In 1985, a man named Douglas Simmonds walked into the British Museum, carrying a bag of old objects. His father Leonard had served with the Royal Air Force in the Middle East during and after the Second World War, and like many veterans stationed far from home, he had picked up curiosities along the way. Clay fragments. Small carved objects. Things that looked interesting without being obviously valuable.
After Leonard died, the collection passed to his son. Douglas wanted someone to tell him what he had. The man who looked at the objects was Irving Finkel — one of the very few people alive who can read cuneiform, the world's oldest writing system. Finkel looked at the tablets one by one. Then he picked up a small, damaged piece of clay — roughly the size of a mobile phone — and started reading. He went very still. The opening lines were famous to anyone in his field. They were the beginning of the Atra-Hasis Flood Story — one of the oldest narratives in recorded human history. A god warning a chosen man of a coming catastrophe. An instruction to build a great boat and save the animals. A story so ancient it had been told and retold across civilizations for thousands of years before anyone carved it into stone or pressed it into paper. But this particular tablet contained something that had never been seen before - construction instructions. Precise ones naming materials, measurements, quantities. A working blueprint for the ark itself — specific enough that a boat could actually be built from it. And the ark it described was nothing like the one in Genesis, it was round. A massive circular coracle — coiled from palm fiber rope, supported by thick wooden ribs, sealed with layers of bitumen that seeped naturally from the Iraqi earth. It was not designed not to sail anywhere, but simply to float, because it had nowhere specific to go, it just needed to survive.
Finkel was — in his own words — "wobbly with desire" to keep studying it. But Simmonds took it back, he wasn't oblivious about its significance. He was simply a man who had inherited a family treasure and wasn't ready to surrender it to a museum. He was, by all accounts, a person of considerable intelligence who knew exactly what he was carrying. But he just wasn't willing to leave it behind.
Finkel never forgot the tablet. For 24 years, he thought about those opening lines. Wondered what the full text said. Then, in 2009, he spotted Douglas Simmonds at a Babylonian exhibition inside the very museum where they had first met. He walked over and asked directly: please, bring the tablet back. This time, Simmonds agreed. What followed was years of painstaking work. The tablet's 60 lines of cuneiform covered both sides of the clay. Some sections were chipped or cracked, forcing Finkel to cross-reference fragments, compare symbols, and reconstruct meaning from what time had left behind. But the construction instructions were remarkable in their specificity — detailed enough that he eventually worked with ancient shipbuilding experts to actually build a replica of the round ark, at roughly one-third scale. When he launched it on a river in Kerala, India, with documentary cameras rolling, the ancient design held.
📷 : Dr. Irving Finkel, a philologist and Assyriologist, displaying a 4000 years-old clay tablet containing the story of the Ark at the British Museum
When Finkel published his findings in his 2014 book The Ark Before Noah, the discovery reverberated well beyond academic circles. Here, pressed into clay nearly four thousand years ago — centuries before the Biblical version of the flood story existed in any written form — was proof that the Noah story was not a single revelation. It was a human idea so old and so powerful that it had traveled across multiple civilizations, being reshaped and retold in each one, until it eventually reached Genesis.
The terror of rising waters. The desperate hope of survival. The belief that something essential — people, animals, knowledge, memory — was worth trying to carry forward through the catastrophe.
That idea was not invented once. It was discovered, again and again, by people who had lived through floods so devastating that the experience demanded a story large enough to contain it. Finkel, for his part, was direct about what the tablet did and did not prove. He was, he said, "107% convinced the ark never existed" as a literal vessel. The story was something more durable than history — an attempt by ancient human beings to make meaning out of the worst thing they could imagine. And the fact that those ancient scribes chose to include precise construction instructions — exact measurements, specific materials, detailed methods — only deepened the mystery. Someone wanted whoever found this tablet to be able to build the boat. Not just to know it existed, but to know how to make it real.
Today the tablet sits on loan at the British Museum, small and easy to walk past without a second glance. But in those 60 lines of wedge-shaped marks, pressed into wet clay with a reed stylus by someone who has been dead for four thousand years, is a question that turns out to be timeless: When everything is at risk of being swept away — what do we choose to save? And how do we carry it forward for the people who come after.
After testing every AI writing tool for 6 months, I found the one workflow that actually produces content worth reading.
