Probably the most fantastic factor that occurred to Tommy McHugh

That is the quarterly hyperlinks ‘n’ updates put up, a set of issues I’ve been studying and doing for the previous few months.

A British man named Tommy McHugh was on the bathroom pooping when apparently he strained too arduous, had a stroke, and awakened within the hospital. McHugh was building employee and ex-con who had by no means been in an artwork gallery “besides possibly to steal one thing”, however as he recovered, he was possessed by an intense want to make artwork:

I’ll paint three or six or 9 photos at a time. […] Canvases turned too pricey, so I began portray the ceilings and the wallpaper and the ground.

Right here’s what it regarded like:

As he mentioned in an interview, “Probably the most fantastic factor that occurred to Tommy McHugh [was] having a stroke whereas doing a poo.”

The blogger Linch claims that Pope Leo’s first encyclical, which is about AI, was considerably written by AI. I imagine that it’s a mortal sin to cross off computer-generated textual content as your individual, so if that is true, I hope the pontiff confesses and repents.

In accordance with the blogger Jenn, Canada misplaced its measles elimination standing as a result of they don’t have sufficient nurses who converse Low German. Mainly, measles outbreaks in Canada are concentrated amongst Mennonites, who do appear to be hesitant about vaccines, however a lot much less so when medical professionals can converse to them of their native language. For example, right here’s the form of miscommunication that may occur between medical doctors and Mennonites, as informed by a Low German-speaking assist employee in Ontario:

The next morning, the mom known as me: her baby was coughing so violently she was vomiting. I informed her to go to the hospital. Later, she known as me once more, upset. She mentioned that when she received to the ER, they’d informed her to go dwelling.

I couldn’t assist however assume one thing was off. The hospital doesn’t flip folks away, I informed her, however she insisted that that they had. So I known as them straight to determine what had occurred. It turned on the market had been a miscommunication. Hospital employees had informed her to not are available, utilizing a “cease” hand gesture to speak, and she or he had turn into so flustered that she didn’t catch the second a part of the message: that she ought to wait within the automotive whereas they ready a negative-pressure room.

In 1830s Massachusetts, beards had been so unusual and unusual {that a} man named Joseph Palmer was mocked and shunned for sporting one. Assailants tried to forcibly shave him, however he fought them off with a knife, and was imprisoned for assault. He refused to pay his high-quality or court docket charges, and so he remained in jail for over a 12 months. This not less than gave him the excuse to create this all-time basic tombstone:

it’s a bit arduous to learn on this picture, but it surely says “Persecuted for sporting the beard” (supply)

The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary supposedly grew out of the bottom, grazed all of the grass it may attain with its stem-like umbilical wire, after which died. European students thought of it a believable organism properly into the 1700s, however doubts began to creep in after numerous expeditions failed to show up any specimens.

TV reveals and flicks usually depict uranium as a glowing inexperienced ore, although it doesn’t really glow. Étienne Fortier-Dubois claims this trope didn’t come from uranium glass, a novelty product from 100 years in the past that does glow inexperienced (however due to fluorescence, not radioactivity). As an alternative the picture of inexperienced, glowing uranium got here, as so many issues do, from The Simpsons.

Uri Bram has a cool new software that tells you ways bizarre you might be. For example, if in case you have a bachelor’s diploma or greater, you don’t have a gun in your house, and each of your dad and mom had been born in america, congratulations—solely 14% of Individuals match you on all three. (That is based mostly on the US Basic Social Survey so it solely works for Individuals, but it surely ought to be straightforward to recreate for any nation with an identical dataset.)

Right here’s one other quantity that stunned me. When you requested me what number of artists make greater than $100k in royalties on Spotify, I’d most likely guess, I dunno, 5,000? The precise quantity is 13,800.

I occurred to be studying Helen DeWitt’s novel The Final Samurai after I noticed her put up about her troubles with the Windham Campbell Prize. The prize is supposed to “present writers with the chance to give attention to their work unbiased of economic issues” by chopping them a test for $175,000. Nevertheless, additionally they require you to spend eight hours filming a promotional video and three days taking part in a workshop at Yale.

