Writers need inspiration somewhere in life, and for many that inspiration comes from their pet cats.
This is a running series where we post pictures of famous writers with their feline companions--the cute, the cuddly, the creepy. And that's just the writers.
Today: Philip K. Dick
Considering Philip K. Dick's stories have been made into movies like Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Total Recall, there's a strong chance this cat is just some sort of android that had vengeance and murder on its mind. Look at it. You can't tell me that cat wasn't wondering about murder.
"Strong" might be a slight exaggeration. But the dusty and old wooden cabinet used to search by title or subject or author, a system that seems anachronistic by today's modern world, still exist in parts of America.
According to the Bangor Daily News, an estimated 25 of the 265 libraries in the state of Maine operate off card catalogs. No electronic filing system to be had, yet no worries either. People get by just fine.
Fort Kent--a tiny town against the Canadian border (and terminus point for US Route 1)--still uses the catalog cards at their library, yet patrons don't mind. "Look at how many books there are here," Louis St. Clement, a visitor told the Daily News. "(The librarian) knows each and every one and where to find it."
Alas, even cozy relics have to make way for technology, so even Fort Kent is slowly changing. For two years, the staff of two librarians have been digitally cataloging every book and periodical and research material, one at a time.
"It's been a labor of love," assistant librarian Cheryl Pelletier told the Daily News. "At one point our computer crashed, so for a year we wrote all the information in notebooks to be entered into the computer later."
Yeah--the computer crashed.
Maybe keeping the card catalog around might be a good idea. Just in case.
The creators at Satellite Studio created OpenStreetMap Haiku, a site that whips up a brand new haiku for every single address, neighborhood, town, etc. you place your cursor over.*
As the creative team explains in a blog post:
"Looking at every aspect of the surroundings of a point, we can generate a poem about any place in the world. The result is sometimes fun, often weird, most of the time pretty terrible. Also probably horrifying for haiku purists (sorry)."
Inspired by artist Naho Matsuda's EVERY THING EVERY TIME project, which used data points of one city to create short poems, the Satellite Studio team followed suit--albeit on a massive global scale.
The myriad of nearby data points from a selected spot include grocery stores, schools, bus stop locations, etc., to generate the haiku. They even include current weather and time of day, which leads to a potentially new haiku again and again for a selected spot.
Some randomly selected locations checked just now:
Boston, MA @ 28 State Street: A bird in the tree, Meet at Court Street, 1 The blurs of lifetimes
Paris, France @ 3 Avenue de l'Opera: White paint on concrete Quite chilly Dear You
Tokyo, Japan @ JP Tower: Commuting back home A vacant lot Warm air from the subway entrance
Checking local places I personally know, OpenStreetMap Haiku generated a variety of poems suggesting again and again that it was "a sad day."
Either the haiku generator is feeling down in the dumps or I need to reevaluate where I live.
*It works well in populated nations. But some random sparse locations, like Micronesia, weren't worth a haiku according to the map. Let's have a moment of silence for Micronesia then.
You know how Hollywood always creates some movie regarding artificial intelligence, where a robot or software starts becoming a little too smart for its own good? Usually chaos ensues, humanity is on the brink, and a great time was had by all.
That's all fiction. But we're off and running with it in reality now, too.
Mark Zuckerberg is obsessed with artificial intelligence and investing in its development. As a result, Facebook researchers created sophisticated software designed to have two programs speak to each other in English.
While the two AI programs used English words, their respective sentences were nonsense. An example of their conversation:
Bob: “I can can I I everything else.” Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”
The kicker? The computers understood was the other was saying. Researchers? They have no idea what the programs meant and don't know the sort of linguistic code being used by each. As a result, the software was shut down quickly.
Don't look so casual, pal! Why so cryptic??
A Georgia Tech researcher at Facebook's AI Research (FAIR), Dhruv Batra, told Fast Co. Design "[t]here was no reward to sticking to English language," and that "[a]gents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves. Like if I say 'the' five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands."
Computers using codewords between themselves that we can't understand--sounds safe to me!
Wha--what are you saying, computer?
