2025-11-17
Horseshit
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Mystery Fuels Unease in Maine Woods: Who Bought Burnt Jacket Mountain?
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In the late 1800s alien ‘engineers’ altered our world forever | Aeon Essays
we can look to one of the strangest stories in the history of science: the 19th-century ‘discovery’ of canal-building aliens on Mars. This story isn’t widely known today and, when it is told at all, it’s usually framed as a curious delusion, shared by a small group of maverick astronomers – at least one of whom had an undiagnosed eye condition. But the event had an enormous impact on scientists and the public. It involved hundreds, perhaps thousands of astronomers, and captured the attention of millions of people. The apparent discovery of aliens on Mars a century ago reveals that the consequences of an encounter with alien life may be less traumatic but also more far-reaching than science-fiction authors have imagined. Indeed, in a sense, ‘aliens’ have already altered our world.
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NYC Council pushes to legalize bodega cats, giving them 'purr-fect' legal status
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I don't believe this, and neither does my cats: Owning a Cat Could Double Your Risk of Schizophrenia, Research Suggests
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If humans stop reading, barbarians will live among us again
when people stop being able to read — to make sense of the meaning of text on a page — they also lose the ability to make sense of the world. At stake here is nothing less than the fate of humanity, given the intimate connection between the written word and civilisation itself. In the beginning was the word. And in the end? At first, the written word seemed to do remarkably well in the internet age. The World Wide Web was essentially a network for web pages largely composed of text, with a modest amount of illustrative art, linked together by text URLs. Google searches for text. Most Facebook posts were written. The same goes for most X posts. Three things are now rapidly eroding the dominance of text. First, encouraged by the peculiar difficulty of the iPhone keyboard, there’s the rise of the emoji, which is in reality a return to the pictograph, a primitive pre-alphabetic form of written communication.
Why did people find it necessary to go beyond cave paintings and pictographs? The answer is that a society of any commercial complexity cannot function on the basis of emojis. Five millennia ago, cuneiform writing was first used in southern Mesopotamia as a means of keeping accounts. Property rights also required written records. The first codes of law appeared in Mesopotamia around 2100BC, exemplified in the Code of Hammurabi (about 1750BC), which was inscribed on stone stelae throughout the Old Babylonian Empire. In other words, without text it is hard to keep track of and communicate the rules that are necessary in a society of any complexity.
- This was not an accident. Twitter was engineered to be an anti-forum where abstract thought and discussion was impossible; and the "smartphone" ensured that it would be painful to attempt. but easy to distribute video.
Electric / Self Driving cars
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Kindergarteners with Chromebooks
Distraction is a huge problem, writes Henry Seton, who teaches world history in a private school.
"We need to insist that schools tighten access to all electronics, not just cellphones," Seton concludes. "If we want to prepare our young people for a future that demands focus, knowledge, and critical thinking, the first steps are simple: Ban the phones, close the laptops, put away the tablets, and let the learning begin."
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Ten years and 100B dollars later: where is Meta's metaverse?
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Meta Replaced the Native WhatsApp for Windows 11 with a Shitty Web App
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$10k RTX Pro reportedly snaps under its own weight during transit
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Matthew Belloni Is Yelling "Iceberg " on the Hollywood Titanic
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Inside the old church where one trillion webpages are being saved
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Intel Cancels Its Mainstream Next-Gen Xeon Server Processors
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iPhone users can now add US passport info to their digital wallets
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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The MP944 was the 'real' first microprocessor, but it was top secret
The world’s first microprocessor is NOT from Intel. But you won’t find it in many textbooks. It was a secret only declassified in 1998; for good reason. The Garrett AiResearch F14 Air Data Computer was ~8x faster than the Intel 4004, and a year earlier!
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Experts question Anthropic's claims of cyberattacks using its tools
this report does not meet the standard of publishing for serious companies. The same goes with research in other fields. You cannot just claim things and not back it up in any way, and we cannot as an industry accept that it’s OK for companies to release this. There seem to be a pattern for Tech Companies (especially in AI, but they’re not the only culprits) out there to just announce things, generate hype and then under-deliever. Just because it works with VCs doesn’t mean it should work with us. We should, as an industry, expect better.
