A Jack Kerouac Bot? AI Program Produces Novel About Its Own Cross-Country Road Trip

“There are four basic human needs; food, sleep, sex and revenge.” 
― Dr Bank$y

Take my advice: The only safe ID is a fake ID 

FHI reports that 90% of PhDs that have ever lived are alive right now.

None of us can control how we’re remembered, though we may try to live in ways that minimize the dancing on our graves. Yet a special place should be made for those who are memorialized not for how they lived, but how they died. Those singular victims of war, accident, or crime may become famous, even important. But their daily voices, their quirks and smiles, their plain ambitions and ordinary loves risk being overwhelmed by the drama of their end. Celebrated so publicly, the private person we also mean to mourn might disappear Do You Recall Jozef Imrich?
Stone used as a doorstep for the last 30 years is meteorite worth $ 100K Vajuu

Cold River: The Cold Truth of Freedom: Jozef Imrich

Doorstopper, indeed. I was surprised at the review placed on this site saying that Cold River was nothing more than a doorstopper.

Alan Jones, the pyjamas and the ponies

What Happens When Writing Fiction Hurts The People The Writer Loves Best?

Not to mention this price: “I stand apart, casing the joint. Always on the lookout for a good line, the odd detail. It’s what writers and visual artists are trained to do: In the midst of a flood, consider the color of the water. We might or might not get a good story that way, but we’re at least more likely to survive the crisis."

Too Much Information In The World? That’s Why We Need Novels

"Too much information creates numbness. Then we stop feeling. Then we stop caring. Refugees become mere numbers, anyone who is different becomes a category, an abstraction. It is not a coincidence that all populist movements are essentially against plurality, against diversity. In creating dualistic frameworks and polarising society, they know they can spread numbness faster. The novel matters because it punches little holes in the wall of indifference that surrounds us. Novels have to swim against the tide. And this was never more clear than it is today." … Read More

Why Germans will be left behind in Artificial Intelligence Handelsblatt. Seems ordinary Germans have sensible attitudes and habits: “They pay with cash, fear self-driving cars, and think data sharing (even when anonymized) is one step away from Stasi methods. “

A Jack Kerouac Bot? AI Program Produces Novel About Its Own Cross-Country Road Trip

Ross Goodwin rigged up a black Cadillac with a camera, a GPS unit, a microphone, a laptop, and a receipt printer, and he and friends drove it from Brooklyn to New Orleans. Data from the instruments was fed into AI software on the laptop that Goodwin had trained on hundreds of books, and over the four-day trip that software produced prose on the tiny printer. The assembled result, a book titled 1 the Road, “is a hallucinatory, oddly illuminating account of a bot’s life on the interstate; The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test meets Google Street View, narrated by Siri."

Hyperallergic: A Banksy artwork “self-destructed” at a Friday night Sotheby’s auction in London.
“Girl with a Balloon” (2006) was the final lot of the evening sale at Sotheby’s and ended things off with an impressive final price of £953,829…
Robert Casterline of Casterline Goodman gallery was in attendance and told Hyperallergic what happened next. He explained there was “complete confusion” and an “alarm inside the frame started going off as the gavel went down.”
“[It] sold for over a million dollars and as we sat there…the painting started moving,” he said, and added that the painting’s frame, also made by Banksy, acted as a shredder and started to cut the canvas into strips. “[It was] all out confusion then complete excitement,” he explained.
Anny Shaw of the Art Newspaper spoke to Alex Branczik, the auction house’s head of contemporary art for Europe,  who seemed as surprised as anyone.

Banksy is a genius.

Health meets wealth: tech giants break into healthcare

Technology has the potential to speed up critical diagnoses and enable large-scale analysis of patient data, saving lives and improving outcomes

Margo Jefferson On Being A Critic And The Many Forms Of Codeswitching In Her Memoir

Jefferson’s memoir Negroland won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, partly because of its ability to be personal and critical at the same time. Jefferson says, “I’d spent my writing life as a critic. My initial feeling was that those kinds of tones and voices had to go; this was memoir. But then, I realized, no, that was as much a fixed part of my identity as other things. I realized I had to include the critic who is diagnosing, who is assessing, who is judging against a kind of backdrop that is aesthetic, cultural, political

Leonard Cohen’s Notebooks In The Freezer (And His Final Poems)

Leonard Cohen’s son says that even talking about his father’s process of writing feels like an invasion. “My father was very interested in preserving the magic of his process. And moreover, not demystifying it. Speaking of any of this … is a transgression,” Adam Cohen says. But a final book of poems “is what he was staying alive for