How I Became a Morning Workout Person

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How I Became a Morning Workout Person In theory, I’ve always been a “morning workout” person: I’ve listened to inspiring TED Talks on the benefits of exercise, read articles about why moving before work is better for your brain, and spent countless evenings with my eyes glued to morning workout routine YouTube videos, vowing to go running as the sun comes up just like the vloggers. Continued here

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EA says it can't recover 60% of players' corrupted Madden franchise save files EA says that a temporary "data storage issue" led to the corruption of many Madden NFL 23 players' Connected Franchise Mode (CFM) save files last week. What's worse, the company now estimates it can recover fewer than half of those corrupted files from a backup. Continued here

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Tale from the crypt: Researchers conduct "virtual autopsy" of mummified toddler A multidisciplinary team of Austrian and German scientists performed a "virtual autopsy" of the 17th century mummified remains of an infant, remarkably preserved in an aristocratic family crypt. They found that despite the infant's noble upbringing, the child suffered from extreme nutritional deficiency, causing rickets or scurvy, and likely died after contracting pneumonia, according to an October paper published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine. Continued here

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Pornhub requires ID from Louisiana users to comply with state's new porn law Pornhub and other major porn sites owned by MindGeek now require Louisiana residents to verify their ages because of the state's new porn law that took effect on January 1, 2023. Continued here

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What You Should Know About Layoffs (Before, During, and After) On the morning of September 14, 2011, I received an Outlook invite to a meeting with my manager and HR. They informed me that my position was being terminated. “You have five minutes to write the last email before you leave your laptop in this room. Your account will be disabled. We will escort you to the exit,” the HR representative said. Continued here

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5 things you didn't know GPS could do You might think you’re an expert at navigating through city traffic, smartphone at your side. You might even hike with a GPS device to find your way through the backcountry. But you’d probably still be surprised at all the things that GPS — the global positioning system that underlies all of modern navigation — can do. GPS consists of a constellation of satellites that send signals to Earth’s surface. A basic GPS receiver, like the one in your smartphone, determines where you are — to within about 1 to 10 meters — by measuring the arrival time of signals from four or more satellites. With fancier (and more expensive) GPS receivers, scientists can pinpoint their locations down to centimeters or even millimeters. Using that fine-grained information, along with new ways to analyze the signals, researchers are discovering that GPS can tell them far more about the planetthan they originally thought it could. Continued here

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The 5 Best iPhone Calendar Apps for Taking Control of Your Time in 2023 These calendar apps can save you time and help you be more productive. Continued here

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Key Bitcoin developer calls on FBI to recover $3.6M in digital coin One of the prominent developers behind the Bitcoin blockchain said he has asked the FBI to assist him in recovering $3.6 million worth of the digital coin that was stolen from his storage wallets on New Year’s Eve. Continued here

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Storm-Chasing Seabirds Ride Out Hurricanes from Inside Like big-wave surfers or daring meteorologists, shearwaters in the Sea of Japan deliberately head toward powerful (and dangerous) storms. When hurricanes strike, most birds either evacuate or take shelter. After all, these storms can cause massive avian mortality. But after analyzing wind data and GPS- tracking information from 75 streaked shearwaters, British and Japanese researchers found that the seabirds sometimes navigate toward the center of hurricanes—and remain there tailing the eye for up to eight hours. Continued here

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LG's 2023 OLED TVs claim to boost brightness by up to 70% January means new technology product announcements from the CES trade show in Las Vegas. LG, a regular CES participant, announced this year's OLED TV lineup at the show. Similar to LG's 2022 OLED TVs, this year's focus is about boosting brightness. But in 2023, LG's OLED TVs will also face stiffer competition, including from Samsung Display's QD-OLED tech, which is also supposed to be getting brighter. Continued here

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Fixing air quality in one of the world's most-polluted cities Born and raised in Indonesia, Piotr Jakubowski spent a career in advertising, which culminated in a stint as the chief marketing officer of Indonesian ride-hailing giant Gojek. He left that job in 2020 to co-found air quality company Nafas, whose monitoring app draws real-time data from a private network of over 200 sensors across 15 cities in Indonesia. The app counts around 20,000 monthly active users. Nafas has raised an angel investment round and is currently raising a seed round. I was researching climate-related business concepts, and living in Jakarta, I discovered that air pollution in my own backyard was higher than in the central business district, and much higher than World Health Organization guidelines. Continued here

