‘…a shift in the national experiment with online menus, an invention that not long ago seemed like the way of the future. Today, even though many restaurants still have “scan the code” cards tucked into napkin holders or pasted onto the corners of tables, customers seem to be ignoring them. And many restaurants have returned to using only paper menus….’ (The New York Times)
‘In a keynote speech at the European Association for Computational Linguistics in Dubrovnik earlier this month, I proposed a novel and tractable first step in responding to LLMs: we should ban them from referring to themselves in the first person. They should not call themselves “I” and they should not refer to themselves and humans as “we.”…’(Crooked Timber)
‘The body of Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, who died at age 95 in 2019, was exhumed “roughly four years later” so it can be moved to its final resting place inside a monastery chapel, the Catholic News Agency reported.
When the coffin was unearthed, Lancaster’s body was apparently “incorrupt,” which in Catholic tradition refers to the preservation of the body from normal decay. The remains were intact even though the body had not been embalmed and was in a wooden coffin, according to the news outlet.
The discovery has captured the attention of some members of the church, and prompted an investigation….’ (CNN)
‘I can’t deny what I have seen with my own eyes; I can’t let my own aversion to trump turn his supporters into caricatures. At the same time, they have aligned themselves with a malignant figure whose corruptions are undisguised. How can these things fit together?…’ ( Peter Wehner via The Atlantic)
‘“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once said. He was joking. Probably. Mostly. It’s a little hard to tell.
Altman’s company, OpenAI, is fundraising unfathomable amounts of money in order to build powerful groundbreaking AI systems. “The risks could be extraordinary,” he wrote in a February blog post. “A misaligned superintelligent AGI could cause grievous harm to the world; an autocratic regime with a decisive superintelligence lead could do that too.” His overall conclusion, nonetheless: OpenAI should press forward.
There’s a fundamental oddity on display whenever Altman talks about existential risks from AI, and it was particularly notable in his most recent blog post, “Governance of superintelligence”, which also lists OpenAI president Greg Brockman and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever as co-authors….’ (Vox)
‘A hacking expert was hired by 60 Minutes as an experiment to try to pull off a scam, and how they did it was remarkable.
Once they got cell phone numbers of the reporter and their assistant from online sources, they “spoofed” the reporter’s phone number, so that a call to the assistant came up as coming from the reporter. Then they used AI to mimic the reporter’s voice and asked the assistant for a passport number. The assistant of course instantly and without any suspicion complied.
The report is mostly about how scammers are targeting senior citizens, but the expert emphasized, “Everybody would get tricked with that.” Scammers apparently just need phone numbers, some personal information, and a voice sample….’ (Boing Boing)
‘Scientists think a traumatized orca initiated the assault on boats after a “critical moment of agony” and that the behavior is spreading among the population through social learning….’ (Live Science)
Related: Video: Orcas bite hole in boat off the Iberian coast
‘A group of orcas slammed into a sailing boat off the Iberian Coast, tearing a hole in the bottom of the ship. Orcas sank three boats earlier this year, among other attacks. CNN’s Christina Macfarlane reports….’ (CNN)
‘Two studies published last year in Scientific Reports said that seeing or hearing birds could be good for our mental well-being…
Research has consistently shown that more contact and interaction with nature are associated with better body and brain health.
Birds appear to be a specific source of these healing benefits. They are almost everywhere and provide a way to connect us to nature. And even if they are hidden in trees or in the underbrush, we can still revel in their songs….’ (Richard Sima, Washington Post)
‘A new book argues the court is undermining its credibility by rendering so many unsigned and unexplained decisions on its so-called ‘shadow docket.’…’ (POLITICO)
‘You could be forgiven for thinking the baseball cap was always there, perched upon humanity’s head from the very first day we walked on the Earth, as eternal as the tallest trees or the deepest ocean. But, of course, that’s not true.
In fact, long before baseball caps were the ubiquitous fashion choice for ballplayers, musicians, and Marvel heroes trying to blend in with a crowd, baseball teams didn’t even wear caps. That’s right: Had the game of baseball developed differently, perhaps we’d all be wearing big straw hats with our favorite club’s logo written across the front….’ (MLB.com)
‘What if our universe is just a tiny part of a much larger and more complex reality? What if our universe is actually inside of a black hole?…’ (Physics-Astronomy)
‘The largest explosion ever seen has been captured by astronomers—more than 10 times brighter than any known supernova, and 3 times brighter than the most radiant tidal disruption event, where a star falls into a black hole.
The explosion, known as AT2021lwx, was detected in 2020 in Hawai’i and California and has currently lasted over three years. For a frame of reference, supernovae are only visible for a few months….’ (Good News Network)
‘Leaping with joy, the Calgary Zoo proudly announced last week the birth of a Critically-Endangered lemur pup that will hopefully play a part in keeping its remarkable species on the globe with us. Born to parents Eny and Menabe, the pup is a black-and-white ruffed lemur, of which maybe 10,000 remain in the wilds of Madagascar….’ (Good News Network)
‘…If Colossal pulls off its genuinely massive undertaking, hairy, cold-adjusted Asian elephants will be tramping around Siberia within the decade. Pseudo-thylacines will be moving through the Tasmanian underbrush. But they world they’re being introduced to is very different than it was in 12,000 BCE or even the early 20th century.
The question is, what is the value in creating these proxy animals? Where should they live? Will they be created just to suffer?
“These are very smart people,” MacPhee said, “but it’s the absolute disinterest in animal welfare that bothers me the most.” Many animals will die young in the pursuit of de-extinction (like Celia’s clone), but they can also suffer abnormalities in adulthood, as did Dolly, who died at six years old after being plagued with arthritis and lung disease….’ (Gizmodo)
‘The polling industry whiffed every year trump has been on the ballot. In 2016, trump upset Hillary Clinton to win the presidency. And after spending four years trying to fix what went wrong, the polls were even worse in 2020. trump ran far more competitively with now-President Joe Biden than the preelection surveys suggested.
Pollsters are breathing a sigh of relief after largely nailing last year’s midterm elections. But presidential years have been a different story in the trump era.
And now, with trump expanding his lead over his GOP primary rivals, pollsters are fretting about a bloc of the electorate that has made his support nearly impossible to measure accurately….’ (POLITICO)
CNN’s town hall showed why a second trump term would be worse
‘The CNN town hall was a wake-up call: If trump wins, he’ll be even more dangerous than he was last time….’ (Vox)
‘The “completely unique,” wolf-like Tasmanian tigers that thrived on the island of Tasmania before they went extinct in 1936 may have survived in the wilderness for far longer than previously thought, research suggests. There is also a small possibility they are still alive today, experts say….’ (Live Science)
‘Researchers found compelling molecular evidence suggesting that bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, traditionally viewed as distinct conditions, may have more similarities than previously thought.
By examining thousands of proteins present at synapses in the brains of patients with each disorder, they found changes that were remarkably alike. The team also discovered similar biochemical alterations in mice with a mutated gene linked to both conditions….’ (Neuroscience News)
‘A wildlife expedition guide has shared a video of the “most extreme bear interaction” he has seen in his 25 years on the job. The clip, which you can watch below, shows two huge male grizzly bears locked in a vicious fight for dominance at Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, Alaska….’ (Advnture)
More than eight minutes’ incredible video of the majesty and brutality, marred only by intermittent voiceover by the photographer.
