Technology has come a long way. We’ve had medical advancements and information technology change the way we love. In the previous 100 years, we have gone from the first car made to the best electric vehicle on the market. Along with these advances, we have had many different ideas brought to fruition.
One of them is using A.I. – artificial intelligence – to reimagine what historical figures would look like if they were walking among us today. At last, forgotten faces of the past can finally be brought back to life in brand new ways.
Artificial intelligence does a great job of recreating a modern Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great is a name as well-known as any other. Fictional stories and movies have been made in his name, and he is bound to be a name that will never be forgotten. Starting a massive military campaign when he was only 20, this Greek King set out to change the course of history and did so very effectively.
Source: Instagram/Royalty Now
We can now see what Alexander the Great may have looked like by the tremendous technological advances made today. Although he was known for being a fierce military leader, Alexander never named someone as his successor when he passed away. The bust used for this rendering is of a young Alexander, clearly showing his youth in the A.I. interpretation.
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Source: Instagram/Royalty Now
Nefertiti ruled during and was most prominently known for a bust made to her liking. Being the only authentic replica giving us an idea of what she looked like, it is nice to see that this Queen kept her majestic aura. The A.I. envisions her to be relaxed and calm, although no one knows what she is like.
Fire crews battled blazes still burning Saturday from wildfires that ravaged parts of Maui as teams with cadaver dogs combed through the rubble in an intensifying search for the missing.
Firefighters were making progress, but three main wildfires that ignited Tuesday and left 80 people dead and thousands of buildings torched were still not extinguished: The Lahaina fire was 85% contained, the Pulehu/Kihei fire 80%, and the Upcountry Maui fire 50% as of late Friday.
Another fire that prompted evacuations in the Kaanapali area of West Maui on Friday evening was 100% contained within a few hours and evacuation orders were canceled, officials said.
As the sun rose in Kihei on Saturday, the sky was filled with the smell of smoke. On the highway into Lahaina, a historic town decimated by the fires, cars, trucks, and buses laden with supplies ignored signs to keep off the median as they tried to bypass the traffic jam ahead of a road blockade.
Residents who were allowed to return to Lahaina on Friday were met with charred remains, demolished homes and businesses, and a changed landscape, including the loss of dozens of their neighbors. But police on Saturday were once again restricting access into West Maui, warning people to stay out of the area because of hazards, including toxic particles from smoldering areas.
Hawaii Gov. Josh Green has warned the death toll could climb even higher as the search for the missing continued. Cadaver-sniffing dogs were brought in Friday to assist the search for the dead, Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen Jr. said.
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In an aerial view, two men ride a scooter by businesses that were destroyed by a wildfire on Aug. 11, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii.
San Francisco, one of the country’s most politically far-left cities, is showing the slowest post-COVID pandemic recovery of any major U.S. or Canadian city, according to newly published data.
The University of Toronto’s School of Cities this week released its “Downtown Recovery Rankings,” which were based on the change in level of foot traffic in dozens of North American cities from before the pandemic to afterward.
Specifically, researchers used mobile phone trajectory data to examine the number of visits to 62 downtown areas, comparing recent activity in the largest cities across the U.S. and Canada to pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
According to the study, San Francisco ranked dead last in recovering from the COVID pandemic, when downtowns around the world became unrecognizably quiet and lifeless due to lockdown measures. Indeed, the far-left California enclave this spring experienced only 32% of the foot traffic seen during the spring of 2019. The number was identical when compared to the winter (December 2022 through February 2023) of the same period in 2019.
SAN FRANCISCO PROFESSOR COMPLAINS ABOUT ‘PSYCHOLOGICAL COST’ OF STORES LOCKING ITEMS TO PREVENT THEFT
The results came a little over two months after San Francisco launched a costly $6 million ad campaign in a bid to attract tourists and business travelers — one of many efforts by the city, led by Democratic Mayor London Breed, to revitalize downtown.
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San Francisco Mayor London N. Breed speaks during a rally for the Housing for All process reform legislation in advance of the San Francisco Planning Commission vote outside City Hall on June 29, 2023.
Elon Musk, who bought the platform for $44 billion in 2022 after months of well-publicized drama and legal issues, is a confirmed bozo. The overgrown Tommy Pickles is best known for inventing an electric car that people made their personalities, trying to go to space, having a child named X Æ A-12 with musician Grimes, and of course, founding PayPal.
