A friend from college told a bunch of us how once, he and some friends had dropped acid and then went to Disneyland. They started “coming up” just after they went through the gates. As they went further into the park, the person in the Goofy costume bounded up to them. Our friend felt freaked out, so he leaned in and confided, “Please, Goofy, not now – we’re tripping, Goofy,” …and Goofy leaned in and whispered back, “Guess what – me too,” and bounded off.
~~~
I sent a postcard with a drawing of my fiance asleep and a message about changing the alarm to spend more time with her. She found it before I mailed it and now we spend more time together while awake too. Thanks.
~~~
Two weeks ago I was placed in a psych ward for attempting to take my own life. I was sitting there alone until another boy came up to me and simply said, “You’re not the most fucked up person anymore”. Everyone was just like me, dealing with some kind of issue. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like I was the only one dealing with these things. I felt normal.
~~~
I am a counselor in a locked mental health facility. We joke that we are just patients with keys.
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I’m hiding pictures of us from the past 13 years under shelves and behind drawers.
My ex-wife takes half the furniture next week.
When she finds them years from now, I hope they break her heart.
~~~
When I bought my first vibrator I was so embarrassed that when the sales person asked if I wanted to purchase batteries as well. I told her no, that I thought “she can buy her own damn batteries.”
~~~
There are no words, in any language verbal or pictorial, that could ever describe how much I wish this postcard were for me. Today is my last visit to your site, never again. It hurts too much, seeing postcards like the one I need, knowing it will never come.
When Donald Trump recently claimed, during what was supposed to be a press conference about a European Union trade deal, that wind turbines were a "con job" that drive whales "loco," kill birds and even people, he wasn’t just repeating old myths. He was tapping into a global pattern of conspiracy theories around renewable energy—particularly wind farms. (Trump calls them “windmills”—a climate denier trope.)
Like 19th century fears that telephones would spread diseases, wind farm conspiracy theories reflect deeper anxieties about change. They combine distrust of government, nostalgia for the fossil fuel era, and a resistance to confronting the complexities of the modern world.
And research shows that, once these fears are embedded in someone’s worldview, no amount of fact-checking is likely to shift them.
Most experimental brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that have been used for synthesizing human speech have been implanted in the areas of the brain that translate the intention to speak into the muscle actions that produce it. A patient has to physically attempt to speak to make these implants work, which is tiresome for severely paralyzed people.
To go around it, researchers at the Stanford University built a BCI that could decode inner speech—the kind we engage in silent reading and use for all our internal monologues. The problem is that those inner monologues often involve stuff we don’t want others to hear. To keep their BCI from spilling the patients’ most private thoughts, the researchers designed a first-of-its-kind “mental privacy” safeguard.
Overlapping signals
The reason nearly all neural prostheses used for speech are designed to decode attempted speech is that our first idea was to try the same thing we did with controlling artificial limbs: record from the area of the brain responsible for controlling muscles. “Attempted movements produced very strong signal, and we thought it could also be used for speech,” says Benyamin Meschede Abramovich Krasa, a neuroscientist at Stanford University who, along with Erin M. Kunz, was a co-lead author of the study.
Four men in Georgia, all living in the same county, mysteriously became infected with a potentially deadly soil bacterium that's normally found in the tropics and subtropics, particularly Southeast Asia and northern Australia. The four cases were tied together not just by their shared location but also by the bacterial strain; whole genome sequencing showed the bacteria causing all four infections were highly related, suggesting a shared source of their infections.
But this bacterium doesn't tend to jump from person to person. And none of the men had recent travel that explained the infection. In fact, only one of the men had ever been to a place where the bacterium lives, but it was decades before his infection. And there's another twist: The four infections spanned decades. The first occurred in 1983, the second in 1989, and the last two occurred a day apart in September 2024.
In a newly published study in Emerging Infectious Diseases, state and federal health researchers suggest that the four linked cases indicate that the dangerous bacterium—Burkholderia pseudomallei—has been lurking in the Georgia area the entire time. They also think they know what triggered its recent reemergence: Hurricane Helene.
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