
It seems that a bunch of the problems are around how lightning striking anything near you is going to be much more dangerous if you're in close contact with the ground. If you stand real close to a tall tree, and the tree gets struck, you're gonna have a bad time. Here's the article.
If you were wondering, the flies were not repelled by the paint itself. They painted the control group cows with black stripes, which did nothing.

I'm a bit far behind on social media, but this was the best meme during the debate in my opinion. Polling released by the Biden campaign seems to indicate other democrats could outperform him against Trump. Don't let anyone tell you that there's some campaign finance problem with Biden withdrawing, that's a lie. As Jerusalem Demsas puts it "The only thing stopping Biden from dropping out is Biden"

One piece of good news though, Macron's surprise parliamentary election went better than expected, the far right bloc came in third of the three major parties. This, along with the UK election result may show that the median voter is "savvier about electoral politics" as one commenter said.
Longer Reads
• Interesting thread about someone who trained LLMs on synthetic data and got big improvements out of it. They were trying to deal with models not handling 'needle in haystack' problems well, which are straightforward to generate artificially. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Patrick Collison generates an AI summary of the recent papers on bridge RNA editing. TL;DR: it makes editing genes much simpler and potentially less error prone. (src)(cached)
– Very disappointing result for Basic Income trial in Denver. They spent quite a lot of money, and a surprisingly large number of people remained homeless. (src)(cached)
– For All Mankind is the show about adding another 10 years of makeup on Joel Kinnaman each season (src)(cached)
– Just a periodic reminder of how great Wolf Ladejinski was. (src)(cached)
– The evolutionary psychology paper about women preferring masculine faces for short term dating didn't replicate. (src)(cached)
– Sequester CO2 in concrete by making the concrete with carbonated water. (src)(cached)
– Investing in the S&P 500 at an all time high is a surprisingly net positive strategic move. (src)(cached)
– Raising property tax rates in California would increase homeownership rates, especially among younger families. (src)(cached)