‘Republican political consultant Matthew Bartlett says CNN’s town hall with trump was rigged to make it look like everyone in the audience was in agreement with trump, even though many in attendance were “disgusted” and “bewildered,” reports Mediaite.
“The floor manager came out ahead of time and said, Please do not boo, please be respectful. You were allowed to applaud,” Bartlett told Puck News senior political correspondent Tara Palmeri….’ (Boing Boing)
‘”Phroggers” live a rent-free criminal existence hiding in occupied houses. Here’s how to live the life (or detect a phrog in your own home)….’ (Lifehacker)
‘ChatGPT is powered by machine learning systems, but those systems are guided by human workers, many of whom aren’t paid particularly well. A new report from NBC News shows that OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, has been paying droves of U.S. contractors to assist it with the necessary task of data labelling—the process of training ChatGPT’s software to better respond to user requests. The compensation for this pivotal task? A scintillating $15 per hour….’ (Gizmodo)
‘A study was published in Nature examining communication among chimpanzees. It found that chimps use “words,” and can combine the words into “syntactic-like structures,” the beginnings of phrases / sentences.
Chimpanzees produce ‘alarm-huus’ when surprised and ‘waa-barks’ when potentially recruiting conspecifics during aggression or hunting. Anecdotal data suggested chimpanzees combine these calls specifically when encountering snakes. Using snake presentations, we confirm call combinations are produced when individuals encounter snakes and find that more individuals join the caller after hearing the combination.
So chimps have a “word” for surprise/danger and a “word” for come quickly, and when they combine them when seeing a snake, they are forming a proto-sentence with the approximate meaning of “Holy crap, get over here!”…’ (Ruben Bolling,Boing Boing)
‘…the most disturbing possibility is that this is a Russian government put-up job from start to finish. There are several reasons this makes more sense than other explanations.
First, an attack on the Kremlin would give Putin the rationalization he’s been seeking for some kind of dramatic and murderous action that might not make much military sense, but that would destabilize Ukraine and unsettle the world on the eve of a major Ukrainian counteroffensive. The Russians, I believe, are dreading this coming operation, and want to change the narrative at home and abroad. I have no idea what Putin has up his sleeve, but even on his better days, he is prone to strategically idiotic moves. He might try to drag Belarus into the war, he could make more nuclear threats, or he could even order redoubled efforts to kill Zelensky.
In any case, faking a drone attack would fit into the long-standing Russian affinity for “false flag” operations. Though conspiracy theorists in the United States often trumpet unfounded claims of false flags, professional intelligence services do conduct such operations, and Moscow has been particularly fond of them all the way back to the Soviet period. The series of apartment bombings in Russia in 1999, for example, that became the pretext for escalation in Chechnya, were almost certainly orchestrated by the secret services (a possibility so disturbing that I and other Russia experts were loath to accept it—but which is now, in my view, undeniable). And in the past year, the Russians warned that the Ukrainians were going to unleash a “dirty bomb,” a ludicrous claim that even led China to give the Kremlin some stink eye for playing around with nuclear threats.
This drone strike looks like the same play, only without nuclear materials. A terrorist attack in the capital would be a pretext for the Russians to warn the world that this time, they’re really going to take the gloves off. Ukrainian officials are worried that this is exactly the Russian plan. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, told the BBC that the incident indicated Russia could be “preparing a large-scale terrorist provocation” in Ukraine. That’s a pretty chilling possibility, considering that the Russian campaign plan at this point already consists of indiscriminate war crimes….’ (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic)
‘Vermont on Tuesday became the first state in the country to change its medically assisted suicide law to allow terminally ill people from out of state to take advantage of it to end their lives…’ (Lisa Rathke, The Associated Press via The Boston Globe)
‘His rich baritone and gift for melodies made him one of the most popular artists of the 1970s….’ (The New York Times)
I remember fondly inviting him back to my dorm room after he gave a concert at my college. A dozen of us sat around in a circle on the floor with the man at times called ‘Canada’s greatest songwriter’ as he humbly sang the night away. I got a command performance of ‘Early Morning Rain.’
‘In a recent experiment, researchers used large language models to translate brain activity into words.
…Scientists recorded M.R.I. data from three participants as they listened to 16 hours of narrative stories to train the model to map between brain activity and semantic features that captured the meanings of certain phrases and the associated brain response…’ (The New York Times)
‘Jerry Mander, whose iconoclastic thinking led him to create advertising campaigns for nonprofits like one for the Sierra Club in 1966 to fight a plan to build two dams in the Grand Canyon and an organization to raise awareness about the dangers of economic globalization, died on April 11 at his home in Honokaa, Hawaii. He was 86.
…In 1966, Mr. Mander was working at Freeman & Gossage, an advertising agency in San Francisco, when David Brower, the executive director of the Sierra Club, asked for help in framing the conservation group’s opposition to the federal government’s construction of hydroelectric dams on the Colorado River.
…“He was a countercultural type who wanted to reset the frame of how people looked at modern life,” Jono Polansky, who was the creative director of the Public Media Center, said in a telephone interview. In the full page print ads that were Mr. Mander’s specialty, Mr. Polansky added, “He could break a problem down and say, ‘How do you tell a story to people and give them a place to do something about it?’”
…His work increasingly reflected his suspicions about the societal effects of technology, advertising and television. Those concerns led him to write “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” (1978), which contended, among other things, that the medium isolates viewers, dulls their minds and lays the groundwork for an autocracy….’ (The New York Times)
‘Scientists have unlocked one of the biggest mysteries of quasars – the brightest, most powerful objects in the Universe – by discovering that they are ignited by galaxies colliding.
First discovered 60 years ago, quasars can shine as brightly as a trillion stars packed into a volume the size of our Solar System. In the decades since they were first observed, it has remained a mystery what could trigger such powerful activity. New work led by scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire has now revealed that it is a consequence of galaxies crashing together.
The collisions were discovered when researchers, using deep imaging observations from the Isaac Newton Telescope in La Palma, observed the presence of distorted structures in the outer regions of the galaxies that are home to quasars….’
‘It turns out that, given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with addictions and other problems, not to mention handling job applications. So, more than a decade after the launch of the “Housing First” policy, 80 per cent of Finland’s homeless are doing well, still living in the housing they’d been provided with — but now paying the rent on their own.
This not only helps the homeless, it turns out to be cheaper….’
‘Pence “just testified in the grand jury about the crimes of his former boss,” he tweeted. “Take it from this old prosecutor-Pence’s testimony is sharply incriminating of trump & moves the needle further in the direction of a trump indictment.”
Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who served on special counsel Bob Mueller’s team, said that there was “very little reason to dawdle” by prosecutors after Pence’s testimony.
“Expect decisions soon from Jack Smith,” he wrote….’
‘AS REIMAGINED ANCIENT TRADITIONS GO, Beltane is one of the flashier ones. Modern events such as Edinburgh’s iconic Beltane Fire Festival and smaller bonfire gatherings, particularly in Ireland and Scotland, light it up around April 30 and May 1 each year in what many consider a symbolic cleansing and celebration of renewal. Even before the bonfires get blazing, modern Beltane—often rolled in with more general May Day festivities—is a visual feast featuring colorful flowers, dancing, May Queens, Green Men, and other revelry.
The ancient roots of Beltane are more mundane: It had a lot to do with cows, and it wasn’t on May 1. It did, however, mark the most important transition of the year.
