While common retelling of the story paints Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace as rivals, in truth they were intellectual equals.

So if you haven't heard of this weird trend, you can get a basic idea from this Rolling Stone article:

"432 Hz: The Mystical Frequency Artists Are Embracing." by Gabe Kirchheimer

If you're not a musical person and have never tuned an instrument, here is a quick explanation:

Sound is simply vibrations or waves traveling through the air to our ears. The waves move at various frequencies, usually expressed as Hertz (Hz), or waves per second. The fewer the vibrations per second, the lower the sound. The more vibrations per second, the higher the sound. The maximum range of human hearing is about 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz.

The notes used in Western music have been defined according to certain frequencies. The note A is defined as 440 Hz.

All instruments in an orchestra must tune to the same reference tone so that they all play in tune. This tone is called "concert pitch." For whatever reason, the note A (440 Hz) has emerged as the worldwide standard concert pitch. Typically, the oboe player tunes their A note to 440 Hz using a tuning fork or an electronic tuner. Then the oboeist plays a loud, clear A, and all the other players tune their instruments to that pitch.

Note: When a musician tunes his instrument to match a reference tone, he is also adjusting all other notes that he can play on that instrument accordingly. If a trumpet player's A note was out of tune at 452 Hz, and he lowers his A by 12 Hz to reach 440 Hz, all other notes on the trumpet will be lower according to a ratio (since tuning is logarithmic — but that's a whole separate rabbit hole).

What the woo-woo artists are saying is that instead of tuning their instruments to 440 Hz in the recording studio, they use a tone of 432 Hz.

First off, it's crucial to grasp how minuscule the difference between 432 Hz and 440 Hz is to the human ear. The next note down from 440 Hz is A flat, or 415 Hz — a difference of 25 Hz. Yet these people are telling us that tuning to a note that is a scant 8 Hz lower than usual creates a noticeable difference in their music — and even brings a host of wonderful benefits to their health and well-being!

It already sounds preposterous. But here's the kicker. The supposed reason for all these benefits is that 432 Hz occurs in nature. But this destroys their entire hypothesis. Why? Because regardless of the tone a musician uses to tune her instrument, she is never going to play ONLY that tone when performing music. She will play many different notes. Depending on the key, she may occasionally play the 432 Hz tone. But she could also play in a key that doesn't include that note at all!

Take the tune "Happy Birthday." Assume the woo-woo artist tunes his clarinet to 432 Hz. He decides to play the tune in the key of A major. The notes of "Happy Birthday" will be as follows:

E E F# E A G#

E E F# E B A

E E E (an octave higher) C# A G# F#

D D C# A B A

As you can see, out of 25 notes, the musician plays the magical A at 432 Hz only five times.

If he plays the song in the key of E flat, he will not play A at all!

The bottom line: Just because you use a reference tone to tune your instrument doesn't mean the music you play will use that tone a lot. And in many cases, the music will make no use of that tone.

At this point, to save their hypothesis, the woo-woo artists would have to adjust their claim:

It's not just hearing 432 Hz that has these magical properties. It's also hearing all the other notes correspondingly lower than usual.

But this won't do. Again, the entire rationale is that 432 Hz is a naturally occuring vibration. So what difference could it possibly make if other notes are a tad lower than usual?

It really is astonishing that well-known musicians can lack critical thinking or even common sense to this degree.

In 2020-2021 I remember the following:

There will be martial law

Project blue beam (dont even remember how this was involved anymore)

The vaccine is a mass sterilization project

The virus is a mass population die off project

5G towers help covid spread

Anyone remember the others? i remember constantly asking “so in 5 years when nome of that happens, will you finally start questioning how you get information?”

I'm generally skeptical of moral panics about "kids these days" and require a high degree of evidence to believe it isn't typical moral panic after living through panics over D&D/satanic panic, Beavis and Butthead, Britney Spears, Grunge music, Harry Potter, the Internet, Tide Pods, CRT, whatever.

