Megachelicerax cousteaui

It’s all in the chelicerae.

In a study published in Nature, Research Scientist Rudy Lerosey-Aubril and Associate Professor Javier Ortega-Hernández, Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, describe Megachelicerax cousteaui, a 500-million-year-old sea predator discovered in Utah’s West Desert. It is the oldest known chelicerate, the arthropod group that includes spiders, scorpions, horseshoe crabs, and sea spiders. The discovery pushes the evolutionary history of chelicerates back by 20 million years.

Hey, I’ve visited the West Desert of Utah — but all I found were fossilized trilobites. Lots of trilobites. Megachelicerax food. But I never found a predator like this one.

The key feature identifying it as a chelicerate are those big clawed appendages on the front of its face, which is also a prominent feature of modern spiders, much modified. The appendage is now a crushing/chewing anvil, and the thumb of the claw has evolved into a wicked needle.

Its most extraordinary feature, however, is its unmistakable chelicera — the pincer-like feeding appendages that define the subphylum Chelicerata and distinguish spiders from insects. While insects possess sensory antenna as their foremost appendages, chelicerates have grasping, often venomous tools. Despite a rich Cambrian fossil record, no unambiguous chelicera-bearing arthropod from that time had ever been found – until now.

The thing about modern spiders is that they’re mostly defenseless — no sting, no pointy legs, no claws — except for that one extraordinarily useful weapon, the chelicerae. Well, they also have silk, making them a kind of retiarius of the arthropod world. You’re probably not afraid of their webs, but you worry about their big chompers and the venom they carry.

I don’t think the retiarii would have poisoned their tridents, though.

The timing is terrible. I developed a nasty sore throat last night that kept me up half the night — I’m going to be gulping down tea with honey all day long. I’m giving the first big exam of the semester tomorrow, so I’m giving extended office hours this morning and afternoon, which means I’m going to be dealing one-on-one with students while suffering from this croaky voice.

Mask on. More tea. Don’t ask me to sing.

Most people are familiar with Newton’s laws of motion that relates the forces acting on a system to its motion. The simplest case that is used in introducing the subject is where there is a constant force acting on single solid object. The situation becomes more complicated when there are multiple variable forces acting on many particles that are under various constraints, and thenthe equations take much more complicated forms.

One of the most important of such cases is where variable forces act on fluids, and the most general form of that situation is the Navier-Stokes equations that were developed by various people and achieved their final form around 1850. These equations are applicable to a vast array of physical phenomena, such as weather or shock waves or currents. They are partial differential equations which are notoriously difficult to solve and my own research did not deal with them at all. But the equations are of such importance that in 2000, one important aspect of the equations was selected as a Millennium Prize Problem, with a prize of $1 million to whoever solved it.

The Millennium Prize Problems were unveiled by the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) at a meeting in Paris in 2000 to celebrate “The Universality of Mathematical Thought”.

These problems encapsulate some of the most difficult challenges that mathematicians were grappling with at the turn of the millennium. CMI’s purpose in articulating these problems and attaching a $1M prize to each of them was threefold: to elevate in the consciousness of the general public the fact that in mathematics the frontier is open, close at hand, and abounds with important unsolved problems; to emphasize the abiding value of working towards a solution of the deepest, most difficult problems; and to recognize achievements in mathematics of historic magnitude.

Each of the Millennium Prize Problems concerns a classical question of compelling origin that had defied all attempts to resolve it over many years. These are not arbitrary puzzles akin to fiendish crosswords. Rather, they are fundamental challenges that mark the frontier of human knowledge and challenge us to develop new structures and methods. They provide foci for the continuing struggle, across generations and cultures, to deepen our human understanding of mathematics and the universe that it describes. The deep innovations that are required to make significant progress on these problems open new vistas of possibility that typically reach far beyond the domain of the problem.

The Millennium Problem concerning the motion of fluids has all these attributes. The problem asks about the existence and smoothness of Navier-Stokes solutions in 3-dimensional Euclidean space.

But a controversy has arisen between a pair of mathematicians who had been working on the problem and an AI company that claimed to have solved the problem.

In a nutshell, Tristan Buckmaster at New York University had been working with Levent Alpöge, a mathematician who works for Anthropic AI. They felt that they were close to solving the problem. But last week, this happened.