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Dark energy and the myth of the disappearing Universe Since the dawn of humanity, we’ve wondered just what our Universe is. What is it made of? How is it structured? Where did it come from? How did it get to be the way it is today? And what will be its ultimate fate? After millennia of wondering and philosophizing, the past ~200 years of scientific investigation have finally brought the answers to us. The Universe is made not just of atoms, neutrinos, and photons, but also of two mysterious substances: dark matter and dark energy. We emerged from an early, hot, dense state; we gravitated and cooled; now the Universe is cold, low in matter density, and we have seen what our ultimate fate will be. Owing to the presence of dark energy — the most dominant but least understood component of the Universe — we now know what’s in store for us in the far future. Objects that are gravitationally bound together, like planets, stars, stellar systems, galaxies, and galaxy clusters, will remain so. But larger-scale objects will be driven apart by the expanding Universe, receding from one another at ever-increasing speeds. We colloquially call this “the disappearing Universe,” but that’s simply a myth. Nothing is disappearing from view, although things are disappearing from our reach. Here’s why that difference is so important. Continued here

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6 Keys To Ramping Up Your Customer Service From Average to Exceptional Today's customers and clients rank businesses by total customer experience versus just service. Continued here

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Dealing with Guilt: Our Favorite Reads I know that my own anxiety is likely the root cause of all this guilt. I know that it paints an unrealistic picture of what’s actually happening around me. And I know that I’m being harder on myself than my (I swear, incredibly nice and supportive) boss and coworkers ever would be. But it can be hard to break free of these feelings of guilt, especially after years of fighting perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and other insecurities. Continued here

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The people who live in multiple timelines The first time I'd been a bit preoccupied and unprepared for the existential baggage of a milestone birthday – particularly since I thought I was only 38. I turned 40 again a few months later. Well, I never had been good at maths. But then I turned 41 a few times, and then 40 once more. Nope, time was clearly out of joint. It turns out many cultures are fine with experiencing multiple years – or multiple ages – simultaneously. Right now it is the start of 2023 everywhere in the world. But step into Myanmar and it's also 1384, while Thailand will shoot you forward to 2566. Moroccans are praying in 1444 but farming in 2972, and Ethiopians are working their way through 2015, which for them has 13 months. Meanwhile in South Korea, where I live, New Year is everybody's birthday. This explains how I turned 40 three times. Continued here

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Scientists tested the intelligence of 13 dog breeds. Labradors are the dumbest Researchers at the University of Helsinki in Finland put over 1,000 dogs from 13 distinct breeds through a battery of cognitive tests in perhaps the largest laboratory study of canine intelligence ever conducted. Their findings were recently published in the journal Scientific Reports. Between March 2016 and February 2022, the authors invited dog owners to bring their one- to eight-year-old pups into a large indoor field to undergo the smartDOG test battery, which was developed by study author Katriina Tiira. Continued here

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Don't Just Focus on Your Technical Skills. Focus On Your People Skills. Early in their careers, young professionals tend to focus on the technical skills that will help them get the next promotion. These skills are certainly useful, but they won’t help you get the promotions down the line. The author identifies three strategic interpersonal skills that young professionals should focus on to shape their future career development: Continued here

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A New Spin for SoulCycle's Founders If spin class was all about connecting with people, can you build a business around it without the bikes? With Peoplehood, they are going to find out. Continued here

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Why 2023 will be "the year of mixed reality" Last month, I wrote a piece for Big Think that praised Generative AI as the most impactful technology of 2022. Over the weeks since, many people have asked me why the metaverse wasn’t chosen, as it was certainly the most hyped technology of the year. My answer is that 2022 was a rollercoaster for the metaverse, not a rocket ship. The public was promised a society-changing technology, but what many people saw were either cartoonish virtual worlds filled with creepy avatars or over-hyped startups selling “virtual real estate” through pump-and-dump NFT schemes.  No, the metaverse was not the most impactful technology of 2022. Fortunately, it really does have the potential to be a society-changing technology. But to get there, the industry needs to move past today’s cartoonish worlds and push for experiences that are more realistic, more artistic, and far more focused on creativity and productivity than on minting NFT landlords. In addition, the industry needs to overcome the common misconception that the metaverse will force everyone to live in a virtual world that will replace our physical surroundings. This is not how the metaverse will unfold.  Continued here

