“If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program - immediately, if not sooner.”
-R B Fuller

  • 7 Posts
  • 451 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
Cake day: August 25th, 2025
  • nymnympseudonym@piefed.socialtoToday I Learned@lemmy.world•TIL children's author Shel Silverstein had sex with hundreds and possibly thousands of women and frequently visited the Playboy mansionEnglish
    58·
    2 days ago

    Personal life

    From around 1967 to 1975, Silverstein lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, California. He also owned homes on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts; Greenwich Village, New York; and Key West, Florida.[34] He never married, and according to the 2007 biography A Boy Named Shel, had sex with “hundreds, perhaps thousands of women”.[2] He was also a frequent presence at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion and Playboy Clubs.

    Silverstein met a woman from Sausalito named Susan Taylor Hastings at the Playboy Mansion,[35] and they had a daughter named Shoshanna Jordan Hastings (b. June 30, 1970).[36] Susan died on June 29, 1975, one day before Shoshanna’s fifth birthday,[36] and Shoshanna went to live with her uncle and aunt in Baltimore, Maryland.[35] Shoshanna died of a cerebral aneurysm on April 24, 1982, at age 11.[37] Silverstein’s 1981 book A Light in the Attic is dedicated to her.[35] Silverstein later met Key West native Sarah Spencer, who drove a tourist train and inspired Silverstein’s song “The Great Conch Train Robbery”.[38][39][40] They had a son named Matthew De Ver (b. November 10, 1984),[41] who later became a New York City–based songwriter and producer.[42]

  • nymnympseudonym@piefed.socialtoArchaeology@mander.xyz•AI cracks Roman-era board gameEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    A smooth, white stone dating from the Roman era and unearthed in the Netherlands has long baffled researchers.

    Now with the help of artificial intelligence, scientists believe they have cracked the mystery: the stone is an ancient board game and they have even guessed the rules.

    The circular piece of limestone has diagonal and straight lines cut into it.

    Using 3D imaging, scientists discovered some lines were deeper than others, suggesting pieces were moved along them, some more than others.

    “We can see wear along the lines on the stone, exactly where you would slide a piece,” said Walter Crist, an archaeologist at Leiden University who specializes in ancient games.

    Other researchers at Maastricht University then used an artificial intelligence program that can deduce the rules to ancient games.

    They trained this AI, baptized Ludii, with the rules of about 100 ancient games from the same area as the Roman stone.

    The computer “produced dozens of possible rule sets. It then played the game against itself and identified a few variants that are enjoyable for humans to play,” said Dennis Soemers, from Maastricht University.

    They then cross-checked the possible rules with the wear on the stone to uncover the most likely set of movements in the game.

    However, Soemers also sounded a note of caution.

    “If you present Ludii with a line pattern like the one on the stone, it will always find game rules. Therefore, we cannot be sure that the Romans played it in precisely that way,” he said.

    The aim of the “deceptively simple but thrilling strategy game” was to hunt and trap the opponent’s pieces in as few moves as possible.

    The research and the possible rules were published in the journal Antiquity.