Month: April 2025

But The Bar Has Been Lowered

Brian J. Noggle

A Chatbot Has Passed a Critical Test For Human-Like Intelligence. Now What?:

There have been several headlines over the past week about an AI chatbot officially passing the Turing test.

These news reports are based on a recent preprint study by two researchers at the University of California San Diego in which four large language models (LLMs) were put through the Turing test. One model – OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 – was deemed indistinguishable from a human more than 70% of the time.

Unfortunately, I have had the opportunity to spend some time on the “live chat” on both the sales side and technical help side of a couple of major tech companies (HP and GoDaddy). I am pretty sure that I was connected to a live person in both instances, but in both cases, quite likely someone whose second (or third or fourth) language was English working from a tightly-written script with long pauses between my “prompts” and their responses.

One suspects that the fact that you cannot tell whether you’re talking to a human might not be just because the computers have gotten better–it might be because the “chats” we have (and, let’s be honest, all communications with large companies especially tech companies) have gotten worse.

(Link via Vodkapundit on Instapundit.)

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Is That All?

Brian J. Noggle

CT scans could be a contributor to cancer, study finds:

CT scans could be an “important cause of cancer” in the United States, according to a new study.

According to the study by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, CT scans could account for 5% of cancer cases in the U.S., more than tripling previous estimates.

Since 2007, the number of CT scans performed in the U.S. has increased by 30%. The research also indicates that CT scans are being overused for instances of upper respiratory infections and common headaches.

Not depicted: Scanners that have become ubiquitous at the exits of major retailers. Old timey ones waited for an RFID to pass through them without deactivation (no (they have been around for, what, forty years now?) but are becoming even more elaborate as they scan items in your cart to make sure you paid for them.

Not as heavy of a dose of radiation as a CT scan, but you don’t get a CT scan several times a week.

Boy, oh boy, we are all guinea pigs, all the time. Presumably because they can no longer test with actual guinea pigs.

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You’ll Need To Be More Specific

Brian J. Noggle

The article The Burden of History & the Promise of Divine Life in this month’s New Oxford Review begins:

Thirty-some years ago, I was in a dark, musty used-book store in downtown Milwaukee when a man appeared around the end of the aisle, handed me a book, and said, “Here, you really ought to read this.” I suppose if I were to add that he then mysteriously disappeared — which he did — you would think I’m making it up. But no, that is how I discovered A Canticle for Leibowitz.

C’mon, man, you’ll have to be more specific than that! Was it Renaissance Books on Plankinton Avenue which backed up to the river? I once spent a long time pawing through its magazines until I actually came up with the Saturday Review from 1957 with an article about Atlas Shrugged in it?

Was it Downtown Books on Wisconsin Avenue where I spent over an hour in the adult magazines room to score a copy of Gallery magazine with Robert B. Parker’s short story “The Surrogate”?

You have to be a bit more specific. And, wow, are my memories sharp and clear on bookstores in Milwaukee in the 1990s.

I’m guessing Renaissance Books.

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Bird Watching With Brian J.

Brian J. Noggle

Black-headed vultures have been moving into Missouri for some time; I’ve seen coverage of them in the local papers, magazines, and probably Larry Dablemont’s columns for a couple of years now. And I know the problem is getting serious as the Missouri Department of Conservation has been running ads in the aforementioned sources (minus Dablemont) saying that if you black vultures are a problem on your property (they’re known to attack living livestock), you can get a permit to kill them (the vultures). I’m under the impression that livestock producers think that step is optional, but if the state is saying maybe it’s a problem, then it’s a bad problem already.

At any rate, I did not get a photo of them, but I did see a trio of them in a field along the farm road that becomes Miller Road in Republic while I was headed to the gym this morning.

And when I got home, I saw this pygmy emu:

I bet this is the same turkey (not turkey vulture, which is the native vulture known for its bald head like a turkey) who crossed my farm road ahead of me the other day.

It’s good to see a turkey as they’re fairly infrequent in my back yard. But it’s odd to see one by itself; usually, when we see them in the valley by the creek down the road aways, you see more than one at a time. Perhaps this is a tom. Larry Dablemont would know, and he would then tell you that their numbers are in fact decreasing and that the state of Missouri doesn’t care since it makes money from turkey hunting permits and they, the government people, tend to work from computer models about populations rather than actually spending a lot of time in the icky woods.

At any rate, just a couple of bird sightings here that are atypical.

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Facebook Is Reading My Brother’s Texts

Brian J. Noggle

I texted him “Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret.” And then asked him if he was on Team Blume or Team Cleary.

So suddenly Facebook is suggesting Blume books to me:

Even though I am sure I told my brother that I was on Team Cleary.

