paid, fed, housed, and in other ways pampered? But right now we can't even do robot path calculations automatically (though Google is working on it, see RT-1). Not enough data.

I'm guessing that In-Q-Tel and similar researchy intelligence organizations are putting a lot of money into finding out how well chatty AI does as an intelligence analyst. Feed it tons of all sorts of intelligence from open source, supper-classified sources, historical information and ask it, e.g. "Will Putin be in power on 2024-01-31?".

Romance and porn writers are probably all over it, but I wonder what AI in general will do to their business models.

Naah.

ChatGPT might work for one-handed reading -- erotica in the 1000-10,000 word range (we read at 250-350 words/minute, so that's a 3-30 minute read, i.e. roughly about the same time frame as a hand job) -- but it'd be useless for romance. Romance story arcs have to build emotional engagement between the lead characters over the course of the entire narrative, but ChatGPT is probabilistic; its window covers sentence-to-sentence level continuity, not chapter-to-chapter.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm pretty sure you'd need to use ChatGPT to draft on a scene by scene basis by feeding it paragraph-sized synopses of each scene, with descriptions of how the protagonists are interacting. And for the sort of extruded product you're talking about are plenty of authors selling via KU and similar who already write 6000-12,000 words/day anyway: ChatGPT might actually slow them down.

Yes gods and little fishes! I wouldn't give it a high mark for English literature, either. Four words in that 'Shakespearian' text were not used in those senses in his time, and two don't occur in his works at all. Yes, I had to check up, but that text grated.

What about Creative Writing majors, who didn't spend their time learning about content (what to write from) but only process (how to write)? As AI gets better at the writing process, are they going to be in trouble?

Maybe.

There are broadly two separate career paths for novelists. One where the authors sell to the public via the commercial trade press -- that'd be me. And the other where the authors compete for literary fellowships and grants, teach creative writing, and compete for academic promotion. The requirements of the two career tracks both involve novel-shaped objects but are otherwise different in every respect.

My cynical view is that the MFA culture is basically a pyramid scheme. It's fuelled by the 1-2 graduates/year who land a 6-7 digit bestseller deal (then probably never sell another novel), and the significantly larger group who publish a slim novel by way of a university press as the necessary publication credit to get their PhD in Creative Writing which in turn is the credential they need to get onto tenure track as a professor of creative writing.

(NB: there are Creative Writing PhDs who are able to walk the walk and talk the talk. Adam Roberts, for example, lectures in creative writing and has a PhD ... and is a repeat Clarke Award nominee and BSFA and John W. Campbell award winning novelist. He has a foot on both career tracks and is doing pretty well at them. That's quite unusual, although increasingly less so.)

Anyway, digression aside, the main problem with ChatGPT is, it will tend over time to commoditize the academic career track's output. First there'll be AI-plagiarism scandals as students deploy ChatGPT to get passing grades. Then sooner or later the uptake of AI text generation in commercial writing will undermine the perceived desirability of "writer" as an academically attested qualification. The last to go will be writers who innovate at some level that AI hasn'ty automated or emulated yet -- I'd like to flatter myself that my ideas shtick is an exemplar of this, but truth be told I'm whistling past the graveyard.

Given that studio heads are sure that viewers will never tire of superheroes, I foresee chatGPT writing the book, writing the script, making the movie... and then reviewing the movie from empty theaters....

I'm guessing that In-Q-Tel and similar researchy intelligence organizations are putting a lot of money into finding out how well chatty AI does as an intelligence analyst.

My guess is: very badly.

ChatGPT lies. It fabricates references in academic papers, it's a glib and facile creator of untruths.

You can probably use it for predigesting intelligence reports, but you can't trust it without a set of well-informed human eyeballs to authenticate and bullshit-test the output.

Nasty hypothesis: we may have already seen (but not noticed) the first AI secret intelligence failure, as some bright spark in the CIA deployed a GAN to digest reports and was lulled into believing a plausible AI lie. Or it might have been some obscure office inside the KGB generating reports about Ukrainian readiness in 2021, and Vladimir Putin was the believer ...

One question to ask, is how much does it costs to maintain the model current ?

A model is static, it needs to be updated to stay current on expressions, buzzwords, current news, new slang.

How much does this costs at ChatGPT scale ?

how well chatty AI does as an intelligence analyst

About story-writing: At least at the level of non-tactical intelligence, telling a good story that the consumer will read and absorb is a huge part of the analytical art of producing finished intelligence. In the US, the State Department and CIA analytical components are famous for their editorial staffs.

Re: translation.

ChatGPT in fact speaks / "understands" many languages other than English, it's just that its English is better because the corpus is (much) bigger. I think it was trained on essentially the whole internet up to some fixed date.

The difference shows in particular when you ask it to write something like a poem: In English it can write pretty impressive poems, in smaller languages less so. But for normal conversation it's more-or-less OK in many many languages.

And of course it can translate too: just ask it "please translate the following to ".

(I don't have an account either, but have seen examples posted by others)

Howard NYC
GRIN - but that reminds me of something in the recent issue of "Branch Line News" that both had me LOL'ing & being not-surprised, given the (low) quality of the named company's products in later years:

"Leyland motors, in Leyland dates (dated?) back to 1896, initially producing ...wait for it .. steam-powered lawn mowers"
Improbable Steampunk, anyone?

What immediately struck me about that story is that it is very Wallace-and-Grommit-like, but not detectably Stross-like.

How much does this costs at ChatGPT scale?

Probably a lot (as in: tens of thousands of dollars in electricity alone, and weeks of time on a supercomputing cluster) to train the model ... but it's train-once-deploy-many-times, and Koomey's law is still in effect: the price is probably halving every 12-18 months (unless they jack the size of the training set by an equivalent amount).

Improbable Steampunk, anyone?

Isn't a lawn mower -- a machine for trimming grasses -- essentially a miniaturized reaping machine?

I know that steam powered ploughing and harvesting machines -- often with a stationary engine and cables/chains across the field to pull the plough or realer -- go back to the mid-19th century, and steam traction engines that could park up at one side of the field and drive powered appliances across it came along not long after, so "take the industrial-sized product and miniaturize it for wealthy consumers who don't want to have to pay an extra gardener to wave a scythe around all summer" seems like a plausible business model. Especially once they switched to petrol power (higher power to weight ratio, simpler to run -- just one liquid fuel, no need for separate solid fuel and water and a boiler).

It would have been suitable only for VERY large lawns. Interestingly, people have made pedal-powered lawn mowers, which mow about as fast as most pedestrian-controlled petrol ones, and could have been made in the relevant era. It would still need a gardener, but not three of them.

There is, regrettably, no pedalpunk genre ....

story arcs have to build emotional engagement between the lead characters over the course of the entire narrative, but ChatGPT is probabilistic

I'm reminded that it can be hard to differentiate association-based logic behaviours from genuine reasoning about cause and effect among animals. So I suppose I'm reaching for an analogy where instead of the training consisting of pure probabilistic analysis of data, there's an effect to introduce a range of abstract constructs into its model. If it can be structured to overtly include predefined classes of entities, use its probabilistic analysis to identity them and to say things about the relationships between them, then perhaps the situation you describe could change. It's still not "genuine reasoning about cause and effect", but might provide a more convincing simulation.

There is, regrettably, no pedalpunk genre ....

Veering wildly off-topic I seem to recall one of the 80s cyberpunks and their crew -- I think Howard Waldrop? -- did a story set in 1890s Paris about a bicycle race up the Eiffel Tower. (The cyberpunk/steampunk crossover was a thing -- think "The Difference Engine" -- and this would have been part of it. Come to think of it, I'm not sure how inspirational TDE would have been for Stephenson's "The Diamond Age", but I suspect there's a connection to be made there.)

The other thing that I noticed was that the story is set at 62 West Wallaby Street, **Wigan, Lancashire"". When has OGH ever written a story set in Lancashire?

Article in The Register over the weekend goes in to the costs of retraining an AI to keep it current.

Charlie
Lije this, you mean? Very similar to 2 delivered at or on Armistice Day 1918 & named "Peace" & "Victory"
Note the winding drum for the ploughing cable.

"...and the comforting smell of cheddar wafting through the streets."

What kind of talk is this?

Mr Wensleydale did not even sell cheddar. There's not much call for it round here. The most popular cheese round here is Ilchester - staggeringly popular in this manor, squire.

And Mr Wensleydale still didn't have any Ilchester in stock. In fact he didn't have any kind of cheese in stock. And so he never even made it to retirement. It was a senseless waste of human life.

uhm...

just wondering about the timing of this topic and introduction of qntm in prior topic/thread...

how do we know if there really is a Charles Stross participating or could it be chatGPT trained up as... strossGPT?

we could unwittingly be participating in a LARPish nightmare... the real humans (qntm & Charles Stross) decided to partner up to to mash together a novel based in part upon the chatter from this thread...

just what is our safe word to exit the holodeck?

will we get a freebie copy of their novel?

[ I'll be leaving now before anyone starts throwing rotten fruit ]

Remind me not to approach any tall buildings if there is any chance that you might be about.

Retraining workers? Where does that happen?

Oh, I know, that's when people who are paid and start at $150k/yr. Now, for the rest of us, let's see, there were a couple of one hour classes and a video at the job I worked at in 91-94. Living in Austin. When I was making $27k/yr. I had a couple of audio tapes (I provided the player) at the Scummy Mortgage co.

I NEVER got any significant training. I went to college part time, and that was it, except learning on the job.

"Retraining workers" is a pile of dung that no one actually does, at least for 90% of us.

Whoa, stick 2-3 extra zeroes on the end of my cost estimate.

Still, given that ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, et al have literally millions of users, amortized over the user base the cost should be manageable (if you can get them to pay their share).

The article is about retraining the AI to keep it current, not the workers. The workers can sign up for evening classes at their own expense.

it'd be useless for romance. Romance story arcs have to build emotional engagement between the lead characters over the course of the entire narrative

Or narratives. Some romance authors (well, at least one) produce series of books with overlapping timeframes and characters, each book seeing the others' story arcs from a different viewpoint, with assorted pairings of lead characters all the way across the LGBTQ+ spectrum.

I wonder how chatGPT would cope with that?

Artisanal Intelligence > Artificial Intelligence

Accept no substitutes!

By the way, it was quite an adventure finally logging in here... movable type seems a heck

You can probably use it for predigesting intelligence reports, but you can't trust it without a set of well-informed human eyeballs to authenticate and bullshit-test the output.

Someone already got caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

CNET pauses publishing AI-written stories after disclosure controversy

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23564311/cnet-pausing-ai-articles-bot-red-ventures

Yes, the posted examples both in the article linked @ 12 and on here were reminding me quite strongly of Google Translate. They've both got the same problem - trained on "the whole internet" so they have ingested but not isolated a whole internet's worth of cock-ups. GT works remarkably well for languages with lots of example translations available, even totally dissimilar ones like Chinese into English, but it rapidly gets worse with more obscure ones; for example some of the things it does with Latin are brain-twistingly grotesque bits of serious WTFery. I hope I never get any of whatever it was the people it cribbed them off were on.

The "style of Shakespeare" example was blatantly crap apparently for the same kind of reason. It didn't remind me of Shakespeare much at all. It did strongly remind me of the kind of ye-olde-pisse-shoppe guff typically spouted by any old random bell who's been asked to write something like how they wrote in the old days before they could spell proper. I chance across that kind of guff on the internet, often labelled "Shakespearian", a lot more often than I ever find any actual Shakespeare, so it seems the machine has learned that guff is what's actually meant.

Another common feature which is immediately obvious is silently pretending bits they don't understand don't exist.

More generally, there is a strong style-flavour, which is quite rank although I have no idea how to begin to define it, about the way computer gadgets like these cock things up. I can ask Google Translate something concerning a language I don't know and even though I do not know what the right answer is, I can still be quite sure that Google's answer is wrong because it doesn't taste right. (I can then use the wrong answer as a starting point from which to do a bit of on-the-spot detailed research into how the particular words in question behave, and find out definitely how it is wrong (thus confirming my opinion) and what the right answer should be.) All the "write something to cheat with a homework question" examples we've been given here (including the OP) taste dead funny; there's no need for additional "watermarking", they've got the authentic machine-cockup flavour built right in.

They've both got the same problem - trained on "the whole internet" so they have ingested but not isolated a whole internet's worth of cock-ups

Related anecdote:

The Laundry Files have fans, and fans being fans, someone set up a Laundry fan wiki (on wikia) to keep track of everything.

So far so good.

So, being lazy and not having a "world book" of my own, I had occasion to go and poke around the fan wiki to remind myself of something. (I do not have the energy to re-read 1.6 million words -- and growing -- of prose every year before starting a new book.)

Now, back in 2010 I sold the TTRPG rights, and some very creative folks turned the Laundry Files into a Role Playing Game.

(So far so good.)

The problem with the TTRPG is that the developers then had to turn out some supplementary scenarios. And while they ran these past me for the official nod of approval, they did so after writing them, which made it really hard for me to raise a red flag and say "this is non-canonical, you can't do that". Worse, a chunk of the supplements were sent my way while dealing with a family medical emergency -- my father was in the ICU for three weeks, not expected to regain consciousness, then expected to be hemilaterally paralysed for life. (Spoiler: he was a tough old bird. He regained consciousness then learned to move his paralysed side again, and kept going for another six or seven years before dying of an unrelated ailment, aged 93.)

Anyway, the Laundry wiki is now hopelessly contaminated with apocrypha that I didn't invent, which is fine if you play the TTRPG (it's in the rule books and supplements) but is less than fine if you're me, looking for a refresher course in something I wrote in a hurry back in say 2008.

The problem with training GANs by hoovering up content off the internet is much, much worse. Cubicle 7 Games did decent quality control and emitted less material than I did, so the stuff I need is all there. Alas, Fandom.com is a Hotel California kind of set up -- folks can go in and create wiki pages and edit them, but there's no button labelled "download this whole slew of wiki pages to local storage". And the problem is only going to get worse if and when the 2nd Edition TTRPG comes out.

More generally, there is a strong style-flavour, which is quite rank although I have no idea how to begin to define it, about the way computer gadgets like these cock things up.

People are already writing apps / web sites which analyses essays and indicates the likelihood that ChatGPT wrote it. Aimed to profs and teachers.

Regarding song writers, I trust everyone here has read Nick Cave's commentary on a ChatGPT's "Nick Cave" song. TL;DR as a song writer, ChatGPT feels no pain, so he has no use for it at all.

I wonder which song writers would find it useful?

Re: 'What kind of talk is this?'

Not as bad as dialogue in some novels and even in movies (i.e., Princess Leia in the first Star Wars movie). This snippet comes across as comfort prose - easy to read, enough imagery and description of place, characters and situation that the reader's mind can imagine themselves there.

Overall, I think the toughest part will be the dialogue especially interspersing it into the overall action of the character. Apart from being utterable (mostly by avoiding tongue twisters and overly long or run on sentences), dialogue has to fit the ability of the character within that moment. If the character is human, he/she has to breathe at more or less regular intervals - even word thoughts while breathless will be different, shorter, more urgent.

There's also the fit of a character's way of speaking with where they are in the story and with whom. Pratchett was really great at using dialogue as a character dimension.

As for programming a ChatAI - rules based on Aristotle's 'The Poetics' (where in a story spoken words matter) and Shakespeare (choice of words affects the rhythm therefore the feel of the moment) would be preferable to stream-of-consciousness. Then again, loose form crappy ChatAI might be indistinguishable from stream-of-consciousness so some cutting edge nouvelle lit auteurs might use it to make some abstruse point or just to make money. (Sorta like applying a couple of coats of white paint on canvas, calling it 'art' and sticking a $XX,XXX price tag on it. This actually happened and you can see it at MOMA.)

https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/40/639

Pop music.

For some reason, I'm picturing a chatbot programmed on Danny Kaye's singing repertoire. Or, perhaps, that of a professional auctioneer....

levity leaven @ 40
As has been remarked upon, before in these many threads ...
"But what about artificial stupidity?"

Yes gods and little fishes! I wouldn't give it a high mark for English literature, either. Four words in that 'Shakespearian' text were not used in those senses in his time, and two don't occur in his works at all. Yes, I had to check up, but that text grated.

Have you read the average student's writing? That Shakespearian text would be a good result from most of the teenagers I teach. (And honestly, better than many of our English teachers would manage, based on reading their memos.)

ChatGPT lies. It fabricates references in academic papers, it's a glib and facile creator of untruths.

So the future of Republican politicians is chatbots?

(Thinking of Santos here, and how he's still supported by the party…)

How much does this costs at ChatGPT scale ?

The 'pro' version is rumoured to be coming at $42 per month, which guarantees access. I've also read that they pay Kenyans $2 per hour to validate input.

Take with the usual quantity of sodium chloride…

Remind me not to approach any tall buildings if there is any chance that you might be about.

?? Was that a joke, or do you disagree with by comments?

Mindless pop music.

Thinking of Santos here

Am I the only one who thinks of the movie "Zelig" when I hear about Santos?

People are already writing apps / web sites which analyses essays and indicates the likelihood that ChatGPT wrote it. Aimed to profs and teachers.

Which might be useful, depending on admin.

I recall one instance, when the internet was young, where I suspected an essay was plagiarized and found most of it online (kid had copied quite a bit from a Bermudan newspaper editorial). I was ordered by admin to mark the bits that weren't word-for-word matches as if the kid wrote them, even if he didn't know what the words meant. (Same principal insisted that I couldn't accuse kids of cheating if they were talking during a test, because I couldn't understand Russian so when they said they were talking about what to do after school I had to believe them. Even if they ended up with identical answers.)

This may be a local problem, but most of my colleagues have just given up. When online classes are held as equivalent to in-person classes, and a kid can attend an online class all year by logging in at precisely the start time, never interact or even log off, not turn anything in, and the teacher is told to provide a way for them to be granted the credit — why stress when clearly admin cares more about pass rate than academic integrity?

That bit didn't get into my article, because my former principal is vindictive and I didn't want her taking revenge against friends who still work at my old school (who I haven't talked to about the school, but she's been nasty for less reason before so I didn't want to risk it.)

The current generation of ML "deep learning" technologies distress me; ignoring threats to livelihoods, projecting the actual likely usages seems to have 80% negative cases. As evidenced by these discussions, the GPT3-associated technologies are good enough to produce glib but unreliable output. The most "productive" use is mass deployment of scamming chatbots and emulation of swarms of discussion on Social Media. This will improve Russia's reach for sowing misinformation by an order of magnitude.

And while Hollywood may get some novel uses out of "deep fake" technology of voice and video, it will further erode the public's ability to know (or care) whether video/audio evidence is meaningful. Even the existence of these technologies inevitably enables villains to repudiate anything they've said or done. (Think of the Vulgarian's cries of "fake news", but even more so.)

The neo-fascists have thrived on injecting lots of bad-faith content into the world, as dull-witted and distracted people lack the discipline and mental bandwidth to screen it out. How much worse will it be now?

Re: 'The neo-fascists have thrived on injecting lots of bad-faith content into the world, as dull-witted and distracted people lack the discipline and mental bandwidth to screen it out. How much worse will it be now?'

Okay - so how do you work around this? This tech isn't going to go away.

As for addressing lack of discipline and mental bandwidth -- not sure what you're getting at: people aren't working hard enough (lazy) or people are too exhausted to cut through the noise (lack of societal support)?

This sounds to me like fighting fire with RS5000 ACM cladding. https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/31/openai_tool_chatgpt_detection/

I'd be highly sceptical if any "app" that could reliably tell if text is ChatGPT or not.

From what I've read, at least part of how it was trained involved it producing text and a classifier giving it feedback on how probable it was that the text was human or AI.

The classifier also got feedback about how well it was doing. It used that feedback to get better at classifying.

Creating a race between the two, that improved them both.

So any "app" would have to be better than the multi million dollar classifier that's running on huge clusters with vast quantities of training data. Somehow I doubt it.

people aren't working hard enough (lazy) or people are too exhausted to cut through the noise (lack of societal support)?

I've decided that people of all levels of intellect and curiosity really want to hear things that reinforce their beliefs. And will take them as fact most of the time. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

waldo:

"Mindless pop music" <== prefix adverb being redundancy

So any "app" would have to be better than the multi million dollar classifier that's running on huge clusters with vast quantities of training data. Somehow I doubt it.

I also doubt it. That was kind of my point - comparing it to a combustable product in a fire-fighting context. Perhaps I should've just said "burning oil." The article notes a high failure rate. This is clearly a case of asymmetric warfare, but I neglected to make that point. Thanks.

Does ChatGPT have access to - and accessible memory of - every page on every book in Google Books, as well as every recorded newspaper, magazine, old time radio show script, TV show, comedian's act and monologue, song lyric, stage play and movie?

Are there any famous novels, stories, serials, etc. that were actually (or rumored to be) written by a committee of hack writers publishing under a pseudonym?

Can ChatGPT write music?

"ChatGPT, finish the complete works of every famous musician that died young starting with Mozart, Jimi Handrix and John Lennon."

Some say, "yes", but judge the output for yourself. GIGO applies.

https://twitter.com/anitakirkovska/status/1620453954269380612

"Audio is all you need?🔊 A lot of the latest AI models push the boundaries for music/audio generation. Here are 6 new models that were launched this week."

Oh, yes, but remember that I spent my time in academia, and am using slightly higher standards. For example, marking down schoolchildren for using 'accommodate' or 'juncture' would be unkind, but letting even first-year undergraduates get away with them would be very shoddy. They should bloody well have checked! And, as Pigeon says, there was a lot of such things, not just of vocabulary.

