Quicklinks: 30 January – 5 February 2023

I’ll start this set of links off with this beautiful 150-year-old tree from Japan.

150 year old wisteria tree in Japan

📸IG godive2000 pic.twitter.com/peY98R8tad

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) January 31, 2023

Imagine if you went walking in the forest and then encountered this fantastical creature!

In the wilderness pic.twitter.com/LIuKLdid02

— Tobias Gremmler (@TobiasGremmler) January 30, 2023

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Quicklinks: 23-29 January 2023

Let’s start off with a pretty cool cat fact.

Let’s learn a #CaturdayCatFact!

While a cat’s adult canines grow in, they go through a phase where each quadrant of their jaw has TWO CANINES! The adult tooth starts growing in next to the baby tooth, allowing the kitten to never go without the function… https://t.co/C3MbtGtA0x pic.twitter.com/CMuxp8S81r

— Ashley Reynolds – ashinonyx@scholar.social (@ashinonyx) January 29, 2023

AI tools like chatGPT are pretty cool. But they are not exactly reliable and, even worse, it’s difficult to know how reliable they are. When you hear a person you don’t know, you can look into what they do or what qualifications they have. With AI, it’s giving you answers which are a mix of all sorts of information; some true, some false. In the following Twitter thread, you can learn how it can construct that false information.

Why does chatGPT make up fake academic papers?

By now, we know that the chatbot notoriously invents fake academic references. E.g. its answer to the most cited economics paper is completely made-up (see image).

But why? And how does it make them? A THREAD (1/n) 🧵 pic.twitter.com/kyWuc915ZJ

— David Smerdon (@dsmerdon) January 27, 2023

The UK porn block and the concept of obscenity

I made a passing reference the to the UK’s new plan to block all porn but I decided that it, and obscenity in general, required a more thorough examination. In short, David Cameron feels that UK internet service providers need to block all porn by default to protect children. In short, again, that idea is stupid. It’s stupid partially because it will not work and partially because the mindset behind it is one that should not be accepted.

30 000-year-old plant grown again

Here’s a very interesting story. Russian scientists found frozen seeds of a plant from 30 000 (A thin space is the recommended format for dividing numbers. 30,000 would really imply 30 with three significant figures.) years ago and have been found and they have managed to grow them. I’m not quite ready to write a long piece (although I have two in mind but am not sure when I will have time to write them) so I’m leaving the explanation to the capable Jerry Coyne.