This won’t appear to be so much, however because the biologist Ruxandra Teslo places it, Bizarre Nerds include tradeoffs. When you’re the form of one that can write an especially ingenious (and good!) novel, you may also have a tough time doing issues which might be straightforward for different folks, like, say, discovering Wi-Fi, or placing your writing on maintain to fly to Yale. DeWitt says she hasn’t had correct time to write down for years, between caring for her dying mom, keeping off a stalker, and coping with dilatory editors, and so she’d moderately be strapped for money if it means she’s free to write down uninterrupted. And so she turns down the prize and the test that comes with it. That’s what seriousness appears like.

Fortuitously, then this occurred:

One other writing prize controversy: one of many Commonwealth Quick Story Prizes seems to have been awarded to an clearly AI-generated story. The prize-winning tales all seem in Granta journal, and the editor’s response was mainly a shrug:

We confirmed Claude.ai the story and requested whether or not it was AI-generated. The response was lengthy, concluding that it was ‘virtually actually not produced unaided by a human’.

A pc scientist named Tuhin Chakrabarty claims that the empty metaphors that plague the prize-winning story—and that plague all AI writing—usually come from human-written fanfiction. For example, the uncommon phrase “the endurance of a reptile”, which seems within the allegedly AI-generated story, additionally happens in this fanfiction based mostly on the Japanese anime/manga Naruto. There’s no method to make certain that an LLM sucked it up and spat it again out, but it surely’s value remembering {that a} significant quantity of the textual content inside these machines was written by individuals who had been taking part in faux with anime characters.

Apparently some estimates of microplastics within the atmosphere is likely to be approach too excessive as a result of the samples received contaminated by lab gloves. As this tweet places it:

Niko McCarty has a nice article on the controversies round eLife, one of many few scientific journals prepared to really attempt new issues. In 2018, the journal ran a trial the place it did away with settle for/reject selections altogether for a small pattern of papers—it simply posted the manuscripts and their peer opinions as “Reviewed Preprints”. Authors had been then capable of attempt publishing their papers elsewhere, or revise and repost them on eLife.

In 2023, the journal was about to make this the coverage for all papers, and a few of the editors and the governing board staged a revolt. They received the editor-in-chief, Michael Eisen, fired. Clarivate, a for-profit firm that collects publishing metrics, yanked the journal’s “Influence Issue”, which is a quantity that folks use to guage a journal’s status. Fortuitously, eLife’s experiment continues, for now.

It’s dismaying to find that, in case you attempt to do one thing even mildly completely different with a scientific journal, folks will freak out and attempt to self-immolate to cease you. Clearly, this isn’t a system that may be reformed from the within, and it wants a managed burn as an alternative. (See: The one science reform we are able to all agree on, however we’re too cowardly to do.)

In accordance with China-watcher Tanner Greer, the Chinese language Communist Get together has determined that the longer term belongs to the nation with one of the best science and expertise, and naturally, they need that nation to be China. Consequently, China has

the world’s most delicate ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector, the world’s largest and most delicate radio telescope, the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic subject, the world’s quickest quantum laptop by computational benefit, and the world’s most delicate neutrino detector […and] the world’s largest primate medical analysis middle.

China now graduates twice as many STEM PhDs because the US does, and it dominates quotation metrics in all types of utilized physics and chemistry fields. It’s straightforward to waste your science funding and it’s straightforward to sport quotation metrics with junk papers—as we Individuals know all too properly. And it’s arduous to tug off a paradigm shift with out a variety of mental freedom. However a decade or two from now, it’s going to be apparent which international locations had been pumping cash into their scientific ecosystems, and which of them had been cancelling grants through the use of CTRL-F on the phrase “range”.

Each every now and then, I reacquaint myself with Suzanne Triester’s fictional online game stills, made on an Amiga laptop within the early Nineteen Nineties: