AI...a Lifesaver?

Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 5 January 2023…

Hey Y’all!

Good morning and happy Fast-Jet Friday from Air2Ground Farms! The fast jet today is the Mighty-Mighty F-15E Strike Eagle flying low in Wales. The top pic is one of our steers enjoying a breakfast bite of hay. The next pics are the beef herd and sheep flock all enjoying their hay. The weather brief is “more of the same.” The forecast holds some potential snow and looking at a possible “winter storm event” early next week. Fun (sarcastic). The animals are doing well on the farm this week. The biggest happening is that we are now in the routine of busting ice from water troughs every morning. With the exception of the automatic waterers for the cows and sheep, everyone else has transitioned to troughs. For the hogs, their gravity-feed stainless steel nipples in the side of the 55 gal drum quickly freeze. We tried a small trough and they tossed it around joyously playing in the splashing water. We then put in a much bigger trough and they seem to accept it as a holder of water instead of a play toy. The pullets have a 5 gallon chicken waterer with a shallow dish at the base and it also freezes quickly. They now have an empty sheep mineral bucket with water. When I went out this morning, one pullet was bravely strutting on top of the frozen bucket. Almost immediately after I busted the ice, it hopped back up and plopped into the water. I had to chuckle. The processor is finally finished with the 13 lambs we dropped off before the holidays. We’ll pick up the meat today and are making arrangements to meet folks tomorrow to pick up their whole lambs. On the YouTube front, I mentioned that Shelley coined the word ‘insteader’ to describe our non-traditional view on homesteading or farmsteading…or life in general. We often choose a path instead of what we are expected to do. That struck a chord with folks and we quickly received requests for t-shirts. We spent quite a bit of time this week trying to figure out how to make that happen and were finally able to. Check out our new Insteader-gear here: https://www.air2groundfarms.com/merchandise

Our Thursday Podcast was discussing our 2023 farm debrief and 2024 goals. Our video today looks at how we stock our pantry for our ketogenic lifestyle and then a quick keto meal. I’ll leave links below.

It’s been a while since we’ve chatted about Artificial Intelligence (AI). 2023 was definitely the year of AI headlines, most focusing on the sensationalistic claims that humanity was soon to end due to the rise of AI. From past blogs, you all know my take on those claims. One of the things that did happen wasn’t discussed much. Towards the end of December, MIT discussed an important AI event that didn’t receive nearly as much front-page time as the predicted ‘end of the world’. On 20 December 2023, MIT News published an article titled “Using AI, MIT researchers identify a new class of antibiotic candidates.” In the article, the author discusses that AI found “a class of compounds that can kill a drug-resistant bacterium [methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)] that causes more than 10,000 deaths in the United States every year.” The researchers were able to use AI’s amazing ability to synthesize data and make predictions based on correlations in the data. The MIT researchers fed the AI tens of thousands of compounds and specified whether or not those compounds had antibiotic properties. The AI then went to work identifying over 12 million new possibilities for antibiotics. The researchers then fed those compounds into three different AIs that were each trained on different data to identify compounds that could be potentially harmful to humans. Through that process, the team of AI identified a compound that should be safe for humans AND kills MRSA. Through lab trials, to include in mice, the compound works. This is the first antibiotic discovery in 60 years! Obviously, the researchers are using this same method to find new medical discoveries. What’s next?

Thursday’s Dust’er Mud Podcast Episode 28, 2023 Debrief and 2024 Goals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js7UtBNZ1jQ

Today’s Video looking at our keto pantry and how we fix a quick keto meal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxJpO1LyvbQ&t=3s

Cheers!

Psycho & Shelley