dav_Oz
Nice twist.
The question though who is compute hijacking whom?
A more darker take:
Thermodynamically by hijacking attention of highly efficent 100 watt machines the agent gets whatever the "mission" is "done". In this case supposedly a promotion prompt for a project.
The parasitization seems to be based of some modified version of cunningham's law effectively trying to nerd snipe 1500 x 100W scientists.
For one it's just competition. If you have regular contact to a diverse set of microorganisms chances are higher that they will keep each other populations in check. The dose makes the poison applies here too in some narrow sense.
Additionally (or even mainly) our immune system always on guard (me/not me) gets to play around with the obvious stuff and not be overwhelmed or be "bored" but constantly trained/tamed. We have evolved to have constant contact to a diverse set of microorganisms which modulate our immune system e.g. through toll-like receptors.
As an extreme case some people develop some natural immunity to the tetanus toxin through regular exposure to a extreme variety of microorganisms, obviously this isn't reliable nor a gamble remotely worth the risk.
[0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3980089/
[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6827147/
Edit: don't know why OP gets downvoted it's a perfectly fine entrance question/bafflement to motivate some deeper digging into microbiology/immunology.
More than one would expect? Like having an IQ of 140 or more? ;)
So maybe just stick right to the paper itself and its clearly stated motivation?
> Perhaps unusually, the authors of this paper are not convinced of the correctness of their proposed hypothesis. Were it to be true it would have profound implications and not just for astrobiology. However, most readers do not need to be told that it is always a bad idea to decide on the truth or falsity of an idea based on the consequences of it being true. While we strongly doubt that any previous industrial civilization existed before our own, asking the question in a formal way that articulates explicitly what evidence for such a civilization might look like raises its own useful questions related both to astrobiology and to Anthropocene studies. Thus, we hope that this paper will serve as motivation to improve the constraints on the hypothesis so that in future we may be better placed to answer our title question.
[0]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...
> Iran waited until the clock passed midnight local time to finalize the agreement, because it did not want the momentous occasion to coincide with President Trump’s birthday on Sunday, according to two Iranian officials who could not be identified because of the matter’s sensitivity. The seven-and-half-hour time difference allowed both Tehran and Washington to claim their preferred version of when the deal was finalized. President Trump had said it would be on Sunday, and Iran had said it would be on a later day.[0]
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/06/14/world/iran-war-trump...
So both complement each other well.
[0]https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674%2826%2900335-1
[1]https://phys.org/news/2026-04-nicotine-biosynthesis-wild-tob...
so kudos to the article/institute, leaving as it is
great band btw
> The name ISIS is not an acronym: it refers to the Ancient Egyptian goddess and the local name for the River Thames. The name was selected for the official opening of the facility in 1985, prior to this it was known as the SNS, or Spallation Neutron Source. The name was considered appropriate as Isis was a goddess who could restore life to the dead, and ISIS made use of equipment previously constructed for the Nimrod and Nina accelerators.[0]
kind of useless if the well produced vid delivers all the examples you can actually listen to ...
To get back to the original point though if I'm not mistaken again in standard mexican spanish /ʃ/ as a phoneme is lost entirely and only appears in the affricative /t͡ʃ/? So in all likelihood the original /ʃ/ in axolotl would be pronounced by way of habit as [t͡ʃ] (unless again you have say a argentinian dialect where e.g. "ll" (/ʝ/) in llamar is pronounced as [ʃ]) if you try to "correct" mexican spanish speakers.
[ɬ] voiceless alveolar lateral fricative [0]
in a sufficient fluent manner (except you happen to speak e.g. Welsh, there the sound is written as ll) otherwise you are saying it half correct which is arguably worse.
So let the nahuatl speaking people have a laugh at your expense for pronouncing it the germanic way or if you want to go unnoticed do it the evolved spanish romanic way, a good middle ground I guess.
Anyway I think it is generally a lot fun to hear words from foreign languages pronounced "wrong" / having trouble hearing/pronouncing it "right" heavy accents are hilarious icebreakers (:
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...
Just three weeks after the publications in Nature (April 1953), a Time journalist Joan Bruce was made aware of the hottest story in science and described the discovery in her nearly publication-ready article (professional photoshoots of Watson/Crick were already taken, yes one of those pictures [0] was consequently prominently featured in The Double Helix 15 years (!) later) as a joint effort of two teams (Wilkins/Franklin & Watson/Crick) but the story was killed because apparently among other consulted scientists Franklin herself found the science lacking, it wasn't revised and subsequently no article was published at the time. No pun intended.
