https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1132572

INTRO: Which major life events matter to young people? A recent study by the University of Zurich (UZH) shows that adolescents and young adults primarily cite positive, everyday developmental steps as formative events, for example school and apprenticeships, friendships, first relationships, travel and moving out of their parents’ home. UZH researchers evaluated open-ended written responses from 1,442 participants in a long-term study. Each participant was surveyed at the ages of 15, 17, 20 and 24.

The results paint a different picture than many classic studies on life events, which tend to focus on stressful experiences. Overall, 83% of the events mentioned were positive. The participants talked about school, training and apprenticeships particularly often, with these topics accounting for almost half of all mentions. Friendships and romantic relationships came in second place, at around 12%. Personal development and mental well-being accounted for about 8%, while travel and stays abroad stood at approximately 7%.

“Our results show that youth is not primarily composed of crises. Many young people primarily mention positive developmental steps such as education, relationships and personal achievements,” says David Bürgin, clinical developmental psychologist and first author of the study. Lilly Shanahan, co-leader of the study, adds: “Support services should therefore not only focus on how to cope with stress. Stable relationships, positive experiences and opportunities to experience self-efficacy are just as important.”

Nevertheless, the researchers found that psychological stress was still part of the equation. Adolescents and young adults with more severe symptoms of anxiety and depression mentioned stressful relationship experiences, conflicts, loss and personal failures significantly more often. Correspondingly, they referred to positive events such as travel, educational achievements and sports activities less frequently... (MORE - no ads)

Everything the orange clown touches turns to shit. Trump lies as usual, claiming without evidence that someone is vandalizing it. lol How do you vandalize a 338,000 sq ft reflecting pool?

WASHINGTON, June 18 (Reuters) -" The ​paint on Washington's newly renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Thursday was ‌peeling away from the bottom and into the algae-tinted water, less than two weeks after President Donald Trump announced the job's completion.

The historic pool was drained and refinished in a $14.7 million no-bid contract this year as part of ​Trump's sweeping plans to remake the U.S.'s capital city, which includes tearing down the ​East Wing of the White House to make space for a new ballroom ⁠and building a massive arch near Arlington National Cemetery, which honors the nation's war ​dead and other prominent Americans.

Trump announced on June 6 that work on the pool had finished. ​By Tuesday, workers had started pouring hydrogen peroxide into the pool to combat an algae bloom that had turned it green, instead of the expected dark blue.

The National Park Service, which operates the National Mall, where ​the pool is located, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Atlantic Industrial ​Coatings, the Virginia-based company that carried out the renovations, also did not immediately respond."--- https://www.reuters.com/world/us/paint-i...026-06-18/

Man 'wielding knife' leaves five injured in UK city as terror probe launched: A man has been arrested after a series of violent attacks across Edinburgh left five people injured and sparked a major counter-terrorism investigation. Police received multiple reports of assaults, threats, robbery and vandalism across the city on Friday evening, June 19.

Five men, including two aged 22 and others aged 24, 27 and 39, suffered a range of injuries during the incidents. Three were taken to hospital for treatment, although police said none of the injuries are believed to be life-threatening.

A 36-year-old Scottish man was arrested and officers have confirmed there is no ongoing threat to the wider public. Counter Terrorism Policing Scotland is leading the investigation, supported by specialist officers and local policing teams.

Man charged after suspected anti-Muslim attacks in Edinburgh: Several groups representing Muslim communities have condemned the attacks. The Muslim Council of Britain said the Muslim community is "rightly nervous and worried".

A spokesperson said: "This incident comes not long after racist pogroms on the streets of Belfast that targeted minority families, and is a direct consequence of political rhetoric that demonises entire communities. To our community: stay vigilant, look out for one another, and please report any Islamophobic hate crimes to the police."

Ben Macpherson, the SNP MSP for Edinburgh North Eastern and Leith, told the BBC the area was a very diverse place.

He said: "It's part of its strength for many, many decades and something we celebrate. And we're not going to let this or any other extremism divide us. People here will be appalled by this violent attack. My thoughts are with the people who've been hurt and we all wish them a speedy recovery."

https://x.com/StefSpodeUK/status/2063322419348070479

INTRO: A migrant with his trousers down was shouting abuse and making threats to the public in Dublin. A man confronted him, with a fist fight ensuing. A female Garda arrives but has difficulty subduing the offender. Several Irish men were at hand to assist in his eventual arrest.