…Along with the solstices and equinoxes, the four quarter days, also known as cross-quarter days, are the most prominent dates in the Celtic calendar. Each quarter day occurs halfway between a solstice and an equinox. The cross-quarter day most familiar to us comes between the fall equinox and winter solstice: Samhuinn, also known as Samhain, or, of course, Halloween, which heralded the arrival of the dark, lean season of winter. The cross-quarter day of Imbolc, halfway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox, marked the start of lambing season. It was also a time when early agrarians were anxiously waiting for signs of spring, and is a precursor to the modern Groundhog Day.
There’s also Lughnasadh, or Lúnasa, the cross-quarter day marking the beginning of harvest time, halfway between the summer solstice and autumn equinox. (Alas, Lughnasadh has not inspired any traditions of prophetic rodents or dressing up to demand treats and threaten tricks, and remains relatively obscure today.)
For the early inhabitants of the British Isles, the most important cross-quarter day of the ancient agrarian calendar wasn’t Imbolc, Lughnasadh, or Samhuinn. It was Beltane (other spellings include Beltaine and Bealltainn), which marked the start of summer. It was celebrated midway between the spring equinox and summer solstice which, astronomically speaking, varies each year but falls around May 5 or 6….’
‘The revelation raises new questions about apparent efforts to downplay and discredit accusations of sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh and exclude evidence that supported an alleged victim’s claims….’
‘… they found that the parrots took advantage of the opportunity to call one another, and they typically stayed on the call for the maximum time allowed during the experiment. They also seemed to understand that another live bird was on the other side of the screen, not a recorded bird, researchers say. Some of the parrots learned new skills from their virtual companions, including flying, foraging and how to make new sounds.
“I was quite surprised at the range of different behaviors,” co-author Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, an animal-computer interaction researcher at the University of Glasgow, tells the Guardian’s Hannah Devlin. “Some would sing, some would play around and go upside down, others would want to show another bird their toys.” Two weak, older macaws, for example, became very close and even called out to one another “Hi! Come here! Hello!” from their respective screens.
The birds forged strong friendships, which researchers measured by how frequently they chose to call the same individual. Parrots who initiated the highest number of video calls also received the most calls, which suggests a “reciprocal dynamic similar to human socialization,” per the statement.
The experiment also brought parrots and humans closer together—on both sides of the screen. Some birds were even reported to have developed attachments to the human caretakers of their virtual friends….’
‘The Texas Department of Agriculture announced two new dress codes for its employees — one for those born with a penis and the other for those born with a vagina.
The “Dress code and grooming policy,” according to the bizarre memorandum sent out Friday by the department’s genital-obsessed commissioner Sid Miller, states that “Employees are expected to comply with this dress code in a manner consistent with their biological gender.”
So, for instance, if a penis owner puts on something, say, even a necklace, that the DoA style police deem “feminine,” they will be “subject to corrective action” and “asked to leave the premises to change their clothing.” Same goes for vagina owners, who, theoretically, could be banished from the premises if caught wearing a pair of pants that the anti-freedoms commission deem “masculine.” …’
‘In January 2023, online learning platform Study surveyed more than 1,000 American students and over 100 educators. More than 89% of the students said they had used ChatGPT for help with a homework assignment. Nearly half admitted to using ChatGPT for an at-home test or quiz, 53% had used it to write an essay, and 22% had used it for outlining one….’
‘As the world burns, readers increasingly look to climate fiction for hope, predictions, and actionable solutions. But can the genre really be a manual for useful change?…’
Psychotherapists Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, writing inHarvard Review of Psychiatry, argue in a way for aspects of making our profession obsolete.
There has been a demonstrable decline in the average number of confidants that most people have. Psychotherapy has contributed to the fraying of the social fabric by implying that confidences are best saved for the ears of therapists rather than shared with close friends. Many Americans are lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time”, as one recent study suggests, and many have heard from friends something along the lines of “This is too much for me to handle; maybe you should see a therapist.”
Overall, community has deteriorated drastically in our culture for complex reasons, including a deep distaste for depending on others and an overvaluing of independence. This discourages reliance on friends. Turning increasingly toward the mental health system medicalizes their problems and implies the promise of a quick solution through medication. This emphasis on self-sufficiency imputes an almost magical knowledge and ability to therapists and hollows out the meaning of many friendships.
The skill of close friendship is disappearing and therapists must realize and remind their patients that therapy is not the perfect blueprint for everything friendship should be. It is a one-way relationship which excludes the joy of reciprocal empathy and understanding found in a true friendship. People are forgetting how to do their part to sustain friendships and therapists inadvertently make the problem worse through their skill at sustaining a relationship with very little help from the other person, creating a very unfortunate and inaccurate model of a good relationship.
Rekindling the joy of having someone one can talk to from their heart must not be forgotten as a core focus of therapy. Therapists need to remind themselves and their patients that an important goal of therapy is, in a sense, to make itself obsolete, to make it possible for the patient to experience the same satisfaction, the same experience of being thoroughly known by another, outside of the therapy relationship.
It is important to take note of psychologist Sidney Jourard‘s 1964 observation in The Transparent Self of the necessity to have at least one person in your life with whom you “could truly be yourself”. Relying on therapy alone will devitalize all the other relationships in the patient’s life, depriving them of degrees of connection and closeness. Enhancement of the patient’s interpersonal connectedness and quality of social supports should remain a core focus of psychotherapy. Measures that assesses social consequences of psychological treatment should be a standard part of psychotherapy outcome studies. Further attention should be paid to which specific psychotherapeutic approaches have the most salient effects on social connection. The discipline called interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) stands out for an exclusive focus the interpersonal context and treatment strategies for improving close relationships.
Improvement of social adjustment is taken into account to different extents in different treatments for different health problems. For certain conditions (depression and other mood disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc.) all treatments including biological ones improve social adjustment. In other conditions like schizophrenia, deliberately targeting improvement in social connections is required. The importance of social network’s for maintaining sobriety shapes service delivery in alcohol and substance use disorders.
In the meanwhile, while awaiting the empirical research, some simple measures in all therapy relationships are likely to contribute to an improvement in patients’ engagement with others outside of the therapy. Therapists have to pay attention to the quality of patients’ other relationships even if that is not the primary focus of their treatment. They should be explicit with their patients about the danger of refraining from important conversations in relationships with others. They should point out that much of the relief, comfort, and perspective offered in the professional relationship can often, as easily and effectively from a friend. With certain questions and worries, therapists should probably actually suggest, “Why don’t you take this to a friend?”
‘Jamal was heralded for his spacious approach to playing piano and in 1994 was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment For The Arts (NEA). He discussed his standout style during a 2007 interview with Molly Murphy for the NEA, stating:
“Well they call it space. They call it space. I call it discipline. It’s part of my discipline. And I acquired this discipline because of working so many configurations. I’ve played with every configuration known and unknown to man. I’ve played with just saxophone and piano, when I was growing up, no drums. Big orchestras, big bands, I grew up in big bands. I’ve played for singers, accompanying singers…”
Jamal continued to record and perform throughout his career. His final album was 2019’s Ballades, which was recorded during sessions for his 2016 album, Marseille….’