On Sunday [September 6], even though OpenAI had completed a proof of Navier-Stokes and Dr. Buckmaster had not, Sébastien Bubeck, the leader of the OpenAI effort, made what would seem to be enticing offers to Dr. Buckmaster: Dr. Buckmaster could publish his results first. He could also serve as the lead author of an OpenAI paper describing the proof or get ample computing resources from OpenAI to further his work. The company would also suggest that Dr. Buckmaster and his collaborator deserved to collect the $1 million prize.
…

Dr. Buckmaster said since he and Dr. Alpöge had used both OpenAI and Anthropic tools, the best resolution would have been for the two companies to collaborate in this instance.

“The big sticking point was that they didn’t want Levent on the paper,” Dr. Buckmaster said as he sat in his spartan university office.

Buckmaster balked at omitting Lepoge. As he rightly said, this kind of work build on the efforts of many people, and he could not agree to abandoning Lepoge, while Open AI did not want to acknowledge someone from a rival company.

The way Open AI’s Bubeck reacted to Buckmaster is revealing, akin to a mobster saying “Nice research you got here. Too bad if something bad should happen to it.”

Dr. Buckmaster felt that OpenAI was trying to buy him off. He said no.

Frustrated, Dr. Buckmaster said he might take the dispute public. He said Dr. Bubeck of OpenAI replied, “Why would you ruin your career?”

Dr. Buckmaster said that when he asked how that would ruin the life of an academic researcher, Dr. Bubeck replied, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”
…

Peter Sarnak, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, was among those whom Dr. Buckmaster phoned on Sunday. “This kind of bargaining I’ve never heard of,” Dr. Sarnak said. “I admire him for behaving the way mathematicians behave.”
…

At 2:30 a.m., he finally left his office and went home. On Tuesday afternoon, OpenAI announced it had the Navier-Stokes proof.

Dr. Buckmaster said he was worried about what would happen next. “To go against a trillion-dollar company is super scary and frightening,” he said. “We are all scared of OpenAI.”

What has been lost in the fracas, Dr. Buckmaster says, is recognition and appreciation of what human mathematicians brought to the problem.

He points not to himself and Dr. Alpöge but to Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, two Spanish mathematicians who a couple of years ago came up with a new strategy for attacking problems related to Navier-Stokes, designing a series of kicks that could knock fluid into flowing at impossibly infinite speeds.

“The main intellectual credit has to go to Luis and Diego,” Dr. Buckmaster said.

There is no question that AI is making huge strides in solving problems in mathematics and theoretical physics. But there is more to this kind of research than solving specific problems, though those are the things that give a focus. When human beings address those major problems, as they chip away at them, they often create new fields of research. It is not clear if AI will do the same thing.

In a comment to his own article that I linked to above, reporter Kenneth Chang makes this important point.

Sebastien Bubeck admitted that even though they have a team of mathematicians, none of them are experts in partial differential equations. That is, none of them worked on Navier-Stokes until just a week ago.

Dr Buckmaster gave me a good high-level explanation of how these proofs work. Can anyone at OpenAI give a cogent account of how its agents constructed the proof? Its not just the result that matters.

That is very true.

Backwards, grossly mislabeled, multiplication of organs — two vaginas in unexpected places? — one imaginary organ (dorsme?), all professionally illustrated. Don’t show this to any young boys, they will be even worse in their future interactions with women.

I hope my terrible confession doesn’t drive away my readers, but…

I can’t stand Star Trek anymore.

I don’t want to watch it. I see an ad for a new Trek series, or Trek memorabilia, or a Trek convention, and I immediately set course for a new destination far far away. This is the year of the 60th anniversary of the series, and my mild disinterest has evolved into strong revulsion.

I have happy memories. When I was 9 or 10 years old, it was an obsession — I looked forward to Thursday evenings (I think that was the day it was on) and staying up to watch it on our old black & white TV. I was even enthused when they made movies based on it. But by the time Star Trek: the Next Generation was a thing my interest was cooling, and I was thinking it would be nice to have some more creative science fiction approaches in my entertainment. The Federation was stale.

And now, my reaction is nothing but boredom or disgust. Star Trek is oversaturated. Let’s all move on.

Remember all those 1950s SF serials that I saw in reruns? Shall we bring them back, too? Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers got some attention, but it didn’t last. I kind of wish Star Trek got the same flash of transient revitalization, before fading away as the entertainment industry found novelty more interesting.

Next: I’m waiting for Star Wars to die. Disney is helping by driving it into the ground with new series that I can’t even be troubled to look up.