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12 Laptops We've Tested and Love If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Buying any laptop is a big decision. You may end up using it for several years before getting another, and there are many makes, models, and chip configurations to choose from. Lucky for you, we’ve tested many of the new releases in the past year. These are our top picks for the very best laptops you can buy right now. Continued here

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Unpaid taxes could destroy porn studio accused of copyright trolling Over the past decade, Malibu Media has emerged as a prominent so-called “copyright troll,” suing thousands of “John Does” for allegedly torrenting adult content hosted on the porn studio’s website, “X-Art.” Whether defendants were guilty or not didn’t seem to matter to Malibu, critics claimed, as much as winning as many settlements as possible. As courts became more familiar with Malibu, however, some judges grew suspicious of the studio’s litigiousness. As early as 2012, a California judge described these lawsuits as “essentially an extortion scheme,” and by 2013, a Wisconsin judge ordered sanctions, agreeing with critics who said that Malibu’s tactics were designed to “harass and intimidate” defendants into paying Malibu thousands in settlements. Continued here

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Are Our Brains Wired to Quiet Quit? While the term “quiet quitting” may be new, what’s happening is just the latest expression of a fundamental aspect of human nature: In the face of persistent and inescapable stressors, people often respond by simply giving up. When nothing is in your control, why even try? Scientists have traditionally called this response “learned helplessness,” but more recent research suggests passivity is our default hardwired response to prolonged adversity. Organizations can reverse passivity among employees by giving them a direct experience of autonomy — the feeling of having control over their life and choices. Continued here

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Alyssa-Amor Gibbons: How to design climate-resilient buildings Architecture can't ignore the realities of climate change. For time-tested solutions that perform under extreme conditions, designer Alyssa-Amor Gibbons says we should look to traditional buildings. Taking us to her home of Barbados, where the hurricane season is unforgiving and freak storms are becoming more frequent, Gibbons points to the brilliance of endemic designs that are built to work with nature -- rather than against it. Continued here

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Wordle: Can a Pandemic Phenomenon Sustain in the Long Term? BRIAN KENNY: For as long as we could read, write, and speak, we played games with words. But if someone told you they had an idea for a game where players had to guess a five letter word in six tries without any clues, you might think they were crazy. Word games have been around for centuries. Archeologists found evidence of word squares in the Roman ruins of Pompei. In the Middle Ages, people played games involving palindromes to ward off evil spirits who they thought were confused about which way to read the words. Crossword puzzles, which some might deem the ultimate word game, didn’t appear until the late 1800s. And Scrabble followed decades later in the 1950s. But with each of these word games, there were clues, structure, rules. So, surely a game that asks players to conjure up a word out of thin air would be doomed to fail. Right? Today on Cold Call, we’ve invited Christina Wallace to discuss her case entitled, Wordle. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast network. Christina Wallace is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School where she teaches Entrepreneurial Marketing and The Entrepreneurial Manager. She’s also a graduate of the MBA program here. And she is a fellow podcaster with a podcast called, The Limit Does Not Exist. What’s that all about, Christina? Continued here

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I Don't Have Enough Work For My Employees I'm stressed out trying to keep them busyduring our slow season. Continued here

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How to Talk to Your Kids About Layoffs Layoffs, we must remember, are a family affair. And facing the painful reality of job loss as a family is necessary. This doesn’t mean your four-year-old needs to know the details of your household budget, or that your pre-teen needs to worry about transferring to a new (unknown) school. But it does mean approaching conversations, and any problems you have, in a clear and age-appropriate manner. In this piece, the author offers advice on what to say (and not to say) when you break the news to your children as well as practical strategies to help your family weather the job loss together. Continued here

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Top Technology and Business Trends for 2023 10 things that will shape the coming year. Continued here

