Let’s call the thoroughfare I live on Lemon Grove. There are two signs for it, one at each end of our block. Until very recently, one of the signs read, “Lemon Grove Avenue”. The other said, “Lemon Grove Street”.
When someone asks for my address, I usually don’t say either. I just say I live on Lemon Grove. Often, the person will say, “Is there another part of that? Is it a street or a drive or something?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “You can pick if you want.” Continue reading
Two years ago, a poet named Maggie Smith wrote a poem called ‘Good Bones.’ I printed it out, and I find myself reading it over and over again. “The world is at least fifty percent terrible/and that’s a conservative estimate,” Smith writes.
Really conservative. Right now, I’d put the number closer to ninety percent. Nearly everything feels awful. I have a bad case of weltschmerz, a term I just learned that smashes together the German words for ‘world’ and ‘pain.’ According to Joachim Whaley, a German historian and linguist at the University of Cambridge, weltschmerz “is the sense both that one is personally inadequate and that one’s personal inadequacy reflects the inadequacy of the world generally.” He adds, “it is pain suffered simultaneously both in the world and at the state of the world, with the sense that the two are linked.”
Yes, that’s exactly how I feel. My personal failings represent the failings of humanity. And lordy are we failing hard. Continue reading
After seven years living amongst our neighbors to the south, I have recently returned “home” to the US of A. I say “home” because I’m a West Coast kid and now I live in Baltimore, which is nothing like the West Coast. Honestly, I culture-shocked less moving from California to Mexico City.
And also, because it’s nothing like when I left. What the hell did you guys do to the place while I was gone? Can I not leave for seven years without having to worry about the whole country going to pot? This is why we can’t have nice things.
I was driving down the freeway the other day (in an automobile that I actually own, which still feels bizarre) and I noticed a woman in a sedan whose bumper was covered in homemade stickers about impeaching the sitting president, who I’m told is some kind of reality TV star, though I have never seen his show.
I noticed her because it was kind of cute. They seemed to be strips of Xerox paper with messages handwritten on them and taped to her car. It rains a lot in Maryland and I found myself wondering how many times she has to re-apply them. It seemed like a serious commitment to a bumper sticker.
Out of nowhere, this big truck with a “Ducks Unlimited” sticker (off the shelf, not homemade) comes barreling towards her like he’s going to rear-end her but stops short. Then he blares his horn, goes around her, and slams on the brakes. It was scary, even two lanes over. This goes on for a while and then he tears off. Continue reading
The news that Aretha Franklin is gravely ill hit me like a punch in the gut. I’m not sure I realized it until that moment, but she provided an important anthem for my teenage years. Decades later, I can still remember how my high school girls track team would blast Franklin’s rendition of “Respect” on our boom box at the track and on the bus ride to meets. We could never replicate Franklin’s powerful, resounding voice, but we sure tried. I can still remember Jill, a sassy blonde 400 meter runner, standing up in the bus and belting out the lyrics — R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me! — while pointing her finger and sashaying her hips. We’d all join in, at the top of our lungs. The music spoke to us.
The song’s lyrics gave us a language for standing up for ourselves. Aretha helped us find our voice.
I was recently in the car with a friend I’ll call Wild Rose, and we turned her satellite radio to the 80’s/90’s station. As is our tradition, we were singing along to the music when a special song came on — Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves.
Yes, another Aretha Franklin tune… I couldn’t help but sing, and also contemplate how far (as in, not a lot) women had come since Franklin had sang that duet with Annie Lennox.
When that song was popular in my youth, I thought that women were really on the verge of making it. We were going to rule the world, rise to lead big companies and be President soon. Hearing it now made me sad to realize how little progress we’ve really made.
Photo of Franklin at the dedication of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial by DOI.
This post originally ran last summer. This summer, we tried to do better–we only planted two squash plants. Still, we went to dinner at a friend’s house last night and left behind a very large zucchini.
At dinner for my 18th birthday, one of my friends gave me one of those long, narrow posters filled with advice and inspiration that were popular at the time. I don’t have the poster in front of me, but there were things like this: Never wash a car, mow a lawn, or buy a Christmas tree after dark. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.
And then there was this gem: Plant zucchini only if you have lots of friends. Continue reading
August 6-10, 2018
In a personal archaeology, your memories are the artifacts, writes Craig this week. And they are all rooted in place.
Guest Melinda Wenner Moyer did us all a favour and brought together some of science writing’s greats to ask which of their stories we should read—and likely didn’t find the first time.
I went to Mexico for a very short time and recorded some snippets of internal monologue there.
Beavers are the spirit animals of the creature known as the tech bro, says Rose. And it’s not a flattering comparison.
And finally, Sally explains Roko’s Basilisk, “Pascal’s wager for the Soylent set.”
It looks like the Basilisk definitely got him, so it’s worth resurfacing the explainer I wrote earlier this year.
If you’re like most people, you haven’t heard of Roko’s Basilisk. If you’re like most of the people who have heard of Roko’s Basilisk, there’s a good chance you started to look into it, encountered the phrase “timeless decision theory”, and immediately stopped looking into it.
However, if you did manage to slog through the perils of rational philosophy, you now understand Roko’s Basilisk. Congratulations! Your reward is a lifetime of terrorised agony, enslaved to a being that does not yet exist but that will torture you for all eternity should you deviate even for a moment from doing its bidding. According to internet folklore.
The internet has no shortage of BS and creepy urban legends, but because Roko’s Basilisk involves AI and the future of technology, otherwise-credible people insist that the threat is real – and so dangerous that Eliezer Yudkowsky, the moderator of rationalist forum Less Wrong, fastidiously scrubbed all mention of the term from the site. “The original version of [Roko’s] post caused actual psychological damage to at least some readers,” he wrote. “Please discontinue all further discussion of the banned topic.”
Intrigued? Yeah, me too. So despite the warnings, I set out to try to understand Roko’s Basilisk. By doing so, was I sealing my fate forever? And worse – have I put YOU in mortal danger?
This is a science blog so I’m going to put the spoiler right at the top – Roko’s Basilisk is stupid. Unless the sum of all your fears is to be annoyed by watered-down philosophy and reheated thought experiments, it is not hazardous to keep reading. However, although a terrorising AI is unlikely to reach back from the future to enslave you, there are some surprisingly convincing reasons to fear Roko’s Basilisk. Continue reading
If you know anything about beavers, it’s likely that they build dams. Natures engineers, they’re called. Eager beavers are up and at ‘em, ready to build complex structures with the simplest materials in just the right spot to stop a river from flowing. In fact, engineering schools across the country — MIT, Oregon State, American River College to name a few — use the beaver as a mascot for this reason. What better animal to represent future engineers than one that builds?
Well, I recently read a book called Animal Constructions and Technological Knowledge by Ashely Shew that made clear that beavers are in fact the perfect mascot for technologists in Silicon Valley, but not in the way they might like.