“The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the study of ancient manuscripts, unlocking texts that have remained unreadable for centuries. From deciphering burnt Roman scrolls to analysing damaged cuneiform tablets, AI-driven tools are revealing new information about the ancient world. This advancement allows researchers to examine vast archives, identify previously unknown writings, and reconstruct missing text with unprecedented accuracy. Scholars are now equipped with more data than ever before, opening up opportunities to answer historical questions that were once out of reach. As reported by nature.com, AI has successfully revealed significant portions of Greek text. Computer scientists Brent Seales from the University of Kentucky and participants of the competition called Vesuvius Challenge, utilised advanced neural networks to detect ink patterns on the fragile scrolls. As reported by Nature.com, the February 2024 winning entry employed a TimeSformer model, revealing text attributed to an ancient Greek philosophical work. Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples, described the discovery as a ‘historic moment for the field.’ AI tools are also being applied to diverse historical collections. Researchers in South Korea are employing transformer-based networks to translate the extensive records of the Joseon dynasty, written in Hanja. This system has expedited translations of state records, offering insights into the political and cultural trends of the era. Similarly, initiatives such as the Fragmentarium project at Ludwig-Maximilians University are using neural networks to identify overlapping cuneiform fragments, uncovering lines from the Epic of Gilgamesh and a previously unknown hymn to Babylon.” (Gadgets 360)
“No wonder, then, that all eyes were on Trump when he entered the Washington National Cathedral on Thursday morning to bid farewell to Jimmy Carter. The presence of the disruptive once and future President alongside all four of his living predecessors was as discordant as any moment at an American state funeral, with its grand rituals meant to unify and salve, could be. Carter’s final public wish, last year, had been to live long enough to vote against Trump. He did so, only to have Trump win in November anyway. When Carter, whom Trump had savaged as the worst President in the history of the U.S., except for the current occupant of the office, died shortly before the New Year, Trump publicly fumed about granting Carter the ritual honor of lowering the U.S. flag to half-staff for thirty days, which Trump complained would ruin his Inauguration and delight his Democratic enemies. But there he was on Thursday morning, sitting elbow to elbow in the second row with those who had spent the past few months campaigning against him as a would-be dictator. As he smiled and chatted with Barack Obama, was he smug? Triumphant? Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sat in front of him, though they did not shake his hand or visibly acknowledge his presence. As Carter’s casket made its way up the center aisle of the cathedral, the cavernous nave was so quiet that I could hear the howling of the frigid January wind outside, fitting background music for a funeral coming amid such a national storm.” (Susan B Glasser/TNY)
“Massive datasets are now coming online, as recorders can be left in the field, listening to the calls of gibbons in the jungle or birds in the forest, 24/7, across long periods of time. There were occasions when such massive datasets were impossible to manage manually. Now, new automatic detection algorithms based on convolutional neural networks can race through thousands of hours of recordings, picking out the animal sounds and clustering them into different types, according to their natural acoustic characteristics. Once those large animal datasets are available, new analytical algorithms become a possibility, such as using deep neural networks to find hidden structure in sequences of animal vocalizations, which may be analogous to the meaningful structure in human language. However, the fundamental question that remains unclear is, what exactly are we hoping to do with these animal sounds? Some organizations, such as Interspecies.io, set its goal quite clearly as, ‘to transduce signals from one species into coherent signals for another.’ In other words, to translate animal communication into human language. Yet most scientists agree that non-human animals do not have an actual language of their own—at least not in the way that we humans have language.” (Arik Kershenbaum/WIRED)
