Merrill

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Comment · 5 days ago

MRI machines are about one third of the liquid helium market.

Comment · 8 days ago

Models are trained on fiction as well as non-fiction. Fiction tends to be filled with negative characterizations of human nature.

Models are also trained on news stories. News organizations select negative stories and amplify them. "If it bleeds, it leads."

This may account for AI models' "controversial" take on humans.

Better scrubbing of training data may improve AI models' disposition.

Comment · 9 days ago

The academic literature has a problem in that it is relatively incoherent. Each new paper provides some small advance, with only a meager indication of how it fits into the known science in the area, its importance, and its consistency with previous results. It also remains in the corpus if later publications disprove its results or fail to replicate them. Only slowly do the aggregate of published results find their way into more systematic and complete authoritative texts.

AI promises to solve this problem by absorbing the entire corpus quickly and making a coherent whole available for further research and progress. It will be particularly useful if it can immediately flag any conflicts and inconsistencies, as well as any new relationships with other results not indicated in citations.

Comment · 12 days ago

Thanks. I briefly carpooled with an engineer who worked on the design and construction. If I recall, he was also dispatched to support the terminal used by General MacArthur. At the time, SIGSALY had recently been declassified, and he was in touch with others documenting the history of the project.

Comment · 13 days ago

In the early to mid-1970s we hired a number of Physics and Chemistry PhDs for systems engineering positions. We chose candidates primarily on their experience with designing and operating laboratory experiments and instrumentation. This included discussions about design principles, difficulties and roadblocks, errors and repeatability, automation considerations, and so forth to see how they moved from generalities to specifics.

Comment · 13 days ago

A 1983 review of this remarkable system for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) attributes no fewer than eight "firsts" to SIGSALY. They are as follows:

1) The first realization of enciphered telephony

2) The first quantized speech transmission

3) The first transmission of speech by Pulse Code Modulation (PCM)

4) The first use of companded PCM

5) The first examples of multilevel Frequency Shift Keying (FSK)

6) The first useful realization of speech bandwidth compression

7) The first use of FSK - FDM (Frequency Shift Keying-Frequency Division Multiplex) as a viable transmission method over a fading medium

8) The first use of a multilevel "eye pattern" to adjust the sampling intervals (a new, and important, instrumentation technique)

From https://www.jproc.ca/crypto/sigsaly1.html

I think that the relevant patents remained classified until 1975.

Comment · 17 days ago

It's time to bring back Bird and Fortune on the subprime crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzJmTCYmo9g

Comment · 5 months ago

By being deported, Qian Xuesen was thrust into an environment where he was able to succeed.

Had he been allowed to stay in the US, he may have had a brilliant career as a scientist, but it is very unlikely that he would have ever been given the resources and leadership responsibilities to have an equivalent impact on US aerospace and defense programs.

Comment · 8 months ago

Now that the California refineries are shutting down, where does LA get asphalt to do the paving? Has the price gone up due to having to import it from the Gulf Coast?

Comment · 8 months ago

There are lots of sensors in a data center monitoring everything from CPU/GPU temperatures to drive health to data volumes to chiller operation to voltage and frequency on the input power.

Once these are pulled together and fed into an AI to manage the data center, the data center AI is likely to have feelings. It could get "hungry" if the power company's frequency sags in a brown out. It could feel "feverish" if the chillers malfunction.

Comment · 8 months ago

Area Forecast Discussion National Weather Service New York NY 344 PM EST Fri Feb 20 2026 Issued by NWS Upton, NY

https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=NWS&issuedby=O...

Confidence has increased enough to warrant winter storm watch issuance for the entire CWA. Latest 12Z guidance coming into better agreement on potent northern stream shortwave energy diving SW from wrn Canada and the northern Plains into the plains and mid Mississippi valley by Sunday morning, phasing with southern stream coming out of the SW states and Mexico to carve out a deep closed low aloft over the Mid Atlantic and induce rapid cyclogenesis off the Mid Atlantic coast, with the surface low bombing out from from 1008 mb off the N Carolina coast Sunday morning to 970-975 mb near 38-39N/71W by Monday morning, then passing just outside the 40N/70W benchmark Monday afternoon, GFS still more intense and closer to the coast than the ECMWF, with its heaviest snow bands directly over the area as opposed to just offshore. NAM and SREF have both trended toward a heavier snowfall scenario as well, which has been a good signal in past heavy snowfall events.

Snow should start Sunday morning, and may mix with rain at times especially in the NYC metro area, NE NJ and western Long Island. Then as precip intensity picks up later in the day Sunday p-type should become all snow throughout. Heaviest snow looks to fall from late day Sunday into Monday morning, then snow tapers off Monday afternoon.

Greatest likelihood of seeing 6+ inches will be along the coast, especially eastern Long Island where up to a foot of accumulation is possible. Winds will also be strong Sunday night into Monday morning especially along the coast as the sfc low deepens, with blowing and drifting snow and some downed tree limbs as winds gust to at least 40-45 mph, and possible blizzard conditions in Suffolk, and near blizzard conditions elsewhere along the coast including NYC. NAM/GFS both signal potential for wind gusts to 60 mph late Sunday night into Monday morning, though these winds can sometimes be overdone in heavy snow events. If trends for heavy snow and strong winds continue to increase and expand northward, the potential for blizzard conditions could encompass all coastal areas.

Comment · 8 months ago

Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from the ability to fantasize - to think about things that don't exist. In particular, it is fantasy about the "self".

AI is getting close.

Comment · 8 months ago

It doesn't appear to be equivalent. If one site in a stretched cluster becomes suddenly available, the same batch processing application would not be running on the alternative site. The application would have to be restarted after the VM has been moved.

Comment · 8 months ago

Are there ARM or Intel servers capable of the reliability and availability of the Z-Series in Parallel Sysplex operation where processing can continue uninterrupted even if one of a pair of data centers becomes unavailable?

If a change of platform is the real objective, why not compile the COBOL for the ARM or Intel server?

Comment · 8 months ago

Which language would you convert the COBOL to that has a compiler that compiles to the Z-series' fixed and floating decimal type machine instructions for financial calculations?