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A Personal Update: The Day To Day Work Of One Physicist.

A brief personal update as to what I have been doing.  There has been much interesting science...

A Simple Way To Assess The Likelihood K2-18 b Host Alien Life. The Odds Are Almost 50-50.

How can you as a person who is not a scientist know if a given claim of having found alien life...

Reported Failure To Reproduce Superconductivity, But Replication Of Apparent Diamagnetism, At Room Temperature In LK-99

Last week it was claimed that a material that would be superconducting at  normal pressure...

Understanding The Great Discovery of A Universal Gravitational Wave Background by the Interational Pulsar Timing Array Collaboration.

What are gravitational waves? What are Pulsars and what does it mean to time a pulsar? How does...

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Hontas FarmerRSS Feed of this column.

Currently I am an adjunct professor at the College of DuPage. My research focuses on astrophysics from massive star formation to astroparticle physics. Born and raised in Chicagoland I have lived... Read More »

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We already know Chat GPT and the tech behind it can replace comedy acts. Right now a new ongoing stream of “news” totally made up news like stories, is being powered by Chat GPT and animated using the Unreal video game engine. Unreal engine a 3D game engine for which the source is available on Github. It is only a matter of time before realistic enough, GPT powered commentary is added to news feeds. "News" here is in scare quotes because it's not like reading a RSS feed and applying some Chat GPT driven reaction to it. Right now it uses GPT to create news items based on things given to it through twitch chat. That said the graphics generation via Unreal engine is of interest as the result is far better graphics.

Chat GPT is known to respond to prompts and will give back what it is asked for.  So I asked it to define the word woman from a purely scientific perspective.  This should be straight forward right.  To many who are anti trans “science” means only certain sciences that they believe in but excludes those they don’t.  In short, they cherry pick whole fields, then only information within fields like biology, or chemistry, or physics that conform to their dogmas. To an extent both sides of this debate do this because it is not about science but about social mores, legalities, and policies. So, I asked Chat GPT.  Chat GPT will at the very least not respond based on a gut reaction in either direction.

One Drive a service many Windows users rely on for storage and, unadvisedly as backup, is down.  This will be especially bothersome for devices that have smaller internal drives and rely on the cloud for storage, and for certain office apps that rely on the cloud. 

In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Chaya Raichick also known as LibsOfTikTok on Twitter has stated that LGBT people are evil and want to recruit children to be gay. This is not a matter of opinion, but much science has been done looking into the causation of LGBT identification. It is clear that the LGBT mating strategies found in humans are a matter of biology and neurology not just psychology and sociology. All those sciences, yes all of those are science, play a part. For instance, biologically transgender people are born (largely) one sex or the other. At the same time biologically and neurologically transgender people are born with brains that execute the mating strategy (gender) of the opposite sex.

The national ignition facility has reported at a press conference that they have gotten more energy out of a controlled thermonuclear reaction than was put in.  We’ve gotten out more energy from thermonuclear fusion before, using bombs.  The issue is getting the energy out in a way that is useful.  This relates to Elon Musk in that he is, like fusion power, one who will over promise but under perform.  The key difference that the researchers would tell you is that the media over promises and hypes up their work.  Meanwhile Elon Musk will overpromise on technology, free speech, space travel, tunnels, solar roofs, stock prices, and everything else.  These are things his “Twitter files” PR agents like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and othe

In science the things that have a tiny probability of happening are the things which make for the best headlines.  News reporters cover crashes, not safe landings or auto races where nothing goes wrong.  Transgender care for youth is like this.  Reuters and other media know that the trainwreck will get ratings. They wrote “No definitive research has established a link between social media use and gender identity among youths.”  Then published a story that presents this very thing as being the case ignoring all evidence.