The yuccas are in bloom:

These plants grow exceptionally well in our desert-like climate. They have stiff, fibrous leaves and stout, waxy flowers that protect them from drought and harsh sun.

They are easy to cultivate. The underground base of the plant is like a big, mutant turnip. Chop off a chunk of the stuff (it kind of looks like potato flesh) and plant it. Yuccas will emerge.

Yuccas are agaves and are native to the southern US and Mexico. The famous Joshua Tree of the Mojave desert is Yucca brevifolia. The botanical sub-family that includes all agaves and yuccas is Agavoideae and that in turn is classified as part of Asparagaceae, the asparagus family. Many older references (like Jepson) still list Agavaceae as a separate family

I’m not really sure what species is growing in our yard. I suspect it is either Yucca filamentosa (Thread Yucca or Adam’s Needle) or Yucca flaccida (Weak-Leaf Yucca). It doesn’t matter. They are really neat, low-maintenance plants that have their showy time and that time is now!

You may remember my previous post about five yards of red cinder.

Click the link to see the picture.

Today I moved the last shovelful. Actually I was using the broom and dustpan at that point! Here’s what it looks like now:

Took a bit. Two months or so. But that’s only working a few days a week and for no more than a few hours at a time. Hey, I’m a senior! I’m retired. WORK is a four-letter word.

Anyway, it feels good. Now I can use the spot for my car. I like the red staining. I wish I had not put down a tarp first. I would have liked a nice, big, round, red stain.

I cheated a little bit. I got the projects done that needed doing but a good chunk of the red rock was merely moved and stashed somewhere else. I’ve got pending projects for the rest of the red rock and I have little piles scattered about and ready for deployment.

*Lyrical inspiration.

In 1989 a physicist at IBM named Donald Eigler and his colleague Erhard Schweizer used a scanning tunneling electron microscope in a new way. Instead of (merely!) looking at individual atoms, they modified the instrument so that they could move individual atoms. This was the result:

They used xenon atoms.

I don’t really know why, but I would guess it’s because xenon is non-reactive and the heaviest of the so-called “noble” gases. The elements on the far right of the periodic table (helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon) are mostly inert. They don’t do much reacting with other elements. Radon is radioactive and one of the rarest elements, so even though its atomic mass is 222, it can’t be worked with. Xenon is the next-heaviest (131).

Xenon occurs naturally in the atmosphere in very small amounts. But it’s a big atmosphere so there is actually a lot of the stuff!

These days it is used as a general anesthetic. Related to that, xenon is used in breathing mixtures for deep-sea divers.

APOD is my favorite website. APOD is Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Today the site turns 30. That’s old in internet-years. APOD is a product of NASA and its collaborations with places like Michigan Tech and the University of Maryland.

These sorts of government/university partnerships are the backbone of fundamental science in the United States. The nation advances when we learn more about our world. Humanity benefits from knowledge. Scholarship and research are essential to civilization.

Today at APOD they created an image of another image. They took 1836 individual images from five years of contributions to the site (it is updated daily). They made a digital mosaic of them, a total of 23,232 tiles. And they used them to make a starry night:

Cool, huh? Click on the image to make it larger.

I like APOD because I get a daily dose of awe. You should check it out, especially the archive. There’s something for everyone, from deep space to spacey scenery.

Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night is in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art.

Yesterday we talked about real stuff. Today, we talk about fakes.

Our Silicon Valley Tech Bro Overlords have finally lost the thread. They’ve saturated the market with tools, toys, gizmos, and gadgets, all promising us a better life. That didn’t work, so they penetrated every aspect of our lives with increasingly glitchy software that demands our continuous attention.

They won. They took over the world.

But it wasn’t enough. They want more.

Case in point—Sam Altman.

This sleazy con artist has a “new” idea. His company is going to make a new product. We don’t know what it is. (Neither does he.) We don’t know what it will do. We really don’t know anything about it at all, except Sam tells us he’ll sell “100 million units” by next year, and that it will be the next “core” item on your desk, right next to your MacBook and your iPhone.

The company is OpenAI. The product is some kind of AI-thingie. You’ve probably heard of ChatGPT, which is OpenAI’s flagship product. This product is enormously expensive. The company loses money every single time someone uses it.

But that’s not important. One thing these guys don’t ever have to worry about is money. They have lots. And rich people give them more all the time. How do you think Uber stays in business?

So Sam has a new idea and it’s a “device” that will be AI-driven and will be part of your life and there will be 100 million of them in the world by next year. This is according to the you-can’t bullshit-us Wall Street Journal:

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman gave his staff a preview Wednesday of the devices he is developing to build with the former Apple designer Jony Ive, laying out plans to ship 100 million AI “companions” that he hopes will become a part of everyday life.

