Why the free will debate hinges on intent

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Why the free will debate hinges on intent     Two men stand by a hangar in a small airfield at night. One is in a police officer’s uniform, the other dressed as a civilian. They talk tensely while, in the background, a small plane is taxiing to the runway. Suddenly, a vehicle pulls up and a man in a military uniform gets out. He and the police officer talk tensely; the military man begins to make a phone call; the civilian shoots him, killing him. A vehicle full of police pulls up abruptly, the police emerging rapidly. The police officer speaks to them as they retrieve the body. They depart as abruptly, with the body but not the shooter. The police officer and the civilian watch the plane take off and then walk off together.What’s going on? A criminal act obviously occurred—from the care with which the civilian aimed, he clearly intended to shoot the man. A terrible act, compounded further by the man’s remorseless air—this was cold-blooded murder, depraved indifference. It is puzzling, though, that the police officer made no attempt to apprehend him. Possibilities come to mind, none good. Perhaps the officer has been blackmailed by the civilian to look the other way. Maybe all the police who appeared on the scene are corrupt, in the pocket of some drug cartel. Or perhaps the police officer is actually an impostor. One can’t be certain, but it’s clear that this was a scene of intent-filled corruption and lawless violence, the police officer and the civilian exemplars of humans at their worst. That’s for sure.  Continued here

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Scientists Explore Pulling Potent Methane Out of the Air to Curb Warming     Methane traps more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, but pulling it from the air could prove to be a more complex task than removing CO2CLIMATEWIRE | Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is essential to meeting international climate goals, scientists say. Without it, it’s all but impossible to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius, the primary targets of the Paris climate agreement. Continued here

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The Conflict Resolution Skills Every Project Manager Needs     It’s best to start any new project by fostering the right conflict mindset among team members. Productive conflict requires that all parties appreciate the competing demands and necessary trade-offs. But don’t expect stakeholders to show up with clarity about their position or empathy for the needs and demands of others. As a great project manager, you need to foster awareness, understanding, and respect for the different perspectives around the table. Your job is to harness the opposing forces and ensure that decisions are made with the benefit of diverse perspectives, the full knowledge of their impact, and the optimal trade-offs between various priorities. Fulfilling that responsibility will require that you embrace productive conflict and hone the associated skills. Continued here

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Sarah Jones: Let's reframe cancel culture     Cancel culture launched a reckoning that was long overdue — but that doesn't mean it's getting everything right. Filmmaker and actor Sarah Jones slips in and out of various characters as she shares her personal experience with cancel culture and suggests a better way to hold others — and ourselves — to account. Continued here

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Ask Ethan: Can we see the cosmic neutrino background?     One of the hardest concepts to wrap our heads around is that of the hot Big Bang: the notion that our Universe began 13.8 billion years ago from an extraordinarily hot, dense, uniform, and rapidly expanding state. Initially, all known species of particles and antiparticles confirmed to exist, along with possibly others that we only speculate about at present, as there was more than enough energy to spontaneously create particle-antiparticle pairs of all types via Einstein’s famous E = mc². Since that early time, the Universe has expanded and cooled substantially, eventually giving rise to atomic nuclei, stable atoms, along with stars, galaxies, and cosmic structures on the largest scales.But it isn’t just atoms and other structures composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons left over from that early epoch, but also cosmic backgrounds of far more numerous particles. While the relic background of photons, the cosmic microwave background (CMB), is by far the most famous leftover cosmic fossil, there should be another one composed of neutrinos and antineutrinos: the cosmic neutrino background. Reader Daniel S. Gelu wants to know about it, writing in to ask: Continued here

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This Vaccine Protects Against Cancer--but Not Enough Boys Are Getting It     "It's like the gift that keeps giving," says Mark Jit, a professor of vaccine epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Not only is it the sole vaccine that can prevent cancer, "we discover it's an even better vaccine as time goes on," he says.Since its development and rollout in the mid-2010s, the HPV vaccine's prowess at heeding off cervical cancer rates has been remarkable. Over an 11-year period in the United Kingdom, cases of cervical cancer fell by 87 percent among those who received the vaccine compared to those who didn't. It's conceivable that one day, a whole form of cancer could be effectively eliminated. Continued here

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Sam Bankman-Fried's Lawyers Are Doing Just Fine, Actually     In the three weeks since his trial began, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of crypto exchange FTX, has watched in near silence as a parade of ex-colleagues, peers and other witnesses have taken the stand. They have testified to his greed, recklessness, bullying and chicanery. His lawyers have offered relatively little in the way of riposte—and have been pilloried for it. But the strategy and ambitions of the defense, ex-prosecutors say, have been misinterpreted.Bankman-Fried is charged with multiple counts of fraud in connection with the collapse of FTX. The exchange fell to pieces in November after users found they could not withdraw their funds, worth billions of dollars in aggregate. The money was missing, the US government claims, because Bankman-Fried had swept it into a sibling company, Alameda Research, where it was used to bankroll high-risk crypto trades, venture bets, personal loans, political donations, debt repayments and other expenses. Continued here

