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some of the things I read in antisocial isolation


From Space, Mont Saint-Michel Stars in a Wild Impressionist Painting
During the winter months, the iconic French site casts a perfect shadow on a bay full of history—and quicksand.


The low angle of the winter sun creates a perfect shadow of the iconic Mont Saint-Michel abbey on the water. Embiggenable. Explore at home.


IT IS ONE OF THE most beautiful and recognizable abbeys in the world: Rising above the medieval walls of a tidal island on France’s northwestern coast, the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel seems to float in the glassy waters of the surrounding bay. At least, that’s how it appears from the mainland, less than half a mile away.

Seen from space during the late autumn and winter months, when the sun is lower in the Northern Hemisphere sky, the monastery’s walls and spires cast a perfect shadow onto the bay. The image above, captured by the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite on November 12, 2022, shows the abbey and island, and their dramatic winter shadow, amid a swirl of enhanced colors. Vivid greens indicate active agricultural areas, while pastel blues and purples reveal the complexity of currents in the shallow Bay of St. Michel. The bay’s tides can fluctuate by nearly 50 feet, occasionally covering the modern bridge that has linked the island to the mainland since 2014.

Most of the buildings and walls standing there today date from the 11th to the 16th centuries, the height of the island’s time as a Benedictine abbey. There are, however, some traces of an earlier life as a holy site dedicated to Archangel Michael in 708, including early and sublime examples of ribbed vaulting and a small, pre-Romanesque church.

The abbey and small village around its base, as well as the island and surrounding bay, have enjoyed UNESCO World Heritage status for more than 40 years, and the fairy-tale setting has inspired countless postcards, screensavers, and at least one version of an actual fairy tale: Corona Castle in Disney’s Tangled movies is based on the island. It’s not the first time Mont Saint-Michel has shown up in the pop culture of the day. The abbey and its island feature in the 11th-century Bayeux Tapestry as a landmark on William the Conqueror’s march from Normandy into Brittany.


The walled island and medieval monastery of Mont Saint-Michel seem to float in the bay of the same name. Embiggenable.

After her baby died in the night, a young
mother called 911.

Police thought they could read her mind
just by listening.

Now she’s haunted by the words she
chose.

How Jessica Logan’s Call for Help
Became Evidence Against Her

Words of conviction

CAUTION: This story contains detailed descriptions of the death of a child.


Detective Eric Matthews decided Jessica Logan probably killed her baby before he talked to a single eyewitness or collected almost any evidence. At that point, on Oct. 9, 2019, the coroner hadn’t yet announced a cause of death. What Matthews did have was a recording of Logan’s 911 call from two days earlier.

The detective scribbled notes as he listened.

“Jessica,” the 911 dispatcher said at one point, “take a deep breath for me, OK?”

“I can’t,” Logan replied, inhaling sharply to force the words out. “That’s my baby.”

“I know. I know.”

“I need my baby.”

The call had come in just after 3 a.m. from a duplex in the heart of Decatur, Illinois. On the tape, Logan struggled to gain her composure as the dispatcher asked what had happened.

“I came in my son room to try to give him a breathing treatment because he needs breathing treatments,” Logan said as she sobbed. “And he’s not breathing.”

She had found her 19-month-old son Jayden tangled up in his bed sheets, face down and stiff, one arm bent above his head and white foam spilling out of his mouth.

“He’s so cold and hard,” Logan said.

“What?”

“He’s so cold and hard.”

Rigor mortis had already begun to set in by the time Jayden’s grandmother and her husband rushed into the apartment. For the final two minutes of the call, Logan could no longer speak. There were only screams.

All of this, the detective concluded after the recording stopped, was an act: The 25-year-old mother of two had likely staged the scene to cover up a murder. He had the evidence right there on tape, and now he was going to build his case against her. Matthews, a veteran on the Decatur police force with buzzed hair and an even temperament, didn’t reach this revelation by applying some tried-and-true police method or proven science.

EARN TO GIVE: Effective altruism solved all the problems of capitalism⁠—until it didn’t
What if a movement designed to do the maximum good for the most people actually helped a few people get very rich?


It’s hard to argue with the tenets of effective altruism. The movement, which began in the UK in 2009 and quickly spread, particularly among America’s tech glitterati, holds that we should spend our lives trying to help the most people we can, in the most effective ways possible. So far, so laudable.

But the downfall of crypto exchange FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, one of the most prominent effective altruists, have exposed some of the problems with the thinking behind the philosophy and how it’s being practiced.

One method at the center of effective altruism (EA) urges its followers to make as much money as possible, so that they can devote a large part of their riches to helping humanity: an idea called “Earn to give.”