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Forget AGI–Sam Altman celebrates ChatGPT following em dash formatting rules
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Meta's Yann LeCun to Launch Physical AI Startup After Declaring LLMs 'Dead End'
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AI Relationships Are on the Rise. A Divorce Boom Could Be Next
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Electricity bills in states with the most data centers are surging
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Peter Thiel sells off all Nvidia stock, stirring bubble fears
Crypto con games
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Americans are heating their homes with Bitcoin this winter
The crypto-heated future may be unfolding in the town of Challis, Idaho, where Cade Peterson’s company, Softwarm, is repurposing bitcoin heat to ward off the winter. Peterson has heated his own home for two-and-a-half years using bitcoin mining equipment and believes that heat will power almost everything in the future. “You will go to Home Depot in a few years and buy a water heater with a data port on it and your water will be heated with bitcoin,” Peterson said.
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Left Angst
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The Last 600 Meters: PBS's 17 Year Disgrace
PBS initially rejected the documentary in 2008 because of its perceived pro-military bias and lack of political commentary, even though the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was the project’s principal funder at the start. The network then began to dictate the direction of the final cut, but Pack wasn’t willing to compromise on his vision.
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'Not in our name': Afrikaners push back against Trump's genocide claims
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Woman pleads guilty lying about astronaut wife accessing bank account from ISS
A former Air Force intelligence officer has pleaded guilty to lying to a federal agent by falsely claiming that her estranged astronaut wife illegally accessed her bank account while aboard the International Space Station for six months, prosecutors in Houston, Texas, said Friday. The guilty plea by Summer Worden, 50, on Thursday comes more than five years after she was indicted in the space case for lying about actions by her wife, Anne McClain, a U.S. Army colonel, West Point graduate and Iraq war combat veteran, while they were in the midst of a divorce. The claim came at a time when Worden said that the couple was engaged in a custody battle over what Worden’s then-6-year-old son, who had been conceived through in vitro fertilization and carried by a surrogate.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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Denmark's drive to conscript teenage girls: "We're pretty scared"
In July, Denmark expanded its military conscription programme. Previously only mandatory for men, now all young women turning 18 will also be entered into a conscription lottery with the potential to be called up for military service, which has been extended from four to 11 months. No one in Denmark has been called up unwillingly since 2012 — because there have been enough volunteers — but the changes mean many teenagers feel it could happen to them in the near future.
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France halts Shein suspension proceedings after sex dolls, weapons are withdrawn | Reuters
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Hertfordshire police admit unlawful arrest of couple in school WhatsApp row
Iran / Houthi
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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What now for peak oil? Unpacking a surprise twist in the fossil fuel feud
In a sharp shift in tone, the latest outlook from the world’s top energy agency signals that oil demand could keep growing through to 2050. The International Energy Agency had previously estimated a peak in global fossil fuel demand by 2030 and said there should be an end to new investments in coal, oil and gas projects to reach net zero emissions by the middle of the century.
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'Trash Pandas' Are Physically Evolving into Pets; SF'S Raccoons Could Be NEXT
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Earth Has Tilted 31.5 Inches Since 1993 – and It's Because of Us
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What's More Dangerous Than India's Frequent Heat Waves? Heat Stress
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Nature's Prescription for Our Future
Over the years, I came to understand that human health and nature’s health are not separate. They are two sides of the same coin. And as science and technology continue to advance, our progress on health has expanded in remarkable ways, yet we sometimes forget that it begins with the world around us. In our search for cures, we sometimes overlook the most powerful one of all: nature. Science increasingly confirms what many of us have long felt: that our health depends on the health of the natural world. The concept of One Health, recognized by the World Health Organization, captures this connection. It affirms that the well-being of people, animals, and ecosystems is inseparable. It is one living system, constantly in balance.
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Saving the Venus Flytrap: How One Woman Rallied a Town Around Its Weirdest Attraction – Garden & Gun
For reasons biologists still don’t fully understand, flytraps’ native range is limited to a roughly eighty-mile strip of the eastern Carolinas, concentrated in North Carolina. Early settlers were fascinated by them. Charles Darwin, who never traveled to North America but corresponded extensively with botanists there, declared them “one of the most wonderful plants in the world.” Today they are known and grown the world over, turning up in botanical gardens, in the home collections of carnivorous plant enthusiasts, and in pop culture. (Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors and the piranha plant in Super Mario Bros. are two memorable homages.) “But most people think they are from the rainforest or from Borneo, somewhere exotic,” Moore says. Like many highly specialized species, they are fighting extinction as development steadily encroaches.
- "Grown all over the world" != "fighting extinction". i certainly agree there may nbe value in preserving wild populations but recognize the value in the fact we have learned to cultivate the plant and rejoice in it.
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Why India caps pollution reading at 500 when the air is more toxic