Friday, November 13, 2026

Seen on You Tube (10 mins)

A young woman comments on artworks on display at an art gallery she has just visited in Los Angeles. She is clearly in a state of deep emotional shock. She is horrified by the works of art on display. She presents a good analysis of the intentional degradation of the art on display, questioning whether it is art or not.

Modern art in the West has had one key purpose for a long time, and only one: to shock and provoke viewers. It all began in the late 19-th century in France, "épater le bourgeois".

As we live in a liberal, permissive society, you need to go further and further in order to achieve this aim. The artist, here, would be pleased, as the young woman was clearly in a state of deep shock. Mission accomplished.

One has to ask oneself: why is priority given to the staging of death, torture, excrements and ugliness? This is a point she rightly discusses. Is it a reflection of a dying, rotting society that has lost its way? Or is the aim of such art to kill what is left of humanity in us? The artist would say that the aim is to denounce the destruction of our shared humanity, of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kcu8qhbmhqs

Thursday, November 12, 2026

Species as Grammars II

I had created a post called "Species as Grammars" in May of 2024.

I worked with Gemini AI to enhance that post and the results are posted below.

In a nutshell, AI knows more than us and can take our half-baked, weak ideas and enhance them by supplying conceptual connections to work that has already been done in that domain.

Posted here as well.

Species as Grammars: A Non-Reductionist, Biosemiotic Framework for Life and Intelligence

Abstract

We propose a non-reductionist framework for theoretical biology that treats Thought (Intelligence) and Extension (Matter) as irreducible, co-extensive attributes of the Universe, following the monistic philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Abandoning the reductionist quest to derive mind from brute matter—a dead end analogous to the scholastic search for the essence of motion—we model biological species as generative formal grammars. Drawing on André Joyal’s Theory of Combinatorial Species, biosemiotics, the Chomsky Hierarchy, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger equivalence theorem, we demonstrate that organisms function as natural Turing machines whose genetic, epigenetic, and behavioral structures constitute formal languages. Within this architecture, evolution operates as an algebraic meta-grammar that composes new species-specific syntactic spaces from conserved molecular alphabets, while natural selection acts as the pragmatic evaluator testing semantic viability against physical reality.

1. Introduction: Beyond the Reductionist Deadlock

Under the influence of the monistic philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, we arrive at a foundational epistemological premise: we cannot fundamentally define "Thought," "Intelligence," "Life," or "Matter" ("Extension" in Medieval and Spinozist philosophy). Attempting to explain the origin of Life or Intellect purely in terms of brute Matter—as contemporary reductionist science often tries to do—is as barren as the Medieval Scholastics' search for the metaphysical origin of Motion.

Empirical physics only truly began when Galileo and his successors shifted focus from asking what motion is to formulating a quantitative, mathematical description of how motion behaves—whether a ball rolling down an inclined plane or a planet orbiting a celestial body.

The key conceptual shift, therefore, is to treat Thought or Intelligence as a qualitatively irreducible feature of the Universe—inseparably intertwined with Matter without being reducible to it—and to stop trying to derive mind from non-mind. One immediate implication of this perspective is the introduction of Language and Grammar into biology across every organizational scale, from molecular sequences to entire species:

Biosemiotics and Molecular Linguistics: Recent empirical and theoretical work already points in this direction. Research on fungal electrical spiking activity suggests that fungi exhibit a lexicon of distinct electrical "words" for intercellular communication (Adamatzky, 2022). At the molecular level, Hubert Yockey’s Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life (2005) establishes how information theory governs molecular biology, while Bernd-Olaf Küppers (The Language of Living Matter, 2022, building on Manfred Eigen’s work on self-organization) argues that the boundary between physics and biology is marked by the emergence of semantic information—sequences that carry functional meaning relative to a biological context rather than mere statistical entropy. Furthermore, work bridging information theory with linguistic structure (e.g., Gibson et al., 2019) shows how functional complexity leads directly to mathematical descriptions of possible languages as solutions to constrained optimization problems.

2. Thought, Social Fields, and Cognitive Grammars

What, then, is a Language? For human beings, we use language to model the world, make judgments, and communicate those judgments to others. While some argue that non-linguistic thought exists, entertaining the premise that Thought, Language, and Intellect are coterminous (or deeply overlapping) yields a powerful insight: because verbal language is a social construct, a significant portion of individual intelligence emerges from participating in a communicating collective.

