Alan Jacobs

With a search engine, you type in a keyword and try to find the best matches. It’s like walking into a library and being handed the ten best books about a topic. What we are trying to do with WolframAlpha is to create custom-created reports to answer specific questions. We are computing answers – even if nobody has ever asked that question before, maybe we can work out a report that answers it. It takes human experts to do that, and that is something that the search engine crowd is often skeptical about. They say that something is only good when it is based on a good algorithm and infinitely scalable. But we are interested in encapsulating the world’s knowledge, not in scalability. Wikipedia is basically a container for random texts written by random people at random times. We can surely do better than that, especially if we want to build something that has different layers and relies on good information. The actual data that we have inside of Wolfram Alpha is now roughly comparable to the textual content of the internet, and much of it comes from primary data sources that are not available online.

There is no greater dishonor when reflecting on the death of a young journalist than by referring to them as “aspiring.” It happened on Monday when news broke that Armando ‘Mando’ Montaño, a 22-year-old recent graduate of Grinnell College and intern with the Associated Press in Mexico City, was found dead in an elevator shaft. Word of his death rocked social networks and prompted friends to write tributes to him that went viral in minutes.

oldhollywood:

Joseph Cotten in The Third Man (1949, dir. Carol Reed)

“We stand for a free and open Internet,” the statement reads. “We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles.” Those principles are:

Expression: Don’t censor the Internet.
Access: Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks.
Openness: Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create, and innovate.
Innovation: Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don’t block new technologies, and don’t punish innovators for their users’ actions.
Privacy: Protect privacy and defend everyone’s ability to control how their data and devices are used.

If this seems vague, that was by design. “The principles were drafted intentionally to be as high-level as possible,” said Josh Levy of Free Press during a Monday conference call. “It’s not proposing any specific policies. Instead, it’s meant to put a line in the sand about what things should look like.”

Where I lose Krieder, however, is in his suggested speed-bump for our “endless frenetic hustle.” Instead of offering realistic solutions like, say, the institution of a Spanish-style siesta for everyone into the workday afternoon, he glibly praises his ability to beg off work for an entire day dedicated to “chilled pink minty cocktails” or, better yet, to decamp completely to an “undisclosed location” (according to an author bio, a country house somewhere on the Chesapeake Bay), as if these were steps we all could take if only we were brave enough to do so.

While both sound like lovely ways to relax and focus on writing, respectively, the likelihood that most readers will be able to join Krieder in his charmed indolence is low; so low, in fact, that his waxing romantic about the spontaneously chill life smacks of a kind of obnoxious classism which unfortunately undermines an otherwise provocative point.

As Krieder himself admits, his own “resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue,” even if he did “make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money.” Regardless of Krieder’s own personal financial situation (which I know nothing of), the pleasantly open schedule that he advocates is almost never possible without a healthy stack of family money or generous institutional grant.

As Richard King, author of How Soon is Now?, a history of UK independent music, has said, it’s a surprise that remix culture has yet to enter the literary world. The cult of the author remains strong, but is under continual attack. As a result, it cannot be long until the question is not “Have you read…?”, but “Whose edit did you read?” I would read a Jonathan Lethem edit of Balzac, or China Miéville’s version of Moby-Dick. I like the original, but I prefer the remix.

The church also has to use new media in ways that highlight the local, the particular, and the personal. For example, on a recent trip across Tennessee, my family and I found ourselves aiming for dinner in Memphis. So we posted a question online—where does one eat with one meal in a great barbeque town? The answer came back—Rendezvous downtown. Now, we could have found it with a Google search—as a famous tourist establishment, Rendezvous would have turned up high on any search engine. But so could a tourist trap with advertising dollars. Instead, I got a word from a friend who pilgrimages to Memphis annually for the music. As a bonus, it turned out we were there on a night when the local minor league baseball team was in town. An unplanned vacation in a great American city culminated with a beautiful night in a stadium nestled into a downtown recommended by a friend on the fly.

On the way home we found ourselves aiming for Knoxville for dinner and a similar query yielded the counsel to eat at Calhoun’s on the Tennessee River. It’s a beautiful spot near the University of Tennessee and opposite the river from a haunting, abandoned hospital. Local, particular, quirky, and glorious. This is the opposite of how to eat in the suburban age, where proximity to the highway and faceless chain restaurants rule. We paid a little more, took more time, but saw two great cities in their glory and ate well.

By contrast, I recently heard a presentation at a conference from a seminary I admire. This man was present in the flesh, but not in relationship. He parachuted in to trumpet the great endeavors of his school, with no knowledge of the graduates of said school sitting right in front of him. To be fair, he’s new. But his presentation could have been done for a group in North Dakota or Afghanistan or Swaziland for all its attention to the local and particular and quirky. The meeting was embodied in one way (we were all in the room together), but abstract and impersonal in every way that mattered.

When I first began to take antidepressants, I understood that doing so meant I had a chemical imbalance in my brain. I knew that, arguably, I should find that comforting—it meant that what I was going through wasn’t my fault—but instead it made me feel out of control. I wanted my feelings to mean something. The idea that my deepest emotions were actually random emanations from my malfunctioning brain didn’t uplift me; it just further demoralized me.

In my 20s, I sought out talk therapy, partly to deal with the questions that using antidepressants raised for me and partly because the effects of the drugs, spectacular in the short term, had waned over time, leaving plenty of real-world problems in their wake. Only then did I begin to notice just how nonrandom my feelings were and how predictably they followed some simple rules of cause and effect.

Looking back, it seems remarkable that I had to work so hard to absorb an elementary lesson: Some things make me feel happy, other things make me feel sad. But for a long time antidepressants were giving me the opposite lesson. If I was suffering because of a glitch in my brain, it didn’t make much difference what I did. For me, antidepressants had promoted a kind of emotional illiteracy. They had prevented me from noticing the reasons that I felt bad when I did and from appreciating the effects of my own choices.

In the past, maples were tapped from Virginia to Northern Canada, though currently only a few US states, Ontario, and Quebec produce meaningful amounts. Maple trees grow the world over in abundance, so why does only North America produce syrup? The traditional response is that the conditions for sap production only exist in North America — cold spring nights with warmer days cause the trees to produce sap, which then rises up the trunk as it warms. Because where in the rest of the world is it colder at night than it is during the day? The truth, as you may have guessed, is somewhat more complicated and politically fraught.

Along with the decision to reinstate slavery in France’s oversea colonies, the institutionalized plunder of art museums across Europe, the deaths of millions of Europeans during 17 years of war, and the renaming of the mille-feuille (a deliciously ancient dessert), Europe’s failure to crack the secret of maple syrup was Napoleon’s fault.

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.