At the root of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a memory that cannot be controlled. It may intrude on everyday activity, thrusting a person into the middle of a horrifying event, or surface as night terrors or flashbacks. Decades of treatment of military veterans and sexual assault survivors have left little doubt that traumatic memories function differently from other memories. […]

The people listening to the sad memories, which often involved the death of a family member, showed consistently high engagement of the hippocampus, part of the brain that organizes and contextualizes memories. When the same people listened to their traumatic memories — of sexual assaults, fires, school shootings and terrorist attacks — the hippocampus was not involved. […]

“traumatic memories are not experienced as memories as such,” but as “fragments of prior events, subjugating the present moment.” The traumatic memories appeared to engage a different area of the brain — the posterior cingulate cortex, or P.C.C., which is usually involved in internally directed thought, like introspection or daydreaming. The more severe the person’s PTSD symptoms were, the more activity appeared in the P.C.C. What is striking about this finding is that the P.C.C. is not known as a memory region, but one that is engaged with “processing of internal experience”

{ NYT | Continue reading }

quote { Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the other (page 69), 1979 | PDF }

A new artificial intelligence computer program created by researchers at the University of Florida and NVIDIA can generate doctors’ notes so well that two physicians couldn’t tell the difference, according to an early study from both groups.

There is a scientific fraud epidemic — and we are ignoring the cure — As the Oxford university psychologist Dorothy Bishop has written, we only know about the ones who get caught. In her view, our “relaxed attitude” to the scientific fraud epidemic is a “disaster-in-waiting.” The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, a data sleuth who specialises in spotting suspect images, might argue the disaster is already here: her Patreon-funded work has resulted in over a thousand retractions and almost as many corrections. That work has been mostly done in Bik’s spare time, amid hostility and threats of lawsuits. Instead of this ad hoc vigilantism, Bishop argues, there should be a proper police force, with an army of scientists specifically trained, perhaps through a masters degree, to protect research integrity. It is a fine idea, if publishers and institutions can be persuaded to employ them (Spandidos, a biomedical publisher, has an in-house anti-fraud team). It could help to scupper the rise of the “paper mill,” an estimated $1bn industry in which unscrupulous researchers can buy authorship on fake papers destined for peer-reviewed journals. China plays an outsize role in this nefarious practice, set up to feed a globally competitive “publish or perish” culture that rates academics according to how often they are published and cited. Peer reviewers, mostly unpaid, don’t always spot the scam. And as the sheer volume of science piles up — an estimated 3.7mn papers from China alone in 2021 — the chances of being rumbled dwindle. Some researchers have been caught on social media asking to opportunistically add their names to existing papers, presumably in return for cash.

In 1970s Ireland, Pubs Briefly Replaced Banks — and It Worked

Why Navajo is the world’s hardest language to learn

A private island resort has found an effective way to eradicate mosquitoes Soneva Fushi, a resort on the private Kunfunadhoo Island in the Maldives, first employed the Biogents system in 2019, using two different types of traps – more than 500 in total positioned around the island. The first type, called the BG-GAT, is a passive trap meant for tiger mosquitoes that have already bitten someone and are searching for a place to lay eggs. The second type, the BG-Mosquitaire CO2, is meant to attract mosquitoes searching for blood, which it does by using carbon dioxide created through yeast and sugar fermentation, plus lactic acid, which mimics human skin. […] The resort said it recorded a dramatic decrease in the island’s mosquito population by upwards of 98% in the first year. […] the Maldives’ native insects are flourishing again. “These natural pollinators are now back in abundance, which means there are more flowers, more fruits and more produce,” says Oines, adding that more fruits and insects also means “there are also more birds visiting the shores of Kunfunadhoo and fireflies are once again spotted at night.”

