M. Thomas Apple's Blog, page 24

The 2022 Year of Space Exploration

Lots and lots and lots of space stories occurred in 2022.

From DART to Landsat, Sagittarius A* black hole to CAPSTONE, the Korean Pathfinder to SpaceX, and to the ISS, Moon, and Mars, here’s a summary of major space exploration projects last year.

Looking forward to 2023 and beyond!

Merry Xmas 2022!

Happy holidays, everyone!

Best wishes for the 2023 New Year. See you on the other side!

What does a dust devil on Mars sound like?

It was “definitely luck” that the dust devil appeared when it did, said the study’s lead author, who estimates there was just a 1-in-200 chance of capturing the audio.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/mars-rover-captures-first-sound-dust-devil-red-planet-rcna61642

Perseverance has been on Mara for almost two years now, and already recorded wind on Mars for the first time in February 2021.

This dust devil was recorded in late September 2021 (wonder why only now it’s being revealed?). The dust devil was “average size,” which is described as about 400 feet / 122 meters tall and 80 feet / 24 meters wide, traveling at 16 feet / 5 meters per second (≈ 11 mph / 18 mph).

Click on the link below to hear the dust devil

https://jirafeau.isae-supaero.fr/f.php?h=2JWSkdJR&p=1

There are a lot of dust devils on Mars. A whole lot. Any settlement would have to be extremely prepared to deal with dust all the time, everywhere. If it ever got into equipment that regulated, say, breathable air inside habitats…

[image error]

From nothing to Mars in 6 years

In 2020, the UAE’s space agency launched its first Mars mission, less than a decade after it was created. How did they manage it?

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221206-how-the-uae-got-a-spacecraft-to-mars-on-the-first-try

This is a great story about how true international cooperation rather than competition can result in scientific progress.

Thanks to their efforts, despite nearly being derailed thanks to the pandemic, we will soon have a complete picture of an entire year of Mars weather.

Not bad for a country whose space agency is so small “you could probably lose it in the car park of Nasa’s giant Johnson Space Centre in Houston.”

(Of course, the project’s findings may mean I have to rewrite some of my novel in progress, but why not? All in the name of science fiction…)

ChatGPT: Is this really the “death of the essay”?

I’ve been testing ChatGPT over the last couple of days. (If you don’t know what this chatbot is, here’s a good NYT article about ChatGPT and others currently in development.)

The avowed purpose of ChatGPT is to create an AI that can create believable dialogues. It does this by scouring the web for data it uses to respond to simple prompts.

By “simple,” I mean sometimes “horribly complicated,” of course. And sometimes a little ridiculous.

Somehow, I doubt that people in the US said “livin’ the dream” in the ’50s…

As has been pointed out, chatbots only generate texts based on what they have been fed, i.e., “garbage in / garbage out.” So if you push the programs hard enough, they will generate racist, sexist, homophobic etc awful stuff — because unfortunately that kind of sick and twisted garbage is still out there, somewhere online in a troll’s paradise.

So far, I have asked the program to:

Write a haiku about winter without using the word “winter”Write a limerick about an Irish baseball playerWrite a dialogue between God and Nietzsche (I just had to…)Imagine what Jean-Paul Sartre and Immanuel Kant would say to each other (see above) but using US ’50 slangHave Thomas Aquinas and John Locke argue about the existence of God (that one was fun)Write a 300 word cause-effect essay about climate changeWrite a 300 word compare and contrast essay about the US and JapanWrite a 1000 word short science fiction story based on MarsWrite a 1500 word short science fiction about robots in the style of Philip K Dick

OK, and the verdict is:

Poetry

It didn’t do too badly with the haiku. However, its vocabulary range was limited and when I generated a second and third haiku with the same directions (i.e., don’t use “winter” in the poem, because haiku are not supposed to directly use season’s names)…

…the program repeatedly used the word “winter,” even though I told it not to. It kept using words like “snowflakes” and “ice,” which naturally do bring “winter” to mind, but it couldn’t seem to figure out how else to describe the season.

The limerick was much worse…

“Faugh a ballagh!” Honestly. Let’s be a little more stereotypical, shall we.

I was hoping the program would substitute an actual Irish player’s name, but it simply repeated the phrase “Irish baseball player.” In subsequent tries, it identified the player as playing for a baseball in Cork.

