Oppenheimer, Hollywood, and Reality

 I once lived downstairs from an Air Force Officer who was at Hanscom. He had participated in the detonation of the first nuclear explosion in 1945. He was an AF tech type person, engineer not physicist. To understand Oppenheimer in reality one must understand 1945 and people at Los Alamos. They were driven both by German brutality as well as the grossly inhumane acts by the Japanese. The Germans recorded their, the Japanese just beheaded theirs, no film or detailed records.

In later July 1945 the US forces were preparing for invasion of Japan. An anticipated loss of life was approaching one million. I had the opportunity to speak with dozens of men and one woman Marine from that time. Their mindset was not anywhere near what we see in 2023 Hollywood. In fact it is unlikely that anyone in Hollywood would even deign to speak with such people as those who fought in WW II. 

Thus a film like Oppenheimer is what Hollywood would like to have seen in 1945. A collection of the selected woke versus the evil empire of war mongers. In reality the loss in Hiroshima and  Nagasaki was on a par with the bombing of Tokyo, brutal, but it led almost instantly to a cessation of the conflict and the saving of millions of lives.

That mindset is devoid of any space in the current Hollywood mind. Oppenheimer did a brilliant job of herding a collection of genius cats. Yet Groves did even more in assembling the materials and infrastructure to effect that. Now the casting of Groves by a Hollywood A lister get us to focus on the current person not the genius of Groves. Without Groves there would never have been an Oppenheimer, and likely I would have become fatherless!

Everything is Climate Change?

 The NY Times blames the Vermont flood on "climate change". In reality it can be argued that the rain is a result of the cloud seeding effects of the Canadian fires. Perhaps then we blame the fires on climate change. And the wheel keeps turning.

I Don't Want an AI ChatBOT

 Garbage in garbage out. Or GIGO. That is the risk of these AI ChatBots, AICs. You see they merely take in lots of data then process it through a weighted array and then use a text formatting system to provide an answer. Thus if I ask "What is the cause of prostate cancer?" the AIC sees words like prostate. cancer, cause, what etc and then takes all its info in and passes it through the neural net to come up with data from the input and then parses it back as a sentence. The input may be a variety of things from professional journals to newspapers to blogs. Each of these has varying reliability but also some critical literature may have been missed.

Then the system iterates in the event this question is asked again and reinforces its original opinion. Unless, however, the user says it is wrong, then it may adjust depending on the algorithm.

The results are correlative not dispositive. The AIC just takes lots of others statements, often lacking in any weighting, and produces a text output. 

The concern is that one may rely on the AIC result as being factual. It is not. At best it is a correlative collection of disparate opinions.

A Hypothetical

 I don't like hypotheticals, especially when testifying as an expert. It is the old "if elephants had wings" issue. However I do wonder what would have happened if in the pandemic we did just nothing. Just tell people the risks and then it rip. No masks, no vaccines, no isolation. Let each individual make their own choice.

So much of what was done was based upon pure abject speculation and Government ignorance. We now know that mutations were frequent and ongoing, masks may or may not work since we still have no idea as to the spread mechanism, vaccines neither prevent catching the disease nor prevent spreading. Weak folks get culled while children are almost held harmless. 

I doubt this will ever be examined since it destroys the Government control deemed critical.

MIT Over Time

The following Pics tell a story.

First MIT 1961, when I was a Freshman.

 

 

MIT in 1971 when I finished Grad School

 

MIT today (from Tech Review). We used to have black robes, doctoral stripes and the MIT hood. I gather some "fashion designer" decided to embrace some idea.

 The above tells a powerful story. One that is most likely untellable in today's world. Also MIT is NO FIT!