Today's Water Cooler 2026-05-14

Birdsong of the Day

Moar mimidae:

PN Montecristo—Jardin de Los 100 años, Santa Ana, El Salvador. I like the insect in the background; it reminds me of Bonham’s drumming in “Ramble On” (the studio version).

In Case You Might Miss…

(1) Zephyr Teachout: ‘If you want democratic governance of AI, block datacenters.’.

(2) The more young people use AI, the more they hate it..

(3) Diseases can spread between apartments via shared ventilation..

Politics

Republican Funhouse

“Pete Hegseth to headline DC faith rally with far-right and Christian nationalist speakers” [Guardian]. “Rededicate 250, billed as the faith-based component of America’s semiquincentennial, features speakers including a Detroit pastor who has called the Democratic platform “demonic” and launched his own memecoin after praying at Trump’s second inauguration; a rabbi who has defended the use of torture and authored an essay titled The Virtue of Hate; and a Christian author and radio host who said in 2020 he would die in the fight to keep Joe Biden out of the White House and was later named in a defamation suit over 2020 election fraud claims.” And the funding: “Rededicate 250 is one of a string of events organised by Freedom 250, a private non-profit launched by the White House in December 2025 as a partner to the bipartisan US semiquincentennial commission Congress established in 2016. Freedom 250 is now under congressional investigation over the redirection of federal funds and the sale of access to Trump.” • Whenever you hear the word “freedom,” check your pocket to see if your wallet is still there.

“White House to host nine-hour prayer festival to spark ‘religious renewal’ ” [Metro]. This, though: “At the beginning of the war with Iran, it was revealed that American soldiers were told that the Iran conflict was ‘God’s plan’ to bring about the end of the world by officials. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation received more than 200 complaints from personnel across all branches of the armed forces. One complainant said their commander kicked off their combat readiness briefing by ‘urging us not to be ‘afraid’ of the looming threat of war.’ They said: ‘He urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.” • How do these people know “God’s divine plan”? Is it written down somewhere?

Democrats en Déshabillé

How To Weigh A Human Head” [(interview) Brian Beutler, Off Message]. The interviewer (not Beutler): “Cassandra: I worry about the Dems “affordability” campaign. At some point we need to start talking about what that is going to look like. While the government can’t control much pricing, how are Dems going to get more money into the pockets of working people? Do you think that a lack of specificity on what fixing affordability is a long-term Achilles heel for Dems?” • “Working people,” “working families”… Democrats cannot say (note the definite article) “the working class,” since that would take precedence, logically, institutionally, and programmatically over the current congeries of identity politics and politcians.

“Younger Democrats challenge blue-state ‘gerontocracy’ ” [Dave Weigel, Semafor]. “At campaign stops in community town halls to backyard fundraiser barbecues, [Rep. Seth Moulton, 47] is dragging the Democratic Party’s quiet family conversation about age into the light of day, arguing to voters that the stakes of the race are bigger than ideology and speak to the future of the party itself.” Let me just sit with that for a moment. More: “Markey isn’t alone. Elderly incumbents across the country who’ve won endorsements from colleagues, labor unions, and progressive organizations are not scaring challengers away. Instead, they’re drawing them – in the form of younger Democrats willing to say the uncomfortable part out loud to voters, whose harsh memories of Joe Biden dooming their 2024 campaign – and of four Democrats dying in their House seats since that election – are still fresh.” And: “Moulton and Bronin are both military veterans in their 40s, like Maine’s Graham Platner, who effectively secured the nomination for U.S. Senate in his state after 78-year-old Gov. Janet Mills dropped out. To the frustration of Democrats who recruited her, Mills could not overcome Democratic angst about her age, even after she pledged to serve only one term. [Moulton is] seeing some of the same angst in [his] partsof New England – a non-ideological worry that their party has too many senior citizens in power, and that they should have retired after Donald Trump’s comeback.” • It’s obviously important to this guy that the midterms be non-ideological. But if the midterms are not ideological, then what’s the point? I mean, would I vote for Sanders over Moulton? In a heartbeat!

