Tucker Carlson says those aren't aliens people keep seeing, they're Nephilim, a caste of angels mentioned in the Bible. (Twitter/X)
Delightful little lead doll found by English mudlark.
The latest in wedding gimmicks is to have a trained owl deliver the rings to the bride and groom at the altar. (NY Times, YouTube, and barnowlringbearer.com)
The migrant rickshaw men of Dehli.
Scott Sumner talks to AI people in San Francisco and wonders if the world is ending.
Comparing modern conversations with AI to 19th-century conversations over the telegraph. A novel about a romance between two telegraph operators appeared in 1879, and by 1886 newspapers were warning of the dangers of "wired love." The eroticism of the disembodied voice is ancient, as is the fear that the unseen speaker might be dishonest and manipulative.
Legend long held that the funerary hut of King Gehzo of Dahomey (r. 1818-1852) had the blood of human sacrifices mixed into the mortar. (Forty-one, victims, the legend says, because 41 is an important number in the local magical tradition.) Some French archaeologists ran the mortar through their lab and found human blood proteins. Also chickens, but nobody much cares about that. Eschewing sensationalism, they published their results in the journal Proteomics. I'm sure they figured that such a claim would make the news no matter where they published it.
California woman, 71, mauled to death by black bear inside her house. A California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesman says, "Black bears are not dangerous animals."
TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates, breaks ground on their first nuclear reactor site, which is in the middle of Wyoming coal country. They're storming ahead even though the design has not yet been approved by the NRC. (NY Times, AP, TerraPower web site)
Neighborhood Nursing is a program launched by Johns Hopkins University. The goal is to have nurses visit every person in the poor neighborhoods of east Baltimore and offer free health checks. (NPR, program web site) This kind of intervention has been shown to have much greater health benefit than other kinds of programs costing ten times as much, so I have never understood why we don't do it more.
We don't know the shape of the universe, and there are several possibilities. (The Guardian)
Interview with Elliott Higgins, Open Source Intelligence guru and founder of Bellingcat. (Wired)
Recovering prepared tombstones from that 13th-century shipwreck off England.
A Chinese firm sold counterfeit titanium that has gotten into jets made by both Boeing and Airbus. (NY Times, Reuters)
Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube) doubts predictions of superintelligent AI by 2028; even the enthusiasts say that building one such system would cost a trillion dollars and consume 20% of US electricity production. She finds AI enthusiasts banking on nuclear fusion to supply the necessary power. "These guys are living in a bubble that has groupthink written all over it."
For as long as anyone has kept statistics, women have been more religious, and more involved in the Christian church, than men. In the US this now appears to be reversing, with more young women than men turning away from Christian churches. (NY Times)
Primer on building a datacenter.
The "fire eating" fungi that spread across burned landscapes, "initiating ecosystem reconstruction."
Paywalled New Yorker article about Zach Horwitz, who masterminded the biggest Ponzi scheme in Hollywood history, selling himself as a millionaire movieland insider who made deals with top producers; he parlayed investments in several films into a small-time acting career. I mention this because of something he wrote on his prison blog, that he had been "obsessed with belief in a superior life that existed just beyond my grasp."
The US Pacific Command now has a code name for their plan to stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan with swarms of underwater, surface, and aerial drones: Hellscape. More at the UK Defence Journal.
Crazy short video of Russian and Ukrainian armored vehicles passing each other on the same road with guns blazing.
Thread on Twitter/X arguing that Russia has the resources for at least two more years of war. They will likely run out of artillery first. They will never run out of men.
Warographics (on YouTube) tries to count the dead soldiers of the Ukraine war, relying heavily on data from Mediazona. Mid-points of their estimates are 85,000 dead Russians and 69,000 dead Ukrainians. The Russian total would be about five times as many as died in Afghanistan, which supposedly forced their withdrawal and hastened the fall of the Soviet Union. Interesting that Putin's nationalist regime is able to endure much higher losses without visible dissent. And note that some European intelligence agencies have issued estimates twice as high as the Mediazona counts.
