The Friday Roundup - 2/16/2024 (FREE) Edition
Killer Warthogs, The Lessons of Regret, Antarctic Mysteries, & a Stunning New AI Text-to-Video Model
Every Friday, I share some of the most interesting articles, videos, and books I’m looking at with our subscribers. It’s an eclectic mix fueled by my unique personal variant of ADHD and pattern recognition, so you won’t find compilations like these anywhere else.
Today, I’m offering a free edition so non-subscribers can have a peek at what they’re missing.
If you’d like access to the The Friday Roundup and all subscribers-only features and posts, you can sign up for just $5/month or $50 per year, right here:
Writing is how I make my living, so if you like what you see here, please support my work by subscribing!
If you’ve already subscribed but would like to throw a tip in the jar, you can do that right here:
Happy Friday everyone!
Here are the stories I found most interesting this week:
His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him. - Peter Holley/TexasMonthly
I was sitting at my desk, going through one article after another.
“Boring.”
Click.
“I think I stopped paying attention to what I was reading like two paragraphs ago.”
Click.
“Wait, this guy’s enormous pet warthog tried to kill him? This I’ve gotta read…”
I don’t know what it is, but an unusual hook and good writing are all I need sometimes to pull me out of my malaise. This one fit the bill. I love unexpected stories, and the drama here is certainly high stakes:
[H]e thought about the animal that had just used its razor-sharp, seven-inch tusks to stab him at least fifteen times. The attack had shredded his lower body and filled his boots with blood, and then left gaping holes in his torso and neck. Had any other animal been responsible, Austin would’ve considered it a random attack. But this was a pet he’d trusted more than any other: his lovable, five-year-old warthog, Waylon.
It wasn’t just an attack, as far as Austin was concerned, but a murderous act of betrayal, one that shattered everything he thought he knew about the deep bond between man and pig. “For years, that animal trusted me everyday and I trusted him,” Austin said. “I put blood, sweat, and tears into his life, and he decided to kill me.”
[…]
Waylon had appeared to be his typical friendly self one October evening at dinner. He greeted Austin at the front gate, happily accepted some back scratches, and trotted beside him as the two walked to a nearby feeding trough. About twenty minutes after he’d arrived, Austin had just finished feeding Daisy, a pot-bellied pig he’s owned since she was a piglet, in an adjacent pen. He re-entered the warthog enclosure and was walking toward his all-terrain vehicle, parked at the entrance of the pen.
Suddenly, his right leg crumpled behind him and he found himself tumbling forward, landing some fifteen feet away. As he gathered his bearings, Waylon’s bulky, gray head emerged from a swirling cloud of dust near his feet. Before Austin could stand up and run, Waylon thrust his face between the rancher’s lower legs and began violently swinging his tusks back and forth. One tusk stabbed Austin twice in the right calf and another stabbed him once in the left calf. His right leg was gashed from the knee to his upper thigh, an injury so wide Austin was later able to put his hand inside it. He remembers the sensation of cool air hitting warm muscle and the realization that blood was pouring out of his jeans and filling his boots.
He knew his parents were almost certainly eating dinner indoors a quarter mile away and nearby ranchers were likely too far away to hear his cries. He screamed anyway.
What you can learn from regret - Charley Locke/Vox
I don’t know about you, but regret, in my life, seems to be a function of age. The older I get, the larger my collection of regrets seems to become. More time means more mistakes, which means more things I wish I could take back and have do-overs on.
The saying “youth is wasted on the young” comes to mind.
The more wisdom we earn — much of it through the mistakes we go on to regret — the more we look back and see how we could have done things differently, and imagine how they might have turned out better if we had. Of course, we don’t know for sure how different things would have been if we’d chosen a different path, but it’s easy to romanticize the road we never traveled.
This piece from Charley Locke opens with a crazy anecdote, but one I found quite compelling:
When Peter and Sjanna Leighton were in their early 20s, their marriage fell apart. Money was tight, and they each feared they were disappointing the other; neither one knew how to communicate their vulnerabilities and hurt.
So one day, almost a year after their vows, Peter packed his bags and moved out of their home in San Antonio, Texas. He got an apartment on his own and focused on building his career in the restaurant business.
“From the outside world, it may have looked like I’d recovered from our marriage failing,” says Peter, who became chronically depressed. “But the memories of how powerful our togetherness could have been, and what could have happened if we had continued developing — all of that churned in me.”
Peter and Sjanna both quietly carried their regret over giving up on their relationship through other marriages, children, and divorce. Then in 2007, 33 years later, Sjanna searched Peter’s name online and found his photography website. “The first photo that came up was a picture of him that he’d taken in our bathroom when we were married, and the second picture was me on our honeymoon, which he had titled ‘The Muse,’” says Sjanna. She realized that he lived in Austin, not far from her, and after a few weeks, she built up the courage to send him an email. They met up for coffee. When they met up a second time a few weeks later, she asked him, “What happened with us, Peter?” He replied, “I don’t know, but you were the love of my life.” Within a month of reconnecting, they were dating again.
