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  Have a Happy Thought: Capybara are a famously relaxed animal. You can easily find photos of capybara happily laying in the sun, or in water, or anywhere really, often alongside other animals that you wouldn’t think would be “chill”. So it should be of no surprise, but great delight to you, to hear that some zoos in Japan have created a competition called “Long Bath Showdown” to find out how long a capybara can sit and soak in a bath. And yes, there are photos.   Here’s Hechima from Saitama Children’s Zoo Park, with a timer showing when she decided to end her bathtime. Image: @capybarabath on X And the winner: Prune, from Nagasaki Bio Park, who took a leisurely soak of 1 hour 45 minutes. Image: @capybarabath on X   Capybara bath time is not restricted to this one competition – zoos all over the country let these beautiful creatures relax in heated water all winter long – and let visitors come and watch for a true moment of relaxation for everyone involved...

  Have a Happy Thought: Last week we all learned something about one time of “AI” – Large Language Models. This week may I introduce you to the other type of AI – one known by farmers around the world: Artificial Insemination.   Side note: A few years ago I was hitch-hiking between some small towns on the South Island and was given rides by two separate women… who happened to be the two AI specialists for that region of the country. Apparently AI folk are good people! And because I am such a city girl, those car rides are how I learned about farming AI at the age of 42.   Artificial Insemination in animals can be done for many reasons – the farmers on the South Island often use it for their cows to help prevent injuries to the cows when the bulls are… over-enthusiastic. Meanwhile, biologists are using AI to help an adorable endangered species – the kākāpō. Image: kākāpō ( Strigops habroptila ) © Oscar Thomas , (CC BY-NC-ND)   You see, for the last f...

  Have a Happy Thought: Ok, maybe not a happy thought, but it is pretty funny. Every time you use a Large Language Model (LLM), like Chat GPT or whatever has been stuffed into your search engine, you put in a “prompt”. That is the question you ask, or the words you type in asking it to do something. Like: “write me a five-paragraph essay about the causes of the Great Depression”, or “what are good ideas for a 13-year-old’s birthday party” Now, unless you have an ongoing conversation with your LLM (it’s not actually artificial intelligence , no matter how many times the tech companies use the term AI), you probably thought that this prompt is all that’s going in to the program to generate a response.   That is.. not at all what is happening.   Some software engineers kept prompting Chat GPT in ways that finally had it output the remainder of the background prompt. Here is a short snippet – follow this link if you want to see the whole thing (4,219 words!) ...

  Have a Happy Thought: A fun fact you all learned at some point in your life is that SCUBA is an acronym – meaning it is a word made up of the first letters (or sounds) of other words. Can you remember what it means? Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. And we humans think we are so smart for coming up with this concept. Turns out, some other air-breathing animals also take pockets of air with them when they go underwater. (as in: not just holding their breath) 1.     Diving-bell spiders (Argyroneta aquatica). These live in freshwater across the Eurasian continent, and take air with them so they can live out most of their lives underwater – they even hunt and breed underwater! But since they still need to breathe air, they spin a silk canopy and trap air bubbles that naturally form along their body hairs under the canopy. And when they need to venture out to hunt, they basically create a smaller air bubble and carry it around like a backpack. ...