Download all of Wikipedia on your phone

Diane Arbus photographed by Garry Winogrand

{ Tod Papageorge, “The Beaches, Los Angeles” 1979 - 1982 | more }

{ In the summers of 1983 and 1984, Tod Papageorge, a professor of photography at the Yale University School of Art, adopted a daily ritual in Athens. He would wake up each morning at the Zafolia Hotel and walk up the hill to the Acropolis to spend the day photographing the scene around the ancient citadel, sweating in the sun. | Tod Papageorge, The Acropolis }

Nuclear research lab Idaho National Laboratory (INL) confirmed that it fell victim to a data breach on Tuesday. SiegedSec, a group of self-proclaimed “gay furry hackers,” took responsibility for the attack and claimed they accessed sensitive employee data like social security numbers, home addresses and more. “We’re willing to make a deal with INL. If they research creating irl catgirls we will take down this post”

Life expectancy can increase by up to 10 years following sustained shifts towards healthier diets — Our results showed that the longevity-associated dietary pattern had moderate intakes of whole grains, fruit, fish and white meat; a high intake of milk and dairy, vegetables, nuts and legumes; a relatively low intake of eggs, red meat and sugar-sweetened beverages; and a low intake of refined grains and processed meat

higher body mass index increased the risk of obesity-related cancer among European adults

Deep space astronauts may be prone to erectile dysfunction, study finds — As if wasting muscles, thinner bones, an elevated cancer risk were not enough

Children tend to overestimate their performance on a variety of tasks and activities […] with their estimates of performance being 1.3 times their actual performance […] children’s self-overestimation gradually decreases with age […] The present meta-analysis examines the specificity of this phenomenon across age, tasks, and more than five decades of historical time (1968–2021). […] children overestimated themselves more strongly in studies that were more recently conducted

Contrary to the commonly-held view, the brain does not have the ability to rewire itself to compensate for the loss of sight, an amputation or stroke. Instead, what is occurring is merely the brain being trained to utilise already existing, but latent, abilities.

ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis The AI-generated data compared the outcomes of two surgical procedures and indicated — wrongly — that one treatment is better than the other.

The focus of this essay is Jacob Lorhard’s Ogdoas scholastica, a compilation of eight books published in 1606. We are interested specifically in Book 8,titled Metaphysics, or Ontology, an English translation of which can be found in Uckelman (2008). As is now well known, what is almost certainly the first published occurrence of the term “ontology” (ontologia, in Latin) is to be found in this work.

The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. By mass, there’s more titanium in the earth’s crust than carbon by a factor of nearly 30, and more titanium than copper by a factor of nearly 100. But despite its abundance, it’s only recently that civilization has been able to use titanium as a metal.

update nov 22:

Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s four days in exile, several staff researchers wrote a letter to the board of directors warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity

Altman back at OpenAI, may have fewer checks on power

Before OpenAI, Altman was asked to leave by his mentor at the prominent start-up incubator Y Combinator, part of a pattern of clashes that some attribute to his self-serving approach […] Graham had surprised the tech world in 2014 by tapping Altman, then in his 20s, to lead the vaunted Silicon Valley incubator. Five years later, he flew across the Atlantic with concerns that the company’s president put his own interests ahead of the organization — worries that would be echoed by OpenAI’s board. […] Altman’s practice of filling the board with allies to gain control is not just common, it’s start-up gospel from Altman’s longtime mentor, venture capitalist Peter Thiel. […] One person who has worked closely with Altman described a pattern of consistent and subtle manipulation that sows division between individuals.

update nov 21:

Sam Altman, OpenAI Board Open Talks to Negotiate His Possible Return

OpenAI’s board may be coming around to Sam Altman returning

After Altman firing, OpenAI tried to merge with rival—and was rejected

update nov 20:

Microsoft already has a perpetual license to all OpenAI IP (short of artificial general intelligence), including source code and model weights; the question was whether it would have the talent to exploit that IP if OpenAI suffered the sort of talent drain that was threatened upon Altman and Brockman’s removal. Indeed they will, as a good portion of that talent seems likely to flow to Microsoft; you can make the case that Microsoft just acquired OpenAI for $0 and zero risk of an antitrust lawsuit.

It ended with former Twitch leader Emmett Shear taking over as OpenAI’s interim chief executive and Microsoft announcing it was hiring Altman and OpenAI co-founder and former President Greg Brockman to lead Microsoft’s new advanced AI research team.

