I am seeing this message now almost every day at least once!
Well, I did not melt thousands of commercial freezers in France!
P.S. aei.org (American Enterprise Institute) is what leftists probably consider a right wing entity.
Thursday, November 12, 2026
White House counsel Warns Democratic Party Representatives not to abuse subpoena powers
Good news! Good move! Being proactive is often commendable! Put the Dimocrats on notice!
"White House counsel Will Scharf warned incoming House Oversight Chair Robert Garcia in a letter reported Wednesday that Democrat investigations of the Trump administration “may cross the line into blatant criminality.”
Scharf wrote that subpoenas “designed merely to abuse or instill fear in the recipient” could be criminal, pointing to Democrat threats to issue them indiscriminately once the party takes control of both chambers in January. ..."
Tiny Fingerprints Reveal Children Helped Make Ancient Clay Art in Israel about 15,000 years ago
Amazing stuff!
"Fingerprints pressed into clay 15,000 years ago show that adults and children in what is now Israel made art side by side, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem reports. The study... describes the earliest known tradition of making clay figurines in the Middle East.
The researchers examined 154 clay artifacts... The objects came from three sites in modern-day Israel and date back between about 15,000 and 11,500 years ago ... Some depict birds, mammals and humans. ... The makers belonged to the Natufian culture, a group of hunter-gatherers who formed some of the first permanent settlements in the Levant ...
Archaeologists had believed clay figurines became common in the region only with the agricultural revolution, beginning around 11,500 years ago, according to the study. Earlier Natufian figurines were mostly bone or stone. The new finds push the clay tradition back well before farming villages and the invention of pottery ..."
From the abstract:
"The emergence of clay technologies and their use in symbolic practices marks a momentous techno-symbolic innovation for human societies.
While in North Africa, Europe and East Asia, this innovation was sporadically attested during the Upper Palaeolithic, in Southwest Asia, it has been commonly believed to emerge in full much later, as one of the innovations associated with Neolithic agricultural societies.
Here, shifting back the ‘revolution of symbols’, we report evidence of the earliest clay figurative tradition in Southwest Asia with the discovery of 154 figurative artefacts from three Natufian (15,000–11,650 years cal. BP) sites in the Southern Levant (Israel).
Through a combined multidisciplinary approach, we demonstrate that children and adults manufactured these objects to produce new symbols with new figurative techniques and practices used as their primary media of figurative expression.
Our study provides important original insights regarding the demographics of craft production and the development of symbolic practices at the beginning of sedentism that influenced the Neolithic transition in Southwest Asia."
Stone Age children left fingerprints on ancient art projects "Clay figurines hint at hands-on learning in the Levant"
15,000 Years Ago, Children Shaped Clay, Long Before Pottery or Farming (original news release from 3/23/2026)
Modelling symbols among the first-sedentary communities: Emergence of clay figurines in Epipaleolithic Southwest Asia (open access)
Fig 1. Sample of Natufian zoomorphic, anthropomorphic and phallic bone, stone and clay figurations from the Southern Levant
Fig 9. Sample of the fingerprints identified on the clay figurines, cylinders and shapings.
The torso of this 14,500-year-old human figurine preserves the fingerprints of an adult (left) and child (right). Researchers think the adult taught the child how to shape the clay.
Nvidia names CFO Colette Kress (age 59) as interim CEO
Did she have a romantic affair with Jensen Huang? Maybe not, she is too old!
Did she have any extramarital affairs of her own?
She has served as the executive vice president and chief financial officer (CFO) of Nvidia since 2013. (Source)
Colette Kress (Source)
NATO taps Ukrainian forces as red-team. Really!
Headline of the day! There is some irony in this!
I guess, NATO could not find any Russian forces! đ
"As NATO races to update its battlefield tactics, a senior official said the use of Ukrainian forces as a “red team” in exercises is meant to “trigger an adaptation cycle” within the alliance. ..."
Flag of NATO (Source)
Unruhen in Frankfurt: 110 Strafanzeigen, TĂ€ter aus elf Nationen
Das war doch nur eine einmalige Entgleisung oder?
