Links
3 stars
The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know | Astral Codex Ten
72-minute read
According to the ~150 eyewitness accounts that have come down to us, the clouds parted, and the pilgrims saw a strange pale sun (or sun-like object), painless to gaze upon. As they watched in wonder, it began to spin around and flash all the colors of the rainbow, drenching the trees and buildings and crowd with yellow, green, and purple light in sequence. Then it seemed to loom, or grow, or fall to earth - accounts differ, but everyone agrees there was mass panic, as the people expected to be crushed or burned or consumed. It lurched downward three times, as the crowd screamed in terror or confessed their sins - then returned to its usual place in the sky. The whole affair had lasted ten minutes.
Since then, the Sun Miracle of Fatima has gained a reputation as the final boss of paranormal experiences, the ultimate challenge for would-be skeptics and debunkers. It’s not hard to see why. The witnesses included journalists, atheists, prominent scientists, and people who freely admitted that they had only attended in order to laugh at everyone else when nothing happened. There are far too many of them to dismiss, and their reports are surprisingly close to unanimous. People in nearby towns who knew nothing about the miracle claimed to have seen the same thing, seemingly ruling out mass hallucination. There are photographs - too low-tech to clearly visualize the sun, but clear enough to show a crowd pointing at the sky in astonishment. For one hundred eight years, believers and skeptics have written magazine articles, scientific papers, and at least a dozen books on the topic, mostly without progress.
Breakdown at the Racetrack | The Local
16-minute read
Once a lucrative gambling business, Ontario’s horse racing industry is now heavily subsidized by the government. As gamblers turn to online gaming, and ideas about animal welfare shift, a cluster of fatal horse injuries at Woodbine raises questions about the future of the sport.
2 stars
Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet | The Guardian
12-minute read
The volcano, with the grand, rolling name of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai, lies 40 miles north of Tongatapu – mostly under the Pacific Ocean but with two spits of land showing above the water, like the ears of a drowned cat. Since its several brief eruptions the previous month, December 2021, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai had continued to gurgle and churn. On that Saturday, 15 January, 2.4 cubic miles of sediment and molten rock shot through its mouth with the force of what scientists call a “magma hammer”, sending a plume of ash at least 35 miles up into the atmosphere. It was the largest atmospheric explosion that modern instruments had recorded, outdoing any nuclear bomb ever detonated. They heard the sound in Alaska. Seven and a half thousand miles away, in the south Indian city of Chennai, meteorologists measured an abrupt spike in atmospheric pressure. It was Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai, doing its thing.
[...]
In the abyssal depths of the ocean, a data cable is a scrawny, unprotected thing, like a snail divested of its shell. Its core consists of fibres of glass, each roughly as thick as a human hair, through which light transmits information at roughly 125,000 miles per second. Around the fibres, there is first a casing of steel for protection, then another of copper to carry electricity to keep the light moving, and then a final sheath of nylon soaked in tar.
What If a Child Was Terrified of Food? | The Cut
17-minute read
ARFID is a fairly new addition to the modern parenting lexicon: A behavior far more severe than pickiness, it’s an eating disorder provoked not by the desire to change one’s body but by the fear of food itself. Only in the past few years has the acronym begun circulating on playgrounds and in school nurses’ offices, and it’s not uncommon for parents to first stumble upon it on their own — on Reddit threads, in Facebook groups, on Instagram or TikTok.
Original link | Archive.is link
My Misadventures in Gentle Parenting | Maclean’s
9-minute read
Gentle parenting wasn’t about ripping down boundaries or letting kids run riot or never saying “no.” It was about allowing kids to experience their big feelings—even if it meant a tantrum—and helping them work through those feelings rather than stifle them. That, of course, dictates tremendous patience from parents. If your kid screams and cries about going to school, gentle parenting means that you don’t give them a timeout, or shove them into their shoes and cart them off. You narrate their feelings back to them and validate them until they’ve calmed down, no matter how long it takes. If they refuse to go to bed, you don’t get angry. You tell them you know they’re having fun, and it’s too bad for it to end, but they need to get their rest.
[...]
That’s what happened to us. I softened every no and negotiated every boundary until my son learned he could wear me down. He pushed, I bent. I began to worry what it meant for a generation of kids never to hear “no” in a meaningful way, to grow up expecting the world to adjust to their desires at every turn.
The Cat Who Woke Me Up | The Sun Magazine
13-minute read
I’ve always been a writer. At Queens College, at Columbia University, at the Long Island Press, and at The Sun, I wrote—because I thought I had something to say. And for a while I think I did. But now my once-wonderful brain, with its eighty-six billion neurons (give or take) and trillions of synapses, is so damaged from Alzheimer’s disease that it’s hard to remember names, appointments, events. Even though my brain is confused and I’m struggling, always struggling, to see if my writing is good, I still want to write. And the writing that matters the most to me isn’t about Alzheimer’s. It’s about a cat. A cat who woke me up. A cat who changed my life.
The Woman Who Ate Only Fruit | The Cut
9-minute read
The request didn’t strike Bernard Hudepohl, the hotel’s owner, as unusual. It wasn’t uncommon for hotel guests to ask for vegan meals or even for them to make their own juices in their room if they were on a cleanse. But when Karolina arrived at the hotel, he and his staff were shocked by her appearance. She was emaciated, her eyes sunken into her skull and her collarbone jutting out of her flesh. The night clerk had to carry her to her room because she couldn’t make it on her own.