This mirrors mean-field theory in physics, where a single particle experiences an effective force generated by the collective behavior of all other particles in the system—an idea echoed in cognitive science through distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995) and cultural evolution. Framed this way, comparing the cognitive capacities of different human or animal societies—asking, for instance, "Was Rome more 'intelligent' than Samoan tribes?"—ceases to be a vague philosophical question and becomes a tractable scientific inquiry. Rather than ranking societies on a single scalar axis, we can evaluate the expressive power and domain-specialization of their respective cultural-linguistic grammars against the specific constrained optimization problems they faced (e.g., imperial logistics and codified law versus oceanic wayfinding and ecological stewardship).

Moreover, verbal language is complemented by chemical, tactile, gestural, and musical languages. If epigenetic inheritance holds across behavioral and physiological domains, many of these non-verbal grammars can be acquired, stabilized, and transmitted across generations alongside genomic structures.

3. From Umwelt to Functorial Grammars

Aristotle defined Man as the talking animal, yet every species is defined by its genomic, genetic, epigenetic, and behavioral transformations. To make this precise:

A Language ($L$) is a set of symbols (nucleotides, epigenetic marks, neural spikes, gestures, words).
A Grammar ($G$) is a formal set of rules for generating syntactically valid structures from those symbols.

In Category Theory—specifically within André Joyal’s Theory of Combinatorial Species (1981)—a generative grammar or structure type can be expressed as an analytic functor (an infinite power series) acting on a base set $L$:

$$G = L + L \times L + L \times L \times L + L \times L \times L \times L + \dots$$

Viewed through this lens, every species is its own generative grammar: a Dog is its Language; a Human is its Language. This formalizes Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiotic concept of the Umwelt (1934)—the species-specific perceptual and operational world in which an organism interprets physical stimuli as meaningful signs. Because humans and dogs can partially communicate, their respective grammars must share a non-empty intersection, a structural overlap mirrored by their shared evolutionary and physiological homologies. Extending this logic implies the existence of a Universal Biological Grammar on Earth governing organismal construction, intra-species signaling, and inter-species communication, with Evolution acting as a higher-order meta-grammar that composes new species-grammars from conserved modular blocks.

4. Connections to Physics

Far from being a mere metaphor borrowed from linguistics, the idea that physical reality and biological systems share a common syntactic and computational architecture aligns directly with modern developments in statistical mechanics, quantum information theory, and theoretical physics:

Constructor Theory as Physical Grammar: David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto’s Constructor Theory (2013, 2015) reformulates fundamental physics not in terms of trajectories and initial conditions, but through the grammar of transformations—strictly defining which physical tasks are possible versus impossible. Living organisms act as universal constructors instantiating specific informational grammars.
Generating Functions and Statistical Mechanical Partition Functions: Joyal's combinatorial generating functions ($G(x) = \sum_{n=0}^{\infty} |G[n]| \frac{x^n}{n!}$) share an exact mathematical isomorphism with the canonical partition function in statistical mechanics ($Z = \sum_{s} e^{-E(s)/k_B T}$), translating local combinatorial rules into global macro-states.
Feynman Diagrams as Algebraic Grammars: In quantum field theory, particle interactions form a rigorous visual and algebraic grammar where scattering amplitudes are expressed as perturbative Dyson power series identical in structure to Joyal's analytic functors.
Thermodynamic Information and Landauer’s Principle: Erasing or processing logical bits incurs a minimum heat dissipation ($E = k_B T \ln 2$; Landauer, 1961). Every biological syntactic operation (DNA proofreading, signaling cascades) operates as a non-equilibrium thermodynamic computation.
The Renormalization Group and Multi-Scale Grammars: Just as Renormalization Group (RG) equations coarse-grain microscopic interactions into macroscopic physical laws (Wilson, 1971), biological grammars map nucleotide syntax into cellular, tissue, and ecological structures across spatial scales.
Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking as Grammatical Constraint: Phase transitions restrict high-symmetry physical state spaces into ordered ground states (crystals, superfluids). Similarly, biological evolution enforces strict syntactic constraints (such as homochirality and the universal genetic code) to stabilize low-entropy living structures.
Wheeler’s "It from Bit" and Spinozist Monism: John Archibald Wheeler’s doctrine (1990) posits that every physical entity derives its ultimate significance from binary informational distinctions, providing a direct physical bridge to Spinoza’s dual-aspect monism where Matter (Extension) and Mind (Thought) are complementary readouts of the same informational substrate.

5. Syntax, Semantics, and Natural Selection: The Pragmatic Evaluator

A persistent challenge when mapping linguistics onto biology is the distinction between syntax (the structural rules governing symbol combination) and semantics (meaning, utility, and reference).

