Mossy sends in: Their children can't eat, speak or walk - so forgotten Zika mothers raise them together. I'm chagrined to admit that I myself forgot all about Zika.

The whole article is really interesting.

I don't pay for Yggles on Substack, and I won't, because of dumb shit like this: There's plenty of water for data centers; Probably the last worry you should have about either water or AI.

He goes on for a long time about how much water there is, and how much water is spent on agriculture. (True!) Since we could desalinate ocean water, the real bottleneck must be energy.

This one isolated sentence is buried in the whole long post about why water is plentiful:

And this is ultimately what all kinds of western water scarcity issues are about. The United States has a lot of water, but a somewhat limited capacity to transport that water to arid regions.

YES, YOU NIMROD. THAT'S THE PROBLEM.

This is personal, because Texas has a massive number of proposed data centers coming to central Texas, and almost no ability to gatekeep how many get built, and we're facing increasing desertification and poor statewide water planning.

ERCOT can gatekeep how many tie into the grid, and so the rest are just looking at building their own gas power plants or using solar, and there's no other regulation mechanism if they're outside of cities, as far as I can tell. So stuff it, Yggles.

I know there's research on the universality (and limitations) of facial expressions.

I'm thinking of the secondary facial expressions like smirks, side-eyes, restrained amusement, etc. And specifically I'm thinking of what happens when people watch international movies. It sure feels like you're accurately reading expressions when you watch a movie, but two things occur to me:

1. There's surely some convergence of monoculture over the past 100 years of movies, especially at the level of facial and expressive acting.
2. You wouldn't know, as a viewer, if you misinterpreted an expression or missed a nuance altogether. Some of that just comes with the territory of watching movies, always.

You wouldn't believe the faces I'm making right now.

* I found that emoticon here, where hundreds of emoticons have little emotion labels attached, which would make an easy data set for comparison. I'm trying to think of older situations where you'd have a catalog of expressions with emotion-labels attached that would have emerged before Western anthropologists. Written descriptions of paintings, maybe?