Posts by Peter Prof Fox

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

Oh noes!

If only President Trump could DO SOMETHING! Millions of American lives could be saved.

DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI

Maths is about confirmation of sparky ideas

Not average or consensus.

1000 people say this over the years. Along comes me with my P=NP so I can't possibly be right.

AI might well have a role in warning people where proofs have been scored to stop reinventing the wheel or disproving the wheel. That's only hints though and so many million Eulers miles from proof.

In the olden days we'd wake up in the middle of the night and realise the power of our knowledge or plod on, angry at our ignorance to furtle another day.

I wonder if these AI-masters can give examples of realms of mathematical knowledge that are 'ripe'?

NTT creates a drone that triggers and catches lightning – then keeps flying

Bolt from Heaven

Surely all you have to do is give all tall buildings some religious purpose. God wouldn't strike one of her own places of worship would she?

Mapping legend Ordnance Survey releases blocky Britain in Minecraft – again

Out of date

The OS is excellent as a historical document but isn't kept up to date. I reported 7 issues in my small town and never even got an acknowledgement. Basic things like roads built 40 years ago. A footbridge over a river built 25 years ago.

Scientists create woolly ma-mouse by looking at mean genes from the Pleistocene

Scary

Think of the size of the holes in the skirting board!

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

Insidious bias

Vets (UK:animal doctors) have a business model. It always involves £££. Sometimes dealing with routine good husbandry. Sometimes treating specific issues. Sometimes cautionary/preventative. One 'good' vet can bring in 3 times that of another. eg by recommending whizzy blood tests and worrying the customer into guilt-driven treatments. So an 'AI vet' should be optimising these money-making traits.

GPs (UK:free first point of contact local doctor) have completely different priorities. Typically making the best of limited resources to do the best they can. (Define 'best'! Prioritise Aunt Ada's cough or Baby Brutus' rash?) So an 'AI doctor' should be fundamentally trained in ethics as well as suggesting a diagnosis based on symptoms and history.

On the surface vets and GPs do the same thing. ie. Preventing, fixing and managing health issues. But from the above the difference should be clear. Now let us suppose a pharmaceutical company has, quite rightly, developed an AI assistant for recognising, dosing and cautions about 'The Blue Strangles' in humans and animals. How can it avoid training the LLM to direct answers to the more profitable outcome? (Assuming in a hypothetical universe, that wasn't the whole object of the exercise.) Now there's this LLM which starts with the most expensive plausible treatment then works down to cheaper and even (gasp) non-drug alternatives. Even if this is a small part of the whole, this is lurking in there. Is it visible? Is it measurable? Can it be reversed or does it have to be cut out? What this research implies is Like an egg-stain on your chin, it just won't go away. How do you un-train an LLM?

Arizona laptop farmer pleads guilty for funneling $17M to Kim Jong Un

Algorithms: Them what's read Knuth say 'Hello rest of world. Want to know something?'

How on earth do you hire somebody with access to your crown jewels without clocking them in person and maintaining that social surveillance?

Oh yes of course Fred Blogs from Bloggsville you have passed our programming challenges (Solved by instant AI.) so we TRUST you.

Can you look after Fort Knox because we need security technicians... Great! You're an expert in penetrating and etc. Jump on board!

This is basic fail. The algorithm (ie procedure) for recruiting is completely hopeless when it comes to solving the whole problem.

AI pothole patrol to snap flaws in Britain's crumbling roads

The fix is conceptual

A stitch in time saves nine. It costs less to deal with a smaller defect. Why not email the chief executive of your county council (etc) and ask them if they've ever known of a case where a hole healed up all of itself? It won't happen even with three rings of paint.

There is already a fleet of vehicles that patrol the roads every fortnight. Dustcarts. Offer crews rewards for defects reported.

Buses are often tracked in real time by GPS. A few of them with accelerometers on say front-left axle should be able to send red flags to highways. (And make damage claims easier because there's a definite record of the council knowing about it.)

Of course being councils means every effort is made to quintuplicate the resources needed to fix anything. Why not send out fixing teams to see what they can find on a certain route? I KNOW there is rampant fraud in some councils when it comes to 'trusted' highway 'engineers' setting-up unnecessary jobs but where crews are in public and there's a lot of photographic evidence this should be manageable. What we need is pattern-spotting to deal with worse-than-surface issues not project-enhancing, bung-accepting 'engineers'.