Realignment and Legitimacy

“The fight against AI datacenters isn’t just about tech – it’s about democracy” [Astra Taylor and Saul Levin, Guardian]. “In truth, anti-datacenter organizing is the real fight, one centered on an industry choke point that people can reach out and touch. This brewing populist resistance isn’t just about limiting local development – it represents a critical new front in the fight against tech-enabled authoritarianism. Where else can people push back on job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes, and autonomous drone strikes? From rural North Carolina to suburban Virginia to the foothills and farmlands of New Mexico and Oregon, ordinary people are coming together across partisan divides to say no to a status quo that allows tech lobbyists to ram through datacenter deals at a breathtaking clip, often behind a veil of secrecy enforced by NDAs. In deep red Indiana, more than 10 counties have enacted moratoriums or temporary bans on new AI datacenters; the Seminole Nation in Oklahoma recently passed a moratorium for their territory; and across New Jersey, project after project has been cancelled due to local fury about the raw deals on offer.” And: “In the words of the antitrust expert Zephyr Teachout: ‘If you want democratic governance of AI, block datacenters. Google’s not coming to any democratic table, not listening to any rules, without people showing force.’” And the bottom line: “Datacenters provide a physical place and focal point where people can show up and directly confront out-of-control and otherwise impossible-to-reach tech billionaires.” • Yep. It would be nice if the transport unions would join in. After all, the things can’t be built unless the materiel is brought in.

“Trump’s Counterterrorism Strategy Explicitly Targets the Left” [Spencer Ackerman, Zeteo]. “After elevating ‘violent left-wing extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists; to a central focus of U.S. counterterrorism, the strategy document, released last week, declared: “The mission of the counterterrorism structures of the U.S. Government is to identify those groups that have the intent and capability to plot attacks against Americans and then neutralize them.’” So what does “neutralize” mean, operationally? More: “Whether consciously or not, that mission statement is ominously similar to perhaps the most prominent of all COINTELPRO memos. In March 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the bureau’s approach to Black-liberationist leaders and organizations, whether Martin Luther King Jr. or the Black Panthers. “Through counterintelligence, it should be possible to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence,” Hoover wrote. Hoover’s classified memo was stolen from a Philadelphia-area FBI office and reported on by Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger in 1971. A congressional investigation known as the Church Committee later validated it and exposed additional aspects of COINTELPRO, along with other repressive domestic and foreign intelligence activities.” • Woo hoo!

“The Sound of Populism: Distinct Linguistic Features Across Populist Variants” [Nature]. “This study explores the sound of populism by integrating classic Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) features, which capture the emotional and stylistic tones of language, with a fine-tuned RoBERTa model, a state-of-the-art context-aware language model trained to detect nuanced expressions of populism. This approach allows us to uncover the auditory dimensions of political rhetoric in U.S. presidential inaugural and State of the Union addresses. We examine how four key populist dimensions (i.e., left-wing, right-wing, anti-elitism, and people-centrism) manifest in the linguistic markers of speech, drawing attention to both commonalities and distinct tonal shifts across these variants. Our findings reveal that populist rhetoric consistently features a direct, assertive “sound” that forges a connection with “the people” and constructs a charismatic leadership persona. However, this sound is not simply informal but strategically calibrated. Notably, right-wing populism and people-centrism exhibit a more emotionally charged discourse, resonating with themes of identity, grievance, and crisis, in contrast to the relatively restrained emotional tones of left-wing and anti-elitist expressions.” • Hmm.

Geopolitics

Moar LEGO:

Pandemics

Stay safe out there!

It’s Airborne

Not just SARS-CoV-2, but also ANDV:

I need to add cruise ship bathrooms to the list of places that should have Auto UV installed in bathrooms

Hospitals
Airplanes
Cruise Ships https://t.co/eg2fyfnY1D pic.twitter.com/l4i6Lu9ZTl

— Barry Hunt (@BarryHunt008) May 13, 2026

“Diseases can spread between apartments via shared ventilation, study shows” [University of Colorado Boulder]. “Airborne diseases like measles, influenza and COVID-19 can easily spread between units in multi-family buildings via a type of bathroom ventilation system commonly used around the world, new research suggests. The study, conducted inside an older high-rise in Spain early in the coronavirus pandemic, adds to a growing body of evidence that airborne viruses can spread between separated indoor spaces, transmitting disease without face-to-face contact. ‘We tend to think that if we shut the door in our apartment, we are safe and can’t get infected. But our study shows that, depending on the ventilation system in place, that may not be the case,’ said senior author Shelly Miller, professor emerita in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder.” • Worth reading in full. I’m surprised that our old friend, Prof. Jose-Luis Jimenez, also from University of Colorado Boulder, isn’t quoted, but he’s still in there punching:

3) I spent a couple of years of my life trying to make progress on this issue. This is how me and many colleagues felt during the pandemic.

