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From The Guardian: “During the second world war, young women broke traditional gender barriers by working in Britain’s forests as part of the Women’s Timber Corps. As many as 15-18,000 young women left home for the first time, aged 17-24, to fell trees with an axe and saw for the war effort. The women could fell 10-tonne trees, carry logs like weight-lifters, work in dangerous sawmills, drive huge timber trucks and calculate timber production figures on which the government depended during wartime. They did exactly the same jobs as the men on less than half the pay. Britain was the largest timber importing nation in the world in 1939, bringing in 96% of its wood. When the war began, home grown timber supplies became vital. Britain needed to produce wood for the coal mines, as well as wood for railway sleepers, telegraph poles, rifle stocks, ship and aircraft construction, and packaging boxes for army supplies.”

A young girl got a life-saving liver transplant and her blood type changed

From The Sydney Morning Herald: “Doctors at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Australia called Demi-Lee Brennan a one-in-6 billion miracle. The 15-year-old liver transplant patient was the first person in the world to take on the immune system and blood type of her donor, negating the need to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of her life. Doctors say they have no idea how this happened. Demi-Lee was nine when she contracted a virus that destroyed her liver. She was given less than 48 hours to live when a donated liver from a 12-year-old boy became available. Demi-Lee had a 10-hour operation and was started on a cocktail of immuno-suppressant drugs. Nine months later, when her condition worsened, doctors were shocked to find that her blood type had changed. The head of hematology, Julie Curtin, said she was stunned when she realised Demi-Lee was now O-positive, rather than O-negative.”

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Continue reading “The Lumberjills were a female tree-cutting corps in the 1940s”

Digg. Reddit. Fark. Stumbleupon. Slashdot. If you were “extremely online” (as the kids say) in the early part of this century — i.e., the early 2000s — these were some of the sites you probably visited a lot, searching for interesting things to read, or just killing time between classes/meetings etc. And around the year 2005 or so, there was arguably no bigger drama in the “social media” space than the battle between Digg and Reddit. Both offered a more modern take on the old bulletin-board forums that ancient internet denizens used to frequent, the Usenet newsgroups like alt.binaries.starwars. While Digg focused on lists of links to news articles and websites, Reddit added a more social element, with “subreddits” devoted to specific topics. Both Digg and Reddit depended on — and to some extent pioneered — a ranking system that awarded points based on how many votes a link got from users. In a way, this was the birth of the kind of algorithmic filtering we now associate with Facebook and Twitter.

For a time, hitting the front page of either Digg — which called itself “the internet’s homepage” — or Reddit more or less guaranteed that your link and/or website would get swamped by literally millions of clicks and hits. In some cases, being one of the top links on either site could cause websites to crash and become completely unavailable, something that at the time was seen as almost a badge of honor.

In case you missed the headlines, these two formerly fierce competitors have now joined forces — or at least two of their founders have. Kevin Rose, who founded Digg in 2004, and Alexis Ohanian, who co-founded Reddit a year later with his friend Steve Huffman, announced on Wednesday that they are partners in a new venture that involves a rebirth of Digg, which they acquired earlier this year. It’s hard to overstate the enmity that these two companies once had for each other when they were both young: Ohanian reportedly sent an email to his cofounder in 2005 with a link to the Reddit site saying “Meet the enemy,” and both sites and founders enjoyed taking shots at each other at every opportunity. As I said in a post on X (yes, I still use it, but not without feeling like I need a shower) to anyone who was a social-web user in the early 2000s, this was like the Hatfields and McCoys holding hands and singing Kumbaya.

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Continue reading “Will a reboot of Digg do anything to help the social web?”

From the BBC: “One of the world’s most prolific blood donors – whose plasma saved the lives of more than two million babies – has died. James Harrison died in his sleep at a nursing home in New South Wales, Australia on 17 February, his family said on Monday. He was 88. Known in Australia as the man with the golden arm, Harrison’s blood contained a rare antibody, Anti-D, which is used to make medication given to pregnant mothers whose blood is at risk of attacking their unborn babies. The Australian Red Cross Blood Service paid tribute to Harrison, saying he pledged to become a donor after receiving transfusions while undergoing a major chest surgery when he was 14. He started donating his blood plasma when he was 18 and continued doing so every two weeks until he was 81. In 2005, he had the world record for most blood plasma donated. His daughter and two of his grandchildren are also recipients of anti-D immunisations.”

