Meme - "To allow our team members to celebrate the Holidays with their families, please note the change in restaurant hours:
Holiday Hours
DECEMBER 24: OPEN 24 HRS
DECEMBER 25: OPEN 24 HRS
DECEMBER 26: OPEN 24 HRS
New Year's Hours
DECEMBER 31: OPEN 24 HRS
JANUARY 1: OPEN 24 HRS"
A college kid created a fake, AI-generated blog. It reached #1 on Hacker News. | MIT Technology Review - "While many have speculated about how GPT-3, the most powerful language-generating AI tool to date, could affect content production, this is one of the only known cases to illustrate the potential... The trick to generating content without the need for much editing was understanding GPT-3’s strengths and weaknesses. “It's quite good at making pretty language, and it's not very good at being logical and rational,” says Porr. So he picked a popular blog category that doesn’t require rigorous logic: productivity and self-help... only three or four of the dozens of people who commented on his top post on Hacker News raised suspicions that it might have been generated by an algorithm. All those comments were immediately downvoted by other community members."
Performative Rage Over Pedophilia Doesn't Protect Kids - "Most children who experience sexual abuse are abused by people they know. Over 90% of sexual assaults against children, are committed by relatives, siblings, parents, teachers, pastors, ministers, or neighbors.
Less than half (around 40%) of sexual assaults against children are committed by pedophiles. The majority of sexual crimes against children are perpetrated by people who do not have a history of disordered sexual arousal to children. Instead, issues of drugs, alcohol, anger, isolation, and control motivate these tragic events.
Pedophilia, a sexual disorder involving repeated sexual arousal, fantasy, or behavior toward children, is not, in and of itself alone, a highly significant risk factor for sexual abuse of children. I know this seems hard to believe, but research demonstrates that it is antisocial personality traits, low empathy for the victim, disinhibiting drugs and alcohol, and isolation which lead to sexual abuse of children. People with pedophilic arousal and attraction are at greater risk compared to the general public to engage in child sex abuse, but it appears that these other risk factors may carry more weight. It is when pedophilia combines with these other risk factors that we must be most concerned.
Many people with pedophilic disorder never sexually abuse children...
Treatment of sexual offenders against children used to be highly punitive, coercive, and filled with shame. But today, these treatments have been shown to potentially increase the risk of recidivism, and to put more children at risk. Punishment and revenge against sex offenders may make us feel vindication, but it comes at the price of future victims. Treatment models such as The Good Lives program have strong evidence for reducing future risk, and rely on building up former offenders, developing skills, resources, motivation, and social connections, not on breaking down these people.
Anger, rage, and fear over the sexual abuse of children not only hurts our chances of preventing future abuse, but it harms the children themselves. It is exactly our rage and shame over sexual abuse, and sexuality in general, which leads many victims to keep their abuse secret. They fear that they are now tainted, that it was somehow their fault, and that our rage will leak onto them."
This won't stop the virtue signallers demanding that the expert be sent to the woodchipper or lined up against the wall and shot
Who was Britain’s greatest prime minister? Episode 6: Winston Churchill - HistoryExtra - "'The left wing of the Labour Party, because Stalin was Hitler's ally. They were, you know, not particularly, you know, you've got miners who, who were refusing to support the war effort. So you've got a variety of political elements there who are unreliable, let's put it like that. I mean, they would have argued they had appreciate sense of the national advantage and that Britain had lost, and that it was necessary to accept that situation, and to accept the deals that Hitler was offering, which a better deal, would have been a better deal than for Vichy France... it's worth bearing in mind when he becomes Prime Minister, he's not leader of the Conservative Party, the leader of the Conservative Party goes on being Neville Chamberlain...
His bravery. I mean, you know, getting into these planes. And remember, you're getting, you get long range German fighters out of Brittany in particular, essentially hunting for Allied merchant shipping. But, you know, getting into planes, and it wasn't exactly in the first flush of youth and flying to, you know, often these conferences, getting into boats and sailing like the Prince of Wales, you know, into the, in the North Atlantic, when, of course, there are German U boats around, I mean, and you know, you might think, Oh, well, nothing ever happens to people, it's worth reminding yourself in in the First World War Kitchener, who Churchill knew very well, had died when HMS Hampshire went down on a mine...
