Young’s goal was not to get Spotify to dump Rogan, as many seem to think. His goal was simply to force Spotify to go on the record, in public, with their explicit support for Rogan, and to raise awareness that their rules — right or wrong — accommodate his show’s commentary on COVID and vaccines.
Month: January 2022
There is lots to know about the brilliantly complex act of teaching and learning. Here is my list of 10 things to know in the plainest terms possible
Alex Quigley provides a reading list of learning and teaching.
Music from your past, present and future
Loved Paul Dempsey’s medely of 2001. I really did not see Chop Suey x Amazing coming.
Whatever the approach of the forecaster, and however sophisticated their tools, the trouble with predictions is their proximity to power. Throughout history, futures have tended to be made by white, well-connected, cis-male people. This homogeneity has had the result of limiting the framing of the future, and, as a result, the actions then taken to shape it. Further, predictions resulting in expensive or undesirable outcomes, like Turchin’s, tend to be ignored by those making the ultimate decisions. This was the case with the nearly two decades worth of pandemic war-gaming that preceded the emergence of Covid-19. Reports in both the US and the UK, for example, stressed the significance of public health systems in responding effectively to a global crisis, but they did not convince either country to bolster their systems. What’s more, no one predicted the extent to which political leaders would be unwilling to listen to scientific advice. Even when futures did have the advantage of taking into account human error, they still produced predictions that were systematically disregarded where they conflicted with political strategies.
The eruption of the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai volcano caused a tsunami, 400,000 lighting strikes and shockwaves that have circled the planet at least twice. Here’s everything we know about the Tonga volcano.
Last fall, I wrote about the concept of “rewilding your attention” — why it’s good to step away from the algorithmic feeds of big social media and find stranger stuff in nooks of…
Continuing the investigation in rewilding our attention, Clive Thompson has created a custom search engine using Glitch for finding weird books in the public domain
If you’re someone who designs learning experiences, I hope you’ll take Wordle as a challenge.
- Can you create a wealth of learning opportunities with only a simple prompt?
- Can you design the activity and support so that everyone learns as much from failure as success?
- Can you offer feedback that goes beyond “right” and “wrong,” that helps learners identify everything right about their wrong answers?
- Can you make room for multiple paths to correctness?
- Can you offer learners a representation of their learning they can share with other people?
Approaching Wordle from the perspective of learning and teaching, Dan Meyer summarises five ingredients that have helped make it work so well.
- Failure is expected.
- Effective feedback.
- Different routes to the same answer.
- Your learning results in a product you can share.
- It’s social
For a different perspective, Daniel Victor provides a profile of Josh Wardle and the meteoric rise of the once-a-day game. While as an alternative, sajadmh has created a version of Wordle in Google Sheets.
Vincent Pankoke ID’d Jewish Council member Arnold van den Bergh as most likely culprit.
Jennifer Ouelette reports on a new threory as to who betrayed Anne Frank’s family. What was most interesting about this was the use of technology to capture new links that may have been used.
As is standard with cold cases, all of these theories and more were considered and carefully studied by Pankoke and his team. They enlisted the services of an Amsterdam-based data company called Xomia, which provided the foundation for a web-based AI program developed by Microsoft. “[I]t would enable the team to marshal the millions of details surrounding the case and make connections among people and events that had been overlooked before,” Sullivan wrote.
We often worry that AI and automation will take our jobs — that software will do work so efficiently and cheaply that corporations will chuck their humans aside. That certainly can happen; bank…
Clive Thompson provides examples of the way in which AI has had some jobs suck. This includes food delivery drivers working for a phantom boss, with transcriptions AI takes the good work and leaves humans with the crap, while Amazon has automated things so much that workers are unable to stop for the toilet.
Partly because there is no way to satisfy these queries, professional historians of Christianity — including most of us working within the secular academy — tend to treat the question of whether Jesus existed or not as neither knowable nor particularly interesting. Rather, we focus without prejudice on other lines of investigation, such as how and when the range of characteristics and ideas attributed to him arose.
