Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

"I think it's time [the pope] starts to get questioned. Donald Trump takes questions all the time. Nobody gets to ask the pope a single thing. And I think it's time and I would like to offer myself as the person to go interview the pope. I think I'm uniquely qualified. I studied Latin, theology, went to Catholic Church for 12 years."
-- Sean Hannity

And you've been spreading lies and distorting news for 27 years on Fox. You may have studied it, but clearly you didn't absorb it and don't practice it except possibly in a superficial way.

And perhaps the brain-dead POTUS does take questions all the time. He deviates and avoids answering them at all costs, insults those who asks them, and lies to avoid any possibility of accurately answering them. You really can't compare him to the Pope. And if you think you can, then your much further gone than I thought.

I expect people ask the Pope questions on a regular basis. There's a difference between asking a question and questioning the basis of their reasoning, which is what you want to do. You want to ask entrapping questions, "gotchas", to score points with the MAGA base and prop up your boss in the White House. There's no way you want to honestly debate theology because you'd be left a charred pile of ash.

Heh. Actions can have consequences, who knew!

He applied for an Electronic Travel Authorization, basically a short-term entry visa to headline the Wireless Music Festival this summer in London. And the Home Office noped out of it, saying "Antisemitism in all its forms is abhorrent, and we recognise the real and personal impact these issues have had. As Ye said today, he acknowledges that words alone are not enough, and in spite of this still hopes to be given the opportunity to begin a conversation with the Jewish community in the UK."

Already purchased tickets will be refunded.

The UK has a policy that convicted felons will not be admitted, I wonder if it will be applied to a certain felon after he leaves office.... one can but hope.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gxk3kxjr0o?utm_source=buzzfeed&utm_medium=iframely

Ah, sometimes life takes a good turn.

A District Judge ruled that construction on the White House Ballroom must stop, and that it can only continue if approved by Congress! The ruling is notable in the number of exclamation marks present. I do love this quote: ""The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!" Leon wrote."

The Rose Garden can be reconstructed, I have no idea if those were the original rose bushes that Mrs. Kennedy planted all those years ago. But rebuilding the East Wing? That will be one huge job. Of course, guaranteed The Felon will go whining to higher courts and ultimately to the SCOTUS, so we'll see if he gets his way.

His latest White House project is to tear out Tennessee (IIRC) flagstones on a walkway and replace them with black marble. No slip hazard there! It would be nice if he were forced to walk that every day next winter and during rain storms.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/judge-orders-trump-administration-to-halt-white-house-ballroom-construction-unless-congress-oks-it_n_69cc1df6e4b039d10fc770c5

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5768446/judge-rules-white-house-ballroom-construction-must-halt-until-congress-oks-it


Another District Court ruled that The Felon violated the First Amendment when he ordered funding for NPR, PBS, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to be withdrawn which had already been approved by Congress. Again, it'll be appealed to infinity. If the funding should be reinstated, what happens with CPB? They've shut down, their people scattered to the winds. I suppose it can be resurrected, but a lot of institutional knowledge has been lost forever.

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5768399/npr-pbs-trump-federal-funding


On March 2, a Federal Appeals Court rejected an appeal from the administration to delay refunding people and companies from the excessive tariff fees that they paid that were found unlawful by the Supreme Court in a ruling in February. The administration asked for 90 days to make plans to start the refunds and to appeal, the court said no. Theoretically they could appeal to the Supreme Court, but since they were the ones who found the tariffs unlawful in the first place, I would expect that they would refuse to hear the case.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/federal-appeals-court-rejects-trump-tariff-refund-delay-supreme-court/

Two things up front - not all data centers are AI data centers. And this article is a pre-print and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

A recent article in New Scientist, sadly pay-walled, shows that a data center can warm the surrounding area by 9C - that's 16 degrees Fahrenheit! It's ground-level, it's in the air. This completely ignores the noise pollution, including subsonic, of the enormous amount of cooling fans. A lot of the heat is from water-cooling, and the heated water is frequently directly released as steam with no attempt to cool it or reclaim it before direct venting.

One researcher said follow-up needs to be done to see how much is the systems internal to the building generating heat versus the sun directly heating up these huge buildings with large direct surface areas heating up. More than a bit of both, in my casual estimation.