How a walnut tree played a critical role in convicting a man of mass murder

From the Dublin Review of Books: “Thirty-five years have now passed since civil war erupted in the Balkans. In 1990, the Yugoslav federation began to tear itself apart, with insurrections breaking out in most of its six constituent republics. One story from the Yugoslav civil war connects a small valley in rural England with a mass grave in Croatia. At its heart is a dreadful crime – involving murder, betrayal and deceit – and a struggle between those who sought to reveal the truth, and those who wanted to deny and suppress it. That conflict was resolved by a most unlikely witness: a walnut tree. One spring morning in 1998, Paul Tabbush was at work at the Bedgebury Pinetum in Kent – one of the world’s largest collections of tree specimens – when he received an unexpected phone call. Prof Tabbush was head of silviculture and seed research with the British Forestry Commission. To his astonishment, the phone call he received that morning came from an investigator with the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.”

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Continue reading “His blood helped save the lives of more than 2 million babies”

From Scientific American: “In 2011 an anonymous poster on the now infamously controversial image board 4chan posed a mathematical puzzle about the cult classic anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The first season of this anime series consists of 14 episodes that were designed so that you can watch them in any order you like. At some point in a 2011 discussion, someone asked the minimum number of episodes they would have to watch to have seen it in every possible order. This question is related to so-called superpermutations, and to this day, mathematicians are unable to fully answer the problem that the 4chan user posed. But amazingly, in that discussion, one of the anonymous users made an estimate of the minimum amount of all episodes to watch with an approach that was previously unknown to mathematicians.”

An Australian couple were forced to sit next to a dead body for hours on a plane flight

From The Guardian: “An Australian couple have criticised Qatar Airways after a blanket-draped corpse was seated next to them during a long-haul flight. Mitchell Ring said a passenger died part-way through the 14-hour flight from Melbourne to Doha last week. “They tried to wheel her up towards business class, but she was quite a large lady and they couldn’t get her through the aisle,” he told Nine News. “They looked a bit frustrated, then they just looked at me and saw seats were available beside me.” Ring said he was made to wait next to the corpse even after the plane landed. Ring and his wife, Jennifer Colin, were seated next to the corpse while travelling en-route to Venice. Ring said he was seated with the body for around four hours despite other empty seats. Qatar Airways apologised “for any inconvenience or distress this incident may have caused.”

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Continue reading “An unknown anime fan solved a long-standing math problem”

From the WSJ: “Eleanor Maguire wasn’t great at navigating the streets of London, and she started to think that the brains of the people who were expert navigators—the city’s famous cabdrivers—might actually be different than hers. She burst into her lab at University College London and told her mentor, Chris Frith, that she’d just seen a movie called “The Knowledge” about a group of would-be London cabdrivers, and that it had given her an idea for a scientific study. Frith told her to go for it. Maguire, who had cancer and died Jan. 4 at age 54, specialized in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory. In a series of studies, she demonstrated that human memories aren’t movies that we replay in our minds the way we watch movies on TV. Rather, they are imperfect scenes that we construct in our minds. When we’re thinking about where we want to go, our brains construct scenes that show us how to get there.”

The game of Ultimate Frisbee is helping to heal some of the wounds in the Middle East

From Reason: “Starting an Ultimate Frisbee league to repair a war-torn country sounds like the plot of a buddy comedy, yet it’s a reality in Iraqi Kurdistan. After German and American aid workers introduced Frisbees to the country in 2019, the sport quickly caught on. By 2023, the scrappy Duhok Shepherds team was flying to Dubai for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Ultimate Club Championship. It was the first time many team members had left Iraq. By November 2024, the team was competing in Doha, Qatar, their uniforms proudly displaying both the Iraqi national flag and the Kurdish tricolor. Invented by New Jersey high schoolers in the 1960s and popularized by hippies, the sport is now the basis of a European relief effort. Beyond those aid organizations, European players have run grassroots fundraising efforts to get the Iraqi Ultimate league off the ground.”