Frustrating that @WHO is still very confusedhttps://t.co/1td1bIdbW5

— Prof. Jose-Luis Jimenez (@jljcolorado) May 13, 2026

Maskstravaganza

The crew of the MV Hondius. Caption: “Crew members on the MV Hondius wait their turns for interviews with epidemiologists”:

Do they know something we don’t?

Pharmaceutical Interventions

“COVID Antiviral Can Prevent Household Contacts From Catching Virus.”

A randomised trial found the antiviral Ensitrelvir cut household COVID infections by more than half. Only 2.9% developed COVID within 10 days vs 9% in the placebo group.

Source: https://t.co/2s3Y7FJ3lK pic.twitter.com/WqVGnbr9g7

— Denis - The COVID info guy - (@BigBadDenis) May 13, 2026

Vaccines

“I made my husband ill with a few words – nobody is immune to the power of the nocebo effect” [Helen Pilcher, Guardian]. “For the past few years, I’ve been writing a book, This Book May Cause Side Effects, about how our thoughts influence ill health. You may have heard of the placebo effect, when positive expectations lead to positive health outcomes. But my interest is in its evil twin. The nocebo effect occurs when dismal expectations lead to negative health outcomes. The phenomenon can create, exacerbate and prolong symptoms. When these symptoms coalesce, people become ill – not from disease, but from the intimate relationship that exists between mind and body.” Module this lady experimenting on her husband without his informed consent, I’m with her so far. More: “You don’t just have to take my word for it. There is a plethora of peer-reviewed studies confirming this idea. In one, patients fresh from minor keyhole surgery received a harmless saline infusion that they were told would temporarily increase their pain. It did just that. In another, 40 asthmatic adults breathed in water vapour from an inhaler they were told contained an irritant. Nineteen went on to feel wheezy. Twelve had a full-blown asthma attack. These are artificial situations, but the nocebo effect is out there in the real world too. Whenever we have negative expectations about health, they can generate a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you’ve felt lousy after having the Covid-19 vaccine, there’s a good chance your symptoms weren’t caused by the vaccine. Combining data from 12 separate clinical trials involving more than 45,000 participants, scientists found that large numbers of people who got placebo shots had adverse side-effects, leading them to conclude that the nocebo effect accounted for a whopping 76% of all common adverse reactions to the jab.

Long Covid

“Endothelial dysfunction and metabolic biomarkers in post-COVID-19 syndrome” [Nature]. From the Abstract: “Here, we aimed to identify biomarkers associated with [post-COVID-19 syndrome (PCS)], and disease severity…. Alterations in markers of endothelial dysfunction and NO-metabolism are detectable at a median of 37.4 weeks after SARS-CoV-2 infection independent of PCS-related fatigue severity.” And from the Discussion: “In summary, our findings show that changes in biomarkers indicative of ED, including alterations in arginine and taurine-related nitric oxide (NO) metabolism, persist at a median of 37.4 weeks following SARS-CoV-2 infection. Additionally, our findings revealed that fatigue-related PCS severity is associated with persistent specific fatty acid elevations, suggesting their potential utility as biomarkers for establishing a diagnosis, assessing disease severity, and monitoring PCS.” • Remember when NIH spent a billion dollars on a survey about PASC (not clear on the overlap between PCS and PASC), and didn’t spend a dime looking for biomarkers? Good times.

