THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

People prefer AI-generated poems to Shakespeare and Dickinson (Jeremy Hsu, 14 November 2024, New Scientist)

Most readers can’t distinguish classic works by poets such as William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson from imitations generated by artificial intelligence. And when asked which they prefer, they often chose the AI poetry.

“Over 78 per cent of our participants gave higher ratings on average to AI-generated poems than to human-written poems by famous poets,” says Brian Porter at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

IT WAS THE BIDEN/HARRIS INFLATION…:

The Threat Trump Poses Is Real, but Democrats Must Learn Through Defeat (Danny Postel, November 6, 2024, New/Lines)

The Democratic Party was in a structurally bad position in 2024. Very bad. As the political scientist John Sides, who has been called “probably the leading authority on campaigns in the United States,” recently pointed out on our podcast, The Lede, “If you were imagining a year in which the Democrats were fighting into some headwinds in terms of [President Joe] Biden’s low popularity, the shadow that inflation may continue to cast in people’s assessments of the economy, it’s easy to see this as a year that would be a comfortable win for the Republicans.” The election was a toss-up only because of Donald Trump’s huge negatives, Sides noted.

..and they nominated Joe and then Kamala.

WATCH ‘EM GO, GO, GO:

Scientists Dropped Gophers Onto Mount St Helens For 1 Day. 40 Years Later, The Effect Is Astonishing (Francesca Benson. 11/11/24, IFL Science)

Two years after the eruption of Mount St Helens, local gophers were sent to the area in what must have been quite a confusing day trip, even if the animals were not aware of the news. The gophers were placed in enclosed areas for the experiment and spent their day digging around in the pumice.

Despite only spending one day in the area, the impact they had was remarkable. Six years after their trip, there were over 40,000 plants thriving where the gophers had gotten to work, while the surrounding land remained, for the most part, barren. Studying the area over 40 years later, the team found they had left one hell of a legacy.

“Plots with historic gopher activity harbored more diverse bacterial and fungal communities than the surrounding old-growth forests,” the team explained. “We also found more diverse fungal communities in these long-term lupine gopher plots than in forests that were historically clearcut, prior to the 1980 eruption, nearby at Bear Meadow.”

The Great Chain of Being