> Three weeks after the three DNA papers were published in Nature, Bragg gave a lecture on the discovery at Guy’s Hospital Medical School in London, which was reported on the front page of the British News Chronicle daily newspaper. This drew the attention of Joan Bruce, a London journalist working for Time. Although Bruce’s article has never been published — or described by historians, until now — it is notable for its novel take on the discovery of the double helix.
Bruce portrayed the work as being done by “two teams”: one, consisting of Wilkins and Franklin, gathering experimental evidence using X-ray analysis; “the other” comprising Watson and Crick, working on theory. To a certain extent, wrote Bruce, the teams worked independently, although “they linked up, confirming each other’s work from time to time, or wrestling over a common problem”. For example, Watson and Crick had “started to work on the double helix theory as a result of Wilkins’ X-rays”. Conversely, she wrote, Franklin was “checking the Cavendish model against her own X-rays, not always confirming the Cavendish structural theory”. It has not escaped our notice that both examples render Franklin in a position of strength, every bit a peer of Wilkins, Crick and Watson.
Unfortunately, Bruce was not so strong on the science. Her article got far enough for Time to send a Cambridge photographer, Anthony Barrington Brown, to shoot portraits of Watson and Crick, and for Watson to tell his friends to watch for it. But it never appeared, perhaps because Franklin told Bruce that it needed an awful lot of work to get the science straight. Bruce’s take on the discovery was buried, and Barrington Brown’s compelling images disappeared until Watson resurrected the best of them 15 years later, for The Double Helix.
It is tantalizing to think how people might remember the double-helix story had Bruce’s article been published, suitably scientifically corrected. From the outset, Franklin would have been represented as an equal member of a quartet who solved the double helix, one half of the team that articulated the scientific question, took important early steps towards a solution, provided crucial data and verified the result. Indeed, one of the first public displays of the double helix, at the Royal Society Conversazione in June 1953, was signed by the authors of all three Nature papers. In this early incarnation, the discovery of the structure of DNA was not seen as a race won by Watson and Crick, but as the outcome of a joint effort.
According to journalist Horace Freeland Judson and Franklin’s biographer, Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin has been reduced to the “wronged heroine” of the double helix. She deserves to be remembered not as the victim of the double helix, but as an equal contributor to the solution of the structure.[1][2]
[0]https://wellcomecollection.org/works/s9z3dhkn/items
Unproductivity is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my unproductivity. I will let it pass through me. When it is gone, only action will remain.
Jump!
Well the effort and care put into the grave made us - 2000 years later in cyberspace - in a sense remember the person. Who was this young woman? They even gave us hints/rewards. Made us curious.
So maybe they prepared her for an afterlife ... of continued memory and presence among the living, which they with their technological limitations succeeded in, we are talking about her, now.
Exponentially falling fertility rates can create dynamics which can be destructive in its own right. As with other complex phenomena it would be for example foolish to rapidly cool the earth's climate. Stability is the key, here. Right now India is just below replacement which short to mid-term looks very promising but will it stabilize? Looking at worldwide trends I very much doubt that. A growing economy needs some demographical stability so coming from a long-term view fertility dropping off a cliff, now, could be bad news later (in one, two generations).
Turning some knobs one way or the other does not produce linear results, quite the opposite, there are thresholds, there is criticality. To draw on another more time compressed analogy here: I guess some operators thought back then: What could go possibly wrong by running a nuclear reactor (RBMK) at safer lower powers?
It is still fascinating to trace back the divergent developments like american-flavoured christian sects or philosophical schools of "pragmatism", "rationalism" etc. which get super-charged by technological disruptions.
In my youth I was heavily influenced by the so-called Bildung which can be functionally thought of as a form of ersatz religion and is maybe better exemplified in the literary tradition of the Bildungsroman.
I've grappled with and wildly fantasized about all sorts of things, experimented mindlessly with all kinds of modes of thinking and consciousness amidst my coming-of-age, in hindsight without this particular frame of Bildung left by myself I would have been left utterly confused and maybe at some point acted out on it. By engaging with books like Der Zauberberg by Thomas Mann or Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften by Robert Musil, my apparent madness was calmed down and instead of breaking the dam of a forming social front of myself with the vastness of the unconsciousness, over time I was guided to develop my own way into slowly operating it appropriately without completely blowing myself up into a messiah or finding myself eternally trapped in the futility and hopelessness of existence.
Borrowing from my background, one effective vaccination which spontaneously came up in my mind against rationalists sects described here, is Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung which can be read as a radical continuation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which was trying to stress test the ratio itself. [To demonstrate the breadth of Bildung in even something like the physical sciences e.g. Einstein was familiar with Kant's a priori framework of space and time, Heisenberg's autobiographical book Der Teil und das Ganze was motivated by: "I wanted to show that science is done by people, and the most wonderful ideas come from dialog".]