One reason for the limited political impact may be that so many Russian soldiers are prisoners: Mediazona has documented that the Wagner Group recruited 48,000 prisoners, of whom at least 17,000 died in the battle at Bakhmut. In all, Wagner lost more than 19,500 men to take Bakhmut, with a high of 213 killed in a single day.
I think the comparison of the Russian ability to endure losses in Afghanistan and Ukraine is misplaced. Afghanistan is the "grave of empires" because neither the British, nor the Russians, nor the Americans, found it important enough to continue investing in. This would be combined with the fact that Gorbachev's will was to reduce Soviet commitments and exposure everywhere. In contrast, Putin believes Ukraine is an objective of the first priority, his will is to have it, and he has the political strength to bring both his government and people along with him. Statistics of losses are much less important than political will. (I would stress that I am not saying that Gorbachev was "weak"; rather, he conceived of his country's interest in very different ways, and consequently adopted very different policies, from Putin.)
ReplyDeleteCalifornia woman, 71, mauled to death by black bear inside her house. A California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesman says, "Black bears are not dangerous animals."
ReplyDeleteNo, what the spokesman actually said is "Black bears are not dangerous animals, but if they associate our homes or cabins or campgrounds as an easy source of food they lose their natural fear of people and their actions get bolder and bolder. This is the most extreme example we've seen in state history."
Context matters, and cherry-picking what was said and distorting the context in order to sensationalize things is very low-brow conduct from you John.
Black bears AREN'T dangerous - unless you do what this particular woman did. She was in the habit of leaving out large amounts of cat food on her porch for neighborhood cats; she was also in the habit of leaving large amounts of trash piled up around her property; she also had a number of broken windows she never repaired or secured; this was also far from the first time a bear came to her home, attracted by the garbage and cat food, and yet she never cleaned up the things that were drawing bears to the home; they were such regular visitors that she had given them nicknames; and most damning of all, the woman's daughter reports that on at least one previous instance, the woman physically struck a bear that tried to enter the home.
If you're stupid or stubborn enough to keep doing the things that attract bears into your home, and take zero steps to actually solve the problem, and bear DOES eventually get into your home, the LAST thing you should ever do is ATTACK THE BEAR. She got away with it once, but not the second time.
And yet here you are, John, making it sound like blacks bears are vicious monsters breaking into people's homes out for human blood.
The reality is this woman was a moron - the kind of person who would probably ignore the warnings at Yellowstone and try to pet or ride on the wild bison. She lured, conditioned, and then provoked a wild animal, and got herself and it killed with her idiocy.
You're the one who loves talking about statistics, John - and going by the numbers, black bears kill fewer people every year than vending machines, by a considerable factor. And in much the same was a vending machines, virtually every instance is a case of a human being interacting with the "dangerous" subject in an imbecilic manner.
Neighborhood Nursing is a program launched by Johns Hopkins University. The goal is to have nurses visit every person in the poor neighborhoods of east Baltimore and offer free health checks. This kind of intervention has been shown to have much greater health benefit than other kinds of programs costing ten times as much, so I have never understood why we don't do it more.
ReplyDeleteBecause no one stands to profit from it, so the only people who undertake it are actual philanthropists.
Our medical system isn't designed to create a healthy populace. Our medical system is designed to extract value for shareholders from an unhealthy populace. We WANT people to be sick, so we can exploit their condition and profit off their misery.
Crazy short video of Russian and Ukrainian armored vehicles passing each other on the same road with guns blazing.
ReplyDeleteThat BTR got walloped, while the Bradley looked unfazed. (Possibly even unhit? Hard to tell in the video.)
Goes to show that even with its larger 30mm cannon (vs the Bradley's 25mm), the thinner and cruder armor of the BTR is a serious weakness in this particular matchup. The BTR-90 only has about 10-12mm of aluminum armor; the Bradley used to have similarly poor armoring when it was first produced, but the design got up-armored dramatically over the years, and boasts between 14.5mm - 30mm of spaced laminate armor, depending on variant. This particular Bradley is one of the variants with hardened steel side skirts as well.