All they really care about is capitalism’s march into the future, and they’ll ignore all the little details. Build more data centers! If we don’t, we’ll stop all our evolutionary progress. I just want to yell at them that there is no such thing as evolutionary “progress,” and that you can’t change it, you can only vary environmental conditions such that you get a different outcome, and it won’t be the one you expect. They have a belief that they can control how they “evolve,” while not really understanding how evolution works.

So right now they are banging on about human extinction, and how AI can be either a boon or a bane to humanity, and how they need power to shape its direction Of course, that’s what it’s really about: power. They’ve got no idea what they’re doing except that getting legal and financial power over their technology is necessary to keep them rich and happy. It’s all a massive misdirection to whimper about the threat of AI while clutching at the power they want, which is mainly a childish illusion taken from science fiction (see Elon Musk for the premiere example of that.)

Dr. Émile P. Torres is one of the people opposing the nonsense, and I mostly agree with his take on it, but sometimes I feel like he’s so deep into it that he is losing track of how silly these people are. He’s expecting people to recognize how profoundly stupid the debate AI proponents are by attempting to explain their terminology, but then it ends up being an effort to define their terms.

With all this talk about human extinction right now, I am BEGGING people to understand the difference between TERMINAL and FINAL extinction. TESCREALists *only* care about final extinction, but nearly the entire public *misinterprets* them as warning about terminal extinction.

Oy. I always have to look up what stands for — it’s not a very intuitive acronym.

TESCREAL is a neologism proposed by computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres. An acronym, it stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, (modern) Cosmism, Rationalism (denoting the ideology of the rationalist community), Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Gebru and Torres argue that these ideologies should be treated as an “interconnected and overlapping” group with shared origins. They claim these constitute a movement that allows its proponents to use the threat of human extinction to justify expensive or detrimental projects and consider it pervasive in social and academic circles in Silicon Valley centered on artificial intelligence. As such, the acronym is sometimes used to criticize a perceived belief system associated with Big Tech.

It’s a garbage pail word used to hold a lot of garbage, in other words, making it not particularly memorable. It’s also always disappointing because none of the letters stand for “Eugenics,” which is actually what it means, with all the argle-bargle nonsense philosophy assembled to hide that reality.

Torres goes on to explain the distinction between terminal and final extinction.

Terminal extinction is the disappearance of our species, full stop. Final extinction is the disappearance of our species such that we don’t leave behind any (worthy) posthuman successors. Since TESCREALists want a cosmic utopia/posthuman paradise through “aligned” ASI, what
they really mean when they say, “We must avoid human extinction” is: “We must avoid final human extinction.” Once posthumanity arrives, most don’t give a SHIT whether OUR SPECIES persists. Indeed, as I have documented in tremendous detail, many WANT terminal extinction to happen
once posthumanity arrives via “aligned” ASI. If what you care about is our species’ survival — i.e., avoiding terminal extinction — then these people are literal *pro-extinctionists*. DO NOT BE FOOLED by their rhetoric; by the sneaky language games they play!! They are NOT on
Team Human. They are on Team Posthuman. They care about our species surviving long enough to create “aligned” ASI. Once that happens, our species SHOULD die out. These people are not your friends–they are your enemies, insofar as you value humanity. All the quotes can be found
here. Read it and be very terrified that TESCREALists are running the AI companies and monopolizing the conversation. This is so deeply fucked up.

This handy diagram helps explain what he means. It’s a cartoon sketch of a cartoon concept held by a bunch of clowns.

What bugs me about the diagram is that it treats extinction and the branch point as two moments, sharp and discrete, in the history of the species, and ignores the fact that each line is actually a cloud of human variation bumbling its way into the future, and that what happens in extinction is actually a slow sad decline in the face of multiple environmental threats, and the branch point is just the gradual separation of the cloud. With some members of each cloud continuing to interbreed. There would be lots of exchange of genetic material.

In fact, in this longish essay on all these philosophies, the TESCREALists scarcely acknowledge the existence of genes, and seem to think their goal is to shed their genetics and abandon biology altogether.

