LAST UPDATE January 13, 2025
News and information culled from the internet
January 13, 2025: I have a Google TV and it is linked to my Google account, so that the You Tube channel is consistent across my phone use, desktop computer use, and the Google TV. Lately it is awash in AI generated video content on the home screen. These videos vary but they have that same smooth-tonal generated look and are very easy to spot, and though they were interesting and curious at first, they've quickly become monotonously the same in showing off the same visual tricks.
Trying to find a simple way to block this sort of content has proved elusive, short of one-by-one going to the video itself and "down voting" it.
I suspect this problem is going to metastasize quickly as AI generated videos become easier to produce. If online services like You Tube don't get a handle on this, there is the risk of it destroying YouTube's online prominence as the main super digital-channel in America.
January 8, 2025: I asked ChatGPT to show me a profile image of Mount Parnitha in Greece - - I wanted to identify a mountain range in a distant part of a photograph image and just needed to compare the "humps" across the outline. This is what ChatGPT showed me - not even remotely correct.
This is Parnitha (click images to enlarge):
Stabilizing the wolf population on Mount Parnitha – eKathimerini [English]
Apple and Google move to have website certificates expire every 47 days instead of the average of 398 days – Computerworld
Dismissed as a "cash grab" for IT departments, but then there's this:
The official reason for speeding up the certificate renewal cycle is to make it far harder for cyberthieves to leverage what are known as orphaned domain names to fuel phishing and other cons to steal data and credentials...
...Nevertheless, it seems clear that sharply accelerated certificate expiration dates are coming."
I've seen this many times, its almost ubiquitous: a website loses its owner (did they die? Just no longer care?) and the site slips into someone else hands who uses the sometimes years of accumulated history as a background to distribute computer spam, viruses, etc.
Wikipedia Public Domain list 2025 – Wikipedia
Major works sliding into Public Domain in 2025 – Mental Floss
Some of the items are: Popeye, Tintin, Marx Bros The Cocoanuts (the film), The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
See the Public Domain resource list
"It has taken only 248 years"
President Biden signed a bill making the American Bald Eagle the National Bird on Christmas Eve. Most people, including professional politicians who are in charge of the country itself, had no idea that it hadn’t been done before.
Article at Washington Post about the effort to get this bill through Congress and onto the President's desk.
Government websites called bald eagles the national bird. Textbooks and newspaper articles agreed. But when Cook searched high and low for any official documentation cementing the bird’s status, he found nothing. Flabbergasted, in 2011 he wrote to his senator — Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California — asking whether her staff could investigate this mystery at the National Archives... "It turns out that the documentation wasn’t missing — it didn’t exist. We’ve never had a national bird," Cook told The Washington Post. "The senator sent me back a letter saying it’s assumed to be our national bird, but it has never been declared our national bird."
ENERGY
Solar power from space? Demonstration in Iceland set for 2030 – Space.com
British company has plan for satellite to "beam to Earth 30 megawatts of clean energy — enough to power about 3,000 homes."
MEDICINE
Fluctuating cholesterol and triglyceride levels linked to Alzheimer's – Phileleftheros [Greek] [Use Google Translate to turn to English]
Oregon Beach sand along Pacific coast with patterns from fresh water flows – click photo to enlarge
MEDICINE
Fighting non-alcoholic fatty-liver disease with Mediterranean diets
Story at Oloygeia [in Greek] [Use Google Translate to turn to English]
21ST CENTURY SCIENCE
Controversy surrounds U.S. company that tests baby embryos for IQ and health
This comes across as a screening service so that parents can conduct a selection process of potential babies.
Story at Parapolitika [in Greek] [Use Google Translate to turn to English]
CHINA
The Chinese Economy Conundrum
"The other possibility... which is "the Consumer" must appear. I'm told that consuming in China is buying gold and burying it somewhere in the back yard, if you have one, or in the floorboards if you live in an apartment. What kind of consuming will help them? And how're they going to do it? I remember that nearly 70% of [American] GDP growth is the consumer, we're very good at shopping. How do we teach the Chinese to be equally good at shopping?"
"That is the key issue... people have understood for decades that China eventually needed to shift out of this property driven economic model, out of this investment in export-driven market and into an economy that would be more reliant on domestic consumption ...the problem is how are they going to accomplish that? Particularly when the property slow-down they've engineered is denting household and consumer confidence in general ...households are becoming less and less inclined to consume and more and more inclined to go back to just saving a lot..."
The John Batchelor Show radio program
Time to go to Disney World? Goofy 4 Mickey