Schopenhauer arrives at the realization because of the groundwork done by Kant (which he heavily acknowledges): that there can't even exist a rational basis for rationality itself, that it is simply an exquisitely disguised tool in the service of the more fundamental will i.e. by its definition an irrational force.
Funny little thought experiment but what consequences does this have? Well, if you are declaring the ratio as your ultima ratio you are just fooling yourself in order to be able to rationalize anything you want. Once internalized Schopenhauer's insight gets you overwhelmed by Mitleid for every conscious being, inoculating you against the excesses of your own ratio. It instantly hit me with the same force as MDMA but several years before.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbin_Bleu
>In 2013, an MIT study discovered that Bleu was the third most-common biography article subject among all the different language versions of Wikipedia; pages on him were available in 194 languages, placing below only Jesus (214) and Barack Obama (200), and above Confucius (192) and Isaac Newton (191). The contradiction between Bleu's high notability on Wikipedia and low real-life notability comparative to the aforementioned historical figures made the creation of these pages unusual.[171][172] Years later, a Reddit user found that these translations were likely done by a single user whose IP addresses on Wikipedia locate to Saudi Arabia. By 2019, Bleu had dropped to #5 on the list of biographies, but increased in Wikipedia notability, by then being available in 213 languages.[173]
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/aetmh9...
[2]https://ar.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%83%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%...
The "simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous" (to borrow from Bloch) in 1930: the triumphant and festive present (Hilbert) confronting the past (Du-Bois-Reymond) with fate already sealed (Gödel).
The past:
>Du Bois-Reymond's investigations of electrical properties of the nervous system had led him to long-standing fundamental questions, especially the nature of matter and force and the relationship between mental phenomena and their physical aspects. He recognized scientists’ general belief that when we do not know a solution—ignoramus in Latin—nevertheless, under certain circumstances, we could know. However, he countered, concerning riddles of the material world such as these two, we must decide in favor of a harder truth: ignorabimus—we shall never know. Du Bois-Reymond reported later that his 1872 speech had excited considerable controversy and his ignorabimus slogan had become a sort of shibboleth in natural philosophy.
The present declaration by Hilbert:
>[...] This conviction of the solvability of every mathematical problem is a powerful incentive to the worker. We hear within us the perpetual call: There is the problem. Seek its solution. You can find it by pure reason, for in mathematics there is no ignorabimus.
And then the barely noticeable turn of events:
>Besides the meeting of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, the other three conferences at Königsberg in early September of 1930 were:
Second Conference on Epistemology of the Exact Sciences,
Annual Meeting of the German Mathematical Society, and
Annual Meeting of the German Physical Society.
The first of these was the most momentous of the four, a major step in bringing the adherents of the Vienna Circle of philosophers to both inner agreement and public notice. Their program challenged and eventually helped supplant much of the type of philosophy discussed and developed in the German universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. On September 6, two days before Hilbert’s speech, the young Austrian logician Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) presented his completeness theorem, which filled a major gap in Hilbert’s finitist foundation of mathematics. In a round-table discussion on the next day, the day before Hilbert spoke, Gödel modestly announced his first incompleteness theorem.
[0]https://old.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/david-hilb...
Say first time heart-broken, some people really lean into it, and some of those people decide to do a deep dive into their chaotic feelings in order to retrieve a meaningful and personal perspective on a otherwise supposedly trivial thing, which they can finally articulate in an art form.
Put it differently: One can go through the motions and mostly copy paste the cultural wealth on a given topic or one can choose a very idiosyncratic route, depending on your craftsmanship the former will most certainly "resonate" with more people the latter only really resonates with you at first, normally it stays that way. But you can refine the process further going through a lot of cycles and with some luck get noticed for your individual/novel/fresh approach, an arduous process and the perseverance mostly comes from the art created being a very personal thing i.e. self-exploring. I think the hardest part is not getting lost when suddenly you manage to garner a lot of attention.
> L: Where did the name Nine Inch Nails come from?
T: I don't know if you've ever tried to think of band names, but usually you think you have a great one and you look at it the next day and it's stupid. I had about 200 of those. Nine Inch Nails lasted the two week test, looked great in print, and could be abbreviated easily. It really doesn't have any literal meaning. It seemed kind of frightening. [In his best he-man voice] Tough and manly! It's a curse trying to come up with band names.
[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20150813023119/http://www.thenin...
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Spelling_to_so...
The article is about "feeling stupid" in hindsight. Because you cannot unsee it anymore. Which makes you wonder about other myriad obvious things you are missing.
"Feeling stupid" can also mean that you get the impression that everyone around you gets it but you don't.
