A land acknowledgment is what you give when you have no intention of giving land. It is like a receipt provided by a highway robber, noting all the jewels and gold coins he has stolen. Maybe it will be useful for an insurance claim? Anyway, you are not getting your jewels back, but now you have documentation. -...
For some people, Disneyland or Disneyworld (or the Disneys in other countries) are like church. "People don't just marry at Disney. They mourn lost relatives at Disney. They go to Disney to celebrate surviving cancer. They go there for one last trip before they die." - CBC
"For some high-level players, even getting the advice of a machine for a move or two at a critical moment is all you’d need to win. Cheaters have been caught sneaking off to the bathroom to check moves on contraband smartphones." - Los Angeles Times
Philip Kennicott: "Authenticating work empowers scholars, and now scientists, and seems to be part of the gatekeeping apparatus that makes museums feel like zones of exclusion, or patriarchy." That's not why we love art. - Washington Post
"People often associate travel with decadent meals, extending their bed times, the attractions and the things you do while you're traveling, really almost at the cost of sleep. Now, I think there's just been a huge seismic shift in our collective awareness and prioritization on wellness and well being." - CNN
In the past 15 years, widely available AI software packages, known as “chess engines,” have been developed to the point where they can easily demolish the world’s best chess players—so all a cheater has to do to win is figure out a way to channel a machine’s advice. - The Atlantic
"Let's take a look at three of these stories — builders of brazen heads and the ruin that visited them — and see if those warnings did us any good." The ill-fated Icarusses in question: Pope Sylvester II, Saint Albert, and Roger Bacon. - Tedium
"To understand disagreements about race, sex and gender dividing the West now, we could do worse than go back to where the sentiment began – with second-wave feminists (in the late) 1960s, and with serious ideas that have been cheapened and weaponised at both ends of the political spectrum today." - Psyche
What we should want is to make outcomes more equal – not opportunity. Antiegalitarians resist calls for equality via the ideology that if people have equal opportunity, then the outcome, whatever it is, is justified. - 3 Quarks Daily
Blindsight is now a well-established clinical phenomenon. When first discovered, it seemed theoretically shocking. No one had expected there could possibly be any such dissociation between perception and sensation. - Aeon
We are strongly influenced by context. From the effect of shadows on how we perceive the brightness of a surface, to our tendency to interpret facial expressions depending on what we think is happening, context permeates all our conscious experiences. - The Guardian
For the Victorians the word “utopian” did not carry the negative connotations of impossibility, naïveté, and dunderheadedness that it does for us now—the writers and thinkers who used that word were for the most part engaged in actual utopian projects, whether literal or literary (or both). - 3 Quarks Daily
The idea that art is only art when it shows evidence of the artist’s handicraft is, at this point, so ludicrous that it barely needs addressing. People who say that anyone can make AI art are the latest in a long line of people who said the same thing about some of the most important art of the 20th...
AI "therapists" are always online, always available, unlike the humans who invented them - but also unlike the humans who trained for years to know how to respond to, say, reports of sexual abuse. "It’s creating the illusion of help," says one ethicist. - Wired
