“The neural nets that we trained here are the beginning of counting oil tanks, or buildings, or windmills. Imagine we wanted to look at sustainable energy infrastructure—solar farms, solar panels on roof—you could start to think about counting their growth through time. You start to get really interesting data streams.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Myth Of College As A “Marketplace Of Ideas”
“Campus speaker invitations and disinvitations reflect a curious paradox. On one hand, there’s clearly a market for speakers for bestselling authors like Murray and Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart writer and prolific campus provocateur. On the other hand, Murray was met with disinvitation attempts in 2014 and 2016 before he was shouted down last week at Middlebury, reflecting student awareness that the work for which Murray is best known—1994’s The Bell Curve, which was excerpted in the New Republic alongside criticism of it—has been largely discredited among social scientists.”
Report: In London, Gentrification Threatens Cultural Vitality
The report “notes that although the vast majority of visitors to the capital reportedly come because of ‘culture and heritage’, 35% of London’s grassroots music venues closed from 2007-2015 and 3,500 artists are likely to lose their places of work by 2019. It argues that rising rents ultimately price people out of areas and cause tension between old and new resident communities, and that the resulting marginalisation of certain groups adds to a homogenisation of residents and culture in the area.”
Why So Many Words Die
Of the Oxford English Dictionary’s 231,000 entries, at least a fifth are obsolete. They range from “aa”, a stream or waterway (try that in Scrabble), to “zymome”, “that constituent of gluten which is insoluble in alcohol”. That is surely an undercounting.
Rebuild Palmyra? Well, First We Have To Have A Conversation About What The Point Of It Is
“Historic restoration should not simply recreate what has been lost. Instead, it could deepen engagement with history and increase concern for the preservation of artefacts. A broader understanding of cultural heritage presses beyond the mere celebration of ancient objects to a more critical awareness of our connection with history. The aim of historic restoration is not to recover material authenticity, but to restore our relationship with the past.”
How Writers Work An Idea On The Page
“What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already done. There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly we’re adjusting that which is already there. The writer revises, the painter touches up, the director edits, the musician overdubs.”
Parallels Between The Arts And Medicine
“It’s said that literature helps us to explore ways of being human, grants glimpses of lives beyond our own, aids empathy with others, alleviates distress, and widens our circle of awareness. The same could be said of clinical practice in all of its manifestations: nursing to surgery, psychotherapy to physiotherapy. An awareness of literature can aid the practice of medicine, just as clinical experience certainly helps me in the writing of my books. I’ve come to see the two disciplines as having more parallels than differences, and I’d like to argue they share a kind of synergy.”
How Language Impacts Reason Impacts Reality
“Language is a tool used to describe the world in which we live. However, don’t confuse the map with the territory! There is one major difference between the world we live in and language: Whereas the real world is free of contradictions, the man-made linguistic descriptions of that world can have contradictions.”
The Astonishing And Perplexing Internet War On Science
“Here, climate change is a government-sponsored hoax, fluoridated water is poisonous, cannabis can cure cancer, and airplanes are constantly spraying pesticides and biological waste into the air. Genetically modified food is destroying humanity and the planet. Vaccines are experimental, autism-causing injections forced on innocent babies. We can’t trust anything that we eat, drink, breathe, or medicate with, nor rely on physicians and public health agencies to act in our best interests.”
So It Appears Early Cave Artists In France Were Pointillists Like Seurat
“These pointillist creations of early modern humans were recently discovered when scientists revisited Abri Cellier, a cave site in France’s Vézère Valley. There, they found 16 limestone tablets left behind by a previous excavation. Images of what appear to be animals, including a woolly mammoth, were formed by a series of punctured dots and, in some cases, carved connecting lines. Combined with previous images from nearby caves in France and Spain, the tablets suggest an early form of pointillism, and a very early point on art history’s timeline.”