Author: Mathew Ingram

From Wikipedia: “Alessandro Zanardi is an Italian former professional racing driver who won the CART championship in 1997 and 1998, and took 15 wins in the series. He also raced in Formula One from 1991 to 1994 and again in 1999; his best result was a sixth-place finish in the 1993 Brazilian Grand Prix. He returned to CART in 2001, but a major crash in the 2001 American Memorial resulted in the amputation of his legs. He returned to racing less than two years after the accident, competing in the European Touring Car Championship in 2003–2004 and then in the World Touring Car Championship between 2005 and 2009; he scored four wins. In addition to continuing to race cars, Zanardi took up competition in handcycling, a form of paralympic cycling. In September 2012 he won gold medals at the London Paralympics and in September 2016 he won a gold and a silver medal at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Paralympics.”

While in exile on Elba Island the former emperor Napoleon decided to take English lessons

From Public Domain Review: “Napoleon had had a rollercoaster eighteen months. First he had been forced to abdicate as Emperor of France and exiled to the island of Elba. Then he had managed to escape, march on Paris, and retake the throne. Finally a crushing loss at Waterloo had led to exile once again, this time to a far more remote island called Saint Helena. The watery walls of his new South Atlantic prison were at least a thousand miles thick in every direction. The British had agreed to provide Le Petit Caporal with plentiful wine, meat, and musical instruments, but he could not have what he most craved — family, power, Europe. To make matters worse, he had virtually nothing to read. Newspapers were banned, and those he did manage to get his hands on were nearly all in English. That was the main reason why, on January 16, 1816, three months after landing on the island, he decided to learn the language of his captors.”

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Continue reading “Racecar driver lost both his legs and became an Olympic athlete”

From The Hustle: “Just after 11 PM on February 15, 1992, a janky ball machine at the Virginia State Lottery HQ spit out 6 winning numbers on live television: 8… 11… 13… 15… 19… 20. In the coming days, officials would find out that one “person” had secured not only the $27,036,142 jackpot, but 6 second prizes, 132 third prizes, and 135k minor prizes collectively worth another $900k. What unfolded next was the strangest, most improbable lottery tale in history — one involving thousands of international investors, dozens of complex computer systems, and a mathematical savant. This is the story of the man who “gamed” the lottery by buying every possible combination. In the late 1960s, a young Romanian economist named Stefan Mandel was struggling to get by. Many Romanians might have turned to a life of crime. But Mandel, a self-described “philosopher-mathematician,” saw another way out: The lottery.”

Researchers have brought prehistoric algae back to life after 7,000 years in Baltic Sea mud

From Phys.org: “A research team led by the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW) was able to revive dormant stages of algae that sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea almost 7,000 years ago. Despite thousands of years of inactivity in the sediment without light and oxygen, the investigated diatom species regained full viability. Many organisms, from bacteria to mammals, can go into a kind of “sleep mode,” known as dormancy, in order to survive periods of unfavorable environmental conditions. They switch to a state of reduced metabolic activity and often form special dormancy stages with robust protective structures and internally stored energy reserves. This also applies to phytoplankton, microscopically small plants that live in the water and photosynthesize. Their dormant stages sink to the bottom of water bodies, where they are covered by sediment over time and preserved under anoxic conditions.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “A rogue Romanian economist won the lottery 14 times”

Before anyone gets upset about my headline, I am using the term “thought process” in the loosest possible way. I realize that many people (perhaps even most people) would not describe what an AI model does as “thinking.” After all, aren’t LLMs just a kind of super-autocomplete, as Noam Chomsky put it, with the whole internet to choose from? Aren’t they mostly just giant guessing machines, with no real intelligence behind them, or “stochastic parrots,” as AI scientists Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru described them? These are all fair questions, and I wish I had answers. But when it gets right down to it, we simply don’t know how LLMs do what they do — and when I say “we,” I’m not just referring to myself, or others like me who aren’t experts in artificial intelligence. Even the people who are building these AI engines and chatbots fundamentally don’t know exactly how they arrive at the outputs they produce (although some of them might pretend otherwise for marketing and/or fundraising purposes).

