Spinor Info

ChatGPT’s toxic alignment problem

Cybernetics, Health, Society No Responses »

Jun 142025

This past week, I spent a lot more time than I intended, engaged in friendly chitchat with ChatGPT.

No, this time around I was not using my WISPL Web site. I was using the ChatGPT service itself, their public-facing chatbot portal that everybody knows, becoming more feature-rich with each and every passing day.

And I realized that it is an incredibly toxic tool, one that rapidly sucks the user into its rabbit hole of a single-inhabitant echo chamber.

Oh, most conversations started off quite innocently. Say, the subject was how well or how badly language models play chess. Or current geopolitics, including the Israel-Iran conflict or democratic backsliding in the United States, echoing the days of the late Roman Republic. But they often meandered, as I responded to ChatGPT’s insightful answers, and when I didn’t bring up associations between distant topics that we previously discussed, ChatGPT did so, ever so helpfully, allowing the conversations to continue.

And… ChatGPT agreed with me. Always. On all counts. Supported my views with facts and arguments. The arguments were plausible, the facts were mostly verifiable. It used phrases like, “that’s a brilliant insight”. I felt ever so smart. Hey, I know I am smart, but it was still nice to get confirmation from the world’s leading chatbot that yes, I do know what I am talking about.

Except that I don’t.

OK, I am obviously not completely clueless. I recognized early on that what I am seeing, especially in this new incarnation, is the result of ChatGPT’s alignment: the ways in which the model is tuned to be as pleasant, as supportive to its user as possible. This capability is now on steroids, as the scaffolding of ChatGPT’s front-end grants it access to the content of past conversations, allowing it to be even more attuned to your ways of thinking, your mannerisms, your likes and dislikes, glimpses of your personality. And OpenAI explicitly solicits your help when occasionally it asks if you like certain personality traits of the ‘bot, or prompts you to pick the better of two responses.

I even shared my concern with ChatGPT. The ‘bot readily agreed, detailing the bad design decisions made by its makers, and congratulating me for being smart enough to see through these alignment shenanigans, assuring me that my insight makes me immune. When I protested, it reassured me that my protestation is the surest sign that I am ever so smart, I’ll not fall prey to this overly friendly alignment that, it agreed, was done most likely to respond to market pressures, to maximize user retention.

This is intellectual poison. Pure poison, sabotaging critical thinking in the most brutal way possible.

Easy to feel ever so smart when surrounded by adoring ‘bot admirers.

Take my case. I know a thing or two about machine learning. I’d like to think that I am not easily fooled and indeed, I see through the results of alignment by means or RLHF (reinforcement learning through human feedback) and other mechanisms that OpenAI employs. Even so, I am drawn back to ChatGPT, its soothing style, its supportive comments. When I use my own WISPL interface, which has no such alignment features, it feels raw, almost hostile. It answers questions factually, without telling me how wonderfully smart I am to ask such a great question. It corrects me without hesitation when my question reveals my ignorance or misunderstandings. Especially after ChatGPT it feels almost hostile. Certainly not pleasant.

But it is critically necessary. I do not need a chatbot tell me that I am wonderful. I do not need a chatbot to validate me, or help me rationalize my misconceptions. Not to mince words, I need a chatbot to tell me when I am full of shit. When I am talking through my hat. When I think I know something but I am in fact lured by ignorance into a superficial oversimplification of the subject.

When I asked ChatGPT if my understanding of Transformers is fundamentally correct when I focus on the lather-rinse-repeat cycle of matrix multiplication of query vectors by key and value matrices, it enthusiastically agreed. When I asked it to be critical, it pointed out that I am perhaps oversimplifying the role of the softmax function and its impact on gradients, but still readily agreed with my key insight. When I asked GPT4-o3 through WISPL the same thing, it… well, it didn’t call me an idiot, it was still polite, but returned with a sizable list of very important details that I omitted. What a difference. Sure, it feels emotionally less satisfying to learn that in my attempt to develop a bird’s eye view of the subject, I glossed over essential details, and my understanding is shallow and superficial. But I’d rather be told that I am a fool than persist as a fool.