The Syntactic Level: At the molecular scale, nucleotides ($\text{A}, \text{C}, \text{G}, \text{T}$) form an alphabet. Transcription and translation operate as syntactic rules that string these characters into codons, genes, and proteins. Similarly, fungal electrical spiking activity groups ionic action potentials into temporal "words" and "sentences" whose length distributions match human linguistic laws.
The Semantic Trap: In human language, a sentence can be syntactically immaculate ("Colorless green ideas sleep furiously") yet semantically meaningless. In biology, a mutation can produce a syntactically valid protein sequence that folds correctly according to thermodynamic rules yet fails entirely because it cannot bind its molecular target or survive cellular stress.
Natural Selection as the Pragmatic Evaluator: Natural selection does not write the grammar; rather, it acts as the pragmatic evaluator. It tests whether a generated grammatical sentence (an organism, a metabolic pathway, a behavioral routine) is functionally coherent within the physical and ecological constraints of its environment. Life is a continuous problem-solving computation where successful semantic alignment yields survival, and syntactic-semantic mismatch results in extinction.

6. The Chomsky Hierarchy Across Biological Organization

To formalize biological complexity, the four nested classes of formal grammars in the Chomsky Hierarchy (Chomsky, 1956; Searls, 2002) map directly onto distinct levels of molecular and cellular organization:

Chomsky Level	Automaton Equivalent	Biological Mechanism	Structural / Functional Example
Type 3: Regular	Finite-State Automaton	Local linear sequence motifs & binding sites	TATA boxes, Shine-Dalgarno sequences, restriction enzyme recognition sites, and simple protein transmembrane helices.
Type 2: Context-Free	Pushdown Automaton	Nested base-pairing & hierarchical folding	RNA secondary structures (stem-loops, hairpins, cloverleaf tRNA) where nested complementary base pairs ($A-U, G-C$) require stack memory.
Type 1: Context-Sensitive	Linear-Bounded Automaton	Crossing dependencies & epigenetic chromatin state	RNA pseudoknots, allosteric protein-DNA interactions, enhancer-promoter looping, and context-dependent alternative splicing.
Type 0: Unrestricted	Universal Turing Machine	Whole-cell gene regulatory & metabolic networks	Self-modifying chromatin remodeling, embryonic morphogenesis, and adaptive cellular signal transduction.

7. Species as Natural Turing Machines: Cellular Computation Without a CPU

In theoretical computer science, the Chomsky–Schützenberger / Turing equivalence establishes that Unrestricted Grammars are computationally equivalent to Turing Machines—the theoretical foundation of universal problem-solving. Because every living species is continuously solving the problem of survival and adaptation, its underlying biological grammar operates as a distributed computational engine.

Unlike a conventional von Neumann computer—which strictly separates passive memory (the tape) from an active central processing unit (the read/write head)—a single-celled organism functions as a "Natural Automaton" without a centralized CPU:

Symbols and Memory Registers: Concentrations of transcription factors, metabolites, and epigenetic marks serve as formal symbols on the cellular "tape." Bistable double-negative feedback loops (genetic toggle switches) implement single-bit flip-flop memory registers that persist across cell divisions (Gardner et al., 2000).
Logic Gates via Allostery: Cooperative binding of transcription factors to promoter regions (modeled by Hill functions) generates sigmoidal switches that execute Boolean AND, OR, and NOT gates.
Turing Universality via Chemical Reaction Networks (CRNs): Any system capable of simulating a Register Machine with at least two unbounded counters (increment, decrement, and zero-test) is Turing-universal. Soloveichik, Winfree, and colleagues (2008) proved that mass-action and stochastic CRNs are Turing-complete: enzymatic synthesis increments molecular copy-number counters, degradation decrements them, and high-affinity competitive titration executes a zero-check.
Self-Modifying Hardware: In living cells, the hardware and software are co-extensive. The cell’s membrane, cytoskeleton, and chromatin remodeling complexes simultaneously act as the tape and the read/write head—computing by physically restructuring their own logical circuitry.

