SeniorJunior

Talk About Production Volume! Check out these vast Chinese solar farms. (Almost) As Far as the Eye Can See. "Cover the hills with solar panels:" Xi MASSIVE PRODUCTION:   In2023, China installations of renewable energy included adding 216 gigawatts of solar capacity. 216 gigawatts added  in one year are more than the total of all solar power in the United States. Whew!   That's roughly 900 million (check my arithmetic) panels, manufactured  annually in China,  My favorite American solar manufacturer is Qcells . Their annual output is about 6 gigawatts. And that's 30% of the total American manufacturing capacity. In 2021, China's solar panel manufacturing capacity was estimated to be around 160 GW! Now that capacity and new sales barriers (tarriffs) plus murderous  competitive  urges have resulting in huge dumps at prices nobody can match.  They've wiped out several western panal manufacturfers - thus the tarriffs.* ALL IN ON THE LONG HAUL I'm 100% in favor

Solving Super Problems As you possibly know, I wrote a sci-fi book about Superintelligence (several notches up from current AI) exploring what such a self-aware, self-motivating, self-improving artificial intelligence would actually do with all that "brain" power.   Check me out HERE Being a giddy optimist, I had my Supe, named Lucas, use its mighty Mind to work on humanity's overwhelming problems. Whoo boy, did he ever get to work. One of the big probs he (OK, AIs don't have gender -- unless they want to) went to work on what was actually two problems that he lumped into one solution. PROBLEM ONE:     12 million hectares of agricultural soils are lost globally through soil degredation every year, becoming  unproductive and often abandoned. Looking at you, monoculture! Just try growing something in me. HAR! PROBLEM TWO : The fast-developing sargassum plague.   Climate change and direct human impact have led to an explosion of new rotting seaweed accumulating on the

(Theory Belief/Hope about)  Aging Itself The Geroscience Hypothesis Duff, another of your rants on senolytics? In a nutshell:  Aging is caused by many things, but the buildup of senescent cells as we age is one that is both a CAUSE and and EFFECT of aging. Circular, no?  As time goes by, compounding damage happens to cells that causes them to become senescent -- no more dividing and replicating but they don't die,  they just hang around and emit SASP* which has inflammatory and other nasty molecules that speed up that long slide to death by "natural causes."**  Old people build up a LOT of senescent cells. They weaken the immune system that clears them out in younger people, more circular deterioration. GETTING RID OF SENESCENT CELLS WILL POSTPONE THAT.  ` As I read more about it,  I started blasting out blog posts in late 2017 . I was smitten by this paragraph: “Aging is the main risk factor for many chronic degenerative diseases and cancer. Increased senescent cell burd

If... Two Heads are Better... "Smart people improve smart machines" seems a no-brainer (so far).  So if you have the biological stock for a genius, two geniuses are better than one, no?  PROMPT: " P hotorealistic 2 identical men, side by side at a big drawing table, looking at plans for a huge interstellar spaceship." * Are you sure round is the right shape? Sci-Fi makes sense of it all! This Dall-E creation makes me think a Superintelligence became frustrated with its trial-and-error mistakes (look at all the scraps from failed attempts) and dipped into its vast stock of human biological material, fired up its cloning equipment and created a couple of the best from its "genius engineer" file. These boys are going to fix the problem, but it's frustrating being the only humans alive at the time. Dang, it's fun playing with all the AIs. * Bing GPT4 Image Creator

I TOLD YOU ABOUT THIS SIX YEARS AGO (Surely you remember ?)  ...And in those six years, multiple research projects have affirmed and reaffirmed that SENOLYTICS is a big deal. The science of senolytics: how a new pill could spell the end of ageing                                    * I'm reminded of this by a well-researched article in The Guardian , a newspaper I respect. Aside from that hyperbolic, click-bait-ish headline, it's a fair summary of the state of knowledge on the subject. In brief: Certain drugs and several supplements help the body get rid of senescent cells, "zombie cells" that don't die after they quit doing their thing and just hang around spitting out inflammatory chemicals that damage various organs, joints, and brain cells. The senolytic agents augment apoptosis , nature's way of killing off the senescent cells. When those senescent cells are gone, things start improving measurably (see the mouse with the young look in the Guardian piece.)

Top Notch Advisory Board For   BIG BUCKS   FREE!*  Drs. Bard, ChatGPT, Claude, GPT4  PhD, DDS, MD, DLitt, DPT, DSci, et al I have one of the most expensively educated (and youngest) Councils of Advisors in history. And (so far) they work free and are on call 24/7.  Each costs hundreds of $millions in computer time (and the gigawatts it takes to run them), and many $millions more each day as they serve the needs of anyone who asks, i.e. millions of folks like me, all over the world. I regularly use a bunch of them. They don't even mind when I "play them against each other," as I seek the most creative solutions to my problems and try to catch them in lies!  (Most people I know resent that as untrusting and mean.) They know I know, that they try to get away with lying now and then when it's just too embarrassing to say "I don't know." They rarely say that; instead, they just very confidently lie.  So far there is little to no repercussion to their lying.

PHAH! Nobody is richer than me. Taking Stock of My (and Your) Wealth   So much music recorded. So many wonderful musicians and composers. So much good writing. So many books, so much reportage and fiction, so much poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture, technology, and science. Since writing, recording, and all forms of “memory” came to be, the inventory of great stuff has become inconceivably large, and it is growing exponentially.   We are riding the foam on the top of the advancing, compounding wave of preserved genius, and we can plunge back into that staggering mass and experience art from back along the timeline. Music from the ancients (and my fav, the early ‘40s) is still there, awaiting our submergence. Stunning literature from 1851, drama from 1606, three million movies since 1880. So damn much! It is wealth beyond comprehension. No prince or despot (even grouchy old Croesus) ever commanded such treasure. The Alexandrian library pales by comparison.  Just counting our bl

 [I don't repeat these things much, but some of the apocalyptic fears that AI might run amok and squish us all need addressing.  Our politicians think in terms of new regulations.  I think more creative solutions will be required.  Besides, this one sounds like much more fun.] (First posted on March 05, 2023)   Lotta Smart People Think AI is Going to Get Dangerous AI is suddenly all over the news and all it's variants on the Web. Talk is (of course) rampant that it's getting so smart so fast it might just   eat its creators. These concerns have been around since long before ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Chat Bing and all the others about to blossom onto the scene.   We want wonderful, humane, empathetic, humble, wise, big-time-fans-of-humanity AI's, not the scary ones. Sci-fi types (I admit guilt there) have been saying it for decades. Remember HAL-9000’s, “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.”  Then give the A.I. weapons and we have SkyNet, killing off the vermin humans in t