Ice cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal.
We Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves – And That’s Determined By Our Age
There’s a lot of research now that shows that in the teenage years we develop skills from what’s called autobiographical reasoning—which is the ability to derive personal meaning from your past—and that’s really the key to narrative identity. When you start doing that in your teenage years, then that kind of opens up a Pandora’s box that says “okay now you can actually create a story for your life that makes meaning about who you were and where you’re going. – Nautilus
… Reviews and Marginalia : ... as if death were nowhere in the background...
As Peter Pan noted, “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D — OH, WHO AM I KIDDING, EVERYONE EXPECTED THIS: Mind Control: Chip Implants Will Zap Obese People When They Think About Food.
The mission of Version Museum is to record and present what the interfaces of software and websites looked like, from their earliest versions until now. The site’s tagline is “a visual history of your favorite technology”. Here’s the history of Facebook; an early screenshot:
When Libraries Are A Tourist Destination
Libraries are certainly having a moment. In the past few years dozens of new high-profile libraries have opened close to home and across the world. And they certainly don’t resemble the book-depot vision of libraries from the past. – The New York Times
“He Has Made Us a Laughing Stock”: Diplomats Stunned by Trump’s Feud With Denmark Vanity Fair
World Seems To Be In Love With Long – Really, Really Long – Audiobooks And Book Theatre
War and Peace? Bring it! Every single word of Silas Marner? Amateurs! What about 72 hours of Sherlock Holmes? Bliss! “‘There is an appetite for the epic that has simply surpassed our expectations,’ says Celia De Wolff, who has produced and directed a marathon adaptation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, to be broadcast over three days” in Britain. “Event radio like this gives the audience a sense of achievement.” – The Observer (UK)
If Mega-Dealers Have Eaten The Art World, What’s Next?
How long can this last? “This market brings together two groups who normally don’t socialize: critics and collectors. There are the exotic-seeming rich people, as any reader of Henry James would know well; once at dinner, asking one collector where he lived, I got a listing of his homes: the Park Avenue apartment, the ranch in Ireland, the winter place in Florida, and so on. Art dealers, too, are fascinating because they sell to collectors expensive artifacts that satisfy no immediate need.” – Hyperallergic
No, Carpe Diem Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does
For Australian philosopher Roman Krznaric, author of Carpe Diem Regained, the “hijacking [of carpe diem] is an existential crime of the century–and one we have barely noticed.” Krznaric is concerned that the philosophy has come to mean something else, almost the antithesis of what Horace’s words actually meant. –JSTOR
How Words Evolve Into Language
When we learn how the world is made through words, we also learn to be sceptical of our current iteration of reality and more tolerant of other perspectives. If life can be differently worded, it can be differently lived. –The Guardian
The Fascinating Ways How An AI Machine Learns Ideas From Stories
“Genesis was capable of making dozens of inferences about the story and several discoveries. It triggered concept patterns for ideas that weren’t explicitly stated in the story, recognizing the themes of violated belief, origin story, medicine man, and creation. It seemed to comprehend the elements of Crow literature, from unknowable events to the concept of medicine to the uniform treatment of all beings and the idea of differences as a source of strength.” –Nautilus
I will never hear my father's voice': Ilya Kaminsky on deafness and escaping the Soviet Union | Books | The Guardian
Kaminsky himself lost most of his hearing after contracting mumps aged four in the Ukrainian city of Odessa. “The Soviet doctor said it was just a cold and sent us away,” he says, without self-pity. This life-changing medical misjudgment would connect him with history in ways that he is still processing. “It is on the day Brezhnev dies that my mother learns of my deafness, and the odyssey of doctors and hospitals begins,” he wrote recently. “My mother shouts at senior citizens in public transport to promptly get up please and give her sick child a seat; my father, embarrassed, hides on the other side of the trolley. I cannot hear a word … Brezhnev is dead. Strangers wear black clothes in public. Thus begins the history of my deafness.”
Are You Ready To Take Advice On Morality From Machines?
“Some scholars herald artificial moral advisors as vast improvements over morally frail humans, as presenting the best opportunity for avoiding the extinction of human life from our own hands. They demand that we should take listen to machines for ethical advice. But should we?” – 3 Quarks Daily