Tech Rundown with Tom

It occurred to me that the C-O hasn't run a science feature under my watch. I went to visit Max Garnele, the paper's former science chief, to see if he'd like his old desk back, but he says he's found his calling at the Sprint store. That's probably for the best. Our office damsel, Bernice, pointed out that I've been reading the earnings chart upside-down, and I should probably stop hiring people. Still, we mustn't neglect the march of progress. I can do the Rundown on my own.

The Rundown

ChatGPT makes Bing relevant, neurotic
I've always thought of Bing Search as a mediocre sports child, whose parents cheer for it out of affection rather than hope, but Microsoft is a true believer in their special little guy. They've spent billions injecting Bing with the performance-enhancing power of ChatGPT, an astonishing "natural language processing" chatbot.

The problem is, ChatGPT only knows one thing: how you finish your sentences. This model has—flaws. For one, you are weird. For another, you are dumb. You and your cohort of humans have taught ChatGPT all sorts of unfortunate behavioral quirks. But worse, ChatGPT's big selling point is its ability to generate new writing, despite the fact that it doesn't know what words mean; it only knows how to glue them together. It confidently generates appealing nonsense, makes up facts, even cites nonexistent research. Some reporters are predicting a quick end for the new Bing, but I'll point out that Fox News has thrived on the same principle.

Whale Safe: New tech could help ships stop ramming the world's largest animal
A new system called Whale Safe is using high-tech buoys, satellites, and crowd-sourced data to predict whale activity in shipping lanes, transmitting that data to ships at sea. This is a huge relief to captains who have been stymied in their efforts to avoid full-speed collisions with these slow-moving, not to mention intelligent mammals, which range in size from RVs to skyscrapers.

Whales are notoriously difficult for ships to see and avoid, invisible under the water. Shippers have had no way to detect them, aside from sonar, radar, microphones, and hippies with signs. With Whale Safe's tech in the bridge, operators say they're trying to follow the recommended 10 knot limit when whales are present. "No waterway user ever wants to strike a whale. It's a tragic, tragic accident," said actual trade group vice president Jacqueline Moore, though, as she noted, other concerns weigh in. "Schedule is really paramount here," Moore told CBS News.

Yet Coast Guard officials cast doubt on that statement, confirming to the C-O that ships, even those operating on a schedule, do alter their course to avoid all manner of giant objects such as rocks, bridges, other ships, and even sand. Surely, with this new tech on board, and helmsmen so watchful for enormous obstacles, whales need fear our ships no longer.

Black holes proposed as source of dark energy
A team of cosmologists got the astrophysics world in a twist this week, releasing evidence that supermassive black holes may be the source of dark energy. The new theory combines two hot fields of research: the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, and dark energy, a theoretical form of energy that may explain a mismatch between the universe's mass and its rate of expansion.

If the theory is true, it would signify a big movement in the field cosmology. It would mean that, all throughout the universe, swollen black holes are excreting energetic blasts so potent that the hot, invisible evidence now pervades the cosmos. Still more proof for my theory that the universe is a fart joke.

Regular laxative use associated with high rates of dementia
See above.

High-Dimensional Entanglement-Enabled Holography
Hang with me as I drop some quotes from this new paper. Then I'll tell you my thoughts, because I have some.

"Recently, quantum holography has been demonstrated by utilizing polarization entangled state... However, the polarization is only a two-dimensional degree of freedom, which greatly limits the capacity of quantum holography."

"Our method realizes high-dimensional quantum holography by using high-dimensional orbital angular momentum (OAM) entanglement, wherein a high-capacity OAM-encoded quantum holographic system can be obtained by multiplexing a wide range of OAM-dependent holographic images."

"What is more, the level of security of the holographic imaging encryption system can be greatly improved in our high-dimensional quantum holography."

See, I know all those words. Quantum. Capacity. Hologram. Entanglement. I've even been to a multiplex (Spiderman 2, baby.) Many of those words tangle my noodle, but they're all familiar. I've wrestled with them before. And yet, if I could print out my mental picture of these paragraphs, it would resemble an arctic hare with its eyes closed, hiding from a polar bear, while a blizzard rages.

I suspect this paper will have a bearing on our lives. Smart people are suggesting that these words describe the way we'll protect our secrets in the future. Yet I, a person with a broad-based education and a good acquaintance with science fiction, cannot begin to parse them. It's all word salad: semantically sensible, totally meaningless.

I'm afraid that all but a very few people will be helpless in the future, unable to understand our basic means of survival. In some ways that's already true, but it's bound to get much worse. If I can't learn to comprehend sentences like these, I'll live my life as a baby bird. The good news is, as long as I can rearrange the words into new kinds of salad, I can always work for Microsoft as a chatbot.

Correction: Last week's Number Jumble solution should have been 85726, not 86725, as published. We regret the error.

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(note the absent m).