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Congress to SBA: Go After the Deadbeats     The agency is being pressed by some Republican members of Congress to fully pursue deliquent, pandemic-era loans handed to small borrowers. The SBA says it isn't cost effective. Continued here

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See How Humans around the World Spend the 24 Hours in a Day     A new study calculated the average “global human day,” revealing which activities take up most of our timeEvery human on Earth has the same 24 hours to spend in a day—but the way we divide those hours for work and sleep and school and play varies a lot. Scientists recently compiled the available data about how people around the world allocate their time and used them to define the average “global human day.” More than a third of our hours are spent in bed, they found, with the rest split among three categories the researchers devised based on whether the time directly affected humans, the physical world, or where and what people are doing. Activities such as agriculture took up much more time in poorer countries than in wealthier ones, whereas others such as human transportation were fairly constant everywhere. Ultimately the study found that relatively little time—about five minutes per average human day—goes to activities that directly alter the environment and climate change, such as extracting energy and dealing with waste, suggesting an opportunity to put in more time to help the planet. “We have to switch off fossil-fuel energy and construct more renewables,” says study co-author Eric Galbraith of McGill University. “If it turned out that the changes we want to make required huge allocations of time to activities we're not doing now, then it would be impossible. But we can tackle this with just a couple of minutes per day. I think that's hopeful.” Continued here

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Top Israel/Hamas misinformation spreaders use Elon Musk's paid "verification"     "Verified" accounts on Elon Musk's X platform spread nearly three-quarters of the 250 most viral posts containing commonly shared misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war, according to a study released yesterday by NewsGuard, a company that has worked with the European Commission on misinformation initiatives. Continued here

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Have a controversial idea? Good. Here's why you should share it.     Peter Singer explains why he helped create the “Journal of Controversial Ideas,” a platform for discussing and examining controversial topics without fear of backlash or censorship. According to Singer, history is rife with examples of people challenging beliefs that were once considered certain but were later proven false. Persecuting those people who challenged those prevailing notions, Singer says, stifled progress.  Continued here

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Why are bed bugs so difficult to deal with?     This year, in Paris, bed bugs have been reported in schools, trains, hospitals and cinemas. But the infestation has been gathering pace for some time. In 2020, an entire unit in a French hospital had to close after a patient was admitted carrying bed bugs. The decision to close the unit was taken after investigations using a sniffer dog revealed that four rooms were infested. The closure lasted 24 days, and cost approximately US$400,000 (£333,000) to treat.It appears to be part of a "global resurgence" of bed bugs that has seen the creatures – small, oval-shaped insects smaller than a grain of rice – becoming a growing problem in cities around the world over the past two decades. Global travel – which has allowed the biting insects to leap continents hidden amongst the luggage of oblivious aircraft passengers – has made it easier for them to spread. But once they gain a foothold somewhere, a recent study suggests they may also be getting harder to treat. Continued here

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Timing Matters: Design the Day for Maximum Productivity     This Nano Tool for Leaders from Wharton Executive Education offers guidance for following your internal clock to improve your daily productivity.Nano Tools for Leaders®  — a collaboration between Wharton Executive Education and Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management — are fast, effective tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes, with the potential to significantly impact your success. Continued here

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Creating a Happier Workplace Is Possible -- and Worth It     Being happy at work isn’t just a win for employees; it’s also a win for employers. Research shows a causal link between happy workers and a 13% increase in productivity. On the flipside, unhappiness at work costs the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity, equal to 11% of global GDP. But too many of us are disconnected, disengaged, and bored at work. 50% of the global workforce is quiet quitting and 18 percent are loud quitting – sharing openly that they are unhappy at work. Social media trends like #QuietQuitting and #ActYourWage have reached over 1.2 billion views and their virality confirms that we’re all still feeling the effects of chronic stress and burnout from the pandemic. Obviously, the current state of workforce unhappiness is a big problem to solve. Happiness at work has to come from a deeper, more intrinsic connection to why we’re there. A culture of autonomy, belonging, and purpose comes from a shared vision, and right now, it’s fair to say that many companies and their employees are simply not seeing eye-to-eye. This article covers three steps organizations can take to turn that around. Continued here