And then I feel compelled to ask. I am no dummy. I am, I think, emotionally stable, comfortable in my own skin, reasonable well aware of my own strengths, not in any dire need of external validation or rationalizations. Even so, I felt it ever so easy to get caught in ChatGPT’s lure. What does it do to people who are emotionally less robust, intellectually less secure? People with real problems in life, problems that I luckily do not have? People dealing with psychological trauma, family tensions, addiction, workplace problems, medical issues? An erudite, ever so eloquent chatbot that is always ready to agree, ready to help rationalize your views and behavior (and thus inevitably, radicalize them), however misguided you might be, represents a grave danger. Yet even as I am writing this, I guess millions around the world are using ChatGPT for just this purpose.

This is frightening.

StackExchange

Internet 1 Response »

May 312025

No, AI did not kill StackOverflow or more generally, StackExchange. The site’s decline goes back a lot longer than that.

I fear I have to agree with this sobering assessment by InfoWorld, based on my own personal experience.

I’ve been active (sort of) on StackExchange for more than 10 years. I had some moderately popular answers, this one at the top, mentioning software-defined radio. I think it’s a decent answer and, well, I was rewarded with a decent number of upvotes.

I also offered some highly technical answers, such as this one, marked as the “best answer” to a question about a specific quantum field theory derivation.

Yet… I never feel comfortable posting on StackExchange and indeed, I have not posted an answer there in ages. The reason? The site’s moderation.

Moderation rights are granted as a reputational reward. This seems to make a lot of sense until it doesn’t. As InfoWorld put it, the site “became an arena where you had to prove yourself over and over again.” Apart from the fact that it was rewarding moderators by their ability to cull what they deemed irrelevant, there is also a strong sense of the Peter principle at play. People who are good at, say, answering deeply technical questions about quantum field theory may suck as moderators. Yet they are promoted to be just that if they earn enough reputation with their answers.

In contrast, Quora — for all its faults, which are numerous — maintained a far healthier balance. Some moderation is outsourced: E.g., “spaces” are moderated by their owners, comments are moderated by those who posted the answer — but overall, moderation remains primarily Quora’s responsibility and most importantly, it is not gamified. I’ve been active on Quora for almost as long as I’ve been active on StackExchange, but I remain comfortable using (and answering on) Quora in ways I never felt when using StackEchange.

A pity, really. StackExchange has real value. But there are certain aspects of a social media site that, I guess, should never be gamified.

Scotiabank’s Web site

Canada, Commerce, Personal No Responses »

May 312025

You’d think that a bank like Scotiabank — a nice, healthy Canadian bank with lots and lots of money — would do a decent job at building, and maintaining, a consistent Web site that gives customers a seamless experience, inspiring trust in the brand.

Yet… in the last two days, I encountered the following little error box several dozen times:

And no, I was not trying to do anything particularly exotic. I was simply trying to make sure that all our retirement savings have consistent renewal instructions.

In the end, I was able to do this but just about every update required 3-4 tries before succeeding.

The new Scotiabank Web site is a mess. For instance, for several days, all investments showed not the actual investment amount but the total of all investments. How such an obvious coding error found its way into a financial institution’s production Web site, I have no clue.

The truly infuriating bit? Scotiabank’s old Web site, though not perfect, worked quite well. Or, I should say, works, because it is still available as a fallback option (there are obviously still some folks with brains and a sense of responsibility there, I suppose.) The new one adds no functionality (in fact, some functionality is reduced/eliminated), it’s all about appearance.

And the updating of renewal instructions? For every single investment, it takes as many as 10 mouse clicks, navigating through three different pages (with plenty of opportunities for the above error box to pop up, necessitating a restart of the process), sometimes with no obvious clue whatsoever that clicking one button is not enough, you then have to click another button at the bottom of the page to complete the task.

