Novel digressions

The tragic and brutal murder of 13-year-old Tair Rada (תאיר ראדה) in the bathroom of her Katzrin school in December 2006 shocked Israel. An immigrant construction worker, Roman Zdorov (רומן זדורוב), was detained two weeks after the murder, sentenced to life imprisonment, and exonerated only in March 2023 after a retrial ordered by the supreme court. An inspection of crime-scene photos in the public domain indicates that the scene was incorrectly interpreted by the police and that much can still be uncovered in this case, despite the long time that passed since the murder.

The premise of the successful computer game-turned-TV series 'The last of us' is a futuristic evolution of the fungal parasitoid ' ophiocordyceps unilateralis '. At some point in the near future, this zombie-ant cordyceps manages to jump species to humans, overnight, grow inside our brains, and mind-control us into murderous zombies. There are several scientific problems here, such as 'overnight', the choice of parasitoid species, and even, as argued below, 'futuristic'... more on 'The last of us' later.

Above: AI self-portraits. The western study of consciousness has a long history and a large body of modern research, but is largely descriptive (see, e.g., main stages  vs. a continuous  evolution, and references therein). Eastern approaches seem to have achieved important practical progress through two millennia of experimentation. Some yogis can reach a very deep meditative state, in which they become aware of their own stream of consciousness. In particular, the yogi can sense how each thought fragment emerges, without his control, from a background of vague fragments, and sometimes even recognizes how the chosen fragment is driven by stimuli and previous fragments, some of which are memories. Consciousness is then recognized as an awareness of the sequence of selected fragments and its evolution, while the uncontrolled and fast mechanism of fragment selection reveals itself only in the meditative state. This deep meditative state is usually an unpleasant, disorienting, and tiring e

This is just a setup post to test the embedding of presentations, video, etc.  But if we're already here, check out the effective and sometimes brave critiques by George Carlin (saying similar things already in the late 1960s), Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Jon Stewart, for instance this week, grilling Biden administration's deputy secretary of defense on unaccounted $850 billion that almost everybody ignores, and a few others across the globe.  You might disagree with these political-satire comedians, but who else builds so much of his or her career on identifying the core systemic problems in the political system, and articulates them so effectively for mass consumption, without, at least in principle, being corrupted? Orators, authors, and journalist have long become ineffective, but some comedians could still win over the amassing propaganda machines and lead the political overhaul that their country needs. Recent examples, ranging from Beppe Grillo to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, dem