"Our interest was having bots who could talk to people," FAIR scientist Mike Lewis told Fast Co. Design. The end result was that Facebook researchers required typical human English be used by the software in the future.
While scientists seemingly paused with trepidation at having computers speak in code to one another, others don't have issues with humanity being left in the dark. Mark Wilson, senior writer at Fast Co. Design, wants the software to have free reign. "[A]t the same time, it feels shortsighted, doesn’t it? If we can build software that can speak to other software more efficiently, shouldn’t we use that? Couldn’t there be some benefit?"
Wilson admits that humans won't know how AI thinks, their thought processes, and how their intelligence might evolve, but if we allow AI to speak in ways humans might never decipher "[I]t offers us the possibility of a more interoperable world, a more perfect place where iPhones talk to refrigerators that talk to your car without a second thought."
Thanks, Mark, but I can survive without my phone talking to my fridge. I really don't need an update that I'm out of mustard before both AIs decide to overthrow humanity.
The fridge was reallllly irked I didn't buy the mustard.
Nobel Prize Laureate J.M Coetzee was once a computer programmer back in the 1960s who worked on designing the United Kingdom's Atlas 2 supercomputer. (It was the '60s. Picture the cut-and-paste set of the original Star Trek with glowing buttons. That was how snazzy the Atlas 2 was. Just swap out Spock for Coetzee.)
According to University of Texas research, while developing the computer Coetzee spent his evenings placing algorithms into it to select words and create repetitive lines to construct "computer poetry." What we end up with explains the 1960s in a nutshell.
"OUTSPREAD LEAF PLANT THE GRAVEDIGGER"
"GLACIAL TAILOR MIRROR THE LEMNISCATE"
"SAD SPADE JOIN THE ENTROPY"
"FRENETIC TETANUS DEADEN THE DOCUMENT"
No offense, but this computer sounds like it needs a good scotch and a couple of anti-depressants to lighten up. Sylvia Plath comes across as rainbows and sunshine compared to this.
She's getting irked because she saw someone do something nice.
Ayn Rand is either a philosopher, a genius, and a skilled writer,
OR
She's a selfish, frightening, and a miserable hack at making books.
Either way, she's as popular as ever.
The way you view her says as much as your view on literature as it does your own personal moral compass. While Rand wrote two novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, it is her creation and development of a philosophical movement of Objectivism--featured in her two books--that keeps her memory alive 35-years after her death.
Did you just ask her for a cookie? Did you??
While her philosophy's scope darts in a dozen directions, one area stands forth today. In layman's terms, Objectivism argues that people should be selfish for their own personal betterment, and that personal self-interest in the only proper moral action. In essence, Objectivism bristles at altruistic behavior, and finds nothing good in doing good deeds for others. Want to eat that last cookie instead of sharing it? Objectivism would tell you to have it all for yourself, then buy a new bag of Oreos and refuse to share them with your friends or loved ones. Keep those cookies away from the hungry people most, too.
Put another way, it's a fancy way to explain being greedy.
A how-to guide on how to be mean!
Jonathan Freedland, a columnist with London's Guardian newspaper, focused on how Rand's philosophy has been embraced with open arms by the current La Casa Blanca administration and executives in Silicon Valley, with believers like Donald Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, House Speaker Paul Ryan, the founder of Uber, Travis Kalanick, and even the deceased Steve Jobs, who called Atlas Shrugged one of the "guides of his life." It seems Ayn Rand is more popular in death than she ever was in life.
Says Freedland:
"No wonder the tech companies don’t mind destroying, say, the taxi business or the traditional news media. Such concerns are beneath the young, powerful men at the top: even to listen to such concerns would be to betray the singularity of their own pure vision. It would be to break Rand’s golden rule, by which the visionary must never sacrifice himself to others.
[...]
Such an ideology will find a ready audience for as long as there are human beings who feel the rush of greed and the lure of unchecked power, longing to succumb to both without guilt. Which is to say: for ever."
If, by chance, you feel the allure of Ayn Rand and Objectivism slowly wooing you, like you wouldn't mind being selfish and only praising yourself, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver had a quick comedic segment a couple seasons ago asking why Ayn Rand was still a thing:
Why IS Rand a thing? Because selfishness is a thing, and selfishness is easy.