Mrs. Perkins, my fourth grade teacher, read Ribsy to the class, and I was pleased to find that I somehow already had Henry and the Clubhouse at home. I read all of the Henry Huggins books and even the Quimby books to the time (what, 1980?–some have been published since). I guess I read a number of the Blume books, too, but I identified more with Henry Huggins (and Henry Reed) than with Fudge or the girld from Blubber.

I wonder if my boys will look back on the Dav Pilkey (Captain Underpants) or Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid) books the same way. Probably not.

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Good Book Hunting, Saturday, April 12: Friends of the Christian County Library (Ozark)

Brian J. Noggle

Ah, gentle reader. I am reaching a point where I’m starting to think Do I need to buy any more books? or Do I want to buy any more books?. The stacks of Nogglestead are crammed full with little room for further additions. And at the rate at which I’m reading small paperbacks now that the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge is complete…. I mean, I’m starting to think I might not be able to read the thousands of books I already own in my lifetime. Do I really want to add more to the backlog?

Fortunately, though, a twee challenge for myself exists. Last year, I went to three of the four Friends of the Christian County Library book sales (Clever, Nixa, and Sparta). But I missed the one in Ozark, the original location when the Friends of the Christian County Library only had two sales a year in Ozark, because it fell in April, before the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library’s spring sale. As I often have recently.

But this year, I was a little more attentive, and when I discovered it was this weekend, I ditched a computer conference in Arkansas to attend (and I ditched for other reasons as well, but as a side effect, I was able to attend).

It was not at the library but instead was at a building in the park right across the street.

It was $3 bag day, but I only got two small bags’ worth.

I got a couple of books:

  • Gunships #4: Sky Fire which looks to be part of a men’s adventure series.
  • Diagnosis Murder: The Silent Partner just in case I didn’t have it. Turns out I do, and I’ve already read it. Something to sneak onto the free book cart at church, I guess.
  • Angles of Attack: An A-6 Intruder Pilot’s War by Peter Hunt about a pilot in Desert Storm.
  • Pindar: The Complete Odes in case I don’t already have them. If I do, this doubles my chances of finding it. Not that I’m likely to go looking for it; more likely, it doubles my chances of just picking it up sometime.
  • Sharpe’s Enemy by Bernard Cornwell. I didn’t have this already, I can honestly say didn’t have this already as I have all the Sharpe’s books together, and this one was not there.
  • Revolt in the Desert by T.E. Lawrence. I have one or two by or about Lawrence of Arabia; not sure if I have his book or not. I do now.
  • Love in Ancient Greece by Rpbert Flacelière translated by James Cleugh. Looks to be a scholarly work.
  • What If? 2 by Robert Crowley (not the Randall Munroe version. I knew I’d seen and maybe bought a copy of the first one in the distant past. Apparently, I have already read this one, too. The people at church are making out pretty well from this haul.
  • The Stingaree by Max Brand. Apparently, I’m into Westerns now so why not try some of the other big authors? No Louis L’Amour books in evidence today.
  • Learn to Play the Guitar by Nick Freeth. It might be a children’s book which might be just what I need since the other books haven’t done me any good.
  • Gus Shafer’s West with a forward by Dr. John M. Christlieb. An artist and sculptor. To help me envision the scenes in the westerns I read (as though Frederic Remington and Charles Russell could not. Sooner or later I’ll read the Time-Life set, too, maybe.
  • Sweden: The Land of Today with text by William Mead. Given that it’s from 1985, it’s the Land of Back Then by now.

Since I had some room, I stuffed a copy of Dating for Dummies to put on one of my boys’ bedrooms as a joke. I put it into the older son’s (who has no trouble dating) under some papers, but he spotted it immediately, so he’s putting it into his brother’s room. Which might hurt the younger as he is just now getting to the dating age but has not yet gone on a date.

I also picked up some DVDs because they were basically free:

  • The Transporter 3; I am pretty sure I have seen the first two (and just bought a copy of the first in 2023).
  • The Black Dahlia. Not the Blue Dahlia, which is the Raymond Chandler movie.
  • The Replacements
  • Ocean’s Twelve; I think I’ve seen it back in the movie-going days.
  • The Bourne Supremacy; I might have seen it in the movie-going days.
  • Basic Instinct; I think I DVRed it at one point.
  • The Quick and the Dead; some Substacker just mentioned the film, so now I have it. And apparently I’m set if I want to go onto a Sharon Stone kick, I’m set.

All told, $6. But I did have a ten spot on me as well, so I re-upped my membership in the Friends of the Christian County Library. I’m only in two such groups now. Well, one, maybe; I think my membership in the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library membership has lapsed until our income stabilizes.

For a brief moment, let me enjoy my tsundoku.