So I suppose that means that it didn’t have access to the various historical writings by SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) members about early Irish players in the US (yes, actually born in Ireland, and there were many, many, many).

Dialogues

Now, this is supposed to be the raison d’être of the program, and indeed, it is amazing at how fast this thing can create dialogues in flawless English (more on that later).

But naturally there are anachronisms. Such as, ah, Thomas Aquinas being familiar with the theory of evolution.

(I forgot to copy the one between God and Nietzsche, but it disappointingly did not include the expected phrase by Nietszsche: “Huh. I thought you were dead?”)

As in the dialogue between Sartre and Kant, the dialogue sounded more like a first-person college essay than an actual dialogue. Real people don’t speak in perfect prose. They make grammar mistakes, use the wrong word, repeat themselves, backtrack and go off on tangents…all sorts of chaos.

Chatbots simply can’t do that, because they are not true AI (yet, TG). They rely on existing text and string together words based on their program. I suppose one could argue that that is what people do, but our brain is not a computer. It’s much more complicated.

We would certainly never have Aquinas — a 13th century Italian priest and religious scholar who “five ways” to prove God’s existence are well-known even to non-Christians — end a dialogue by saying “Ultimately, each person must come to their own conclusions about the existence of God.”

Fiction

I didn’t even bother taking a photo of the fiction prose the program spat out, because it was incredibly descriptive and horribly boring at the same time.

In two attempts, the chatbot wrote exactly one line of dialogue — “Are you okay?”

The rest was prose. That’s it. Even the attempt to get it to write like PKD about robots was a total failure. It simply wrote descriptions, even though it finally did give one character a name (Rachael, not surprisingly).

But nothing happened. There was no plot, no dialogue, no character development, no tension or conflict to be resolved.

Fiction writers, your careers are safe. At least until we can figure out how to make a better prompt (more like, direct the program to texts publicly available, such as the Bible — I have to admit, the biblical story of removing a sandwich from the VCR is pretty funny.)

However…

Essays

Here is where the program shined. Scarily so.

I copied the four essays written by the chatbot and pasted them into MS Word to check.

As usual, MS Word (a program designed to torture business office workers around the world) identified “reflected back” and “in order to” as being redundant (although we do use these phrases and they sound perfectly natural).

In other essays, it insisted that a comma be inserted before each and every conjunction (and, but), regardless of whether there was an SVO sentence before and after the word (i.e., it would insist on a comma prior to the previous “and” in this sentence!). And it didn’t like phrases such as “the majority of people in Japan” (MS Words thinks “most” or “many” is “more precise” a phrase…uh…no, they are exactly the opposite, MUCH less precise).

So the chatbot writes essays even better than what MS Word is programmed to judge. Scary.

In the three versions of “compare US to Japan” essays, the program used three different points of comparison, but the only point that remained the same was “collectivism” versus “individualism,” which are indeed typical comparisons made.

However, the program also failed to use any hedging modifiers such as “tend to” or “are more likely to,” which places the essays firmly in the “Essentialism” camp — i.e., claiming that all people in a certain group behave and think exactly alike.

It also never made it even close to 300 words, ending at around 220 at most in its third attempt. The conclusion paragraph was adequate, though short, and the introduction paragraph was incredibly short — a single sentence in one case.

So, even though the chatbot has its issues — obviously, it didn’t bother with references, since it would have to cite virtually the entire internet — it can produce reasonably well-written essays in borderline academic prose.

And that is what has some up in arms. Even newspaper columnists are musing whether their jobs are safe. After all, couldn’t we just tell a chatbot to write an editorial or opinion column, given the right prompt? And college professors worry that “the college essay is dead” — while others laugh at the idea of professors using a program to automatically judge papers that are automatically generated.

For me, as an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) writing instructor, it has become progressively difficult to determine which essays are written just by the student and which are written using machine translation. But I’ve never had to deal with the entire essay being generated by the machine. And that is very likely to happen once my Japanese students figure this out (i.e., once the news stories about chatbots are translated — by DeepL — into Japanese).

So I figure — there’s very little I can do about it, it’s not going away and will likely only get better, so the focus should be on the students’ learning something that they want to learn, rather than focus on how many mistakes in vocabulary or grammar they make.

Which is to say, continue to teach writing as I always have. As a means of personal expression and growth and communication with one’s peers.