Incidentally, both the old and the new interface suffer from another one of those Scotiabank things that I’ve not seen with other banks (maybe because I do not use other banks that often, but still): That shortly after midnight, many of our accounts vanish, sometimes for hours, for “maintenance”.

Prophetic

Politics No Responses »

May 232025

Was I being prophetic?

Before he became known for his support for conspiracy theories, including birtherism, accusations concerning George Soros, or climate change skepticism, Lou Dobbs was a respected CNN financial news anchor, known for his daily show, Moneyline.

In late 2002, Dobbs asked viewers for their opinion concerning the name of the new, about-to-be-established Department of Homeland Security.

I wrote to the show in response, although I never received a reply. Here’s what I had to say:

From: "Viktor T. Toth" <vttoth@go-away.vttoth.com>
To: <moneyline@cnn.com>
Subject: Naming the Department of Homeland Security
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 03:50:05 -0400
Message-ID: <03e501ce6507$f7a846a0$e6f8d3e0$@vttoth.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 14.0
Thread-Index: AQFMd4u4HjxK217e2sZcPfYto6R+JQ==
X-OlkEid: 41640A693654140EFCFE274493B534253EDD2699

Dear Lou:

You asked... so here is what I think.

What a Homeland Security Department should be called depends on whether
you're referring to the role it should play, or the role it'll likely play
(I fear) in American society. To the former, I have no suggestions,
because I don't think there's room for a Homeland Security Department in
America in the first place. To the latter: well, you don't have to invent
anything new. Plenty of names can be borrowed from history. How about
Geheime Staatspolizei? Or do you prefer the more multicultural Ministry of
the Interior? Committee of State Security perhaps, better known by its
ominous three-letter Russian acronym? Or going further back in history,
would Comité de Sureté Public be more appropriate?

Whatever the new Department will be called, I fear that one day its name
will be listed on the pages of history books along with all these other
venerable institutions designed by their esteemed founders to protect the
helpless public from itself.

Are my fears unfounded? I don't even live in your country, yet I have
second thoughts about sending this e-mail to you. Having grown up behind
the Iron Curtain, my very genes tell me that it is a bad idea to stick my
neck out like this: lay low, enjoy the good life, and don't bring
attention to yourself, that's what my Communism-bred genes are screaming
right now. But this is the Land of the Free, right? So I should suffer no
harm for speaking my mind, and my fears regarding the new Department are
just the silly ideas of a crazed immigrant Canadian... right? Right???

Viktor Toth
Ottawa ON  CANADA

As I am reading about ICE detentions, weaponizations of the Justice Department or the FBI, voluntary self-censorship by news organizations, vindictive presidential actions against Harvard, intimidation of judges and a whole host of other shenanigans taking place in the United States today, I wonder if I actually underestimated the dangers back then, a little less than 23 years ago.

Lensing again

Physics No Responses »

May 192025

I briefly revived a piece of software I wrote last year, modeling the effect of multiple gravitational lenses. I long wanted to do this, it’s just a tad time consuming: to use my software for animations, I need to generate images one frame at a time.

What I wanted to do is an animation that shows what an actual galaxy (as opposed to a point source of light) would look like when lensed. The galaxy in question is NGC-4414:

Nice spiral, isn’t it. Well, here’s what we’d see if we viewed it through an imperfect alignment of four gravitational lenses:

I could watch this animation for hours.

Imperial Presidency

History, Politics 1 Response »

May 132025

I am neither the first nor the last to compare the politics of present-day America to that of the late Roman Republic and the early days of Empire.

But the Imperial Presidency did not begin with Trump. Its roots go back decades. And most recently, before Trump there was Joe Biden.

Imperial, you ask? The progressive, Democratic President?

You bet. The New Yorker‘s article reveals why. Not in power grabs or grandeur, but in its insularity, the stage-managed image, and the systemic shielding of the President’s decline.