So even the staid, straight-laced WSJ loves tech hype and bullshit.

Look: OpenAI isn’t going to deliver 100 million of anything! This is ALL GARBAGE. There is no new killer device. There is no new killer app. At best, we will get incremental improvements in our existing tech. Like, they will get better batteries.

And OpenAI is certainly not going to deliver a product that has not yet been created.

This is just more of the bullshit universe these clowns inhabit. All Sam Altman is doing is taking a page from the Elon Must playbook. When your company is losing money and can’t find a way to make a proper product that people want to buy, then hype up a bunch of fancy new ideas and tell your shareholders that these things are “just around the corner.” The credulous fools who own your stock will buy more and tell their friends to buy more and the result will be that the stock price will go up and everyone will get richer.

Meanwhile the company still sucks. And the products don’t sell. Yet Altman claims his new product will add ONE TRILLION DOLLARS in value to the company. Man, I wish I knew that math!

The so-called AI industry has failed to create anything. There is no consumer AI product that’s anywhere close to mass adoption. We used to call this “faking it” but now we call it entrepreneurship.

Don’t give billionaires the benefit of the doubt. When they spew their stupid bullshit, call them on it. Every time Sam Altman or the other Tech Bros open their mouths to tell us their “vision” just say “fake news” over and over again.

Then turn off your computer and go outside.

I’m exhausted by the endless tech hype that tries to sell us “the next big thing.” I’m old enough to have lived through multiple tech-hype cycles: PCs, the internet, streaming, iPhones, etc., ad nauseum. Now it’s AI. We’ll get to that later.

Today I want to talk about something REAL. This is technology that is actually useful and is actually working. At the Yimin coal facility in Mongolia the new truck fleet is electric and autonomous:

This checks all the cool, tech-y boxes: 5G, cloud computing, EVs, and AI.

Coal mining is not very exciting. But it is pretty damn important, especially in emerging economies. Getting robots to do some of the dirty work is a hell of an accomplishment. This is the kind of thing that we need technology for—solving real problems in the real world.

Tomorrow we will look at fake stuff.

We’ve a nocturnal visitor. He/she/it leaves deposits behind:

Here’s another take:

We’ve seen opossums before in our back yard. Our neighbor across the street reports an abundance of raccoons in the vicinity. We smell skunk regularly.

I tend to think it’s a striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis).

But I really don’t know so I’m throwing it out there! What’s crapping in my yard?

They call the stuff aluminium in Britain and other places. It keeps the -ium ending common to many other elements. But here in the States it’s aluminum and it is one of the pillars of our economy.

Vaclav Smil says that modern civilization rests on four materials: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia. It’s hard to argue with that.

The materials that take the most total energy to produce in this country are paper, gasoline, steel, and ethylene. But on a mass-basis, it’s aluminum. Per pound or per kilogram, aluminum is the most energy-intensive stuff produced in large quantities in the US.

It’s chemistry, man. Aluminum is very abundant but it likes to combine with other elements (particularly oxygen) a little too much. Pure aluminum metal oxidizes immediately on contact with air. (That provides a protective layer and keeps it from corroding.) Aluminum ore is called bauxite and it contains alumina or aluminum oxide (Al₂O₃). This stuff is the devil to take apart. It took modern electrolysis to make it practical. About one-fourth of the cost of aluminum is the electricity needed to separate the metal.

In Napoleon’s time aluminum was worth more than gold. Today’s spot price has aluminum at $1.13 per pound (about 32 12-oz. cans)! That’s only possible because of cheap and abundant energy. We don’t produce much in the way of primary aluminum in this country. China is the leader, with India, Russia, and Canada significant if small producers. But we consume a lot of aluminum—about 35 kg (77 lbs.) per capita annually.

I rant and complain a bit too much, I think. I see bad things everywhere. And all the time. That’s no way to live. You have to be positive. That’s hard work for me. I’m a natural skeptic, and that’s only a step or two away from cynic. No one likes a cynic.

My mom is a very upbeat person. But she’s not one of those Pollyanna types, she’s too earthy for that. It’s actually a concerted effort on her part. Mom just prefers to look on the bright side and so she does.

I like mining.com because I’m interested in natural resources. Regardless of your outlook on the world’s future, one thing is certain: we will need massive amounts of mined materials.

If you’re a techno-optimist you obviously support the expansion of mining as the new AI-led Cryp-topia will need one hell of a lot of computers and a boatload of electricity to run them.

If you’re the eco-topia type with a goat in the backyard and solar roof tiles, you’ll need a hell of a lot of electricity and a boatload of computers. You may or may not support the expansion of mining.