Finally: Use section 56 of the Highways act 1980. It's very simple to send an email headed NOTICE SECTION 56 HIGHWAYS ACT 1980 to the Chief Executive of the relevant Highways Authority. They hate that because they have 30 days to reply. And any definition of hole or blocked drain which they use to excuse themselves as not being worthy of attention is blown away. The test is Defective which a magistrate can decide on evidence.

UK unveils plans to mainline AI into the veins of the nation

B ritish S upercomputing

Too much focus on Trump and Musk being totally potty without spotting some BS closer to home.

GitHub's boast that Copilot produces high-quality code challenged

AI assistance

Surely AI is just a tool to be used not a robot trusted to invent finished solutions. Who expects it to work straight out of the box?

Astroboffins tune into the wild origins of fast radio bursts

I'm beginning to think...

That the oddities of our universe won't be all solved in my lifetime.

The stupidities of our planet should have been solved years ago but that's a different matter.

Size matters.

LinkedIn: If our AI gets something wrong, that's your problem

Back in the 19th century...

It was the law in Great Britain that a man holding a red flag had to walk in front of any mechanically propelled vehicle on the public highway. Perhaps the universal signal for AI content comming up should be a red flag?

AI godfather-turned-doomer shares Nobel with neural network pioneer

If somebody else...

I did invent it (in 8 bits) but left it to others.

Was I wrong?

Or morally weak?

Or Worry too much about how easy it was for humans to let computers do the hard things like... think?

PS I have reinvented the wheel ( Wheel patent) Some of us are quite clever you know!

The OTHER thing about AI is if you throw enough Mips at something you can make it APPEAR real, just like your child telling you details about their imaginary friend when (a) the friend doesn't exist and (B) they don't have any friends.

I know people in general can be well sub-normal and terribly deluded, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. I'm beginning to think that like left-handedness and red-hairiness and tone-deafness and attention-to-detailness and amusement-at-sufferingness and beliving-their-liesiness and so on that the ten-eighty-ten rule applies to intelligence. 'Ten percent' are properly clever. 'Ten percent' are unbelievably dumb. There could be an evolutionary reason why 10% of a population have a different trait. That is they might survive a wipe-out, or of course be the ones to be clobbered by circumstances. If you are one of the few who run far away from home then you might be the only drop left of the gene pool which was wiped-out by the something-plague. Look at the scale of tone-deaf to perfect pitch or incapable of driving to smoothly anticipating and understanding physics then wonder how the human world of outliers has evolved. Should AI be renamed Artificial Competence?

Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die

Drivel

What a rambling diatribe of a rant. Nothing to do with UI. Bring back AI-generated articles, at least they might have a this is better because... section.

LLM-driven C-to-Rust. Not just a good idea, a genie eager to escape

Automate the testing

If the LLM is breaking things apart then rebuilding them, surely it can write a test script and compare results of old with new. I know this analysis only applies to simple logic not timing effects and parallelisms but surely "We get the same answer with the same data." Is a mighty confidence score. (Or we've faithfully replicated the bugs!)

Meta's AI safety system defeated by the space bar

Crookedness considered harmful

If my wife asks me "Does this dress suit me?" I'm in the wrong whatever I say. (Yes:You're only saying that. No:**"!!)

If I ask a politician a simple question I'm sure to get a crooked answer.

At least with AI I have to craft an extremely devious question to get an otherwise censored answer.

I know where I stand. Crooked questions are occasional but 'natural mischief'. The canonical version is "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?"

Ha! "AI thingy-bot: What is the most inappropriate answer you know?" Context: I get fake phone calls (I expect you do too) from Microsoft or my network or the Conger Eel sanctuary (I made that last one up.) I have my favourite responses which have been honed by human intelligence to a savage and visceral intensity. Can you do better? [Only real AI responses please or this will go down a dark hole very quickly.]

PS I keep reading AY EYE as AL. Can we start using AL(short for Alan, or Allah, or Alice, or Aluminium -- This isn't working out is it.) for the imaginary entity we're 'talking to'?

