Reading, TV, Music and Art
You read an article by someone and you think this person is different. Alec Wilkinson is that kind of person. I read the first article (about learning math at 65) not knowing who he was but then I learned he was a writer for the New Yorker for the last 40 years. Here is a link to an article in the New Yorker about the jazz guitarist Julian Lage. If I could only be this cool!
Music
- The band Khruangbin
- Wyatt Flores,country
Art
- Keith Haring nyt-04/2024
Streaming TV
that eventually the truism that TV was garbage was replaced by the truism that TV was the new literature, or cinema, or maybe even religion. A New York Times critic heralded “The Sopranos” as possibly the greatest work of pop culture in a quarter century. “Deadwood” was likened to Shakespeare, “The Wire” to Dickens, “Mad Men” to Cheever. People deconstructed “Lost” and argued over “Girls.” TV’s auteurs bestrode the cultural conversation like the easy riders and raging bulls of film in the 1970s.
Reading List
Notes
Small Magazines from Steve Mintz -- "... [essays by] Matthew Yglesias. Then, too, there are the essays that fill the pages not just of The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation and The New Yorker, but a host of digital magazines of ideas, philosophy and culture commentary and analysis with much smaller circulations, like Aeon, The Boston Review, Liberties, Quillette and UnHerd."
also from Mintz --
To that list, I add a recent essay by Len Gutkin entitled “A Decade of Ideological Transformation Comes Undone.” This is one of those essays that I wish I had written myself. It’s provocative, powerful and persuasive. On a highly charged topic, it’s also remarkably subtle and nuanced.
Mark Koyama: ‘Pre-Industrial Societies is a brief, readable portrait of how preindustrial societies functioned…. Crone isn't afraid to generalize and to draw on the ideas of social scientists. She packs in an amazing amount of analyze into a very short book and roams across entirety of world history. If I could only recommend one book to students interested in how societies functioned in the past, it might be this book!…
Palaces for the people - Eric Klineberg
Clare Keegan
What/How to Think About AI
I don't know how to process this article but I may have to look at it again. Moral Reality Check (a short story)
Harari and AI
Wikipedia Artilce about Neal Stephenson
Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds. -- Neal Stephenson
We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propa- gating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it’s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.
In effect we are asking our computers to shoulder responsibilities that have always been considered the province of human beings—we want them to understand our desires, to anticipate our needs, to foresee consequences, to make connections, to handle routine chores without being asked, to remind us of what we ought to be reminded of while filtering out noise.
I know I have this same concept form Yaval Noah Harari but I can find it. FIND IT.
Why Unix is Hard
I saw this post on Hacker News The Cognitive Style of Unix. It is short but brings up the concept of "internalization vs. externalization" in user interfaces and what is better. Very interesting . In his footnotes is a much longer paper about the same subject In the Beginning Was the Command Line. I need to read this!.
How much can you ask of people?
Governing the econmics of the common good
To meet today's grand challenges, economics requires an understanding of how common objectives may be collaboratively set and met. Tied to the assumption that the state can, at best, fix market failures and is always at risk of "capture", economic theory has been unable to offer such a framework. To move beyond such limiting assumptions, the article provides a renewed conception of the common good, going beyond the classic public good and commons approach, as a way of steering and shaping (rather than just fixing) the economy towards collective goals. Governing the Economics of the common good
People On the Web
Kevin recommended Heather Cox Richardson
Who is this guy Brian Haidet
Libraries and Knowledge Representation
I know this is a streach but libraries where about the organization of information through metadata. This article is about some linkage between semantics and data management. Knowledge Representaion meets Digital Libraries
From Science-Miner
This is more of what I thought we should be doing in libraries
Scientitifc entity recognition