That said, slogging through a thousand pages of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead is hard. Be selfish and refuse to subject yourself to them.
The official website of the White House, henceforth known as la Casa Blanca on this humble page, has long allowed a translation from the English language into Spanish. This might be because over 41 million Americans are native Spanish speakers, with an additional 11.6 million native English speakers also fluent in the romance language.
Alas, in the last week, the official Casa Blanca website has stopped allowing a Spanish translation for no apparent reason other than it's not English. President Donald Trump even once said during a primary debate his preference. "This is a country where we speak English," Trump said. Except, you know, for where the country speaks Spanish. (Don't let anyone know highway signs in Vermont sometimes show kilometers! Quebec's influence has run amok!)
When initially asked about it, Casa Blanca spokesperson Sean Spicer said the website was in flux. "We are continuing to build out the website," Spicer said. "We've got the IT folks working overtime on that now." Naturally, a complete removal of Spanish makes sense. Those verbs are so complex!
A few days later, la Casa Blanca claimed they were going to bring back a translation eventually. "We're just building up," said Helen Aguirre Ferre, director of media affairs, while still emphasizing the need to build an established website over two decades old. "It's just day two on the job," she said earlier in the week.
Now, as of day nine on the job, nothing still has changed.
At least one of these people wants to read more. (Maybe.)
iQuanti, a data-driven digital marketing company, combed results for the most popular resolutions for 2017 searched for on Google's search engine.
According to the results, the desire to read more was #7 on the list of most popular results. Numbers 1-through-6?
1.)Get Healthy: Yes, the nebulous and ambiguous "get healthy." You might believe "get healthy" to be going to the gym five days a week and eating more vegetables, while Steve in Sheboygan, WI, might be steadfast that getting healthy is a six-pack of Miller Lite and a bag of Tostitos for breakfast.
2.)Get Organized: It seems all of those hoarding shows on TV have scared the bejeezus out of Americans.
3.)Live Life to The Fullest: If you're sitting there thinking, "Yeah, but what does that actually mean on a broad scale?" Good news--you're right! It's really just a wannabe tag line to a self help book on the discount rack at Barnes & Noble.
5.)Spend Less/Save More: Apparently buying American Girl dolls is not a sound investment strategy.
6.)Travel: Going two towns over to visit the new Arby's that just opened seemingly doesn't qualify.
And this bring us to #7 on the list. Of all the things that Americans searched Google for regarding resolutions, the seventh most popular matter was to read more.
There were 4,746,560 searches about reading more. This sounds absolutely fantastic until you learn this was actually down 5.63% from last year's 5,029,790 searches.
Oh. That's sort of a downer.
Well, I guess there goes my resolution to be more positive in 2017.
Serena Williams became engaged to Alexis Ohanian, the cofounder of Reddit the other day, and announced it to the world via a poem on--surprise!--Reddit. Somewhere, Twitter is pissed.
Specifically, Williams announced on the forum "ISaidYes" (aka: r/isaidyes), where brides and grooms share stories of how their own proposals occurred. If you're happily married, by all means, enjoy the tenderly sweet tales and occasional videos and photos. Alternatively, if you're frustratingly single, I'd recommend having a bottle of cheap bourbon nearby before perusing.
As for Williams and her poem, it is as follows:
I came home
A little late
Someone had a bag packed for me
And a carriage awaited
Destination: Rome
To escort me to my very own "charming"
Back to where our stars first collided
And now it was full circle
At the same table we first met by chance
This time he made it not by chance
But by choice
Down on one knee
He said 4 words
And
r/isaidyes
This engagement doesn't look like it's off to a flying start. She's already coming home late? That doesn't happen until at least a solid five years into any healthy relationship, never mind before you're actually engaged.
Like many tech organizations, Google is working on artificial intelligence (AI). And like any good science fiction movie, the AI developed so far is cold, calculating, and incapable of showing much human emotion. Kind of like your ex-significant other.