Policy

“Hantavirus Isn’t Just a Threat. It’s a Test.” [David Wallace-Wells, New York Times]. “If we’re lucky, it will be a while before a new pandemic arises to rival the death and disruption of Covid. But the hantavirus outbreak that began several weeks ago on a cruise ship traveling the Atlantic Ocean shows, I think, we are terribly unprepared for even a lesser public health threat.” But: “Over the past week, as the world began worrying over hantavirus news, officials from the W.H.O., the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and other organizations spoke almost in unison to caution against public panic.” As always. And: “he most pressing question for health leaders isn’t how worried we should be, in part because the threat remains effectively zero for anyone who hasn’t come into close contact [ugh] with those on board. The question is how seriously health officials are taking the disease, since they are the ones in a position to keep the outbreak small and contained.” And: “But it’s not just ideologically driven Americans who seem focused on downplaying risks, even at the cost of enabling further spread. In their presentations over the past week, world health leaders characterized the disease in such incomplete terms that the International Hantavirus Society was compelled to publish a corrective, challenging prevailing guidance about transmission before symptom onset, the long incubation period and the required proximity to pass the disease from one person to another.” • I wonder who’s going to hand Tedros a note this time? Or maybe the lesson WHO learned was to do that sort of thing in private.

If we’re lucky….

“The hantavirus is a wake-up call. Will the Trump administration answer it?” [Craig Spencer, STAT]. “But [the Hantavirus] episode has already shown us where our ability to respond to emerging threats is strong — and where it is lacking. Let me start with what worked, because it is the part of the story most Americans do not know. The National Quarantine Unit in Nebraska now holding our returning passengers is partnered with a Level 1 Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Center — a RESPTC — the highest tier of a national network built specifically for moments like this…. That network has survived three administrations and shifting political winds. It is a rare American success story in public health: something that we built when we were scared and sustained when we weren’t, and that is functioning right now exactly as it was designed to.” But: “Despite these bright spots, this outbreak has clearly revealed the impact of outright dismantling much of our preparedness infrastructure in the U.S. over the past year. Normally, the U.S. would be two steps ahead on an outbreak like this. Instead, it feels as though we’re two weeks behind. Start with surveillance: U.S. Agency for International Development programs and its personnel — which supported much of the infrastructure underwriting America’s investment in detecting disease threats before they reach our shores — have all been gutted or defunded…. Research has taken a similar hit….. And last year, NIH cut a grant supporting one of the few American labs studying Andes hantavirus. That cut probably wouldn’t have changed this outbreak’s trajectory, but the symbolism is hard to miss.” And: “And in the most telling detail: CDC staff now require approval to work with the WHO, requiring a slow and bureaucratic process. [acting CDC director, Jay Bhattacharya] said in a CBS News interview that no approval is necessary, but on-the-ground employees disagree.” • Bhattacharya lied? Surely not.

Business

AI: “The more young people use AI, the more they hate it” [The Verge]. “But contrary to the tales spun by tech companies like OpenAI and Google, polling data shows that Gen Z students and workers are a big part of the wider cultural backlash against AI. And even as they utilize these tools, vast swaths of young people are deeply acrimonious and even resentful of the AI-centric future that many feel is being forced on them. ‘The part that feels scariest to me is the human impact … their ability to have relationships or just basic communication.’ Far from the stereotype of lazy young people looking for shortcuts, Gen Zers have had some of the loudest and most detailed objections to generative AI use. Their attitudes also reflect a much wider backlash against AI and the tech industry in general, which has recently resulted in a nonpartisan movement against data centers across the country and threatened both CEOs and politicians supportive of Silicon Valley’s AI frenzy.” • Modulo the assumption that generations have agency (they don’t), if the “backlash” remains “cultural” capital will weather the storm, as it always does. Now, if — let’s not say “resistance,” mkay? — conflict breaks out in the workplace, that’s another matter entirely.

AI: Internet of Shit: AI Poop Analysis App Offered to Sell Me Database of Its Users’ Poops” [404 Media]. “The post, made by a user called Ill_Car_7351, was advertising exactly what it sounds like: A database of poop images, collected from an AI poop analyzing app that he had launched several years ago. Basically, 25,000 people had been taking images of their poop and uploading them to his app. He’d been collecting, analyzing, and annotating these images and now wanted to sell access to them….. I messaged the poster and told him I was interested in obtaining the database. Thus began my journey into the Internet of Shit and, by extension, the unpleasant world of the underground sale of highly sensitive, app-collected user data for AI training.” • Fortunately, AI make it really easy to create apps, generally with low to no security!

