ChatGPT 3.5 available for free

The famous Large Language Model is now available for free, no account needed. (Note that the premium and superior version is 4.0… possibly later by the time you read this.) https://chat.openai.com/

And more good news from FutureCrunch (bolding mine):

Three countries making uncelebrated progress on poverty
Uzbekistan has witnessed a sharp decline in child poverty, falling from 21.5% in 2021 to 13.7% in 2023; in the Philippines, a new report estimates the poverty rate could soon fall to single digits; and in Cambodia, average incomes have grown fourfold since 1990 and average schooling has increased from 2.4 to 5.1 years.

Swiss women win major climate court case

A group of 2,000+ senior women in Switzerland have won a court case that may force European governments to do more about climate change:

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled Tuesday that Switzerland had not acted urgently to achieve climate targets, leading victims, who are mostly in their 70s, to suffer physically and emotionally while potentially placed at risk of dying.

The women, part of a group called KlimaSeniorinnen (Senior Women for Climate Protection), filed the lawsuit nine years ago.

The court’s judgment is binding, cannot be appealed, and could “influence the law in 46 countries in Europe including the UK,” the BBC reported.

I found this in Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/2000-senior-women-win-biggest-victory-possible-in-landmark-climate-case/. More information on senior women fighting climate change at https://19thnews.org/2024/01/climate-grandmothers-environmental-activism/:

These are the climate grannies. They’ll do whatever it takes to protect their grandchildren.

And more good news from FutureCrunch (bolding mine):

FBI confirms huge decline in crime in the United States
New data from over 13,000 agencies, covering all of 2023, have shown that there was a 13% decline in murder last year (the largest one-year decline ever recorded); a 6% decline in violent crime, likely the lowest rate since the late 1960s; and a 4% decline in property crime. Fox News has been strangely silent.

From the internet (2018, part 2)

More stuff I saved because it was funny or useful or somehow worth saving:

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Changing life patterns: use habit substitution (replace smoking with chewing gum – can’t do both); habit attachment (append new habit to existing one, like floss after brushing).

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When dealing with clutter, I pick up an object and go “where should I put this?”, and of course this doesn’t work, because if I knew that, I would’ve put it there in the first place. It’s clutter because I didn’t have an answer.

So instead, I say “Where should this be a year from now?”

For some reason, this elicits entirely different answers. It cuts through the paralysis and imagines a future where the needful has been done.

Start with a very small habit that doesn’t take a whole lot of willpower to do and consistently do it…like do 1 sit up, and do it EVERY DAY.

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((I actually found this one to be helpful:))
Procrastinate later! What’s the rush? There’s always tomorrow!

((Also on procrastination:))
“Discipline is much more valuable than motivation.”

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In times of crisis, the wise build bridges, the fools build barriers.

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“When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.”

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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Look for the word “homeopathic” on the label: that’s Greek for useless.

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I had no idea so many women wanted to be my friend until I started dating …@Spaziotwat

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The duty of the general is to ride by the ranks on horseback, show himself to those in danger, praise the brave, threaten the cowardly, encourage the lazy, fill up gaps, transpose a company if necessary, bring aid to wearied, anticipate the crisis, the hour, and the outcome. – Onasander

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And in good news from FutureCrunch (2024!):

Everything in America is awful
Apart from the fact that marriage rates are up and divorce rates are down, the percentage of Americans without health insurance has fallen by almost half since 2010, employment for people in their prime working years is at its highest level in more than two decades, manufacturing construction spending has climbed to $225 billion per month, cholesterol levels are gradually improving across the country, and life expectancy has increased for the first time in two years thanks to a levelling off of overdose deaths.

Global warming 2023 / 2024

We’re shattering heat records: https://wapo.st/49b3HcF (Washington Post free link, from June 2023, approx 1,100 words):

New precedents have been set in recent weeks and months, surprising some scientists with their swift evolution: historically warm oceans, with North Atlantic temperatures already nearing their typical annual peak; unparalleled low sea ice levels around Antarctica, where global warming impacts had, until now, been slower to appear; and the planet experiencing its warmest June ever charted, according to new data.

And then, on Monday, came Earth’s hottest day in at least 125,000 years. Tuesday was hotter.

“We have never seen anything like this before,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

But it’s not hopeless. EV sales are rising rapidly (almost all new cars in Norway, 25% of all new cars in Europe, from 2% in the US in 2020 to almost 10% in 2023); renewable energy is going up (see chart below); CO2 emissions are actually dropping in the EU and the US: https://wapo.st/3J3jRtX (Washington Post free link), approx 700 words. One chart:

The note in the upper-right corner is amazing: “China increased its renewable energy by almost 400% since 2015.”