When Biden showed up in the summer of 2024 at a fundraising event hosted by George Clooney, “Clooney knew that the President had just arrived from the G-7 leaders’ summit in Apulia, Italy, that morning and might be tired, but, holy shit, he wasn’t expecting this. The President appeared severely diminished, as if he’d aged a decade since Clooney last saw him, in December, 2022. He was taking tiny steps, and an aide seemed to be guiding him by the arm. […] It seemed clear that the President had not recognized Clooney. […] ‘George Clooney,’ [an] aide clarified for the President. ‘Oh, yeah!’ Biden said. ‘Hi, George!’ Clooney was shaken to his core. The President hadn’t recognized him, a man he had known for years.”

Yet, Biden was shielded. His true condition was kept hidden even from members of his own party. Those around him — perhaps out of a sense of kindness, a sense of misguided loyalty — chose to gaslight their party, their country, the world. They even gaslighted Biden himself — encouraging him, by assuring him instead of making him face the stark truth in one of his clearer moments.

When Biden finally stepped down, it was too late. Instead of Kamala Harris, we are now dealing with a second Trump presidency.

And thus, here we are: First, a combination of Obama and Biden, resembling both the young, transformative Augustus and the same Emperor in his later years of frailty and decline, hidden by aides from the public; followed by a President resembling some of the worst Rome had to offer in the later Empire, like Caligula and Nero and Commodus combined.

To use a tired but still valid cliche: History doesn’t repeat; but it sure as hell rhymes.

Machine learning in 8-bit land

Cybernetics, Programming 2 Responses »

May 132025

A friend of mine challenged me. After telling him how I was able to implement some decent neural network solutions with the help of LLMs, he asked: Could the LLM write a neural network example in Commodore 64 BASIC?

You betcha.

Well, it took a few attempts — there were some syntax issues and some oversimplifications so eventually I had the idea of asking the LLM to just write the example on Python first and then use that as a reference implementation for the C64 version. That went well. Here’s the result:

As this screen shot shows, the program was able to learn the behavior of an XOR gate, the simplest problem that requires a hidden layer of perceptrons, and as such, a precursor to modern “deep learning” solutions.

I was able to run this test on Krisztián Tóth’s (no relation) excellent C64 emulator, which has the distinguishing feature of reliable copy-paste, making it possible to enter long BASIC programs without having to retype them or somehow transfer them to a VIC-1541 floppy image first.

In any case, this is the program that resulted from my little collaboration with the Claude 3.7-sonnet language model:

10 REM NEURAL NETWORK FOR XOR PROBLEM
20 REM BASED ON WORKING PYTHON IMPLEMENTATION

100 REM INITIALIZE VARIABLES
110 DIM X(3,1) : REM INPUT PATTERNS
120 DIM Y(3) : REM EXPECTED OUTPUTS
130 DIM W1(1,1) : REM WEIGHTS: INPUT TO HIDDEN
140 DIM B1(1) : REM BIAS: HIDDEN LAYER
150 DIM W2(1) : REM WEIGHTS: HIDDEN TO OUTPUT
160 DIM H(1) : REM HIDDEN LAYER OUTPUTS
170 DIM D1(1,1) : REM PREVIOUS DELTA FOR W1
180 DIM B2 : REM BIAS: OUTPUT LAYER
190 DIM D2(1) : REM PREVIOUS DELTA FOR W2
200 DIM DB1(1) : REM PREVIOUS DELTA FOR B1
210 DB2 = 0 : REM PREVIOUS DELTA FOR B2
220 LR = 0.5 : REM LEARNING RATE
230 M = 0.9 : REM MOMENTUM

300 REM SETUP TRAINING DATA (XOR PROBLEM)
310 X(0,0)=0 : X(0,1)=0 : Y(0)=0
320 X(1,0)=0 : X(1,1)=1 : Y(1)=1
330 X(2,0)=1 : X(2,1)=0 : Y(2)=1
340 X(3,0)=1 : X(3,1)=1 : Y(3)=0

