Kickoff for May 27, 2024
A few (at least for me) unexpected treats in this week's edition of the Kickoff. I really love it when that happens. I hope you do, too.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
Is loneliness a threat to Germany's democracy? — Wherein we learn about a study that points to a large percentage of young Germans feeling isolated and how that can not only affect their physical and mental health but also weaken social cohesion.
From the article:
The study "Extrem Einsam" ("Extremely Lonely"), part of the Kollekt project funded by the Federal Family Affairs Ministry, suggests loneliness could also harbor a threat to democracy. Researchers found a link between loneliness and anti-democratic attitudes: An inclination toward populism, the belief in conspiracy theories, authoritarian attitudes and the approval of political rule-breaking and violence.
How print got cool again — Wherein we discover that printed newspapers in the United States are thriving in an unexpected place: American high schools.
From the article:
Some of the resilience of paper in schools comes down to how student publications tend to be run—that is, by older faculty advisers who are more familiar with, if not stubbornly nostalgic for, print. But in recent years, print has gained a newfound pull among young people, whose experience with physical newspapers is likely limited to visits with their grandparents.
Stone Age Humans Chose Their Rocks with Care — Wherein we learn that our very distant ancestors were quite discerning about the raw materials for their tools and actually had a deep knowledge of what rocks to use for what purposes.
From the article:
You may look at a rock and see a hunk of stone. Ancient people looked at a rock and saw a world of possibility. Rocks could be knapped, or shaped, into knife blades, spear points, ax heads, and more, allowing hunter-gatherers to take on new prey and use animal remains for clothing and other things.
How ChatGPT and Other LLMs Work—and Where They Could Go Next — Wherein David Nield walks us through, at a high level, the inner working of Large Language Models (LLMs) like the ubiquitous ChatGPT and looks at some of their limitations.
From the article:
From the way LLMs work, it's clear that they're excellent at mimicking text they've been trained on, and producing text that sounds natural and informed, albeit a little bland. Through their “advanced autocorrect” method, they're going to get facts right most of the time. (It's clear what follows “the first president of the USA was …”) But it's here where they can start to fall down: The most likely next word isn't always the right one.
The Virtue of Slow Writers — Wherein Lauren Alwan explores why some writers take what seems like forever to complete a book or other literary project and uncovers the mindset that a writer playing the longer game must have.
From the article:
[K]now when to let go, keep faith in the process, be flexible, fail better, and whenever possible, stay astonished. Though perhaps most importantly, recognize the value that comes with the passing of time itself.
The Fading Memories of Youth — Wherein Sara Reardon introduces us to research that indicates that while we have memories that were formed during our early childhoods, we can't access those memories as easily as we believe we can.
From the article:
People generally remember nothing from before age 3, and children’s memory abilities don’t fully mature until about age 7. “It’s a paradox in a sense,” says neuroscientist Flavio Donato of the University of Basel. “In the moment that the brain is learning at a rate it will never show again during the whole lifetime, those memories seem not to stick in the brain.”
The Starship or the Canoe: Where Will Our Future Adaptations Be? — Wherein we go back a few years and find Kenneth Brower revisiting the ideas underlying his wonderful book The Starship and the Canoe, and Brower pondering whether humanity should devote its resources to making life on Earth better or travelling to the stars.
From the article:
What does make us think we’re going anywhere? Colonization of the stars is wonderful as romance, but is up against two intractable realities: the cosmological and the biological. The cosmic problem is distance. The TRAPPIST-1 system, at 40 light years and 232 trillion miles away, is indeed relatively close, yet still unimaginably far.
By Challenging Our Physical Bodies, We May Heal Our Civic Ones — Wherein Colm O'Shea looks at the radical and revolutionary origins of gymnastics, and how embracing group physical activity might be able to bridge some of the political, economic, and ideological gaps that exist in societies today.
From the article:
Nevertheless, the state and the citizen form a circuit; one cannot improve without the help of the other. Consider the ballooning costs of healthcare: The state has a duty to us, no doubt, but — except for the chronically ill or dying — the responsibility works both ways. If we saw a complete apathy about physical conditioning as a dereliction of duty to the collective body, might this not alter at least some of our choices?
What my mother’s sticky notes show about the nature of the self — Wherein Crispin Sartwell writes about caring for him elderly mother, who's suffering from dementia, how his mother coped with her memory loss (by literally outsourcing her memory to her physical surroundings), and the effects that changes to those surroundings have on her.
From the article:
[S]he experiences every change to her house as a change to her self, and I think that, in imagination and in reality, with dementia or without, there is no firm distinction between who we are and where we are.