Wednesday, April 03, 2024

Taiwan Quake - Universal brain-computer interface lets people play games with just their thoughts.

Taiwan earthquake: what is known and what happens next Asia Times


Taiwan Quake Puts World’s Most Advanced Chips at Risk MSN


No Earthly Cross Is Borne In Vain, For The Darkness Of Good Friday Is No Match For The Radiance Of Easter Sunday


Amazing revelations. But as Hunter S Thompson once observed, ‘the TV business is often perceived as a cruel and shallow trench through the heart of the journalism industry’

Federal Court publishes affidavit detailing Seven Network payments to Bruce Lehrmann, including for sex, drugs


WELL, GOOD:  Pilot study shows ketogenic diet improves severe mental illness


The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’


 Universal brain-computer interface lets people play games with just their thoughts.


As an editor, Toni Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters – long, generous, critical, and freshly unearthed from the Archive 


Cities have become frictionless, optimized sites of consumerism and productivity. In other words, they have lost their  humanity  


Journalist Toolbox – AI. Highlights dozens of sources, applications, tools and services, as well as fact check training. Includes DeepFakes, Images and Multimedia Verification, AI search engines, Verification Handbook: How to Think About Deepfakes and Emerging Manipulation Technologies..


What I’ve been reading

Christopher Phillips, Battle Ground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East.  A good, “simple enough” introduction to the wars going on in Syria, Yemen, and other parts of the Middle East.  If you are worried you will hate, you can just skip the Palestine chapter.

Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.  About five percent of American women end up having five children or more — what do you learn by talking to them?  (“Which one should I give back?”)  The author herself has eight children.

Beth Linker, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America.  For a long time I’ve been thinking there should be a good book on this topic, and now there is one.  Both fun and interesting.

Maxwell Stearns, Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing our Broken Democracy argues for proportional representation and accompanying reforms.  Putting aside whether this ever can happen, I am never quite sure how this is supposed to work when nuclear weapons use is such a live issue.

Ethan Mollick is the best and most thorough Twitter commentator on LLMs, he now has a forthcoming book Co-Intelligence.

Andrew Leigh, an Australian MP and also economist, has published The Shortest History of Economics, recommended by Claudia Goldin.


 New York Times:”Since leaving office in 2021, former President Donald J. Trump has spent more than $100 million on lawyers and other costs related to fending off various investigations, indictments and his coming criminal trials, according to a New York Times review of federal records. The remarkable sum means that Mr. Trump has averaged more than $90,000 a day in legal-related costs for more than three years — none of it paid for with his own money. 

Instead, the former president has relied almost entirely on donations made in an attempt to fight the results of the 2020 election. Now, those accounts are nearly drained, and Mr. Trump faces a choice: begin to pay his own substantial legal fees or find another way to finance them…”


Harvard Crimson: “The Caselaw Access Project published nearly seven million cases from the Harvard Law School’s collections online on March 8, concluding a nine-year process to digitize the HLS Library’s archive of court cases. The Caselaw Access Project, also known as CAP, aimed “to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online in a consistent format, digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law School Library,” according to the project’s website. The recent release of cases has culminated in “360 years of United States caselaw” accessible to the public, according to the project’s website. This includes all “official, book-published state and federal United States caselaw through 2020,” with the first case dating back to 1658. Jack Cushman, the project’s director, said that the impetus behind the effort was a desire to make caselaw more accessible to the public. In the past, few people beyond lawyers had access to expensive caselaw databases and could view important legal decisions. This project, according to Cushman, sought to level the playing field. Cushman said he believed it was important “for everyone to have access to the law of the land.”


The Crime Data Explorer (CDE) is the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program’sdynamic solution to presenting crime data in a more immediate venue that reflects the constant change in the nation’s crime circumstance. 

The CDE pages provide a view of estimated national and state data, reported agency-level crime statistics, and graphs of specific variables from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). You can also download bulk datasets from a variety of UCR topics. In addition, the Crime Data API(application programming interface) provides a way for developers to access and share large amounts of data in significant ways. 

The Crime Data Explorer is part of the FBI’s broader effort to modernize the reporting of national crime data. It allows you to view trendsdownload bulk data, and access the Crime Data API for reported crime at the national, state, and agency levels…The Crime Data Explorer (CDE) is the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program’sexternal link icon dynamic solution to presenting crime data in a more immediate venue that reflects the constant change in the nation’s crime circumstance.

  • Violent crime is composed of four offenses. homicide (murder and non negligent manslaughter), rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Violent crimes involve force or threat of force…”