Bad Guys Making Bad Life Decisions

The morning television news threw me for a loop today. The very first story I saw after the TV cut on was about the officer-involved shooting at the Burger King the other day, and released the name of the IMPD who had to shoot the dude using his backup gun. Turns out I know the guy. I first met him at MAG-40 up in Rochester, and he was an assistant instructor at the carbine class I took from Uncle Pat. Sometimes it's an uncomfortably small world.

That bad guy picked the wrong officer to throw down with, but better him than some other less experienced, less trained cop who might have panicked.

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Oh, hell no.

The amount of preparation that went into this one stunt is amazing, but my palms sweat just watching it.

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Yikes

This huge old hackberry that just shed one of its trunks and smashed through a roof is about the size of the one that was in the back yard at Roseholme Cottage. I miss its shade, but I'm sure glad it was dealt with before something like this occurred.

About that missing sub...

Someone quipped that if these sorts of deep-diving sub expeditions continue as expected and become even more frequent, it won't be long before the sea floor around the wreck of the Titanic turns into a waterlogged version of the upper slopes of Everest, strewn with the corpses of well-heeled adventure seekers.

https://t.co/yEEi9OX8iA pic.twitter.com/nBl4BY0iuS

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 20, 2023

Going back and looking at the CBS reporter's junket on the sub, the whole thing becomes a huge "Oh, hell, no" in my book. Especially reading some of the tweets that David Pogue made recently. Pogue's set himself up for some subpoenas if the sub's passengers are, in fact, croaked.

incredibly funny when the overly-industry-friendly tech journalists don’t realise they’re saying some really damning stuff. https://t.co/vXo9yaZeZ3 pic.twitter.com/TQdkT5ruAH

— Richard (405 Mi16 era) (@halkyardo) June 20, 2023

The kind of photography I'll never do.

This is just all kinds of NOPE right here...

It's interesting to see from a technical standpoint, but it makes sphincter clench and my hair stand on end.

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Yikes.

You know how there are those occasional missing person stories with a gruesome ending, where they find the person weeks later behind some heavy piece of furniture where they'd fallen and suffocated? This is worse.

This reads like something that kicks off a Stephen King short story* from way back in his more tightly-edited, way-scarier days...

Duncan Alexander Burrell Gordon, of Greer, was reported missing in early May from the recycling plant where his father is a supervisor.

Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger said Gordon apparently fell into the plastic shredder where he was working May 5, the last time he was seen, news agencies reported.

*I'm referring, of course, to the creepy-ass story "The Mangler", which was originally published in Cavalier magazine and can be found in the collection Night Shift. Apparently it got a godawful movie adaptation which, despite being an absolute box office flop and panned by critics, spawned a pair of straight-to-video sequels.

Yikes.

Got another test in the works...

“It’s like a scaled-down 5.56 round!”

”They forgot to scale the price tag down to match.”

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 20, 2022

Rise of the Machines

What would happen if an AI designed to find new helpful chemicals were instead used to find new harmful ones?

"We were vaguely aware of security concerns around work with pathogens or toxic chemicals, but that did not relate to us; we primarily operate in a virtual setting. Our work is rooted in building machine learning models for therapeutic and toxic targets to better assist in the design of new molecules for drug discovery. We have spent decades using computers and AI to improve human health—not to degrade it. We were naive in thinking about the potential misuse of our trade, as our aim had always been to avoid molecular features that could interfere with the many different classes of proteins essential to human life. Even our projects on Ebola and neurotoxins, which could have sparked thoughts about the potential negative implications of our machine learning models, had not set our alarm bells ringing... 

<snip> 

...Our toxicity models were originally created for use in avoiding toxicity, enabling us to better virtually screen molecules (for pharmaceutical and consumer product applications) before ultimately confirming their toxicity through in vitro testing. The inverse, however, has always been true: the better we can predict toxicity, the better we can steer our generative model to design new molecules in a region of chemical space populated by predominantly lethal molecules. We did not assess the virtual molecules for synthesizability or explore how to make them with retrosynthesis software. For both of these processes, commercial and open-source software is readily available that can be easily plugged into the de novo design process of new molecules7. We also did not physically synthesize any of the molecules; but with a global array of hundreds of commercial companies offering chemical synthesis, that is not necessarily a very big step, and this area is poorly regulated, with few if any checks to prevent the synthesis of new, extremely toxic agents that could potentially be used as chemical weapons. Importantly, we had a human in the loop with a firm moral and ethical ‘don’t-go-there’ voice to intervene. But what if the human were removed or replaced with a bad actor? With current breakthroughs and research into autonomous synthesis8, a complete design–make–test cycle applicable to making not only drugs, but toxins, is within reach. Our proof of concept thus highlights how a nonhuman autonomous creator of a deadly chemical weapon is entirely feasible."

This isn't science fiction, this is IRL MurderBot.

"I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you."

Pleasant dreams?

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Disembodied

Taking a shortcut down an alley on the way to lunch yesterday, I was a little startled by something lying in the leaves, off to the side...

Just leaning against the fence there, staring up at me with hollow concrete eyes. Its gaze felt accusatorial, somehow. 

I've taken to carrying the EOS M with its 22mm f/2 pancake lens around in my pocket again this winter, set to monochrome, so I stuck the camera up in the thing's grille, snapped a few pics, and strolled on.

(Incidentally, if you shoot Canon's EOS M crop sensor system, it's probably a goner, but we've seen that coming for a while...)

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Don't Look Down

I watched the first third or so of The Alpinist over a late lunch yesterday. It's a great documentary, and when I watch it, I understand what normal folks get out of watching scary movies. 

