Mini Video Throughput: Emergency Zombies, Neuralink and iPhones
Just a few links this week wrapped around a couple of videos. We’ll do a full link-o-rama next week.
[ThTh1] So was there a reason to fear that the test of the Emergency Alert System earlier this week would activate the Marburg virus implanted into us by the COVID-19 vaccines and turn us into zombies, roaming the countryside and eating brains in obedience to the Democrats’ Marxist communist anarchist capitalist agenda?
No.
Glad we had this conversation.
[ThTh2] In more serious news, Wired has the horrifying details of what happened to the monkeys in Elon Musks’ neuralink experiment. I am somewhat in-between on neuralink and similar technologies. I think there is a potential for direction connections between the brain and computers. In particular, for people with disabilities or artificial limbs, some of the potential of which is already being explored.
However, the idea that we will one day have the Matrix-like ability to upload our minds to computers or download information into our brains seems unlikely. I believe I have linked this essay before, but it’s worth linking again: the brain is not a computer. It does not store information like computers do or process information like computers do. Our memory is flabby, vague and easily rewritten. It stores information in a variety of different ways, none of which are like the way computers store information. The most likely thing that would happen if you uploaded your brain to a computer is that it would get a bunch of nonsense. And the most likely thing that would happen if you downloaded a computer into your brain would be a seizure.
One of the strange aspects of being human is that we don’t really understand … ourselves. We don’t understand how our brains work, how they process and retain information and how they make us … us. So while I think it’s unlikely Elon’s experiment, upon expansion to humans, will have as horrifying outcomes as his monkey experiments did — we can understand what’s going on — the potential for the technology is far more limited that he or his online stans think.
[ThTh3] In space news, NASA successfully returned a sample from asteroid Bennu to the surface of the Earth. I discuss in my latest appearance on Heard Tell.
[ThTh4] Speaking of vaccines, the Nobel Prize for Medicine went to the scientists who developed the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. It is well-deserved. And the tears of anti-vax hysterics are a particularly yummy frosting on that cake.
[ThTh5] Is the Apple ad showing titanium crashing into the Earth an accurate description of how this works? Find out in this week’s video throughput:
ThTh1: However, about an hour before the test was scheduled to go off, I disabled my hearing aids and put the phone in the next room from where I was working. In normal operation, the hearing aids link to the phone by Bluetooth and are the default audio device. Alerts are LOUD.Report
Back in 1988, there was a book handed around the church explaining 88 reasons why the rapture will be in 1988.
It was supposed to happen somewhere around September 11th-13th somewhere around “sundown”. (Sundown where? Israel? Mount Kisco, New York?) and, as it turns out, it didn’t happen (to the best of my knowledge).
Anyway. Maybe they’ll activate the Marburg virus next year.Report
ThTh5 – have they changed the standard of ‘natural occurring elements’ in schools since the 80s/90s? I just ask because back then the ‘naturally occurring element’ with the highest atomic number was Uranium, and most periodic tables were stylized to show that. The reason of course is that U-238’s half life is the age of the solar system while the longest lived isotopes of Neptunium and Plutonium are measured in the millions of years. Those two do have trace amounts in Uranium ores (because uranium ores do naturally a little bit of what goes on, on purpose, in nuke reactors), but do we now teach that they are actually ‘naturally occurring’?Report
One of the strange aspects of being human is that we don’t really understand … ourselves.
Not that strange. Try asking a cow to explain cows.Report