The irony especially in maths - it seems - is that you can feel stupid because you don't get it and then quit but also keep feeling stupid if you finally got it because in hindsight everything falls so neatly into place that you can't imagine that you had so much trouble to get it in the first place!
From personal experience in a controlled setting (tutoring) if I'm strict about the form: no phone and all learning material prepared beforehand I get mostly positive feedback and some even feel relief for that time. Imo the deeper truth of the matter is that they are used to adults struggling to give them full attention, too, a two-way-street but all the blame is usually given to the younger folk.
I find it surprising because it took e.g. smokers a lot longer although the evidence was overwhelming [1] in 1964. Today (almost) every tobacco smoker acknowledges the negative health effects.
It is a insidious kind of addiction: a massive amount of very short-lived, small dopamine spikes throughout the day seamlessly incorporated into your "normal" functional life which makes it extremely hard to get out of the loop.
[0]https://talker.news/2024/08/28/why-3-in-4-gen-z-blame-social...
[1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/add.16007
Basically, I could have got "hooked" as my pre-frontal cortex was already fully developed and I kindly declined. Gen Z for the most part was confronted with the "choice" of small dopamine hits designed after the newest slot machine research [0][1] when they were underage.
As others have pointed out the 90s-00s had its own limitations and frustrations so going back to that nobody is really nostalgic about that part but back then you had to at least choose video games (install it, meet the hardware requirements and get sufficiently proficient in it ;) ) to get to today's level of addiction which permeates mainstream online social interactions.
[0]https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/social-media-copies-gambling-met...
[1]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-024-10031-0
[0]https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2010/01/what-were-they...
According to the WHO[0] the tolerable daily intake (TDI) for uranium is 0.6 µg/kg body weight per day. So, 42 µg/day for a 70kg/150lbs person.
Worst case scenario for drinking 5l of water daily from those glasses would give oral exposure to 3.15 µg in total. Even if you were for some reason a vinegar enthusiast 1l/day would leave you with "only" 30µg.
Maybe you want to err on the side of caution and don't try pickling with those.
On the other hand if I deliberately left little things out to later test them, they became more engaged because they knew I only gave them the necessary tools but they had to work out the little things by themselves. The students were more on the edge and this resulted in better engagement overall.
It was fascinating to experiment with it because my expectations of hard/intermediate/easy problems were at times wildly off.
And surely, there are adaptations at play here, if one is used to discomfort in order to learn hopefully the danger zone gets smaller with time. Sometimes I feel - especially for younger folks coming fresh from high school - the zone between comfort and danger is pretty small as they got habituated on cramming which is essentially all danger zone.
Current orbital eccentricites for our plantes in ascending order:
[0.00002 (Triton)]
0.0068 (Venus)
0.0086 (Neptune)
0.0167 (Earth)
0.0472 (Uranus)
0.0541 (Saturn)
0.0934 (Mars)
[0.9951 (parabolic) (Comet Hale-Bopp)]
So, the planets eccentricities (except for Mercury) are within one order of magnitude (0.01 and 0.1) nearly circular.
That it some impressive cultural feat. It combines the human ability to take on the extraordinarily long term view [0] - planning ahead - (our prefrontal cortex is only fully developed at 25 years of age) and the control of fire which goes back at least 1 million (!) years [1].
Some of the Proto-Indo-Europeans [2] seemed to be very keen at ritualizing the control of fire which can be attested through various examples in Indo-European practices [3].
If one traces back the Indo-European origin of the word fire there are 2 main terms:
(1) *h₁n̥gʷnis
(2) *péh₂wr̥
The first one refers to the animate feature of fire (e.g. as "Spirit"/"God", "active") while the second one to the inanimate ("substance", "passive") [4], interestingly Proto-Indo-European is thought to have animacy gender as a distinct grammatical feature [5] which was later replaced by the masculine/feminine gender.
The germanic root for fire comes from the inanimate one while the Persian atash, the latin ignis or Agni (Vedic deity of fire) from the animate form.
[0]https://longnow.org/ideas/the-fire-that-never-goes-out/
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_hum...
[2]https://www.science.org/content/article/new-language-databas...
[3]https://books.google.at/books?id=cI-bEAAAQBAJ
[4]https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-E...
About 0.285% or 2.85‰ (!). For a 200lbs (90kg) person about 14 drinks[0] for a 120lbs (55kg) person about 11 drinks.
TL;DR: The issue was resolved with a low carb diet (about 6 months) and putting her on courses of fluconazole.
[0]1 drink = a 12-ounce (350 ml) beer or 5 ounces of wine (140 ml) http://www.clinlabnavigator.com/alcohol-ethanol-ethyl-alcoho...