This not it an answer to your question, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki

So the future of Republican politicians is chatbots?

Seriously, I've been saying for a while now that what we've got in ChatGPT isn't Artificial Intelligence, it's Artificial Boris Johnson.

Am I the only one who thinks of the movie "Zelig" when I hear about Santos?

Zellig was fictional, wasn't he?

I prefer to think of Santos in terms of Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln (a thinly-disguised variant of who will hopefully be appearing in my next space opera, if I ever get the thing finished).

Pigeon wrote:
Remind me not to approach any tall buildings if there is any chance that you might be about.

?? Was that a joke, or do you disagree with by comments?

I believe it is a joke based on your physics test sheet 'Calculating Energy Conservations' that begins with the words "Mr. Prior drops a 4.5 kg steel ball…"

Anyway, I have a follow-up question to your precise instructions on essay writing. In the one with the most precise instructions (the one which returns six paragraphs instead of five) you make a blunder by writing in the third bullet point: 'Discoveries: What did he discover about biology that made him famous?', which apparently went completely unnoticed by ChatGPT. You don't comment on that fact. So my question: was that a deliberate blunder to test ChatGPT or an honest typo on your part (and you maybe didn't notice it yourself)?

Are there any famous novels, stories, serials, etc. that were actually (or rumored to be) written by a committee of hack writers publishing under a pseudonym?

Tons!

They still exist.

Your starting point on wikipedia is "house name". The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew are among the most famous novel series. (Unfortunately the term of art "house name" is hopelessly contaminated by real estate agents on google. Good luck finding anything useful via non-human-curated search.)

"Mr Prior drops a 4.5kg steel ball from the roof of a 75m tall building..."

Literally LOLROFHMS.

In his 1961 book The Silver Eggheads Fritz Leiber had all novels written by machine. The “authors” were people hired to look good in their pictures on the covers and media interviews. The books themselves were “wordwooze” (now an internet publisher who, I assume, knew of the book. Wordwooze was highly addictive but after reading it nobody could remember the contents and bought the next novel as soon as it was published. A classic addiction. ChatGPT could probably already do this (apart from the enjoyment and addition). That would need a little extra tweaking.

So, I have a fair bit of the material produced for the game.

What, exactly, did they get wrong? I'm curious about how to run a canonically accurate version of the game.

Ellery Queen was the pseudonym of many authors - including Jack Vance who wrote three novels published under that name.

Can't remember in full off the top of my head (it's a long time ago!) but stuff like depicting the Deep Ones as low-tech/no-tech spear-wielding aboriginals. (Compare and contrast with Ramona's van in "The Annihilation Score" which came out at around the same time as that supplement, the title of which I'm blanking on.)

Since Natural Stupidity, per Heinlein, is the only thing in the Universe more common than Hydrogen, I find the artificial variety superfluous to requirement.

That's why I love spam filters and hate "machine learning".

So any "app" would have to be better than the multi million dollar classifier that's running on huge clusters with vast quantities of training data. Somehow I doubt it.

I'm just guessing here. Since ChatGPT will produce multiple, similar, but non-identical responses to the same input query, I'd figured that the checking app did something like submitting the input multiple times, collected the outputs, and processed them somehow (presumably based on word patterns). The similarity cluster among ChatGPT outputs are then compared with the target text, and if it target falls near or within the cluster, it's flagged as a possible product of ChatGPT.

Whether this is the actual process or not I have no idea, but since a 22 year-old came up with it quickly, it can't be terribly complicated.

Duffy:

Tom Swift, Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, et al

then there's the infamous "Perry Rhodan" ... which I squirm in acknowledging having bought dozens... "sold approximately two billion copies" of about 3000+ installments...

I seem to recall a jibe from awhile ago that social media was about monetizing what friends and family used to do for people, often for free.

That makes a problem: if Facebook, for instance, is your major point of contact with people, whether it's family, friends, or client base, then you've got a single point of failure: Facebook. That may be a problem.

With regards to ChatGPT and similar operations, outsourcing writing skills to a media company seems like a bad idea if people become dependent on having it as a service, and don't develop the skills on their own. I agree that many people are so bad at writing that plugging a prompt into an AI probably helps them, but it would kinda suck if businesses skidded to a stop every time an AI was down for maintenance.

Really? I thought Ellery Queen was just two writers, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee. But Wikipedia says that they indeed licensed the name to other writers, so long as those writers did not use their character, Ellery Queen. Three novels with EQ as a character were written from detailed outlines provided by Dannay: Theodore Sturgeon wrote "The Player on the Other Side", and Avram Davidson "On the Eigth Day" and "The Fourth Side of the Triangle".

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:House_names

how do we know if there really is a Charles Stross participating or could it be chatGPT trained up as... strossGPT?

I've snarkily quipped before that most participants here never appear near the focal point, Charles Stross, and therefore can be modeled with relatively low-resolution AI. A few regularly manifest avatars near Charlie, such as Greg, and therefore need to be rendered in high resolution at least occasionally.

This Earth instance is one of those modeling, "What might Charles Stross have written if the Eschaton stories hadn't been runaway hits?" Unfortunately someone seems to be messing around with the background settings on this one; the "political plausibility" slider has been turned way down and we're getting total nonsense.

In the one with the most precise instructions (the one which returns six paragraphs instead of five) you make a blunder by writing in the third bullet point: 'Discoveries: What did he discover about biology that made him famous?', which apparently went completely unnoticed by ChatGPT. You don't comment on that fact. So my question: was that a deliberate blunder to test ChatGPT or an honest typo on your part (and you maybe didn't notice it yourself)?

Blunder. Thanks for pointing it out. I'll correct it. I have multiple versions of the essay assignment (one for each unit) and I accidentally copied the wrong one for the article.

It's got a handful of generic-SF-tending-vaguely-Strossian elements chucked into the penultimate paragraph, with no noticeable relevance to the rest of it. It's identified the two main associations - "plot/W&G" and "author/Charles Stross" - it's been asked for. Also, I'd guess there is a heck of a lot more gubbins about W&G scattered around the internet than there is about Charlie. So it's concentrated on the association it's got more material for and coughed up a conglomeration of plot elements associated with W&G. Then it's handled "author/Charles Stross" by TOADing up the concluding summary-of-setting paragraphs out of the blurbs off the back covers of Charlie's books, and tacking that on the end without caring whether or not it actually has any sensible connection with the stuff preceding it.

It strikes me in fact that it seems to be using much the same kind of methods that I remember using myself, mostly as a schoolkid, to satisfy some demand to spout guff on some given subject that I had negative interest in and seriously could not be fucking arsed with.

So with this one, noting that had I been set it at school, for both the positions of ${Wallace_and_Gromit} and ${Charles_Stross} the school would have picked people I couldn't give a rat's arse about/cordially detested/felt nauseated by the mere thought of reading/had no idea who they even were, because all schools always did that. I'd most likely have done something like:

• Who/what even are these people? Look in school library. 4 W&G books and a crappy encyclopedia article; one CS book with 14 of its 63 pages missing and nowt else. Right, that defines what my own relative amounts of output for the two points are going to be, and gives me "well that's all there was in the library sir" as an unarguable excuse.

• What do they do, what sort of things are they about? The W&G encyclopedia article would evaluate to "file under paint drying, ignore" if I wasn't under compulsion. Flick through the books, confirm impression. Flick through the CS book, get much the same impression. Right, fuck actually reading any of them then, it's coming out of the 5 back cover blurbs and the article.

• The "X did Y" thing? They seem to mix like oil and water, and the obvious unstated point of the assignment is to get us to produce a stable emulsion by inventing an appropriate and effective surfactant. Bollocks to that, far too much effort, they can have one floating on top of the other and it technically doesn't flout the exact wording of the assignment enough for me to expect adverse consequences or care that it's shit.

• The problem has now been reduced to an acceptably small degree of effort. Stir together the four W&G blurbs, dump the resulting greeny-brown mess on the paper and sprinkle with conspicuous words out of the CS blurb as a topping. 5 paras, hastily scribbled. Done.

By this means I would expect to hit a point comfortably enough within the first sigma of the class dross distribution to avoid any specific effort from the teacher to address the failing that I have done the whole thing entirely avoiding engaging my brain, and neither acquiring nor needing any greater comprehension of the subject matter or skill in the methods. And looking at the results, the robot seems to have done more or less exactly the same thing, although it probably didn't swear to itself quite so much in the process.

The comprehensively-specified Einstein biography assignment demonstrates another standard evasion: when there are that many detailed requirements, you can start to get away with pretending some of the more awkward ones weren't actually given. If you do all the rest nobody will care, especially if the omitted ones are silly to begin with. So the bit about the fashion environment in 1900s Germany gets quietly diverted to /dev/null.

Similarly with Einstein's achievements in biology. Never even heard of him having any, so bugger looking that up, I'll just answer as if it said "physics" and if challenged say I thought "biology" was a mistake. (I realise that in this case it actually was a mistake, but that doesn't change the point.)

The physics problems with stupid answers are close to being an evasion which is actually taught. At least we were; "don't get wound up if you can't, write what you can down so they can see you know what you're doing", "if you can state the methods correctly you'll still get some of the marks even if you don't do the specific calculations right", and similar assistive remarks. It doesn't always work, and it's counterproductive making up random numbers to try and take advantage of it, but the robot doesn't understand that and it's doing the "do what you can" bit pretty well.

So when it comes to the question of schoolkids using it to cheat with homework, perhaps it's not so bad. It seems to have either learned for itself, or perhaps been taught by its programmers whether deliberately or not, to be a homework cheat itself, not in the blatant sense of cheating by copying someone else's answers, but in the more subtle sense of cheating by evading the intellectual intent of the assignment and performing it entirely mindlessly to minimise effort, exploiting the failings of the assessment system to avoid having to trouble itself with actually learning anything from doing it. I'm not sure that it really matters too much whether a pupil who turns in something like that has actually concocted it personally or copied out something a robot has concocted. The amount of learning accomplished is zero in either case, and you could contend that getting a robot to do it is actually better for the prospects of learning at least some of the stuff over the long term, because the pupil isn't learning to hate the stuff and automatically reject anything connected with it through being constantly pissed off at having to be bored shitless with it.

If you do all the rest nobody will care, especially if the omitted ones are silly to begin with. So the bit about the fashion environment in 1900s Germany gets quietly diverted to /dev/null.

Yup. And expected for Einstein. There are deliberately way too many questions to fit into the required length, so no matter what you would be leaving something out.

Some of the other scientists in the assignment have less information about them, so it gives students something that they can find information on. And some students are much more interested in fashion/social history so it's a chance for them to write about something they find more engaging.

The assignment is mostly practice for the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test, which is so formulaic ChatGPT could probably ace it. (And is also totally not concerned with factual accuracy — so glib inaccuracies are rewarded more than clumsy truths.)

"if you can state the methods correctly you'll still get some of the marks even if you don't do the specific calculations right"… [the robot]'s doing the "do what you can" bit pretty well

Yup. That's why I long ago switched to weighting the method much more than the calculations (so a wrong method with perfect calculations earns no marks, while a correct method where two digits were transposed when copying doesn't fail because they got the wrong answer).

If the diagrams don't match the calculations, that is a big indication that the student either doesn't understand the concept and is blindly writing stuff down, or copied from somewhere (likely more than one source). For formative assessment I would ideally question them to figure out what they don't understand and go from there.

Assigning actual marks is always a bigger issue, because students and parents focus on the mark rather than on learning (cheating is just the end-point of a continuum). This is the case even in higher ed — one of my profs said about 10% of his students (in an elective course) were actually interested in the material, and the rest just wanted marks/credits towards their degree and enrolled because it was convenient/easy marks/fit their timetable. For required courses it's an even bigger problem. Doesn't help that admin (and guidance) care almost exclusively about students earning a credit and very little about what they actually learn.

I think one of the ways to improve education would be to remove marks/grades. I know teachers who are doing it and while I was initially skeptical I'm now convinced that it would be an improvement. It does, however, require an administration who supports it and is willing to stand up to parent bullying — which is rarer than you would think.

http://newsletter.oapt.ca/files/so-you-wanna-go-gradeless.html

One question I was given was on thermal expansion: given a uniform ring with a gap in it (and all relevant constants), at what temperature will the gap close?

I trusted my mathematics, and was the only one that got it right :-)

Not ChatGPT but definitely AI. Space.com reports possible radio telescope alien signatures from several stars.

https://www.space.com/machine-learning-seti-technosignatures

Question to ChatGPT: What is the plot of the unpublished script Charles Stross wrote for Wallace and Grommit?

One other thing catches my attention when reading the AI's output: It starts off strong and with a decent adherence to what it's supposed to be doing - and then wanders off into vagueness and doesn't really wrap up anything. That's not a composition failure mode unique to AIs but it's one that I've noticed happening a lot when AIs are given prompts like this.

Details are hard. A bored human could make them up:

In the center of town the village green was occupied by a monolith no resident had seen appear. A five-meter block of molecularly compacted cheddar resistant to any hand tool or hungry mouse available to the residents, it bore a mysterious inscription: I ᴀᴍ ᴛʜᴇ Aᴀʀᴅᴍᴀɴ; I ᴀᴍ ɴᴏᴛ ʏᴏᴜʀ Gᴏᴅ. I ᴀᴍ ᴅᴇsᴄᴇɴᴅᴇᴅ ꜰʀᴏᴍ ʏᴏᴜ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴇxɪsᴛ ɪɴ ʏᴏᴜʀ ꜰᴜᴛᴜʀᴇ. Tʜᴏᴜ sʜᴀʟᴛ ɴᴏᴛ ᴀᴅᴜʟᴛᴇʀᴀᴛᴇ ᴄʜᴇᴇsᴇ ᴘʀᴏᴅᴜᴄᴛs ᴡɪᴛʜɪɴ ᴍʏ ʟɪɢʜᴛ ᴄᴏɴᴇ. Oʀ ᴇʟsᴇ.

So when it comes to the question of schoolkids using it to cheat with homework, perhaps it's not so bad.

Forgot to address this. My base assumption for decades has been that anything done at home might have had assistance ranging from hints to active cheating, usually by the parents. (Every teacher I know has stories of parents coming in to complain about a mark they got on their child's assignment!) Knowing that I will likely get no support from admin I don't worry about it. Most of my marks come from work done in class, in front of me.

There's a 'tutoring service' just up the road that buys assignments/tests from students and sells copies to other students. Illegal, but the school system makes no effort to stop it, and enough parents are willing to pay for it that they stay in business.

So in summary, I don't think that it's a game-changer in high school, just a lower-cost, lower-quality variant fo what is already accepted by the system. Which is why I ended the article with KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON.

Presumably when you say "uniform" you mean not merely homogeneous but also isotropic? :-)

Most of my marks come from work done in class, in front of me.

Expanding to note that officially no homework is supposed to count towards a student's final mark. Yet if a student is doing poorly admin also wants them to be given alternate work they can complete at home for extra credit so they can pass the course. If a student knows an assignment is worth no marks they will not do it, and admin will ask why it is being assigned if it doesn't count. (Yes, the ability to think logically seems not required for administration.)

My solution for some topics has been practice booklets, with the answers, which I hand out with a goal (practice these until you can do five in five minutes with no mistakes). If a student doesn't do it I don't care, but if they fail a quiz on the same topic (often taken from the practice booklet) then I ask to see the booklet — which is usually blank. This gives me some ammunition if parents complain that material wasn't taught.

I should also note that I was available every day for an hour before school for extra help if students wanted to make an appointment for one-on-one tutoring. Useful for some students, and a CYA against others who told their parents I was refusing to answer questions (that they hadn't asked, because they hadn't shown up).

Yes. Remember that this was at an elementary class, and such subtleties were not taught.

Pigeon @ 74
Signor Galilei drops a 4.5kg Iron ball from a 55m tall building (!)

Howard NYC @ 62
Mindless pop music" <== prefix adverb being redundancy - Not ALWAYS
See also Retiring @ 84, who mentions - Theodore Sturgeon & Sturgeon's Revelation - which was that "90% of EVERYTHING is crap".
For "pop music" that's 99 or even 99.9%, but, very occasionally, someone, or some group, break the rule - yet it's the "Safe way to bet".
Par example on R4 last week, someone said something like: "Everyone knows at least on "ABBA" tune & loves it" - well NO, actually. I've never knowingkly heard more than about 20 seconds of any such & it's all shit.
YMMV

EC
IF it was being heated, the gap would get bigger, so the answer is how many degrees lower would you have to go to get the gap to close, yes?

As I've said before, I really want an AS. My late wife and I agreed on wanting one back in the nineties. An AS would handle what it knows correctly (the bodily part enhancement is email spam, delete), and the stuff it wasn't sure, "hey, boss, what should I do wit' dis?"

It would never try to guess what you wanted done with the unknown.

IF it was being heated, the gap would get bigger, so the answer is how many degrees lower would you have to go to get the gap to close, yes?

The size of the gap will change in absolute linear value as the temperature changes, but if it's say a 1 degree of arc gap then that angle won't change will it?

I'm sorry... are you implying that BoJo is not an artifical construct politbot?

Thanks, I didn't get that either. I was, perhaps, thinking of standing on one side of a tall building, when on the other side there was an alien who can *leap tall buildings in a single bound and then land on my side....

To stay in genre, Doc Savage.

Or, as my late wife referred to him, Perry Rodent.

Actually, I read the first several (4SJ brought them to the US). It was to Doc Smith, esp, IIRC, the Skylark series, then the Galactic Patrol, as Sword of Shannara was to Tolkien....

Ok, I can claim to actual co-locations to OGH, once at a Balticon, and then at his table talk (sorry again, Charlie, didn't mean to be like that) at Worldcon last Summer in Chicago.

Chatbots writing novels. Um, well... ok, the BSFS gives out the Compton-Crook award, for best debut novel from a small press. They submit, and members (who are pled with to read and rate) some of us do that. I d/l three a few days ago, figuring I might be able to get through them by a week from Sat, the deadline.

Well, I rated two of them in one day. 3 on a scale of 1-10. One of them was gun porn. As they say on a snarky site I hang out on, we see a story about a bunch of people were shot, and the shooter either shot or taken into custody in the news, and the snark response afterwards is, "but are the guns ok?"

The second... now, in the writing class I'm just finishing up from Odyssey Online, they encourage the use of "fresh language". Well... the preface made no sense, and then there was the first sentence of chapter 1. I copied it to my friend/author Alma Alexander, and her reactions was that her eyes were bleeding....

Either of those, a chatbot wwould have done as well or better.

Fortunately, the third was a good bit better, though heafvy on infodump, and a fourth is good, and worth reading.

The Perry Rhodan books were a lot of fun when I was a kid. I suspect that if I went back and read them I'd discover that they'd been visited by the suck fairy, but such is life.

True, but not enough to get a mark. The answer is 'never'.

There already exist large scale 'writing mills', mechanical Turk style, where people gin up a block of text on a particular topic for a nominal sum. Much of the commercial internet is absolutely full of this stuff, mostly done by cubicle workers in India or other low cost English speaking locales. Much of it is utter garbage, liberally sprinkled with whatever googlebait keywords the website operators have determined most likely to produce profits via clicks.

ChatGpt will likely displace a lot of that output, since it isn't very good anyway.

I posit a future in which future chatbots are 'trained' on the content of the internet, which becomes ever more full of value-free chatbot output, which follows a recursive process to become a vast, expensive and utterly valueless horror of meaningless dreck.

Substantive conversations such as happen on this site will still be possible, but finding them in the first place through a search engine will become ever more impossible.

Zellig was fictional, wasn't he?

Totally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelig

Zelig is a 1983 American mockumentary film written, directed by and starring Woody Allen as Leonard Zelig, a nondescript enigma, who, apparently out of his desire to fit in and be liked, unwittingly takes on the characteristics of strong personalities around him.

Worth a watch. Set in the 1920s US. Well done. Even though I've come to have a personal dislike for Woody Allen.

Mike Collins:

uhm... infomericals? sermons? feline holograms? rebuttals to twitter (eqv) flame wars? interstellar weather alerts?

"light to medium novae in the quadrant this century with a 90% near certainty of dark matter clumping around wormholes"

It starts off strong and with a decent adherence to what it's supposed to be doing - and then wanders off into vagueness and doesn't really wrap up anything.

Yeah: when I'm pitching a new book proposal to my agent that's roughly how I roll, too. (The end is strongly determined by the path the narrative took to get here, I'm a pantser not a plotter, so all I'm trying to get across is a bit of the flavour of what I'm aiming to accomplish, not the detailed roadmap.)

Duffy asked on February 1, 2023 10:34 in #65:

Are there any famous novels, stories, serials, etc. that were actually (or rumored to be) written by a committee of hack writers publishing under a pseudonym?

Wel, not hacks, and under their own names, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Came_the_Manatee

I ran into a similar problem when working at a university, where some of my students were doing a TAFE course (vocational training) rather than a uni course. For the uni course we were pretty invested in making sure that the people who passed deserved it; TAFE were much more concerned about passing people to keep their numbers up and the money coming in. Their reasoning was that a bad plumber simply didn't get as much work -- we tried to point out that a bad Enrolled Nurse could kill people but it never seemed to sink in sadly. As a result we were pushed to pass people who submitted papers that were clearly not written by then and/or could not do something as simple as check a blood sugar correctly, as two examples. Very demoralising.

I, too, claim a number of co-locations with Charlie (and Feorag, so there is a witness known to readers of this blog), mostly at BSFA Eastercons and the Satellite $Positive conventions. Neither Whitroth nor I claim to have be co-located with each other.

The only other poster I am likely to have co-located with is Bellinghman, and I don't know if that has happened.