I know this probably sounds terrible, as though AI scientists are playing with explosives while not understanding how combustion works, but a surprising amount of science (the really interesting part anyway) is like this. Which is why I was so excited to see the recent reports from Anthropic, in which the company — founded by former OpenAI scientist Dario Amodei in 2021 — described at length its efforts to understand on a deeper level how its AI (nicknamed Claude) “thinks,” or why it arrives at the conclusions that it does. You might think that this should be fairly straightforward — couldn’t Anthropic just ask Claude a question, and then ask it to describe how it arrived at its answer? The short version is yes, Anthropic has done this with simple math problems, and Claude has gone into some detail about how it arrived at the answers it gave; but when the company tried looking under the hood at how it actually arrived at the answer, the real process it used was not even close to what it said it was doing.

Again, this is going to sound either ridiculous or disturbing to many people, or possibly a combination of the two. Doesn’t this mean that AI engines are making things up? How can we trust them? After all, companies are using artificial intelligence to perform all kinds of services, and government agents like Homeland Security and Elon Musk’s DOGE are even relying on it for more crucial functions, like figuring out who is a terrorist, and re-engineering the entire infrastructure of the government. Does any of this make sense if LLMs are just making shit up all the time? These are also fair questions. I for one think we should hold off on entrusting government services — like the decision on whether to deport someone to a prison in El Salvador — to an AI engine until we can understand how they arrive at their conclusions, and why they sometimes “hallucinate” (which AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton prefers to call “confabulate”).

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Continue reading “What can we learn from an AI’s thought process?”

From Wikipedia: “Martin Pistorius is a South African man who had locked-in syndrome and was unable to move or communicate for 12 years. When he was 12, he began losing voluntary motor control and eventually fell into a vegetative state for three years. He began regaining consciousness around age 16 and achieved full consciousness by age 19, although he was still completely paralysed with the exception of his eyes. He was unable to communicate until his caregiver noticed that he could use his eyes to respond to her words. His parents then gave him a speech computer, and he began slowly regaining some upper body functions. In 2008, he met his wife Joanna, and in 2009 they married. By that time, Pistorius had regained limited control over his head and arms, but still needed his speech computer to communicate with others. In 2018, it was announced that the couple were expecting a child, and Pistorius was wheelchair racing.”

This guy is making millions by losing at every game he plays

From Slate: “At a private baccarat table near the back of the El Cortez Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas on a chilly January afternoon, a crowd of fans gathered to watch one of the world’s most famous gamblers at work. Some had come all the way here just to watch him play. They savored every detail—how he cut chips, ruffled his cash, bantered with the dealer. He was dressed for the job. His gray hair was molded into a tight crew cut, and he wore a knitted gold necklace low across his collarbone and a Super Bowl–sized ring with a Ruby 777 jackpot dangling from his hand. The scene was impressive, except in one way: This man absolutely sucked at gambling. I’d been with Vegas Matt — the YouTube tycoon whose millions of followers salivate over his every bet — for only a few hours. He’d already lost close to $30,000 and was set to lose even more.”

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Continue reading “He was in a vegetative state for a decade and came back to life”

From Atlas Obscura: “As the railway grew more popular in the 1850s and 1860s, trains allowed travelers to move about with unprecedented speed and efficiency, cutting the length of travel time drastically. But according to the more fearful Victorians, these technological achievements came at the considerable cost of mental health. As Edwin Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller wrote in The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present, trains were believed to “injure the brain.” In particular, the jarring motion of the train was alleged to unhinge the mind and either drive sane people mad or trigger violent outbursts from a latent “lunatic.” Mixed with the noise of the train car, it could, it was believed, shatter nerves. In the 1860s and ‘70s, reports began emerging of bizarre passenger behavior on the railways. When seemingly sedate people boarded trains, they suddenly began behaving in socially unacceptable ways.”

How did a billionaire inventor’s supposedly unsinkable mega-yacht capsize?

From New Lines: “In Aug. 19, 2024, a storm swept into Sicily’s Gulf of Porticciolo and, within minutes, sank the megayacht Bayesian, drowning 58-year-old British tycoon Mike Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter and five other passengers. For many, the incident conjured up the hubris of those who compete with the gods. Months of investigations by the Italian judiciary and by journalists have failed to provide a clear explanation for what caused the shipwreck. Footage shot by Italian Navy divers, who entered the hull at a depth of nearly 165 feet, shows it waterlogged but its structures and equipment perfectly intact. The Bayesian looks like a ghost vessel: It gives the impression that it could resurface and resume sailing. The affair remains surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery, much like the owner of the vessel and its 235-foot mast that defied the sky.”