“I have sometimes pondered the pivotal moment when money changes people forever. The answer is without doubt the acquisition of the private plane—it’s the moment when you leave the human race forever. And having just flown back on JetBlue Mosaic from the Dominican Republic sitting next to an enormous Russian chomping plantain chips, I attest wholeheartedly that it’s a loss of connection not to be regretted. So it is no surprise to me that Bill Clinton, in his new memoir Citizen, ascribes his dependence on Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane to the travel needs of the Clinton foundation. Who else is going to put his Boeing 727 at the service of an ex-president to fly around to what our soon-to-be 47th president once called ‘shithole countries’ than a fraudulent pedophile like Epstein in desperate need of adding sheen to his slime? In 2002 Epstein picked up Clinton in Siberia on the ‘Lolita Express’ and flew him to a US naval base in Japan, which hardly sounds like the thrumming locus of nubile orgies. The late TV legend Barbara Walters used to lament the necessity to vacation every year with the crass termagant CEO of a bra company just because said termagant happened to own her own plane. Most of Henry Kissinger’s inner circle was dictated by who could fly him where and when … A leading M&A lawyer once told me that corporate merger negotiations often run aground on a vague-sounding contractual term known as ‘the social issues.’ The social issues are, primarily, the private plane. Can the exiting big shot still have use of it? How often? With how many co-passengers? No plane, no deal … The Obamas won’t even cross the road these days—or in Barack’s case, play a round of golf at a prestigious club—without the use of a private plane belonging to one of their billionaire circle. It is worth examining who did and did not make the cut at his notorious Martha’s Vineyard 60th birthday party in 2021 based on whether or not the guest in question could provide future access to wings.” (Tina Brown)
“I’ll not fall for the bait. I watched Trump’s press conference. I will take him seriously, but not literally. He’s negotiating. He’s sending messages … He is haggling for better rates for American ships in the Canal (and perhaps a MAGA project of widening that too-skinny thing) … He is haggling with Denmark: Greenland wants independence, at least a majority of its minuscule (57,000) population does and we’re a more plausible big brother than you … Those days are over. There are few illusions about ideological conflict anymore; this is a mercantile world of power politics and national neuroses. The Russians are muddling through their historic strategy of masochistic machismo; they bleed themselves dry and then sulk over the ashes. The Chinese have had a consistent strategy overseas that has nothing to do with Marx. They practice bribery followed by exploitation. They’ll build a port or dig a mine in Africa or South America, then insist on running it for their own benefit. They’ll stay away from costly military ventures (except, perhaps, in their perceived sphere of influence)—and then swoop in with infrastructure emoluments in order to harvest rare earth minerals, after we’ve bombed a place to smithereens. This will certainly be the case if the dust ever settles in Afghanistan, which has lots of fabulous stuff in the ground. There is nothing high-minded about the Chinese way. There is no yammer about liberty and democracy; there is no fantasy of a ‘free’ world. There is only the brute exercise of economic power. I suspect that this is the sort of foreign policy that Trump is aiming for: entirely transactional. He would be the last person to sign up for a Carteresque humanitarian policy toward all nations; he has ridiculed George W. Bush’s ‘forward freedom agenda,’ which attempted a Neo-conservative idealism in its effort to remake the Middle East.” (Joe Klein/Sanity Clause)
“Before Christmas, Ann Telnaes, an editorial cartoonist at the Washington Post, submitted a drawing that depicted four billionaire media and tech executives and one mouse genuflecting before Donald Trump, shown standing on a garlanded dais. The cartoon, Telnaes wrote last weekend, was inspired by recent reports of ‘men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-Lago’ to visit Trump in the wake of his election win in November. (The mouse in the cartoon, Mickey, was a symbolic stand-in for the Walt Disney Company, the owner of ABC News, which recently paid sixteen million dollars to settle a defamation case brought by Trump despite many observers feeling that the network could successfully—and certainly should—have fought on.) The cartoon, however, never appeared in the Post, an outcome that Telnaes attributed to the fact that one of the billionaires she caricatured was Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner. ‘I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,’ Telnaes wrote. And so she decided to quit. ‘I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist,’ she added. ‘But I will not stop holding truth to power.’ The decision did cause a stir in media circles—indeed, it was perceived as exacerbating a crisis that has roiled the Post ever since Bezos made the decision, shortly before the election, to block the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris, Trump’s rival. Bezos presented that move as downstream of concerns about trust in journalism, but many observers suspected, given the timing, that he was trying to curry favor with Trump given his voluminous outside business interests (and Trump’s threats to use the power of the state to go after his perceived enemies)—including, apparently, many Post subscribers, some three hundred thousand of whom reportedly canceled in the wake of the scrapped endorsement.” (Jon Allsop/CJR)
