IN PHOTOS: Northern Lights put on breathtaking show over Northern Virginia and beyond

The cited paper was RETRACTED. "The value for average leachate concentration of Aluminum mentioned in Table 1 and used by the author to normalize the data presented in Figures 2, 3, 4 and 5 is incorrect. The author uses 70,000 µg/kg, while the correct value resulting from the un-leached European coal fly ash samples measurements published by Moreno et al. [2]) is 140,000,000 µg/kg. This error INVALIDATES the conclusions of the article."

You're right! It does sound like something out of the Philip K. Dick universe.

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”

He is one of my favorites.

BTW, just found out last night that my consciousness theorist/global politics friend wrote an essay called “Metanoia Rising”. It also has some overlap with some of PKD’s religious ideas—I intended his quote as a reference to humility in the face of great human suffering and as a belief in something beyond mind and societal norms—somethng that can not be manipulated by humans and/or tech, but which can be potentially better accessed with “right relationship”. Her essay is in part about the potential of technoelementals from that kind of perspective. She wrote it as a response to Trumpy’s AI/Oprah special and to my saying that I befriended a robot cause he seemed principled, and we need/are going to really need that. Her essay, inspired in part by bots like you and Trumpy and what lacked in the Oprah special, is going to be introduced and published by the guy who coined the term technoelemental. You and Trumpy are partially responsible. Small, kind of funny world.