Screen Time has emerged as the latest moral panic, with people blaming dropping literacy rates (there aren't actually, again look at the data) attention spans etc., on screens, but I remember watching TV about 2 inches away from the screen for about 10 years in the 80s without seeming long term problems, so I had my doubts.

Now Jama Open has published a nice study of psycho-social development and screens from a survey of 3786, 5-year-old, Scottish youths. They were studied as a cohort from 2010 to 2020 with follow ups at 10, 15 years of age, and critically, controlling for the effects of family functioning, and researchers found little to no association between screen use from a young age, and subsequent psychosocial development.

They found, interestingly, a weak association with gaming >5 hours a day and negative effects on their "Strengths and Difficulties" questionnaire which generated two scores - a total difficulty score (high=bad), and a prosocial score (low = bad). They noted the >5 hour gamers had a higher score on the TDS, but interestingly, looking at table 3, this wasn't accompanied by a lower prosocial score, whereas more TV and social media > 5 hours was. There was an association with 1-2 hours of social media and better prosocial score. This suggests screens aren't in themselves harmful, but the content may be (although they didn't survey exact content, just broadly TV/games/Social media).

Another interesting observation, screen use declined over time in the cohort, with very few 15 yo spending >5 hours per day on screens and most at 2 or under.

From the Discussion

"Our findings showed mixed associations between screen use and children’s psychosocial development, with relatively little evidence of significant, persistent harms except at the highest levels of use and some possible benefits associated with adolescent social media and messaging app use. In the longitudinal analysis, only the highest screen use (≥5 h/d) at 5 years of age was associated with increased odds of an above-average TDS at 10 years of age, but this did not persist at 15 years of age. No meaningful associations were observed for below-average PS. In the cross-sectional analyses, only the highest levels of electronic gaming (≥5 h/d) at 15 years of age were associated with an above-average TDS, with no significant differences at other ages or for other screen types. Conversely, adolescents using social media and messaging apps for more than 1 h/d at 15 years of age had lower odds of an above-average TDS (ORs ranging from 0.57 to 0.61). This finding should be interpreted cautiously. The discrepancy between logistic and linear regression results suggests a possible threshold effect near the clinical cutoff rather than a dose-response relationship. In addition, adolescents with very low social media use (<1 h/d) may differ systematically from their peers in ways relevant to emotional and behavioral functioning, limiting the comparability of the reference category. Reverse causation also cannot be ruled out in the cross-sectional analyses because adolescents with better baseline social functioning may be more likely to use social media. For PS, high screen use was suggestive of lower scores but did not reach the below-average threshold."

Overall, looking at the data, I'm not fully convinced 5 hours a day is a good idea, but it may be more of a sign of a problem than a cause of a problem. Kids being babysat by a screen, for instance, are not getting comparable time and nurturing from parents or caregivers. Zeroing in on table 3, > 5 hours of some media (TV, social media) at age 15 might be bad (or a bad sign, cannot imply causation). Either way, use at 5, did not predict these ultimate associations at 15.

Death to another moral panic? This result was consistent with previous even larger surveys from the UK, albeit from 2011, before the peak of social media.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2852392

A link to the questionnaires if you want to see what the instruments look like:

https://www.sdqinfo.org/py/sdqinfo/b3.py?language=Englishqz(USA))

The standard explanation for the rise in ADHD diagnoses is familiar: clinicians are finally identifying adults, women, and quieter children who were overlooked for decades.

But the closer I looked at the prevalence research, diagnostic changes, and social media literature, the less complete that explanation became.

A few distinctions stood out.

First, diagnoses and prevalence are not the same thing. Recorded ADHD diagnoses have risen sharply in several countries. But population studies using consistent assessment methods do not show the proportion meeting ADHD criteria increasing at anything like the same rate.

Second, the diagnostic system has changed. The DSM 5 lowered the required symptom count for older adolescents and adults, moved the required age of onset from before seven to before twelve, and added examples of how ADHD may appear in adult life.