Today, at 75 and 72 years old, Peter and Sjanna have been happily remarried for 16 years. “When we got back together, we did it with our regrets and our perceived mistakes,” says Peter. “Because of that, when there have been storms, we’ve been able to weather them.”
Regret, Locke says, “can seem useless and self-indulgent,” because we aren’t able to go back and change the past. “But the emotion can clarify a disconnect between who we are and who we want to be. And it can show us how to change.”
More:
According to Summerville, the most common regrets come from career and romance. As people age, entering their 60s and 70s, family and health start to come up as regrets, too, but romantic regret remains consistent through life stages.
She has also found that regrets of inaction are more common than regrets of action. In other words, we tend to regret the things we didn’t do rather than the things we did. “Human memory adaptively functions to remind us of open things on our to-do list, rather than things we’ve crossed off,” says Summerville, “which might mean that we have a better memory for unmet goals and they persist longer.”
Another factor: When we think about the path we didn’t take, we only imagine the dreamy positives, overlooking the mundane details and inevitable disappointments. It’s harder to regret choices we actually made since they led to so many other specifics. “With action regrets, you can find a silver lining, but with inaction regrets, you can’t do that,” says Daniel Pink, author of The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. It’s easy to regret not running away with that glamorous stranger at 22 since you don’t see the fights and heartbreak. It’s trickier to regret an unhappy marriage if it also led to wonderful kids.
Regret can teach us how to live a life more well-aligned with our values, making better use of the time we’ve got left in this world than we have in the past.
But to do that, we have to identify the things we regret and try to understand the choices we made in the context that we made them.
Then, we have to figure out what we can learn from the regret. What can we act on now that can move us in a direction we’d prefer to go in?
“It’s never too late,” writes Locke, “to learn from your regrets and use them to shape who you want to be today.”
What the Hell is Going on in Antarctica??
This isn’t a link to a singular piece. A couple of stories about Antarctica have crossed my desk in the past week that got me researching, and as I started looking them up, I realized there’s a rabbit hole in the South Pole.
Let’s start with the big one. For reasons that are completely obscure, the Iranian government has laid claim to property in Antarctica, and want to build a military and scientific base there.
The first strange thing is that this claim came from an interview with Iranian Navy Rear Admiral Shahram Irani that was aired on Iranian television last September (2023) but is suddenly all over Western news media this week, as though this is a new story.
The details are incredibly sparse.
I managed to track down the original interview clip, which was translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) when it first aired. The whole thing is quite brief:
Interviewer: "Many of our people are wondering if the army will be able to raise the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the South Pole? As the Commander of strategic Navy forces, can you make this promise to our people? [Can you promise] that we will have a base there?"
Iranian Navy Rear Admiral Shahram Irani: "With regard to the South Pole, as you know… The beautiful beaches of Makran connect us to the South Pole, we have property rights there, and they belong to the public. Our plan is to raise the flag there, inshallah. It is not only military work but also scientific work that needs to be carried out."
Interviewer: "Yes, right."
Irani: "Our scientists are getting ready for a joint operation, encompassing the efforts of all our people, in keeping with the guidelines of our Leader, inshallah."
Interviewer: "So we can declare that Admiral Irani promises that we will build a permanent base in the South Pole?"
Irani: "Inshallah, inshallah."
There is no context offered for why the interviewer asks the question, but it’s impossible to believe that “many” Iranians are “wondering if the army will be able to raise the flag of…Iran in the South Pole”. Why would any of them even think of such a thing? The whole thing feels like a government PR setup (and IRIB TV1, the channel on which it aired, is the “national channel” in Iran).
The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 lays out clearly, in Article I, that “Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only. There shall be prohibited, inter alia, any measure of a military nature, such as the establishment of military bases and fortifications, the carrying out of military manoeuvres, as well as the testing of any type of weapon.”
So what is Iran flaunting, here, and why?
And when Irani says, “The beautiful beaches of Makran connect us to the South Pole,” does he realize the South Pole is over 8,000 miles away?
It’s all so very odd.
The second story is one that comes from Pravda.ru. A little history via Wikipedia: Pravda was was established as the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party, then sold off during Boris Yeltsin’s tenure to a Greek business family, then re-acquired by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, then split into two distinct entities in the late 1990s. The Pravda newspaper still belongs to the Communist Party, but the online version is privately owned.
None of which tells us whether the online Pravda has any credibility. So take it with a large grain of salt when I tell you Pravda.ru reported this week that
A researcher has announced an exciting discovery: the discovery of an ancient city in Antarctica. According to him, satellite imagery indicates that the ancient settlement has begun to emerge from beneath layers of permafrost and ice, likely as a result of climate change.
The scientist provided photographs in which one can see structures resembling pyramidal shapes and patterns similar to those found in the streets of ancient cities. A satellite archeology specialist conducted a survey of the area where NASA astronauts previously discovered a huge underground cavity, going to a depth of about 300 meters, located near the Thwaites Glacier.
Despite assumptions, the study requires confirmation and authentication by recognized experts and organizations. NASA officials have not yet commented on this issue. The reliability of such statements raises serious doubts.
