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 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 ...

 Hey, Claude, Translate This I've been fascinated by flapping wing aircraft ever since Dune introduced us to 'Thopters" (ornithopters) that fly like dragonflies. Ever watched a dragonfly fly?  Want to see me fly backwards? So there is a link* in an "Atlas" newsletter about wing flapper research, but the important part is in Chinese. I gave the problem to Claude Opus 4.6.  Of all the translation programs I've used, it's the fastest, and generates pristine english.  PROMPT: Please interpret this into english: 摘要 本文提出了一种新颖的建模方法, 用于研究由薄且可随意变形的膜组成的双翼扑翼的推力生成机制. 基于应变能等效原理, 膜 结构通过弹簧质点系统进行建模. 气动载荷采用简化的准定常气动模型计算, 并考虑“合拢-打开”机制. 当两个翼面接触时, 系统中引入 了冲击力. 对机翼动力学数值模拟问题, 首先进行了网格收敛性分析以确定合适的网格尺寸. 为了验证所提出建模方法的正确性, 将预 测的双翼扑翼飞行器的推力和所需功率与实验数据进行了比较. 本文还分析了前进速度对推力的影响. 结果表明, 随着前进速度的增 加, 推力产生效率降低, 同时机翼变形减小. 8:53 AM CLAUDE COMMENTS : This is the abstract of a Chinese academic paper on biomechanical/aerospace engineering. Here's the translation: The (almost instant) Translation ...

Staggering Budgets for ICE or Stuff you maybe missed in the "Big Beautiful Bill"  This year the budget for ICE Recruitment, Operations and personnel is THREE TIMES the highest it ever was in the Biden Administration. The budget for building new holding and detention centers is MORE than three times bigger. These mega-budgets go on, slightly diminishing, for three more years. The 2006 ICE budget is about the size of the total military spending for each of: Italy, South Korea, and Australia. That includes all their ships, planes, tanks and missiles. It's not overstatement when, as many worried citizens are saying, President Trump is building a "personal army," or a national police force funded approximately three time more than the FBI.  Oh, and he cut the FBI's budget this year by $500 million. Just sayin'. Check this out.  Just the shorter bars buy more "beds" than the entire federal prison system.  Giant cages, converted warehouses and tent ci...

  This Seems Relatively (!) Important In all the coverage of the upcoming NASA SLS slingshot around the moon coverage, it seems to me that direct comparisons between our two moon-bound rockets are missing. Maybe I'm just not watching the right media? I'm a big fan of both NASA and SpaceX, and they have different objectives in our return to Luna. Still, comparisons are enlightening.  This occurred to me watching the SLS creep toward the launchpad on the same huge, tracked crawler that moved the Saturn stacks. Space X is a whole new generation, including how it gets to its launchpad.  And Starship is a LOT bigger! Want to drag race? BIG DIFFS ALL AROUND like how they get to their launchpads. NASA SLS Transport MethodUses the Crawler-Transporter 2 (CT-2), a massive tracked vehicle (world's largest self-propelled) that carries the entire stacked rocket on a Mobile Launcher Platform (MLP). The crawler has laser guidance for leveling and precision docking. SpaceX Starship Stage...

  So much talk of AI agents, super chatbot spinoffs that can actually do things for you, pay your bills, grocery shop, run your research project, scratch your back. AI mavens are  inventing and hawking them like crazy.  I'm ready to go. I've been thinking what kind of help I need here around the farm. I just have to think about where I could use a little help.   The agents I want: Agent 1: Teenager . A full service phone and app consultant that doesn’t think old people suck.   Agent 2: MIT Masters degree computer scientist with powerful layman communications skills and endless patience. It can get me out of any computer pickle, spitspot. It assumes administrator/owner powers and fixes problems that confound me. Agent 3 : MBA accountant .   Reads all letters and documents from our investments. Makes suggestions. Keeps all our financial records. Files our taxes. Agent 4: Newsy. Stays up to the minute on agents and AI in general. And on science broadly....