AI

 5/30/26 Axios:

AI tools might be hallucinating less, but they're still spitting out inaccurate answers cloaked in polished, hyper-confident language....

Driving the news: New research suggests AI note-taking tools (often called AI scribes) can help in medical settings, but only in tandem with professional reviewers.

• A Yale School of Medicine study this month found that first-year medical students who revised their own clinical notes with AI-generated drafts generally maintained note quality.
• But the AI notes themselves often omitted important details, including symptom duration.
• Two-thirds of students said the notes were "helpful as a first draft," but 21% said the note taker "may reduce my ability to learn how to write a good note."

Looking at the papers submitted by my students this last semester, I saw a lot of this: very polished prose, drawing confidential conclusions with weak or no supporting evidence. And of course, hallucinate sources.

I use SuperGrok for some tasks in the shop or for astronomy, but I have learned mostly to use it as a really good search engine. It makes enough mistakes that I never completely trust it 

The Explore Scientific iEXOS 100-2 Mount I Bought

I bought this because I wanted a small easy to transport mount for public astronomy with my Televue-85. That it was a goto mount just made the.$300 price all the better.  It is very well made so I was very disappointed when it started behaving erratically a few days after it arrived  

The factory said it was fine. When it came back, i suspected the problem was that it needed more than 12V to operate; goto mounts demand a lot while slowing across the sky 

It now appears that the intermittent problems that I am seeing hs because the bundled ExploreStars app is, in the words of SuperGrok, "abandonware": software free but largely forgotten by its authors and supported like they no longer remember their child. It works but unreliable enough that few people use it.

What most owners of the mount use are ASCOM (a standard free Windows driver package) or INDI (the Linux equivalent). Planetarium programs such as Carte du Ciel and Stellarium can control the mount through the ASCOM drivers telling it where to go (ditto for KStars in Linux). So using a laptop, not a tablet or cellphone. This takes away much of the simplicity of a small tablet.

Kstars under Linux is pretty clumsy to control the mount. Setting these up under either Linux or Windows is clumsy because you are either on the Internet reading instructions or connected to the mounts server, not both. Lots of disconnecting and reconnecting. I ordered a USB WiFi adapter so that I can have both open at the same time. I have done this before in the 1980s where I set up a PC with two Ethernet cards to create a LAN analyzer, so i know it can be done.

In any case, if it turns out to be too clumsy to use for goto, it is still a nice compact mount for public astronomy. 

Sorting Mementos and Junk for the Move

Do any of you have a cassette to digital capacity. Let me really stretch: 1600 dpi 9 track magtape?

Do They Have Frigidity Problems?

 From an open source science journal:

Glaciers are rapidly retreating worldwide duto anthropogenic climate change, with severe implications not only for ecosystems and water security but also for cultural memory, emotional wellbeing, and environmental justice. In the Andes, glaciers are more than reservoirs of ice—they are living beings within Indigenous cosmologies, ancestral knowledge systems, and everyday life. This essay explores the cultural, emotional, and symbolic dimensions of glacial loss, focusing on Andean communities who view glaciers as sacred entities..

Glaciers as more-than-human beings

Is it that hard for an editor to say, "Yes, I understand that indigenous cultures have strong mythological beliefs about glacierz but that does mean we mistake that for science. Find whatever journal Carlos Castaneda editing now for this article."

You're Having a Bad Day? Ask These Candles How Their Days Have Gone!

I used to by mistake use these to make the bearings on my Dobsonian move more smoothly. (That does not work. Clean them thoroughly instead, especially of any candle wax.) I kept them in the telescope in the last house. Think of the punishment "hot house' in Cool Hand Luke or the marvelous parody in Take the Money and Run, where the protagonist is locked in a hot house for two days with a life insurance salesman.

At Least He is a FORMER CIA Official

 5/27/26 New York Post:

A former high-ranking CIA official who allegedly lied about his credentials to secure $77,000 in bogus military leave was busted after FBI agents found a mind-blowing fortune, including $40 million worth of gold bars, hidden inside his Virginia home.

The feds conducted a raid at the residence of David Rush last week, uncovering a staggering 303 gold bars, $2 million in cash and nearly three dozen luxury Rolex watches, according to court documents.

Rush, until recently a “senior executive service-level employee” at the CIA, reportedly requested the massive haul of gold and foreign currency for “work-related expenses” between November and March.

If all the Medicaid/Medicare fraudsters and crooks who did not have a a good reason to take $2 million of gold bars home were routed out, would we still be running a deficit every year?

The article explains that he was caught when he defrauded the government of $77,000. This led to the discovery that his bachelor's and master's degrees did not exist nor his military pilot's license. 

If the CIA is this careless about background checks, how careful are the other departments?

The profound greed, too. $40 million is a lot of money. You can live very, very comfortably on that forever.  He could have stolen $2 million, created a new identity (he did work for CIA) and never been caught.

Do You Recognize This?

 I am organizing my entropic collection of telescope parts preparing for my cross-country move. Stuff I do not need (how many 2" to 1.25" adapters did I buy and when?) I will sell. Some parts make me scratch my head and say, "What is this?" It is beautifully machined and polished. Might I have upgraded some part of a Losmandy mount in the long tunnel of time?