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For a law whose central clause contains just twenty-six words, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 has generated vast amounts of debate over the past few years, thanks in part to criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. Conservative politicians say the law—which shields online services from liability for the content they host—allows social networks like Twitter and Facebook to censor right-wing voices, while liberals say Section 230 gives the social platforms an excuse not to remove offensive speech and disinformation. Donald Trump and Joe Biden have both spoken out against the law, and promised to change it. This week, the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments in two cases that could alter or even dismantle Section 230.

On Tuesday, the court’s nine justices heard arguments in the first case, Gonzalez v Google. The family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a US citizen who was killed in an Isis attack in Paris in 2015, claim that YouTube violated the federal Anti-Terrorism Act by recommending videos featuring terrorist groups, and thereby helped cause Gonzalez’s death. On Wednesday, the court heard arguments in the second case, which also involves a terrorism-related death: in that case, the family of Nawras Alassaf, who was killed in a terrorist attack in 2017, claim that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube recommend content related to terrorism, and thus contributed to his death. After a lower court ruled the companies could be liable, Twitter asked the Supreme Court to say whether Section 230 applies.

The clause at the heart of Section 230 states: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In practice, this has meant that services such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are not held liable for things their users post, whether it’s links or videos or any other content (unless the content is illegal). The question before the Supreme Court is whether that protection extends to content these services recommend, or promote to users via their algorithms. Section 230, the plaintiffs argue in Gonzalez, “does not contain specific language regarding recommendations, and does not provide a distinct legal standard governing recommendations.”

Continue reading “Section 230 gets its day in court”

The Moon doesn’t currently have an independent time. Each lunar mission uses its own timescale that is linked, through its handlers on Earth, to coordinated universal time, or UTc — the standard against which the planet’s clocks are set. But this method is relatively imprecise and spacecraft exploring the Moon don’t synchronize the time with each other. The approach works when the Moon hosts a handful of independent missions, but it will be a problem when there are multiple craft working together. Space agencies will also want to track them using satellite navigation, which relies on precise timing signals. It’s not obvious what form a universal lunar time would take. Clocks on Earth and the Moon naturally tick at different speeds, because of the differing gravitational fields of the two bodies. Official lunar time could be based on a clock system designed to synchronize with UTC, or it could be independent of Earth time.

Napoleon and his traveling library

From a Sacramento newspaper in 1885 (via Austin Kleon’s blog): “Many of Napoleon’s biographers have mentioned that he used to carry a number of favorite books wherever he went, but it is not generally known that he made several plans for the construction of portable libraries. Some interesting information on this is given us by M. Louis Barbier of the Louvre Library, who bases his information upon memoirs left by his father, who was Napoleon’s librarian. Napoleon used to carry about the books he required in several boxes holding about sixty volumes each. These volumes, which were supplied by a well-known cabinetmaker. They were made of mahogany at first, but as it was found that this was not strong enough for the knocking about they had to sustain, M. Barbier had them made of oak and covered with leather. The inside was lined with green leather or velvet, and the books were bound in morocco.”

Continue reading “What time is it on the Moon?”

In a recent version of her excellent newsletter Griefbacon (which is the literal translation of a German term for eating because you’re sad), Helena Fitzgerald writes about her favourite kinds of terrible coffee, including:

“Gas Station Coffee: You’re driving somewhere you’ve never been before. The country is so much larger than anything should be. No matter how many times you think how is there this much of it, how is there still so much of it, there is always more, a room further inside the house, opening into other rooms. Highways spool out like the surface of an unknown planet. It’s lonely but most things are lonely; that’s why it matters so much when anything doesn’t feel lonely, even for five minutes. It’s lonely, but a lot of us like being lonely a lot more than we think we do.

You’re going to meet someone’s parents. You’re going somewhere for Thanksgiving; you have homemade food in the back of the car in big dishes covered over with foil. You’re going to see the friend who moved out of the city. It’s not all that far away but it’s more fun to pretend that it is. You’re going to someone’s wedding; a dry cleaning bag is hanging off that uncertain hook in the backseat like a ghostly passenger. You’re holding a cup of gas station coffee. It’s maybe the worst coffee you’ve ever had. It’s maybe the worst coffee anyone’s ever had.

You stopped at a gas station because you needed gas or because you needed to pee. You got out of the car and the air smelled just slightly wild, in that way the air near a gas station always does. You went inside and bought a coffee and the coffee came in one of the those horrible hyper-insulated styrofoam cups with the treacherous little flip-top tab. You took it back to the car and took a sip and burned your tongue and then you drove away. Or, really, someone else drove away. Gas station coffee is the glory of the passenger seat, the dissociative blur of houses and highway, the crackle of untrustworthy radio stations, every conversation interrupted at its crisis point or punchline by the google maps lady’s polite warnings.”