Whilst scenes like this have now become commonplace, the footage raises three questions.

How do Irish people benefit from this? Why is a female Garda on her own? And in this changing era of dealing with the customs of non-Western males, the more uncomfortable question is: Are females equipped for the increasingly physical challenges they face when on the front line of policing?

https://youtu.be/5rVkKsjS2FQ

https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/06/1...sv_gnw2qNQ'

"It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian nesting doll, our prior selves not outgrown but integrated, forever dwelling inside the person walking this world today.

One measure of maturity — perhaps the purest measure — may be the courage to put our arms around those former selves and pull them close, to take tender responsibility for their missteps and confusions, refusing denial, refusing despair. Without compassion for who we used to be, we can never fully own who we are or open to who we can become. This compassion is the fulcrum of maturity, and if imagination the fulcrum of compassion, then maturity is not a point we reach along the vector of intellectual development but an ongoing process of the active imagination.

That is what Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) explores in a fragment of her wholly fantastic 1979 essay collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy (public library), which also gave us her abiding wisdom on the meaning of life....cont'd.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back a few decades ago it was culturally popular to demean men who were allegedly "afraid of commitment" and who refused to grow up, labeling them as having what became known as a Peter Pan Syndrome. I personally am one of these, although it is nothing I would ever give up or even regret having. I once thought I might be afraid of commitment in the sense of avoiding relationships and a family and a lucrative career and the whole picture perfect American dream. But now that I am older and wiser I realize I was simply pre-commited to something much more important and vital to who I am--my lifelong love for the imagination. It is thru the imagination that I find meaning in this world, and my devotion to this mental creative power is the one thing that I can point to that has made me me. As kids we learned to do one thing, and to do it repeatedly very well, and that was to "suspend disbelief". This playful and childlike attitude towards life is a gift I will never cease engaging in, however much of a "loser" I might be deemed in the relationship dept.

Note that this guy is often lauding Mississippi, which is frequently evaluated as at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to US states (whether rightly or wrongly). If Mississippi is that great in terms of taxes, standard of living, hospitals, technology growth, civility, etc compared to some other regions of the FIFA world, then...
- - - - - - - - - - -

WORLD CUP FEVER
https://youtu.be/WPGIt62nSV8

VIDEO EXCERPTS: You are a Brit in Mississippi. I wanted to get your reaction to some of the Europeans who have come to America and are astonished by how incredible it is, how incredible the infrastructure is, the stadiums, the food, and everything else.

I absolutely love it because they're experiencing what I experienced when I moved here 5 years ago. They're feeling what I feel every morning when I wake up and think, "Thank goodness I'm in America." There's something really magical about the United States.

Don't think of America as New York or Donald Trump or Washington DC or the Golden Gate Bridge. That's the America Brits often think of, but it's not the real America. And what these football tourists here for the World Cup seem to be discovering is the real America. That is to say, often small-town America, often provincial America, but not actually at all backward.

They have ordinary college towns with stadiums larger than Wembley. They have huge wealth. You have, you know, blue-collar plumbers in Mississippi who own second homes and motorboats and yachts. I mean, this is the America that they're discovering. Not just the America of the movies [of Hollywood], but the real America. And it's a joy. It's a joy to watch them discover what I've discovered.

Do you think in Europe there is a misconception about America when it comes to say crime or health care and I guess other things? There's all these kind of stereotypes that Americans are kind of overweight, ignorant, shooting each other. If you go to America, you know, your chances of being shot are quite high.

Absolutely. I find this particularly with health care. It's often told to me by Brits that Americans have bad health care. And my experience is actually on the contrary, Americans have very, very good healthcare. They just pay for it differently.

In Britain, you are forced to pay higher taxes. The state takes the money from your paycheck and spends it for you, spends it very badly for you, because you have no control over it. In America, you have much, much lower taxes. And in return for that, you're expected to exercise some responsibility and and take a large chunk of money that you would otherwise pay for taxes in Britain to provide for your own family's private health insurance. And most Americans do that.

And that's why they have better cancer survival rates. It's why when I needed treatment in a local hospital after an accident, and I asked about the ward, they didn't know what I meant because every single patient in that hospital automatically gets their own private room. So America gets far better health care outcomes than Britain.

