I'm a believer in multitasking, so when I go out to the desert I bring both my telescope and my camera. While the telescope is doing its thing, the camera might as well be doing something too.
Lately I've been playing with star trails, figuring out the best settings and exposure time. Here are a few tips:
Pick a very dark sky. A good star trail requires at least a four-hour exposure, and that means the gaps between stars need to be really dark or else they'll wash out the trails.
I've never had much use for my camera's long-exposure noise reduction feature because it doesn't really seem to do much. But it's the best solution for keeping noise down on a super-long exposure.
Unfortunately, it requires as much time for the camera to calculate and remove the noise as it takes for the main exposure itself. So a four-hour exposure becomes eight hours, and no camera battery will last that long. The solution for me is a little battery pack that I plug into the camera's power socket. Between the camera battery and the battery pack I can keep the camera going for ten or twelve hours.
The picture below turned out pretty well. The tree has a reddish cast, probably because my car's tail lights were on for part of the time. The road at the bottom is Highway 177, which forms the eastern boundary of Joshua Tree National Park. It's pretty deserted late at night, which becomes obvious when you realize that the headlight streaks in the photo are all I got during a four-hour exposure.
I don't subscribe to Bloomberg so I can't read all of Tyler Cowen's column this week about artificial intelligence. But here's an excerpt from his blog. The topic is ChatGPT, an example of a Large Language Model:
I’ve started dividing the people I know into three camps: those who are not yet aware of LLMs; those who complain about their current LLMs; and those who have some inkling of the startling future before us. The intriguing thing about LLMs is that they do not follow smooth, continuous rules of development. Rather they are like a larva due to sprout into a butterfly.
I don't agree with Tyler about everything, but I sure do about this. And I suspect there are going to be some more converts when v4.0 of ChatGPT is released.
I always get lots of pushback when I write about how AI is on a swift upward path. The most sophisticated criticism focuses on the underlying technology: Moore's Law is dead. Deep learning has scalability issues. Machine learning in general has fundamental limits. LLMs merely mimic human speech using correlations and pattern matching. Etc.
But who cares? Even if I stipulate that all of this is true, it just means that AI researchers are inventing new kinds of models constantly when the older ones hit a wall. How else did you suppose that advances in AI would happen?
In the case of ChatGPT I reject the criticisms anyway. It's not yet as good as college-level speech and perception, but neither was the Model T as good as a Corvette. It's going to get better very quickly. And the criticism that it "mimics" human speech without true understanding is laughable. That's what most humans do too. And in any case, who cares if it has "true" understanding or consciousness? If it starts cranking out sonnets better than Shakespeare's or designing better moon rockets than NASA, then it's as useful as a human being regardless of what's going on inside. Consciousness is overrated anyway.
The really interesting thing about LLMs is what they say about which jobs are going to be on the AI chopping block first. Most people have generally thought that AI would take low-level jobs first, and then, as it got smarter, would start taking away higher-income jobs.
But that may not be the case. One of the hardest things for AI to do, for example, is to interact with the real world and move around in it. This means that AI is more likely to become a great lawyer than a great police officer, for example. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it takes only a few years for AI to put lawyers almost entirely out of business unless they're among the 10% (or so) of courtroom lawyers. And even that 10% will go away shortly afterward since their interaction with the real world is fairly constrained and formalized.
Driverless cars, in contrast, are hard because the controlling software has to deal with a vast and complicated slice of the real world. And even so they're making good progress if you can rein in your contempt for their (obvious and expected) limitations at this point in their development. AI will have similar difficulties with ditch digging, short order cooking, plumbing, primary education, etc.
It will have much less difficulty with jobs that require a lot of knowledge but allow it to interact mostly with the digital world. This includes law, diagnostic medicine, university teaching, writing of all kinds, and so forth.
The bottom line, whether you personally choose to believe it or not, is that AI remains on an exponential growth path—and that's true of both hardware and software. In ten or fifteen years its capabilities will be nearly a thousand times greater than they are today. Considering where we are now, that should either scare the hell out of you or strike you with awe at how human existence is about to change.
Partly this is because we all get fooled by the Mercator projection used on most maps, which stretches the northern parts of Canada into something about the size of Russia. But it's also because nearly all of Canada is completely empty. About 99% of the population lives in the narrow red strip on the map below. That's the real Canada.
Remote jobs made up 13.2% of postings advertised on LinkedIn last month—down from 20.6% in March. Other job sites such as Indeed.com and ZipRecruiter also report declines in remote listings.
....Companies such as Walt Disney Co. and Starbucks Corp., meanwhile, are stepping up the days that hybrid employees are required to come into the office. Ally Financial Inc., based in Detroit, stepped up its return-to-office policy in September, shifting from asking workers to come in at least part-time to expecting it. How many days depends on the job and department.
Lots of workers might like having remote jobs, but as near as I can tell bosses almost universally hate it. For that reason remote work is nearly certain to continue shrinking, and if the economy goes into recession later this year it's likely to plummet.¹ By the end of 2024, I predict that the share of workers who are remote will be only slightly higher than a pre-pandemic trendline would have suggested. Call it 9% or so.
¹Because workers will be more desperate for jobs, which will give employers the leverage to hire only people willing to work out of an office.
I've developed something like a schedule for my astrophotography: Once a month, when the moon starts to cooperate, I head out to Palomar Mountain to do some test runs that give me an idea of which settings (mainly exposure time) work best on my chosen target. Then, a week later, I head out to the desert to (hopefully) make my final images. Then I wait three weeks for the moon to go back down before I go out again.