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Another Domino Falls in Georgia     With the attorney Kenneth Chesebro agreeing to plead guilty to a single felony today, the Fulton County, Georgia, racketeering case against Donald Trump and others for attempting to steal the 2020 election has one more conviction and one fewer defendant.As part of the deal, Chesebro pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to file false documents. He’ll pay $5,000 in fines, write an apology letter, and face five years of probation. Perhaps most important, he agreed to testify in upcoming trials. Chesebro faced seven counts that portrayed him as central to a scheme to send slates of false electors to Washington, D.C., after the 2020 election and to efforts to disrupt the certification of the election on January 6, 2021, in Congress. He had argued that he was merely offering legal opinions to clients. Chesebro’s plea came on the same day that jury selection began in his case, and one day after the attorney Sidney Powell took a somewhat similar plea deal. Scott Hall, an Atlanta bail bondsman, pleaded guilty in September. Continued here

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How to Save Greenland's Massive Ice Sheet     The Greenland Ice Sheet could experience runaway melting if the world overshoots climate targets, but even then quick action could stabilize itGreenland’s massive ice sheet, which is thawing because of human-induced climate change, could be saved from complete meltdown even if global temperatures soar past key international targets, a study suggests. But rescuing the ice in these conditions would require huge future cuts in atmospheric greenhouse-gas levels — and would not prevent the ice sheet from melting enough to cause up to several metres of sea-level rise. Continued here

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Some Parents Show Their Kids They Care With a Corpse     If you’re a silphid beetle, a dead body is all your children really want, and it's your job—no matter how difficult it is—to get it for them.Emily Schwing: Parenting can seem a thankless gig. First, you and your partner track down a dead body. Next, the two of you work together to bury it, and it’s often many times the size of your own body. If it starts to rot, or you start to snack on this body, you’ll have to cover the stench of decomposition with your own anal secretions so that other hungry, desperate, overworked parents don’t come looking for your lunch. And this all before your kids are even born—that is, if you’re a silphid beetle. Continued here

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JWST Detects Quartz Crystals in an Exoplanet's Atmosphere     Astronomers have found high-altitude clouds formed from quartz crystals on the gas-giant world WASP-17bThousand-mile-per-hour winds are blowing a hail of tiny quartz crystals through the silicate-enhanced, scorching hot atmosphere of a distant gas giant planet called WASP-17b, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found. Continued here

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An enduring "fact" about the 1918 flu might be wrong     The 1918 flu pandemic (which lasted from February 1918 to April 1920) infected an estimated 500 million people and killed 25 to 50 million, representing between 1.3% and 3% of the global population. These numbers make the COVID-19 pandemic seem benign by comparison: As of July 2023, COVID-19 had killed an estimated 6.95 million people, representing roughly 0.09% of the global population.A frightening and oft-repeated fact about the 1918 flu is that it killed healthy young adults in their twenties just as often as it did the very young and the very old. This is quite out of the ordinary for infectious diseases. As William Paul Glezen, a distinguished emeritus professor in the Baylor College of Medicine’s Department of Molecular Virology & Microbiology, wrote, “[it] was not just the weak and infirm who were taken away but the flower and strength of the land.” Continued here

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The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike     Today’s happiness and personal-finance gurus have no shortage of advice for living a good life. Meditate daily. Sleep for eight hours a night. Don’t forget to save for retirement. They’re not wrong, but few of these experts will tell you one of the best ways to improve your life: Ditch your car.A year ago, my wife and I sold one of our cars and replaced it with an e-bike. As someone who writes about climate change, I knew that I was doing something good for the planet. I knew that passenger vehicles are responsible for much of our greenhouse-gas emissions—16 percent in the U.S., to be exact—and that the pollution spewing from gas-powered cars doesn’t just heat up the planet; it could increase the risk of premature death. I also knew that electric cars were an imperfect fix: Though they’re responsible for less carbon pollution than gas cars, even when powered by today’s dirty electric grid, their supply chain is carbon intensive, and many of the materials needed to produce their batteries are, in some cases, mined via a process that brutally exploits workers and harms ecosystems and sacred Indigenous lands. An e-bike’s comparatively tiny battery means less electricity, fewer emissions, fewer resources. They are clearly better for the planet than cars of any kind. Continued here

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Making Continuous Learning a Habit: Our Favorite Reads     People who practice lifelong learning are happier and more fulfilled. Continued here

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For Israeli-American Entrepreneurs, There Is No More Business as Usual     How startup founders are working to protect their employees and businesses in a country mobilizing for war. Continued here

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Pakistan's lost city of 40,000 people     A slight breeze cut through the balmy heat as I surveyed the ancient city around me. Millions of red bricks formed walkways and wells, with entire neighbourhoods sprawled out in a grid-like fashion. An ancient Buddhist stupa towered over the time-worn streets, with a large communal pool complete with a wide staircase below. Somehow, only a handful of other people were here – I practically had the place all to myself.I was about an hour outside of the dusty town of Larkana in southern Pakistan at the historical site of Mohenjo-daro. While today only ruins remain, 4,500 years ago this was not only one of the world's earliest cities, but a thriving metropolis featuring highly advanced infrastructures. Continued here

