I think our skill to process information has natural limits, which were overwhelmed decades ago by the social media firehose and a breakdown of information-filtering infrastructure.

an average edition of a newspaper the size of The Times already contains more information about the world than a person in the 17th Century was likely to come across in a lifetime. (Wurman, Information Anxiety)

That was back in 1989. We’re now 30 years later with an internet supercharged by predatory algorithms.

And we can’t filter all of it without either completely withdrawing from the world entirely or spending months learning why and how to filter it ourselves.

We have had information overload in some form or another since the 1500s. What is changing now is the filters we use for the most of the 1500 period are breaking, and designing new filters doesn’t mean simply updating the old filters. They have broken for structural reasons, not for service reasons. (Shirky, It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure)

In an analysis of human exposure to climate change extremes — such as heatwaves, floods, droughts, wildfires, cyclones and crop failures — researchers found that children born in 2020 are two to seven times more likely to face one-in-10,000 year events than those who were born in 1960.

Why pick (great) grandparents as the reference point?

Wouldn’t it be more practical to compare them with their parents?

Edit: the actual study does show comparative data for other cohorts (i.e. every decade since 1960). Unless the average LiveScience reader is in their 60s, they just picked a weirdly unrelatable way to describe the study.

Serbian prosecutors on May 14 announced that the cultural official in charge of the site’s historic designation had forged a key document and had been arrested. Goran Vasic, the acting director of the Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, admitted he had fabricated an expert’s opinion.

“Vasic forged a proposal for a decision to revoke the status of cultural property,” prosecutors said in a statement.

So they forged a document in order to un-protect the building site?