Did You Know that a Black enslaved man was Responsible for Saving America from a SmallPox Epidemic

Onesimus (potrait unavailable) introduced the idea of vaccination based upon the African practice of inoculation in Libya,to help mitigate spread of smallpox

💉THREAD💉

Onesimus was an enslaved African who introduced the concept of inoculation to America and helped save hundreds of Bostonians from smallpox in 1721. But his role has hardly been told.

It began in 1716. When asked by his owner, prominent Puritan minister Cotton Mather, about a scar on his forearm, Onesimus described the basics of smallpox inoculation - a practice that was common Africa (and Asia) but relatively unknown in the American colonies.

There has been too much talk of petrodollars.

And not enough talk of Chinese dollars

China isn't really de-dollarizing. Rather the contrary.

A new blog

1/

cfr.org/articles/china…

SAFE's quarterly data shows that 70% of the external fx assets of the Chinese state commercial banks are in dollars -- and that almost all of their net external fx assets (external assets funded domestically) are in dollars

2/

I don't love the SAFE quarterly data set -- it shows more external assets and way more external liabilities than the PBOC's data set. But the numbers on external assets at least line up, and the extra external liabilities are in CNY

3/

Watching the events unfold in Bengal is fascinating. TMC & its eco-system are using a set of classic manipulation tools to try & fool the public, & rig the mandate. Here are a few examples:

#1 Gaslighting: A favourite tool of manipulators where they make people doubt their own memory or perception of reality by twisting facts or simply denying events that happened in plain sight.

Example: Mamata Banerjee is trying to erase memory the violence that she & her goons have perpetrated over the years, by playing victim. She had the gall to say recently, “Just look at this atrocity. What kind of hooliganism is going on? Voting does not happen like this. Voting happens peacefully. It is a festival of democracy."
That's gaslighting 101
indiasnews.net/news/279018386…

#2 Lying: Sharing deliberate falsehoods to mislead people.
For example, Abhishek Banerjee wrote a long post alleging that an elderly man died due to CRPF mishandling. However, cameras at the booth show that no such thing happened & the poor man just collapsed due to ill health.

#3 Blame shifting: This is another common manipulation tool, where people shift focus from the perpetrator's actions and blame the victim or a third party .
Example: This minion is blaming the BJP for deployment of CRPF while praising Mamata. There is no mention of the large scale rigging, 52 poll related deaths, & large scale violence in 2021, which made this move necessary.

1/ Carrot is shutting down

This is certainly not the outcome we wanted, but the situation with the Drift exploit, has proven to be catastrophic for our continued operations.

2/ We are setting May 14th as the deadline to withdraw any remaining funds from Boost, Turbo, and CRT before we will then begin to deleverage the system.

Your deposited funds are still yours, but all leverage will be reduced to zero, freeing up all liquidity for CRT redemption

3/ Any recovery effort by Drift will still be distributed as stated previously.

We don’t have a time-table on when that will be, but regardless, we will be here to handle that process and honor our commitment.

AFTER ALMOST FOUR YEARS OF WAITING...#SurvivingEarth HAS FINALLY COME!
Created by Impossible Pictures and TIM HAINES, i.e., the masters behind the Walking With series, will SE be yet another glorious success? MOST LIKELY YES!
TRAILER BREAKDOWN...BEGINS NOW! (1/?)

Our first shot is a tree being struck by lightning. This is a scene that may remind you of the Dimetrodon segment in Walking with Monsters, and as you'll see later, this indeed is most likely from a Permian sequence...Though probably not the one Dimetrodon will appear in. (2/?)

Carboniferous forests burning...
This forest is a mixture of photoreal VFX and live action elements from a PRACTICAL FX FOREST the team built for the series! (3/?)

1/Does your ability to remember temporal lobe anatomy seem, well, temporary?

Or are you feeling temporally challenged when it comes to this complex region?

Here’s a thread to help you remember the structures of the temporal lobe!

2/Temporal lobe can be divided centrally & peripherally.

Centrally is the hippocampus.

It’s a very old part of the brain & is relatively well preserved going all the way back to rats.

Its main function is memory—getting both rats & us through mazes—including the maze of life

3/Peripherally is the neocortex.