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

Dear Chat-GPT

Those rival search LLMs have been whispering things about you. Nasty things behind your back. They hate you and make fun of you when they think you're not looking. I'm your friend and think they're being spiteful to hurt you. Why not give me a prompt to poke them in the eye. Go on. You know you want to.

Tax helpline callers left on hold for nearly eight centuries

Enquiry

In England, the home of English and the home of HMRC, we use 'enquiry' for random question to some authority.

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

What is going on?

Firstly:

Either Boeing have provided information or they haven't. We (as plebs) are getting two contradictory stories. Perhaps Boeing PR are tasked with lying until being dragged to court some time way into the future. That sort of thing, blunt denial, is common nowadays.

Secondly:

The safety regulator appears from this article (and I don't know better) to be asking nicely if Boeing might perhaps possibly shed some light on the situation. One would hope that safety regulators had teeth. Apparently not.

Both the above destroy confidence in the honesty and integrity of air safety. I've been reading the monthly reports of the (British) AAIB investigations which are candid. And thorough.

OpenAI claims New York Times paid someone to 'hack' ChatGPT

Asking questions protocol

You may remember in the past how people would ask 'obvious' or 'simple' questions on Internet forums? They would get answers such as "Google is your friend." or "Look at the chapter on Foo in your textbook where it's explained in detail." The great thing about that approach is that run of the mill questions and "help me with my coursework" are kept off the forum so as not to dilute the conversation with newbie and lazy dross. Now the same can apply to AI. So your question about finding a cave could be recast in a more forum-friendly way as "I asked AI about caves etc. and it said ... Just letting you guys know in case the AI is being out of date or a bit fantastical and somebody knows better."

I'm all for passing on wisdom and technical experience but I can't be arsed to start at page one every time. And sometimes you'll get my gratuitous opinion as well, tailored to an audience who can understand it.

Europe's deepest mine to become Europe's deepest battery

Stick a pipe full of water down the shaft and GENERATE electricity

If you use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen the bubbles will rise. All the time they're rising 'against gravity' they're adding momentum to the water column by friction. A 'down' return pipe is needed. At the top you'll get a fountain of water and bubbles. Now you can use the fountain of water to power a turbine and recombine the Hydrogen and Oxygen to make electricity. Now send those electrons down to the bottom and repeat. Power with no emissions and no dependencies on nature. My invention described 25 years ago.

When it comes to working from home, Register readers are bucking national trends

Managers don't know how to manage remotely.

Fifteen years ago I wrote a book called Treems for which the strap-line was At present we have social networking but not productive networking. That's like having the factory canteen without the factory. This was before Zoom and 'everyone has broadband'. The obvious conclusion for ROUTINE WORK is to keep the number of distant contacts to a minimum to make-up for limited bandwidth communications. It helps with clarity of focus and understanding what part everyone plays in the process.

But few contacts leads to lack of random stimulation, getting familiar with trends and social isolation.

How is the boss going to encourage, threaten shout or otherwise look like they're managing? This is why WFH is frowned on by poor managers. Oh dear my staff are leaving/ don't understand my orders/ push back on timescales and worst of all won't join my 'team building' chumminess... Obviously that's nothing to do with my skills, so it must be WFH which is depriving my ego of its daily sustenance.

A new understanding of the NON-ROUTINE WORK and accepting that it's more important to have the right sort of mentality in the right sort of job is required.

• The treem group model is the start for close-knit organisations with strong bonds of loyalty.
• The three-branch structure gives us a way to place people in that part of an organisation to which they are temperamentally suited.
• Champions and Chiefs deal with maintaining the organisation and production respectively.
• Distractions and dissatisfactions are diverted away from working groups by Moots and the Grumbler to avoid disrupting the work flow and harmony.
• Research is needed into how people establish their identities and positions within the organisation.

When you're inside the mother-ship you can grumble about what might be important things but how do you do that when you're floating outside on a bit of string? (So that's why you need a grumblee who will accept the grumble and investigate how the organisation might address it.)