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Not Marking A Treasure, Unfortunately

Brian J. Noggle

A week or so every spring, the setting sun in the afternoon is aligned just right that it comes in through the lower-level patio doors and travels behind the bookshelves in the hall between our offices–a gap of no more than an inch at the widest–and strikes the wall just to the left of the curtained doorway that leads to our store room:

We call the store room “The Cat Litter Room” as most of our litter boxes are in there.

But it also holds a store of old Texas Instruments and Commodore computers as well as forty- or fifty-year-old video gaming systems.

So maybe it really is pointing the way to some ancient treasures.

Actually, we might not see it daily every year as a cloudy evening will block it.

It’s kind of like our pew at church in early service. In spring, the rising sun can come in through the stained glass and strafe us in the back pew. In fall, it can happen twice: Once before the time change and once after switching to Standard Time. We can watch the sun get closer over the course of a month, and then once it’s done with us, its rise is too early to bother anyone else. Come to think of it, the light in the pew and the light in the hall coincide.

Nothing important like NOTICING YOUR HAIR IS ON FIRE FROM TARIFFS OR TODAY’S OTHER NEWS, but something I’ve noticed over time that the other residents of Nogglestead or the back pew have not.

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Book Report: Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1963)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverWow, gentle reader. It has been sixteen years since I picked up a Tarzan book; I read Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan. Perhaps not long after I got the books, although back in those days I was not dilligent about posting my purchases for future me to review. Also, I was not posting the scans of the covers–probably expecting the Amazon link below to carry the weight of it–so I can’t easily review how awful this brutal 1960s covers were. Ugly.

At any rate, in this, the eleventh volume of the series (originally from 1927), Tarzan is not really the main character. In it, a group of Arabs have come down into the heart of Africa looking for a fabled treasure city, and there’s some intrigue amongst them. One fellow is in love with the sheikh’s daughter, but he’s framed for attempted murder and escapes before he is killed. Meanwhile, an expedition with a couple of Americans, a young naturalist out to photograph the wildlife and a wealthy man out to hunt exotic game, and they fall out due to the brutality of the wealthy man. The young man wanders into a hidden valley, a lost world where Crusaders have taken up a defensive position and think that they’re surrounded by Saracens. But the residents of the valley are broken into two factions in two cities, and they have an annual tournament instead of war. The young man falls for the princess of one of the cities, but she’s stolen away by the leader of the opposing city. And these threads come together as the Arabs find their way into the valley. Tarzan has his moments, but the greater part of the book is given over to the other characters.

So it blends several different genres of pulp: The jungle adventure, the lost world adventure. The prose is, of course, deep and learned in a way that gets thinner in time–learned but terse in the 1940s, a little learned but thinner in the 1960s, and then mostly unlearned but thick with unnecessary description and extraneous scenes in the modern era.

I have one or two more of these paperbacks in the stacks somewhere, and I’ll look forward to reading them maybe in the near term.

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Brian J. In Big Heapum Legal Trouble

Brian J. Noggle

A couple of weeks ago, I got a couple of calls on my cellular phone which I ignored. The computer-voiced, and not even AI-voiced, message indicated I was in heapum trouble:

Oh, noes! A agarbagemalgation of legal terms, no indication of who or what or an actual phone number, and an immediate need for me to act UNDER PENALTY OF LAW!

If you cannot trust that, what can you trust?

I blocked the number and then got the same crap from a different number which I then blocked.

But unknown number, unnamed legal team, and disembodied voice IS NOT GIVING UP.

Oh, morenoes! ESCALATION! They will send me more robocalls HARDER!

I kind of feel bad for the scammers in a couple of years, when the old people will have grown up with the Internet and will trust no one or no bodiless notification from the ether.

But, you know what? 1) How can you feel bad about those people, and 2) People will still have mush for brains in a couple of years and will fall for anything. Perhaps even I, should I reach geriatricity, might with a wavering and warbling voice, believe. But that last is most unlikely in either clause.

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Book Report: Slipt by Alan Dean Foster (1984)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverAfter reading Mid-Flinx, I picked up this other mid-80s Alan Dean Foster paperback for a quick read. Which was a bit of a mistake as it was not especially quick at all.

In it, a large Corporation conducts a quick, overnight cleanup of a longtime toxic waste dump in a California valley which was not adequately distanced from the parent company. So a corporate executive fixture oversees the project, and it goes flawlessly except for a bit of a cancer cluster amongst the residents of a shantytown on the hill beside the dump. The company finds/relocates a number of them, but one old man, who has lived there his whole life, doesn’t want to go. When the fixer visits him, the old man shows him a couple of tricks that indicate he might have special powers as a result of living by and playing in the dump as a youth. So the fixer hopes to bring him into a black site corporate lab for testing, but the old man, who has a heart condition, takes off–his grand niece, the crippled sole survivor of a school bus accident, has telepathy and counsels him as he flees from the corporation to meet her in Texas. But the corporation through its regional offices are hot on his trail, culminating in kidnapping and murder to get a hold of him.

