Fireplace by Robert Winthrop Chanler at Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's studio in New York City, 1918
Some of the 2,000-year-old bamboo slips recently recovered in China turned out to contain medical texts from
the school of Bian Que, one of the supposed founders of traditional Chinese medicine.
The man who used an AI chatbot to recreate his childhood imaginary friend, a microwave oven, only to have it
try to murder him.
Prior to bringing the Stone of Destiny from Scotland down to Westminster Abbey for the coronation, scientists threw a lot of
non-destructive testing at it, found some hints about its history but nothing that strikes me as major.
Attempt by Madagascar to establish a vanilla cartel with a minimum price
has collapsed, because so many pods remained unsold at the official price. I understand the desire to prevent wild swings in price, which happen every so often to all agricultural products in unregulated markets. But as the US and Europe have learned, the only way to keep agricultural prices high is by limiting the amount sent to market, and Madagascar has refused to take that road.
Another piece arguing that the way to overcome neighbors' objections to new development is to give them a share of the profits. This is how Seoul has built so many apartments.
In 1985,
Bulgaria's population was 9.0 million; in 2021 it was 6.9 million. The government says this is the result of a low birth rate, a high death rate, and out-migration.
New
Australian defense policy cuts back on land forces to refocus on long-range missiles, submarines, and other weapons explicitly for use in an air/sea war against China. Document and official statements
here.
Ground-penetrating radar identified another
Viking ship in a burial mound.
Rumor has it that Rupert Murdoch fired Tucker Carlson because people (including one of Murdoch's ex-girlfriends) were hailing Carlson as a prophet, and "That stuff freaks Rupert out. He doesn’t like all the spiritual talk."
If you want to know about Japan's new military strategy and weapons purchase plans,
this 72-minute video from Perun will tell you; I think these are very important changes. The first 38 minutes of the video is on Japanese history and you can skip that if you have even basic knowledge of the subject.
The Ingenuity helicopter has now made 51 flights on Mars; NASA's short video celebrating the 50th flight is
here. And
this video describes the larger copters NASA plans to build for future missions, based on their experience with Ingenuity.
Colin Woodard at
Politco, arguing that regional differences in the level of gun violence across America are caused by cultural differences that go back to the first Euro-African settlement of the regions.
Roman camp found in the Arabian desert, looks exactly like every other Roman camp from Scotland to Nubia.
This week's random past post:
The Emperor's Quest for Immortality, 2017.
Ukraine Links
An argument that the US military is not doing enough to learn from the war in Ukraine
The US is supplying Ukraine with truck-mounted 30mm autocannons for defense against drones.
Russian blogger with the Rusich group admits that Russia is not fighting against fascism, but for "living space."
Prigozhin on the war, western aid, and the timing of the Ukrainian offensive (he says not until after May 1). He also reveals that the fable I call "the boy who cried wolf" is called in Russian "the boy in the lake."
Ukrainian pizza ad with Russian tank.
Modern warfare: first, a Ukrainian firm put out a game in which you play a Ukrainian drone operator dropping grenades on Russian troops and equipment, then a Russian firm responded with a game in which you guide a Lancet loitering munition to its target.
Intense infantry combat video.
A claim that one Ukrainian platoon fighting in Bakhmut lost 18 of 21 men in 24 hours.
Thread on the latest US weapons aid to Ukraine, includes a quadrupling of spending for artillery ammunition, enough for "thousands" of laser-guided Excalibur shells.
Artilleryman Thomas Theiner with an overview of the reserve forces Ukraine is making ready for its spring offensive.
The US leaks reveal that the US government thought Ukraine had been taken in by a concerted Russian disinformation campaign concerning a possible attack from Belarus this winter.
3 comments:
The story about microoven and chatbot is quite old, and I still have problems believing it. 100 page story is just 50 000 words, so the dataset used for training is miniscule even for a finetuning (it's not impossible - I've seen claims of finetuning a LoRa with just few sentences). I think IF the story has any ties to reality, 90% if it happened inside the guy's head.
That story about Murdoch is fascinating. The ex-girlfriend is actually an ex-fiancee, Ann Lesley Smith. Smith had been telling people Carlson was "a messenger from God," but things came to a head when, "In late March, Carlson had dinner at Murdoch’s Bel Air vineyard with Murdoch and Smith, according to the source. During dinner, Smith pulled out a bible and started reading passages from the Book of Exodus, the source said. 'Rupert just sat there and stared,' the source said. A few days after the dinner, Murdoch and Smith called off the wedding."
The journalist then goes on to quote "sources" saying Murdoch is getting "erratic" and senile. One could just as easily say he knows what he likes and what he doesn't. But the "sources" could be positioning the company to rehire Carlson once the old man is out of the way--which might track with the quiet fashion in which the whole thing seems to have been handled, including by Carlson.
"A claim that one Ukrainian platoon fighting in Bakhmut lost 18 of 21 men in 24 hours."
That's a weird way to phrase the fact that they had 18 killed or wounded - your wording makes it sound like only fatalities.
Which is not to diminish the intensity of the fighting in Bakhmut. It's hell there, and the only positive to be found is that they're still tying up huge amounts of Russian forces, and are continuing to inflict disproportionately heavy losses on the Russians.
I hope they can hold out, but the grim possibility is that the defense won't be able to last forever. The Russian willingness to throw ever more conscripts into the meat grinder has a history of eventually winning out - if nothing else, the Ukrainians are burning through ammo and supplies faster than is to be hoped. A withdrawal may become inevitable, if for no other reason than the soldiers on the ground simply run out of bullets (as well as defensible cover, as the Russians are pummeling every building they can with artillery fire, leaving only rubble).
Post a Comment