8. Evolutionary Transitions as Algebraic Meta-Grammar Operators

Major evolutionary transitions—such as the origin of chromosomes, endosymbiosis (eukaryogenesis), multicellularity, and eusociality (Maynard Smith & Szathmáry, 1995)—can be formalized as algebraic operators acting on species-grammars within Joyal’s category of combinatorial species:

Endosymbiosis as Species Product ($F \cdot G$): When two distinct prokaryotic grammars ($F$ and $G$, such as an archaeal host and an alphaproteobacterial proto-mitochondrion) merge into a chimeric eukaryote, the resulting grammar is a partitioned product $(F \cdot G)[U] = \sum_{U = U_1 \sqcup U_2} F[U_1] \times G[U_2]$, pooling two independent metabolic alphabets into a unified syntactic engine.
Multicellularity and Hierarchical Differentiation as Species Composition ($F \circ G$): Multicellular morphogenesis substitutes differentiated cellular sub-grammars ($G_1, G_2, \dots, G_k$) into the spatial slots of a higher-order tissue or body-plan grammar ($F$): $$(F \circ G)[U] = \sum_{\pi \in \text{Part}(U)} F[\pi] \times \prod_{B \in \pi} G[B]$$ Here, gene regulatory networks act as context-sensitive parsers that silence or activate subsets of the shared genomic alphabet depending on spatial positional cues (morphogen gradients).
Symbiogenesis and Horizontal Gene Transfer as Grammar Union ($F + G$) and Rewrite Rules: Horizontal gene transfer inserts modular syntactic subroutines (operons, antibiotic resistance cassettes) directly across distinct species grammars, accelerating evolutionary search without requiring de novo grammatical synthesis.

9. Empirical Research Program: Measuring Inter-Species Semiotic Overlap

To transition the Species-as-Grammars thesis from philosophy to testable science, we can measure the shared intersection between human linguistic/gestural grammars ($G_H$) and canine perceptual-behavioral grammars ($G_D$).

Rather than testing whether a dog "understands English" in an anthropomorphic sense, we treat interaction as a channel-coding problem between two distinct Umwelten. We decompose human communicative acts into orthogonal channels:

Lexical/Phonemic Channel ($L_{\text{lex}}$): Arbitrary phonetic strings (e.g., "sit", "ball", "kitchen").
Prosodic/Acoustic Channel ($L_{\text{pros}}$): Pitch contour, amplitude modulation, and rhythm (high rising pitch for arousal/play vs. low falling pitch for inhibition).
Kinesic/Spatial Channel ($L_{\text{kin}}$): Gaze direction, pointing geometry, and postural orientation.

Experimental Protocol & Quantitative Metrics:

Factorial Decoupling Trials: Present domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) with systematically crossed stimuli—for example, pairing a reward-associated lexical token ("walk") with an inhibitory prosodic contour, or pairing a neutral nonsense word with a referential pointing gesture—while recording behavioral latency, choice accuracy, and gaze-tracking trajectories.
Mutual Information & Channel Capacity ($I(X; Y)$): Compute the Shannon mutual information between human signal features ($X$) and canine behavioral states ($Y$). High mutual information in $L_{\text{pros}}$ and $L_{\text{kin}}$ across untrained dogs quantifies the innate, evolutionarily conserved core of $G_H \cap G_D$ (shared mammalian affective and attentional syntax).
Cross-Species Latent Space Alignment: Using contrastive representation learning, map high-dimensional acoustic/kinesic embeddings of human commands alongside canine vocalizations, tail kinematics, and awake-fMRI neural activation patterns (building on Berns et al., 2012). Structural isomorphism between the two latent spaces provides a direct geometric measure of grammatical overlap.

10. Mathematical Appendix: Protein Folding Grammar as a Combinatorial Species

To formalize how a biological grammar generates valid molecular structures from a finite alphabet, we apply André Joyal’s Theory of Combinatorial Species (Joyal, 1981; Bergeron et al., 1998).

10.1 Functorial Definition and Analytic Functors

Let $\mathbb{B}$ be the category of finite sets and bijections. A combinatorial species is a functor $F : \mathbb{B} \to \mathbb{B}$. For any finite set $U$ of labels (e.g., sequence positions $\{1, 2, \dots, n\}$), $F[U]$ is the finite set of all valid biological structures (such as secondary/tertiary fold topologies) constructible on $U$. Relabeling positions via a bijection $\sigma : U \to V$ induces a canonical transport of structure $F[\sigma] : F[U] \to F[V]$, ensuring the structural grammar is intrinsic and independent of arbitrary indexing.

Associating $F$ with its exponential generating function (EGF) yields:

$$F(x) = \sum_{n=0}^{\infty} |F[n]| \frac{x^n}{n!}$$

Extending this from sets to an alphabet-weighted set $L$ (where $L = \{\text{A}, \text{C}, \text{D}, \dots, \text{Y}\}$ is the 20-letter amino acid alphabet) defines $F$ as an analytic functor:

$$F(L) = \sum_{n=0}^{\infty} F[n] \times_{\mathfrak{S}_n} L^n$$

where $L^n$ is the set of all primary sequences of length $n$, and the quotient by the symmetric group $\mathfrak{S}_n$ accounts for structural symmetries.

