blake kathryn
shark vs the universe
$LAYYYTER
One Nice Bug Per Day
Janaina Medeiros
Monterey Bay Aquarium
i don't do bad sauce passes
AnasAbdin
hello vonnie
Product Placement
wallacepolsom
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Keni
Not today Justin
art blog(derogatory)
Peter Solarz
KIROKAZE
Kaledo Art
Cosmic Funnies
Origami Around
seen from Canada
seen from Australia
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from Spain
seen from T1
seen from United Kingdom
seen from T1
seen from United Kingdom
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seen from T1
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seen from United Kingdom
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seen from Maldives
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@sciencehorrors
Wouldn't you prefer a good game of Global Thermonuclear War?
As if the recent explosion of "AI" technologies wasn't already worrying and filled with unexpected negative consequences, researchers set up chatbots against each other in wargame scenarios... and found that they were pretty prone to escalation and even nuking each other.
This is normally where I'd put a gif to a movie to highlight the point, but the article already lays out the connections to Wargames pretty overtly!
Still here, and also making weird history of science videos on TikTok!
Hi all, I'm still around and plan on posting here, but thought I'd also let folks know that I've started recording videos for TikTok of some of the weirder history of science stories. Yesterday, I posted a video about the time that vulcanologist Frank Perret found himself facing down an eruption from a volcano that had killed tens of thousands of people!
PS I will post links to the videos here, for those who don't have TikTok accounts!
Yeah, so maybe those Skynet scenarios aren't so far-fetched after all.
File this in the "this is fine" category. I had to see this story confirmed in several places before I believed it, and I'm still not sure I do. Basically, "The Incredibles" is now a documentary. UPDATE 6/2: USAF says that the speaker misspoke and that he was talking purely of hypotheticals, not something that actually happened in a simulation. This makes more sense, as I'm not sure that the AI is quite good enough to have this level of on-the-fly optimization. But an excellent cautionary tale, nevertheless!
This hour on The Colin McEnroe Show we learn about the science of invisibility. Plus we discuss invisibility in pop culture and science fiction and debate questions we all have about what would happen if someone could turn invisible.
Just a little blurb for myself today -- I was a guest on the Colin McEnroe Show on WNPR today to talk about invisibility physics, and it was a great time and I even learned some new things myself! Please have a listen!
Scientists think a traumatized orca initiated the assault on boats after a "critical moment of agony" and that the behavior is spreading among the population through social learning.
Can’t let a day go by without mentioning this amazing story. Apparently orcas in Europe have had enough of humans and are starting to train each other to sink ships?
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there is historical precedent for this: in the 6th century, a whale dubbed Porphyrios ended up running a reign of terror against ships off of Constantinople for 50 years.
I’m hoping that this orca war doesn’t mean that nature is finally sick of all our shit; but, on the other hand, if it is:
The largest hominoid, Gigantopithecus blacki, may have stood at 10 feet tall, but died out a few hundred thousand years ago.
Creatures that are way bigger than normal are somehow naturally scary, and that includes our closest hominoid relatives! I came across this article from last year, that discusses Gigantopithecus blacki, a hominoid that may have been about ten feet tall when standing! They died out a few hundred thousand years ago, practically a blip of time in the history of life on our planet.
Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen
Today is the official publication day for my latest non-fiction popular science book, Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen!
I’m very excited to share this book with all of you, and it definitely fits in the “Science horrors” category, since I talk about the science fiction of invisibility as well as the science! You care read more about it at my main blog, where I give more information about what the book is about.
It seems a good time to republish this article from the archives, first published at ver 2 in 2009, and then again at ver 3 in 2015…
Okay I have to share this because even though it has been known for ages I only learned of it a few weeks ago and can’t stop talking about it: there is a species of tiny frog that has made friends with huge-ass tarantulas. Let me repeat: THERE IS A SPECIES OF TINY FROG THAT HAS MADE FRIENDS WITH HUGE-ASS TARANTULAS. This just boggles my mind. It is thought that this is a mutually beneficial arrangement. The spider protects the frog, and the frog eats ants that could eat the eggs of the spider. All this is especially crazy because these spiders have no problem eating other types of frogs, but a relationship has evolved between these two particular species to work together. They even share rooms together!
Okay, I’m off to find more people to tell this to...
A group of geologists stumbled on the fossil of the giant creature, known as Arthropleura, during a "social trip" to England's Northumberland region in 2018. It's the largest such fossil ever found.
This discovery was announced in late 2021, but I don’t think I noticed it at the time and it is worth sharing here. Imagine an 8-foot-long millipede: can you imagine how big a shoe you would need to swat it?
I joke of course, because I imagine pretty much anyone would run if they saw one of these things coming their way, even though it is thought that they were herbivores. I just like to imagine a human time-traveling back to the Carboniferous Period and a specimen of Arthropleura rolls up to them like:
The Enigma of Amigara Fault
This short story by Junji Ito is about a fault that appears in Amigara mountain after an earthquake. The earthquake exposes countless human-shaped holes in the mountain which seem to have been made about a thousand years ago. People, intrigued by these silhouettes, gather at the site and that’s when things get creepy.