Pigeon: Google Translate works remarkably well for languages with lots of example translations available, even totally dissimilar ones like Chinese into English, but it rapidly gets worse with more obscure ones; for example some of the things it does with Latin are brain-twistingly grotesque bits of serious what-the-fuckery. I hope I never get any of whatever it was the people it cribbed them off were on.

Latin translation: Google Translate opera egregie pro linguis cum multis exemplis translationum quae in promptu sunt, etiam prorsus dissimiles sunt sicut Sinica in Anglico, sed celerius deteriora sunt obscurioribus; exempli gratia, quaedam quae apud Latinos sunt, cerebri deridiculo deridiculo serio quid-frudico. Spero me numquam ullius rei, cuiuscumque fuit populus, qui eas agebat, detrahebat.

Reverse translation into English: Google Translate works brilliantly for languages ​​with many examples of translations available, even completely different ones like Chinese to English, but they get worse faster and more obscure; for example, some of the things that are among the Latins, the brain is mockingly mocking seriously what-fudi. I hope I never detracted from anything, regardless of the people who did it.

Until Pigeon went off on... flowery... turns of phrase, Google Translate was doing pretty well.

for pedalpunk try Sean McMullen SOULS IN THE GREAT MACHINE

EC @ 106
If you are looking to heat it ... of course not, so "never" is { One value of } "Correct" ...

Oh yes - I've personally met Charlie & Feorag several times & Nile & Bellinghman & I think, one or two others ....
Here's hoping we all live long enough for Glasgow '24, eh?

I've also co-located with Bellinghman (Eastercon, locations vary), Greg (Eastercon again, Londonshire area) and Nojay (many and often, back to about 1980) that I definitely know of..

Wallace written by Stross would be breathtaking...

Current applications?

Children's books - particularly in combination with AI art. It appears that at least some people are doing brisk business.

Assignment modeling

Sometimes students have no idea how to structure a formulaic writing assignments. ChatGPT does provide lousy, but well enough structured nonsense that a student can likely generate an appropriately structured essay quickly simply by following the structure. I'd guess they learn how to churn out homework level nonsense quicker with this approach.

To my knowledge I've only colocated with Robert P on our now annual cup of coffee when he comes to my neck of the planet to visit his mother.

Of course, I could have sat next to anyone else on here and not known it.

Re: 'Until Pigeon went off on... flowery... turns of phrase, Google Translate was doing pretty well.'

So this might make it easier (cheaper) to translate books into other languages which means better profits and maybe a better return for publishers and authors.

I can see this tech being useful for multinationals. Scenario: You have to get a PPT report translated into X languages for a presentation you're doing in a couple of days. Even if your org has a translation department, chances are they're swamped so you have to farm it out to some accredited translators. Very expensive real fast. Yes, the universal biz language is English but if it's an important report, you need to have it translated and vetted for local internal distribution - otherwise 'misunderstandings' (screw-ups).

Google translate ...

I've used this a few times but only for personal entertainment, i.e. translating lyrics or some comments in reference materials. Anyways, if you happen to be fluent in more than one language you can play a version of the telephone game with Google translate by having it translate back and forth a few times and then see how well that last translation resembles the original. Simple (straightforward) and consistent sentence structure and vocabulary/terminology usually help keep the meaning intact.

Customizing AI ...

At some point it should be feasible to order a custom writing style including vocabulary level by feeding only data from some pre-selected sources or that have really strong positive correlations with certain demo variables. (I'm guessing this is probably what happened with the papers submitted to science journals.)

There already exist large scale 'writing mills', mechanical Turk style, where people gin up a block of text on a particular topic for a nominal sum. Much of the commercial internet is absolutely full of this stuff, mostly done by cubicle workers in India or other low cost English speaking locales.

OpenAI used the equivalent when training ChatGPT to be nice.

OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021. Much of that text appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest.

One Sama worker tasked with reading and labeling text for OpenAI told TIME he suffered from recurring visions after reading a graphic description of a man having sex with a dog in the presence of a young child. “That was torture,” he said. “You will read a number of statements like that all through the week. By the time it gets to Friday, you are disturbed from thinking through that picture.”

OpenAI signed three contracts worth about $200,000 in total with Sama in late 2021 to label textual descriptions of sexual abuse, hate speech, and violence. Around three dozen workers were split into three teams, one focusing on each subject. Three employees told TIME they were expected to read and label between 150 and 250 passages of text per nine-hour shift. Those snippets could range from around 100 words to well over 1,000. All of the four employees interviewed by TIME described being mentally scarred by the work. Although they were entitled to attend sessions with “wellness” counselors, all four said these sessions were unhelpful and rare due to high demands to be more productive at work. Two said they were only given the option to attend group sessions, and one said their requests to see counselors on a one-to-one basis instead were repeatedly denied by Sama management.

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

Their reasoning was that a bad plumber simply didn't get as much work -- we tried to point out that a bad Enrolled Nurse could kill people but it never seemed to sink in sadly. As a result we were pushed to pass people who submitted papers that were clearly not written by then and/or could not do something as simple as check a blood sugar correctly, as two examples. Very demoralising.

Demoralizing, indeed.

That looks like a bad case of what I think of as "market reasoning" — the idea that the free market will correct all problems. Usually used to justify eliminating safety regulations (or avoid imposing them).

Easily shown to be not the case by the history of the FDA. Market forces didn't prevent the use of formaldehyde as a meat preservative, or arsenic dyes in children's candy, or…

Read Deborah Blum's book The Poison Squad, or watch the PBS documentary based on it, for an interesting (and somewhat alarming, for those of use with right-wing governments) account.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squad/

'I've also co-located with..."

So y'all are bosons (integer spin) rather than fermions (half-integral).

Interesting...

Paws @ 118
Well - next time, let's hope that I know who you are!

hmmm... rather interesting more interesting the second time I've read it... so... HMMM...

imagine what would happen if there'd been embedded AI (multiple AIs?) which ran on obsolete hardware and could not be ported off prior to sinking? simplest thing just ignore the AIs and drown 'em like a sack of kittens... but aircraft carriers are designed to handle brutal conditions and there's some quite brilliant coding in the mix of the AIs so in those last days before the sinking there's a bit of unauthorized construction and welding and re-cabling... not so much revenge motivated rather the deeply embedded directive to protect the Brazilian poeple even after death 'n decommissioning leads the ALs to all sorts of wacky adventures...

https://lite.cnn.com/2023/02/01/americas/brazil-ghost-aircraft-carrier-sinking-intl-hnk-ml

It starts off strong and with a decent adherence to what it's supposed to be doing - and then wanders off into vagueness and doesn't really wrap up anything.

Yeah: when I'm pitching a new book proposal to my agent that's roughly how I roll, too. (The end is strongly determined by the path the narrative took to get here, I'm a pantser not a plotter, so all I'm trying to get across is a bit of the flavour of what I'm aiming to accomplish, not the detailed roadmap.)

That's why I don't think this is going to be a useful way to detect AI prose; too many humans produce stuff like this.

It's fine for a human author to be a pantser. You are metaphorically wearing pants. Indeed, you know what pants are. For chatbots, there's no there there.

(This I believe: Anyone with multiple Hugo Awards is very good at telling worthwhile and coherent stories, even if they may have trouble articulating some details of the process.)

I, too, claim a number of co-locations with Charlie (and Feorag, so there is a witness known to readers of this blog), mostly at BSFA Eastercons and the Satellite $Positive conventions. Neither Whitroth nor I claim to have be co-located with each other

I've also been in the physical presence of Charlie and Feorag - but not you or Whitroth. They'd probably have noticed if an AI used the same avatar to render all three of us, right?

(Shades of my social circles in the '90s when we noticed the unhelpfulness of things like "Do you know $FOO? Tall guy, brown hair, wears glasses, knows a lot about computers?" That wasn't all of us but it was a lot of us.)

Here's hoping we all live long enough for Glasgow '24, eh?

If you haven't already, I hope you have time in Glasgow to get Charlie to introduce you to Kevin Standlee and his wife Lisa. I think the three of you could spend a while geeking out about trains.

Did you already see their Railway Myths, Legends, and Stories videos?

The only other poster I am likely to have co-located with is Bellinghman, and I don't know if that has happened.

I think we may have met once at a BSI meeting down in Chiswick. My wife (who doesn't share my surname) has been in meetings at Cambridge with you more than once. Since both you and she are now retired, that won't happen any more.

Vulch we've encountered a number of times as fellow Ingress players.

I think the first time I met Paws was just after I'd heard my mother had died, so I was not terribly social right then (it was Good Friday evening, and there was fuck all that could be done before the other side of Easter, so we stayed in Bradford).

Greg is usually at London-based Eastercons, and we have friends in common too.

Nojay is another congoer, who we last saw in Buxton

We've chatted with Nile more than once

And of course, Charlie and Feòrag, the latter not always in Charlie's company. (One case was doing a Melbourne pub crawl while Charlie was having to do promotional stuff in the Crown Casino, back during the 2010 Worldcon.)

It applies equally if you are cooling it - see Vulch (#98) - unless you have discovered a material that shrinks to nothing at absolute zero.

Bellinghman
"BSI" as in "British Standards Institute" ??
Their Now-retired Company Secretary, one Geoff Strawbridge is a longstanding friend of mine - do you know him? { Also active in CAMRA }

Yes, precisely. The building is on top of Gunnersbury station, which is a right bugger to get to from Cambridge.

?

3 trains an hour, journey time 2 hours according to NR. CBG -> FPK/TOM -> HII -> GUN.

Or for only one change, CBG -> SRA -> GUN, which NR won't show you directly, so you have to look it up in 2 stages. About 2 and three quarter hours, 5 trains per hour but some of them are very close together in time so it's effectively more like 2 with options to wait for the next one if this one is too full.

Using the Underground, CBG -> LST -> anywhere between Tower Hill and Gloucester Road -> GUN; or CBG -> KGX -> Chiswick Park and probably walk to GUN rather than change again to go 1 stop. Lots of tph to KGX and plenty to LST.

Looks pretty good to me, indeed a lot better than I was expecting.

It's a trick question. It says "when does it close" and gives you a pile of constants and data to work it out with in order to make you think there actually is something to work out and waste your time slogging through calculations, when in fact the answer is "never" without having to work anything out at all.

Children's books - particularly in combination with AI art. It appears that at least some people are doing brisk business.

The children I have encountered are quite discerning, and know the difference between a decent book and a crap one. Their tastes do not align with mine but they definitely have them. Maybe it's possible to get AI generated drek past their parents but I can't see them putting up with it.

I've been in Charlie's presence once. Actually exchanged a couple of words with him while he was signing a copy of The Delirium Brief.

Robert Prior and I both live in Ontario, so it's conceivably possible that we've both been in the same place at the same time. However, how would we know?

All that aside, I'm now intensely curious as to what our gracious host would do if he was really asked to write the script for a Wallace and Gromit short.

While it may have improved since I did it, it took longer than that, in practice, and I found the underground least crowded (at rush hour!) and most comfortable. That was despite the link to Gunnersbury being irregular and unreliable. Nobody I knew took Silverlink more than once ....

what our gracious host would do if he was really asked to write the script for a Wallace and Gromit short.

Politely decline, and advise them to look for an actual scriptwriter.

Hint: I do not write plays, poetry, TV or film scripts, TTRPG manuals, or comic scripts. These are all different skills and while some of my aptitudes are probably transferable it's probably not a great use of my time.

(About a decade ago I got sucked into a BBC2 attempt to reboot Doomwatch. I learned what BBC2 drama scriptwriters get paid. Turns out I'd have been taking a 50-70% pay cut. It was worth doing for the credentials only if I wanted to be able to pitch my own TV/film book adaptations, and I was into it for the technical challenge -- Doomwatch was ground-breaking in 1972-74 but 40 years later the conceptual framework needed a huge update -- but in the end it went nowhere. The producer I was working with -- that's BBC-speak for what the US media-world call a director -- had a play go gold in the West End and bailed.)

The only bit of the Doomwatch experience I'm keeping is an acronym I'm working in to the later New Management books. By 2017 the Laundry has been dissolved: it no longer exists as a Ministry of Defense agency. Its replacement is a full scale Department with a cabinet minister in charge: the Department for Existential Anthropic Threats. ("DEAT -- the H is silent".)

"...Google Translate was doing pretty well."

It was doing pretty well at reversing its own transformation, but it's ruddy awful Latin, even excluding the bits that are entirely wrong. It's basically English written with Latin words, similar to what might be produced by a novice who has learnt the basic rules of Latin grammar, but applies them (clumsily) in an English manner due to not having learned how the Romans themselves applied them yet.

Again, I suspect that reflects what it's found to extract the patterns from. There are plenty of standard translations of the well-known Latin authors on the net - Horace and Juvenal and Virgil and all them lot - so it does fine with something it recognises as an actual quotation, but there are big differences between the ways all those authors use the language - much greater than the differences between Charles Dickens and Charles Stross, for example - so it's not a great base to generalise from; on top of that, a lot of those famous authors were writing poetry, and Latin poetry is all about exploiting the grammatical rigidity to wildly reshuffle sentences without changing the meaning, which of course makes things even worse. For "generic" Latin with translations, I guess it's pretty much limited to people learning Latin posting basic exercises they've done, errors and all, for human scrutiny, and so its own attempts at generic translation come out looking pretty similar.

LONG time since I've done any of this, so cba to do more than one sentence, but I reckon it would be better as...

Google Translate linguas multis versorum exemplis inveniendis egregie versat, et discrepantes ut anglicam sinicamque, sed celeriter ignotioribus deteriorat.

...but none of you have been in the same room as me...

...so do I exist? or am I the latest iteration of wertenteilGPT trained upon the collected scribblings of a guy who died a decade ago and lives on as a ghost in the virtualized machine...?

indeed will that be our fate and this blog's eventual doom once chatbots get cheaper-faster-clever(er)...?

screw that... I'm ordering in a pizza with a bottom shelf bottle of vodka... booze and starchy-greasy-gooeyness can suppress my worries about being replaced by a chatbot... till I scrap the cardboard

The children I have encountered are quite discerning, and know the difference between a decent book and a crap one. Their tastes do not align with mine but they definitely have them. Maybe it's possible to get AI generated drek past their parents but I can't see them putting up with it.

I suspect you could optimize a GPT to produce adequate formulaic fiction that satisfied the target audience, no matter what their age. It might take a fair bit of input/tweaking for a while, but it would eventually get there.

The AI-generated childrens' book in the news was written/illustrated with a lot of input from the creator, and intended as a present for a friend's children — who apparently liked it.

https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-midjourney-ai-write-illustrate-childrens-book-one-weekend-alice-2023-1

I suspect you could optimize a GPT to produce adequate formulaic fiction that satisfied the target audience, no matter what their age. It might take a fair bit of input/tweaking for a while, but it would eventually get there.

It would get there at first. But readers like novelty, and after a while they get bored if you don't ring the changes. When you publish a successful book the first thing your editor will say is "that sold well, now write me another just like it -- only different". By which they mean, they want to experience the same sense of novelty, which you simply can't provide if you recycle the exact same characters and plot all over again.

But readers like novelty, and after a while they get bored if you don't ring the changes.

How long is "a while"? Harry Turtledove retold WWII how many times, in different guises? It was successful enough to pay for his childrens' college…

With a sufficiently large number of characters and plots (not to mention settings), I suspect the permutations would be enough to keep a fair number of people interested enough to keep returning.

EC
"Sliverplonk" is the name that must not be mentioned ... Fortunately, all their ex-services are, now, almost-infinitely improved.

Just saw this in the news.

Inmates should be able to donate organs or bone marrow in exchange for reduced time in prison, according to a proposed bill in Massachusetts.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64488678

Not certain how this can be squared with "informed consent", but then I understand so little of American thought nowadays…

"By which they mean, they want to experience the same sense of novelty, which you simply can't provide if you recycle the exact same characters and plot all over again."

Technically true as stated, but the degree of variation that is required to sell craploads of books doesn't seem to be very great. Look at Enid Blyton pumping out endless minor variations on "group of n kids + 1 pet animal discover a criminal gang and bust it up". Or for adult literature, PG Wodehouse: 4 sets of characters x 5 plots = 20 novels (and none of them are funny, whatever anyone says).

Inmates should be able to donate organs

Now, to make more inmates! Jail time for jaywalkers! (cf. Larry Niven's The Jigsaw Man)

Robert Prior:

the "prison industrial complex" in US is notorious for so many things there's no room to list 'em all...

this is one more being added, assuming this passes the stink test in front of judges... the 'moral hazard' being these prisoners are going to be pressured into donating...

please note to effectively complete any tissue graft, there has to be rather precise matching (starting with basic blood type then branching off into ever fuzzier aspects of protein markers) if the patient receiving the tissue is to have a long enough life extension to warrant the misery and expense of the surgery (and follow up treatment)...

while there are medications effective in suppressing rejection in cases of not-quite-precise-match there are horrid problems starting with expense and then continuing into life quality side effects and long term damage to other organs... then there's the nightmare of immo-suppression leading to opportunistic infections and possibly cancer... so "rather precise matching" is the objective aimed at via pre-screening potential donors long before there are patients in need of tissue grafts...

which means if that patient is deemed 'high value' due to some set of attributes (young-ish, powerful family, photogenic, et al) wheres as the donor is deemed low value' due to being a convicted felon there will be pressure placed upon the warden to place more pressure on the convict with that best available match to cough up a kidney lest there be an unfortunate riot during which both kidneys get shanked...

Good point about artificial stupidity. ChatGPT could almost be invented for troll farms. Doesn't have to be paid, never gets tired.

How long is "a while"? Harry Turtledove retold WWII how many times, in different guises? It was successful enough to pay for his childrens' college…

You called it yourself with the "im different guises".

The WWII remix with added rather stupid alien space lizards flailing around in the middle was amusing enough for a while (although I didn't get on with the final book in the series -- it went in a necessary direction, but didn't deliver full closure).

Then there was "Stalin, but with Necromancy", and "what if the Confederacy didn't collapse in 1865 and most of a century later the Slaveowner's Treasonous Rebellion: Round 2" (and then Round 3) follow the patterns of WW1 and WW2?

Confession: I like Harry, but I prefer his standalones and historicals more. By the second of those series I baled after book 1 (and never touched the third series).

If you have the intestinal fortitude, go to Amazon and sign up for Kindle Unlimited for a month. It's about $10, and if you've got and Android or iOS device (or a Mac or a PC) there's a free reader app to download and read ebooks on. You get up to 20 three books at any time; finish one, return it, and get another. Now start trawling through the recommendations, or go deep diving on keywords like "alpha/omega", "pack", "dragon", "princess", "urban fantasy", "witch", "magic school" ...

After a while it all begins to blur into a sort of beige extruded urban fantasy product of uniform if bland texture. There are nuggets of rancid shit embedded in it: there are somewhat fewer (but a non-zero number of) gemstones as well. However, the overall feel is indeed what Leiber described as "wordwooze".

I was in the WSFS meeting in Chicago, where we were beat out over the insane new rule about "selling WSFS memberships, then adding attending". So I saw Kevin Standlee, SMOF....

I would just like to refer you to Paulette's experience during interrogation in Dark State, where threats are made, of extraordinary rendition ... for spare body parts.

"These are different skills", hell, yes. A very old acquaintance of mine (I'm not sure I still consider him a friend, given our political differences, US politics) has more than one tried to get me to write a script, and I try to tell him that, and he doesn't get it.

In the same room? I don't know. Back in '90, Bob Lipton took me to a Lunarians meeting (where it turned out I knew half or two-thirds of the members), I've been to a couple of Heliospheres, and I always go to Philcon, so if you've been to any of those....

Into Darkness was a Turtledove series I bought as soon as each paperback came out. Not interested in some other, and not interested in his, or someone else's, US Civil War novels.

WRT Latin translation, it occurs to me that there's a long history of post-Classical Latin, namely Ecclesiastical Latin. Training your AI on that might be interesting, though not, I suspect, very useful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin

It didn't affect just the USA. The contaminated blood scandal was caused by the UK gummint saving money by buying USA blood products, and infecting a huge number of people with HIV and HepC.

That Latin was used for all scientific and many other purposes up until Newton's time, across all of Europe. It would certainly be useful if you were writing a mediaeval fantasy involving magical incantations,

I liked "Down in the Bottomlands", but almost everything he has written seems to belong to genres I dislike. While there may be a few standalones I would like, the chances of a purchase being one are not great. It's a pity.

as Bruce Sterling put it all too well, "the street finds its own uses for things"

slippery slope... nope... we've slid down that long ago...

the only aspect of "Dark State" that did not ring true was the pace in the interrogation scenes... slower the pace there's ever worsening pysch pressure... I guess there was demands to get answers sooner than later...

for anyone keeping score at home... prisoners are:

(a) cautionary tale to anyone without a decent lawyer or escape route to a place accepting political refugees (Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc)

(b) semi-involuntary peasant labor in factories inside the gray walls (China, USA, etc)

(c) semi-voluntary participants in testing of medications (China, USA, etc)

(d) so why not treat 'em as a source of spare parts for those in dire need with high quality insurance coverage and political clout? (RUMORS include: China, India, Iran, N. Korea, and USA)

after all, "profit" is in where you have control over a scarce resource and a demand for it to warrant the necessary effort to effectively steal-demand-harvest-purify-transport "it"

and none of them are funny, whatever anyone says

There we must agree to disagree.

as Bruce Sterling put it all too well, "the street finds its own uses for things"

I believe that was Gibson, not Sterling? Anyway, you're point is well taken.