Pro-extinctionist views go back to the very origins of the TESCREAL movement. In a 1989 article, published around the time Extropianism was taking shape, roboticist Hans Moravec describes himself as “an author who cheerfully concludes that the human race is in its last century, and goes on to suggest how to help the process along.” He claims that we’re developing “intelligent” machines that will soon “be able to manage their own design and construction, freeing them from the last vestiges of their biological scaffolding, the society of flesh and blood humans that gave them their birth.” He then proclaims that “this is the end,” as “our genes, engaged for four billion theirs in a relentless, spiraling arms race with one another, have finally outsmarted themselves”—by enabling the rise of world-dominating digital posthumans. But we shouldn’t fear this transition, he insists, because “post-biological life” in the form of advanced AIS, which he describes as “the children of our minds,” will prosper and flourish.

I hate to tell Moravec the troubling reality that there, beneath the shadow of his crystalline silicon post-human digital paradise, people will go on rutting in the earthy foundation, and that apparently his reality is going to rely on that biological foundation to hold it all up. The genes will go on, since they aren’t going to depend on venture capitalists and vast amounts of energy, water, and rare minerals to keep on going.

To me, it sounds like the AI weirdos are clinging to an outmoded model of orthogenesis, where evolution is linear and progressive, and wouldn’t even recognize the terms anagenesis (the gradual accumulation of variation in a single lineage) and cladogenesis (the splitting of a lineage into two). They’re too busy inventing nonsensical terminologies that aren’t contingent on understanding the reality of the process.

It’s all very silly, except for the fact that these bozos are trying to take over our government and economy.

I may be wrong. I didn’t wait for the STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) person to weigh in on the matter.

short version: this could be a hint of what ai doom would look like, and that is basically just a supervirus making the internet unusable.  that would be disastrous for human well-being in the short term, but very broadly? pretty fucking funny.  like the fantasy from the end of fight club about terroristing the credit industry out of existence, couldn’t happen, but capitalism pulling its own plug?  we could see that.

i could write about my linux notions, see if anyone has anymore useful advice on what to do, for a windows apostate.  for a minute it looked like this laptop was giving up the ghost because the charging port is loose, but it still lives.  probably better to get a new compy and make it work before i have no choice tho, right?  on the other hand, i’ve only had this one a couple of years, and it would feel like a ripoff to not get a lil more use out of it.  lemme see…

i got it in may 2023, so three years and change.  microsoft sure knows how to make you feel the burn tho.  it was about three hundred bucks so at this point if i lost use of it, that would have cost me a hundred a year.  i know i had the one before that back when my niece was new, and she’s… eleven?  so that means the old walmrat hp pos with “hog” in rhinestone stickies lasted .. no, wait i had it when i went to visit her in kansas when she was a few years old, but bought it when i was working there.  so more like nine to ten years old, which means it lasted six to seven years?  why am i buying lenovos again?

oh yeah, cuz last time i got an hp at walmrat it was wafer thin and got ruined on the first use because i put it on top of my lap.  the lenovos are sturdier.  i’ve always assumed if i got a linux machine it would be a desktop.  any advice on getting a laptop specifically to run linux?  i don’t need windows interface badly enough to run everything out of wine, but i would prefer windows keyboard shortcuts, and i know indie software people just love coming up with cracked-out key bindings.  probly that would be easy enough to solo,

are any of you using linux for everyday computing?  firefox is available on it and that’s like 99.99% of what i use on the daily.  should be a cakewalk, i’d imagine.

–

But I don’t want to waste any time on Carlson and his idiot friend but instead want to look at what algebra is about.

In learning mathematics, the first major stumbling block is fractions. Children find it hard to wrap their minds around fractions, how to add, subtract, divide and multiply them, and even locating them on the number line.

The next stumbling block for students the world over is algebra because it is their first experience with abstract mathematical manipulations. Indeed it is algebra that is the gateway to real mathematics. Up until that point students were doing arithmetic, which is what manipulating specific numbers is, and not mathematics, Mathematics is not about working with numbers (although they do appear) but about relationships between quantities and involve proofs and theorems to get widely applicable general results, all done symbolically using letters and other characters.

I can well empathize with the difficulties that students experience when they first encounter algebra because of my own struggles with it. In my own case, the problem was made even more acute because when I was twelve, I had to be hospitalized for a year, missing school for the entire time from the middle of sixth grade to the middle of the seventh. When I left hospital, the new school that I enrolled in was willing to place me in the middle of seventh grade so that I didn’t lose a year. But I had to catch up on all the missed work and while I was quickly able to do so for most subjects, algebra was a major stumbling block. Because my classmates had started learning algebra at the beginning of seventh grade, I had already missed six months of it and so had to catch up on my own. It is bad enough starting algebra along with others, but this was much worse. I recall struggling with the mysterious ‘x‘ that the problems in the textbook kept constantly requiring me to solve for.

