From Prison to Purpose Through Wildland Firefighting | Royal Ramey | TED

Dispatches from a post-election classroomPublished inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter3 min read5 hours ago-- HalloIssue #205: a letter from prison + an email from Taylor Swifts dadLest youve had enough post-election analysis, I just want to share a single story that felt new to me: Ian Williams Notes from a classroom. Williams is a graduate instructor at UNC Chapel Hill. Hes currently teaching a cultural studies class, the perfect crucible for a conversation about what happened last Tuesday.Most of his students voted for Harris. Two voted for Trump. Williams doesnt share much about the demographics of these students, but theyre undergrads. When asked who voted on the economy, almost all of them raised their hands. Policy researcher Brett Heinz agrees that this election was the inflation election. The price of eggs alone doubled in 2022. An MIT study earlier this year found that Bidens $1,400 stimulus checks were probably responsible, at least partially.But the most fascinating parts of Williams conversation with his students are cultural, not political (though the boundary between those two concepts is blurry). Nobody under ~30 trusts legacy media, but we knew that. More specifically, theyre suspicious of text but they love podcasts. Text seems overly edited and manipulated. Audio feels more authentic, more dynamic. Also: None of Williams students cared at all about Harris celebrity endorsements. One Harris voter said she knew that Swift and Beyonce werent for her, they were for Harris. The endorsements felt elitist and box-check-y. They were also just a little boring? Maybe the politics of celebrity are over, Williams writes. None of his students are impressed by big names anymore. What theyre drawn to most is honesty, passion, and perceived authenticity. Harris SockelWhat Im readingTaylor Lorenz on why theres no democratic equivalent to Rogan: The closest thing to a progressive Joe Rogan in mainstream liberal media is probably the podcast Pod Save America. But the podcasters on that show operate with a clear allegiance to the Democratic Party establishment. They dont speak to the youth or the disaffected masses who are fed up with the entire system. Who will be the next Chapo Trap House? (User Mag)Palantir, which builds AI tools for governments, has quickly grown into one of the top 10 most valuable AI companies by market cap. One writer who worked there before it IPO-d remembers a culture of highly dedicated weirdos who read books on theatrical improv to get good at their jobs. (Nabeel Qureshi)The quiet art of living well: pay attention to how your mind wanders. (Bill Wear)Taylor Swifts dads emails: I need to vent. Have actually entered this into Ripleys longest email contest. (Jane Song)A sentence I highlighted recentlyTrue intimacy, more than sex, is what youll miss Yes, I do miss sex, but in the grand scheme of things, what I really miss is intimacy. Damian Delune, The Top 15 Things Ive Learned After Three Years in Prison

Two veterans, two perspectives on Veterans DayPublished inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter3 min read1 day ago-- Hello! Weve returned with the Medium NewsletterIssue #204: raking leaves and making things you actually love (even if no one else does)It makes cosmic sense for Veterans Day to fall one week after Election Day.* Not only do many of us get a three day weekend to recover, but: After voting on the principles that will define U.S. politics for four years, were honoring the people who fight for them.That sounds straightforward, but if youve ever met a veteran and listened to their stories, you know the truth: Not everyone fights (in the traditional sense) and the principles themselves are fuzzy.Benjamin Sledge was deployed to Afghanistan from 20032004 and to Iraq from 20062008. Hes part of the 1 in 10 U.S. army veterans to actually witness combat (most, like J.D. Vance or Tim Walz, work clerical jobs or train domestically). On Medium, Sledge describes being shelled and not knowing where its coming from; interviewing civilians to figure out who the enemy even is; getting bored as you drink your two rationed beers a day.Sledge has to get monthly ketamine infusions for chronic pain, and hes still in PT but the worst part of war isnt physical, he writes. Its not shame or PTSD, either. Instead, its moral injury the feeling of doing things that live in the gray area between right and wrong. We fear being viewed as monsters, he says, or lauded as heroes when we feel the things weve done were morally ambiguous or wrong.A story from Samantha Mazzotta showed me the other (more common) side of what its like to be a vet. Mazzotta was a military journalist, the same job JD Vance had. It involves running around the base with a notebook and camera covering trainings, ceremonies, and team-building events. Also, writing lots of press releases. Its essentially a free journalism school sponsored by the government. I can see how it led to Vances career as an author, speaker, and VP-elect. Mazzotta thinks its lowkey one of the best damn jobs in the military:I dont know a single person who served as a public affairs specialist who didnt love what they did. As a junior enlisted soldier, I had an almost unheard-of amount of freedom and discretion while out on assignments. While other soldiers languished behind a computer screen, I loaded film into a camera, grabbed a notebook, and went out to cover artillery training exercises Harris Sockel*This is totally coincidental. Veterans Day commemorates a pact that effectively ended World War I. And Election Day is on a Tuesday in November so farmers could spend a day (Monday) commuting to a remote polling location during an ideal time of year for them: the frenetic planting season (spring) and harvest (early fall) are over but winter hasnt yet made roads icy. Three stories, one sentence eachA computer science student predicts every election since 1916 in just 91 lines of C++ code (as a way to prove why we should all be more skeptical of election predictions). (Harys Dalvi)Leave the leaves where they are (on your lawn!) because raking deprives your precious grasses of natural fertilizers like phosphorus and potassium. (Olivia Louise Dobbs)Yes, making something that does numbers is nice, but it feels even better when you make something you actually love first. (Wen-Hsiu Wang)A good sentence I highlighted this weekLife wants to adapt and evolve, to make mistakes and be inconsistent. Anna Mercury, Institutions vs. Evolution