It's not a tool. It's 5 Claude prompts run in a specific order that turns a rough idea into a finished piece in 40 minutes.
Here's the system:
Every AI writing tool has the same problem.
They start at the wrong end.
You give them a topic. They give you a draft. The draft is clean, organized, and completely hollow because the tool skipped the only part that makes writing worth reading.
The thinking.
Good writing isn't organized information. It's a writer working something out in public finding the angle nobody took, the tension nobody named, the insight that was obvious in hindsight and invisible before.
No tool finds that for you. But a system can force you to find it yourself before a single word of the actual piece gets written.
That's what these 5 prompts do. They run in order. Each one builds on the last. By the time you reach Prompt 5, you're not writing from a blank page you're writing from a position.
40 minutes. One rough idea in. One finished piece out.
Here's the system.
PROMPT 1 - The Angle Excavator
Most people start writing with a topic. The best writers start with a tension.
Run this first before you write a single sentence.
"I have a rough idea for a piece of writing. Your job is not to outline it. Your job is to find what's actually interesting about it.
Read the idea below and give me:
The obvious angle what everyone who covers this topic already says.
The contrarian angle what someone who has thought about this longer than anyone would say instead.
The personal angle the version of this idea that only someone with a specific lived experience could write authentically.
The tension the unresolved contradiction inside this topic that makes it genuinely worth writing about right now.
Do not write the piece. Give me the four angles and tell me which one has the most to say that hasn't already been said.
Here is my rough idea: [paste idea]"
Pick the angle that makes you slightly uncomfortable. That's the one.
Memory is past/input, reason is present/process, future/output is recycle. What ensues is gain, growth of capital in soul. That's what defines human, garment soul donnes.
Posits memory (past/input), reason (present/process), recycle output into future gains building soul's capital & human is soul's growth thru cycle not capabilities.
Process/capital metaphors tie to spiritual development, reinterpreting human essence poetically.
Withholding transfers will only help UCP to accelerate the displacement of public healthcare with for-profit healthcare.
So while symbolic in presenting a united front, this letter remains a deficient strategy. It will not engage the federal govt to ‘enforce’ compliance.
There continues to be complete confusion about the limits of federal and provincial power.
I’m guessing, but I imagine signatories think PMMC can fine UCP, charge UCP with a crime, or even step in to cancel or amend the legislation AB UCP have used to enable private healthcare.
Top students at Stanford don't read books cover to cover anymore.
They upload the PDF to NotebookLM and run a 6-prompt workflow that extracts the core arguments, counterexamples, and real-world applications in one sitting.
Here are the exact prompts they use:
1. The Core Argument Extractor
Every book has one central argument everything else serves.
Most readers finish the whole thing and can't state it in two sentences.
Paste this first:
"Read this entire book and identify the single central argument the author is making. Not the topic. The argument the specific claim they are trying to convince me is true. State it in two sentences maximum. Then identify the 3 to 5 key sub-arguments that support the central claim. For each sub-argument: what evidence or reasoning does the author use to support it, and how strong is that evidence on a scale of anecdote to empirical proof?"
If you can't state a book's central argument in two sentences after finishing it, you haven't finished it.
You've just been present for it.
This prompt makes sure you actually have it.
2. The Assumption Auditor
Every author has a worldview baked into every book they write.
Most of those assumptions are never stated because the author doesn't realize they're making them.
They feel like facts because they feel obvious to the person writing.
"Identify every significant assumption this author makes that they never explicitly state or defend. What does the author take for granted about human nature, about how organizations work, about what people want, about how change happens? For each unstated assumption: is it well-supported by evidence outside this book, is it contested by credible thinkers in related fields, or is it simply the author's worldview presented as universal truth? Which assumption, if wrong, would most undermine the book's central argument?"
The best books survive this prompt with most of their argument intact.
The overrated ones collapse at assumption two or three.
Running this tells you exactly how much of what you just read was insight versus ideology.
Estamos fabricando una generación con una tolerancia cero a la frustración. Hemos pasado de "búscate la vida" a "te lo doy masticado para que no sufras". El problema es que el aprendizaje real siempre pica un poco, y si evitamos el picor, evitamos el crecimiento. 🧵va...