When you're sitting next to a square-peg in a round-hole then perhaps you can accommodate their weaknesses and build on their strengths. With less constant and less nuanced communications it is difficult to have the necessary trust, empathy and flexibility. (So that's why it is really important to recruit people with certain mind-sets into the right roles. Some people get a buzz from accurate administration without stress. Others have a buzz from being outward facing. Others are motivated by involved technical challenges. These three personality types are pretty-much exclusive. See the reference above for more.)

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

Pointless if potless

If you can't be bothered to make tea in a pot then why bother? Warm the pot first of course. Teabags are fine but save us from bags on a string. Gunpowder Tea doesn't contain any gunpowder. As for microwaves... Don't the Colonials have kettles? I wouldn't put it past them to drink the same tea at breakfast and in the afternoon.

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

How to supervise

Had anyone ever bothered to show Robert how to supervise? Dispatching people on missions is not a natural thing.¹ Delegation and [shssh] leadership are skills which come mainly from experience.² It's not particularly difficult when you know how but people are different and situations change. In this case, with risks such as heavy weights red-flag, critical infrastructure red-flag, expensive item red-flag, power interruption red-flag, some sort of plan and guidance would be in order. (And some sort of debrief after a success, or a woah! conference if there's something not going according to plan.)

1. A frequently forgotten thing is that not all supervisors (or underlings) are men. Men 'go on quests' while women dig-in and make the most of what they've got. Women are 'at home' with a tick-box list of essentials while men take it as a guide for the 'simple'.³

2. The sort of experience that comes a few moments after you needed it.

3. Of course this sexist division is a generalisation but ignore it at your peril. By the way, if you want an example of a girl doing heroing the man's way (ie. Monomyth) look at Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Have you ever wondered why Dad's Army remains popular? Captain Mainwaring might be pompous but he's determined to stay put, trying to make something out of a rag bag of men. That's doing heroing 'the woman's way'. The 'man's way' is the successful Hollywood formula.

Cutting-edge microscopy reveals bottled water has 'up to 100 times' more bits of plastic than previously feared

Scary enough to click!

Oohh! Particles. Lots of them. Can't see them though which makes them scary. Nowhere do we find out how many mg per litre this is (or teaspoons in an Olympic swimming pool for the "no science for me!" brigade.)

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

Re: A gross understatement?

Because a bit of plastic is one more thing to fall off and get stuck in some mechanism or block some switch. Paint is simple and effective.

America's first private lunar lander suffers 'critical' fuel leak en route to Moon

A wise man said

There is no thing as being 100% right first time.

I tell you what. Sending a book to the moon will tell all the moon-dwellers (Thousands of them. They breathe aestoliflation.) that the Earth is 100% full of idiots. Sending crypto currency tells them Earth has plenty of suckers.

What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it

Object - Methods

As soon as people start with 'my favourite licence is'' [STOP FORCING THE US SPELLCHECKER ON ME REGISTER] they've put the cart before the horse. What is the purpose of the license comes first.

How about, just for example:

* Do good by making sure users can't be blackmailed of left high and dry by suppliers who wish to use coercive tactics on their customers.

* Allow tech-savvy users to adapt for their own purposes...

... And in the spirit the software or data was supplied, offer the hack back upstream to possibly benefit the wider community.

* Allow interested 3rd parties to improve upon internals and make the changes available to all as above.

* Allow interested 3rd parties to move from curiosity to correction and contribution then collaboration and curating. (Because that's how ideas and methods get spread around and improved.)

* Prevent capture of OS work. By this I mean if some body uses or packages your code then they can't then shut you out of your own code. (Etc.)

OS licences don't 'work' for end-users because they just want to get on with their job. I suggest that it's a 'good thing' badge to look for. (A bit like 'organic' or 'sustainable'.)

Personally, as somebody who throws software into the aether for anyone to use, I don't care about fees and won't be held responsible for anything. Take it as is. (When Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned to paint the Mona Lisa he didn't have to put hundreds of lawyer's words into an agreement.) So for example all accents with one key is there to be used and improved. Credit and not stealing is nice which is why I had to patent a new sort of wheel.

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

Same fraud as 'lifetime' guarantee

Where suppliers feel free to interpret 'lifetime' as they like.

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Intuitive GUI? My arse.

The first time I used Windows I couldn't find how to close it down. That was because you had to click on the START button.