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A Valuable COVID Drug Doesn't Work against New Variants Current monoclonal antibodies fail against COVID virus variants, so drugmakers want to use a fast-track test for new ones Aaron Glatt recalls one of the first times he used monoclonal antibodies to help a patient with COVID. It was November 2020, during the first year of the pandemic, and “before then there hadn’t really been drugs we could use to treat people with early-onset illness,” says Glatt, an infectious disease physician at Mount Sinai South Nassau in Oceanside, N.Y. His patient, an elderly woman, was coughing and weak. But shortly after the antibody infusion began, “she had an amazing turnaround,” Glatt says. “Her breathing improved, and she began to perk up. I spoke to her the next day, and she was doing very well.” Continued here

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Here's What You Can Expect at CES 2023 After going remote at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, CES returned to Las Vegas in 2022 for a hybrid experience. Many companies opted to continue virtually attending the annual consumer trade show. Even though CES 2023 is not expected to recapture the entire grandeur of years past, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) that hosts the event anticipates around 100,000 attendees. CES 2023 runs from January 5 to 8, and it still offers an option for remote attendance. In spite of an economy that's worrisome for most CEOs and last year's major flops (remember NFTs?), innovative hardware announcements will continue to make a splash on the showroom floor. From cohesive developments in the smart home category to peculiar designs for electric vehicles, here's what you can expect at CES 2023. Continued here

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Here's How Your Company Can Change the World It's important to remember that there'smore than one way to tackle any problem. Continued here

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Spain Just Launched a Year-Long Digital Nomad Visa for Remote Workers  Looking for an adventure? Now you can say 'adios' to America and 'hola' to Spain thanks to a new digital nomad visa program. Continued here

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A Republican Congresswoman’s Lasting Regret Outgoing Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler reflects on the forces that ended her 12-year term, and what might have been different. Among the things Jaime Herrera Beutler remembers about January 6, 2021, is that her husband managed to turn off the television just in time. Continued here

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Google announces official Android support for RISC-V Over the holiday break, the footage from the recent "RISC-V Summit" was posted for the world to see, and would you believe that Google showed up to profess its love for the up-and-coming CPU architecture? Continued here

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Dreading a Mountain of Emails After the Holidays? Follow These 3 Rules to Get Caught Up Quickly Start your year off with a clean inbox by following the R.A.D. System. Continued here

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VW's next electric car for the US is the ID.7 sedan On Tuesday in Las Vegas, Volkswagen revealed its next fully electric model destined for North America. Well, a somewhat-camouflaged version, at any rate—the show car wears an electroluminescent QR code livery for its debut at this year's Consumer Electronics Show. Continued here

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You Can't Have a Career If You Quit Every Year  Whether you want to be an entrepreneur or work for one, having the mindset that there's always something better a step away doesn't serve anyone, especially you. Continued here

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Financial Firms May Have to Reveal their Climate Risk And public companies may have to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, if regulators finalize proposed rules U.S. regulators laid the groundwork last year to address the threats that climate change poses to the global financial system. Continued here

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Best of IdeaCast 2022 From incivility for frontline workers to struggles with hybrid work to actual progress made since the murder of George Floyd, HBR IdeaCast spent 2022 sharing impactful management research and exploring the social and business trends that affect workers and leaders. Join hosts Alison Beard and Curt Nickisch as they listen in on some of their favorite interviews of the year. They share what made these conversations so memorable and insightful and why they’re still worth a listen—or a re-listen—in 2023. Continued here

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How to Grow Your Top Line in a Down Market As the economic outlook continues to be murky, plenty of companies are making cuts. But you can’t cut your way to prosperity. There are often-overlooked opportunities to grow the top line — a lot and fast, even in the face of a down market — with a set of tactical actions designed to improve sales and margins. The authors have found that companies that use tough times to maximize their bang for the buck in sales and marketing are able to increase revenues by tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars within one to two quarters. They’re also the companies that emerge stronger than ever as markets turn around. The authors present several quick-impact opportunities in three areas: improving commercial effectiveness, increasing marketing ROI, and optimizing revenue from your existing customers. Continued here

