In the vast digital landscape of the internet, strange phenomena occasionally occur that leave users questioning their own eyes. These digital apparitions, often called “internet ghosts,” are fleeting moments where content appears briefly before vanishing without a trace, leaving bewildered …
Elon Musk just wants to go to space
In 414 BC, Aristophanes’ The Birds was first performed in Athens. In this comedy, two disgruntled middle-aged men, fed up with life on Earth, convince a giant bird to create a great city in the sky. Free from the cruel …
The painful truth about assisted suicide
There is a popular image of assisted suicide: a swift, straightforward procedure, backed by the awesome authority of modern science, sure to send you off in a comfortable doze. Dignity in Dying, for instance, claim that assisted suicide can “guarantee” …
How humans became microplastic
This past summer, I spent a morning hunting for shrimp and prawns on a remote beach in Scotland. It was the kind of ritual interaction with nature that modern people have long prized: wading through tidal pools at the edge …
Forget what you know about Lucy Letby
The timing of this week’s public inquiry into “the events at the Countess of Chester Hospital”, and the growing suspicion that Lucy Letby’s convictions are unsafe, inadvertently throws up a dramatic forking of two possible worlds. In the first, the …
The problem with banning masks
We can surely be grateful that, more than two years after Covid mandates were relaxed across most of the United States, it is possible to go days without encountering a masked face. Even in the Democratic-run parts of the country …
Why shouldn’t AI write a film?
“This machine can produce a 5,000-word story, all typed and ready for despatch, in 30 seconds. How can the writers compete with that?” So asks Roald Dahl in his short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator, published in 1953.
The eponymous …
How the NYT undermined mask evidence
Amid the storm of US election headlines in recent weeks, a snippet of news began bubbling up on social media that, only a few years ago, would have whipped up a frenzied media hurricane. President Biden had tested positive for …
Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History – Part 1 | Roman Bystrianyk
It wasn’t long ago when infections plagued the Western world. Smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, typhoid, diphtheria, whooping cough, and other diseases were once considered a tragic part of life. Starting in the mid-1800s, there was a steady drop in the …
Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History – Part 1 | Roman Bystrianyk
It wasn’t long ago when infections plagued the Western world. Smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, typhoid, diphtheria, whooping cough, and other diseases were once considered a tragic part of life. Starting in the mid-1800s, there was a steady drop in the …
China is stealing Silicon Valley’s homework
Up until the 16th century, China was the most technologically advanced region in the world. While aristocrats ruled Europe, China’s meritocratic literati made exquisite scientific discoveries: gunpowder, the compass, papermaking and printing, among others. Now, China hopes to return to …
The Big Air Con
Airport world is a parallel dimension. No matter where they are geographically, all airports are essentially the same place, with a simplified “international English” and a time zone only loosely tethered to its location. Airport world even has its own …
The trouble with political Christianity
In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Jesus condemns those who “(either) love the tree and hate its fruit (or) love the fruit and hate the tree”. A regular critique of the nominally religious is that they claim to believe in, …
Trust the (Computer-Generated Gobbledygook) Science!
What do you get when you mix AI-generated nonsense with AI-driven peer review? A story that undermines the Trust The Science! injunction of the technocratic tyrants once and for all, that’s what!
Source: The Corbett Report Read the original article …
The danger of trial by statistics
Sally Clark had two sons. Both died within weeks of birth, a year apart, apparently of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), sometimes called cot death. SIDS is — mercifully — rare; in England, at the time, it struck roughly one …