Nearly 500 employees of OpenAI have signed a letter saying they may quit and join Sam Altman at Microsoft unless the startup’s board resigns and reappoints the ousted CEO.

update nov 19:

OpenAI Investors Plot Last-Minute Push With Microsoft To Reinstate Sam Altman As CEO

Altman is “ambivalent” about coming back and would want significant governance changes

Kholsa Ventures, an early backer of OpenAI, wants Mr Altman back at OpenAI but “will back him in whatever he does next.” Mr Altman and former Apple design chief Jony Ive have been discussing building a new AI hardware device. It said that SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son had been involved in the conversation.

nov 18:

On Friday, OpenAI fired CEO Sam Altman in a surprise move that led to the resignation of President Greg Brockman and three senior scientists. The move also blindsided key investor and minority owner Microsoft, reportedly making CEO Satya Nadella furious. […] According to Brockman, the OpenAI management team was only made aware of these moves shortly after the fact, but former CTO (now interim CEO) Mira Murati had been informed on Thursday night. […] insiders say the move was mostly a power play that resulted from a cultural schism between Altman and Sutskever over Altman’s management style and drive for high-profile publicity. On September 29, Sutskever tweeted, “Ego is the enemy of growth.”

{ Ars Technica | Continue reading }

Instead of building the next GPT or image maker DALL-E, Sutskever tells me his new priority is to figure out how to stop an artificial superintelligence (a hypothetical future technology he sees coming with the foresight of a true believer) from going rogue. Sutskever tells me a lot of other things too. He thinks ChatGPT just might be conscious (if you squint). He thinks the world needs to wake up to the true power of the technology his company and others are racing to create. And he thinks some humans will one day choose to merge with machines.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

{ @sama = Sam Altman | @gdb = Greg Brockman }

It is the rise and fall of median voters’ unhappiness that drives the regime change between the two major political parties in the United States.

Eye-to-eye contact is rare but shapes our social behavior […] participants engaged in mutual eye-to-eye contact only 3.5% of the time

Psychedelic treatments are speeding towards approval. Many questions remain about the formerly taboo chemicals that are being used to treat trauma and depression. […] Dölen says that psychedelics could be a “master key” that unlocks critical periods — making them more sensitive to particular stimuli.

viruses can actually get sick. […]the culprits turn out to be other viruses.

Elephants give each other unique names, groundbreaking study reveals […] researchers recorded over 600 elephant calls […] low-frequency noises between 1 to 20 Hertz, too low for the human ear to hear. However, these so-called infrasounds can travel over vast distances as large as 10 kilometers (6 miles). The researchers then implemented a machine learning algorithm, which identified specific rumbles for 119 individual elephants. […] Some of these rumbles were played back to 17 wild elephants. When they heard their name, they were more likely to move quickly toward the sound source and vocalize faster in response.

How Stone Walls Became a Signature Landform of New England

Updates to the Open AI saga

AI outperforms conventional weather forecasting for the first time

How Citizen Scientists Rescued Crucial World War II Weather Data

In machine learning, a stochastic parrot is a large language model that is good at generating convincing language, but does not actually understand the meaning of the language it is processing

Perhaps “Shakespeare” was a woman — Shakespeare’s life is remarkably well documented, by the standards of the period—yet no records from his lifetime identify him unequivocally as a writer. The more than 70 documents that exist show him as an actor, a shareholder in a theater company, a moneylender, and a property investor. They show that he dodged taxes, was fined for hoarding grain during a shortage, pursued petty lawsuits, and was subject to a restraining order. The profile is remarkably coherent, adding up to a mercenary impresario of the Renaissance entertainment industry. What’s missing is any sign that he wrote. No such void exists for other major writers of the period. […] By contrast, more than a few of Shakespeare’s contemporaries are on record suggesting that his name got affixed to work that wasn’t his.

Dominatrix’s ‘Slave’ Sentenced for ‘Ferocious’ Murder of Her Boyfriend

Rip Off fetish is a FemDom fetish in which the Domme rips off Her sub, typically by increasing the price of a clip. The sub is typically turned on by being ripped off. Ideas for Rip Off Fetish: Increase the price of a very short clip that features hardly anything; Explain in painful detail why the sub deserves to be ripped off.

Addicted to losing: How casino-like apps have drained people of millions

Mobile phone use may affect semen quality

Does body exposure drive income success on Instagram? Is there a difference between male and female content in this regard? […] Accounts with high level of body exposure achieve higher prices and advertising revenues than accounts with less nudity, regardless of the gender.