Keine Pauschalierungen bitte, beschwichtigen ist angesagt! đ
Deutschland ist ein Schmelztiegel geworden auch was gewalttÀtige Demonstrationen angeht!
Ein ein Pole, ein RumÀne und ein Ukrainer war auch dabei!
"... Dass 53 TĂ€ter bereits festgenommen worden sind, das wird ebenso bestĂ€tigt. Insgesamt setzte es fĂŒr die PlĂŒnderer und GewalttĂ€ter 110 Strafanzeigen. ...
Unter den 53 verhafteten HaupttĂ€tern sind nur 22 Personen mit deutscher StaatsbĂŒrgerschaft. ...
Unter den Festgenommenen waren auch 16 auslĂ€ndische Staatsangehörige: Vier Afghanen, zwei Syrer, zwei Tunesier, zwei TĂŒrken, ein Bosnier, ein Migrant aus Eritrea, ein Iraker, ein Pole, ein RumĂ€ne und ein Ukrainer. ..."
The History and Future of Neuroeconomics. Is there a future? Really!
Economics has been for a long time an already wobbly social science by itself full of peculiarities and anecdotes! I am an economist myself.
Where does neuroeconomics fit in with micro- and macroeconomics?
From the definition cited below I can not really tell the difference between economics and neuroeconomics.
I have a hunch that this pseudoscience called neuroeconomics will fade away and disappear within the next 10-20 years or so.
"In early October, neuroeconomics scholars descended on Pasadena to attend the Society for Neuroeconomics' annual conference and learn about the latest research in the field. ...
Caltech faculty have been at the forefront of the development and growth of neuroeconomics since its formal inception in the early 2000s. ...
Caltech faculty have been at the forefront of the development and growth of neuroeconomics since its formal inception in the early 2000s. ...
So, what exactly is neuroeconomics? The Society for Neuroeconomics website describes as a field that "represents the confluence of economics, psychology, and neuroscience in the study of human decision making." ... the aim of the field is much more profound.
"Neuroeconomics is about understanding human nature: Who is it that we are? Why do we do what we do?" ...
The idea of combining neuroscience and economics research really started to gain some traction and coalesce into a field when the Society for Neuroeconomics was formally established in 2005. How did the organization bring these disciplines together? ..."
Fingernail-sized chip untangles mixed light
Good news! This could be huge!
"In brief
- Most everyday light sources, such as light bulbs, produce incoherent light. Unlike laser light, their light waves do not maintain a fixed relationship with one another. When different light contributions overlap, separating them into their underlying components has long been a challenge.
- Combining advanced light-based chips and a sorting algorithm, the researchers created a device that produced separated, pure incoherent beams from a mix of incoherent or partially coherent light sources. They were able to do this with two and three input lights.
- By allowing researchers to distinguish between different light sources, this advance could help extract more information from light to improve many technologies, such as cameras, microscopes, and telescopes.
... designed a chip that can take a muddled mixture of light from multiple lasers and output clean beams of light.
It’s the first time researchers have demonstrated a device that can take in mixed, or partially coherent, light and sort its photons into a clear set of separate beams. ..."
From the abstract:
"While partial coherence often degrades interference and information transfer, its correlations can be engineered to enhance imaging and optical information processing.
However, approaches based on tomography and numerical reconstruction do not physically separate unknown fields into their coherence modes—that is, their orthogonal and mutually incoherent components.
Here we demonstrate the separation of partially coherent light into coherence modes.
We use variational processing in layered self-configuring interferometers on a silicon photonic circuit.
This process finds the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of the coherency matrix, characterizing the state while leaving it intact and separated after optimization.
We show that spatially orthogonal, mutually incoherent beams can be routed to separate outputs even when their intensity profiles overlap.
Our experiment separates the two strongest coherence modes from a nine-input sampling of overlapping fields from two independent lasers; operation beyond two modes is verified in a rank-3 experiment.