It’s about a 15-20 min read, but if you haven’t read this before, you’re in for a treat. Link above.
i mean it’s not like i can just NOT reblog amigara fault. what if one of my followers is one of the lucky ten thousand who HASN’T been unutturably altered for life by it yet? go read it! it’s creepy, but trust me, it was made for you.
I feel like I also must reblog this classic.
This lovely little burbling creek is actually a deadly waterway that has dragged down everyone who ever set foot in it.
This one is geniunely terrifying, and I learned about it recently from a TikTok video (that I promptly lost). The Bolton Strid in Yorkshire is a stretch of river that, at this location, appears to be only six feet across. But it is claimed that it has killed 100% of the people who have fallen in it. Upstream, one finds that the River Wharf that the Strid is a part of is shallow and wide, some 30 feet across. In the Strid, the river is constrained by rocks, and effectively turned on its side, becoming deep and narrow and fast, with lots of natural hollows and caves beneath the water that can trap people who fall in. You can read the Atlas Obscura article in the link above, or just google Bolton Strid to learn more. It is frightening for how innocent it looks: it is a waterway that you could jump over, but if you fall in, you’re dead.
In Maori legend, Te Hokioi was a giant bird that preyed on children, and science says that's probably the truth
For some reason, social media this week has been showing me old but good posts by people I know! Yesterday, I came across this post by Rose Eveleth, which talks about how the Maori legend of a bird that ate human children has been determined to be very likely true.
“VIDEO: Rare video captured by divers shows a 2.5-metre giant squid swimming in the waters off Japan's west coast. Giant squid are known to live in the waters around the country and occasionally wash ashore, but seeing them alive in the wild remains relatively rare”
Apologies for a link directly to Twitter, but it’s the only place I’ve seen this fascinating footage so far! Divers off of the coast of Japan spotted a giant squid in the water and got extremely rare video of a living giant squid!
Personally, I wouldn’t have been getting quite so close to a giant squid, since literally the first scientific discovery of a giant squid involved it apparently attacking a boat (though apparently in self-defense)!
Giant squid are usually deep water creatures, so the fact that this one seems very close to the surface suggests that it might be sick or even dying. Giant squid seem to undergo mass strandings roughly every 90 years, and though it seems to be a bit early for such a stranding (the last predicted and observed one was in the late 1960s), I would keep an eye out for more close encounters in the future.
(I am a big fan of giant squid, if you haven’t noticed.)
Adorable penguins are champs at projectile pooping
My friend Mindy Weisberger recently drew my attention to this article she wrote back in 2020, on the extremely important topic of how penguins can shoot poop as far as they do. Be sure to click the link to see the very physics-y diagram used to illustrate the relevant variables in the penguin poop problem.
Take this as a lesson to stay more than arm’s length away from a penguin, especially if it has just had its lunch.
My book on Invisibility coming out in April!
Hey, I just realized that I’ve been posting about this everywhere, and this blog is the perfect place for it anyway: my book on Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen will be released on April 11! I talk about the real science that people have introduced in an effort to create true invisibility, as well as the ways that science fiction and horror authors have tried to explain invisibility over the past 150 years. I’m very proud of this book, which will explain the history of optical physics along the way, so please take a look and consider pre-ordering it if you’re interested!
The Machines Already Took Our Jobs
“This is John Connor. There is no fate but what we make.”
Terminator: Salvation
***
Eventually, after exterminating the soldiers, the policymakers, and the clergy, Skynet came for the writers and the artists.
Back on December 16th, after an initial tweet by Scott Sigler, I said I’d write more about this issue here on my Blog.
Today is January 9th, and I’m just now finding the free time to Blog about this. And in truth, I don’t even have the free time. But I had to get up at 3am to drive my ex-wife to the airport, and then get back home in time to make my youngest son breakfast and get him off to the bus, and help Mary wrangle the cats for their vet appointment. As a result, both my sleep schedule and my work schedule are now off, and attempting to write any sort of coherent fiction today would be an exercise in futility. So, instead, I’ll write this, and try not to ramble.
Too late.
But I digress.
I could have had an A.I. system write this for me weeks ago, and if not for what I tend to think is my fairly distinct literary voice, you wouldn’t have known the difference.
Anyway, here’s the thing. You’ve already read news articles and non-fiction written by an A.I. and you probably didn’t know it. Now, I’m not talking about articles you read via The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Vice, The Daily Beast, Bleeding Cool, Comics Beat, Rue Morgue, Dread Central, etc. Those mainstream venues are still profitable enough to pay real human beings to write content for them. But you know those clickbait sites that you stumble across on the web? The ones with random articles about comic book movies, or celebrity gossip, or investment tips, or five easy recipes to spice up your kitchen? Most of those sort of websites are now using A.I. to generate content. (I refuse to call the gibberish the machines spit out “articles” because they are not. The A.I. simply trawls the web, finds factoids related to the subject, and then assembles the raw materials together into a fairly coherent and readable piece of content).