That Latin was used for all scientific and many other purposes up until Newton's time, across all of Europe. It would certainly be useful if you were writing a mediaeval fantasy involving magical incantations,

The Rivers of London series works with Thaumaturgical Latin quite well.

Another place "Latin" gets used quite a lot is in the life sciences. Within the field this leads to silliness, in a way that seldom makes it into novels.

Recent example: a friend of mine out working in the desert near $Military base posted a picture of "A modern thunderbird." My response was "Gashawk, probably some member of the Petroligulpidae from the silhouette." They posted a close-up picture (it was flying pretty effing low), and my response was "Looks like Globodominus septendecimus. Apparently they're declining in the wild." Only a few people found it funny of course, but that's how some real scientists goof around when no one's watching.

On a techie mailing list I'm on, a few years ago there was an extensive discussion of octopi v. octopuses (Latin v. Greek root).

I believe that, if you are playing that game, it should be octopodes.

After a while it all begins to blur into a sort of beige extruded urban fantasy product of uniform if bland texture.

And wouldn't that that be just the market that a authorGPT bot would be aiming at…

I once had a several-decades-long collection of Analog magazines (long-ago donated to a nephew). I ended my subscription when I realized I was able to figure out the plot of most of the stories after less than a page. (Didn't help that the magazine's politics was drifting rightward as mine was drifting leftward.) Yet the subscribers were paying for that, and indeed were unhappy with fiction that challenged them to think.

My father liked mysteries, and for Christmas one year I got him a subscription to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. He tactfully let me know that I shouldn't renew the subscription — the writing was formulaic and the mysteries weren't very mysterious. yet again, the magazine was able to stay in business for a long time with such writing.

When I was a kid, there were many books of adventure stories set in WWII itself. Formulaic, with very limited settings and limited characters, and yet popular enough to get published with sequels.

I'm not convinced that 'novelty' is essential. A certain level of unpredictability for dramatic tension, sure — but formulaic fiction seems to manage without novelty in the sense of 'something new'.

"I once had a several-decades-long collection of Analog magazines"

Previously Astounding.

I think that Astounding and a few other pulps had a considerable influence on the culture of the 20th Century, present readership included. It would be nice to have a complete archive of those.

It was decided that for English usage, the correct plural was octopusses.

Feel free to picture a cat with eight limbs....

Scott Sanford noted on February 2, 2023 at 09:51 in #129:

I've also been in the physical presence of Charlie and Feorag - but not you or Whitroth. They'd probably have noticed if an AI used the same avatar to render all three of us, right?

I've also been in the physical presence of Charlie in Powell's City of Books, and again at the 2016 Westercon. I've colocated with Scott numerous times, and hope to again at GameStorm next month, Great Bird of the Galaxy willing. Scott would be best equipped to attest to my artificial intelligence, or natural stupidity, until Glasgow '24.

I'm going to have to organize a party/meet-up at Glasgow next year, aren't I?

With all of these co-locations and missing, with OGH's permission, I'd like to propose that we have a get-together Thursday evening at Worldcon in Glasgow in '24, for those of us there. As I understand cons over there don't have room parties, I assume this would mean the hotel bar.

That was my first and, to date, sadly, my only Worldcon. Got to the Dealer's Room on the first day in time to discover that the Foglio's had already sold out all the stock they brought, but did get to chat with them at least. Almost got a Shaun Tan drawing and met/spoke to/was in proximity to many very cool and awesome authors. Was kissed by George Martin, passed Alastair Reynolds on the escalator and attended a panel that included Charlie and, from memory, Jay Lake.

As I understand cons over there don't have room parties

Cons do have room parties, but the Glasgow worldcon isn't hotel-based -- it's being held at the SECC, a big-ass international conference centre (with multiple hotels scattered around). The nearest hotel to the venue is the Crowne Plaza (which actually connects to it directly via indoor corridors) but most folks won't be staying there. The hotel has a bar in the lobby, and there will also (this being a UK convention) almost certainly be a real ale bar, BUT (big caveat coming) COVID19 ain't over and I'm not optimistic about the wisdom of hanging out in a mostly-unmasked area with lots of talkative people from all over the world. On the other hand, the SECC is fairly close to the river Clyde: on the gripping hand, it's going to be August in Glasgow so the weather will the changeable with a high probability of random showers.

Finally: as a local-ish author I'm going to be a target of opportunity for panels, so can't guarantee availability for any given one-hour slot.

Rbt Prior @ 148
It's the oxymoron: "American thought" that does it ....

Kardashev -I had about a hunderd or so of those, but I sold them ....

Charlie @ 173
* Yes, you are!* - sign me up right now.

whitroth
THURSDAY?
Ok, I'll have to come up a day earlier .....

for English usage, the correct plural was octopusses

Or in the USA, octopussies?

I'm thinking octopendants or octopedants depending on orientation. Physical orientation, an octopus walking on something is octopedant, but obviously if it's hanging from something...

Charlie Stross:

I'm going to have to organize a party/meet-up at Glasgow next year, aren't I?

if only to prove you're you and not a chatbot...

though it is feasible you are simply the fleshy public shown face for the strossGPT which is kept chained up in a windowless concrete bunker somewhere far off the highway toiling upon manuscripts odd 'n arcane

~Sighs~ I do hope Niven wasn't right about organ donation as a dystopia. The worldbuidling in his "Gil of the ARM stories" was not remotely pleasant.

Yes. Gibson.

No, octopodes are sets of four antipodes aligned along a plane.

~Sighs~ I do hope Niven wasn't right about organ donation as a dystopia. The worldbuidling in his "Gil of the ARM stories" was not remotely pleasant.

Technically no. What he's talking about was known to be impossible when he wrote it.

Organ transplantation has its own forest of little dystopias, along with some real life extensions. Yes, prisoners could be exploited for organs, I suppose, but the quality would kind of suck. As a punishment, breaking up someone for parts would be pretty wasteful. Also (black humor), various municipalities are trying to cut back on the amount of organic waste going into landfills, so dumping unused convict parts would contribute more to methane emissions than to extending the lives of citizens. (/black humor).

I think a bigger problem isn't organ donation, it's surplusing people, telling them they're of no use, that they're on their own, and tossing them in a slum, then proceeding to ruin whatever it was they'd been doing through ignorance and greed. We do that entirely too much.

One question I was given was on thermal expansion: given a uniform ring with a gap in it (and all relevant constants), at what temperature will the gap close?

(and all the other replies to this original post)

It depends on the material. As long as the material is below its kindling point, the gap will close at a temperature above the melting point and below the boiling point.

various municipalities are trying to cut back on the amount of organic waste going into landfills

Why would you send fresh meat to landfill? Even pet food would be better, but I'm sure there's a market for "ethical meat pies" or something similar.

Why would you send fresh meat to landfill? Even pet food would be better, but I'm sure there's a market for "ethical meat pies" or something similar.'

Soilant Green! Best cannabis fertilizer on earth. Also works on hemp, kudzu, and Japanese knotweed.

One thing I noticed was that, if you search for English children's books with significant female and/or Chinese representation, there's a real dearth. Almost certainly lots worse for smaller minorities. Well, that's true up and down the age chain...

And, a lot of that tends to be driven by market size. But, there's an underserved market for literature with targeted audiences, whether they be exotic pornography or children's books about a Jamaican family. ChatGPT, or its successors, will likely reduce costs enough at adequate quality to serve those markets. I guess children's books first because image generation from text is currently arguably somewhat better than a mediocre human artist.

When I was a kid, there were many books of adventure stories set in WWII itself. Formulaic, with very limited settings and limited characters, and yet popular enough to get published with sequels.

I missed those. (In the US.) But I do remember a clutter of TV shows set in WWII on TV during the 60s. Some farcical (Hogan's Heroes), some not (12 O'Clock High), and many formulaic (Combat!). Even as a kid it struck me that many of these shows lasted 2 or 3 times as long as the period they were set in. Especially Combat! which was set in the US action in western Europe. The series ran for 4 or 5 years.

As a side note, my father thought many of these things not worth much time except for 12 O'Clock high. He flew as a waist gunner on B24s and I got the impression that for a TV series he thought it was a reasonable depiction of things. Sanitized for TV viewing at the time.

It would be nice to have a complete archive of those.

I have a very large pile of Analog. My wife keeps asking why. My thought is to re-read them when I'm doddering and forgetful and then they will be entertaining all over again.

I have an urge to find the 4 issues that got me hooked on SF back around 64 when I was in grade school. Incredibly racist (I could see at at age 10) first contact story. Later I learned that this was a typical thing for JC.

Feel free to picture a cat with eight limbs....

Sorry. My mind heads off to "My name is Bond, James Bond"

Just saw this in the news.

Inmates should be able to donate organs or bone marrow in exchange for reduced time in prison, according to a proposed bill in Massachusetts

Silly season for state laws in the US. Every January there is a pile of such things introduced in various state legislatures. Mostly red meat for a group of odd ball constituents. They never go anywhere. And yes both side do such. Although the craziest ones tend to lean R.

In the US most all state legislatures meet starting in January every year or two. And all the folks go got elected saying they'd do $thiscrazything introduce bills. 99.99% get printed up, put in the record, and vanish till needed again for the same reason.

I bet if someone wants to dig there is a web site somewhere that collects such things. There was an article in a Texas newspaper a couple of weeks ago summarizing some of the more, ah, interesting ones filed there. Like dissolving the city government of Austin and making it rule by a committee reporting to the state legislature.

As to the specifics of that bill. Even if the courts upheld it, the result would be nothing. As H pointed out the likelihood that a long term prisoner having body parts of a quality to be usable is much less than useful. Plus it would require the entire US public donor system to toss out their rule book as to how organs can ethically get into the system.

Not going to guess how many non public donor organs get transplanted in the US. I'm sure it's above 0. But 1000s or even 100s would surprise me. Way too many things to keep secret for all but the uber rich who could set up their own mini hospital. But even then it would likely be staffed by people from other countries to avoid paper trails. Just equipping such a thing would leave a big trail for some aspiring scandal sheet web site to follow.

if only to prove you're you and not a chatbot...

I've been to pub meets with my World of Warcraft guild across Europe for about 16 years now, and there are still rumours that the head honcho has never turned up in person, just sent the same actor impersonating her every single time.

Ok, I'll have to come up a day earlier .....

You'll need to be there on Wednesday if you want to go on Feorag's traditional pre-worldcon pub crawl.

...there are still rumours that the head honcho has never turned up in person, just sent the same actor impersonating her every single time.

Wow, Kevin should try that. >grin<

But you have to give props to the guy who plays Ben Yalow. He turns up on time, stays in character, and has been playing the role capably for many years now.

David L:

guess how many non public donor organs get transplanted

dude... paperwork is the ally of obscuring the sourcing of stuff... witness at this very moment the side-stepping of sanctions by simply adding a (very) temporary primary destination to a cooperative warehouse in a neutral nation's seaport followed by a secondary leg to a Russian seaport...

only it is not necessary to do that for less carefully tracked shipments on freighters which whilst out on the high seas simply get re-routed under another identifier in one or another ship registry bureaucracies...

ditto for human tissue... just don't make a fuss when you check in to get a new kidney sewn in and be polite to the nurses and pre-pay the sizable 'consulting fees' charged by hospital administrators for 'special services'...

there will be creditable paperwork to distract anyone watching on a given day who otherwise might find out you were supposedly ranked as #7612 on the waiting list due to age-alcoholism-obesity-rare-blood-type... yet here you are being shaved as part of a briskly efficient pre-surgical routine which will have you wheeled into the operating room a mere two hours after arrival...

then a month after you are safely-happily-healthily discharged from hospital the originating paperwork (and lab tests and doctor notes and nurse clerical crap and meal choices) will all get assembled into a file folder which will then be tragically misplaced (but never destroyed) making impossible to perform an audit any time other than during that one month post-discharge...

have you ever wondered why hospital keep replacing their recordkeeping software and (in old days as well still today) all paper-based records are stored in some shabby warehouse where mold-rats-rain can reach?

no administrator wants records to linger for too long... just long enough to demand payment from patients and/or insurance companies... after which an unpredictable, open-ended resource for lawyers to demand as part of "civil suit discovery" and/or prosecutors seeking convictions (and resulting headlines)...

keep in mind, on any given day in a hospital there will be between three and twelve surgical procedures in each operating room (24H/7D never idle)... so if there are ten operating rooms who has the dogged determination to audit all those 30 (120?) procedures for irregularities? and then do it again the next day? every day for 365 days in each year? and for how many years of dull tedious 'nothing burgers'?

my guess is at least 10% (not ten) of all tissue transplants are entangled in varying degrees of irregularities... some politician or executive has a care accident, not seen for three weeks due to a supposedly slow recovery due to minor complications but was it a car crash or was there a replacement liver stitched in under that surgical scar?

there's always been a vague sense of hundreds (maybe thousands) of people disappearing weekly...

all that's necessary to determine tissue match is a blood sample... and how many Americans get routine blood testing done? how often does some portion of those blood samples get sent out to testing facilities outside a doctor's office rather than done on site? what actually happens behind those windowless walls?

quietly followed up with a quiet disappearance once there's a wealthy client matching up...?

Let's just say I think you're way off base. If I say more I may get carded.

I agree: I think Howard NYC is excessively paranoid -- at least about transplant surgery in the west: China is rather different (I've heard rumours of prisoners sentences being "upgraded" to capital punishment specifically because they were a good tissue match for a high-up Party member in need).

But hospitals in the US and places like the UK and anywhere in the EU are serious about medical record retention if only because litigation can show up years after the event and they may need to prove that they didn't do whatever they're being sued over. And medical records in particular have potentially got a life cycle as long as a human being (unlike, say, tax records where you're only required to retain detailed transaction records for a decade in case of an audit).

I guess children's books first because image generation from text is currently arguably somewhat better than a mediocre human artist.

We considered quoting the possibly apocryphal remark by a park ranger on the difficulty of design bear-proof garbage containers because of the considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists in the ChatGPT article, but decided to leave it out in the interests of not offending administrative sensibilities.

But hospitals in the US and places like the UK and anywhere in the EU are serious about medical record retention

Most of the US, maybe all of it, has a system where you can check a box to be an organ donor and it be on your driver's license card and in the state online records system. So legally if you show up dead at a hospital or die there and the box is checked they can harvest your organs. But in reality that check box only determines how the hospital staff approaches finding your nearest relatives and starting the conversation about getting their permission for donation. They have no interest in dealing with a screaming spouse/parent or a family lawyer threatening to sue because they disagreed with the check box.

Then you have people like my late mother. She was firmly convinced that since they kept brain dead people's heart and lung operating the organs were always harvested from people who were still alive and might recover. Sigh.

Charlie Stross & David L:

my father had drawn out cardiac decline, multiple surgeries, frequent hospitalizations... from 1974 till his death in 2001... joke made by ICU nurse at [redacted] hospital was he'd met her just before going out on maternity leave in 1977 and she shared with him pictures of her daughter all the way thru high school graduation...

based upon our family's copies of his accumulated records he was in and out of [redacted] hospital for overnight stays, emergency treatment, outpatient care and tests (OMG the blood tests)... and across three decades [redacted] hospital replaced their recordkeeping system more than a dozen times, in fits-and-starts... differing departments having differing needs and thus not always handshaking effectively between Billing, Outpatient, ER (US eqv to UK A&E), Pharmacy, Post-Op, Pre-Op, Labs, et al... by my estimate his insurance paid for over 300 nights of in-patient stays... and yet every time they switched systems somehow his records from the old systems never migrated onto the new systems without one of us physically meeting with a senior administrator time 'n time again to insist upon it being done with verification...

entire years of treatment were 'misplaced'... it was brutally un-funny whenever some executive attempted to snow me with technobabble, each successive attempt to hand wave vaguely at "computers" as the culprit and then I'd ask technical questions -- I've been coding for pay since I was 17 in 1978 -- and they find themselves utterly derailed... one of my lawyer cousins (in an extended family of about 200 adults there's 14 who are lawyers) sat me down to explain it was not incompetence but rather deliberate efforts at seemingly reasonable mistakes to misplace as much of my father's records as feasible given multiple treatment errors... not just him... at [redacted] hospital there'd been an eye popping number of whoooopies leading to crippling injuries and outright death... my lawyer cousin assured me compared to other similarly sized hospitals this one had a relatively lower rate of whoooopies... much fewer doctors losing their licenses and/or encouraged to relocate to a low population state like Utah where there was so many empty slots for doctors they'd be welcomed despite a high rate of malpractice claims against 'em...

it is not paranoia... it is grim personal observation... as to my snarky remarks about the wealthy getting preferential treatment in receiving scarce tissue transplants... I will refer you to the hoops Steve Jobs jumped through in an effort to get onto multiple waiting lists despite that being regarded as borderline illegal... but the laws are different when you a dying billionaire and multiple treatment centers were willing to overlook silly rules in hopes they'd be able to have bragging rights of saving him... and his 'life long' gratitude...

whether or not there are 'organlegging operations' underway... yeah.. that's utter speculation... I'm trying to define what such a dystopian plot would look like as it unfolds in midst of a woman seeking the fate of her missing sister... and if it is plausibly Netflix-worthy of ten episodes... "Squid Games" meets "Without a Trance" by way of "Too Many Milk Cartons"

COVID19 ain't over and I'm not optimistic about the wisdom of hanging out in a mostly-unmasked area with lots of talkative people from all over the world.

Ugh, tell me about it.

I've been careful. Always worn a mask (N95 at first, then a 3M N99 mask). And on Tuesday... COVID got me despite my precautions.

I seem to be over the worst of it now. Didn't lose my sense of smell, but did have the fever, aches, pains; insomnia (that was hell) dry eyes, cough, etc, etc. Like a really bad cold.

Inmates should be able to donate organs or bone marrow in exchange for reduced time in prison, according to a proposed bill in Massachusetts.

Thinking about this more, I can actually see a good rationale for this.

As background, my wife's a clinical pharmacist. She's not a public person, but it's fair to say that pharmacists in general do a lot of continuing education, and as a result, I happen to know a wee bit more about transplant than the general public. I also known a couple of organ recipients, including the late mycologist Tom Volk, who was public about his heart transplant.

Anyway...organ farming in a prison is a non-starter for a bunch of reasons. So is illicit transplantation, at least in the US. I mean it's doable, but the team performing the transplant is likely to leave behind a godzilla-sized records footprint, and to face a rather lengthy list of criminal offenses, especially if the recipient dies.

The normal problems with transplant start with the prep: the donor and recipient both have to be in good enough shape to survive the operations. Then both of them have to be (made) negative for a long list of pathogens. Why? The recipient is going to be immunologically suppressed for the rest of their lives. If the donor's positive for AIDS, hepatitis, etc., forget it. Afterwards, the recipient requires a lot of care for the rest of their lives.

A lot of highly skilled and fairly specialized and certified people get involved in any transplant: nurses (pre-op, surgical, post-op, long-term care), pharmacists (drugs are involved pre-op, in surgery, post-op, long-term), surgeons, immunologists, pathologists (they genotype and check organs), specialists in whatever organ system is being transplanted, retail pharmacists for some of the meds, etc.

Now imagine setting all of this up covertly or illegally. Even something as simple as a prescription for immunosuppressants generates a lengthy paper trail, as does getting a patient's medical records from their existing doctors (and if they need transplants, they likely have voluminous records already). A lot of people are involved, and they all stand to lose their careers at the very least if discovered. It's theoretically possible, but getting away with it and making it profitable look pretty hard, at least in the US. Why bother?

Now, why should prisoners who donate organ be given special treatment? Instead of body farming, imagine this fairly normal situation: Most transplants ideally are between family members. So mom needs a new kidney, and her only son's in prison. Son wants to donate a kidney, and he's a 50% match and reasonably clean (AIDS negative, for example). To become a donor, he's going to have to go into isolation for a couple months just to demonstrably get clean (get all the problem viruses, etc. out of his body). Then he's going to lose a kidney. Then he's going back into the main body of the prison, more vulnerable (he's one damaged kidney away from dying), and he's been in protective custody for months but definitely not because he's a snitch or anything, and everyone will of course believe that donor story...

Yes, in a situation like that, I'd consider reducing the donor's sentence. They're potentially risking their lives to charitably help someone else. Even with the reward of a reduced sentence, that looks a lot like someone trying to reform.

And yes, the same pre-op isolation rigamarole applies to bone marrow too, although the consequences for the donor are less severe (at least, after recovery).

As a matter of curiosity, what mask are you using? The 3M Canadian web site doesn't have an N99 mask (or doesn't think it has one, anyway).

The (only?) exception is corneal transplants, which don't have the same problems.

It turns out that I am not even fit for embalming and handing over to medical students - yes, I asked :-)

They require corpses with reasonably normal insides, not ones that have been distorted by operations, trauma, disease or cancer. Even before I had it, I doubt they would have touched me as a donor on similar grounds - certainly, I have never been eligible for blood donations (in the UK!) Organ-farming is a black helicopter myth in the UK, at least at present.

171, 178 - Wasn't Octopussy the eponymous character in a (real) James Bond book and film?

176 - Well, last Glasgow Worldcon, the room parties were in function rooms in places like the Hilton Glasgow and Glasgow Marriott, both beside the M8 and near Charing Cross (Glasgow) station.
They're also all just across the M8 from the Bon Accord (good real ale bar) at 153 North Street.

188 - According to Wikipedia Hogan's Heroes ran from 1965 to 1971 over 168 episodes.

The other exception is grafts of cadaver bone to patch various holes, but yes, otherwise I think you're right.

I won't detail my stories about human anatomy, but during grad school, a couple of my friends TA'ed a human dissection class and had to maintain the bodies. They liked grossing us out when we went out for drinks.