Many mornings, Dani Clode wakes up, straps a robotic thumb to one of her hands, and gets to work, poring through reams of neuroscience data, sketching ideas for new prosthetic devices, and thinking about ways to augment the human body. Clode works as a specialist at the University of Cambridge’s Plasticity Lab, which studies the neuroscience of assistive devices. But she also creates prosthetics, ones that often fall outside the conventional bounds of functionality and aesthetics. Her designs include a clear acrylic forearm prosthetic with an internal metronome that beats in sync with the wearer’s heart and an arm made with rearrangeable sections of resin, polished wood, moss, bronze, gold, rhodium, and cork. Clode’s current project is a “third thumb” that anyone can use to augment their grip.

Why are flood myths so common in cultures around the world?

As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss notes in “The Structural Study of Myth,” there is an “astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions.” From the city-states of ancient Greece to the hunter-gatherer tribes of the Amazon rainforest, cultures everywhere have preserved suspiciously similar stories. Especially common are stories about world-ending floods and the chosen individuals that managed to survive them, like the biblical Noah and Utnapishtim, the ark builder in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a text thought to be even older than the Abrahamic religions. In Aztec mythology, a man named Tata and his wife Nena carve out a cypress tree after being warned of a coming deluge by the god Tezcatlipoca, while Manu, the first man in Hindu folklore, was visited by a fish that guided his boat to the peak of a mountain. The list goes on.

Continue reading “New prosthetics include third thumbs and superhero skins”

One of the most enduring mysteries in modern Chilean history may finally have been solved after forensic experts determined that the Nobel prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda died after being poisoned with a powerful toxin, apparently confirming decades of suspicions that he was murdered. According to the official version, Neruda – who made his name as a young poet with the collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair – died from prostate cancer and malnutrition on 23 September 1973, just 12 days after the military coup that overthrew the government of his friend, President Salvador Allende. But scientists now say he died from a buildup of botulism toxin.

Magenta is a color that doesn’t exist – so what’s happening when we see it?

Most people have heard of the color magenta, a combination of purple and red. But in literal terms, it doesn’t exist – in other words, there is no magenta when you look at the colors that a prism creates. Magenta has no wavelength of light that corresponds to it. Amelia Settembre writes: “Usually, when trying to determine color, the brain averages the colors to come up with an outcome. If you mix green and red, you’ll end up with a yellow light because the brain has averaged it. When you mix red and purple, your brain averages them. Ultimately, this would reasonably come out to green but because your brain wants the outcome to make logical sense, it mixes the colors and you get magenta.”

Continue reading “Forensic scientists say poet Pablo Neruda was poisoned”

For more than a billion users around the world, TikTok is just a mobile video-sharing app that they scroll through to watch people dancing and cats falling off furniture (or cats dancing and people falling off furniture). For the US Congress, however, TikTok has become a political football that has yet to be spiked. It’s been four years since national-security concerns over the app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, first hit the news in a big way. The story crescendoed in 2020, when then-President Donald Trump signed an order that would have banned the app (as well as the popular Chinese messaging app WeChat) from the US unless ByteDance sold its operations to an American entity. This, in turn, triggered frantic maneuvering among potential buyers, including Microsoft, the cloud-computing firm Oracle, and a group of investment banks. Ultimately, Trump’s order was blocked by the courts. In the summer of 2021, President Biden revoked it.

That didn’t end the debate over what to do about TikTok, however; indeed, in announcing the revocation of Trump’s order, Biden announced a wider review of foreign-owned apps. Over the past year, everyone from the administrative arm of the US House of Representatives to state colleges have banned the app on their devices or networks, while members of Congress have asked Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores. In November, Brendan Carr, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, told Axios: “I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban” of TikTok in the US. In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that officials at the Pentagon and the Justice Department want to force ByteDance to sell off TikTok, because of what they see as a risk that Beijing will be able to access Americans’ TikTok data and use the app’s algorithms to influence what American users see. In January, Josh Hawley, a Republican US senator, introduced a bill that, echoing Trump’s old order, would ban the app for all American users.

Recently, the shooting down of a Chinese surveillance balloon—and China’s warnings of reprisals against the US—have pushed tension levels over TikTok even higher. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said earlier this week that a complete ban on TikTok “should be looked at.” Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida, and Angus King, an independent from Maine, have also reintroduced a bill aimed at banning TikTok from operating in the United States unless it severs its ties to China. TikTok, Mario Díaz-Balart, a Republican Congressman from Florida, said, is “basically a Chinese Communist Party balloon in everybody’s home.” After the balloon was shot down, his colleague Matt Gaetz added: “Now blow up TikTok.” 

Continue reading “Congress continues to wrestle with a problem called TikTok”

In 1982, Larry Walters, a 33-year-old truck driver from North Hollywood, tied 45 weather balloons to a lawn chair and soared into the skies, getting as high as 16,000 feet, where he was spotted by a number of jet aircraft. ”This guy broke into our channel with a mayday,” said Doug Dixon, a member of an Orange County citizens band radio club. ”He said he had shot up like an elevator to 16,000 feet and was getting numb before he started shooting out some of the balloons.” Walters then lost his pistol overboard, and the chair drifted downward. He became entangled in a power line, briefly blacking out a small area. The chair dangled five feet above the ground, and Mr. Walters was able to get down safely.

