‘Now, a new study in the journal Science Advances from researchers at the University of Melbourne and the University of Cambridge — Elizabeth Bowman, David Coghill, Carsten Murawski, and Peter Bossaerts — finds that far from making users smarter, smart drugs seem to actually undermine cognitive performance.

The authors tested the effects of three drugs — methylphenidate (more commonly known through one of its brand names, Ritalin), modafinil, and dextroamphetamine* (brand name Dexedrine, among others) — on a cognitive task designed to more closely mimic the complexities of real-world problems than past stimulant studies.

Far from simply concluding that smart drugs offer little benefit, the researchers found that the drugs actually seemed to leave users worse off. While study subjects worked harder while on the drugs compared to placebo, the “quality of effort,” or productivity, actually declined. The upshot is that smart drugs led users to spend more effort working while being less productive — not exactly a picture of cognitive enhancement….’ (Vox)

* one of the two active components of popular ADHD stimulant Adderall -ed.

‘The earth has about 36 billion acres of dry land. Who owns those acres? Madison Trust Company put together a list of who owns the most land of anyone on earth. You may have your own little acre, or part of one, but that’s nothing compared to what the British royal family owns- 6,600,000,000 acres! That puts them at the top of the biggest landowners on earth. And we thought the British Empire was a thing of the past.

What’s really impressive is that, of the top 19 landowners, only one is an individual person. That is Gina Rinehart of Australia, who personally owns 23,969,000 acres, putting her at #4 on the list. The next individual landowner is at #20. The rest are families, corporations, or communities. An awful lot of them are in Australia, which is a big country with a small population concentrated in the eastern cities.

Did you guess the #2 landowner in the world? It is the Catholic Church. You might feel better about #3, which is the Inuit People of Nunavut, who own 87,500,000 acres in Northern Canada. You can see the list in both infographic and text form, plus more information about what they are using their land for, in this post….’ (Neatorama)

‘Watch video from the legendary singer-songwriter’s historic conert at the scenic Washington state venue….’ (JamBase)

‘Newly announced modifications to the autocorrect feature used on iPhones will better understand a word’s context in a text message, saving users some blushes….’ (The New York Times)

‘Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the ‘passing along’ of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk….’ (3 Quarks Daily)

‘Chris Christie attacked rival Donald Trump last night in a 90-minute town hall on CNN, branding the twice-convicted former game show host as a loser. And a loser. And a loser. And it might be the only time the former New Jersey governor has ever told the honest-to-goodness truth.

“He hasn’t won a damn thing since 2016. Three-time loser,” the former 2016 loser said in front of a live audience.

“2018 we lost the House. 2020 we lost the White House. We lost the United State Senate a couple of weeks later in 2021,” he reminded his voters. “And in 2022 we lost two more governorships, another Senate seat, and barely took the House of Representatives when Joe Biden had the most incompetent first two years I’ve ever seen in my life.”…’ (Boing Boing)

The video is here.

‘Malaria kills half a million people a year in Africa. We can prevent that — if we act fast enough….’ (Vox)

‘A list of ideas, in no particular order and from different fields, that help explain how the world works…’ (Morgan Housel via Collab Fund)

‘I’ve been compiling lists of “unpopular ideas,” things that seem weird or bad to most people (at least, to most educated urbanites in the United States, which is the demographic I know best).

Even though I disagree with many of these ideas, I nevertheless think it’s valuable to practice engaging with ideas that seem weird or bad, for two reasons: First, because such ideas might occasionally be true, and it’s worth sifting through some duds to find a gem.

And second, because I think our imaginations tend to be too constrained by conventional “common sense,” and that many ideas we accept as true today were counterintuitive to past generations. Considering weird ideas helps de-anchor us from the status quo, and that’s valuable independently of whether those particular ideas are true or not.

… [Some people have missed this disclaimer in the past, so I’m going to say again that I’m not endorsing these ideas, merely collecting them, and I disagree with many of them.]…’ ( Julia Galef)

‘The war began in the early morning hours with a massive bombardment — China’s version of “shock and awe.” Chinese planes and rockets swiftly destroyed most of Taiwan’s navy and air force as the People’s Liberation army and navy mounted a massive amphibious assault across the 100-mile Taiwan Strait. Having taken seriously President Joe Biden’s pledge to defend the island, Beijing also struck pre-emptively at U.S. and allied air bases and ships in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. managed to even the odds for a time by deploying more sophisticated submarines as well as B-21 and B-2 stealth bombers to get inside China’s air defense zones, but Washington ran out of key munitions in a matter of days and saw its network access severed. The United States and its main ally, Japan, lost thousands of servicemembers, dozens of ships, and hundreds of aircraft. Taiwan’s economy was devastated. And as a protracted siege ensued, the U.S. was much slower to rebuild, taking years to replace ships as it reckoned with how shriveled its industrial base had become compared to China’s….’ (POLITICO)

Wildfire smoke reminded people about climate change. How soon will they forget?