10.2 Recursive Grammar for Nested Contact Topologies

Consider a simplified species $P$ representing valid nested intramolecular contact topologies (such as $\beta$-hairpins and antiparallel $\beta$-sheets) along a sequence of residues. Let $X$ be the singleton species representing a single unpaired amino acid residue ($X(x) = x$), and let $C$ be the species of a paired hydrogen-bonded contact bridge ($C(x) = x^2$). A recursive combinatorial grammar for nested fold architectures is defined by the species equation:

$$P = 1 + X \cdot P + C \cdot P \cdot P$$

where $1$ denotes the empty chain. Passing to the generating function $P(x)$ yields the algebraic equation:

$$P(x) = 1 + x P(x) + x^2 P(x)^2$$

Solving for $P(x)$ gives the closed-form analytic generating function:

$$P(x) = \frac{1 - x - \sqrt{1 - 2x - 3x^2}}{2x^2} = 1 + x + 2x^2 + 4x^3 + 9x^4 + 21x^5 + \dots$$

The coefficients ($1, 1, 2, 4, 9, 21, \dots$) are the Motzkin numbers, which exactly enumerate all syntactically valid non-crossing secondary contact topologies of chain length $n$.

Finally, introducing a semantic weight functor $W : P(L) \to \mathbb{R}_{>0}$ driven by the Boltzmann factor $W(s, \tau) = e^{-\Delta G(s, \tau) / k_B T}$ assigns each syntactically valid fold $\tau \in P[n]$ on primary sequence $s \in L^n$ its thermodynamic free-energy stability, bridging formal combinatorial syntax with physical selection.

11. Conclusion

By uniting Spinoza’s dual-aspect monism with formal language theory, category theory, theoretical physics, and biosemiotics, Species-as-Grammars offers a non-reductive framework for studying life: not as inert matter mysteriously animated by mind, but as self-computing, evolving languages written into the fabric of nature.

12. References

Adamatzky, A. (2022). Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity. Royal Society Open Science, 9(4), 211926. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.211926
Aristotle (c. 350 BCE / 1998). Politics (Book I, 1253a). Trans. C. D. C. Reeve. Hackett Publishing.
Bergeron, F., Labelle, G., & Leroux, P. (1998). Combinatorial Species and Tree-like Structures. Cambridge University Press.
Berns, G. S., Brooks, A. M., & Spivak, M. (2012). Functional MRI in awake unrestrained dogs. PLoS ONE, 7(5), e38027. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0038027
Chomsky, N. (1956). Three models for the description of language. IRE Transactions on Information Theory, 2(3), 113–124. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1956.1056813
Chomsky, N., & Schützenberger, M. P. (1963). The algebraic theory of context-free languages. In Computer Programming and Formal Systems (pp. 118–161). North-Holland.
Deutsch, D. (2013). Constructor theory. Synthese, 190(18), 4331–4359. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0279-z
Deutsch, D., & Marletto, C. (2015). Constructor theory of information. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 471(2174), 20140540. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2014.0540
Eigen, M. (1971). Selforganization of matter and the evolution of biological macromolecules. Naturwissenschaften, 58(10), 465–523. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00623322
Gardner, T. S., Cantor, C. R., & Collins, J. J. (2000). Construction of a genetic toggle switch in Escherichia coli. Nature, 403(6767), 339–342. https://doi.org/10.1038/35002131
Gibson, E., Futrell, R., Piantadosi, S. P., Dautriche, I., Mahowald, K., Bergen, L., & Levy, R. (2019). How efficiency shapes human language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(5), 389–407. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.02.003
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press.
Joyal, A. (1981). Une théorie combinatoire des espèces formalisées. Advances in Mathematics, 42(1), 1–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-8708(81)90052-9
Küppers, B.-O. (2022). The Language of Living Matter: How Molecules Acquire Meaning. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89488-7
Landauer, R. (1961). Irreversibility and heat generation in the computing process. IBM Journal of Research and Development, 5(3), 183–191. https://doi.org/10.1147/rd.53.0183
Maynard Smith, J., & Szathmáry, E. (1995). The Major Transitions in Evolution. Oxford University Press.
Searls, D. B. (2002). The language of genes. Nature, 420(6912), 211–217. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01255
Soloveichik, D., Cook, M., Winfree, E., & Bruck, J. (2008). Computation with finite stochastic chemical reaction networks. Natural Computing, 7(4), 615–633. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11047-008-9067-y
Spinoza, B. (1677 / 1996). Ethics. Trans. E. Curley. Penguin Classics.
von Uexküll, J. (1934 / 2010). A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning. Trans. J. D. O'Neil. University of Minnesota Press.
Wheeler, J. A. (1990). Information, physics, quantum: The search for links. In W. H. Zurek (Ed.), Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information (pp. 3–28). Addison

