Cromwell at Dunbar 1886 Andrew Carrick Gow 1848-1920 Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1886 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N01588 (c/o Wikimedia Commons)
Most students of American history are familiar with the standard narrative of New England’s early settlers: the Mayflower, the Puritans, and the quest for religious freedom. But there is a darker, hidden foundation stone buried beneath the soil of early Massachusetts. It is a story born of cold rain, political betrayal, and a brutal military disaster that history has largely allowed to slip through its cracks.
It began on the stormy morning of September 3, 1650, in a muddy marshland just outside the Scottish town of Dunbar…
Artist’s impression. Probably doesn’t have that many track lights behind it.
Just 300 miles or so across, this mini Pluto is thought to be the solar system’s smallest object yet with a clearly detected global atmosphere bound by gravity, said lead researcher Ko Arimatsu of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
The planetoid, called “(612533) 2002 XV93” (good luck remembering that one), was discovered and tracked by three separate observatories in Japan in 2024.
So why is it being only announced now?
Because scientists are cautious folk. They still want other observers to document this in other countries, to increase the validity of their finding.
The fact that the planetoid has an atmosphere (ridiculously thin, something like five to ten million times thinner than that of the Earth’s) came as a surprise.
Rocky objects traveling through space are known as meteoroids, but when they enter Earth’s atmosphere and create fireballs, they are called meteors. Any fragments that fall to Earth’s surface are meteorites.
“WE will decide the fate of our Country – NOT some out-of-control, Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about,” Trump wrote.
Hmm. OK, what did this “Radical Left AI company” want?
US defense officials have pushed for unfettered access to Claude’s capabilities that they say can help protect the country, while Anthropic has resisted allowing its product to be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons systems that can kill people without human input.
To find out that the outsourced company in charge couldn’t even be bothered to test the product. They just happily pocketed $72 million of taxpayer dollars and laughed all the way to the bank.
Post a comment on Reddit, answer coding questions on Stack Overflow, edit a Wikipedia entry or share a baby photo on your public Facebook or Instagram feed and you are also helping to trainthe next generation of artificial intelligence.
I saw a baseball game last September. That was live. Does that count?
Oh. Do you mean “live” in the Japanese sense, i.e., a live performance by a musical artist?
As in a live concert?
At a club?
Or just that the musicians were alive and actually wrote their own music and played their own instruments rather than danced around and lip-synced?
Yes. I am a snarky Gen-Xer. Wave the flannel.
(FWIW I think the last live musical performance I’ve seen was in a Japanese club in Osaka around 2000 or 2001, and before that in mid-1999 in a club somewhere in Boston. It’s hard to get out when you have a family and need to actually go to work in the morning.)
The story of the last 20 years of pop culture is, in many ways, the Victory Of The Nerd: Comic book films, gaming adaptations, the general adoption of deeply nerdy genre trappings like time loop stories, superheroes, and more, all making billions of dollars at the box office as geek obsessions infiltrate the body mainstream.
“It should be able to make a smarter AGI, then an even smarter AGI, then an intelligence explosion,” he added, presumably referring to the singularity.
Astronomers have discovered what may be the brightest object in the universe, a quasar with a black hole at its heart growing so fast that it swallows the equivalent of a sun a day.
M Thomas Apple Author Page 