The End is Near

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Burning the Old Year, Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds. 

 Notes friends tied to the doorknob, transparent scarlet paper, sizzle like moth wings, marry the air.

 So much of any year is flammable, lists of vegetables, partial poems. 

 Orange swirling flame of days, so little is a stone. 

 Where there was something and suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space. 

 I begin again with the smallest numbers.

 Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves, only the things I didn’t do crackle after the blazing dies. 

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So Fast

“This year went by so fast that I can literally still see myself saying the exact same thing last year.” 

 By Colin Tom

 

Tom Gauld’s reading statistics for 2023

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The best songs of 2023

Here are 25 songs that Mark Savage had on repeat all year.

 

Dear John letter

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No Need to Worry

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Reindeer can multitask

A recent study in Current Biology discovered the reindeers don't waste any time. Instead of choosing to eat or sleep, they can do both: ruminating over their cud while they rest.

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Hold tight, Prancer

Parents in Utah had to allay their children’s fears for Santa’s sleigh when three deer were seen being airlifted over Heber City last week.

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No pasarán!

Photograph: Rodrigo Garrido/Reuters

 Sea lions obstruct the path of riot police during clashes with fishers who are protesting against the government after the repeal of the existing fishing law and the non-payment of promised bonuses in Valparaíso, Chile.

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Petite Nature , Steeven Salvat

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Arctic fox, Vegan Flava

BSA

 

Standing Together

People pass a sign in Hebrew and Arabic that reads: ‘People of Jaffa, we will go through this together’ outside a cultural community centre. Photograph: Gali Tibbon/the Guardian

 
In Jaffa and Tel Aviv, a growing band of local people are standing together to protect civilians and foster peace.
“These are extreme times. People are still processing the Hamas attack and the war in Gaza. People are in survival mode and thinking in black and white,” said Nadav Shofet, Standing Together’s lead community organiser in Tel Aviv and Jaffa.
One slender reason for hope is sharp rise in volunteers since the war began, members of the NGO say. Since the Hamas attacks in southern Israel in October, which killed 1,200 people, mainly civilians, thousands have joined the organisation.
During the Israeli military offensive in Gaza, which has so far killed about 18,000 people, mostly women and children, and destroyed swaths of the territory, more have come forward to work with the group.
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Winter, Jamie Scott

Solastalgia

More precisely, solastalgia is taken from the Latin word solacium, meaning comfort, and the Greek root -algia, referring to grief, pain, or suffering. It is the existential distress one experiences when they encounter environmental changes.

 Particularly, it's the feeling some people get when they miss what it felt like to celebrate the holidays before. The feeling of solastalgia is typically associated with climate change, and how the changing weather patterns affect the way people have grown to live during the winter season.

 Many people have ingrained traditions or lifestyles connected to winter and the holidays, but that has slowly changed due to the rising temperature, and extreme shifts in the weather. 

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AI expert warns against telling your secrets to chatbots such as ChatGPT

Mike Wooldridge, a professor of AI at Oxford University, says sharing private information or having heart-to-hearts with a chatbot would be “extremely unwise” as anything revealed helps train future versions.

 Users should also not expect a balanced response to their comments as the technology “tells you what you want to hear”, he adds. 

Wooldridge is exploring the subject of AI in this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures. 

He will look at the “big questions facing AI research and unravel the myths about how this ground-breaking technology really works”, according to the institution. How a machine can be taught to translate from one language to another and how chatbots work will be among the topics he will discuss. He will also address the question that looms around AI: can it ever be truly like humans? 

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Merry Christmas !

Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

 

There's no stopping it now, Peteski

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Fake tree, Andrew Townsend

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Miniature portraits of Mughal emperors by Amjad Ali Talpur.

To create his 13cm x 15cm (5in x 6in) portraits of Mughal emperors, Talpur works on handmade paper and makes his own brushes and colours, as is tradition, but he’s added a unique element: his paintings resemble sliding puzzles.

 

Prague university shooting leaves more than 15 dead.

A student at Prague’s Charles University has shot dead more than 15 people and injured 24 others, nine of them seriously, before being killed by police, officers have said. 

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Snow patrol, Ida Wyman

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“Whatever!”’

Photo by Karen Smith. 

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A Crocodile Dad with 100 Babies on His Back

Dhritiman Mukherjee is the wildlife photographer who caught this rare sight on film. 

Getting very close to a gharial crocodile while carrying a hundred of his babies is quite an extraordinary feat in itself as the male crocodile can be very protective of its young and will become aggressive if threatened. 

 The gharial is one of the endangered crocodilian species native to India and Nepal. As of 2017, the IUCN estimates about 650 adult gharials left in the world, although its population trend indicates an increasing number, most likely due to conservation efforts. Just this year, Fort Worth Zoo reported four new gharial babies. Generally, crocodiles will carry their young in their mouths, however, since the gharial's snout is too narrow, the hatchlings ride on their father's back instead. 

The gharial, of which Mukherjee had taken a photo, apparently mated with around 7 to 8 females, which explains why he has 100 babies on his back. 

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How much do you remember about 2023?

Test your memory of 2023 in our four-part Christmas quiz - 52 questions for 52 weeks of the year. 

Part one covers January to March.

 

White South Carolina couple ‘harassed Black neighbors with burning cross’

On Wednesday morning, federal agents searched the house of 28-year-old Worden Butler and 27-year-old Alexis Hartnett in Horry county for a “civil rights investigation involving allegations of racial discrimination”, WBTW reports the agency saying. 

 According to Horry county police reports reviewed by WPDE, between 23 and 24 November, Butler and Hartnett, who are white, allegedly harassed and stalked their neighbors, who are Black, with “racially motivated words and actions”.

 In one incident, Butler and Hartnett reportedly erected a cross that faced their neighbors’ privacy fence. “The cross was facing the victims’ home and the suspect set the cross on fire,” a police report said.

 

Twilight, Arthur Drooker

Twilight presents a series of photographs Arthur Drooker made over four years from the same vantage point at The Sea Ranch on the Northern California coast.

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Iceland volcano spewing lava

After weeks of intense earthquake activity, a volcano has erupted on the Reykjanes peninsula of south-west Iceland.

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