This past weekend Y and I drove down to Los Angeles to attend his younger son Michael’s wedding. (Thus the absence of daily posts here for five days.) It was our first trip out of town in 3 1/2 years, since December 2019, the last time we drove to LA. (Y has been on a couple business trips over the past couple years, but I haven’t left the Bay Area in that time.)
We left Thursday morning Continue reading
Topics in this post:
Despite conservative histrionics and paranoia:
Washington Post, Eugene Robinson, 27 Mar 2023: Opinion | ‘Wokeness’ is winning
Topics in this post:
(And these are just the left-over links after several weeks of addressing such issues at higher levels.)
NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 28 Mar 2023: What the Republican Push for ‘Parents’ Rights’ Is Really About
On Sunday evening, March 26th, we went a concert on the UC Berkeley Campus, at Zellerbach Hall, to see the Zurich Chamber Orchestra. The concert included an extraordinary piece by contemporary composer Max Richter, a re-imagining of Vivaldi’s ever-popular The Four Seasons.
I missed seeing that greenish comet that was visible in the sky a few weeks ago. The latest sky event being discussed in the media — at least on TV and on websites — is a fairly rare conjunction of five naked-eye-visible planets (all except Saturn, and including Uranus, which will require binoculars to see) in recent days, with tonight, March 27th, having a prime view.
I happen to have a perfectly clear view of the western horizon from my house, and there are no major clouds today, so I’m hoping to see it.
What strikes me in the coverage of this story is the scientific illiteracy, at worst, or simply journalistic sloppiness, at best, in how this event is described. Continue reading
Today: some better descriptions of wokeism; how wokeness undermines the idea of eternal conservative values; and if so many other books are banned from public schools, why not the Bible?
Today’s NY Times website has this letter column: A Conservative’s View of What ‘Woke’ Means
The latest about chatbots, why they would be biased one way or another, and how there is now a conservative version of them; and recalling Conservapedia.
Our story so far: Continue reading
It turns out that a tune I liked, which I described as having “a relentless three note descending theme, underlying colorful violin lines,” in one of the Oscar nominated films, Triangle of Sadness, that I discussed in my post of March 14th, was not an original composition by the film’s composer, but a Baroque piece by one Marin Marais, called “The Bells of St Genevieve.”
I had the local classical music station, KDFC, on in the background this afternoon, set at a fairly low volume, yet noticed this piece and thought, doesn’t that sound a lot like that track from….? *Is* it that track from…? And checked it out. The KDFC host didn’t mention the connection of this piece to that film. But I’m guessing that’s why they played it.
Also: reflecting on Arthur C. Clarke and John Brockman, wondering if there is a permanent limit to human cultural education.
NY Times, Yuval Noah Harari, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin, 24 March 2023: You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills
Harari and his collaborators discuss the dangers of AI, specifically the recent chatbots, which dangers I am coming to understand quite differently than the way such presumed dangers of AI have been described until recently. The current problem is that these new AI apps *aren’t* intelligent — they’re merely reflecting back everything, wisdom and nonsense, that they absorb from the web. Continue reading
When I was browsing through several John Brockman books a few weeks ago, I decided to buy the last one he published in that series, from 2019. It’s called The Last Unknowns, and instead of gathering answers from many contributors to a single question for each book, this one is a collection of questions, the deepest, most profound questions that remain unanswered, according to the contributors. Just questions.
Typically there’s one question per contributor on each page. So you can flip through the book in about a hour. In this and a subsequent post or two, I’ll list what I think are the most interesting questions, and then give my take on the nature of their answers.