Regardless, the future is here and everyone needs stuff we dig out of the ground. I came across an article on mining.com about a tire company that’s doing its best to conserve, that is, use its resources wisely. They are doing cool stuff. That makes me feel good. Capitalism has a way of turning certain humans into sociopathic swine (see Musk, Elon; Bezos, Jeff; or Zuckerberg, Mark). That makes me feel bad. Like I said, I need to be more positive.

Capitalism also has a way of stimulating innovation. It’s a huge force for good in the world because it creates wealth and lifts people out of poverty.

Kal Tire supplies tires to the mining industry. You’ve seen those gigantic tires on big trucks and tractors. I once stood next to a hauler at an open-pit mine site and the tires were taller than me. And that was a medium-sized rig. The mining industry uses a lot of tires. Big tires on big vehicles in gnarly places that wear out quickly.

These guys (they are a British Columbia company) have a pretty cool recycling program. They have a plant in Chile (the world’s largest supplier of copper) that processes old tires. They use a special furnace that heats without oxygen and they can recover a lot:

A full load, five 63-inch tires, generates 6,500 litres of alternative fuel, 4,000 kilograms of steel, 8,000 kg of carbon ash, all for reuse in new materials, plus enough synthetic gas to fuel the plant for several hours.

A lot of small-scale solutions add up to big changes. This kind of cool stuff makes me feel good. People are smart and creative. With the right incentives, people can solve a lot of problems. Governments should reward and encourage companies that reduce their environmental footprint.

I’ll write about more cool stuff when I find it.

Humans have been writing for five thousand years. Egyptians used reed pens, ink, and papyrus in the First Dynasty (3000 BC).

That’s a pretty robust technology. In our modern world we have lots of ways of writing: printing presses, typewriters, word processors, whiteboards, touchscreens, talk-to-text, and every kind of implement from Sharpies to airbrushes. And let’s not forget golf pencils!

Typewriters were once essential. Now they’re quaint. What other means of writing will follow them to the dustbin? We live in an era of rapid technological change, yet we embrace new technologies as if they will last forever. Remember fax machines?

I’ve always thought of myself as interested in technology and enthusiastic about new inventions. Ever since the iPhone however, I’ve had a change of heart. I’m not opposed to new tech, of course. I just wish we would get off the goddamn tech treadmill that demands constant “upgrading.” Did you know there have been 47 iterations of the iPhone since its first release in 2007?

That’s absurd. Most of the digital junk in the world exists because some company decided last year’s product is now obsolete and needs replacing. Nearly 1 in 5 people in the world use an iPhone. Have you got your iPhone 16 yet?

I’m picking on Apple because they are a corporate behemoth. They do a great job with their advertising and they exude a free-spirited image, but they are as buttoned-down as any other outfit governed by quarterly results.

I’m choosing to replace “upgrade” with Cory Doctorow’s lovely neologism “enshittification.” Once a company’s product gets popular enough, it gets harder and harder to grow the user base. And grow the user base is the Single Most Important Principle of the tech business model. So how do you get new people? You add new features! You change old ones! You make the product seem fresher and better. Note that I said “seem.” Rarely do good products get better. They usually get worse. Bigger, uglier, clunkier, and further removed from the user’s experience. Google Search is a good example. It used to be a great adventure to surf the ‘net with a search engine. Now it’s a chore—all the links are paid for and the same ones turn up over and over again. The world wide web is now a gated community.

I think today’s vehicles are much better than the old ones of my youth. And certainly computers are slicker and more powerful. TVs are waaaaay nicer. I look forward to the future—people will invent new things, create new things, and discover new things. I think all that is marvelous.

But our Silicon Valley Tech Bro Overlords want to squeeze every goddamn nickel of profit out of every thought you make and every breath you take. They want to digitize, tokenize, and monetize every goddamn thing everyone does in this world. They want you completely enmeshed in their products so that all your actions will add to their bottom line.

But writing belongs to everyone. Apple doesn’t own it, even if all the writing a billion people do everyday is on an Apple device.

I say let’s start carrying a pencil and a piece of paper in our pockets wherever we go. I mean, we carry smartphones with us everywhere, and those are complex, expensive things that need frequent attention and regular charging. It’s like carrying a hamster around. You have to be vigilant or the little thing will run away, or get squished, or bite your finger. Our digital devices have a life, and we’ve chained ourselves to them.

Writing, that is, the robust, old-fashioned way of making marks on paper, will survive. Tech comes and tech goes. What’s hip today is moldy tomorrow. Writing is personal. It’s intimate. It’s tactile. It’s universal. It’s quiet. It doesn’t need batteries. It doesn’t even need an audience. Writing for oneself is an ancient practice.

Pencil, paper, and pencil “lead” (i.e. graphite) are all carbon-based. Just like us. Writing is life!