Eva De Roovere - "Fantastig toch"

Andrew Kipnis - "The ghosts haunting China's cities"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/14/the-ghosts-haunting-chinas-cities-death-dying-funerals-superstition

As China urbanises, its ideas about ghosts are transforming. Only in urban and urbanising China are ghosts equated with strangers. In traditional, rural Chinese society, ghosts were often thought of as relatives or kin who had been mistreated in life and not given a proper burial. The whole purpose of a funeral was to make sure that a dead relative became an ancestor instead of a ghost. When a person's social universe is composed almost entirely of family, then both good and evil must be located within the family. In urban settings, these can be separated: family can be imagined as purely good, while evil is located in strangers.

Arthur C. Brooks - "Overwhelmed? Just Say 'No.'"

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/saying-no-science-happiness/677579/

My problem is twofold. The first is not valuing the future properly compared with the present. Economists and psychologists have long studied the phenomenon of discounting, according to which we value something right now more highly than we value the idea of having the same item in, say, a year's time.

Scott Aarsonson - "Does fermion doubling make the universe not a computer?"

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7705

I wanted to make a deeper point. Even if the fermion doubling problem had been a fundamental obstruction to simulating Nature on a Turing machine, rather than (as it now seems) a technical problem with technical solutions, it still might not have refuted the version of the simulation hypothesis that people care about. We should really distinguish at least three questions:

1. Can currently-known physics be simulated on computers using currently-known approaches?
2. Is the Physical Church-Turing Thesis true? That is: can any physical process be simulated on a Turing machine to any desired accuracy (at least probabilistically), given enough information about its initial state?
3. Is our whole observed universe a “simulation” being run in a different, larger universe?

Crucially, each of these three questions has only a tenuous connection to the other two! As far as I can see, there aren’t even nontrivial implications among them. For example, even if it turned out that lattice methods couldn’t properly simulate the Standard Model, that would say little about whether any computational methods could do so—or even more important, whether any computational methods could simulate the ultimate quantum theory of gravity. A priori, simulating quantum gravity might be harder than “merely” simulating the Standard Model (if, e.g., Roger Penrose’s microtubule theory turned out to be right), but it might also be easier: for example, because of the finiteness of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, and perhaps the Hilbert space dimension, of any bounded region of space.

Editors from N+1 Magazine - "Why Is Everything So Ugly?"

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/the-intellectual-situation/why-is-everything-so-ugly/

Such bad lighting - and such large portions! We exit the movie theatre to a bright realization: our films are exactly as overlit as our reality. As our environment has become blander, it has also become more legible-too legible. That's a shame, because many products of the new ugliness could benefit from a little chiaroscuroed ambiguity: if the world has to fill itself up with smart teapots, app-operated vacuum cleaners, and creepily huge menswear, we'd prefer it all to be shrouded in darkness. For thousands of years, this was the principle of illumination that triumphed over all others. Louis XIV's Versailles and Louis the Tavern Owner's tavern had this in common: the recognition that some details are worth keeping hidden. But now blinding illumination is the default condition of every apartment, office, pharmacy, lanudromat, print shop, sandwich shop, train station, airport, grocery store, UPS store, tattoo parlour, bank, and this vape shop we've just walked into.

Adam Mastroianni - "Good conversations have lots of doorknobs"

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/good-conversations-have-lots-of-doorknobs

Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful ("Why won't he ask me a single question?") while taker has a lovely time ("She must really think I'm interesting!") or gets annoyed ("My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?").

What matter most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affordances. Takers can present big, graspable doorknobs ("I get kinda creeped out when couples treat their dogs like babies") or not ("Let me tell you about the plot of the movie Must Love Dogs...). Good taking makes the other side want to take too ("I know! My friends asked me to be the godparent to their Schnauzer, it's so crazy" "What?? Was there a ceremony?"). Similarly, some questions have doorknobs ("Why do you think you and your brother turned out so different?") and some don't ("How many of your grandparents are still living?"). But even affordance-less giving can be met with affordance-ful taking ("I have one grandma still alive, and I think a lot about all this knowledge she has-how to raise a family, how to cope with tragedy, how to make chocolate zucchini bread-and how I feel anxious about learning from her while I still can").

Marina Dyachenko & Sergey Dyachenko - "Assassin of Reality (Vita Nostra)"

Second book in the vita nostra series.  While not as gripping as the first, still pretty good. More established because you know the world.

Did Portnov regret her fate? Did he feel guilty? It was an interesting question. Does a dictionary pine for a long forgotten word?

Erik Rozing - "Waanbeelden"

Korte verhalen, psychoses etc.  Aardig, maar houdt niet erg vast.

Peter Watts - "Echopraxia (Firefall)"

Prequel to "Blindsight".  Pretty good although I struggle even more actually understanding what's happening. Sometimes the language gets so obscure, so deep-yet-vaguely technical that it's hard to understand. Still a good read.

    "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams"
            William Shakespeare

The Semmelweis reflex or "Semmelweis effect" is a metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms.

The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision.

Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.

Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations-and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren't any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty-first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.

"Rakshi and her kind, they're wise to the old school. You leak footage showing the slants skewering babies and it'll take them maybe thirty seconds to find a pixel that doesn't belong. Discredit the whole campaign. People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe. The great thing about making yourself the villain is nobody's likely to contradict you."

    "I have never for one instant seen clearly within myself. How then would you have me judge the deeds of others?"
        Maurice Maeterlinck

Imagine you're Siri Keeton, he remembered. And gleaned from a later excerpt of the same signal: Imagine you're a machine.
    "It's a literary affectation. He's trying to be poetic. Putting yourself in the character's head, that kind of thing."

Sisu

Harsh Finnish action film, gray and bloody. Good.

Sisu; untranslatable, Finnish word, a Finnish word variously translated as stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness. It is held by Finns to express their national character. It is generally considered not to have a single-word literal equivalent in English (tenacity, grit, resilience, and hardiness are much the same things, but do not necessarily imply stoicism or bravery).

the Beekeeper

Usual terrible Jason Stratham stuff.  Enjoyable for how bad it is.

Wonka

Enjoyable enough musical.  songs not that amazing.  All easy going.