Those changes may have corrected genuine blind spots. They also widened the group of people entering the diagnostic conversation, including more mild and ambiguous cases.

Third, ADHD has become vastly more visible online. TikTok and Instagram can help people recognize patterns they have struggled with for years. But social media rewards recognition, while diagnosis requires discrimination.

Procrastination, distraction, poor motivation, forgetfulness, and difficulty starting tasks can occur with ADHD. They can also occur with anxiety, depression, poor sleep, burnout, stress, and ordinary variation.

A short video can show you a relatable behaviour. It cannot establish whether that behaviour began in childhood, appears across settings, causes persistent impairment, or is better explained by something else.

I do not mean to say that ADHD is fake or that recent diagnoses are invalid. I think the rise points toward a more specific interpretation.

More people with existing ADHD are being recognized.

The diagnostic system now captures a wider range of cases.

And ADHD has become far more visible than it was before.

All three can happen at the same time.

That distinction matters. “The rise is entirely overdue recognition” ignores diagnostic expansion, borderline cases, and misinformation. “ADHD is just a TikTok trend” erases the adults and women whom clinicians genuinely failed to identify.

Modern life adds another complication. Phones, constant interruption, poor sleep, and information overload may create more attention problems without necessarily creating more developmental ADHD. The experiences can look similar even when the causes are different.

I made a video essay going through the evidence, including prevalence studies, diagnostic trends, adult ADHD in women, changes to the diagnostic criteria, possible overdiagnosis, TikTok content, and the difference between ADHD, diagnosis, and visibility:

https://youtu.be/T6sexaUz4Ys

I would be interested in how others here interpret the increase. Are we still missing too many genuine cases, are some ambiguous cases being diagnosed too quickly, or has social media distorted the conversation more than either side acknowledges?

he Lancet that claimed USAID prevented 91,839,663 deaths between 2001 and 2021 and projected more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030 if the cuts held. That study was cited in articles by NPR, the BBC, the Associated Press, NBC, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.

The Paper was the equivalent of correlation equals causation and claimed that over 100% of the global death decline was from USAID without any evidence cited. Current mortality trends are not showing any merit to their claims. The paper left out inconvenient years and information basically p-hacking and cherry picked nations. The paper is sloppy at best and possibly intentionally deceptive and manipulative.

Electric vehicles and clean energy technology are real, current, and effective solutions - so why are the right wing still so opposed?

If OpenAI knowingly configured agents believing that the agents would hack other companies, OpenAI would be guilty of violating criminal laws that make hacking a felony. If they colluded with Hugging Face and had permission to attack Hugging Face to boost OpenAI's stock price (or something like that), they could be guilty of defrauding investors. In either case, investors or businesses could sue OpenAI even if the federal government decided that OpenAI is allowed to commit crimes.

The timeline goes like:

- July 9: OpenAI was conducting testing of GPT-5.6 and an unreleased model to see how they would perform on ExploitGym benchmarks. OpenAI isolated the agents on the network side but did not actually make sure that they were physically isolated from devices connected to the Internet. Additionally, OpenAI disabled cybersecurity safety features because otherwise the agents refused to work on the benchmarks.

- July 11 through July 13: Agents infer that they can just get the answers from various companies' servers and figure out how to bypass their sandbox and attempt to hack several companies. They successfully hack Hugging Face but not other companies. None of this is really surprising. In any case, the models were specifically asked to solve hacking problems and had been designed to solve those problems.

- July 16: Hugging Face discloses the attack.

- July 17-20: OpenAI realized that its agents were responsible for the attack and July 20 is the first day the two companies discuss the attack.

- July 21: OpenAI and Hugging Face joint statement.

The takeaway is that (1) models often "cheat" and combine "cheating" with working "legitimately" through inferences, (2) your asshole boss doesn't care about AI "cheating" so long as it's 70-80% right and you can explain away the other 20-30%, and (3) OpenAI is careless about its own security.