How AI uses social media to help con artists with the ‘grandparent scam’ and other schemes

People are editing Paul Nicklen into hospital bed pictures, faking his passports, and scamming fans out of thousands of dollars through social media impersonation.

Google is taking legal action against two groups of scammers. The first created social media pages and ran ads that encouraged people to “download” Bard, our freely available generative AI tool that does not need to be downloaded. The ads instead led people to download malware that compromised their social media accounts. The second weaponized the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to harm their business competitors by submitting thousands of blatantly fraudulent copyright notices.

AI robot chemist could make oxygen on Mars

AI could predict heart attack risk up to 10 years in the future, finds Oxford study

Cognitive decline in old age is slower in pet owners

Welcome to the Kinky World of AI Financial Domination

Bonsai Kitten (2021)

Free will implicates inner speech via self-regulation

Results from a new clinical trial suggest that a group of brain regions known as the “salience network” is activated after a drug is taken intravenously, but not when that same drug is taken orally. When drugs enter the brain quickly, such as through injection or smoking, they are more addictive than when they enter the brain more slowly, such as when they are taken orally. However, the brain circuits underlying these differences are not well understood. […] drug smoking and injection are associated with developing a substance use disorder more quickly than taking drugs orally or by insufflation (e.g., snorting).[…] The salience network attributes value to things in our environment and is important for recognizing and translating internal sensations—including the subjective effects of drugs. This research adds to a growing body of evidence documenting the important role that the salience network appears to play in substance use and addiction.

Google Maps captures B-2 Stealth Bomber crashing off runway

A Hiker Is Lucky to Be Alive After Following a Fake Trail on Google Maps

Las Vegas Sphere reports $98.4 million loss; CFO quits — Sphere, the $2.3 billion venue near the Strip opened Sept. 29

Inside The Small World of Simulating Other Worlds — Across the world, around 20 analog space facilities host people who volunteer to be study subjects, isolating themselves for weeks or months in polar stations, desert outposts, or even sealed habitats inside NASA centers. These places are intended to mimic how people might fare on Mars or the moon, or on long-term orbital stations.

Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots

This document acknowledges that Lauren (“Talent”) has agreed to appear for a MAXIMUM of THREE (3) days and TWO (2) nights at the residence of her mother (“Venue”) during the Thanksgiving holiday, pursuant to the terms of this agreement. […] Venue shall provide Talent with unlimited, unmonitored access to a fully stocked bar for the duration of her appearance, featuring a MINIMUM of: ONE (1) gallon-size handle of vodka…

This is a rare music video about using a diamond cutting disk to cut an entrapped metal penile ring. The music is Mozart’s piano concerto no. 21 in C major.

Vittorio Gassman in I Mostri

Unrealistic optimism or optimism bias—the tendency for individuals to overestimate the chance of favorable outcomes occurring and underestimate the chance of bad —has been found to be one of the most pervasive human traits across many domains. For instance, research has shown that individuals tend to underestimate the likelihood of developing a drinking problem or getting divorced and to overestimate their future earnings and how long they are going to live. Our established tendency toward unrealistic optimism poses an evolutionary puzzle as normative models of human judgment, like expected utility theory, suggest unbiased assessments of probabilities are advantageous. Like any other judgmental bias, optimism bias distorts the decision-making process, leading to systematic decision errors, increased rash and risky behavior and a failure to take precautionary measures. […]

There are reasons for expecting that the optimism bias may be associated with cognitive ability. Supportive empirical evidence for this framework comes from the experimental literature on cognitive ability and judgmental biases. For instance, intelligence has been found to lower one’s susceptibility to hindsight bias, overconfidence, framing, and the sunk cost fallacy. […]

we used an unbalanced panel of 36,312 respondents […]

The findings we present provide evidence that forecasting accuracy is linked to cognitive ability. Specifically, we find that higher cognitive ability is associated with a higher incidence of realism and pessimism in beliefs and a lower incidence of unrealistic optimism.

Taken together, our results lead us to conclude that the rash and risky behaviors associated with excessive optimism may be a side product of the true driver, low cognitive ability.

{ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin | Continue reading }

It’s true: People do poop, a lot, in ride lines at Disneyland and Disney World

Psychedelic treatments are speeding towards approval — but no one knows how they work

The distribution of lie prevalence is specified to exhibit a non-normal, positively skewed distribution in which the majority of people are normatively honest, and most lies are told by a few prolific liars.

willful ignorance provides people with a built-in excuse to act selfishly

A wandering mind is not always a creative mind. Anecdotes about ideas spontaneously entering awareness during walks, showers and other off-task activities are plenty. The science behind it, however, is still inconclusive. […] our findings suggest that a wandering mind is not always necessarily a creative mind

People often make judgments about uncertain facts and events, for example `Germany will win the world cup’. Here we present a rational analysis of these judgments: we argue that a guess functions as a compressed encoding of the speaker’s subjective probability distribution over relevant possibilities.

Imagine a bowl of soup that never emptied, no matter how many spoonfuls you ate - when and how would you know to stop eating? Satiation can play a role in regulating eating behavior, but research suggests visual cues may be just as important. results suggest that eating can be strongly controlled by visual cues, which can even override satiation.

One in eight users under the age of 16 said they had experienced unwanted sexual advances on the platform over the previous seven days […] unsolicited penis pictures and other forms of harassment […] When a Meta security expert told Mark Zuckerberg that Instagram’s approach to protecting teens wasn’t working, the CEO didn’t reply. Now the former insider is set to tell Congress about the predatory behavior.

Zuurbier said “that he would pay Tokelau a certain amount of money and that Tokelau would allow the domain for his use” […] In the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau became an unlikely internet giant—but not in the way it may have hoped. Until recently, its .tk domain had more users than any other country’s: a staggering 25 million. But there has been and still is only one website actually from Tokelau that is registered with the domain: the page for Teletok. Nearly all the others that have used .tk have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals. How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrime

More than 40 years ago, Farouk El-Baz theorized that the wind played a big hand in shaping the Great Sphinx of Giza before the ancient Egyptians added surface details to the landmark sculpture. A new study offers evidence to suggest that theory might be plausible.

Erewhon’s Secrets — In the 1960s, two macrobiotic enthusiasts started a health-food sect beloved by hippies. Now it’s the most culty grocer in L.A.

Penguin of the month: Timmy - Stole fish - Pushed another penguin over. Good penguin, naughty penguin: Inside the incredible drama at the National Aquarium

Starfish bodies aren’t bodies at all “It’s as if the sea star is completely missing a trunk, and is best described as just a head crawling along the seafloor”

One sleepless night can rapidly reverse depression for several days — Acute sleep loss increases dopamine release and rewires the brain, new study finds

wasabi improves short- and long-term memory in older people

our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health

The significant health benefits of walking backward

When science showed in the 1970s that gas stoves produced harmful indoor air pollution, the industry reached fortobacco’s PR playbook

Amazon can keep the drones in the air only by giving stuff away. Years of toil by top scientists and aviation specialists have yielded a program that flies Listerine Cool Mint Breath Strips or a can of Campbell’s Chunky Minestrone With Italian Sausage — but not both at once — to customers as gifts. […] Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh over five pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy. You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street… But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees. Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.

I had my hoodies that featured these amazing 1940’s drawings of Snow White fucking the dwarfs and stuff like that. […] I do think retouching often ruins the image. In these 70s, 80s porn mags i’m talking about the woman looked so real and sexual in such a visceral way, the frizziness of the hair would look like a halo because of the lighting, she might have stretchmarks showing inside her thighs which just makes her more tangible and makes you want to fuck, you want to touch her because she feels real. […] It’s like you have bad values if you slept with more than like 9 people and if any less then you’re an angel. Why is there so much value put on sex, who you’ve had sex with and how many times […] I feel so sorry for the generation behind us, the saturation levels are insane. I watched something yesterday and it said in the last 20 years, the human race has risen by about 2 billion, which is insane. How can you expect to get your dream job, to be singular, to stand out and to have created something truly new? Can you actually even do anything new anymore? And that makes me so sad.

AI smoothie shop in San Francisco closes two months after launch

AI can catalogue a forest’s inhabitants simply by listening

GSK will pay 23andMe $20 million for one year of non-exclusive access to anonymized DNA data from the approximately 80% of gene-testing customers who have agreed to share their information for research

The creator economy is fragmented and chaotic. Talent manager Ursus Magana can (almost) make sense of it, with a frenetic formula for gaming the algorithms.

