Laurie Anderson is addicted to an AI version of Lou Reed

From The Guardian: “Laurie Anderson, the American avant garde artist, musician and thinker says she has grown hopelessly hooked on an AI text generator that emulates the vocabulary and style of her own longtime partner and collaborator, Velvet Underground co-founder Lou Reed, who died in 2013. She fed a vast cache of Reed’s writing, songs and interviews into the machine. A decade after his death, the resulting algorithm lets Anderson type in prompts before an AI Reed begins “riffing” written responses back to her, in prose and verse. “I’m totally 100%, sadly addicted to this,” she laughs. “I still am, after all this time. I kind of literally just can’t stop doing it, and my friends just can’t stand it.” The results, Anderson says, can be hit and miss. “Three-quarters of it is just completely idiotic and stupid. And then maybe 15% is like, ‘Oh?’. And then the rest is pretty interesting. And that’s a pretty good ratio for writing, I think.”

She can tell whether someone has Parkinson’s based on the way they smell

From the BBC: “A Scottish woman who found she could detect Parkinson’s through smell has inspired scientists to develop a swab test that could be used to diagnose it. Researchers in Manchester have created a new method which they say can detect the disease in three minutes. Their work was inspired by Joy Milne, a retired nurse from Perth. Joy, 72, knew her husband Les had Parkinson’s more than 12 years before he was diagnosed when she identified a change in the way he smelled. “He had this musty rather unpleasant smell especially round his shoulders and the back of his neck and his skin had definitely changed,” she said. She only linked the odour to the disease after Les was diagnosed and they met people at a Parkinson’s UK support group who had the same distinctive smell. Now a team in the University of Manchester, working with Joy, has developed a simple skin-swab test which they claim is 95% accurate under laboratory conditions when it comes to telling whether people have Parkinson’s.”

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What it was like to spend two years as a hostage in Syria

From Theo Padnos: “The thing about life in an electricity-less cell underground is that you soon lose your orientation in time and space. Sometimes you wake up in the early evening believing it to be dawn. Winter couldn’t possibly have come yet, you tell yourself, and then one day, some chance glimpse of the out-of-doors reveals the snow to be sifting down over a courtyard. One’s captors do everything in their power to deepen this disorientation. Whenever you most need to see, that’s when they put you in a blindfold. You’re not meant to know the date, who’s winning the war, where you are, anyone’s actual names. During my time in Syria, I sustained a series of head injuries. Under such circumstances, the more one stares at the walls, the more the room spins. Which way is the floor? Off which walls is the gunfire ricocheting? You can guess, but really you have no idea.”

Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic work, but not in the way scientists originally thought they did

A series of brain scans interrupted by an image of a drug-injection pen

From The Atlantic: “When scientists first created the class of drugs that includes Ozempic, they told a tidy story about how the medications would work: The gut releases a hormone called GLP-1 that signals you’re full, so a drug that mimics GLP-1 could do the exact same thing, helping people eat less and lose weight. The rest, as they say, is history. The GLP-1 revolution birthed semaglutide, which became Ozempic and Wegovy, and tirzepatide, which became Mounjaro and Zepbound—drugs that are rapidly changing the face of obesity medicine. They work as intended: as modulators of appetite. But at the same time that they have become massive successes, the science that underpinned their development has fallen apart. The fact that they worked was serendipity, Randy Seeley, an obesity researcher at the University of Michigan, told me.”

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How two Irish businessmen almost took Nigeria for $11 billion

From the NYT: “Like a lot of explosive financial scandals, the story of Michael Quinn and Brendan Cahill could fairly be described as a simple proposition that spun completely out of control. The two had been working in Nigeria since the 1970s, doing small-time deals in the energy and defense sectors, like fixing tanks and siting oil wells. But in the mid-2000s, they spied a bigger opportunity. They knew that Nigeria’s refineries were burning off most of the gas during oil drilling, so they proposed a plant that would take in that gas and use it to power the grid. Then the government changed its mind, so they went to arbitration. Quinn and Cahill hadn’t laid a single pipe for the gas-leaning facility, but this was immaterial. When the arbitration finished, the government of Nigeria was defeated and the decision was in P.&I.D.’s favor. The damages were $6.6 billion.”

