Without god ...

Yours truly is an atheist. Have been for well over 60+ years as needing god to be ethically honest and caring is not necessary IMHO, a notion shared by Camus, Einstein and George Carlin, among significant others too numerous to count. With this being said, the move by Harvard to make Greg Epstein, an atheist, as chief Chaplin, is a smart move by bringing atheism as a viable alternative to the dark vagaries of magic and religion in the year of our lord 2022.

Last month, Harvard University named a new Chief Chaplain: Greg Epstein, an atheist. As reported in The New York Times,1 Epstein, the campus humanist chaplain, was unanimously elected to “coordinate the activities of more than 40 university chaplains, who lead the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and other religious communities on campus.” Perusing the hundreds of reader comments generated by the Times article revealed broad support. While some questioned whether an atheist could be a “real” chaplain, others suggested that appointing a humanist was a clever move—a way to have a neutral figure in a position of power.

Yet, across a chasm of difference, both reactions share a problematic assumption: that humanist commitments—by virtue of omitting belief in God(s)—involve no basis for religious authority, indeed no commitments at all. In stark contrast, the Harvard students interviewed about Epstein praised his ability to support an authentic quest for meaning without belief in God. “Being able to find values and rituals but not having to believe in magic,” A.J. Kumar, former president of a Harvard humanist group, was quoted as saying, “that’s a powerful thing.” But is it really possible to have meaning (the values and sense of purpose) without magic (the supernatural beings and metaphysics)? Are the commentators right to treat humanism as an absence of meaningful commitments, versus a commitment to humanistic sources of value and meaning?

Camus said it best in L'étranger

Comme si cette rage aveugle m'avait lavé, me débarrasse de l'espoir ; pour la première fois, dans cette nuit pleine de signes et d'étoiles, je m'ouvrais à la bienveillante indifférence du monde.

As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the benign indifference of the world.

 

Cover of the first edition

Fixit Girl

A mysterious programmer comes to the aid of her boss in solving a wicked problem with code. Enjoy.

Random Shots ...

Working Hard/Rev II

Taking it easy :)

11:00 PM

Barn Doors

Waxing Gibbous

Stratus Clouds

Stratus II

Sturgeon Moon

Kn U REED THIS?

Let's think about this. It's akin to the fact young people have a problem with the notion of time ...

We won't talk about stick shift cars but we could, right?

There's a cost to all of this as the question to ask is, what happens if the power goes out or one needs to be able to read cursive written information articulating something really important residing on paper. Disquieting don't you think? As often stated in BRT, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, something readily seen in the pix seen above when young people cannot discern the data contained within said images.

Illustration by Katie Martin. Source: Library of Congress.

GEN Z NEVER LEARNED TO READ CURSIVE

How will they interpret the past?

It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren’t very helpful to him, because of course he couldn’t read cursive.

Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and flourishes. Amused by my astonishment, the students offered reflections about the place—or absence—of handwriting in their lives. Instead of the Civil War past, we found ourselves exploring a different set of historical changes. In my ignorance, I became their pupil as well as a kind of historical artifact, a Rip van Winkle confronting a transformed world.

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past," 

 - George Orwell/1984

11:00PM ...

 

11:00PM ...

Why this image when this blurb's about AI, the open ended tech never to be fully understood as it takes real time software to react to realtime input, something not possible unless realtime evolving software is rewriting itself in realtime in order to cope with said realtime input. With this image as indirect reference, it stands to reason people who build this code are getting rather nervous to say the least as said software is evolving at speeds beyond the kin of man. With this being said, anybody who states AI will never become sentient assumes everything will remain as it is. Well, we all know how turns out, right? 

To answer why 11:00PM is the cover page for this blurb centers on the fact the lack of sanguine vibes of AI as a possible dark harbinger of the future reflects, indirectly, with the quasi dark nature of this piece although the summer night in question, when this pix was taken, was truly stellar as it was the prelude to a hurricane fortunately passing us by back in 2021. :)

After years of development, AI is now driving cars on public roads, making life-changing assessments for people in correctional settings, and generating award-winning art. A longstanding question in the field is whether a superintelligent AI could break bad and take out humanity, and researchers from the University of Oxford and Google Deepmind have now concluded that it’s “likely” in new research.

The paper, published last month in the peer-reviewed AI Magazine, is a fascinating one that tries to think through how artificial intelligence could pose an existential risk to humanity by looking at how reward systems might be artificially constructed.

