At Cosmos Malick: New Worlds and Old.
A very small part of the supermassive datacenter being built on the shores of Lake Whitney. The companies who build these things always deny that they use a lot of water, and yet they always build them on lakes and rivers. What an odd coincidence.
Ezra Pound, from Guide to Kulchur (1938):
The Homeric world, very human. The Odyssey high water mark for the adventure story, as for example Odysseus on the spar after shipwreck. Sam Smiles never got any further in preaching self-reliance. A world of irresponsible gods, a very high society without recognizable morals, the individual responsible to himself.
Scarcely any two writers, much less nations, agree in using words in the same sense. Such a latitude, it is true, allows a scope for politicians to speculate, like merchants with false weights, artificial credit, or base money, and to deceive the people, by making the same word adored by one party, and execrated by another. The union of the people, in any principle, rule, or system, is thus rendered impossible; because superstition, prejudice, habit, and passions, are so differently attached to words, that you can scarcely make any nation understand itself. The words monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, king, prince, lords, commons, nobles, patricians, plebeians, if carefully attended to, will be found to be used in different senses, perpetually, by different nations, by different writers in the same nation, and even by the same writers in different pages.
Coming: Tom and Wystan.
Today I concluded my four-post miniseries on religion and the movies — as seen through moments in Hail, Caesar!
David Bennett has a wonderful music-theory-ish overview of Revolver — released 60 years ago this week.
As you've heard me say many times, I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health. It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.
When I see any AI make any progress on the amelioration (not even the cure) of any disease, I’ll treat this as something other than the sales pitch of a con man. Not until. And I think that should be everyone’s attitude. The Big Tech companies have been so indifferent, or even hostile, to human well-being for so many years now that their promises are worth absolutely zero. Maybe they (or people using their products) will indeed cure some diseases; and if they do I will thank them and praise them. (h/t @manton for the quote)
What makes the Arday situation distinctive, and different from the Platner situation and from my former colleague who claimed she was chased by a rhinoceros once too often, is that the organization — Cambridge University — doesn’t seem to have responded with any recognition that the organization’s mission was in any way damaged or threatened, other than in a public relations sense, if the accusations against Arday were true. That raises the reasonable suspicion that the organization doesn’t recognize that it has a mission, or, alternatively, believes that whatever Arday was doing was unrelated to that mission. That suspicion, in turn, is a far, far greater threat to the organization than Arday’s hire was.