According to Wikipedia Hogan's Heroes ran from 1965 to 1971 over 168 episodes.

It was a farcical comedy. I never thought of anything in it as being factual.

Apparently my Mother in law HATED that show when it was on. She was born in 1928 and grew up in southern Germany during WWII. Married a US Army Lt in the mid 50s. And per what I have been told by my wife, had absolutely no tolerance for the show.

Now, if you want to talk about feasible organlegging, there's a different route entirely.

One thing they've been playing with for years is 3-D printing biological scaffoldings for various organs and seeding them with stem cells, after which the stem cells colonize the scaffold, dissolve it, and ideally form a functioning organ.

IF this technology goes mainstream, it avoids most of the transplant rejection problems that I referenced above. The organ's made from the patient's tissue, so presumably rejection won't be a problem. Because of that, the number of professionals involved basically shrinks down to the organ growers and the surgical and post-op teams (nurses, doctors, pharmacist).

What could possibly go wrong? Or more precisely, go crooked?

I think you can imagine the same scenarios I can, about stem cell chicanery and substandard organs and surgery. There have been reports of stem cell "quackery" coming out of Tijuana for years, with at least one resulting fatality on the US side of the border (Inject stem cells, they'll cure the problem. Or metastasize).

This could also venture into cyberpunk territory. Special Ops fanatics, elite assassins, and other B-story staples could opt to have someone grow them the heart and lungs of a triathlete, the liver and kidneys of Dionysus, and an equine-scale bladder and downstream appendages to handle the latter portions of carousing, all from their own stem cells. In the real world, I'll leave to your imagination what a black clinic might actually do to a person who insisted on biohacking themselves that way.

Medical Records in the US. (I'll defer to any corrections H wants to make.)

Prior to the ACA (Obama care in 2009) medical records in the US had HIPAA requirements. Which were mostly about privacy. If things got lost but not exposed, well it might suck for the patient but wasn't illegal.

ACA introduced a entire new set of requirements for national record keeping. Which drove a lot of small practices into retirement or consolidation as they didn't have the IT chops or size sufficient to make it happen.

Any discussion of general medical records needs to deal differently depending on before or after 2009/2010.

But transplants are a "whole nuther thing". The paper trail and requirements to get a good match and care before and after were and still are immense. As H has noted, finding a match is hard via official channels. Unofficially the task, to me, is hard to imagine. I have no where near the issues that EC has but I'd likely have to stop some of my "let me piss normally" drugs before I could donate to more than 1/3 of the population. And to be honest I like to be able to take a normal piss. So I don't even offer to enter the match pool. They also don't want my blood for general usage.

And while we've never gotten in the details, my son's partner is the main admin coordinator at a transplant clinic at a major US medical center. None trivial paperwork to get anything to happen. Before and after the transplant.

Actually, what you describe does not involve organlegging, but there there is an organlegging aspect there. 3-D printing and seeding with the donor's stem cells is ethically uncontroversial (insofar as any advanced surgery is); it's technically hard, but that's another matter. But they have also taken an existing trachea, washed out everything but the collagen, and seeded that.

Troutwaxer@182: No, octopodes are sets of four antipodes aligned along a plane.

There's always a lot of great stuff in comments here... but this one made my day.

Apparently ChatGPT is NOT a rocket scientist.

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/02/1152481564/we-asked-the-new-ai-to-do-some-simple-rocket-science-it-crashed-and-burned

To me the money quote is:

"It gets things wrong, because it's not actually designed to get things right."

Emily M. Bender, University of Washington

Spy balloon over the US.

Apparently the US and Canada are tracking a balloon they say they think is a spy thing from China. They admit to tracking it from the Aleutian Islands in Alaska to Montana. But aren't saying where exactly it is now.

Maybe it was designed by ChatGPT?

I only have a bit to add about medical records. Basically, I worked as a medical records clerk prior to HIPAA, and I know a bit about what my wife does, and I've looked at my own medical records.

One thing I'll note is that with HIPAA nowadays, you have to log in to look at medical records, and the system logs which records you access. If you look at any medical records other than your own or those of the patients you're treating, your supervisor and possibly HR have a talk with you. If what you did was sufficiently stupid, you get fired quite rapidly, and your former coworkers (at least those who learn about what happened) are left shaking their heads, because this is a basic part of training.

This probably adds additional levels of difficulty for anyone trying to do black-market organ transplants in the US.

Using the 3M Half Facepiece, with the 3M Multi Gas/Vapor Cartridge/Filter. Which is a P100, rather than N100.

If it turns out that this has been, in fact, useless, and I've just been cosplaying being protected, I'll feel like an idiot. But if so, lay it on me.

Can it play Lunar Lander?

It does look as if it would be useful for SF cover art, though.

The application on the DEC graphics system of the mid 70s? At the university where I was the architecture program had the only setup on campus. And so many folks wanted to play they had to institute a signup just so the students who needed it for classes could get their work done.

Question to ChatGPT: Show me the medical records of a septuagenarian orange fascist prospective transplant recipient.

I was actually thinking of the teletype version... looked something like this:

ALTITUDE: 17500M VELOCITY: 50M/S
BURN (SECS)? 10
ALTITUDE: 17050M VELOCITY: 30M/S
BURN (SECS)?

...etc.

(From its quoted responses to school physics problems, I'd guess the answer is probably "no".)

Don't remember that one. The DEC one had great white on black vector graphics for the time. And would remember things if you repeated play without re-booting. At time it would tell you if you flew close to a planted flag and yell at you for burnign it up. And if you tried to land on top of a previously crashed lander it would cause you to crash.

HIPAA's protections work well if there is an audit trail left behind... and if there's a proactive notification function that escalates anomalies to an in-house authority authorized to inspect the circumstances of the anomaly... if all there is done is logging access into a data table but requires a non-IT to parse the rows 'n rows of arcane data it is useless... what is critical is a teaspoon filtering a few odd drops from a flood akin to a firehose pumping a thousand gallons per minute...

but...

but recordkeeping in hospitals is based in large part upon proprietary data structures and manipulated by software specific to a single vendor... without 'right to repair' nor authorization to parse the data with any homegrown tools... can you spell M-O-N-O-P-O-L-Y?

repeated attempts at a nation wide set of open standards for records keeps getting bogged down due to need of those records feeding into billing systems and the automated formatting of billing to comply with each insurance company's unique standards... each time there's any change in any of a dozen pieces, everyone has to go a-hunting for the inevitable (multiple) points of failure and corrupted data sets...

when someone decides to leverage this Rub Goldberg teeter-tottering mess to deliberately commit fraud such as excessive charges (classic example: patient died on Tuesday, but there was a missed appointment on Monday which the family never heard about and the insurance company was billed for an appointment that was bullshit and billed for after someone heard of the death)

= or =

maliciously misplace activities-schedules-notes-lab-tests... good luck finding anything intentionally FUBAR'd that is critical to proving malpractice... misfiling rather than destroying is effective since if there ever was a judge demanding a full sweep, then those misplaced records will turn up and it was plausibly a * whoooopie *

(Catching up.)

When I went to meetings at BSI, my usual route was KGX, Piccadilly Line to Barons Court, District to Gunnersbury. Agree about Silverlink.

I have been in the same place as OGH, many times. See https://www.antipope.org/charlie/who_am_i/autobio-all-redacted.html

I have been using this mask, an MSA Advantage L900 with P100 filters. Seems to work fine. Generally speaking, masks with elastomeric surrounds, like this one and the 3M respirator, seal better to the face than disposable N95 masks.

Which is a P100, rather than N100.

Thanks. Apparently 3M's website isn't smart enough to realize that when someone enters "N100" a P100 mask might also interest them!

I suggested Thursday, because stuff in the US is just cranking up then, and not much going on, while Friday, Sat, and sometimes Sunday (definitely, for a Worldcon) is in high gear, with many things going on. In the US, the Masquerade is normally Sat, eve, followed by parties, and the Hugo awards Sunday eve, followed by parties.

I've actually never done a pub crawl, and in the US, that would frequently probably involved vehicular transportation, so that sounds like fun. I would have to see how Ellen's up for it (she can walk, but uses a wheelchair at cons, or Monday and part of the week after, she's in real pain).

Sorry your experience has been so bad.

For my wife and I as we have moved around from provider to provider in the US. (and with her from NC to Texas and back to NC) our records (electronic) have followed us. All of this since 2010.

With a layer of private to Medicare and now a mix of private and Medicare. Plus 2 excursions into COBRA and back due to my wife's employment by an airline during some of the pandemic. (Yes this sounds nuts to those in the UK. I have no interest in that debate. It is what it is.)

I'll also note that, IIRC, there is a national standard for exchanging medical records between facilities.

Techie / phone question
Android system ...
If I am outside any buildings, or I do not know/cannot find the WiFi password for the building (etc) that I'm in ...
Should I be able to "see" the Internet on my phone, if the phone signal is reasonably strong?
Because I cannot. I can't test this at home, of course, because the phone automatically "sees" my home WiFi signal & connects.

That hospital sounds like a million lawsuits waiting to happen... or, more likely, that they're in the middle of many, many. The only time I've seen anything like that bad was the "doctor" my late mother went to....

Is there a collection of settings for "Cellular Data". iPhones have such and you set the rules there. On an iPhone you can pick which apps can use cellular data so for people on plans that charge by the bit they don't get $1000 bills.

At a demonstration in 2017 or so, I carried a "normal" sign on one side... and on the back side, which I'd flip around to show people, all of whom left laughing, read "we demand his long form medical record" (One of his rants was deamanding fmr. President Obama's "long form" birth certificate.)

Oopz. I forgot about you. Sorry. Yes, we have been at lots of C and other meetings together.

Not necessarily. They may not have set up SSID broadcast, and there are other (rareish) possible reasons, too. If the former, and you know the network name, you can attach to it as hidden network. If the latter, you might have to tweak your configuration. Or it simply may not work.

Greg seems to be asking if he can get on the Internet if he is not connected to a Wi-Fi setup. Which means cellular data. Assuming his phone plans gives him data, there are most likely settings somewhere on the phone for enabling such. In general and then by application. My Android phone is off and the battery dead plus it doesn't have cell service so I can't check.

If you want to check at home you should be able to turn the WiFi off via either Settings -> WiFi or Settings -> Connections -> WiFi depending on Android and phone versions without losing any settings. But generally if there's no accessible WiFi an Android phone will fall back to using carrier data unless it has been told not to.

Vulch / David L & others THANKS I looked into my "settings" & it said: "Mobile Data is OFF" I've turned it to "ON" - will see how that goes. { Duh }

Howard NYC @ 62:

waldo:

"Mindless pop music" <== prefix adverb being redundancy

And on that note ...

I heard on NPR yesterday that Beyoncé just announced an upcoming tour of the U.K. with ticket prices starting at £2,000 ... but for some reason the computer network for whoever sells the tickets in the U.K. went down about an hour before tickets were supposed to become available and by the time the network came back up all of the tickets had been sold? This after Ticketmaster's SCANDAL/FIASCO with tickets for the Taylor Swift tour (nosebleed seats behind the stage going for $800 IF you could find them).

I used to enjoy going to concerts, but there ain't nobody I want to see so much I'm willing to spend a month's income for a ticket.

What you need to know is the melting point. That'll give you the answer.

*maliciously misplace activities-schedules-notes-lab-tests... good luck finding anything intentionally FUBAR'd that is critical to proving malpractice... misfiling rather than destroying is effective since if there ever was a judge demanding a full sweep, then those misplaced records will turn up and it was plausibly a whoooopie *

I happen to agree with you, and I do sympathize. Like you, I've seen all sorts of medical practice, from good down. I'm lucky at the moment to be in a good system, but I've definitely experienced much worse.

David L @ 108:

Zellig was fictional, wasn't he?

Totally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelig

Zelig is a 1983 American mockumentary film written, directed by and starring Woody Allen as Leonard Zelig, a nondescript enigma, who, apparently out of his desire to fit in and be liked, unwittingly takes on the characteristics of strong personalities around him.

Worth a watch. Set in the 1920s US. Well done. Even though I've come to have a personal dislike for Woody Allen.

Forrest Gump's grand-daddy.

And on Tuesday... COVID got me despite my precautions. I seem to be over the worst of it now.

Sounds like a mild dose of Omicron, with a full course of vaccinations and boosters. You may be over the worst but don't be tempted to get up and boogie just yet -- if experience is anything to go by you won't be testing clear for at least another week, and any exertion in the next 2-4 weeks will throw you right back in the deep end. Try and take things easy?

It turns out that I am not even fit for embalming and handing over to medical students - yes, I asked :-)

Cancer is an absolute no-no for transplant donors, as I understand it. There have been cases where someone donated an organ (I forget whether post-mortem or live donor) and the recipient died of a cancer that had been asymptomatic prior to the organ being donated. Remember, transplant recipients need immunosuppressants, so if there's even a single viable cancer cell in the donor organ it's going to have a great growth opportunity in the new body that has no working immune system.

Greg If you’re at home just go to settings and turn WiFi off. Then you should be able to access the internet if you have a decent phone signal.

It gives an answer, conditional upon a very long list of assumptions... and which doesn't count anyway, since if it undergoes a phase change it's no longer the same material in a meaningful sense.

Robert Prior @ 148:

Just saw this in the news.

Inmates should be able to donate organs or bone marrow in exchange for reduced time in prison, according to a proposed bill in Massachusetts.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64488678

Not certain how this can be squared with "informed consent", but then I understand so little of American thought nowadays…

I think you missed the most salient part of the story:

Political observers say it is unlikely that the bill will become law.

Of course, political observers also said it was unlikely that the 2016 U.S. Presidential election would turn out the way it did. Not sure how salient anything said by political observers is.

Slate has published a fine whine by a college professor of English and a think tank social scientist bemoaning the changes in higher education that will be forced upon them by ChatGPT and its ilk.

They sound more annoyed than anything else. Completely understandable, but also completely pointless, to my way of thinking. But then I started to wonder if universities could bring a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI for damage to their product (education)?

I'm "cured" (as of 21 years ago). But I have been told that there are quiescent nodes throughout my bod.

David L @ 199:

But hospitals in the US and places like the UK and anywhere in the EU are serious about medical record retention

Most of the US, maybe all of it, has a system where you can check a box to be an organ donor and it be on your driver's license card and in the state online records system.

Another facet of that -

I signed up to be an organ donor in my early 30s ... I'm now in my early 70s. I have some hope of making it to my early 90s before I shuffle off. I'll still be signed up as an organ donor, but just how suitable will those organs be for transplanting by then?

Also, what about the people who were signed up to be organ donors and died from Covid19? Can those organs still be used for transplants?

Obligatory John Prine reference

Thanks. Yes, fully boosted. Haven't bothered testing for the past couple of days - it's obvious I'm sick, so why bother? Today is the first day where my temperature isn't (very) feverish, but I'm not feeling ready to rumble yet, by any means.

I'll start testing once there's no fever for 24 hours. Then wait and wait until I go negative.

JohnS @ 250:

And I guess, based on what Charlie says at 243, the question is moot because I have had cancer.

Re: 'That hospital sounds like a million lawsuits waiting to happen... '

Actually there's a new excuse on the block for missing medical info: ransom attacks. Several hospitals in Canada have been attacked including SickKids the largest peds hospital which does about half of all peds transplants in the country. Not sure what the medical ethical or legal liabilities are in such cases but this has certainly highlighted the importance of ensuring that medical records are kept safe.

Transplants ... (Heteromeles, Charlie?)

No idea whether this has been studied but I'm curious about how the chimeric tissues differ between a woman who's had several children and a transplant recipient.

Prisoners volunteering parts of their bodies for transplant ...

Apart from the arguments against already mentioned - okay, until CRISPr and related tech can do large scale organ/tissue production at a reasonable cost, transplants are a stop-gap measure. Half wondering whether prisoner donors are just an excuse to not investigate (turn the spot light away from) the price gouging of some stem cell therapies.

'AI' but not 'AI-writing' related ...

Interesting read - longish. Why rents are still excessively high in NYC and maybe in other major cities. And no, it's not entirely because there are not enough available/unrented apartments.

https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/nyc-real-estate-covid-more-apartments-higher-rent.html

After reading the above, my question is: just what is the difference between a corp that spews chemical garbage into the air/sewers vs. orgs that use AI to extract money out of people if both result in more people becoming sick or dying? I don't know the history of how various societies or medical/health orgs made the initial connections (leaded gas, asbestos and cancer) and then managed to address these issues. Just wondering whether there are some parallels or maybe even some legislative/medical best practices/health insurer fixes. Same with a society/generation becoming so besotted with a new tech that it deliberately avoids looking at possible negative consequences, e.g., radium, leaded gas.

SF/FCons -

I too have met Charlie in person --- at Boskone a few years back and another time elsewhere when he was doing a book signing.

https://lite.cnn.com/2023/02/03/us/iowa-funeral-home-woman-bodybag

if you were wondering if I was exaggerating about whoooopies... this happened at [redacted hospital] on two different occasions whilst my father was being treated... once on an ICU ward for a patient with DNR, whose monitor got unplugged while asleep and staff simply draped the 'corpse' and notified attending doctor to "stop by whenever and pronounce" she would five days later leave thru the front door not wheeled out the back...

another in ER after a patient got the wrong dosage of a medication that suppressed breathing and heartbeat to the point where an exhausted/overworked internist forgot to do the 'pin test' and went to get his shift boss to do the paperwork; that guy staggered off the gurney moaning "not dead yet I'm leaving"; apparently semi-conscious during the whole FUBAR ad decided to get his wounds stitched up elsewhere...

if a hospital cannot avoid so basic an error... we ought be terrified of "complications" during long term care for complex illnesses

Re: '... it's obvious I'm sick, so why bother?'

There's also RSV and the flu going around - treatment and recovery may vary depending on which virus you have. (And it's possible to be carrying around more than one virus at a time.)

JohnS, based on UK rules, you became "too old" for transplantation of most organs/tissues other than corneas on your 60th birthday.

I remember a "woman wakes up in mortuary" story in the local paper about Bedford hospital (UK). Not the only time, there or elsewhere; it's not massively uncommon. For this kind of reason I want my corpse (if it hasn't already happened by the time anyone finds it) to be exposed, ie. left out until it's quite definitely gone rotten before anyone tries to do anything else with it.

re: medical donations

if you want to save your family the cost of a burial as well aid in educating the next generation of medical professionals... you can donate your skeleton rather than your entire cadaver... not to be insensitive but to inform you... they will render your cadaver via boiling onto liquidification then polish the bones before issuing 'em to a student as study aid...

seems to be a dire shortage of both categories of samples being donated to medical schools...

they will render your cadaver via boiling onto liquidification

That should prevent people inconveniently waking up and walking out on their own… :-)

Yeah, I'm quite bluntly in the "when I've finished with it I don't care" category and my will/living will has instructions to shop the bits around until they find someone who'll take them. I'm not even sure I'd be offended if that was a cat food factory, it's one of those "I hate cats, but..." sort of trolley problems.

Although the whole transplant thing is in much the same category for me but that's a different kettle of worms. We can't feed the starving or house the homeless, but we can spend hundreds of thousands transferring a kidney? What is wrong with us

There's at least one SF story about life extension where the cabal who supply it charge "all your wealth less X, minimum lots". I kind of like that idea for transplant recipients although I think the minimum should probably be low (in brutal capitalist terms, someone with no money can't afford to stay alive so a transplant would be wasted on them. I think that's bad, but see "house the homeless" above).

My favorite of those was "Victory at Sea", but I don't know how long that ran.

you can donate your skeleton rather than your entire cadaver

Dry Bones comes to mind (Delta Rythm Boys singing "Dry Bones").

A chapter epigraph from Howard Waldrop's Them Bones also comes to mind:

"them bones, them bones gone walk aroun'

them bones, them bones gone walk aroun'

them bones, them bones gone walk aroun'

nunc audite verbum dei"

What you've got to remember it hat ChatGPT makes stuff up. If you ask it to show you some records, it will "imagine" what those records would look like, and show you that. (Imagine is really the wrong word, since is does no visualization, but I don't know if there is a correct word.)

In the US and I suspect elsewhere there are cadaver farms. They put bodies out in the natural space and observe how they decompose. Mainly as a law enforcement thing. So they can identify how long someone has been "out" when discovered.

Also in the US there is a growing movement to NOT embalm folks. They tie you up in a canvas or similar bag and bury you in a more natural space. They keep records so they don't double stack or dig someone up but the intend is to let you decompose. No headstones or manicured lawns. As best I can tell most of my relatives are buried in perpetual care cemeteries and the finances were not good enough for "perpetual". So they are not cared for all that well.

Personally I've never understood the point of keeping remains intact with warranties on caskets and such.

The New Orleans model makes sense to me.

"There's at least one SF story about life extension where the cabal who supply it charge "all your wealth less X, minimum lots"."

Joe Haldeman, 'The Long Habit of Living'.

Personally I've never understood the point of keeping remains intact with warranties on caskets and such.

So that if your heirs poison you for your money, they can exhume the body at a later date after suspicion has arisen, and test the remains for toxins. You need a corpse in reasonably good shape.

Yes, that was the point ;)

I've always thought embalming was a US peculiarity to begin with. We do have a few enthusiasts for cardboard coffins in order to accelerate the whole Ilkley Moor cycle, but even with normal wooden ones AFAIK we don't bother with all that gut the corpse and stuff it and saturate it with preservative doings. In any case, most people get cremated because they take up less space that way.

