Just when I thought the nerds of Silicon Valley couldn’t get any weirder, news of a super-secret brain-trust of highly credentialed scientists and academics committed to a near-religious belief in the reality of UFOs starts making the rounds.

One of these cranks, a guy who goes by the name of “Tyler D.,” actually “believes that his time working for the space program, absorbing the emanations of strange and powerful machines, altered the ‘frequencies’ of his body and made it receptive to the communications of nonhuman intelligence.”

It gets weirder.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Well, this is depressing:

Most of us now discriminate against members of the other political side explicitly and implicitly—in hiring, dating, and marriage, as well as judgments of patriotism, compassion, and even physical attractiveness, according to recent research.

It gets worse: Nearly half of Democrats say they’d be unhappy if their child married a Republican, 15 percent of Republicans think the country would be better off if large numbers of Democrats “just died,” and 20 percent of both parties agree that many members of the other side “lack the traits to be considered fully human.”

I don’t understand. And I mean that I literally don’t understand. What kind of a person are you who demonizes another for the crime of holding an opinion different from your own? A terrible person, that’s what.

If that describes you, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate your priorities. You can start by learning from the residents of Watertown, New York.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

In War and Peace – “the greatest of all novels” – Tolstoy “shows us how our minds work even though memory omits what makes no sense.” Gary Saul Morson explains:

When Prince Andrei’s wife is dying in labor, he waits in the next room listening to her pitiful, animal screams. He feels unendurable guilt as she suffers. At last he hears the shriek of an infant, and his first thought is “why have they taken a baby in there?” He is so focused on his wife’s suffering that he forgets—only for a split second, of course—why she is suffering. He will never remember this absurd first reaction, immediately corrected; once again, only Tolstoy would notice it.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Can we talk about the word belated?

Here’s how The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (fourth edition) defines it: “Having been delayed; done or sent too late….”

And here’s what The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has to say: “Delayed; tardy; coming (too) late.”

So when you’re a dick and you miss someone’s birthday, don’t say, “Happy belated birthday!” The birthday wasn’t late; you were. The correct way to handle the situation, then, is to say, “Belated happy birthday!” And then to not be a dick the next time it comes around.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

Good news! Artificial intelligence will never replace artists. “A machine could not surpass us massively in creativity,” writes Harvard philosophy professor Sean Dorrance Kelly, “because either its achievement would be understandable, in which case it would not massively surpass us, or it would not be understandable, in which case we could not count it as making any creative advance at all.”

Bad news! It appears to be getting easier to create deepfakes, which involves machines learning by example. “In a grim reflection on our species,” writes Ben Sixsmith, “this tends to involve anonymous netizens creating videos in which the faces of celebrities have been grafted onto the bodies of porn stars.”

So, basically, ScarJo was right. The Internet is pretty much just “a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Did you know that there are hierarchies to cool? In a brilliant and incisive (not to mention hilarious) essay over at the Sydney Review of Books, Chris Fleming breaks it down for us:

The Velvet Underground are probably cooler than the Ramones, but the Ramones are much cooler than Pink Floyd; Pink Floyd are cooler than Coldplay (the name is misleading), and Coldplay are cooler than Nickelback. And there are bands even less cool than Nickelback, although I can’t bring any to mind right at this minute.

He also knows a thing or two about the “Aspiring Cool of Instagram,” whose “Romantic Injunction” is “Watch me not caring about whether or not you watch me (but please do watch me).” And then there’s the humblebrag: “Look at me being incredibly successful even though I’m surprised and amused by this attention and – believe me – I’m not even slightly invested in it – even so, check me out. (Repeatedly if you have to. I do.)”

Cool, it turns out, is elusive. “We can’t reliably predict its path,” writes Fleming, “because it never announces its itinerary.” So I guess Tower of Power was on to something way back in 1973:

You done even went and found you a guru
In your effort to find you a new you
And maybe even managed 
To raise your conscious level
As you striving to find the right road
There’s one thing you should know
What’s hip today
Might become passé

Finally, a warning: “To compound difficulties…cool is largely an unspeakable art and its artisans will rarely admit to practicing it – to being cool, that is. Yet the converse isn’t necessarily true: denying that you’re cool doesn’t make you cool.”

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If you’re in the midst of an existential crisis right now, you’re probably not going to want to watch this. If, on the other hand, you think stars and planets and light years are cool – and you don’t mind feeling a little insignificant – check it out.

So. Still think everyone is special?

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Juho Sarvikas is the chief product officer for HMD Global, the company producing “classic” mobile phones like the Nokia 3310. In 2019.

Why is anyone still making dumphones, you ask? Because people are buying them. “Digital well-being is a concrete area now,” says Sarvikas. “When you want to go into detox mode or if you want to be less connected, we want to be the company that has the toolkit for you.”

So, basically, when you’re ready to say “No more” to our over-reaching tech overlords, there’s a $1 billion company ready to monetize your decision.

Surprisingly, though, that’s not the most worrisome thing about this article.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment