The major story of the past couple of weeks has been Ukraine’s Kursk offensive and the seizing of over 1100 square kilometres of Russian territory in the past ten days. This has been a stunning change in the direction of the war. At least five Ukrainian brigades, or elements of those brigades, and possibly more have seized the initiative and remained on the move since surprising the Russians in their initial crossing of the border into the Russian Kursk oblast.

Highlights

European beech trees more than 1,500 kilometers apart all drop their fruit at the same time in a grand synchronization event now linked to the summer solstice.

From England to Sweden to Italy — across multiple seas, time zones and climates — somehow these trees “know” when to reproduce. But how?

Their analysis of over 60 years’ worth of seeding data suggests that European beech trees time their masting to the summer solstice and peak daylight.

The discovery of the genetic mechanism that governs this solstice-monitoring behavior could bring researchers closer to understanding many other mysteries of tree physiology.

So it’s easy to see why masting trees synchronize their seed production. Understanding how they do it, however, is more complicated. Plants usually synchronize their reproduction by timing it to the same weather signals.

Then the team stumbled across a clue by accident. One summer evening, Bogdziewicz was sitting on his balcony reading a study which found that the timing of leaf senescence — the natural aging process leaves go through each autumn — depends on when the local weather warms relative to the summer solstice. Inspired by this finding, he sent the paper to his research group and called a brainstorming session.

It’s the first time that researchers have identified day length as a cue for masting. While Koenig cautioned that the result is only correlational, he added that “there’s very little out there speculating on how the trees are doing what they’re doing.”

If the solstice is shown to activate a genetic mechanism, it would be a major breakthrough for the field. Currently, there’s little data to explain how trees behave as they do. No one even knows whether trees naturally grow old and die, Vacchiano said. Ecologists struggle just to study trees: From branches to root systems, the parts of a tree say very little about the physiology of the tree as a whole. What experts do know is that discovering how trees sense their environment will help them answer the questions that have been stumping them for decades.

Tsundoku is a Japanese term for buying books and magazines far faster than you can read them. Döstädning is a concept from Sweden that translates into death cleaning, advice for how to get rid of your stuff before making other people do it after you die.

Get to know some books by Vernor Vinge

J.G. Ballard: My Favorite Books

Metadata

• Author: The MIT Press Reader
• Category: article
• URL: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/j-g-ballard-my-favorite-books/

Highlights

In this respect I differed completely from my children, who began to read (I suspect) only after they had left their universities. Like many parents who brought up teenagers in the 1970s, it worried me that my children were more interested in going to pop concerts than in reading “Pride and Prejudice” or “The Brothers Karamazov” — how naive I must have been. But it seemed to me then that they were missing something vital to the growth of their imaginations, that radical reordering of the world that only the great novelists can achieve.

I now see that I was completely wrong to worry, and that their sense of priorities was right — the heady, optimistic world of pop culture, which I had never experienced, was the important one for them to explore. Jane Austen and Dostoyevsky could wait until they had gained the maturity in their 20s and 30s to appreciate and understand these writers, far more meaningfully than I could have done at 16 or 17.

Books:

• “The Day of the Locust,” Nathanael West
• “Collected Short Stories,” Ernest Hemingway
• “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• “The Annotated Alice,” ed. Martin Gardner
• “The World through Blunted Sight,” Patrick Trevor-Roper
• “The Naked Lunch,” William Burroughs
• “The Black Box,” ed. Malcolm MacPherson
• “Los Angeles Yellow Pages”
• “America,” Jean Baudrillard
• “The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí,” by Dalí

Cyber Conflict and Subversion in the Russia-Ukraine War

Metadata

• Author: Default
• Category: article
• URL: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/cyber-conflict-in-the-russia-ukraine-war

Highlights

The Russia-Ukraine war is the first case of cyber conflict in a large-scale military conflict involving a major power.

Contrary to cyberwar fears, most cyber operations remained strategically inconsequential, but there are several exceptions: the AcidRain operation, the UKRTelecom disruption, the September 2022 power grid sabotage, and the catastrophic Kyivstar outage of 2023.

