AfTea - Concepts of a Plan, Peak Burning Man, and MooDeng
Well, that happened, it’s over, and we’re all worse off for having experienced it. Thankfully, a new baby hippo was born in Thailand, so the Tea will be dotted with MooDeng instead of the Marmalade Monarch’s concepts within plans. And if that isn’t enough, get to the end for an incredible solar flare.
More than 47,000 people died in Europe last year due to heat (Reuters) The planet will survive the Great Warming & Energizing of our atmosphere. The people, might have a tougher time of it.
Surprising New Research Links Infant Mortality to Crashing Bat Populations (NY Times) Bats eat insects. Without them, insects screw up crops. Farmers use more pesticides to kill insects, which increases infant mortality by 8%. Just great.
Is 10-to-4 the new 9-to-5? (Sherwood) Unless you work in finance, law, healthcare, or retail, you’ve probably noticed this already. 915am meetings have become 1030am, or punted to after 12pm, when the west coast wakes up. Hopefully this thins out the commute so nurses, construction workers, and teachers aren’t stuck behind 20 buses filled with tech workers who aren’t even awake yet.
War Taxes Are Making You Poorer (Ken K) Take this 9/11 anniversary to imagine what we could do with a trillion dollars a year. How much better this country would be if we didn’t funnel $800 Billion to defense contractors chasing ghosts from 25 years ago? It’s fun to dream.
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Mobile phones are not linked to brain cancer, according to a major review of 28 years of research (Ohio Capital Journal) One more time for the people in the back? For serious. Drop it already, we’ve been arguing about it for a generation, and it is still untrue.
Self-medicating gorillas may hold new drugs clues (BBC) Given the jungles of Gabon also created ibogaine, we really should treat these places with a bit more respect. They probably hold secrets to most of our problems.
1 in 10 Minors Say Their Friends Use AI to Generate Nudes of Other Kids, Survey Finds (404 Media) This is so utterly fucked that I have no words. I exited the academic stream before sexting really took off, so I can’t even imagine how stressful this must be. The idea of some incel dropping deepfakes on group texts or class message boards would turn any parent into Achilles post-Patroclus, so the idea that it’s already a reality for 10% of sub-18 year olds…kills me.
Kids who use ChatGPT as a study assistant do worse on tests (Hechinger Report) This one surprised me, as ChatGPT tutoring functionality was what Khan Academy bet the farm on. If this holds up when the sample size scales from 1,000 to 100,000, all those AI-education firms might be fucked.
We might have seen peak Burning Man (Sherwood) We probably haven’t, but this boy can dream.
Playing Dungeons & Dragons helps autistic players in social interactions (Ars Technica) Any Game Master you know could have told you this. Here is to hoping behavioral therapy might one day include the clicky clack of dice rolling.
And your link to the wildly vivid solar flare that happened on Sept. 1st.
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