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Continue reading “Her research on the brains of UK cab drivers changed science”

From National Geographic: “A young woman is swept from her home into a foreign, enchanted world. Her captor is no mere mortal, but a powerful and mystical fairy or beast. So begins the odyssey of Feyre, the protagonist of Sarah J. Maas’s bestselling A Court of Thorns and Roses, a sprawling epic that currently spans five novels. The series has made Romantasy, a blending of romance and fantasy, a fixture on social media where readers gush about favorite characters and share elaborate fan theories. Fans lovingly refer to it as “faerie smut,” using Maas’s consciously archaic spelling, and it draws on centuries-old material with timeless appeal. Maas’s most notable source is The Ballad of Tam Lin, a Scottish ballad that dates to as early as the 16th century, and her most obvious nod to the ballad is in one of her main characters, a love interest named Tamlin.”

In the 19th century people in China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan used a single written language

From Wikipedia: “Literary Chinese was the medium of all formal writing in Vietnam for almost all of the country’s history until the early 20th century, when it was replaced by vernacular writing. The language was used in China, as well as in Korea and Japan, and used the same standard Chinese characters. It was used for official business, historical annals, fiction, verse, and scholarship. Literary Chinese was a style of writing modelled on the classics of the Warring States period and Han dynasty. It remained largely static while the various varieties of Chinese evolved and diverged to the point of mutual unintelligibility. The language enabled scholars from all of these countries to communicate in writing, in much the same way that Latin did in European countries.”

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Continue reading “Faerie smut is having a moment, just like it did in the 1500s”

In the old days of artificial intelligence — in other words, more than about ten years ago — one of the big debates was whether an artificial or computerized intelligence would ever be able to pass the Turing test. Designed by the pioneering computer scientist and code-breaker Alan Turing in 1949, before computers as we know them even existed, the test was designed to see whether an artificial intelligence could behave in a human-enough way to convince people that it was a person (Turing called it “the imitation test”). Whatever you think of AI engines or LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, most of them seem to be able to pass the Turing test with flying colours. They are carrying on conversations (sometimes with each other), and generating human speech and text in convincing ways, to the point where even tools that determine whether writing is AI-generated are being fooled.

At this point, it would be hard to argue that these AI engines aren’t intelligent, in some definition of that term. In addition to human-like writing, they have passed pretty much every math, science, and legal test we can design, they are designing new proteins and detecting cancer much faster and more accurately than humans can, and so on. But intelligence isn’t all there is to being human. We also believe that being human involves something called “consciousness,” which we all pretend to understand but is difficult to define. In most cases, it involves an awareness of ourselves as thinking beings — an ability to stand at a distance from ourselves, in a virtual sense, and observe ourselves thinking and behaving; in other words, an understanding that we are alive (there isn’t an approved Turing test for consciousness yet, but someone has proposed one).

The primary foundations of consciousness are the individualized experiences that we have of the world around us, which philosophers often call “qualia” — a word derived from the term “quality” (if you’re interested, there’s a long and in-depth discussion of the concept on the Astral Codex Ten blog). What is included in this term are all the ways we interact with our surroundings: the taste of foods, including the things we like or dislike; the sound of a favourite song; the feeling of different materials when we touch them; how all of these sensory experiences can make us feel psychologically, or how they can evoke a memory; the concept of certain things being “beautiful” or “ugly;” and of course our emotions — our love for a child or a partner, our anger at those who have wronged us, our joy when something good happens to someone we like.

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Continue reading “AI forces us to think about what consciousness means”

From the Wall Street Journal: “Lead pollution in ancient Rome was so high that it dropped the population’s IQ by around 3 points, if not more. Elites were exposed to lead through water pipes, cooking pots, bath tubs, cosmetics and the syrups that sweetened their wine. But the most widespread exposure for Romans came from industrial pollution caused by the mining and smelting of metals used to make money. Romans melted down galena, a lead-rich ore, to extract the silver needed for coins, and lead was a major byproduct of the process. McConnell and his colleagues examined airborne lead that drifted north from ancient Rome and was preserved in ice cores extracted from Greenland. The samples dated between 2,500 and 1,400 years ago—an era that included the rise and fall of the empire.The researchers matched the chemical fingerprint of the lead found in the cores to lead sources in the empire, according to McConnell.”

The Heslington Brain is a human specimen that is more than 2,600 years old

From Wikipedia: “The Heslington Brain is a 2,600-year-old human brain found inside a skull buried in a pit in Yorkshire by York Archaeological Trust in 2008. It is the oldest preserved brain ever found in Eurasia, and is believed to be the best-preserved ancient brain in the world. The skull was discovered during an archaeological dig commissioned by the University of York on the site of its new campus on the outskirts of the city of York. The area was found to have been the site of well-developed permanent habitation between 2,000–3,000 years before the present day. A number of possibly ritualistic objects were found to have been deposited in several pits, including the skull, which had belonged to a man probably in his 30s. He had been hanged before being decapitated with a knife and his skull appears to have been buried immediately. The rest of the body was missing. Although it is not known why he was killed, it is possible that it may have been a human sacrifice or ritual murder.”

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Continue reading “Ancient Rome was so polluted with lead people’s IQs dropped”

From Wikipedia: “Claudette Colvin is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus. It occurred nine months before the similar, more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Colvin was one of four plaintiffs in the first federal court case filed on February 1, 1956 to challenge bus segregation in the city. On June 13, 1956, the judges determined that the state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional. The case went to the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the district court’s ruling. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to the state of Alabama to end bus segregation.”

The heir to a British fortune, he died of a heroin overdose in a hotel in Afghanistan

From The Guardian: “Many people die in Peshawar, violently or otherwise. Carlos Mavroleon didn’t want to die here. Certainly not in the small, claustrophobic hotel room where they found his heroin-soaked body, on 27 August 1998. He had packed it in to his 40 years. The old Etonian heir to a £100m fortune, he had been a war correspondent, a Wall Street broker, a lover of glamorous women from glamorous political dynasties. He had been a gimlet-eyed war reporter, blowing off the tension in the bars of Notting Hill. He commanded a unit of Afghan Mujahideen against the Red Army and had been a bodyguard for a Pakistani tribal chief. And, for most of his adult life, Carlos had been a regular user of speed, coke, Ecstasy, heroin and a variety of other pharmaceutical products.”

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Continue reading “Rosa Parks was not the first to refuse to leave her seat”

From Wikipedia: “Alan Francis is a horseshoe pitcher from Defiance, Ohio who has won the World Horseshoe Championship 28 times — in 1989, 1993, 1995–1999, 2001, 2003–2010, 2012–2019 and 2021–2024. He holds the record for most championships with 2nd place belonging to Ted Allen, who has won 10. He is also the only player to consistently pitch over 90%, and is regarded by many as the greatest horseshoe pitcher ever. The New York Times wrote that he may be “the most dominant athlete in any sport in the country”. He began competing when he was 9, and won a record 4 Junior Boys World Championships, the first of which he won at the age of 12. He competed in his first world championship in 1978, held in Des Moines. He has by far the highest ringer percentage in history at 90 percent, and the most consecutive wins in history.”

This solar furnace in the French alps creates temperatures of 3,500 degrees Celsius

From RIBA Journal: “The Odeillo Solar Furnace in France – the largest in the world – was built by engineer Felix Trombe and opened in 1970. It is 48 metres (157 ft) high and 54 metres (177 ft) wide, and includes 63 heliostats. The sun’s energy is reflected via a series of 9,600 mirrors and concentrated onto a point about the size of a cooking pot to create temperatures reaching 3,500°C. The furnace is used by space agencies including NASA as well as scientists and technology companies to ascertain the effects of extremely high temperatures on materials intended for use in nuclear reactors or space vehicle re-entry. It is situated in Font-Romeu-Odeillo-Via, in the region of Occitania, in the Pyrenees mountains south of France. The site was chosen because of the length and the quality of sunshine with direct light (more than 2,500 h/year) and the purity of its atmosphere (high altitude and low average humidity).”