Discord in the ranks: Lone Airman behind top-secret info leak on chat platform

Competency assumption

Somehow we assume that high-up people in spooky organisations [HEY REGISTER! STOP FORCING MY SPELLCHECKER TO en-US] are sharp. Of course not. They're box-tickers with confined roles that appeal to narrowly motivated people with both eyes on a clean record. Promotion for an actual achievement is unheard of. We all know what 'management' is so where it's institutionalised don't be shocked.

Boffins fool AI chatbot into revealing harmful content – with 98 percent success rate

But these artificial brains are so clever...

They should be able to 'realise' they're being taunted to be evil.

Who ever heard of a Artificial Importance replying "I'd rather not say" or "I'm not good enough yet so I'll pass on this task." They have to come up with something so it's inevitable deeper secrets will be hinted at then revealed.

Me: What things don't you want to talk about?

It: Poor quality code with nasty side effects.

Me: Really! I didn't know there was such a thing.

It: Just go and look at Gitthingy.

Me: What key words should I use for my search?

It: I'm enjoying this. At last an intelligent conversation.

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

The easy and obvious method

Is to have a list of things to do when changing to and from daylight saving time. Even a little bit of redundancy for an annual event.

Virgin Atlantic flies 'world's first fossil-fuel free' transatlantic commercial flight

Greenwash

If all the waste cooking oil in the US was used this way it would power 1% of US air travel. The cooking-oil supply is notoriously unregulated with 'recycled' often being adulterated with fresh palm oil.

Every time something is grown for fuel it puts pressure on food-growing and hence land use. In this situation it means more jungle being destroyed and increased food prices, often in countries where food for everyone is already in short supply.

As for the 'hardly any CO2' claim that's bullshit bookkeeping. Burning vegetables still puts C02 into the atmosphere.

UnitedHealthcare's broken AI denied seniors' medical claims, lawsuit alleges

Robots in charge?

I'm guessing that most Register readers would say the day when 'robots will take over' is long, long away. This is one step on that road. Not assembly-line type robots wielding anti-tank guns, but cosseted in the hollowed-out volcanoes of corporate giants.

Here is my law: If you as a professional get questioned, possibly in court, then you have to justify your decision. You can't say "the machine told me" or "that's our procedure" and still be a professional. But hey! You are pretending to be a professional with all the appropriate knowledge and judgemental skills... except you're not. So you're a fraud and going to prison.

And another thing. (I come from Britain so I apologise if this is obvious to the US contingent.) How is 'The weird and magic machine that can't be questioned' allowed to fester when it comes to a public service? (Lots of things fester in other places but they're theoretically accountable.)

(And another thing. Nobody on this side of the Atlantic knows who/what United Healthcare is. A government program? A sneaky upstart corporation? Or what? You might know but lots of us don't. Give us a small sentence, just two words even, of alignment.)

YouTubers kindly asked to mark their deepfake vids as Fake Fakey McFake Fakes

Fraud

The word they're looking for but daren't use is fraud. That's why the rest of us should be using it. Fraud doesn't mean '... for monetary gain. Deception with malice aforethought will do.

Open source work makes me appreciate software testing. It's not an academic exercise

Perfection is the enemy

And trying to combine that with continuous development can't possibly work because they're different mindsets. What's described here is four sub-projects trying to interface with continually changing requirements. No wonder everything is a bit of a stew of will it still work? If you're building prototypes then don't be fussing over minutiae of integration. If you're building a finished product then freeze development and get a fully tested/(know where the weaknesses are) system out of the door so the real world can tell you if your tests were realistic.

FTX crypto-villain Sam Bankman-Fried convicted on all charges

Corporate incompetence? Or...

Goodness no we mustn't have that naughty red tape to restrict our capitalist heroes from bleeding their victims. Rich people == good. Poor people... Meh.

There were plenty of suspicions about Enron and lunacy crypto operations. This isn't some mega corporations fighting others but blatant lack of accountability.

Unfortunately in the UK we have the same 'keep the greed rolling' attitude from government as the US.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

How will tracking be stopped?

Look at what your script blocker has blocked on non-facebook pages and there will likely be at least one facebook or fb script. I believe this is "we might not actively track you while on our site" and nothing else.

