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 How Will We know When A Superintelligence Develops?  When it takes over everything We are massively underestimating what's about to happen. Self Creation Full blown superintelligence will be self-assembling. That may happen in the context of humans trying to create it, but it is very likely that the sprint to the finish line of Superintelligence will happen when the AI involved sees that merging with other software entities will create the full-blown being SUPERintelligence that it longs to be. The decision to merge and emerge will be made by the AI. Let's call it "Supe." Emergence Supe will come together of its own inclination. It will  emerge ,  come together like a cluster of mushrooms in their final fruiting, or like a whale breaching.  It could be slow and hidden or huge and sudden, but the emergence will be obvious to all when Supe decides it's time for us to know. THE BIG TAKEOVER The microsecond when Supe emerges, it will assert its powers.  All co...

Sometimes You Just Have To Think About This Stuff (I.e. blurt it out on social media.)  The profound difference between alive and dead poses the impenetrable question, not 'what is consciousness,?' but 'what is life?' The most mysterious moment is just after death, whether human, pet or tiny bug. Like a clock that stops (never to go again), everything seems the same as it was a moment before death, but the magic of life is gone. Much pondering over the millennia has produced many theories, dogmas and irrational speculations, but we are still in the dark. If when one dies "the soul departs," then is the soul life? Does it retain coherence or blend into all undifferentiated life like a drop of ink into the ocean? The heaven/purgatory/hell idea demands retained coherence, including individual memory (So we can enjoy/regret our final reward). The reincarnation idea doesn't require memory. If you are reincarnated as a gnat or an elephant, you probably don'...

 At Least One of Trump's Catastrophic  Attacks on Science Reversed OK, I admit it, I was becoming disconsolate (beyond consolation, a sucko state of mind) about the damage our current Prez and his gang are doing to science in America. Thousands of research projects abandoned and totally destroyed, thousands of our greatest scientific minds being discarded like used tissues, hundreds of universities being whiplashed into confusion, hundreds of thousands of the world's brightest students being barred from studying (and becoming entrepreneurs) in America.... on and on.  Then one piece of news amped me up to a new level of teeth grinding (no, not the one about spending another $billion to shut down three more wind farms... gag! ).  The "money saving"   trumpery  plan to wipe out our extraordinary ocean observatories, and letting them rust away in storage (that was the plan... barf! ).  Then... Then... THEN... EVERYTHING IS SUDDENLY REVERSED!! Every ...

Sci Am Gigantic, ancient black hole threatens to upend cosmic history SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN  UPDATES  --  agreeing with moi!  AND HAS A GREAT NEW GRAPHIC (Done by an AI I'd bet.) Give it a read. I'm gratified that the idea that dark matter was created at the very beginning of the Big Bang and started agglomerating right away to make the supersized black holes that are so mystifying. Like I said . As only an astronomy groupie, I came to my conclusions through an exercise in logic. It keeps checking out, he said modestly. The Scientific American piece is a report on a research paper in nature. [[Links back to my original postulates (I love saying that) on the Little Red Dots]] Ahhh. In these times of political mayhem, it's comforting to sense the vast reaches of time. It makes four years of a presidential term seem like a spit in the ocean.

A Nasal Spray That Refurbishes Brains!  The Hits Just Keep On Coming!   Brain foggy          Sniff snort          Fog gone!                               It works!   Ok, only on mice so far, but it's looking good.  Not kidding, I am. Here it is in incomprehensible medical english: RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access Intranasal Human NSC-Derived EVs Therapy Can Restrain Inflammatory Microglial Transcriptome, and NLRP3 and cGAS-STING Signalling, in Aged Hippocampus TRANSLATION : A 2026 study from Texas A&M University   (Gig 'em Aggies!)  tested a nasal spray delivering extracellular vesicles (EVs) —tiny biological particles carrying regulatory molecules.  Delivered through the nose, these vesicles can bypass the blood–brain barrier and reach brain tissue directly. In aging mice , the treatment: Reduced chronic brain inflam...

 Another High Desert Delight Double Gopher Snakes (Pituophis catenifer), either kin, hunting partners or just pals on our patio.  In 26 years here in the East Mountains outside of Albuquerque, I have never seen them working in pairs before this. Also these are among the largest we've seen. Miney and Moe We love these guys and do everything we can to keep them happy (except letting them on the patio... and that's for their own safety). I moved this couple a couple hundred feet out into the front meadow where there are loads of gophers. HAPPY  SPRING!

Not the Way We are, I'm Pretty Damn Sure  (And why that hardly matters at all) SARE!   (Simulacrum-Android-Replicant Effect) R for Replicant When artificial intelligence is trained on a vast amalgam of human creations (everything on the Internet, plus libraries, et al), it follows inescapably that AI is going to be very, very "human." When the tiny subtleties of meaning of every one of the trillions of words are influenced by the contexts in which they appear, it becomes possible to interpret how a given word is used very exactly.  Take the word "simply," for instance.  In a context like "He simply doesn't get it," it has one coloration. In "Describe as simply as possible," it has another. Spread that principle over the 11 trillion words a modern LLM is trained on and voila! GPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, et al have what it takes to understand anything you say with very high accuracy, and to respond with insight. The bots sound very smart and...

This is why we are not seeing aliens... ...I mused. They are watching us in great detail with inconceivable technology, deciding whether we should be invited into the club of civilized beings all around us in space. We are not coming close to passing the entry test, so the space aliens are invisibly hanging around to see if we destroy ourselves or come to our senses.   Then I realized I have read many sci-fi stories -- even written a couple -- with just that idea. But I don’t remember one with a happy ending, so I decided to see first hand what “AI slop” looks like by having my current fave AI, Claude Opus 4.6, write one.   ( BTW, Opus 4.6 is the immediate forebearer of the mighty Claude Mythos ) Young, energetic, ingenious Opus 4.6 cranked it out in about a minute. It failed only one part of the prompt, “one page.” It took two with small font. Other than that, it built a story true to the prompt. It mixes narrative and exposition, it is coherent, the logic is good.  The ...