In the etymology subreddit, someone made note of the fact that in various languages, the word for "night" is the same as the word for "eight" with the letter "n" added. This is true. He/she offered a theoretical and totally incorrect hypothesis.
I won't give the correct explanation here. I'll let readers ponder the curiosity before seeking the correct explanation, which is buried down in the comment thread in the reply by BeansandDoritos.
The image above was submitted to the blackmagicfuckery subreddit by someone wondering why one brick in a sidewalk was not covered with the dusting of snow. After dozens of inane replies ("Australian brick" "installed upside down, snow is on bottom") one knowledgeable Redditor provided the proper information:
In the old days they fired bricks in a big kiln. All stacked on top of each other. They found that the bricks at the bottom experienced higher temperatures for longer. Turning them into a denser brick, closer to ceramic, that had a metallic "clink" sound when tapped with a hammer or another brick.
For a time these clinkers were not wanted because they have a high thermal conductivity, meaning they transport heat and cold into/out of your house better, that's bad. Then someone figured out they make great road pavers. Being harder than normal bricks they take longer to wear out.
Some people used them as building decorations because they are usually a darker colour than normal bricks. And some people realised that they are waterproof and started using them as the outside layer in double brick buildings. With increased demand they started to purposefully make clinkers for decoration, waterproofing and road paving.
Looks like magic, but it's just science. You learn something every day.
The Netherlands’ largest newspaper, De Telegraaf, recently published an interview with a woman claiming to organise her own evacuation flights from Dubai, selling seats at €1,600 (US$ 1850) each. Four days later, her photo was removed from the article, though the interview remained.
Bellingcat has found that the original image not only includes artefacts commonly associated with generative AI, but that the flights referenced in the article do not appear to exist.
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Published on De Telegraaf’s website on March 5, the headline reads: “Dutch people in the Middle East feel abandoned by the government: We just rented a plane ourselves.”
The Dutch minister of foreign affairs was confronted with this headline during a television interview, in which he described ongoing efforts by the Dutch government to repatriate citizens to the Netherlands.
The article features interviews with several Dutch people struggling to leave Dubai and Abu Dhabi, including Tamara Harema. Under the subheading “Dutch people hire their own plane”, Harema says she was “rebooked five times by Emirates” and that the official repatriation flights organised by the Dutch government were not ‘taking off’.
As part of a group, she says, they are organising buses and have hired an Airbus A321 to fly home. Harema is quoted as saying: “The first plane is already full, so we’re organising a second flight. Stranded travellers can contact us.”
However, several discrepancies in Harema’s photo, published in the original article, suggest it was AI-generated. No trace of a person matching Harema’s face or profile could be found, and flight-tracking data suggests no such plane took off.
The Photo
In the image below, the world’s tallest structure, Burj Khalifa, can be seen through the window overlooking the Dubai skyline. Each side of the tower is unique, with platforms that protrude at different heights and in different directions. It also contains several mechanical floors, which appear as dark bands in the photo.
By cross-checking the height of the visible platforms together with the location of the mechanical floors, it’s possible to determine that Harema’s hotel room faces north-west, towards the Burj Khalifa’s south-east-facing facade.
Comparing Harema’s photo (bottom left) to all three sides of Burj Khalifa’s base suggests she is looking at the Southeast facade. Source: Harema’s image / Google Street View.
Several discrepancies are visible when comparing Harema’s photo with other images of the building, including an upper mechanical floor appearing higher than in other images and the absence of the water feature at the base of the building.
Harema’s image (left), compared to a screenshot of a video of the building from 2020 (right), suggests a discrepancy between the upper mechanical floors. The water feature is also absent. Source: Harema’s image / Youtube.
To establish whether Harema’s photo could have been taken several years earlier, Google Street View imagery was analysed from 2013 onwards. No match could be found when comparing the arrangement of buildings at the base of the Burj Khalifa.
In Harema’s photo, the arrangement of buildings at the base of the tower does not match historic Google Street View images. Source Harema’s image/ Google Street View.
Several other irregularities, as shown below, including the hotel room furniture and details of Harema’s clothing and jewellery, also suggest it may have been AI-generated.
