‘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)

‘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)

‘Unlike their Hollywood counterparts, the real-life Men in Black are mysterious figures who threaten people who have reported paranormal experiences….’ (All That Is Interesting)

‘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)

‘A case on the Court’s “shadow docket” could strike down state and local bans on AR-15s and similar weapons….’ (Vox)

‘The murder case against Richard Glossip is so weak that even Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general says he should not be executed….’ (Vox)

‘…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)

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)

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television was, at the time it came out, heavily shaped my social thinking, and its importance has if anything been enhanced in the intervening decades.

Most Powerful Objects in the Universe:

‘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….’

— via GoodNewsNetwork

‘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….’

— via Common Dreams

One can only hope…

‘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….’

— via Salon.com

‘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….’

— via Atlas Obscura

‘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….’

— via Rest of World

Jeff Vandermeer writes:

‘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?…’

— via Esquire

‘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.”…’

— via POLITICO

‘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….’

— via Politico.

Related: Dozens of Australian politicians urge US to abandon Julian Assange extradition

‘In open letter, 48 MPs and senators warn ‘closest strategic ally’ that pursuit of WikiLeaks founder ‘set a dangerous precedent’…’

— via The Guardian

‘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….’

— via Boing Boing

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..’

— via Neuroscience News

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?…’

— Tom Kilpatrick via The Manual

‘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….’

— via Common Dreams

‘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….’

— via Gizmodo

‘…[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….’

— via POLITICO

‘Research assessed democracy in every state. Tennessee came in last place….’

— via Vox

‘Text a friend, write a thank-you note, compliment a stranger — people appreciate these gestures….’

— via Vox

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….’

— via POLITICO

‘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….’

— via Boing Boing

‘”It’s never a good sign when there are fewer people at your current rally than are in prison for your last one.”…’

— via Mashable

‘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…’

— via IFLScience

’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.”…’

— via Boing Boing

‘New York Justice Juan Merchan told a trump org. executive he got off easy in another criminal case. Will the former president be so lucky?…’

— via POLITICO

‘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….’

— via Live Science

‘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….’

— via Boing Boing

‘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?…’

— via The New York Times

‘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……’

— via Atlas Obscura

’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.…’

— via Vox

’A man in India is the first person thought to be sickened by a fungus that usually attacks and kills rose plants…’

— via Gizmodo

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.”…’

— via oing Boing

’Biden again called for an assault weapons ban after the Nashville shooting. Why hasn’t Congress acted?…’

— via Vox

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.…’

— via Boing Boing

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.

‘When you stick ink-filled needles into your skin, your body’s defenders respond accordingly. Scientists aren’t sure if that’s good or bad for you….’

— Katherine J.Wu via The Atlantic

‘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….’

— David A. Graham via The Atlantic

‘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….’

— via THETA NOIR

‘Sixteen young Montanans have sued their state, arguing that its support of fossil fuels violates the state Constitution….’

— via New York Times

…and filed a formal complaint to have it removed

‘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….’

— Jacob Weisberger via Boing Boing

‘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….’

— via Boing Boing

‘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….’

— via Neuroscience Stuff tumbler

‘A search engine researcher explains the promise and peril of letting ChatGPT and its cousins search the web for you….’

— via Gizmodo

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.’

— via Wicca.com

‘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….’

— via Bookriot

‘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….’

— via POLITICO

‘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…….’

— via Boing Boing

I will be lined up at my local theater the moment this greatest concert film of all time hits the screen again!

‘These creatures might have disappeared forever, if not for some last-ditch conservation….’

— via Gizmodo

‘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.

In a typically well-argued and well-researched piece for the NY Times, Zeynep Tufekci explains what the review actually shows and why the science is clear that masks do work….’

— via Kottke

‘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’?…’

— via 3 Quarks Daily

Related:

‘What happens when an entire generation loses itself in a world of abstractions?…’

— via City Journal

‘…there might be something more fundamental about the way clowns look that unsettles people.

