Freaky, depressing essay about the AI dominated future.
The founders of the Luddite Club, an anti-smartphone, anti-social media group of teenagers from NYC, are in college now, some still spreading their message and others back in the social media world. (NY Times) One complains that she has to carry a smartphone because all the university's systems use two-factor authentication.
Serious look from Perun at what the recently revealed Chinese warplanes might be and where they might fit in China's overall military planning and global military competition, 1-hour video.
Highly regarded translator Damion Searls has a new book called The Philosophy of Translation, and translator Lily Meyer has an interesting review. Meyer says the book "is a meditation on what it means to read like a translator, which means, really, that it’s an ode to close reading." I still read some online stuff in German and French because I am fascinated by the mental exercise of reading through the dark glass of another language.
New study identifies the first speakers of the Indo-European languages as those living along the "Caucacus-Lower Volga Cline", or the CLV people. (Abstract at Nature, popular summary) This is essentially what the blogger Davidski has been saying for a couple of years. One of the big remaining questions is whether the speakers of early Anatolian Indo-European languages, like the Hittites, entered Anatolia from the east or the west.
What is "ordo amoris?"
Review of a new book on the color pink. I find pink interesting because light blue looks to me like light blue, and light green looks like light green, but pink does not look to me like light red. Especially in the shocking variety it looks to me like a completely different color. Is this just because I grew up calling it by its own name?
Spitalfields Life tours the old Smithfield market and the surrounding streets, with a brief history of the market.
Scientists are working on a strontium map of Africa to help determine the origin of enslaved people brought to the Americas. I still think archaeologists put too much faith in strontium, which is a great clue but not as certain a market as some people seem to think.
Paleontologists have found a bona fide waterfowl with fully modern bird anatomy that predates the Cretaceous mass extinction, which appears to settle an old argument about whether modern birds shared the planet with dinosaurs.
Alex Tabarrok, Three Simple Principles of Trade Policy.
Katherine Rundell on the importance of children's books.
The obscure question of where Thomas More was born, which some modern Brits seem to care a lot about. Here's a piece of advice for navigating the world of thought: learn to enjoy saying "I don't know."
Scott Siskind and friends will tell you who the latest Trump medical appointments are, along with a few issues they hope each might work on.
Tyler Cowen on the costs and benefits of USAID. My personal view is that for an agency created as a soft weapon in the Cold War, it has done a fair amount of good. But I consider that western aid to poor countries is a complicated topic, and that there are lots of costs, viz., the African textile industry being ravaged by donated clothes. I read a major study a few years ago which concluded that if you exclude the single case of South Korea, US aid strongly correlates with worse economic outcomes in the countries we are trying to help. Partly because so much of it goes to the American people and institutions that handle it, and also because corrupt leaders steal so much of it: "This paper documents that aid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centers known for bank secrecy and private wealth management, but not in other financial centers."
6 comments:
Freaky, depressing essay about the AI dominated future.
A) The AI dominated future of America. The EU established rather sweeping regulations a while ago, as a BASELINE, and will likely only add to it.
B) ...and even then, probably not even in America. The essay reads like one of those 1980s speculative tracts that were everywhere, talking about how computers would totally transform every aspect of business and home life. And this one goes on on some pretty wild limbs, into which no sane person should put any stock.
Review of a new book on the color pink. I find pink interesting because light blue looks to me like light blue, and light green looks like light green, but pink does not look to me like light red. Especially in the shocking variety it looks to me like a completely different color. Is this just because I grew up calling it by its own name?
Given that you are essentially describing the exact same thing that people from cultures which don't differentiate between blue and green say?
Yeah, it's absolutely because you grew up calling it by its own name.
See also the color orange, which wasn't a thing in Europe before the arrival of the fruit, and its subsequent associations with the House of Orange. Prior to that, it was conceived of as a variety of red.
See also "redhead" and "red breasted robin", both of which are unmistakably orange things to us in the modern day, but not when the terms originated.
Color is one of those things that's almost impossible to describe. Don't all shades of color have names precisely because they are at best impossible to describe? Light blue gives you some idea of the color, but also leaves too much ground uncovered. Here are a few names that attempt to capture the exact kind of light blue: powder blue, sky blue, azure, or maybe even cyan or turquoise.
There are even names for shades of pink -- blush, salmon, and rose. This sight has 129 names for shades of pink.
Google "names of rare colors" and have a feast.
https://www.color-meanings.com/shades-of-pink-color-names-html-hex-rgb-codes/
Just to note that JD Vance's interpretation is not really his, or new. In Poland i've heard about ordo amoris at least a decade ago from rightwing publishers. Given JD Vance's familiarity with Poland, I wonder whether this is where he took the idea from?
-- szopen
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