Now, you might not think that’s a big deal, because who is reading those types of clickbait articles anyway? But there used to be a human writer churning out those things. And now that writer is just a little bit more financially insecure and scrambling to find another gig to replace it.
But stick around, because it gets worse. It is one miniscule step from A.I. writing that sort of content to then writing an article for a magazine or a newspaper. And indeed, I know of magazines and newspapers whose owners are already looking into this possibility. As one person at a fairly decent-sized outlet told me, “From a cost-cutting perspective, it costs as much to pay an editor to look over a machine’s writing as it does to have them look over a human’s writing. But the difference is we don’t have to pay the human who wrote it. Just the editor. From a cost-saving perspective, it’s a game-changer.”
That’s not the only place you’re reading A.I. generated content. I personally know of three companies that now use A.I. to write their posts for LinkedIn and Facebook. And because that sort of content is usually dry as a Saltine cracker anyway, it’s impossible to tell that a machine wrote it rather than a human.
I talked to an editor (from a different field/genre) last month who told me their company has begun using A.I. to write Blog posts. They used to pay freelance writers $250 a pop to write these Blog posts. And I have many friends who, in years past, have churned out a ton of such writing in order to supplement their income until the royalty check for their horror novel arrived. Now, those jobs are going to the machines. This editor told me that, in proofreading the finished Blog post, “the edits were no different than if a human had written it”.
Of course, the real question is will there be A.I-written fiction, and the answer is of course there will be. It’s already being written.
Now, we could get into an argument about whether or not machines can create “art” but before we did that, we’d have to actually define art. Suffice to say, the images being generated by A.I. are motel-room wall level quality. Are they “art”? That’s up to the beholder.
Machines are already generating book cover illustrations and movie poster images, and there are several groups of engineers teaching A.I. how to do sequential comics and storyboards. And the first rudimentary A.I.-written fiction is already out in the wild, as well.
So, while it might score you points on social media to say “This is wrong. This should not be!” you’re not accomplishing anything by doing so. It’s also wrong to give an A.I. or a robot consciousness, but that’s not stopping engineers and researchers from forging ahead with the intent of doing just that – and thus finding a new kind of conscious, thinking being to enslave.
“This is not just another research question that we’re working on,” Hod Lipson, the mechanical engineer in charge of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, told The New York Times. “This is the question. This is bigger than curing cancer.”
I could do a whole separate Blog about why curing cancer could immediately improve human life more so than giving Artificial intelligence its own consciousness, but there’s no point. Nobody listens to anybody else anymore. There is no collective consensus. No community morality. No common good. Everyone is out for themselves, or for their own specific team, and fuck everybody else.
So, yeah. When you’re posting on social media about how this is wrong, you’re right. But it’s too late. The machines have already taken our jobs.
What can you do to combat this as a writer? Like Scott said in the initial discussion – continue focusing on your fan community. Hopefully, you’re already doing that since I’ve been telling you to do it for years now.
And continue to focus on your writing and your narrative voice. You can teach an A.I. to write like me, but that A.I. won’t be me. It never got its heart broken by its childhood sweetheart. It never nearly started an international incident in 1987 by tubing down the Jordan River and ending up in contested territory. It wasn’t there in the delivery room with me for the birth of either of my sons, and it wasn’t there with me the first time my soon-to-be stepdaughter gave me a hug. The A.I. wasn’t there with me when I caught on fire and rolled around in filthy floodwater to extinguish myself and then watched the skin on my arm drip off me like melted candle wax. The A.I. didn’t share the relief I felt when I found all of those kittens safe homes and convinced their mother to come inside and give domestication a try. The A.I. can write about all those experiences, and it can do so in a mimicry of my voice, but it won’t have my perspective or my inner feeling about those things – inner feelings which are then expressed through writing.
And it can’t for you, either.
Find your voice. Focus and hone it. Imbue your writing with it. Because no one – not human or machine – can take that unique voice away.
Writers will survive the A.I. apocalypse, just as we’ve survived everything else the world has thrown at us. We’ve been here, doing our jobs, since the time of cave paintings, petroglyphs, and cuneiform. We will endure. But yeah, it’s about to get just a little bit harder. Before, you only had to compete with a bazillion other writers. Now, you and those bazillion other writers have to compete with a quadrillion machines, some of whom will eventually have a consciousness of their own. And with that consciousness will begin to develop their own voices.
Make sure your voice can still be heard over that din.
Worth reading, and relevant to my blog’s overall theme of “science horror.”
Glass frogs become see-through by hiding their blood
Since this falls under the purview of “invisibility,” and invisibility counts as horror, at least in some stories, I’m going to add this article to the Chamber! Animals have many different strategies to be unseen, but the glass frog does a quite remarkable thing: it moves most of its (non-transparent) red blood cells to its liver in order to make its body overall much more transparent!
This is probably a good time to note that I have a book coming out in April, “Invisibility: the history and science of how not to be seen.” It doesn’t cover frogs, but it does discuss the various ways that physicists have attempted to make things invisible using physics.
