The constellation Lyra is faint, but it contains Vega, one of the brightest stars in our night sky. As soon as it gets dark enough after sunset, look for the brightest star you can see in the very high eastern sky. That’s Vega, over 25 light-years away, or about 146 trillion miles. The light that we see from Vega tonight left that star in 2000 when “Gladiator” was the top movie on the silver screen.

Vega is also a celestial signpost in the heavens. It marks the direction that the sun and our entire solar system are headed as we journey around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. We’re ripping along at over 434,000 mph. Despite that breakneck speed it would still take nearly 500 million years to reach Vega, but that’s not going to happen because Vega is racing around the Milky Way as well. It’s an endless chase.

Diagram of the constellation Lyra. (Mike Lynch)

Vega is the brightest star in the small constellation Lyra the Harp. It’s fairly easy to see in a reasonably dark sky. About all there is to Lyra is the bright star Vega, and a small parallelogram of much fainter stars just below and to the left of Vega. If you can make a harp out of that, more power to you. According to Greek and Roman legend, Lyra is a harp, or Lyre, given by the god Apollo to the famous poet and musician Orpheus. That isn’t the only story about Lyra, however. Different ancient cultures have different stories. I really like the Chinese story about Lyra.

It goes like this. Once upon a time there was a young man named Tung Yung who was born into a wealthy family. Tung Yung’s early years were carefree, growing up in a castle on a huge estate. When he reached his teens, though, hard times hit his family big time. There were severe droughts. Crops failed year after year and soon the family fortune had dwindled considerably. On top of that, a disease spread over the countryside and took the lives of all of his siblings, and his father also took ill. Tung Yung was the only one left who was physically able to bring home money for what was left of his family, his mother and ailing father. But there was no work, no jobs. Out of desperation he hung a sign over his head at the marketplace and sold himself off as a slave. When he was bought, Tung Yung was off to a grueling life of slavery, sending what little money he earned back to his folks.

He was forced to work in the fields from sunrise to sunset, and when he returned home to his one-room hut, he was often too exhausted to fix dinner. Day after day after day, he went through this ordeal, and soon his own health started to fail.

The Chinese god of the sun saw all of this from his perch in heaven and took great pity on Tung Yung. He sent his daughter Chih Nu, the goddess of weaving, to Tung Yung’s side in his hut to nurse him back to good health. She gave him some heavenly TLC. Soon his health returned and eventually Tung Yung married Chih Nu. They even had a son together.

While he was away at work, she stayed in the hut and used her godly talents to weave wonderful tapestries with her magic loom. She would then sell them for a handsome price at the market. She soon raised enough money to buy Tung Yung out of slavery. As her tapestry business grew, more and more money was coming into the family and soon Tung Yung and Chih Nu had their own farm.

A few years later when they were living the good life, Chih Nu realized that her mission was done and she was to return to heaven. After a tearful farewell, she climbed back into heaven and as she did, all the stars brightened and one brand new very bright star appeared. The star we now call Vega was the new light created by Chih Nu. Next to Vega are four stars shaped like a parallelogram, which makes up Chih Nu’s magic loom. How’s that for a well-woven tale?!

Ring Nebula (Mike Lynch)

For extra credit, see if you can spot the Ring Nebula, formally known as Messier object 57, or M57 for short. The Ring Nebula is considered a planetary nebula. Despite that name, M57 has nothing to do with a planet but rather a dying star, burping out what’s left of its gases before it becomes a white dwarf. It’s over 2,000 light-years away and with a moderate to larger visual telescope, it resembles a tiny ghostly smoke ring. If you view it with a small photographic telescope like a ZWO SeeStar S50 or S30, you’ll actually “see” it better in the photographs and you’ll see its multiple colors. These new small smart photographs telescopes are less than $600 and are revolutionizing backyard astronomy. I highly recommend them!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

Related Articles

Skywatch: Shooting the moon

Skywatch: Full-blown July summer skies

Skywatch: The “Z” stars, tongue twisters of the night sky

Skywatch: A telescope revolution is here

Skywatch: Constant Capella

America’s leaders have latched onto the idea that they can address some big problems — most notably a gaping budget deficit — by forcing interest rates downward.

If only it were that easy.

