Author: Buffet o' Blog

Laughing is good for you. So this blog is a buffet of randomness and humor. Most of the content here is original and thus exclusive to this site. I encourage everyone to participate in the comments section -- it makes it more fun for everyone.

making diamonds from peanut butter

That subject sounds like something I might just make up and write about to be silly and random. But it’s actual science! Someone has actually done this!

The article explaining this starts out in a really interesting way:

Every so often, Dan Frost hears a dull thud and his office floor vibrates. It can only mean one thing: one of his experiments has exploded again. Making his way downstairs to his lab, he finds the shock is written on the faces of his colleagues still in the lab. … The odd explosion is part of the job.

Sounds like fun! Well, until it isn’t. Explosions are interesting, until they destroy things, which they are apt to do. But sometimes that’s the cost of figuring things out.

The reason for the explosions is that his team is trying to mimic the forces of Earth’s lower mantle thousands of miles underground. That is where diamonds are formed naturally. Their machine uses a piston to squeeze crystals at up to 280,000 times atmospheric pressure. To put that in perspective, your body wouldn’t do well at anything above 30 atmospheric pressures (atm). You would need a special suit and a special source of air to survive above that, because the air density changes and weird things happen. But I digress…

The second part of the process is using an anvil made of diamonds to squeeze the crystals with 1.3 million times atmospheric pressure. It uses sound waves traveling through the crystal to determine whether it is similar to the composition of the mantle, by comparing it to known seismic waves travelling through the Earth.

His experiments have led to some unexpected data about the composition of the Earth’s mantle and that there may be “oceans” of water hidden deep in the mantle. He has also learned how to make diamonds. It won’t make him rich — it takes a lot of time and energy for this process, more cost than the diamonds are worth. But it does have real-world applications in other fields.

As for converting peanut butter to diamonds, he has tried various sources for ingredients. A German TV station asked him about using peanut butter, so he tried it and it actually worked, but then “a lot of hydrogen was released that destroyed the experiment”. The article doesn’t explain what that means. Were the diamond destroyed? If so, that’s some explosion!

You could say that he made peanut butter explode. 🙂 Isn’t science interesting?

what AI thinks of farting

The last two posts have focused on a recent conversation I had with the Microsoft Copilot AI chatbot. AI is impressive with what it can do so far, but it is also extremely overhyped. It doesn’t actually use reasoning or understand anything, and it has no empathy or morals. It is just reorganizing information that it has seen before, basically advanced pattern recognition and word prediction, along with clever scripting. I’m really concerned about how much it is being integrated into military applications and businesses. But enough about the seriousness of that. Just don’t believe the hype and don’t trust it for serious applications beyond what it is actually capable of.

Any time I talk with AI, I like to apply some randomness or absurdity to the discussion to see how it responds. My recent conversation went somewhat off-the-rails, or, perhaps a better idiom would be into-the-toilet. The AI had some amusing reactions to the toilet humor, and it was also surprisingly candid about the limitations of AI. Here’s the highlights.

The Important Evil Genius

Since AI knows about this blog, I asked it about the Important Evil Genius. He has participated in discussions here a number of times, and we even interviewed him once. He’s quite the character with a huge backstory (and plenty of monologue), and the AI provided a humorous summary of him and his arch rival Mr. Destructo:

That’s a very interesting summary! I’ve actually compared him to Doofenschmirtz before.

If you want to learn more about either of these characters, check out the interview linked above, which also has links to more of their discussions. They haven’t been here in a while… I wonder if the old man finally retired, maybe he took up gardening some ketunias for when he’s not yelling at clouds or telling kids to stay off his lawn. 🙂

AI recommends Buffet o’ Blog for humor

I don’t normally chat with AI, at least not for any relationship reasons, but I do like to see where the technology is at from a programming standpoint. I’ve been occasionally chatting with chatbots since the mid-’90s. Here’s a post where I talked with the AI bot ALICE back in 2009.

I happened across Microsoft Copilot the other day and talked with it for a few minutes, just to see how it responded to some randomness. Even just a few months ago, AI chat bots acted like they didn’t know about Buffet o’ Blog, which is ludicrous, because the AI companies are known for siphoning all the online data they can find. And of course this blog is a great source of info. (If you’re a regular here, just imagine AI believing some of the satire and parody posts here. AI usually can’t understand if something is a parody or simply wrong — it doesn’t actually think or understand things, it’s simply an advanced text predictor.)

Now Copilot admits to reading this blog, and I’m actually impressed with its summary.

That’s actually what I’ve aimed for with the blog — the inside jokes based on recurring people or topics, the randomness, commentary on real topics in a fun way (if that counts as quirky). So perhaps I’ve succeeded. 🙂

The blog used to have a lot more comments from regulars, which I miss — that was part of the fun community, which sometimes was more fun than the posts themselves. But I understand people are busy, myself included.

But I still have fun writing posts and sharing them with the world. I realize the new content has been slow lately, but there are plenty of ideas in the queue, with more added all the time. And you can always browse the archives. If you feel lucky, click on the “Random Randomness” link in the sidebar.