Online breast cancer risk calculator

A 5-Minute Quiz Revealed Olivia Munn’s Breast Cancer Risk. You Can Take It Too.

Article is about 1,100 words: https://time.com/6952723/breast-cancer-risk-assessment-tool/.

What is the Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Tool?
Who should take it?
Where do mammograms fit in?
Future innovations

Released in 1989 by the National Cancer Institute, the online questionnaire takes less than five minutes to complete and pretty accurately predicts a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer…. The questionnaire—also known as the Gail Model after its developer Dr. Mitchell Gail at the National Cancer Institute—is about 98% accurate in predicting risk of breast cancer in most women.

Here’s the calculator: https://bcrisktool.cancer.gov/calculator.html.

And random good news from Future Crunch (now calling its newsletter Fix the News):

Lichtenstein’s parliament just voted 24-1 to legalise same-sex marriage. The African Development Bank says Africa will have 11 of the 20 fastest-growing economies in the world this year. McKenzie Scott has now given away $16.5 billion from the fortune she came into after divorcing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Fewer middle-aged people are dying from cancer in the UK than at any other point in the last 25 years. Gene editing for sickle cell disease is expensive, but it’s going to get a lot more accessible.

The cystic-fibrosis breakthrough that changed everything

Cystic fibrosis once all but guaranteed an early death. When the disease was first identified, in the 1930s, most babies born with CF died in infancy. The next decades were a grind of incremental medical progress: A child born with CF in the ’50s could expect to live until age 5. In the ’70s, age 10. In the early 2000s, age 35. With Trikafta came a quantum leap. Today, those who begin taking the drug in early adolescence, a recent study projected, can expect to survive to age 82.5—an essentially normal life span.

Of course, there are issues:

Side effects: “It can cause cataracts as well as liver injury. More perplexing, Trikafta may affect the brain. For Jenny, starting Trikafta coincided with a wave of intense insomnia, brain fog, and anxiety.”
Trikafta repairs the results of a specific mutation: “For another group of CF patients, Trikafta simply does not work. About 10 percent lack the F508del mutation that the triple combination was specifically designed to fix.”
Since so many people have been more or less cured, support groups for CF patient have been disappearing, even for the 10% who are not helped by Trikafta: “Recently, Make-A-Wish announced that children with CF would no longer automatically be eligible for the program, because “life-changing advances” had radically improved the outlook for them.”
And… CF patients expected to die young. Often they have no savings, no professional skills, no kids, because they did not expect to live long enough to deal with those. But now they will live.

7,700 words but all interesting: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/cystic-fibrosis-trikafta-breakthrough-treatment/677471/. Send me a note if you can’t read it.

From the internet (2018, part 1)

I save interesting sayings that I find on the internet. Here are some from 2016-2018 but which still make me laugh… or learn:

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> Old Chinese proverb: You can’t polish a turd.

Rlippa: But you can sure step in it… over and over and over again.

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” …You Don’t Tug On Superman’s Cape…

You Don’t Spit Into The Wind
You Don’t Pull The Mask Off The Old Lone Ranger
And You Don’t Mess Around With “A Grand Jury Subpoena.”

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Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, tells me: “The result will violate a cardinal national security rule: Avoid having more than one nuclear crisis at a time.”

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biffbobfred Ars Scholae Palatinae:

<<…>>

My grandmother was kinda like this. At night she got up and laid on the bathroom floor, probably because the tiles were cool and soothing (no evidence of a fall). My sis found her in the morning. No known cause of death. I can guarantee she was not part of Project Mayhem or whatever. Human bodies are incredibly complex. Sometimes I wonder why we don’t randomly explode. The fact that some people live for 30,000 days or more is still magic to me. Not a miracle but magic.

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I don’t know why men go to bars to meet women.

Go to Target.

The female to male ratio is 10 to 1 & they’re already looking for things they don’t need.

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Remember, folks, you can lead a gift horse to water, but you can’t look him in the mouth. (Or something like that.) Sometimes you just have to bite the hand that you’re dealt.

We could stand here and talk until the cows turn blue. But we have to get all our ducks on the same page, or the fan is gonna hit the roof.

Wake up and smell the music. Don’t count your chickens without breaking a few eggs!

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You never realize how many shortcuts a computer has until a cat sits on the keyboard.

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Libertarians believe consenting adults have the right to do whatever they choose, except band together. — Emo Philips

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/14/raccoons-drunk-crab-apples-cause-false-rabies-scare-west-virginia/:

High animals are more common as more jurisdictions legalize marijuana and people plop the drug into tasty edibles that also appeal to their pets, who can’t read warning labels and don’t typically have the impulse control to stop at one, Brulliard reported.