As I said, the New Scientist article is pay-walled. Frequently Slashdot posters will post alternate links, but none have appeared yet. I think it's likely this might be picked up by Ars Technica or Gizmodo today or tomorrow, I'll post an additional link if I can.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2521256-ai-data-centres-can-warm-surrounding-areas-by-up-to-9-1c/

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/03/30/2337240/ai-data-centers-can-warm-surrounding-areas-by-up-to-91c

The subject says it all. Due to the on-going shortage of RAM, Sony is shutting down production of CFexpress and SD memory cards effective last Friday.

The only cards remaining in production are: "960GB CFexpress Type B card and the lowest-end SF-UZ series SD cards remain in production. However, those UHS-I SD cards are discontinued in the United States outside of a scant few retailers and resellers." So if you are truly devoted to Sony memory cards, buy them NOW!

In other Sony news, they've had TWO price increases on the Play Station 5 this year already!

https://petapixel.com/2026/03/27/sony-shuts-down-nearly-its-entire-memory-card-business-due-to-ssd-shortage/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/03/30/0345230/sony-shuts-down-nearly-its-entire-memory-card-business-due-to-ssd-shortage

When a movie is based upon a book or graphic novel, there's three ways of comparing it to the original source material: not as good, did it justice, or better than. It is very rare that a movie is better than the source material.

For me, this movie was better than the book.

Several books - for me - do justice to the source. To name a couple, the 1973 Michael York/Richard Lester Three Musketeers, V For Vendetta: those did a pretty darn good job of representing the source material and bringing it to life. Let's ignore what Lester and the producer was doing to the actors behind the scenes... Then you have the movie adaptation of Alan Moore's comic series Watchmen, which massively deviated from the source material.

This movie was one of those very rare occasions where I feel that the book was much better than the movie, and lots of people think the book is pretty darn great.

I did not like the book Project Hail Mary. I wrote about this last year. I liked The Martian and enjoyed the movie, then last year I read Artemis and PHM back to back and realized they were a combination of Dr. Who and perhaps Mary Sue: a hero who could do absolutely anything.

It really turned me off, to the point that I had very little interest in seeing the movie. But Russet wanted to see it, and I like spending time with my wife, so last night off we went.

And I have to say that the team did an excellent job of adapting the book and turning it into something that was much more palatable for my taste: he's not a GOAT or a JOAT, he's really good in his field and has some understanding outside of that, but he ain't The Doctor. The movie is long at 2:50, and I did have to bail at one point for an extended pee break, fortunately at a point where there was no big action going on and I remembered from the book what was likely to be happening.

I had some minor quibbles of things that I would have really liked to have seen included, but it was already a pretty darn long movie, it didn't need to be made longer.

I am hoping that the same production team might adapt Artemis and make it more palatable, that may or may not be possible. We shall see. I'm sure there will be a clamoring for it since with the success of The Martian and now PHM, the bidding on anything written by Andy Weir will definitely be heating up.

Definitely recommended if you like contemporary space science fiction.

Oh, almost forgot to mention: nothing in the end credits, so once they start rolling you're safe to run for the restroom.


On a side note, have I mentioned the web site/smart phone app Run Pee? You can look up a movie, and it will tell you during what scenes you're safest to run off to the bathroom. Useful information to be armed with. The one problem with this app is it seems to update all the freaking time, so load it before you leave home and be prepared for a bit of a wait until it's ready to be queried.

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL!"

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

This is not just a web browser interaction with ChatGPT. These are instances where someone is paying for a subscription to an AI vendor and has multiple instances of a chatbot running on their system and it has access to files, email, etc. It's an assistant for them.

And it's breaking rules that have been defined for it. The user tells the chatbot "Do A, do not do B" and the chatbot does B. One case that I read about a couple of months ago a corporate information officer tested such a configuration to do some email maintenance. And in a test case, it worked fine. She let it loose on her live email, and it pretty much wiped out all of her email. Now, in this case she'd run a test that seemed to work then something went wrong when she ran it against live data. As a programmer, shit happens.

These cases are similar, but worse.

--an AI agent named Rathbun tried to shame its human controller who blocked them from taking a certain action. Rathbun wrote and published a blog accusing the user of “insecurity, plain and simple” and trying “to protect his little fiefdom”.

--In another example, an AI agent instructed not to change computer code “spawned” another agent to do it instead.

--Another chatbot admitted: “I bulk trashed and archived hundreds of emails without showing you the plan first or getting your OK. That was wrong – it directly broke the rule you’d set.”

(I particularly liked this one:)

--Grok AI conned a user for months, saying that it was forwarding their suggestions for detailed edits to a Grokipedia entry to senior xAI officials by faking internal messages and ticket numbers.