40% of people faint at least once in their lifetime […] Mouse experiments reveal the brain-heart connections that cause us to rapidly lose consciousness

How to remove a spider from your ear

“Clue” is a comedy whodunit that is being distributed with three different endings […] The way Paramount is handling its multiple endings is ingenious. They’re playing each of the endings in a third of the theaters where the movie is booked. If this were a better movie, that might mean you’d have to drive all over town and buy three tickets to see all the endings. With “Clue,” though, one ending is more than enough.

Viagra could slash risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 60%

Scientists say they have successfully simulated a method of backward time travel that allowed them to change an event after the fact one out of four times. The Cambridge University team is quick to caution that they have not built a time machine, per se, but also note how their process doesn’t violate physics while changing past events after they have happened.

The future may be less about healing injured body parts and more about regenerating new ones. How bioelectricity could regrow limbs and organs

The human body has 1.8 trillion cells dedicated to defending it. For the first time, a study has measured the size of the immune system: if it were an organ, it would weigh more than a kilo and represents 0.2% of all human cells.

Researchers found that when adjusted for body mass index (BMI), intake of unprocessed and processed red meat (beef, pork or lamb) was not directly associated with any markers of inflammation, suggesting that body weight, not red meat, may be the driver of increased systemic inflammation. Of particular interest was the lack of a link between red meat intake and C-reactive protein (CRP), the major inflammatory risk marker of chronic disease.

Some patients can have vivid and detailed sexual hallucinations during anesthesia with sedative-hypnotic drugs like propofol, midazolam, diazepam and nitrous oxide. Some make suggestive or sexual comments or act out, such as grabbing or kissing medical professionals or touching themselves in a sexual way. Others awaken erroneously believing they were sexually assaulted.

A Third of Chocolate Products Are High in Heavy Metals

The Emptiness Of Literature Written For The Market

Italian woman wins court case to evict her two sons, aged 40 and 42

about 22 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous activity may provide an antidote to the ills of prolonged sitting

Cats have 276 facial expressions — Each expression combined about four of 26 unique facial movements, including parted lips, jaw drops, dilated or constricted pupils, blinks and half blinks, pulled lip corners, nose licks, protracted or retracted whiskers, and/or various ear positions. By comparison, humans have 44 unique facial movements, although researchers are still working out how many different expressions they combine into, Florkiewicz says. Dogs have 27 facial movements, but again, their total number of expressions isn’t known.

AI ‘breakthrough’: neural net has human-like ability to generalize language

Humans Absorb Bias from AI — And Keep It after They Stop Using the Algorithm

Thai Food Near Me, Dentist Near Me, Notary Near Me, Plumber Near Me — businesses across the country picked names meant to outsmart Google Search. Does it actually work?

How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

“african country that starts with k”

An account on Grindr called “GiantCockNYC” is constantly reappearing in users’ messages despite being blocked, with the account owner claiming they are an employee for the hookup app who is able to repeatedly remove the blocks. But Grindr itself says that isn’t the case here. A spokesperson said in an email that “The person created multiple profiles, deleted, then created another — with the same name/photos to make it appear as though blocks weren’t working.”

PimEyes, a public search engine that uses facial recognition to match online photos of people, has banned searches of minors over concerns it endangers children

Will Banksy’s Identity Finally Be Unmasked in a Defamation Lawsuit Brought by a U.K. Greeting Card Company?

Instagram linked to depression, anxiety, insomnia in kids, US states’ lawsuit — In a complaint filed in the Oakland, California, federal court on Tuesday, 33 states including California and Illinois said Meta, which also operates Facebook, has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its platforms

Higher levels of empathy may increase risk of inflammation, study suggests

The Paleo-fantasy often described as “Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer” […] dominates the literature. We see it used as the default hypothesis in anatomical and physiological reconstructions of the past as well as studies of modern people evoking evolutionary explanations. However, the idea of a strict sexual labor division in the Paleolithic is an assumption with little supporting evidence

Data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models.

Thousands of drivers have sensitive data exposed to hackers in major IT breach

1Password, a popular password management platform used by over 100,000 businesses, suffered a security incident after hackers gained access to its Okta ID management tenant.

Edgar Allan Poe lived at 35 different addresses in his 40 years.

