Tag: 07.22.19

Thanks To Climate Change, The Oregon Shakespeare Festival Considers Changes To Its Outdoor Theatre

Before a grassfire up the Rogue Valley shut down this weekend’s outdoor performances – and moved them inside to a local high school auditorium, as planned in case of smoke – the Oregon Shakespeare Festival held a town hall to announce that it was considering changes to its big outdoor theatre. “Ideas include a retractable roof and a redesign of the seating to encircle the stage so theater-goers are closer to the actors.” – Medford Mail-Tribune (Oregon)

Why Changing Marijuana Laws Made This Christian Publisher Change Its Name

“Christian Book Distributors, also known as CBD, was started four decades ago by brothers Ray and Stephen Hendrickson, selling Christian books, Bibles, home-schooling materials, toys and games. But the company has announced that the rising popularity of cannabidiol, the legal cannabis-derived chemical known as CBD, has begun to cause some unfortunate customer errors.” – The Guardian

The Great Indian Novel Was Written By A Woman And Published In Pakistan In 1959

Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire, written in Urdu and translated by the author into English in 1998, “tells a completist and syncretistic version of 2,500 years of history in modern-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh — beginning with the Nanda Dynasty on the brink of defeat by the founder of the Mauryan Empire (323 to 185 BCE), and ending in post-Partition despair. But the novel, barreling through the ages, leads up to 1947 with great purpose, the deep past used to understand the suddenness and chaos of Partition.” – The Nation

Trying To Get One’s Head Around The Idea Of Math As a “Beautiful Art”

That math is an art, that one of its signature qualities is its beauty—these are ideas that continue to be articulated by mathematicians, even as non-mathematicians may wonder what that could possibly mean. I myself become wary when a mathematician or scientist speaks about the beauty of her discipline, since it can seem vague and high-handed, if not wrong. – The Paris Review

Observation Without Judgment: The Hidden Perils Of Machine Learning

Because most machine-learning models cannot offer reasons for their ongoing judgments, there is no way to tell when they’ve misfired if one doesn’t already have an independent judgment about the answers they provide. Misfires can be rare in a well-trained system. But they can also be triggered intentionally by someone who knows just what kind of data to feed into that system. – The New Yorker

Ten Years Ago A Neuroscientist Said He Could Build A Human Brain Within Ten Years. It Didn’t Happen

Henry Markram’s goal wasn’t to create a simplified version of the brain, but a gloriously complex facsimile, down to the constituent neurons, the electrical activity coursing along them, and even the genes turning on and off within them. From the outset, the criticism to this approach was very widespread, and to many other neuroscientists, its bottom-up strategy seemed implausible to the point of absurdity. – The Atlantic