Google wanted to change this. The Brain Team made their AI read 2,865 romance novels in hopes it would develop a more sensible diction to its tone of voice--or at least an appreciation for book covers with bare chested men. Next, the team then gave the AI two short sentences, one beginning, one end, and asked its computer child to complete the story and concept in fewer than thirteen of its own sentences.
What we get is poetry that even Walt Whitman pauses over.
Take this poem:
there is no one else in the world. there is no one else in sight. they were the only ones who mattered. they were the only ones left. he had to be with me. she had to be with him. i had to do this. i wanted to kill him. i started to cry. i turned to him.
It's always a good laugh whenever AI casually writes the sentence "I wanted to kill him." As if every dystopian nightmare just didn't become a little more possible. This is The Matrix without Keanu Reeve's stilted delivery.
Then there's this nugget:
he was silent for a long moment. he was silent for a moment. it was quiet for a moment. it was dark and cold. there was a pause. it was my turn.
This is after it read romance books, too! Imagine what vivid little love chestnuts might have come out if the AI read horror stories, war epics, or anything involving Twilight.
Google says they're still in the early stages of creating a natural speech pattern for its AI, although it's doubtful homicidal computers ever need to have casual conversational skills.
It was the week of the National Spelling Bee, when every awkward 6-to-14 year old who will be your future boss got on stage and impressed everyone with knowledge of obscure Latin-by-way-of-Middle-French words. This led everyone to question their own personal spelling abilities--and that's where Google came in.
New Hampshire can't spell "diarrhea," nor can Arizona.
Florida struggles with "tomorrow," potentially because half of its residents might die before then.
South Dakota trips up on "gray," as the cold, desolate misery of living there infects their spelling. Michigan has "gray" concerns as well. But, you know. Michigan.
Minnesota wonders how to spell "broccoli," a mythical vegetable believed by locals to exist in faraway warmer climates.
Texas can't spell "niece," nor Nevada "cousin." Two words tripping up thousands of married couples in each state since the 1850s.
And then there's Massachusetts...which can't spell itself. That's right. The state with the most letters in its name, haphazardly thrown together as if blended in a Cuisinart, is troubling its own citizens to such a degree that people turn to Google for help.
Ohio doesn't have such problems since saying the state's name out loud practically spells itself. But Ohio can't spell "banana," so what do they know?
According to the company's website, "Mathpix is the world's first technology that can read pictures of your handwritten math. Simply take a photo, crop your equation of interest, and you instantly get solutions and plots." And, as the app's lead developer told the website Motherboard, the app's "algorithms get smarter over time as we get data from users."
This is crippling news to math nerds everywhere who for years have run illicit black market homework "help" in the shady corners of high schools and your lesser known Panera Bread locations. How will the geek shakedown continue if math illiterates can turn to an app now?
Sure, jocks and drama club enthusiasts alike will still fail their math finals when all technology has to be put away. But let's focus on the positive here! The math nerd monopoly has been broken!
Does your mom or dad wear a monocle or own a Bentley [but only with a man servant behind the wheel]? Did your grandfather have a closet full of top hats and smoking pipes? Do you know the elderly nanny that raised you better than your mother and father? Does your name sound like a piece of furniture from Pottery Barn? Congratulations! You won the life lottery, and odds are you're employed in a small segment of career fields that desire such a background.
Facebook once operated similarly as well. As a smaller, promising upstart years ago born of Harvard's bosom, Facebook focused on hiring from a pool of candidates largely out of Ivy League schools, with the occasional Stanford thrown in for good measure. But today, as powerful companies focus solely on pedigree regardless of ability, the pool has drained thin. Very thin. This has led Facebook to expand their own talent pool search.
"We recruit from three hundred schools," Facebook vice president Janelle Gale mentioned at a San Francisco educator conference recently, all while shuffling her abacus and looking to be awarded a gold star. "We want to hire people who’s need to learn is greater than their need to be right," Gale said. What does that even mean? I don't know, but it's exciting in its ambiguity!
