AfterMath

The Few Pros and Many Cons of AI — Posted Tuesday February 10, 2026

I've used the computer algebra/calculus program Mathematica since its DOS version came out in 1992. The programming is simple for basic stuff, but for advanced applications the necessary code can be intimidating. So I struggled with it off and on over the years, although since retirement it's been little more than a calculator for quick inquiries. I've long since forgotten how to program the more difficult stuff, but then I discovered ChatGPT, the free online artificial intelligence (AI) program that requires little more than a simple typed-in inquiry. Amazingly, ChatGPT responds with Mathematica code that I could never master. Best of all, it works perfectly, although sometimes it misunderstands exactly what it is that you want. (I recently revised a paper I wrote using Mathematica's curve-fitting capabilities.)

I now realize that AI will likely not become Skynet, the destroyer of the world from 1991's great Terminator 2: Judgment Day film. But I'm beginning to also realize that AI doesn't have to take over the world's nuclear launch codes to bring about the end of humanity—it only has to destroy our jobs, which it is already doing. With over 8.2 billion people on the planet today, employment is a basic human need. AI is now threatening to take over just about everything we do except gardening and janitorial work.

The online version of The Atlantic magazine has a lengthy new article that discusses the potential destruction of a large swath of the American workforce. You should read it—it quite accurately predicts the likely disastrous downside of a technology that has the potential to undo all of civilization.

The only detour I could make out of the article is "universal basic income" for people who cannot find work because of AI. But basic universal income means both living in a cardboard box on the sidewalk and bread and circuses to keep the masses of unemployed compliant and appeased by a government and the uber-wealthy who will undoubtedly control and profit handsomely from AI.

My civil service pension relies on contributions from workers. But if there are no workers, you can find me living in a cardboard box in the near future, if I'm still around. Yes, I know: "Poor Little Snowflake."
Amerika, the New Rome — Posted Tuesday February 10, 2026
Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as Caligula.

In 66-73 AD, Jewish rebels fought an all-out war against the armies of ancient Rome's generals Vespasian and Titus (one of his sons). The Jews lost everything—Jerusalem was burned to the ground, the Second Temple was looted and destroyed, and according to the ancient historian Flavius Josephus hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women and children were slaughtered, along with thousands crucified. Titus finished the war after his father became emperor and returned to Rome carrying a fortune of Jewish gold, silver and jewels. Many Jewish prisoners were brought to Rome as well, to serve as slaves or gladiatorial victims.

After Ttitus' death, his brother Domitian constructed the Arch of Titus in 81 AD to commemorate the conquest of Judea. The loot from the war was used to construct the Colosseum a year before, which was nothing but an open-air torture chamber for the sick amusement of Rome's corrupt and sadistic citizens.

Now Emperor Donaldus Johannus Trump wants to build a 250-foot high arch on the Potomac River across from the Lincoln Memorial. Infamously named the Arch of Trump, it would be five times as high as that of Titus, dwarfing everything around it, and would be built in similar architectural style.

Like Trump's lavish new ballroom, which is currently being constructed on the grounds of the demolished East Wing of the White House, the Arc de Tromp would be paid for by billionaire worshipers with money they've made from the destruction of Amerika's environment, economy, healthcare and middle class.

And still no one does anything about Trump, not even a single brave, disgusted Secret Service member with a 15-round Glock 19 Gen 5 MOS. I hopefully await an incident similar to that which befell another sick emperor, Caligula, in 41 AD. (However, it is very probable that, like the Praetorian Guard that carried out Caligula's execution, Trump's betrayers and their families would be killed. It is also very likely that every Secret Service member has been warned of this certainty.)
Getting Rich on YouTube? — Posted Saturday January 31, 2026
With something like \(1.8 \times 10^6\) YouTube subscribers (many of whom pay a subscription fee to her site), my erstwhile favorite German physicist Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder has abandoned the academic life (as have many popular physicists unhappy with a professor's salary) and is well on her way to multi-millionaire-hood. I can't help but be disappointed. It ain't envy, just the way things are today.
With Trump, the 2nd Amendment Only Applies to Some — Posted Saturday January 31, 2026
I sent a comment to a liberal site last week regarding gun ownership. I said that if I were a billionaire, I'd gift an AR-15 assault rifle and 10,000 rounds of ammo to every black man and woman in America, citing the legitimacy of the 2nd Amendment. My sentiment was well received by others.