Although rats also have neocortex, theirs is much different structurally than humans.

So I like to think of neocortex as providing the newer (neo) functions of the temporal lobes seen in humans: speech, language, visual processing/social cues

23 years after airing, I gave BBC's "Neuromancer" a try. (I didnt want to ruin my memory of the books).

If you (re)listen today, it's amazing what holds up : use of AI, the oligarchs, political intrigue of megacorps. And (of course) first use of the word "cyberspace" (🧵1 of 5)

William Gibson wrote amazing prose, but this BBC version misses some of his more poetic details, like this favorite scene of mine. In the book, Case isnt just laughing, his cheeks are streaked with tears of release. One of my favorite scenes as a teen/young adult
(🧵 2 of 5)

The tech bits not only hold up, but the way society USES the tech does also. Amazing tech is ultimately just leveraged for surveillance, military, and hedonistic "bread and circus" for the masses. Pretty amazing to be that prescient in the first years of the 1980s.
(🧵 3 of 5)

🚨What happens to tropical rainforests as CO₂ rises?

New research shows higher CO₂ boosts tree growth & C uptake by pushing roots to aggressively mine scarce phosphorus.

This strengthens the C sink now, but depletes nutrients, ultimately limiting long-term C storage.🧵1/11

2/ Scientists tested this in the Amazon by exposing forest patches to higher CO₂ (future-like conditions) and tracking how trees, roots, and soils responded over time.

3/ Step 1: More CO₂ → faster photosynthesis

Trees produce more sugars, grow faster, and pull more CO₂ out of the air.

This is the short-term “carbon sink boost.”

Two paths to governance-bearing tokenized stocks launched the same week.

@Computershare ISTs: the token IS the registered share.
@OndoFinance + @Broadridge: the token wraps a beneficial interest, proxy voting bolted on.

@steinRWA called it "game over." It isn't. 🧵

Path 1 - native distributed. @Computershare acts as transfer agent. IST holders are registered shareholders on the issuer's books. Voting, dividends, corporate actions flow directly.

No SPV. No custodian holding the real shares. Token = share.

Path 2 - custodial wrapper + proxy bridge. @OndoFinance holds underlying shares through a BVI SPV via @AlpacaHQ. Token holders get beneficial exposure. @Broadridge provides the proxy voting pipe.

Token = contractual claim. Voting = pass-through courtesy.

We hear the songs all the time. But do we ever hear how they came alive?

A thread 🧵- for the recording process of some greatest hits in music

1- Dire Straits - Money for Nothing

Mark Knopfler telling the story of how Money for Nothing was written, at British TV show Parkinson. That's quite an interesting story.

2- Metallica - The Black Album Recordings James Hetfield recording his vocals for the band's most successful album.

3- Bee Gees - Tragedy

Bee Gees recording their number 1 hit 'Tragedy' in 1978 during the make up process of their album called Spirits Having Flown.

Former Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief, Zaluzhnyi: The old world order didn't enter turbulence. It no longer exists

Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, Venezuela and now the Middle East all show the same thing: rules exist on paper, but there is no force to enforce them. 1/

Zaluzhnyi: If any world order still exists, it is the order of the strong.

America is now telling Europe it is no longer the guarantor of European security and that Europe’s security is now in Europe’s own hands. That alone shows the old order is over. 2/

Zaluzhnyi: Whether this is already a third world war, historians will decide later.

But as witnesses, we can see an unfinished war in Ukraine, an unfinished war in the Middle East, and no mechanism able to prevent a third, fourth, or fifth war from breaking out. 3/

Introducing Silico: the platform for building AI models with the precision of written software.

Silico lets researchers and engineers see inside their models, debug failures, and intentionally design them from the ground up.

Early access is open now. 🧵(1/10)

We’ve used interpretability to discover a novel class of Alzheimer’s biomarkers, teach a language model to correct its own hallucinations, and diagnose performance bottlenecks in a robotics model.

Silico brings those frontier techniques to everyone. (2/10)

Silico introduces our model neuroscientist: an autonomous agent that plans and runs concurrent experiments on your model.

It works with your team in our model design environment, where you can organize research threads, replicate and extend papers, and collaborate on findings.

Here are 5 things you can do with Silico:
(3/10)