I’ll start. I finished the superb Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham and Miranda July’s excellent All Fours within the last few weeks. I’m about halfway through Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. I could not finish Frankenstein — I was so excited and the book was so not my thing.
A friend recommended that I read North Woods by Daniel Mason next but I’ve also got my eye on There There by Tommy Orange and The Missing Thread by Daisy Dunn (which I posted about this morning). It’s just over a month until Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo drops…the excerpt piqued my already excited interest.
What’s everyone else reading these days? Or are looking forward to reading?
The Howtown crew explains how food manufacturers, the USDA, and food label services figure out how many calories are in the foods we eat. Spoiler: it’s not just a matter of burning food to see how much energy is produced — different nutrients are absorbed more or less efficiently by the body so you need to measure the output and compare it to the input.
And don’t forget to check the comments for Joss Fong’s banana oat blobs.
Humans are the first and, to our knowledge, only entities on Earth to develop general intelligence, which has allowed us to dominate and alter the planet in a way and at a speed that no other entity has managed. Now, some people are working towards building an artificial general intelligence. So what happens when humans are matched or even far outclassed by this new general intelligence?
Such an intelligence explosion might lead to a true superintelligent entity. We don’t know what such a being would look like, what its motives or goals would be, what would go on in its inner world. We could be as laughably stupid to a superintelligence as squirrels are to us. Unable to even comprehend its way of thinking.
This hypothetical scenario keeps many people up at night. Humanity is the only example we have of an animal becoming smarter than all others — and we have not been kind to what we perceive as less intelligent beings. AGI might be the last invention of humanity.
Jamelle Bouie: “If Democrats win control of Washington in November, they should make reforming our democracy a priority” because the Republicans’ “ability to win power without winning votes is a powerful disincentive to change” their extremist ways.
The musician Nick Cave was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this week (full interview) and he read a letter from his Red Hand Files, an AMA project where fans write in with questions and he answers them. The question was:
Following the last few years I’m feeling empty and more cynical than ever. I’m losing faith in other people, and I’m scared to pass these feelings to my little son. Do you still believe in Us (human beings)?
In a lovely letter in response (which he reads in the video above), Cave writes that “much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt” and that “it took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope”. That devastation was the death of his 15-year-old son in 2015, which he talks more about in this interview and in this book. Cave’s response concludes:
Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.
I promise, your day will be better if you take a few minutes to watch or read this letter. And the entire interview is worth watching as well — there is no better interviewer on the topic of loss and grief than Stephen Colbert.
A few years ago, he read about imiquimod, a drug that, among other uses, is approved to fight one form of skin cancer and has shown promise against several more. Typically, imiquimod, which can help destroy tumors and usually comes in the form of a cream, is prescribed as a front-line drug as part of a broader cancer treatment plan, but Heman wondered if it could be made available more easily to people in the earliest stages of the disease. A bar of soap, he reckoned, might be just the delivery system for such a lifesaving drug, not just because it was simple, but because it would be a lot more affordable than the $40,000 it typically costs for skin-cancer treatment.
“What is one thing that is an internationally impactful idea, something that everyone can use, [regardless of] socioeconomic class?” Heman recalls thinking. “Almost everyone uses soap and water for cleaning. So soap would probably be the best option.”
To celebrate the 15th anniversary of Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis, it’s being released on vinyl. “A full circle moment to honor the weird little chiptune album that changed my life for the better.”
I read a lot of comments about political logos… Having helped shape the logo of every Democratic president in the twenty-first century (hflr.io/biden, hflr.io/obama), let me say from experience that campaign typography is *completely* unlike graphic design: it’s a strange and fascinating agility sport, marked by limited information, a ticking clock, unimaginable pressures, and serious consequences. It’s Iron Chef, but in Adobe Illustrator.
Imagine a client asking for a logo in 24 hours, but not telling you the name of the company! That’s what it’s like to participate in the veepstakes. Nobody who commented on the Biden/Harris logo realized that Robyn Kanner and I were busy developing *dozens* of possible identities in parallel, completely firewalled from the political side of things, awaiting the news until 40 minutes before press time.