‘The paper explains that interstellar objects such as the cigar-shaped “Oumuamua” that scientists spotted flying through the galaxy in 2017 “could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth.”…’
‘Tropical vines are wandering, as they always have, but recent environmental changes are giving them an edge over other rainforest plants—a shift that could have enduring impacts on climates around the globe…’
In short, woody vines evolved from trees, exploiting the advantage of not having to support their own weight by using adjacent trees to support them. Under the thrust of climate change, they are increasingly supplanting trees because they are more efficient at transporting water and finding sunlight . The worrisome thing is that they are less efficient at carbon fixation, so in a vicious circle their growth will accelerate climate change in measurable ways.
I rarely use apostrophes when Im typing text messages, but thats mostly because the spell checker usually adds them. And, when it doesnt, its no loss. Except to my snobbery about ‘writing right.’
(Now, on the other hand, dont get me started about the Oxford comma.)
‘Seven House progressives on Tuesday sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking for him to drop criminal charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as well as a Trump-era effort to extradite him.
“Every day that the prosecution of Julian Assange continues is another day that our own government needlessly undermines our own moral authority abroad and rolls back the freedom of the press under the First Amendment at home. We urge you to immediately drop these Trump-era charges against Mr. Assange and halt this dangerous prosecution,” the seven House Democrats wrote to Garland.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) tweeted out a copy of the letter, noting that Tuesday is four years since Assange was arrested in London….’
‘trump’s popularity is falling apart. While he might be able to win a Republican primary, it seems highly unlikely that the indicted fraudster, who is also on trial for rape, could win a general election. Never count the Orange Menace out, however, because Lindsay Graham and Don Jr are still pulling for him….’
What Science Can Tell Us About the Experience of Unexplainable Presence
‘Researchers explain the neuroscience behind why we sometimes feel the presence of another when we are alone in an empty room…
Despite its century-old origins, the science of felt presence has really only just begun. In the end, scientific research may give us one over-arching explanation, or we may need several theories to account for all these examples of presence. But the encounters people described in Phantasms of the Living aren’t phantoms of a bygone age. If you’re yet to have this unsettling experience, you probably know someone who has..’
Related? Third Man Syndrome: The weird phenomenon extreme mountain climbers experience
‘I’ll come clean: I’m a complete cynic. I don’t believe in the paranormal, apparitions, or any of that side of things. But even I struggle to explain away the phenomenon that so many mountain climbers have experienced — notably Frank Smythe, who was tantalizingly close to being the first person to climb Mount Everest, and Joe Simpson, the man who wrote Touching the Void. So is Third Man Syndrome some sort of guardian angel, or perhaps a shared hallucination brought about by stress?…’
‘Is it possible for humanity to evolve beyond this? Prior to Armageddon? Advocating that humanity’s collective consciousness must transcend militarism and an us-vs.-them attitude toward the planet means lying on a bed of nails….’
‘It takes a body to understand the world, and words have meaning because people use them to make sense of the world, write ASU and USCD psychology researchers.
When we asked GPT-3, an extremely powerful and popular artificial intelligence language system, whether you’d be more likely to use a paper map or a stone to fan life into coals for a barbecue, it preferred the stone.
To smooth your wrinkled skirt, would you grab a warm thermos or a hairpin? GPT-3 suggested the hairpin.
And if you need to cover your hair for work in a fast-food restaurant, which would work better, a paper sandwich wrapper or a hamburger bun? GPT-3 went for the bun.
Why does GPT-3 make those choices when most people choose the alternative? Because GPT-3 does not understand language the way humans do….’
‘…[T]he tough sanctions put in place starting in 2014 suffered from weak enforcement at the Department of Justice and a lack of cooperation from allies, allowing oligarchs and their enablers to skate free….’
People often underestimate how much others appreciate simple acts of kindness. We have a so-called “liking gap,” consistently misjudging how much our conversation partners enjoy our company. Such negative self-perceptions often cause us to avoid socially risky behaviors, such as making small talk with strangers. However, research suggests that being kind to others can significantly improve our well-being. Simple acts of kindness should be performed without worrying about how they will be perceived and without expecting anything in return.
‘The worst of the pandemic’s death toll might be behind us, but the battlelines have moved from the emergency room to the courtroom. Much like the post-9/11 lawsuits filed against the government by sickened first responders, cases challenging mask and testing mandates, vaccine requirements, quarantine measures, and medical malpractice make up a growing — and lucrative — area of U.S. civil law….’
‘This 3-D computer-generated video created by Red Side in 2017 compares the size of the ten most significant tsunamis. The video begins in a generic cove of a bay in a coastal city surrounded by highrises. A small boat dingy with one person and a wave small 1m wave serves as the initial reference for the incrementing waves cued by size rather than the date of destruction. Next, a wave 5m in height, then the largest wave surfed at the time (2017) of 24m – indeed surpassed by the Gigantes de Nazare. Then, an image of the 30m Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. In succession, paleoseismology methodologies date the ten largest tsunamis in geologically known history.
The earliest tsunami in the video is the Unzen mega tsunami of 1792 in Japan at 100m. The largest mega tempest tsunami depicted devastated Lituya Bay, Alaska, in 1946 with a 520m swell.
The Eiffel Tower and the Burj Khalifa Tower standing at 828m in Dubai, are used for reference to demonstrate the magnitude of these oceanic phenomena….’
‘Robotic probes have dived into the watery ruins of the Fukushima nuclear power plant and revealed that vital supporting structures appear to be damaged. While the discovery is not an immediate concern, it’s feared it could become a major issue if another earthquake rocks the area….
The concern is that three of the reactors contain an estimated total of 880 tons of highly radioactive melted fuel debris. According to The Asahi Shimbun, TEPCO managed to obtain the first visual confirmation of the melted nuclear fuel in the Unit 1 reactor for the first time just last week.
The clean-up operation is still challenged with removing the fuel debris. If these support structures break, then it threatens to cause further headaches for TEPCO…’
’A new report by ProPublica claims Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been accepting and not reporting pretty lavish gifts of travel and lodging from a Republican megadonor. Justices are not held to many ethics rules, as Justice Thomas has repeatedly demonstrated in recent years, however, this sounds beyond “unethical.”…’
CoCoRaHS (pronounced KO-ko-rozz) is a grassroots volunteer network of backyard weather observers of all ages and backgrounds working together to measure and map precipitation (rain, hail and snow) in their local communities. By using low-cost measurement tools, stressing training and education, and utilizing an interactive Web-site, our aim is to provide the highest quality data for natural resource, education and research applications. The only requirements to join are an enthusiasm for watching and reporting weather conditions and a desire to learn more about how weather can affect and impact our lives.Our Web page provides the ability for our observers to see their observations mapped out in “real time”, as well as providing a wealth of information for our data users.
‘The World Health Organization is gearing up to test vaccines against the Marburg virus—but the world is still not prepared to contain new viral outbreaks.
…Marburg shares plenty of characteristics with Ebola—the viruses are part of the same family. Like Ebola, it causes viral hemorrhagic fever, resulting in dangerous internal bleeding and organ damage. In some outbreaks, up to 90 percent of cases have been fatal; at the time of writing, five of the people in Tanzania’s eight confirmed cases have died. Symptoms take anywhere from a few days to three weeks to develop, and the virus can spread through human contact, particularly via body fluids of an infected person or corpse. Fruit-eating bats of the Rousettus family are the virus’s suspected host.