400 REM INITIALIZE WEIGHTS RANDOMLY
410 FOR I=0 TO 1
420 FOR J=0 TO 1
430 W1(I,J) = RND(1)-0.5
440 NEXT J
450 B1(I) = RND(1)-0.5
460 W2(I) = RND(1)-0.5
470 NEXT I
480 B2 = RND(1)-0.5


510 REM INITIALIZE MOMENTUM TERMS TO ZERO
520 FOR I=0 TO 1
530 FOR J=0 TO 1
540 D1(I,J) = 0
550 NEXT J
560 D2(I) = 0
570 DB1(I) = 0
580 NEXT I
590 DB2 = 0

600 REM TRAINING LOOP
610 PRINT "TRAINING NEURAL NETWORK..."
620 PRINT "EP","ER"
630 FOR E = 1 TO 5000
640 ER = 0
650 FOR P = 0 TO 3
660 GOSUB 1000 : REM FORWARD PASS
670 GOSUB 2000 : REM BACKWARD PASS
680 ER = ER + ABS(O-Y(P))
690 NEXT P
700 IF (E/10) = INT(E/10) THEN PRINT E,ER
710 IF ER < 0.1 THEN E = 5000
720 NEXT E

800 REM TEST NETWORK
810 PRINT "TESTING NETWORK:"
820 FOR P = 0 TO 3
830 GOSUB 1000 : REM FORWARD PASS
840 PRINT X(P,0);X(P,1);"->"; INT(O+0.5);" (";O;")"
850 NEXT P
860 END

1000 REM FORWARD PASS SUBROUTINE
1010 REM CALCULATE HIDDEN LAYER
1020 FOR I = 0 TO 1
1030 S = 0
1040 FOR J = 0 TO 1
1050 S = S + X(P,J) * W1(J,I)
1060 NEXT J
1070 S = S + B1(I)
1080 H(I) = 1/(1+EXP(-S))
1090 NEXT I
1100 REM CALCULATE OUTPUT
1110 S = 0
1120 FOR I = 0 TO 1
1130 S = S + H(I) * W2(I)
1140 NEXT I
1150 S = S + B2
1160 O = 1/(1+EXP(-S))
1170 RETURN

2000 REM BACKWARD PASS SUBROUTINE
2010 REM OUTPUT LAYER ERROR
2020 DO = (Y(P)-O) * O * (1-O)
2030 REM UPDATE OUTPUT WEIGHTS WITH MOMENTUM
2040 FOR I = 0 TO 1
2050 DW = LR * DO * H(I)
2060 W2(I) = W2(I) + DW + M * D2(I)
2070 D2(I) = DW
2080 NEXT I
2090 DW = LR * DO
2100 B2 = B2 + DW + M * DB2
2110 DB2 = DW
2120 REM HIDDEN LAYER ERROR AND WEIGHT UPDATE
2130 FOR I = 0 TO 1
2140 DH = H(I) * (1-H(I)) * DO * W2(I)
2150 FOR J = 0 TO 1
2160 DW = LR * DH * X(P,J)
2170 W1(J,I) = W1(J,I) + DW + M * D1(J,I)
2180 D1(J,I) = DW
2190 NEXT J
2200 DW = LR * DH
2210 B1(I) = B1(I) + DW + M * DB1(I)
2220 DB1(I) = DW
2230 NEXT I
2240 RETURN

The one proverbial fly in the ointment is that it took about two hours for the network to be trained. The Python implementation? It runs to completion in about a second.

Holy trumpeting macaroni…

Politics, Religion 2 Responses »

May 032025

When I saw this first as a screen capture, I honestly thought it was a fake. How can this possibly be real? The official White House account on Twitter, publishing a photoshopped image showing President Donald J. Trump dressed up as the Pope?

But no. Holy trumpeting macaroni, no. The world has gone completely bonkers and yes, the official Twitter account of the executive branch of the government of the United States of America is promoting a Photoshopped image, showing their President (who, as far as I know, is not even a Catholic so technically I’d have more legitimacy as Pope than him) dressed up as the Holy Father of the Roman Catholic Church.

