Lonely Surfaces

L. M. Sacasas | The Convivial Society | 10th December 2022

The most important thing about a technological development is not what it can do, but how it trains us to behave. Better AI images encourage us to look shallowly, as if skim reading, because these works do not reward close attention. This is not an existential problem for art unless "we find ourselves conditioned to never expect depth at all or unable to perceive it when we do encounter it" (3,699 word)

'There's No Such Thing As A Free Watch'

Jenny Odell | Bureau Of Suspended Objects | 18th August 2017 | PDF

Deep dive into the surprisingly twisted history of a single mass-produced object and what it can tell us about capitalism. Sold via a complex network of drop-shipping sites, the watch in question is a "physical witness" at the heart of a storm of deception. It is certainly the product of a scam, but is perhaps merely a more overt one than most of the objects we unthinkingly purchase (2,963 words)

Browser classified:

Life-Changing Concepts newsletter makes you more successful in life with mental models. Get a summary of 20 useful mental models when you join. It’s free.

Sound

Bartosz Ciechanowski | 22nd October 2022

What sound is, and how sound works, from first principles, beautifully illustrated by inline animations. Each one of Bartosz Ciechanowski's explainers is a museum-quality gem. We have thrilled in the past to his essays on watches and cameras. By the end of this one you will have a schematic idea of how synthesisers and speakers work, and Fourier transforms will hold no terrors for you (7,900 words)

The Right Amount Of Hegel

Tom Whyman | Art Review | 13th December 2022

Archivists have found thousands of pages of notes recording lectures on art given by Hegel at Heidelberg in 1816-1818. Should we be excited? Up to a point. Hegel is one of the all-time great philosophers. But the scale and density of his published writings are already enough to daunt scholars and defy lesser readers. His work might be more widely appreciated if we had less of it, not more (1,700 words)

Browser classified:

Spoil the chocolate lovers in your life with a fantastic Christmas gift from Cocoa Runners. Whether you're looking for festive tastings, premium gift boxes, limited edition advent calendars, or the best hot chocolates for cold nights, Cocoa Runners has all bases covered. Browser readers get 15% off any Xmas box using code BROWSERCR15 at checkout.

John Adams

Tyler Cowen | Conversations | 14th December 2022

The American composer and conductor John Adams proves wise and charming throughout this lively conversation about his own work and about music more generally. Topics include Adams's latest opera, Anthony and Cleopatra, classical music versus contemporary music, Charles Ives, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman, San Francisco, clarinets and cinema (7,200 words)

Analogies For Large Language Models

Dynomight | 8th December 2022

Ignore the unwieldy title. This is a virtuoso display of synthetic thinking about how all scenarios imagining the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the future of society are captured by the historical analogies on which they rely. Will AI do for office work what railroads did for horses? Or what tractors did for farming? Or what guns did for swords? Or what photography did for painting? (1,620 words)

Cryptic crosswords getting you DOWN? No need to get A-CROSS.

We at The Browser are here to help. Pick up the ultimate beginners' guide, by Dan Feyer and Uri Bram, and let us show you what those mysterious clues are all about...

Identical Twins Aren't That Identical

Stuart Ritchie | Science Fictions | 4th December 2022

The University of South Carolina accused identical twins of colluding in an exam, and now the twins have won a $6.5 million lawsuit by arguing that their papers were similar because their minds were "connected". Is there any good science in this claim? Probably not. But if there were, it would have interesting implications for debates about how far genetic endowment determines behaviour (2,800 words)

Dismantling Sellafield

Samanth Subramanian | Guardian | 15th December 2022

Superb reporting from Sellafield in northern England, where Britain's first big nuclear plant is winding down. Sellafield produced plutonium for nuclear weapons in the 1950s, and electricity until 2003. Until this year it reprocessed spent fuel. Now it is the world's most toxic storage depot, holding tonnes of plutonium and lakes of liquid waste that will need guarding for thousands of years (6,070 words)

Browser classified:

Spoil the chocolate lovers in your life with a fantastic Christmas gift from Cocoa Runners. Whether you're looking for festive tastings, premium gift boxes, limited edition advent calendars, or the best hot chocolates for cold nights, Cocoa Runners has all bases covered. Browser readers get 15% off any Xmas box using code BROWSERCR15 at checkout.