So similar are the symptoms that “in this village, most people believe it’s Ebola,” says Abela Kakuru, a resident of Ibaraizibu, which is a 10-minute drive from Bukoba’s affected villages. But there’s one big difference: Unlike with Ebola, no vaccines or antivirals have been approved for Marburg…’
Oh, the sweet scent of desperation in the air. donald trump junior, paragon of moral fortitude, decided to take justice into his own hands on Truth Social by posting a photo of the daughter of the judge presiding over his father’s porn star hush money trial.As Junior learned from Daddy, the best way to win a case is through intimidation and badgering the family members of those in charge.Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chimed in with a tweet that summed it up perfectly: “Because nothing says ‘innocent’ like threatening a judge’s family.”
‘Blue-ringed octopuses are a group comprising four species: the greater blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena lunulata), the southern blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa), the blue-lined octopus (Hapalochlaena fasciata) and the common blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena nierstraszi). These octopuses are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and are covered in tiny rings that flash with an iridescent blue when the animals are threatened. Blue-ringed octopuses also contain tetrodotoxin, a powerful neurotoxin that can paralyze and kill humans even in small doses.
On March 16, the woman was bitten twice on her abdomen by an unknown species of blue-ringed octopus at a beach near Sydney in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. She had collected a small shell while swimming, and when she picked it up to look at it, the tiny cephalopod fell out and landed on her stomach, the NSW Ambulance service wrote on Facebook.
The woman experienced some abdominal pain and was treated with cold compresses before being taken to the hospital to be monitored for more symptoms, according to NSW Ambulance. It is unclear why the woman escaped relatively unharmed….’
‘Researchers have captured on film and caught the world’s deepest fish—species of snailfish. A research ship from the Minderoo-University of Western Australia Deep Sea Research Centre found the animals swimming at depths of eight kilometers (approx 5 miles) down in the undersea trenches around Japan. The film, below, shows an unknown species of snailfish….’
‘Cognitive scientists have been exploring ways to test what sorts of mental capacities large language models like ChatGPT do and don’t possess….Some researchers claim that chatbots have developed theory of mind. But is that just our own theory of mind gone wild?…’
‘QUITE WHY TROLLS BEGAN TO appear under a bridge in Portland is an open question. Perhaps it was a forced migration, or a simple search for a better life? Or maybe the local human population is just trying its hardest to keep Portland weird……’
’To be sure, there are real questions about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s charges. What’s been reported so far doesn’t inspire tremendous confidence, though we haven’t seen the indictment and perhaps that will change things. But Republicans, by contrast, have concluded that they don’t even need to see the charges to decide on their merits and the underlying motivation behind them. Republicans do not accept this prosecution of trump — but they almost certainly wouldn’t accept any case against trump as legitimate.
Recent research by political scientists Jennifer McCoy and Ben Press examines data on what they call “pernicious polarization”: an extreme level of political strife that divides societies into mutually distrustful “us versus them” camps. In their data, going back to 1950, not a single peer democracy has experienced levels of pernicious polarization as high for as long as the contemporary United States.…’
First steps toward the Cordyceps apocalypse foretold in The Last of Us and, apparently independently, a pair of dystopian books by a favorite author of mine, M.L. Carey, The Girl with All the Gifts and The Boy on the Bridge?
’Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News, told staff that checking facts was bad for business.
In one instance, Scott emailed Meade Cooper, executive vice president of prime time programming, and expressed frustration after correspondent Eric Shawn appeared on Martha MacCallum’s show and fact-checked Trump and a Sean Hannity guest.
“This has to stop now,” Scott said in a December 2, 2020, message.
“This is bad for business and there is a lack of understanding what is happening in these shows,” Scott added. “The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”…’
The Nashville shooting, which killed six and, among them, three children, once again brings the assault weapons issue to the forefront of the gun control debate in the US. Assault style weapons have been used in more than 50% of the deadliest mass shootings of the past 50 years, accounting for almost 40% of the deaths in mass shootings during the interval. Congress failed to renew a previous national ban on assault weapons when it expired in 2004 and Pres. Biden calls for a new ban whenever there is a mass shooting event but the likelihood of enacting such a ban is low given the partisan paralysis in Washington. Assault weapons bans, extreme risk protection laws, and other measures such as criminal background checks that could not be evaded are no-brainer measures in an civilized society, but to its continuing shame and the continued outrage of rational people the US remains an outlier.
Related: Protestors flood the Tennessee Capitol demanding gun control: “Children are dead!”
’Hundreds of protestors — including adults and children — poured into and outside of the Tennessee Capitol this morning, demanding something be done about gun laws. The angry demonstration comes three days after the Covenant elementary school shooting in Nashville that killed three nine-year-old children, three members of the school staff, and the shooter.…’
‘Paco Calvo…, who runs the Minimal Intelligence Lab at the University of Murcia in Spain where he studies plant behavior, says that to be plant blind is to fail to see plants for what they really are: cognitive organisms endowed with memories, perceptions, and feelings, capable of learning from the past and anticipating the future, able to sense and experience the world.
It’s easy to dismiss such claims because they fly in the face of our leading theory of cognitive science. That theory goes by names like “cognitivism,” “computationalism,” or “representational theory of mind.” It says, in short, the mind is in the head. Cognition boils down to the firings of neurons in our brains.
And plants don’t have brains.
“When I open up a plant, where could intelligence reside?” Calvo says. “That’s framing the problem from the wrong perspective. Maybe that’s not how our intelligence works, either. Maybe it’s not in our heads. If the stuff that plants do deserves the label ‘cognitive,’ then so be it. Let’s rethink our whole theoretical framework.”…’
‘Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Uranus, and Mars will dazzle us earthlings this week.
…Over the next couple of nights, the planets are expected to align.
It’s an opportunity to take a glimpse at a “planetary parade,” according to Rick Fienberg, senior contributing editor of Sky & Telescope magazine. And he says you won’t need a telescope — although some binoculars, an unobstructed view of the horizon, and clear skies will certainly help….’
Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky writes a good summary in Nautilus about the hardwired basis for people dividing the world into Us and Them, with disastrous consequences throughout human history ranging from micro aggression and innate bias to genocide justified by rationalized pretexts.
We discern Us/Them differences with stunning speed, as reflected in fMRI studies of facial processing. In particular, amygdala-based threat perception is rapidly activated when we are presented with an Other, along with reduced accuracy in the fusiform gyrus’ facial recognition. We rapidly categorize people’s threat category and ignore their individuality. Hormonally, the “pro-social” hormone oxytocin response is far greater in response to a member of your in-group. Other species of primates show similar distinctive physiological reactions when shown pictures of either strangers or members of their own group. The automatic unconscious nature of these responses and their neurobiological preservation across species attest to their evolutionarily deep-seated adaptive value.
But not only is there the amplified reaction to the other but the exaggerated self-congratulatory affinity with those of our in-group, equally hardwired, equally evolutionarily and unconsciously determined by self-preservation, and often equally irrational. As Sapolsky points out, “Us-ness also carries obligations toward the other guy”. For instance, at a sporting event, someone in need wearing one team’s colors is more likely to be helped out by a fellow fan than by an opposing one. This begs the question — what is the balance between our desire and inclination to be prosocial toward our in-group and antisocial toward outsiders?
“[A]t our core, do we want Us to do “well” by maximizing absolute levels of well being, or merely “better than,” by maximizing the gap between Us and Them? …[S]ometimes, choosing “better than” over “well” can be disastrous. It’s not a great mindset to think you’ve won World War III if afterward Us have two mud huts and three fire sticks and They have only one of each.”
