Anil Gomes at The Guardian:
Why do some things combine and others separate? Add nitric acid to gold, and nothing happens. Pour on aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids, and the gold dissolves. The chemical doctrine of affinity emerged as a way to explain these reactions. In his 1809 novel Elective Affinities, Johann Wolfgang Goethe applied the idea to human relationships. Charlotte and Edward may form a stable union but if Edward has an affinity with young Ottilie – ah, well, then all bets are off.
What is an affinity? A little like a crush, I suppose, at least at the beginning. And sometimes just as fleeting. But sometimes more stable, more serious, and more revealing of our ways of engaging with things. Brian Dillon’s writings have always been marked by affinities – for artworks, for writers, even for particular sentences.
more here.
In the spring of 1954, Reinhard Müller stepped onto a stage in the German city of Wolfsburg as a volunteer in a magic show. His presence was captured in a small sepia photograph, where he can be seen in conversation with a tuxedoed magician holding the elegant pocket watch that Müller has just entrusted to him. The conjurer is Helmut Ewald Schreiber (1903–1963), better known by his stage name Kalanag. He is in the final stages of a trick called “The Devil’s Mail,” a popular feature of his world-touring magic revue, Simsalabim. A few moments before, Müller’s watch had been reduced to fragments in a mortar by sharp blows of the magician’s wand. In the photograph, Kalanag can be seen returning the now miraculously restored timepiece to its owner. But his watch is not all that Müller will take with him when he leaves the stage. To his delight, he will also carry this snapshot, delivered to him in an envelope by the magician within moments of the very scene that it depicts.
EVERYONE HAS
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, published in 1974, was nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. A work of fictionalised autobiography, the book follows its author Robert Pirsig on a long motorcycle ride through the US, from Minnesota across the prairie to Oregon, then down to southern California. The muscles of that skeletal journey are Pirsig’s philosophical musings on the notion of Quality. Pirsig created the concept in order explain the relationship between human values and societal values.
With the use of this new technology exploding into the masses, previously unknown risks being revealed each day, and big tech companies pretending everything is fine, there is an expectation that the government might step in. But so far, legislators have taken little concrete action. And the reality is that even if lawmakers were suddenly gripped with an urgent desire to address this issue, most governments don’t have the institutional nimbleness, or frankly knowledge, needed to match the current speed of AI development.
Tuesday 28 February marks the 70th anniversary of – in my view – the most important day in the history of science. On a fine Saturday morning with crocuses in flower along the Backs in Cambridge, two men saw something surprising and beautiful. The double helix structure of DNA instantly revealed why living things were different: a molecule carries self-copying messages from the past to the future, bearing instructions written in a four-letter alphabet about how to synthesise living bodies from food. In the Eagle pub that lunchtime, Francis Crick and James Watson announced to startled fellow drinkers that they had discovered the secret of life.
THE PASSAGE OF 
I don’t know why but I’m still affected by the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. I didn’t know him, and I don’t think I’ve even seen all of his work, but his presence is so affecting to me. He doesn’t look like an actor. He struggled with addiction. He got sober young and relapsed. It scares me.
IN MANY WAYS, even before I knew exactly what I was looking at, I took Wavelength as a kind of long goodbye, an extended adieu to Western vanishing-point perspective. Or, at the very least, a goodbye to the obvious inferences, i.e., the eye-I dyad at the very center of Western classical ideas of (split/bifurcated/troubled) consciousness, mind/body, man/nature, foreground/background, and all its decidedly phallic impulses. Penetrating space, penetrating gaze as apex being. And none of the above even remotely meant as a critique. Michael Snow being, idea-of-the-north/star-like, a true Canadian, down to his spooky insistence on there being a point (neither/nor wave particle).
We’re always thinking about: What are those targets in the future? Cancer is one of those things. The biggest impact is going to be what’s called systemic delivery, or in vivo delivery. There’s been one example of this in the community right now—to treat a liver disease. Intellia Therapeutics, a biotech company, has shown that you can actually intravenously apply CRISPR-Cas9 treatment. (CRISPR is the guide RNA, the targeting molecule, and Cas9 is the cutting molecule that edits DNA.) It can go to the liver and target the liver cells, and make edits at a high enough efficacy to treat genetic liver disease. The problem is that the liver is the easiest. It’s like the garbage can of the body. Pretty much anything that you put into the body is ultimately going to find its way to the liver. So that’s absolutely the easiest tissue to deliver to. But trying to deliver to a solid tumor, or to the brain, is much more difficult.
The edge of the Chihuahuan Desert in northern Mexico is a part of the world in which nothing is what it seems. The Mapimí Silent Zone, a region often known simply as La Zona del Silencio, or the Zone of Silence, is 30 miles of barren brown plains. It’s a wasteland strewn with cosmic debris; compasses go haywire, and cell phones and radios jam. In many ways, this forsaken stretch is Durango’s answer to Area 51 in Nevada or State Route 375, the so-called Extraterrestrial Highway that cuts through miles of empty terrain and is haunted by strange legends. The Zone’s desolation is compounded by Durango’s notorious history of drug trafficking and banditry. In his new collection, Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence (New Directions Press, 2023), the Mexican poet 
It will surprise no one to learn that medieval European societies had strong views about the roles of men and women – especially with regard to sexuality. Members of one sex were naturally graced with self-discipline, able to resist base urges and live a life of propriety. Members of the other were inherently insatiable and, left to their own devices, would be incapable of exercising any control over their passions at all. It was the responsibility of the former – and of institutions such as marriage – to rein in the lustful impulses of the latter and act as the gatekeepers of sex.
A cry for help is hard to resist. This exchange comes from conversations between the AI engineer Blake Lemoine and an AI system called LaMDA (‘Language Model for Dialogue Applications’). Last year, Lemoine