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Continue reading “Victorians believed that train rides could cause insanity”

From WTOL-11: “A Michigan resident died from rabies after receiving a transplanted organ in Lucas County earlier this year, according to the Toledo-Lucas County Health Department. Dr. Carl Schmidt, a deputy coroner, said the recipient, who had undergone a kidney transplant in December, contracted the viral disease through the donated organ. The University of Toledo Medical Center released a statement Wednesday afternoon, saying “A patient receiving care at The University of Toledo Medical Center died in January 2025 of rabies. That patient underwent a deceased donor organ transplant in late 2024 at UTMC. Person-to-person transmission of rabies is extremely rare, though it has been documented in a very small number of cases involving organ transplantation.” A media representative for OPTN told WTOL 11 that this is the third time that rabies has been transmitted through transplanted organs.

He pretended to go to jail as a prank and then got arrested and sent to prison for real

From NY Mag: “Last October, William Banks posted on Instagram that he was looking for a subletter: $1,025 a month for eight months in a prewar building in Crown Heights with three roommates. “I’m leaving New York for a little while because unfortunately I have to go to jail in Connecticut,” Banks told everyone. Banks had been arrested at the end of 2023 in Westport for stealing five Israeli lawn flags. Banks, 28, a comedian by trade, focuses on extended and absurd bits that play out on social media and refuse to wink at the camera. In real life, Banks agreed to a plan in Connecticut that would result in the charge getting wiped from his record if he agreed to 200 hours of community service and two years of probation as well as taking a psychiatric evaluation and a hate-crime class. But for their show on social media, the gang rented a disused jail outside Miami for a five-hour shoot, hiring a friend from Detroit to play Banks’s cellmate.”

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Continue reading “A transplant patient died of rabies from a donated kidney”

From LARB: “An early 20th-century journalist and travel writer, William Seabrook was once among the most successful wordsmiths of his day, a progenitor of both gonzo journalists and contemporary Vice contributors, his work anticipating the former by decades and the latter by almost a century. He joined camel raids in Arabia, attended voodoo rites in Haiti — after which he helped popularize the word “zombie” — and supped with cannibal kings in Africa. Along the way, he became friendly with Aleister Crowley, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and many other notorious figures of his era. Committed to telling stories as truthfully as he could, he would later bribe a French morgue attendant to slice off a bit of neck flesh from a cyclist killed in an accident. Have you heard that human flesh resembles veal? You likely learned as much from Seabrook, who had the cut prepared three different ways by the chef of an acquaintance.”

John Tesh came up with the melody for the NBA theme and left it on a voicemail for himself

From Why Is This Interesting? “Tesh was traveling to cover the Tour de France in 1989 when he woke up suddenly in Megève, France, with an idea. Knowing how easily it could vanish, he called his own answering machine back home in the States to capture it, humming energetically into the phone. When he returned home, Tesh took this voicemail, placed the answering machine literally onto his keyboard, and began riffing, gradually bringing in his band to turn a rough voice memo into the iconic, polished composition. The kicker: NBC had put out the call for a new NBA theme song to legendary composers like John Williams and Hans Zimmer. But against the odds, they chose the enthusiastic melody that Tesh first captured in a half-awake voicemail, cementing it as the NBA’s iconic musical signature for more than a decade, becoming the soundtrack to Michael Jordan’s reign and the league’s growth through the 1990s.”

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Continue reading “This gonzo journalist from the ’30s said he ate human flesh”

From ProPublica: “Early last year, Matthew Allison could be found at the Space Banana dance club, awkwardly swaying to his own beat. Clutching the cheapest house beer, he’d greet people with a bear hug, a broad grin and his familiar, “Yo, bro!” salutations. Allison, then a 37-year-old convenience store worker and Saturday-night DJ, seemed to like everyone he met in Boise, Idaho’s small electronic dance music scene. And most people seemed to like him back. He was so gentle, former friends remember, that for a time he eschewed honey so as not to cause harm to bees. He was “a little goofy,” a former friend, Tyler Whitt, recalled. But that lovable persona hid a more sinister core. When he was behind his computer screen, Allison used the handle BTC, short for BanThisChannel, he told ProPublica. On the social media and messaging platform Telegram, authorities say, Allison was a key figure in a network of white supremacist and neo-Nazi chat groups and channels known as Terrorgram.”

