Marc David Baer at The Guardian:
On the southern steppe of Ukraine in 512BCE, the envoy of Scythian King Idanthyrsus delivered a frog, a mouse, a bird and several arrows to Darius, mighty king of Persia. Then, without saying a word, he departed. Darius was confident the nomadic Scythians were pledging their allegiance. But his adviser understood the intended meaning. Unless the invading Persians turned into frogs and dived into the water, became mice and dug underground, or turned into birds and flew away, they would be riddled with deadly arrows as trespassers in the nomads’ land. Darius withdrew his soldiers.
For two millennia gigantic imperial armies were unable to defeat much smaller numbers of elusive horse archers who utilised tactics of surprise, feigned retreat and ambush rather than engaging in set-piece battles. In this book, which flows as fast as the nomads’ horses galloped, emeritus professor of ancient history Kenneth Harl chronicles the empires that roamed across the Eurasian steppe from ancient times to the death of Tamerlane at the beginning of the 15th century.
more here.
Has any man in history loved anything as much as Orson Squire Fowler loved the octagon? Fowler, born in Cohocton, N.Y., in 1809, published a book in 1848 arguing that all houses should be eight-sided. He influenced a (failed) utopian community in Kansas called Octagon City, delivered an estimated 350 public orations on octagon supremacy and built himself a 60-room octagonal palace in upstate New York.
“Streaming” music. Sounds so simple, so peaceful, right? If you’re listening closely, though, you know that contemporary pop is a much choppier body of water, oceanic in its breadth and volume. In little sips and big gulps, I’ll be keeping track of my new faves with the following list of 2023’s best recordings — organized chronologically by release date — and I’ll be updating it continuously throughout the year.
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Here/After The Art is an attempt to elevate a discussion and research the future of art as it has never been done before. We ask creators to produce NFTs that make predictions on the future of art. This project invites diversity across continents and creative disciplines. For example, in addition to visual artists we will also reach out to renowned filmmakers, musicians, and designers to create a vibrant mix of personalities who have a voice in what art has been, is, and especially what it will be. We recognise and appreciate that all this takes place in the age of emerging technologies including AI, NFT, and in the new spaces such as web3, metaverse and the decentralisation of culture.
Reality is different these days. It isn’t just that we have the tools to experience reality differently, or augment reality, by affixing a Meta Quest headset or an Apple Vision Pro to our skulls. It isn’t just that we have the ability to quantify reality, through smartwatches and heart rate monitors and step counters and sleep trackers, or that we have the ability to manipulate people’s perceptions of reality, through social media filters so ubiquitous that there is now a whole cottage industry of plastic surgery devoted to making people’s fleshly faces match the selfies they post on Instagram. Nor is it just the fact that our social world includes the conversations we have with virtual personal assistants like Siri and Alexa, whose soothing voices greet us when we come home, or remind us of the weather.
No audio recordings of Walter Benjamin have survived. His voice was once described as beautiful, even melodious—just the sort of voice that would have been suitable for the new medium of radio broadcasting that spread across Germany in the 1920s. If one could pay the fee for a wireless receiver, Benjamin could be heard in the late afternoons or early evenings, often during what was called “Youth Hour.” His topics ranged widely, from a brass works outside Berlin to a fish market in Naples. In one broadcast, he lavished his attention on an antiquarian bookstore with aisles like labyrinths, whose walls were adorned with drawings of enchanted forests and castles. For others, he related “True Dog Stories” or perplexed his young listeners with brain teasers and riddles. He also wrote, and even acted in, a variety of radio plays that satirized the history of German literature or plunged into surrealist fantasy. One such play introduced a lunar creature named Labu who bore the august title “President of the Moon Committee for Earth Research.”
LASTING FOR THREE STRAIGHT DAYS,
Humans are bioelectrical beings. The collections of cells that make up tissues and organs communicate using the language of voltages and electric fields. This electrical code is produced by specialized ion channels and proteins imbedded in cell membranes. 
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When I was a graduate student at the start of the 1990s, I spent half my time thinking about artificial intelligence, especially artificial neural networks, and half my time thinking about consciousness. I’ve ended up working more on consciousness over the years, but over the last decade I’ve keenly followed the explosion of work on deep learning in artificial neural networks. Just recently, my interests in neural networks and in consciousness have begun to collide.
Justifiably, the book opens with sensory biology. Before we understand what is in the mind of any organism, Chittka argues, we first need to understand the gateways, the sense organs, through which information from the outside world is filtered. These are shaped by both evolutionary history and daily life (i.e. what information matters on a day-to-day basis and what can be safely ignored). Chapter 2 deals with the historical research that showed that bees do have colour vision and furthermore can perceive ultraviolet (UV) light. Many flowers sport UV patterns invisible to us. Remarkably, UV photoreceptors are found in numerous insects and other crustaceans whose shared ancestry goes back to the Cambrian, predating 
“You know, I don’t really talk to that many other novelists,” James McBride told me. “I don’t spend a lot of time with other writers.” It was a statement that explained a lot, while at the same time shooting a pet theory out of the water. If McBride’s most recent books—the celebrated