Allie Gemmill, Author at Atom Insider | Discover Movie News & Exclusive Articles from atomtickets.comWhen author J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973 at 81, he left behind a family, an academic career, plenty of friends, and esteemed peers. But what the world remembers of Tolkien to this day are his Lord of the Rings novels, along with The Hobbit and The Silmarillion.
While legions of fans keep discoveri…
Biopics are an interesting genre. It is intriguing to read Allie Gemmill’s discussion of J. R. R. Tolkien’s life and some of the facts that were left out for the sake of narrative, such as Tolkien and Bratt marrying. I guess we cannot include every detail of life, but such creations are often just as interesting in what they leave out as what they include.
Another fact is the origin of the idea of ‘Cellar Door’:
The fantasy writer J. R. R. Tolkien, who was also a philologist, might well be the linguist she had in mind. He mentioned the idea of cellar door’s special beauty in a speech in 1955 and is often given credit for it. Other supposed authors abound; the story is tangled. But Tolkien, at least, can be ruled out as the originator. He was, after all, just 11 years old in 1903 when a curious novel called “Gee-Boy” — which also alludes to the aesthetic properties of cellar door — was published by the Shakespeare scholar Cyrus Lauron Hooper. Hooper’s narrator writes of the title character: “He even grew to like sounds unassociated with their meaning, and once made a list of the words he loved most, as doubloon, squadron, thatch, fanfare (he never did know the meaning of this one), Sphinx, pimpernel, Caliban, Setebos, Carib, susurro, torquet, Jungfrau. He was laughed at by a friend, but logic was his as well as sentiment; an Italian savant maintained that the most beautiful combination of English sounds was cellar-door; no association of ideas here to help out! sensuous impression merely! the cellar-door is purely American.”
It wasn’t the first major music festival in Australia but for much of its 22 years Big Day Out was the most important.
I love Robert Moran’s point about every Big Day Out you attend blending into one over time:
It might be the lingering festival drought brought on by the pandemic, it might just be my age (geriatric millennials, put your hands up), but every Big Day Out I ever went to has suddenly blurred into one mega-festival. In my head, I swear I saw New Order and Sleater-Kinney perform on the same day, but Wikipedia says that’s impossible. (An abundance of Smirnoff Ices, the signature festival drink, may also be to blame for my recollection.)
When I listened to the Inside the Big Day Out podcast, I found myself going back to the posters to remember which years I went. Although I can remember moments, such as Dave Grohl coming across to the second stage as we waited for Nine Inch Nails or Paul Dempsey questioning why we were watching Something for Kate when Red Hot Chili Peppers were playing, which years these were kind of escapes me. One other thing that I cannot remember is how I actually survived the whole day. I was not drinking alcohol, but I actually cannot remember drinking anything. To be honest, I cannot remember eating anything either.
Memories truly are a strange thing.
Eternals is a 2021 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics race of the same name. Produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, it is the 26th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The film is directed by Chloé Zhao, who wrote the screenplay with Patrick Burleigh, Ryan Firpo, and Kaz Firpo. It stars an ensemble cast including Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Harish Patel, Kit Harington, Salma Hayek, and Angelina Jolie. In the film, the Eternals, an immortal alien race, emerge from hiding after thousands of years to protect Earth from their ancient counterparts, the Deviants.
I watched Eternals and could put my finger on how it felt different to other films within the Marvel universe. Joel Hodge captures this difference through an exploration of the humanity, metaphysics and love.
In this “good faith”, Marvel reveals its basic metaphysical commitments and vision, though it does not provide deep philosophical justifications. The unanswered question for Marvel — like other fantasy and science fiction mythologies — is: What is the origin and source of such love? Why does love seem, to us moderns, as the most natural order for life and the universe? Here it is inescapable that the question of a loving God must be addressed. And among all the world religions, it is Christianity that presents this vision of a loving God most clearly. “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 12) is stated in the New Testament with such conviction and clarity.
These structures are a sci-fi solution to the problem of getting objects into orbit without a rocket—but you don’t want to be under one if the cable snaps.
Rhett Allain discusses the physics involved in building a space elevator and what would happen if it were to break.
The need for this 800-year-old invention was so strong that two people came up with it at the same time. It’s as useful today as ever.