This 4K drone video from @liulangCooki takes us on a journey from the base camp at 17,400 feet all the way to the summit of Mount Everest. Along the way, you can see tiny little people hiking up and the paths they take. Very cool.
Is Ben scrolling TikTok right now? “This site reveals, in real-time, whether I — artist and professor Ben Grosser — am currently scrolling TikTok. Think of it as a last-ditch effort, a sort of public confessional as therapeutic tool…”
Mark Rober built a robot that solves jigsaw puzzles and pitted it against Tammy McLeod, one of the world’s faster human solvers. The design and build process is fascinating, especially the fine-tuning enabling the robot to “wiggle” each piece into its place.
When we first tried to assemble the puzzle, almost none of the pieces fit together perfectly. This was before we had corrected the errors in the computer vision code as described earlier.
However even after we improved the computer vision code, some small errors remained. Many pieces would fit together perfectly, and then you would see one that was ever so slightly out of place, and that could ruin the alignment for the rest of the puzzle if left unresolved.
To solve this, we took inspiration from humans. If you try to place a puzzle piece with your hands, you’ll find that often you need to wiggle the piece around to get it to snap into place. So we programmed the robot to do the same thing.
Recent CDC report: “Among children born during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths…”
Kurzgesagt explores what happens when a virus or bacteria enters a human body and the essential role fever plays in helping your body fight off disease.
Fever feels bad. So we take medication to suppress it — but is this a good idea? It turns out fever is one of the oldest defenses against disease. What exactly is a fever, and how does it make your immune defense stronger? Should you take a pill to combat it?
We often mistake fever for the disease…it’s actually part of the cure. When my kids were young, I vividly remember our laissez-faire French pediatrician urging us not to give them medication to get rid of their fevers because that was the body fighting back and doing useful work — unless their temps got too high of course.
Lethonomia “refers to the inability to recall someone’s name”. I can never remember the name of the actor who plays Frodo in LOTR or Spider-Man from Sam Raimi’s movies.
August 1st was Earth Overshoot Day for 2024. “In the past 7 months, we’ve used everything our planet can regenerate this year. For the rest of the year, we’ll deplete our children’s future.” We’re using the resources of 1.75 Earths per year.
This piece by Lydia Polgreen on The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids is so good — straightforward and informative, especially when compared to the incoherent nonsense that the NY Times has run about trans people over the past few years. The piece is about, in Polgreen’s words, “the sneaky effort to use what looks like science to justify broad intrusions in our personal freedom”.
I usually don’t do this, but I’ve excerpted the article’s conclusion here because it just gets right to the heart of an urgent concern: the freedom to control our own bodies.
Imagine that your health care required objective justification, if access to birth control or erectile dysfunction medications required proving that you were having monogamous sex, or good sex, or sex at all. Or if fertility care was provided only if you could prove that becoming a parent would make you happy, or you would be a good parent. Or that abortion would be available only if you could prove that it would improve your life.
In a free society we agree that these are private matters, decided by individuals and their families, with the support of doctors using mainstream medical science as a guide, even when they involve children. We invite politicians and judges into them at great peril to our freedom.
A pilot program in Copenhagen was designed to encourage tourists “to act a bit more responsibly and think about their impact on the environment” during visits. Visitors got free lunch for urban farm work or free kayak rental for trash cleanup.
The way the Fields sisters see it, and I think they’re right: race is a fiction, it doesn’t exist biologically, it’s a social construction, it’s designed to categorize, and it often obscures far more than it explains. But racism is real, right? Racism, the action, is real, it’s material, it affects people’s lives, it has life or death stakes, it structures the way that we engage in, and are received by, the society in which we live.
The example they give in the beginning of the book is: imagine a Black police officer is killed by one of his white colleagues. He’s undercover and he’s shot and killed. The news would say that this police officer was killed because he was Black. But the Fields sisters would say, wait a sec. Did the white officer shoot because he was white? That the Blackness caused the death, that the whiteness caused the shooting? No, of course not. What happened was that a white officer relied on racist assumptions about people of African descent to come to a set of conclusions, then acted on those conclusions.
