Links 1 December 2023

NY Magazine compiles a list of "Every Single Lie Told by George Santos."

This years Comedy Wildlife Photography winners.

In Italy, the high price of white truffles has led to a violent struggle in which truffle-sniffing dogs are regularly poisoned with strychnine-laced meatballs.

On land, datacenters are hard to cool and use a ton of water. A few years ago Microsoft hit on a possible solution, puting shipping-contained-sized computing units on the sea floor 100 feet down. This has not become common but interest continues. (2020 post about Microsoft's first big test, Project Natick; new article about Chinese deployment of the technology; summary article about the pros and cons)

Some weird bits of feudal law that still endure in England. 

From Ella Standage, a poem titled "Faithful" about love and translation.

Human Rights Watch finally gets around to reporting that the projectile that hit a Gaza hospital on October 17, triggering anti-Israel riots across the globe, was likely a misfired Palestinian rocket. 
OSINT guys on X figured this out within 48 hours, but I guess it's good that HRW finally released this finding.

Maya cities had no sewers or privies, and nobody knows what happened to all their human waste. Funny that after reading about the Maya for fifty years I am just now discovering this.

The insane process of choosing the books for the NY Times Ten Best Books of the Year list, which begins in March and includes dozens of meetings with impassioned presentations on behalf of the editors' favorites. (NY Times) Personally I find the 100 Notable Books list much more useful.

Scathing review of Costin Alamariu's (=Bronze Age Pervert's) dissertation : "It’s like saying that philosophy has something to do with fish, because people study philosophy in school and there are schools of fish." But the writer concludes that while nothing Alamariu writes makes philosophical sense it does make you want to live more fully.

Mummies and other cool archaeological finds from a Wari site near Lima, Peru.

Kevin Drum says young men are doing fine.

Russia's Supreme Court declares the global gay rights movement to be an "extremist group," which effectively criminalizes all gay activism in Russia.

Neural net Artificial Intelligence is famously a "black box," that is, we don't have a clue about the details of its reasoning process. In this post, Scott Siskind reads some recent work that tries to understand how AIs reason. One fascinating discovery is that they function by simulating much larger AIs; in one of the toy examples, a two-neuron AI works by simulating a five-neuron AI. So a 100,000-neuron AI is probably simulating an AI with millions or billions of neurons, connected in multi-demensional arrays.

Immigrant neighborhoods probably existed in the very first cities.

Libertarian Alex Taborrok reviews The Big Fail, a new book about pandemic response. Like most others, the authors find that lockdowns, social distancing, and masking had little effect; the only important thing was vaccination. Speeding up the vaccines by five weeks (which we could have done) would likely have saved more lives than all the other measures combined.

Tyler Cowen interviews philosopher John Gray, much about pessimism.

Life on earth is staggering. A new study finds that there are a million trillion trillion living cells (10 to the 30th) and that life has a huge, geological-scale impact on the plant, among other things collectively fixing 250 billion tons of carbon per year. As the authors note, this gives us a way to look for life on other worlds, because life like ours is pretty damn obvious. (NY Times, original article)

Good summary on X of some issues that might follow if Venezuela tries to annex Guyana. Wikipedia has the historical background.

Some remarkable drawings by the artist known as Faith XLVII.

The most powerful cosmic ray particle ever detected was the "Oh-My-God Particle" of 1991. This particle, probably a proton, had an estimated energy of 320 exa-electron volts (eEv), roughly equivalent to a baseball traveling 100 kilometers per hour (63 mph). For a long time it was by far the most powerful particle ever detected, but now there is another in the same range: the Amaterasu particle, detected on May 27, 2021. This had an estimated energy of 240 eEv. Exactly how particles with this much energy could be generated has never been explained, so there was always a nagging suspicion that the measurement of the Oh-My-God Particle was messed up somehow. This second example in the same range is therefore important confirmation. Like the Oh-My-God Particle, the Amaterasu Particle seems to have come from an empty region of space.

Short video showing what looks like an American AGM-88 HARM missile destroying a Russian SAM system, which means Ukraine has figured out how to fire these very effective missiles from its existing jets.