Father's Day Card from my younger daughter; text says, "I drew you a sunflower where the deer can't eat it."
Asking AI to adjudicate Supreme Court cases: Adam Unikowsky thinks Claude 3 Opus is better than the actual court. I mean, who do you trust to respect precedent, Claude 3 or Clarence Thomas?
But here's an argument that AI won't take our jobs. You might think that AI translation would be leading to a decline in jobs for translators, but so far the number of human translators still seems to be rising. "When creative destruction happens, it’s always easier to see the destruction than the creation." I suspect this is an intermediate stage and before very long AI will be as good as the average human translator, but I won't guess how long that will take.
Intelligent Scott Siskind essay, "Fake Tradition is Traditional."
New Zealand has a Tree of the Year contest, and this year's winner looks a lot like an ent.
Fascinating little Celtic fertility idol.
How much of life on earth is dormant? "We live on a dormant planet. Life is mainly about being asleep."
In January, the discovery of a major deposit of rare earth minerals was announced in Sweden; now a Norwegian company claims to have found an eve bigger deposit in Norway. We won't be crippled by running out of metals.
Audobon photography awards: top 100 here; nice selection here.
With no actual history to speak of, North Macedonia leans on its very tenuous ties to Alexander the Great, to the immense irritation of the Greeks. (NY Times) It's hard to have a nation without national heroes.
Japanse battery maker TDK claims that a new material can increase the energy storage density 100-fold over their current batteries.
Loose Thread Stitchery, the Tumblr of someone who does amazing embroidery.
The amazingly diverse salamanders of the southern Appalachians.
Hoard of medieval silver found in Hungary.
Today's reason to hate the rich: the folks who poisoned the trees blocking their view of Camden Harbor in Maine.
A claim that the camp of the Assyrian army during the siege of Jerusalem has been identified.
Update on the search for Planet 9.
An argument that fossils excavated from Native lands should be repatriated. This piece appeared in Nature with the statement, "According to Lakotan people, they have always lived in Paha Sapa, as they call the Black Hills." This is false both as to the actual history of the Lakotas, whose tradition records that they first saw the Black Hills in the 1750s and did not live there until the 1800s, and to the opinion of better informed Lakota, who know this. And, no, monster stories are not evidence that pre-modern peoples knew about dinosaurs.
Worm charmers.
Some cool Roman armor.
At The Chronicle, Colin Dickey writes that for the past 75 years, many Americans seem to have held that if students emerge from college agreeing with them, they have been educated; if they emerge with different views, they have been "indoctrinated." Many conservatives used to think that professors indoctrinated students into communism, but now the fear is that they indoctrinate them into wokeism. (How and why this changed remain obscure.) Meanwhile, many professors wonder how they are having such a profound impact on students who won't do the reading or show up for class.
Reason: "Numerous federal appeals courts have ruled that filming the police is protected under the First Amendment, but police around the country continue to illegally arrest people for it."
Photographs of Iceland over the past century, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of its independence.
This week's music is Orff's Carmina Burana: the whole hour-long thing, the amazing 3:38 of O Fortuna in a live performance with fireworks.
Thread on Twitter/X about the ineffectiveness of KGB intelligence gathering: "Who can any longer doubt that Soviet leaders...would have been far better off throughout the cold war reading and believing Western newspapers, than believing what the KGB told them?"
The German army has placed an order for $9 billion worth of 155mm artillery shells, to supply Ukraine and restock their own arsenals. That's $9 billion for just one category of munitions out of dozens, dwarfing Germany's recent $2 billion order for 100 new tanks. This new era of war and international tension is already very expensive, and it's only going to get worse.
US defense figure Joseph S. Nye, Jr. on Eight Lessons from the War in Ukraine.
Excellent, informative thread on Twitter/X covering the impact of Russian electronic warfare on various NATO-supplied weapons. Longer article version here. From Colby Badhwar, one of the internet's top experts on anything to do with weapons procurement.
CSIS report on Ukrainian resistance to Russian occupation. Involves many women and is especially strong in Crimea.
Autonomous mine-scanning drones have arrived.