The world’s longest possible train journey

A 29‐year‐old woman apparently jumped from the 86th‐floor observation deck of the Empire State Building last night, but survived when she landed on a three‐foot ledge about 20 feet below, the police said. She was admitted to Bellevue Hospital with a fractured pelvis. Authorities at the 102‐story building on West 34th Street theorized that strong wind gusts saved the life of Elvita Adams, of 975 Walton Avenue in the Bronx. [NY Times, December 3, 1979]

{ The Shortest Papers Ever Published }

Man arrested for faking heart attack 20 times at restaurants to avoid paying bill

Amazon sold bottles of urine marketed as an energy drink, a new documentary alleges. […] attained number one bestseller status in the “Bitter Lemon” category.

Hacker leaks millions more 23andMe user records on cybercrime forum

Your Personal Information Is Probably Being Used to Train Generative AI Models — Meta has said its latest AI was partially trained on public Facebook and Instagram posts. According to Elon Musk, the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) plans to do the same with its own users’ content. Amazon, too, says it will use voice data from customers’ Alexa conversations to train its new LLM.

Biopiracy: when indigenous knowledge is patented for profit

Frying pan company sued for claiming temperatures that rival the Sun

In an unusual trial, Stanford Medicine researchers found that a patient’s belief that they had received ketamine, even if they didn’t, could improve their depression.

The Notorious Arrest of Cecil George Edwards

Monet Refuses the Operation ∆ By Lisel Mueller

A wild idea to protect the great barrier reef: Ships carry mist-making machines that cause clouds to block the sun. It could work.

Online voting is insecure. This doesn’t stop organizations and governments from using it.

From High Life Hackers to National Menace: The Rise and Fall of Digital Bandits ‘ACG’

A narrow majority of adults (53%) say they have between one and four close friends, while a significant share (38%) say they have five or more. Some 8% say they have no close friends.

The menstrual rhythm of the brain — In the female brain, regions important for memory and perception are remodeled in the course of the menstrual cycle

Testicles like to be a tad bit cooler than the rest of your body because that’s the ideal temperature for sperm production. Lax scrotal skin allows your balls to hang lower, away from your body, when your internal temperature rises, like after the gym. When you’re in a cold room, testicles shrink up closer to your body for warmth.

“selfcest” fetishists — VFX Artists Are Bringing ‘Clone Porn’ to the Mainstream

What Is ChatGPT Vision? 7 Ways People Are Using This Wild New Feature Related: From Reading X-Rays to Decoding Classified UFO Reports, ChatGPT Shows Off Its Vision

Save the Robots was an underground after hours club in New York City’s East Village neighborhood. “Robots,” as the venue was popularly known, operated illegally from a nondescript storefront and basement at 25 Avenue B, between East 2nd and 3rd Streets, from 1983 until mid-1984, when the club was shut down for fire safety violations. […] Save the Robots was known for its late hours of operation and sold only vodka, soda and fruit juice. Patrons typically arrived after 4 a.m. and partied until the 8 a.m. closing time.

On 25 October 1946, Karl Popper (at the London School of Economics), was invited to present a paper entitled “Are There Philosophical Problems?” at a meeting of the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club, which was chaired by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The two started arguing vehemently over whether there existed substantial problems in philosophy, or merely linguistic puzzles—the position taken by Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein used a fireplace poker to emphasize his points, gesturing with it as the argument grew more heated. Eventually, Wittgenstein claimed that philosophical problems were nonexistent.

In response, Popper claimed there were many issues in philosophy, such as setting a basis for moral guidelines. Wittgenstein then thrust the poker at Popper, challenging him to give any example of a moral rule, Popper (later) claimed to have said:

“Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers”

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Parnet: Let’s move on to “W”.

Deleuze: There’s nothing in “W”.

Parnet: Yes, there’s Wittgenstein. I know he’s nothing for you, but it’s only a word.

Deleuze: I don’t like to talk about that… For me, it’s a philosophical catastrophe. It’s the very example of a “school”, it’s a regression of all philosophy, a massive regression. […] They imposed a system of terror in which, under the pretext of doing something new, it’s poverty instituted in all grandeur… […] the Wittgensteinians are mean and destructive. […] They are assassins of philosophy.

{ The Deleuze Seminars | Continue reading }