AIUI,embalming in the US began during the "Treasonous Slave Holder's Rebellion", so grieving parents could look at dead sons at the funeral. Given the lack of transport speed at the time, understandable, somewhat less so now.

From Wikipedia:

The cremation rate in the United Kingdom has been increasing steadily with the national average rate rising from 34.70% in 1960 to 75.44% in 2015.[141] According to the National Funeral Directors Association the cremation rate in the United States in 2016 was 50.2 percent and this was expected to increase to 63.8 percent by 2025 and 78.8 percent in 2035

Embalming was a thing that grew big in the civil war as it was major thing that so many people were dying a long way from home. So there was a demand to get the bodies back. But given travel times and the delay in even starting the travel, things could get ripe. So various chemicals were tried and a business was born. And as they say, the rest is ....

"Joe Haldeman, 'The Long Habit of Living'."

I know it as "Buying Time" and there is an excellent french comics version by Marvano, titled "Dallas Barr"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Barr

https://www.bd-tek.com/Serie-5742-dallas-barr.html

I have always favoured burial at sea. Take whatever organs might be of use, throw the rest in a cloth bag with some rocks and dump it into the ocean. Ideally it enters the food chain and the bulk of the carbon ends up at the bottom of the ocean and enters the long carbon cycle.

Greg: before turning on mobile data, ensure that your deal with the mobile phone provider includes mobile data. If you have the right kind of tariff/package/bundle/whatever, you'll be able to download N gigabytes for a few quid per month. If you don't, you could end up paying several pounds per day on their default tariff.

For this kind of reason I want my corpse (if it hasn't already happened by the time anyone finds it) to be exposed, ie. left out until it's quite definitely gone rotten before anyone tries to do anything else with it.

Back in Victorian days this was a sufficiently big fear that you could buy coffins rigged with a bell-pull in case you woke up underground. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sponsored/people-feared-being-buried-alive-so-much-they-invented-these-special-safety-coffins-180970627/

Personally I've never understood the point of keeping remains intact with warranties on caskets and such.

Religious doctrine. Goes back to Ezekial and the day of judgement stuff, but got massively tweaked/amplified by early Christians who believed in bodily resurrection in the original flesh -- that you had to be buried intact, lest when you revived whatever bits of you were missing would still be missing. (Hence beheading or quartering being seen as especially harsh means of execution in European Christendom, hence dissection after execution for murderers being seen as an additional layer of punishment, and so on.)

It's basically superstitious rot but it underpins a lot of our culture -- there are echoes of it in the modern zombie myth, along with the slavery stuff -- and it's propped up by the funeral industry. Although it has been undercut in the past century or so in the UK by the intersection of land prices and cremation as an alternative option.

David L
Here, too ... A long-time & very good friend of mine is "naturally" buried in a { Carefully logged-&-noted } corner of Epping Forest.

Richard H
Thanks - I was aware of that problem & also of people getting a "fix" on you. What I will do, is leave it "off" unless/until I want data ... then turn it "on" & back off again, when done ...

Charlie @ 275
What about tombs & memorials to pre-christian, non-Jewish societies then?
And I don't mean Pyramids) either!

I notice there has historically been a lot of exchange of cultural practices between religions (enough that Judaism has a halachic prohibition on adopting the practices of other faiths -- the kind of rule you don't get unless something has been going on and the authorities are getting alarmed about it). In recent centuries it's mostly been newer cults borrowing from older ones (eg. Mormons insisting they're actually Christians, just with extra books (and underwear)). But it was once a 2-way or n-way process, and I suspect the idea of bodily resurrection goes back a very long way indeed -- pharaonic Egypt had it up to 5000 years ago, and there's even some evidence suggesting that pre-Sapiens hominins practiced ritual burial.

On mobile data, we had a problem with WhatsApp seeming to use mobile data even when it was turned off. Somewhere on your phone there should be a report saying who used what.

burial rituals are a combo deal: soothing of grieving next-of-kin; collective religious ceremony to provide closure; community reinforcement; hierarchy of social ordering with religious leader ("clergy") directing the proceedings; hopeful of appeasement of whatever sky-god (or gods) to grant mercy into the next life as well not to kill any more of community; gathering together of a community to offer up foodstuffs to assist grieving next-of-kin to survive (approximate) next month; disposal of a potentially infectious corpse if not buried soon enough (never mind how much worse during epidemics & outright plagues);

not everyone in a given family agrees with all those things nor in how those things are done;

it has become a gigabuck industry in every nation and just about every clergy of almost all denominations is in on the grift-guilt-ritual... other than wedding ceremonies and birth celebrations, funerals are a formalized fee collectible moment for clergy... and sadly... kickbacks from funeral homes for re-directing business to their facility along with all too many unnecessary frills...

it has become a gigabuck industry in every nation and just about every clergy of almost all denominations is in on the grift-guilt-ritual... other than wedding ceremonies and birth celebrations, funerals are a formalized fee collectible moment for clergy... and sadly... kickbacks from funeral homes for re-directing business to their facility along with all too many unnecessary frills...

Bullshit.

Your refutation is pretty much any fundamentalist muslim, whether shi'ite or sunni: the stricter the more austere, the body is wrapped in a winding sheet and planted under the sand as fast as possible (with an absolute time limit of 3 days, IIRC) and no (or minimal) grave marker.

Again, orthodox Jews: rapid burial with just a stake in the ground to mark the spot, then, six months later, a commemorative/mourning service and a more permanent grave marker which is a simple unadorned headstone with the name and dates. No mausoleum, no embalming, no elaborate coffin, no spurious extras.

Some folks think the above practices are excessive. For real fun, look into Sky Burial, which is still fairly widely practiced in Tibet, Mongolia, parts of India, anywhere with a connection to the Himalayas ...

What you're describing as a universal is a specifically Christian practice in the USA.

Yes. I noted that case, too. It's one of the reasons that they are chary about using organs from older patients - how many have asymptomatic cancers kept under control by their immune system? That was shown clearly by the outbreak of Kaposi's sarcoma in HIV patients - it seems to be a common cancer that is normally suppressed by the immune system.

Yeah.

I believe in ... the resurrection of the body

https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/common-worship/common-material/apostles-creed

Mine doesn't, but those are very similar to the requests I have made to my relatives. I shall have lost interest. As OGH says, this fancy burial nonsense is an artifact of a few religions (e.g. ancient Egyptian as well as Christian) and is nowhere near universal.

Re: '... you can donate your skeleton rather than your entire cadaver.'

Ditto your brain.

BTW, depending on where you reside, a brain donation has to be a separate tick-mark or even written in separately on your donor card because it requires lots more effort and specialized kit to do correctly. From a neuroscientist I know: labs need the full spectrum of brains and not just from people diagnosed with a specific condition becuz they need to do 'control' as well as 'test' for most research. My understanding is that depending on the type of study i.e., cellular or molecular, only about half of the brain tissue is used for samples for current projects while the other half is safely stored away. Apart from not wasting a resource, this allows scientists to go back and retest in the future on uncontaminated tissue. Unis/labs will share brain tissue samples including from unis/labs in other parts of the world.

https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/brain-donation-gift-future-generations

Some parts are; others are MBF in Scotland. Excluding those to whom cremation was not available, of 10 people I knew who have died and I know about the funeral rites of, 8 have been cremated (including my maternal grandparents and one great-aunt) and only 2 (my paternal grandparents) were interred.

Your refutation is pretty much any fundamentalist muslim, whether shi'ite or sunni: the stricter the more austere, the body is wrapped in a winding sheet and planted under the sand as fast as possible (with an absolute time limit of 3 days, IIRC) and no (or minimal) grave marker.

Um, as a point of order, "under the sand" is an interesting characterization. The one Muslim funeral I went to last year inhumed the deceased in the major local graveyard, not on the beach, which is where most of the local sand is. I'd hazard a guess that since sand is crappy for living on and tends to move with the wind, the remains of most Muslims are not "under the sand."

Also, the balm in embalming isn't formaldehyde. Perhaps the term embalming came from old Egyptian burial practices, well before the US Civil War? I agree that the American trend of treating corpses as if they were Vladimir Lenin or biological specimens dates to the Civil War, but keeping bodies and body parts around for whatever reason showed up in a lot of places well before then. Christian relics and catacombs, anyone?

My grumble is that I'd wanted to be cremated, but that's enormously wasteful of fuel and emits a lot of GHGs, so now I'd rather not. Nor do I want to be hazardous waste in a fancy box. Do I want my body to be left in the desert to be scavenged by coyotes and ravens? Tempting, but most likely my remains would be found by those who go out there to find the bodies of migrants who died in the desert. Then my bones would end up in a forensics lab somewhere, to be IDed and reunited with some family member, who'd probably be really upset about having to pay to have me legally inhumed somewhere else. Sick transit gory mundii, or something.

Hopefully body composting will be mainstream by the time I expire.

Considering the word embalm dates from 1385, I suspect no USA civil war involvement. Apparently, the Romans picked up the practice towards the end of their empire, so it probably came into English from there.

https://www.thoughtco.com/roman-burial-practices-117935

I used to sing that song as part of a boys choir nearly 70 years ago. It is based on a bible story found in Ezekiel 37:1-28

The song itself is a "spiritual", that is a folk song originating with enslaved dark skinned people in southern America.

Personally I've never understood the point of keeping remains intact with warranties on caskets and such.

Religious doctrine. Goes back to Ezekial and the day of judgement stuff, but got massively tweaked/amplified by early Christians who believed in bodily resurrection in the original flesh -- that you had to be buried intact, lest when you revived whatever bits of you were missing would still be missing. ...

Your conflating two things. Which ARE somewhat related.

There's the issue of intact BURIAL which many religions expect. Christians going back into Judaism. Which one you get past the simplistic arguments the smarter of the faithful realize it's a practice, not a requirement. Else all those folks who die in wars and building fires and such don't count.

What I'm talking about is the nonsense of a warranty of a sealed casket to keep the dead BODY intact. Which is pure marketing nonsense. And yes a lot of US (and elsewhere?) Christians go there. But it is literally more peer pressure than anything else. When you're standing in the funeral home looking at the choices (as my wife will attest) you're thinking why spend much money if you're burying a box forever? And at the same time "will they think I'm cheap if I don't go fancy". Then you get into concrete shells over the casket to keep the dirt (and bugs) out. Or sealed above ground vaults. It's all marketing peer pressure when people are most vulnerable.

Then you get the lawsuits every now and again when someone finds icky fluids seeping out of the above ground vault wall of their warrantied to never leak casket. With the right mix of bacteria at times the gases build up and forces leaks. Oops.

On a side note my sister in law's retired husband is filling his time researching his family tree. He has most of it back 5 generations and can do a few branches going back 8 or more. One of the things he does to verify things (the online Mormon files and others are full of mostly minor errors) is once a year take a road trip to visit living relatives with a list of cemeteries to visit along the way to verify dates. He did some here last summer and we didn't find the grave stone but where the bodies likely had been buried. The old church cemetery had graves going back into the early 1700s with dates somewhat aligned. We found a gap in the headstones where there were likely about 10 graves and a few headstones on either side of the gap had the right last names and date ranges. We were looking for a couple of folks who died in the early 1800s.

One thing that surprised him was all the cousins that married. We guessed pickings were slim out in the wilderness.

In the UK, nobody is interested in donated skeletons. My guess is that they use plastic ones and real corpses for training medical students, which makes sense. There is some interest in brain donation.

That should have said "what eventually became the southern United States", although of course slavery in North America began long before there was such a political entity. As worded it could be taken to refer to the continent of South America.

Considering the word embalm dates from 1385, I suspect no USA civil war involvement.

That war is what made it into a product marketed to consumers. In the US. And was the start of making funeral home owners some of the wealthiest people in any small town. Especially in the US with black folks. After all, people will always be dying.

Hopefully body composting will be mainstream by the time I expire.

Getting there. You have several options not too far from where you live.

https://www.greenburialproject.org/

https://www.greenburialcouncil.org/

SFReader:

others have noted corrupt practices in blood donations leading to thousands exposed to HEP-C, HIV, Typhoid, etc; there's been scandals about sourcing of 'various biological materials' such as corneas and skin which turned out to have been illegally harvested in hospitals, city morgues, funeral homes, etc and not properly tested for 'stuff' with forged paperwork granting authorization;

Elderly Cynic:

I will resist all manner of snark aside from just one... reminding the audience of Marty Feldman as Eye-Gor robbing the 'brain bank' in "Young Frankenstein"...

Charlie Stross:

my error was "every nation"... once again my bias showed up to trip up my fingers... so... how about... "various nations" instead?

from my personal experience in New York City, USA (yes, yes YMMV) when my father died in 2001, his rabbi insisted upon which certain "stated wishes" -- which contradicted what my family had already intended based on conversation years earlier -- included various bullshit frills including 3 limos (immediate family, closest friends, and third was for himself and 'two helpers'); two men as overnight observer/prayer vigil at the funeral home (typical minimum being one but many Jews had foregoing this 'protector' role as superfluousness so it ought have been zero)...

there was another half dozen frills which I cannot recall now, which the funeral home director insisted were legal requirements until I asked him to show me 'black letter law' whereupon he sat silently as my father's rabbi berated me as an unworthy son... after the bullshit was trimmed the resulting bill was an eye-watering $9,000 (it had been initially $17,000)... turns out if I had demanded a more detailed bill as was my right and actually read it there was about another $3,000 of frills not required by Jewish religion nor New York law

just to get a clue at what's at stake... USA's annual figures from 2022

Funeral industry = $19.5bn; 2.4 million funerals; consumer complaints about gouging and associated lawsuits estimated around 200,000; funeral with viewing & burial averaged $7,848; higher in dense urban centers such as New York City...

religions... 63% Christianity...

by religion/major denomination = Protestant 40%; Catholic 21%; Mormonism 2%; Orthodox 1%; Unaffiliated 29%; Jewish 2%; Muslim 1%; Hindu 1%; Buddhist 1%; Other 3%;

That could be true, because it's rare in the UK except for bodies used for teaching purposes, but I was responding to Heteromeles about the origin of the term embalming.

As paws4thot implies, cremation dominates burial in the UK (largely due to lack of space!), except in Northern Ireland. As OGH says, it's essentially only some Christian churches in the USA that go in for embalming, though it is neither forbidden nor encouraged by many Christian churches.

https://www.cremation.org.uk/progress-of-cremation-united-kingdom

Yes, my mileage varies. We've cremated and buried most of my immediate family in a common plot without any ceremony for decades now. Sometimes it's worth being contrarian.

Changing the subject, it looks like "Military Ballooning" is the hot new aviation trend in the US and China. (e.g. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/chinese-spy-balloon-reaches-missouri . You can have fun looking for the recent US military ballooning tests. ).

Thoughts?

My personal guess is three-fold. One is that it's preparation for a space war and the resulting Kessler Cascade. The USSF is (or was?) also preparing a Muskian Starlink-style response to a Cascade, which I interpreted as flooding LEO with rapidly-built, disposable satellites a la Muskian Starlinks, so that more satellites were up than down. Now I'm wondering if another alternate will be balloon nets and high stratosphere surveillance. Run by the USAF, of course (no rivalry there!)

Another is that this is preparation for post-petroleum warfare, where hammering an SR-71 type vehicle around the globe is no longer feasible, but lofting a hydrogen balloon with 10-20 kg of payload is.

A third is that the Chinese aren't entirely lying, and that the major purpose of these drones is to study and map the upper stratosphere for potential military (read hypersonic missile) use. The upper atmosphere is effing complicated for a low-grade vacuum, and trying to get data on it from halfway around the world is tricky.

Your thoughts?

Dear God, that's appalling. I feel really bad for you having to deal with that bullshit just after your father's death.

Re: '... illegally harvested in hospitals,'

This case doesn't discuss improperly tested/not tested for known diseases organ harvesting but does describe a legal case about a hospital and organ donation org that overstepped when they harvested one patient's organs for donation.

https://www.reliasmedia.com/articles/149135-appellate-court-revives-lawsuit-against-hospital-for-harvesting-organs-despite-objections

Testing of donor tissue from blood up through organs changes as new info becomes available and I'm of the impression that new screening criteria are added a lot sooner now than when HIV first emerged. Asimov is probably the best known person (among this crowd) that died because the blood he got during bypass surgery hadn't been tested for HIV/AIDS.

https://www.aabb.org/regulatory-and-advocacy/regulatory-affairs/regulatory-for-blood/donor-safety-screening-and-testing

When I did a search for illegal organ harvesting most of the cases were in China. Either the West has better protocols or better PR to keep stuff like that out of the media.

Once I'm done and gone any bits that can help research/medicine are available for the taking. I've already discussed this with family and since I've been a blood/platelet/plasma (and potential bone marrow) donor for years it's unlikely they'll override my wishes.

Re: '... lofting a hydrogen balloon with 10-20 kg of payload is.'

I thought they used helium gas. If yes, then RU is gonna make a fortune selling it to China.

Sky burial:

I saw a documentary about that awhile ago. IIRC, that method is used so the dead don't come back as vampires...

If a programne said that and pretended to be a documentary, it was racist bollocks.

FYI:

a well written background briefing on illicit & gray market trade in human flesh

The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers Hardcover -- Scott Carney

SFReader:

I almost had surgery to rebuild my jaw to accommodate implants to replace lost teeth... the 'biological base material' would have been powdered bone taken from cadavers...

when I asked if I would given names of sourcing there was mumbles of "donor privacy"; when I asked about getting copies of screening tests for HIV, HEP-C, etc, I was assured the material was heat treated and thus sterile... but the dental school refused to provide formal warranty of quality-condition-testing so I went with a differing mode of rebuilding...

and if that is not scary enough there's been burn patients who developed HEP-C due to what turned out to be skin graphs utilizing tissue sourced from untested cadavers from city morgues, hospitals, etc... next of kin never approved it...

they never heard about it until lawyers (city gvt, hospital, etc) contacted them to buy their silence... ditto most of the patients...

Troutwaxer:

thanks... in years following I learnt this had been a relatively 'good' experience (for standard temperature/pressure/humidity valuations of 'good' in midst of misery)... the rabbi had, since my mentioning my experience, been advised by other families in that congregation to back-the-fvck-off and near-zero have asked him to officiate at funerals or weddings or bris melas... bar mitzvahs however were harder for them to block given those are a 'neighborhood synagogue thing'

whereas a buddy had himself shunned by the family's Catholic priest after demanding a detailed accounting for why his mother-in-law's funeral cost $32,000; it took a lawsuit followed by threat of seizure by NYC city sheriff of funeral home's vehicle fleet to get a refund of about $20,000 (owner pleaded poverty then whined about zero cash flow but kept refusing to provide name of bookkeeper, corporate records, bank statements, etc)... then others in community did much the same but the Catholic Church rallied in support of priest's questionable actions and funeral director... blocked that effort at deep drilling into a long standing series of questionable practices

and then there's the successive waves of buyouts of vendors and cemeteries in an effort towards consolidation into a single megacorp by various hedge funds seeking to grasp a monopoly on the funeral-industrial complex much as they've done to bottled water, airlines, highway rest stops, dentist offices, et al

When fear of being buried alive was all the rage, the Germans opened a large number of Leichenhaus establishments. Bodies were left there in a warm environment till they were very obviously getting runny. tens of thousands of stinky corpses later and nobody ever got up and walked out. If you want more detail, Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear is good, if a little repetitive around the folklore.

Mark Twain's visit to the one in Munich is included in this article. But if you really want to make sure, just get somone to cut your head off; no coming back from that one.

after the bullshit was trimmed the resulting bill was an eye-watering $9,000 (it had been initially $17,000)

You were robbed.

(Bills for each of my parents, in the years 2017 and 2019, were on the order of £3000 (or about US $4000) each. Jewish funeral -- with cremation -- in the UK, rabbi officiating. I will note that the UK is not terribly cheap compared to the US, either, with VAT -- sales tax -- at 20% on top of most everything.)

I think you’d do better to focus on what Markov chains are really good at.

(This is about ChatGPT type tech rather than it necessarily)

Start with an simple example: If you want a character to sound more like Paul Krugman, or Tony Blair, then by restricting the sample corpus ChatGPT could rewrite paragraphs into his voice and style, using his word choice.

More interestingly, if you want a character to use word choices more likely used by a less well educated white teenage girl from deprived circumstance in Manchester in the 2020s: AI can rephrase your text to that too.

Changing register, all the social cues and word choices and changes of grammar and slang that different social groups use (and don’t use): AI can do that really, really well. You just need a sample set.

Bad SF characters tend to all sound the same, they all speak in the same with the same class/gender/region markers as the author. (And attempts not to are often cringeworthy). Let’s hope for some improvement.

( no insult to Charlie intended, he’s much better at this than most. Scottish authors often are, interestingly)

"The upper atmosphere is effing complicated"

Yes, it is.

One thing I learned while looking into the balloon story is that there's an altitude around 17-20 km up where the west-to-east prevailing winds change to east-to-west. In between those levels, there's the Quasi-Zero Wind Layer (could one come up with a more delightful name?) where the east-west component is quasi-zero and there wasn't much north-south component to begin with. So a balloon parked there will stay close to stationary relative to the ground, and if it needs to make E-W corrections, it can go up or down a bit.

Papers on the QZWL tend to have Chinese authors.

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019AdAtS..36.1143Y/abstract

Personally, you would have to pay me to go and watch Beyonce, but I think you will find the "Full VIP onstage experience" is the £2000 ticket. Some restricted view tickets started at £65.

The problem of ridiculous ticket prices seem set to grow as theres not much profit for the artistes in streaming, DVD sales are plummeting and vinyl is somewhat niche. Its also not helped by the likes of Ticketmaster adopting an adaptive approach to ticket pricing.

