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The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is one of the most important spiritual sites for Christians, so it may come as some surprise that the keys to the church are entrusted to the care of two Muslim families. This tradition dates back several centuries and was reportedly instituted by Saladin, the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, who expelled the Christian Crusaders from Jerusalem. According to the historical record, two Muslim families have been entrusted with the care of the church for over 850 years. The keys, which were created on July 15, 1149, were entrusted by the legendary Ayyubid Sultan Saladin to two Muslim families in Jerusalem. On February 10, 1187, Saladin designated the Joudeh Al-Husseini family as the only rightful keeper of the keys and authorized the Nuseibeh family to operate the doors. (via Greek Reporter)

The solution to a famous cryptographic puzzle has been sitting in a library for ten years

For 35 years, the world’s most sophisticated minds have attacked Kryptos, a sculpture at CIA headquarters, with everything in the cryptographic arsenal. Computer scientists deployed algorithms, and obsessives spent decades analyzing letter frequencies, transposition matrices, and polyalphabetic substitutions. They all failed to solve the final 97 characters carved into the sculpture’s copper sheets. Then last month, two journalists cracked it in one evening using a powerful tool in intelligence gathering: asking a librarian for some boxes. When Jarett Kobek, reading the auction announcement for Jim Sanborn’s planned sale of the solution, noticed a throwaway line about “coding charts” in the Smithsonian archives. He asked his friend Richard Byrne to request the boxes. Byrne spent September 2nd photographing papers. Sanborn had accidentally included them when archiving his materials a decade earlier. (via Why Is This Interesting)

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For nearly a quarter-century he railed against slavery in one Quaker meeting after another in and around Philadelphia, confronting slave owners and slave traders. He insisted on the utter depravity and sinfulness of “Man-stealers,” who were, in his view, the literal spawn of Satan. He considered it his Godly duty to expose and drive them out. He became one of the very first to call for the abolition of slavery. He was notable for his physique. Benjamin Lay was a dwarf, or “little person,” standing just over four feet tall. He was called a hunchback because of an extreme curvature of his spine, a medical condition called kyphosis. According to a fellow Quaker, his “head was large in proportion to his body; the features of his face were remarkable, and boldly delineated, and his countenance was grave and benignant.” He called himself “little Benjamin,” but he also likened himself to David who slew Goliath. He did not lack confidence in himself. (via the Smithsonian)

Lost Jack Kerouac story found among assassinated mafia boss’ belongings

A lost story written and signed by legendary San Francisco writer Jack Kerouac has been found among the belongings of an infamous mafia boss who was gunned down in 1985. The two-page story, titled “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing,” was written shortly before the publication of Kerouac’s 1957 masterpiece “On the Road.” The story details, in Kerouac’s typical ecstatic and spontaneous style, an evening of joy and yearning in Denver with Neal Cassady, LuAnne Henderson and Allen Ginsberg, using their alter egos Dean Moriarty, Marylou and Carlo Marx. The typed story is signed by Kerouac with a green fountain pen, something he was known to do at the time. The story’s existence was unknown to the public until recently, as it spent many years among the belongings of the former head of the Gambino New York crime family Paul Castellano. (via SF Gate)

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Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a piece for The Torment Nexus about the threat of AI, and more specifically what some call “artificial general intelligence” or AGI, which is a shorthand term for something that approaches human-like intelligence. As I tried to point out in that piece, even the recognized experts in AI — including the forefathers of modern artificial intelligence like Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun (who now works at Meta), and Yoshua Bengio — can’t seem to agree on whether AI actually poses an imminent danger to society or to mankind in general. Hinton, for example, who co-developed the technology behind neural networks, famously quit working on AI at Google because he said he wanted to be free to talk about his concerns around artificial general intelligence. He has said that he came to believe AI models such as ChatGPT were developing human-like intelligence faster than he expected. “It’s as if aliens have landed and people haven’t realized because they speak very good English,” he told MIT.

LeCun, however, told the Wall Street Journal that warnings about the technology’s potential for existential peril are “complete B.S.” LeCun, who won the Turing Award — one of the top prizes in computer science — in 2019, says he thinks that today’s AI models are barely even as smart as an animal, let alone a human being, and the risk that they will soon become all-powerful supercomputers is negligible at best. LeCun says that before we get too worried about the risks of superintelligence, “we need to have a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat,” as he put it. There are now large camps of “AI doomers” who believe that Hinton is right and that dangerous AGI is around the corner, and then there are those who believe we should press ahead anyway, and that supersmart AI will solve all of humanity’s problems and usher us into a utopia, a group who are often called “effective accelerators,” usually shortened to “e/acc.”

In addition to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, one of the leading AI engines is Claude, which comes from a company called Anthropic, whose co-founders are former OpenAI staffers including siblings Dario Amodei — the CEO — and Daniela Amodei. The company’s head of policy, Jack Clark (formerly head of policy at OpenAI) recently published a post on Substack titled “Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear,” based on a speech he made at a recent conference about AI called The Curve. Although he didn’t come to any firm conclusions about the imminent danger (or lack of it) posed by existing AI engines, Clark did argue that there is some reason for concern, in part because we simply don’t understand how AI engines do what they do. And that includes scientists who helped develop the large-language model behind most of the leading AI engines. It’s one thing to be convinced that we understand the danger of a technology when we know how it works on a fundamental level, but it’s another to make that assumption when we don’t really understand how it works. Here’s Clark:

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Nola and Helan are two of the hundreds of sleeping children who have appeared sporadically in Sweden over a span of 20 years. The first official medical reports of the epidemic appeared in the early 2000s. Typically, the sleeping sickness had an insidious onset. Children initially became anxious and depressed. Their behavior changed: They stopped playing with other children and, over time, stopped playing altogether. They slowly withdrew into themselves, and soon they couldn’t go to school. They spoke less and less, until they didn’t speak at all. Eventually, they took to bed. If they entered the deepest stage, they could no longer eat or open their eyes. They became completely immobile, showing no response to family or friends, and no longer acknowledging pain or hunger or discomfort. They ceased having any active participation in the world. (via Nautilus)

Hitler was addicted to a form of heroin and many soldiers were given the equivalent of meth

At the end, when he was hiding in his Fuhrerbunker, Hitler was in a frail state. He had lost his teeth, he was drooling and hallucinating. The man who believed in what he called the “Aryan master race” had ended up a junkie. Author Norman Ohler attributes the downfall of Hitler to drugs, primarily Eukodal, a preform of heroin. From time to time, the veins of the pure vegetarian also contained the anabolic steroids of pigs. And his “dealer” was none other than his personal doctor, Theodor Morell. Ohler explains that several high-ranking Nazis were addicted to opioid drugs, while civilians and frontline soldiers took Pervitin, a pill form of Crystal Meth. Before the Final Battle of World War II, the Nazis were in search of a miracle drug to transform “men into predators,” Ohler writes, quoting a leading pharmacologist of the Navy. (via Guernica)

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Continue reading “Sweden has seen an epidemic of children in an endless sleep”