“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” - George Orwell, 1984
Lawrence O'Donnell BRILLIANTLY slams JD Vance for his many lies, unanswered questions, and said he's the "very first Vice Presidential candidate in history who doesn't know who won the last election."
“The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape”
From earlier this summer, The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape is a great piece by Taffy Brodesser-Akner about the real-life kidnapping that inspired her recent novel, Long Island Compromise.
Jack was home safe. He had survived his kidnapping. But the actual kidnapping is not what this story is about, if you can believe it. It’s about surviving what you survived, which is also known as the rest of your life.
It’s also about, spoiler alert, trauma.
Tolstoy tells us that all happy families are alike and that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. A few years ago, I wrote a different novel, my first novel, about divorce, which was inspired in part by the divorce stories of several people I know, and I came to the conclusion that, actually, all divorces are exactly alike. I tell you this because I’ve now come to understand the same thing about trauma: Happy, well-adjusted people are all different. The traumatized are exactly alike. I’m about to tell you a story that is nothing like a violent kidnapping — almost laughably so — but what I’ve learned over the years is that trauma is trauma. Something terrible happens, beyond what is in our own personal capacity to cope with, and the details don’t matter as much as the state we’re thrown into. Our bodies and brains have not evolved to reliably differentiate a rape at knife point from a job loss that threatens us with financial ruin or from the dismantling of our world by our parents’ divorce. It’s wrong, but explain that to your poor, battered autonomic nervous system.
Like I said, it’s a great piece and you should read the whole thing. The piece is also available, with some additional author commentary, on this episode of The Daily podcast
Old photos of basketball games and boxing matches often have a pleasing hazy blue background that modern photos lack. “The blue haze that adds such a wonderful ambience to the arena is caused by cigarette smoke.”
In the late 19th century, hotels started building fully outfitted darkrooms for travelling photographers to develop their plates.
Lobbyists exploit massive loophole to wine and dine lawmakers, aides at fancy getaways Politico
American Suburbs Are a Horror Movie and We’re the Protagonists. “American suburbs are full of ugly, empty, liminal spaces: spaces you are not meant to linger in or enjoy. They’re the creepy hallways of the built environment…”
A handy guide to the universal language for the mathematically perplexed
Ars Technica: “Galileo once famously describedthe universe as a great book “written in mathematical language and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures.”
Unfortunately, it’s a language that many people outside of math and science simply do not speak, largely because they are flummoxed and/or intimidated by the sheer density of all that strange symbolic notation. Math teacher extraordinaire Ben Orlin is here to help with his latest book:
Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. And just like Orlin’s previous outings, it’s filled with the author’s trademark bad drawings. Bonus: Orlin created a fun personality quiz, which you can take here to find out your mathematical style. Orlin’s first book, Math with Bad Drawings, after his blogof the same name, was published in 2018.
It included such highlights as placing a discussion of the correlation coefficientand “Anscombe’s Quartet” into the world of Harry Potter and arguing that building the Death Star in the shape of a sphere may not have been the Galactic Empire’s wisest move. We declared it “a great, entertaining read for neophytes and math fans alike, because Orlin excels at finding novel ways to connect the math to real-world problems—or in the case of the Death Star, to problems in fictional worlds.”
In 2019, Orlin took on the challenge of conveying the usefulness and beauty of calculus with tall tales, witty asides, and even more bad drawings in Change Is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World. That book is a colorful collection of 28 mathematical tales connecting concepts in calculus to art, literature, and all manner of things human beings grapple with on a daily basis.
most recent book was 2022’s Math Games with Bad Drawings—less a book one reads cover to cover and more a chance for readers to browse randomly at their leisure to find the games best suited to their particular tastes and skills, such as Jotto, a logic-oriented word game invented in 1955 that is similar to Wordle.
There were five different categories of games: spatial games, number games, combination games, games of risk and reward, and information games. All could be played with just a few common household items: pencil and paper, coins, colored pens, standard dice, Goldfish crackers, paper clips, your hands, and occasionally an Internet connection. (You can try your hand at a game of Quantum Go Fish here.)
DuckDuckGo Joins AI Chat, Promises Enhanced Anonymity
Tech Republic: “DuckDuckGo, a search company, launched a free and anonymous AI Chat service in June 2024. AI Chat joins DuckAssist, which generates answers based on Wikipedia, as a way to explore topics with AI. AI Chat operates with the widely used prompt-and-response process popularized by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. But DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat seeks to minimize potential privacy concerns by design. AI Chat offers anonymous access:
No account, username, email address, or password needed. DuckDuckGo promises that your prompts and information will not be used to train any of the AI models. This means you shouldn’t worry about content from your queries being embedded in a response delivered to other people. As of September 2024, AI Chat lets you choose to chat with any of four chat models:
- GPT-4o mini from OpenAI.
- Claude 3 Haiku from Anthropic.
- Llama 3.1 70B, an open-source model from Meta.
- Mixtral 8x7B, an open-source model from Mistral AI, a French company.
You may switch between models at any time, allowing you to compare responses. Overall, DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat provides a simple and free way to interact with four different large language models anonymously.”