Chat-GPT has a sense of humor

This is a chat by Michael with GPT 3.5---unblemished, unedited; even the emojis are authentic:

Could you put the following sentence into ancient English: "A man with small hands, orange face color, and a unique blond comb-over, seized seized power again."

ChatGPT said:

Sure! Here's a version in Old English (Anglo-Saxon), which was spoken roughly between the 5th and 11th centuries:

"An wer mid lytlum handum, orangum andwlitan hiwe, ⁊ anfealdum fealoþweorfendre loccum, feng eft to anweald."

Let me know if you'd like any refinements!

You said:

Could you also put it into medieval English? 

ChatGPT said:

Sure! Here's a version in Middle English (spoken roughly between the 12th and 15th centuries):

"A man with smal hondes, orang-coloured face, and a selcouth y-blonded comb-over, hath eft y-taken power."

Let me know if you'd like it in a specific Middle English dialect, like Chaucerian English!

You said:

Last question: could you put the same sentence into the English of Shakespeare?

ChatGPT said:

Of course! Here’s the sentence in Early Modern English, in the style of Shakespeare:

"A man of small hands, an orange-visaged hue, and a most singular blond comb-over, hath seized power once more."

Wouldst thou have it more poetical or dramatic? 😄

You said:

Yes, of course

ChatGPT said:

Alright! Here’s a more poetic and dramatic Shakespearean version:

"Lo! A man of meager hand and visage bright as burnish’d gold, his tresses swept as though by fateful wind, hath once more clapp’d his grasp upon the seat of power!"

I aimed for something suitably grandiose and theatrical—let me know if thou dost crave further flourish! 😄

You said:

Yes, sure, I will put this on my blog

ChatGPT said:

That sounds great! If you want me to refine it further or add a bit more Shakespearean flair, just let me know. Also, if you need a title or introduction for your blog post, I'd be happy to help! 😃

You said:

So, you do have "further flourish" ?

ChatGPT said:

But of course! Here is an even grander, more Shakespearean version, brimming with flourish and poetic weight:

Dost thou find it pleasing to thine ear, or shall I gild it yet further? 😄"Behold! A man of meanly fashion’d hands, his visage hued like a setting sun, his golden locks array’d in a wind-blown folly—lo, he doth once more lay claim to scept’red might, seizing the seat of power with grasp most resolute!"

Dost thou find it pleasing to thine ear, or shall I gild it yet further? 😄

No need to do more. You exhibited a sense of humor. Thank You!

War Plans -- for your information -- from the New York Times

 The Worst Part of Pete Hegseth’s Group Chat Debacle

And why the careless secretary of defense should resign.

March 25, 2025

By David French

There are so many ways in which sharing war plans is among the most egregious forms of security breach. It’s hard to think of a form of security breach that is worse than this. But aside from that, there is now public insight into conversations that were meant to be private.

You have the vice president questioning the judgment of the president. You have the vice president laying into our allies. I know that’s something that they do publicly, as well, but there’s a difference between public communication and private communication. The private communication was never intended for the allies. So all of these things are damaging diplomatically. They’re damaging politically. They’re damaging militarily, and in the worst scenario, they could be catastrophically dangerous for American lives.

It should be obvious to people that sharing plans for an attack hours before the attack could create problems, but let’s get a little bit more specific: The Houthis could move some of their weapons away from targeted locations. They could move senior officials away from targeted locations so that the strikes are less effective. They could choose to, for example, launch missiles themselves to attack before they are attacked, an action that could be incredibly costly in lives and in ships. They could move their senior leaders.

The administration is saying now that there was nothing classified in the chat and they weren’t really war plans, in many ways, casting aspersions on Goldberg’s integrity. In fact, when Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, was confronted with these facts, he attacked Goldberg and did not acknowledge his own wrongdoing. But there is not an officer alive whose career would survive a security breach like this.