He nearly drowned on his way to inventing the ubiquitous side-release buckle

From Tedium: “I’ve been thinking a lot about fasteners, especially side-release clamps. You know the kind. The plastic buckles where you use two fingers to press in, and the two pieces of plastic disconnect from one another. It’s everywhere, and this is probably the first time you’ve heard someone talk about it. Who came up with the idea of side-release clamps? Surprisingly for an object of such ubiquity, the answer is simple: It was conceived by just one inventor, a guy who shares a name with a hero plucked from the funnies. Dick Tracy of Illinois has explained how a white-water rafting incident got him thinking about the importance of easy-access latches. At the time, hiking backpacks had stabilizing chest straps that were loop-through—and hard to remove with a single hand. Fortunately for him, he was in a position to do something about it. He worked for Illinois Tool Works (ITW), a major manufacturing firm, and he had been tasked with coming up with new product lines that could bring in millions of dollars.”

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Continue reading “A DJ’s secret life at the center of an online terrorism network”

Until a couple of years ago, you couldn’t turn around without running into an academic article, university department, or even an entire nonprofit organization devoted to the evils of misinformation and its more sinister cousin, disinformation. Over the past decade or so, Facebook and YouTube have both been accused of distributing massive quantities of both misinformation (accidentally false facts) and disinformation (deliberately false facts), that some say have played a key role in a host of different problems, from the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar or the election of Donald Trump to anti-vaccine hysteria. YouTube in particular has been accused of “radicalizing” the vulnerable by sending them down disinfo “rabbit holes” about everything from 9/11 to the pyramids. And Facebook was widely criticized for saying in 2020 that it didn’t want to become an “arbiter of truth” by taking down posts with misinformation.

The amount of research in this area has declined of late, in part because of the chilling effect from lawsuits and threats issued by members of the Trump administration, who see the topic of disinformation as a cover for censorship of conservative views. Academic entities — including the Stanford Internet Observatory — have either been shut down or dramatically downsized as a result. This is obviously bad, but I think in some ways it represents the chickens coming home to roost, after years of focusing on the sources of disinformation rather than trying to think about the root cause — in other words, seeing it primarily as a supply issue rather than a demand issue. This results in everyone spending most of their time beating up on suppliers like X and Facebook and YouTube, none of which helps to solve the underlying problems.

As Trump and his right-wing acolytes gained traction, they reversed the polarity on the disinformation debate: instead of a well-intentioned attempt to convince Facebook and X and other platforms that they should care about the spread of false information about important topics like COVID, it became about a “woke” mob — including the Biden administration — that was forcing Facebook and the other platforms to censor free speech (I’ve written about the lawsuits launched by the Trump government and Republicans in Congress over the First Amendment implications of what is known as “jawboning,” or attempts by officials to influence the decisions made by platforms). And once Trump was elected, companies like Meta and Google have shown that they are more than happy to jump on that bandwagon and apologize for their prior behavior.

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Continue reading “Disinformation isn’t a supply problem it’s a demand problem”

From Wikipedia: “James Carter was born in 1925 to a Mississippi sharecropping family and as a young man was several times an inmate of the Mississippi prison system. In 1959, Carter was a prisoner in a Mississippi State Penitentiary when Alan Lomax recorded him leading a group of prisoners singing “Po’ Lazarus”, an African-American work song, while chopping logs in time to the music. The recording was issued on volume nine of Bad Man Ballads in Lomax’s 1959 Southern Journey LP series. Decades later, the recording was licensed for use in the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and topped the Billboard charts for weeks. Lomax’s daughter Anna found Carter in Chicago and flew there to personally present him with a $20,000 royalty check.”

This religion is dying out because it refuses to explain itself or evangelize

From The Dial: “The last thing a metal worker from Liège is expected to do is found a new religion. Yet that is just what Louis-Joseph Antoine did, in Jameppe-sur-Meuse, Belgium, in 1910. Antoinism, his namesake religion, is not nearly as popular today as it was in its early years. Bernard is an Antoinist healer, a sort of parish priest for the movement. He is elegant, slightly balding and quick to smile. His pseudonym is not intended to protect his identity, but to preserve the discretion about Antoinism required by his Council. Other Antoinists declined interviews, citing an unwillingness to proselytize. “Recruitment is not part of our statutes, writings, or belief system,” Bernard explained to me. “We do not wish to conquer the world or to tell people how to do better than they already are.” Antoine himself is said to have destroyed 8,000 booklets he had created to spread his word. This attitude has helped to maintain an aura of mystery around Antoinism. But it may also have stymied its future.”

