PicoBlog

One of the most frustrating (and often terrifying) experiences as we get older can be a loss of cognitive powers. It’s one of the most frequent concerns I hear from people. Often the next question is about supplements like Prevagen. The promise of ways not to become more forgetful with age is seductive. And we would spend almost anything to help ourselves and our loved ones avoid the merciless decline of actual diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Share Oftentimes when I walk in the woods, I come across trees with enormous lumps on them that look like tumors: It doesn’t seem to happen to just one species or size of tree: The lumps are covered with bark and aren’t oozing sap, but they definitely don’t look normal. Here’s an enormous one we found wrapped almost completely around a tree in Florida: So, I began to wonder: After doing some research, the good news is that these lumps are not cancerous.

The OpenAI saga has devolved into a power struggle. A central question now is whether OpenAI will even survive. Over 700 employees of 770 have signed a letter calling for the board to resign. They have also suggested they will join OpenAI’s former CEO and president, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, at Microsoft and build a rival generative AI service. If you remove 90% of your staff in one week, the company’s viability is hanging by a thread.

The A.V. Club, once the source for some of the best, most influential film writing of the new millennium and now lost to the same “pivot to video and listicles” nonsense plaguing other pop culture websites, recently ran a list of critically acclaimed directors’ worst films. Besides the fact that it’s lazy (The Happening as M. Night Shyamalan’s worst movie), unfair (Piranha II as James Cameron’s worst movie when it’s his first movie), and just plain wrong (Hook as Spielberg’s worst when prints of 1941 exist), it makes the very disheartening, tiresome argument that Robert Altman’s Popeye is a bad movie.

When I was maybe 4 or 5 years old, I remember sitting in a dim theater with my family as artificial leaves fell all around us. Next came a light mist of raindrops, signaling spring’s arrival. On the screen or stage before us, I can’t remember which, a story unfolded, about a young girl whose family was too poor to afford new clothes for school. Instead, her mother stitched a patchwork coat from scraps of fabric — an old shirt, a blanket — and instead of being ashamed of her family’s poverty, she felt grateful.

Short post today, but I just had to write something about the perfect game that New York Yankees starter Domingo Germán threw last night. Perfect games are incredibly rare and incredibly cool; Germán’s was just the 22nd of the World Series era (since 1903), including both the regular season and postseason, and the first in MLB since King Félix Hernández did it on August 15, 2012, more than a decade earlier.

Casually Concerned By Dominic Schlueter A documentation of my journey as an eighteen-year-old entrepreneur. Challenging myself to write something every day for 300 days in a row. I'm casually concerned about giving you a look inside my head, but oh well. ncG1vNJzZmirpZfAta3CpGWcp51kjbW0xKusp6aZo7SmssWemq0%3D

Anthony Bowens, just before his Franchise Championship-winning performance, at Battle Club Pro Unfinished Business on June 21st. (Photo: David Bixenspan) On Friday night, Battle Club Pro, Joakim Morales’s promotion, ran its latest show in what was, for lack of a better term, the courtyard of a public school in the Bedford-Stuyvescent neighborhood of Brooklyn. After at least two different attempts at outdoor shows from Battle Club got rained out and moved indoors in the past two years, it finally happened, so running on the first night of Summer was clearly a good idea.

I was listening to an interview with ELO’s front man Jeff Lynne on Sirius the other day and he shared this interesting story. Following the departure of Roy Wood in 1972, Jeff Lynne assumed sole leadership of Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) and wrote, arranged, and produced virtually all of its subsequent records. ELO broke up in 1986. Jeff Lynne tells the story about Bruce in the song Don’t Bring me Down.