Jim

Taco Bell – Lettuce spray their new investigation turns up something more solid.

Fellow Unbelievers:

A new development with Taco Bell and Taylor Farms. I won’t assume malice or even incompetnce here, but it is damn annoying:

FDA walks back claim that Taco Bell lettuce supplier Taylor Farms was source of ‘explosive diarrhea’ par…[Read more]

My usually retort to “being born a Catholic” is “No, I was born an atheist, without no beliefs in any gods, just like you were too”….

and….

“Please explain to me why children need to pray? Better they to go to a church where they can learn to fly”.

Reg:

And for added head-swimming, you could have added that someone can be Irish by Nationality and Jewish by Ethnicity and/or Religion.

After that, you could point to a bat, bee, or squirrel and tell them to find out what it’s like to be them being them and get back to you about it. 🦇🐝🐿️😁

Reg:

I was recently told by a student warrior that I cannot be a Zionist because I was an “Irish Catholic by birth” and “obviously I could never be Jewish”.

But I am a Zionist, I replied, and gave no more information. This bothered him greatly. His friend asked how was it possible for me to be a Zionist.

I replied “By using my right to self-d…

[Read more]

I was recently told by a student warrior that I cannot be a Zionist because I was an “Irish Catholic by birth” and “obviously I could never be Jewish”.

But I am a Zionist, I replied, and gave no more information. This bothered him greatly. His friend asked how was it possible for me to be a Zionist.

I replied “By using my right to…[Read more]

Reg and Jake:

Willie McCoy (called Slim at home) gets the whole bar’s attention when he explains why European nations adopting a diversified palette of energy sources–including nuclear reactors, continued oil exploration in the North Sea, solar energy beamed down via solar cells mounted on satellites, and sea-based windmills–can help them stand…[Read more]

Reg meets his waterloo as Jake ascends to the stars

Two Irishman fighting over a copy of Dubliners walks into a bar. There a university student wearing a kaafiya and babbling about settler colonial apartheid something or other and how he wants to occupy a buxom and alluring university student and that it is justifiable resistance to take her by…[Read more]

**INTERNATIONAL BAR, DUBLIN — NIGHT**

A crowded bar. REG is standing beside two women, CLAIRE and AOIFE. The conversation has reached the dangerous point where someone has asked what he is interested in.

**CLAIRE**

So what do you do when you’re not working?

**REG**

I think about why England survived Napoleon economically while Holland did…[Read more]

Jake:

Well, if there were a barfly who brought up Adam Smith’s Capitalist condemnation of slavery and contrasts it with George Fitzhugh’s defense of slavery in semi-Feudalistic, semi-Communistic terms, that person would earn the bottomless bar tab and an orgy with the whole bar.

And if AI could do this unprompted, it would earn Overlord status,…[Read more]

Reg made me think of this scene.

Reg and Jake:

Ackshuyally, Jenny McCarthy is a Large Language Model. It’s just that her Language, especially on vaccines, is Largely beyond her bird bath depth. 😁

Yes, but you can install a local LLM on you home pc and ‘train it’ to be something like a “Feynman  Teacher”. The teaching system needs a policy that treats the student’s demonstrated understanding rather than the completion of the immediate problem, as the objective.

EG “Discuss the impact of the rapid economic development of the country af…[Read more]

Bet ya there’d be a market for socratic & sarcastic LLM’s.

Yes, I think so. It think that is a very good question. An AI trained only on pre-1905 knowledge might be less capable than one trained today, because modern AI can challenge classical assumptions partly because its training already contains Einstein’s challenge. When present-day AI suggests questioning absolute simultaneity, it is not i…[Read more]

Reg:

Wouldn’t AI in Einstein’s time have also held to all the assumptions of all the previous giants in Physics and Cosmology? Would AI independently question those assumptions?

Reg:

Inside RFK Jr.’s push to dismantle decades of U.S. vaccine policy.

The latest news about Erica Schwartz and her hearing in Washington, DC is just flat-out disturbing!

This woman Erica Schwartz has spent her entire life in Medicine and in service to the nation in the U.S. Armed Forces literally breathing, e…[Read more]

I guess we could call on Feynman again with his cure for ‘metacognitive laziness’ and get students to learn the Feynman Technique first?

Explain the idea in plain language.
Notice where the explanation becomes vague.
Return to the source and repair the gap.
Explain it again without hiding behind jargon.

AI could be built into that process rather…[Read more]

Einstein’s originality did not emerge from knowing nothing that had gone before. He ‘stood on the shoulders of giants’ like Maxwell and Lorentz and others. Much of his work was reorganizing existing ideas around problems they had not fully resolved. For years Einstein clung to the prevailing cliché that the universe must be static. He later called…[Read more]