This month's project was not the C2022 comet, which I showed yesterday. That was just a bonus target that I had to do right away before it disappeared. My real target was M42, the Orion nebula, the biggest and most spectacular nebula in the sky. That makes it ideal for a beginner.
I have three images below. The bottom one was taken at Palomar Mountain on a night that featured both a bright moon and some equipment failures. As a result, I got only one usable frame from a stack of 60-second exposures. That's way too short an exposure time, and the single frame lacks detail. But it's surprisingly good anyway, and as a bonus it gives the best approximation of a Klingon bird of prey.
The middle image was taken from two stacks of images made at Palomar Mountain on a moonless night a week later. The main part of the image was created from a stack of 240-second exposures, while the bright center was made from a stack of 7-second exposures. At home I composited those together to get good detail across the whole image. Overall, it turned out well. I wouldn't have minded if it were my final image.
But there's more juice to be squeezed out of this onion. The top image is the best of all. It was made from a big stack of 300-second exposures (35 images total) while the bright center was made from an enormous stack of 5-second exposures (500 images total). The shorter exposure on the second stack keeps the center from being blown out, which erases all the detail. I composited that onto the main image and, finally, for the semicircular formation just to the right of center, I copied the version from my set of 7-second exposures the previous week. Altogether, then, it's a three-part composite.
The longer exposure along with the extremely dark sky provides better visibility of both the surrounding gases and the other nearby nebulas. The formation just a little to the right of the center is M43, De Mairan's Nebula, while the large blue formation farther to the right is NGC 1977, the Running Man nebula. (The black dust lanes in the center supposedly look a little bit like a running man. I'd say it looks more like Edvard Munch's "Scream.")
You'll notice that Orion only barely fits in the top image. I don't mind this. I deliberately bought a telescope with a long focal length even though I knew there would be three or four objects that only barely fit the frame. But for all the other objects in the universe, which are much smaller, that's not a problem and the longer focal length will give me much better magnification and detail.
(But in the middle picture everything fits fine! What's the deal? This is actually due to an equipment failure the night I took the picture. When I was all done I decided I should re-aim the scope and take another dozen shots. I ended up re-aiming inaccurately, but I knew my software could easily correct that. It did, but the result was sort of like a composite, with a good deal more horizontal room. It also has more vertical headroom, but that's only because it shows less of the nebula.)
January 22, 2023 — Desert Center, CaliforniaJanuary 18, 2023 — Palomar Mountain, CaliforniaJanuary 7, 2023 — Palomar Mountain, California
Yesterday the marketing department at Mars Inc. discontinued the use of their animated M&Ms characters because, um, Tucker Carlson said they were fat lesbians now? Or something. It's not really explainable without sounding like an idiot yourself.
But now there's this:
Fox News is MAD that "woke" Xbox is changing its power saving mode
Earhardt: "Xbox has also announced that they're going woke because of climate change"
Failla: "They're trying to recruit your kids into climate politics at an earlier age"
I'll confess that I didn't quite believe this at first. I mean, it's Twitter, right? People are always exaggerating.
So I clicked on the video. Not only is the tweet correct, but Lis went easy on them. The Fox folks are literally outraged that Microsoft has added an auto-off setting to the Xbox, something that half the tech appliances in America have. My printer goes to sleep after an hour. My computer sleeps after 20 minutes. My phone sleeps after five minutes. This is a feature so common that my only surprise is that the Xbox didn't already have it.
And apparently it's all part of a conspiracy that started with gas stoves, moved on to coffee, and now is infesting video games.
Wait. Coffee? Dear Lord, I must have missed something. What have liberals done to coffee?
POSTSCRIPT: Just to make things clear, the new feature on the Xbox is that you can set it to shut off completely instead of merely going to sleep. This is what's destroying America's youth.
A lawyer for former vice president Mike Pence, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, found what they called “a small number” of documents bearing classified markings during a search of Pence’s Indiana home, according to letters to the National Archives.
Search Obama's house! Do it now! I'll bet he's got, like, a million classified documents or something.
In a statement to DailyMail.com, PETA President Ingrid Newkirk praised Jenner and Shayk for possibly making a statement against trophy hunting....Newkirk also urged the fashion stars to give up using wool products, which PETA says leads to the abuse and injury of sheep, and silk, which results in silkworms being killed in many instances.
Dan McLaughlin got caught recently by a speed camera and then, a few days later, received a citation in the mail. Normally, that would just be one of those things:
What is obnoxious, however, is that the pretext for this particular ticket is “speeding in a school zone” even though it was based on a camera observation at 10 a.m. on the Sunday morning of a three-day weekend. A machine using an empty school as a justification for a ticket no decent police officer would write is a fine emblem of Hochul’s New York.
And it is the result of a specific decision made by the governor when she signed a bill last June to allow school-zone cameras to operate 24/7, entirely without regard to whether the school is open or occupied by humans.
Finally, left and right can come together. I've never gotten a ticket like this, but I do drive by our local elementary school regularly. It has a big sign that says the school zone speed limit is 25 mph "when children are present." But most people seem unaware of that qualifier and creep along regardless of whether any children are within a thousand yards.
I know, I know: boo hoo. I'm not going to get any sympathy for having to slow down for a couple hundred yards once or twice a day.
Nonetheless, this definitely makes my top thousand list of annoying things. So there.