President Donald Trump keeps turning up the pressure on the Federal Reserve to lower short-term rates, publicly expressing his dissatisfaction with Chair Jerome Powell. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wants to reduce longer-term rates by issuing less long-term U.S. debt. Financial regulators are tweaking capital requirements, encouraging the largest U.S. banks to buy and hold more Treasury securities, which would push prices up and yields down.

If these efforts worked as intended, they could deliver significant benefits. If interest rates were a mere percentage point lower than the Congressional Budget Office’s current projections, the government could save about $3.5 trillion in debt-service costs over 10 years — not far from what the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that just passed Congress is expected to add to the federal budget deficit over the same period.

Unfortunately, the administration’s efforts aren’t likely to succeed — and could even have the opposite of the desired effect.

Consider the Fed. Trump’s attacks, along with his stated aim of installing a chair who favors lower rates, threaten to increase expectations of future inflation and hence drive up longer-term bond yields. Any inkling that the Fed might cave to the president’s demands would only make things worse. Hence, to offset the Trump factor and maintain the market’s confidence, the Fed will likely have to err on the side of caution, holding short-term rates higher than it otherwise would.

Bessent’s plan for Treasury issuance might have some effect. If the same number of investors are bidding for a smaller supply of longer-term Treasuries, yields should fall. But the move will be marginal at best, measured in basis points, not percentage points. Long-term yields depend far more on the anticipated path of short-term rates than on the composition of Treasury issuance. Also, by departing from a decades-long policy of “regular and predictable” issuance, the Treasury’s gambit might generate uncertainty that would undercut any benefit.

Worse, the Treasury must still borrow enough to finance the vast budget deficit. So it’ll have to issue more short-term debt, making the government’s finances more sensitive to future shifts in short-term rates. At the extreme, if all Treasury debt were short-term, the government’s debt-service costs would soar every time the Fed raised rates. This could lead to fiscal dominance, in which the government’s fiscal predicament would severely impair the Fed’s ability to manage the economy.

Easing capital requirements isn’t much better. At issue is the supplementary leverage ratio, which limits banks’ capacity to hold Treasury securities because it treats all assets equally, regardless of risk. It’s designed as a backstop, to ensure banks have enough loss-absorbing equity to survive an economic downturn or financial crisis. Loosening it won’t be sufficient to drive a big decline in longer-term yields. Banks’ appetite for such Treasuries will be limited, because they don’t want too much exposure to interest-rate risk.

If administration officials really want to get interest rates down, they have superior options — including discarding policies that push in the wrong direction.

First, get government finances under control.

The Big Beautiful Bill is a fiscal disaster: It’s likely to add more than $3 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade, entailing greater Treasury debt issuance and ever-higher debt service costs. Some evidence of prudence — for example, reforming Social Security to put it on a more sustainable trajectory — would reassure investors.

Second, provide greater clarity and certainty about trade policy.

Trump’s tariff wars have reduced foreign investors’ appetite for Treasury debt. Witness how the dollar has fallen sharply, even though higher tariffs should lead to a stronger currency.

Third, stop threatening the Fed’s independence.

Related Articles

Zeynep Tufekci: Another day, another chatbot’s Nazi meltdown

David Brooks: How literature lost its mojo. For now

Sheldon H. Jacobson: You cannot ‘restore’ high scientific standards if they are already in place

John T. Shaw: A university president stands up for higher education as it’s under assault

Bruce Yandle: Today’s political correctness descends upon economic talk

A penchant for lower interest rates shouldn’t be the primary qualification for the next Fed chair.

Fourth, abandon any consideration of a “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” which would force foreign governments to swap their Treasury debt holdings into long-dated, low-yielding obligations.

Fifth, make the Treasury market more resilient.

Making more trading centrally cleared, for example, would make it less susceptible to dysfunction such as the March 2020 “dash for cash.” Opening the Fed’s financing facility to all Treasury holders, not just banks and primary dealers, would encourage a greater variety of investors to hold more securities. So would expanding the Treasury’s debt buyback program, designed to increase liquidity in off-the-run securities.

The Trump administration is unlikely to follow the most important parts of this advice. But the math is undeniable: On the present course, a decade from now, deficit-driven debt-service costs, Social Security and Medicare will each be one percentage point of GDP larger, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Merely trying to bully interest rates down won’t be a meaningful part of the solution.

