How Ticks Use Electric Fields to Find Hosts | May 08 2025, 03:39

By the way, have you ever wondered how ticks, those slow, wingless creatures, end up on a human body so quickly? And not just on humans. It turns out the answer to this question emerged quite recently — in 2023.

Sam England and Katie Lihou hypothesized that ticks can sense and react to the electric fields emitted by all living beings, including humans. To test this, they collected ticks and placed them on a specially grounded surface that mimicked a plant. Then they passed a 750-volt electrode over them — approximately the amount emitted by a typical mammal. The ticks immediately “jumped towards the electrode. The same thing happened when the scientists used a charged rabbit’s paw.

In general, it was discovered that ticks do not jump, fly, or even crawl deliberately towards humans. They are simply attracted to us because of the electrostatic charge — like dust or hair to a charged balloon.

Anomalies in Linguistic Output and the Case for AI Deployment in U.S. Politics

So, I’m convinced that Trump is operating on AI models, likely an early Grok, through a chip in his noggin, by special robots. All the signs are there, and I’ll provide the arguments.

That is, whenever Trump opens his mouth to say something, his TrumpGPT invents the next word for the already spoken ones, and since GPT hallucinations are not canceled, it ends up as it does. TrumpAI can’t finish a thought. It operates on looped inference: each word triggers the next without any notion of the end of the sequence. This isn’t rhetoric—it’s runaway generation. The speech patterns of TrumpGPT-0 remind one of a Markov Chain with lags.

Before elections, they just fine-tuned him on everything good, so when he comes up with the next token, it often clashes with what he was taught, but at the same time, generates a lot of accompanying nonsense. Anyway, he and Melania have their tokens, so everything’s in its place.

The pre-trained foundational model, as we see, is rather simple, probably about 1.5B parameters at best. Maybe GPT-2. Or something like that. This explains the irreducible inclination to looped inference. Apparently, there were a few volunteers, one went off to control a mouse cursor on the screen and play Minecraft, and the other, well, went off to become president. The timings match up.

Friendship with Elon is not about politics, it’s tech support. Elon did what he could to fine-tune the model, but apparently, they hit the limits of the technology.

The model was trained on Fox News broadcasts over 20 years. Everyone knows he “thinks what he sees on TV. Hence the “They’re eating the dogs, the cats”. Actually, it’s a vulnerability. As soon as the words “they’re stealing the election are uttered, Grok v0.1 intercepts and begins to playback the script. The syndrome of a “model too open to external context.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation? Not in this build. Question: “Who was the first president of the USA? might trigger an answer “Me. Because the model does not have access to external databases. Only pretrain on personal memoirs and commercials for Trump Steaks.

TrumpGPT operates on a custom version of TensorFlow from 2009, where half of the dependencies conflict with reality. That’s why it freezes at the words “climate change, “facts, and “evidence.

So, we just need to add a disclaimer:

This content was generated by artificial intelligence and for entertainment purposes only. This content is It should not be used for any other purpose, such as making financial decisions or providing medical advice. It may contain errors or inaccuracies, and should not be relied upon as a substitute for professional advice.

The Dual Legacy of William Mulholland | May 06 2025, 19:31

I just read that Mulholland Drive was named after William Mulholland, who on one hand provided Los Angeles with water, but on the other hand buried 431 people after the St. Francis Dam he built collapsed, merely twelve hours after he and his assistant had inspected it. Essentially, it was the worst technological disaster in the US of the 20th century.

So, he truly did supply the county with water. Initially through good engineering, and then again through bad.

Incidentally, it serves as a good example of why it’s improper to name things after living individuals.

Reflective Interlude: Jean Nouvel’s Mirrored Cube in Paris | May 06 2025, 03:59

This building pleasantly surprised me in Paris. It’s a large mirrored cube that covers some construction at this site (I will attach what used to stand here before the cube was erected in the comments). The idea of architect Jean Nouvel. Notice how both buildings are reflected and seem to be “completed” by the reflections. In autumn 2025, this spot will open as the Cartier Foundation Museum of Contemporary Art, so this is a temporary structure.

Daniela Werneck: From Rio to Realism | May 04 2025, 13:24

An intriguing artist from Houston — Daniela Werneck. She specializes in watercolors. Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A self-taught painter who holds a degree in interior design from the School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro. She has dedicated herself to realistic figurative art for just the past decade. Thus, with sufficient resolve, anything is achievable.

Posts discussing art like this are categorized under the tag #artrauflikes, and at beinginamerica.com in the “Art Rauf Likes” section, one can discover all 150 (unlike Facebook, which tends to forget (or omit) nearly half of them).

Metropolitan Opera’s Le Nozze di Figaro: A Mixed Experience | May 03 2025, 04:14

I’m not even sure whether to praise the Metropolitan Opera or criticize them. They have a new production of Le Nozze di Figaro, and this year they are showing it exactly once in a live broadcast on April 26 and exactly once in a recording on April 30, and only in select theaters worldwide. They offer recordings for a fee, but never from the current season—well, for obvious reasons. So, Figaro will only be added to their library next year.

Our local cinema failed the live broadcast—they apologized, sent us home, and promised a refund. Four days later, a recorded session was shown in the same theater. That went almost smoothly, if you ignore the severe sound issues during the first 30 minutes. Since I can’t tell if both were issues with the specific theater or poor organization by the Met, I dropped them a support line just in case.

And support apologized on behalf of the theater and, as a nice bonus, sent me a link to a video 1280 × 720, 3h37m, asking me to watch it by Monday because after that the carriage turns back into a pumpkin. Well, okay, not quite an mp3 file, but it streams via m3u8, and yt-dlp manages to convert it into a 6-gigabyte mp4 file in 3 minutes.

Interestingly, this recording starts with the opera artists singing the Ukrainian anthem on stage before the curtain is even raised. This introduction was not shown at the cinema.

I am honest, and of course, I won’t give the file to anyone. I will watch it myself when convenient, and then I may delete it, or might keep it on my personal laptop for personal use. And I might even buy a subscription to the Met this weekend. In short, they’ve done well, though, there is a small nuance 🙂

Exploring the Morning Coffee Conundrum: Caffeine vs. Adenosine Dynamics | May 03 2025, 01:31

I started reading a very good book, Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. It states that the caffeine in coffee operates by clogging up the receptors of adenosine, which accumulates throughout the day and contributes to sleep pressure—the growing urge to sleep. However, what the book doesn’t mention, and what I’m curious about, is why people drink coffee in the morning when there is minimal adenosine in the body to begin with. Well, theoretically, caffeine could linger for several hours, but usually, adenosine doesn’t build up enough within a few hours to cause drowsiness.

Interestingly, in the evening or at night, coffee works—but as they say, there’s a catch. Caffeine temporarily blocks the adenosine receptors, making you feel alert. Yet, adenosine continues to accumulate in the background, and by nighttime, there’s a ton of it. As soon as the caffeine level drops, all the accumulated adenosine molecules “crash onto the receptors. This causes a sharp wave of sleepiness and fatigue—and that’s the infamous “crash.

Is there an explanation for morning coffee? Or is it just tradition?