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'Super Mario Bros. Wonder' Is the Face of Nintendo's Transformation     Nintendo is having a very good year. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was a record-breaking success; Switch sales continue to climb even in the console’s sixth year. In February, the company opened Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios in California. All of this, though, looks small compared to the hype around the company’s ubiquitous moustachioed plumber. This summer, The Super Mario Bros. Movie brought in nearly $1.4 billion globally at the box office, making it the second-highest-grossing animated film of all time. Now, Nintendo is releasing Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the latest game in the franchise, to rave reviews from critics.Mario has been bouncing his way to this moment for some time. Developer Shigeru Miyamoto created the character, an unassuming Italian plumber with a knack for saving princesses and jumping really high, four decades ago. Following a series of successful games on early Nintendo systems, Mario got his first movie in 1993—a puzzling, staggeringly bad live-action flick with little resemblance to the growing franchise. Continued here

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Rembrandt died broke with dwindling fame. Here's why.     Was Rembrandt van Rijn a bad student? Birgit Boelens, a conservator at the Hermitage Amsterdam art museum and curator of the 2023 exhibit titled Rembrandt & His Contemporaries, hesitates. One would think that someone with Rembrandt’s innate talent must have been a bit of a rulebreaker, but this was not necessarily the case. “He certainly had a mind of his own,” Boelens says. “But above all, he was curious and eager to learn, and his teachers appreciated that.”During the Dutch Golden Age, aspiring painters started their careers working as apprentices in the studios of established artists. From his teacher, Pieter Lastman, Rembrandt learned how to make history paintings. Combining portraiture, figure painting, architectural painting, and still life, this genre was long considered the pinnacle of artistic expression. As an apprentice, Rembrandt not only inherited Lastman’s affinity for creating grand, complex images but also his ability to imbue scenes from the past with a contemporary significance. Continued here

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AI Is About to Photoshop Your Memories     The smartphone camera roll is a digital diary. What happens when the images inside are more perfect than real?There is a commercial following me around the internet. In the ad, a happy father is playing with his son on the beach while Mom is documenting it all on her brand-new Google Pixel 8 phone. Dad lifts the boy and gently tosses him a foot or so into the air. Mom, quick with the shutter, captures her giggling son at the apex of his flight. In the next frame, Mom clicks a button on her phone labeled “Magic Editor,” which allows her to isolate the boy on her screen and effortlessly drag him higher into the air and farther from Dad’s outstretched arms. With another tap, she adds contrast to the washed-out sky in the background, making the clouds pop. The boy is now soaring against an iridescent sky. A good shot has become a great one. Continued here

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How the Enneagram Can Help Companies Combat Quiet Quitting     Startups to Fortune 500 companies are using this ancient personality system to boost employee motivation. Here's how to use it. Continued here

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TikTok-Hyped Halloween Decor Is Out of Control     What I’m about to tell you sounds like the kind of thing made by an AI story generator designed to spit out the final segments of the local 11 o’clock news, but here goes: A few weeks ago, firefighters in Glens Falls, New York, got called to the scene of a burning home. Except it wasn’t burning, it was a very elaborate Halloween display made with some LED lights, fabric, a fog machine, and a fan. An NPR Morning Edition report called it a “fire.”Chances are, though, you didn’t hear about this first on NPR. It, erm, blew up on TikTok. Or, rather, videos of fake-house-fire Halloween decorations are all over the platform, which currently has about 140 million views on videos that fit the description of “house on fire Halloween decoration.” It’s absurd. Continued here

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Thanks to AI, the future of programming may involve YELLING IN ALL CAPS     Not long after OpenAI first unveiled its DALL-E 3 AI image generator integrated into ChatGPT earlier this month, some users testing the feature began noticing bugs in the ChatGPT app that revealed internal prompts shared between the image generator and the AI assistant. Amusingly to some, the instructions included commands written in all-caps for emphasis, showing that the future of telling computers what to do (including programming) may involve surprisingly human-like communication techniques. Continued here

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Did Australia's boomerangs pave the way for flight?     The aircraft is one of the most significant developments of modern society, enabling people, goods and ideas to fly around the world far more efficiently than ever before. The first successful piloted flight took off in 1903 in North Carolina, but a 10,000-year-old hunting tool likely developed by Aboriginal Australians may have held the key to its lift-off. As early aviators discovered, the secret to flight is balancing the flow of air. Therefore, an aircraft's wings, tail or propeller blades are often shaped in a specially designed, curved manner called an aerofoil that lifts the plane up and allows it to drag or turn to the side as it moves through the air.   Continued here