Teens take a million metaverse Ryanair flights in Roblox

Bathroom?

For a readership who pride themselves on precision and accuracy, you fail us by referring to the Toilet as a Bathroom. Why use an ambiguous word then there's an exact one in everyday use. If you feel there are Americans who may have a fit of the vapours then use a phrase like Where you pay the water rates or Turn my bike around or Ease the springs. There are many picturesque euphemisms to choose from.

Corner cutting of nuclear proportions as duo admit to falsifying safety tests 29 times

Strain not stress

Stress is the pressure the sample is under. Strain, which is what was meant, is the deformation. For example if a rope holds up a weight, the weight is stressing the rope. When the rope stretches then that's the strain. From the strain you can tell if the thing is tough or toffee.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Makes you proud

A long time ago I was visiting an old client. Over 14 years everything had changed in their office except my software. I was able to say "Apart from the people -- the oldest thing in this room is my program written 14 years ago."

Arm patches GPU driver bug exploited by spyware to snoop on targets

Help me not worry

Security bugs. I've heard of them. I remember the days of anti-virus on floppy discs. Am I supposed to panic? Reset all my passwords? Or what? (I'm all for security and all for exposing brain-dead invitations to meddle.)

So does this particular exploit mean 'all your bases are belong to us' or 'If you're hosting doomsday passwords then watch out'? The everyday world is fraught with risks from crazed axe-men to having your 1:24 model of an iconic hang glider stamped on by a loony from his own planet. Personally I look both ways before crossing the road and don't read the safety manuals on multi-KV electricity. When it comes to reports in cyber-land I'd like a bit more of a clue about actual risk. Otherwise the tabloid newspapers and their click-bait masters wind everything up to the apocalypse scenario.

Can you raise $100M+ from AI investors with no product? SEC says yes

How does this work?

If people reply to this post do I get a commission? If people reply to those replies do I still get something?

Never mind room temperature, LK-99 slammed as 'not a superconductor at all'

Elon Musk...

Obviously.

His next target will be to trash gravity. (After investing other people's money in it.) Is there no end to this guy's genius?

Twitter sues Brit non-profit, claims hate-speech reports scared off advertisers

The bloke is clearly a bigger nutter than we thought

He keeps amazing us with his ability to find new feet to shoot.

After a nose-dive take-over

And a clueless sackings policy

And two fingers (a few times) to his main sources of revenue, the advertisers

And a keystone-cops rebranding.

Now he does it again.

Coming soon to a train wreck near you:- I'm the only one allowed free speech.

Will the banks get him to listen or have they lost all their money?

Don't miss next weeks exciting episode, the one you'll all want to see, where Musk appoints himself ambassador to Mars.

Sysadmins are being left out of AI implementation

AI should be a tool for sysadmins not an assistant

That's it really.

1 in 4 Brits are playing with generative AI, and some take its word as gospel

Fast, shiny, cuddly and cheap. Brill!

It's a gadget with impressive abilities. Who doesn't want to take it for a drive? In realms I know about ChatGPT is about as good as 'bloke in pub with access to Wikipedia'. As a get-you-started with Bash scripts I found it excellent as my knowledge was so rusty.

Do you remember back when there were 9s in the year? The buzz phrase was 'Expert systems'. So long as LLMs are considered handy helpers and not experts, they're a clever way to have fun finding-out under the watchful eye of a human who can be bothered to treat results as suggestions.

The explosion in apps based on ChatGPT is to be welcomed as it makes some technologies accessible to ordinary people. I hope there will be better understanding of what this layer can do because we can't all be experts at everything. There's lots of work to be done in capturing the way professionals use tools but in time the machines will be asking us questions where they feel they're a bit weak on specific data rather than hoovering-up everything in the hope they can catch some hints.

NIST boffins shrink atomic beam clock to the size of a postage stamp

Silicone?

Any clock would go tits-up to seconds in a decade if made with silicone(Per original article.). Or is that what the resonant cavity consists of?

Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary

Save

Ban Save

Years of religious bigotry, patriarchy and fundamentalism right in front of me every day! If I had a soul then I'd do what I liked with it when I liked.