“Yesterday, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the Front national and godfather of the French far-right, died at age 96. For many, this was a moment of jubilation and I’m certainly among those who think the world is a better place without that vile ogre. Still, it’s hard to celebrate after reflecting that his political movement has gone from the margins to the mainstream, and the party that he founded, now led by his daughter Marine and renamed the Rassemblement national, is the single largest group in parliament and is on the cusp of power in France. His expulsion from the party by his daughter buoyed its fortunes and his death is likely only to out help more. Like many founders of movements, he will be more powerful in his absence. Across the world, the type of politics Le Pen championed, a crude, combative populism that plays constantly at the edges of fascism, is becoming the dominant political style. It is a cliché to call things ‘the [insert nation] Trump’ but Le Pen has some claim to being the French Trump avant la lettre: he pioneered the cheap machismo, vulgarity, casual racism, and outrageous declarations.” (Unpopular Front/John Ganz)
“WHEN ERIC ADAMS HIT THE FAMED Apollo theater in Harlem on Thursday for his State of the City address, he stood on a stage where celebrated performances have taken place for 90 years. And no one has been performing on the political stage quite like the embattled New York City mayor since Donald Trump’s November win. The indicted mayor—who faces a five-count case alleging he benefited from bribes and gifts from people with ties to the Turkish government—urged Trump to “fix the border” within a week of the presidential election, and said he was open to collaborating with the incoming administration on immigration enforcement, which includes a vast mass-deportation plan. It was the continuation of a tough-on-immigration posture for Adams, who once called himself the ‘Biden of Brooklyn,’ and who has said he wants to focus on criminals and not mass deportation. At a press conference in December, Adams suggested that undocumented immigrants don’t have the right to due process, saying ‘the Constitution is for Americans.’ ‘I’m not a person that snuck into this country,’ he added for good measure. ‘My ancestors have been here for a long time.’ Adams later walked back the comments after criticism. But he subsequently has met with Trump’s incoming border czar, Tom Homan. Adams’s evolution seems likely to be more than just rhetorical. In 2024, he opposed sanctuary laws passed by the New York City Council to shield immigrants. After Trump’s reelection, the mayor said that he is now prepared to use executive action to loosen those laws, easing the way for federal law enforcement to deport people living in New York City. Speaking about migrant criminals at a December press conference, he said violent Venezuelan gang members were making their way to New York City. ‘Cancel me, because I’m going to protect the people of this city,’ he declared.” (Adrian Carrasquillo/The Bullwark)
“Three weeks from now, the Democratic National Committee will convene in National Harbor, Maryland, to elect a new party chair and other national officers. For Democrats reeling from the defeat of Kamala Harris, this will be their first opportunity to anoint a fresh face for the national party to replace Jaime Harrison, who is stepping down. A new chair, particularly one elected via an open vote and not merely picked by an incumbent president, as is the party’s tradition, could also change how Democrats operate at both the national and state level. So, while some joke that the race for DNC chair is the ultimate high school class president election, whoever holds the office will have a significant role in how Democrats respond to Trump, how they rebuild, what changes they make to their media, technology, and fundraising practices, and how the 2028 presidential selection process plays out. But who will make this decision? Officially, it’s a secret. According to the DNC, there are 448 active members of the national committee, including 200 elected members from 57 states, territories, and Democrats Abroad; members representing 16 affiliate groups; and 73 ‘at-large’ members who were elected as a slate appointed in 2021 by the party chairman, Jaime Harrison. For a party that claims the word ‘democratic’ and insists that it is a champion of transparency and accountability in government, the official roster of these 448 voters is not public. Michael Kapp, a DNC member from California who was first elected to that position by his state party’s executive committee in 2016, told me the list isn’t public ‘because it’s the DNC—it’s a black box.’ He told me that leadership holds tightly to the list to prevent any organizing beyond their control. Today, we’re going to open up the DNC’s black box.” (Micah Sifry/TAP)