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Want to sleep longer? Move to Albania Sleep, says Shakespeare, is “the main course in life’s feast, and the most nourishing.” How long we take each night to get our fill depends on many variables, chief among them age. A recent article in Nature describes what is probably the largest ever global study on sleep duration, and it shows three distinct phases in sleepers worldwide, corresponding to early, mid, and late adulthood. (For more, see this Big Think article.) Continued here

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How microplastics are infiltrating the food you eat Microplastics have infiltrated every part of the planet. They have been found buried in Antarctic sea ice, within the guts of marine animals inhabiting the deepest ocean trenches, and in drinking water around the world. Plastic pollution has been found on beaches of remote, uninhabited islands and it shows up in sea water samples across the planet. One study estimated that there are around 24.4 trillion fragments of microplastics in the upper regions of the world's oceans.   But they aren't just ubiquitous in water – they are spread widely in soils on land too and can even end up in the food we eat. Unwittingly, we may be consuming tiny fragments of plastic with almost every bite we take. Continued here

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Restrictions on Psilocybin 'Magic Mushrooms' Are Easing as Research Ramps Up Magic mushrooms are undergoing a transformation from illicit recreational drug to promising mental health treatment. Numerous studies have reported positive findings using psilocybin—the mushrooms' main psychoactive compound—for treating depression as well as smoking and alcohol addiction, and for reducing anxiety in the terminally ill. Ongoing and planned studies are testing the drug for conditions that include opioid dependence, PTSD and anorexia nervosa. This scientific interest, plus growing social acceptance, is contributing to legal changes in cities across the U.S. In 2020 Oregon passed statewide legislation decriminalizing magic mushrooms, and the state is building a framework for regulating legal therapeutic use—becoming the first jurisdiction in the world to do so. For now psilocybin remains illegal and strictly controlled at the national level in most countries, slowing research. But an international push to get the drug reclassified aims to lower barriers everywhere. Continued here

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The Hidden Cost of Cheap TVs The television I grew up with—a Quasar from the early 1980s—was more like a piece of furniture than an electronic device. It was huge, for one thing: a roughly four-foot cube with a tiny curved screen. You couldn’t always make out a lot of details, partially because of the low resolution and partially because we lived in rural Ontario, didn’t have cable, and relied on an antenna. I remember the screen being covered in a fuzzy layer of static as we tried to watch Hockey Night in Canada. This whole contraption was housed in a beautifully finished wooden box, implying that it was built to be an heirloom. The price implied the same. My parents don’t remember what they paid for the TV, but it wasn’t unusual for a console TV at that time to sell for $800, or about $2,500 today adjusted for inflation. That’s probably why our family kept using the TV across three different decades—that, and it was heavy. It took three of us to move it. Continued here

