Month: March 2024

From GWAS: “The first reports of deaths in patients who received the human growth hormone surfaced in 1985 both in the USA and UK. Post-mortem examinations revealed that all the deaths were due to a prion disease called Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, which led the government to shut down the program. But by then, more than 30,000 children were already dosed, who would later become the subjects of what might be the longest natural history study in medical history, running for more than 40 years. One major revelation was the discovery of amyloid beta protein aggregates in the grey matter resembling Alzheimer’s, which led scientists to speculate that Alzheimer’s disease could be transmitted from one human to another via infectious proteins.”

A nursing student’s murder sends a wave of fear through Athens, Georgia

From The Atlantic: “Laken Riley, a junior at the University of Georgia, went out for her morning jog in Athens. Riley was an avid runner, well known in the local running community, and had recently competed in the annual AthHalf, one of Athens’s beloved institutions. She took her regular route around Lake Herrick, an on-campus trail near the campus’s Intramural Fields. When she failed to return home, her roommate, a fellow runner and Riley’s best friend, called the police. Within the next hour, they found Riley’s lifeless body in a wooded area just off the trail. Her skull had been crushed.I know exactly where Riley was killed, because I also live in Athens, and I’m also a runner. Riley’s murder, the first homicide on campus in more than 30 years, sent a wave of terror through Athens, but it hit the running community particularly hard.”

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 “Growth hormone injections for dwarfism also gave patients Alzheimer’s”

From Ara The Rat: “In 2001, two boys playing in the woods in Radnor, Pennsylvania, found a strange three-foot sealed PVC pipe hidden inside a concrete drain. Inside, they discovered documents relating to numerous bank robberies and instructions on how to clean a Baretta firearm. Police found a three foot deep bunker filled with more PVC pipes and waterproof containers, containing books, maps, notes on 160 banks from Virginia to Connecticut, 5 guns, 500 rounds of ammunition and 8 Halloween masks. It didn’t take long before they realized who was behind this. For almost three decades, someone had been successfully robbing banks with a professionalism that had earned grudging respect. He was the most prolific bank robber in U.S. history netting himself around $2 million, more than John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde combined.”

Famous painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec invented chocolate mousse

From Tasting Table: “In addition to being a prolific painter, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was, as the Art Institute of Chicago puts it, gifted at representing the celebrity brand. One of his most famous works, “At the Moulin Rouge” (1892) depicts a bustling metropolitan nightlife scene that’s full of electricity and the hum of the after-hours-underworld. To say that Toulouse-Lautrec had a “palette” for the decadent would be accurate. But while other artists like Picasso and Van Gogh were chasing the green fairy under the absinthe drip, Toulouse-Lautrec was using his spoon to carve into bowls of rich chocolate mousse. While it might seem like an emblem of fine dining, but it wasn’t invented by a chef at all – it was created by Toulouse-Lautrec during the late 1800s. But he was less adept at naming foods. Mousse used to be called “chocolate mayonnaise.”

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 “He was the most prolific bank robber the US has ever seen”

From Inverse: “George Lucas didn’t plan on making Darth Vader the secret father of Luke Skywalker. As much as fans have been told that Lucas had a massive plan for the Star Wars saga prior to 1977, the sources closest to that process say the opposite. “When I was his wife, I never knew there were nine stories,” Marcia Lucas says in the new docuseries Icons Unearthed: Star Wars. “I never knew there were two stories.” But perhaps the greatest revelation in this under-the-radar documentary involves the origin of the franchise’s most famous twist. It turns out the “I am your father” moment started as an offhanded joke at a dinner party. Lucas was struggling to come up with some kind of big twist for Empire’s third act when he invited screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz over for dinner. When Lucas described his struggles with writing the Empire story, Huyck joked, “You can always make Darth Vader Luke’s father.”

The children’s classic Goodnight Moon was inspired by a stormy lesbian romance

From The Hornet: “A biography of Margaret Wise Brown by Amy Gary reveals that Brown, author of the classic children’s books Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, had a tumultuous love life which included an affair with a married woman. Brown never married or had children. Instead she had a string of apparently torrid romances, including one with Blanche Oelrichs (who used the male nom de plume Michael Strange for her erotic poetry), a married woman 20 years her senior. The two women’s romance was actually the inspiration behind the beloved children’s book classic Goodnight Moon. During one breakup, she wrote a poem about a girl who moved from the country to the city and to soothe herself imagined her old room. Later, the poem returned to her in a dream along with images of her downstairs neighbor’s apartment — its bright green walls, red furniture with yellow trim. The result was Goodnight Moon.”

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 “The idea of Darth Vader being Luke’s father started as a joke”

From JSTOR Daily: “According to new DNA findings, General Casimir Pulaski, the Polish aristocrat who aided the American Revolution as the Father of the American Cavalry, seems to have been intersex. That is, a person who combines both male and female traits. In Pulaski’s case, the bodily remains include a pelvis and facial structure that are characteristically female, but Pulaski was baptized as a boy, and is usually pictured with facial hair. Exiled from Poland, Pulaski arrived in Massachusetts in July 1777 with a letter of introduction from the Marquis de Lafayette, after hearing the call of the American revolution from afar. That led to a meeting with George Washington. Soon Pulaski was put in charge of the 700 men of the Continental Army’s cavalry, and using European methods of horse-mounted warfare, Pulaski rode into American, and Polish history.”

