The Egg Subsumes the Sperm
In today's edition: Google's RankBrain, a futures market as art, the Chinese Titanic, "life-style," and fertilization verbs.
***The Real Future Fair is coming to San Francisco, November 6-7. From now until the Fair, I'll be giving a couple tickets to the Friday conference away each time I send a newsletter. All you have to do is reply to this email, and I'll pick the people who hit my inbox first.***
"RankBrain is one of the 'hundreds' of signals that go into an algorithm that determines what results appear on a Google search page and where they are ranked, Corrado said. In the few months it has been deployed, RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query, he said. 'I was surprised,' Corrado said. 'I would describe this as having gone better than we would have expected.'"
2. A Guggenheim futures market of sorts?
"Åzone Futures Market is a Guggenheim online exhibition that enables you to take a position on the future of a world increasingly shaped by emerging technologies. Sign up and receive 10,000Å of Åzone currency to invest in a dynamic market of future conditions."
"China's first domestically built luxury cruise liner - designed to be more than twice the size of the Titanic, the ill-fated British passenger ship that sank on its maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg in 1912 - will launch in 2020, mainland media reports. The China State Shipbuilding Corp (CSSC), the nation's largest shipbuilder, would sign a £2.6 billion (HK$31 billion) joint venturewith Britain's Carnival Corp, the world's largest cruise ship operator, news website Caixin.com said."
4. On the counterculture's "life-style" and art.
"The counterculture was too preoccupied inventing a new world of cultural experiences and social rituals—acid rock music; guerrilla or street theater; anarchic literature; Eastern-infused spirituality; freestyle dancing, 'de-schooling' and the free university; androgynous fashion and hairstyles, including flying the long hair of one’s 'freak flag'; gatherings of campus protests, be-ins and sit-ins, and communal living, etc.—to be concerned about a separate category called art. To the hippie, life was art and art was life. At the time, it was referred to as 'life-style.' Long before the word lifestyle became synonymous with aspirational marketing and consumer hedonism, it was in fact used to describe what geographers and anthropologists might call a way of life (genre de vie). It is therefore surprising from today’s vantage point to see the word, then typically hyphenated, in contemporaneous accounts being used in a positive or at least neutral way to signify what were, indeed, new and even radical ways of living, thinking, and making."
5. Why you might want to consider the stock high-school sex ed phrase, "The sperm penetrates the egg."
"Now I can manipulate sentences to convey the basics of mammalian reproduction to reflect cultural female-as-object-male-as-subject tropes: 'The sperm penetrates the egg.' Factual balance: 'Two gametes fuse to create the zygote'. Or an opposite but equally lop-sided power narrative: 'The egg subsumes the sperm.' If I mess with word order and passive/active voice I can probably come up with more than a dozen ways to colour the essentials."
On Fusion: Hmm: the head of the National Institute for Mental Health is headed to Google.
1. bloomberg.com 2. azone.guggenheim.org | @juliaxgulia 3. scmp.com | @samanthaculp 4. walkerart.org 5. nicolagriffith.com | @hellbox
The Egg Subsumes the Sperm