CategoryArts & Culture
Oppenheimer Steals the Show
Cillian Murphy wins Best Actor, Nolan Best Director
Jean Twenge: Gen Z Isn’t Reading
Zoomers were born into smartphones, not Shakespeare
American Beauty and the Power of Media
A scene from the 1999 film on finding beauty in the mundane
A Canticle for Leibowitz, a Canticle of Speculative Warning
A 1959 novel's speculation of nuclear fallout is yet a story of hope.This past year seems to have been the year of the atomic bomb, at least in what I’ve read and watched. I started 2023 by reading The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, a pair of novels that consistently alludes to Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer arrived a few months later in July, sobering audiences worldwide and reinvigorating public interest in the godlike power these brilliant scientists had unleashed on the world. Most recently, I read the 1959 dystopian novel by Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz, a speculative tale about nuclear holocaust and the perennial human tendency for self-destruction. What a cheery year it’s been! Maybe I’ll switch things up and read Anne of Green Read More ›
AI Decodes Scrolls Scorched by Vesuvius’ Eruption
In 79 AD, Vesuvius reduced a library to charcoal. Remarkably, machine learning technology has begun to decipher scrolls that humans could not unwrap
Book Banning Today: Silently … Not Like in the Old Days
Traditional anti-book banning groups are simply not where the action is and maybe don’t want to beLast week we looked at the way censorship in the age of the internet is typically invisible. It’s not the police raiding bookstores; it’s — for example — sudden downranking of posts so that information that might have reached millions of people reaches only dozens. Constantly suppressed, it can’t go viral. We can see the change more clearly if we look at the difference between how books (and other information) used to get banned and how they get banned today. Book banning before the internet When the word “book bans” is used today, it usually means something different from what it meant even a few decades ago. Ulysses, a groundbreaking work by Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941) was indeed banned Read More ›
Alien Resurrection Part 4: The Good, the Bad, and the… Bizarre
In a single moment, Purvis becomes one of the most heroic characters in the entire franchise
Thinking Back to the Very Beginnings of Art
It just appears, from great antiquity, and we really don’t know why. All we know is that animals don’t do it
Artists Strike Back!: New Tool “Poisons” Images Pirated by AI
Nightshade, developed by University of Chicago computer science prof Ben Zhao, makes the AI generator keep giving you a cat when you ask for a dog
Cyber Plagiarism: When AI Systems Snatch Your Copyrighted Images
Outright copying of others’ images may put system’s owners in legal jeopardy. Let's look at U.S. legal decisions
Japanese Novelist Who Won Prestigious Literary Award Unabashedly Used ChatGPT
Meanwhile, authors in the United States are waging war against AI for copyright violation
Alien Resurrection, Part 2: Trying to Recover After a Retcon
The writers of the show never seemed to agree on how smart these aliens really are.
Tech Billionaires and Their Science Fiction Dreams
They're mistaking cautionary tales for instruction manuals.
Alien Resurrection, Part 1: This Movie Pays for the Sins of the Last One
It's better than Aliens 3, but has a host of problems nonetheless.
Robert J. Marks on the Copyright Lawsuits Against the Chatbots
Essentially, the salad of material that the chatbot produces for users contains thousands of ingredients lifted without compensation from copyright holders
Alien 3 Review, Part 4
Ripley's curtain callIn the third article, Ripley woke up in an all-male prison after surviving a shuttle crash. A parasitic alien tagged along and implanted an embryo in an inmate’s dog. The embryo breaks out of the animal and begins killing people until everyone figures out what’s going on, then they hatched one of the dumbest plans I’ve ever seen in cinema. After that, Ripley begins feeling sick. She goes to her still fully intact cryobed and scans herself. She finds that the parasitic alien has also planted an embryo inside her. The fact that Ripley had an embryo in her the entire time is ridiculous for a number of reasons. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, her cryobed wasn’t broken, so Read More ›
Deciphering the Hidden Meanings of Cave Art
In many cases, there are more dots and lines than animals, which suggests some sort of early information system
AI Will Disrupt Everything — But Forget the Robot Apocalypse!
It will be a slow, steady, measured disruption, like the one the printing press created
Alien 3 Review, Part 3
Aliens vs. Looney TunesIn the previous reviews, we talked about how Ripley is once again the sole survivor. Her ship crashed because, somehow, the alien queen she killed in the second movie managed to lay an egg in the five minutes before it died. That egg hatched, attacked Ripley and the other’s cryobeds, and some of its acidic salvia melted its way into the ship’s wiring, causing the spacecraft to crash. To make the situation even more ridiculous, the escape shuttle the cryobeds were moved into crashed as well, and everyone expect Ripley was killed. Ripley wakes up in an all-male prison. Superintendent Harold Andrews is concerned for her safety, so he does his best to keep Ripley in the medical wing. Ripley Read More ›