Month: March 2023

Brenda Leyland was a stylish, well-spoken and rather private woman who lived in a picturesque village in Leicestershire. Her son Ben knew she told stories, and that some of them may have been on the tall side. He also knew that she spent a lot of time on her laptop and was increasingly living online. What he didn’t know was that his mother had become a Twitter troll who spent the final years of her life relentlessly attacking the parents of Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in Portugal in 2007. In 2014, Brenda was approached by a journalist who told her she had been reported to Scotland Yard and her tweets were being investigated as part of a larger campaign of abuse against the McCanns.. “Well, that’s fair enough,” she said calmly. But Brenda’s face gave her away. Her eyes blinked and her cheek twitched anxiously.Four days later, on 4 October 2014, Brenda killed herself.

Former Meta staffer says she was paid $190,000 a year to do nothing

This week, Meta made headlines again after announcing it would be laying off 10,000 workers. These layoffs are in addition to the 11,000 employees it fired in November of last year—meaning that in four months, Meta has let go of over 20,000 workers. In a video with over 122,000 views, TikTok user Maddie (@maddie_macho) writes that she got “paid $190k to do nothing at Meta.” How did this happen? According to Maddie, she was hired to be a recruiter, but was also told that she should not hire anyone for 6 months to a year. Instead of hiring, Maddie said she spent her days going through the company’s onboarding process and attending team meetings—something that confused her. “Why are we meeting? We’re not hiring nobody!” she says in the video.

Continue reading “My mother the troll, and the sad ending to her life”

At the American Physical Society’s annual March meeting in Las Vegas, Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, announced that he and his team had achieved a century-old dream of the field: a superconductor that works at room temperature and near-room pressure. Interest was so intense that security stopped people from entering the overflowing room. The results, published in Nature, appear to show that a conventional conductor — a solid composed of hydrogen, nitrogen and the rare-earth metal lutetium — was transformed into a flawless material capable of conducting electricity with perfect efficiency. While the announcement has been greeted with enthusiasm by some scientists, others are far more cautious.

Resurrect an ancient library from the ashes of a volcano. Win $250,000

If you know anything about machine vision — or know anyone who does — you could win $250,000 if you can somehow decipher what’s written on an ancient scroll of papyrus, which was carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius thousands of years ago (things in Pompeii were vaporized, but in nearby Herculaneum they were buried in hot mud and preserved). The scrolls were found in 1750 by a farmer digging a well, who uncovered part of the ruins of a massive villa that was owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Using a particle accelerator, scientists were able to lift some of the text from the scrolls, showing that “digital unwrapping” is possible. And now a group of Silicon Valley investors have started a contest to help decipher as much of the scrolls as possible.

Continue reading “Did scientists really discover a new superconductor?”

Aging a character in Midjourney v5, from 8 years old to 70 years old.

They grow up so fast 🥹 pic.twitter.com/bhFYZLq4Xl

— Nick St. Pierre (@nickfloats) March 17, 2023

Two years ago this month, Australia passed a law called the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, which, as the name suggested, forced digital platforms like Facebook and Google to negotiate deals to pay the news media for the latter’s content. If they failed to do so, the Australian government would reserve the right to impose deals between the parties. Before the law was passed, Google warned users that the legislation could affect their ability to search; meanwhile, Facebook tried to sway public opinion against the law by promising to block all news content from its platform in Australia. When the law passed, Facebook did precisely that. But after amendments made the law less stringent, the platform removed the ban. Eventually, both Facebook and Google cut deals with multiple news companies.

Fast forward two years, and a similar scenario is playing out in Canada. Encouraged by the sums of money that Australian media companies received as a result of the legislation there—about a hundred and fifty million Australian dollars, according to a report in CJR by Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia Journalism School—the Canadian government moved to implement its own version of such a law: Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which has been through the House of Commons and is now making its way through the Senate. Last month, Google removed news from Canadian search results in what the company described as “tests.” Last week, Facebook said that it will cut off access to news in Canada if the law is passed in its present form. Rinse, repeat. 

Last week, Sabrina Geremia, the head of Google’s Canadian arm, and Jason Kee, its public policy manager, testified before a Canadian government committee hearing into Bill C-18. (The committee asked other Google executives to appear, including the CEO, Sundar Pichai, but they declined). Kee claimed that the bill would incentivize “clickbait” journalism and favor larger news companies over smaller publishers. Google’s opposition—or, at least, its tactics in trying to remove news from search results in Canada—may have backfired: News Media Canada, a lobby group representing digital and print publishers, said in a statement that Google’s move to cut off Canadians’ access to news was “heavy-handed” and that it “underscores that there is a significant power imbalance between publishers and platforms,” thus proving a need for regulation.

