Up From Facebook

Let’s hand the microphone to Garrett Graff: “ Most people think of  Jurassic Park  as a cautionary tale for science, when really it’s a cautionary tale for corporate trust and safety teams, board oversight, and regulatory compliance. The dinosaurs’ entirely predictable rampage should really be seen as a failure of the security teams and the fence builders. The mistakes we’re seeing from these frontier AI companies are similarly the failures of the fence builders. *snip* “The battle between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind is something like if Leo Szilard, Arthur Holly Compton, and Edward Teller had each led their own competing private effort to develop an atomic bomb and thermonuclear bomb — with no government assistance or coordination, all backed instead by private equity money — simultaneously building their own competing Los Alamos-style labs and negotiating with the military about how (and if) the military could use their own proprietary individual nuclear weapons."...

And in the age of cheap drones, you can't really defend against it.  As we are seeing, it doesn't take long to deplete any missile defenses you have, and no one has missile defenses covering everything anyway.   Maybe most of these attacks won't amount to much, but sometimes... We are ruled by people who have spent their lives saying, "Mommy, he hit me back!" yet are still surprised when it happens.   ~Duncan Black  

From Medpage Today: “Speaking about the order at the Oval Office on Monday, Trump repeatedly suggested the number or timing of vaccines could play a role in rising rates of autism spectrum disorder . . .”   Uh, no. What’s been rising is the rate of ASD *diagnoses,” due to changes in classification criteria and increased awareness. There’s no evidence that the incidence of ASD is increasing and there’s no evidence that vaccines have anything to do with ASD. The rates of childhood vaccination in the US have not increased. https://www.medpagetoday.com/pediatrics/vaccines/122557?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2026-08-10&mh=eb71348a5ff6ae370cc6759bc5dc3300&zdee=gAAAAABm4u1YoCP4y5SBTJUyUyqo9KxZhft26L1xeGdP0BzzQQN1Pb_ifR6vFqhFh-3U6Q_nU7DbA-EawzzXKxSRhMOwjrOGuOKbf7OE641eN0HfnK6eObE%3D&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Headlines%20Evening%20-%20Randomized%202026-08-10&utm_term=NL_Daily_DHE_dual-gmail-definition

Real threats do not require social influencers, since they are obvious to all. No one had to convince Americans after Pearl Harbor that the danger was great and sacrifice imperative. They saw it clearly and acted. When a modern cable news anchor reports with a smirk that the opposition is destroying this once great republic, cuts to commercial, and then returns with yet another ”crisis,” one can safely assume that, although the issue may or may not be serious, it is not existential. ~Thomas Madden

Most days I go on walks of 4-6 miles in the nearby woods. I bring my camera. I tell people that it gives me something to do with my hands. But it’s more than that. I learned the basics of photography in high school. I used many of those skills as a postdoc and well into my career as a scientist. Digital photography freed me from the darkroom.  Through all those decades, my life was dominated by the future and how to control it. Photography was a means to an end. Revisiting photography after retirement has not just taught me new skills, it’s taught me to live in the moment at a time in my life when the amount of “future” I have left is shrinking. As the professional wildlife photographer Simon d’Entremont says: “Photography doesn’t just change the pictures you make, it changes the person who makes them. Photography is a way of participating in the world instead of consuming it.” In the video link at the end, d’Entrement enumerates six ways that photography is transformative in the w...

The fact of college graduation matters far more, if you’re worried about jobs, than *which* college you attended. For most employers and most jobs, the fact that you graduated college shows that you’re a finisher. Over a four-year period, you took courses in a variety of fields and, within a narrow timetable (quarter or semester) completed all the tasks at an acceptable proficiency year over year.   “ In high school I used to OBSESS over the US News and World report college rankings, naively thinking school prestige = long-term career success.| Fast forward a decade later, I think these ranking lists are less of an indicator of the quality of education you’ll receive, and more so of the network you’ll have access to (both of your peers and alumni). So my biggest tip for soon-to-be and current college students: No matter where you go to school, surround yourself with people who give a f*ck about their future. Because the clearest indicator of long-term success is how much you and th...