The number of physical components scales linearly with the rank r of the coherency matrix, through r in situ gradient-based optimizations enabled by electronic drive-frequency multiplexing of the phase shifters.
We benchmark performance against an on-chip mixture-based tomographic method.
These results establish a scalable framework for programmable coherence analysis and control."
Automatic on-chip separation of partially coherent light into its mutually incoherent components (open access)
Fig. 1: An integrated photonic circuit to process spatial partial coherence.
Tiny volcanic crystals could predict future volcanic eruptions
Amazing stuff!
"... Rather than study common precursors such as earthquakes or gas, a team decided to take a peek inside of Earth at tiny crystals that grow within magma.
Magma contains many kinds of crystal minerals depending on how deep it is stored beneath a volcano. Researchers turned to a mineral called plagioclase—one of the most common in the chain of volcanoes known as the Pacific Ring of Fire—that has different appearances and compositions depending on the conditions of the surrounding magma. Plagioclase can therefore provide clues as to what magma was doing before an eruption.
Researchers collected volcanic rocks from the Andean Mountains, one of the most active regions in the Ring of Fire, then analyzed the structures and compositions of the rocks’ plagioclase.
Across seven volcanoes, the team found that the tiniest crystals—only the width of a human hair—form just before a volcano erupts, when hot magma fills in where cold magma used to sit and destabilizes the system. Similar tiny crystals appeared in existing datasets of eruptions. ..."
"... researchers have shown tiny crystals are a window to activity inside volcanoes and could provide clues to when they might erupt. ...
examined a common white crystal called ‘plagioclase’, found in rocks.
The smallest crystals from Andean volcanoes of different ages, eruptive styles and activity levels had the same chemical signature.
“Plagioclase grows in magma only a few kilometres below the surface, reacting to changes in temperature, water content and magma composition,” ...
"Analysing the chemistry of individual crystals rather than whole rocks allows us to reconstruct different stages of a volcano's history and identify the processes that occurred immediately before eruption.
“The smallest, newest crystals – just the width of a human hair – were formed during the final stages of an eruption. ..."
From the abstract (unfortunately, a very technical):
"Arc andesites are hybrids generated by mixing of mafic and silicic magmas. The silicic endmember can contribute to crustal growth or trigger explosive eruptions, yet remains difficult to constrain due to limited representation in the erupted record.
Here, we show that textural, elemental and isotopic records preserved in plagioclase can distinguish between trapped and erupted crystal mush, thus constraining conditions of magma storage vs. eruption in arc systems.
We define the plagioclase eruptibility field, a narrow and recurrent anorthite range (An~61) that represents erupted melt across Central Andes volcanoes upon mafic recharge.
The recycled plagioclase cargo is dominantly An~43, recording prolonged crystallisation and assimilation within silicic mushes. This pattern repeats in continental and composite arcs globally, indicating strong eruptive filtering of arc magmas and widespread occurrence of dormant felsic and mafic mushes that, in most cases, contribute to crustal growth; yet exceptionally, felsic mushes can rapidly remobilise to generate super-eruptions."
Crystals hint at a volcano’s ability to erupt (original news release)
Fig. 1: Back-scattered electron (BSE) and transmitted-light images (PPL, plane-polarised light; XPL, cross-polarised light) illustrating the plagioclase textural classification.
Mauersteine aus Stroh soll drei Geschosse tragen, jetzt steht der erste Pavillon
Dem deutschen Ingenieure ist nichts zu schwör! Was bedeutet das Wort strohdumm!
Seltsames oder Gewohntes aus der Bananenrepublik D!
Der StrawBrick-Pavillon in Stuttgart zeigt, wie sich Stroh als nachhaltiger Baustoff fĂŒr tragende GebĂ€ude nutzen lĂ€sst.
Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia chief
A married man and CEO with too many romantic affairs with mature women and a female employee!
Yesterday, it was claimed that he had at least a second affair. I blogged here about it.
Too bad, now we will not learn about other romantic affairs anymore, I am afraid.
Will his wife now get a divorce?
Jensen Huang
From Pixels to Actions--Towards Native Vision-Language-Action Policies
This could be an interesting new research paper by Ziwei Liu and his team!
