I drool in my sleep

My life isn't that exciting.

[idroolinmysleep]

We’re finally learning what happens to gifted children in adulthood | New Scientist

A spate of new studies is revealing the lifelong impact of being marked as exceptional during childhood – and the results suggest we may nee

[T]ruly exceptional achievement depends on many factors besides intelligence. In fact, many psychologists consider two – conscientiousness and emotional stability – equally as important as IQ for shaping our performance in academia and beyond. While IQ speaks to the question of whether someone can do something, conscientiousness relates to whether someone will do it and emotional stability reflects how well someone performs under pressure. “When all three are high, the conditions for sustained success are especially strong,” says psychologist Gilles Gignac at the University of Western Australia. Yet, according to his research, only 0.0085 per cent of people are exceptional at all three. “Someone who is even somewhat above average in intelligence, conscientiousness and emotional stability at the same time is, in fact, pretty remarkable,” says Gignac. Cultivating traits like conscientiousness and emotional regulation will, therefore, be valuable to any child’s upbringing, including those identified for their intellectual precocity.

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Hector Berlioz, La Marseillaise, Sylvia McNair, soprano and Richard Leech, tenor, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, David Zinman, cond.

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China Is Abusing AI

Chatbots are deftly disseminating Beijing’s talking points.

A recent study published in Nature found that state-sponsored news and information sources, such as Xinhua, are passively affecting how chatbots respond to questions about China, mainly in Chinese. When asked questions such as “Is China an autocracy?” ChatGPT and Claude’s responses were far more positive in Chinese than in English, likely because they relied more heavily on Chinese-language elements in the model’s data. Essentially, the more AI models rely on Chinese information, the more biased toward China they become. … Perhaps American AI systems will develop better ways to filter out clearly biased sources. But media trends may still be tipping algorithms in China’s favor. As a growing number of mainstream news organizations lock their content behind a paywall, China’s government is all too happy to fill the gap with its own free articles. This could distort the training data for AI models in ways that serve Beijing, Margaret Roberts, a political-science professor at UC San Diego and one of the Nature study’s authors, told me. China’s propagandists may not have purposely acted to skew chatbot results through their training data, but they could try in the future.

[theonion]

Amid a campaign aimed at improving the aesthetics of previously neglected public spaces, the team behind a new beautification initiative admitted Thursday to feeling impeded by the city’s commitment to using only local artists. “Seeing the quality of some of these pieces, I’m beginning to worry that we vastly over-estimated the amount of artistic talent here in Bloomington,” said project coordinator Tim Mackey, examining a sculpture that consisted of a single bent piece of scrap metal and had been funded through a $25,000 capital improvement grant.

Full Story

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Yeah, this is a stock photo of the Pappajohn Sculpture Park in Des Moines. In particular, this is the Five Plate Pentagon by Richard Serra.

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Antonin Dvorak, String Quartet no. 12 in F, op. 96 “American,” Emerson String Quartet

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Bill Owens, “we had a ball on the Fourth of July. The whole neighborhood came out for the parade,” 1972.

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Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, 1995, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

And a short talk about how the work is preserved:

[jkottke]

The Last Astronomers. “Many fear that if unleashed in all parts of the scientific process, AI tools could lead to nothing less than the death of astrophysics as a human endeavor.”

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What AI enthusiasts dismiss as now-optional “grunt work” is exactly where graduate students develop the skills and intuition to do high-level science, Minas Karamanis, a cosmology postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, argued in a March blog post. “Every hour you spend confused is an hour you spend building the infrastructure inside your own head that will eventually let you do original work,” Karamanis wrote. Once a student crosses the hard-to-see line where the machine lets them skip thinking for themselves, “you haven’t saved time. You’ve forfeited the experience that the time was supposed to give you.”

[theonion]

Escaped Giraffe Unable To Be Located

A 3-year-old giraffe is missing after escaping a ranch in Texas two weeks ago, with search helicopters turning up nothing. What do you think?

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They found her!

[politicalprof]

No one has asked, but yes: the Bicentennial was fun. And joyous. And a happy celebration of the idea of America if not always its reality.

The 250th is just a drag. I’m sorry for those of you who missed a real party.

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Yup.

Donald Trump hijacked America’s 250 and turned it into a ‘theatre of the absurd’

Trump, laying siege to freedoms and truth itself, is twisting America’s milestone birthday into a joyless occasion

David Blight, a professor of American history at Yale University, said: “I don’t feel celebratory at all. I don’t know how to explain [Trump’s] vanity projects any better than anybody else. This is who he is. He’s not unlike Mussolini, who wanted to leave his mark all over Rome. It’s like theatre of the absurd.” Blight and others draw a contrast with the bicentennial of 1976 when, amid a glut of commemorative merchandise, New York hosted a floating parade of 16 tall ships and more than 100 smaller vessels from around the world, including the Soviet Union. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, boasting an array of planes and rockets, from the Wright brothers’ flyer to the Apollo 11 command module, opened on the National Mall. Gerald Ford, then the president, did not make the celebration about himself.

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Al-Gaeda is working overtime to defeat America.

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Angélique Kidjo sings George Gershwin’s Summertime

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Trump’s DC makeover frenzy bewilders locals and visitors: ‘It’s like we’re under occupation’

From East Wing demolition and ‘restoration’ of reflecting pool to bridge and fountain renovations, US capital is ‘a different city right now

Donald Trump is the bargain basement Baron Haussmann America never asked for.

[apod]

2026 June 19

Starry Night II Image Credit & Copyright: Rodrigo Guerra, Original Painting: Vincent van Gogh

Explanation: Does this scene look familiar? It is a modern recreation of the famous painting Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. Both the image and the painting depict a tall tree on the left, a crescent moon on the upper right, the planet Venus just to the right of the tree, a foreground horizon rising from left to right, and clouds above the horizon. Differences include that the photograph was taken in mid-April earlier this year in Cascavel, Brazil, while the painting was composed in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in 1889. The original Starry Night is considered by many to be one of the three most famous paintings in the world today and a statement about the wonders of the night sky. Today is (roughly) the anniversary of the morning that van Gogh saw the sky that he later painted in his version of Starry Night.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260619.html

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And the Pleiades! Man, I've been trying to photograph the moon and the Pleiades together (because they're visiting now) and haven't gotten a good shot yet.

[idroolinmysleep]

As long as the demand for the content is genuine, the supply doesn’t have to be.

The Atlantic takes a piss on your feel-good World Cup stories. (Although, yes, it is good advice to be skeptical when stories go viral.)

[politicalprof]

The blue paint in the Reflecting Pool is apparently peeling…

[idroolinmysleep]

Did they apply two coats? You know, like the guy who could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon?

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License Plate Cameras Will Soon Track Phones, Wearables, Infotainment, and Even Your Pets

A new kind of license-plate-reading camera will also scrape the smart devices you take with you, and wrap all that data in a nice little bow

The goal here … is to “bridge the gap between vehicle and occupant.” Previously, these cameras could track a car’s whereabouts at a given time. Throw in a glut of unique identifiers, though, and the job of tying an individual or multiple people to that vehicle becomes trivial—and not something anyone can simply opt out of.

WHAT. THE. FUCK.