Societal collapses

Historians are now using scientific methods of analysis to summarize how and why societies collapse:

By looking back at past polycrises (and there were many) we can try and figure out which societies coped best…. Pouring through the historical record, we have started noticing some very important themes rhyming through history. Even major ecological disasters and unpredictable climates are nothing new.

Inequality and elite infighting

One of the most common patterns that has jumped out is how extreme inequality shows up in nearly every case of major crisis. When big gaps exist between the haves and have-nots, not just in material wealth but also access to positions of power, this breeds frustration, dissent and turmoil.

About 4,100 words: https://theconversation.com/historys-crisis-detectives-how-were-using-maths-and-data-to-reveal-why-societies-collapse-and-clues-about-the-future-218969.

Something to take a little heart from:

Fascists and fascist governments, despite their positioning are generally bad at war…

War is something fascists value intensely because the beating heart of fascist ideology is a desire to prove heroic masculinity in the crucible of violent conflict (arising out of deep insecurity, generally). Or as Eco puts it, “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life, but, rather, life is lived for struggle…life is permanent warfare” and as a result, “everyone is educated to become a hero.”² Being good at war is fundamentally central to fascism in nearly all of its forms – indeed, I’d argue nothing is so central. Consequently, there is real value in showing that fascism is, in fact, bad at war, which it is.

Concluding:

The more standard pattern is that fascist or near-fascist regimes regularly start wars of choice which they then lose catastrophically. That is about as bad at war as one can be.

More details at https://acoup.blog/2024/02/23/fireside-friday-february-23-2024-on-the-military-failures-of-fascism/ (approx 2,200 words).

And some more good climate news from the Wall Street Journal via FutureCrunch:

In 2020, Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged that the country’s emissions would begin falling before 2030 and hit net zero before 2060, part of its plan prepared under the Paris accord. He also said China would have 1,200 gigawatts of total solar- and wind-power capacity by the end of this decade. The country is six years ahead of schedule: China reached 1,050 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity at the end of 2023, and the China Electricity Council forecast last month that capacity would top 1,300 gigawatts by the end of this year.

40% of US electricity now emissions-free

((2023)) Wind and solar are likely to be in a dead heat with coal, and all carbon-emissions-free sources combined will account for roughly 40 percent of US electricity production.

Overall electricity production year-to-date is down by just over one percent from 2022, though demand was higher this October compared to last year. This is in keeping with a general trend of flat-to-declining electricity use as greater efficiency is offsetting factors like population growth and expanding electrification.

That’s important because it means that any newly added capacity will displace the use of existing facilities. And, at the moment, that displacement is happening to coal.

Excellent progress! Of course, electricity generation is not the only source of global warming gases, but it’s an important part. Details at https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/12/40-of-us-electricity-is-now-emissions-free/.

And from FutureCrunch (my bolding):

For the first time in a decade, the EPA has tightened regulations on air pollution, lowering the allowable limit for annual PM2.5 levels from 12 micrograms per cubic meter to 9. The reduction is predicted to reap $46 billion in net health benefits by 2032, including prevention of up to 800,000 asthma attacks and 4,500 premature deaths. NPR

Alzheimer’s progress

For years, Alzheimer’s conferences were like the obituary pages in the local newspaper: It’s where clinicians and researchers in the field went to find out the names of the latest promising drugs to die. Between 1998 and 2017 alone, 146 clinical trials of new Alzheimer’s drugs failed…

The big potential benefit (of new drugs), say Alzheimer’s experts, lies in using these drugs, or others soon to come, in conjunction with a second recent development in the field: diagnostic blood tests that can identify the presence of Alzheimer’s-associated proteins…. Scientists believe that in a few years clinicians may be able to use them to make quick, early diagnoses cheaply, even before patients show any outward symptoms. That suggests a new strategy against the disease: GPs could screen otherwise healthy people for early-stage Alzheimer’s and treat them with drugs that slow the progress of the disease before major damage has occurred. The hope is that eventually, Alzheimer’s will no longer be a terminal disease but a chronic one that can be managed with drugs and perhaps be staved off indefinitely.

Full article also covers the history of the disease, why it was so hard to develop effective drugs, and how PET scans (to detect amyloid and tau in living people) were a game-changer. And remember, this is just the start — the future will only bring better treatments. 4,400 words: https://www.newsweek.com/2023/10/20/can-we-prevent-alzheimers-scientists-say-new-tests-treatments-game-changer-1832957.html.

Bonus: an item from FutureCrunch:

Ten people died from unprovoked shark attacks globally in 2023, a slight uptick over the five-year average. This makes sharks less dangerous than lawn mowers, ladders, champagne corks, jet skis, and lightning strikes.

Guess which one of those things got an entire article in ABC News?