From the abstract:
"Vision-language-action models are typically built on a simple premise: perception is first compressed by visual encoders, and action reasoning begins only afterwards.
Yet manipulation often hinges on precisely the visual signals most vulnerable to this abstraction, e.g., local geometry, boundaries, depth, and subtle state changes. This raises a fundamental question: should action policies inherit a fixed visual endpoint, or directly access evolving visual computation?
We introduce NEO-VLA, a structurally encoder-free vision-language-action framework.
Images are tokenized by lightweight patch convolutional layers and evolve jointly with language throughout the backbone, allowing a flow-matching action expert to draw from instruction-conditioned visual representations at different depths.
This simple change reveals a consistent pattern. Native architectures outperform encoder-based counterparts under controlled comparisons; full fine-tuning reduces but does not erase the gap, and additional scale alone cannot recover it.
More strikingly, layer-wise probing shows that the action-critical signals often peak well before the final visual representation.
Across diverse manipulation settings and distribution shifts, NEO-VLA consequently achieves stronger and more robust control.
Together, these results suggest that embodied control benefits from access to visual representations across the computational hierarchy, rather than a fixed encoder output."
VFlash: Fast, Accurate Visual Planning via Flash Primitive Decoding
This could be an interesting new research paper by Alan Yuille and Jan Kautz and their team! By the way, these researchers are from Nvidia.
Jan Kautz is the Vice President of Research, NVIDIA Research. Any Chinese spies involved? Just kidding!
From the abstract:
"Models for physical AI tasks, such as robotics and autonomous driving, need not reason solely in language. They can use visual plans--points, bounding boxes, and trajectories--to represent spatial goals and anticipate motion.
However, autoregressive vision-language models generate these plans one coordinate token at a time, making richer predictions increasingly costly.
We introduce VFlash, a method for fast, accurate visual planning through Flash Primitive Decoding.
VFlash exploits the known structure of visual primitives to predict their coordinates jointly, using a lightweight drafter that generates an entire primitive in one forward pass. The layout adapts to the primitive's type, dimensionality, and length, supporting compact boxes and long, variable-length trajectories. Crucially, spatial accuracy need not require reproducing an autoregressive model's exact token sequence.
VFlash therefore trains on annotated primitives and directly accepts structurally valid predictions without target-token agreement. Across the evaluated 2D and 3D robot trajectory tasks, VFlash consistently reduces prediction errors relative to autoregressive decoding.
Preliminary single-rollout measurements indicate approximately 25x faster generation for 3D point motion forecasting.
A world action model conditioned on VFlash plans achieves 70.2% average success across four MolmoSpaces task suites, compared with 62.6% for the baseline."
Wednesday, November 11, 2026
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is reported to have had a second extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell,
What a gigolo! He prefers mature women! She is married too!
Ms. Powell is Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare and a direct subordinate.
There got to be at least a third woman! đ
The famous expression "let the chips fall where they may" gets a whole new meaning! đ
Kimberly Powell (age 48)
A long list of President Trump administration officials living on military bases due to to security concerns, threats, or harassment
This seems to be extremely unusual! This is not acceptable!
According to Google:
"Several senior Trump administration officials reside or have resided on U.S. military bases in the Washington, D.C., area due to security concerns, threats, or harassment:
Todd Blanche – Attorney General, living on a U.S. military base since early 2026.
Scott Bessent – Treasury Secretary, relocated to a military base following security threats from Iran.
Marco Rubio – Secretary of State, living on Generals Row at Fort McNair.
Pete Hegseth – Secretary of Defense (War Secretary), living on Generals Row at Fort McNair.
Stephen Miller – White House Chief of Staff (and former Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy), moved into military housing after facing protests and harassment at his Virginia home.
Kristi Noem – Former Secretary of Homeland Security, lived in government-owned housing at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling.
Pam Bondi – Former Attorney General, previously resided on a military installation.
Dan Driscoll – Secretary of the Army, shared military housing at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall. "
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