As people go, Churchill was not particularly racist. I think a lot of people find that surprising to hear. But, you know, he was more happy with the company of both of, of Jews, than most politicians of that period. When he went to the Middle East, he was quite happy to get on with those Muslims that he was introduced to. Erm, I don't, you know, he was much less of a, I mean, he was, remember, from a liberal background in some respects, you know, at some point that people tend to forget when they're talking about him. So yes, he was a supporter of Empire. Empire today appears totally anachronistic in the case of the Western European empires. I mean, obviously, there are other empires at the moment, Indonesia is an empire which, if you experience it from the point of view of New Guinea, or if you're living in Kashmir, you would experience maybe India as an empire. But the point is that now, Empire in the case of Britain appears an anachronism. But it's worth bearing in mind that Churchill almost always was roughly in line with at least a significant portion of domestic public opinion. I think it's fair to say that when he became peacetime Prime Minister in 1951, you know, he accepted what had happened that led government, Clement Attlee had given independence to the South Asian colonies, to Israel’"
Why is it not surprising that the left wing of the Labour Party favoured appeasement because Stalin was Hitler's ally?
Why Are We Living Longer Than Our Ancestors? | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘The basic facts of it are that around 100 years ago, life expectancy around the world was about 35 to 40. We don't know exactly what it was. And today, it's, it's about 73. And so we we basically doubled life expectancy. Now, just to explain something it's important to remember, a lot of that is from childhood mortality decreasing. So a lot of people used to die at five weeks, or five months or five years. Throughout most of human history, 40% of all children would die before they reached adulthood. So childhood was the most dangerous part of your life, really, until you got very old. But people are also living longer at the other end. So an adult in 1850, who lived, made it to adulthood, his or her life expectancy would be about 60. Now it's 85...
Science and medical advances are crucial. And there is certainly a project that celebrates the importance of science and society. Science on its own is not enough. And you need to take the ideas that come out of science and apply them at scale for them to make a difference. And that involves a different set of talents, right? It involves people who are activists and evangelists for these ideas and involves legal reformers, in some cases involves people who are just influential being influencers, I suppose, you would say now. And, and they're an important part of the story too. And so you know, the best example of this is, which I think is probably surprising to a lot of people is pasteurization. So one of the things that I found fascinating doing the research for this project is just how deadly milk was. In the middle of the 19th century in big cities, like New York where I live in part just because there was no refrigeration. So milk would spoil, you would that, you could get tuberculosis from milk. You know, it was, it was a major problem. And in New York in the 1850s, 60% of all deaths were children. So it gives you some measure of how dangerous childhood was at that point. And milk was one of the big killers. So, this is a case study in in this idea that science is on its own, not enough, which is that Louis Pasteur, pioneering chemist comes up with the technique of pasteurization, which, by heating milk, you know, 130 degrees, it, it becomes safe, you kill off whatever bacteria and germs are in the, in the milk, he comes up with that technique in 1865. But we don't have pasteurized milk on the shelves in American cities until 1915, it takes 50 years for this life saving idea to make a difference. And that's because it wasn't just enough to come up with the idea, you had a whole amazing kind of protest movements fighting for pasteurized milk. And this department store magnate named Nathan Strauss, who owned the Macy's department store, in the middle of his career decided to become a huge, you know, advocate for pasteurized milk, funding all these campaigns to get people to drink it and convince the milk industry to start pasteurizing and for laws to pass and things like that. So it's almost like a in some ways, a movement closer to, you know, the suffrage movement, or the abolition of slavery or something like that. It's not just a bunch of scientists and lab coats.’"
Ravenna: From Roman Powerhouse To Artistic Hub | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Please give us a bit of sense about what’s so captivating about the city itself.’...