(Left) a distorted lamp stand; (top right) blurring on the “V” of her T-shirt; (bottom right) an earring that appears to merge into her face – all discrepancies commonly associated with generative AI.
Fully Booked Airbus A321
Regarding whether the plane existed, Harema says in her interview that buses have already been arranged to collect passengers from two locations in Dubai on Saturday, March 7, after which a 232-seater Airbus A321 will depart from Muscat, Oman, for the Netherlands.
The article notes the cost is €1,600 (US$ 1850) per person, without detours. “Although we read that a Dutch repatriation flight costs €600, just try getting on such a flight,” says Harema.
According to Flightradar24, multiple A321s departed Muscat on March 7 and 8, but none bound for the Netherlands. The only aircraft that did arrive in Amsterdam from Muscat were either government-organised repatriation flights or scheduled Oman Air services, none of which were Airbus A321s.
Two Airbus A321s were recorded on the ground at Muscat Airport on March 7. One, belonging to Gulf Air, later departed for Rome via Riyadh March 8. The other, operated by SalamAir, had been flying routes between Oman and Bangladesh until March 3, but has since remained in Muscat.
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After contacting De Telegraaf, an explanation for the photo’s removal was added at the bottom of the article, stating that the photo did “likely not meet our journalistic guidelines.”
The newspaper’s deputy editor-in-chief, Joost de Haas, added:
“Regarding the quoted Tamara Harema, the editors contacted her after Mr. Chizki Loonstein—a long-standing source for one of our reporters—informed us about attempts to charter a plane. Mr Loonstein informed us that Ms Harema stayed in Dubai and could tell us more about it. This led to messages from which several quotes from Harema were extracted, as reproduced in the relevant passage of the article.”
A search for Loonstein led to a six-month-old report from another Dutch newspaper, NRC, which claimed that Loonstein, a lawyer, emigrated to Dubai after his legal company went bankrupt, leaving his clients, victims of fraud, worse off.
Contacted for comment, Loonstein confirmed that he knew Harema and had shared her contact details in “an app group” in relation to a flight from Muscat to Amsterdam. After this contact, Bellingcat sent him the photo of Harema to confirm her identity and asked him to share Harema’s contact details. In response, Loonstein refused to provide further comment.
Merel Zoet and Claire Press contributed to this report.
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My favouritest sport fact ever is that in 1990s 2 cardiac surgeons watched an f1 race to save the lives of countless kids. The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) kept losing the lives of patients after successful heart surgeries. Specifically the 10-15 minutes after a bonefide clinically successful surgery patients would die:
And so the two surgeons filmed a handover after heart surgery and sent it to the Ferrari pitcrew who were told to critique and improve handover process
And from this:
we got this:
The error rate during patien handovers dropped from 30% to 10% with the F1 informed protocol.
I literally love this fact so much because being an pitcrew member is such a thankless job because theyre underpaid and overworked mechanics and they literally saved lives in this instance.
The doctors went to the race tracks to watch the car changes and the pit crews went to the hospitals and watched a live transfer and offered suggestions and they kept working with them to improve.
After there was a successful improvement of the most vital metrics of a handover of a patient from surgery to ICU, the pit crews also worked with other hospitals for other procedures and it’s now a whole thing of trying to apply the specialized, streamlined and speedy teamwork and nonverbal coordination of pit crews to other high-risk fields.
This is a perfect example of how two very different fields of knowledge meeting can make a huge leap forward in progress.
In 1999, while serving as research fellows at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, physicists Thomas Fink and Yong Mao made a mathematical study of necktie knots. They published a summary in Nature that year and a detailed exposition in Physica A in 2000.
They found that, if knots are modeled as persistent random walks on a triangular lattice, there are exactly 85 ways to tie a tie. Of the 10 knots they scored as most aesthetic (for symmetry and balance), only four (four-in-hand, Pratt knot, half-Windsor, Windsor) are well known to Western men; interestingly, the simplest of the remainder, the unassuming small knot, above, is popular in the communist youth organization in China.
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