Monday Links from the Easter Bunny's Secret Underground Lair vol. DCXCIII

[ladymuck]

• Sins of the Father - ”When Lesley Hu wanted to vaccinate her young son, her conspiracy-obsessed ex-husband went to unimaginable lengths to stop her.” Idiots abound

Cripes! That did not turn out the way I expected

[NickFitz]

Time to settle back with a brew and copious quantities of chocolate while you read this lot

• Sins of the Father - ”When Lesley Hu wanted to vaccinate her young son, her conspiracy-obsessed ex-husband went to unimaginable lengths to stop her.” Idiots abound
• Conspiracy Theories Can Be Undermined with These Strategies, New Analysis Shows - Possible antidotes to idiocy: ”When someone falls down a conspiracy rabbit hole, there are very few proved ways to pull them out, according to a new analysis. The study is a review of research on attempts to counteract conspiratorial thinking, and it finds that common strategies that involve counterarguments and fact-checking largely fail to change people’s beliefs.”
• Interspecific interactions between sympatric apes - ”Gorillas reside in sympatry with chimpanzees over the majority of their range… Interactions between gorillas and chimpanzees were most common during foraging activities, but they also overlapped in several other contexts. From a social perspective, we provide evidence of consistent relationships between particular chimpanzee-gorilla dyads.” Apes together strong
• What color were Neandertals? - Nobody's certain, it seems: ”Even with whole genomes, scientists can't say very precisely what pattern of skin, hair, and eye pigmentation was in ancient populations like the Neandertals.”
• ‘Dad said: We’re going to follow Captain Cook’: how an endless round-the-world voyage stole my childhood - ”In 1976, Suzanne Heywood’s father decided to take the family on a three-year sailing ‘adventure’ – and then just kept going. It was a journey into fear, isolation and danger…” Taking your children away for a life on the ocean waves might not be the best thing, it turns out
• The Artisans Behind India’s Living Root Bridges - ”For hundreds of years, [Hally War's] people have been not building bridges, but growing them… The interwoven aerial roots create a pervading fairy-tale atmosphere, appearing to connect myth and reality and the past and the future rather than the two sides of the river.” Seems like a rather cool thing to devote your life to
• Hacking a Russian war criminal, commander of 960th Assault Aviation Regiment - Intelligence operations take some strange turns nowadays: ”The hacktivists monitored the colonel’s correspondence for several months and made the most effective use of the leaks in the interests of the Ukrainian Defense Forces… You might be wondering how much does the commander of an aviation regiment earn? Perhaps this will also be of interest to his wife, who will feature below in this material.”
• Sumplete - A puzzle created by "AI": ”Sumplete was invented and coded entirely by AI (ChatGPT)… After a few hours of prompting, the AI chatbot had created this unique puzzle game. ChatGPT not only came up with the idea, but also coded the game, designed it and even named it!”
• Reverse-engineering the division microcode in the Intel 8086 processor - Ken Shirriff continues to pull apart the 8086: ”While programmers today take division for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — division required a slow and tedious loop implemented in assembly code. One of the nice features of the Intel 8086 processor (1978) was that it provided machine instructions for integer multiplication and division. Internally, the 8086 still performed a loop, but the loop was implemented in microcode: faster and transparent to the programmer. Even so, division was a slow operation, about 50 times slower than addition.”
• Shelling out. - ”Over 90 Easter Eggs issued by Rowntrees of York, back in the 80s & 90s. Nostalgia overload!” Happy chocolatefest! I got a Smarties egg this year, though it says Nestlé instead of Rowntrees nowadays
  
  

Happy invoicing!