We’re going about this AI thing the wrong way
Paul Erdos on math and amphetamines
Authorities say avoid wrestling armadillos due to leprosy risk
From The Economist: “Hansen’s disease, better known as leprosy, is a tropical malady that is rare in America. In 2020, just 159 cases were reported. Only 5% of people seem to be susceptible to infection. Because it is so rare, Americans seldom think about leprosy, and many clinicians have never seen it outside a textbook. This is starting to change. Nearly 17% of leprosy cases were in Florida in 2020, and over 80% of those were in central Florida, and this year the state has 16 cases. In the past, Americans with leprosy usually caught it while travelling to countries where it is more common, such as Brazil or India, or had been in close contact with people from such places. Armadillo wrestlers are also at risk—the nine-banded armadillo can carry the disease. This latest outbreak is unusual in that the patients are neither travelers nor armadillo wrestlers.”
Letters describe what life was like for a twenty-something in 18th century London
From The Smithsonian: “When Ben Browne was 27, he traded his small English town for the bustling streets of London to work as a law clerk. There, he led the typical life of a 20-something in a big city: His social life flourished, he fell in love and he was constantly stressed about money. The year was 1719. Some 65 letters that Browne sent to his father during this period are the focus of a new display at the historic Browne family home in Cumbria, England. In his letters, Browne described his new job training as a clerk to a lawyer, and complained about working long hours, copying legal documents from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. In one letter, he expressed frustration with his father’s decision to apprentice him to his employer for five years, rather than a shorter training period. Browne wrote that he needed money to pay rent—and to purchase stockings, breeches, wigs and other items he deemed necessary for his life in London.”
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The Black ad executive who wrote Coke’s famous jingle
From Medium: “Songwriter, producer, and McCann Erickson executive Roquel “Billy” Davis, conceived and co-wrote “I’d Like To Buy the World A Coke” for that famous 1971 campaign. Davis’s biography is every inch as remarkable as the fictional Don Draper or any other character from Mad Men. Born in Detroit in 1932, he wrote songs in the 1950s for Jackie Wilson with his partner, Berry Gordy. Early in his career, Davis also worked with Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and other blues and rock pioneers on the Chess label. Later, Davis and Gordy started the Detroit R&B label Anna Records and recruited a teenaged Aretha Franklin, along with Mary Wilson, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and what became the Four Tops. As Gordy took more control over the growing company, Davis’s work was increasingly marginalized. He began to look elsewhere.”
If sound could travel through space, the sun would be as loud as a jet airplane
From Reddit: “The Sun is immensely loud. The surface generates thousands to tens of thousands of watts of sound power for every square meter. That’s something like 10x to 100x the power flux through the speakers at a rock concert, or out the front of a police siren. Except the “speaker surface” in this case is the entire surface of the Sun, some 10,000 times larger than the surface area of Earth. Most of that sound energy just gets reflected right back down into the Sun, but some of it gets out into the solar chromosphere and corona. None of us (professional solar physicists) can be sure, yet, just how much of that sound energy gets out, but it’s most likely between about 30 and about 300 watts per square meter of surface, on average.”
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Continue reading “The Black ad executive who wrote Coke’s famous jingle”Some publishers fear that Google’s AI-powered search could be a catastrophe
Whenever Google makes a change to its search product, it inevitably generates a lot of anxiety among news outlets, many of which rely on the revenue that they get from traffic driven by the platform. But the response to the company’s most recent announcement was arguably a class apart. “It’s the End of Google Search As We Know It,” read a headline in Wired. Danielle Coffey, the CEO of the News Media Alliance, a lobby group that represents newspapers and other publishers, told CNN that the changes would be “catastrophic” for its members; others called the Google news a “death blow.” Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge, argued that the latest changes will accelerate what he calls “Google Zero,” whereby Google search traffic vanishes completely for some publishers.
The changes in question involve a fundamental reworking of Google’s search product, which will incorporate a variety of features powered by the company’s artificial intelligence engine, which it calls Gemini. (The new features were announced last week at Google’s annual developer conference in Mountain View, California, an event known as I/O.) As Wired explained, the latest announcement is the culmination of a series of moves that Google has made over the past year or so. Last year, the company created a separate section of its Search Labs—which allows users to experiment with new features—for what the company called Search Generative Experience. The announcement last week essentially incorporates those experimental features into the main search product.
The most obvious change is that, for many searches, AI-generated summaries of the information a user has requested will appear at the top of the search page, above Google’s traditional blue links; when a journalist from Wired asked, for example, where the best place to see the aurora borealis would be, Google’s AI-generated response advised the Arctic Circle as part of a longer passage of text. Liz Reid, the head of Google’s search team, told Wired that AI answers won’t appear for simple searches that could be satisfied by linking to a specific website, but will be used for more complex queries. (If you want the old-fashioned results without the AI summary, you can still get them by clicking on the “Web” heading under the “More” tab at the top of the search page. According to a number of reports, you could also try adding a few characters to your Google search URL.)
