Pentium As A Navajo Weaving

Ken Shirriff | 1st September 2024

There is a striking visual similarity between integrated circuit designs and Navajo weaving. This is historically resonant. In the 1960s, the Fairchild company set up plants to make integrated circuits on Navajo land with Navajo workers. History now comes full circle, as Navajo artists recreate the complex designs of Pentium chips — with over three million tiny transistors — on woven rugs (6,700 words)

Challenging The Myths Of Generative AI

Eryk Salvaggio | Tech Policy Press | 29th August 2024

Read between the slick marketing lines about generative AI’s capabilities. The prompt myth creates the illusion that LLMs are “retrieving information rather than constructing word associations”. The intelligence myth conflates “AI systems inspired by models of human thought” with a capacity to think. The scaling myth claims that all problems can be fixed with more data or better training (3,600 words)

Podcast: Gaslighting | Origin Story. How did the title of a 1938 play, Gaslight, become a verb used in psychology and then a buzzword for 21C political discourse? This is a straightforward, evidence-based explanation (37m 16s)

Video: A 4000-Year-Old Brick | YouTube | British Museum | 16m 21s

Museum curator explains how archaeology has adapted to incorporate not just the unearthing and study of the distance past, but the previously-unknown work of past archaeologists. The Sumerian brick studied here has been excavated multiple times, including by employees of Alexander the Great.

Moleskine Mania

Roland Allen | Walrus | 30th August 2024

On the branding of the Moleskine notebook. Inspired by a line from Bruce Chatwin and consciously targeted at the "contemporary nomad", one wonders if they are purchased more than they are filled. A Barnes & Noble buyer reports: "Do you know there’s a section of our customer base that buys a fresh Moleskine every time they come into a store? We have no idea what they do with them" (2,800 words)

ChatGPT Goes To Church

Arlie Coles | Plough | 6th June 2024

Churches, too, must grapple with the implications of Large Language Models (LLMs). Many interesting questions raised here. How best to console a parishioner laid off because of AI? Can an LLM be possessed by a demon? Should we trust AI's interpretation of the Bible? Could ChatGPT, with the right training, preach? This has been tried already and the results were "trite and unsettling" (3,200 words)

Sovereignty Of The Latter-Day Saints

Katie McBride Moench | JSTOR Daily | 28th August 2024

Early Latter-Day Saints moved west to escape the "unwelcome oversight of the US government". The resulting Utah War of 1857 is dwarfed in history by the Civil War that followed, but this conflict between federal authorities and LDS militias over polygamy, religious freedom and community autonomy should be studied as a parallel to the bubbling tensions over states rights and slavery (2,000 words)

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Out of the mouths of babes. Wild Interest is the new podcast created and hosted by children, exploring nature, science, current affairs and even the paranormal. The series celebrates our innate curiosity with unstudied eloquence that touches the heart and sparks the imagination. Wild Interest Podcast by Kids for Kids

Stolen iPhone. I Survived

David G.W. Birch | 27th August 2024

Our phones contain our lives: identity documents, the means to pay for things, travel and event tickets, sentimental photographs — all of it. Phone theft and related fraud are very common crimes. If it happens to you, immediately use the remote wiping feature provided by Apple (or equivalent). Then get the number and your cards blocked, and brace yourself to resist a lot of scams (1,400 words)

The How And The Why

Sara Hendren | 10th June 2024

“College should be a mix of choices and constraints on a young person’s impulses — the longstanding ideal of the liberal arts. Some classes you choose, some you don’t. The autonomy-led, buffet-style, platform-burnishing model for higher education is thoroughly internalised in most places.” First in a series about college education, ideally read in order — here are parts two, three, four and five (6,000 words)

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Out of the mouths of babes. Wild Interest is the new podcast created and hosted by children, exploring nature, science, current affairs and even the paranormal. The series celebrates our innate curiosity with unstudied eloquence that touches the heart and sparks the imagination. Wild Interest Podcast by Kids for Kids

The Power Of Supercitizens

Brian Klaas | Garden Of Forking Paths | 15th August 2024

Volunteering is an important kind of social glue. Why do people do it? It requires the right organisational infrastructure. Parkruns — free, open 5k time trials — are an example: hundreds of runners in the UK gather on Saturday mornings, helped by hordes of volunteers. Those who hit a milestone are celebrated by the gathered crowd. Parkruns are cheerful, social, and “ruthlessly inclusive” (3,000 words)