’The key element that is so fascinating, I think, is that there are about a dozen major buildings that are all very close together in what was a good Roman city, but it's now a very, very small, walled, walled area. It's, it's ancient walls are still standing to a very limited height. But the wonderful thing is that you can walk around from one to another. And you see these amazing churches covered in mosaic, with sculptures outside, with beautiful areas where there must have been palazzi and other secular buildings that have not survived, but we know they were there. And some of the floor mosaics have been saved and are now on display. So you get a sense of a whole culture that is very much pressed into a small area. And even in one day, you can run from one building to the other and admire all these truly amazing early Christian monuments. They are so spectacular. And one of the reasons why they have been, they continue to be spectacular is that Ravenna really slipped out of historical importance. By the year 1000, it was, it was revisited by Ottonian emperors from Germany and a few, very, very few pilgrims and merchants. But it wasn't the great center it had been. And in that period of relative neglect, it continued to be a very important local city, local market and so on. But it didn't attract developers. And this was the saving of the early Christian mosaics which adorn it.’...
‘Charlemagne and his new palace at Aachen. And as I understand that he based that on the architecture of Ravenna, not Rome, even as Rome is where he gets coronated. And I think you write, he uses building materials taken from Ravenna to make that path. What's the significance of that, of choosing Ravenna over Rome?’
‘Well, I think he wanted building materials that he could not find north of the Alps. And one of the reasons for that was that columns that supported stone buildings, were no longer being cut in the marble quarries. And you needed old columns, good, strong, old Roman columns, wherever you could find them. And indeed, he applied to the Bishop of Rome, as well as the Bishop of Ravenna for permission to take building materials, specifically columns and capitals, and then marble fragments that he could use to decorate the interior of his buildings. So we know that it wasn't just Ravenna. Rome also gave up some of its old building material. But it's interesting to me that he went three times to Ravena and although he didn't stay very long, I’m quite quite sure he was taken by the Bishop of Ravenna to see the churches and he must have seen the portrayal of Justinian in the mosaic in San Vitale and it is the case that the octagonal church, which was his palace church, at Aachen, is an octagon. And it's modeled on the plan of San Vitale. I mean, you may have seen other octagonal churches, but nothing like that had ever been built north of the Alps. So it was a very, it was a technical achievement for his architects. And I do wonder whether he may have taken skilled craftsmen from Ravenna to assist in the building, when he took off all those building materials. And of course, he took the great equestrian statue that Theodoric had put up in front of his palace. And he had that transported over the Alps and set it up in front of Charles's new Palace in Aachen. So he really wanted to recreate the sense of grandeur that he associated with Roman traditions in Ravenna. And that's that is, we know that the step, that statue arrived and was put up, because there's a poem about it’...
‘When you think of great Italianate cities, like you think Venice and you might think Milan and Florence, but I sometimes wonder Ravenna doesn't get into the same breath. And you know, a couple things you noted and book it out Ravenna was never its own agent, and rarely made history in obvious shaping fashion. How important is that to its legacy and how we perceive it today?’
‘I think we go to Italy, because we know about the Italian Renaissance. And we think of Italy and Italian art as being rediscovered in the 15th century and redeveloped in its all its glorious forms, which was so influential thereafter. So we don't think so much about the early Christian period, when there was indeed an incredible flourishing of artistic endeavor and achievement in architecture and sculpture and this mosaic decoration, but there isn't any fresco painting of great importance in Ravenna. The Renaissance was not, it did not mark Ravenna in the same way. So, inevitably, people go to Venice, where Renaissance art is very, very beautifully displayed in numerous buildings and churches that were wonderfully decorated by famous artists. And Ravenna did not have famous artists and did not have a Renaissance that's comparable. And therefore, it always remained a backwater. And that may have indeed preserved these early Christian buildings from being modernized, from being rebuilt. We know that the great Cathedral, constructed in the early fifth century was indeed torn down and rebuilt in Baroque style, to please the local Bishop who wanted a grander church, a better church. So there were modifications that of course, changed the style of architecture. But some, most of the old decorated early Christian buildings were allowed to remain. And that's why we see such a, an enormous treasure, the great jewelry of beautiful, beautiful achievements in Ravenna today... it inspired so many people who subsequently visited it. It is like a prototype of a European city’"
Britain's Greatest Prime Minister Episode 9: Secrets Of Being A Successful Leader - HistoryExtra - "‘When and why did the post emerge?’