Are the two stories somehow related? No idea. Are either of them related to another story I came across when looking this up? Hard to say:
Passengers on a Norwegian Cruise Line Star Ship are majorly upset over a last-minute change to their itinerary.
Ticketed guests were told they would be travelling to South America and Antarctica. But it wasn’t until after they boarded the boat that they realised there had been a slight change of plans – their trip would only cover destinations in South America. One infuriated passenger took to TikTok to express her frustrations.
“Never book a cruise with Norwegian Cruise Line,” the account @ruinedvacation proclaimed in their 9 February video. “Our ship is not going to Antarctica. They secretly changed the name of this cruise yesterday on the app.”
[…]
“According to customer service on the ship, this decision was made by head office in Miami before we departed, and it was for ‘operational reasons,’” the woman continued. “They refuse to explain what those operational reasons are. We know it’s not weather. So, what is the reason?”
Ultimately, the passenger was told the ship was under a strict “go slow order” which is why they had to cut Antarctica from the schedule.
“Is it saving fuel costs? Is it something with the ship, that it can’t handle the long journey? We don’t know,” she went on to say, noting how many passengers felt “scammed”.
It’s funny, since Antarctica is a place almost nobody thinks about without a good reason, but I’m starting to get the feeling that there’s something going on down there that they don’t want you to know about. If you search X/Twitter for “Antarctica,” the number of conspiracy theories you come up with is incredible. Perhaps the most interesting of these is an interview on the Sean Ryan Show with a “whistleblower” named Eric Hecker, who used to work for Raytheon — a defense contractor — at the South Pole. He claimed that there are “directed energy weapons” in Antarctica that can cause (and have caused) earthquakes:
I have yet to watch the full interview, but it’s available here for those who are interested:
Raytheon has definitely been down in the ice for a while. I found a press release from 2004 stating that they’d been selected to
[C]ontinue support services for the National Science Foundation’s U.S. Antarctic Program. The support contract extension is for $546 million, bringing the total value of the contract to $1.172 billion and extending the agreement another five years from April 1, 2005 to March 31, 2010. The initial program was awarded in April 2000.
Under the contract, Raytheon Technical Services Company LLC (RTSC) will continue to provide science, operations and maintenance support for the U.S. Antarctic Program, the nation's scientific research program in the Antarctic, to include all labor, materials, facilities and equipment. Work is performed in Antarctica, South America, New Zealand and the United States.
A billion dollars is a lot of money for “support” services to a program that “manages all U.S. scientific research and related logistics in Antarctica as well as aboard ships in the Southern Ocean.”
According to the NSFUAP’s own fact sheet, “Research is done in Antarctica only when it cannot be performed in a more accessible location.”
Raytheon’s contract ended in 2012. But that wasn’t the end of Defense Contractors providing expensive support services to the least populous continent on the planet.
In 2011, Lockheed Martin announced that it had won the contract, “valued at approximately $2 billion if all options are exercised.”
Under the new contract, Lockheed Martin will work with the NSF to implement a cost-effective, streamlined infrastructure for managing work stations and medical facilities, research vessels, construction projects and remote sites in and around Antarctica. The corporation also will modernize technologies to transport scientists, staff and supplies to and from the Antarctic region.
Does that sound like billions of dollars worth of work to you? Feels iffy to me.
And is the fact that much of Antarctica is simply blurred out on Google Earth indicative of something being hidden, or is the explanation something totally prosaic?
For that matter, is this a structure?
Have fun with the rabbit hole, everyone!
OpenAI’s new Sora model can generate minute-long videos from text prompts - Pranav Dixit/Engadget
In a video I released a year ago last month, I made a prediction to my readers:
It's not going to be long before I'm not going to have to do any of the video editing. In fact, there are programs out there that will do that for me.
I might actually look in one for this video. In fact, it's not going to be long before videos like this one could be made without me actually doing the work of going out and finding the stock footage and editing it together. In fact, it's not going to be long before videos like this one are going to be possible kind of in the way that Midjourney, you can type in a prompt and get a piece of art.
We're going to be able to ask the AI to make a video and it's going to go out and find the stock footage and it's going to put it together and it's going to edit it and we're going to wind up with an end result that doesn't require hours of our time to put these things together. That's coming fast.
It's probably already in development right now.
Yesterday, I saw that prediction come true.
The name of the AI model is Sora, and it’s made by OpenAI — the same folks who gave us ChatGPT and DALL-E. This is what Sora looks like in action:
No, it’s not perfect, but it is absolutely stunning what it can produce based on text prompts alone.
Here’s another sample, based on the following prompt: “A stylish woman walks down a Tokyo street filled with warm glowing neon and animated city signage. She wears a black leather jacket, a long red dress, and black boots, and carries a black purse. She wears sunglasses and red lipstick. She walks confidently and casually. The street is damp and reflective, creating a mirror effect of the colorful lights. Many pedestrians walk about.”
As you can see, this is a dramatic leap forward. As this technology continues to develop, the opportunities for amateur filmmakers to create something that would ordinarily far outstrip their budget (and have to make it through the movie studio gauntlet) for nothing more than the cost of GPU time.
That’s it for me for this edition. Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next week!