Since his big purchase, he has made several interesting (and highly public) business decisions. It has been reported that he has slashed staff by about 80%, closed several offices, stopped paying bills, and of course, he gave former President Donald Trump his account back. Even if you are not a Twitter power user like me, you can imagine these extreme measures have caused some issues with the platform. But TBH, shockingly, nothing catastrophic.
Every morning, I open the app and find interesting things to read, jokes to laugh at, and takes to make me angry. The introduction of the “For You” feed—an algorithmically-powered stream of popular tweets, tailored to each user’s online bubble—polarized my timeline but has consistently exposed me to some of the most hilarious stuff I have seen on the app in years. If you use Twitter as God intended—for the jokes—you are handsomely rewarded. Not every tweet is a home run, but it is very easy to ignore the garbage and keep scrolling. The overly sanctimonious users whose feeds keep surfacing the triggering content that they can’t resist interacting with are the only ones suffering.
As Elon’s reign has continued, there have been some hiccups: losing my blue check was a short-lived ego bruise, the “rate limit exceeded” debacle (in which non-paying users were only allowed to see 600 tweets per day) affected me for about 24 hours, and previews not loading in iMessage negatively impacted my group chat performance. These were short-lived, minor annoyances. Bonehead moves that were quickly corrected or forgotten.
Carrie Frost is well-equipped for hydration. A registered nurse and a mother of two from Colorado, she estimates that her family has accumulated “upward of 25 to 30” reusable flasks at home for keeping cold drinks: flasks large and small, of various designs and colors, with a straw and without. But last month, as she sat in 90-degree heat at her son’s travel baseball tournament, she drank from a plastic water bottle that she had purchased for $3 at a local grocery store.
“Convenience,” she said, laughing, as she tried to piece together why, once again, she was not using one of her many beverage containers. “I guess we’re just a lazy society.”
Americans are drinking a lot of water, but they are on the fence about how best to do it. More than $2 billion in reusable water bottles were sold in the United States in 2022, up from around $1.5 billion in 2020, according to Greg Williamson, the president of CamelBak, which is a maker of reusable bottles.
And sales of single-serving water bottles have been rising steadily, too, reaching 11.3 billion gallons in 2022, according to the most recent data from the Beverage Marketing Association, which tracks beverage sales.
In other words, consumers are spending billions of dollars a year on reusable bottles to stay hydrated and then buying bottled water anyway, even as faucet water remains free.
“Faucet?” said Jason Taylor from Georgia, whose son was playing the same Birmingham baseball tournament. “Faucet? I haven’t drunk from the faucet since I was 18.” He had heard stories about tainted water, like in Flint, Mich., and did not trust the faucet water at the hotel, he said, so he filled his reusable flask with ice from the hotel and poured bottled water over it. The hotel ice he trusted; the faucet water there, not so much.
Calibrating your monitor means making sure it displays colors correctly—that content other people have created looks accurate on your screen, and vice versa. If you’re working on documents or images for a wider audience, or simply just want things to look good, you want that kind of accuracy.
Color calibration is also important for making sure anything on your screen looks its best, from games to movies. It ensures that light areas aren’t too blown out, that details aren’t lost in dark areas, and that color tones look natural. The process can improve your viewing experience even if you’re not a creative professional.
You should also bear in mind that laptop screens are configured and calibrated at the factory, and no adjustments are necessary (or indeed possible, apart from brightness). These calibration steps only apply if you’ve got a separate monitor hooked up to your Windows or Mac computer. Before you dig in, you’ll need a working knowledge of your monitor’s settings and controls, so checking the documentation that came with it or running a quick web search might help here. You can also just play around with the on-screen controls until you know what’s what. You’ll be adjusting settings such as brightness, contrast, and color temperature.
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You’ll want to ensure your monitor’s colors are calibrated correctly to see everything in wondrous detail. Linus Mimietz / Unsplash
We’ve all heard that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but how true is that?
Apples are not high in vitamin A, nor are they beneficial for vision like carrots. They are not a great source of vitamin C and therefore don’t fight off colds as oranges do.
However, apples contain various bioactive substances – natural chemicals that occur in small amounts in foods and that have biological effects in the body. These chemicals are not classified as nutrients like vitamins. Because apples contain many health-promoting bioactive substances, the fruit is considered a “functional” food.
For years, I have taught university classes on nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, carbs, proteins, and fats. But recently I developed a course specifically on functional foods. The class explores the various bioactive substances in food and how some may even function like a medicine.