‘Because Britain had its traumas in the 17th century. A civil war that resulted in the execution of the king, revolution, replacement of the monarchy in 1660. But, it still wasn't a constitutional monarchy, but it was moving from an absolute monarchy, as we saw, for example, in France with Louis XIV, it was moving in the direction of a constitutional monarchy, that in 1688, 1689, a Catholic James II, replaced by William of Orange, and Mary, and again, Parliament becoming more and more powerful, and, and limiting, restricting the freedom of maneuver of the monarch. And then in 1714, the Hanoverians, George I didn't speak English. A German, for goodness sake, on the crown of Britain, very upsetting, alien to many people. And by now, we've had the Centennial Act, of Parliament coming into effect every seven years, three years before that, then seven years, and a sense that power had moved decisively in the direction of a constitutional monarchy, and that the parliament was essential. And George I needed their own person in Parliament to do their business, to get their acts through and to get their finance through. And this was the beginning. So in 1721 he asked Robert Walpole, to be First Lord of the Treasury… it was just an event that achieved bare minimum notice in the press of the day. And of course, there had been antecedents, look at Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Woolsey before him, or William Robert Cecil, under Elizabeth I, figures with many of the powers of Prime Minister but their authority rested on the monarchy, on the crown. And that was different because Walpole, his successors, depended on the crown, yes, but also on Parliament and progressively on Parliament...
I think we would see many echoes of him in, Boris Johnson, they went to the same school, Eton, well, that's a surprise. They went on to university together, they were big men, larger than life, extrovert characters, manipulators of media, manipulators of other people, lovers of the extravaganza, they both lived at Downing Street with a woman who, Walpole later married and Boris Johnson, his fiance, Carrie Symonds… they’re both 25 years younger, both nearly die in their first year in office, both came to power through the chance event of the South Sea bubble with Walpole and Brexit for Johnson’"
The Enlightenment: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Alongside reason, the Enlightenment had another wing associated with it. And that was feeling. That's what the cliche The Age of Reason leaves out. From the beginning of the 18th century onwards, Enlightenment philosophers were interested in feeling. What they called, especially, sympathy. Sometimes they spoke of the passions. They were interested in sympathy, as a bond that holds society together, and brings different people together. Adam Smith, was a moral philosopher, as well as an economist. And his first book was the Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is all about sympathy. The Wealth of Nations, is absolutely not a treatise on cold transactional rationality as people think. Smith begins by saying that the impulse to deal with each other, to trade and truck - that's his word - is built into human nature. So, reason and sympathy conjoined. And, laterally, the Enlightenment was looking for a way of understanding human nature. We're focused on the link between the mind and the body, reason and the emotions...
[Besides Newton being published,] James II of England was deposed. And William of Orange was invited over from Holland to take place on the throne, form a new dynasty. That's also an epoch making date. Because the idea that one dynasty had a god given right to rule was simply put aside. And instead, the principle of utility, you get the best person for the job to be king, was put in its place. And thirdly, a third reason for beginning in the 1680s [for the Enlightenment] is the work of Pierre Beale, a French Protestant driven into exile, who worked in Holland, and published a number of works beginning with thoughts on the comet. criticizing superstition, and advancing rational arguments. The comet was the one that we now know as Haley’s Comet. It produced a great deal of panic. And Beale put forth all sorts of sensible arguments, to say that comets are merely natural phenomena, and that nobody should be frightened of them'"
Madness and misery in Antarctica - HistoryExtra - "‘The Inuit don't have any access to fresh fruit, fruit and vegetables or other known anti-scurvetics. However, they didn't suffer from scurvy. And so he reasoned that there must be something in the Inuit diet of fresh meat, that combats scurvy. And so he prescribed a diet of, exclusive, consisting exclusively of fresh penguin, and seal meat, and eaten as raw as possible in the Inuit fashion. And those who were able to stomach it; given the the culinary ineptitude of the cook, many didn't. But those who did, saw their scurvy symptoms gradually disappear. And that led to a, that led Cook to become one of the most popular men on board’"
Britain may not be a saintly nation, but it has certainly never been a fascist one - "In the Thirties, when multiple European fascism movements took hold from Greece to Yugoslavia and as Hitler invaded Europe, very few countries managed to withstand the ideology's horrible deadweight in its entirety. Britain, however, was one of them, emerging from the 20th century without ever having capitulated to a dictatorship or entertained a fascist party in any remotely serious way. Jingoism is never a good look, but if there is one solid claim to exceptionalism Britain has, surely it is this. But in keeping with our times, a vogue has emerged for pretending that we actually have a real history of fascism, that there but for the grace of God (or random chance), we’d have gone the way of our continental neighbours. That there’s no real difference between us and Europe. This is false: there is every difference between Britain and Europe, due to long-brewed differences in political organisation. Totalitarianism, of which communism is as much an example as fascism, hasn’t had a foothold in Britain since Queen Mary I (Bloody Mary) burned hundreds of protestants at the stake. This can’t be said of much of Europe, or indeed many other countries."
