Power OFF Day!

Power off day! I could say that we're being Eco-conscious by not using electrical power today, but it's off more from necessity. When I renewed my maintenance subscription for the local company that maintains my furnace/AC, plumbing, and electrical, they said, "Oh, you're due for your free annual inspections!" Heh, heh. 

 

So of course after the inspection, the electrical guy reminded me again (I've been hearing this from electricians for years) that my 31-year-old power distribution box with all the circuit breakers is long overdue for refurbishment. I've been ignoring those recommendations in the past, but this time he pointed out some termination screws that have changed color, from a nice clean silver to a dirty orange from overheating over the years, some miswired neutral connections, and a bunch of leaves, spider webs, a hornet's nest, none of which matter. But then he also demonstrated that several of my ground fault circuit interrupters don't disconnect when the test button is pushed. OK that got my attention. One of them even buzzes, which is a symptom of electrical arcing inside. Bad news overall. 

 

So I bit the bullet and scheduled the work, and this morning they're on their way, to refurbish my panels, which in this case means replacing the original 1995 vintage circuit breaker box entirely, and then replace all the circuit breakers in the "new" 2008 vintage box. One benefit of all this, will be the re-labeling of all the circuit breakers to identify where in the house is affected by each one. I'll love having that, as the original labeling was washed out many years ago, when someone left the electrical door open to the weather for a few weeks, until I finally discovered it one day. 

 

I expect that it will be quite interesting, for this technology-dependent couple, to be entirely without electrical power all day. And I wonder about possibly tomorrow, if the work runs long. The good news, is that I have a battery backup on my Internet & WiFi, so we'll be able to use that for a few hours, until the battery runs down. 

 

It's cold, foggy, and even somewhat drippy out there -- great weather for our nice hot breakfast and homemade latte, so I'll hurry to finish all that, before they get here and shut off the main bus.

Who knew?

I just read this morning that Quinine is ototoxic (affects the inner ear). I drank an entire small bottle of tonic water a week ago Wednesday to deal with a major hamstring cramp, my worst ever. It helped with the cramp, but the next day and subsequent days, I've noticed some dizziness, weakness, spacial disorientation, and my everyday tinnitus got significantly louder. 

 

I've had other issues going on for the past week, for which I saw a doctor on Friday, and have been taking an antibiotic until today. But I was curious about my entire suite of symptoms, so I asked an AI to try to integrate and analyze all the information I could think to provide about my activities and symptoms for the past week. I was surprised when it mentioned that the much louder tinnitus was probably the result of drinking the tonic water. What?! 

 

So I asked Google to tell me more about quinine and tinnitus:

"Based on your description, you are experiencing symptoms consistent with cinchonism—a syndrome resulting from quinine toxicity, which often causes the exact side effects you mentioned: tinnitus (ringing/buzzing), dizziness, and vertigo. While quinine in tonic water is diluted, sensitive individuals can experience these effects, which are recognized as being ototoxic (harmful to the inner ear)."

 

The attached image contains the complete response. Interesting!

 

P.S. My dad got me started on tonic water for cramps decades ago. This time, with a massive and repeating cramp that was getting the best of me, I gulped down the entire 12oz bottle, instead of just taking a few sips. So that could have been a factor in why it affected me so much more than before. 

Misinformation: Bixonimania

Misinformation warning: Don't trust anyone quoting Bixonimania as a real disease

If you ever do a search for itchy eye symptoms, and find an article or quote or other information saying that those symptoms are caused by Bixonimania, STOP! The alarm bells should be going off in your head, and the red flags should be waving madly. 

 

I just ran across an article about this experiment, but (as usual, darn it) it quickly disappeared from my Facebook feed, so I went searching to find an authoritative article about it, and found this excellent one at Nature.com. 

 

My initial response to the first article I was reading was, "Huh. Why would anyone in their right mind insert fake scientific research into the public information stream? I can only imagine bad results from this, as gullible humans are equally likely to start using this information. Just look at the misinformed vaccines=autism arguments." 