From the very first weeks that you’re a member of the military, you start learning about operational security. This is drilled into officers. And those consequences would be instant relief from command.

I have seen this with my own eyes. I have been a part of this process. You would have a relief from command followed by a comprehensive investigation, and potentially criminal charges. In the military, you would be advising an officer to seek counsel, to get a lawyer instantly, because the criminal investigation would be equally instant.

This morning

We had a storm during the night, and the atmosphere is still quite unsettled. Moist air blowing in from the sea hits the serra, is pushed up and condenses into these dramatic, fast-moving cloud banks. And while we are at it: watching the grass grow:

Have you heard of "sociogenomics," or of "polygenic scores" ?

We hadn't when we tripped over an article in the New York Times titled A new scientific field is recasting who we are and how we got that way by Dalton Conly of Princeton University. It highlights scientific progress in genetics by answering some questions such as: “how do our genes predetermine our health, or our success in life.” The article in questions is an interesting case study in wokeness as well, but we won’t go into that.

In this post, we’ll try (1) to recast the new scientific context, now dubbed sociogenomics, a fusion of behavioural science and genomics, and (2) list a few important results. Here we go:

Throughout human history, genetics (“blood”, or “family line” in ancient parlance), was held to determine the future of our offspring. Ch. Darwin and G. Mendel made important contributions (Darwin, in this blog’s opinion, was the pivotal killer of “faith-based” believe systems (religions)). Then, F. Crick and J. Watson decoded the workings of the DNA—explaining how “sex” works in creating inherited traits, and we got used to the idea that specific traits are connected to specific genes.

 

But then came the discovery that some traits are not linked to one gene, but correlated to a whole profile of genes, which led to the construction of so-called polygenetic indexes. Initially, research focused on the genetic profiles (PGI-scores) of specific diseases--63% of breast cancer incidence can now be linked to polygenetic factors, or 71% of schizophrenia. But then it became clear that all kinds of things human are related to all kinds of polygenetic factors.

Take educational attainment: among adults who score very low on the corresponding PGI, only 7% finish college. Among those whose score is very hight, the number is 71%.  PGI’s have been created for more than 3500 traits, from sleep habits to right- or left-handedness and extroversion.

But that’s not all. PGI’s codetermine social behaviour. Children who have genes that correlate to more success in school evoke more intellectual engagement from their parents than kids in the same family who don’t share these genes. This feedback loop starts at the age of 18 month, long before any assessment of academic ability. In other words, parents don’t just parent their children, children parent their parents, somehow---somewhat mysteriously---guided buy their genes. And it turns out that genetic guidance happens everywhere. People in the US tend to marry people with similar genetic profiles. Very similar, in fact: spouses are on average the genetic equivalents of their first cousins once removed. Even more mysteriously, there’s the effect of lateral gene transfer (something very popular among microbes): your spouse's genes influence your likelihood of depressions almost a third as much as your own genes do. The presence of a few genetically predisposed smokers in high school appears to cause smoking rates to spike for an entire grade---even among those students who didn’t personally know those nicotine-prone classmates---spreading like a genetically sparked wildfire through the social network.   

Polygenetic indexes have spread rapidly and are now arriving in IVF-clinics. In the past, one could already screen embryos for some genetic diseases, but soon you will be able to screen them for happiness and success in life. It’s a brave new world out there. Be prepared.

What happens to Ukraine: "It's up to Europe" by Paul Krugman

 From Krugman's Substack account:

Like many other Americans at the time, I spent the afternoon of the bicentennial — July 4, 1976 — at a cookout. In my case the cookout was in a park in Lisbon, Portugal, hosted by the American ambassador, who read to us a special message from Gerald Ford. I’ve always wondered how the embassy managed to find hot dogs — not exactly a Portuguese staple — for the occasion.

