Who’s the Cutest Little Dolphin? Is It You?
Sometimes, they catch (dolphin) mothers and calves together, and the animals exchange signature whistles throughout the process. By analysing 19 such moments, recorded over 34 years, Sayigh’s student Nicole El Haddad showed that mothers raised and widened the pitch of their signature whistles when calling to their calves, just as humans do when talking to their babies.
Know Better (feat. CKay, Seun Kuti & Egypt 80') by Janelle Monáe
New album from Janelle Monáe. Always a pleasure.
Nimona
Nimona is such a terrific novel and I’m really optimistic the film will do it justice. Not long till we find out.
Inflation Is Being Driven By Corporate Price Gouging
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and Common Wealth think tanks have shown that profits were up 34 percent at the end of 2021 compared to pre-pandemic levels and that nearly all of this increase in profits was due to just twenty-five companies.
using the latest available figures for the largest 350 companies on the London Stock Exchange, recently showed that profit margins for the first half of 2022 were nearly double — 89 percent higher than the same period in 2019 before the pandemic.
The chief economist of UBS Global Wealth Management, Paul Donovan, stated that “Much of the current inflation is driven by profit expansion,” adding, “Typically, one would expect about 15 percent of inflation to come from margin expansion, but the number today is probably about 50 percent.”
The very rich are getting much richer extremely quickly. And entirely at our expense.
The tenth anniversary of Iain Banks’ passing.
Ten years on: Iain M. Banks (1954-2013)
“When in Rome; burn it.” The State of the Art (1991).
Ten years ago. Shit.
You Can’t Understand Modern China Without Looking at the History of Land Reform
I always end my courses on modern China with two final messages for my students: go to China, and when you go, be sure to visit the countryside.
That second message is much needed. Today we know China as a nation of sprawling megacities. My adopted hometown of New Orleans wouldn’t even crack the list of the top 150 Chinese cities by population. But there still exists ample beauty in a vast, diverse countryside, especially in remote villages that have managed to find a way avoid the sledgehammer of modernity.
The Chinese ‘Across the Spider-Verse’ poster is all kinds of amazing.
What languages dominate the internet?
Rest of World turned to W3Techs, a web-scanning firm based in Austria, to count all of the publicly accessible web addresses on the internet to get hard numbers on the discrepancy. Our data shows that a little more than half the sites on the web use English as their primary language. That’s a lot more than one might expect, given that native English speakers only make up just under 5% of the global population. Meanwhile, Chinese and Hindi are the second and third most-spoken languages in the world, but the same scan found they account for just 1.4% and 0.07% of domains, respectively.
Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’ | Financial Times
“There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the ’50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.”
So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics.
“It’s genuinely amazing that . . . these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text,” he says. But, in his view, that doesn’t make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, “but no one wants to use that term, because it’s not as sexy”.
The AI pivot
Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI
“Current AI feels like something out of a Philip K Dick story because it answers a question very few people were asking: What if a computer was stupid?”
Fun and thorough article linking the AI and crypto hucksters. It’s deeply depressing to see people falling for the AI-booster’s bullshit, just months after the collapse of the crypto-bullshit industry.
Shall we learn from our mistakes? No! We’ll just be fooled time and time again.