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A Rare Otherworldly Sculpture by Surrealist Artist Leonora Carrington Is Going to AuctionThe 1951 artwork, La Grande Dame (The Cat Woman), stands over six feet tall and features paintings of hybrid creatures and lush dreamscapesLa Grande Dame (The Cat Woman)by Leonora Carrington on display at Sotheby's in New York City John Lamparski / Getty ImagesAs Surrealism celebrates its100th birthday, a rare sculpture by renowned Surrealist Leonora Carrington is going up for auction.On November 18, Sothebys will sellLa Grande Dame (The Cat Woman), which the British-Mexican artist created in 1951. The piece is expected to sell for between $5 million and $7 million.The otherworldly sculpture is made of carved and polychrome wood, which Carrington painted with depictions of hybrid creatures and lush dreamscapes that evoke a lasting sense of awe, per Sothebys. At more than six feet tall, La Grande Dame is a poised, puzzling figure with elongated features and an indecipherable expression spread across its spade-shaped head, asArtnets Richard Whiddington writes. The piece is more than six feet tall. Sotheby'sExperts have raised concerns about the authenticity of some of the sculptures attributed to Carrington, according to the Art Newspapers Hannah McGivern. However, La Grande Dame isnt one of them. Sothebys says that Harold Gabriel Weisz Carrington, the artists eldest son and president of the Fundacin Leonora Carrington, has confirmed the works authenticity.Museums, as well as private collectors, are expected to bid on the sculpture. Its being sold by a distinguished private American collection, per Sothebys. The piece was previously owned by Edward James, a British patron of the Surrealist movement. This is the first time its come up for public auction in three decades.This is her greatest sculpture, Julian Dawes, Sothebys senior vice president and head of Impressionist and modern art for the Americas, tellsARTnews Karen K. Ho.Dawes adds that her work is very relevant across the world. Carrington was a British artist working in Mexico using Egyptian and Celtic and pre-Columbian iconography, creating something thats wholly fantastical and original, he says. I wouldnt be surprised if we see a lot of institutional activity.Another piece by Carrington, a 1945 painting called Les Distractions de Dagobert, sold for a record $28.5 million earlier this year. Experts say demand for Carringtons work has surged as the art world has shifted its focus to the often-overlookedwomen of the Surrealist movement. The sculpture isis made of carved and polychrome wood. Sotheby'sBorn to a wealthy family in England in 1917, Carrington was a rebellious child who was expelled from at least two convent schools. When she was 14, her parents sent her to an Italian boarding school, where she took up painting.She later moved to London, then Paris, and began participating in the Surrealist movement in the late 1930s. Carrington relocated to Mexico in 1942, became a naturalized Mexican citizen and spent the rest of her life in the country. Shedied in 2011 at age 94.Carrington was primarily a painter, but she was also a writer and sculptor. Her work often featured goddesses, animals, human-animal hybrids, mythological creatures and otherworldly scenes. However, as with the work of other Surrealists, Carringtons art is difficult to characterizeand she liked it that way.Throughout her life, she refused to explain her work and she disliked any attempt to impose the order of language onto her visuals, wroteArtsys Siobhan Leddy in 2019. In seeing beyond the visible world, beyond the rational or comprehensible, Carrington leaves us only with abstract terms like magic.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Art, Artists, Arts, Auctions, Mexico, Painters, Sculpture, Surrealism, Visual Arts, Writers