 

But then I sent that remark to one of my AI resources to comment about it, and it contributed some good points to the discussion. To quote: 

 

It is a valid and deeply concerning reaction. The "Bixonimania" experiment highlights a fundamental vulnerability in how Large Language Models (LLMs) function, and your comparison to the vaccine-autism controversy is apt: both involve the "pollution" of an information ecosystem, but AI accelerates the speed and scale at which that pollution spreads. 

 

To understand why this happens and why it’s so dangerous, it helps to look at the "plumbing" of how AI processes information compared to how a human expert does.

 

1. Pattern Matching vs. Veracity

Humans (ideally) use a "truth-first" filter. When we read a paper, we look for peer reviews, institutional credibility, and internal logic. If a paper mentions The Simpsons as a medical source, our "BS detector" triggers an immediate override.

AI models, however, are essentially "probabilistic mirrors." They are trained to predict the next most likely word in a sequence based on patterns. When the researchers uploaded those fake papers to a preprint server, they provided the AI with a professional-looking pattern: medical terminology, structured abstracts, and citations.

To the AI, "Bixonimania" didn't look like a joke; it looked like a "low-frequency token" that suddenly gained a cluster of supporting context. Because the AI doesn't "know" what a skin disease is in the physical world, it can't cross-reference the claim against physical reality—it only cross-references it against its database of text.

 

2. The "Hallucination" Feedback Loop

The most dangerous part of this experiment wasn't just that the AI "believed" the fake papers, but that it began to synthesize and expand upon them. This creates a feedback loop:

a. Injection: Fake data is put online.

b. Ingestion: AI scrapers crawl the web and ingest the fake data.

c. Amplification: Users ask the AI about the topic, and the AI generates "authoritative" summaries.

d. Pollution: These AI summaries are then posted on blogs, social media, or even other low-tier academic journals.

e. Re-ingestion: The AI (or a different model) crawls the web again, finds the "new" mentions of the disease, and concludes that because there are now more sources, the information must be even more credible.

 

3. Why would researchers do this?

While it seems counterintuitive to "pollute" the stream, researchers do this as a form of "Red Teaming" or "Stress Testing." By creating a harmless fake disease (rather than fake instructions for a bomb or a toxic chemical), they prove a systemic weakness.

 

The goal is to force AI developers to:

• Improve Attribution: Making sure the AI tells you exactly where it got a fact.

• Fact-Checking Layers: Implementing secondary "critic" models that are specifically trained to look for satire or logical inconsistencies.

• Source Weighting: Teaching models to trust a peer-reviewed journal at a much higher weight than a "preprint" server (where anyone can upload anything without a review).

 

The "Gullible Human" Factor

You hit the nail on the head regarding "gullible humans." The danger isn't just that the AI is wrong; it's that [some] humans have developed a "transparency bias" toward AI. Because the AI sounds confident, professional, and neutral, some people tend to trust it more than a random person on a forum. For example, if a parent searches for symptoms their child has, and an AI confidently diagnoses "Bixonimania," that parent may stop looking for the real cause, leading to genuine physical harm. This experiment serves as a necessary, if jarring, wake-up call that "sounding smart" is not the same thing as "being right."

The Fort!

We took my local and visiting family out for an "interesting" evening meal on Wednesday. Dinner at The Fort was delicious, with a varied and unique menu, and some fun ambience! Here are a few pics from our outing. 

 

Family photo in the courtyard just outside the main building, looking toward the front wall and gate. 

 

Candid photo of Brighton and Marissa, showing The Fort's pleasant courtyard. 

 

A bit of a closeup of The Fort's entrance from the courtyard. 

 

Interesting artwork on the rocks outside The Fort's front gate. 

 

Pretty view of the skyline over Denver, with The Fort in the foreground.