Month: July 2023

Rachel Nuwer writes for the BBC: “In February 2020, Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago, was running an experiment on whether the drug MDMA increased the pleasantness of social touch when Mike Bremmer, de Wit’s research assistant, appeared at her office door. The latest participant in the double-blind trial, a man named Brendan, had filled out a questionnaire and written: “This experience has helped me sort out a debilitating personal issue. Google my name. I now know what I need to do.” They googled Brendan’s name, and up popped a disturbing revelation: until just a few months before, Brendan had been the leader of the US Midwest faction of Identity Evropa, a notorious white nationalist group also known as the American Identity Movement.”

This fighter pilot turned MIT computer science professor believed the universe is a computer

Alex Williams writes for the New York Times: “Edward Fredkin, who despite never having graduated from college became an influential professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and a maverick theorist who championed the idea that the entire universe might function like one big computer, died on June 13 in Brookline, Mass. He was 88. After serving as a fighter pilot in the Air Force in the early 1950s, Professor Fredkin became a renowned, if unconventional, scientific thinker. He was a close friend and intellectual sparring partner of the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman and the computer scientist Marvin Minsky, a trailblazer in artificial intelligence. An autodidact who left college after a year, he nonetheless became a full professor of computer science at M.I.T. at 34.” (Bonus link: Here’s an interview with Fredkin from The Atlantic in 1988).

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Continue reading “A dose of MDMA transformed a notorious white supremacist”

From Kevin Dickinson at Big Think: “Ancient Akkadian is an early Semitic language that was the mother tongue of the Akkadian Empire, which arose around 2300 B.C. through the conquests of its founder, Sargon the Great. Hundreds of thousands — by some accounts more than a million — Akkadian texts have been discovered and today lie in museums and universities. Many have even been digitized online. Each one has the potential to teach us about the life, politics, and beliefs of the first civilizations, yet this knowledge remains locked behind the time and manpower necessary to translate them. To help change that, a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists and computer scientists has developed an artificial intelligence that can translate Akkadian almost instantly and unlock the historic record preserved in these 5,000-year-old tablets.”

The most accomplished man in Europe in the 18th century was a Black man

From Bri Michele at Medium: “Chevalier, based on a true story, traces the life of Joseph Bologne, an 18th century French nobleman. Joseph was the son of a wealthy plantation owner in the French Caribbean and an enslaved Senegalese woman. After some time, Joseph’s father came back to France, and brought Joseph and his mother back with him. The movie follows Joseph’s life from the time he arrives in France. It shows the racial challenges he faced in the private music academy his father enrolled him in — and how he persevered and overcame every single one of them. He became the most accomplished violinist and composer in all of France, rivaling Mozart himself. His accomplishments were so impressive that Queen Marie Antoinette bestowed on him the title of the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, making him part of her court.”

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

Continue reading “New AI translates 5,000-year-old cuneiform tablets instantly”

Last Friday, Twitter suddenly started blocking anyone not logged into a Twitter account from seeing public tweets, reversing a feature that the platform had allowed since it launched in 2007. As The Verge reported, Twitter didn’t announce any policy change, and so it was initially unclear whether the block was intentional or just the latest in a series of technical glitches to have bedeviled the platform since Musk acquired it last year. Musk eventually tweeted that the change was a “temporary emergency measure” necessitated by what he described as the rampant “scraping,” or copying, of tweets by third parties in an act that he called “data pillaging.” At time of writing, the restriction appeared to have been lifted, according to Search Engine Roundtable. The group chats breathed a sigh of relief.

This wasn’t the end of the Twitter drama, however. On Saturday, Musk announced that logged-in users would also face restrictions when viewing tweets, in the form of a “rate limit” that would be determined based on their account status. Musk said that unverified users—in other words, anyone who hasn’t paid eight dollars a month for a subscription to the Twitter Blue service, or been awarded verified status by virtue of being an advertiser or celebrity—would be able to see a maximum of six hundred posts per day; verified accounts would be capped at six thousand. Musk later added that, in the near future, the rate limits would increase to eight hundred and eight thousand tweets per day for unverified and verified users, respectively, with new unverified accounts capped at four hundred. 

As The Verge noted, Musk blamed the scraping of Twitter, in part, on companies that are trying to harvest data to train artificial-intelligence engines, but he didn’t mention that the incident might have been driven, at least in part, by his own decisions. Twitter recently imposed fees for access to its software API, which allows third-party services to pull tweets to display in their apps. And, since taking over the company, Musk has laid off more than three quarters of its staff, many of whom were involved in maintaining its technical infrastructure. Last November, an unnamed Twitter engineer told the MIT Technology Review that after watching the layoffs at the company, he was convinced that, in the future, “things will be broken more often [and] things will be broken for longer periods of time.” In March, a change by a single engineer led to an outage; two months later, the much-hyped live launch of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign via the Twitter Spaces feature was crippled by glitches. There have been other such examples.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Twitter throttles tweets as Meta launches a competitor”

Drik Schulze-Makuch writes for Big Think: “In the mid-1970s, NASA sent two Viking landers to the surface of Mars equipped with instruments that conducted the only life detection experiments ever conducted on another planet. At the time of those landings, scientists had very little understanding of the Martian environment. Since Earth is a water planet, it seemed reasonable that adding water might coax life to show itself in the extremely dry Martian environment. In hindsight, it is possible that approach was too much of a good thing. For microbes that live within salt rocks, pouring water over them might overwhelm them. In technical terms, we would say that we were hyperhydrating them, but in simple terms, it would be more like drowning them.”

