Stats ...

Note: Lebanon's death and wounded tolls are not part of this equation.

Add 45 dead more to the Palestine part of the chart as of 10/26/24.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, says, “The entire population of Gaza is at risk of dying in a genocide that has been announced and executed under our watch.”

Israeli forces bomb six buildings in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, killing at least 45 people, as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) calls on the United States to stop the “systematic extermination of an entire population” in the Palestinian enclave.

Turning off the US ordnance spicket will shut down Israel's endless war against the defenseless immediately, something that should have happened from the get go without question.

The time to implement the two state solution is nigh.

Wikipedia, an addition for the ages :)

Oh dear! Oh dear,! I shall be late! - White Rabbit: Alice in Wonderland

Wikipedia, an addiction for the ages :), is a resource this rube depends on as said environment is self correcting due to the fact the world's dictionary's constantly updated and corrected by dedicated fact checkers and researchers as needs warrant, something truly wonderful in a age filled with bogus data, increasingly generated by AI. With this being said, The Conversation has an interesting piece, indirectly channeling Lewis J. Carroll, in describing how people like us access an environment both trusted and loved in a way unable to be described unless one uses Wikipedia as often as yours truly.

To whit.

If you’ve ever gone to look up a quick fact and just kept browsing from one article (or page, or video), to another, to another – then you know the feeling of “going down a rabbit hole”. This experience of curiosity-led online wandering has become synonymous with the free, user-created encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is today one of the world’s most popular websites. With more users than Amazon, Netflix, TikTok or ChatGPT, the site is a go-to source for people to learn about and discover new interests.

In new research involving more than 480,000 Wikipedia users in 14 languages across 50 countries, US researchers led by Dale Zhou at the University of Pennsylvania studied three distinctly different ways of going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. These “curiosity styles” have been studied before, but not in such a large, diverse group of people using Wikipedia “naturalistically”, in daily life.

The research may help us better understand the nature and importance of curiosity, its connections to wellbeing, and strategies for preventing the spread of false information.

Illustration of a wiki rabbit hole for a t-shirt

The Rabbit Hole beckons :)

Busybodys, hunters and dancers

The new study explores the “knowledge networks” associated with the three main styles of curiosity: busybody, hunter and dancer. A knowledge network is a visual representation of how readers “weave a thread” across Wikipedia articles.

As the researchers explain:

The busybody scouts for loose threads of novelty, the hunter pursues specific answers in a projectile path, and the dancer leaps in creative breaks with tradition across typically siloed areas of knowledge.

Earlier research had shown evidence of busybodies and hunters, and speculated about the existence of dancers. The new study confirms that busybodies and hunters exist in multiple countries and languages. It also details the dancer style, which has been more elusive to document.

Yours truly, as my loyal readers know, is a cross between hunter & dancer. :)

The researchers also identified geographical differences between curiosity styles.

In all 14 languages studied, busybodies tend to read more about culture, media, food, art, philosophy and religion. Hunters in 12 out of 14 languages tend to read more about science, technology, engineering and maths.

In German and English, hunters were more drawn to pages about history and society than busybodies. The opposite was true in Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Dutch and Chinese.

Dancers were identified by their forward leaps between disparate topics, as well as the diversity of their interests.

Contribute to Wikipedia, it's the right thing to do. :)

Complicit ...

A damaged press vehicle at the site of an Israeli strike that killed journalists in Hasbaiyya, southern Lebanon, on October 25, 2024 [Stringer/Reuters]

The US is complicit in enabling Israel to kill anyone they want including journalists. Genocide, war mongering and wanton violence is SOP in a country's that's out of control. This is total crap and a stain on both nations without question as ongoing war crimes are happening as we speak thanks to an entangled alliance from hell.

An Israeli air strike has killed at least three journalists as they slept in their accommodation in southern Lebanon, in what news outlets say was a direct hit on an area removed from the continuing conflict between the Israeli military and Hezbollah.

The air raid hit a compound in Hasbaiyya housing several journalists at about 4am (01:00 GMT) on Friday, killing two cameramen and a technician.

“This is a very serious incident. Israel didn’t give any warning,” Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan said, reporting from the southern Lebanese city. “Hasbaiyya is under no evacuation orders and, in fact, it has been relatively calm.

