Dixie Burge in Big Band Swing:
“Oscar Levant is a character who, if he did not exist, could not be imagined.” These words were used by Levant’s great friend, S. N.(“Sam”)Behrman, to describe him. No truer words were ever spoken! In his lifetime, Oscar Levant flourished as (and subsequently gave up each, one by one) gifted composer, concert pianist, radio personality, movie star, successful recording artist, best-selling author, talk-show host and quiz show panelist. Whew! It was what he described as his Noel Coward Principal he managed “to break off his jobs at a certain interval.” He appeared in thirteen movies, including “An American In Paris”, “The Band Wagon”, “Humoresque” and the George Gershwin biograpy, “Rhapsody in Blue”, in which he played “an unsympathetic part… myself.”
…Levant was an astonishingly gifted concert pianist who, in his heyday of the 1940’s and early-to-mid 1950’s, earned more money than any other pianist in America. In the 1930’s, before he gained his real fame, Levant was dubbed “the wag of Broadway” by Michael Mok in the New York Post. In the 1940’s, at the height of his fame as a wit and bad boy, he was known as “the enfant terrible.” In the 1950’s and ‘60’s, after mental illness and drug abuse had taken their toll, Levant was known as “America’s favorite neurotic.” He sporadically appeared on The Tonight Show with Jack Paar to talk candidly about those subjects, being the first well-known personality to do so. He coined a now-famous phrase: “There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased that line.” Author Christopher Isherwood described Levant as a character created by Dostoevsky someone “completely unmasked at all times.”
…“It’s not what you are – it’s what you don’t become that hurts.” Oscar Levant
More here.
“The big debate among memory theorists over the last hundred years has been about whether human and animal is relational or absolute. The relational school argues that our memory system stores information about the relations between objects and ideas, but not necessarily details about the objects themselves. This is also called the constructivist view, because it implies that, lacking sensory specifics, we construct a memory representation of reality out of these relations (with many details filled in or reconstructed on the spot). The constructivists believe that the function of memory is to ignore irrelevant details, while preserving the gist. The competing theory is called the record-keeping theory. Supporters of this view argue that memory is like a tape recorder or digital video camera, preserving all or most of our experiences accurately, and with near perfect fidelity.
In 2014, Christine and the Queens’ French album début, “Chaleur Humaine” (“Human Warmth”), became a runaway hit; the following year, a self-titled version appeared in the U.S., with many of the lyrics reworked into English. The songs had infectious hooks and shimmering electronic instrumentation. Back then, Letissier used feminine pronouns, but he was already casting off the strictures of gender. The opening song of the début album, “iT,” was a danceable tune in which bright drops of synthesizer rained into caverns of pulsating bass. The lyrics were a priapic fantasy: “I’ll rule over all my dead impersonations / ’Cause I’ve got it / I’m a man now.” I saw Christine and the Queens perform in 2015, in New York, and recall how hard-earned those declarations seemed to be. Christine—petite, lithe, androgynous—seemed at ease in a dark suit, standing at the front of the stage or dancing in a wash of blue light. But there were moments when the line between Letissier’s different selves blurred. During one rapturous wave of applause, he teared up, then apologized for the lapse, admitting, “I wanted to be fierce.”
While GPT-4 does have a radically different architecture from our own biological brains (like being solely feedforward and synchronous, whereas our own organic brains have a lot of feedback and asynchronous processing), AIs are neural networks inspired from biological ones. AIs have a learning rule that changes the strengths of the connections between their neurons, just like us—except their learning rule is applied from the outside by their engineers during a training phase, unlike us, who are forever learning (and forgetting). When artificial neural networks are trained, they often develop the properties we associate with real neural networks like grid-cells, shape-tuning, and visual illusions, which is why researchers in 2019 proposed a “
The Japanese-born British novelist 
One hundred and fifty years ago this month, John Stuart Mill died in his home in Avignon. His last words were to his step-daughter, Helen Taylor: “You know that I have done my work.”
Perhaps the most fascinating thing here is the insistence that singing the song isn’t enough to help the supplicant who is in a crisis situation. It’s also essential to understand what the lyrics really mean. The Derveni author gets most irate when describing those who turn to other musical ritualists for enlightenment, for “they go away after having performed [the rites] before they have attained knowledge, without even asking further questions.”
Imagine you’re in a room with a hundred American young adults, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Over their lifetimes, about 25 of them will have a 
Half a decade ago, chemist Mark Levin was a postdoc looking for a visionary project that could change his field. He found inspiration in a set of published wish lists from pharmaceutical-industry scientists who were looking for ways to transform medicinal chemistry
Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems
If you believe the hype, computers that exploit the strange behaviours of the atomic realm could accelerate drug discovery, crack encryption, speed up decision-making in financial transactions, improve machine learning, develop revolutionary materials and even address climate change. The surprise is that those claims are now starting to seem a lot more plausible — and perhaps even too conservative.
In his now-classic 2018 book,