The DIY scientist, the Olympian, and the mutated gene

David Epstein tells the story of a young woman with a rare genetic condition who spent years trying to convince doctors that she had the same disorder as a famous Olympic athlete: “I got a personal note from a 39-year-old Iowa mother named Jill Viles. She was the muscular dystrophy patient, and she had an elaborate theory linking the gene mutation that made her muscles wither to an Olympic sprinter named Priscilla Lopes-Schliep. A few days later, I got a package from Jill, and it included a stack of family photos — the originals, not copies; a detailed medical history; scientific papers, and a 19-page, illustrated and bound packet. Within a few minutes, I was astounded.”

Continue reading “The time a truck driver flew to 16,000 feet in a lawn chair”

We all know that tulip mania was a frenzy. Everyone in the Netherlands was involved, from chimney-sweeps to aristocrats. The same tulip bulb, or rather tulip future, was traded sometimes 10 times a day. No one wanted the bulbs, only the profits – it was a phenomenon of pure greed. Tulips were sold for crazy prices – the price of houses – and fortunes were won and lost. It was the foolishness of newcomers to the market that set off the crash in February 1637. Desperate bankrupts threw themselves in canals. The government finally stepped in and ceased the trade, but not before the economy of Holland was ruined. Yes, it makes an exciting story. The trouble is, most of it is untrue.

The only woman in an around-the-world solo sailing race is in the lead

Somewhere in the Southern Pacific Ocean, Kirsten Neuschafer is alone on her boat, Minnehaha, as she tries to outmaneuver the latest storm to cross her path as she approaches Cape Horn. She’s spent the past day heading north in an effort to skirt the worst of the oncoming weather. The storm is threatening wind gusts up to 55 miles per hour and seas building to 25 feet. Neuschafer is battling to win what is possibly the most challenging competition the sailing world has to offer — the Golden Globe Race. Neuschafer, the only woman competing, has left all rivals in her wake. Of the 16 entrants who departed five months ago, only four are still in the race, and for the moment at least, she’s leading.

Continue reading “Tulip mania: Classic story of a financial bubble is wrong”

If this happened in a movie, viewers would think it was ridiculous and incredibly unlikely, and yet this appears to be how Shari Redstone regained control of her father’s multibillion-dollar media empire:

I can still remember how the hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I first heard “Last Kind Word Blues,” by a Southern blues singer named “Geeshie” Wiley. I forget exactly where I heard it — I thought it was embedded as an audio file in the article posted below, a feature from the New York Times magazine that was published in 2014. But when I went back to check, it wasn’t there. It might have been in the movie “Crumb,” a documentary on underground artist Robert Crumb, which used it. Anyway, I think part of my interest was the haunting sound of the song itself, and part was that I had never heard of Geeshie Wiley, despite a lifelong love of American blues music from the turn of the century.

When I looked up the song, I came across the video embedded below on YouTube, in which someone going by the name “I Play Banjo Now” plays it in 2012, sitting on what appears to be a bed in an unkempt bedroom. It really captures the essence of Geeshie’s performance, I think, and many of the more than 500 commenters on the video seem to agree. I have returned to play this video many times over the years (I’ve also learned to play the song myself on guitar, although not nearly as well). The performer, I found out later, is Christine Pizzuti, whose version appears on an album of American Blues songs called The American Epic Sessions, along with artists like Jack White and the Avett Brothers. The album is also the soundtrack to a movie of the same name.

So who who was Geeshie Wiley? Where did she come from? And what happened to her? As the NYT piece makes clear, there are no easy answers to those questions:

Continue reading “The mystery of Geeshie and Elvie”

This is a video clip that begins with a real street, then the camera turns down an alleyway, and the video transitions to a simulated streetscape generated with Unreal Engine 5, the latest version of the video game-development software. It is almost impossible to tell that it’s not a real video of a real location (except maybe for the doll’s head on a window ledge that disappears halfway through).

In November, OpenAI, a company that develops artificial-intelligence software, released ChatGPT, a program that allows users to ask conversational-style questions and receive essay-style answers. It soon became clear that, unlike with some earlier chat-software programs, this one could, in a matter of seconds, generate content that was both readable and reasonably intelligent. Unsurprisingly, this caused consternation among humans who get paid to generate content that is readable and intelligent. Their concerns are reasonable: companies that make money creating such content may well see AI-powered tools as an opportunity to cut costs and increase profits, two things that companies that make money from content like to do.

AI in the media is, more broadly, having a moment. Around the same time that ChatGPT launched, CNET, a technology news site, quietly started publishing articles that were written with the help of artificial intelligence, as Futurism reported last month. A disclaimer on the site assured readers that all of the articles were checked by human editors, but as Futurism later reported, many of the CNET pieces written by the AI software not only contained errors, but in some cases were plagiarized. After these reports came out, Red Ventures—a private-equity firm that owns CNET and a number of other online publications, including Lonely Planet and Healthline—told staff that it was pausing the use of the AI software, which it said had been developed in-house.

Continue reading “Is AI software a partner for journalism, or a disaster?”