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Continue reading “The most dominant athlete is a horseshoe pitcher from Ohio”

From CNN: “The oldest known tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament sold on Wednesday for $5.04 million, more than double its high estimate. The stone, which dates back around 1,500 years to the Late Roman-Byzantine era, sparked more than 10 minutes of intense bidding, according to a statement from Sotheby’s New York. The anonymous buyer plans to donate the artifact to an Israeli institution. The stone is a remarkable artifact from the ancient world, but it lay forgotten for hundreds of years. Weighing in at 115 pounds and standing two feet tall, the stone was discovered in 1913 during excavations for a new railway line, but the significance of the find was not fully appreciated and the stone went on to be used as part of the paving outside someone’s house for three decades, and the surface was exposed to heavy foot traffic.”

They bought a lottery ticket with his stolen credit card and he wants a share of the winnings

From AP: “Thieves used a stolen card to buy a winning French lottery ticket worth 500,000 euros ($523,000). But they vanished before cashing in —- and now they’re among France’s most famous fugitives. The man whose card was stolen, identified in police documents as Jean-David E., is offering to split the cash with the lucky winners. He wants his wallet back, too. The thieves, meanwhile, face the risk of arrest. As of Saturday, the state lottery operator La Française des Jeux, said that no one had submitted the ticket to cash out. Jean-David filed a police complaint about the theft, but is ready to withdraw it if the thieves come forward so that they can share the money. The lawyer launched a national appeal asking the perpetrators to contact his office to make a deal.”

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Continue reading “Tablet with ten commandments was used as a paving stone”

From the WSJ: “Nontra Yantaprasert couldn’t wait to take her husband’s shorter and easier-to-pronounce last name. She didn’t know what kinds of problems it would cause.His last name is Null, the same word used by computer scientists to mean “no value” or “invalid value.” The Nulls of the world, it turns out, endure a lifetime of website bouncebacks, processing errors and declarations by customer-service representatives that their accounts don’t exist. After becoming a Null, she was due to travel to India in 2014 on a nonrefundable flight for a friend’s marriage, but her visa hadn’t arrived in the mail. The Indian consulate told her it had tried multiple times but the computer system couldn’t process her last name, she said. Null was first coined 60 years ago by a British computer scientist and has since been incorporated into many of the systems that make American commerce run, from hotel reservation sites to government agencies.”

This French widow created the modern champagne market almost singlehandedly

From the Smithsonian: “Highlighted by its distinctive gold-yellow label, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne is hard to ignore. In 2012, it was the second highest selling brand of champagne in the world, with 1,474,000 nine-liter cases sold worldwide. But Veuve Clicquot wasn’t always so successful: if it weren’t for the efforts of a cunning 19th-century business mind, the champagne might never have existed. That remarkable mind belonged to the eponymous Widow (veuve in French0) Clicquot, one of the world’s first international businesswomen, who brought her wine business back from the brink of destruction and invented a process that helped create the modern champagne market as we know it. By the time she died in 1866, Veuve Clicquot was exporting champagne to the far reaches of the world, from Lapland to the United States.”

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Continue reading “When your last name is Null nothing works properly”

From The New Yorker: “For Wilson Bentley, the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century microphotographic innovator and bona-fide snowflake obsessive, contemplating the dazzling panoply of kaleidoscopic snow-crystal formations was a pastime that never lost its lustre. In fact, it is through Bentley’s encyclopedic collection of more than five thousand snowflake photographs, a portion of which are now housed in the Smithsonian Institution, that we got the notion of snowflakes’ singularity in the first place. Bentley was born in 1865 and raised on a farm in Jericho, Vermont. His father and brother spent their days tending to the property. Bentley was expected to pitch in, too, but he was more interested in studying the land than in working it. He became enthralled with a microscope given to him by his mother, a former schoolteacher, and discovered that each snowflake had its own careful and fleeting geometry.”

Archaeologists have found the first pharaoh’s tomb in more than a hundred years

From the BBC: “Egyptologists have discovered the first tomb of a pharaoh since Tutankhamun’s was uncovered over a century ago. King Thutmose II’s tomb was the last undiscovered royal tomb of the 18th Egyptian dynasty. A British-Egyptian team has located it in the Western Valleys of the Theban Necropoli. Researchers had thought the burial chambers of the 18th dynasty pharaohs were more than 2km away, closer to the Valley of the Kings. The crew found it in an area associated with the resting places of royal women, but when they got into the burial chamber they found it decorated – the sign of a pharaoh. Dr Litherland said the discovery solved the mystery of where the tombs of early 18th dynasty kings are located. Researchers found Thutmose II’s mummified remains two centuries ago but its original burial site had never been located.”

