Luminative.Media

Our intention: to delve deeper into issues, at greater length and with more historical and social context, to cross disciplines, social silos, political tribes and cultural boundaries, not possible to pursue through the immediacy of daily media. More here: luminative.media

Suzi Dougherty’s photograph of 18-year-old Caspar deemed ‘suspicious’ by judges, even though it was taken on her mobile theguardian.com/australia-news…

🤔 My breakfast read Training the large neural networks behind many modern AI tools requires real computational might. For example, OpenAI’s most advanced language model, GPT-3, required an astounding (mind-boggling 😳) million billion ... 👇spectrum.ieee.org/floating-point…

This is #kharkiv, #ukraine. The city has been shelled heavily since the beginning of the russian invasion. The footage shows what the city center looks like after yesterday’s shelling. Putin’s template is simple: flatten cities, install satraps, rule by fear. Chechnya redux.

Some of the "American sweets" shops in London's Oxford St are being investigated for selling counterfeit goods. No, not the sweets. Those shops have always intrigued me, because I can't believe anyone would want to eat such horrible ... 🧵👇 bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan…

When all the boomers die, who's going to have their roomfuls and garages full of junk? It's only when you deal with the death of a parent that you consider how much stuff they (and then you) accumulate. Trust the Swedish to have "death cleaning”. See🧵👇 theglobeandmail.com/canada/article…

“Holocaust Memorial Day – 27th January 2022” Herein: • A poem by Matilda Olkinaitė, shot by local Nazi collaborators in her Lithuanian village of Panemunėlis • A video in my series entitled “The coronavirus is not the Holocaust” #HolocaustRemembrance gregorybufithis.com/2022/01/27/hol…

One pillar of the modern world was the project to transform science from a discipline for contemplating nature into a tool for mastering it. 👸 among the new sciences was mathematical physics, made possible by a corresponding transformation of mathematics. thenewatlantis.com/publications/m…

“I think we do ourselves a disservice if we romanticize the origins of United States and cast it as some sort of political utopia from which we have fallen. I think we’d do a lot better if we’d see that division and disagreement have been … laphamsquarterly.org/content/alan-t…

Universe-ending scenarios made to fit our tiny human minds. It can be difficult – impossible even – to truly comprehend the sheer scale of the cosmos. It is so vast and ancient that trying to imagine ... chemistryworld.com/review/the-end…

This is one of the most concrete examples of TikTok’s ability to manufacture celebrities and drive cultural moments. If you caught someone actually smiling while looking at their phone recently, chances are they were watching the TikTok video of a man cruising on a ... 1/5

“The neurological symptoms are only becoming more and more scary”. Some people who become ill with the coronavirus develop neurological symptoms. Scientists are struggling to understand why. nature.com/articles/d4158…

Faintly exciting: this has been predicted for decades. There are flybys by existing spacecraft due over the next few months; not clear whether they have the telemetry to analyse this. Fingers crossed. theguardian.com/science/2020/s…

From squaring the circle to taking the perfect bridge-spotting tour of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the mathematics of impossibility prove when something just can’t happen. The long history, and surprising relevance, of problems that just can’t be solved. quantamagazine.org/when-math-gets…

Good layman's guide/summary of the analysis done by a supercomputer re: the Bradykinin hypothesis which was detailed a few weeks ago in "The Scientist" magazine elemental.medium.com/a-supercompute…

Wonder epitomises what education is about: opening up the world. Educators interested in – or devoted to – opening up the world to their students should consider wonder essential to the task, and will do their utmost to foster students’ sense of wonder. psyche.co/ideas/why-good…

“Live from the COVID-19 labs: an update”. There are genuine grounds for hope. We know many of the virus’s weaknesses, there are lots of promising drugs that might prevent its replication, and we are beginning to understand the immune response to the virus. gregorybufithis.com/2020/08/19/liv…

A new analysis of ancient genomes suggests that different branches of the human family tree interbred multiple times, and that some humans carry DNA from an archaic, unknown ancestor. phys.org/news/2020-08-d…

“The circus is coming to town! It’s the social networking event of the summer!” Some thoughts on tomorrow’s U.S. Big Tech antitrust hearing. gregorybufithis.com/2020/07/28/the…