~metafilter | Bookmarks (987)

The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out . Ig Nobel prize winner Saul Justin Newman on his paper Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans.In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don't stack up. I've tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world...

Watch the Greenough river in Western Australia come to life as you read the stories of the people who celebrate the return of the water flow. Odyssey Story Format (mix of images, text and video) on the ABC.

Greg Morton can do all the voices. I always wonder how people can do this kind of imitation. Not just one, but so many!

It seems unlikely that a system relying on hallucinated base rates and numerical simulations goes all the way to outperforming (half-decent) human forecasters in any meaningful way. from Contra papers claiming superhuman AI forecasting [Lesswrong]

Starting in 2017, NW Natural promoted the potential of "renewable natural gas" to counter the movement to ban new fossil gas hookups and electrify residential heating and cooking. A trove of more than 100 insider documents shows that NW Natural has done a lot less than promised in their Less We Can campaign.The documents, obtained by the Energy and Policy Institute, and reported by...

Nausea-inducing cane toad baits help freshwater crocodiles avoid poisonous pest. New research shows taste-aversion therapy helps hundreds of freshwater crocodiles avoid poisoning by cane toads spreading across the Kimberley.

Produced by Sara Gibbs and Elsa Williams, The Daily Tism is an Onion-like parody news site produced by autistic people, poking fun at themselves, for themselves and people who want to laugh with them. Some headlines: "Autistic Woman Who Always Guesses Plot Twist Carefully Selects Which Movie To Ruin," "Pasta Dish Murdered By Sauce and Cheese Being Mixed In," and "Austic Man Concentrating So...

Do you like the New York Times' Spelling Bee? Try Eightile for a [timed] variant, in Spanish or English.

The Conversation: Earthquake scientists detected an unusual signal on monitoring stations used to detect seismic activity during September 2023. We saw it on sensors everywhere, from the Arctic to Antarctica. We were baffled – the signal was unlike any previously recorded. Instead of the frequency-rich rumble typical of earthquakes, this was a monotonous hum, containing only a single vibration frequency. Even more puzzling was...

Senay Boztas (The Art Newspaper, 09/03/2024), "Rijksmuseum acquires controversial early botanic book on Suriname" (ungated): "Maria Sibylla Merian's 1705 Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium [Latin, Dutch, Dutch counterproof] is considered a 'high point' of early printing ... More recently, the contemporary artist Patricia Kaersenhout superimposed images of prominent Carribbean-born people onto images from the book, and made a series responding to the 'erasure' of local people's...

@HidingInPrivate's video "How the GOP Lies to Us: The Trump Economy" fact checks GOP claims in the 2024 platform, and found it with holes big enough you can probably drive a Star Destroyer through... Some examples to follow:* Platform claimed Trump's term spurred "historic economic growth, job creation, and resurgence in American manufacturing". Would it surprise you that NONE of that was true? *...

We can't live without air. We can't live without water. And now we can't live without our phones. Yet our digital information systems are failing us. Promises of unlimited connectivity and access have led to a fractionalization of reality and levels of noise that undermine our social cohesion. Without a common understanding and language about what we are facing, we put at risk our...

The way teenage girls speak is often derided, but they are in fact our linguistic trailblazers. Teenage girls are the main accelerators of how language changes and evolves. It's a reminder that the most influential people in our society aren't always the most obvious.

Fracking ban takes effect in Queensland's Channel Country, protecting one of the most unique river systems in the world. It took 10 years, but Channel Country communities say they're relieved and overwhelmed as a promised ban to prevent future fracking projects in the precious river system becomes official.

Meet DebunkBot: an AI chat bot that provides factual explanations and counter-evidence for these conspiratorial events. It's strength appears to be that the LLM is inexhaustible and will argue indefinitely. They found that the targeted dialogues resulted in a relatively durable 20% decrease in the misinformed beliefs, which is better than similar dialogues with humans. Science has published the paper, Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs...

I Stayed at This Coast Guard Station in the Middle of the Ocean. So Can You. [Outside; ungated]

Wrecked rain gauges. Whistleblowers. Million-dollar payouts and manhunts. Then a Colorado crop fraud got really crazy. The sordid story of two ranchers who conspired to falsify drought numbers by tampering with rain gauges on the plains of Colorado and Kansas, resulting in millions in false insurance claims. By Michael Booth for the Colorado Sun.

One day, James Williams —the former Google strategist I met—addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: "How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?" There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.

The Washington Post challenges Biden's claim that Turkish-American activist Aysenur Eygi's death was due to an accidental ricochet with new video and eyewitnesses. (archive.is) The Biden administration has released $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt, overriding human rights concerns, citing Egypt's assistance with Gaza talks. Brown University held the first of two forums on the issue of divestment and the advisory committee is...

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars's dead core? No? Well. It's fine. I'm sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and...

Calling the mound 'howe' would make perfect sense, as 'haug' (pronounced howg) is Old Norse for a mound [Orkneyology]skara brae, previously