BBC photo

Three Lebanese journalists have been killed in an Israeli air strike on a building known to be housing reporters in south-eastern Lebanon, witnesses have told the BBC.

The attack was carried out on a guesthouse in a compound in Hasbaya being used by more than a dozen journalists from at least seven media organisations - with a courtyard containing cars clearly marked with "press".

The three men worked for broadcasters Al-Manar TV and Al Mayadeen TV, which issued statements paying tribute to their killed employees.

Lebanon's information minister said the attack was deliberate and described it as a "war crime".

The Israeli military has not yet commented, but has previously denied targeting journalists.

Orwell lives.

Chasing the Hunter's Moon

This year, fall colors in New England rule as seen in this short clip as prelude to seeing
the Hunter's Moon in all its glory. :)

Once done ...

The Climeworks AG Mammoth carbon removal plant in Hellisheidi, Iceland, on May 8th, 2024.  

Photo: Getty Images

Have said this for years regarding climate change, once done, it's done. We have passed 1.5 C while fossil fuel use continues to rise. As stated before, the only real change will happen when a catastrophe of biblical proportions occurs. In this case, India looks like a real possibility, or possibly Pakistan, as high temps and humidity point toward web bulb territory, a most frightening scenario for any country and its people to face as man moves further into the 21st century.

Tech companies think they can reverse climate change with fancy new tools to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But new research throws cold water on the idea that cooling the planet after it has already heated beyond a key turning point can avoid serious damage. Much of the toll climate change takes — from rising seas to lost homes — can’t be undone, recent research published in the journal Nature warns.

That makes it all the more urgent for governments and companies with climate goals to slash pollution from fossil fuels now, rather than offsetting or capturing their greenhouse gas emissions after the fact.

One of the hopes with carbon removal is that it can potentially reverse climate change, bringing temperatures back down if we overshoot that 1.5-degree target. But things won’t just go back to normal, the new research conducted by 30 scientists shows. Melting ice from glaciers would continue to raise sea levels “for centuries to millennia,” for example, a phenomenon that has already pushed people from their homes along vulnerable coastlines. And even if the globe’s average temperature comes back down, it’s hard to say exactly what outcome to expect from region to region.

Dawn

Being Inconvenienced ...

Solitude

This pix, taken by yours truly, indirectly connects to an insightful piece written by Nicholas Taleb titled The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority, an often overlooked dark truth not only corrupting how the US is governed, (Think Trump, W & the Electoral College) but also on how the intolerant often foist upon society things the majority doesn't want because being inconvenienced is not tolerated, especially in the pursuit of money.

To whit

This example of complexity hit me, ironically, as I was attending the New England Complex Systems institute summer barbecue. As the hosts were setting up the table and unpacking the drinks, a friend who was observant and only ate Kosher dropped by to say hello. I offered him a glass of that type of yellow sugared water with citric acid people sometimes call lemonade, almost certain that he would reject it owing to his dietary laws. He didn’t. He drank the liquid called lemonade, and another Kosher person commented: “liquids around here are Kosher”. We looked at the carton container. There was a fine print: a tiny symbol, a U inside a circle, indicating that it was Kosher. The symbol will be detected by those who need to know and look for the minuscule print. As to others, like myself, I had been speaking prose all these years without knowing, drinking Kosher liquids without knowing they were Kosher liquids.

A strange idea hit me. The Kosher population represents less than three tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are Kosher. Why? Simply because going full Kosher allows the producer, grocer, restaurant, to not have to distinguish between Kosher and nonkosher for liquids, with special markers, separate aisles, separate inventories, different stocking sub-facilities. 

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

As stated before, in business, being needlessly inconvenienced can be economically fatal.

And the simple rule that changes the total is as follows:

A Kosher (or halal) eater will never eat nonkosher (or nonhalal) food , but a nonkosher eater isn’t banned from eating kosher.

Or, rephrased in another domain:

A disabled person will not use the regular bathroom but a nondisabled person will use the bathroom for disabled people.

Another example: do not think that the spread of automatic shifting cars is necessarily due to the majority of drivers initially preferring automatic; it can just be because those who can drive manual shifts can always drive automatic, but the reciprocal is not true [1].

Which means, it's become almost impossible to buy a stick shift car in the US.

11:00pm

A difference of opinion :)

You gotta laugh, right? Liuyu Animation rules. :)

0 & then Sum ...

