Also on today’s menu:
Anniversary Of Old Man’s Fall
Alleged Texas Murderer Apprehended
‘Failed Attempt At Putin Assassination’
Dr. Alexander Huth, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, announced that an artificial intelligence-based decoder can translate brain activity into a continuous stream of text, allowing a person’s thoughts to be read non-invasively.
The decoder can reconstruct speech with uncanny accuracy using fMRI scan data, Huth said. “We were kind of shocked that it works as well as it does. I’ve been working on this for 15 years … so it was shocking and exciting when it finally did work.”
Previous language decoding systems have required surgical implants. This latest advance raises the prospect of having new ways to restore speech in patients struggling to communicate due to a stroke or motor neurone disease.
Anniversary Of Old Man’s Fall
Governor Chris Sununu is expected to sign into law House Bill 96 during today’s Executive Council meeting. The bill would establish May 3 as Old Man of the Mountain Day.
It was 20 years ago today that the iconic attraction tumbled down the side of Cannon Mountain in Franconia Notch. White surveyors first recorded encountering the “Great Stone Face” (as Nathaniel Hawthorne would call it in a short story he later wrote) around 1805. Franklin-born statesman Daniel Webster famously wrote, “Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoemakers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.”
For the last 40 years before the granite icon fell, volunteers led by Niels Nielsen and, later, his son, David Nielsen, served as caretakers of the rock profile, securing it against the pull of gravity with giant chains. Sometime during the night leading into May 3, 2003, the Old Man tumbled down the cliff.
A joke in my family was that it was the arrival of my father, Ralph “Babe” Caldwell, in heaven that so shook up the stone face. Babe had died just days before, on April 28, 2003.
Members of the New Hampshire Legislature and the Old Man of the Mountain Legacy Fund will join the governor and Executive Council for today’s ceremony, and songwriter Rick Lang will perform “The Great Stone Face”.
Alleged Texas Murderer Apprehended
Police have arrested 38-year-old Francisco Oropesa, a man suspected of killing five of his neighbors in Texas on April 28, after finding him hiding under a pile of laundry in a cupboard several miles from his own home. He is accused of attacking his neighbors after they asked him to stop shooting his rifle in the neighborhood. One of the victims was a nine-year-old child.
The victims, who had moved to Texas from Honduras, were Sonia Guzman, 28, Diana Velasquez, 21, Obdulia Molina, 31, Jonathan Caceres, 18, and Daniel Enrique Lazo, nine.
Oropesa is a Mexican national who had been deported four times between 2009 and 2016, according to U.S. immigration officials. He now faces five counts of murder.
Authorities are investigating how he obtained the weapon used in the killings.
‘Failed Attempt At Putin Assassination’
The Ukrainian presidential office is not commenting on Russian reports that Ukraine had sent two drones targeting the Kremlin in Moscow in an attempt to kill President Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin said Russian special services had disabled the drones, and that Putin was not in the Kremlin at the time,
Russian social media showed smoke over central Moscow and the Kremlin said fragments of the drones had fallen on the Kremlin, but no one had been hurt, adding that the attack was “a planned terrorist act and an assassination attempt on the president”, adding that Russia “reserves the right to take retaliatory measures wherever and whenever is deemed necessary”.
The statement said Putin’s official schedule would not be unaffected.
Café Chatter
On Landscape Of Hate: An excellent perspective this morning. Thank you.
— Susan Duncan
I agree, for the most part. We have friends and family that we know have very different political views than we do. It works for us to just not discuss politics. I guess that could be seen as avoiding, but it works for us. We have everything else in common and have a great time together. Unfortunately, we lost a friendship with a couple that we use to see all the time. Dinner, travel. I wish that we could have worked it out. We always had some differences politically but we had polite, if not animated conversations. However they changed. It became personal for them and we started getting attacked for our views, and then the name calling started. So, that was it. I applaud you for talking to each other. I do think it’s different when friends become so entrenched in their opinions that everything is tainted by it. Otherwise, we have had, and still do have friends and family who have very opposite political opinions. We just agree to disagree. For the most part. It has become much more difficult over the past 6 or 7 years.
— Candace Skurnik
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