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The Lou Reed-loving Czech rock group The Plastic People of the Universe may well be the only covers band to ever alter the course of history. After tanks from the Warsaw Pact countries rolled into Prague in 1968, curtailing the liberalising and reformist Alexander Dubček, bands were told to play on, but only if they didn’t have long hair or sing in English. The Plastics, with their unshorn locks, bohemian ways and repertoire of Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa songs, proved to be a thorn in the side of the Soviets. Members and fans of the band were put on trial in 1976, leading playwright Václav Havel and others to write the Charter 77 manifesto and organise protests that shamed the government into lightening the band members’ sentences. When Reed went to interview Havel for Rolling Stone in 1990, he was left stunned when the statesman said to him: “Did you know that I am president because of you?”

Does Albert Einstein’s first wife deserve some credit for relativity?

While her husband, Albert Einstein is celebrated as perhaps the best physicist of the 20^th century, one question about his career remains: How much did his first wife Mileva contribute to his groundbreaking science? While nobody has been able to credit her with any specific part of his work, their letters and numerous testimonies presented in the books dedicated to her provide substantial evidence on how they collaborated from the time they met in 1896 up to their separation in 1914. We will never know. But nobody made it clearer than Albert Einstein himself that they collaborated on special relativity when he wrote to Mileva on 27 March 1901: “How happy and proud I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on relative motion to a victorious conclusion.”

Continue reading “How Lou Reed changed the course of Polish history”

Mary Godwin and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley travelled to Europe in 1816, and went to Geneva, to stay with Lord Byron. That year was remarkable for being the “year without a summer.” In 1815 there was a large volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa. Clouds of volcanic ash were propelled into the upper atmosphere, obscuring the sun. The Northern hemisphere saw crop failures, food shortages and sudden climatic change. At the time many were unaware of the causes of this strange phenomenon, and it was common to have to light candles in the middle of the day due to the darkness. Mary and her companions found themselves unable to enjoy the outdoors and instead spent their time inside discussing science, politics and literature. Eventually Byron suggested a ghost story writing competition. And thus, Frankenstein was born.

What happens when a philosopher falls in love

Agnes Callard calls herself a “public philosopher,” which means she applies philosophical thinking to every aspect of her life — including falling in love with a student, divorcing her husband and then living with both of them at the same time. Agnes views romantic relationships as the place where some of the most pressing philosophical problems surface in life, and she tries to “navigate the moral-opprobrium reflexes in the right way,” so that people won’t dismiss the topic as unworthy of public discussion. “If you’re a real philosopher,” she said, “you don’t need privacy, because you’re a living embodiment of your theory at every moment, even in your sleep.” Jonathan Lear, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, said Agnes approaches every conversation as if it were integral to her life’s work, as it was for Socrates. “She’s attempting to live a philosophical life, and this includes taking responsibility for the very concept of marriage.”

Continue reading “The connection between a volcano and Frankenstein”

Social media is known for producing drama. In Twitter’s case, that’s been true as much behind the scenes as on the platform of late. On Monday, the service was hit by the latest in a series of glitches; this one made it impossible for users to post images, and also triggered a popup error about the company’s application programming interface, or API, whenever someone clicked on a link. Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer later reported, in the Platformer newsletter, that the glitch was the result of a lone engineer making a mistake while trying to restrict free access to Twitter’s API—a decision that the company recently announced, sparking frustration among researchers and journalists who depend on access to the API for their work. Then, on Tuesday, Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter last year for forty-four billion dollars, got into a public spat with Haraldur Thorleifsson, an employee who said he wasn’t sure if he’d just been laid off, with Musk accusing Thorleifsson of doing no work and pretending to have a disability.  Thorleifsson has multiple dystrophy and is in a wheelchair, and in the past has been named Iceland’s Person of the Year. (Musk later apologized to Thorleifsson, who, Musk said, is now “considering remaining at Twitter.”)

