John L. Taylor @johnnylogic@qoto.org

Yoel Roth, the former Head of Trust and Safety for Twitter, shared his thoughts on Musk’s handling of Twitter and the reasons for his departure while speaking at a Knight Foundation conference. He largely just confirms what we all know from following the debacle, though he does demonstrate a good practice for personal and professional life– defining clear boundaries:

“Before Musk took over Twitter, Roth wrote down several commitments to himself that would trigger the decision to quit. One limit, he said — one that was never reached — was that Roth would refuse to lie for Musk. Another limit, one that was ultimately reached and drove his decision to resign, was ‘if Twitter starts being ruled by dictatorial edict rather than by a policy.’”

#Boundaries, #Safety, #SocialMedia, #Technology, #Trust, #Twitter

Key changes in popular music have virtually disappeared in the last fifteen years. This article discusses the factors at play.

#Data, #Music, #PopularMusic

This visualization attempts to represent Elon Musk’s extreme wealth, and it is frankly obscene.

#Inequality, #Musk, #Wealth

One of the great pleasures of my regular park walks is running into wildlife like this barred owl. The photo looks a bit painterly because I had to zoom in on a low-quality camera phone.

#Nature, #Owl, #Walking

“[The] Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities… Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”
– Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas

#Economics, #GDP, #Measurement, #Quote, #Quotes, #Values

As John Tyler Bonner, a professor of ecology put it, slime molds are “no more than a bag of amoebae encased in a thin slime sheath, yet they manage to have various behaviors that are equal to those of animals who possess muscles and nerves with ganglia – that is, simple brains.”

#Biology, #Learning, #SlimeMold

Slime molds are fascinating. They can live as single-celled organisms or work together as a colony that differentiates functions and exhibits learning behaviors without having anything like a brain. Training one slime mold and then allowing it to fuse with another transmits the training with the new slime mold.

#Biology, #Learning, #SlimeMold, #Video

I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think.

There are the rushing waves
mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillions apart
yet forming white surf in unison.

Ages on ages
before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?
On a dead planet
with no life to entertain.

Never at rest
tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the sun
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe.

---
Originally from “The Value of Science,” public address at the National Academy of Sciences (Autumn 1955)

#Feynman, #Poetry, #Science, #Wonder

The first is a reflection on Seduced by Story: the Use and Abuse of Narrative by Peter Brooks. Brooks argues, in short:

“[W]e’ve relied too heavily on storytelling conventions to understand the world around us, which has resulted in a “narrative takeover of reality” that affects nearly every form of communication—including the way doctors interact with patients, how financial reports are written, and the branding that corporations use to present themselves to consumers. Meanwhile, other modes of expression, interpretation, and comprehension, such as analysis and argument, have fallen to the wayside.”

The second, Don’t Treat Your Life as a Project, challenges the value of compressing your life (and self-concept) into a story:

“Projects fail and people fail in them. But we have come to speak as if a person can be a failure—as though failure were an identity, not an event. When you define your life by way of a single enterprise, a narrative arc, its outcome will come to define you…. What makes the narrator’s life worth living is not some grand narrative, running from conception or birth to inevitable death; it is the countless little thoughts and deeds and gentle, joking interactions that occupy day after day after day. If you pay attention… there’s enough in a single lunch hour to fill a book.”

#Books, #Criticism, #Internet. #Narrative, #Philosophy, #Self, #Story

This is a video of a blanket octopus filmed in the ocean depths next to Romblon Island in the Philippines. What a beautiful iridescent creature!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJS2oYvi9CI

#Diving, #Nature. #Octopus, #Video