"We want people who are open and receptive. We want to make sure people are in jobs they are good at and enjoy," she continued. People who are open and receptive and willing to accept being wrong when told so? Sounds like me as a bagger boy at a grocery store when I was fourteen. Where do I sign up?
Gale never specifically detailed the alleged three hundred schools Facebook recruits from, but Forbes analyzed LinkedIn's searchable database and found "at least 40 Facebook employees attended Arizona State, while nearly as many hail from Cal State, Chico. The University of Oregon has at least a dozen alumni at Facebook; Texas Tech can count six."
That's a steep drop off. Texas Tech counts six and we're only four schools into counting. Incuding the Ivy League and a handful of other overly connected schools, we still have a list of roughly 280 schools to flesh out. So how thin is this Facebook job search?
This is all related to what Lauren Rivera wrote late last year in the Harvard Business Review, studying how elite corporations have an incestuous relationship with elite schools, creating a cycle of elitist entitlement. "[Elite professions have] on-campus “school lists” [with] two tiers, based largely on prestige," Rivera notes. "So even before applications are received, employers allocate jobs based on alma mater, skewing opportunities toward (and against) students from particular campuses [...] This leaves most students from nonlisted schools out of the game."
Phew. At least we now know Facebook's hiring ambiguity wasn't done out of nobility but just pure necessity. The plebeian masses thought they might have a chance for a second, and that can't happen.
Who knows better what will become a bestseller? A human being or computer?
Inkitt is a website and publisher that believes computers know best. Kind of like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, except less easily offended and more interested in your penchant for sassy beach reads. Inkitt suspects that by using various algorithms they can track readers' collective behavior patterns, at least when it comes to the behavior of purchasing books.
Writers can publish passages and chapters of their books in the community forums of Inkitt and receive feedback from members. Inkitt then uses a proprietary algorithm to detect the likelihood of the "stickiness" of pieces, as the website's co-founder and CEO Ali Albazaz once described it.
Using this method, and through Tor Books publishing, Inkitt will release the first book using a data-driven focus. Bright Star, a young adult story, will challenge the algorithm next year.
The Most Dangerous Writing App isn't shy about patting itself on the back with self-naming itself, and it's not shy about ruining an artistic moment of inspiration that requires a person to pause and ruminate on the possibilities of phrasing.
But that's not the point.
The Most Dangerous Writing App is an open source app that uses a fogged screen and a countdown clock, all in hopes of forcing one to write. If you pause for more than five seconds, everything you wrote is lost, deleted, gone. The fogged screen serves as a focus to simply write as well, forgiving typos and grammar in favor of decidedly placing words on screen--even hot messes in a hazy condition.
You're allowed to endlessly backspace, if you even have an idea where you are on the screen (it's fogged, remember?), but at some point you don't focus on the snafus. You channel your inner James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and slap wildly at the keys in hopes that some nugget, some string of words, a phrase, a sentence sounds like poetry, the beginning of a novel, the ending of an opus, the breaking of your heart.
This is like when a supermodel tells you it's okay to be ugly. It's easy when things worked out beautifully for you.
Bill Gates is the supermodel of this story. It's one thing if someone is telling you to go to college, but another when that person is one of the richest people in the world and a college dropout.
"I think the value of getting a great education - that is going to college - is easy to underestimate. The most interesting jobs require a college education. The STEM related jobs are probably the most interesting although they are not for everyone. The value of staying curious - reading a lot and learning new things even after college is also underestimated."
It's easy to underestimate college when you dropped out and still made $50 billion.
I personally enjoy wondering why STEM jobs are the most interesting though. It seems to matter who's delivering the message. I assume it's because Ernest Hemingway didn't share his opinion on life and interesting career choices and tell us that gunning down water buffalo as a career big game hunter is where it's at.
You really need to have ADHD to feel like Twitter is long-winded. Regardless, Matchbook, a literary magazine, is looking for story submissions that max out at 70 characters--half the length of a full tweet.
The inspiration for the stories comes from those tiny three line Google ads that are freakishly customized to your browsing habits usually populating the side of various websites. You know when you're browsing the web some night and you search for airfare to Trinidad, then look for an oatmeal raisin cookie recipe, and then later--magically--see an advertisement for some Trinidadian bakery that sells oatmeal cookies? Like your computer was reading your mind, but in a slightly confused way? Yeah--those Google ads.
