Life in 2023
“I’ll be on the road in one min, Beautiful. I’m waiting for my Watch to update.”
Me to Merianna just now before I head off to 4th of July festivities. What a time to be alive.
Inside a Genius Mind: Leonardo’s Notebooks
Amazing web app here (bottom link to direct Google Experiment) focused on major themes in Leonardo’s notebooks and connecting them with machine learning. I’m a huge fan of notebooks, and I use the example of Leonardo keeping his thoughts in them all the time with my own students.
If you’re like me and really into Leonardo’s “notebooking” practices and history, I highly suggest you check out the videos Adam Savage has done on his Tested YouTube channel. Wonderful and inspiring videos. May we all find something that moves us in such a way!
Leonardo da Vinci: Inside a genius mind post:
From the stages of his life to dispelling myths, and examining his masterpieces up close, everyone can delve into Leonardo’s mind as we’ve brought together for the first time 1,300 pages from his collections of volumes and notebooks. The codices, brimming sketches, ideas, and observations, offer a window into the boundless imagination of one of history’s greatest polymaths. With the aid of Machine Learning and the curatorial expertise of Professor Martin Kemp, the accompanying experiment also called “Inside a Genius Mind” unravels these intriguing and sometimes mysterious materials.
Litter.
Ben: “Emmy, do you know what’s not funny?”
Emmy: “No?”
Ben: “Litter.”
Captain Planet lives on.
Are You a Subtitles Fan Too?
I realized last week while catching up on The Mandalorian that I have been using subtitles so much more recently. I chalked it up to getting older and not being able to hear dialogue as well. Interesting study here…
50% of Americans watch content with subtitles most of the time.
55% say it is harder to hear dialogue in shows and movies than it used to be.
62% of Americans use subtitles more on streaming services than regular TV.
57% watch content in public; 74% of Gen Z do so.
Goodreads Stuck as a Product
This is painful to read as a long-time Goodreads (and LibraryThing) user from the “before times”…
Goodreads, Amazon’s website for book lovers, causes problems in publishing – The Washington Post:
But after Amazon bought Goodreads, it gradually became clear that the technology was old and the data not well organized, and that a significant investment would be required to bring the site up to speed, according to two former Goodreads employees.
The reason “it feels stuck as a product,” one of the former Goodreads employees said, is because “it was painfully slow to create change.” As a result, proposed features like a recommendation algorithm or a news feed for the Kindle powered by Goodreads were never built.
“It’s Like a Choir”
This has no bearing on your life and won’t change how you think about your drive to work.
“It’s like a choir, with all these supermassive black hole pairs chiming in at different frequencies,” Chiara Mingarelli, a NANOGrav scientist who worked on the new findings, said in a press release.
However, this is a HUGE deal. And those of us who follow these things are FREAKING OUT. Science is amazing. Life is amazing. This Creation that we get to participate in briefly is AMAZING!
Scientists Find the Gravitational Wave Background: What It Means:
Well, here it is. And it really is the big one!
Scientists from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) have officially made the first detections of the gravitational wave background.
They made the first detections of what? Fair question, especially if you haven’t, in fact, been extremely tuned in to physics and astronomy Twitter. So let’s back up…
“What’s next is everything,” she said in a press release. “This is just the beginning.”
From Back in the Day at Google
Just found these in a box! “Ain’t it funny, how Time slips away…” to quote Willie Nelson.
What a Time to Be Alive
The Buffet Is Back in the U.S., From Las Vegas to Small Southern Towns – The New York Times:
“The buffet is designed so the TikTokers and the Instagrammers can make their pretty pictures of the food,” Ms. Orner said.
What Happens to the Web Now?
Artificial Intelligence might usher in something like a return to curated web experiences. This article is presented in a very “anti-AI” posture, but it also raises the idea that what happens to the web after AI completely saturates online content (and discovery through search and googling, etc.) is a realization that humans are pretty good at curating stuff for other humans.
Hence, making a Spotify playlist for someone special is still just as engaging as when we used cassette tapes in the 80s and 90s to do the same.
My personal wish is that we all go back to the notion of personal blogging or at least small and niche online communities with things like guestbooks (go sign mine… just set up today!) and Blogrolls to point us in interesting directions rather than relying on TikTok’s algorithms…
AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born – The Verge:
This is the same complaint identified by Stack Overflow’s mods: that AI-generated misinformation is insidious because it’s often invisible. It’s fluent but not grounded in real-world experience, and so it takes time and expertise to unpick. If machine-generated content supplants human authorship, it would be hard — impossible, even — to fully map the damage. And yes, people are plentiful sources of misinformation, too, but if AI systems also choke out the platforms where human expertise currently thrives, then there will be less opportunity to remedy our collective errors.