Also on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Federal Trade Commission has demanded that Twitter turn over any internal communications related to Musk, as well as detailed information about staff layoffs; according to documents seen by Ryan Tracy, a Journal reporter, the FTC cited “concerns that staff reductions could compromise the company’s ability to protect users.” In letters sent to Twitter and its lawyers since Musk’s acquisition of the company, the FTC also asked the company to identify all journalists who have been granted access to company records. This appears to be a reference to the “Twitter Files,” reports from a number of journalists, including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, that were based on internal documents that Musk’s Twitter provided to them, and alleged censorship and other improprieties by Twitter’s former management. According to the Journal, the FTC is also seeking to depose Musk.

Musk responded to Monday’s technical glitches by saying that “a small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.” After the recent housecleaning in which thousands of employees were laid off, Musk demanded that those left at the company commit to his “extremely hardcore” vision, which would see them work for “long hours at high intensity,” or be forced out. Between October, when Musk took control of Twitter, and late January, about eighty percent of full-time workers left the company, Engadget reported, leaving it severely understaffed in some areas. A former employee told the Washington Post that at least six critical systems at Twitter—“like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical,” the former staffer said—“no longer have any engineers” associated with them. Twitter now has about two thousand employees, down from seven thousand five hundred when Musk took over.

Continue reading “Glitches, trolls, and declining revenue take center stage in the Twitter soap opera”

In 1950, Johnny Cash was 18 years old. Looking for independence and a sense of purpose, Cash enlisted in the Air Force and was quickly shipped off to San Antonio, Texas, where he was stationed at the Lackland Air Force base. On March 5th, 1953, Staff Sgt Cash was manning his post when he intercepted an important communique from the Soviets. He hastily transcribed a message explaining that Joseph Stalin was in poor health. For the Americans, the health of the Soviet leader was of critical importance to both the military and intelligence services. Cash continued transcribing morse code messages until he received word that Stalin had been pronounced dead. He relayed the message to his superiors, who in turn relayed it to President Eisenhower.

Plutonium is the deadliest substance known to man. Or is it?

Plutonium is the most dangerous substance known to man. We know this because Walter Cronkite told us so. Cronkite was the dean of network broadcasters and one of the most trusted voices in America. Ralph Nader, a few years earlier, told us just how dangerous. Nader said in a speech at Lafayette College in 1975 that a pound of plutonium could kill eight billion people. But Galen Winsor worked at the US plutonium production plant at Hanford, Washington, for 15 years, and the staff there regularly carried around lumps of highly enriched plutonium in their lab coat pockets. What Nader and the other claimants almost always forget to mention is that plutonium is an alpha-particle emitter. Alpha is a form of radiation that has almost no penetrating power. Alpha particles will be stopped by a piece of paper or a few centimeters of air.

Continue reading “Johnny Cash was the first to find out that Stalin had died”

Researchers found that they could reconstruct high-resolution and highly accurate images from brain activity by using the popular Stable Diffusion image generation model, as outlined in a paper published in December. The authors wrote that unlike previous studies, they didn’t need to train or fine-tune the AI models to create these images. The researchers—from the Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences at Osaka University—said that they first predicted a latent representation, which is a model of the image’s data, from fMRI signals. Then, the model was processed and noise was added to it through the diffusion process. Finally, the researchers decoded text representations from fMRI signals within the higher visual cortex and used them as input to produce a final constructed image.

The quest to restore Notre Dame’s sound

Looking up at the catheral’s nave, there are three holes where the spire fell.  Much of the cathedral’s restoration, projected to be completed in 2024, will address these large holes. They affect not just the structure of the building, but also something that cannot be seen: the acoustics. “Notre Dame has lost about 20 percent of its acoustics,” says Mylène Pardoen, who is the co-director of the acoustics team working on Notre Dame — under the aegis of the French Ministry of Culture and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.), a research organization from whose ranks specialists have been drawn for the restoration. The holes caused a measurable decline in the glorious resonances that gave the building its unique sound.