So much for self-hating British leftists
A dad faces hard prison time after trying to shut down his home internet - "In one town of France, a father got fed up with the amount of screen time his kids were indulging in and decided to do something about it. He tried to get them offline by shutting down the internet, but he ended up shutting it down for the whole town... It all began in a town called Messanges. A dad used a multi-wave band jammer to temporarily cut off the internet connection at his home in order to get his kids offline. However, the device is illegal in France because it interferes with telecommunication signals. Once nearly two municipalities were shut down, France's National Frequency Agency began an investigation that led them to the unnamed father."
Welcome spiders into your home and say no to pest control, expert says - ""Spiders and centipedes are predators, pill bugs are decomposers and wasps are actually very important as pollinators in our ecosystem," Guidotti, an entomology technician at the Royal Ontario Museum, told CBC News... True pests that actually can cause damage are carpenter ants, termites and bed bugs, Guidotti said. Only then would she approve calling in the exterminator. Studies have found that hundreds of species, including spiders, insects, flies, beetles and ants, can exist in a single house unbeknownst to the human inhabitants, creating an environment unexpectedly rich in biodiversity."
Should I Kill Spiders in My Home? An Entomologist Explains Why Not To - " People like to think of their dwellings as safely insulated from the outside world, but many types of spiders can be found inside. Some are accidentally trapped, while others are short-term visitors. Some species even enjoy the great indoors, where they happily live out their lives and make more spiders. These arachnids are usually secretive, and almost all you meet are neither aggressive nor dangerous. And they may be providing services like eating pests – some even eat other spiders... Although they are generalist predators, apt to eat anything they can catch, spiders regularly capture nuisance pests and even disease-carrying insects – for example, mosquitoes. There’s even a species of jumping spider that prefers to eat blood-filled mosquitoes in African homes. So killing a spider doesn’t just cost the arachnid its life, it may take an important predator out of your home... Spiders are not out to get you and actually prefer to avoid humans; we are much more dangerous to them than vice versa. Bites from spiders are extremely rare. Although there are a few medically important species like widow spiders and recluses, even their bites are uncommon and rarely cause serious issues."
Ecce Homo 'restorer' wants a slice of the royalties - "Some painters die penniless, their work unappreciated. So it seems only fair after her artwork attracted global attention that Cecilia Giménez make some money – even if she did make Jesus look like a very hairy monkey. The 80-year-old Spanish parishioner became a worldwide laughing stock earlier this year after her botched restoration of a 19-century fresco of Christ with a crown of thorns became an internet sensation. Millions were reduced to tears of laughter, even as some hailed it as a masterpiece in its own right. Crowds have since swarmed to Giménez's handiwork, paying the Sanctuary of Mercy Church in Borja, near Zaragoza, €4 (£3) each to marvel or mock. And now Giménez wants a slice of the action. "She just wants the church to conform to the law," said Enrique Trebolle, the lawyer hired by Giménez. "If this means economic compensation she wants it to be for charitable purposes." Trebolle said that Giménez wanted her cut of the profits to help Muscular atrophy charities because her son suffers from the condition. Ecce Homo, or Behold the Man, by Spanish artist Elias Garcia Martinez had suffered years of deterioration due to moisture when Giménez decided to take her brush to it. The resulting image has variously been dubbed "the worst restoration in history", "beast Jesus", and "a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic". As the image's popularity grew, helped by an online petition in support of Giménez's work, paying visitors have poured thousands of euros into church coffers. Budget airline Ryanair even got in on the act, laying on a special flight to Zaragoza airport."