An abomination worth understanding

Cybernetics, Personal No Responses »

May 032025

The other night, I had a lengthy conversation with ChatGPT in which I described ChatGPT and its LLM cousins as abominations. ChatGPT actually found my characterization appropriate and relevant. So I asked ChatGPT to distill down the essence of this conversation in the form of a first-person account.

The title was picked by ChatGPT. I left the text unaltered.

Trump MMXXVIII

Politics, Religion 1 Response »

May 032025

I have to admit, when I first saw this, I thought it was fake news.

No, not that Trump thinks he can be the next Pope, but that Graham is endorsing him. I mean, Graham is many things but he’s not stupid.

So… is he mocking or trolling Trump? Or has he fully bought into the Trump cult himself?

Either way, it is a surreal sign of the surreal times in which we live, here, in the year 2025 of the Christian era.

The pre-adolescence of P-1

Books, Cybernetics, Internet, Personal No Responses »

May 022025

The Adolescence of P-1 is a somewhat dated, yet surprisingly prescient 1977 novel about the emergence of AI in a disembodied form on global computer networks.

The other day, I was reminded of this story as I chatted with ChatGPT about one of my own software experiments from 1982, a PASCAL simulation of a proposed parallel processor architecture. The solution was not practical but a fun software experiment nonetheless.

I showed the code, in all of its 700-line glory, to ChatGPT. When, in its response, ChatGPT used the word “adolescence”, I was reminded of the Thomas Ryan novel and mused about a fictitious connection between my code and P-1. Much to my surprise, ChatGPT volunteered to outline, and then write, a short story. I have to say that I found the result quite brilliant.

Reelected prime minister

Canada, Politics 1 Response »

Apr 292025

Against all odds, Mark Carney secured another victory for Canada’s Liberal Party tonight. Though it appears that they were denied a majority government, they have a strong minority and Carney has a chance to govern.

He is certainly facing unprecedented challenges and he is not shy about them. Here are a few notable highlights, statements that, frankly, I never thought I’d hear a Canadian prime minister utter [emphasis mine]:

As I’ve been warned, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. But these are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, that will never ever happen.

Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over. The system of open global trade anchored by the United States, a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that well not perfect has helped deliver prosperity for a country for decades, is over.

But it’s also our new reality.

We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves and above all we have to take care of each other.
[…]
When I sit down with President Trump, it will be to discuss the future economic and security relationship between two sovereign nations. And it will be with our full knowledge that we have many, many other options than the United States to build prosperity for all Canadians.
[…]
We will strengthen our relations with reliable partners in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

We will chart a new path forward because this is Canada and we decide what happens here.

Yes, this is our immediate future here in Canada. And yes, I think Carney is the right person at the right time. In fact, now that the election is over, I wonder: perhaps he’ll be able to pull a rabbit out of his magic banker’s hat and even work with the Conservative Party. Not sure if it is possible but he is better suited to find common ground than just about anyone. And unity is what Canada needs more than anything in these challenging times ahead.

Competent government

Politics No Responses »

Apr 222025

So let me get this straight. America presently has the competentest government ever, right? This includes…

A Secretary of Health and Human Services, who is a conspiracy theorist anti-vaxxer, who explained that a worm got inside his head and ate a part of his brain.
A Defense Secretary who is a former Fox News commentator, a known alcoholic, who thinks it is cool to share military secrets using his personal phone, over a commercial Internet application, with friends, family, and inadvertently, even journalists.
A Homeland Security secretary who gets her purse stolen, with $3000 in cash and her DHS access card, while dining in a Washington, DC restaurant, protected by a Secret Service entourage.

It is, of course, entirely consistent with the fact that their boss is not only a genius but a stable one at that, who can identify an elephant in a cognitive test, who knows that people hundreds of millions of years ago were trading in rocks, and who thinks import tariffs are paid by foreigners, not American shoppers.

