THERE ARE literally over four thousand photos on my phone at the moment, many of which I'd meant to sort through and file away into digital memory boxes but forgot about when new photos took their place. I may be feeling crushed by their spatial weight as an unfinished task in my mind, so I've decided to share a few a them here in a series of Life Lately photo diaries...
The brain-powered individual, which is variously called the self, the ego, the mind, or “me,” lies at the center of Western thought. In the worldview of the West, we herald the greatest thinkers as world-changers. There is no more concise example of this than philosopher René Descartes’ famous statement, “Cogito, ergo sum,” or, “I think, therefore I am.” But who is this? Let’s take a closer look at the thinker, or the “me,” we all take for granted.
Increasingly, we’re surrounded by fake people. Sometimes we know it and sometimes we don’t. They offer us customer service on Web sites, target us in video games, and fill our social-media feeds; they trade stocks and, with the help of systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can write essays, articles, and e-mails. By no means are these A.I. systems up to all the tasks expected of a full-fledged person. But they excel in certain domains, and they’re branching out.
JUST A FEW photos of the past days and weeks leading up to summer's end and the official arrival of fall. There are deep orange roses that faded to pink and photos on old digital cameras; there are dusky autumn skies and late-night tapas after getting caught in the wild Scottish rain and Eggs Benedict the morning after ...
THIS INSTALMENT OF 10 IMAGES features snapshots from Kyiv, Ukraine by Nastia Poberezhna. There are glimpses of her home, the door open to the terrace; a bouquet of bright pink roses against a raindrop-covered car window, a blurry glimpse of the city just beyond. There are hard boiled eggs and Saint Laurent coffee cups, pizza and peonies and the everyday moments of a life...
AFTER TRYING TWO sets of meals from a recipe box company over the past two weeks, this weekend we tried a new company that makes healthy meal kits and so far, the two meals we made were delicious! And, even more amazingly, P made the first and I made the second⏤and guess what? It actually turned out. Crazy right? In other news, finally had a chance to watch the 2014 film, The Theory of Everything ...
THE BIO ON Deborah Needleman's Instagram page says, "Baskets, flowers, other people’s houses, the occasional dog, things like that". And for the most part, that's true, except that recently, she began posting images of her own home, a country house in Garrison, Upstate New York, which was published in Architectural Digest about a week ago, and we couldn't help but be absorbed with every last detail.
JANUARY LASTED a million days but February seems to be flying by. There is sunshine and birdsong, snowdrops, and today we saw a tree blooming with delicate white blossoms. It just as quickly clouded over and there were rainy spells here and there (it is England, after all), but overall, it's been feeling rather springlike. Of course, there are terrible floods again in the south, but hopefully all these weekend storms will pass by soon and we can look forward to warmer days ...
The immense and forbidding Southern Ocean is famous for howling gales and devilish swells that have tested mariners for centuries. But its true strength lies beneath the waves. The ocean’s dominant feature, extending up to two miles deep and as much as 1,200 miles wide, is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, by far the largest current in the world. It is the world’s climate engine, and it has kept the world from warming even more by drawing deep water from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, much of which has been submerged for hundreds of years, and pulling it to the surface. There, it exchanges heat and carbon dioxide with the atmosphere before being dispatched again on its eternal round trip.
I READ AN article this weekend about the things you can do to increase your chances of living to 100 and felt smug that I was already doing many of them (Strength training? Check. Dark chocolate? Yes. A Mediterranean Diet? Of course.). The ones that I wasn't doing, I started immediately, buying a box of green tea and ordering a high bar to install in the door frame outside our upstairs home gym ...
WHEN I FIRST began putting together this instalment of Life Lately, had actually disabled the entire TIG Instgram account (as in, removed it from the internet) and deleted the app from my phone—hence the title. Also took time off from Twitter at same time and reclaimed all of the EXTRA hours left from those two alone to catch up on reading (currently reading this book). Recently, in our triweekly articles series, we had included two very interesting articles on this very topic: The Case for Deleting Everything and America Offline, both of which had confirmed my restless feelings and urge to be extremely and wildly social media-free.
‘Why do different cultures respond differently to depression?’ The question is typical of Matthew. The assumption embedded in it creates rhetorical tension, pulling you on to his intellectual territory, forcing you to take a position. At the same time, it sounds like the beginning of a joke.
THIS INSTALMENT OF 10 IMAGES features the charming pastel-hued Instagram photos of Yunjung Choi @cuisiniere. One of the best things about the social media app is its ability to provide a window into the lives of people over five thousand miles away, and Choi is just that, in Seoul, South Korea.
In computer science, the main outlets for peer-reviewed research are not journals but conferences, where accepted papers are presented in the form of talks or posters. In June, 2019, at a large artificial-intelligence conference in Long Beach, California, called Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, I stopped to look at a poster for a project called Speech2Face.
We are city people, P and I. Before Valencia and before Edinburgh, we lived in a huge metropolis filled with millions of people. We barely knew our neighbours in the tall building where we lived, and the ultimate luxury was having an elevator all to ourselves on the way up to our condo after a long day at work in an office complex in the west end ...