Here’s how Rocky’s musical language from the Project Hail Mary movie was created. The filmmakers didn’t “want it to feel like a human language because he’s supposed to be really more musically communicating”.
I’m Done Using AI. “It made me lazy. It made me stop caring. It made me a worse programmer. It made me depressed. Because I stopped doing the hard work, I stopped learning, I stopped growing, I stopped being the one making the software.”
Why weren’t bicycles invented sooner? “Why was no one…even considering the question of human-powered vehicles until the 1400s? Why weren’t there bicycle mechanics in the 1300s, when there were clockmakers, or at least by the 1500s, when we had watches?”
Death Cab for Cutie rolled into the NPR offices for a Tiny Desk Concert, which featured two new songs from their current album and some oldies: Title and Registration and Soul Meets Body. Gibbard noted:
I’m starting to realize that some of our earlier records came out a similar distance away from, like, the Beatles records when I was a kid.
This is Death Cab’s second Tiny Desk…here’s the first one from 2015:
I took this as an opportunity to listen to my favorite Death Cab song, Transatlanticism. And when are we getting a Postal Sevice Tiny Desk? Come on, we’ve been good! We need this!
Tags: Death Cab For Cutie · music · Tiny Desk Concerts · video
Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same. “A recommender that’s a mediocre predictor of what you’d love in a rich, diverse world becomes an excellent predictor of what you’ll click in the impoverished one it creates.”
Oh wow, Williams College’s Hopkins Observatory has a huge collection of eclipse glasses & viewers (and other eclipse ephemera), some of them dating back to 1793. Here are a few of my favorites:
(via present & correct)
Stories that the authors of the Bible borrowed from other cultures and religions, including the flood myth, the Garden of Eden, etc. I learned about these in a religion & mythology class in college, which cemented my atheism.
“Widely regarded as the most complicated board game ever made, The Campaign for North Africa tries to simulate WW2’s North African theater in as granular fashion as possible…” 1500 hours to finish the game — that’s 1h20m every day for 3 years.
New vocabulary term: “soft secession”.
Good sentence: “The market’s most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices.”
“Your brain is a gambling addict that bets on reality. It doesn’t wait for information. It guesses what should happen and adjusts when surprised. Most bets win. But when they don’t, you run into walls.”
I’ve felt this for years (blogs have global context): “The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.”
British climate scientist Kevin Anderson (from a 2024 video):
So there is lots that you will hear — lots of rhetoric, lots of good words, lots of optimism about the future. But given we’ve known about this subject and apparently been working on it for 30 years, the trend line tells us that we are heading towards three to four degrees centigrade of warming across this century: an absolute climate catastrophe, a catastrophe for all species including our own. And so that’s the direction of travel. Now, that direction of travel does not have to continue, but the current trend line tells us that all we are doing so far is giving rhetoric and optimism and greenwash, and not driving the levels of change that are necessary to stay within the 1.5-to-2-degree framing of the Paris Agreement.
And:
And I have to be honest and say that my judgment, my best guess as someone who’s worked on this for years, is that we are going to fail. We’re going to go to three or four degrees centigrade of warming, and we’re going to put up with — well, we won’t put up with — we’ll have to live through, or die from, all of the repercussions that that will have. That is a terrible prospect, and one that I think we have to try everything we can to avoid.
But the message of hope, if there’s any thread of hope in this, is that it is a choice to fail. We have so far repeatedly — I’m going to say “we”; what I mean is effectively our leaders, politically, academically, in the journalistic community, across the board, those people that are framing this debate — have chosen actively to fail for three decades. And when they have breakfast with their own children, I hope they are thinking about what they have deliberately, what we have deliberately, imposed upon their future.
Tags: climate crisis · Kevin Anderson · video
“Since 1974, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, including 146 million among children younger than 5 years… For every death averted, 66 years of full health were gained on average, translating to 10.2 billion years of full health gained.”
“Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer’s disease.” The key difference: “the constant work of locating yourself in space, tracking a destination and updating a mental map as conditions change.”
Stories of “people finding weird, wild and defiant ways to avoid using AI in their professional lives”. Like: “I keep a to-do list in a paper notebook, but my boss believes I have an AI task-keeping assistant via Claude.”
Crocs Has a Trick for Dodging Taxes: a Tiny Office in Malta. “Come tax season, the Broomfield, Colo., company has claimed that all its global profits were actually earned in this two-person office.” The US is not a serious country.
The Doulas Who Help Us Die. “Instead of assisting in the birthing room or the nursery, end-of-life doulas could keep vigil over people during their last hours, providing comfort and companionship and helping a family find peace.”
Tom Chiarella shares his rules for giving a eulogy.
It may hurt to write it. And reading it? For some, that’s the worst part. The world might spin a little, and everything familiar to you might fade for a few minutes. But remember, remind yourself as you stand there, you are the lucky one.
And that’s not because you aren’t dead. You were selected. You get to stand, face the group, the family, the world, and add it up. You’re being asked to do something at the very moment when nothing can be done. You get the last word in the attempt to define the outlines of a life. I don’t care what you say, bub: That is a gift.
This rule surprised me:
You must make them laugh. Laughs are a pivot point in a funeral. They are your responsibility. The best laughs come by forcing people not to idealize the dead. In order to do this, you have to be willing to tell a story, at the closing of which you draw conclusions that no one expects.
[This is a vintage post originally from Jun 2014.]
Tags: death · how to · timeless posts · Tom Chiarella
NASA has provided some early-stage funding to explore the idea of releasing a swarm of tiny probes (weighing only a few grams each) into Saturn’s rings to study them up close.
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