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How You Define the Problem Determines Whether You Solve It New innovations can seem like they come out of nowhere. How could so many people have missed the solution to the problem for so long? And how in the world did the first person come up with that solution at all? In fact, most people who come up with creative solutions rely on a relatively straightforward method: finding a solution inside the collective memory of the people working on the problem. That is, someone working to solve the problem knows something that will help them find a solution — they just haven’t realized yet that they know it. When doing creative problem solving, the statement of the problem is the cue to memory. That is what reaches in to memory and draws out related information. In order to generate a variety of possible solutions to a problem, the problem solver (or group) can change the description of the problem in ways that lead new information to be drawn from memory. The most consistently creative people and groups are ones that find many different ways to describe the problem being solved. Continued here S11 3 Tips for Building Excitement Around Your Entrepreneurial Vision Ensure that it aligns with values, demonstrate your expertise, communicate it consistently--and be willing to pivot. Continued here S58 To grasp how serotonin works on the brain, look to the gut | Psyche Ideas is a systems neurobiologist. He is a Robinson fellow at the University of Sydney in Australia, where he runs an interdisciplinary lab that aims to integrate neuroscience, evolutionary theory and complex systems to understand how neurobiology supports awareness and flexible, parallel behaviour. If you are driving home from work along a road you’ve travelled numerous times before, your mind is likely to wander. You might become absorbed by a great conversation on the radio, or start rehearsing for an important meeting the next day. You steer your car down your usual route in a largely automatic way, without having to pay deliberate attention to the steering wheel, the subtle movements of your feet on the pedals, or the ever-changing traffic conditions around you. Yet if you encounter a sudden cognitive challenge, such as an unexpected road closure, you are quickly able to shift gears, identifying a new route home via a side street that you rarely use. Continued here S61 This Rare Robert Burns Book Was Discovered in a Barber Shop, Where It Was Used to Clean Razors In the late 19th century, a rare first-edition copy of the Robert Burns’ debut poetry collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was found in an English barber shop. It was missing its first 50 pages, as the owner had torn them out and used them to clean razors.  Fortunately, John Murison, a seed merchant and Burns enthusiast, spotted the rare book in the shop and purchased it from the owner. Experts don’t know the exact date of the transaction, though they estimate that it took place in the 1880s or 1890s. Continued here S38 New 13th-gen Intel Core desktop CPUs are handing out cores to everyone The 13th-generation "Raptor Lake" Intel Core CPUs we've tested so far have performed well by virtue of throwing lots and lots of cores at most workloads, and the less-expensive processors in the lineup are going to take the same approach. The number of large high-performance P-cores is staying the same, but CPUs from i5 to i9 are all picking up extra E-cores to help with rendering, encoding, and other high-end professional apps that can use every CPU core you give them. Continued here S65 How Kindle novelists are using ChatGPT Earlier this year, I wrote about genre-fiction authors using AI in their novels. Most wrote for Amazon’s Kindle platform, where an extremely rapid pace of publishing, as fast as a book a month, is the norm. AI helped them write quickly, but it also raised complex aesthetic and ethical questions. Would the widespread use of AI warp fiction toward the most common conventions and tropes? What parts of the writing process can be automated before the writing no longer feels like their own? Should authors have to disclose their use of AI? With the debut of ChatGPT, many of the questions these writers were dealing with have become more urgent and mainstream. I checked back with one of the authors, Jennifer Lepp, who writes in the cozy paranormal mystery subgenre under the pen name Leanne Leeds, to see how she was thinking about AI now. She’s still using the GPT-3-based tool Sudowrite — in fact, she is now paid to write tips on using it for the company’s blog — and has begun incorporating some of the more recent tools into her fiction. We spoke about what it’s been like working with ChatGPT, how its debut has roiled the independent author community, and other topics.    Continued here S27 I Threw a Holiday Party in Horizon Worlds. It Didn't Go Well I am, to put it mildly, a "metaverse" skeptic. The term entered common parlance without really referring to any specific technology, and companies like Meta, née Facebook, that promote it most heavily don't seem to be very good at building … whatever it is. However, I'm open minded. So when my editor came to me with a challenge to spend time during the holidays in "the metaverse," I was down to give it a shot. The idea was simple. Companies like Meta claim that their "metaverse" platforms are going to bring people together, right? Well, the holidays would be a perfect time to test this. It's a time for social gatherings, often involving loved ones from other states or even countries. If ever there was an opportunity for new tech to connect physically distant people … well, it would be March 2020. But the holidays are a close second. Continued here S47 ‘It’s Making Us More