To give you some of the background: The most successful AI models today are known as GANs, or Generative Adversarial Networks. They have a two-part structure where one part of the program is trying to generate a picture (or sentence) from input data, and a second part is grading its performance. What the new paper proposes is that at some point in the future, an advanced AI overseeing some important function could be incentivized to come up with cheating strategies to get its reward in ways that harm humanity. 

“Under the conditions we have identified, our conclusion is much stronger than that of any previous publication—an existential catastrophe is not just possible, but likely,” Cohen said on Twitter in a thread about the paper. 

"In a world with infinite resources, I would be extremely uncertain about what would happen. In a world with finite resources, there's unavoidable competition for these resources," Cohen told Motherboard in an interview. "And if you're in a competition with something capable of outfoxing you at every turn, then you shouldn't expect to win. And the other key part is that it would have an insatiable appetite for more energy to keep driving the probability closer and closer."

Verticality

Sisyphus had a better deal :)

Sisyphus had a better deal as he had no pointy haired boss there to mock him. :)

Cheating death twice has consequences ...

Then I witnessed the torture of Sisyphus, as he wrestled with a huge rock with both hands. Bracing himself and thrusting with hands and feet he pushed the boulder uphill to the top. But every time, as he was about to send it toppling over the crest, its sheer weight turned it back, and once again towards the plain the pitiless rock rolled down. So once more he had to wrestle with the thing and push it up, while the sweat poured from his limbs and the dust rose high above his head. (Odyssey, Book 11:593)

A detail from a black-figure amphora depicting the punishment of Sisyphus in Hades as Persephone looks on. 530 BCE. (Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich)

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch ... ever.

Hemp yet again ...

Cannabis plants grow at a CBD oil hemp marijuana farm in Colorado. 

Photograph by Jeremy Poland, Getty Imagess

For over 50,000 years, hemp, an edible and medicninal plant able to grow almost anywhere, has been used to make fiber and construction materials far longer than the rise of civilization. Now, this wonder plant may help to save the planet from the ravages of civilization itself.

 

Hemp stem showing fibers

Beyond hype: It’s a microbe killer. A thirst quencher. A textile that uses a fifth the water of cotton. Hemp also helps build cars and brew beer. And it’s a protein bomb, Nat Geo writes, with pasta, tofu, and various meat substitutes being developed from hemp. (Pictured on top, Cannabis plants grow at a CBD oil hemp marijuana farm in Colorado.)

It's about time ...

The Spiral Jetty ...

 

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970). Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA. Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water. 1,500 ft. (457.2 m) long and 15 ft. (4.6 m) wide. Collection Dia Art Foundation. Photograph: William T. Carson, 2020 © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York

Poster child 101, the Spiral Jetty, located in the Great Salt Lake, shows, in indirect fashion, the increasing impact of GW writ large.

In 1972, just two years after it was completed, “Spiral Jetty” all but disappeared from view. Robert Smithson’s seminal earthwork was created at a time when the water levels of Utah’s Great Salt Lake were unusually low, making it easy to discern the sculpture’s vortex-like coil of black basalt rocks. But when heavy rain battered the area, the lake swelled and engulfed the spiral. It was the start of a three-decade-long period during which “Spiral Jetty” was largely submerged, save for a few brief reappearances; the waters at one point covered the rocks by 16 feet.

50 years later ...

But what Smithson, who died in 1973, could not have anticipated was that the Great Salt Lake, amid record drought, would shrink by two-thirds. Since 2002, the spiral has been bone-dry, its 6,650-ton mass of rock situated atop cracked, sun-scorched earth. 

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970). Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA. Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water. 1,500 ft. (457.2 m) long and 15 ft. (4.6 m) wide. Collection Dia Art Foundation. Photograph: Matthew Coolidge, 2002 © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York. 

Suffused with light ...

Nighthawks Edward Hopper 1942

Suffused with light is the core essence of Edward Hopper's work, an elusive quality only a few great painters possess.

Hopper’s understanding of the expressive possibilities of light playing on simplified shapes gives the painting its beauty. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. 

Exactly

A partner in crime ...

Jason Allen’s A.I.-generated work, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” took first place in the digital category at the Colorado State Fair.Credit...via Jason Allen

You knew this was going to happen, it was just a matter of when in terms of man working with AI to generate art, in this case, Jason M. Allen working with MidJourney to create a righteous piece, seen above, titled “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial”. Yours truly is an artist and is starting to dabble with Dall-E 2 to create work because it matters not what tool you use, it matters if you can create something of value using said tool, which, IMHO, Jason certainly did. 

As often stated in BRT, it's just the beginning as AI 's now creating work on its own so get used to it, I have.

Thus far, AI has a thing for eyes ...