The founder of Alcoholics Anonymous tried LSD and ignited a controversy still raging today

From Inverse: “It’s August 29, 1956. A philosopher, a psychiatrist, and his research assistant watch as the most famous recovering alcoholic puts a dose of LSD in his mouth and swallows. The man is Bill Wilson and he’s the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, the largest abstinence-only addiction recovery program in the world. By the time the man millions affectionately call “Bill W.” dropped acid, he’d been sober for more than two decades. His experience would fundamentally transform his outlook on recovery, horrify A.A. leadership, and disappoint hundreds of thousands. All this because Wilson believed other recovering alcoholics could benefit from taking LSD as a way to facilitate the “spiritual experience” he believed was necessary to successful recovery. “

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What life is like in one of Putin’s Siberian gulags

From The Economist: “The wake-up call in cell number nine of the ik-6 prison colony in the Siberian town of Omsk comes at 5am in the form of the Russian national anthem blasting from a loudspeaker. Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist and politician, knew as soon as he heard the opening chord that he had only five minutes to get up before prison guards would take away his pillow and mattress. By 5.20am his metal bed frame, attached to the wall, would be locked up so that he could not use it for the rest of the day. Kara-Murza’s cell, painted in bright blue, was five metres long and two metres wide. In the middle, a table and a bench were screwed to the floor. The only objects he was allowed to keep were a mug, a tooth brush, a towel and a pair of slippers. The light was never turned off. Later in the morning a mug of tea and a bowl of gluey porridge made from an unidentifiable grain would be pushed through a small hatch.”

He conned 18th-century London society by inventing his own language

George Psalmanazar, The Frenchman Who Fooled Europe Into Thinking He Was  Asian

From The Atlantic: “A Modest Proposal makes a passing reference to “the famous Psalmanazar, a native of the island Formosa.” This blond, blue-eyed “savage” claimed people ate children in his homeland. “When any young person happened to be put to death,” Jonathan Swift recounted, “the executioner sold the carcass to persons of quality as a prime dainty.” George Psalmanazar claimed to be a kidnapping victim who was snatched from Formosa (now known as Taiwan) by a Jesuit named Father de Rode of Avignon. In eighteenth-century England, Psalmanazar gained the same level of fame or infamy as a modern-day reality-television-star train wreck. Nobles and rich merchants invited him to their dinner tables, where he spoke gibberish while inhaling mouthfuls of bloody food. (According to imaginary custom, Formosans ate their meat raw.)”

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Made some new friends on a paddle down a Florida creek

We drove down to spend March in Florida, near Venice — just south of Sarasota, on the Gulf side — so of course I brought my kayak, and when I had a free afternoon I took it down to Curry Creek, which runs behind the mobile home park where we are staying, and empties into the bay and from there into the gulf. It was a beautiful day for a paddle, so I took it slow and paddled about three or four kilometres — saw a few ibises, a couple of herons, some miscellaneous birds of various kinds, and lots of moss hanging from the trees.

While I was paddling, I saw a man sitting on a bench on the bank of the creek and he was looking at something across the creek. “There he is,” he said, pointing at an alligator sunning himself on a sand bar — about eight or nine feet long probably. As I paddled by he submerged, so I only got a shot of his head poking up above the water. Further along I saw another one, but he was completely obscured except for his nose, and seemed to want to have nothing to do with me, which was fine with me 🙂

The only downside to this whole trip is that it was such a beautiful day that I just kept on paddling for about two hours, despite a dull ache in my shoulder that had been there for a few days, and I haven’t been in a kayak for about six months. I thought maybe I could paddle it out, but this was a mistake — the following day I could barely move my shoulder without pain, and it was throbbing even without me moving it. So now I am on a rest, ice, warm, no exercise regimen for awhile I guess. But it was worth it! Almost.

Senior citizens fight myths about age with sexy OnlyFans

From Huck magazine: “In the week Hattie Wiener spends a copious amount of time alone in her Manhattan studio, propped up in bed with a heating pad – a tool many use to help relieve back pain and other aches. On Sundays, however, the 87-year-old transforms, prancing around her apartment in her laciest lingerie, while a friend snaps photos of her to post on OnlyFans. “You would think that perhaps my oldness would be a turnoff sexually. But it isn’t to young men,” she said. “It’s heartening to know that so many young men allow themselves to be admirers of older women’s bodies.” Hattie is one of a number of women who have launched OnlyFans accounts in their later life, demonstrating that old age is not just Alzheimer’s and wheelchairs and nursing home and smells, but that it is also interesting and adventurous and exciting and beautiful.”

It just got easier to visit a vanishing glacier, but is that a good thing?

From the NYT: “For thousands of years, humans have raced to be the first to scale a peak, cross a frontier, or document a new species or landscape. Now, in some cases, we’re racing to be the last. The term last-chance tourism, which has gained traction in the past two decades, describes the impulse to visit threatened places before they disappear. Studies have found that the appeal of the disappearing can be a powerful motivator. But in many cases, the presence of tourists at a fragile site can accelerate the place’s demise. There is some evidence that a visit to a threatened place can inspire meaningful behavioral change in visitors, potentially helping to offset the negative impacts of a trip. But research is still in its early stages, and results are mixed. In a place like Chamonix — where tourism is the mainstay of the economy, and where climate change is already having palpable effects on tourist offerings — such tensions are playing out in real time.”

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