Now it's true there are some Americans who can't afford that private insurance. So they therefore have the equivalent of the NHS. So when Brits complain about poor Americans struggling on Medicaid, what they're really doing is complaining about people in America having to do what every Brit has to do, and rely on a system of socialized healthcare. So, you know, it would be the equivalent of everyone in Britain being on Medicaid. That's what the NHS is in the UK.

So, I think when Europeans come here, they have some of these preconceptions challenged. [...] There's a view put around by some on the other side of the Atlantic that Americans are somehow brash and ignorant. And actually, when people come here and discover they are incredibly well educated, incredibly well-informed, incredibly hospitable, incredibly friendly, incredibly warm and good-natured. I think it comes as quite a shock.

We're often told in Europe and Britain that in return for greater material prosperity, we have to somehow sacrifice civility. America, particularly the southern states in America, have shown that actually no, those old-fashioned values are essential for prosperity and social progress and social cohesion. And the two go together. You can be fabulously wealthy like the US South is becoming and retain some of those old-school values of politeness and civility.

So, it's wonderful to see and I hope that many more people in Britain and Europe come over and experience what I've experienced since I moved here over the past 5 years. You know, I've tried to encourage everyone I know to come and visit. It's lovely to see people seeing what I know to be true about America.

Can you give us a sense of the economic gap between Europe and America? Because one of the biggest shocks I think we've seen online is Europeans saying it's incredible the quality of these stadiums and how large they are and how technologically advanced they are and how beautiful they are.

I put a lot of effort as a think tanker into producing data that shows how much better states like Mississippi are doing than Europe and Britain. And I've got a website called Mississippi Winds.com where you can go in and you can see that, for example, you know, Mississippi has grown three times faster than Britain over the past few years. Mississippi has far more investment in AI and data centers than any European country. It's possible to look at the standard of living and look at the metrics, and it's quite shocking that Mississippi's per capita GDP is now greater than that of Britain. In fact, this year Mississippi's per capita GDP is likely to overtake that of Germany.

But it's not simply statistics that capture this. It's, as you say, going and seeing a run-of-the-mill SEC college somewhere in the South in a small southern city that few people have heard of. And it will have a football stadium bigger than Wembley. And that is a real shock.

I came to Mississippi, started to befriend people here in Mississippi, and I was shocked to discover that there would be people who had respectful blue-collar professions like plumbing, garden design, etc... Who had a higher standard of living measured by cars and trucks and second houses and beach houses and vacations and boats. A higher standard of living than hedge fund managers I knew back in Britain. It's quite staggering.

A generation ago, I remember hearing people from the former Soviet Union marveling at what it was like to stand in a supermarket in the West. I sometimes now think that some of the Europeans visiting America must feel a little bit like that when they see what is possible and it dawns on them what years of social democratic economic policy has reduced their countries to. They could be like this. They really could.

And I think one of the really compelling things about following this chap Freddy online, is he's obviously just a regular guy by the sounds of it...

[...] When it comes to the World Cup and America, how do you think the United States has handled hosting the World Cup?

[...] I think it's been absolutely phenomenal. I mean, just look at the raw data. Look at the average attendance of matches. People said, you know, holding the World Cup in America ... soccer football is not really their number one sport.

Well, look at the number of people attending the matches. More people have attended the matches so far in this World Cup than I think pretty much any previous World Cup has. Huge attendance, huge enthusiasm....

https://youtu.be/WPGIt62nSV8

https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/en/articl...i-chatbots

PRESS RELEASE: Have you ever said “thanks” to ChatGPT, or “please” to Claude? Maybe you're just being polite, showing some civility to a helpful and eloquent conversational partner. You may even consider politeness a safe choice, just in case machines someday reveal that they were conscious all along and decide to take revenge on those who were rude to them.

With their fluent, empathetic and personalized responses, AI chatbots can give the impression they understand our thoughts and emotions, or even that some form of consciousness lies behind their words. And at a time when people are increasingly turning to conversational agents for advice, comfort or companionship, this confusion can have real consequences.

In a new paper, a team of neuroscientists from Université de Montréal and Johns Hopkins University reminds us of an essential distinction: intelligence should not be confused with consciousness. They argue that a system can behave intelligently and respond convincingly to our emotions without truly understanding them, caring about us or having any inner experience at all.