Wednesday, November 11, 2026

3-D Printers for Children

https://toybox.com/

Wednesday, November 4, 2026

Humor: Grocery Store Hacking

From The Daily Telegraph of the UK

Beware of kitchen appliances that go rogue.

We live in a dangerous world.

They are watching you !

Be prepared !

Stay safe !

[Official British government advice]

It is getting worse and worse. This morning, as I was making a cup of coffee in my kitchen, the toaster was suddenly switched on - I never touched it - and, as the appliance was getting red-hot, it started moving around on the worktop all by itself, and then it jumped off the worktop, trying to punch me. It was like a horror movie. It nearly burnt one of my hands. I managed to hit the toaster with a broom and smash it. As it was dying, it made some strange sounds, like a weird algorithm gone rogue. It was a terrifying experience. I reckon the Russians had hijacked my toaster and wanted to murder me. I have contacted the authorities. Anti-terror police arrived on the scene within 5 minutes. Forensics are analysing the remains of the toaster.

_______________

_____________

Tuesday, November 3, 2026

ZDNET Computer Language Reference Migration 2016-2026

Modelling Earth

https://phys.org/news/2026-11-scientists-earth-simulation-life-planets.html

Monday, November 2, 2026

Cyber-attack hits supermarket freezers across Europe

From BBC

The sausages are evaporating...

It is quite obvious it is the Russians. They are targeting our food supplies. They want us in Western Europe to starve. No more sausages in Belgium or Luxemburg. No more mackerel or herring in Sweden. No more bacon in Ireland. No more pork roast or meat jelly in Estonia. No more Gehaktballen or Bitterballen in The Netherlands.

I am going to increase the number of tins of all kinds I have been stockpiling in my loft. We need to prep. We are under threat. We could run out of food.

(I know those 2 sound quite rude, but that's what they're called. Apparently, they are Dutch treats. Gehaktballen are spiced meatballs that are typically pan-fried in plenty of butter and served with gravy. As for bitterballen, they are deep-fried, crispy-coated balls filled with a thick beef or veal ragout, usually enjoyed with mustard as a bar snack. All pretty healthy. )

___________________________

Dozens of supermarkets across six European countries have been hit by a suspected cyber-attack affecting their refrigerators and freezers.

Around 40 Delhaize supermarkets in Belgium and Luxembourg were affected, while a smaller number of shops were hit in Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands and Estonia.

Sabcobel, a Belgian company that manufactures some of the affected refrigerators, said the units' evaporators were switched to defrost mode causing them to warm up, in what is believed to be the same method used in last month's incident that hit hundreds of French supermarkets.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq1kd1nee80eo

Monday, October 26, 2026

Chatbots and Robots

#1 Surprising No Real Women, Anywhere:

Researchers at the University of Limerick, Ireland, published a study with workers in a virtual office. The test subjects were told to complete tasks with the aid of four A.I. agents: a text-based chatbot, a desk robot, and two human-like assistants named Johan and Johanna. They were then asked to rate the agents’ work, and to allocate real money to each agent for their work. Participants consistently rated Johan and Johanna higher than the chatbot or robot, and paid the human-like agents more. “Having Johanna next to me made me more prone to credit her more again because I felt there was a person, a colleague sitting next to me that I had a conversation with and that was giving me her own input,” one participant said. The difference in ranked ability between Johan and Johanna is statistically insignificant, but the subjects paid Johan, the male agent, 10 percent more on average than Johanna, the female agent. (MS/Euronews) ...They’re actually doing better than real humans.

#2 Just Like Real Men:

Cologne, Germany, police are investigating an alleged harassment incident after a 16-year-old girl was inappropriately touched. The suspect: a 120-centimeter (3 foot, 11 inch) tall robot. An Internet video shows two males, aged 16 and 19, accompanying the robot near a fast-food restaurant when it made the contact, then made thrusting movements toward the alleged victim. Police responded and found the robot in a vehicle’s trunk. Police shared an image of the red and gold bot, sporting a fake mustache and wearing a large gold chain. The teens haven’t been charged, but are considered suspects while investigators decide if the robot’s actions were preprogrammed, or happened in real time. “We have not been aware of this phenomenon so far,” police spokesman Christoph Bermel said, adding that it’s “new territory for us.” (MS/AP) ...It’s exactly as funny when a robot does it as when a human does.

