A US citizen detained for a peaceful protest. Media companies investigated for their reporting. ICE scanning social media for illegal opinions. Can everyone see where this is going? torment-nexus.mathewingram.com/time-to-w…
What a terrible story: according to news reports, Gene Hackman’s wife died of a respiratory virus and he was in the house with her body for a week after that until his heart gave out. It sounds like he had fairly severe Alzheimer’s. So tragic
Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and Digg cofounder Kevin Rose are rebooting Digg, and they have some thoughts about how to improve the social web. In this week’s Torment Nexus: torment-nexus.mathewingram.com/will-a-re…
State Dept. plans to use AI to scan social media and then revoke the visas of foreign students who appear “pro-Hamas” www.axios.com/2025/03/0…
In this week’s Torment Nexus newsletter, I wrote about the reboot of Digg by cofounder Kevin Rose and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian. Does it have anything to offer today’s social web? torment-nexus.mathewingram.com/will-a-re…
This is what the White House cares about – not helping Ukraine, or food prices, or affordable health care, but attacking a few experiments to help people with hormone-related health problems www.whitehouse.gov/articles/…
If you were extremely online in the early 2000s, this is like the Hatfields and the McCoys joining hands and singing Kumbaya: www.nytimes.com/2025/03/0…
A recent federal court ruling on AI and copyright was hailed by some as a landmark event, but that overlooks some significant aspects of the case. I looked into it in my latest post at The Torment Nexus torment-nexus.mathewingram.com/breaking-…
Maybe taking some things out of copyright and putting them in the public domain wasn’t a great idea after all
Maybe taking some things out of copyright and putting them in the public domain isn’t such a good idea
This is wild: Microsoft says its new quantum chip uses the “Majorana particle,” named after the Italian theoretical physicist who proposed it in 1937. It has no electrical charge because it is its own anti-particle www.theverge.com/news/6142…
If you fire the people who handle FOIA requests, then you can’t respond to FOIA requests. Genius. www.cnn.com/2025/02/1…
Julianne Moore’s children’s book Freckleface Strawberry is part of a “compliance review” of school materials related to executive orders regarding “gender ideology” and “racial indoctrination” www.cnn.com/2025/02/1…
The FT is reporting that Trump plans to withdraw troops from the Baltic states, which could have tragic consequences for Ukraine and possibly other nearby countries
Cool Canadian fact: the ceremonial gavel of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada is made from a piece of a window from the White House taken before the British burned it to the ground in the War of 1812
Joan Baez with Margo Price, Linda Ronstadt, Lucinda Williams, Roseanne Cash, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne (from Joan’s Facebook feed)
I know there are lots of other factors, but on a fundamental level I think Trump and Musk are just a couple of guys whose fathers mistreated them and they are taking that rage out on the world
Norovirus, or as the Australians call it “Ornor-ovirus.” (Sorry not sorry)
A judge ruled that DOGE is an official gov’t agency so it can have access to records, but that also means it is subject to FOIA, privacy laws and the administrative procedures act: abcnews.go.com/Politics/…
Trump State Department official has repeatedly called for mass sterilization of ‘low-IQ trash’ www.independent.co.uk/news/worl…
“Information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate, and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female.” www.404media.co/trump-adm…
Some eager beavers saved the Czech government $1.2 million
From National Geographic: “Officials in the Brdy region of the Czech Republic were at an impasse.Despite securing more than one million dollars’ worth of funding for a new dam to address water issues, the project had stalled after seven years of planning because the necessary building permits for such a structure couldn’t be acquired. But then, everyone woke up one morning in January to find that the job had been completed—by eight beavers.
Stacking cups as a game was invented by this guy’s dad
From Defector: “If neighbors peeking behind curtains at the idling 18-wheeler thought to call in a complaint, the husband and wife receiving the delivery didn’t notice. They were too busy unloading boxes—more than 800 of them. That problem cost $43,000, a sum that represented the entire life savings of Mr. Fox and his wife, who at that point had been surviving on public-school salaries. Friends and family never really said it out loud, but they were certainly thinking it: This was insane.
Does Elon Musk want to buy OpenAI? Yes and no
If you’ve been reading the news at all, you probably know that Elon Musk — and/or a group of twentysomething programmer/hackers with nicknames like “Big Balls” (no, I am not making this up) — have taken control of significant parts of the functional machinery of the US government, including the Departments of Energy, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They are installing external servers and shutting down billions of dollars worth of payments, as well as firing tens of thousands of federal employees.