Gradient

When looking at this "wonderful" pix taken by yours truly, the relationship of infinity to zero applies as said entities are complimentary to each other as one requires the other in order to become complete, something beautifully illustrated by the Yang/Yin symbol showing the two forever transitioning from zero to infinity while, at the same time, possessing some of the characteristics of the other depicted by dots of opposing color residing in the center of each. 

Yin and yang (/jɪn/ and /jæŋ/), yinyang,[1][2] or yin-yang[3][2] is a Chinese philosophical concept

that describes opposite but interconnected forces. 

With this in mind, it seems 0's are hardwired into the brain because zero, like infinity, journeys to forever, a concept really hard to let go of without question. :)

Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers such as 50, 505 and 5,005. An elementary version of the concept of zero was born.

Hundreds of years later, in seventh-century India, zero took on a new identity. No longer a placeholder, the digit acquired a value and found its place on the number line, before 1. It's invention went on to spark historic advances in science and technology. From zero sprang the laws of the universe, number theory and modern mathematics.

“Zero is, by many mathematicians, definitely considered one of the greatest — or maybe the greatest — achievement of mankind,” said the neuroscientist Andreas Nieder, who studies animal and human intelligence at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “It took an eternity until mathematicians finally invented zero as a number.”

Mark Belan/Quanta Magazine

Perhaps that’s no surprise given that the concept can be difficult for the brain to grasp. It takes children longer to understand and use zero than other numbers, and it takes adults longer to read it than other small numbers. That’s because to understand zero, our mind must create something out of nothing. It must recognize absence as a mathematical object.

“It’s like an extra level of abstraction away from the world around you,” said Benjy Barnett(opens a new tab), who is completing graduate work on consciousness at University College London. Nonzero numbers map onto countable objects in the environment: three chairs, each with four legs, at one table. With zero, he said, “we have to go one step further and say, ‘OK, there wasn’t anything there. Therefore, there must be zero of them.’”

Factoid, The ancient Greeks hated the notion of zero. This is why Zeno's Paradox works. :)

Achilles and the tortoise

Everything's connected. 

Hunter's Moon

The ultimate enabler

Iranian missiles flying over Israel on Oct. 1. Photo: Wisam Hashlamoun/Anadolu via Getty Images

Without the US as ultimate enabler, Israel would cease to exist, something to consider when seeing how Israel is "interacting" with neighboring states. Now comes a security breach, which sounds legitimate, regarding Israel's expected response to Iran's Oct 1 missile attack, a most disconcerting turn of events possibly opening the gates of hell known as WW III.

To whit.

U.S. officials are extremely concerned about a potentially major security breach after two alleged U.S. intelligence documents about Israel's preparations for an attack on Iran were published by a Telegram account affiliated with Iran.

Why it matters: The alleged leak comes as Israel completes weeks of preparations for a retaliation against Iran, which attacked Israel with a barrage of ballistic missiles on Oct. 1.

The leak could be an attempt to disrupt the Israeli operation.

The Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the leaked documents, but did not dispute their authenticity.

The data.

The documents are attributed to the US Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, and they note that Israel was still moving military assets in place to conduct a military strike in response to Iran’s blistering ballistic missile attack on 1 October. They were sharable within the “Five Eyes”, which are the US, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

The documents, which are marked top secret, were posted to the Telegram messaging app and first reported by CNN and Axios. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The investigation is also examining how the documents were obtained – including whether it was an intentional leak by a member of the US intelligence community or obtained by another method, like a hack – and whether any other intelligence information was compromised, one of the officials said. As part of that investigation, officials are working to determine who had access to the documents before they were posted, the official said.

The horror, the horror ...

In the national interest ...

Trump, left, talks with Netanyahu in 2017 [File: Evan Vucci/Reuters]

Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with former US President Donald Trump, according to the prime minister’s office.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu reiterated what he has also said publicly: Israel takes into account the issues the US administration raises, but in the end will make its decisions based on its national interests,” it said.

Israel said earlier this month it would consider Washington’s input over its expected response to Iran’s October 1 missile attack but will eventually decide in line with its “national interests”.

Seems America's national interests don't matter, only Israel's as its logical for a country with 9.3 million citizens and smaller than New Jersey should be the tail wagging the dog here without question.

Israel vs the US.

Israel’s size in comparison to the USA

The abyss looms.