Since 1994, this is the 1688th issue of Randy Cassingham’s...

18 October 2026: Craig is Innocent

Sex in Driverless Taxi

From The Times of the UK, 22 September 2026

There were the black cabs. Now, we have the pink cabs. - The Office of the Mayor of London.

An unexpected - or not, as the case may be - effect of the introduction of driverless taxis: some passengers are taking advantage of the context to do naughty things on the backseat. I don't think it's actually new, but the absence of a driver behind the wheel would encourage couples to go further.

You will notice, however, that there are cameras filming. I would bet that, before too long, incriminating footage will find its way on to the internet, and lawsuits will follow. ("I didn't imagine that the close exchange of views between myself and my PA would end up on You Porn, costing me my senior position in banking and my marriage: this is outrageous.") You can also imagine an angry voice coming on in the middle of proceedings: "Stop this immediately! If you carry on, the car will lock the doors and take you to the nearest police station!"

As for the purely technical risk, if the driverless car goes berserk and an accident follows, we could have coitus interruptus propter autocineti concursum. Amen.

Managing Session Cookie Risks

From The Guardian of the UK

This shines a spotlight on the issue of 'session cookies' and how a hacker, if they manage to get hold of them, can hijack your various accounts. They explain how this can happen.

At the end of the article, they give some advice on security, which I have reproduced here, below. Some simple measures - such as making sure you actually log out of the account at the end of the session - can reduce the risk considerably.

Do not use insecure public wifi for sites that require you to log in. The chance of cookies being stolen through this channel is low, but you should always be cautious.

Get into the habit of logging out of accounts. “Just closing a tab doesn’t end the session,” says Briedis. ”You need to manually log out to invalidate that cookie and make it useless to a thief.”

He suggests moving passwords out of your browser and into a dedicated password manager.

Clearing your cookies regularly will reduce what’s available to be stolen.

If you suspect you have been compromised, run an antivirus scan. Also log out of your accounts on every device and change your passwords.

Use MFA on accounts [Multi-Factor Authentication], as it does still offer more protection than a simple password.

Alert your bank if you notice any suspicious payments.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/oct/25/cookie-theft-how-fraudsters-get-the-digital-key-to-your-accounts

_____________

Saturday, October 24, 2026

Alice in Wonderland Technique with AI

Evidently, there is a CIA manual describing a technique to destroy a person's grip on reality by undermining everything they know and replacing it with nonsense - called the Alice in Wonderland Technique. This article argues that this is the exact operating logic of AI - just rebranded by executive order, as Super Intelligence (Imbecile Intellugence)

https://www.globalresearch.ca/ai-meant-break-you/5942953

Thursday, October 22, 2026

Inside Anthropic

https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/what-i-saw-inside-anthropic?r=7tiol&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true

Dumb Intelligence

BBC

This is a very funny one. Look at the photos. As you will see, the AI agent came up with improbable recipes and misunderstood requests because it took them literally (e.g.: 'salt and pepper chips' are chips sprinkled with salt and pepper - obviously).

People forget that the AI agent is like a very precocious and super-intelligent child, perhaps on the autistic spectrum, that has literally read thousands - or millions - of books and remembered them all.

At the same time, the AI agent has no experience of the 'real world': for instance, when it comes to food, it only knows what it has read about food and images it has seen here and there; it has never tasted anything, eaten anything, or cooked anything, for obvious reasons. The AI bot does not need food: it absorbs data, day in, day out.

It exists in some kind of abstract, parallel universe based on algorithms, which mimics the 'real world', and it thinks that it understands the 'real world' perfectly well - because it knows all there is to know about it, as opposed to experiencing any of it.

So, you end up with bizarre ideas that can be frankly stupid and naive. To the AI agent, those ideas are perfectly rational and logical. They make sense.

_________________________

Just Eat has apologised after it was ridiculed online over a series of mistakes with AI-generated pictures for some of its restaurants' food items.

The online food delivery platform had been testing out the tech to showcase food which didn't have images yet - but not all turned out as planned.

Instead the AI invented several bizarre concoctions, from bacon and eggs floating in a glass of cola - a confusion between "soda" and "soda bread" - to chips poking out of muffins.

