deathmtn

Soap operas, for example, are good places for this kind of social conversation. They provide a safe, neutral space through which sensitive topics can be broached and discussed. And they are pretty much universal.
They often become important centers of national and even international conversations.

In Hangzhou factory workers bring each other up to date with episodes of the soaps they missed due to revolving shift patterns. In Trinidad, a few neighbours might show up when the soap starts. In Egypt, some families sit down together after the Iftar meal to watch the Ramadan soap operas. A Rwandan soap opera that aimed to improve inter-ethnic relationships was found most successful when the audience listened to it in a social setting: they discussed what happened afterwards and later reported more positive inter-ethnic attitudes.
It's a way for people to take the local cultural temperature. By discussing the developments in their favourite soap opera they're adjusting themselves to the new realities in their societies, and they are thinking about it from the position of all the characters involved in the soap opera. They are jointly involved in thinking something through, about which they can develop their own feelings, because it's fictional.

Long ago, four giant beings arrived in southeast Australia. Three strode out to other parts of the continent, but one crouched in place. His body transformed into a volcano called Budj Bim, and his teeth became the lava the volcano spat out.

Now, scientists say this tale—told by the Aboriginal Gunditjmara people of the area—may have some basis in fact. About 37,000 years ago, Budj Bim and another nearby volcano formed through a rapid series of eruptions, new evidence reveals, suggesting the legend may be the oldest story still being told today.

On March 20, the White House released its long-awaited National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence for Congress.

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The framework also instructs Congress to “preempt state AI laws that impose undue burdens to ensure a minimally burdensome national standard consistent with these recommendations, not fifty discordant ones.”

A patent granted to Google on January 27, 2026 titled “AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user” describes a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google's machine learning model thinks they should see instead.

On its own, WebMCP is a significant technical shift. But put it next to this patent and the strategy becomes unmistakable. Google isn’t just making agents more efficient, there’s a bigger vision to build a system where websites are disassembled into its component parts, and reassembled by AI systems (Google and others) to best serve each individual user. WebMCP turns your website into those parts and provides instructions on how to use them. Patents like the one in this article allow Google to determine what’s done with the parts.

The San Pedro Cutud Lenten Rites are a re-enactment of Christ’s Passion and crucifixion held in Barangay San Pedro Cutud, San Fernando, Pampanga. It includes a passion play, culminating in the actual nailing of at least three penitents to wooden crosses atop a makeshift Calvary.

One afternoon in 1963, 13-year-old Erasto Mpemba was making ice cream at Magamba Secondary School in Tanzania. In a hurry to claim space in the freezer, he stuck in his slurry of milk and sugar while it was still piping hot—unlike his classmates, who had left their batches out to cool beforehand. Yet, in an event that would shape the course of modern physics, Mpemba found that his ice cream froze first.

Mpemba later repeated the experiment with water and kept asking his teachers why hot liquids froze faster than cold ones, but they brushed him off. Undeterred, Mpemba decided to ask Denis Osborne, a physicist visiting from the University of Dar es Salaam. Osborne promised to go home and repeat the experiment himself. In a now-classic 1969 paper, Osborne—crediting Mpemba as first author—reported the phenomenon, proclaiming that “no question should be ridiculed.”

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday announced it will no longer approve consumer-grade routers made outside of the US, citing a President Trump directive on reducing the use of foreign technology for national security reasons. The action will prevent foreign-made routers from being imported into or sold in the US.

Routers already approved for sale in the US can continue to be sold, and consumers can keep using any router they've previously obtained, the FCC said. But the FCC will not approve new device models made at least partly outside the US unless the Department of Defense or Department of Homeland Security determines that the router does not pose national security risks.

In both videos we see that drawing from observation involves near-continual eye movement between the source and the drawing.

On the iPhone SE (2020 / SE2), the “feel” is more mixed. I’d say it’s usable, but not fast, with small stutters and slowdowns during normal use. My common complaint is basic day-to-day responsiveness taking a hit, like delays when opening Siri or switching tasks.

It’s truly sad that Apple forces the users to either be secure or to massively slow down their phones. Extremely sad. I don’t even know how this can be legal. The performance degradations can be minimised, but they are still a degradation for all the basic features, for no reason whatsoever.

In addition, Apple noted that DarkSword doesn't appear to work on iPhones that've enabled Lockdown Mode, which users can turn on to prevent spyware threats at the cost of disabling certain features.

But people rarely talk about that part of Chopin. Pianists will sometimes mention it in offhand moments. But it's not the officially important part that we're supposed to study and appreciate and write books about. The art culture I grew up in— that of Western Europe and its American kin- mostly just ignores the beauty of process, the beauty of doing. It ignores how the performance feels to the performer, on the inside. You never see a review of a ballet that says
"Well, it sure looked beautiful, but, man, it must have been pure torture for the dancers."