See, regular horror flicks don't do much for me. I know that ghosts and zombies and vampires and stuff aren't real. But you know what is real? Gravity. The frickin' ground. And just watching that stuff makes me horripilate and my palms sweat.

Anyway, the climbing this LeClerc kid did was just nuts. When Alex frickin' Honnold says things that amount to "This guy's a wild man and I have no idea how he does the stuff he does", that's saying something.

Apocalypse Now

Sure, sure, we've had some bad rain and flooding incidents here in the US in the last couple years, but in Egypt they've taken this to the next level. They found a way to add an extra little dash of awfulness to a plain old flood!

I've seen school delayed because it was too foggy to safely run the buses, and I've gotten to stay home from school because of snow and ice, but I have to say that school being closed because of a swarm of scorpions is entirely outside of my experience.

You gotta wonder if the old timers in Aswan are all like "In my day, we didn't shut down school for any scorpion swarm. Heck, Ahmad got stung on the playground and had to get carted off in an ambulance and we didn't even pause our soccer game."

Al Jazeera's piece clarifies things a bit, saying it was the weather that caused the school closures, not the plague of arachnids, which leads to the obvious "Well in northern Egypt we know how to drive in floods!" joke.

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That sound you hear...

...is my distal sphincter slamming shut with an audible "CLANG!"

I will be pooping angel hair pasta for a week.

There are not enough Oh Hell Noes in the whole world to describe this. And yes I see the safety tether. Don't care. 

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Groundhog Hour

If you battle insomnia at times, you can understand the existential horror of the situation.

Despite going to bed dead tired somewhere around eleven o'clock, your eyelids flutter open at...glance at the clock on your iPad by the bed...quarter after one in the morning.

Screwing your eyes tightly shut and counting sheep gets you nowhere, so you open your Kindle copy of The Big Sort, hoping some very serious nonfiction* will speed you on your way back to the Realm of Nod.

The clock in the upper left corner of the iPad's screen says it's 1:35AM as you start reading. Digging in to Bishop's tome, you resolutely turn virtual pages, waiting for your eyelids to sag. 

Check the clock. It's 1:55AM. 

Return to the book. Another chapter down. Sweet slumber continues to evade you. Plow through the text.

Check the clock.

1:25AM.

What fresh hell is this?

I'm not going to lie, gentle reader, there was a heartbeat there where I was sure my clutch had started slipping for good and I'd descended into some Kafka-esque horror before I remembered it was just the night of the Autumnal Clock Juggle.

*I like chewy nonfiction as much as the next nerd, but it has a time and that time is not normally when one is fending off the sandman.

Window Washing

This morning's cartoons featured a 1937-vintage Popeye number wherein he and Bluto do battle over who will clean the windows on Olive Oyl's high-rise office.

I thought the hooks on the outside of the windows they used to clip in with their safety harnesses were an interesting detail and wondered to myself if that was really how it was done back in the day.

Boy howdy was it ever.

"But it's factory ammo!"

"Factory" ammo may not mean the same thing, depending on which factory we're talking about. Some of the most disappointing ammo I'd tried thus far was from a factory. The 124gr Sumbro FMJ ammunition I ran through my M&P9 back in 2015 or so had an extreme spread of 89.2 feet per second. In other words, out of ten rounds that were, not just from the same lot number, but the same box, the slowest round was doing 1,069fps while the fastest was almost a hundred feet per second faster, at 1,158.

The Macedonian ammo maker may not have covered themselves with glory, there, but last Friday I had a box of Turkish Sarsilmaz 124gr FMJ that effectively said "biramı tut".

This is obviously some definition of "professional performance" with which I was previously unfamiliar.

No, you are not misreading terrible handwriting. A ten round string fired from a single magazine in a Shield Plus had a velocity spread only a hair less than 180fps.

Yikes. I think they are having issues with their kalite kontrolü.

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More Human Than Human

I don't know how much of this is hyperbole and how much is actually yikes-worthy:

It is not clear how far Chinese military researchers have gone. They are, however, advocating use of the CRISPR gene-editing tool to enhance human capabilities, and the Communist Party's Central Military Commission is "supporting research in human performance enhancement and 'new concept' biotechnology."

I mean, maybe they just want people for an exciting new life in the off-world colonies?

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I know this may come as a shock, but...

 ...one of the guys who featured in this video...

...has died of natural causes, assuming you consider gravity a natural cause.

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Well, that's positively horrifying...

"A man in Brisbane, Australia, returned home to find two huge snakes had fallen through his kitchen ceiling on Monday.

The carpet pythons measured around 2.9 meters (9.5 feet) and 2.5 meters (8.2 feet), according to snake catcher Steven Brown, of Brisbane North Snake Catchers and Relocation, who removed them from the property.

"Both these snakes were two of the fattest snakes I've seen, as in the amount of muscle they had," Brown told CNN, adding that they were "very well fed."

[snip]

The snake catcher told CNN that it is breeding season for the snakes and it is likely the two males were fighting over a nearby female, who could have been in the roof or somewhere around the house."

The Australian government tourism agency was unavailable for comment, probably because they'd all been bitten by giant highly-venomous spiders or something.
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The Big Bang

Here's a really cool photo essay on the effects of the big blast in Beirut.

That was about fifteen B-17's bombloads worth of explosive going off all at once in one place.
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This is the most 2020 thing I've read yet.

What gun for one million radioactive communist cannibal ants?

This was a Twilight Zone episode, right?https://t.co/Hi7cCv4Fdp

— Kirk Freeman (@KirkFreemanLaw) August 3, 2020

ETA: And yes, the story itself dates to last year and is reporting on events that had occurred years before that. But that has just given the ants time to get closer.
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