“A deeply religious man, Jimmy Carter infused a renewed sense of moral purpose into U.S. foreign policy, an important pivot from the disastrous effects of the Vietnam War and Watergate. His first inaugural address in 1977 sought to marry his idealism with a strategic vision toward allies and opponents: ‘Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for these societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights.’ His administration then proceeded quickly to criticize human rights violations in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Uganda and supported sanctioning countries with abusive records, such as Rhodesia. That same year, Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance articulated a set of principles and policies that would eventually become Presidential Directive 30, a blueprint for how the U.S. government would promote human rights. The State Department quickly stood up a new bureau for human rights and humanitarian affairs which began issuing public country reports on human rights. The National Security Council under Zbigniew Brzezinski established the first interagency working group to integrate human rights into foreign assistance and other decisions. These and many other actions created a formal framework and bureaucracy to elevate human rights that have endured and expanded for decades. Inevitably, Carter’s high purposes faced significant tradeoffs in cases where the perceived need to contain the USSR and other adversaries overrode the call for justice he personally and politically embraced. One tragic example: Archbishop Oscar Romero’s forsaken pleas to Carter in February 1980 to ban military aid to the Salvadoran junta, shortly before a death squad, led by a U.S.-trained officer, assassinated him. Nonetheless, his lifelong commitment to protect and champion human rights defenders around the world, which I witnessed first-hand at the Carter Center, demonstrates his steadfast pursuit of what he once called America’s ‘historical birthright’ to advance the universal demand for fundamental human rights.” (Ted Piccone/Brookings)
“The brightest comet in nearly 20 years — comet G3 ATLAS (C/2024) — is expected to reach its peak brilliance later this week into early next week. The only question is: ‘Will you actually be able to see it?’ This celestial paradox belongs to Comet 2024 G3 (ATLAS), which was first sighted on April 5 of last year by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey, in images obtained with a 0.5-meter (19.7-inch) reflector telescope located in Rio Hurtado, Chile. At the time of discovery, the comet was 407 million miles (655 million km) from Earth and shining at an exceedingly faint magnitude of +19. That's roughly 158,000 times dimmer than the faintest star visible to the naked eye. A preliminary orbit for this comet indicated that it was going to pass exceptionally close — less than 9 million miles (14 million km) from the sun in mid-January 2025; only about one-quarter the distance of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. However, these initial calculations also suggested that G3 ATLAS was a new comet coming directly from out of the Oort cloud, a vast bubble composed of countless billions of icy objects encircling our solar system, located perhaps 10 trillion miles (16 trillion km) from the sun. Small sun-skirting comets originating from the Oort Cloud, making their first approach to the sun, often disintegrate before reaching perihelion (their closest approach to the sun). But after G3 ATLAS’s orbit was refined, it was determined that it was actually a dynamically old comet, having made at least one previous close approach to the sun, with an orbital period of roughly 160,000 years. This provided hope that — having survived a prior close encounter with the sun — this comet could survive its impending close brush and possibly put on a bright display after the start of the new year.” (Joe Rao/Space.com)
“Today, every sign and signal coming out of Washington is that MAGA is being normalized. Journalists are fawningly interviewing the Trump players like they always do incoming administrations (see the political site Axios this morning treating chief of staff Susie Wiles like a hero general). The media barons continue to bend the knee. Over the weekend, the Washington Post refused to run a satirical cartoon showing its owner among other American billionaires and corporate chiefs supplicant to the Fat Man, prompting the cartoonist to quit. New York Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi spoke for what I am sure are many potential collaborationists when he urged his fellow Democrats to work with Trump for the good of the country because Americans are tired of ‘endless finger-pointing, nit-picking and daily battling’ - a tactic that, has he not noticed, actually worked rather well for the Republicans! We will get back to who we are one day, but we can’t if we forget what’s actually happened. The zone may be flooded with Bannon’s shit, but that doesn’t mean we must reject the evidence of our memories and our own eyes and ears, the totalitarian party’s final and most essential edict in Orwell’s 1984.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)