Original link | Archive.is link
Zackery Died After Climbing on Top of a Subway Train. Who Is to Blame? | New York Times
7-minute read
Zackery died while doing something that he had been posting about on social media for months. On Instagram, he’d documented himself clinging to the back of a train cab as it sped through the Prospect Avenue stop in Brooklyn, and striking a swaggering pose for the camera while standing on top of a J train that was approaching the Williamsburg Bridge.
Original link | Archive.is link
“You Think Me a Bold Cheat”: Mary Carleton, Counterfeit Princess | The Public Domain Review
9-minute read
In early June of 1663, Mary Carleton was tried for bigamy in London’s Old Bailey. A figure of considerable public fascination, Mary had been “viewed” by an estimated five hundred visitors while in prison awaiting trial.1 Officially, she stood accused of having wed John Carleton in London while already married to John Steadman, a shoemaker, in Canterbury. (Over the course of the trial, the possible existence of a third husband, a Dover surgeon named Day, emerged.) Unofficially, she stood accused in the court of public opinion of a far more interesting cheat: impersonating a fabulously wealthy foreigner in order to lure the hapless Carleton — a lawyer’s clerk, eighteen years old — into marriage. Though Mary herself modestly claimed noble rather than royal birth, she became widely known as the German Princess.
Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear | Import AI
12-minute read
At this point, I’m a true technology optimist - I look at this technology and I believe it will go so, so far - farther even than anyone is expecting, other than perhaps the people in this audience. And that it is going to cover a lot of ground very quickly. I came to this position uneasily. Both by virtue of my background as a journalist and my personality, I’m wired for skepticism. But after a decade of being hit again and again in the head with the phenomenon of wild new capabilities emerging as a consequence of computational scale, I must admit defeat. I have seen this happen so many times and I do not see technical blockers in front of us. Now, I believe the technology is broadly unencumbered, as long as we give it the resources it needs to grow in capability. And grow is an important word here. This technology really is more akin to something grown than something made - you combine the right initial conditions and you stick a scaffold in the ground and out grows something of complexity you could not have possibly hoped to design yourself. We are growing extremely powerful systems that we do not fully understand. Each time we grow a larger system, we run tests on it. The tests show the system is much more capable at things which are economically useful. And the bigger and more complicated you make these systems, the more they seem to display awareness that they are things.
1 star
Ancient Shipwrecks Rewrite the Story of Iron Age Trade | UCSD
3-minute read
New research out of the University of California San Diego and the University of Haifa is reshaping what we know about ancient seaborne trade in the eastern Mediterranean. Published recently in Antiquity, a new paper documents the first-ever discovery of Iron Age ship cargoes within a former port city in Israel and provides rare, direct evidence of trade in a period previously understood largely through land-based finds.
How pen caps work | Overthinking Everything
3-minute read
So, I recently learned how pen caps work. I think it’s neat, so I’m going to tell you about it, but I also think the experience of figuring this out illustrates some other interesting things about the world, so I’m going to tell you about that too.
First, pen caps.
Why do people get paid to invest their money? | Noahpinion
8-minute read
This strikes some people as unfair. After all, the median personal wealth in America is around $112,000, meaning that almost half of Americans don’t even have $100,000 to invest. If you don’t have much wealth at all, then the only way for you to get $20,000 — probably — is to work a bunch of hours. At 19 an hour, that’s 1000 hours — more than half of a typical working year!
A cartoonist’s review of AI art | The Oatmeal
2-minute read
This is a comic about AI art.
Amazon says its AI will let NBA fans track brand-new stats | The Verge
2-minute read
The new tech will track 29 body parts of each player as they move across the court — although which specific body parts and exactly how they will be tracked, AWS did not say. The movements will feed into the AI system to deliver stats that “capture previously unmeasured aspects of basketball,” the company says.
Ballers can now be analyzed not just by whether or not they made the shot but by the difficulty of their attempted shots. Another stat, called the Expected Field Goal Percentage, can predict the odds of their making that shot by factoring in metrics like the orientation and pose of the shooter and the positions of the defenders, among other details.
Another new stat called Gravity is meant to quantify the “advantage” individual players bring on the court. In practice, this means tracking the movement of players and their defenders with and without the ball to analyze how closely they are being guarded and how their movements make advantageous space on the court for teammates. Another new insight promised by AWS is a set of stats focused entirely on the defenders, called the Defensive Score Box, which will break down typical stats such as rebounds or blocks by the defensive players for that play.
Nature Gets a One-Star Yelp: The Funniest National Park Complaints | ZME Science
1-minute read
Who doesn’t like national parks? They’re the crown jewels of nature, beautiful landscapes and ecosystems preserved for everyone to enjoy. Everyone loves them, except the people defunding them and the folks on Yelp leaving one-star reviews because the Grand Canyon was “just a hole.”
French facts of the day | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Macron’s government consistently spent more as a share of total output than any other OECD member, with the public sector accounting for over 57% of GDP in 2024. The telling trend is France’s divergence from its neighbors. When Macron took office, France’s debt-to-GDP ratio was 11 percentage points above the Eurozone average; by 2024, that gap had increased to 25 points. Public debt is set to hit 116% of GDP in 2025 and the deficit is set to double the EU average.