Hans Christian Andersen wrote about climbing Mount Vesuvius while it was erupting

From The Marginalian: “In mid-February of 1834, while touring Europe, 29-year-old Andersen arrived in Naples just as the mighty Mount Vesuvius was in the midst of one of its then-regular and dramatic eruptions, three centuries after the first of them had drowned dozens of Italian villages in hot lava and killed an estimated 3,000 people. In his diary, there is a breathtaking account of his visit to Vesuvius and his crazy quest to climb the mount as it was erupting. “We stood before the mountain itself, whose rounded contours were covered with blocks of lava and ash,” he wrote. “We were now ascending a fairly steep grade, sinking up over our knees into ash. With every other step we slid backward by one. Large, loose rocks went sliding downward when we stepped on them. Coal-black smoke swirled upward; then a ball of fire and gigantic, glowing boulders rolled down onto the plain that we had to cross to get to the lava flow.”

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 Polish aristocrat who helped the US in the 1700s was probably intersex”

In December, the New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI—the creator of the popular artificial intelligence software known as ChatGPT—and Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s primary financial backers and partners. As reported by the Times, the suit alleged that OpenAI used millions of Times articles to train “automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information” by reproducing Times articles. By doing this, the suit argued, OpenAI was trying to “free-ride” on the newspaper’s investment in journalism, and Microsoft was guilty of doing the same, because it used ChatGPT technology in its Bing search engine and in many Microsoft Office products. The Times didn’t ask for specific financial damages from OpenAI or Microsoft, but said that the behavior alleged in the lawsuit should result in “billions of dollars” in damages from both companies. The Times also asked the court to force OpenAI to destroy any AI models, databases, and training data that were based on copyrighted material from the paper.

As I reported for CJR in January, OpenAI’s response to the lawsuit was twofold: On the one hand, it argued that the Times was not being transparent about the process it had used to get ChatGPT to produce the copies of Times articles, and that getting ChatGPT to do this involved a bug that users would likely never experience. At the same time, OpenAI argued that its scanning or “ingestion” of data from sources such as the Times to feed its AI engine was permissible under the fair use exemption in American copyright law. As I explained in October, according to the fair use principle, copyrighted material can be used for certain purposes without permission, and without paying the owner a fee for licensing, provided the use meets certain criteria (as outlined in the “four factors” test that judges use when hearing fair use cases).

Last week, OpenAI filed an official response to the Times lawsuit that echoes and expands on many of the arguments the company originally made in January. Despite the allegations that ChatGPT could become a competitor to the Times by reproducing articles, OpenAI said in its response that ChatGPT is “not in any way a substitute for a subscription to the New York Times.” In the real world, OpenAI said, people not only do not use ChatGPT for that purpose, but would not be able to do so even if they wanted to, since “in the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.” According to OpenAI, the allegations in the Times’ lawsuit “do not meet its famously rigorous journalistic standards.” In reality, the company said, the Times paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products, and it took this person or persons tens of thousands of attempts to generate the kinds of results included in the suit.

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

Continue reading “OpenAI and Microsoft respond to the Times while Musk also sues OpenAI”

From The Chronicle: “In the 1930s, the married anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead had seen themselves as scientists seeking to expand the accepted limits of “normal” human behavior, communication, and consciousness. By the 1940s they came to believe that their project could help ensure the survival of humanity itself. By 1963 Bateson and Mead were divorced. But Bateson continued to see himself as pushing the boundaries of science to prevent feedback loops of conflict, which led him to the psychoanalyst John C. Lilly’s Communications Research Institute on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Lilly’s résumé was impeccable: degrees from Caltech and Dartmouth, a stint teaching at Penn, previously the head of a government research lab at the NIH. For reasons that remained somewhat mysterious, he had managed to persuade NASA to fund his efforts to teach dolphins how to speak English.”

What it’s like to live on one of the US Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines

From Vanity Fair: “Under cover of darkness, I boarded a Navy vessel at a heavily guarded military base along the Eastern Seaboard. The location and time of departure, as well as the direction and distance of travel, were unknown to me. Adding to the sense of secrecy, a towering sailor in camouflage stood in the rain, examining my belongings for electronics that might leave a digital trail an adversary could intercept and exploit. Buffeted by strong winds and high Atlantic seas, the support ship sailed through the night for more than 15 storm-tossed hours toward a destination somewhere off the continental shelf. Just after dawn, a sleek, inky object appeared in the distance, right above the waterline. It was the protruding bridge of what sailors call a “boomer”—a submarine armed to the gills with nuclear missiles—which is considered the most lethal, stealthy, and survivable weapon in America’s strategic arsenal.”

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 “These scientists thought LSD would help them talk to dolphins”