So: I was not really sure where it was going, and the setting of the middle 1980s southwest was not as exotic as, say, a forest planet. The prose was serviceable, but the story not especially gripping. Kind of Firestarter, actually. With toxic waste instead of a government program behind it. And toxic waste was really a big concern in the 1980s, ainna? We sure got a lot of pop culture from it: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Toxic Avenger, C.H.U.D., and so forth.

At any rate, thinking about it and researching this post made it clear how Foster kind of recycles current tropes, themes, and setting from not only his own work but the culture at large. I mean, Midworld takes place on a forested planet (like Mid-Flinx). Codgerspace features older protagonists (although so does Cocoon which comes out later). Maybe I’m reading too much into it.

But I might want to hold off on picking up another Foster soon. And given how I’ve apparently paced them out so far, it might be a decade.

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“Raise Insurance Rates For Everyone Who Pays For Insurance Bill” Doesn’t Sound As Snappy

Brian J. Noggle

Missouri woman living with breast cancer asks lawmakers to pass Cancer Patients’ Bill of Rights:

She approached Democratic St. Louis Sen. Angela Mosley about writing a Cancer Patients’ Bill of Rights. This bill would ensure patients have the right to clear explanations in their language, shorter waits for test results and appointments with specialists, access to clinical trials at request, and much more. Insurance companies would be expected to bear any costs associated with this bill.

Our financially and probably otherwise illiterate legislators continue to layer up mandates on insurance companies and then slag on them when insurance prices go up. And then they mandate purchasing insurance coverage.

Republicans are not immune to these feel-good, hide-the-cost bills. One of my current senators made it mandatory that my health care coverage pay for autism treatments that I’ll never use.

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Overthinking It

Brian J. Noggle

I noticed the fire alarms at church have arrows pointing up.

Most fire alarms–if not all of them–are designed for the alarmant to pull down. I looked at the side of the alarm, and it is indeed hinged at the bottom.

The arrows indicate where you’re supposed to pull, not which direction you’re supposed to pull.

I’m not entirely sure on the design. I’d hate for someone to hesitate and cogitate on this in an emergency, where that person might be overcome by smoke whilst trying to tug up.

But maybe I’m the only one who worries about those possibilities.

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Attention: Your Hair Is Not On Fire

Brian J. Noggle

It’s filtering to the masses: The economy is cratering! Recession! Depression! Doom!

My mother-in-law is no longer technically a shut-in, but she does watch a lot of cable news. My beautiful wife is steeped in the non-profit world and other feminine sources of information. And even the newspapers that are nominally Trump-supporting such as the New York Post have to fill column inches and screen pixels several times a day, so some doom-mongering is inevitable. They’re starting to fear in a herd-like fashion.

But.

In recent years, during what was presented as the best economic recovery ever, Jack, the price of gas and groceries effectively doubled? And that was fine?

But now the word tariffs gets screamed from the broadcast tours and the tubes and wires of the Internet, and now we’re supposed to panic?

Yeah, nobody’s hair is on fire, and day-to-day has not changed.

I guess a lot of government people are out of work and uncertain. Kind of like tech jobs have been shed over recent years by the tens of thousands and how manufacturing jobs have evaporated en masse in the last couple of decades.

Head down, everyone, and carry on. No one knows what lies ahead.

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Missing What’s Gone That I Only Now Noticed

Brian J. Noggle

So I like to carry a small disposable lighter on my person when I leave the house. Because if I’m ever in the situation when I need to make a fire (for an emergency survival situation, gentle reader, not because I dislike someone’s politics, because I am not young and or easily led by the permanent professional and optimized cacophony of the Internet), I want to be able to make a fire easily.

In the past, I’ve grabbed a three pack of small lighters at the checkout stand at the grocery or the Walmart, and I’ve kept them in my pocket provisioning drawer. I lose them here and there when they fall out of my loose pockets when I’m sitting various places–I probably have a bunch hidden in the chair in the parlor or beside the drivers’ seats of my vehicles–but I lost the last of them a couple of weeks ago.

When I went to replace them, I couldn’t find them at the checkout stands any more. I mean, you used to find them everywhere with the candy bars and chapstick.

But Walmart has dramatically cut its point-of-sale merchandise to basically candy bars, and I couldn’t find them at the Pricecutter. So I made a point to look for them.

I found some at the courtesy counter.

They’re now $1.50 each, not three for a dollar or three for a buck fifty.

Given that I’m going to lose them, I certainly don’t want to buy refillable collectible lighters or anything with personality.

But…. I guess it’s just one thing I’m used to being ubiquitous that was ubiquitous geographically but not in the time stream.

Maybe I should pay as much heed to not losing them as I do to the other things in my pockets.

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