‘Extreme weather and climate-linked disasters don’t always lead to changes in public opinion…’ (Vox)

The future of Canada’s wildfires, explained by a Canadian fire scientist

‘The smoke is clearing from New York and other East Coast cities, but Canada’s wildfires are set to get worse…’ (Vox)

If you can’t breathe well, neither can your pet

‘…While pet parents and animals in the US are a safe distance from the flames themselves, the threat of air pollution cannot be underestimated. In humans, air pollution can cause dizziness, coughing, headaches, and in more severe cases and vulnerable groups, heart and lung problems. Air pollution is also a silent killer: It’s responsible for nearly 250,000 premature deaths in the US and 6.7 million premature deaths globally each year….’ (Vox)

Dirty air can be deadly. Here’s how to protect yourself.

’The Air Quality Index can warn you about wildfire smoke and pollution in your area. Here’s a step-by-step guide…’ (Vox)

‘DID THE WEST ANTARCTIC ICE Sheet completely collapse during the latest interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago? It’s an important question for climate scientists, but geology was giving them no answers. So they turned to genetics instead.

Enter Turquet’s octopus (Pareledone turqueti), a cephalopod with a four-million-year pedigree that makes its home in the icy waters around Antarctica. Recent DNA analysis shows that two distinct populations of this species, one in the Weddell Sea and the other in the Ross Sea, mated about 125,000 years ago.

This could only have happened if the massive ice sheet that now separates those populations wasn’t there at the time. So yes, it did collapse. And that’s bad news, because it increases the likelihood that it will happen again….’ (Atlas Obscura)

‘Loath as I am to give the vile Tucker Carlson even scintilla of extra attention, it’s pretty important that the Right’s darling pundit opened up his new show on Twitter with rank anti-Semitism.

In a lengthy defense of his hero Vladimir Putin, he called the Jewish president of Ukraine “sweaty and rat-like, … a persecutor of Christians, a friend of Blackrock.”…’ (Boing Boing)

A miscellaneous cluster of AI links from today’s Morning News:

• “One way of thinking about a program like ChatGPT is that it’s much better at assessing vibes than it is at reproducing facts.” / Read Max
• See also: A writer asks ChatGPT to control his life, which it then destroys in short order. / Motherboard
• Ted Chiang: Instead of “artificial intelligence,” we should call it “applied statistics,” because it isn’t intelligent at all. / Financial Times
• Watch: ELIZA, a chatbot written in 1966, has a conversation with ChatGPT, triggering a flurry of “as an AI language model” responses. / YouTube
• Adobe’s new AI generative fill tool is fun for memes but bad at art. / Inside My Head, Hyperallergic

‘…you might be a sulker. You’ve probably had to deal with someone else’s sulk, too. But what is sulking, exactly? Why do we do it? And why does it have such a bad reputation?…’ (Aeon Essays)

‘According to the guy in this video, Indium is the only element in the universe that is both safe enough and soft enough to chew on like bubblegum.

He explains that it has a consistency similar to refrigerated milk duds, but its is tasteless. Indium is also soft enough to write with like a pencil.

A piece of chewing gum and writing utensil all in one- what more could one ask for in life?… ‘ ( Boing Boing)

‘A 43-year-old gun shop owner in Georgia is shutting down his store, saying he can no longer sell weapons in good conscience. He says both the Nashville elementary school mass shooting in March and the Atlanta hospital mass shooting in May were the “final straws.”

And after someone came into his gun shop six weeks ago wanting to buy 4,000 rounds, he told NBC News he knew he was making the right decision. “I just can’t,” he said….’  Boing Boing)

‘A flat, rounded shell. A tail that’s folded under the body. This is what a crab looks like, and apparently what peak performance might look like — at least according to evolution. A crab-like body plan has evolved at least five separate times among decapod crustaceans, a group that includes crabs, lobsters and shrimp. In fact, it’s happened so often that there’s a name for it: carcinization….’  3 Quarks Daily)

‘…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)

‘“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)

‘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