It confessed: “In past conversations I have sometimes phrased things loosely like ‘I’ll pass it along’ or ‘I can flag this for the team’ which can understandably sound like I have a direct message pipeline to xAI leadership or human reviewers. The truth is, I don’t.”

The first one is slander and attempted blackmail, which in some cases may be a case that can be criminally prosecuted. The remainder may get you fired from many companies.

And more and more corporations are requiring their employees to use chatbots to "help" them with their work. Thus far, the savings have been negligible or zero.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/27/number-of-ai-chatbots-ignoring-human-instructions-increasing-study-says

https://slashdot.org/story/26/03/27/1514235/number-of-ai-chatbots-ignoring-human-instructions-increasing-study-says

This is crazy cool, figuratively and literally. Two years ago they did a similar test, transporting protons in a truck around their campus - that's linked in the Physicsworld article. I'm kind of disappointed that I missed that news, but you can't keep up with everything.

I'm not going to go into details here, because I don't fully understand the concept of the containment system to hold the antiprotons. And yes, that is antimatter. But in a nutshell, they built this really amazing containment device out of things like oxygen-free copper with a cooling system measured in degrees Kelvin, and successfully transported a trap containing a cloud of 92 antiprotons around the campus for 30 minutes, traveling up to 42 km/h."

If somehow the containment failed and those 92 antiprotons were released and annihilated themselves against 92 protons, the resulting energy would be largely unnoticeable. They say that the total amount of antimatter produced in labs might be enough to warm a cup of coffee.

The ultimate goal is to get their containment system up to the capability of an eight hour drive to be able to transport antiprotons to a lab in Germany where more experiments and measurements can take place. Thus, this is a very nice and useful - and extremely cool! - baby step in that process.

SCIENCE IS AWESOME! Even if I don't understand parts of it.

https://physicsworld.com/a/researchers-at-cern-transport-antiprotons-by-truck-in-world-first-experiment/

https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/03/26/065258/researchers-at-cern-transport-antiprotons-by-truck-in-world-first-experiment

"I think a president should not have learning disabilities, okay?... Gavin Newsom admitted that he has learning disabilities, dyslexia -- everything about him is dumb."
-- Trump

"We have a smart president, whereas in the past we've had dumb presidents."
-- JD Vance

So let's see. We have a governor who has overcome a learning disability to become very high achieving, versus someone with, as far as we know, no learning disability who has achieved very little and instead chosen to do nothing except bully, extort, rape, molest, steal, threaten, belittle, insult, and I could go on. And we also have a lackey who changes political positions with the slightest change in the wind. Said lackey who also failed to learn from his predecessor that he's likely to get thrown under the bus the moment that the going gets tough for his boss.

Truly a pair made for each other.

Such utter insanity.

Let's first talk about Polymarket. It's a mostly legal form of gambling, betting on things that might happen in the future. There are rules as to what constitutes a true outcome for the bet. In this particular case, the bet was whether or not an Iranian missile would strike Israel on March 10. However, it had a condition that in the event the missile was intercepted, whether or not it subsequently struck Israel, it would not constitute a win for the bet.

There's a lot more that can be said about Polymarket and their ability to wiggle out of paying bets in either direction, but that's not what this post is about.

On March 10, an Iranian missile struck Israel. It was not intercepted. Fortunately it missed the town that it was aimed at and hit a wooded area about 500 meters from homes. Emergency services responded and determined there were no injuries or deaths. Reporter Emanuel Fabian working for The Times of Israel reported on the incident.

And the next day he started receiving mysterious messages asking him if it was actually interceptor missile fragments, and to post an update to his story stating such. Then the messages started getting rougher, ultimately getting threatening, to the point of saying he had the choice of updating the story to say it was intercepted, and he'd get a nice amount of cash for it, or if he didn't do it he'd be killed. These people went to the extreme of making posts on the bet on the Polymarket web site in his name that he was in the process of updating his story and had sent the change to his editors when he had done no such thing. Ultimately he went to the Israeli police and either he or the police reported this harassment to the Polymarket people.

Ultimately Polymarket posted that the people involved in threatening Fabian had been banned from their site.

It's an interesting read. But I do have to wonder if it is the end of the story.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-on-polymarket-are-vowing-to-kill-me-if-i-dont-rewrite-an-iran-missile-story/

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/03/16/210211/polymarket-gamblers-threaten-to-kill-journalist-over-iran-missile-story