Conspiracy theories from chatbots

The following are things I've posted on Facebook and LinkedIn recently.

The latest flavor of conspiracy theories is, "ChatGPT says this, so it must be true." I saw one today.

ChatGPT is a probabilistic model of word usage. It constructs texts by using words in the normal ways. It is good at paraphrasing a given text or things that it saw on web pages. But it does not reason consciously, does not have knowledge, does not have opinions, and generally can't tell you where it got the material it is paraphrasing.

I am a computational linguist (30-year career at UGA Institute for Artificial Intelligence). I use things like ChatGPT daily in my work nowadays. I know how they work.

If it suggests a theory, consider it pure speculation. It may be worth pursuing, because ChatGPT is good at rearranging ideas that have already been expressed, often in ways that can be fruitful. But ChatGPT's words are not authoritative knowledge.

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Don't call me a "MAGA"

As the political right wing starts to break up (with Cruz, for example, criticizing Trump), I've caught a whiff of the next political annoyance:

Being called a "MAGA" or "fascist" if you don't toe someone's entire liberal line on all issues.

We've had a problem with people wanting Christianity to be a tool of the right wing. There are also those who want it to be a tool of the left wing. We Christians need to remain free to criticize both.

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Leo XIV

A thought about Pope Leo: For the first time, there is a Pope who actually grew up and lived under the U.S. Constitution and should understand American values "from the inside." I know he moved to Peru later as a missionary, but nonetheless, he should understand America and be able to communicate with Americans better than any of his predecessors.

I don't mean that he agrees with any segment of American politics. I mean he knows things that a Pope ordinarily would not, and knows how to express things in our language.

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Bad schools

A thought based on some memories from my childhood:

I think the reason so many people tolerate bad schools is that they take it for granted that school is painful drudgery. They don't love learning and don't see that the main purpose of a school is to give out something that should be loved.

At one high school, I got a lot of funny looks — including some from teachers — for being more interested in my courses than in the football team. They perpetuated the assumption that being taught was painful, and that the only thing that would make school tolerable was to fill it with entertainment and keep people focused on that.

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Automated cartoonist

ChatGPT created this from a description I wrote. (I thank Grant Blair for assistance.)

Clients, please read only the first panel.

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First quarter moon

While setting up the telescope, I grabbed a few video frames of the whole visible moon. Celestron 8 EdgeHD, f/7 reducer, Altair 26C camera, SharpCap. Best 75% of 53 frames — that must mean 39 or 40 frames were stacked, depending on how the rounding is done.

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Theophilus, Cyrillus, Catharina

These lunar craters are named (from north to south) Theophilus, Cyrillus, and Catharina. The last one is not actually named after my daughter, but it's a nice thought. You can see them in the picture above, but this is a separate video sequence of 1000 frames of just the region of interest; the best 750 were stacked. Same telescope and camera.

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A glimpse of M3

My real reason for setting up the telescope was to see if I had fixed the guiding problem from several nights ago. Apparently so (the adjustable lens of the guidescope had been loose), but clouds came in right after I took aim at the globular cluster M3, and I was only able to stack five 30-second exposures. PixInsight and BlurXTerminator were used as usual, although BlurXTerminator made little difference. This is an example of making the best of inadequate astrophotography, and it's interesting because sometimes the opportunity to photograph something important is fleeting.

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UGA elevator ghost story

I had an odd experience on May 1. The emergency telephone in an elevator got a spam call.

I stepped into an elevator in UGA parking deck S11. Immediately I heard a woman's voice on the loudspeaker: "Hello? Can you hear me?"

I asked what was happening, and she launched into a recorded spiel for Medicare supplemental insurance.

Parking Services tells me this has happened before. Apparently, the emergency telephones in elevators are cell phones and can receive calls from anywhere. That should not be. I thought they were dedicated lines to an office. At the very least, there should be restrictions on where they can receive calls from.

In the Internet era, security is always an afterthought.

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Bonnie Young Giles, 1950-2025

Bonnie Giles, née Bonnie Young, my first cousin on my mother's side, died on April 30. I had not seen her in several years, but in my younger days she gave me valuable encouragement for my academic ambitions and scientific interests, especially right after my father died.

The full obituary is here. Bonnie was the first of my cousins on my mother's side to go to college, and as such, she paved the way for several others. One generation back, my mother's family had been very rural Georgians, living on a successful but isolated farm, and high school in the 1940s was something of a new thing. Several of my mother's generation encouraged their children to aim for college, and Bonnie was the first to avail herself of this; she wanted to be a schoolteacher, and was actively interested in education, since at least her early teen years.

In 1968-69, she was a freshman at Valdosta State College, where we lived, and we saw her often. She took me on my first visit to a college bookstore, and I bought an optics book, which I still use. It may seem unusual that I think of Bonnie when I use a certain green reference book that is still on my shelf, but I do. She was of course well known in Moultrie as long-time director of the Head Start program, and, for a few years, proprietor of a Christian bookstore.

May her memory be eternal.

[Added:] I might as well mention an even more out-of-the-way thing that regularly reminds me of Bonnie and her family. Some UGA buildings have sound-absorbing ceilings made out of a material that looks like pressed white spaghetti (it is actually wood fibers). This material is known as Armstrong Tectum. Well, Bonnie's family had a sample of Tectum, about 4×4×2 inches, on a bookshelf in their den, and I remember being shown it when I was about 5 years old and told that it was for making ceilings, and then seeing it on subsequent visits. So now, when I see a Tectum ceiling, I think of the Youngs.

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101½ and still going

On a happier note, I was delighted to discover that my second-grade teacher, Myrtle Lofton, is still living in Moultrie and celebrated her 100th birthday a year and a half ago. I must hasten to send a birthday card! Or maybe a letter and a couple of my books. More here.

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VueScan problem with Canon D570 scanner via Wi-Fi

I use VueScan for almost all my scanning of both pages and slides. It works with all flatbed scanners and also with my two Nikon Coolscan film scanners. And it contains all its own drivers, so you don't need a current driver for your scanner. It's available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

But... it didn't work right with my new Canon D570 all-in-one, accessed by Wi-Fi. It saw the scanner as "D570" but could not actually scan; when told to preview, it would just blink the screen for a moment and then act as if nothing had happened.

The solution (from the developer of VueScan himself) is to disable TLS, which is encryption of network communication.

Canon's documentation led me to believe, incorrectly, that TLS only affected the Apple Airprint functionality (which includes scanning). But it apparently gets in the way of VueScan under all circumstances. To disabled it, I activated the remote (web) system management console and looked under TCP/IP Settings. I think TLS is also on the D570's own menu under Airprint, but I'm not sure.

All fixed now!

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