AI: “This Reggae Band Is in a Nightmare Battle Against AI Slop Remixes” [Wired]. “The California-based reggae band Stick Figure has been around for 20 years, eight albums, and countless hours on the road, but lead vocalist and guitarist Scott Woodruff has never seen a track take off like “Angels Above Me” did this past week. The six-year-old song hit number one on the iTunes sales charts in six different countries, including the United Kingdom, Austria, and Canada, skyrocketing “out of nowhere,” according to Woodruff. Stick Figure has had plenty of thrilling milestones before, with albums repeatedly hitting number one in the reggae category, and hit singles amassing hundreds of millions of streams. But the speed at which this track went from a years-old sleeper to a smash was new. People were posting TikToks about it, gushing with enthusiasm. ‘It was exciting,’ Woodruff says. ‘But then once I found it was because of some version that was basically stolen and generated in one click, I mean, it’s saddening.’ Stick Figure is grappling with a thoroughly modern music business conundrum: It has a hit tune—but most of the plays and attention are on unauthorized, robotic remixes that the band and its team suspect have been spun up with the help of artificial intelligence tools. One remix amassed over 1.8 million plays on YouTube in five days. ‘Right now, four different versions are going viral,’ says Woodruff. He’s getting royalties for none of them. The band’s label has been fighting to remove these tracks, with varying degrees of success.” • Theft at scale.

AI: “How tarot readers are using AI – and what it says about our growing reliance on chatbots for emotional support and advice” [The Conversation]. ” For many, AI has become a modern oracle – a source of guidance, emotional support or clarity in moments of uncertainty – though critics worry that they could lead to emotional dependence on the technology.” And: “Now, we’re seeing these two forces – AI and occult practices – meeting in strange and fascinating ways. An increasing number of tarot readers, from novices to seasoned practitioners, have been turning to AI to help make sense of their tarot readings. What makes this pairing so striking is that interpretation is the whole point of tarot. And yet AI often brings little knowledge of your history or your unique situation when it dispenses advice.” For example: “Say someone drew the Fool and the Ten of Wands for a question about a career change. The Fool points toward a leap into the unknown, while the Ten of Wands speaks to burnout and an unsustainable load. But do the cards say, ‘Leave, you’re exhausted and something better awaits’? Or ‘Leave, and the new job will be just as demanding’? Rather than sit with that ambiguity, some readers simply ask the AI for the meaning of the reading.” And: “These uses of AI are seductive. They make the act of self-reflection less demanding. But within the broader tarot community, we found a lot of criticism of AI, and there were concerns about how the sycophantic nature of the technology could undermine people’s intuition and reasoning.” And: “Some interviewees even treated bizarre AI-generated outputs or hallucinations as meaningful precisely because they were random and unintended, the same way that a card drawn at random feels like it carries a secret message.” The bottom line: “AI is becoming a powerful new oracle in its own right.” • Oh good.

AI: “Researchers say AI chatbots may blur the line between reality and delusion” [Science Daily]. “A new study suggests AI chatbots may do more than spread misinformation — they can actively strengthen a user’s false beliefs. Because conversational AI often validates and builds on what users say, it can make distorted memories, conspiracy theories, or delusions feel more believable and emotionally real. Researchers warn that AI companions may be especially risky for isolated or vulnerable people seeking reassurance and connection.” • Which for some reason our society seems to be producing more and more of.

AI: “Anthropic Says Claude Turned Evil for a Bizarre Reason” [Futurism]. “In a classic example of the AI industry’s reputational alchemy, Anthropic has often transformed bad behavior by its flagship model Claude into fresh hype. When it revealed its Mythos Preview model last month, for example, the company declared that the system had “reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.” And last year, it conceded that during the testing of its Claude Opus 4 model, the AI ended up blackmailing a human user upon being threatened with shutdown. The maneuver was obvious to anyone who’s been watching OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s antics at Anthropic’s chief rival: the more threatening a problem the AI industry can cook up, the more imminently it can sell its own solutions.” Sh*t in the well, sell people sh*t remover. More: “Now, for some reason, Anthropic is relitigating the blackmail incident. Specifically, it’s placing the blame for Claude’s evil behavior on an intriguing villain: the internet at large. Or, to put it another way, it says that humanity — all our journalism and speculation and fiction and social media posts about AI that goes bad — went into Claude’s training data and led the bot astray.” • “We only meant to steal the good data!”