What we think of as exercise now used to literally be torture

From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: “The word ‘treadmill’ first entered the English language in 1822, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. Most exercise equipment (think ‘bike’ or ‘weights’ or ‘jump rope’) describes either how to use the equipment or what makes the item useful for a workout. The word ‘treadmill’ has the ‘tread’ part, signaling that it’s used for walking, but it also has the ‘mill’ part, which suggests that it’s used for grinding something down. And while exercise can definitely be a grind, that saying wasn’t one back in the early 1800s. The early treadmills were a lot like sawmills or windmills or millstones, and the first treadmills weren’t found at your local gym — they were found in prisons. The people on them were inmates, and this was part of their sentence.”

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Continue reading “We may have accidentally killed whatever life there was on Mars”

From Bryan Burrough at Texas Monthly magazine: “They found her naked body 36 years ago now, her head sunk into a bathtub full of black water, hands tied behind her with a tank top. She had been a quiet, shy woman, five foot seven, with lustrous brown hair cascading past her shoulders and an easy smile that friends didn’t see as much as they once had. Susan was thirty years old and living alone that summer, left by a biker-ish husband who had fled the state, waiting for her divorce to go through. She was a local girl, a little lonely, a little sad, trying hard to put her life back in order. When she missed her shift at the sandpaper factory two days running, a supervisor called her father, Joe Atkins.”

Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert were bitter rivals, and then they both got cancer

From Sally Jenkins at the New York Times: “They have known each other for 50 years now, outlasting most marriages. Aside from blood kin, Navratilova points out, “I’ve known Chris longer than anybody else in my life, and so it is for her.” Lately, they have never been closer — a fact they refuse to cheapen with sentimentality. “It’s been up and down, the friendship,” Evert says. At the ages of 68 and 66, respectively, Evert and Navratilova have found themselves more intertwined than ever, by an unwelcome factor. You want to meet an opponent who draws you nearer in mutual understanding? Try having cancer at the same time. “It was like, are you kidding me?” Evert says.”

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

Continue reading “Everyone in town thought they knew who killed Susan Woods”

From Tara Isabella Burton for the Smithsonian magazine: “In the autumn of 1878, Thomas Alva Edison had a problem. He hadn’t invented the light bulb—yet. Or, to put it more precisely, he had invented a light bulb, but he couldn’t keep it lit for more than a few minutes at a time. He still hadn’t figured out how to regulate the temperature of the light bulb’s internal filament, meaning the incandescent bulb would immediately overheat, and the filament would promptly melt down. Unfortunately, Edison was running out of time. All over North America and Europe, inventors like him were working on—and patenting—their own electric projects. Sooner or later, somebody would wind up harnessing electricity. Two Canadians, Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans, had already patented an inefficient design four years before.”

The Sicilian mafia got its start controlling the market for oranges and lemons

From research by Arcangelo Dimico, Alessia Isopi and Ola Olsson: “Since its first appearance in the late 1800s, the reasons behind the rise of the Sicilian mafia have remained a puzzle. We argue that the mafia arose as a response to an exogenous shock in the demand for oranges and lemons, following Lind’s discovery in the late eighteenth century that citrus fruits cured scurvy. More specifically, we claim that mafia appeared in locations where producers made high profits from citrus production for export. Operating in an environment with a weak rule of law, the mafia protected citrus production from predation and acted as intermediaries between producers and exporters. Using original data from a parliamentary inquiry in 1881–1886 on Sicilian towns, the Damiani Inquiry.”

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

Continue reading “How Edison pretended that he had invented the light bulb”

From Gillian Brockell for the Washington Post: “The mystery of what happened to Emanuela Orlandi has been a national obsession in Italy for 40 years, as of this month, but it went international last year with the release of the Netflix documentary “Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi.” In the four-part series, Orlandi’s family members, their attorney, police investigators and several Italian journalists go through the case, all of them concluding that the Vatican knows more than it has said. The Orlandi family had lived and worked in the city for more than 100 years, serving seven popes as ushers and messengers. In the 1980s, usher Ercole Orlandi lived in an apartment there with his wife, son and four daughters. Emanuela was the second youngest.”

The biggest fraud in modern physics

From Deep Space on Medium: “At the beginning of the 21st century, experimental physics saw a startling breakthrough thanks to the work ofJan Hendrik Schön. This German physicist who worked at Bell Labs was a real prodigy. He set up daring and breakthrough experiments that pushed physics far ahead of the curve. At one period of his career, Schön published one article every eight days, in the most prestigious scientific journals, such as Nature and Science. Schön’s biggest success was that he was supposedly able to create a transistor working at the molecular level from organic materials. But other scientists could not replicate Schön’s results — it seemed that everything Schön wrote about worked only when he was in charge of the experiment.”

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

Continue reading “A girl vanished in Vatican City and her fate remains a mystery”