Wednesday, March 8, 2023
The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.
For instance, a young child acquiring a language is developing — unconsciously, automatically and speedily from minuscule data — a grammar, a stupendously sophisticated system of logical principles and parameters. This grammar can be understood as an expression of the innate, genetically installed “operating system” that endows humans with the capacity to generate complex sentences and long trains of thought.
— Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull, "Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT," The New York Times
Tuesday, March 7, 2023
Do not underestimate objects, he advises... Do not leave objects out of account. The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up mostly of objects.
— David Foster Wallace via Tim Carpenter, To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die
Monday, March 6, 2023
Shangri-La
— Ski Run
Sunday, March 5, 2023
A hike.
— Lily
Saturday, March 4, 2023
The point is that for Harry Callahan photography has been a way of living—his way of meeting and making peace with the day.
— John Szarkowski via Tim Carpenter, To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die
Friday, March 3, 2023
“Sure, that’s my grandma from the photo album,” Noë explained in our most recent conversation. “But if you take it out of the context of the photo album and put it on a wall in a gallery, what the heck is it anymore? It’s no longer clear what it is, what it is trying to show or what it is for — what it is a tool for doing.”
— Blake Gopnik, "The Supreme Court May Force Us to Rethink 500 Years of Art," The New York Times
Thursday, March 2, 2023
I don't want to make plop art - sculpture that just gets plopped down in places. I wouldn't want to litter every corner of the world with my sculpture.
— Rachel Whiteread via @postul8_
Wednesday, March 1, 2023
Finally: according to Heidegger, "We are what we say to one another."
— Tim Carpenter, To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Movements are lies that are agreed on.
— @jerrysaltz
Monday, February 27, 2023
These books are 57mm high and 47mm wide – about the same length as a mouse's tail. In around 1800, the publisher John Marshall came up with the idea of helping children learn by reading books to their dolls.
— @britishlibrary
Sunday, February 26, 2023
As a threshold matter, the photograph is persuasive because it is constructed of the same stuff as every-day experience.
— Tim Carpenter, To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die
Saturday, February 25, 2023
Most young people now watch TV with the subtitles on
18-24yr olds: 61%
25-49yr olds: 31%
50-64yr olds: 13%
65+yr olds: 22%
— @esaagar
Friday, February 24, 2023
I change titles pretty often.
— H (I might have misheard him)*
Thursday, February 23, 2023
The most dramatic photos from the train derailment in #eastpalestine Ohio weren't taken by photojournalists.
— @patrickwitty
Wednesday, February 22, 2023
As his [Gingrich's] second wife would say of him, "He has to be historic to justify his life."
— Neal Gabler, Against the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Rise of Conservatism, 1976-2009
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
Human history has been going on for over 2,000 centuries. It's hard to wrap your head around. And this is, I mean, even that's just the end of a very long road. The 100,000 years before that, it's not like that was that different. So there's been people like us, that have emotions like us, that have physical sensations like us, for so, so long.
— Tim Urban, "Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #360"
Monday, February 20, 2023
The sculpture, entitled Balloon Dog (Blue), was one of a limited run of 799 editions (now 798). The piece was fully insured and now the shattered pieces are waiting to be evaluated by an art insurance expert.
Some collectors have since offered to buy the broken pieces of the sculpture 🎈🐕
— @streetartglobe
Sunday, February 19, 2023
And I had this conversation with him. I said, "Why do you think there's ever gonna be a final theory? Why should there ever be a final theory? I mean, what does that mean? Do physics departments shut down? We've solved everything? And, you know, doesn't it seem that every time we answer some old questions we'll just find new ones and that it will just keep going on forever and ever?" And he said, "Well, that's what they used to say about the Nile. They were never gonna find the end." Then one day they found it.
— Andrew Strominger, "Andrew Strominger: Black Holes, Quantum Gravity, and Theoretical Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #359"
Saturday, February 18, 2023
I think those guys sending me the postcards knew all along I was tryin' to fool them by gettin' all this, so they fooled me by givin' it all to me.
— Samuel Shem, The House of God
Friday, February 17, 2023
Each of us has forgotten almost every last bit of our direct experience; so little of what we've done and seen and read and heard remains available to us.
— Tim Carpenter, To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die
