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File this under "small wins". I had been banging my head against a technical problem for most of the day yesterday. As I slipped into bed around midnight, I suddenly knew the solution. Despite the call of the pillows, I dragged myself out of bed, down to the laptop and took a full 30 seconds to write it down -- and thank goodness, because by this morning I had forgotten about it again!

Crowds and water have more in common than you'd think - they both flow like a fluid, with predictable patterns that can turn perilous if not properly managed. Looks like the physics of human herds is no bull, as researchers have uncovered the fluid dynamics behind dangerous crowd crushes.

Using Reddit's popular ChangeMyView community as a source of baseline data, OpenAI had previously found that 2022's ChatGPT-3.5 was significantly less persuasive than random humans, ranking in just the 38th percentile on this measure. But that performance jumped to the 77th percentile with September's release of the o1-mini reasoning model and up to percentiles in the high 80s for the full-fledged o1 model.

So are you smarter than a Redditor?

When even Cory Doctrow starts to sound like an optimist I have to give myself a reality check as it usually means I'm heading off the deep end. But in this case it just rubs me the wrong way that he talks about Mastodon and Bluesky in the same breath -- one is not like the other.

Originality.AI looked at 8,885 long Facebook posts made over the past six years.

Key Findings

• 41.18% of current Facebook long-form posts are Likely AI, as of November 2024.
• Between 2023 and November 2024, the average percentage of monthly AI posts on Facebook was 24.05%.
• This reflects a 4.3x increase in monthly AI Facebook content since the launch of ChatGPT. In comparison, the monthly average was 5.34% from 2018 to 2022.

Yet another entry from the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction department, as drug-addicted rats have turned Houston’s police evidence storage into their personal stash house.

And I just assumed they called Rainbolt

The Breakthrough Starshot program has gotten a lot of press for planning to accelerate tiny (a few grams) probes to 10-20% C with powerful laser pulses, but a new idea proposes building a giant particle accelerator in space to push much larger probes (up to 1000kg) up to speed with a relativistic electron beam. Such a setup might get a large-ish probe to Alpha Centauri within 40 years.

Well, maybe not, but a new study suggests drinking it only in the morning can reduce the risk of heart disease and all-cause mortality. so that's something, right?

As far as we've been able to tell, all matter in the universe comes in just of two distinct types: fermions (particles that make stuff)and bosons (particles that mediate a force).

However, physicists from Rice University have developed a mathematical framework for a third type, known as paraparticles, whose behavior could imply the existence of elementary particles nobody has ever considered. While they don't yet have a means for experimentally identifying such particles yet (or even predicting exactly what they'd do), this is the first time that such a model has been found that allows for a new particle family.

Dubbed Mazarron II, she was extracted from the sea in twenty parts and taken to the laboratories of the Cartagena National Museum of Underwater Archaeology for reconstruction. Laden with a cargo of lead ingots, she will not only offer an insight into the shipbuilding techniques of the Phoenicians but also their metallurgical sophistication.