Certainly, not-at-the-back tickets for the next Peter Gabriel tour were around £85 (twice as much at the front) and not much different for Muse at Milton Keynes this summer where you have to stand.

Not sure how much I would pay to see Gilmour perform Comfortably Numb one more time... a lot I suspect.

406 icehawk - ( no insult to Charlie intended, he’s much better at this than most. Scottish authors often are, interestingly)
Charlie is not Scottish, he's from Leeds and just lives here. As for why Scottish authors speak "well" in multiple voices, most of us are actually taught grammar, and can speak at least 2 languages by the time we're 6.

Heteromeles @ 297:

Changing the subject, it looks like "Military Ballooning" is the hot new aviation trend in the US and China. (e.g. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/chinese-spy-balloon-reaches-missouri . You can have fun looking for the recent US military ballooning tests. ).

Thoughts?

VIDEO: Chinese spy balloon shot down in view from Cherry Grove, South Carolina

It seems prudent to me to wait until it's over the Atlantic Ocean where the USN can have ships standing by to recover the debris instead of shooting it down over some populated area and having to search half the states of Montana or Missouri to find the debris. Noting that by the time it was reported over Montana, it had already drifted down to Missouri ... and it appears the USAF did have a pretty good idea where to find it when they were READY to shoot it down.

My own thought is it IS what the Chinese claim it is, some kind of high-altitude research vessel that got away from them, although I'm not discounting the possibility it's PSYCHO-logical warfare - they're just fucking with the U.S. to drive the rabid fascist wing of the GQP crazy ... crazier?

Something else for the GQP to use to attack Democrats, making Congress even more of a clown show than it already is? ... becoming even more unhinged than they already are.

Grant @ 308:

Personally, you would have to pay me to go and watch Beyonce, but I think you will find the "Full VIP onstage experience" is the £2000 ticket. Some restricted view tickets started at £65.

You wouldn't have to PAY me. Just give me a free ticket and I'd go. I'd probably go.

But even £65 ($78.34 USD just now) is more than I'd be willing to spend of my own money. She only has one song that I'm halfway familiar with & I can listen to that anytime I want to on YouTube.

The problem of ridiculous ticket prices seem set to grow as theres not much profit for the artistes in streaming, DVD sales are plummeting and vinyl is somewhat niche. Its also not helped by the likes of Ticketmaster adopting an adaptive approach to ticket pricing.

Certainly, not-at-the-back tickets for the next Peter Gabriel tour were around £85 (twice as much at the front) and not much different for Muse at Milton Keynes this summer where you have to stand.

Not sure how much I would pay to see Gilmour perform Comfortably Numb one more time... a lot I suspect.

The main problem for me (and I understand it IS me, not the artists or the fans) is I've gotten too old to enjoy the experience. I'm at the point in my life where the nosebleed seats aren't satisfying any more and floor seats are too expensive and I'm so angry all the time from having stupid, drunken assholes falling on me that I can't ENJOY festival/lawn seating.

Plus, I no longer have a lady friend I can reliably count on to accompany me IF/WHEN I do acquire tickets. And eventually the GOOD concerts will come out on DVD, so I can view them over & over again at my own leisure.

What I really miss now is the opportunity to get together with friends so we can make our own music.

I thought they used helium gas. If yes, then RU is gonna make a fortune selling it to China.

I was thinking about hydrogen in because helium tends to get pumped out of the weirder end of gas fields, so if those shut down, so does the helium supply. The problem with this notion is that the easiest way to make hydrogen is from methane...

On the gripping hand, flammability at 20 km up is an interesting concept, and new helium production is in foreign places like Algeria, Qatar, and possibly Oklahoma and Kansas, so what do I know?

Good to know about the Quasi-Zero Wind Level. That explains how the balloon can maneuver by simply adding air into an internal ballast bag and drop or raise.

It's also congruent with what John Powell (who runs a ballooning aerospace company) thinks ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xxoRK9ucc0 ). It's worth watching. He thinks it was a telecom experiment that got away, rather than a spycraft. If it could hang out in the QZWL, that would make sense*. His informed guess at this point is that the telecom experiments are being done by a division of the Chinese military, and the only reason this was freaky is that it was a bit bigger than normal, and China didn't tell the US it was entering our airspace. Otherwise, as he points out, people release balloons all he time.

*The idea is to use balloons to replace satellites for telecommunications, and apparently it's a possible trillion dollar field that's being pursued globally. Having a balloon able to keep station for an extended period with minimal propulsion is useful, and that might be what makes the QZWL so attractive.

I increasingly agree with you about research (see my previous post).

The one point I'd gently disagree on is the debris field. You can see plenty of videos of what happens when a weather balloon cargo hits online. It's not going Mach 15, and it's so light it basically goes boink. See this video for example ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp-dNA2POJw ) of six separate balloon missions. Crashes start 25 minutes in, although it's fun to watch the whole thing*.

Given that the Chinese balloon is white and it's February, it's probably saner to drop the thing into the dark Atlantic than into deep white snow in eastern Montana, but I suspect they'd get all the pieces either way. Wonder if they'll ever show off what they retrieved?

*Disclosure: I support JP Aerospace on Patreon, because I think what he's doing is cool.

@279 Howard NYC: "funerals are a formalized fee collectible moment for clergy"

Yeah, no. Not this clergyperson. I'm a Unitarian Universalist minister in the US state of Massachusetts. I get zero dollars if I do a memorial service for someone in my congregation. If it's someone outside my congregation, I might get US$125 to US$250. Considering I usually put in 4-5 hours meeting with the family, doing the service, and going to the reception, my hourly rate is US$63 if I'm lucky, US$25 if I'm not. And I never keep that money, it goes to a fund out of which we help people in need. This is true of all the clergy I know who work for mainline denominations.

I could also point to the trend of religious disaffiliation, which is causing more families to officiate at their own memorial services. (I was just at a memorial service where the family officiated, and it was one of the best memorial services I've been to.) I feel like you're writing about the 1950s, when clergy could indeed turn officiating at funerals into a nice little side hustle. Those days are long gone.

I do agree with your general point, that the funeral industry in the US overcharges. Funeral homes are being bought up by big corporations, who want to improve the quarterly reports, so they jack prices up up up. And they have a captive market -- right after a death, most people are not in the mood to bargain for lower rates. So as soon as my father went into hospice, we started shopping around (with his blessing, he was a tightwad), and arranged everything in advance. Under the laws of Massachusetts, you can pay for the memorial service in advance, and the money goes into a trust. We drove a hard bargain, he was buried in a cheap pine box (his choice), and we lowered the bill significantly.

I started to wonder if universities could bring a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI for damage to their product (education)?

I asked this question to some people who work in higher education. General consensus was no; on the contrary, flagging students’ work as cheating via ChatGPT could result in universities being sued by students wrongfully expelled. One lady put her real published academic papers into OpenAI’s text flagging system, and about half of them were judged as "likely AI".

Well, the "documentary" was more about the history of the vampire myth, the sky burial was mentioned only briefly.

Re: '... the debris field ... happens when a weather balloon cargo hits'

Interesting - I then watched the next video below which is both shorter (a little over 11 min) and more informative. I was curious about what happens when anything spills overboard at that altitude - it just seems to fly off into the distance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kIdRFIFWz8

Some time ago - maybe a few years now - there was some discussion on this blog about the accumulating debris from satellites. Consensus seemed to be that 'yeah - not a good idea to pollute our skies'. I think we also discussed how much it's going to cost us to get this debris removed - horrendously expensive. So while I think such experiments are interesting esp. since it appears that it allows many students to participate, at the same time I think it's at least equally important to teach these students about thinking through the consequences of conducting such experiments. Ethics applies to experiments conducted in the sky as much as it applies to experiments conducted in ground based labs. (Consider this a tirade, but I'm serious about this stuff.)

https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/ESA_purchases_world-first_debris_removal_mission_from_start-up

I think it would be unwise to assume that the thing would come down in one single rapidly-recoverable piece, especially if you've been shooting it to make it come down. It would be better to plan for it coming down in the kind of state of integrity expected of flimsy things that have been shot. So it's worth remembering that if you do it in Montana then all you have to do to get the bits you missed is wait for the snow to melt. If you do it over the Atlantic then you have to wait for the ocean to dry up, which would be incredibly boring and probably not worth the hassle, even though it is likely that it'd be the interesting bits you'd lost.

Well, from the pictures ( https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-says-us-is-going-take-care-of-chinese-balloon-2023-02-04/ ), the popped the balloon. Since this is what happened naturally in the video I linked to, I'd expect a similar result. Note that this balloon is 60,000' up, while the ones in the JP Aerospace videos fall from 100,000' up.

As for asking the Navy to find pieces of balloon in a shallow ocean (it appears to be less than 10 meters deep 5 km offshore where they shot it down)...I think they might have divers and ROVs up to the task?

Incidentally, I was wrong about Montana. At least parts of it are cycling above and below freezing. It's not in the storm track right now.

As OGH says, it's essentially only some Christian churches in the USA that go in for embalming

From a distance it might seem that way. But it is really non denominational except where the "faith" frowns on it.

It is a part of the huge funeral burial marketing money extraction business. What Howard NYC experienced is typical. You have someone dealing with a loss. Most times it is a bit of a surprise. Even when someone is at end of life in a nursing home no one is expecting it YESTERDAY. So the funeral homes play up peer pressure. Open casket which leads to makeup, embalming, and dressing. Plus the casket needs to be nice on the INSIDE to go along with the nice outside. Someone can drop $5K on a mid grade casket and $10K and up isn't rare at all. And this is being pushed on people at their most vulnerable. They are dealing with legal issues, work issues, relatives visiting from who knows where. Some of them telling exactly what you should BE doing whether you want to or not. (Let's toss in relatives/kids from a prior divorce to make it more stressful.) And in many cases EVERYTHING is a line item. Somber muzac over the sound system $100. Guest signing book. $200-$500. (Plain or really really nice.) And so on.

It's a racket. Everyone knows it. But they folks making the money are making so much they are powerful in influencing the laws of each state.

Now toss in instructions in a will which can have all kinds of legal impact as to what must be done.

My wife's mother's death and delayed funeral allowed the family fractures to get exposed and people show their real colors.

I think it would be unwise to assume that the thing would come down in one single rapidly-recoverable piece, especially if you've been shooting it to make it come down.

I saw some pics where there was a very big balloon with a payload suspended under it. And the payload seemed to have wings of solar panels out each side. (So one side would be in the sun all the time?) And the descriptions have not been clear but it has been described as the size of 3 city buses end to end. Which seems to be the payload size as the balloon has been visible by eye from the ground. Someone I know was out on the SC coast when it was shot down and got some pics that they posted on Facebook.

... electrolysis of the lifting gas is neither a meaningful cost or obstacle for high altitude ballooning. Heck, you might do it that way just because splitting some tap water for each launch is simpler logistics than ordering in gas canisters.

I saw some pics where there was a very big balloon with a payload suspended under it. And the payload seemed to have wings of solar panels out each side. (So one side would be in the sun all the time?) And the descriptions have not been clear but it has been described as the size of 3 city buses end to end. Which seems to be the payload size as the balloon has been visible by eye from the ground. Someone I know was out on the SC coast when it was shot down and got some pics that they posted on Facebook.

Remember that, when carbon fiber is involved, large doesn't necessarily mean heavy. Here's a picure of a bus-length truss being held in one hand (from http://www.jpaerospace.com/ascender175.html ). Since I've seen JPA videos of their rigs falling to Earth from 100,000' and more-or-less surviving the impact (their test platforms are foam blocks for equipment racks surrounded by a carbon fiber space frame), I don't think the Chinese balloon payload came down in little pieces. It may well have broken when it hit the water, but I'll be surprised if it shattered. All the USN did was hole the balloon.

I dread what will happen when my parents die. First, because it will be horrible anyway. Second, because I know my sister and it is not going to be a good experience (I am the executor of their will and will be directly in the firing line).

It remains my hope that it won't matter for some decades yet.

I've actually never done a pub crawl, and in the US, that would frequently probably involved vehicular transportation, so that sounds like fun.

Here in Portland, Oregon we've got some pedal trolleys that are hard to explain to someone who's never seen one: imagine a long table on wheels, arranged such that ten or twelve people sitting at the table pedal to propel the thing while one hopefully sober person at the end drives. These are very popular with pub crawl groups.

At least one business has somehow figured out how to license them as real bars, allowing people to pedal and drink at the same time.

(Ah, pictures!)

Sean McMullen might beg to differ with his post apocalyptic passenger propelled railways.

Ticket Prices ....
It's "traditional" for both moronic-&-arrogant-&-ignorant tory & labour politicians to take a swipe at Opera. They've been doing it for years, the grotty little shits.
BUT
It turns out that "decent" seats at a fascismfootball game are frequently considerably more expensive than a fairly good Opera seat. The fucking papers always quote the (very few) most expensive seats at "O" & the cheapest at the muddy bollock scenario.
Um.

Changing the subject, it looks like "Military Ballooning" is the hot new aviation trend in the US and China.

The balloon shot-down nonsense is proof that the US right wing has completely lost its tiny mind.

China has a Mars orbiter, a rover on the Moon, a space station ... and spy satellites that are likely at least as good as anything the United States had in the late 1980s (and probably better). They don't need spy balloons any more than the US does.

This is most likely exactly what they say it is: a high altitude meteorological research project that had an oopsie when its flight termination system failed, and drifted way off course because balloons are only barely steerable at the best of times (by ascending and descending in hope of catching a favourable wind). The stratospheric jet streams blow at up to 200km/h; drifting across the Pacific in only a few days is entirely possible. This is, needless to say, embarrassing, so they're denying everything.

And taking the US media narrative at face value on this subject is a sign of personal idiocy.

The main problem for me (and I understand it IS me, not the artists or the fans) is I've gotten too old to enjoy the experience. I'm at the point in my life where the nosebleed seats aren't satisfying any more and floor seats are too expensive and I'm so angry all the time from having stupid, drunken assholes falling on me that I can't ENJOY festival/lawn seating.

Me too, alas.

The Pet Shop Boys have been on my must-see bucket list for years. I scored tickets to a gig in Glasgow on their world tour in 2019, for May 2020. The gig was postponed ... and eventually went ahead in 2022 during a COVID spike and I was too chicken to go.

So imagine my joy when they were announced as the headline act in Edinburgh at the outdoor Hogmanay party 15 minutes' walk from my front door this year?

Two tickets, £85 each, and the music was great, and I was close to death for two days afterwards. Because it was an outdoor, standing-only venue in 2-4 ℃ weather with rain, in the dark. Guess who has no sense of balance and relies on visible vertical lines to know which way is up? And guess what there weren't a lot of, due to the wild illuminations in PSB's stage show? I nearly fell over and/or got trampled several times, my knees were in agony (it took us an hour and a half to find the end of the queue and get into the venue, then another two and a half hours of concert and fireworks), and I was borderline hypothermic when I got home (my outer layers were close to waterlogged).

It was a great gig, and would have been great for me, too, if I'd been a decade or two younger. As it is, I now know this: no more standing gigs, no more outdoor events (except in good weather).

I sympathise. I was staying with family in Edinburgh over Christmas and fell victim to the pedestrian traps masquerading as cycle track barriers when crossing London Road at night (the things with a vertical pole in an extended concrete base that blends in with the road surface under street lights).

The balloon shot-down nonsense is proof that the US right wing has completely lost its tiny mind.

Two possible non-crazy reasons (from the perspective of the American government) come to mind:

1) To show the American crazies that (a) we can too shoot down things even with a Democrat in the White House and (b) it was just a damn weather balloon all along. The crazies are by definition fact-resistant but some people can feel better for having told them.

2) To show the world that, yes, it was just a weather balloon all along. We won't know about that for a few days; the wreckage needs to be recovered and then experts will need to poke at it and write reports that pointy-haired bosses can understand.

There's the outside possibility that the Chinese really were up to something sneaky, but if so the story will drop out of the media quickly; neither government would want to talk about it in public.

general snark:

notion of surveillance airborne versus orbital... given there's an increasing number of reliable drone platforms effectively self-piloting whilst in station keeping mode and simple course compliance plus along with high efficiency solar cells plus low weight batteries plus hundreds of potential reasons for deployment...

not least as: spotters of fish for harvest; micro-climes for better regional weather predictions; forests for signs of fire; migratory swarms of illicit refugees fleeing war-famine-drought; traffic jams in urban areas; war zone intel on troop movements down to platoon granularity;

my guess (WAG indeed) is it was a deliberate mistake in mode of plausible screwup... test the will of the enemy, the responses of the 'liberal press' as well determine how much intel could be gathered when-not-if a couple thousand low-visibility-low-radar-cross-section (no such thing as perfect stealth) are deployed as a slow moving swarm at ultra high altitudes over a vast region... such as a water body between an aggressor's home coast and a targeted invasion coast (cough cough Taiwan)... much cheaper than LEO satellites... offering unending coverage...

Pigeon:

it is a balloon... unarmored... lifted by a fabric-like sack... if shot by non-exploding impactors it rips opens and vents the lift-gas... if you are angry and wasteful you'd expend an ATA missile but with patience and a desire to recover bigger pieces than thumbnail-sized then fire off a half-dozen rounds of 20MM ammo to punch big holes in the bag-thingie

Heteromeles:

there's assumption of intent... "recoverable" for re-use versus "itty-bitty bits" to baffle investigators... any recon platform sent over hostile territory will either be the very best sensor you got (if very few deployed such as SR-71 & U2) or the ultimate in cheapness (if high numbers to be deployed)... either way my bet is on an internal chunk of termite (200 grams?) to ensure electronics were slagged... better yet if Li-On batteries were utilized those were rigged to ignite if not handled with love by a technician trained in disarming the trigger

Charlie Stross:

You were robbed.

uhm, YUP.

Most folk when dealing with funeral arrangements simply shrug, sign the contract and write out a check. After all it is (literally) a once in a lifetime expense. You should show proper respect. Including renting a limo for grieving closest next-of-kin at (then) US$80/H with 5H minimum. With the funeral director all too likely counting upon the usual sibling rivalry, inter-generational bickering and status seeking via loudest whiny voices to ensure more than one limo being needed.

That scenario came to my attention when it arose from another friend's experience, and he called me in tears because his boyfriend was not going to allowed into the inner circle of grievers (not anti-gay bias, rather due to them not married like all the others) and therefore would ride in an 'ordinary' car to the cemetery. So I pointed out the hourly rate was an open wound. He could not get the funeral director to answer questions till director was forced to talk to me. Turned out in that part of New Jersey "going rate" in 2007 was US$ 115/H. When shouted out to those assembled, everyone realized they were being gouged, the widow then suggested any wanting to ride in limo to split the cost of it, and nobody wanted to kick in their share so there were zero limos.

(But. But? But my friend was blamed as ungrateful, disrespectful son. Never ever forget the spite of any relative denied their perceived portion of high status respect such as riding in a limo in a funeral vehicle fleet.)

Which along with various opportunities for savagely applied markups post-manufacturing plus poorly written regulations & vague applicable laws plus inferior regulatory oversight plus oh-by-the-ways sneaked in... is likely part of analysis arising out of research done by hedge funds prior to them seeking to perform a "rollup" of the funeral-industrial complex. In a rather attempt toward as close to monopoly as they could achieve.

So for any author looking to snark about amoral hedge funds in US there's squeezing the living via a nation-wide monopoly on insulin and the (recently) dead via a nation-wide monopoly on funerals... with a follow up snark about how tangled a mess arises from the death of anyone who own a house... takes years to deal with post-death issues of assets even when there's a last testament and nobody is challenging it... amazing numbers of companies claiming an overdue bill... in my father's case there was OBTW billing in 2003 (he died in 2001) attempting to collect for treatments he never received for diseases he never had... including a wheelchair rental in 1998 of US$74/M for six months... paperwork sure did look official

Considering that the USA has been spying on the rest of the world using overflights for 70 years, my reaction was the fuss was pure blue arse display.

whitroth:

That hospital sounds like a million lawsuits waiting to happen

why do you think I write it as [redacted hospital]?

since 1985 what with my father's near-death there (and a half-dozen other too close calls after 1985) I've tried to become an advocate for better recordkeeping and more openness and a national directory/clearinghouse for malpractice and other related stuff... my efforts led to me threatened with so many lawsuits one of my cousin-the-lawyers educated me about SLAPP mode of litigation (mostly US but other nations got an eqv) utilized by megacorps to suppress anyone lacking a gigabuck of resources who is seeking to challenge them... my online activities have been surveyed by various bad actors for key words such as names (doctors, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, etc) since the earilest years of the web... I can post whatever I want just without naming names or dates too specific... basically I stopped trying to help fix the mess when I realized I had little to gain and so much to lose

All the USN did was hole the balloon.

Reportedly it was shot down by an F-16 at 60,000 feet (which is about 10-15,000 feet higher than an F-16's maximum altitude, so neat trick). Going by the brief video I saw, they totally shredded the gas bag -- looks like they shot a missile right through it. So quite likely they detonated a continuous-rod warhead inside it (one capable of shredding enemy combat aircraft with some amount of armour around vulnerable bits).

In which case? What arrives at surface level will most likely resemble confetti.

I gave up such things decades ago (obviously not gigs, but open-air performances etc.) on similar grounds. The wet and hypothermia issue is the only soluble aspect, but both suitable kit and experience is needed. From your posts, I doubt that you would use such kit for anything else.