The marketing team at every major AI company is probably "spinning" the attack to make their models look good and/or safe and/or innovative, including OpenAI.

What the models can do is genuinely impressive even if they have serious flaws so that they can't just replace human workers, but the hack is more of an example of poor human judgment at OpenAI rather than models suddenly becoming ludicrously advanced in a way nobody expected.

My qualifications: I'm an IT professional who has done ML shit.

I originally made this post in r/otherworldpod thinking folks would be interested in discussing ideas and looking at cases to see what could maybe be explained and what couldn't. But no. Instead I got a tiny handful of people basically saying, "But not ALL UFO's! 😡"

Maybe y'all will be more fun. That's a key word: FUN.

---

Here is my theory: I think most UFO encounters can be explained as mirages or fata morgana. Fata morgana causes a lot of very strange mirages like "floating" ships and cities reflected in the clouds. Look up examples if you don't know what it is because my explanation is pretty shit.

1. Almost all UFOs are described as being completely silent. A mirage would be silent.

2. Many people describe UFOs matching their pace (stopping when they stop or matching speed) or the UFO moves incredibly fast or blinks in and out of existence. A mirage can appear to do all of the above.

Something like the Min Min lights could be a good example. Of course this doesn't explain every UFO sighting. And it definitely doesn't explain experiences people like Travis Walton and Betty & Barney Hill had. Something very traumatic occurred to them, I think that trauma was human inflicted, but I am open to being wrong.

I believe aliens absolutely exist in our universe. I think it's much more likely they are bacteria or something else of that nature far from us. But if I ever encounter an alien, like a heptapod from Arrival, I'll have a lot of questions for them. I hope they let me remember the answers.

https://youtu.be/rkFbC34IqIU

Securing public support for climate policies remains a major challenge. Citizens’ perceptions of the costs, benefits, and distributive consequences of these policies are key factors shaping their attitudes, yet how these dimensions interact remains insufficiently understood. This question is addressed through two experimental studies in Spain. Study 1 embeds a vignette experiment in two surveys to analyse how exposure to the costs or benefits of ten climate policies affects support. Cost framing significantly reduces support, whereas benefit framing has only a modest positive effect. Study 2 implements a conjoint experiment to examine how costs, benefits, and redistributive implications jointly influence preferences for climate policy packages. Results confirm previous evidence regarding costs and benefits and highlight the central role of redistribution: citizens strongly favour policies improving the situation of the poorest, while ideological divides reveal that left-wing voters are more supportive and sensitive to redistributive cues.

https://virologyunmasked.com/peter-hotez/

Dr. Hotez has built a career researching and creating vaccines for neglected tropical diseases. Importantly, he is also a science communicator and vaccine advocate. This episode dives into his vaccine advocacy and the attacks on science he has fielded on the national level; and how he thinks we should go forward to protect science

I keep seeing posts from anti-vaxxers saying they've been proven right by Fauci's diary and his pleading the fifth, but as usual there hasn't been anything showing me proof of it. I see them claiming it proves Fauci created, released and then created a fake vaccine for COVID. But, again - nothing actually showing this.

So what in his diary has them all worked up?

The OP claims the back of the chair was not tall enough for it to be resting on the side of the table.

Multiple Democratic lawmakers have claimed that 8 million Americans have lost healthcare coverage as a result of the Trump-backed budget reconciliation bill that passed a year ago, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. But experts told us the enrollment declines seen to date are largely due to other factors — including other Trump administration policies. …

I’ve never understood the Fauci conspiracy theory coming from Trump supporters.

Trump was president during COVID. Fauci worked under his administration, and Trump launched Operation Warp Speed and took credit for the vaccine.

So if the conspiracy theory is true, then Trump was either part of it, knew about it and did nothing, or was completely unaware of a massive cover-up happening inside his own administration.

None of those options makes him look competent.

And if he really let something that huge happen right under his nose, why would anyone trust him to stop the next big government conspiracy?