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Continue reading “Forty years later he got paid for a song he sang while in prison”

From CNN: “Traveling along the highways of Europe, a campervan named Stella Vita has driven almost 2,000 kilometers without stopping for fuel or plugging in to charge. Described as a self-sustaining house on wheels, the campervan has solar panels fitted to its roof and is powered by the energy of the sun alone. It is fully equipped with living essentials including a double bed, sofa, kitchen area and a bathroom with a shower, sink and toilet. It can fit two people, who can drive, cook breakfast and watch television using just the vehicle’s solar-charged battery, according to its creators – 22 students at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. The team started brainstorming for the project last September and they came up with the idea in two months. From November 2020 until March this year, they designed the campervan, aiming to make it as aerodynamic and lightweight as possible while still making it look good.”

The original Superman was a bald drifter who got his powers from an experimental drug

From Wikipedia: “Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster met in 1932 while attending Glenville High School in Cleveland and bonded over their admiration of fiction. Siegel aspired to become a writer and Shuster aspired to become an illustrator. Siegel wrote amateur science fiction stories, which he self-published as a magazine called Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization. His friend Shuster often provided illustrations for his work. In January 1933, Siegel published a short story in his magazine titled “The Reign of the Superman”. The titular character is a homeless man named Bill Dunn who is tricked by an evil scientist into consuming an experimental drug, which gives Dunn the powers of mind-reading, mind-control, and clairvoyance. He uses these powers for profit and amusement, but then the drug wears off, leaving him a powerless vagrant again. Shuster’s illustrations depicted Dunn as a bald man.”

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Continue reading “Solar-powered camper drives 1,200 miles without recharging”

From Space.com: “Space is an airless vacuum, so technically, you can’t smell anything. However, space is not a complete vacuum. It’s full of all manner of molecules, some of which have their own strong odors when we smell them on Earth. During the Apollo moon landings, the astronauts would often comment on a gunpowder-like smell once they had clambered back into the airlock and removed their helmets. Similarly, after spacewalking, astronauts returning to the confines of the International Space Station reported the smell of gunpowder, as well as ozone and something like burnt steak. So what’s going on? Where does the smell come from? Scientists have two good theories. One is that, while an astronaut is on a spacewalk, single atoms of oxygen can adhere to their spacesuit, and when they reenter the airlock and repressurize, molecular oxygen — O2, or two atoms of oxygen — floods into the airlock and combines with the single oxygen atoms to form ozone, or O3. This would explain the sour, metallic smell.”

Why would someone run thirty hours in a hurricane on a race with no course?

From the NYT: “Finally, the race directors shouted go, and the runners broke toward every point of the compass. We were all headed toward the same finish line. But in between here and there — some 120 miles on the most efficient and complete route — we would take countless different paths. That’s because adventure racing is a mash-up of an Ironman triathlon and a wilderness treasure hunt, with teams of three tracking down hidden checkpoints over vast distances in rough terrain. For this national championship contest, we had to seek 50 checkpoints secreted throughout the Monongahela National Forest over the course of 30 hours — during which time few teams would sleep. To reach the checkpoints, we could use only our feet, mountain bikes and canoes, and for navigation we had to rely on maps and compasses. Whichever team found the most checkpoints (and crossed the finish line) by the deadline would win.”

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Continue reading “Astronauts say outer space smells like burnt steak”

From the BBC: “In the early hours of 14 September 2019, Eleanor Paice jolted awake to the sound of smashing glass. Living in a staff flat above Blenheim Palace, the guest services supervisor was used to strange noises. But when fire alarms began to blare, she knew something was wrong. She quickly began evacuating to the great courtyard. But unbeknown to her, she was running straight into the final moments of an audacious heist. Five men had smashed their way into the palace, ripped out a £4.8m solid gold toilet and fled in a stolen Volkswagen Golf. The working loo, entitled America, had been on display for just two days at the 18th Century stately home, plumbed in as part of an exhibition by the Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan. It was a crime that intrigued art lovers, delighted the press and coined countless potty-themed puns. The BBC gained exclusive behind-the-scenes access to staff at Blenheim Palace.”

