Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Picture this: the setting sun paints a cornfield in dazzling hues of amber and gold. Thousands of corn stalks, heavy with cobs and rustling leaves, tower over everyone—kids running though corn mazes; farmers examining their crops; and robots whizzing by as they gently pluck ripe, sweet ears for the fall harvest.

Wait, robots?

Idyllic farmlands and robots may seem a strange couple. But thanks to increasingly sophisticated software allowing robots to “see” their surroundings—a technology called computer vision—they’re rapidly integrating into our food production mainline. Robots are now performing everyday chores, such as harvesting ripe fruits or destroying crop-withering weeds. With an ongoing shortage in farmworkers, the hope is that machines could help boost crop harvests, reliably bring fresh fruits and veggies to our dinner tables, and minimize waste. To fulfill the vision, robot farmworkers need to be able to traverse complex and confusing farmlands. Unfortunately, these machines aren’t the best navigators. They tend to get lost, especially when faced with complex and challenging terrain. Like kids struggling in a corn maze, robots forget their location so often the symptom has a name: the kidnapped robot problem.

More here.

The Heart of Herakles

Lying under the stars,
In the summer night,
Late, while the autumn
Constellations climb the sky,
As the cluster of Hercules
Falls down the west
I put the telescope by
And watch Deneb
Move toward the zenith.
My body is asleep. Only
My eyes and brain are awake.
The stars stand around me
Like gold eyes. I can no longer
Tell where I begin and leave off.
The faint breeze in the dark pines,
And the invisible grass,
The tipping earth, the swarming stars
Have an eye that sees itself.

by Kenneth Rexroth
from News of the Universe, by Robert Bly
Sierra Club Books, 1995

Madeleine Connors in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

John Waters was kicked out of NYU film school for smoking marijuana. Even that incubator for original filmmakers couldn’t handle him. Now, among people I know, announcing yourself as a graduate of NYU film school is a shorthand for being an uppity, social-climbing brat (I should know, I’m one of them). It’s so much cooler to be John Waters. He’s a degenerate and an iconoclast, making even the most daring artists look like uninspired conformists. In fact, I don’t know anyone who dislikes John Waters. If I did, I would think it was an easy tell that they were boring and had bad sex.

Almost an hour into Multiple Maniacs, the protagonist—a murderous drag queen—gets raped by a giant lobster. The scene plays for slapstick laughs, and in the screening at the Academy Museum on September 21, the audience was cackling. (If a filmmaker attempted this today, he would naturally be crucified, but Waters pulls it off.) The 1970 film has not lost its sting, even decades later. Waters manages to violate every taboo.

More here.

Andrew Deck in Rest of World:

A string of job postings from high-profile training data companies, such as Scale AI and Appen, are recruiting poets, novelists, playwrights, or writers with a PhD or master’s degree. Dozens more seek general annotators with humanities degrees, or years of work experience in literary fields. The listings aren’t limited to English: Some are looking specifically for poets and fiction writers in Hindi and Japanese, as well as writers in languages less represented on the internet.

The companies say contractors will write short stories on a given topic to feed them into AI models. They will also use these workers to provide feedback on the literary quality of their current AI-generated text.

More here.

Zofeen T Ebrahim in The Guardian:

Deep in Pakistan’s countryside, Sindhi Chhokri and her teenage brother Toxic Sufi are raising a few eyebrows.

Under the banner the Pahnji Gang, the siblings have also been finding an audience for their rap music in rural Sindh. “Growing up, it was hard to navigate past a string of unsaid things that did not seem right. And when we did, we would be reprimanded by the village elders,” says Sindhi Chhokri, real name Urooj Fatima, speaking from her village in Yaqoob Kapri, near Jhuddo city.

Her 18-year-old brother, Mohammad Kapri, who raps as Toxic Sufi, says music has allowed them to “speak freely” about issues that are otherwise “conveniently shoved under the carpet because they make people uneasy”.

Songs around sexual violence, “honour” killings, police brutality, child labour, even enforced disappearances, are winning the pair a YouTube following although Fatima says they still cannot afford a studio to record videos.

More here.