Blue Zone Distraction

Cremieux Recueil | 26th August 2024

Blue Zones — geographical regions that supposedly have the world’s most long-lived people — are dubious. Whether it’s Sardinia, Okinawa, or Greece, the numbers of old people are wrong, due to census mistakes or “pension fraudsters”. These errors propagate false claims about the benefits of wine-drinking or plant-based diets. Researchers seriously interested in longevity must look for better data (2,200 words)

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Out of the mouths of babes. Wild Interest is the new podcast created and hosted by children, exploring nature, science, current affairs and even the paranormal. The series celebrates our innate curiosity with unstudied eloquence that touches the heart and sparks the imagination. Wild Interest Podcast by Kids for Kids

Measuring The Black Death

Saloni Dattani | Asimov Press | 25th August 2024

For a cataclysmic event that reordered European society, there is little certainty about how many people died during the Black Death. Estimates suggest between 40 and 60 percent of the population. Parish records or tax registries are unreliable proxies for mortality as they exclude a majority of the population. From tuberculosis to Covid-19, “many modern examples reveal a similar struggle to track deaths” (3,100 words)

Podcast: Madhur Jaffrey | Full English. About the actress and celebrity chef who brought Indian food to British and American audiences (57m 39s)

Video: Mysteries From A Nuclear Test Site | YouTube | Journey To The Microcosmos | 9m 8s

A bag of sand from the Marshall Islands, examined under a microscope.

What Lasts And (Mostly) Doesn’t Last

Lincoln Michel | Counter Craft | 21st August 2024

How many writers or titles from bestseller lists of yore are recognisable today? Surprisingly few. The converse is also true: Melville and Kafka lay forgotten for decades before being “rediscovered”. The books that endure usually have a dedicated following of specialist readers. They are foundational in a style or genre. Lovecraft died poor and obscure but is easily the most influential horror author today (1,900 words)

TikTok LLM

Eleanor Stern | New Inquiry | 24th June 2024

To bypass TikTok’s algorithms with their “intense, often inscrutable” censorship, users have created a “mirror-lexicon”: nazis are yahtzees, kill is unalive, porn is corn — a “replacement vocabulary” in linguistics parlance. Some of it has left TikTok’s confines; teachers worry about students using “unalive” in emails. This “algospeak” harks back to a central irony of language taboos: “proscription is productive” (2,500 words)

Danger On The Divide

Maggie Slepian | Longreads | 15th August 2024

Cautionary tale of cycling trip gone wrong along the “Divide” — a 2700-mile-long route on dirt roads crossing New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. “I had spent countless nights in the woods adjusting my relationship to danger. But no matter how desensitised we had become, the more time spent in the woods, the more of a numbers game you play with injury, weather, wildlife, exposure” (5,500 words)

The Myth Of Simple Truths

Scott Aiken & Robert Talisse | 3 Quarks Daily | 4th January 2016

“So much political commentary seems to proceed by means of debate rather than report. Rather than presenting facts and professing a view, commentators present views concerning the views of their opponents. Despite heated disagreements over Big Questions like healthcare, abortion, race relations and global warming, we find a surprising consensus about the nature of political disagreement itself” (900 words)

Republican Radical Who Helped Gay Rights

Neil J. Young | Reason | 11th August 2024

On Dorr Legg — Republican and gay rights trailblazer. Moved to LA during its gay boom in the 1940s. Launched ONE Magazine, the first American publication for positive coverage of homosexuality, acquiring more than 5,000 subscribers within a year and a larger covert readership. Successfully fought obscenity charges laid against the magazine, resulting in a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1958 (4,200 words)

Soviet Sabotage Doctrine

Daniela Richterova | War On The Rocks | 19th August 2024

Putin seems to be following the Cold War playbook for sabotage operations in the West: Disrupt policies not in Moscow’s interests. Generate strife within NATO by playing up French-American, Greek-Turkish, British-German tensions. Target key infrastructure: power plants, pipelines, refineries, rail lines, drinking water reservoirs, nuclear bomb shelters. More might be yet to come (2,900 words)