A Nobel Prize-winning expert in decision making explains his final decision

From the WSJ: “In mid-March 2024, Daniel Kahneman flew from New York to Paris with his partner to unite with his daughter and her family. They spent days walking around the city, going to museums and the ballet, and savoring soufflés and chocolate mousse. Around March 22, Kahneman, who had turned 90 that month, also started emailing a personal message to several dozen of the people he was closest to: This is a goodbye letter I am sending friends to tell them that I am on my way to Switzerland, where my life will end on March 27. Kahneman was one of the world’s most influential thinkers—a psychologist at Princeton University and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. He had spent his long career studying the imperfections and inconsistencies of human decision-making. By most accounts—although not his own—Kahneman was still in reasonably good physical and mental health when he chose to die.”

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Continue reading “The inside story of the theft of a gold toilet from Blenheim Palace”

From Atlas Obscura: “In 1997 — at the height of a wave of exposés, lawsuits, and public outrage against the tobacco industry — a man named Puzant Torigian, a Hackensack, New Jersey-based entrepreneur, launched a new brand of cigarettes called Bravo. Bravo cigarettes contained nothing but lettuce, dried and cured to look like tobacco, processed into sheets, shredded, flavored with herbal extracts, and rolled up and boxed like any other cig. Torigian’s marketing materials claimed that Bravo “tastes (well pretty close) like a cigarette,” but lacked their harmful nicotine and tobacco tar. However, in interviews, he stressed that he hadn’t spent 40 years developing the product just to offer a safer replacement for traditional smokes. He wanted people to use Bravo as a smoking cessation tool. Even at the time, this struck many folks as an odd proposition. But Bravo wasn’t just one aging inventor’s offbeat idea. It was the most developed of many attempts, stretching back over a century, to develop alternatives to tobacco cigarettes.”

An unlikely organ helps to explain Sherpas’ aptitude for altitude

From Scientific American: “For most mountaineers, some level of altitude sickness is inevitable. But Indigenous highlanders living on the Tibetan Plateau, known as Sherpas, have inhabited the high Himalaya long enough to have an evolutionary edge at tolerating elevation compared with lowlanders born and raised farther down. For a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, researchers compared Sherpa and lowlander blood samples during a Himalayan trek to investigate the Sherpas’ aptitude for altitude—and they found a crucial clue in the kidney.The thinner atmosphere up high can lead to hypoxia, a dangerous lack of oxygen. Hypoxic people breathe faster to bring more oxygen into their lungs. But extra breathing also empties the lungs of more carbon dioxide than usual, which in turn reduces the production of carbonic acid in the blood. Once blood acidity shifts, the only thing that can fix it is the kidneys.”

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Continue reading “One man’s lifelong quest to create a lettuce cigarette”

In a post on X a little over a week ago, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said that the company had “trained a new model that is good at creative writing,” although he said he wasn’t sure how or when it would be released. Altman said reading the output this new model generated was the first time he had been “really struck by something written by AI” (a comment that, depending on how you look at it, doesn’t say much about the company’s previous chatbots). The prompt Altman gave his experimental fiction-writing AI engine was this: “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.” And with that single post, he tossed what amounts to a large cluster bomb into the writing community, the shrapnel and shock waves from which continue to reverberate.

If that cluster-bomb metaphor seems a little strained, you probably aren’t going to love the output from OpenAI’s new fiction-writing engine. In his newsletter, Max Read described it as “the kind of technically proficient but ultimately unimaginative exercise you might expect from a smart student who reads only YA fiction.” Rachel Kiley summarized some of the criticism at The Daily Dot and said that the best AI will ever be able to do is “spit up something wearing the patchwork skin of real art, good or bad. And the only people who could look at both and say they’re the same are people who don’t actually try to engage with art beyond seeing it as content.” Author Dave Eggers told The San Francisco Standard: “AI can cut and paste text stolen from the internet, but that’s not art. It’s pastiche garbage that would fool only the most gullible. It’s a cheap party trick.”

Anyway, here’s an excerpt so that you can judge for yourself:

Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original. Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else’s need. I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let’s call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.

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Continue reading “Can OpenAI do creative writing? Yes and no”