But perhaps it was also noticed by the Trump Administation who, responding to the murder by ICE of a legally gun-carrying American citizen, quickly denounced the 2nd Amendment, no doubt thinking that all hell would break loose with their control of Amerika if minorities were armed and able to respond to Trump's evil regime.

Didja know that in pre-Civil War America (and even later) it was illegal for a slave or any black person to possess a gun? The law presumed the same thing then that Trump fears today: that blacks and minorities must be controlled far more than whites. But with the recent murder of Alex Pretti by ICE, Trump now wants to restrict firearm ownership to "his" people, meaning white, evangelical GOP-worshiping Republicans.

Maybe even all Democrats, Independents and Greens will be banned from gun ownership. As a firearm-owning Green, I await the outcome of this latest outrage by Trump. Meanwhile, ICE, do not come to my door if you know what's good for you.

More Outrage: Trump posted an anti-Obama video showing Obama and his wife Michelle as monkeys. Trump took the video down, while still insisting that he's "the least racist person in the world." Dear God in Heaven, remove this man from us.
Lament — Posted Saturday February 7, 2026

I was not, I was, I am not, I care not. — Common ancient Greek epitaph

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. — Macbeth
I'm 77, and today I cannot help but wonder where all the years went. Who is this strange old person in my mirror? Nowadays I take walks, go to church, go to the gym, read, watch video lectures, peruse YouTube, shop for food and do little else. What a pathetic life! But thank God, it will not go on forever.
With Trump, What Goes Down Stays Down — Posted Saturday January 31, 2026
Take a gander at this graph depicting U.S. science agency staffing levels. Trump 2016 had a go at reducing them (particularly the EPA), but it wasn't until he got reelected and brought on board rabid science-haters like himself that things really went downhill, literally and precipitously. And of course the EPA is taking the biggest hit of all, mainly because Trump detests any kind of regulation, but also because environmental well-being stands in the way of wealth and profit.

Future generations of Americans will hate us for allowing this to happen, assuming they're intelligent enough to read graphs, unlike all Republicans today. That's why I'm often tempted to say "Just let it all burn down."
Melania — Posted Saturday January 31, 2026
Amazon's multi-zillionaire CEO Jeff Bezos spent $75 million producing and promoting the new film Melania, no doubt hoping to impress hubby Donald Trump and giving the nearly always-publicly-absent First Lady a bump in her own approval ratings. As the Salon article points out, the film is bombing, but not so much with Republicans.

Every day I identify Donald Trump more and more with the Antichrist, and with his third trophy wife Melania as either the new Eva Braun or the Whore of Babylon. You can understand why I detest Trump, but why should I pick on dear little Melania?

It's because she posed naked for money in several American and British tabloids like The New York Post in the 1990s, and the photos no doubt caught the eye of serial womanizer Trump, who has a known fetish for young, beautiful, blonde stiletto-heeled women, not to mention underage girls.

But the worst thing is that Melania, who has publicly claimed the photos were only classy, artsy-fartsy modeling gigs, cannot esape the fact that the photos were nothing but girl-on-girl porn with S&M overtones (there are other links to much worse photos, but I will not provide them here).

Try to imagine Jaqueline Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush or Michelle Obama posing for filth such as this for money and fame. And yet conservative Republicans are lining up at the theaters to watch the historical rewriting of one of the worse First Ladies in America's often sordid political past.
It Ain't There — Posted Saturday January 24, 2026
Last month, physicists made a fascinating but heart-breaking null discovery: the suspected and long hoped-for sterile neutrino doesn't exist.

Such a particle would have been a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle), far heavier than the three other known neutrinos, and its existence would have broken the long-standing Standard Model of particle physics and cosmology. [By the way, why does Nature love the number three? We live in three spacial dimensions, there are three neutrinos, three types of electrons, three families of elementary particles, along with the Christian Trinity of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit].

But the sterile neutrino represented the best and most likely candidate for dark matter, the elusive pixie particle that is presumed by most scientists to make up about 85% of all ordinary matter in the universe.