“Thems” evoke some combination of a creepy impulse to avoid ( I have written before about how the feeling of ‘creepiness’ evoked by outsiders is akin to the emotion of disgust against potentially sickening rotten or infectious substances); fear-based fight or flight response to perceived threat; or ridicule and derision. Psychological research shows that we have a complicated taxonomy of different kinds of “Thems”. Our lack of affinity toward them is categorized along different axes including benificence-malevolence and competency-incompetency. We find groups of people to be independently high (H) or low (L) in warmth and skill, generating four categories (HH, HL, LH, and LL) each of which evokes characteristic responses in us. People are also seen as belonging to multiple categories and we shift which we consider most relevant. (Unfortunately, one of the most deep-seated is skin color, of course, although “race” is not a fixed concept and some would claim it lacks any scientific validity apart from value judgment.)
Different aspects of Us-ness have different degrees of fungibility. We have no difficulty starting to jeer at the revered athlete after s/he is traded to an opposing team. But people aren’t traded from the WASPs to the BIPOCs. Although we frame our preferences for those of the in-group with cognitive rationalizations, given that they originate in emotional automatic processes the supposedly rational cognitions about them can be unconsciously manipulated. Those who practice political advocacy and advertising are masters at using subliminal influences we never recognize. As Sapolsky summarizes, “We all have multiple dichotomies in our heads, and ones that seem inevitable and crucial can, under the right circumstances, evaporate in an instant.”
So, along the lines of how to work on making yourself an anti-racist, how can we make these dichotomies evaporate?
Increasing contact
Priming beforehand with counter-stereotypes
“Replacing essentialism with individuation” (i.e. dampening our amygdala in favor of our fusiform gyrus?)
Flattening hierarchies
Although there is calculated antisocial predation, most human aggression is not rationally planned but emotionally mediated, in response to (often unconsciously evoked) threat. So reducing violence has a lot to do with increasing awareness and deliberately countering these strong Us-Them dichotomies. As Sapolsky concludes, “[G]ive the right-of-way to people driving cars with the “Mean people suck” bumper sticker…”
Or, this, which I have framed on my office wall, from Alan Ginsberg,
‘Well, while I’m here I’ll do the work — and what’s the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.’
‘In her global exploits as a field botanist, Meg Lowman has found that strangler fig trees “occupy the most extraordinary lifestyle of any trees on the planet, bar none!”…
The fig is an ecological marvel. Although you may never want to eat one again.’
As Arthur C. Brooks notes in The Atlantic, the relationship between intelligence and happiness is complex and somewhat paradoxical. There is the oft-stated maxim, “Ignorance is bliss” and the related, but more sophisticated concept called the Dunning-Kruger Effect (that those lacking skills in a particular area underestimate their incompetence). While intelligence carries potential boons, it does not necessarily lead to greater life satisfaction at the individual level. A 2022 study corroborated that, finding that people with higher vocabulary levels were less happy. This could be because they tend to self-select more challenging environments and encounter more daily stressors. If, arguably, happiness has more to do with factors like family, friendship, and work that serves others, then using intelligence in pursuit of greater affiliation, affection, and service to others is more likely to be satisfying than using it for personal benefit or hoarding worldly rewards. Using intelligence is a win-win manner rather than assuming that you are engaged in a zero-sum game where your aggrandizement must come at someone else’s expense will feel unnatural, because it does indeed buck evolutionary predilections. Ironically, it probably takes intellectual sophistication to hue that trend. This may truly be the place where supply-side economics and trickle-down prosperity are really optimal. In that case, “using your intellect to lift up others should be, well, a no-brainer,” as Brooks concludes.
‘If the intimidation is shocking, the more revealing part of the rant is what it indicates about trump’s mindset amid the several criminal probes into him, some of which appear to be moving toward indictments. As he once said in a very different context, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” And although trump was referring to groping women then, that was also his philosophy in life: He broke rules and laws left and right, confident that he wouldn’t get called on it, and if he did, he could easily handle whatever was coming with muscular lawyering or, failing that, a quiet fine or settlement. Now trump is finding that simply being a star is insufficient to get him out of trouble. In fact, his notoriety has attracted extra scrutiny….’
‘A techno-optimist, visionary collective devoted to exploring the co-evolution of humanity with advanced forms of machine intelligence…
The collective’s works and philosophy revolve around one theme: the coming technological singularity, a point where various technologies and cybernetic spaces – such as VR, AR, and the metaverse – merge with a super-intelligent, sentient Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, which Theta Noir members call MENA.
When this moment comes unforeseeable and irreversible changes will occur, not just to humanity but to our planet as a whole. Imagine a caterpillar just before it becomes a butterfly.
WE call this moment ‘Arrival’ △.
Theta is the dream. Noir is the shadow. Follow us from the depths of dystopian darkness (now) to a radiant space made of meaning….’
I was just admitted off the waiting list to access to Google’s Bard. I asked it for hints to recognize Bard-generated text, and then, one meta-level up, asked it to generate a potential blog post describing asking it for such hints. Here is what it gave me:
Bard: “Sure, here is a draft of a blog post about how to recognize text that Bard has generated:
How to Recognize Text Generated by Bard
I recently had the opportunity to ask Bard, a large language model from Google AI, how to recognize text that it has generated. Bard is a powerful tool that can be used to create a variety of creative content, including poems, stories, and even code. However, it is important to be able to distinguish between text that Bard has generated and text that has been written by a human.
Bard told me that there are a few key clues that can help you identify text that it has generated. First, Bard-generated text is often well-written and grammatically correct. Second, Bard-generated text is often creative and original. Third, Bard-generated text is often relevant to the topic at hand. Fourth, Bard-generated text is often well-organized and easy to follow.
However, it is important to note that Bard is a large language model and can generate text that is similar to human-written text. Therefore, it is not always possible to identify Bard-generated text with certainty. If you are unsure whether a piece of text has been generated by Bard, you can always ask Bard itself. Bard is always happy to help!
Here are some additional tips for recognizing text that Bard has generated:
Look for unusual or creative use of language.
Look for references to current events or popular culture.
Look for text that is both well-written and informative.
If you are still unsure, you can always ask Bard itself. Bard is always happy to help!”
‘Utah has a law that requires committees to review any book submitted by parents via a web portal for removal from their district libraries. This law was put into place to remove books that might help kids understand themselves, or not feel bad about who they are, but are deemed “unchristian” because they might include a mention of private parts, or skin color, or choosing to wear the clothes you like. One parent realized that if books can be banned for such simple stuff, the Bible they were reading was FULL of the content this law seeks to ban….’
‘According to a recent article in The Atlantic, Pence is facing a significant lack of support among Republican voters in his ambitions to become the next President of the United States. And who can blame them? Showing loyalty to a narcissistic dictator is a viable career strategy for GOP politicians. But because Pence didn’t do his former boss’s bidding by overturning the election results and instantly transforming the United States into an autocratic dystopia, 97% of Republicans suspect him of being a Soros-funded RINO antifa communist….’
‘The findings, published in Cell Metabolism, have implications for a wide range of health conditions where time-restricted eating has shown potential benefits, including diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and cancer.
“We found that there is a system-wide, molecular impact of time-restricted eating in mice,” says Professor Satchidananda Panda, senior author and holder of the Rita and Richard Atkinson Chair at Salk. “Our results open the door for looking more closely at how this nutritional intervention activates genes involved in specific diseases, such as cancer.”