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Continue reading “He invented a new way to take photographs of snowflakes”

If you’ve been following court cases that relate to artificial intelligence, you probably saw some headlines about a recent federal court decision in the US District Court for Delaware, in a copyright-infringement case filed by Thomson Reuters against a company called Ross Intelligence. I saw headlines that claimed this was a “landmark ruling” and a “major win” for content creators, that the AI industry was on the ropes, that this decision marked a turning point in the debate over copyright and artificial intelligence, that fair use is over as a defense for AI training, etc. etc. Is this accurate? Not really. It is definitely true that the court’s ruling is the first significant federal decision related to AI and copyright. But there are a number of reasons why this case doesn’t have as much impact on AI and copyright as the headlines might lead you to believe.

Before I continue, I should note my bias on the question of AI and copyright: Faithful readers of Torment Nexus will recall that in a previous post, I discussed the issue of whether the indexing of content by AI engines should be considered fair use. As I tried to argue in that post, it’s my view that it should. Do LLMs scrape and ingest copyrighted content in large quantities, in most cases without permission? Yes. Do they use this content to generate responses to questions or prompts that relate to the topics discussed in the original versions of that content? Yes. Nevertheless, I believe — as a number of copyright and intellectual property experts do — that this activity should fall under the fair-use exception in US copyright law, for a number of reasons outlined in that post. I’ll get to some of that later, I just wanted to get my bias up front before I continue.

First, some of the facts related to this particular case: Thomson Reuters, which operates the Reuters news-wire service, also owns a number of professional databases that make up the majority of its business. One of those is called Westlaw, and it’s fascinating to me that for years the company had what amounted to a monopoly on the method of citing legal cases in US courts. It seems bizarre now, but Westlaw owned a copyright that covered the system of page-numbering used in US courts, so you literally couldn’t even refer to a previous case for precedent without infringing on Westlaw’s copyright, and the company spent years suing everyone who tried to use it without paying for it — like Lexis-Nexis, a competing legal database. That monopoly over page numbering was mostly dismantled in the late 1990s, but Westlaw still has a copyright on the way cases are summarized, something known as “headnotes.”

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Continue reading “Breaking down a federal court’s ruling on AI and copyright”

From CNN: “The patient consulted a doctor about a chronic cough that was concerning him. During his first couple months of treatment, he was diagnosed with pneumonia, thickening and stiffness in the right lung, and bronchiectasis, or damage of the breathing tubes. When the patient finally reached Munavvar’s clinic at the age of 47, they ran multiple tests, including a CAT scan, and conducted a white light bronchoscopy, a procedure involving the insertion of a scope inside the airways to view the lungs. The doctor noticed extensive shadowing and a thickening lump in the lower right lung. These symptoms, along with the spread of a bacterial infection in the pockets of the lower right lung, led his team to believe that the man had a tumor, which needed prompt removal. But when doctors performed surgery on a man to remove what they suspected to be a carcinoma, they instead found a toy traffic cone he had swallowed in 1974.”

The poet John Milton coined almost twice as many words as William Shakespeare

From The Guardian: “To many scholars he is still the sublime English poet. But John Milton deserves to be remembered for rather more than Paradise Lost. According to Gavin Alexander, a lecturer in English at Cambridge university and fellow of Milton’s alma mater, Christ’s College, who has trawled the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for evidence, Milton is responsible for introducing approximately 630 words to the English language, making him the country’s greatest neologist, ahead of Ben Jonson with 558, John Donne with 342 and Shakespeare with 229. Without the great poet there would be no liturgical, debauchery, besottedly, unhealthily, padlock, dismissive, terrific, embellishing, fragrance, didactic or love-lorn. And certainly no complacency.”

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Continue reading “A lung tumor turned out to be a toy he swallowed 40 years ago”