Functional foods defined
Functional foods are not the same as superfoods. “Superfood” is a buzzword marketers use to promote foods like kale, spinach, and blueberries. Labeling them as “super” appeals to the public and increases sales. But superfood is generally meant to imply a food that has superior nutritional value and that is high in nutrients that are beneficial for health. For example, salmon and tuna are considered superfoods because the omega-3 fats they contain have been linked to heart health.
Superfood advertisements claim that eating the food will improve some aspect of health. The problem is that most of those claims are not based on scientific research like the criteria for functional foods are.
In addition to the nutrients that our bodies need for growth and development, functional foods contain a variety of bioactive substances, each with a unique function in the body. The bioactive substances can be found naturally in foods or added during processing.
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While apples aren’t considered a superfood, they are considered a functional food. Caterina Oltean/500px Prime via Getty Images
The term toxic positivity has gained popularity in recent years, referring to moments when people responded to others’ struggles with surface-deep assurances and clichéd phrases such as, “Everything happens for a reason,” or, “Have you tried yoga?”
But there is a similar, if lesser-known, concept that is more inner-directed: emotional perfectionism.
While we usually think of a perfectionist as someone who holds themselves to a high standard for how they look, behave, or work, emotional perfectionists hold themselves to a similar standard regarding how they feel. Rather than encouraging others to look on the bright side (toxic positivity), they expect themselves to be unfailingly upbeat.
“It’s really when you have an emotion about emotion, and you’re suppressing what you have labeled the bad emotion,” said Annie Hickox, a psychologist who also holds a Ph.D. in clinical neuroscience. “Emotional perfectionism often follows a script of: ‘We shouldn’t do this,’ ‘I shouldn’t be mad about that,’ ‘I shouldn’t be angry,’ ” added Hickox, who coined the term in 2016.
Hickox believes emotional perfectionism could be an unrecognized source of anxiety, based on experience with her patients. “They’ll say, ‘Oh no, I’m not a perfectionist.’ But you can find thoughts where they’re holding themselves up to a very high standard,” she said.
Toxic positivity and emotional perfectionism have the same underlying root cause: a discomfort with other people’s negative emotions. Vrinda Kalia, a psychology professor at Miami University who studies perfectionism and emotional expression, said that expecting life — yours or others’ — to be “awesome all the time” is extremely debilitating because it ignores reality. “This is not what life is like.”
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People who experience emotional perfectionism are reluctant to admit to negative emotions. (iStock)
One of Donald Trump’s greatest political talents–if you can call it that–is the ability to kick up such a whirlwind of chaos that it becomes easy to lose sight of simple moral baselines. Actions and stories that would functionally end other presidencies are forgotten within days as the bright bouncy orange ball moves to the next outrage and shatters the next norm. Opponents are left wondering whether to five the next five-alarm fire or try to focus on rebuilding the crumbling foundations of governance from the last fire.
That is in part what has happened over Trump’s personal financial behavior. For years, Americans of decency have eagerly awaited the disclosure of Donald Trump’s personal and organizational tax records, knowing that they were likely to reveal massive corruption, potentially leading to a crisis of government, impeachment, resignation, or any other consequence of note. But Trump’s chaos tornado, particularly in the context of a historic pandemic, has essentially nullified the consequences of what should be earth-shattering revelations.
When the New York Times released the main story on Trump’s tax-dodging and enormous personal debts, it basically had no impact on public polling and lasted about one to two days in the national news cycle. This is in part because Trump has so debased expectations for his own behavior and public service that everyone knows he’s a crook–even his own supporters–but either they don’t care or they were already opposing him, anyway. But it’s also because who has time to worry about whether the president is a tax cheat when he is actively spreading a deadly virus at the highest levels of government, sabotaging the Postal Service, and refusing to accept the results of a free and fair election? This in spite of the fact that we absolutely must care about these things. After all, the president is $421 million in debt. Whoever owns his debt, including potential foreign adversaries, could essentially be running national policy! Even if we believe we cannot afford to pay attention to it given the rest of the hurricane winds, we still must manage to maintain our focus.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Source: Instagram/Royalty Now
In an aerial view, two men ride a scooter by businesses that were destroyed by a wildfire on Aug. 11, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii.
San Francisco Mayor London N. Breed speaks during a rally for the Housing for All process reform legislation in advance of the San Francisco Planning Commission vote outside City Hall on June 29, 2023.
You’ll want to ensure your monitor’s colors are calibrated correctly to see everything in wondrous detail. 
While apples aren’t considered a superfood, they are considered a functional food. 
Gage Skidmore/Flickr
James' World 2 