And naturally I will continue to write my own fiction the old-fashioned way…

Heh

ispace is not “Japan” but “Japanese”

Mission success would also be a milestone in space cooperation between Japan and the United States…

https://www.yahoo.com/news/japans-ispace-readies-delayed-launch-220204283.html

OK, wait…

A Japanese start-up (I.e., a small private company)…

using a SpaceX rocket (I.e., a private company owned by the world’s wealthiest pri…er, person)…

sends up a small craft made in Germany…

along with the Rashid rover (made by the UAE)…

and “a two-wheeled, baseball-sized device from Japan’s JAXA space agency”…

and somehow this is cooperation between the US and Japan versus China and Russia?

I’m not seeing it. The project may have used a NASA launchpad, but the people are charge (and the ones paying for it) are not part of any national government.

And I have a feeling this is the wave of the future. More and more private companies will get involved in space projects as they realize that they can thus ignore politics and aim at profits.

I, for one, welcome our future corporate overlords…

Smashwords End of the Year Sale from 12/15 to 1/1!

“Find my ebooks and a wide collection of great indie titles as part of the Smashwords 2022 End of Year Sale! Check out https://smashwords.com/shelves/promos before the end of the month and follow @smashwords for more promos like this! #SmashwordsEOYSale #ebook #sale #books2read #indiebooks”

(I swiped this from the Smashwords promo site as a “generic blurb.” But what else, really, do I need to write?

All my ebooks on Smashwords are “50%” off! That means the books that are listed as $0.99 are actually free, since they don’t do $0.49.

And don’t forget that all proceeds from Destiny in the Future are donated to fight cancer.

Gift an ebook to friends and family!

Chatbots — Still not AI but still dangerous

[ChatGPT] could teach his daughter math, science and English, not to mention a few other important lessons. Chief among them: Do not believe everything you are told.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html

They’re all the rage online. Type in a request for a description how two historical people who never actually met would respond to each other had they actually met, and the program will oblige.

They’ll cause all sorts of rage online, too, once the peddlers of incessant false news and innuendo realize what a bonanza they’ve stumbled upon.

You want an image of an event that never really happened?

No problem. A program can generate one for you. We can even call it “art,” for what that’s worth.

No, BIG problem, especially when it convinces the gullible that it DID happen.

2023 will tell 2020 and 2022 to hold its coffee.

Just what we all wanted, right?

Still, chatbots are not (repeat, NOT) true AI. Sorry, Google engineer who watched too much Ghost in the Shell. Chatbots repeat our very human bias. Repeatedly.

As in, there are way too many racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic comments online. Full stop.

At a minor level, as a writing instructor, a student telling a chatbot to write a 600-word comparison-contrast essay is the least of my worries.

For starters, the damn things are probably scouring the Internet right now and “learning” from text on web pages like…uh…this one…

US to report major fusion breakthrough

The Financial Times reported Sunday that scientists in the California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) had achieved a “net energy gain” from an experimental fusion reactor.

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-to-announce-major-scientific-breakthrough-amid-nuclear-fusion-reports-3598437/amp/1

This is being spread across various websites. FT and Washington Post wrote the most details, but both are behind paywalls (boo) so I cited NDTV instead.

If…a BIG if…this report is true, it would still take a decade or more to commercialize fusion to the point where it would make even a dent in climate change.

But it would be a big first step.

A BIG if.

(FWIW, European scientists claimed this back in February …and in June… and again in September, and then it all fizzled out. So I’m not holding my breath on yet another politically charged, puff out our nationalist chest claim until I see scientific evidence that the reaction can be sustained and repeated elsewhere.)

Can you say “billlyons and billyons of dollars”?

Why do all the planets orbit the sun in the same direction?

Note: not to scale (duh). Thanks, Getty. Uh, is this really the best way to show the solar system? (There…are…NINE..planets!)

Think of pizza dough flattening into an enlarging disk as it’s tossed. Because the cloud had an initial rotation, this same direction of spin has persisted…

https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/solar-system/a39729213/why-do-all-the-planets-orbit-in-the-same-direction/

So basically the answer is simply that that’s the way they all started out.

Some moons, however, do have retrograde orbits. I.e., they orbit in the opposite direction around their respective planets. Some small asteroids and comets also have retrograde orbits due to their small mass being easily affected by larger cosmic objects.

But I bet now you’re all thinking of pizza…