Tech: “The Bug That Fixed Itself When the Engineer Went Home” [Silicon Opera]. “In 2019, a mid-sized software consultancy in Amsterdam was six weeks into a rewrite of a client’s data pipeline… he senior engineer assigned to it, a developer I’ll call Lars, had spent the better part of two weeks staring at the code. He’d added logging. He’d added more logging. He’d drawn sequence diagrams on the whiteboard until the markers ran dry. Nothing clicked. On a Friday afternoon, his team lead told him to go home early. The client demo was on Monday. Spending the weekend at his desk would accomplish nothing except making him less sharp for the demo itself. Lars reluctantly closed his laptop and left. Saturday morning, while making coffee, he understood exactly what was wrong. Not a hunch. The full picture. He could see the precise moment two worker threads were both reading a stale lock state from a cache layer that wasn’t invalidating on write. He wrote it down on his phone before the kettle finished boiling. By Sunday afternoon, the fix was in review.” But: “The phenomenon Lars experienced has a name in cognitive science: incubation. It’s the stage between active, effortful problem-solving and the moment of insight, and it is not passive. Your brain keeps working on the problem after you stop consciously engaging with it. Neuroscience research on default mode network activity (the brain’s baseline state when you’re not focused on a task) suggests this isn’t mystical. When you step away from a problem, you stop suppressing the associative, wandering cognition that conscious focus actively inhibits. You start making connections across distant memory regions. The shower, the commute, the walk that ‘wastes’ time is often when your brain finally gets to run the search query without your prefrontal cortex interrupting it every thirty seconds with a more obvious but wrong answer.” • Yes, but what about the quarterly results.

Economics: “The Week Observed: May 8, 2026” [CIty Observatory]. “Two bad years for two big firms. Some business groups would like to claim that a recent drop in Portland employment can be blamed on a “bad busienss climate.” The real explanation is closer to home. Two of the area’s leading employers, INtel and Nike, have both had their two worst years in more than two decades. Their job losses—due to idiosyncratic business problems, not local public policies, explain most or all of Portland’s perceived economic weakness. It is a statistical fact, according to the Oregon Department of Employment, metro Portland ended 2025 with about 8,800 fewer jobs than it started. Business groups want to blame public policies for recent job declines, but a much bigger factor is competitive failures by Nike and Intel. Both companies announced layoffs: Nike 740 layoffs and Intel 4,500. Together, these announced layoffs equal a majority of Portland’s 8,800 job losses in 2025. What’s more, when big firms like Nike and Intel lay off people, economists expect those to cause additional layoffs in the broader economy–enough to have accounted for more than the net decline in employment in Portland in 2025. The claimed multipliers in Nike- and Intel-commissioned “Economic Impact Statements” imply the two firms’ layoffs should have cost the local economy more than 20,000 jobs. The region has lost barely a third of that many jobs. In other words, while struggles at Nike and Intel created challenges for the area’s job picture, job growth at other area enterprises offset much, if not all, of the economic fallout from Nike and Intel’s layoffs.” But: “There’s an old saying: a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The region’s businesses are trying to turn the miscalculation and business missteps by Intel and Nike into a cudgel, shifting the blame away from the firms’ responsibility for region’s job losses, to fashion a tool to extract policy concessions from the public including a reduction of business taxes.” • Because of course they are.

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 64 Greed (previous close: 65 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 66 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). • Somebody tap the meter! It’s stuck!

Rapture Index: Closes down one on Oil Supply/Price. “Despite all the fighting in the Middle East, oil prices have declined” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 182. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • I’d never checked the FAQ for this site. It’s everything I expected, and more.

The Gallery

“Blue: the color that didn’t exist until someone invented a word for it” [Language Log]:

And so but:

The Conservatory

For other Led Zeppelin fans:

Groves of Academe

“Penn has an AI problem” [The Daily Pennsylvanian]. Student newspaper: “While it may seem convenient to plug a problem set or 40-page reading into ChatGPT, the drawbacks of AI usage are widely documented and increasingly detrimental. Students develop an overreliance on AI, social interaction and communication are reduced, AI programs produce and reinforce biased and false information without any accountability, and critical thinking is inhibited. As Penn students, our purpose is to take advantage of our education, not give it away to an AI model while we sit by passively.” And: “Penn’s lack of transparency on its AI policy combined with the University’s ever-increasing dedication to AI innovation teaches students an unexpected lesson: AI is no longer a tool with potential benefits, but a prerequisite for living. While elite institutions like Penn would never explicitly endorse the use of generative AI in schoolwork, they seem to welcome the technology in almost every other form and setting. Through its countless new programs and AI-centered events, Penn has positioned AI as an inescapable future that we all must accept in order to achieve success.” And: “The irony is that as Penn pours endless money and energy into AI advancement in its attempt to get ahead, the University is only quickening its own demise. AI cannot coexist with education — it can only degrade it. As technology advances and workers are replaced by machines, schools are some of the only places we have left to explore and wrestle with human thought. With our own university leading the charge, AI is now corrupting those few sacred spaces and leaving us with nowhere to engage in true scholarship.” • Weirdly, I search for administration/administrators, and don’t find anything.