Mary, the 54-year-old Asian elephant at the Berlin Zoo, loves using a hose to rinse off. Urban et al., Current Biology, 2024Elephants are highly intelligent, social creatures capable of peeling bananas, burying and mourning their dead, solving problems and greeting their companions.Now, scientists have added another skill to this list: using hoses to keep themselves cleanand, possibly, to play pranks on each other. Researchers describe these behaviors in a new paper published last week in the journal Current Biology.I am convinced that elephantsand possibly lots of animalsdo all sorts of interesting things that we often miss, or dismiss as one-offs or anecdotes, says Lucy Bates, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Portsmouth in England who was not involved with the research, to Sciences Sara Reardon.A 54-year-old Asian elephant named Mary at the Berlin Zoo surprised researchers with her adeptness at not only using the hose, but also adjusting her use to serve different purposes.Mary, who was born in the wild and had lived at other zoos, cleverly used her trunk to manipulate a hose to shower herself with water. She adopted various techniques to shower different parts of her body, including a lasso-like motion that allowed her to reach her back. Mary also changed her grip on the hose to reach various body parts, and she would raise one of her back legs so she could shower it.Researchers also presented Mary with hoses of different sizes to observe her reactions. She preferred the zoos standard-sized hose over smaller or larger ones, probably because the other sizes were more difficult to grab and move with her trunk.Mary is the queen of showering, says study co-author Michael Brecht, a computational neuroscientist at Humboldt University of Berlin, in a statement.Watch this elephant turn a hose into a sophisticated showering toolWatch on But another Asian elephant, 12-year-old Anchali, appeared to understand how to use the hose to play tricks on Mary. When Mary was showering herself, Anchali would often squeeze, clamp and stand on the hose, thus interrupting the water flow.Researchers suggest Anchalis behaviors could have been purposeful attempts to sabotage Marys shower time, they write in the paper. Over time, she got better at kinking the hoseand she did it more often. The younger elephant alsodeveloped a new behavior, which the team calls a trunk stand, that involves leaning into her trunk to flatten the hose.Anchali may have just been messing around playfully. But its also possible she was acting out of spite, because Mary periodically acted aggressively toward Anchali, per the researchers.Its something we would really like to knowdoes she think its funny? Brecht tells the Guardians Nicola Davis. I think its very funny, but we really dont know. Maybe shes just trying to be mean.Researchers couldnt prove Anchalis antics were vengefulin another experiment, they found that she most often interacted with the hose closest to her, rather than the one Mary was using. But they note its not clear whether Anchali could tell which hose went to Mary. Mary used the hose in different ways to shower various parts of her body, while Anchali shut off the water by clamping the hose. Urban et al., Current Biology, 2024The captive Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) also exhibited highly lateralized behaviors when handling the hoses, meaning they showered one side of their bodies more frequently than the other. These preferences seemed to align with the elephants trunkedness, or whether they were right-trunked or left-trunked (similar to right-handedness and left-handedness in humans). For instance, Mary is left-trunked and spent more time using the hose to shower the left side of her body than the right side.Marys elegant and elaborate use of the hose for showering isnt all that surprising, given her physiology, the researchers write in the paper. They suspect that she might have a somewhat intuitive understanding for a hose, because its super similar to the trunk, says study co-author Lena Kaufmann, also a neuroscientist at Humboldt University of Berlin, to the New York Times Emily Anthes.Still, Marys behavior is yet another example of non-human animals using tools, along with cockatoos, macaques, crows, dolphins and others. Scientists have deemed hoses complex tools because of their length and flexibility, and because of the dynamics of flowing water.I had not thought about hoses as tools much before, but what came out from [this research] is that elephants have an exquisite understanding of these tools, Brecht says in the statement.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Animals, Cognition, Elephants, Neuroscience, New Research, Tools, wildlife, Zoology

Image credits:@one_to_one_hundred (Auckland, New Zealand)@franzao.f (Brazil)@arthursvalente (Budapest, Hungary)@ivaboxx (Ankara, Turkey)@golden.vis.st (Warsaw, Poland)@nobrand_studio (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago)@vis_on.studio (Bangkok, Thailand)@vz.visual (Warsaw, Poland)www.cgarchitect.com/members/maritz-emile Best of the Week Nov 03, 2024Looking for inspiration? Check out the TOP 10 best images posted last week on cgarchitect.com!See more on our board www.cgarchitect.com/boards/5108034b-best-of-the-week-nov-03-2024#top10 #vizprooftheweek #architecture #cgarchitect #archviz #visualization #architecturevisualization #3d #rendering #cgi #cgavizpro #render #vray #coronarender #unrealengine #vantage #3dsmax #revit #cg #3dbuilding #3drender #3darchitecture #3drender #3drendering #3dinterior #3dinteriordesign

CONTRIBUTOR CONTENT: From 2024 to 2031, there will be an annual growth of 26.00% in AI and blockchain and Spectral Labs is taking part in this revolution. Spectral Labs is on a mission to change the way users interact with decentralized finance (DeFi) using AI-powered onchain agents. These autonomous agents allow users to do complex financial tasksRead More

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New Steamwork APIs make it easier for players to switch game versions and beta branchesValve says the changes "solve some common challenges to switching game versions on Steam" News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on Nov. 12, 2024 Steam has introduced new Steamworks APIs to "solve some common challenges to switching game versions on Steam."Whereas previously, Steam itself suggests "accessing these alternative build branches has been fairly obscure," the new API makes it easier for the players to identify and load different game versions.In a new blog post, Valve said "these new tools, developers can now offer players a choice in game to join a beta branch for testing or to switch back to an older version of the game."The company said the changes make it easier for players to clearly choose which version of the game they want, particularly when it comes to beta testing or "testing out the latest updates."In the new article, Valve also gives a case study, showing how it's now easier for players to participate in beta tests, and then another example, which shows how players can help developers test new, less stable updates ahead of full deployment.