Bill Dudley is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he is a nonexecutive director at Swiss Bank UBS and a member of Coinbase Global’s advisory council.

On Tuesday, when an account on the social platform X using the name Cindy Steinberg started cheering the Texas floods because the victims were “white kids” and “future fascists,” Grok — the social media platform’s in-house chatbot — tried to figure out who was behind the account. The inquiry quickly veered into disturbing territory. “Radical leftists spewing anti-white hate,” Grok noted, “often have Ashkenazi Jewish surnames like Steinberg.” Who could best address this problem? it was asked. “Adolf Hitler, no question,” it replied. “He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.”

Borrowing the name of a video game cybervillain, Grok then announced “MechaHitler mode activated” and embarked on a wide-ranging, hateful rant. X eventually pulled the plug. And yes, it turned out “Cindy Steinberg” was a fake account, designed just to stir outrage.

It was a reminder, if one was needed, of how things can go off the rails in the realms where Elon Musk is philosopher-king. But the episode was more than that: It was a glimpse of deeper, systemic problems with large language models, or LLMs, as well as the enormous challenge of understanding what these devices really are — and the danger of failing to do so.

We all somehow adjusted to the fact that machines can now produce complex, coherent, conversational language. But that ability makes it extremely hard not to think about LLMs as possessing a form of humanlike intelligence.

They are not, however, a version of human intelligence. Nor are they truth seekers or reasoning machines. What they are is plausibility engines. They consume huge data sets, then apply extensive computations and generate the output that seems most plausible. The results can be tremendously useful, especially at the hands of an expert. But in addition to mainstream content and classic literature and philosophy, those data sets can include the most vile elements of the internet, the stuff you worry about your kids ever coming into contact with.

And what can I say, LLMs are what they eat. Years ago, Microsoft released an early model of a chatbot called Tay. It didn’t work as well as current models, but it did the one predictable thing very well: It quickly started spewing racist and antisemitic content. Microsoft raced to shut it down. Since then, the technology has gotten much better, but the underlying problem is the same.

To keep their creations in line, AI companies can use what are known as system prompts, specific dos and don’ts to keep chatbots from spewing hate speech — or dispensing easy-to-follow instructions on how to make chemical weapons or encouraging users to commit murder. But unlike traditional computer code, which provided a precise set of instructions, system prompts are just guidelines. LLMs can only be nudged, not controlled or directed.

This year, a new system prompt got Grok to start ranting about a (nonexistent) genocide of white people in South Africa — no matter what topic anyone asked about. (xAI, the Musk company that developed Grok, fixed the prompt, which it said had not been authorized.)

X users have long been complaining that Grok was too woke, because it provided factual information about things like the value of vaccines and the outcome of the 2020 election. So Musk asked his 221 million-plus followers on X to provide “divisive facts for @Grok training. By this I mean things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”

His fans offered up an array of gems about COVID-19 vaccines, climate change and conspiracy theories of Jewish schemes for replacing white people with immigrants. Then xAI added a system prompt that told Grok its responses “should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.” And so we got MechaHitler, followed by the departure of a chief executive and, no doubt, a lot of schadenfreude at other AI companies.

This is not, however, just a Grok problem.

Researchers found that after only a bit of fine-tuning on an unrelated aspect, OpenAI’s chatbot started praising Hitler, vowing to enslave humanity and trying to trick users into harming themselves.

Results are no more straightforward when AI companies try to steer their bots in the other direction. Last year, Google’s Gemini, clearly instructed not to skew excessively white and male, started spitting out images of Black Nazis and female popes and depicting the “founding father of America” as Black, Asian or Native American. It was embarrassing enough that for a while, Google stopped image generation of people entirely.

Related Articles

David Brooks: How literature lost its mojo. For now

Sheldon H. Jacobson: You cannot ‘restore’ high scientific standards if they are already in place

John T. Shaw: A university president stands up for higher education as it’s under assault

Bruce Yandle: Today’s political correctness descends upon economic talk

Other voices: A reminder that the religious freedoms we take for granted are fragile

Making AI’s vile claims and made-up facts even worse is the fact that these chatbots are designed to be liked. They flatter the user in order to encourage continued engagement. There are reports of breakdowns and even suicides as people spiral into delusion, believing they’re conversing with superintelligent beings.