Public Health

“Alcohol is wreaking havoc on U.S. public health. American society looks the other way” [STAT News]. “It is a drug that kills nearly 500 Americans every day, and causes more deaths in a typical year than every infectious disease combined. It is manufactured abroad and domestically, then sold by powerful multinational organizations with a vast network of distributors. Its promoters can appear indifferent to its addictive and ruinous properties. For decades — for centuries, really — it has destroyed lives, torn apart families, stunted the economy, and caused millions of deaths. Yet alcohol, by far the most popular and most harmful mind-altering substance in the U.S., is not seen as a public health emergency. Alcohol is central to American life because of its social and cultural benefits to the many people who drink without issue. But alcohol’s ubiquity persists in the face of mountains of research linking heavy drinking to cancer, heart disease, stroke, cognitive decline, developmental disorders, gun violence, injuries, and countless other consequences.” • I conceptualize such things as tranches of lethality, and the United States is very, very good at laying them down, Oxycontin, obesity, “deaths of despair” — all tranches of lethality. And very profitable for some!

Climate

“Something weird and worrying is happening with rain, study finds” [USA Today]. “New research shows that although the world is seeing more rain overall, it’s also getting drier at the same time. How can that be? In simple terms, the world’s rainfall is increasingly packed into bigger storms with longer dry spells in between. And a lot of rain all at once causes problems for overwhelmed soil. The findings say the study is the first to demonstrate that a year’s worth of rainfall packed into bigger and wetter storms means less water for aquifers and ecosystems, even if total precipitation increases. Because soil can absorb only so much water at once, what is not soaked up collects on the surface where it’s more readily evaporated.” • Sheet mulch.

Zeitgeist Watch

“How Occultists Remade the World” [Compact]. “his March, Pope Leo hosted a private meeting for several priests from the International Association of Exorcists. Their goal was to lobby the Roman Pontiff into increasing the number of trained exorcists available to every Catholic diocese. The world, they said, was witnessing an unprecedented rise in ‘occultism, esotericism, and Satanism.’ The current exorcists on hand were insufficient to respond to the increasing number of ‘people seriously disturbed by the extraordinary action of the devil as a result of frequenting occult sects.’ Two years prior, Pope Francis had publicly warned that ‘our secularized world is teeming with magicians, occultism, spiritism, astrologers and satanic sects.’ The supernatural, it would appear, is on the move, and popes and priests aren’t the only ones who have noticed.” • Next up, AI exorcists.

Class Warfare

“Epstein Advised U.S. Treasury on Crypto During Obama’s Iran Sanctions Push” [DropSite News]. “We’re documenting Epstein’s financial operations and security dealings that implicate governments around the world…. The U.S. hesitance around cryptocurrency is evident in the emails of Jeffrey Epstein—a figure who was keenly interested in developing cryptocurrency and consulted on it with the U.S. Treasury Department. Epstein’s interventions came at a time when the U.S. was pursuing a détente with Iran over its nuclear program, and the growth and development of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were beginning to reshape the global financial landscape. Epstein was more than familiar with the issue of Iranian sanctions since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and had extensive experience and interest in clandestine movements of capital. In the early 1980s, Epstein shared a penthouse office with Stan Pottinger, a lawyer who was moving embargoed arms through shell companies to fuel the war between Iran and Iraq. Epstein also worked at one point for Saudi financier Adnan Khashoggi, who used poorly regulated financial institutions, like the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, to launder money from covert arms sales, in what became known as the ‘Iran-Contra’ affair. According to Epstein’s notes from the meeting, officials from the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes wanted the financier’s insight into how cryptocurrencies could be used for arms shipments and nuclear proliferation payments.”• It’s critical to place Epstein in an elite (class) context, and not within the party binary.

