Oh-oh. Thailand may be experiencing a miniature Chernobyl-type situation. A cesium-137 cylinder has been smelted resulting in the emission of radioactive red dust. Officials think that it's contained, but reading the article, it doesn't seem that they are certain.
The “red dust” was sent to a metal factory in Rayong province.
Office of Atoms for Peace officials travelled to the factory in Rayong
and found 24 tonnes of “red dust” contaminated with caesium-137.
That's a lot of dust.
Several Thai media outlets reported earlier that the cylinder was found
crushed into a block with other metals in preparation to be smelted but
“tragedy was avoided” as it hadn’t yet been put into the furnace. It
turns out this was not true and the cylinder had been smelted.
National Power Plant 5A Co., Ltd., and the Office of Atoms for Peace set
up a team of 50 people to search for the missing radioactive isotope
but couldn’t find it anywhere on the plant grounds. They believe it has
been taken away.
Yikes.
––– 良くない –––If you've been paying attention, people are realizing suddenly that
AI will upend the world. When those closely involved with AI say things like:
"But what we're looking at now is intelligence itself... This is the
first time we're able to create intelligence itself and increase its
amount in the universe,"
They aren't kidding.
Google will soon release an AI model that can answer health questions with a passable degree of accuracy. Whereas IBM's Watson failed spectacularly, such that even MD Anderson Cancer Center couldn't make it work, the power of GPT-4 has been used to create
MedPaLM-2, which has been able to
pass medical board exams at a level which equates it to an expert physician.
––– 凄い –––How did I not know this before? Sets of letters that I used to call alphabets, are not really that. True alphabets are where symbols representing vowels and consonants are treated equally. But some character sets, like the Japanese hiragana and katakana are representation of syllables, and are called
syllabaries. When character sets are consonant-vowel pairs, like Javanese or Ethiopian, they are called
abugidas. And if they are just consonant sounds, and you are expected to fill in vowel sounds that aren't provided (like Hebrew and Arabic), those are called
abjads. Here's a
very pretty and unusual abugida, the
Ditema, used by the Xhosa and Zulu.
––– 凄い –––
Coupled with the fact that pedestrian traffic of "normal people" is down (because who wants to walk around downtown these days), that's a lot of avoidable tragedy. How is it compassionate to let the homeless wander the streets like feral animals, shooting up drugs, trashing the city, setting things on fire, while we pay increasingly higher taxes to clean up the mess?
––– 良くない –––––– 凄い –––
––– 良くない –––Strange: Elon Musk used to warn us about the danger of AI, and now I read that
he put money into its development? And he's surprised that it's closed-source and making money? Hmmmm....
––– 良くない –––I guess many wealthy people decided not to pay the Metro tax. Wealthy people generally tend to know when something is a good investment. I don't think they "forgot". I think they're sending a message. And of course, here's
Salem, trying to figure out how to keep Oregonian's kicker refund. Because they have a
whole slew of give-aways that need funding.
They don't even have enough money to fund solutions for the problems they create!
––– 凄い –––Not grounded in reality, but we can always dream, right?
––– 凄い –––
––– 良くない –––
––– 良くない –––The
secret dealings behind the COVID-19 agitprop are finally coming to light.
This guy wasn't fooled.
––– 凄い –––
Fifty-seven percent of Gen Zers and Millenials say they do not feel
like they have adulting figured out. In the survey, 63% of Gen Zers and
Millennials said they did not feel like they were prepared for the
responsibility of being an adult, and admitted they feel burned out by
adulthood.
The biggest struggle for both generations seems to revolve around
cars with 63% of the younger generations having no idea how to change
the oil in a car, 48% not knowing how to change a tire and 42% not
knowing how to jumpstart a car.
––– 良くない –––Congratulations to Daniel Stenberg, on the 25th anniversary of cURL. He's one of the unsung heroes of the Internet that most people have never heard of.
––– 凄い –––
––– 良くない –––
