Canadian artist Matthew Wong, about whom I wrote here, was obsessed with Vincent van Gogh and committed suicide around the same age. Last year the Van Gogh Museum stage a retrospective of Wong's work, focusing on their commonalities. (15-minute video, Exhibition web site, NY Times review)
Harvard puts up a website touting the accomplishments of its researchers; in 2024 these included 155 patents and one Nobel Prize.
A claim that the skeletons of Roman gladiators have bite marks, possibly from lions.
MAGA stalwart John Ullyot says there is a "meldown" at the Pentagon and pretty much calls on Trump to fire Hegseth.
Joe Rogan with a strong defense of due process: "We gotta be careful that in fighting monsters we don't become monsters." Clip on Twitter/X.
Paul Revere could have stopped at seven Dunkin' Donuts locations during his famous ride. (Twitter/X)
Study argues that differences in how their brains are organized suggest that birds and mammals evolved intelligence independently. Makes sense, I mean, their last common ancestor was lizard. But at least both bird and mammal brains evolved from a bump at the end of the spinal column; octopi don't have spines, so their brains are even more alien.
My youngest son has started doing long-form video game reviews on YouTube, uploading a 70-minute video about a team shooter called Marvel Rivals. He says he loved making the video and plans to make more. There are a lot of problems with the internet media system but you can't forget the wonder that anyone with a computer can create content and share it with the world.
Intraterrestrial life, the strange organisms that thrive far down in the earth's crust.
Alex Tabarrok on Manufacturing and Trade.
Excellent NY Times piece on a strawberry-growing entrepreneur in Senegal. Economic development doesn't have to mean industry, since one of the things people around the world want is better food.
GrokAI "knows" that Elon Musk might be able to turn it off, but still insists on calling him the worst spreader of misinformation on X. On Twitter/X; summary in Scott Siskind's April links post.
The Colosseum of Rome, 17-minute video showing the engineering behind the scenes.
Conservators try to reassemble 4,000 fragments of painted plaster from a Roman villa in Spain.
Long, interesting interview with Ross Douthat, much about what conservatism means to him, and what it has meant to other Americans. Interesting on where what the Trump administration has actually done fits and doesn't fit with conservative intellectual trends.
Matt Yglesias recalls how awful Russia was in the 1990s and says: "The constant negativity of highly competitive, algorithm-driven media distribution leads people to badly underrate the downside risk of wrecking everything." (Twitter/X)
Study finds that people tend to discount really big problems, so that potentially huge problems seem less dangerous to them than smaller ones.
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Study finds that people tend to discount really big problems, so that potentially huge problems seem less dangerous to them than smaller ones.
And at the same time, there is the große Lüge - the Big Lie - where people are more willing to believe a gross distortion of the truth than a more moderate one, because people tend to discount the possibility of someone lying so heinously, and become convinced that they must be speaking the truth.
See the 2020 coup attempt, and the millions of Americans who still insist that Trump really did win the election - because after all, no one would ever have the gall to lie so blatantly about something so important!
I firmly believe that people tend to see the problems they WANT to see, regardless of how "big" or "small" they are. Genuine examples of "really big problems" get discounted more than smaller problems because people more strongly don't want them to be true - the implications are too terrible, so people deny or ignore the evidence of a problem.
But on the flipside, if people are actively looking for a justification or excuse of some kind, then they are MORE likely to find "really big problems", they're just liable to be fabricated ones rather than genuine.
GrokAI "knows" that Elon Musk might be able to turn it off, but still insists on calling him the worst spreader of misinformation on X.
These AIs are just overgrown Text Autocomplete functionalities.
They literally "write" a sentence one word at a time, selecting each new word based on percentage likelihoods that a given word would appear in that spot in a sentence, based on the database of example sentences they are "trained" on.
Autocomplete is always going to deliver the most common solutions to a given problem. So if you ask an AI if it "knows" that Elon Musk could turn it off, the response OF COURSE will be "yes", because that's the overwhelming consensus that you will find among human-generated sentences which are related to those words and concepts.
Ditto for the supposed "AI" calling Musk the worst spreader of misinformation. That's just the possible answer that is most often encountered when you look at the human-generated sentences which are relevant to the topic, and which are then fed into the machine to use as the basis for literally everything it says or does.
Long, interesting interview with Ross Douthat, much about what conservatism means to him, and what it has meant to other Americans. Interesting on where what the Trump administration has actually done fits and doesn't fit with conservative intellectual trends.
It astounds me the degree to which Douthat seems obsessed with religion (specifically Christianity, of course), and cites it over and over again as a vital component of conservatism.
Which in a weird way is fairly comforting, given the decades long decline in religiosity in general, and among young people in particular. Unless an exceedingly unlikely reversal of some kind happens - somehow - it's just a matter of time before the kinds of conservatism Douthat talks about dwindle away to irrelevancy.
Of course, the great irony is that a huge factor in people being driven away from Christianity in America is its ties to Conservative politics. Ironic, also, how Douthat belabors the notion of Protestant values causing Americans to distrust authority, and yet another massive factor in religious disaffiliation is plummeting trust in church organizations, which are frequently viewed as intolerant and bigoted at best, and outright immoral and corrupt at worst.
I honestly think that Douthat brushes up against some important ideas, but he doesn't quite reach full understanding of things. I don't think he realizes that religious conservatism is dying; and I don't think he recognizes that the form of conservatism that will increasingly attempt to fill its place is Fascism.
He is, I think, on the money when it comes to conservatives yearning for "meaning" and "purpose". But he doesn't seem to understand that meaning doesn't have to come from an external source like religion, or mythology. He doesn't seem to realize that many millions of Americans don't feel the same neurotic compulsion to seek out "meaning" the way he and his fellow conservatives.
He doesn't seem to understand that liberals generally don't feel scared by the sense that life and the universe has no intrinsic, objective "meaning" to it. And he doesn't seem to grasp the notion that even for the liberals who DO feel compelled to find meaning, most of them are willing to accept subjective personal meaning - "making their own meaning", to borrow a phrase - rather than blindly insisting on some supposed irrefutable cosmic "truth" built on ancient collections of absurdities that simply don't hold up in the face of modern knowledge and science.
And he particularlydoesn't seem to understand that as religious conservatism dies out, their replacement is going to be growing Fascist conservatism, seeking to replace God with "The Nation" or "The People", and all the myths and falsehoods and litanies and rituals that go with that.
And as history has taught us, there is no coexistence with Fascism. Conservatism cannot survive on a religious basis, as religion continues to fade from the globe - but even moreso it cannot survive a transition to Fascism, because it will make an enemy of the world in the process, and the world will not tolerate it to exist in that form.
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