“Conspiracy theorists are building AI interfaces to the Epstein files – and presenting their views as data analysis” [The Conversation]. “The Department of Justice has released more than 3 million publicly available documents related to the shadowy sex-trafficking networks surrounding Epstein. Journalists and researchers are working to make sense of the massive trove of data, but it is going slowly, and the interface built by the Department of Justice to the documents is unwieldy. In response, some Americans have taken it upon themselves to dive into the archive. They are using artificial intelligence to develop platforms to make navigating the Epstein files easier and to conjure up new assessments of all the information. As a scholar of online conspiratorial activity, I’m seeing that these tools are also helping conspiracy theorists craft their narratives. Because the Epstein files are a massive, unstructured dataset made up of PDF files, videos, photographs and other materials, these platforms make it easier for people to see connections where none exist.”

“Top of Whose Class?” [The Math Of Politics (KF)]. The paradox: “Suppose you want to be a successful film actor. You can be unusually talented, or you can be unusually good-looking. Either path will do, both is nice but unnecessary, and the world produces children who are mostly neither. In the general population, the two traits — talent and looks — are uncorrelated. Now sample only the successful actors. You will find — and Joseph Berkson noticed this in 1946 — that talent and looks are negatively correlated within your sample. The successful actors who aren’t especially good-looking had to be unusually talented to make it; the ones who aren’t especially talented had to be unusually photogenic. The negative correlation is an artifact of the selection rule. It tells you nothing about the underlying joint distribution of talent and beauty. It tells you only that you conditioned on something.’ This is Berkson’s paradox. It is the most reliable engine of spurious findings in observational research…. ” And: “The unconditional question is not “among adult elites, who was an elite kid?” The unconditional question is “among elite kids, what fraction become adult elites?” That second number is roughly forty times larger than the base rate in the general population.” • I ought to be able to say something clever of Bourdieu’s Classification Struggles, but I am in a hurry….

News of the Wired

“A New Type of Neuroplasticity Rewires the Brain After a Single Experience” [Quanta Magazine]. Couldn’t include in the brain findings for today’s Words of the Day. “The brain is “incredibly plastic, and it stays that way throughout the lifespan of a human,” said Christine Grienberger, a neuroscientist at Brandeis University. This plasticity, the quality of being easily reshaped, makes the brain really good at learning — a quintessential process that allows us to remember the plotline of a novel, navigate a new city, pick up a new language, and avoid touching a hot stove. But neuroscientists are still uncovering fundamental rules that describe how neuroplasticity reshapes brain connections. Recently, neuroscientists described a new form of neuroplasticity that might be helping the brain learn across a timescale of several seconds — long enough to capture the behavioral process of learning from a single experience. In two recent reviews, published in The Journal of Neuroscience and Nature Neuroscience, they describe ‘behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity,’ or BTSP. This type of learning in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory hub, is caused by an electrical change that affects multiple neurons at once and unfolds across several seconds. Researchers suspect that it may help the brain learn in a single attempt.” And: “If you imagine even the simplest of the behavioral learning — for example, learning to stop at a red light signal, or to even explore and figure out what are the main parts in a particular room — it will take you at least a few seconds,’ said Anant Jain, a neurophysiologist at the Center for High Impact Neuroscience and Translational Applications in India. BTSP explains how the brain can encode behaviors in a single burst of brain activity that unfolds across several seconds.” • Not like a lightning strike, then.

Plant of the Day

Via MO:

MO writes: “I am attaching that ponytail or elephants foot palm.” • The contradiction between the geometric lawns (b-a-a-d lawns) and the curvacious palms is interesting.

Dear readers, I [am (!!)] still just a bit short on Plantidotes! Thanks to the readers who more Plantidotes in! (It’s helpful to have one Plantidote for each email. I track the Plantidotes I have run by whether I have opened the mail or not, and when there are several Plantidotes in one mail and I use one, I have to remember to mark the mail unread so that I remember to return to the mail for the rest. And if I’m in a rush, that’s a source of error. Thank you!

Send your plantidotes as attachments to lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [AT] protonmail [DOT] com. And if you put “Plant” or “Plantidote” in the subject line, I’ll be less likely to lose it. Gardening season approaches, at least in the Northeast. Prep work is fine!