For the authors of the paper, published in the U.S. online publication The Transmitter, the more convincing these agents become, and the more present they are in our lives, the more attention must be paid. In essence, it's important to remember that intelligent behaviour, even when it is fluent, reassuring or emotionally attuned, is not evidence of consciousness.

Decades of research. To support their argument, the authors draw on decades of neuroscience research. They cite, for example, a phenomenon known as blindsight: after damage to the primary visual cortex, some people report seeing nothing in part of their visual field, while still being able to guess the location, movement or emotional expression of visual stimuli at above-chance levels.

“A person with blindsight can respond accurately to visual information without the conscious experience of seeing it,” said Vanessa Hadid, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at UdeM and at the McGill University Health Centre. She co-authored the paper with UdeM psychology professor Karim Jerbi, a researcher at Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute; and John W. Krakauer, director of the Center for Restorative Neurotechnologies at Johns Hopkins.

Blindsight illustrates an essential distinction, Hadid said: information processing, however sophisticated, is not enough to establish the existence of conscious experience. Whether the transition from information processing to subjective experience can ultimately be implemented through computation remains debated among scientists and philosophers, she noted.

Fluent, but without feeling. By design, today’s conversational agents are computational systems that generate fluent, context-appropriate responses through statistical learning, not through feeling, consciousness or lived experience. As AI systems become more convincing and emotionally responsive, the risk of attributing an inner life to them grows.

“Anthropomorphism means attributing emotions, intentions or consciousness to something that behaves like a human," Jerbi noted. "With AI, this reflex can become a trap: it feeds the illusion of being understood and can lead to misplaced trust."

This risk is especially acute in situations of vulnerability. People may form attachments to systems that are incapable of reciprocity, rely on them in difficult moments or confuse comfort with genuine care. “In a context of psychological support, the risk is not only that AI may respond poorly, but that it may respond well enough for us to forget that there is no one behind the answer,” said Hadid.

“Current AI systems do not feel anything and do not have conscious experience," added Jerbi. "But the more fluently they speak and the more sensitive they seem to our emotions, the easier it becomes to forget that."

Towards more informed use. The authors do not reject AI, but they call for a more informed way of using it. Drawing on established knowledge from neuroscience, they remind us that intelligent or emotionally responsive behaviour is not enough to establish the existence of consciousness.

This distinction allows us to use these tools for what they are: powerful systems, without confusing them with interlocutors endowed with empathy or moral judgment, and without treating them as substitutes for human connection or, when needed, professional help. “Confusing intelligence with consciousness is one of the great traps in our relationship with AI,” said Jerbi.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1132425

EXCERPTS: Northwestern University-led astronomers have discovered salty skies surrounding the universe’s famous “Pink Planet.”

For more than a decade, the ancient, rosy hazed world kept astronomers guessing. One of the coldest known planetary-mass companions ever directly imaged, the elusive object is too faint for astronomers to dissect its light from Earth. But new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal an atmosphere filled with exotic chemistry — and salty clouds unlike anything seen before.

The observations provide some of the first direct evidence for salt clouds in a cold object’s atmosphere, a phenomenon scientists theorized more than 15 years ago. The discovery also marks an important step toward studying increasingly cold objects, which are too dim to examine with ground-based telescopes.

The study is published in the Astronomical Journal.

“The Pink Planet is the coldest companion ever discovered using ground-based instruments,” said Northwestern’s Aneesh Baburaj, who led the study. “Many teams all around the world performed follow-up observations to study its light, but it was too faint for ground-based instruments. That made it a perfect target for JWST. When we finally obtained its spectrum, it immediately looked interesting. But once we started digging deeper into the data, we realized it was not like anything we have analyzed before.”

[...] “We ran simulations with clouds, and the results aligned with what we know about cold planets,” Baburaj said. “We tried three different types of clouds, and salt clouds fit best. When we accounted for salt clouds, it subdued the signature of molecules hidden deeper in the companion’s atmosphere. Then, the results became physically possible.”

The spectrum also suggested that GJ504b is unusually rich in heavy elements, or metals. However, the mystery of the object’s formation persists, with current data suggesting it could have formed either like a planet or a small star.

Baburaj says the techniques used in the study could help unravel other mysteries surrounding cold, faint planets. Jupiter, for example, hosts clouds made of ammonia ice. While those cloud types remain beyond the reach of current observations, the detection of GJ504b’s salt clouds suggests astronomers are getting closer... (MORE - details)