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<p>Nick -</p>
<p>"most egregiously bent thread" is a pretty high bar to reach on
FriAM... without Owen here to remind us of thread-hygiene, we are
a collective free-associative thermal bath (and myself, perhaps a
hotspot in that milieu)?<br>
</p>
<p>that said, your point is (well?) taken that you didn't get much
specific response to your offering:</p>
<p><img src="cid:part1.d29t2VG5.QSg7Ip6N@swcp.com" alt=""
width="527" height="527"></p>
<p>not knowing your prompt to Artist Tremblay, I was not sure how to
respond to the above. I sort of waited to see who else might
provide some parallax?<br>
</p>
<p>I did recognize that you triggered a clever mashup of the idea
that "Uncle Sam is ill" and that somehow had the country listened
to the sympathetic democratic donkey at his side , (gently)
remonstrating him for not inoculating our "body politic" more
strongly (by electing Kamala and a majority of House/Senate reps)?
<br>
</p>
<p>I wasn't as clear on the implications of Mumps itself... other
than the coincidence of names (MU + UMP)? I think I wondered if
MUMPS was way too mild/temporary of a condition for what we are
experiencing? I knew (of) Mumps as a child but don't think I knew
anyone who contracted/suffered it... maybe a few years too young
or a few counties too remote?</p>
<p>Everytime I see another AI-generated "cartoon" I am fascinated by
the emotional affect the characters are imbued with. The
technical issues with 3D modeling and rendering (if that were in
fact how the images are generated, which it is not, also
fascinating) are less fascinating... someone who understands the
transformer/diffusion processes in this context better than I can
maybe explain how/why that is?<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 3/16/25 4:51 PM, Nicholas Thompson
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAAXA=WmgwQD0gB8KwC9TRH07tvAP=efX-ybkhchK5LjuVWvVaw@mail.gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<div dir="auto">These contributions, interesting In their own
right , constitute the most egregiously bent thread that has
ever been foisted on friam. Am I being rebuked for offering
lame Political commentary, or are your guys just clueless?</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
<div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Mar 16, 2025 at
3:18 PM steve smith <<a href="mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">sasmyth@swcp.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
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style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204)">
<div>
<p><br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">It
seems to me they haven’t this through so good.
Thousands of NIH, NSF, and DOE funded scientists
out on the international market. Add to that
reduced regulation on advanced scientific
equipment and services. Augment with a general
sense of doom and self-interest and alienation
from their country of origin. Sounds like a
recipe for foreign-based companies to scoop them
up, if not other governments. I won’t suggest
particulars, but I think it is obvious how this
could result in bad outcomes. <br>
</span></p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p>My molecular biologist daughter is in the breach/sights
of this nonsense. She dedicated her career to
3rd-world focused virology (flavi like West Nile,
Dingue, Zika) and is now faced with the triple-whammy of
reduced funding/interest in third-world problems,
reduced *health* funding, and the spirit that suggests
as a woman in science she might somehow have gotten her
funding through DEI biases. She is not a candidate
for "defecting" to China or Russia in this context but
has been made crazy by watching her mid-career
colleagues defect from academic research to
profit-focused big pharma. She got pulled off Flavi's
to chase Coronas for a year or more because her
institution had more funding than they could spend and
her funding was a little more fungible... I think she
can (probably) hang in there through the current storm
(years) but not clear and it might actually be better
for her (career) to move to a European Institution
(though I don't know if that is even possible given what
EricS suggested about demand/supply.</p>
<p>After the fall of the Soviet Union, I participated in a
brief project reviewing US State Dept proposals by
(former) Soviet scientists seeking an alternative to
becomeing rogue nuclear scientists for who knows?
Seems like we are about to have our own problem of that
nature?<br>
</p>
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