Five Level Lower Back Fusion - 9 Months Later

 It has been 9 months since I had 5 lower back disks fused together...  While I have never experienced any pain, my right leg does not have the strength to walk up steps which may or may not be a byproduct of the surgery.  However, while I can walk, I cannot walk fast nor does my walking seem to be done without effort, like it was before...  

I also have difficulty putting on socks so all of my shoe wearing, including tennis shoes, is done without socks.

My sleeping positions on both sides or on my back.  I don't remember sleeping on my stomach but I don't even try as that would bend my back the wrong way, I think.

I have a little trouble stepping over the sides of the hot tub but it has not detered me from soaking in the hot water or using the therapeutic jets.

Bending over is a little bit of a problem but bening my knees or holding onto something compensates so the stuggle is minimal.

All in all, my choices were do nothing 9 months ago which was not really an option, take shots that would temporarily mask the pain and help the movement, or fuse the disks via surgery.  I saw no reason to postpone the inevitable.

Communications

 

Take ChatGPT to the Next Level

CHATGPT AND TOOLS like it have made AI available to the masses. We can now get all sorts of responses back on almost any topic imaginable. These bots can come up with sonnets, code, philosophy, and more.

However, while you can just type anything you like into ChatGPT and get it to understand you, there are ways of getting more interesting and useful results out of the bot. This “prompt engineering” is becoming a specialized skill of its own.

Sometimes all it takes is the addition of a few more words or an extra line of instruction and you can get ChatGPT responses that are a level above what everyone else is seeing—and we've included several examples below.

For the purposes of this guide, we tested these prompts with GPT-4: The latest version of ChatGPT at the time of writing, but only available to some users. However, they should work fine with older versions of ChatGPT too.

Get Your Answers in Tabular Form
ChatGPT can give you responses in the form of a table if you ask. This is particularly helpful for getting information or creative ideas. For example, you could tabulate meal ideas and ingredients, or game ideas and equipment, or the days of the week and how they're said in a few different languages.

Using follow-up prompts and natural language, you can have ChatGPT make changes to the tables its drawn and even produce them in a standard format that can be understood by another program (such as Microsoft Excel).

Output Text in the Style of Your Favorite Author
With some careful prompting, you can get ChatGPT out of its rather dull, matter-of-fact, default tone and into something much more interesting—such as the style of your favorite author, perhaps.

You could go for the searing simplicity of an Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver story, for instance, or the lyrical rhythm of a Shakespearean play, or the density of a Dickens novel. The end results don't come close to the genius of the actual authors themselves, but it's another way of being more creative with the output you get.  READ MORE...

Things Sciece Cannot Explain

 

A New Discovery at CERN

 

Strictly Political

 

PENTAGON: Alien Mothership Could be Lurking

Department of Defense official floats the idea that an alien mothership is cruising our solar system.

 (Image credit: Marc Ward/Stocktrek Images via Getty Images)

A draft paper by a Harvard scientist and the head of the Pentagon's UFO office has raised the idea an alien mothership could be in the solar system, sending out tiny probes dubbed "dandelion seeds" to explore the planets within.

Could an alien mothership be hovering around the solar system, sending out tiny probes to explore planets? According to a Harvard scientist and a Pentagon official, it's possible.

In a draft paper, the pair said it is feasible an extraterrestrial spaceship could be in our galactic neighborhood, exploring the region by the means of "dandelion seeds" — small spacecraft that can gather and send back information, similar to the way humans send out spacecraft to explore planets.

Avi Loeb(opens in new tab), an astronomer at Harvard University, and Sean M. Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — established in July 2022 by the Department of Defense (DoD) to detect and study "objects of interest" — released the draft, Physical Constraints on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena(opens in new tab), on March 7. It is not an official Pentagon document but was carried out in partnership with the DoD. It has not been peer-reviewed.  READ MORE...

Humans

 

Cherokee Proverb

 

Love Your Enemies

 You have to have your head in the sand (or up somewhere else) if you are not aware that former President Donald Trump has been indicted by the Grand Jury of NYC as as result of the evidence presented to it by DA Alvin Bragg...  his case revolves around taking a misdemeaner that has expired by the statute of limitations and turned it into a felony...  Legal pundits, are not even sure if this is legal because of the foundation crime has expired...

No former President has ever been indicted...  what kind of precedent is this going to set in place?

Even before this case goes to a jury trial, Trump's lawyers will take appeals to the Supreme Court.

Trump's indictment will galvanize the Republican Party and maybe some open-minded liberals to the point that they put Donald Trump back in the white house in 2024.

