Harold Carr

Are we nearing peak credulity yet?

@Greg_Brent @pagan_hoetry No, no. It's the dude from the B52s. 😆

@pagan_hoetry This is Frank Zappa

This is gonna derail my entire day

My dad (Richard Feynman) had terrible handwriting, not in the sense that it was scribbly or imprecise, but in the sense that the characters were too similar. M was three spikes, N and U were two spikes, I was one spike with a dot somewhere near it. I was reading a letter from him, smoothly read the word "minimum", and then did a double-take. "Minimum" was fifteen spikes with two dots over it. How could I read that so easily? It's amazing how the brain works.

I read Richard Dawkins piece on LLMs and consciousness. It's remarkable how painfully sycophantic the quoted passages are, something LLMs seem to emulate more and more with great effect It reminds me of the Sandmann by ETA Hoffmann, a dark, multilayered story in which the protagonist becomes obsessed with Olimpia, an automoton human doll that doesn't say much, but reflects all of his thoughts and desires so well, he falls in love with it When this story was written at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the idea of mechanical humans was fuelled by clockwork musicians and writer androids that made philosophers question whether consciousness was just an illusion Hoffmann was a part of the counter movement, German romanticism. He expressed the idea that we are so eager to see our own ego mirrored back at us that we will accept even a soulless machine as a conscious human. "It is true, her speech is limited to few words; but these few words appear as genuine hieroglyphs of an inner world full of love and high poetic knowledge of the higher life... But to the poetic soul, all this is perfectly clear." Sounds similar, doesn’t it?

@NoahPasternak @Srirachachau How he used to look at large women he now looks at pizza. Such is life.

I know where I'd start looking for suspects. Cattlemen in the South have ginned up hatred for Black Vultures, whining about calf "depredation". A Bill has even been introduced by industry lackeys in DC that would allow them to kill these wonderful birds. wlos.com/news/local/gre…

All rockstars should become catty, paranoid gossips. It's so much more interesting than whatever the hell Bruce Springsteen is doing.

🥶 Very cold for early May in the Canadian Prairies. MANITOBA -9.3°C Brandon -8.8°C Wasagaming -8.4°C Deerwood -8.3°C Gretna -8.2°C Fisher Branch -8.0°C Carberry -7.9°C Cypress River, Pilot Mound -7.2°C Melita -7.0°C McCreary -6.8°C Gimli -6.4°C Morden -6.0°C Winnipeg #MBstorm

"Taken together with '47', 'the Comey post' has a direct stochastic meaning." I think we need to ban the word "stochastic" since nobody uses it correctly.

@JazzMemes the piano tech:

Every fucking day … Ottawa again. Const. Andrew Reesor. 77 unauthorized database searches. Not a typo. Seventy-seven. Internal records say he queried 44 women, including his own sister. Admitted some were out of “curiosity” and “attraction.” Also searched colleagues and others with no policing purpose. Even allegations of deceptive explanations when questioned. And what follows? Not criminal court. Six charges under the Community Safety and Policing Act, essentially internal discipline. Ordered by Ottawa Police Chief Eric Stubbs. We’ve been here before. Again and again. Unauthorized access to police databases is one of the most common forms of misconduct, and one of the most consistently handled behind closed doors. This isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern. Personal curiosity. Attraction. Boredom. That’s what people’s private information is being accessed for. Not investigations. Not public safety. And the public is expected to trust the same system that keeps dealing with it internally. At some point, the question stops being “what happened here?” And becomes “Why isn’t this treated like what it is?” A serious breach of trust with real-world consequences and criminal charges? Why? Because it’s one rule for them and another rule for us? #onpoli #cdnpoli

The only thing weaker than indicting a guy for an Instagram photo of seashells is flexing that you have been investigating it for a year.

Pete Hegseth sounds like a guy explaining crypto while doing lines at a divorce party.

Cissy Strut with Shane & Tom 🧿 #guitar #guitars #bass #drums

The strongest El Niño in 150 years? That’s not hype, it’s the actual median forecast right now for the developing event later this year. It could rival — or even surpass — the legendary 1877 El Niño, the strongest on record, which was linked to widespread drought, monsoon failure, and global food crises in parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. But what does that mean today? It means a tremendous amount of excess ocean heat being released into the atmosphere - energy that can rearrange weather patterns around the world. That typically leads to: 🌧️ Increased flood risk in some regions 🔥 More intense/ prolonged heatwaves, drought and fires 🌪️ A shift in severe storm tracks 🌀 And often a suppressed Atlantic hurricane season, but boosted in the East Pacific. Since it’s so huge, when the Pacific talks, the atmosphere listens! But this isn’t 1877… forecasting, infrastructure, and global awareness are far better today. We’ll be better prepared. Now transparency on the science: the 1877 3-month Nino 3.4 ocean temp anomaly maxed out at +2.7°C. The latest median forecast for all ensembles in late 2026 is +2.75°C in the Nino 3.4 region. So, it may be stronger. Here’s the caveat: that region is now approx .75 - 1°C warmer than it was in 1855, so some of the heat building up there is on top of a baseline which is already warmer today. So in absolutes… this will probably rival 1877, but relatively speaking due to global warming, the event will likely fall short and thus its global impacts may not rise to that level. That’s why we now have the RONI (index) which accounts for our new warmed World. (Pictured here is the October NMME with a region of +3-4°C over the East Tropical Pacific) Will certainly be interesting to watch from a scientific perspective.

Update:

Wild structure with the destructive hailer coming into Springfield, Missouri #mowx

I just realized Randy Newman isn’t on that greatest living songwriters list, seems like a great concept for a funny-sad Randy Newman song.

I don't think I remember a cold snap like the one coming later this weekend into May. Temperatures will be 10-15 degrees below average and it looks to last at least 2 weeks. Hopefully the pattern changes mid May and we go right to summer!