There were few Americans in Portugal at the time. Lisbon in 1976 was a sleepy backwater — not the tourist and mobile worker hotspot that it is today. And the U.S. deliberately kept a low profile. Portugal had overthrown its fascist dictator only two years earlier, and many people there were obsessed with the idea that Henry Kissinger, who had warned that Portugal might go Communist, would try to engineer a coup like the one that overthrew Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. There were graffiti on the walls saying “Morte ao CIA” (death to the CIA) although some of them added, in fresher paint, “e o KGB.”

So America tried to stay out of the limelight. In fact, there were so few official representatives of the U.S. government around that the cookout had to be filled out with lots of staffers from other Western embassies.

Oh, and what was I doing there? I was part of a small group of MIT graduate students who spent the summer working for Portugal’s central bank. That’s me below, on the far right:

Anyway, the point was that Portugal’s democratic forces needed all the help they could get. But America, which was persona non grata at the time, believed that it would be counterproductive to intervene in any visible way. So it was up to the Europeans to save a still-fragile democracy.

And they rose to the occasion. I don’t pretend to understand all the ins and outs, but by all accounts the Germans in particular provided crucial aid to pro-democracy parties, especially Portugal’s Socialists (who were really moderate social democrats.) The cause of democracy was also helped by the prospect that if Portugal remained democratic, it could expect not simply to join the European Union but to receive large-scale aid (“cohesion funds.”)

The reason I bring up this old history is that we have once again reached a moment when the future of democracy depends on Europe rising to the occasion.

Of course, the situation now is far more fraught than it was that long-ago summer. This time the democracy at risk is Ukraine, which is fighting for its life against Russian aggression. And the reason America won’t be there for a democracy in danger isn’t fear of political blowback: it’s the fact that the president of the United States has made it clear that he’s anti-democracy, admires Vladimir Putin and wants Russian aggression to succeed.

So it’s now up to European nations to rescue Ukraine.

Does Europe have the resources to save Ukraine? Of course it does. The European Union and the UK combined have ten times Russia’s GDP. European aid to Ukraine has long exceeded US aid, and Europe could easily replace America’s share. In the early stages of the war, the US provided the bulk of the military aid, but even that gap has greatly narrowed:

Source: Kiel Institute

Can Europe step up fast enough? There are, as I understand it, some important weapons systems America may stop supplying that Europe can’t quickly replace. But as Phillips O’Brien has pointed out, we’ve been hearing predictions of Ukraine’s imminent collapse for at least a year, when the reality is that Russia has achieved only minor and meaningless territorial gains at immense cost in men and materiel. When Trump told Zelensky

You don't have the cards. You're buried there, people are dying, you're running low on soldiers.

he was almost surely wrong. Ukraine can probably hang on long enough, even with a total cutoff of US aid, for Europe to come to its rescue.

So it really comes down to political will.

Trump probably imagines that he can bully European leaders into standing aside and letting his friend (or boss?) Vladimir win. And given Europe’s history of timidity, you can understand why he might think that. But European leaders are certainly saying the right things now and also talking, in a way I’ve never seen before, about in effect declaring independence from the United States.

If Trump nonetheless tries to pressure Europe into abandoning Ukraine, say by imposing tariffs on European goods (which seems to be his only tactic), someone will have to tell him, “Sir, you don’t have the cards.” The EU exports less than 3 percent of its GDP to the United States. And there’s already a public backlash against even the threat of tariffs, as well as the absence of any visible effort on Trump’s part to make good on his campaign promises to bring down grocery prices.

In short, Europe shouldn’t be afraid of Donald Trump. If it wants to save democracy in Ukraine, it can.

And it should. If Ukraine falls, it won’t be the last target. And the rise of right-wing extremist parties in some European nations should make supporters of democracy even more determined to counter anything that might make people believe that these parties represent the future, which means among other things denying Putin anything that can be spun as a victory.

Like tens of millions of Americans, I hate the fact that we need to appeal to foreign leaders to do the right thing, because we know that our own president won’t. But this is Europe’s moment, and we can only hope that the continent’s leaders seize it.