GO Fest 2026

We enjoyed a fun but flaming hot 100° Saturday in downtown Littleton, participating in Pokemon GO Fest Global 2026 with my sister and niece, and the other 775+ players keeping downtown hopping. We had a bunch of fun battling and catching "Mega Mewtwo X", even though we weren't properly outfitted to handle the heat. We took refuge for a little while, in the nice cool local ice cream shop Inside Scoop. The organizers (Niantic calls them our Community Ambassadors) had thoughtfully arranged for people to bring a few coolers full of ice and bottled water. We called it quits a little early, with no regrets. 

The crowd was still out there when we were returning home with our Los Portales Mexican takeout dinner to share with our visitors. And I think most everyone will be out there again on Sunday. 

Update: Sunday was yet another flaming hot 97° day. We were out there, along with 900+ other friendly but sorta crazy people who were willing to get out in this heat to do battle with the ferocious “Mega Mewtwo Y” critter. And chat of course. We were slightly better prepared this time—Jennefer bought us some evaporative cooling neck wraps a few years ago, and they were very helpful today. Then our friend went home for lunch, and brought us back some soda bottles refilled with tap water and frozen. Pressing those against the neck and other hotspots was immensely helpful in cooling us down even more.

Fun Saturday

Pleasant Saturday afternoon in downtown Littleton with family and gameplay companions. We had a fun day together, but I think I overdid the part about splurging on ice cream, and then still finishing my big dinner, but I have my fingers crossed that it's true what they say... an early-to-bed Saturday night can heal many things. ;-)

Pretty flowers on Main Street, encountered during our walking loop around downtown Littleton.

A few pretty roses in front of a shop on Alamo Avenue, on the second half of our walking route.

Group photo of some of our companion players in Bega Park, where we start our downtown adventure.

Thursday... looking up

We enjoyed a pleasant Thursday, with nothing much to share, except a tentative report of me feeling like I'm finally on the upswing, after too many (7) weeks of dealing with this medical craziness. Maybe a few pics from today will bring my perspective back to something fun.

Here's what our Thursday morning looked like. We continue to enjoy watching the Finches come and go from our feeders over the deck.

Sitting at the breakfast nook table, drinking my 3rd (of 5) big glass of water, and enjoying some French-press coffee, several slices from a Trompeau Bakery baguette that we got at the Farmer's Market on Saturday, along with some chunks of Humboldt Fog goat cheese, some slices of Rattlesnake Cheddar cheese, and oh yeah, some "everything but the bagel" Cheddar cheese. Yum!

We love seeing the Goldfinches out there, and especially when the bright daylight illuminates their beautiful yellow colors so nicely. It was a good day to not venture too far from the house -- you can see the clouds gathering over the foothills.

We came across these pretty roses at Gallup Gardens on our short walk around Ketring Park. I'm feeling like I can start getting out again, a little at a time, without risking the dreaded side-effect of Cipro, "ruptured tendons." This has been a long drawn-out 7 weeks.

Looking out over the deck at the usual Spring rain showers that are making their appearance this afternoon.

Littleton Fire Muster 6/13/2026

 

They'll be hosting a Fire Muster in Littleton on June 13. I stopped into a fire muster years ago, during Littleton's annual Western Welcome Week, when walking Mandy with Ken, and it was a lot of fun to see the old and new fire engines and other apparatus. The kids absolutely loved running around under the high water sprays in their bathing suits. Some of those old fire engines are being kept in gorgeous condition. 

Fun fact: The first recorded fire muster occurred in 1849 in Bath, Maine, involving five hand-powered pumps, or "hand tubs". While that historic town of Bath holds a very chaotic, bittersweet memory in my own life, it eventually became a favorite travel spot for Jennefer and me. But if you want to experience a piece of that 1849 tradition closer to home, head down to ACC this weekend! 

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."

Flight to Tuktoyaktuk

It's a cool and rainy Wednesday -- 43°F in Littleton this afternoon and cooling down, with a forecast overnight low just a few degrees above freezing. We have a nice view of the neighbor's pretty pink dripping-wet blossoms in their yard down the hill.  

 

 

 

 

This is a perfect wet and gloomy day to continue my Canada simulated flying adventure, with a flight in the XCub from Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk on the coast of the Beaufort Sea. Here I'm taxiing for takeoff from the snow-covered Inuvik airport. 

 

I'm cruising northbound at 1500 feet, which is plenty high enough to clear any terrain in this area. It's mostly overcast, and with the temperature at -17°C, it's a good idea to stay low and out of those icy clouds! 

 

I have a beautifully reflective view on the approach over the Kugmallit Bay into Tuktoyaktuk on the north coast of Yukon Territory. This airport is like quite a few of the smaller Alaskan airports in the simulator. I never know what I'm going to find when I get there. There's a decent chance that no one has gotten around to simulating the airport in any way. Sometimes there's nothing but trees, which can be interesting, but oftentimes I'll find a runway with no support buildings in sight. One airport had just the rotating beacon light on a tower in the middle of the forest. It's hard to tell from this far out, but it appears this airport's runway and some buildings are in the simulator's database for this location. Good news!  

Here's a zoomed-out map showing my current location, just for a little perspective! It looks like the only thing between me and the North Pole now, is miles and miles of open water. 

Mixing Sim and Real World

My niece flew back today, after visiting relatives and friends on the east coast. I made a fun new adventure out of it for me, by flying the simulated Boeing 787-10 over the same route at roughly the same time. I had even more fun, by figuring out how to track her flight on the same map as my simulated flight! In this snapshot, my aircraft is the blue airplane symbol, and her Airbus A320neo is the little blue "traffic" symbol surrounded by a red hexagon, about 21 minutes behind me. After I landed, I looked up the gate where she was supposed to arrive, which was B31, and taxied up to the same exact spot on the north side of Concourse B. Yeah, pretty nerdy, I know...

Relay (movie)

Peaceful sunset to end a quiet Monday, as we wrap up the year. We watched the movie “Relay,” which was a bit of an adrenaline rush. My interest was piqued by the use of pseudo-teletype technology — using a third-party operator as a voice mask to stay anonymous. It’s a clever bit of realism; because the operator just reads the text provided, the caller's true voice and identity stay completely off the grid. I doubt the required level of anonymity would be achieved in real life, as I’ll bet those services are required to keep a log of all their calls.

October Pics

We’re enjoying the Fall color views from our breakfast table, and on our outings in the Littleton area. Here are some photos from this week. 

Rapids along the South Platte River near the Mineral Avenue overpass, with some nice yellow Cottonwoods

Nice view of Eagle Watch Lake, through a yellow Cottonwood

Nice yellow Cottonwood by the rapids where the rafters and kayakers usually put in, on the South Platte River

Reds and yellows along the South Platte River

Cottonwood trees and clouds, with some pretty yellow in the foreground

South Platte River with pretty yellow in the foreground

Pretty red leaves — my iPhone says this is a Virginia Creeper

Pretty reds — the three-leaf pattern reminds me of the Poison Oak I used to see in California — my iPhone says this is Fragrant Sumac

Raindrops on Blackrock Lake

Cottonwood tree chock full of Blackbirds all enthusiastically singing

House Finche inbound to the bird feeder, with Fall colors in the neighborhood below

My favorite tree for Fall, the Purple Autumn Ash

Kitty Rufus and round squirrel

House Finches, Fall colors, foothills and overcast in background

Blue Jay and Fall colors

Kitty Rufus sprawled out

Blue Jay enjoying the peanuts that we put out for the squirrels

House Finches on our Bird Buddy feeder

Cyclist pausing on the bridge over a creek feeding into the South Platte River

Pretty red Fragrant Sumac along the South Platte River

Fall colors in front of Red Tail lake. My phone says this is a Maple. 

Prickly Pear fruit by the trail

My Simulated Flights in 2025

I've been getting virtually out and about with my PC flight simulators frequently this year, starting with some adventures around Alaska in the Douglas DC-3, and then recreating the “Island Hopper” route in the Boeing 737-800. 

Then I began some serious crisscrossing of the world in the Boeing 787-10. I consolidated some 787 checklists from the web, into a more concise one that enables me to start up the Dreamliner from cold and dark, then get through an entire flight safely, including landing, even in zero-zero conditions if necessary, then taxiing to the gate and shutting down. It’s always fun to hear that characteristic tone, when I turn off the seatbelt sign after cutting fuel to the engines. I imagine half the passengers jumping up, when the seatbelt lights turn off. 

I'm still adhering to my favorite way of doing this -- saving the flight after I land, and then picking up at the same spot on the airport where I left off, to head somewhere new, using the current real-world weather conditions. 

I got overwhelmed with doing my usual verbose descriptions of each flight over on my VirtuallyAloft blog, so I took a break from that, and for the time being, I'm logging my flights in my free account on the my.flightradar24.com website. If you click on that link, you will first see a world map, with all my recent flights overlaid on it. You can use the "Camera Controls" widget in the lower right corner to pan around, and zoom in and out on the map. You can also click here to see a tabular list of my flights. 

Snowy Saturday

Chilly 27°F Saturday, and heading down to 9° tonight. It’s been snowing lightly for most of the day. The kitties enjoyed the view from the breakfast nook door out to the deck, which was busy with squirrels and birds. 

I enjoyed today’s snow from the comfort of the DC-3 cockpit while flying in Alaska, on my way from Cold Bay to Dutch Harbor. The overcast and visibility in Dutch Harbor were both too low to safely complete the instrument approach. I gave it a couple of tries, then resolved to head somewhere else, when suddenly the simulator retrieved a weather update…

Suddenly the sky cleared, which made the approach and landing a piece of cake. Good flying karma today… Then I went out and shoveled some of the light fluffy stuff off of the driveway…

Beginning of decorating

We started decorating the house for the Christmas holiday today. The kitties have been paying close attention to all the changes. Here’s Rufus exploring the tree skirt. 

Bean checking out the nutcrackers

Rufus getting in the way in the kitchen

Rufus in an ornament box

Christmas tree with lights in the breakfast nook

Christmas tree closeup - needles and lights

Christmas tree in the front yard with lights and snow