Category: Blog

After 26 years on the programme, the legendary presenter bids farewell to the series — Read on www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/melvyn-bragg-decides-to-step-down-from-presenting-in-our-time/

Indeed, it is entirely plausible that with only a few turns of history, China might now be the world’s most populous Christian nation. And if that seems hard to believe, consider what did happen. Sixty three years after the fall of Nanjing in 1864, China again erupted into civil war under Mao Zedong. This time…

What is life but what we choose, who we know, what we experience? Incoherent empty men want to sell me the chance to stop reading and writing and thinking, to stop caring for my kids or talking to my parents, to stop choosing what I do or knowing why I do it. Blissful ignorance and…

But “consumers don’t want to have to work hard to find what to watch,” said Smallwood. “They just want the right thing served up to them.” Todd Yellin believes ChatGPT is capable of writing a cookie-cutter Christmas movie now – but the potential blowback for trampling on human artistry wouldn’t be worth the risk. Most…

An interactive exploration of the planets, moons, asteroids, and other objects in the Solar System. — Read on atlasof.space/chaos

Like a human brain, artificial neural networks take some kind of input (words, say) and produce outputs (other words). For the human brain, what happens in the middle is something of a black box, but we know that words we hear are translated into neural activity that represents meaning, then decoded into other words. Mr.…

Doors brings to mind Christopher Nolan’s Inception (“a mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in”) and the doorway effect (“The doorway effect or location updating effect is a replicable psychological phenomenon characterized by short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway or moving from one location to another.”)…

Dreams are an invaluable way for another world to bolster the waking world. Freud famously interpreted them as a window into the unconscious mind, but recent research suggests that dreams are something more tangible than this, a way of re-enforcing your kinaesthetic memory, the memory that makes you reach for the branch in the right…

In some ways, he’ll always remain an observer of the group and never a true participant. But he is a full participant in his own life: deeply satisfied in the things he chooses to do and the people he chooses to be with. In a world designed for joiners, this is the otrovert’s ideal path.…

Social media was level one of this challenge, and it absolutely fucking cooked society. AI is level two in this maze—the three-headed sphinx whispering promises and threats simultaneously. Many who surrendered their focus in round one will surrender their critical thinking in round two. Scarcity drives value. Focused thought is becoming scarce. — Read on…