Continue reading “AI recreates the images people are looking at based on MRI brain scans”

Graffiti by street artist Pure Evil depicting a rhino with the slogan “I Am A Unicorn” on a wall in Shoreditch, London, England. https://www.artsy.net/artist/pure-evil

From Max Read’s newsletter:

I counted nearly two dozen accounts and websites with similar logos, storefronts, wares, and nonsense names: In addition to Narry, Himmo, Rotu, and Tadu, there’s Zodu and Bexe, which like the four James identified also have black-and-white logos and claim to be “committed to providing unique products at tremendous values to our customers”; Zimma and Rommo have identical storefronts to the Zodu/Bexe family of shops but feature rainbow, rather than black-and-white, logos; Dula, Potta (or, according to the logo on the navigation bar at the top, “Putta”), Bezenpy, Bezenfy, and Tozdy, have Zimma/Rommo-style rainbow logos but a different storefront and a promise to “dedicate ourselves to providing the latest blanket, clothes, canvas, ornament, jewels and accessories”; finally, there’s Poxo, Gota, Duno, each of which sports a rainbow logo but claims it “curates 100 amazing fandom-related items and accessories.” All of the sites sell a narrow and largely overlapping range of products, a dollar-store mix of junky gadgets, clothes, household decoration, and ear-wax cleaners.

Here’s an essay that The Edge published by Daniel Kahneman, professor of psychology emeritus at Princeton University, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, and the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

“To a good first approximation, people simply don’t change their minds about anything that matters. Let’s start from the main domains where we know people don’t change their minds—politics or religion. When you ask people, why do you believe what you believe? They answer by giving reasons for their beliefs. Subjectively, we experience that reasons are prior to the beliefs that can be deduced from them. But we know that the power of reasons is an illusion. The belief will not change when the reasons are defeated. The causality is reversed. People believe the reasons because they believe in the conclusion. In politics and in religion, the main driver is social. We believe what the people we love and trust believe. This is not a conscious decision to conform by hiding one’s true beliefs. It’s the truth. This is how we believe. Indeed, beliefs persevere even without any social pressure.”

Like a lot of people, I’ve been following the gradual decline/devolution of Twitter, and in this post from his Garbage Day newsletter, Ryan Broderick — one of the sharpest anthropologists of the modern internet, in my opinion — breaks down what he thinks is happening:

My best guess is that what’s happening to Twitter right now is similar, in a sense, to what happened to 4chan around 2011-2012. Like Twitter, 4chan was never a place for mentally healthy people, but it began to lean into its worst impulses as it became increasingly fixated on what supposedly “normal” people were doing on sites like Twitter, Tumblr, and eventually Instagram. And one theory I’ve always had is that that initial anger and resentment was actually a quality of life thing. 4chan users could see that the site they were using was broken, janky, unpleasant, and quickly racing to the bottom culturally and it created a radicalization loop that set the groundwork for the full far-right takeover a year or so later. So, in that same way, maybe Twitter users are obsessed with TikTok right now because it’s, at least from the outside, a nicer app full of seemingly happier users. Or, at the very least, users that are more earnest, which is the worst possible thing a Twitter user can be.

Graffiti by street artist Pure Evil depicting a rhino with the slogan “I Am A Unicorn” on a wall in Shoreditch, London, England. https://www.artsy.net/artist/pure-evil

I hesitate to read too much into an interview, but this Q&A with Jim Carrey from a few years ago is a great look at someone who has submerged themselves so deep in a role (in this case, as Andy Kaufman, Carrey’s comedic hero) that he either a) suffers some kind of psychic break, or b) has gained a kind of Buddhist/existentialist insight into the nature of existence, or c) both. Thanks to Matt Webb and his Interconnected newsletter for reminding me of this:

Mr. Carrey, have you ever had a spiritual epiphany?

Well, I have gone through a lot changes in the last few years and a lot of realizations — and I guess you could say awakenings about things. Everything is touched by that, everything I am doing creatively right now seems to point to the awareness of a lack of self. What are we? Why are we here? And the answer to both of those questions is: nothing, no reason, as far as I am concerned.

What do you think prompted those awakenings?

