The Morning News

An interesting article at The Verge about a visit to robotics company Engineered Arts, where they're trying to create androids with a human body's dexterity.

(The video shows one of their most advanced machines responding when someone tries to touch its nose.)

As you get used to treating human-like automata as automata, you may slowly find yourself treating humans the same. It’s similar to the dilemma parents have with young children and Alexa. Should they be polite to the AI assistant because it encourages them to be polite to humans? Or is that the wrong way to treat a piece of software coded and controlled by a huge multinational corporation?

As I ponder this, Jackson and I walk past a desk laden with mechanical widgets undergoing stress tests. Pistons have been nailed to a wooden plank while, on a stand, tiny pulleys lift and lower a cup full of screws. And, true to Singler’s suggestion that humans will ascribe a bit of soul to just about anything that moves, I feel passing sympathy even for these tortured components.

Via The Browser

For your weekly soothe, "Joshua Tree, for orchestra," by Georg Friedrich Haas, from its Switzerland premier in 2020.

The watcher of the night sky inevitably looks at groups of stars, and these create pictures in the viewer’s imagination. However, when looking at the same area through a telescope, the sheer number of light spots makes it impossible to recognize structures. Everything revolves around density and imperceptible motion. That’s the phenomenon which I wanted to implement in music.

Via The Rest Is Noise

Gavin Francis: Considering the rise in antibiotic resistance, this "golden era" in medicine may be seen as an age of recklessness.

↩︎ The London Review of Books 3d

In 2021, the CEOs of America’s seven biggest publicly traded health insurance companies together earned more than $283 million.

↩︎ STAT 3d

Why are watches often set to 10:10 in ads? One theory is that the hands then resemble a smiling face.

↩︎ Real Clear Science 3d

One friend’s dad was a former professional drag racer whose compound included an airplane hangar, a forklift, a single-wide trailer, and a giant yard that occasionally doubled as a mud pit where people would race beater cars while crashing into each other.

Drew Millard on The Righteous Gemstones.

↩︎ Dirt

"There is no difference, ingredients-wise, between the Fanta in the fridge at the 7-Eleven and the Fanta of the spirits."

↩︎ The New York Times 4d

With the sunset of the iPod, here are the competitors that didn't make it.

↩︎ Tedium 4d

Divers removed 25,000 pounds of trash from Lake Tahoe, 358.9 pounds of which were inner tubes.

↩︎ San Francisco Chronicle 4d

Either the creator will achieve such a level of success that they’ll no longer feel “relatable” to audiences and must reckon with their persona, the creator will be subject to some level of cancellation for past actions...or the job will create such a pressure-cooker environment that the creator quits altogether—but only for a while.

The brutality of the YouTube celebrity pipeline.

↩︎ Vox

A timeline of the past two years of Covid deaths in the US, alongside how the tolls compare to other large numbers of people.

↩︎ Axios 4d

Just because robots can write poetry doesn't mean it's good, but then that depends on what "good" means to us, exactly.

↩︎ The New Criterion 4d

"The dozen biggest oil companies are on track to spend $103m a day the rest of the decade exploiting new fields of oil and gas."

↩︎ The Guardian 4d

A poem to remind you that being Elon Musk is probably a pretty lonely thing to be.

At least that's what we thought when we read it.

"There Is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier," by Matthew Rohrer, whose A Hummock in the Malookas was selected by Mary Oliver for the 1994 National Poetry Series.

There is absolutely nothing lonelier
than the little Mars rover
never shutting down, digging up
rocks, so far away from Bond street
in a light rain. I wonder
if he makes little beeps? If so
he is lonelier still. He fires a laser
into the dust. He coughs. A shiny
thing in the sand turns out to be his.

The White House has a record collection—Funkadelic, The Sex Pistols—stored offsite. Jimmy Carter’s grandson digs in the crates.

↩︎ Washingtonian 5d

One to three million Uyghurs have been placed in Chinese "reeducation centers." A comic about escaping one just won the Pulitzer.

↩︎ Insider 5d

“Man the pilgrim.” "Man the greedy." "The man who wants to understand." Names our species has proposed for itself

↩︎ Futility Closet 5d

The White House is partnering with internet providers to offer high-speed service—at less than $30/month—to low-income Americans.

↩︎ NPR 5d

Creepy/not creepy? Employers use software to scan corporate Slack chats for signs of burnout and mental distress.

↩︎ Morning Brew 5d

Since the dawn of the internet, forum posters have been striving to find new ways to call each other (and non-posters) obvious, basic, and easily led—in presumable contrast to the alluringly independent person doing the insulting.

The world’s richest man doesn’t seem to know that mocking people for being boring is a trope of message boards.

↩︎ Read Max