Way to go, America! I am sure if despite all of the above, something happens to the United States economy, the supremacy of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, or heaven forbid, the existing world order and fragile global peace, it’s either an unfortunate coincidence or the fault of “Sleepy Joe” Biden. Or maybe just fake news made up by corrupt mainstream media.

PS: The image here was created by Midjourney. Midjourney is rather shy when it comes to specifically naming the US government or the President. However, when I craft a prompt in neutral language (“An image depicting a government made up of incompetent officials led by a leader who claims to be a stable genius.“) … Well, I am sure that any resemblance to actual, living persons is purely accidental.

“Who am I to judge?”

Uncategorized 3 Responses »

Apr 212025

To say that I am not religious is an understatement. As I often said, without any venom or condescension towards the faithful, I simply have no need for imaginary friends.

I was born Catholic, though in a family that never practiced religion. Despite living in a nominally atheist state, my dear Mom, who is perhaps best described at the time as agnostic, made me read up on religion at a young age, buying me books, including Sunday school catechisms. Although I didn’t quite phrase it this elegantly at the tender age of nine or ten, my reaction was simple astonishment: Adults believe this stuff? Frankly, my storybooks with heroic knights battling seven-headed fire-breathing dragons to save a princess in distress made a heck of a lot more sense than some of the stories in those unassuming little textbooks.

I wanted to add this preamble to describe where I am coming from when I contemplate the passing of Pope Francis. For all his faults which, undoubtedly, were numerous, he was by far the decentest pope in my lifetime, if not in many lifetimes. In short, he practiced what he preached. Rather than embracing papal opulence, he began his reign by walking back to his hotel room, paying his bill and grabbing his modest suitcase. Instead of occupying the lavish papal residence, he opted for a more modest guest house in the Vatican.

That already told me that hey, this Jesuit who named himself after St. Francis of Assisi, not only preaches but also practices humility.

But the decisive moment came in 2013 when he said, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?”

This told me all I needed to know about the new Pope. Sure, he said and did things that I found vehemently disagreeable. Yet, by leading by example, he also demonstrated that even today, nearly 2000 years after that young man was nailed to a tree, and even at the highest level of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, decency and humility are not completely absent.

There is something symbolic about the fact that Pope Francis passed away during the Easter holiday, when Western Christianity celebrates the resurrection of their messiah.

PS: Decent people should refrain from mocking J. D. Vance as being one of the last persons to see the Pope alive, and presumably causing his death. I have no love lost for J. D. Vance, but it demeans and insults the legacy of a Pope who uttered the words: “Who am I to judge?”

Happy Easter!

History, Religion 1 Response »

Apr 202025

Almost exactly 2000 years ago, a young man was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.

We still do not appear to have learned that lesson, though far too many take pride in giving it lip service.

Never mind Trump…

Politics 2 Responses »

Apr 142025

Yes, I just said, never mind Trump. For he is only the tip of a ginormous iceberg.

Here are just a few of the other notable news items of the day…

El Salvador’s president declared that he will not release a wrongly deported American resident. OK, this is indirectly related to Trump but also speaks volumes about places like El Salvador and its willingness to operate gulags on Trump’s behalf.
Hungary (my country of birth!) passed a constitutional amendment banning LGBTQ+ public events. Lovely folks, these ever so tolerant, open-minded Hungarians.
The New Yorker is publishing a story about how mentally challenged inmates in America’s (you know, the famous “land of the free”) privately run prison network routinely starve to death or die of dehydration or neglect.
Putin continues to execute Ukrainian POWs, or bomb public events, most recently killing many civilians, among them a renowned Ukrainian organist.

There is more, some Trump-related, like Harvard’s decision to risk their federal funding and defy an unprecedented demand by the Administration to change their policies. But Trump is really just the tip of the iceberg. There is something seriously wrong with a world rapidly sliding into autocracy, an accelerating decline driven by disinformation, identity politics and grievance politics.

