When I first saw this feature as the frontispiece of a rather venerable and unfailing website, I had a moment of misgivings—wondering if they had surrendered to those catch-penny walls of copy-pasta when one strays too near the lower bounds of a webpage.
The New Yorker has a nice, succinct piece on the recent demonstration of the artificial intelligence DeepMind, whose talents draw from two sources, a deductive network of filters and positive-reinforcement.
The program—instructed with only the protocol that winning was good and losing bad—dazzled the human audience with a stellar progression on a platform of classic arcade games with some very masterful and unexpected strokes. It is not that DeepMind is inside the game, like when one challenges the game, but separated like a human player, and quickly devised a sure strategy. The program, however, did not perform quite so well with certain games—like Ms. Pac-Man, and the handlers weren’t quite sure why. Some disparaging voices checked their enthusiasm, as milestones like Deep Blue beating a chess grand-master or Watson winning against Jeopardy! quiz-masters. These achievements, though not coddled and not insignificant, came about, however, through extensive coaching, whereas DeepMind is learning on its own. What do you think? Is growth going to be exponential and get very quickly out of human hands?
neat, petite: Agent Scully posing as Morticia Addams
dog and butterfly: some beautiful photography of an unlikely pairing
geisterstadt: there is a growing website of abandoned places and ghosts towns all over the world
de stiji: a print or tee-shirt of the TARDIS in the style of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian
a great rodd of birch: a character called Whipping Tom (with several copy-cats) terrorised Londoners in the 1600s, beating their hinders and shouting, “Spanko!”
The inexhaustibly fascinating Dangerous Minds features a look at the major arcana of a suite of tarot cards conceived by the brilliant artist Edward Gorey, who gave us the lovable in the macabre.
The cards are not properly prognosticating ones, however, as they all represent different aspects of our internal fantods, a word more than for the nonce, that describes our worries and anxieties and irritations and bode no hope for a bright and uplifting fortune. For instance, drawing the Feather can be interpreted to forecast obstacles of a most pernicious nature—including, rather specifically, blackmail, a forged passport, intestinal discomfort, and loss of eyelashes (which is called madarosis). The horror. Be sure to check out the link for more backstory and augury, and Dangerous Minds in general for some veteran discoveries.
After the long, violent delay in Antioch, the Crusader army found itself on the last short leg through the Levant and onto Jerusalem. Though diminished in numbers and supplies, they met little local resistance in blazing a trail across the wilderness towards the heart of the Holy Land.
While the intervening populations, Tripoli, Haifa, did not exactly roll over, the Crusaders’ dread reputation for ruthlessness proceeded them and communities decided prudently that it was easier to aid and abet the advancing army and send them on their merry way rather than suffer their wrath and wind up slaughtered and cooked for supper. That act of cannibalism during the siege of Ma’arrat al-Numan grew in people’s imaginations and echoed, along with a lot of other misdeeds, through the decades and contributed to the so-called Great Schism, when the Eastern Church asserted independence from Rome. Another rumour—or rather a realisation began to circulate regarding the Crusaders’ ultimate goal, conquest of Jerusalem. Byzantium and Fatimid Egypt, while not exactly fast-friends, did maintain diplomatic-relations, since after all they had a shared enemy and shared national-interests in the Seljuk Turks, who’d captured many Byzantine lands and until only a decade or so prior, held Palestine and Jerusalem. The Shia Egyptians had expelled the Sunni Turks at a great cost, but now were wise to the Crusaders designs and did not want their hard-earned gains to fall to Christian occupiers. Egyptian leaders appealed to Emperor Alexios, offering terms that all parties could live with—safe passage for pilgrimage, protection of the churches and freedom of worship. Alexios had to concede, however, that the army had gone rogue, after failing to restore Antioch to the Empire and founding their own Crusade States (Egypt was probably also smarting for having spilled so much blood and treasure expelling the Seljuk Turks, while if they had been patient, this army would have been sent down from Europe to do the dirty-work and Egypt would only have light-duties), and he would be powerless to stop them.
The Crusaders too had gotten a taste of the Holy Land not as pilgrims but as conquerers and were far from sated. Egypt resigned itself to raising an army to dispatch with this nuisance, but the Crusaders’ pace was too quick and they ended up taking Jerusalem and unleashed a terrible and unconstrained massacre of Muslim residents before falling to that familiar routine of deciding ownership of the prize. Out of humility, no one in the end claimed kingship over Jerusalem but rather Advocate-in-Chief. And scene—well, not quite. The noble families of Europe who’d sat out the first Crusade, dismissing it as a fool’s errand, hearing reports of the glory and plunder of these instigators were kicking themselves for not having gotten in on the ground-floor, launching successive waves of sloppy-seconds raising more ire and polarisation hoping to maintain that tenuous hold on the Holy Land and secure greater conquests.
brotherly-love: these two siblings have been exchanging a single birthday card for twenty-seven years
worrywart: the not so obvious benefits of anxieties
ewe-net: wifi-enabled sheep aim to create mobile access points for rural Wales
honourable mentions: some of the contenders from Sony’s World Photography Awards
tip of the iceberg: research suggests that the unconscious mind is capable of mental acrobatics we usually associate with conscious deliberation
Sometimes a reminder is far better than a discovery.