Antes, si un alumno perdía la ficha o no apuntaba los deberes, tenía un problema que debía resolver él solo. Hoy, tiene un batallón de adultos rescatándole al minuto. Si no les dejamos cometer errores pequeños ahora, se pegarán el golpe grande después.
Hemos confundido "acompañar" con "hacer por ellos". Resolverles cada duda antes de que piensen un segundo o simplificarles las tareas hasta el absurdo solo genera dependencia. La autonomía no se enseña en un libro, se entrena dejando que se equivoquen.
LETS TALK ABOUT PAINFUL S€X WITHOUT SHAME BECAUSE S€X IS NOT MEANT TO HURT
IT IS MORE COMMON THAN YOU THINK.
When Pleasure Hurts: A Woman’s Body Is Speaking, and We Must Listen
There is a story many women carry quietly, and it begins in a bedroom and ends in silence.
It is the story of pain where pleasure is expected, and of endurance where joy should live. Dyspareunia is the name medicine gives to painful sex, and yet the experience itself has existed long before we learned to label it. As a gynaecologist,
I say this without apology and without whispering: sex is not meant to hurt, and when it does, the body is not being dramatic, it is being honest. According to the guidance of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists(RCOG), painful sex should never be dismissed, because pain is often a message, and messages deserve interpreters, and interpreters deserve time
Sometimes the pain waits at the doorway of the vagina, like a guard refusing entry, and sometimes it hides deep inside the pelvis, like a secret with sharp edges. Superficial pain may come from dryness, from infections, from conditions of the vulva, and from the quiet hormonal changes of menopause or breastfeeding, when oestrogen slips away like a lover who forgot to say goodbye. Deep pain, however, may whisper the names of heavier things: endometriosis, pelvic infections, fibroids, ovarian cysts, or adhesions, and these are not small matters, even when they are spoken of in small voices.
If someone steals your iPhone and knows your passcode, they can:
- Change your Apple ID password
- Turn off Find My iPhone
- Access every saved password
- Empty your bank accounts
- Lock you out of your own Apple ID forever
All in under 60 seconds.
Here are 5 settings that prevent this ↓
1. Turn on Stolen Device Protection
Settings → Face ID & Passcode → Stolen Device Protection → Turn ON
Set it to "Always" not just "Away from Familiar Locations."
This is the single most important setting on your iPhone.
When it's on, changing your Apple ID password requires Face ID or Touch ID no passcode fallback. Plus a one-hour security delay.
A thief with your passcode alone cannot lock you out.
Good news: Apple started turning this ON by default in iOS 26.4.
But if you haven't updated or if you turned it off without realizing it might still be off.
Go check right now:
Settings → Face ID & Passcode → scroll down → Stolen Device Protection
If it says "Off" turn it on immediately.
This feature has existed since January 2024. Millions of people still don't have it enabled.
Your home is photographed and publicly visible on at least 5 websites right now.
Google Maps. Apple Maps. Bing Maps. Zillow. Redfin.
Front door. Driveway. Windows. Side gates. Cars.
Anyone in the world can see it in 10 seconds.
You can blur or remove it from all of them. Free. Takes 15 minutes.
Here's the exact process for every platform:
This isn't paranoia.
Law enforcement officials have confirmed that criminals use Street View to case neighborhoods without ever driving through them.
They can see entry points, whether there's a side gate, what cars are in the driveway, and whether anyone's home.
Even Apple's CEO Tim Cook had his home blurred after a stalking incident.
If it's worth doing for him, it's worth doing for you.
Platform 1: Google Maps (Street View)
This is the one most people see.
>> Go to maps.google.com on a computer
>> Search your address
>> Drag the yellow Pegman onto your street to enter Street View
>> Click "Report a Problem" in the bottom right (tiny font, easy to miss)
>> Select "My home" under Request Blurring
>> Drag the red box over your house
>> Enter email, complete CAPTCHA, submit
Google processes most requests in 24-48 hours.
⚠️ This is permanent. Once blurred, it cannot be undone.
@Kevin_McKernan @SethSHowes Yeah, methylation status is a huge boon with good quality nanopore reads. Darado SUP + methylation analysis would be interesting. Means of deriving useful info, of course, are more contrived for methylation.
