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The Phone

Prank calls, long-distance connections, secret messages

Out There

Seth Shostak On The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence

I doubt any aliens we might encounter are going to be biological. I think they’re all going to be machines.

I Feel Sorry For Aliens

Lonely nights I walk to the old / elevator that used to hold Montana / grain: beams rusted, train tracks / ripped out, a patchwork of missing / roof panels framing perfect squares / of starlight

Sunbeams

Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

Carl Sagan

Under The Surface

Güven Güzeldere On The Mysteries Of Consciousness And Artificial Intelligence

Cohen: This summer, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine caused controversy by disclosing a conversation with an AI called LaMDA, or “Language Model for Dialog Applications.” The conversation seemed to suggest this AI system had some awareness of itself, but the idea was dismissed by a number of people who work with such systems.

Güzeldere: It’s interesting that Google fired the guy who published that conversation. . . . People are saying, “Oh, it’s just a hack,” but it’s a very impressive hack. I think it will become a product that will be accepted by consumers.

The Enchanted Loom

The brain’s genius is its gift for reflection. . . . It takes many forms: our finding similarities among seemingly unrelated things, wadding up worries into tangled balls of obsession difficult to pierce even with the spike of logic, painting elaborate status or romance fantasies in which we star, picturing ourselves elsewhere and elsewhen.

Bat Season

These were strange and intoxicating expeditions. At the cliff-lined ends of forest-service roads or the edges of muddy cattle tanks, or in the cricket-loud groves where saguaros gave way to oaks, I would help stretch nets on moonless evenings. Bats fluttered into the thin weave and were trapped, toothy and screaming.

The Great Decline

Shanna Swan On The Worldwide Drop In Fertility

Frisch: You found about a 1 percent decline in sperm counts per year.

Swan: Yes, which would mean a 50 percent decline over fifty years. We’re actually seeing something a little steeper than that.

Plastic: A Personal History

How can I find a way to praise / it? Do the early inventors & embracers / churn with regret?