Ignorant’ Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-critical-race-theory legislation is already changing how professors in Florida teach. Jonathan Cox faced an agonizing decision. He was scheduled to teach two classes this past fall at the University of Central Florida that would explore color-blind racism, the concept that ostensibly race-neutral practices can have a discriminatory impact. The first, “Race and Social Media,” featured a unit on “racial ideology and color-blindness.” The second, “Race and Ethnicity,” included a reading on “the myth of a color-blind society.” An assistant sociology professor, Cox had taught both courses before; they typically drew 35 to 40 undergraduates apiece. Continued here S30 What is negative energy? And can it give us wormholes and warp drives? Energy has several different dictionary definitions as well as a technical version in physics textbooks, but boiled down to its essence, energy is the ability to effect change. A hunter’s taut bowstring with an arrow perched on it has a lot of potential energy. The change that is effected when the bowstring is released is an arrow shot at high speed through the air. That form of moving energy is called kinetic energy, and it can also effect change — like when the arrow hits its target, which means the hunter’s family will eat that day. Energy is ubiquitous in our Universe. Indeed, everything we see can be thought of as an endless dance of energy, with the energy changing forms — as logs burn, which boils water for coffee, which is drunk by groggy people headed off to work, where they can do their job and change the world around them. Energy is constantly flowing through objects and people, resulting in the tumultuous world in which we live. Continued here S57 A conversation with my spider Maman and Louise Bourgeois | Psyche Ideas Maman, a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois outside Tate Modern in London, October 2007. Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Maman, a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois outside Tate Modern in London, October 2007. Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Continued here S46 The Republican Majority’s Opening Debacle Republicans today could take control of the House of Representatives, giving them a foothold of power in Washington from which to smother Joe Biden’s agenda and generally make life hell for the president and his family. It all depends on whether Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the GOP House leader, can lock down the final votes he needs to become speaker. As of this morning, McCarthy was short of the 218 required for a majority. He can afford to lose only four Republicans in the party-line vote if all members are present. So far, at least five and potentially more than a dozen far-right lawmakers remain opposed to McCarthy’s candidacy or are withholding their support. Continued here S60 A Rare Snowy Owl Is Captivating Southern California Last week, a snowy owl made a surprise visit to the Southern California city of Cypress, located southeast of Los Angeles in Orange County. Excited neighbors and birders gathered to observe the raptor, which found accommodations on rooftops in a residential area. On December 27, the owl’s crowd of admirers surpassed 30 people at times. Some were locals, and others had traveled some 100 miles to catch a glimpse of the rarity. Continued here S53 The Universe Is More in Our Hands Than Ever Before Pity the poor astronomer. Biologists can hold examples of life in their hands. Geologists can fill specimen cabinets with rocks. Even physicists get to probe subatomic particles in laboratories built here on Earth. But across its millennia-long history, astronomy has always been a science of separation. No astronomer has stood on the shores of an alien exoplanet orbiting a distant star or viewed an interstellar nebula up close. Other than a few captured light waves crossing the great void, astronomers have never had intimate access to the environments that spur their passion. Until recently, that is. At the turn of the 21st century, astrophysicists opened a new and unexpected era for themselves: large-scale laboratory experimentation. High-powered machines, in particular some very large lasers, have provided ways to re-create the cosmos, allowing scientists like myself to explore some of the universe’s most dramatic environments in contained, controlled settings. Researchers have learned to explode mini supernovas in their labs, reproduce environments around newborn stars, and even probe the hearts of massive and potentially habitable exoplanets. Continued here S59 'The Collaboration' Brings Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Broadway Starring Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope, the production explores two art icons’ complex relationship In the mid-1980s, two art sensations—Pop Art icon Andy Warhol and Neo-Expressionist star Jean-Michel Basquiat—joined creative forces.  