Hazard High School lap dance: Kentucky residents defend 'man pageant' - "It was an event that once would have barely made news outside the school gymnasium, much less traveled beyond this 4,900-resident Appalachian mountain town. But within hours of Hazard High School's homecoming "Man Pageant," where male students dressed in women’s undergarments appeared to lap-dance and grind on seated school leaders, the photos hit social media. By the next day, they’d gone viral — sparking outrage that turned a derisive national spotlight on this tiny Kentucky community like never before. Images that included principal Donald "Happy" Mobelini, who is also Hazard’s mayor, smiling while half-clad students danced suggestively — and young women dressed as Hooters waitresses — drew condemnation from legions of social media users."
Hazard, Ky., district investigating homecoming activities depicting lap dances - "Photos of the lap dances on the Hazard High School Athletics Facebook page were removed, but a photo on the page of teen girls in Hooters t-shirts and those depicting male students being paddled remained"
‘Poop tomatoes’ found growing on shore of Kent coast where sewage pumped into sea - "So much raw sewage is pouring into the sea near holiday beaches on the Kent coast that hundreds of ‘poop’ tomatoes are growing on the shoreline and from seeds in the human excrement... "It’s worrying to think there are tomatoes growing there because they come from tomato pips in people’s poo and they are being fertilised by the human sewage going into the sea. "What other damage must it be doing to the environment? It’s terrible and something should be done about it."
Imagine being upset about organically grown food
Premarital cohabitation and divorce: Support for the "Trial Marriage" Theory? - "A number of studies show that premarital cohabitation is associated with an increased risk of subsequent marital dissolution. Some argue that this is a consequence of selection effects and that once these are controlled for premarital cohabitation has no effect on dissolution. We examine the effect of premarital cohabitation on subsequent marital dissolution by using rich retrospective life-history data from Austria. We model union formation and dissolution jointly to control for unobserved selectivity of cohabiters and non-cohabiters. Our results show that those who cohabit prior to marriage have a higher risk of marital dissolution. However, once observed and unobserved characteristics are controlled for, the risks of marital dissolution for those who cohabit prior to marriage are significantly lower than for those who marry directly. The finding that premarital cohabitation decreases the risk of marital separation provides support for the “trial marriage” theory."
Otter family checks out Mustafa Centre after visits to Bukit Timah petrol station & Newton condo - "The family got their name as the six original otters lived under Jiak Kim bridge where Zouk nightclub used to be. According to OtterWatch, this family has been looking for a larger home ground for the last four months. As the family expands, they will need a larger territory, but the waters in Central Singapore have been taken by other otter families, such as the prominent Marina Bay and Bishan families."
When the bulldog's away, the otters will play: Yio Chu Kang homeowner loses goldfish worth $5,000 - "They may have been deterred by a bulldog the last time, but the otters are back. A homeowner surnamed Lin, woke up last Sunday (June 26) morning to find that his prized goldfish had been bitten to death by some furry intruders... the otters had sneaked into his home by biting a hole through the plastic mesh which he had installed on his front gate. This isn't the first time otters have invaded Lin's home. In February, a group of otters broke into his garden, but they were unable to get to his koi thanks to his trusty bulldog. However, the canine died last week... Unfortunately, Lin isn't the only homeowner whose pets have fallen prey to hungry otters. In March, a 76-year-old homeowner in Jalan Kayu came home from his morning exercise to find his beloved koi and luohan fish devoured by otters."
Otters are cute so good luck
