Al Parsai

Wittgenstein’s Philosophy Is Daunting. This Biography Makes Him Human.

Wittgenstein’s Philosophy Is Daunting. This Biography Makes Him Human. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/b...

Your Brain’s Memory of a Story Depends on How It Was Told Telling the same story in different ways can change the brain networks that the listener uses to form memories

Telling the same story in different ways can change the brain networks that the listener uses to form memories

Bernard! You are one of only a handful journalists in NZ worth reading. Don’t get too bleak ☺️

How Empathy Became a Threat

How Empathy Became a Threat www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/b...

When I read Philip K Dick at 16 and it blew my mind, I was inspired me to go out and read Berkeley’s _Principles_.

When these guys saw The Matrix at 32 and it blew theirs, they were inspired to go out and ask ChatGPT “generate a five-minute podcast about what The Matrix really means.”

The Natural Philosophy Symposium is underway! I had some idea of live-skeeting, but the real-time event is too absorbing.

www.naturalphilosophyhopkins.org/natural-phil...

Anyway, we've had:

(cont)

A Professor’s Final Gift to Her Students: Her Life Savings

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/11/u...

I went on Piers Morgan to talk with Eric Weinstein. Not a productive conversation, alas.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m7L...

This Therapist Helped Clients Feel Better. It Was A.I. (Gift Article) In the first clinical trial of its kind, an A.I. chatbot eased mental health symptoms among participants. The technology may someday help solve the provider shortage.

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/h...

‘The Phoenician Scheme’ Trailer: Wes Anderson Returns With Father-Daughter Drama, Absurd Action and a Star-Studded Cast Benicio del Toro and Mia Threapleton portray a complex father-and-daughter duo in the trailer for "The Phoenician Scheme," Wes Anderson's new film.

variety.com/2025/film/ne...

(PDF) Stein's Paradox in Statistics PDF | On May 1, 1977, Bradley Efron and others published Stein's Paradox in Statistics | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

With all the bad shit going on, I'm trying to spend more time reading science and math and less doom-scrolling.

Today's diversion was an exploration of the James-Stein estimator, wherein we can get a better joint estimate of the means of three variables than by taking the mean of each variable.

Join us on Wednesday March 26 for the start of our season of American neo noir films of the 1970s. At 7pm, Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE (1973), followed at 9.10pm by Don Siegel’s DIRTY HARRY (1971). Full program details via the link on our bio.
www.melbournecinematheque.org/category/pre...

Been waiting for it.
Thank you 🙏

Worse than I thought! For example:

“John Lilly, a neurophysiologist and psychedelic researcher who once used LSD to investigate dolphin communication, famously abused ketamine until he believed that he was contacted by an extraterrestrial entity who removed his penis.”

"Under Fascism there appear for the first time a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions."
José Ortega y Gasset

Are complex systems predictable? Can we use (un)predictability to measure complexity? Here's a great review by A. Vulpiani and co-workers on how chaos, Lyapunov exponents, information theory and statistical physics get together to answer these questions denali.phys.uniroma1.it/~cencini/Pap...

French polling on Ukraine

UE The Union for Everyone | Members Run This Union

“Want to organize a union? Check out these resources from experienced union leaders:

📌 UE’s 5 Steps to Organizing: ueunion.org
📌 NEA Union 101: nea.org
📌 Organizer’s Handbook: workerorganizing.org
📌 Teamsters Guide: teamster.org
📌 Digital Union Guide: uniontrack.com

#UnionStrong #OrganizeNow”

Elon Musk is a proven danger to good science, but the Royal Society won’t say so. That’s why I resigned | Kit Yates It is vital to act, and I urge colleagues to do so. How can we stand by and laud this man while he undermines scientific integrity? asks academic and author Kit Yates

🚨I promised I'd say more on the Royal Society and Elon Musk, so here it is. 🚨

I've resigned my position as Associate Editor at Royal Society's journal Open Science in protest at their lack of action over Elon Musk.

My op-ed in @theguardian.com
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

In an ideal world, every College and University in the States would have a mass protest and general strike tomorrow.

‘The basis of eugenics’: Elon Musk and the menacing return of the R-word The slur is rooted in the dehumanization of people with intellectual disabilities. Its resurgence threatens the fragile progress we’ve made

‘The basis of eugenics’: Elon Musk and the menacing return of the R-word www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

A Woman Wonders if She’s Human in “I’m Not a Robot” In Victoria Warmerdam’s short film, a series of failed CAPTCHA tests plunges a woman into a strange new reality.

Watch it here:

www.newyorker.com/culture/scre...

The New Yorker Film “I’m Not a Robot” Wins a 2025 Academy Award The Oscar for Best Live Action Short went to Victoria Warmerdam’s darkly comic tale about a woman who fails a series of CAPTCHA tests.

“I’m Not a Robot,” a darkly comic film about a woman trying to convince her computer that she is human, won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short. It is the second film released by The New Yorker to be honored with an Oscar.

INTRODUCTION

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?

Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take.

thebullshitmachines.com

The importance of Taleb’s system From the Fourth Quadrant to the Skin in the Game

The importance of Taleb’s system
From the Fourth Quadrant to the Skin in the Game
branko2f7.substack.com/p/the-import...

As a reminder, the federal funding freeze memo went out on a Monday, and NSF froze their funds on Tuesday. When he says jump, they ask “how high?”, science be damned.

Without a doubt, Fairbanks :)

INTRODUCTION

The #BullshitMachines: a course by @ct_bergstrom and @jevinwest

https://thebullshitmachines.com

White House budget proposal could shatter the National Science Foundation “This kind of cut would kill American science and boost China.”…

The US government has been turned over to a group of extraordinarily ignorant people, and they are working to destroy science in this country. Cutting over half the NSF budget would save < 0.1% of the federal budget, but do incalculable harm. Simply heartbreaking.

arstechnica.com/science/2025...

How do we test the (Gaia) theory of planetary self-regulation (Lovelock-Margulis)? We just started our experimental implementation on bioreactors using #synbio to bring planetary scale to the Lab.Exciting day! @vmaull.bsky.social @ftmaestre.bsky.social @vdlorenzo.bsky.social @jordiplam.bsky.social