Continued here S52 You’ll Miss Gerontocracy When It’s Gone For the past two years, Washington has been under the unified control of the Democratic Party. It has also been under the control of a narrow demographic: longtime recipients of Social Security. The ruling troika of Nancy Pelosi (age 82), Chuck Schumer (72), and Joe Biden (80) has participated in politics for about a combined 140 years. The last time one of them had a job that wasn’t based on Pennsylvania Avenue was 1987. Critics have sneeringly referred to this state of affairs as a gerontocracy. The gerontocrats are supposedly unable to relinquish power, to admit that their cohort’s time is done. By hoarding leadership, the ruling oldsters have kept successor generations on the bench, depriving them of their turn to run the country. Continued here S49 Eight Self-Help Books That Actually Help These titles are challenging where others are pandering, and open-minded where others are prescriptive. Any book can be a self-help book, depending on how it’s read. Political pamphlets, epic poems, and contemporary novels can all offer insight into how to live—or how not to. But the self-help genre is thought to have had its true start in 1859, when Samuel Smiles, a second-rate Scottish journalist and doctor, published Self-Help, With Illustrations of Character and Conduct. It became an international best seller, and the cult of personal improvement was born. Continued here S42 Nvidia unveils a broad range of efficient new laptop GPUs, from RTX 4050 to 4090 In addition to un-unlaunching the RTX 4070 Ti GPU for desktops at CES today, Nvidia announced a new range of RTX 4000-series laptop GPUs. Nvidia claims the new GPUs will provide big performance and power efficiency boosts, particularly for the lower-end GPUs that ship in the gaming laptops that most people buy. Continued here S55 Kevin McCarthy’s Loyalty to Trump Got Him Nothing The once-presumptive House leader has been through three embarrassing rounds of voting, with more to come. High-level politics is fundamentally about dealmaking. You can’t succeed as anything more than a back-bencher if you aren’t willing to make a deal with almost anyone on almost anything. In Faust, a deal with the devil is fatal; on Capitol Hill, it’s how you survive. Continued here S54 Is This the Start of an AI Takeover? This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Last week, I asked OpenAI’s GPT-3 AI chatbot what I should ask all of you about AI. It suggested the question: “How do you think AI will change the way we live and work in the next decade?” The Up for Debate reader Ed reacted with suspicion: Continued here S64 Long Out of Math, an AI Programmer Cracks a Pure Math Problem | Quanta Magazine A family of sets is "union-closed" if the combination of any two sets in the family equals an existing set in the family. In mid-October, Justin Gilmer flew from California to New York to attend a friend's wedding. While on the East Coast he visited his former adviser, Michael Saks, a mathematician at Rutgers University, where Gilmer had received his doctorate seven years earlier. Continued here S50 The Mistakes Historians Make on Television History professionals can offer crucial insights on the great issues of the day. But best beware these stock phrases. In the fall of 1998, as an assistant history professor recently out of graduate school, I was excited to get a call from a producer of a local CBS morning news show who had noticed a panel discussion I’d organized about the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. The producer asked me on the show to put the event in historical context. I of course accepted. Continued here S62 Texas Woman Rescues 1,500 Hypothermic Bats During Cold Snap The Houston Humane Society wildlife center director nursed the animals to health in her attic About 1,500 Mexican free-tailed bats were rescued in Houston over the holidays, after an Arctic front brought extreme freezing temperatures. Weakened by the cold, they had fallen from their roosts in the city’s bridges.  Continued here S51 The Quiet Profundity of Everyday Awe That feeling—of being in the presence of something vast—is good for us. And, counterintuitively, it can often be found in completely unremarkable circumstances. What gives you a sense of awe? That word, awe—the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world—is often associated with the extraordinary. You might imagine standing next to a 350-foot-tall tree or on a wide-open plain with a storm approaching, or hearing an electric guitar fill the space of an arena, or holding the tiny finger of a newborn baby. Awe blows us away: It reminds us that there are forces bigger than ourselves, and it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense of what we have encountered. Continued here S56 Russia’s Depraved Decadence The Russians continue to murder both Ukrainians and their own young men for Putin’s mad scheme. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Continued here S63 Henrietta Lacks' Virginia Hometown Will Build Statue in Her Honor, Replacing Robert E. Lee Monument The city of Roanoke, Virginia, will erect a bronze statue of Henrietta Lacks in a plaza where a monument to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee once stood. Born in Roanoke in 1920, Lacks was a Black woman whose cancer cells were taken without her permission and used for groundbreaking medical research. Last month, early sketches for the new statue were revealed at an announcement ceremony. Continued here Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Followers Blog Archive ►  2024 (51) ►  December (1) ►  October (2) ►  August (2) ►  July (4) ►  June (3) ►  May (5) ►  April (4) ►  March (2) ►  February (10) ►  January (18) ▼  2023 (834) ►  December (20) ►  November (54) ►  October (44) ►  September (108) ►  August (91) ►  July (29) ►  June (68) ►  May (104) ►  April (33) ►  March (30) ►  February (99) ▼  January (154) A Physical Theory For When the Brain Performs Best... Feb 1, 2023 - 4 Startup Terms Explained With Analo... January 31, 2023 - Russian offensive "imminent" as... 'Tomb Raider' is Becoming a TV Series -- 'The Last... 9 Strategies to Improve Business Team Collaboratio... Jan 31, 2023 - The Jack Ma test for China"s promis... January 30, 2023 - Russia-Ukraine war live: Zelens... Does the Best Workout Exist? Exercise Scientists A... 25 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Explained: This Is the 'M... This Overlooked Scientist Helped Save Washington, ... 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