Continue reading “Canada imitates Australia’s news law, but to what end?”

Throwback to this gem: A video shared to Twitter in 2020 by the Peninsula Open Space Trust, shows a coyote and a badger using a culvert to travel beneath a highway near Gilroy, California. The coyote jumps at his friend in a playful way, as though he wants him to hurry up, and the unusual duo then march off through the tunnel together, on their way to have an adventure.

The Pavilion of the Enlightened, in the Samut Prakan province of Thailand has a “creative design” not based on any historic structure. It celebrates the story of 500 enlightened monks who achieved Nirvana with very peculiar geometric shapes (via @Rainmaker1973 on Twitter)

Historian Rebecca Simon writes: Anne Bonny made an unforgettable impression from the bow of the pirate ship, Revenge, in the 1700s.Beautiful with fiery red hair that matched her temperament, she’d patrol the ship wearing a jacket and trousers, with a handkerchief tied around her head. Though forced to disguise herself as a man to lead the life she wanted, Anne proved herself to be just as skilled and ruthless as anypirate. One of thecrew’s newer recruits was a man named Mark Read, and Anne found herself taken with him. She revealed that she was a woman and declared her love for him — not missing a beat, Read revealed that she was also a woman. Thus began a passionate, secret love affair between two of the most fearsome pirates of the time.

Did Coca-Cola have cocaine as an ingredient, and if so how much?

From a Twitter thread by journalist Trung Phan: “By the mid-1800s, Europeans were using cocaine recreationally. A popular way to consume it was in a drink called Vin Mariani (combo of cocaine and red wine). Famous fans of the beverage included Pope Leo XIII and President Ulysses S. Grant. After the end of the Civil War, pharmacists in America started cranking out ‘patent medicines’ to provide a buzz as well as relieve headaches and bodily pains. These unregulated concoctions contained hard drugs like morphine, opium, heroin and cocaine. John Stith Pemberton borrowed the Vin Mariani formula and added kola nuts — which have caffeine — to create Coca-Cola in 1886. But critics blamed the drink for cocaine addiction and stirred racist fears that it was leading to Black crime. Coca-Cola took out the cocaine in 1902.”

Continue reading “Anne and Mary, fearsome pirates who were also lovers”

Sasha Chapin writes about having aphantasia, which some of you might recall I also suffer from (although maybe “suffer from” is the wrong term):

“I wonder whether my mental existence is more shallow than that of others, whether my somewhat detached, playful, and ironic view of life is partially based on my blankness. I have never been haunted by an image of suffering or pined after the picture of a distant lover crossing a hypothetical room in a hypothetical evening. When I am reminded of some contentious issue, like firearm regulation, I’m not watching a movie in my mind about horrible things happening; everything is simply a concept. It’s easy to stay at a mental remove.

It’s possible that aphantasia actually makes writing easier for me because there’s nothing to get in the way of the words. I’m not worried about doing justice to the pictures in my head—they are not there. Also, since I don’t remember through the visual, life is already stored as a series of connected verbal clusters, ready to be deployed. I just have to start moving my hands to get them out of storage. Recently, it was revealed to me that some people have trouble describing recent incidents in their lives in anecdote form. And this is totally foreign to me. The first words I call on aren’t always fantastic, but they can always be summoned.

There is another potential upside I wonder about, which is: maybe I have an easier time accepting death than other people. The transience of things has always seemed obvious and relatively easy to accept for me. Everything has already slipped into the void for me, everything that’s not right here. I remember that, last summer, I sat with a friend in a park in Dumbo at sunset, watching the pink-purple fall on all the metal and water, the wheezing cars and glass towers. I thought: this is as beautiful as it’s going to get. But it didn’t occur to me to hold onto the substance of the moment, because I knew that was impossible. When I turned around, it was gone.”

Interestingly enough, Sasha also wrote about how he used an online course, meditation, and some micro-dosing of psilocybin and LSD to trigger something approaching mental visualization — or at least more than he had before:

“There is one fMRI study of an aphantasic person. Scans revealed that, when asked to visualize, he displayed different patterns of brain activity than healthy subjects—specifically, less activation in areas associated with mental imagery, and more activation in regions associated with semantic processing. Crudely speaking, he was using non-image parts of his brain to do image stuff. This matches with my subjective experience of aphantasia, wherein trying to remember an image brings up a set of words, sounds, and even spatial information, just no pictures. 