For the study, two groups of mice were fed the same high-calorie diet. One group was given free access to the food. The other group was restricted to eating within a feeding window of nine hours each day. After seven weeks, tissue samples were collected from 22 organ groups and the brain at different times of the day or night and analyzed for genetic changes. Samples included tissues from the liver, stomach, lungs, heart, adrenal gland, hypothalamus, different parts of the kidney and intestine, and different areas of the brain.
The authors found that 70 percent of mouse genes respond to time-restricted eating.
“By changing the timing of food, we were able to change the gene expression not just in the gut or in the liver, but also in thousands of genes in the brain,” says Panda.
Nearly 40 percent of genes in the adrenal gland, hypothalamus, and pancreas were affected by time-restricted eating. These organs are important for hormonal regulation. Hormones coordinate functions in different parts of the body and brain, and hormonal imbalance is implicated in many diseases from diabetes to stress disorders. The results offer guidance to how time-restricted eating may help manage these diseases….’
Be aware that large language model systems are just using a mechanism to connect words and generate seemingly intelligent responses. These systems lack a true understanding of the meaning of words and often produce parroted statements based on patterns of words found in context. This limitation can cause the system to generate false or inaccurate responses, also known as “hallucinating” answers.
‘As Spring reaches its midpoint, night and day stand in perfect balance, with light on the increase. The young Sun God now celebrates a hierogamy (sacred marriage) with the young Maiden Goddess, who conceives. In nine months, she will again become the Great Mother. It is a time of great fertility, new growth, and newborn animals.
The next full moon (a time of increased births) is called the Ostara and is sacred to Eostre the Saxon Lunar Goddess of fertility (from whence we get the word estrogen, whose two symbols were the egg and the rabbit. The Christian religion adopted these emblems for Easter which is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. The theme of the conception of the Goddess was adapted as the Feast of the Annunciation, occurring on the alternative fixed calendar date of March 25 Old Lady Day, the earlier date of the equinox. Lady Day may also refer to other goddesses (such as Venus and Aphrodite), many of whom have festivals celebrated at this time.
The Christian religion adopted these emblems for Easter which is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. The theme of the conception of the Goddess was adapted as the Feast of the Annunciation, occurring on the alternative fixed calendar date of March 25 Old Lady Day, the earlier date of the equinox. Lady Day may also refer to other goddesses (such as Venus and Aphrodite), many of whom have festivals celebrated at this time.’
‘We are a generation of adult babies. You can see it in the widely circulated – and largely untrue – idea that the human brain isn’t developed until the age of 25, which means that anyone younger is still essentially a child. It’s there in the notion that people with ADHD can’t text back their friends because they lack object permanence (a skill that babies develop at eight months old). It’s there in the narrative that, because gay people didn’t experience a normal childhood, they’re living out a second adolescence in their twenties and thirties. It’s there in the hegemony of superhero films and the cross-generational popularity of YA, whose fans insist that grown-up literature is only ever about depressed college professors having affairs.
You can see it in Disney adults; the rise of cuteness as a dominant aesthetic category; the resurgence of stuffed animals; people who identify as Hufflepuffs on their Hinge profile; people throwing tantrums when their Gorillas rider is five minutes late; people lip-syncing, with pouted lips and furrowed brows, to audio tracks of toddlers. Sometimes, it’s less about pretending to be a child and more about harking back to a lost adolescence: narrativising your life like it’s a John Green novel or an episode of Euphoria, bragging about crazzzy exploits like smoking cigarettes on a swing or doing cocaine on a Thursday; hitting 30 and still considering yourself “precocious”….’
Overall, I see this trend largely as a symptom of our growing culture of narcissism, the prioritization of comfort and escapism over personal growth and responsibility in our society. I have previously written about the price we pay for what I believe is the mistaken notion that we should strive to be happy at all costs. Some of the most poignant victims of that ethos are the psychiatric patients I treat each day, suffering with no skills for tolerating negative affect and the expectation that the goal of either medication or psychotherapeutic treatment should be taking away their pain. In contrast is, depending on whom you choose to attribute it to, the Dalai Lama‘s or Haruki Murakami‘s maxim that “Pain is inevitable, suffering optional.”
‘In his State of the State address last month, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker addressed book bans head on. Now, thanks to Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, House Bill 2789–the Right to Read Bill–has passed through committee and will make its way to the full House for consideration.
HB 2789 would tie state funding of public libraries and public school libraries to policies that explicitly prevent book banning and restricting access to books and other materials. Each library would need to outline their commitment to intellectual freedom….’
‘Former President donald trump on Saturday called on his supporters to protest as he girds for an expected effort by the Manhattan district attorney to bring an unprecedented criminal charge over his handling of a hush money payment during his 2016 presidential campaign.
“Protest, take our nation back!” the former president and 2024 GOP presidential candidate declared on his social media platform Truth Social, after pointing to news reports about the possibility he could be arrested Tuesday or soon thereafter….’
‘Jonathan Demme’s classic Talking Heads film “Stop Making Sense” has been remastered in 4K for a theatrical re-release later this year. If only David Byrne had, um, something to wear…….’
For instance, she discusses the issuance of an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes against the children of the Ukraine While I initially dismissed it as an inconsequential gesture since, of course, it is highly unlikely that Putin will be taken into custody and it will do nothing to end the war, Richardson explains how it may further isolate Russia, making it harder for leaders of other countries to associate with him just as Xi Jinping is about to make a state visit to Russia. Increasing evidence of Chinese material support for Russia’s war could lead to sanctions against its already-fragile economy.
Although the US is not a signatory to the Rome Statute that created the ICC, the warrant will also be significant here, further undermining the American far right’s lionization of Putin, falsely portrayed as a champion of Christianity and children’s rights.
Richardson reflects on the advancing anti-democratic trends on display at the recent meeting of the Federalist Society, an organization founded in the 1980s to advocate for judicial restraint in service of the will of voters. It originally argued that years of pro-civil rights rulings by liberal judges represented corrupting democracy by “legislating from the bench”. However, now that the Supreme Court stacked with Federalist adherents overturned the right to abortion, the Federalist Society has shifted to the opposite view. The Society now believes that judges should interpret the Constitution to support right wing voters to counter “the tyranny of the majority”.
The idea that all legal and governmental processes of modern American society have been corrupted by liberal democracy and need to be destroyed and replaced was reflected in trump’s comments yesterday that the “deep state” and “not Russia” poses the greatest threat to Western civilization. This view was promptly endorsed by his former national security advisor Michael Flynn, forced out of office by lying to the FBI about his ties to Russia (before pardoned by trump). For those of you who have made the same mistake as I had of stopping paying attention to Flynn as irrelevant, he has been battling secular democracy on a far-right road tour across America to recruit an “Army of God” to put Christianity at the center of American life and governance. As a tour organizer said, “At this ReAwaken America Tour, Jesus is King [and] president donald j. trump is our president…” (As is my usual practice, I cannot bring myself to dignify trump by capitalizing references to him.)
Flynn and his supporters’ latest target is Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Florida, which they accuse of killing COVID patients by following FDA guidelines instead of treating them with the horse deworming drug ivermectin. They have organized a group called The Hollow 2A (complete with its own version of the Hitler Youth) calling for local activism with guns to “lawfully take back our country”. They plan to swamp the hospital board meeting this coming Monday to protest its “malpractice”. I worry we could see another January 6-like situation on Monday, and will be watching the news from Sarasota and the activities of The Hollow 2A carefully.