In fact the strongest factor we identified was hidden emotional signals, suggesting that for many people, a fear of clowns stems from not being able to see their facial expressions due to their make-up. We cannot see their “true” faces and therefore cannot understand their emotional intent. So, for example, we don’t know whether they have a frown or a furrowed brow, which would indicate anger. Not being able to detect what a clown is thinking or what they might do next makes some of us on edge when we are around them….’

— via The Conversation

‘This shouldn’t need to be said in 2023, but forcing teenagers to become parents isn’t good for the teenagers, the baby or society in general…’

— via  The Guardian

Related? Watch as Marjorie Taylor Greene runs congress for Speaker McCarthy

‘Guess Kevin McCarthy had someplace to be today and had Greene sworn in to replace him. Hey, look! Everything is normal. Happens all the time, except not usually with people so busy fighting the gazpacho and Jewish Space Laser conspiracies….’

— via Boing Boing

‘An unusual feeding technique only recently observed by scientists was documented nearly 2,000 years ago, a study suggests…’

— via The Guardian

‘RadioGPT can talk. It can research. It can take your calls. And it could be coming to your market….’

— via Slate

‘When handling rare books, experts say that bare, just-cleaned hands are best. Why won’t the public believe them?…’

— via The New York Times

‘For all of the technical and dramatic excellence of Tár, I was largely repulsed by it for two reasons: the film’s many outright errors concerning the orchestral world and the character of Tár herself….’

— via San Francisco Classical Voice

‘Our relationship to the written word is fundamentally changing. So-called generative artificial intelligence has gone mainstream through programs like ChatGPT, which use large language models, or LLMs, to statistically predict the next letter or word in a sequence, yielding sentences and paragraphs that mimic the content of whatever documents they are trained on. They have brought something like autocomplete to the entirety of the internet. For now, people are still typing the actual prompts for these programs and, likewise, the models are still (mostly) trained on human prose instead of their own machine-made opuses.

But circumstances could change—as evidenced by the release last week of an API for ChatGPT, which will allow the technology to be integrated directly into web applications such as social media and online shopping. It is easy now to imagine a setup wherein machines could prompt other machines to put out text ad infinitum, flooding the internet with synthetic text devoid of human agency or intent: gray goo, but for the written word….’

— via The Atlantic

Imagining the Unimaginable.

‘A war over Taiwan would likely involve the largest and most complex amphibious invasion ever mounted. Were the conflict to drag on, it might well evolve into a building-to-building, mountaintop-to-mountaintop ground war in one of the most densely populated and economically advanced countries on Earth. And that’s just in Taiwan itself.

It’s an open question whether the U.S. would come to its longtime ally Taiwan’s aid; if the United States got involved, we would see a scenario the world has managed to avoid over the 75 years since the introduction of the atomic bomb: direct exchange of fire between two nuclear-armed superpowers.

“Disabuse yourself of the notion that war with China is going to be like anything we’ve experienced in our lifetimes,” said David Ochmanek, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration who is now a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation….’

— via Grid

‘Latvia has the highest drunk driving rate in all of Europe. Under a new law, the Latvian government can seize the cars of drunk drivers and sell or donate them….’

— via Gizmodo

‘Are huskies at their happiest running hundreds of miles a week, as mushers maintain? Or, as animal rights activists insist, are they victims of callous human ambition, sometimes required to endure unfathomable hardship? The conflict has embroiled … the Iditarod … in a fight that could change the sport forever—and, if some have their way, maybe even lead to its demise…’

— via GQ

‘N95s are good. Some scientists want to do much better….’

— Jacob Stern via The Atlantic

‘There could and may well be a pandemic much deadlier than Covid, and if there is, some pretty strong measures would be justified to bring it to a halt before it sweeps the world. Good research into whether masks as worn by normal people under normal conditions prevent disease transmission is a big part of figuring out what our pandemic response should be….’

— via Vox