Emilie Lucchesi in Discover:

In 1978, Kathy Kleiner was asleep in her bed at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University when serial killer Ted Bundy entered through an unlocked door. After attacking two of her sorority sisters, Bundy found Kathy’s door also unlocked. Kathy survived the attack and is one of only a few Bundy survivors. When we began writing her memoir, A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy, she said she wanted to weave in as many stories about the other victims as possible. For about two years, I researched the more than 30 women and girls Bundy killed. By the time I started compiling their biographies for an appendix, I often felt stressed, saddened and a bit on edge. There were certain victims who I thought about daily. Later, I learned I had empathy overload, an experience that social scientists are finding can happen to people in both their professional and personal lives.

From Science:

We asked young scientists this question: If you could introduce any two scientists, regardless of where and when they lived, whom would you choose, and how would their collaboration change the course of history? Read a selection of the responses here. Follow NextGen Voices on social media with hashtag #NextGenSci.

Randy Boyagoda at the New York Times:

Bookish flexing aside, I have for years been an evangelist for Fosse, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. And “evangelizing” is an apt word, given the vibrant, mirror-dark religious feeling of his books. Fosse converted to Catholicism in 2012, when he was already a well-established playwright and fiction writer in his native Norway, which celebrates Fosse with a biannual festival dedicated to his work. (The most recent took place this past summer, over 12 days.) His international stature and popularity in a generally secular country is a strong indicator that Fosse’s books aren’t just for the faithful: Indeed, many religiously minded readers of the Chesterton, Lewis and Tolkien club may be put off by Fosse’s formal and stylistic demands, and also by his obscure, at times even willfully inchoate writing about human and divine life.

The Nobel announcement comes only a few weeks before his latest novel, “A Shining,” will be published in English (beautifully and brilliantly translated, as was “Septology,” by Damion Searls), and it affords an excellent occasion to make a stronger case for why reading Fosse is a singular and transporting experience.

more here.

Jackson Arn at The New Yorker:

In a past life, he was an arsonist. A bold accusation, I realize, but nobody makes that many paintings, drawings, and photographs of fire without some buried lust for the real deal. By the time I left “Ed Ruscha / Now Then,” an XXL retrospective at moma comprising some two hundred works produced between the Eisenhower years and the present, I had lost count of the burning things, which are as lowbrow as a diner and as la-di-da as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The title of Ruscha’s 1964 photo series, “Various Small Fires and Milk,” could have been, minus the milk, a reasonable title for the exhibition itself, if he hadn’t painted various large ones, too.

The strangest thing about these fires, other than their quantity, is their calm. There are no people running out of lacma, and if there were you get the feeling they’d be fine. Tranquillity, often simple but rarely simpleminded, may be Ruscha’s essential quality as an artist.

more here.

Rosemarie Ostler in Lapham’s Quarterly:

Corn offers an example of how English words evolved in America. Before 1492, the plant that Americans call corn (Zea mays) was unknown in England. The word corn was a general term for grain, usually referring to whichever cereal crop was most abundant in the region. For instance, corn meant wheat in England, but usually referred to oats in Ireland. When American corn came to Britain, it was named maize, the English version of mahiz, an Indigenous Arawakan word adopted by the Spanish. When the first colonists encountered it in North America, however, they almost always referred to it as corn or Indian corn, probably because it was the main cereal crop of the area.

More here.

Ben R. Newell and David R. Shanks in the MIT Press Reader:

A famous experimental example of this too-much-thinking effect involves strawberry jam. The setup was as follows. Participants were brought into a laboratory and were asked to taste five different jams lined up on a table in front of them. After tasting the jams, they were asked to rate how much they liked each one. However, before making the ratings, half of the participants were asked to write down their reasons for liking or disliking each of the jams, while the other half (a control group) listed reasons for a completely unrelated decision: choosing their university major. The experimenters had carefully selected the jams to be representative of a spectrum of quality according to trained experts. The crucial question was whether the participants who were asked to think and provide reasons for their preferences or those who judged without justification ended up with ratings more similar to those of the experts.

The results were intriguing.

More here.

Rachael Scarborough King and Seth Rudy in Aeon:

Right now, many forms of knowledge production seem to be facing their end. The crisis of the humanities has reached a tipping point of financial and popular disinvestment, while technological advances such as new artificial intelligence programmes may outstrip human ingenuity. As news outlets disappear, extreme political movements question the concept of objectivity and the scientific process. Many of our systems for producing and certifying knowledge have ended or are ending.