So, the way the exercises work is… okay, this is where it gets fuzzy for me. But I guess that… since people with aphantasia use their word-brain instead of their image-brain when trying to visualize… then… by using their word-brain extra hard… maybe the dormant visual brain regions will be activated a little bit in the process… so new brain connections will form?”

(from Katherine Champagne on Twitter, via the London Review of Books)

In 1952, the United States military needed leaders for a new kind of mission. It involved a treacherous journey into unexplored territory, with danger a certainty. But 28-year-old Navy Lt. James Earl Carter Jr. answered the call. “Unexplored territory,” in this case, was the aftermath of one of the world’s first serious nuclear accidents. On Dec. 12, 1962, the NRX research reactor at Chalk River, Ontario, in Canada had suffered a partial meltdown. Ruptured radioactive fuel rods were stuck inside the reactor core. Radioactive water filled the reactor building’s basement. Lieutenant Carter was an officer in the Navy’s nuclear submarine program and thus an expert on reactors and nuclear physics.

Greenland’s misunderstood winter treat

For many in northwest Greenland, the iconic flavor of winter is that of fermented meat, perhaps most iconically kiviaq, a dish made by packing 300 to 500 whole dovekies—beaks, feathers, and all—into the hollowed-out carcass of a seal, stitching it up and sealing it with fat, then burying it under rocks for a few months to ferment. Once it’s dug up and opened, people skin and eat the birds one at a time. Plates of these small fermented seabirds are a staple at many kaffemiit—big communal gatherings celebrating anything from holidays to birthdays—during the winter, especially among the Inughuit.

Continue reading “When Jimmy Carter helped save a nuclear reactor”

Jutting out of the permafrost on a mountainside on Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago, the entrance to the world’s “doomsday” seed vault is worthy of any James Bond movie. Surrounded by snow, ice and the occasional polar bear, the facility houses 1.2 million seed samples from every corner of the planet as an insurance policy against catastrophe. It is a monument to 12,000 years of human agriculture that aims to prevent the permanent loss of crop species after war, natural disaster or pandemic. The Global Seed Vault in the Norwegian Arctic, which opened in 2008, is closed to the public and shrouded in mystery, the subject of numerous internet doomsday conspiracy theories. To celebrate the vault’s 15th anniversary, everyone was invited on a virtual tour to see inside the vast collection of tubers, rice, grains, and other seeds.

The forgotten history of the world’s first trans clinic

Magnus Hirschfeld sought to specialize in sexual health, an area of growing interest. Many of his predecessors and colleagues believed that homosexuality was pathological, using new theories from psychology to suggest it was a sign of mental ill health. Hirschfeld, in contrast, argued that a person may be born with characteristics that did not fit into heterosexual or binary categories and supported the idea that a “third sex” (or Geschlecht) existed naturally. Hirschfeld proposed the term “sexual intermediaries” for nonconforming individuals. He purchased a Berlin villa in early 1919 and opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute for Sexual Research) on July 6. By 1930 it would perform the first modern gender-affirmation surgeries in the world.

Continue reading “Inside the Arctic seed vault that could save humanity”

Libby Jackson, the Head of Space Exploration in the UK, says that there is “no way” humans are the only life form in the universe. Jackson reportedly continued by saying that the existence of aliens isn’t a question of if but more a question of when we’ll find more answers to those burning questions. This report isn’t all that surprising as scientists have claimed that alien life almost certainly exists in some fashion in past studies. Jackson is just one of the most recent public figures to speak out about the existence of aliens in our universe. The 41-year-old Head of Space Exploration was just awarded an OBE in 2022 and is convinced that deeper space exploration will provide answers. Dr. Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space, has also said she believes aliens exist somewhere. The consensus from Dr. Sharman and others in the community seems to be that there are just too many stars and galaxies for human life to be the only form of life in the universe.

This town in Manitoba has a polar bear jail

A frontier settlement founded for fur trading in 1717, Churchill sits smack in the middle of the “polar bear highway”—the natural path the animals take to get onto the sea ice every year. Located on the shore of Hudson Bay, Churchill has around 850 human residents and about the same number of bears roaming around. So the town had to get creative about how to handle the massive animals. Colloquially known as the polar bear jail, the holding facility is a massive hangar of 28 cells built from cinder blocks with steel bar ceilings and doors. A second set of solid metal doors prevents bears from reaching out between bars. Most cells fit only one bear (otherwise they’d fight) but two larger cells are reserved for moms with cubs. Five of the cells are air-conditioned to make them more comfortable during warmer weather. Some bears are tranquilized when they’re brought in. Others arrive awake in huge culverts, traps baited with a chunk of seal meat.

Continue reading “UK space exploration boss says aliens definitely exist”