A human touch

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today: Number of foreign buyers purchasing U.S. homes plummets; Understanding why we laugh; and what’s with all the doctored bird photos…🤔

Let’s get into it!

Despite the thousands of cultural differences between peoples on earth, there are plenty of universally-expressed and universally-understood common denominators, including laughter.

No matter where you go in the world, what someone is feeling when they’re laughing is more or less interpreted correctly. It’s what makes stand up comedy such an honest form of art; the audience evaluates it in real time, and that evaluation can’t be faked.

In the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, the causes of laughter have basically remained the same, though the neurological mechanisms that control it have evolved, too.

A study called “The Neural Basis of Laughter,” published in Trends in Neurosciences, identified two separate neurological systems that produce laughter. One is responsible for emotion, play, bonding, and primal social instincts, and the other is almost born out of social instincts, relating to conversation, timing, manners, and voluntary control.

The latter is particularly interesting; it’s almost a microcosm of the evolved human capacity for consciousness, defined by our ability to make choices—to think about our thoughts, if you will. Recognizing that a social situation calls for laughter as an expression of friendliness and mood-setting is very different from the instinctive and involuntary reaction to finding something funny.

There’s always been tension between the constitutional right to privacy in Western democracies, and a government’s mandate to defend the country from threats, both foreign and domestic.

That tension has been steadily growing since the birth of the internet, kicked into overdrive after 9/11, and has been almost irreconcilable since smartphones went mainstream.

The federal prosecution of Atlanta-based police-militarization activist Sam Tunick could be a watershed moment in the battle between privacy and security. He was detained at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta in January of last year on what the Department of Homeland Security said was suspicion he possessed sexually exploitative images of children.

The crime he’s accused of, however, is violating a rarely-used federal statute that prohibits the destruction of property to prevent it from being seized. Tunick’s Google Pixel phone had an operating system installed called GrapheneOS, which allows the user to enter a PIN that wipes the phone’s entire contents when trying to unlock it.

The case’s first hearing happened last week, and it will likely be several months before any further developments occur.

Birders enjoy watching these magnificent winged creatures for the sake of their magnificence, but the mark of a true successful day is finding a bird in a place one wouldn’t normally expect to.

Schemers on the internet know this, and have been using AI to alter images that make it look like rare birds have been found in wildly unlikely habitats.

That’s the worst example of the growing problem of AI-altered bird photos. At the same time, the zone is being flooded with less-suspect, but equally fake images that have been subtly filtered to enhance the apparent quality of the photograph. For example, someone can upload a photo on ChatGPT and ask it to remove a leaf that’s slightly blocking the outstretched wing of a heron, and then publish the altered image.

A recently-penned article in the journal Nature described the situation.

“My experience of looking at Facebook these days is that a huge volume of wildlife photos now are simply AI-generated imagery,” said Dr Alexander Lees, an ecologist at Manchester Metropolitan University who authored the journal article.

“The idea that we could maybe use those photos to help us understand where species are in space and time is very difficult.”

Metal bands live every day subconsciously begging the metal gods not to make it the day they have their Spinal Tap moment.

In the case of Judas Priest, that day arrived on Aug. 19, 1991 in Toronto, when their frontman Rob Halford (ironically nicknamed the metal god) took a spill off his motorcycle while driving onto the stage, knocking himself unconscious, and resulting in the band playing the entire first song without any vocals, unaware that Halford was even on the stage.

“That was a horrible moment, really,” former Priest guitarist K.K. Downing told BraveWords in a recent interview. “It’s a big outdoor venue. And from the stage to the dressing rooms it was a car ride. [W]e couldn’t find the car keys to start off, and we were late getting in the car.

“And so…they started the intro tape when we were still driving to the stage…[W]e didn’t get to the stage in time.”

“[A] set of stairs in the middle of the stage [were meant to] kind of rise up, and then Rob [was to] ride the motorbike out onto the stage. But the stairs didn’t go high enough, and Rob drove out and collided with the stairs and knocked himself out.

“By this time we got the guitars, we went on stage, but there was dry ice and smoke…we didn’t know Rob was on the stage, because he was flat out. So we played the first song without any vocals!”

Halford ultimately got up and played the gig, but unbeknownst to anyone at the time, it would be his last with Priest for 14 years.

Hot ticket

Have you ever thought about how many big movies came out in August during the ‘80s? If you need a refresher, just check out today’s August ’80s blockbuster trivia 🎥 😎