Knolling is the practice of organizing objects in parallel or at 90° angles. The term has been popularized by artist Tom Sachs; he picked it up from Andrew Kromelow when both were working at Frank Gehry’s furniture fabrication shop. Gehry was designing chairs for furniture company Knoll, and Kromelow would arrange unused tools in a manner similar to Knoll furniture. Hence, knolling.
Republicans Will Refuse to Certify a Harris Win. “There are more than enough [pro-Trump election conspiracists] in these key posts to bring us to a constitutional crisis.” (Have you noticed Trump isn’t really campaigning? This is one reason why.)
Nancy Pelosi’s Art of Power, a short profile by David Remnick. My friend Meg sent me this, saying that this Pelosi quote should be on a t-shirt: “You have to be willing to throw a punch. For the children.”
The Mushroom Color Atlas is a resource and reference for everyone curious about mushrooms and the beautiful and subtle colors derived from dyeing with mushrooms. But it is also the start of a journey and a point of departure, introducing you to the kaleidoscopic fungi kingdom and our connection to it.
Scott Heiferman sold his dotcom company in 1999 and then went to work the counter at McDonald’s “to help get back in touch with the real world”. One takeaway: “most of my mcdonald’s co-workers did their jobs much better than i ever could.”
What “Center” Is That, Exactly? A.R. Moxon on the continuing pleas from political “centrists” for the Democratic Party to find common ground with a party dedicated to extremist white Christian nationalism and whose party members joyously brandish MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs at party conventions.
It must be a center that exists between two points one of which pretty clearly reads MASS DEPORTATION NOW, and I suppose Chait would have it that the other point is apparently so far to the right of basic acts of governance like feeding hungry schoolchildren that such acts don’t appear in between. The center is apparently now a cruel enough place that decency doesn’t live there, and Chait, who has never believed that Democrats should ever do anything other than seek the votes of those who hate decency, now believes that Democrats should once again run away from decency, as a strategic matter.
So maybe “the center” isn’t a position. Maybe it’s an alignment, one that sees unity as a constant and never-changing agreement with supremacists, a certification that supremacists and only supremacists are part of “us,” and any attempt to make common cause with unwanted groups that supremacists consider to be their enemies represents polarization and disunity, in a way that supremacist violence itself never will.
Maybe “the center” is just whatever no-man’s land currently happens to occupy the space between the worst atrocities we can imagine, and however far we’ve travelled toward those committing them to try to get them on our side, a journey we undertook so that we won’t have to do the work of opposing them.
I think it might be that.
Such a center is a center that will make itself comfortable with any atrocity, because comfort is its only goal.
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naive version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
The Babylonian map of the world is the oldest map of the world, in the world. Written and inscribed on clay in Mesopotamia around 2,900-years-ago, it is, like so many cuneiform tablets, incomplete. However, Irving Finkel and a particularly gifted student of his — Edith Horsley — managed to locate a missing piece of the map, slot it back into the cuneiform tablet, and from there set us all on journey through the somewhat mythical landscape of Mesopotamia to find the final resting place of the ark. And yes we mean that ark, as in Noah’s ark. Although in the earlier Mesopotamian version of the flood story, the ark is built by Ziusudra.
Finkel could not possibly look more like a British Museum curator than he does.
Btw, I first heard about the earliest Mesopotamian version of the flood story in a mythology class I took in college. I’d spent a lot of my youth going to church but religion didn’t click for me and I was never a believer. Hearing that flood story clinched it for me — the Old Testament of the Christian bible is just as mythological as the Greek or Mesopotamian gods (everything is a remix) — and I’ve been solidly atheist ever since. (via open culture)
Saturday Night is a forthcoming movie directed by Jason Reitman about the premiere of Saturday Night Live.
At 11:30pm on October 11, 1975, a ferocious troupe of young comedians and writers changed television — and culture — forever. Directed by Jason Reitman and written by Gil Kenan & Reitman, Saturday Night is based on the true story of what happened behind the scenes in the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live. Full of humor, chaos, and the magic of a revolution that almost wasn’t, we count down the minutes in real time until we hear those famous words…
According to Wikipedia, Succession’s Nicholas Braun (Cousin Greg) plays both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson in the film. (via @ernie.tedium.co)
Is this a new streaming device for your TV or the bar of soap in the shower that’s been worn down to a sliver but your parents won’t throw it out because “there’s still a lot of soap there”?
