“Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother’s Day, historically one of the busiest call days of the year,” reported The New York Times back in April. “Verizon added that the length of voice calls was up 33 percent from an average day before the outbreak. AT&T said that the number of cellular calls had risen 35 percent and that Wi-Fi-based calls had nearly doubled from averages in normal times.” – Nautilus
Tag: 09.23.20
How A Viral Video About Math Ignited A Philosophical Debate
Cunningham had unwittingly re-ignited a very ancient and unresolved debate in the philosophy of science. What, exactly, is math? Is it invented, or discovered? And are the things that mathematicians work with—numbers, algebraic equations, geometry, theorems and so on—real? – Smithsonian
Caravaggio As Therapy (Caravaggio?? Yes.)
Teju Cole: “He was a murderer, a slaveholder, a terror and a pest. But I don’t go to Caravaggio to be reminded of how good people are and certainly not because of how good he was. To the contrary: I seek him out for a certain kind of otherwise unbearable knowledge. … I don’t have to love him to know that I need to know what he knows, the knowledge that hums, centuries later, on the surface of his paintings, knowledge of all the pain, loneliness, beauty, fear and awful vulnerability our bodies have in common.” – The New York Times Magazine
An AI Scientist Explains Why The GPT-3 Bot Is So Good At ‘Writing’ Original Text
“It’s far and away the most ‘knowledgeable’ natural language generation program to date, and it has a range of potential uses in professions ranging from teaching to journalism to customer service. GPT-3 confirms what computer scientists have known for decades: Size matters.” – The Conversation
Arts Fundraising Needs To Be Fully Professionalized As A Field
“As many as 44% of fundraisers fell in the profession by accident, with only 5% gravitating to fundraising as an intentional career choice. … We wouldn’t, for example, find a surgeon, accountant or lawyer who said they had got into their role by accident. All those roles would require a set period of study, with key milestones for passing training and competency-based testing. Yet in careers such as fundraising, there is no such pathway.” – Arts Professional
American Museum Of Natural History Fires Curator For Sexual Harassment
Mark E. Siddall, an invertebrate zoologist whose expertise is in leeches, “was fired this month … after the museum found that he had sexually harassed and bullied a graduate student who was doing research under his supervision.” – The New York Times
Juliette Gréco, Legend Of Chanson Française, Dead At 93
“An acclaimed French chanteuse whose sensual stage mystique and doleful voice bewitched audiences for more than six decades and made her an international recording and concert star, … [Gréco] was one of the last links to Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialist intellectuals who made her their raven-haired, black-clad muse in the post-World War II bohemia of Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood.” – The Washington Post
What Virtual Theatre Is Lacking
“When I tune into a play or a devised theater piece, I’m not looking to be dazzled by computer graphics. Clever Zoom backdrops don’t seize my imagination. I want what I always want from the stage: a confrontation with what it means to be human.” – Los Angeles Times
Metropolitan Opera Decides To Cancel Entire 20/21 Season
The decision is likely to send ripples of concern through New York and the rest of the country, as Broadway theaters, symphony halls, rock venues, comedy clubs, dance spaces and other live arts institutions grapple with the question of when it will be safe again to perform indoors. Far from being a gilded outlier, the Met, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, may well prove to be a bellwether. – The New York Times
$40-Million Collection-Care Goal: Brooklyn Museum’s 1st Round of Art Sales Under AAMD’s Relaxed Rules
The American Alliance of Museums’ Code of Ethics for collections, which states that sale proceeds can be used only for “acquisition or direct care of collections” [emphasis added]. Brooklyn’s disposals may serve as a role model for other financially pressed art museums, because it’s a pioneer on this new trail. – Lee Rosenbaum