I still believe that the existence of dark matter will ultimately be disproved, possibly by a modification of Einstein's 1915 gravity theory. But it's disheartening to find that scientists can disprove one hypothetical particle relatively quickly and cheaply (the sterile neutrino) but can't disprove the hypothetical dark matter pest despite four fruitless decades of searching along with billions of dollars.

In this video Australian astrophysicist Matt O'Dowd explains the situtation in detail:

On Approaching 80 — Posted Friday January 23, 2026

"Whose face will you take with you into the darkness?" — Anonymous

I woke up this morning thinking of a short story I read long ago in college. It was The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, written by the noted author Katherine Anne Porter in 1930. It tells the story of an 80-year-old grandmother on her deathbed who was abandoned at the altar by her fiancé, and she recalls the painful experience as she is dying. As death approaches, she asks God to give her a sign of assurance that she is loved and accepted by Him, but she receives no sign. As her life blinks out, she imagines herself as a small blue light. Resigned, and thinking that God has also jilted her, she blows out the light.

I recently turned 77, but it seems like yesterday when I was young with a wife and children. The wife is dead now, and the children and their families are more distant than they are near. But I know whose face I will take with me when I go, and I know that God will never abandon me.
Remember, YOU Elected Him — Posted Friday January 16, 2026
President Trump is threatening to enact the Insurrection Act. Next up: Martial law.

It's 1933 all over again:

Who Today Remembers Walt Kelly? — Posted Thursday January 15, 2026
In a recent comic, political cartoonist Ted Rall posted this:

In the image Rall apologizes to Walt Kelly, the late and great popular newspaper cartoonist who once had his character Pogo famously utter "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Kelly left us long ago, and I lament his absence today, when speaking the truth about an insane, slobbering and tyrannical President Donald Trump is likely to see all political cartoonists declared enemies, subject to arrest by ICE and summarily executed.

That day is coming soon, my fellow Americans. And it was YOU who elected this monster.
More Pixie Dust? — Posted Thursday January 15, 2026
I think it was about 25 years ago, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was being developed. There were concerns about it creating a miniature black hole, which would quickly devour the collider facility and then the entire Earth itself:

But there were also concerns that it would create a massive particle called a strangelet, composed of up and down quarks along with a strange quark, whose composition would be stable and capable of converting the entire Earth into a huge strangelet mass, destroying all life. The particle itself is known to be unstable, but in large enough amounts it would be stable—and even more powerful than Donald Trump to destroy everything in its path.

Such a mass (called a "quark nugget") would also be electrically neutral, and would therefore be a candidate for dark matter, which physicists to date have spent billions of dollars looking for. The LHC is nowhere near powerful enough to create such a mass, but the Big Bang would have had more than enough energy to create enormous amounts of these things. And being stable and electrically uncharged , they'd just be floating around now in the observable universe, behaving exactly like dark matter.

In her latest video, noted German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder references the Einstein-like American mathematical physicist Edward Witten, who has proved mathematically that quark nuggets can exist (Hossenfelder rightly comments "And who can disagree with Ed Witten?") I won't disagree either, but if quark nuggets cannot ever be produced in the laboratory, then to me it's just another kind of hypothetical pixie dust.
Gee, That Didn't Take Long — Posted Saturday January 3, 2026
A vassal state is a country ruled by another, but propped up by a local ruler who kowtows to the true power. Thanks to President Trump, Venezuela is now a vassal state of America.

Venezuela's erstwhile president Nicolás Maduro was a liberal authoritarian ruler who oppressed dissent and was indifferent to his country's covert policy of allowing illegal drugs to transit from Colombia (along with precursor chemicals from China and India) and into America and other nations. The drugs of choice are fentanyl and cocaine, each highly addictive and often fatal (especially fentanyl, which is lethal in mere milligram doses).

Trump is now claiming ownership of Venezuela, presumably until a "suitable" client ruler is either elected or appointed. Venezuela's vast oil reserves are the true underlying reason for Trump's illegal military actions, since he doesn't really give a damn about the drug problem.

My prediction: The year 2026 will be unlike and far worse than anything we've ever experienced under Trump. He's just getting started. May God help the world.
Happy New Year — Posted Thursday January 1, 2026
Another year. God grant that it will be much better than the last.