Imad Khan at CNET:
Jokes, sarcasm and humor require understanding the subtleties of language and human behavior. When a comedian says something sarcastic or controversial, usually the audience can discern the tone and know it’s more of an exaggeration, something that’s learned from years of human interaction.
But PaLM, or Pathways Language Model, learned it without being explicitly trained on humor and the logic of jokes. After being fed two jokes, it was able to interpret them and spit out an explanation. In a blog post, Google shows how PaLM understands a novel joke not found on the internet.
More here.
In all of physical law, there’s arguably no principle more sacrosanct than the second law of thermodynamics — the notion that entropy, a measure of disorder, will always stay the same or increase. “If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations,” wrote the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington in his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World. “If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” No violation of this law has ever been observed, nor is any expected.
Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and the 
THE CARTHAGINIANS WERE
On 4 March, Christopher Jackson tweeted that he was leaving the University of Manchester, UK, to work at Jacobs, a scientific-consulting firm with headquarters in Dallas, Texas. Jackson, a prominent geoscientist, is part of a growing wave of researchers using the #leavingacademia hashtag when announcing their resignations from higher education. Like many, his discontent festered in part owing to increasing teaching demands and pressure to win grants amid lip-service-level support during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Doocot or dookit is the Scottish term for a dovecote or columbarium; a structure built to nest and breed domesticated pigeons. Some doo men keep their champion pigeons in doocots cut into attic spaces or adapted garden sheds, but on the schemes I lived on, we had neither attics nor gardens, and so the men who wanted to keep pigeons built their lofts out on any piece of unclaimed ground. Aesthetically they have little in common with the traditional stone dovecotes you might find on the grounds of a manor house. The doocots I remember were monolithic towers, twenty feet tall, and they were built from salvaged materials: old Formica tabletops, screwed to corrugated iron and offcuts of MDF. It gave most doocots a rickety charm, which the men tried to disguise by painting the whole thing a uniform colour.
In an afterword to Far from the Light of Heaven, Thompson asks himself if he’s writing space opera — “a conversation my editor, my agent, my cat and I had many times” — and if so, what would the tropes of that subgenre bring to his work. As a practicing psychiatrist who somehow manages another full-time career as a novelist, Thompson has shared 
A UK politician recently suggested that people could combat the cost-of-living crisis by working more hours or getting a better job. This is one more in a long line of instances where societal problems have been framed as being solvable by individual actions. One of the earliest I can remember was when Tory minister Norman Tebbit, following a claim that the riots of 1981 were caused by high unemployment, cited his own father as a salutary example of self-responsibility. ‘I grew up in the 30s with an unemployed father,’ he said. ‘He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it.’ More recently British TV personality Kirsty Alsop recommended that young people start saving earlier and cut out the fancy coffees, gym membership and Netflix subscriptions as a way of combatting unaffordable house prices.
My mom always told me if I didn’t separate my lights from my darks, I would ding my white laundry. I always thought this was nonsense. And, in fact, in the fancy washing machine in the apartment I shared with my husband, this was nonsense. Oh, I was absolutely reckless! I would toss bright red shirts in with white sheets and black jeans in with cream-colored t’s. And it was always alright in the end. The whites stayed white, and the colors did not fade. I was confident in my millennial assessment that separating the lights from the darks was simply Gen X anxiety, old wisdom, no longer applicable, démodé even. 
Fifty years ago this July, newspaper headlines shocked the conscience of the nation with a disturbing story of racial bias and medical mistreatment in one of America’s most honored institutions. The alarming Associated Press story first appeared on July 25, 1972 in the Washington Star. The front page headline, “Syphilis Patients Died Untreated,” caught readers attention. They’d go on to read that the goal of a strange, non-therapeutic experiment conducted by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) was not to treat the sick or save lives, but “determine from autopsies what the disease does to the human body.”
Kandis Williams. Triadic Ensemble: stacked erasures, 2021.