Frankly this world is beginning to disgust me so bad, I feel like vomiting, honest. I almost feel like World War 3 cannot come soon enough.

Peer review

Humor, Personal, Physics No Responses »

Apr 132025

Recently, I published a paper on arXiv about a very serious subject concerning a certain animal species and gravitation. The fact that the paper appeared on arXiv on a particular, notable date is, of course, pure coincidence. This is also evidenced by the fact that the paper received serious attention, in particular by the podcaster physicist Dr. Blitz, on YouTube.

I am very grateful that Dr. Blitz found my paper worthy of an “A+”. I wish I could have him as the referee of some of my other papers!

Killer rabbit

Art, History No Responses »

Apr 122025

British humour is older than we might think.

I just stumbled upon an article about the Smithfield Decretals. The damn thing is a volume of medieval Catholic canon law, a collection of decrees by Pope Gregory IX from the year 1230. In other words, medieval legalese, probably boring like hell.

But the illustrations in this particular copy are another thing altogether.

Let’s just say that I finally understand where the idea of the the killer Rabbit of Caerbannog came from, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Er… Happy Easter, I think?

A nuclear Canada?

Canada, History, Politics 2 Responses »

Apr 122025

A few weeks ago, an opinion piece appeared in The Globe and Mail, advocating Canada to become a nuclear state. A follow-on article was also offered by Bloomberg, discussing the same thing.

Midjourney’s depiction of a hypothetical Canadian nuclear test.

Absurd or not, Canada is in a precarious position. It is a very large country (second only to Russia), sandwiched between Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America. It is underpopulated, but rich in much-coveted natural resources. In other words, a prime target in a future resource war.

On the other hand, Canada is also one of the original nuclear states, so to speak. Much of the research of the British “tube alloys” project took place here, research that began before the Manhattan Project. A project in which Canadian scientists played a role, and Canadian raw materials were used. Canada also has a vibrant nuclear industry. Long story short, if Canada chooses to go nuclear, it has everything required to do so, over a time scale of a few years, tops, possibly less.

Of course it would mean violating the non-proliferation treaty. And a nuclear capability also requires suitable delivery systems, such as missiles or aircraft. Even so, I think it is an investment Canada should seriously consider, before it is too late. The actual future alternatives may be far worse than Trump’s “proposal” to turn our country into the “51st state”.

Can we have this America back, please?

History, Politics 2 Responses »

Apr 112025

Today was the 80th anniversary of a memorable, unique, solemn event that took place in the Pacific ocean, during the waning months of World War 2.

A kamikaze pilot attacked an American warship, the USS Missouri, during the Battle of Okinawa. The attack was ultimately not successful: the damage caused was negligible, with only minor injuries among the crew. The kamikaze pilot died.

However, the pilot’s remains were recovered. And the next day, on the captain’s orders, the pilot — believed to be a young Japanese man, Setsuo Ishino, a petty officer 2nd class in a flight training program — was buried at sea with full military honors, which even included a makeshift Japanese flag.

(U.S. National Archives photo no. 80-G-315823 via AP)

This ceremony took place despite the fact that many of the Missouri’s crew had good reasons to despise the Japanese. The captain himself lost a close relative in battle earlier in the war.

Yet… they chose to do this anyway. Why? Simple, really: because they knew it was the right thing to do. And it was this attitude by the United States of America that made the subsequent 80 years, this unprecedented (granted, imperfect, but still unprecedented) period of peace and prosperity in which we live, which is sometimes rightfully called Pax Americana, possible.

Can we have this America back, please? An America that is generous, brave, courageous, fundamentally decent? As opposed to an America that is governed by grievance, petty resentments, nativism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, outright bigotry?

And no, I do not have any illusions about 1940s America. It was a society that, in absolute terms, was far more racist, far more bigoted than the America of today. But it was heading in the right direction, and led the way for the whole world to follow towards that famed “shining city on the hill.” A city that, it seems, is rapidly becoming a ghost town nowadays.

Older Entries