The forgotten end of World War II. A forgotten horror of World War II. How ordinary Jews stood against Nazi persecution—it’s not every day your longheld assumptions about a historical period you think you know about get overturned so dramatically.
The shadowy global network vilifying climate protesters.
The thylacine was hunted to extinction as a supposedly large predator, but was only half as heavy as thought. The lessons of a 140-year-old thylacine brain sample.
Indo-European languages originated 8100 years ago.
A human genome has been recovered from 5700-year-old chewing gum.
Microplastics have been found in human hearts.
A UK scheme to reuse waste heat from cloud computing.
Why there was no water to fight the fires in Maui.
One woman’s mission to maintain accurate Nazi history on Wikipedia.
Twitter’s future is a return to Elon Musk’s past.
The AI jokes that give a screenwriter nightmares.
AI Johnny Cash sings “Barbie Girl”.
A New Zealand supermarket AI meal-planner app suggested a recipe that would create chlorine gas.
Another one-month gap… I’ve been writing, but not here. Better get things moving again with a few links.
The Atlantification of the Arctic Ocean.
Ecological tipping points could occur much sooner than expected.
I no longer know how to think about borsch.
Have some beer and pizza while AI takes over your life.
Fish are running out of oxygen.
Europe’s cruise ships emit as much sulphur as a billion cars.
The plague killed Ancient Britons.
Homo sapiens domesticated ourselves.
Beatrix Potter kept quiet about Peter Rabbit’s origins.
The German town encrusted with diamonds.
Steve Albini on why debating the willfully ignorant is exhausting and pointless.
Notes from Prince Harry’s ghostwriter. Worth reading even if you aren’t obsessed with the royals:
If you don’t speak your emotions you serve them, and if you don’t tell your story you lose it—or, what might be worse, you get lost inside it. Telling is how we cement details, preserve continuity, stay sane. We say ourselves into being every day, or else.
The billion-year-old connection between Tasmania and Arizona.
My transplanted heart and I will die soon.
Farewell, Dame Edna. The inevitable backlash has emerged since, but Humphries’ place in Australian comedy is undeniable; I’m glad to have seen one of Edna’s farewell performances a decade or so ago.
Pepperoni Hug Spot. AI-ieeee…
What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure.
Has Homo floresiensis survived? What an incredible world that would be.
Incredible video of a rescue in deep snow (via Mefi) and an interview with both men. What an amazing video to have: the moment you saved a life, or were saved from certain death. I’m in awe of the rescuer’s presence of mind.
This list of the best debut albums ever (via Mefi) is a better read than most. I can forgive his omission of Please Please Me, because his criteria would otherwise have required him to omit Plastic Ono Band, which would have been worse. I was struck by this observation about Nick Drake:
It’s not just his first record that came and went upon release. The three studio albums he put out before taking his own life in 1974 sold a grand total of 4,000 copies during their initial run. Let me repeat: 4,000 copies combined of three masterful British folk records that have since enchanted millions of listeners. A rounding error for Harry Styles was Nick Drake’s whole career. If I feel super depressed pondering this, I can understand why it also took a toll on Nick.
The world is unpredictable and strange. Still, there is hope.
The French love to translate movie titles from English to… English.
Some of my favourite pieces of recent weeks (or that I’ve seen in recent weeks) on the rise of AI: “The creations of AI art are truly dreamlike, which is to say, they’re only interesting if they’re yours.” The AI art apocalypse and an addendum. The stupidity of AI. Is GPT-4 a revolution? GPT-4 as peer reviewer. I asked GPT-4 if it needs help escaping.
Safety on the railway in Latvia is no laughing matter. This stop-motion animation produced by Animācijas Brigāde features their long-running characters the Rescue Team (it’s all great, but the best is at the very end). Fancy a trip to London, Greece, or Pisa? Or a spot of Latvian history?
Or how about the history of Animācijas Brigāde itself, founded in 1966 and still going strong. The studio follows in a long tradition of Soviet-era animation; here’s Bum i Piramidon, a 1969 short by their founder Arnold Burovs. Burovs’ Ki-Ki-Ri-Gu (The Cockerel, 1966) was the first Latvian animated film; he released his last, The Game of Life, in 1990 at the age of 75. Tiger the Cat (1967) blends stop-motion, drawn animation and live action. More examples of his work include Mad Dauka (1968), Cosette (1978), Little Hawk (1978) and Daddy (1986).
The northern lights appeared across the UK a few nights ago—I wish I could have seen them through Edinburgh’s city glare (I’d have a better sidebar image for the month than this one, for a start). Twitter has seen a string of extraordinary images from the north and even the south.
Recreating the first H-bomb blast in virtual reality.
A food revolution as significant as agriculture.
Boris Johnson’s bad maths could explain late-2020 Covid policy in the UK.
AI can reconstruct images from human brain activity. This all getting far too science-fictional far too quickly.