Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

This is Ephemeris for Monday, July 27th. Today the Sun will be up for 14 hours and 50 minutes, setting at 9:14, and it will rise tomorrow at 6:24. The Moon, 2 days before full, will set at 5:04 tomorrow morning.

What science fiction TV shows and movies get artificial intelligence or intelligent computers all wrong at least before 2001 A Space Odyssey, was if they don’t know the answer they will give you: a “THIS DOES NOT COMPUTE”. Current artificial intelligence large language models will rarely admit that they don’t know or can’t find an answer. It will give you something, even if it is not correct. It’s called halucinating. Sounds like lying to me. They’re called chat bots, because they are made to sound human, and can be very seductive. However, they are alien minds, as if space aliens learned about us by monitoring our radio, TV and internet. AI’s are trained on Internet content. You know what a swamp that is!

The astronomical event times given in this blog are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan (Lat 44.7° N, Long 85.7° W; EDT, UT – 4 hours) unless stated otherwise. Times will be different for other locations.

Addendum

If a chat bot gives you references, follow them up. once when doing research on something, Google’s Gemini referenced an old post on this site. I also caught it in an error, and told it so. It told me I was right.