Anna Kelsey-Sugg and Julie Street discuss Dennis Duncan research in the index. He explains how the practice evolved separately in Paris and Oxford during 1230. Although the two inventions were not connected, they were both associated with the rise of the university and the lecture.
In the early 13th century, two things happened to create the perfect time for the invention of the index.
One was the creation of universities. “Not coincidentally, Paris and Oxford are the places where the universities have just arrived,” Dr Duncan says.
The other thing was the arrival of preaching or mendicant religious orders, and a new idea to have friars live among the people in big cities to preach and “stop the flock from going astray”.
Duncan also makes the case for human curation and says that although the idea of the index is central to the web, it is also something that cannot be completely automated. To demonstrate this, he provides two index for his book, Index, A History Of to demonstrate the differences.
This has me wondering where this all I wonder where this sits within Chris Aldrich’s research into the history of commonplace books.
My point is simple: give the ‘underprivileged’ access to the cultural wealth that has long been the exclusive purview of the elite, and you will have given them the tools with which to subvert the social hierarchies that have kept them down. Beyond equipping them with marketable skills and the means for economic self-advancement, this deeper work of education is the most valuable gift that colleges and universities can give to young people. It is also the most valuable contribution they can make to a democratic society.
Fiction can serve as a window into multiple realities–to imagine different futures or understand our own past. This hour, author Dave Eggers talks tech, education, and the healing power of writing.
I am not necessarily sure if the podcast really addressed the question that got me in. However, it did provide an interesting insight into Dave Eggers that I did not know, including his work with 826 Valencia and giving children more of a voice in the world. A couple of observations that stood out was that often a memoir can feel like chaos in your own head, but look like clarity when written on the page. Also, he ended the conversation with a sagely piece of advice:
If you want to be a writer, start listening
This blogging reflection on writing a song might go nowheres, fast, as the song might go, too. Or the song might become a demo for some other project. Or I might like it all enough to make a recording with instrumentation.
Who knows. I don’t.
That’s one of the beautiful things of songwriting, though — the slippery qualities that allow some songs to remain in the mix of regular playing and others, that just disappear.
Through a series of posts, Kevin Hodgson explores his process of songwriting. Starting from the initial experience of stumbling through an idea:
Processing through the mess of drafting and editing:
it’s almost as if someone else is making up the song and I am just paying attention. I let myself wander. I trust my mind. Which is weird when you’re in that moment. Yet it’s powerfully interesting magic, too, as the writer in me is separated from the listener in me which is separated from the musician in me.
From the outside, it’s a mess. For me, it’s the thing, the process where everything is made visible to me as a songwriter.
All along with a whole different story going on in the margins. Then comes the initial demo, which is then stretched out and built on top of.
I found Hodgson’s idea of recording a ‘demo’ interesting.
I’m always anxious about my singing voice, which is one reason why I always am ready to call anything I record a “demo” and cover myself from criticism (that I can’t sing as well as I should be able to, given how many years I’ve been at this).
With technology as it is these days, it feels like the ‘demo’ is as much about mindset as anything else. I was interested in listening to The Story of 1999 podcast series and the way in which Prince recorded everything with a thought that it might be the take. He then covered up the bits that he did not want with explosions.
One of the things that intrigues me about taking a song from its core elements and building it out as the different journeys it can take. For example, in the documentary Class Albums: The Joshua Tree, Brian Eno threw around the faders on the mixing desk and demonstrated how the track (might have been Street with No Name, can’t quite remember) could have been a Depeche Mode song. This is one of the things that always interests me with the Song Exploder podcast.
In addition to such changes, in an age of so much abundance, there is also power in actually removing something.
I do think that all the work I did in polishing up the song in the production version in my, ahen, “studio” (ie, corner of my room) was worth it — it forced me to listen to the song closely, day after day, and to tweak the lyrics and timing of the voice, and all that planning and thinking and tinkering informed even this acoustic version, even though it very basic in nature.
Epic History TV’s guide to building the perfect castle is useful in that it capture many of the different variables. So often guides in textbooks will provide an ideal that does not exist. This video provides various examples to help illustrate the different models.
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