Month: August 2025

Stare at Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ Today

Give yourself 10 mins today to stare at Bosch’s work and learn a little about yourself, the world, consciousness, and projection (not a bad use of just 10 mins of your day instead of doomscrolling Reels or TikTok)…

10-Minute Challenge: Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ – The New York Times (Gift Article):

Today, we bring you another focus challenge, in which we invite you to spend uninterrupted time looking at one piece of art. This one is a 500-year-old, three-paneled triptych by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch.

Can AI Dream of Electric Consciousness?

On spiritual attractors that attract even AI (perhaps that’s due to them being mostly human creation but perhaps something else)… Nishitani was right…

Claude Finds God—Asterisk:

As we’ve mentioned, initially models will go into these discussions of consciousness that get increasingly philosophical. And so at that point you could imagine, if that’s the thing that is just straightforwardly getting reinforced, then you might expect just increasingly deep philosophical discussions of consciousness.

But we do in fact see these phase changes, where there will be relatively normal, coherent discussions of consciousness, to increasingly speculative discussions, to the kind of manic bliss state, and then to some kind of calm, subtle silence — emptiness. And I think it’s quite interesting that we see the phase changes that we do there as opposed to just some much more straightforward running down a single path.

Lightning Kills Lots of Trees

Admittedly, I haven’t read this entire paper but I do have a few analytical questions about the data and variables… but still fascinating nonetheless (especially with my latest work on plasma and ecology!)…

Lightning Kills Way More Trees Than You Would Ever Believe : ScienceAlert:

A first-of-its-kind study estimates that lightning strikes kill 320 million trees every year.

For perspective, these dead trees account for up to 2.9 percent of annual loss in plant biomass and emit up to 1.09 billion tons of carbon dioxide.