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“Mirror, mirror in my hand, who’s the fairest in the land?” Photo by Andre Mouton on Unsplash
Eclipse update
The total solar eclipse of 2024 is still on! It will be visible across a large swath of North America on April 8.
Here Are the Best Places to View the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse
The sun is 400 times bigger than the moon, but it’s also 400 times farther away from us—a glorious cosmic coincidence that has the moon precisely covering the sun’s face when the two align. The result is a total solar eclipse. The alignment is visible only within a narrow band, the path of totality, which will arc across North America on April 8. (The last total eclipse on the continent was in August 2017.)
The 2017 eclipse was awesome, in the old sense of the word — inspiring awe. I have no doubt this one will be too. But where is the best place to view the eclipse?
The moon’s shadow hits land in Sinaloa, Mexico, and runs up to Labrador, Canada, crossing the continent in just an hour and 35 minutes. Within the shaded region, totality lasts longest at the centerline, reaching four and a half minutes in some places.
Having seen two total eclipses in recent years, trust me, you want to get into the zone of totality if you can.
San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Little Rock, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Buffalo, Montreal, and Burlington are all in the band of totality, so any of those cities might be a good viewing spot.
You also need to account for weather and cloud cover. If the clouds are blocking the sun, you won’t get the full experience. The article at the link has helpful color-coded graphics to show you where the band of totality is and which areas have the best weather for eclipse viewing.
Spoiler alert: in April, you’re more likely to have clear skies in the Southwest — Mexico, Texas, even Arkansas — than in the Northeast, where overcast skies are more likely. So plan accordingly!
Day of the Monkey!
The long-feared ape uprising may have begun in Thailand.
AN ARMY of thousands of monkeys have run a city in central Thailand into the ground.
Several stores and businesses have been forced to shutter and relocate, investors have halted their investments, and shoppers have all but entirely vanished from Lopburi.
The Thai city, once a thriving hub for tourists who flocked to see the city's wild macaques, has now been completely overrun by the 3,500-strong army that have taken control.
Some locals have fled, while others have been forced to barricade their homes in a desperate bid to protect themselves against the rampaging monkeys.
“We live in a cage but the monkeys live outside,” Lopburi local Kuljira Taechawattanawanna told AFP.
Charlton Heston, God rest his soul, was not available for comment. But I think we know what his comment would have been.
Lopburi has had to establish several no-go zones throughout the city, as some of these areas have been taken over by warring rival monkey gangs.
In all fairness to the monkeys, humans manage to do this in many cities on their own.
At first the locals attempted to keep the animals at bay by providing them with junk food, but that plan backfired and seemed to only make the monkeys more violent.
Yeah, real shocker that plan didn’t work. “Give the monkeys junk food. Maybe they’ll go away.” Genius!
We can only hope that other monkeys don’t see what these marauding monkeys are doing and decide to do the same thing in other population centers. Things could get really bad if monkeys started imitating other monkeys and doing what they do.
Good thing monkeys aren’t known to do that.
Fun with AI!
If you’re a paid user of ChatGPT, you may already be familiar with the custom GPTs which users can create. Here’s a explanation if you’re not. The short version is people can train and tune a GPT for a specific purpose, like being a math tutor, a research assistant, party planner, logo maker, and thousands of other uses.
One GPT currently sitting atop the charts is Murder Mystery Mayhem:
As it says on the label, this GPT lets you take the part of a 1920s detective solving a murder mystery which the AI generates on the fly.
Again, you need the $20/mo ChatGPT+ subscription to access custom GPTs, so I won’t go on and on about it, since I imagine most Thursday Things Happy Subscribers are not ChatGPT subscribers too. But I do want to share a few screenshots to give you a taste of what AI can do. When I click the button to begin a new mystery, the AI gave me this:
So we’re pretty sure the butler didn’t do it … or did he?
ChatGPT is now integrated with OpenAI’s image-generating AI, called DALL-E, which it can call upon to create images.
A suspicious lot, indeed! Keep in mind that these are not pre-generated characters in a pre-written mystery for the player to solve. The AI makes it all up on the fly. If you go to Murder Mystery Mayhem, you may or may not be presented with the same set of characters, but probably these are unique to this particular instance. Even if you did get the same set up, you would likely get a different outcome. The AI makes it up as you go!
As you see, the characters have a very “in genre” feel, as if drawn from an Agatha Christie novel or an alternate universe game of Clue. For me, this game has a fun retro feel, going back to the text-based computer games of the DOS era, but with better graphics.
I’ll leave the mystery — I mainly wanted to share that this is a thing — but if Happy Subscribers want to solve this mystery with me, let me know by message or comment which character I should question first, and I’ll share the results next week!
Thank you for reading!
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