We want to offer a new perspective by arguing that it is salutary – or even desirable – for knowledge projects to confront their ends. With humanities scholars, social scientists and natural scientists all forced to defend their work, from accusations of the ‘hoax’ of climate change to assumptions of the ‘uselessness’ of a humanities degree, knowledge producers within and without academia are challenged to articulate why they do what they do and, we suggest, when they might be done. The prospect of an artificially or externally imposed end can help clarify both the purpose and endpoint of our scholarship.

More here.

Jonathan Romney at The Current:

Right from the start, Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream (2022) catches us off guard. It begins with an epigraph musing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead,” then takes us into deep space and onto the surface of the moon. It then unleashes an image storm of rockets, robots, and star-gazers, and rapid-fire fragments of early silent cinema, 1920s science fiction, fifties cartoons, and sixties and seventies newsreel footage, before lingering on a close-up of glittery varnish on fingernails. The effect is dizzying, and Morgen has fittingly described the film, a tribute to the late David Bowie, as “an experiential documentary.” This is not a conventional account of a rock musician’s life and work. Neither a concert movie nor an information-laden career overview, it is instead a free-associative hybrid of pop history and imaginative extravaganza—impressionistic, eclectically allusive, and, above all, immersive.

more here.

Merve Emre at The New Yorker:

The word that comes to mind to describe all this—the light, the music, the sacred waters, the sacred garments—is “pilgrimage.” One rarely sees living writers treated with such reverence. “I am just a strange guy from the western part of Norway, from the rural part of Norway,” Fosse told me. He grew up a mixture of a communist and an anarchist, a “hippie” who loved playing the fiddle and reading in the countryside. He enrolled at the University of Bergen, where he studied comparative literature and started writing in Nynorsk, the written standard specific to the rural regions of the west. His first novel, “Red, Black,” was published in 1983, followed throughout the next three decades by “Melancholy I” and “Melancholy II,” “Morning and Evening,” “Aliss at the Fire,” and “Trilogy.” After a wildly successful and hectic period during which he worked almost exclusively as a playwright, Fosse converted to Catholicism in 2012, quit drinking, and remarried. He then started writing “Septology,” a seven-volume novel written in a single sentence and exemplifying what he has described as his turn to “slow prose.” (The book was translated, by Damion Searls, for Fitzcarraldo Editions, in the U.K.; a U.S. edition is out this month, from Transit Books.)

more here.

“Wrecked is the ship of pearl!”
…………..– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Nautilus: An Ode

I fantasize about inhabiting a nautilus, how each chamber
is bigger than the last, how the shell, when seawater
leaves a chamber, achieves
weightlessness,

how I could put down barriers like the creature,
how unoccupied spaces could grow, or how, in buoyant
separate rooms, we could find ourselves again
floating,

but we were so dissimilar in our turning, spiraling
away, so I have left you behind, wall by wall.
(No need to go back to our spira mirabilis.)
At great depths,

the shell implodes: I’m not going any deeper.
Inside now I, too, am nacre, mother
of pearl. Even if I crack, I isolate the fissure.
That’s how I could outgrow a shell, crawl its corridors,

feel my way through the smooth walls until suddenly—
light

(I am defenseless, but I am no longer inhabiting dread.)

by Elinor Ann Walker
from Plume Magazine

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

In more than 1,500 animal species, from crickets and sea urchins to bottlenose dolphins and bonobos, scientists have observed sexual encounters between members of the same sex. Some researchers have proposed that this behavior has existed since the dawn of the animal kingdom. But the authors of a new study of thousands of mammalian species paint a different picture, arguing that same-sex sexual behavior evolved when mammals started living in social groups. Although the behavior does not produce offspring to carry on the animals’ genes, it could offer other evolutionary advantages, such as smoothing over conflicts, the researchers proposed.

“It may contribute to establishing and maintaining positive social relationships,” said José Gómez, an evolutionary biologist at the Experimental Station of Arid Zones in Almería, Spain, and an author of the new study. But Dr. Gómez cautioned that the study, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, could not shed much light on sexual orientation in humans. “The type of same-sex sexual behavior we have used in our analysis is so different from that observed in humans that our study is unable to provide an explanation for its expression today,” he said.

More here.