[FRIAM] MUsk + trUMP's = MUMPS

[steve smith]

Nick -

"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)?

that said, your point is (well?) taken that you didn't get much specific 
response to your offering:

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?

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)?

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?

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?

On 3/16/25 4:51 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> 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?
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 16, 2025 at 3:18 PM steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
>
>>     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.
>>
>     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.
>
>     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?
>
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