[salmagundi] What is art?

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Published on: February 4, 2024

A recurring question that keeps popping up again and again. Came across this interesting article, which covers and few

  • Art is useless
  • Art is truth
  • Art is (social) justice
  • Art is good for us
  • Art is for bildung, self development
  • Art is for consituting the tribe, especially in modernity
  • Art is for connecting us as individuals outside borders of the group
  • Art is for cultural capital
  • Art is for equipping us for modern life
  • Art is for civilizing us
  • Art is for artists
  • Art is for increasing life
  • Art is a fountain of spirit

Art can be many things at once…

More of this here: [The Link]

[aeon] State of philosophy

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Published on: November 7, 2023

Interesting article about state of philosophy today. Few quotes from the article.

“The discipline today finds itself precariously balanced between incomprehensible specialisation and cheap self-help” .. says the tagline of the article.

“There is a disconnect between philosophy as it was practised by the likes of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Kant, and what readers are being offered today. Corporatisation and commercialisation have not only dulled people’s tolerance for critical thinking but have warped their expectations about what it means to read philosophy, seeing it only as something that can make them happier. ”

“Clearly, our century’s emphasis on quantified knowledge, specialisation and marketability has created an intellectual climate that not only devalues philosophical thought, but has turned philosophy itself into something it was never supposed to be.”

More of this interesting analysis here: [The Link]

[aeon] The ends of knowledge

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Published on: October 4, 2023

Interesting article about what are the ends/goals of any our work, especially about activities around building knowledge.

“… revealed four key ways in which to understand ‘ends’, which emerged collectively: end as telos, end as terminus, end as termination and end as apocalypse. “

“… four groupings – unification, access, utopia/dystopia and conceptualisation – synthesise many of the ways that knowledge workers respond when asked to consider their discipline’s ends, from seeking a point of convergence for knowledge to articulating the central project of their field. “

More of this in article here: [The Link]

Also interesting to checkout their book: The ends of knowledge; outcomes and endpoints across the arts & sciences

reason.com: pirate preservationists

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Published on: September 14, 2023

Many interesting items are becoming (have become) non-physical (books, art, music streaming…) and meaning of ownership has changed significantly. Often I wonder what I should do with all the books I have in my shelf and all the old music CDs I still own (haven’t got around to relinquishing them). Just came across an interesting article that talks more about this phenomena and specifically about keeping some certain cultural archives safe and what it means w.r.t the laws.

An interesting snippet towards the end of the article: ”
The good news is that so many people have now joined the preservation fight, either deliberately or accidentally: The more distributed the effort, the less brittle and more resilient it will be. Like those music-swapping networks of the ’90s, this web of preservationists is neither entirely online nor entirely offline. That’s good too: If physical copies let you hang onto something when a stream is altered or removed, digital copies let you almost costlessly save and transmit items that otherwise would be scarce. I don’t know the best way to keep our collective cultural archive alive, but I’m pretty sure it will involve an intricate interplay between the physical and the digital, not just one or the other.

More of this here: [The Link]

[plough] What is time for?

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Published on: August 20, 2023

Many articles and books have been written about: doing things slowly, being idle, importance of being bored (to be creative) and other virtues of spending quality time. Came across another interesting article around this theme. Talks about the question “What is time for? How would we spend our time if we weren’t busy?”

Few snippets from the article

“The leisure that is necessary for human beings is not just a break from real life, a place where we rest and restore ourselves in order to go back to work. What we are after is a state that looks like the culmination of a life.”

“Leisure requires cultivation – cultivation of habits and of communities that help to form habits. The pursuit of leisure requires this effort because we resist it. “

“Leisure turns out to be an interior discipline. It is not enough to simply choose a central life activity that is intrinsically leisurely. One must recognize the good of leisure and seek it out. “

Read more about the examples of contemplative leisure and how we sometimes fear pursuing being in such states: [The link]

Creative use of AI in film making

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Published on: May 11, 2023

I like reading and watch sci-fiction & fantasy series. Lord of the rings being the one of all time great series. Came across this awesome video made using some of these generative AI tools that is popping up these days. The video is pretty well made. The creators even have started a course on how to use generative AI for filmmaking!

check their course here: AI Filmmaking — Curious Refuge

watch video in youtube:
Lord of the Rings by Wes Anderson Trailer | The Whimsical Fellowship – YouTube

AI image generators overview

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Published on: March 5, 2023

Quick rundown of different AI image generators of the day at Slashgear web.

  • Nightcafe
  • Jasper Art
  • DALL-E 2
  • Dream by WOMBO
  • Photosonic
  • Starryai
  • Stable Diffusion
  • Runaway ML
  • Lensa
  • Toongineer
  • Midjourney
  • MyHeritage AI Time Machine
  • Deep Dream Generator
  • Craiyon V2

More about this here: [The Link]

Timeline of world history

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Published on: February 12, 2023

Disruptive science in decline

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Published on: January 6, 2023

An interesting article and study about decline in disruptive science in most research fields.

Few excerpts from the article:

Disruptiveness is not inherently good, and incremental science is not necessarily bad, says Wang.”

Finding an explanation for the decline won’t be easy, Walsh says. Although the proportion of disruptive research dropped significantly between 1945 and 2010, the number of highly disruptive studies has remained about the same. The rate of decline is also puzzling: CD indices fell steeply from 1945 to 1970, then more gradually from the late 1990s to 2010. “Whatever explanation you have for disruptiveness dropping off, you need to also make sense of it levelling off” in the 2000s, he says.

More of this here @nature: [The link]

DISRUPTIVE SCIENCE DWINDLES. Chart shows disruptiveness of papers has fallen over time in all analysed fields.

Nuclear Fusion: Seems there is a major (scientific) breakthrough

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Published on: December 16, 2022

Lots of articles and hype around Nuclear Fusion these days (dec 2022). Seems this time around it is a breakthrough of some scientific significance. A nice article from MITTech review explaining and putting results in context of current progress.

e.g. “..This is a big moment for fusion power, a basic test that the field has been striving for since researchers started dreaming about it in the 1950s. That deserves to be celebrated, and I think it’s fine to get excited about it. It’s a true milestone.

But…we need to be clear here. This is primarily a scientific achievement. Fusion has a long way to go to be a technology that we’re really using in our daily lives.”

More of this here: [The Link]

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