Kickoff For October 21, 2024
I've got nothing pithy or mildly witty to share this week, so let's get Monday started with these links:
What Really Happened to Michael Rockefeller — Wherein Carl Hoffman traces the final journey in New Guinea of the American anthropologist and art collector to try to learn his fate decades after his disappearance.
From the article:
The official cause of Michael’s death was drowning, but there had long been a multitude of rumors. He’d been kidnapped and kept prisoner. He’d gone native and was hiding out in the jungle. He’d been consumed by sharks. He’d made it to shore, only to be killed and eaten by the local Asmat headhunters. The story had grown, become mythical. There had been an off-Broadway play about him, a novel, a rock song, even a television show in the 1980s hosted by Leonard Nimoy.
The End of the Lab Rat? — Wherein we learn about the move away from using certain types of animals in medical research and get a glimpse of some of the options that exist or are being developed.
From the article:
A growing, multidisciplinary community of researchers around the world is investigating alternatives to animal models. Some are motivated by concerns about animal welfare, but for many, sparing the lives of millions of creatures is just an added bonus. They are driven primarily to create technologies and methods that will approximate human biology and variability better than animals do.
The Magazine for Mercenaries Enters Polite Society — Wherein we meet Susan Katz Keating, the owner of Soldier of Fortune magazine, who's trying to shift the publication away from its former macho stance to one that's focused on political analysis, both in the US and abroad.
From the article:
“There have not been any follow-on attacks or counterattacks, which I think would have happened by now if this had been an Archduke Ferdinand moment,” she said. “I see the hit on Trump as another iteration of the school-shooter, mall-shooter phenomenon, and not as a political flash point. We are not headed for a civil war.”
How Stanley Kubrick Shoots A Film At 3 Budget Levels — Wherein get get a peek into how the costs of three of the legendary director's films fuelled his creativity, and how rising budgets helped Kubrick better realize his visions.
From the article:
His working style grew from carefully planned low budget filmmaking all the way to taking over a year to photograph a feature with a high budget. His innovative, experimental style, supreme technical photographic knowledge and desire for ultimate creative control did however remain present throughout his career.
A day in the life of the world’s fastest supercomputer — Wherein we learn about a computer called Frontier, the first one to perform 1018 floating point operations per second, about the many and varied tasks it performs daily, and about the challenges of using it.
From the article:
Researchers are using the supercomputer to create cutting-edge models of everything from subatomic particles to galaxies. Some projects are simulating proteins to help develop new drugs, modelling turbulence to improve aeroplane engine design and creating open-source large language models (LLMs) to compete with the artificial intelligence (AI) tools from Google and OpenAI.
How to Make Millions as a Professional Whistleblower — Wherein we learn about someone going by the (fake) name Richard Overum, who goes to great lengths and uses a fairly recent American law to not only root out corporate corruption and inform on the perpetrators, but also to turn a tidy profit from those efforts.
From the article:
The vast majority of people providing tips to whistleblower programs do so only once in their life. They are not—as Overum is—repeat customers. Over the course of his career, Overum says that his tips, which can include hundreds of pages of evidence, have led to various regulatory agencies, including the SEC, taking action approximately 90 times.