But while that mission might be purely altruistic, there’s another way of seeing it: As a get-out-of-jail-free card to people who want to put vast wealth creation at the center of their lives. It allows such people to ignore, if they wish, the fraying edges of the neoliberal order: The widening gaps between rich and poor, for instance, or the destruction of the environment. And while they’re giving away a lot of their wealth, they aren’t doing it at the expense of personal luxury. Not only does ‘earn to give’ ignore the problems at the heart of the prevailing economic system, it supercharges capitalism. It hints that capitalism isn’t only the best way to live, or the only way to live, but also a just way to live.


Cards Against Humanity is a fill-in-the-blank party game that turns your awkward personality and lackluster social skills into hours of fun! Wow.


The CIA Hounded A Reporter Till He Died


In the 1980s, reporters discovered that the CIA-backed Contras in Nicaragua trafficked a whole lot of cocaine. Few people in America really cared about the news. Then in 1996, reporter Gary Webb put out a series on the subject, adding, “Hey, cocaine? That’s the same thing that’s hurting America RIGHT NOW!” Suddenly, Americans cared a whole lot.

Everyone got mad, including the media, who mainly got mad at Webb. How dare he come forward with information they already knew — and, they argued, how dare he go further using bad sourcing they’d rejected. The media ostracized him, and in the end, Webb was found dead. He had been shot in the head twice. It was ruled a suicide.

You can now take a minute to think about that last sentence and consider just how obvious it is that any corpse found with two bullets in the head is the victim of a cover-up, not a suicide. And when you’re done, let’s step back in and point out that in reality, it’s entirely possible for someone to die by suicide with two shots fired through the head. The first shot goes out the cheek, totally failing to kill. And while plenty of people who survive a suicide attempt go on to never try again, if someone is in pain, the sudden appearance of a bullet wound in his face is unlikely to lessen it, and that’s when they fire shot number two.

An AI Found an Unknown ‘Ghost’ Ancestor in The Human Genome


Denisova Cave in Siberia, Russia. Embiggenable. Explore at home.


Nobody knows who she was, just that she was different: A teenage girl from over 50,000 years ago of such odd uniqueness she appeared to be a ‘hybrid’ ancestor to modern humans that scientists hadn’t seen before.

Only recently, researchers have uncovered evidence she wasn’t alone. In a 2019 study analyzing the tangled mess of humanity’s prehistory, scientists used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify an unknown human ancestor species that modern humans encountered – and shared dalliances with – on the long trek out of Africa millennia ago.

“About 80,000 years ago, the so-called Out of Africa occurred, when part of the human population, which already consisted of modern humans, abandoned the African continent and migrated to other continents, giving rise to all the current populations,” explained evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain.

As modern humans forged this path into the landmass of Eurasia, they forged some other things too – breeding with ancient and extinct hominids from other species.


CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.

Here’s ya long awaited Ozzy Man commentary on Gym Fails Part 3 ay. Cheers!


液体まるを飾ってみたらおしゃれだった。Liquid Maru is cool art work!


THE LAST TAB . . .

DNA showed a mother was also her daughter’s uncle — how scientists solved this medical mystery
Why you may have more aunts and uncles than you suspected at the holiday table.


Embiggenable.


HOW CAN A PATERNITY TEST suggest a mother is also her daughter’s father?

The answer to that medical mystery, sparked by a confusing paternity test result, is “When the genes of a vanished twin brother live on in the mother’s DNA.” The finding, which genetics experts reported earlier this month, suggests that such human “chimeras” — people with DNA from more than one embryo — could be more common than we thought.

“What is the frequency of this? We don’t really know,” said Juan Yunis of Colombia’s Instituto de Genética. Only about 20 confirmed cases are documented, he said: “Probably there are more. And it can have a profound effect on one’s life.”

In recent decades, DNA studies have opened a new view on the truly messy biology of human reproduction, which is not always as textbook-neat as health class images of a sperm meeting an egg and nine months later, a baby resulting. The opening weeks of human development during pregnancy see rapid cell development in embryos, all orchestrated by a genetic shuffle that sometimes takes a more complicated course. That leads to outcomes ranging from triplets to miscarriages (which are thought to result from DNA abnormalities in about half of all known cases). One of those curious paths might lead to chimerism, where in an unknown number of cases, genes from a “vanishing twin” end up mixed in with those of a surviving sibling. There’s usually few outward signs of the condition, leading it to fly under the medical radar.


Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.

Ed., etc. I didn’t have time to do this today.


Assimilation Complete