Poetic licence

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Exploring the Wednesday effect; eating pomegranates can improve heart function by 80%; and Brian May confirms Queen is done touring for good.

Let’s get into it!

When you think of Wednesday, what comes to mind? It’s a bland, middle-of-the-road, low-stakes day for many. Nothing happened, nothing is on the immediate horizon, and there’s nothing to do.

That’s an extreme version of “the Wednesday effect,” but the point is that most people think of Wednesday as the Point Nemo of their week, while the productive see it as an opportunity.

Emily Balcetis, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at New York University, phrased it elegantly: our lives are mostly made up of Wednesdays.

Those who treat these such uneventful days as a time to make up ground or chip away at a goal typically demonstrate the tenets of how real success is achieved, not through grand gesture-like productivity surges, but through consistency and glass-half-full thinking.

According to Balcetis, the biggest roadblocks to progress that most people face are the belief that if they can’t do something perfectly, it’s not worth doing at all; they don’t consider the necessary habits to be part of their identity; and most importantly, they’re waiting for the perfect time to start.

The last one is how the Wednesday effect win. It’s not necessarily rooted in procrastination, but it certainly ends up becoming that. That merges with roadblock two: the task is identified with a future self, not the present self, delaying action infinitely.

Today is Wednesday; what are you going to do about it? 😏

OpenAI announced earlier this week that it will begin inserting an invisible watermark to identify all AI-generated text. This will apply to content produced by ChatGPT, along with its coding tool, Codex.

The change is being implemented in order for OpenAI to be in compliance with the EU AI Act, which demands such identifiers be present in all model-made text.

OpenAI’s watermark will not be visible, but will be machine-detectable, meaning anyone with access to the detection tool will be able to scan content to determine its provenance, according to OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman.

That tool is not being released to the public at first, due to what the company described as risks of “false positives,” but it will be made available to those who require its use on a “case-by-case basis.”

Anthropic introduced similar technology in August, and Google’s DeepMind has offered similar features for several years.

Various polling groups have determined the vast majority of Americans and Canadians across the entire political spectrum support making it mandatory for AI-generated content to be irreversibly labelled as such.

A study conducted by researchers at King’s College London found eating pomegranates can trigger the production of a naturally-occurring compound in the body called urolithin A, which is known to provide cardiovascular health benefits.

On top of pomegranates, the compound is also produced after eating foods like walnuts and certain berries, and its benefits are tied specifically to processes that promote blood vessel function and heart relaxation.

Heart relaxation was a benefit of particular interest to the researchers, because roughly half of all types of heart failure are due to “preserved ejection fraction,” which occurs when the heart can still pump blood, but much less efficiently due to a stiffening and scarring of the muscle.

Urolithin A was found to improve heart relaxation capabilities by 80% in animal models experimented with by the researchers.

“This raises the exciting possibility of developing new treatments that improve clinical outcomes and quality of life for people living with the condition,” said Dr. Joseph Burgoyne, senior author of the study at King’s College London.

“While there isn’t enough evidence to suggest that people should eat pomegranates to treat heart failure, these findings raise the possibility that dietary approaches that enhance urolithin A production may help alleviate this condition.”

Brian May told The Times the other day that as far as he’s concerned, Queen will not tour again, and it’s a decision he didn’t make recently.

"I made a decision 18 months ago that I didn't want to tour again. A close family friend died when we were in the States, so I said to my tour manager, 'I'll just nip home for a few days and come back.' She looked me in the eyes and said, 'You know you can't do that.'

"I love to play, I love to travel, but the trade-off is sacrificing your freedom. I have a wife, grandchildren and a lot of astrophysics I want to do, so I'm thinking maybe 50 years is enough."

Still, as someone said once upon a time, the show must go on.

"We do want to do something fairly revolutionary," May continued. "Not as ABBA did [with digital avatars], but along those lines…Last year I went to the Sphere, my juices started flowing and I sketched out a whole Queen show.

“I think an immersive experience is still on the cards and it could conquer time and space, but currently you can't make it without AI and I have serious misgivings about that."

Let’s go to the movies!

You might not remember just how many great movies hit the big screen in the month of October, back in the day. That’s what we’re quizzin’ you on, with today’s trivia!