The Rise And Fall Of Peer Review

Adam Mastroianni | Experimental History | 13th December 2022

Peer review is "the grand experiment we’ve been running for six decades" and it has failed. It is expensive and detrimental to research productivity. Plus, studies in which errors are deliberately added to papers have demonstrated that reviewers don't catch the mistakes before publication the majority of the time. So what now? What science does best: move on to a new experiment and try again (3,618 words)

Books Of The Year

The White Review | 8th December 2022

Many lists of "best" books are published at this time of year. Few are this wide-ranging or surprising. Suggestions of the best Sri Lankan fiction sit alongside memoirs by Paul Theroux, Laurie Lee and Simone de Beauvoir. Works in translation, whether from 18C Irish or classical Chinese, are well represented. Hard to peruse without adding new volumes to one's to be read list (15,260 words)

Browser classified:

Yakread merges all your content—newsletters, bookmarks, tweets, and more—into a single intelligently curated feed. It's great for keeping up with all your subscriptions without feeling overwhelmed. Give it a try.

Becoming A Chatbot

Laura Preston | Guardian | 13th December 2022

Account of a year working as the "human backup" for a conversational AI named Brenda, which answers basic questions about real estate listings. The company deliberately hired poets and writers with MFAs or PhDs. The work was mostly a "game of reflexes", editing and improving the AI's responses against the clock. Brenda was never allowed to say "I don't know" or "I'm not a bot" (5,509 words)

Scientists Can't Give Up On Alien Life

Ethan Siegel | Big Think | 13th December 2022

Efforts to discover life elsewhere in the universe have so far yielded no results, but continuing the hunt is still a valuable endeavour. Facing the "end of our scientific certainty" and designing methods of inquiry that attempt to go beyond the limits of our capabilities into the philosophical realm is worthwhile in and of itself. "The odds are unknown, but the payoff could be unfathomable" (2,938 words)

Cryptic crosswords getting you DOWN? No need to get a-CROSS.
We at The Browser are here to help. Pick up the ultimate beginners' guide, by Dan Feyer and Uri Bram, and let us show you what those mysterious clues are all about...

All Souls Politics Exam

All Souls College, Oxford | 2016-2022 | PDF

Past paper for the last six years of the All Souls prize fellowship exam. Candidates sit four three-hour papers, only two of which can be in their own subject. In each, they must answer three questions with as much originality as possible. Questions on this politics paper include: "Has the Cold War ended?", "Why not anarchism?", "What explains civil wars?", and "Is populism an ideology?" (2,354 words)

Searching For Zarahemla

Emily Fox Kaplan | Pipe Wrench | 6th December 2022

Some Mormons believe that the events described in their holy book took place in northern Guatemala and southern Mexico. This journalist joined a package tour revealing the region to the faithful. "I think I find Mormons so compelling because Jews don’t have any certainty about anything... 16 million-plus Mormons, one set of very specific answers to pretty much every question imaginable" (8,012 words)

Browser classified:

Spoil the chocolate lovers in your life with a fantastic Christmas gift from Cocoa Runners. Whether you're looking for festive tastings, premium gift boxes, limited edition advent calendars, or the best hot chocolates for cold nights, Cocoa Runners has all bases covered. Browser readers get 15% off any Xmas box using code BROWSERCR15 at checkout.