These developments suggest hacking groups are increasingly fusing cyber operations with traditional subversive methods to improve effectiveness.

The first exceptional case is AcidRain. This advanced malware knocked out satellite communication provided by Viasat’s K-SAT service across Europe the very moment the invasion commenced. Among the customers of the K-SAT service: Ukraine’s military. The operation that deployed this malware stands out not only because it shows a direct linkage to military goals but also because it could have plausibly produced a clear tactical, potentially strategic, advantage for Russian troops at a decisive moment.

The second exception is a cyber operation in March 2022 that caused a massive outage of UKRTelecom, a major internet provider in Ukraine. It took only a month to prepare yet caused significant damage. It cut off over 80 percent of UKRTelecom’s customers from the internet for close to 24 hours.

Finally, the potentially most severe challenge to the theory of subversion is a power grid sabotage operation in September 2022. The operation stands out not only because it used a novel technique but also because it took very little preparation. According to Mandiant, it required only two months of preparation and used what is called “living off the land” techniques, namely foregoing malware and using only existing functionality.

After all, why go through the trouble of finding vulnerabilities in complex networks and develop sophisticated exploits when you can take the easy route via an employee, or even direct network access?

Some article from the past ;)

Why We Love Music

Metadata

• Author: Jill Suttie
• Category: article
• URL: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_we_love_music

Highlights

Using fMRI technology, they’re discovering why music can inspire such strong feelings and bind us so tightly to other people.

“A single sound tone is not really pleasurable in itself; but if these sounds are organized over time in some sort of arrangement, it’s amazingly powerful.”

There’s another part of the brain that seeps dopamine, specifically just before those peak emotional moments in a song: the caudate nucleus, which is involved in the anticipation of pleasure. Presumably, the anticipatory pleasure comes from familiarity with the song—you have a memory of the song you enjoyed in the past embedded in your brain, and you anticipate the high points that are coming.

During peak emotional moments in the songs identified by the listeners, dopamine was released in the nucleus accumbens, a structure deep within the older part of our human brain.

This finding suggested to her that when people listen to unfamiliar music, their brains process the sounds through memory circuits, searching for recognizable patterns to help them make predictions about where the song is heading. If music is too foreign-sounding, it will be hard to anticipate the song’s structure, and people won’t like it—meaning, no dopamine hit. But, if the music has some recognizable features—maybe a familiar beat or melodic structure—people will more likely be able to anticipate the song’s emotional peaks and enjoy it more. The dopamine hit comes from having their predictions confirmed—or violated slightly, in intriguing ways.

On the other hand, people tend to tire of pop music more readily than they do of jazz, for the same reason—it can become too predictable.

Her findings also explain why people can hear the same song over and over again and still enjoy it. The emotional hit off of a familiar piece of music can be so intense, in fact, that it’s easily re-stimulated even years later.

“Musical rhythms can directly affect your brain rhythms, and brain rhythms are responsible for how you feel at any given moment,” says Large.

“If I’m a performer and you’re a listener, and what I’m playing really moves you, I’ve basically synchronized your brain rhythm with mine,” says Large. “That’s how I communicate with you.”

He points to the work of Erin Hannon at the University of Nevada who found that babies as young as 8 months old already tune into the rhythms of the music from their own cultural environment.

“Liking is so subjective,” he says. “Music may not sound any different to you than to someone else, but you learn to associate it with something you like and you’ll experience a pleasure response.”

Interesting findings

Some appetizers for the book on breaking Enigma.

Have enjoyed The New York Trilogy

Filosofą išgarsinusi „Nuovargio visuomenė“ (vok. Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) Vokietijoje išleista 2010 m. Šioje knygoje jis dešimtmečiu aplenkė šiandien visuotinai pripažįstamą perdegimo kultūros įsigalėjimą, ypač būdingą vadinamajai tūkstantmečio kartai (gimusiesiems 1981–1996 m.). Kasdien patiriama tokia stipri stimuliacija, ypač internete ir socialiniuose tinkluose, kad sunkiai begebama jausti ar savarankiškai mąstyti. Ironiška, kad Hano knygos populiarinamos iš lūpų į lūpas būtent per internetą.

Looking forward to reading the book someday.