I guess just getting to the place where you have everything everybody has ever desired and realizing you are still unhappy. And that you can still be unhappy is a shock when you have accomplished everything you ever dreamt of and more and then you realize, “My gosh, it’s not about this.”

Is that what happened to you?

Yeah, sure. It didn’t happen to me. There is no me. But it happened. And it pushed me towards the realization there is no individual here. There are only energies. Playing Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon in 1999, for example, I realized that I could lose myself in a character. I could live in a character. And when I finished with that, I took a month to remember who I was. But there was a shift that had already happened. And the shift was, “Wait a second. If I can put Jim Carrey aside for four months, who is Jim Carrey? Who the hell is that?”

What do you mean?

If you want to talk scientifically, break it down to a cluster of tetrahedrons that somehow believe they are athing. But they’re ideas — just ideas. Jim Carrey was an idea my parents gave me. Irish-Scottish-French was an idea I was given. Canadian was an idea that I was given. I had a hockey team and a religion and all of these things that cobble together into this kind of Frankenstein monster, this representation. It’s like an avatar. These are all the things I am. You are not an actor, or a lawyer. No one is a lawyer. There are lawyers, law is practiced, but no one is a lawyer. There is no one, in fact, there.

From Max Read’s newsletter:

I counted nearly two dozen accounts and websites with similar logos, storefronts, wares, and nonsense names: In addition to Narry, Himmo, Rotu, and Tadu, there’s Zodu and Bexe, which like the four James identified also have black-and-white logos and claim to be “committed to providing unique products at tremendous values to our customers”; Zimma and Rommo have identical storefronts to the Zodu/Bexe family of shops but feature rainbow, rather than black-and-white, logos; Dula, Potta (or, according to the logo on the navigation bar at the top, “Putta”), Bezenpy, Bezenfy, and Tozdy, have Zimma/Rommo-style rainbow logos but a different storefront and a promise to “dedicate ourselves to providing the latest blanket, clothes, canvas, ornament, jewels and accessories”; finally, there’s Poxo, Gota, Duno, each of which sports a rainbow logo but claims it “curates 100 amazing fandom-related items and accessories.” All of the sites sell a narrow and largely overlapping range of products, a dollar-store mix of junky gadgets, clothes, household decoration, and ear-wax cleaners.

Brian Feldman wrote about some of the criticisms of ChatGPT and questions about what the impact of AI software is going to be:

“All of these questions are asking “Should we let the horse leave the barn?” while the people asking stand in front of an empty barn. If years of collective online activity is anything to go by, this stuff is good enough for everyone else. If ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG, it’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of web users are totally fine with blurry JPEGs. I see them all over the place. (Sometimes, as I wrote in 2014, the blurriness is the point.) We love parlor tricks like SmartChild and Akinator.”

“Whether or not machine-text and -art is “good” or “convincing” is not the relevant issue. The issue is whether it is “good enough.” Clearly, to many people, it is good enough! Internet users are really skilled at convincing themselves that the convenient thing in front of them is the thing they want, whether that’s a barely coherent machine-generated article about what time the Super Bowl is or dubious footage a preferred/reviled political candidate.”

“I just think it’s worth reiterating that the story of internet culture recently has not been one of austerity or moderation. It’s about taking the easy route and flooding the zone with the same meme templates and TikTok sounds everyone else is using at a regular interval — as opposed to things that are creative and unique and, well, good. This has been true for years: consistency over quality is a winning strategy in terms of audience growth. All of the stories I read about content creator burnout are about how exhausting and awful it is to have to post so often, rather than about what most artists have traditionally struggled with throughout most of human history: being in a creative rut. To me, that’s extremely telling.”

“A flywheel system that encourages this type of brainless output incentivizes the proliferation of automated systems that let people continue to pump out at-best-mediocre stuff while shirking responsibility for what’s actually generated. So I see the twisted appeal of the shortcuts, and am not more aghast about it than anything else I’ve seen over the last decade. The posters have been sleepwalking for a very long time.”