Why is time going so fast and how do I slow it down?
CAN I GET INJECTIONS? Boosting One Mitochondrial Protein Increases Lifespan And Slows Aging in Mice.
“It’s a real nightmare”— Spiders are becoming “more angry and aggressive” due to global warming EcoPortal
Elias Canetti saw death as a cosmic offense, an intolerable humiliation. As he reframed Descartes, “I hate death, therefore I am”... more »
Here's a great resource if you want to start sprouting!
A quite good essay on how to find books to read. And “if I quit social media, will I read more books?” (New Yorker)
Exploring the lush gardens of Sydney’s trophy homes
From Mollymook to [Matraville] to Manly, why the NSW’s prestige property owners flock to hire landscape studio Dangar Barin Smith
Origins and persistence of the Mafia in the United States
This paper provides evidence of the institutional continuity between the “old world” Sicilian mafia and the mafia in America. We examine the migration to the United States of mafiosi expelled from Sicily in the 1920s following Fascist repression lead by Cesare Mori, the so-called “Iron Prefect”. Using historical US administrative records and FBI reports from decades later, we provide evidence that expelled mafiosi settled in pre-existing Sicilian immigrant enclaves, contributing to the rise of the American La Cosa Nostra (LCN). Our analysis reveals that a significant share of future mafia leaders in the US originated from neighborhoods that had hosted immigrant communities originating in the 32 Sicilian municipalities targeted by anti-mafia Fascist raids decades earlier. Future mafia activity is also disproportionately concentrated in these same neighborhoods. We then explore the socio-economic impact of organized crime on these communities. In the short term, we observe increased violence in adjacent neighborhoods, heightened incarceration rates, and redlining practices that restricted access to the formal financial sector. However, in the long run, these same neighborhoods exhibited higher levels of education, employment, and social mobility, challenging prevailing narratives about the purely detrimental effects of organized crime. Our findings contribute to debates on the persistence of criminal organizations and their broader economic and social consequences.
That is a new paper in the works by Zachary Porreca, Paolo Pinotti, and Masismo Anelli, here is the abstract online.
Library of Time
Library of Time – “The mission of this websiteis to create a collection of every calendar with a verifiable date at a specific point in time, as well as to display other methods of timekeeping.
It is to be a celebration of time as counted by humans from all walks of life, displaying all of the unique ways different people chose to satisfy one of humanity’s earliest and most universal curiosities. This website, comprised of calendar information and a calculator to display the date in multiple calendars, is not a new idea.
Many have built similar tools in the past, albeit at a much smaller scale, typically consisting of only 3 or 4 calendars. But much like how the Rosetta Stone allowed linguists to decode ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs by having the same passage written in Ancient Greek, Demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphs (of which we had already known the Greek and some of the Demotic), these earlier websites have allowed me to calibrate unknown calendars to known ones.
Thus, I have dubbed these phenomena Temporal Rosetta Stones, as well as referring to the discovery and study of them as Digital Archaeology. Temporal Rosetta Stones all seem to have come from a similar time in the history of the internet, when one-off websites were made for specific purposes rather than the general-purpose websites that we have today. These sites, built with simple HTML sporting plain text on colored backgrounds, genuinely feel ancient.
And when the time comes that their maintainers cancel the project, forget to renew the domain, or pass away, then my fear is that much of their work will be lost. Some of these Temporal Rosetta Stones are primary sources, displaying information that cannot be found anywhere else, whether it’s because their creator had studied something legitimately niche or because they are documenting calendars that they themselves had created…
Regarding the Library of Time, this website may never be finished, simply due to the fact that there are just too many calendars, cycles, and exceptions to be documented in my lifetime. For that reason, I constrained this website to being written in simple HTML and JavaScript, without a backend, so that it can be downloaded as a single file and run by anyone…”
Librarians Aren’t Hiding Secret Books From You That Only AI Knows About
Scientific American: “Never heard of the Journal of International Relief or the International Humanitarian Digital Repository?
That’s because they don’t exist. But that’s not stopping some of the world’s most popular artificial intelligence models from sending users looking for records such as these, according to a new International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) statement.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot and other models are befuddling students, researchers and archivists by generating “incorrect or fabricated archival references,” according to the ICRC, which runs some of the world’s most used research archives. (Scientific American has asked the owners of those AI models to comment.)
AI models not only point some users to false sources but also cause problems for researchers and librarians, who end up wasting their time looking for requested nonexistent records, says Library of Virginia chief of researcher engagement Sarah Falls. Her library estimates that 15 percent of emailed reference questions it receives are now ChatGPT-generated, and some include hallucinated citations for both published works and unique primary source documents.
“For our staff, it is much harder to prove that a unique record doesn’t exist,” she says. This is not the first time AI has been caught making up false citations. The ICRC recommends that people consult online catalogs or references in existing published scholarly works to find references to real studies instead of assuming anything cited by an AI is real, no matter how authoritative it might sound.”