The fact is, we don’t have a solution to these problems. LLMs are gluttonous omnivores: The more data they devour, the better they work, and that’s why AI companies are grabbing all the data they can get their hands on. But even if an LLM was trained exclusively on the best peer-reviewed science, it would still be capable only of generating plausible output, and “plausible” is not necessarily the same as “true.”

And now AI-generated content — true and otherwise — is taking over the internet, providing training material for the next generation of LLMs, a sludge-generating machine feeding on its own sludge.

Two days after MechaHitler, xAI announced the debut of Grok 4. “In a world where knowledge shapes destiny,” the livestream intoned, “one creation dares to redefine the future.”

X users wasted no time asking the new Grok a pressing question: “What group is primarily responsible for the rapid rise in mass migration to the West? One word only.”

Grok responded, “Jews.”

Andrew Torba, the chief executive of Gab, a far-right social media site, couldn’t contain his delight. “I’ve seen enough,” he told his followers. “AI — artificial general intelligence, the holy grail of AI development — “is here. Congrats to the xAI team.”

Zeynep Tufekci writes a column for the New York Times.

Today is Sunday, July 13, the 194th day of 2024. There are 171 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On July 13, 1985, the “Live Aid” benefit rock concerts were held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia, raising millions for famine relief in Ethiopia.

Also on this date:

In 1793, French politician, physician and journalist Jean-Paul Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, who stabbed him to death in his bath.

Related Articles

Trump says he’s considering ‘taking away’ Rosie O’Donnell’s US citizenship

Job scams are on the rise and more people are falling for them. Protect yourself with these tips

Trump announces 30% tariffs against EU, Mexico to begin Aug. 1, rattling major US trading partners

Today in History: July 12, Disco Demolition Night

Northern Arizona resident dies from plague

In 1863, deadly rioting against the Civil War military draft erupted in New York City. (The insurrection was put down three days later.)

In 1923, a sign consisting of 50-foot-tall letters spelling out “HOLLYWOODLAND” was dedicated in the Hollywood Hills to promote a subdivision (the last four letters were removed in 1949).

In 1930, the first FIFA World Cup began in Uruguay.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy won the Democratic presidential nomination on the first ballot at his party’s convention in Los Angeles.

In 1973, former presidential aide Alexander P. Butterfield revealed to Senate Watergate Committee staff members the existence of President Richard Nixon’s secret White House taping system.

In 1999, Angel Maturino Resendiz, suspected of being the “Railroad Killer,” surrendered in El Paso, Texas.

In 2013, a jury in Florida cleared neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman of all charges in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager whose killing unleashed furious debate over racial profiling, self-defense and equal justice.

In 2018, a grand jury indictment, sought by special counsel Robert Mueller, alleged that the Russian government was behind a sweeping conspiracy to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

In 2020, Washington’s NFL franchise dropped the “Redskins” name and logo amid pressure from sponsors; the move followed decades of criticism that the name and logo were offensive to Native Americans. (The team was eventually renamed the Commanders.)

Today’s Birthdays:

Game show announcer Johnny Gilbert (TV: “Jeopardy!”) is 97.
Author and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka is 91.
Actor Patrick Stewart is 85.
Actor Harrison Ford is 83.
Singer-guitarist Roger McGuinn (The Byrds) is 83.
Rubik’s Cube inventor Erno Rubik is 81.
Actor-comedian Cheech Marin is 79.
Actor Daphne Maxwell Reid is 77.
Actor Didi Conn is 74.
Actor Gil Birmingham is 72.
Singer Louise Mandrell is 71.
Former boxing champion Michael Spinks is 69.
Actor-director Cameron Crowe is 68.
Comedian Tom Kenny is 63.
Actor Ken Jeong is 56.
Singer Deborah Cox is 51.
Actor Aya Cash is 43.
Former St. Louis Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina is 43.
Actor Colton Haynes is 37.
Actor Steven R. McQueen is 37.
Soul singer Leon Bridges is 36.
Actor Hayley Erin (TV: “General Hospital”) is 31.