Apparently, such wet-weather gear is currently in vogue, which amuses me and my children, because I am transiently fashionable :-)

Howard NYC
SLAPP mode of litigation (mostly US but other nations) - yup, we've got that, badly.
As any reader of "Private Eye" will know, there's been an ongoing campaign against this corporate & political arse-covering for a loooong time ....
Recently, progress has been made, in small ways, but the criminal shits are still trying it on.
For a very recent example: Nadhim Zahawi tried SLAPPing the "Independent" & it's journos - but got a polite version of Arkell vs Pressdram in reply

Charlie
I suspect that the US Armed & Intel services already knew, quite well, that it was a simple weather drone, but shredding it "looks fierce" to the brain-fucked & shuts them up & also leaves nothing for conspiracy loons to rant on about.

Thing is, I did have multiple thermal layers and a waterproof outer shell! It just wasn't a sufficiently waterproof one -- I'd believed the weather forecast and opted for a lighter water repellent down-filled anorak that mostly served as a windbreaker/additional thermal insulation, instead of the heavier standing-in-a-freezing-shower-for-three-hours waterproof I should have worn. Turns out the down anorak was only sufficient to keep the water out for a couple of hours, not 8:30pm-1:30am.

As for the hypothermia, I've lost about 15kg in the past six months (deliberate, induced by medication, under medical supervision). I don't stay warm the way I did a year ago, to say the least.

(I don't go hill walking or rambling these days, so not out often enough to maintain awareness of my current protection needs.)

Yes, those things are a disaster in serious rain, despite the fact that some of them imply they can handle rain; even after an hour, I assume that it would have got wet, nust not the whole way through. My experience is that all insulating waterproofs and waterproofed insulation are a thoroughly bad idea for anything except brief use.

The other aspect is that the only insulating material that stays reasonably insulating when wet is wool; down is excellent in very cold conditions, but is no better than synthetics in wet ones.

I am very prone to hypothermia, too, which is why I go in for overkill on my protection, including all-wool insulation and separate NON-insulating waterproofs. Camping out for 6 nights does not give you a chance to warm up except by body heat!

Second, because I know my sister and it is not going to be a good experience (I am the executor of their will and will be directly in the firing line).

I'm seriously considering hiring a nephew (who's a lawyer) to be my executor, for a fee. Got to discuss it when we meet to update my will.

Not that I anticipate much contention, but this way I know that provisions will be followed, rather than money redirected to 'worthier' charities that I don't think are very effective.

"Reportedly it was shot down by an F-16 at 60,000 feet "

It was a F-22 flying out of Langley AFB and using a Sidewinder/AIM-9X.

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3288543/f-22-safely-shoots-down-chinese-spy-balloon-off-south-carolina-coast/

Wikipedia says the missile has a blast-fragmentation warhead with an IR proximity fuse. Sounds well suited for shredding a balloon envelope.

It is a part of the huge funeral burial marketing money extraction business.

I understand that selling plots in the cemetery goes by a similar method. Show the punters to the low-end first, get them to think "How grotty is this?" then move to the swankier (and thus more expensive) places. Upsell, upsell, upsell.

I read an account by an author who worked in a cemetery as a teenager who said that in those days, cemeteries kept a very close eye on which plots received flowers, and how often. If some poor stuff in an expensive part of the graveyard received no marks of esteem in ten years, they were dug up and placed in a low-rent section (headstone moved and everything) so that the spot could be re-sold.

That would have been in the early 1970s, so that practice might have been discontinued.

Reportedly it was shot down by an F-16 at 60,000 feet (which is about 10-15,000 feet higher than an F-16's maximum altitude, so neat trick)

F-22. The only report of anything else that I've seen is your comment. The government even released the type of missile used.

Based on photos taken by people I know on the ground it fell with the big bag acting a bit as a drogue chute.

"Sounds well suited for shredding a balloon envelope."

Speaking of that, the videos suggest that the payload may have remained attached to a major shard of the envelope, which was billowing in a parachute-like fashion. If so, it may have survived relatively intact.

I expect that detailed examination will be done at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, Wright-Patterson AFB.

https://www.nasic.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Article/611728/national-air-and-space-intelligence-center-heritage/

lot to be said for arranging ur funeral ahead of time if circumstances permit

here buddhist monks deal with funerals, and there is considerable milking of the bereaved, and for subsequent anniversary services after various (usually prime for some reason) numbers of years, they also go for low-temperature cremation followed by messing about with the bones with special chopsticks, bugger that

i'd like a nice minimally-attended high-temperature cremation followed by a larger party where such english-speaking friends as i have left can help themselves to anything they want from my library, even if a lot of it may only be fit for recycling by then

A bit like using a .5" sniper rifle to pot rabbits ....

Kardashev:

payload may have remained attached

there goes my WAG abut a thermite charge embedded in the electronics... so... maybe really was a lone ill-behaved wayward weather balloon?

realistic question of if ever we find out what the military retrieved and what they learned from the pieces... my WAG on that is "near-zero" in "25 years" (feeling optimistic am I)

Well, slavery in North America began considerably before the British showed up. Just like everywhere. But the terms were a lot different (and different in different places, and probably times). E.g. among many Amerind tribes after being a slave for awhile, you could be adopted into the tribe.

It's my understanding that slavery is almost universal among low-tech cultures. The exceptions prefer things like peonage or serfdom. (This may not apply to hunter-gatherers.) Aristotle is famous, among other things, for saying that they wouldn't need slaves when the looms could work themselves. (For some reason he didn't consider the child slaves being worked to death in the silver mines. But the basic idea is present. Slavery can be abolished by mechanical labor.)

Reportedly it was shot down by an F-16 at 60,000 feet (which is about 10-15,000 feet higher than an F-16's maximum altitude, so neat trick). Going by the brief video I saw, they totally shredded the gas bag -- looks like they shot a missile right through it. So quite likely they detonated a continuous-rod warhead inside it (one capable of shredding enemy combat aircraft with some amount of armour around vulnerable bits).

As others have noted, the Reuters link at 320 showed the shredded balloon falling with payload intact. Since, again, everyone from high school science classes to meteorologists to the military routinely launch balloons and retrieve payloads, perhaps the various high-flying militaries have good protocols for shooting them down with payloads intact? For example, why even put a warhead in the Sidewinder? All you need is for it to pass through the balloon, and it might even make it easier for the missile to climb to 60,000' if it needed to (F-22's ceiling is listed as "above 50,000'").

The bigger question is why the Chinese didn't just notify the US of a straying science experiment, but made it a mystery craft that caused all this commotion? I think the guesses about political screwups below the level of President Xi are probably correct. Another possibility is that it's an experimental telecom system for future commercial use, and when it got loose, the Chinese were hoping the US would blow up the payload and hide whatever they were testing (which begs the question of why the Chinese didn't shoot it down themselves...?). As for why the US military wanted to drop it ten miles off the coast in 47' of water, perhaps they want people wearing protection to retrieve it and handle it, in case some bright bulb had put a self-destruct on something. Having a civilian retrieve a part that blows up on them could turn a little kerfuffle into a bigger diplomatic incident.

As for telecoms, again, some are hyping balloons as cheap alternatives to telecom satellites, and touting this as a future trillion dollar industry. Us companies are in the field, and so is the Chinese military. Apparently, China does aerospace R&D differently, and this bit is under part of the military, rather than an independent company. We'll see if there's ever a public report on what that balloon was carrying.

there goes my WAG abut a thermite charge embedded in the electronics... so... maybe really was a lone ill-behaved wayward weather balloon?

I think they were/are very much concerned about self-destructs in the payload.

See https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3288543/f-22-safely-shoots-down-chinese-spy-balloon-off-south-carolina-coast/ and https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3288618/senior-defense-official-and-senior-military-official-hold-an-off-camera-on-back/

The official doing the briefing consistently said things like, "Military commanders determined that there was undue risk of debris causing harm to civilians while the balloon was over land." The reporters interpreted this as a concern for debris falling on civilians, but if you parse the sentence, it could easily mean that they're concerned about self-destructs and booby-traps as well.

The F-22's maximum operational altitude is 65,000 feet per wikipedia which is really high compared to most previous fighter aircraft, and would make it the logical choice for bagging a high-altitude balloon.

I will note that Sidewinders are cheap (by AAM standards: they're $200-400,000 depending on model), the AIM-9X has been around for over 20 years, and all air forces like to occasionally expend some missiles just to ensure that (a) they work per spec and (b) the pilots get to practice with the real thing -- they can probably chalk this up to the training budget, if not PR.

Point of detail:

From the above-mentioned https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3288618/senior-defense-official-and-senior-military-official-hold-an-off-camera-on-back/

"As planned, the F-22 engaged the balloon from an altitude of 58,000 feet. The balloon itself was between 60 and 65,000 feet."

" For example, why even put a warhead in the Sidewinder? All you need is for it to pass through the balloon..."

I'm losing track of my sources, but apparently the concern was that just poking a hole in the balloon could lead to a relatively slow leak, allowing it to stay aloft long enough to drift out to deeper waters where recovery of the payload would be more difficult.

336 - According to Wikipedia specs more like 58_000 feet ceiling, and another ~20_000 feet altitude for a typical AIM vertical flight profile.

339 - Also trying to lose weight for medical reasons; conga-rat-shoe-laces.

342 ref 446 - Or, if it was a Raptor that takes the launch ceiling up to 65_000 and then another 20k...

350 - You need an appropriate density substance in the warhead space of the missile to make it "fly right".

352 - Confirmed by an informed source.

I'm losing track of my sources, but apparently the concern was that just poking a hole in the balloon could lead to a relatively slow leak, allowing it to stay aloft long enough to drift out to deeper waters where recovery of the payload would be more difficult.

Okay...

I guess I'm coming from the JP Aerospace videos of weather balloons turning to spaghetti at ~100,000' when they can't stretch any more (see links in previous posts). From that perspective, the Chinese balloon looked to be extremely intact after being shot. But it was around 60,000', and nowhere near maximum stretch.

On the other hand, I'd interpreted the white cloud at impact as being some sort of condensation caused by the balloon rupture, but I suppose it could have been smoke.

Regardless, the payload looked to be intact after the missile hit, and the balloon was largely intact. If the missile did explode, it did remarkably little shredding damage.

When trading on commodities markets, lessened time makes you more money. Especially if you have the arbitraging advantage of getting intel faster than anyone else about the differing prices between London and Chicago.

Distance from London to Chicago is 6,349 km; transit time for data thru fiber optic is at about 1/3 lightspeed due to internal reflections (effectively 19,000 km); whereas using GEO is round trip of 71,786 km;

So using either LEO satellites or in-atmospheric high flying drones would cut distance down; problem being it would take a constellation of at minimum two hundred satellites to provide reliable LEO relaying; not impossible just really expensive; also closely tracked by just about everyone since launching rockets and placing lumps in LEO is of interest to governments; in contrast much less official tracking to operate a fleet of one hundred PV-electric drones positioned to provide overlapping relaying along a line between London to Chicago.

Thereby reducing the distance by about 12,630 km; which is about 4.2 milliseconds faster than anyone dependent upon fiber optic.

Based on whispers about traders having secured a monopoly on a line of microwave towers between New York City and Chicago, who have been arbitraging differences in ETF indexes prices versus underlying stock prices, that advantage is worth somewhere between US$40m to US$80m daily. There being about 250 trading days per calendar year, that adds up into the gigabucks.

I'm wondering why nobody in the past twenty years looked to see if there's a bunch of station keeping drones between London to Chicago.

Not really well suited. Heat seeking missiles aren't particularly good at finding balloons. Either they've got more than one kind of guidance, or they were relying on good aim and the proximity fuse. Radar targeting would have been much better. Or even sonar, except the missile was probably moving too fast.

Weather balloons are around 10 meters across. This one seems to be 100 meters or more.

Supposedly one of the selling points for Starlink once the laser crosslinks are runing at full chat. London links to a satellite south of Ireland, one or two more orbital planes across the Atlantic and data is being delivered to New York. Speed of light minus the time taken to reform packets in each satellite it passes through.

Waiting a few days may have allowed a tuning of the missile guidance to go for the balloon instead of the payload.

Re: '... deliberate mistake in mode of plausible screwup..'

Could be.

Some questions:

1-Did Taiwan or Japan pass along any info of a large 'weather balloon' to US forces based near there?

2-Didn't the US send some additional ships to that region not that long ago just as a reminder to China that the US will be available to support its allies just in case. If so - wouldn't these US ships be able to spot and report such activity. Ditto for various satellites.

3-This balloon passed over Canadian territory before hovering over Montana - where was NORAD? If they can report Santa's yearly trip, then they should be able to see and report on this. (Lots of disappointed kids if this gets out.)

4-Is there any international body for the registration, monitoring/tracking and reporting of 'weather balloons'? If no and if balloons are a potential growth industry then we need such an agency.

5-If this was a legit weather balloon snafu, the non-communication of a straying weather monitoring station to Canada and the US about this oopsie could be another example of local admins (usu. of the politico and police persuasion) trying or being ordered to prevent any embarrassment similar to the COVID outbreak. (Weird because there is still a lot of international collaboration on science projects between China and the US.)

6-If the balloon cargo survives the drop, would the MilIntel folks be able to tell whether the info is real or a plant? Or where any 'weather data' was being sent to? And I'm assuming that the onboard comm would have been two-way to some extent in which case the real data could have been erased and fake data sent and stored. (How could you tell if this happened?)

Lots of questions and possibilities.

It was not a weather-balloon.

Weather-balloons burst before they get that far up, and their payload is 4x4x10cm of styrofoam with a naked PCB and a dip-in-water-to-activate battery which lasts only a couple of hours.

This one had solar panels, and it was a lot larger, so it was built for duration in days, weeks or months.

In theory it could be SIGINT, but given China's resources, there is nothing they could do from that balloon they couldn't do better in orbit where they would have more energy and much, much heavier payload.

My guess is that it was a "climate-balloon", because there is no other way to explore what goes between flight level and satellite orbit.

But it could easily also be a university project, to see how cheaply one could circumnavigate the globe while taking pictures shitty pictures of whatever passes under the camera.

The US over-reaction is best understood in the context of "Havanna-Syndrome" and similar "auto-immune responses" of a paranoid imperium circling the drain...

Most likely what happened was that somebody spotted it by accident, and Space Force saw a great chance to show how much and how well they defend the Christian Taliban's Sacred Homeland.

3-This balloon passed over Canadian territory before hovering over Montana - where was NORAD? If they can report Santa's yearly trip, then they should be able to see and report on this. (Lots of disappointed kids if this gets out.)

They've reported they were tracking the balloon as it came in over the Aleutians, handed it off to Canada, then back to the US.

If it was a spy balloon, it might have been doing signals intelligence. In this mission, it could usefully float through, being stupid, detect whatever radar and other signals hit it, and send that information home somehow (presumably by uplinking to a satellite). IIRC, casing radars and other defenses is the kind of thing the US does routinely, in case they have to fly through that environment on an attack.

I'd hazard a guess that the proper counter would be to turn off any emissions they didn't want the Chinese to know about, monitor what they could get from balloon transmissions, and possibly conduct spoofing operations to mislead the Chinese about signals and radar in North America. In that case, letting it fly to the Atlantic might be more useful than shooting it down immediately.

The balloon could also be spying on weather patterns over the US. Combat meteorology is a thing, and remote atmospheric sensing can only provide so much data about conditions in the middle of the atmosphere. This is why hurricane hunters fly into storms and drop radiosondes, to get wind and pressure data from inside the storm. There's less that the US can do to stop this kind of spying, but they could at least see what sensors the balloon carried.

As for the Sidwinder targeting the balloon and not the payload, AIM-9X block 3 has something that looks like it could be an imaging IR sensor, so they may have given it a visual lock. In the video, there was a bunch of rocket exhaust, then nothing until the balloon deflated. I'm not sure whether that was rocket exhaust making a contrail in one body of air before crossing to another where it didn't make a contrail, or whether the missile just boosted until it acquired the target, then hit it ballistically since the balloon was more-or-less stationary relative to the rocket's speed.

The other thing is that AIM-9 training rounds are a thing. They have inert warheads and are over $150k cheaper than a full warhead. I'd still bet that's what they used to hit the balloon.

"there is nothing they could do from that balloon they couldn't do better in orbit where they would have more energy and much, much heavier payload."

Not entirely convinced by this. The long dwell time (something only available to GEO and Molniya satellites) give you the chance to play some games with signals monitoring that a normal LEO sat could not. The payload did look an interesting shape. How much power do you need to listen?

Vulch@360: Speed of light minus the time taken to reform packets in each satellite it passes through.

And there's the rub. Electromagnetic communication channels, whether laser or microwave, are unreliable. Forward error-correcting codes can deal with that, but not instantaneously. How much delay do they add in comparison with what you've saved by discarding the fibre?

»The payload did look an interesting shape. How much power do you need to listen? «

Not much.

How much power do you need to get the "take" home ?

A LOT.

If it was SIGINT, it would need a massive pipe back home, and US's own SIGINT satellites would have spotted that long time ago, no matter where on the planet these balloons were, and this is far from the first one.

As for loitering balloons as tool of SIGINT: I still dont buy it. It is not steerable and the chances of it going anywhere useful are nonexisting.

Try selecting Height=10 in https://earth.nullschool.net that will give you a good idea about the environment up there.

Heat seeking missiles aren't particularly good at finding balloons

AIUI modern IR homing missiles aren't simple-minded heat-seekers, they have FLIR cameras and image processors on board that can discriminate betweem an actual target, a decoy flare, or the sun.

Clark Ashton Smith, "The Second Interment". Nightmare fuel back in my childhood.

in terms of monitoring the battlefield (or potential battlefield) the US (and thus NATO) rely upon AWACS which is an unarmed Air Force jet (Boeing C-135) stuffed with as much hardware as feasible... downsides from perspective of Chinese is not the airframe nor the sensors but the decades of trial-n-error the USAF have had to shake down operations into sustainable routine...

when you have an opportunity to avoid directly imitating a technologically superior enemy with larger annual budgets by taking another path... why not?

not only are drone swarms usefully flexible for covering a battlefield but the potential non-military applications turn it from a bleeding wound military procurement cycle (yeah I'm looking at you F35 JSF[1]) into an all-weather-all-circumstances testbed for producing an effective design for surveillance drone swarms...

open source suggests each AWACS costs in range of US$400M and takes 3Y to build and debug and certify (never mind the decade or so to design-build-test each generational prototype)...

whereas a drone swarm could be composed of multiple generations (each done a bit slapdash in less than 2Y) and multiple variants (10? 20? 30!?) under evaluation simultaneously...

not only useful for international adventuring (with greater success than Russia's cluelessness without looking to Iran as drone vendor) but big plus for intimidating domestic hooligans who could look up into the unblinking eyes of a drone swarm feeding real time intel into an AI analyzing and counting and identifying...

and oh yeah... there's more accurate weather prediction, crop yields, fishing, forest fires, water utilization, and other boring stuff too...

[1] "The program has drawn much scrutiny and criticism for its unprecedented size, complexity, ballooning costs, and much-delayed deliveries."

»not only are drone swarms usefully«

But why are you mentioning that in context of a balloon meandering about wherever the stratosphere takes it ?

Hint: Drones can steer and be steered.

How much power do you need to listen?

It's not just listening.

It needs power to inflate/deflate the inner balonet full of ballast air (not helium) that is used to make the balloon ascend or descend, which is its only way of controlling its direction.

It needs power to charge the batteries to keep the location, sensors, and comms stack running overnight. Along with the inflation/deflation pump. So take your expected daytime power demand and triple it -- at least! -- to cover overnight requirements. Maybe more, because if it drifts too far north or south it may have only limited hours in which to charge up cells to carry it through 18-22 hours of darkness.

It's at high altitude so it's quite likely the instruments will need heater elements to keep them from freezing.

And so on.

Finally: modern space-rated PV cells are printed thin films on sheets of plastic that weigh about as much per unit area as printer paper (aside from the support truss). So PV power is cheap when you're calculating your mass budget. Why not carry as much of it as possible?

It is quite likely that it was a prototype for a long-term (climate?) balloon, they intended to bring it down over the Pacific, but the kill signal failed. Going public with that would have been embarrassing, so nobody took the decision to do so, and it was too late by the time the blue-arse posturing started.

"Radar targeting would have been much better."

As it happens, the AIM-9-2 modern version of the Sidewinder has a data link back to the launching F-22, which has a very good radar. Dunno if it was used or needed in the present case, but it was available.

hmmm... any guesses how soon till there's vendors amongst the military-industrial complex shaking the Pentagon's pants leg seeking a couple megabucks for designing a prototype for an anti-balloon defense system?

because... why not?

Maybe those bells on coffins are still useful.

Residential care facility faces $10,000 fine after Iowa funeral director finds woman pronounced dead gasping for air in body bag

Since we are past 300, a totally unrelated comment.

Commercially available home 3D printers are s-l-o-w. This xenomorph-inspired sex toy was made with such printer; more accurately, the mold was 3D-printed, then silicon poured to make this eldritch abomination:

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b38bb93f9087635cad196f1a86900c4a-lq

The mold took 19 days to print.

Whoever designed it needs to work on their design skills then. I built a similar size mask over a couple of days print time, a mold shouldn't take much longer unless they tried to do it all in a huge single block.

I will ask them

4-Is there any international body for the registration, monitoring/tracking and reporting of 'weather balloons'? If no and if balloons are a potential growth industry then we need such an agency.

There are a LOT of weather balloons lofted daily. And they are much smaller than this one just shot down.

Between 900 and 1,300 locations around the globe do routine releases, two or four times daily

and

Military and civilian government meteorological agencies such as the National Weather Service in the US typically launch balloons, and by international agreements almost all the data are shared with all nations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_balloon