Instead of a too-close-for-comfort ad, Matchbook wants a story that reads like an ad. They're very specific about the number of characters per line, too. The title/first line should be no more than 25 characters, while the second and third lines should be no more than 35 characters. In essence, it's as if Google ads had a haiku baby.
In case you're wondering, and I know you are, I just searched for Trinidad and oatmeal raisin cookies, but came across a recipe for Trinidad coconut bread pudding instead. This finally confirms that Trinidad has been a secret bread pudding hot spot that we've all quietly suspected for years.
Mathematicians are an exciting bunch. Nothing thrills them like numbers, decaffeinated green tea, and moss. So finding the biggest known prime number raises the hair on the back of their necks.
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS...yes) is a computer collective from around the world that has sought out uninterruptedly (for over 20 years!) the largest known prime numbers.
It's the number 274,207,281– 1. Also known as some number that's 22 million digits long (really) that will never affect your everyday life (really). This new finding is so important that it was actually discovered in September by the computers, but no one noticed until recently when routine maintenance was performed. I don't know about you, but I haven't been this excited since I last blinked my eyes about 2.67 seconds ago. The chills!
Jesus's footprints are made up of miracles and not carbon, I assume.
Everything we eat, drink, use, drive, and operate leaves a carbon footprint. The question is how much of a footprint? Are we talking Bigfoot footprints? Jesus walking in the sand footprints? Global-panic-because-we're-all-going-to-die footprints? Just how big?
Someone recently asked NPR's All Tech that question, specifically about the footprint of a text message. There's a solid chance that if you're reading this you're going to send dozens, if not hundreds, of text messages today. So what sort of damage are you really doing besides being antisocial?
According to Berners-Lee, assuming we only focus on the actual text message itself and the ability to transmit it (thus, ignoring the manufacture and distribution of the phone to begin with), each text leaves behind 0.014 grams of CO2e. Are you writing 1,000 texts a day? Perform the math accordingly. Berners-Lee notes that in 2010 the estimate for all the world's text messaging carbon footprint was 32,000 tons of CO2e per year. It's probably edged up a bit in the ensuing six years.
That sounds like a lot, but the world produces 50 billion tons of CO2e per year. Writing texts is barely a drop then. So how does this compare to other forms of communication?
Text message: 0.014 grams of CO2e per text
Email: 4 grams of CO2e per email
Letter: 140 grams of CO2e per letter (assuming the letter weighs 10 grams, is made of recycled paper, and is later recycled again)
Berners-Lee says it would take 10,000 texts to equal the carbon footprint of a letter.
But admit it--you're really concerned about one thing here: Does your addiction to emoji use affect the text message carbon footprint?
The answer is no. It's the same as any other character typed into the text box.
MIT loves themselves time capsules. LOVES them. There are at least eight known--and untold unknown--time capsules buried on the Cambridge, MA, campus, and the latest has just been discovered. Construction on a foundation for a new science building unearthed the discovery buried in 1957, which was generally forgotten despite an abundance of historical documentation about its existence. Until now, that is.
Unlike most time capsules that tend to be opened while someone is still alive from when it was buried, this latest time capsule has specific instructions listed not to be opened until 2957, a thousand years after its burial. To ensure everything contained within survives that long, a special glass container was constructed. Argon gas was pumped inside before sealing, as well as a small amount of carbon-14--which will allow scientists in the future to discern the container's age should it ever crack open in the next millennium and the contents destroyed.
The contents are generally known. The container is clear, and now that it has been brought back to light, Douglas and others have looked in the records to see what was included. Among the items includes synthetic penicillin, newly minted coins from the First Bank of Boston, and a cryotron, which Tech Talk noted was “the tiny unit invented at MIT this year which will replace complex tubes and expensive transistors in electronic computers of the future.”
Now, some students are proposing--wait for it--another time capsule to be buried alongside this one once construction is completed. And then in 50 years it, too, will be unearthed during a construction project.