@Kevin_McKernan @SethSHowes So Dorado is a standard base calling algorithm made by ONT, which has different quality modes, with SUP (super-accurate basecalling) being one of the better algos. It's all ML, the instrument generates skwiggles of electrical signal that need AI to deconvolute
@Kevin_McKernan @SethSHowes Modified (such as methylated DNA) produces a slightly different signal than non methylated so they CAN be differentiated from each other with ONT (as long as the reads are from RAW HOST DNA). If you use a pcr panel this is moot bc the products won't be methylated
Key concerns:
Social transition has "significant effects on [the child's] psychological functioning and longer-term outcomes", including potential medical implications. Consequently, no education professional has the expertise to assess a child's "best interests" on this matter as suggested by the draft guidance (e.g. para 254, 256 etc.)
Encouraging an assessment of "best interests" in cases of gender-related distress contravenes KCSIE's own stipulation in para. 45 "Only appropriately trained professionals should attempt to make a diagnosis of a mental health problem."
Teachers do not acquire the necessary expertise to assess "best interests" when a child enters puberty (paras. 258, 259, 264, 265).
The draft guidance puts children at risk by encouraging teachers to stray beyond their professional expertise, handing them a highly consequential decision that they are not qualified to make.
This is true even if parents consent to social transition. Parents are not always well-informed about the consequences this may have for a child, so while parental consent is important, teachers must not be given the impression that there is a green light to proceed as long as parents approve. Teachers cannot determine whether this is in the child's "best interests" (257) even if the parents might think so.
The draft guidance fails to define social transition and thus confuses personal expression (which is uncontroversial as long as a child complies with uniform regulations) with teachers treating a child as if they were the opposite sex (which has profound consequences for the child and their peers).
The guidance must articulate more clearly that social transition in the context of a school involves harnessing the child's peers and teachers as a form of 'therapeutic community' to affirm the child as the opposite sex (or non-binary or other identity).
The guidance is not clear that safeguarding considerations take priority over a child's individual agency and their equality/human rights e.g. if an equality claim puts a child at risk of harm.
The guidance mentions 'harm' (para. 261) but does not explain what this means for a cross-sex or non-binary identified child e.g. breast binding, tucking, DIY hormones, heightened dysphoria, online exploitation, misinformation about suicide.
Para 263 promises confidentiality if a child reveals a cross-sex identity to a teacher but does not demand social transition. This means parents are uninformed about something that could indicate underlying mental health issues, trauma, neurodevelopmental issues. This secrecy undermines safeguarding for these children.
Para 252 opens up the possibility of schools drafting their own policies on 'social transition'. This creates a loophole for unevidenced and unsafe policymaking by education professionals, who are not qualified to make decisions relating to mental health.
Para 262 must be reworded to be clear that if a school considers a parent to be such a risk that their child's cross-sex identity should be concealed from them, this would warrant immediate referral to social services (not merely a consultation with the DSL). Otherwise schools will continue to use this as a loophole to exclude parents from decision-making.
Note: The main question to respond to is Question 33 of the consultation. Further information may be added in response to Question 34 on single-sex toilets, changing rooms etc., and Question 35 on single-sex sport.
Yesterday cowards hide behind the Women’s Bill, but their real agenda was clear -unfairly increase seats for underdeveloped BIMARU North states that vote them blindly, while cutting developed South states’ share to rig future elections.
Congress & Opposition rightly struck it down.If you have guts, implement Women’s Reservation on CURRENT seats right now. Stop playing politics with women just to win elections.
Thanks CONGRESS,TMC,DMK,SP for saving India becoming Bimaru country from South, northeast, West ✌️
O debate político numa sociedade de massas nunca é bom, mas se esvaziou demais no Brasil. Até 2014, você discutia os candidatos pelo que representavam economicamente. Não tem mais nada. As pessoas se aferraram a uma defesa abstrata da democracia, ignorando tudo. +
Ninguém discute a sério a politica fiscal, a falta de projeto de desenvolvimento, a qualidade dos empregos, a absurda informalidade, o desalento, mais de 300 mil pessoas na rua, o Acordo Mercosul-UE, os péssimos termos de troca com a China, os baixos salários. +
As pessoas simplesmente ignoram, muito por culpa da esquerda, o que aconteceu neste país, especialmente entre 2016 e 2022. Ficam falando dessa intentona de golpe e ignoram apenas a financeirização da Petrobras, a venda da Eletrobras, o teto de gastos, a reforma trabalhista+