Note: this post was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
Continue reading “Some publishers fear that Google’s AI-powered search could be a catastrophe”Leonhard Euler was an intellectual giant of the 1700s
The plot to kidnap the Pope and take him to Liechtenstein
From the Swiss National Museum: “In the middle of the First World War, diplomats in Switzerland, Austria and the Vatican were trying to resolve the Roman question. The issue, as the representative of the Holy See in Bern wrote to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Austria in 1916, was “one of the most complicated seen in world politics for a considerable time”. After Italy conquered the Papal States in 1870 and incorporated the Vatican into the nation state of Italy, efforts were made to resolve the situation. The Principality of Liechtenstein came up among the proposals put forward: Rome and Vienna developed a particular interest in a secret plan, whereby the Principality would be offered to the pontiff. The rationale behind the idea was that the Pope would acquire ‘global sovereignty,’ facilitating negotiations with the Italian government.”
American hockey players start to develop a Canadian accent the longer they play
From Ars Technica: “University of Rochester linguist Andrew Bray started out studying the evolution of the trademark sports jargon used in hockey for his master’s thesis. For instance, a hockey arena is a “barn,” while the puck is a “biscuit.” When he would tell people about the project, however, they kept asking if he was trying to determine why American hockey players sound like “fake Canadians.” Intrigued, Bray decided to shift his research focus to find out if hockey players did indeed have distinctively Canadian speech patterns and, if so, why this might be the case. He discovered that US hockey players borrow certain aspects of the Canadian English accent. But they don’t follow the typical rules of pronunciation. “American hockey players are not trying to shift their speech to sound more Canadian,” Bray said. “They’re trying to sound more like a hockey player. That’s why it’s most evident in hockey-specific terms.”
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Continue reading “The plot to kidnap the Pope and take him to Liechtenstein”Google Maps shares a feature with this ancient video game
From Interconnected: “Thirty years ago, a company called Etak released the first commercially available computerized navigation system for automobiles. Spearheaded by an engineer named Stan Honey and bankrolled by Nolan Bushnell, the cofounder of Atari, the company’s Navigator was ahead of its time. Benj Edwards, a technology historian, discovered that the dart-shaped arrow that Etak used for location is the same arrow that Google Maps uses to show your current location. But Edwards’ research went even further back: He discovered that an engineer who worked in a nearby office had shown the team a vector-based video game called Asteroids, and Etak’s on-screen representation of the car in its naviation system wound up using a vector triangle almost identical to the ship from Asteroids. Google then adopted something very similar for the car in its next-generation car navigation system product.”
Why hearing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” sometimes made people run for the exits
From Now I Know: “Circuses, historically, haven’t been the safest form of entertainment. Wild animals, random pyrotechnics, people on tightropes, etc. A loose animal or a fire can not only put guests in harm’s way, but once customers begin to react, others may panic — and that’s a recipe for disaster. To combat this, circuses had to find a way to let everyone know that something was urgently wrong, without alerting the audience. Music became an easy solution. Circuses back then often had bands that regaled patrons with all sorts of tunes, and everyone could hear the band. At some point, the management of one of the circuses decided to use the band as an alert system — if the band played a previously specified tune, that was a signal to the circus personnel that something bad was happening. And the song they chose? “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The idea of using “The Stars and Stripes Forever” as the so-called “Disaster March” spread throughout the circus industry.”
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Continue reading “Google Maps shares a feature with this ancient video game”The people who first ate mushrooms
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The sex strike that has shaken the ultra-Orthodox world
From The Cut: “Fifty miles northwest of New York City is a town built as a kind of experiment: an attempt to insulate a religious community from the vagaries of time and assimilation. There, the women serve Sabbath meals that would not be out of place in 19th-century Eastern Europe — gefilte fish, golden challah, buttery kokosh cake — and the men dress in black coats and long sidelocks. In that town, a girl grew up to be a woman, and she got married, and the marriage turned bad. For four years, 30-year-old Malky Gold Berkowitz has been fighting to be freed from her husband, Wolf Berkowitz, a man who she says has subjected her to extensive harassment and physical assault. Malky lives in Kiryas Joel, or the City of Joel, an ultra-Orthodox enclave whose strictures on women make it an outlier even among other ultra-Orthodox sects — a world within a world.”
The rocket scientist who invented the Super Soaker water gun in his spare time
From The Smithsonian: “You might think it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to invent a squirt gun like the Super Soaker. But Lonnie Johnson, the inventor who devised this hugely popular toy that can drench half the neighborhood with a single pull of the trigger, actually worked on the Galileo and Cassini satellite programs and at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he helped develop the B2 stealth bomber. Johnson is a prodigious creator, holding more than 120 patents on a variety of products and processes, including designs for lithium batteries and electrochemical conversion systems, heat pumps and a ceramic proton-conducting electrolyte. But Johnson has also patented such amusing concepts as a hair drying curler apparatus, wet diaper detector, and Nerf Blasters, the rapid-fire system with foam darts that tempts the child in all of us.”
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