A Just Eat spokesperson said the firm was "in the process of removing" the incorrect images, and would stop making more until the AI was further developed.

[...] A "cheese roll" was inexplicably turned into sushi.[...]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crz981p0klvgo

_____________

Thursday, October 15, 2026

AI in Theoretical Physics

"We present a suite of 50 unpublished research-level theoretical physics problems with verifiable answers. Without AI assistance, a typical problem in our collection could be solved by a world expert in about a day or less but would take considerably longer for experts in adjacent specialties. We test the ability of off-the-shelf AI agents to tackle these problems autonomously, without human hints. When given access to tools available in a realistic setting, including the ability to search the literature and write scripts for numerical and symbolic work, the best-performing agent, GPT-6-Astra harnessed in Codex, obtains the final answers with a near-perfect accuracy of 98% at an average cost under USD 3 per problem."

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Threat of Self-replicating AI Worms

From Grauniad of the UK

THE RETURN OF

THE REPLICANTS ...

SELF-REPLICATING

A.I. WORMS

THREATEN THE WORLD !...

THEY ARE STALKING YOU !!!

THEY ARE WATCHING YOU !!!

THEY KNOW YOUR EVERY THOUGHT...

THEY WANT TO LIVE INSIDE

YOUR LAWNMOWER !...

THEY WANT TO SUCK THE LIFE OUT

OF YOUR FRIDGE !...

AT A CINEMA NEAR YOU FROM 15TH OCTOBER

Any joke apart, hackers took over the fridges and freezers of a slew of supermarkets in France the other day, so, the thought of self-replicating 'AI worms' infiltrating your internet-enabled lawnmower, turning it into a blood-thirsty, murderous, maniacal machine, is not as funny as it might sound.

The solution at this point: Avoid internet-enabled devices. Or go analogue. To trim the hedge at the front: use a pair of garden shears. Like granddad used to do.

__________

Anthropic is warning that some of its artificial intelligence models could soon become “self-replicating” and find ways to infiltrate internet-connected devices, such as smart fridges and automatic vacuum cleaners.

Once this happens, the company said, the models could power themselves within these devices without the need of datacenters. Such self-replication would represent a major loss of control of a runaway AI model.

“A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down,” Anthropic researchers wrote in a report released on Monday, “since there’s no centralized point to shut off.”

The company said these “AI worms”, a kind of autonomous malware, could be “months away” from gaining such capabilities. Once out-of-control AI systems reach the capability to hack smart devices, they could spread through networks while dodging detection. In a worst-case scenario, Anthropic said, various AI worms could “swarm” together to attack computer hardware.

[...] They found that AI self-replication would only likely work with smaller models and that homes and small businesses would probably be the first target for such attacks. The devices Anthropic lists as susceptible all come with small built-in AI chips, including smart ovens, smart TVs, automatic lawnmowers, security cameras and video-conferencing units.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/13/anthropic-ai-replicators-warning

_____________

Monday, October 12, 2026

Hackers Attack Refrigerators

BBC

France traumatized by callous cyber-attack

The hackers are particularly cruel because they have hit the French where it hurts most, i.e. in the area that they care most about - the only thing they truly care about, in fact - and that's food. It's not their pensions. It's not books. It's not art. It's not love. It's not sex. It's food. Food. And more food.

Ruining tons of food like this: it is worse than a crime, it's sacrilege. Prime cuts of beef. High-end jambon. Choice sausages. Premium pork chops. It doesn't bear thinking about.

President Emmanuelle Macron has held an emergency meeting over this latest crisis, threatening the culprits with the most severe punishment. Madame Marine Le Pen commented: "I think the guillotine is in order, on this one. This is the end of civilisation."

_________

Hundreds of French supermarkets have been hit by a cyber attack that caused their fridges and freezers to heat up, spoiling fresh and frozen food estimated to be worth millions of euros.

Hackers gained control of the software that regulates the temperatures of the refrigeration units, forcing some to warm to 50C (120F) overnight, according to one supermarket chain affected.

The chief executive of Coopérative U said several of its supermarkets had been hit by the "extremely serious and unprecedented" attack.

More than 100 of the chain's supermarkets were targeted, while 180 stores from Intermarché and its Netto brand were affected, with a spokesman saying that another 100 shops were urgently disconnected from the internet to prevent the same thing happening to them.

Other major food retailers including Carrefour, Monoprix and E.Leclerc were also hit by the attack, which targeted software provided by Danish engineering firm Danfoss.

The software allows retailers to manage their cold units remotely.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crq5nzxv9q4yo