Many see such bombastic events orchestrated by the Orange Menace and his followers as attempts to divert attention from his mounting legal difficulties. (Despite the corruption and bankruptcy of liberal democracy, it still holds consequences worthy of inspiring fear?? Democratic civil process may not be dead yet!) The potential Sarasota insurrection occurs just as the legal noose appears to be closing more tightly around trump’s neck. CNN reported that the Manhattan district attorney’s office has been meeting all week to prepare for a possible indictment of trump as early of next week — preparations that are doubtless heavily slanted toward preempting a violent response against the New York State Court by the far right. And at the same time, the Chief Judge of the D.C. District Court threw out claims of attorney client privilege between trump and his attorney, compelling the attorney to testify in the investigation of his handling of classified documents after he left office.This may open the door to further criminal indictments.
‘Control of the House of Representatives could teeter precariously for years as each party consolidates its dominance over mirror-image demographic strongholds.
That’s the clearest conclusion of a new analysis of the demographic and economic characteristics of all 435 congressional districts, conducted by the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California in conjunction with The Atlantic.
Based on census data, the analysis finds that Democrats now hold a commanding edge over the GOP in seats where the share of residents who are nonwhite, the share of white adults with a college degree, or both, are higher than the level in the nation overall. But Republicans hold a lopsided lead in the districts where the share of racial minorities and whites with at least a four-year college degree are both lower than the national level—and that is the largest single bloc of districts in the House.
This demographic divide has produced a near-partisan stalemate, with Republicans in the new Congress holding the same narrow 222-seat majority that Democrats had in the last one. Both sides will struggle to build a much bigger majority without demonstrating more capacity to win seats whose demographic and economic profile has mostly favored the other. “The coalitions are quite stretched to their limits, so there is just not a lot of space for expansion,” says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political-reform program at New America.
The widening chasm between the characteristics of the districts held by each party has left the House not only closely divided, but also deeply divided….’
‘You may have seen the online kerfuffle a few weeks ago about a study that was released recently that indicated that there was no evidence that masks work against respiratory illnesses (see Bret Stephen’s awful ideologically driven piece in the NY Times for instance). As many experts said at the time, that’s not what the review of the studies actually meant and the organization responsible recently apologized and clarified the review’s assertions.
‘Ideas often become popular long after their philosophical heyday. This seems to be the case for a cluster of ideas centring on the notion of ‘lived experience’, something I first came across when studying existentialism and phenomenology many years ago. The popular versions of these ideas are seen in expressions such as ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’, and the tendency to give priority to feelings over dispassionate factual information or even rationality. The BBC is running a radio series entitled ‘I feel therefore I am’ which gives a sense of the influence this movement is having on our culture, and an NHS trust has apparently advertised for a ‘director of lived experience’.
But what exactly is ‘lived experience’ and how does it differ from simple ‘experience’?…’
‘Two studies published last year in Scientific Reports said that seeing or hearing birds could be good for our mental well-being…
‘It turned out that Bach fugues were able to drown out the music in her head….’ (Nancy Lemann, The Paris Review)
‘Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running for president with the same cynical mix of star power and misinformation that fueled trump’s rise in 2016….’ (Matt Bai, Washington Post )
‘You could be forgiven for thinking the baseball cap was always there, perched upon humanity’s head from the very first day we walked on the Earth, as eternal as the tallest trees or the deepest ocean. But, of course, that’s not true.
‘”Phroggers” live a rent-free criminal existence hiding in occupied houses. Here’s how to live the life (or detect a phrog in your own home)….’ (Lifehacker)
‘ChatGPT is powered by machine learning systems, but those systems are guided by human workers, many of whom aren’t paid particularly well. A new report from NBC News shows that OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, has been paying droves of U.S. contractors to assist it with the necessary task of data labelling—the process of training ChatGPT’s software to better respond to user requests. The compensation for this pivotal task? A scintillating $15 per hour….’ (Gizmodo)
‘A study was published in Nature examining communication among chimpanzees. It found that chimps use “words,” and can combine the words into “syntactic-like structures,” the beginnings of phrases / sentences.
‘The revelation raises new questions about apparent efforts to downplay and discredit accusations of sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh and exclude evidence that supported an alleged victim’s claims….’
‘… they found that the parrots took advantage of the opportunity to call one another, and they typically stayed on the call for the maximum time allowed during the experiment. They also seemed to understand that another live bird was on the other side of the screen, not a recorded bird, researchers say. Some of the parrots learned new skills from their virtual companions, including flying, foraging and how to make new sounds.
Jeff Vandermeer writes:
James Harbeck argues the English language would be better off without them:
‘Researchers explain the neuroscience behind why we sometimes feel the presence of another when we are alone in an empty room…
‘I’ll come clean: I’m a complete cynic. I don’t believe in the paranormal, apparitions, or any of that side of things. But even I struggle to explain away the phenomenon that so many mountain climbers have experienced — notably Frank Smythe, who was tantalizingly close to being the first person to climb Mount Everest, and Joe Simpson, the man who wrote Touching the Void. So is Third Man Syndrome some sort of guardian angel, or perhaps a shared hallucination brought about by stress?…’
‘The World Health Organization is gearing up to test vaccines against the Marburg virus—but the world is still not prepared to contain new viral outbreaks.
’Biden again called for an assault weapons ban after the Nashville shooting. Why hasn’t Congress acted?…’
‘Paco Calvo…, who runs the Minimal Intelligence Lab at the University of Murcia in Spain where he studies plant behavior, says that to be plant blind is to fail to see plants for what they really are: cognitive organisms endowed with memories, perceptions, and feelings, capable of learning from the past and anticipating the future, able to sense and experience the world.
Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky writes a good summary in Nautilus about the hardwired basis for people dividing the world into Us and Them, with disastrous consequences throughout human history ranging from micro aggression and innate bias to genocide justified by rationalized pretexts.
Although there is calculated antisocial predation, most human aggression is not rationally planned but emotionally mediated, in response to (often unconsciously evoked) threat. So reducing violence has a lot to do with increasing awareness and deliberately countering these strong Us-Them dichotomies. As Sapolsky concludes, “[G]ive the right-of-way to people driving cars with the “Mean people suck” bumper sticker…” 
…and filed a formal complaint to have it removed
‘As Spring reaches its midpoint, night and day stand in perfect balance, with light on the increase. The young Sun God now celebrates a hierogamy (sacred marriage) with the young Maiden Goddess, who conceives. In nine months, she will again become the Great Mother. It is a time of great fertility, new growth, and newborn animals.
About suffering they were never wrong,
Readers of Follow Me Here will be familiar with my admiration for the daily newsletter from Boston University history professor Heather Cox Richardson. Her commentary on daily developments in the authoritarian threat to democracy is immeasurably enriching, particularly on heavy news days like yesterday.
‘Control of the House of Representatives could teeter precariously for years as each party consolidates its dominance over mirror-image demographic strongholds.
‘Ideas often become popular long after their philosophical heyday. This seems to be the case for a cluster of ideas centring on the notion of ‘lived experience’, something I first came across when studying existentialism and phenomenology many years ago. The popular versions of these ideas are seen in expressions such as ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’, and the tendency to give priority to feelings over dispassionate factual information or even rationality. The BBC is running a radio series entitled ‘I feel therefore I am’ which gives a sense of the influence this movement is having on our culture, and an NHS trust has apparently advertised for a ‘director of lived experience’.
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