Immediately after Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’s VP pick, the memes started. Most zeroed in on Walz’s potent Midwestern dad energy; he’s the kind of guy who would help a neighbor fix a car, pick you up from the airport, or bring you some soup when you’re sick. For his supporters, Walz is bringing the same kind of energy and hope to the presidential race as Obama did in 2008 and Bernie Sanders did in 2016.
And so of course someone made Tim Walz Fixed Your Bicycle; it’s a collection of things Walz would do for you because he’s just that kinda guy.
Each time you refresh the page, you get a new saying; some of the other ones:
Tim Walz remembers where you parked your car.
Tim Walz has room for a little slice of pie.
Tim Walz is glad to give you a hand with your stroller down those stairs.
Honan even turned the site into a book. A few months later, folks on Twitter started sharing all the wonderful things that would happen when Obama won the Democratic nomination and I collected a bunch of those tweets into this site.
The Portable Feminist Reader, edited by Roxane Gay. Includes writing by Agrippa, Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, The Guerrilla Girls, and more.
I watched the men’s Olympic mountain biking race last week and something one of the announcers said caught my attention. She was describing the electronic shifters the cyclists use and then said that many of the competitors were also using an AI-controlled suspension system that automagically adjusted the level of suspension according to the terrain and rider preference.
The S-Works is the first production bike to debut with the latest version of RockShox’s Flight Attendant Ai suspension. This uses sensors in the SID Ultimate fork, SIDLuxe Ultimate shock, Quarq XX SL power crank, XX SL rear mech and XX shifters to build a comprehensive ride ‘picture’. It then automatically switch the fork and shock between open, pedal and lock modes depending on incoming impacts, bike orientation, pre-emptive shift signals and rider referencing ‘effort states’.
Flight Attendant is comprised of two primary components: a fork module and a rear shock module. The fork module sits atop a special Charger damper that comes inside a Pike, Lyrik or Zeb, while the shock module is built into the piggyback reservoir of a Flight Attendant-specific Super Deluxe Ultimate shock. These two modules communicate wirelessly, and decide whether the suspension should be in one of three predetermined compression settings: Open, Pedal or Lock.
The system makes these decisions based on input provided by an array of sensors. Inside the fork and shock modules you’ll find an accelerometer and an inclinometer, which allows the bike to detect both bump forces and pitch. There’s also a sensor within the crank spindle to detect if you’re pedalling or coasting.
With this combination of sensors, Flight Attendant builds a picture of the terrain and the rider’s pedalling input. Based on that picture, it automatically adjusts the suspension to the ideal setting. Put simply, it’s designed to firm up the suspension to improve pedal efficiency on the climbs and along smoother terrain, while allowing the suspension to open up for the descents and on rougher trails. And all without your hands ever having to leave the grips.
And does it work? Again from Mountain Bike Rider:
In fact I’d actually say RockShox’s claimed 1.8% faster over a 90 minute event is an underestimation for most riders. Even XC GOAT Nino Schurter found the Flight Attendant changed modes over four times more often (1,325 switches rather than 300) than he normally would with a manual lockout. That experiment also ended in the first of several World Cup wins for SID Flight Attendant prototypes in 2023 including some by Victor Koretsky on a modified version of the previous Epic Evo.
A lot of that is MTB jargon but I hope you get the jist. What I couldn’t find is any evidence that Flight Attendant or any of the similar systems are actually using AI or machine learning to assist with these adjustments. I did find this article on Pinkbike about Shimano’s plans for a suspension system that a rider can train.
Automatic control of suspension itself is nothing new. Fox Live Valve, RockShox Flight Attendant and more recently, SR Suntour’s TACT suspension products have been automatically adjusting suspension damping, with varying levels of success, for a good number of years now. However, the programming behind the function of these products is relatively fixed. There is no scope for the rider to give the system feedback on its performance. It can’t “learn” what the rider’s preferences are.
It could be that the Olympic riders are using pre-market prototypes that use machine learning to adapt to individual rider preferences, but I don’t know. I’d love to hear from folks out there if you know any more details!
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