The fight between liberals and conservatives is going to tear our country apart and while divided and weak, our enemies will use that to their advantage.  Our enemies will control the USA by having a stronger economy and a stronger military and the rest of the world will choose CHINA as their new global leader.

We are so silly and deserve what we get...

Most of you who read this will not see why I should be so alarmed... so my comment is simply this:  WAIT AND SEE.

Angel

 

Alien

 

Nervous About AI

OpenAI entered the Silicon Valley stratosphere last year with the release of two AI products, the image-generator DALLE-2 and the chatbot ChatGPT. (The company recently unveiled GPT-4, which can ace most standardized tests, among other improvements on its predecessor.) Sam Altman (above), OpenAI’s co-founder, has become a public face of the AI revolution, alternately evangelical and circumspect about the potent force he has helped unleash on the world.

In the latest episode of On With Kara Swisher, Swisher speaks with Altman about the many possibilities and pitfalls of his nascent field, focusing on some of the key questions around it. Among them: How do we best to regulate a technology even its founders don’t fully understand? And who gets the enormous sums of money at stake? Altman has lofty ideas for how generative AI could transform society. But as Swisher observes, he sounds like the starry-eyed tech founders she encountered a quarter-century ago — only some of whom stayed true to their ideals.

Kara Swisher: You started Loopt. That’s where I met you.

Sam Altman: Yeah.

Swisher: Explain what it was. I don’t even remember, Sam. I’m sorry.

Altman: That’s no problem. Well, it didn’t work out. There’s no reason to remember. It was a location-based social app for mobile phones.

Swisher: Right. What happened?

Altman: The market wasn’t there, I’d say, is the No. 1 thing.

Swisher: Yeah. Because?

TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

New Hydrogen Motor

 

Why Hydrogen Vehicles Failed

 

Multiverse Theory

Interest in the multiverse theory, suggesting that our universe is just one of many, spiked following the release of the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. The film follows Evelyn Wang on her journey to connect with versions of herself in parallel universes to ultimately stop the destruction of the multiverse.

The multiverse idea has long been an inspiration for science fiction writers. But does it have any basis in science? And if so, is it a concept we could ever test experimentally?

That’s the topic of the third episode of our podcast Great Mysteries of Physics – hosted by me, Miriam Frankel, science editor at The Conversation, and supported by FQxI, the Foundational Questions Institute.

Don’t let yourself be misled. Understand issues with help from expertsGet the newsletter

“One way to think of a multiverse is just to say: ‘Well, the universe might be really, really big – much bigger than our observable universe – and so there could be other regions of the universe that are far beyond our horizon that have different things happening in them’,” explains Katie Mack, Hawking chair in cosmology and science communication at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. “And I think that idea is totally well accepted in cosmology.”  READ MORE...

Conrol

 

Vibrations

 

Awareness

 

Out of the Box

 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) COULD REPLACE 300,000,000 JOBS WORLDWIDE...

SOUND THE ALARM...

Elon Musk, the Apple CEO, whoever the hell he is, plus 1,100 are now warning the world that we should slow down with our push to develop AI/Robot technology...

WHY?

Because it replaces frigging jobs that those assholes knew about from the getgo...  who are now realizing that those displaced workers will have nowhere to go...

SHOULD THEY NOT HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT THAT FIRST?

Sometimes, people with lots of intelligence are actually stupid and ignorant because they cannot think beyond their focus.

THE GENNIE IS OUT OF THE BOX...   and, it ain't gonna be put back in the box...  not now...  not ever...

WHY?

MONEY...

                 POWER...

                                  CONTROL...

• Robots don't get sick
• Robots can fight wars
• Robots don't complain
• Robots can work longer than a typical shift
• Robots don't demand vacations
• Robots can work through holidays
• Robots don't need to celebrate Christmas
• Robots don't get sick

TECHNOLOGY... has become an intergral part of our lives, of our societies...  and, of our quality of life.  We could not live without our smart phones, iwatches, ipads, and tablets.  We control our homes and vehicles with smart technology.  Social media forums occupy most of our free time and keeps us from being productive at work.  What we cannot find in the stores, we can order online and have it delivered for free.

The auto industry uses robots to build cars.  The medical industry uses robots to perform routine jobs.  Other industries uses robots to perform minor maintenance tasks.

It will not be easy to give up robots after seeing the cost savings.

It is great that Elong Musk and others have seen the future's unintended consequences...  but, it is too late to stop the momentum.