History In The Making

Stephen Davies | Work In Progress | 8th December

The study of history is meant to help us understand our present and our future. But a conception of history dominated by wars and revolutions will not get us very far. It is new ideas and new technologies that do most to shape the world over time. Better to understand how Newton's Principia changed science, and how the Model-T changed America, than how 1066 changed Britain (3,100 words)

The Brilliant Hackwork Of P.G. Wodehouse

Dan Brooks | Gawker | 7th December 2022

P.G. Wodehouse found a recipe for writing comic novels, and very wisely stuck to it. In innumerable novels and short stories Bertie Wooster gets into some scrape after shunning Jeeves's advice, and Jeeves, after a huff, engineers a happy ending. The formulaic quality of the stories is part of their charm. It allows for a seemingly effortless style of writing, and the levity transmits itself to the reader (1,500 words)

Clinical Trials And Biotech Innovation

Matthew Herper | STAT | 3rd November 2022

This ought to be a great century for biology. The combination of gene editing and AI is opening up vast new prospects for understanding and optimising our bodies. But how much of this life-science will get out of the labs and into production if the law requires the safety and efficacy of every product to be proven in clinical trials? Ensuring safety is vital — but is there a better way of doing it? (5,400 words)

The Weirdness Of Beavers

Leila Philip | Literary Hub | 8th December 2022

A brief history of beavers in art, history, scholarship and religion. A million years ago, beavers "the size of bears" roamed North America. The evolution of beavers remains something of a mystery: To look at, they are "part bear, part bird, part monkey, part lizard". Nobody knows when they started building dams. They seem to have a capacity for collective intelligence, like ants or bees (2,900 words)

Browser classified:

Spoil the chocolate lovers in your life with a fantastic Christmas gift from Cocoa Runners. Whether you're looking for festive tastings, premium gift boxes, limited edition advent calendars, or the best hot chocolates for cold nights, Cocoa Runners has all bases covered. Browser readers get 15% off any Xmas box using code BROWSERCR15 at checkout.

Why Is Everything So Ugly?

The Editors | n+1 | 7th December 2022

You can walk for hours across New York City without seeing anything that is both new and beautiful. We have at our disposal the most advanced design and manufacturing technologies in human history, yet the environment we make for ourselves is a "drab sublime" of flat-pack furniture, municipal infrastructure, home electronics and commercial graphic design. Who asked for all this? (4,100 words)

Can AI Write Authentic Poetry?

Keith Holyoak | MIT Press Reader | 7th December 2022

There is plenty of fun to be had seeding GPT-3 to write prose and make pictures, then laughing at the off-kilter weirdness of the results, which have strayed of late deep into the uncanny valley. But what of poetry, which abolished all conventions a century ago, and now strives for unusual effects? Might AI poetry be equal or superior to that of humans? The short answer is, "Yes, but ..." (3,400 words)

Browser classified:

Yakread merges all your content—newsletters, bookmarks, tweets, and more—into a single intelligently curated feed. It's great for keeping up with all your subscriptions without feeling overwhelmed. Give it a try.

Finding Language In The Brain

Giosuè Baggio | MIT Press Reader | 25th November 2022

Mathematical systems are useful for understanding language, but perhaps language is itself also a system for computation. If so, then it would follow that language is the "software" being run by human "hardware" — that is, the brain. "The language-as-calculus idea may well be the best model of language in the brain we currently have — or perhaps the worst, except for all the others" (1,495 words)

I Don’t Want To Be An Internet Person

Ginevra Davis | Palladium | 4th November 2022

Reflections on online vs "real" life, told via an encounter with someone who is "cool on a certain corner of the internet". "The internet people are in charge. They make the memes and coin the neologisms that will become mainstream discourse in five years. To define the internet is to form the base layer upon which all culture is built. In the long run, these people will win" (4,176 words)

How To Speak Honeybee

Karen Bakker | Noema | 2nd November 2022

Bees communicate mainly by dance, but they also have a vocabulary of sounds and vibrations. They have excellent eyesight and can recognise faces. They can rob and cheat. They get happy and sad. When a swarm needs to split or move on, the bees will argue and vote about where to go next. To better observe them, humans are now building a bee-sized robot which will pass as a bee among bees (4,700 words)

Beware Of The Perfect Gentleman

R.F. Jurjevics | Vice | 28th November 2022

Let's say you are a man with an "open face". You seem strong, gentle, trustworthy. You have got "the look". That's the good news. The bad news is that fraudsters and catfishers seek out faces like yours for use in "romance scams". Your pirated photo may be used to defraud dozens, even hundreds, of people. And, thanks to Google's reverse-image search, those victims may then come looking for you (4,600 words)