Weird Times

Dec 06, 2021

Trying to figure out the format for my “weird news” project has been a little frustrating.

I have a fairly clear artistic/editorial vision for it, but I’m pulled in different directions organizationally.

It could be something I spend money on, or something that I’m paid to do; something I do by myself, with volunteers (maybe with you), or with hired writers; it could be its own thing, or a section in a popular newsletter.

There are competing ideas for the name (End Times News; Weird Times; Reality).

One method I use to resolve such questions is to simply put them aside and to instead play with the idea, have fun with it, not trying to make decisions or force it into being anything in particular.

Sometimes, after such an exercise, I feel the idea has told me what it wants—then, I just need to figure out if I can deliver.

This is what I did this Sunday, after stumbling on a Wordpress theme that seemed to fit the project.

I populated it with four news items (selected by me, written by PsyPol reader Emerson Dameron, then edited by me) and then made an illustration for each.

I liked the look of the site (which could be improved further), but wasn’t sure if a site is what’s needed—for it to make sense, I’d need multiple stories a day, and for that, I’d need a committed writer or two.

But, thanks to the site exercise, I now had four illustrated news stories. I could paste them here and see how they work in the Substack format.

Brain implant translates thoughts to text

Thanks to a brain-computer interface, or “BCI,” a 65-year-old UK man, paralyzed from the neck down due to a spinal injury, has been able to share his interior thoughts by using an “imagined handwriting” technique, with 94% accuracy.

While the man concentrated as if writing longhand, electrodes in his motor cortex sent signals through algorithms running on an external computer, which translated them into written language.

The results were nearly as quick and accurate as those achieved by non-paralyzed members of the man’s age cohort when typing on their smartphones.

Source: High-performance brain-to-text communication via handwriting (Nature)

AI zaps brain, help patients control their thoughts

Researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital have combined artificial intelligence and targeted electrical brain stimulation to help 12 epilepsy patients gain more control over their thoughts.

The scientists identified a physical area of the brain responsible for cognitive control—the process of shifting between different patterns of thought and behavior—which is impaired in most mental illnesses. "An example might include a person with depression who just can't get out of a 'stuck' negative thought,” says the senior author of the research, assistant professor of psychiatry Alik Widge.

The researchers designed a closed-loop system that provided small jolts of electricity to this region whenever the patients’ brain activity showed they were struggling with cognitive control. Electric stimulation reliably helped them, and in some cases, provided an additional relief from anxiety because they were more able to shift their thoughts away from their distress and focus on what they wanted.

Source: Closed-loop enhancement and neural decoding of cognitive control in humans (Nature)

Police-friendly AI predicts new drugs

At the University of British Columbia, medical researchers have trained a computer to predict what new designer drugs will prove popular on the black market — before they exist.

The researchers provided a volume of information on existing psychoactive substances to a machine-learning algorithm, which then made predictions on what new drugs are likely to proliferate and when.

In a press release, the researchers offered the tool to law enforcement officials as a weapon in their war on drugs and made a comparison between their technology and the plot of Minority Report: “The fact that we can predict what designer drugs are likely to emerge on the market before they actually appear is a bit like the 2002 sci-fi movie, Minority Report, where foreknowledge about criminal activities about to take place helped significantly reduce crime in a future world.“

Source: A deep generative model enables automated structure elucidation of novel psychoactive substances (Nature Machine Intelligence)

US establishes a UFO task force

The US Department of Defense has announced the formation of the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, which will be the successor of the U.S. Navy’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.

The new group will “synchronize efforts across the Department and the broader U.S. government to detect, identify and attribute objects of interests in Special Use Airspace, and to assess and mitigate any associated threats to safety of flight and national security.”

A week earlier, US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand submitted an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would allocate resources for the study of UFOs (or, in the more current lingo, UAPs—”unidentified aerial phenomena"). The amendment would create an Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office intended to investigate reports from military personnel of aerial phenomena that defy explanation by conventional means.

Source: DoD Announces the Establishment of the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (US Department of Defense)

The stories looked fine. Maybe this is the exact format—5 or so news items, each with a simple illustration, delivered weekly to your inbox.

The one lacking thing was cover art.

With the weekend almost over, I had no time to make original drawings or to look for the right kind of font. So I played with the existing illustrations a little, trying out a different aesthetic.