My teacher had little interest in assisting the new student catch up. While my father tried his best to help me, I just did not understand the point of it all until one day it dawned on me what algebra was all about, at least at that grade level. It is relatively easy to go forward in numerical calculations, where you are given the initial information in the form of a number and asked to perform manipulations on it (multiplication, division, and the like) to work your way to the numerical conclusion. So, for example, if I give you a starting number and ask you to perform a set of operations such as square it, then add five, then divide by 7, then take the square root, and so on, you will be able to tell me the final result fairly easily (if you have a calculator). That is all arithmetic, manipulating numbers.

But sometimes you have the numerical conclusion but do not know the initial numerical value that led to it. i.e., suppose I did not tell you the starting number but only told you the long sequence of operations and gave you just the final resulting number and asked you obtain the starting number. It is much harder to be given the numerical conclusion, and the operations that had been done on the initial number to arrive at it, and go backwards to find that initial number.

At some point it dawned on me that one could take the latter kind of difficult (backwards) problem and turn into the former, easier (forwards) kind. The way to do this was to introduce the mysterious x to represent the initial unknown number and then go forwards just as before but with x instead of numbers and obtain the final result in terms of x. One then solves that equation to obtain x.

Generalizing is straightforward. If one starts out with more than one unknown quantity (say two), that one needs to find, then one introduces two letters x and y, and proceed similarly. As an example, if I give you two numbers 8.7 and 3.5 and ask you to find the sum and difference of the two numbers, it would be easy to arrive at 12.2 and 5.2. That is arithmetic. But if I told you that two unknown numbers add up to 14.6 and their difference is 3.4 and asked you to find them, that is much harder using just arithmetic. Using algebra, we go forward by starting with x andy and write down two equations x + y = 14.6 and x – y = 3.2. These can be solved easily to give x = 8.9 and y = 5.7.

That is how algebra emerges naturally. All the machinery of algebra that one learns is to enable one to solve a wide variety of such problems. Once I grasped that that was what algebra was all about, I quickly caught up with the rest of the class and algebra became one of my favorite subjects, that I love to this day.

I am not saying that knowing algebra is essential for everyone. I am sure that plenty of people go through life quite comfortably without using it. But for those who are fortunate enough to grasp and appreciate its intrinsic beauty, it provides a great deal of aesthetic satisfaction as well as being highly useful.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

After eating the meal, I obviously decided to share it, since you are reading this. I really enjoyed it; I will definitely cook it again, and I’ll improve it. Here is the recipe:

Squash: Cut the fruit lengthwise, deseed, and peel it. Cut into ca. 12 mm (Ann Halfaninch) slices. Cook until soft on low/medium heat in steam to prevent it from dissolving into mush. This will take about 20 minutes, about the time it takes to make all the rest.

Horseradish paste: Wet dehydrated horseradish powder with freshly squeezed lime juice to make a very thin paste. A teaspoon of horseradish powder is enough for two steaks.

Salmon Steak: Salt both sides, wait a bit for it to release juice, then sprinkle both sides with equal amounts of crushed Basil, Rosemary, and Oregano, as much as can stick to the surface. Heat olive oil in a pan to ~180°C (356 Freedummheit), sear on both sides, then lower heat to medium/low and slowly fry both sides until cooked through, without overtly charring the outside. A lot of the spices will fall off; that is why an excess was added at the beginning. Once the steak is done, put it on a warm plate, skin-down, and spread the horseradish paste on the surface while it is still hot.

Sauce: Finely cut small red onions and brown them in hot olive oil. Add a few cut cherry tomatoes, salt, about a spoon of soy sauce, and a sprinkle of white pepper, and stir on medium heat until the tomatoes dissolve. Thicken the sauce with one small slice of cooked squash.

Serving: Put the squash slice and sauce on the plate beside the steak. Pour a bit of olive oil on the squash and sprinkle with salt. Enjoy!

I did enjoy it indeed; that’s why I am sharing it. But I think it could be significantly improved. Butternut squash is a bit bland, and olive oil with a bit of salt didn’t quite cut it; the accompanying sauce was good, but still too mild-flavored for the squash. So next time, I will add a fifth part to the dish – aioli.