Posts Tagged ‘Think’
“Man towers above the rest of creation so long as he realizes his own nature, and when he forgets it, he sinks lower than the beasts”*…
The estimable Jill Lepore on her strategy for coping during the “First 100 Days”…
On the twentieth of January, the year of our Lord 2025, Donald Trump’s one hundred days began.
Thank you. Thank you very much, everybody. (Applause.) Wow. Thank you very, very much.
I read his second Inaugural Address early the next morning in bed, curled, bent to the glow of an iPhone in dark mode, a morning ritual that always feels like sin.
From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world.
Then, dutifully, I scrolled through the Day One executive orders:
A full, complete and unconditional pardon . . . offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 . . .
. . . the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States . . .
. . . establishes the Department of Government Efficiency . . .
. . . eliminate the “electric vehicle (EV) mandate” . . .
. . . directing that it officially be renamed the Gulf of America.
The Day One executive orders included—and depended on—the President’s formal, executive declarations of not one, not two, but three national emergencies: an immigration emergency, an energy emergency, and a terrorism emergency. There was also the Donald-Trump-is-President-again emergency.
I buried my phone under my pillow and closed my eyes. Blindly, I reached over to my nightstand and groped for a book. I pulled off the stack the first of the Penguin Little Black Classics, a collection of slender paperbacks that I’d been meaning to read, each as thin and sleek as my phone, bound in black, with white type on a plain cover. Dark mode.
No. 1, Giovanni Boccaccio, “Mrs Rosie and the Priest,” is described on the back cover as “bawdy tales of pimps, cuckolds, lovers and clever women from the fourteenth-century Florentine masterpiece The Decameron.” The book opened like a flower, like a hinge, like a butterfly, like a pair of hands in blessing. I turned to the first page:
I was told some time ago about a young man from Perugia called Andreuccio, the son of a certain Pietro and a horse-dealer by trade.
My heart leapt. I had found my doomscrolling methadone. With five hundred gold florins in his bag, Andreuccio set off for Naples. And I made a vow to read one volume of the Penguin Little Black Classics each morning in bed, matins, for a hundred days. Two and a half times Lent. In case of emergency, break open a book…
And read she did– each morning, before the day’s decrees, she turned to a slim book, hoping for sense, or solace… and happily for us, she kept a journal: “A Hundred Classics to Get Me Through a Hundred Days of Trump,” from @newyorker.com. (In the event of a paywall: an archived version.)
* “Indeed, the condition of human nature is just this; man towers above the rest of creation so long as he realizes his own nature, and when he forgets it, he sinks lower than the beasts. For other living things to be ignorant of themselves, is natural; but for man it is a defect.” – Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
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As we pursue perspective, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that Aretha Franklin impatrted some timeless advice: she released “Think” (which she had co-written with Ted White), the first single from her upcoming album Aretha Now. It reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, Franklin’s seventh top 10 hit in the United States and hit number 1 on the magazine’s Hot Rhythm & Blues Singles, her sixth single to top that chart.
“I introduce you to the hardest-working man in show biz, ladies and gentlemen, the Godfather of Soul, Mr. James Brown”*…
James Brown shows you how…
Don’t go into this expecting Arthur Murray-level clarity of instruction. This is Soul Train-era James Brown, shaking way more than any simple footprint pattern could convey. That’s not to say there isn’t concrete information to be gleaned here, especially if you never really knew which moves constitute The Funky Chicken. Ditto The Boogaloo, The Camel Walk, and something I swear sounds like The Mac Davis.
James proudly demonstrates them all, as unconcerned as a peacock would be when it comes to breaking things down for the folks at home. (Trust me, your kneecaps will be grateful he’s not more explicit.)…
Learn from the best: “James Brown gives you dancing lessons,” from Ayum Halliday (@AyunHalliday) in @openculture.
* Danny Ray, emcee and “cape man” for James Brown
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As we shake a leg, we might send virtuosic birthday greetings to Aretha Louise Franklin; she was born on this date in 1942. A singer, songwriter, and pianist, she began her career as a gospel singer in her father’s church in Detroit. At the age of 18, she signed as a mainstream recording artist for Columbia Records. But it was in the late 60’s when she switched to Atlantic Records, that her career blossomed; she released a string of hits– “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)“, “Respect“, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman“, “Chain of Fools“, “Think“, and “I Say a Little Prayer“– that cemented her status as the Queen of Soul.
In all, Franklin recorded 112 charted singles on the US Billboard charts, including 73 Hot 100 entries, 17 top-ten pop singles, 100 R&B entries and 20 number-one R&B singles. With global sales of over 75 million records, Franklin is one of the world’s best-selling music artists of all time.
Franklin won 18 Grammy Awards, including the first eight awards given for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance (1968–1975) and a Grammy Awards Living Legend honor and Lifetime Achievement Award. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1987, she became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She also was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005 and into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2012. In 2010, Rolling Stone ranked Franklin number one on its list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time”. And in 2019, the Pulitzer Prize jury awarded the singer a posthumous special citation “for her indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades”. In 2020, Franklin was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
“The number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years”*…
Moore’s Law has held up almost astoundingly well…
This seemingly inexorable march has enabled an extraordinary range of new products and services– from intercontinental ballistic missiles to global environmental monitoring systems and from smart phones to medical implants… But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are sounding an alarm…
The speed of our technology doubles every year, right? Not anymore. We’ve come to take for granted that as the years go on, computing technology gets faster, cheaper and more energy-efficient.
In their recent paper, “Science and research policy at the end of Moore’s law” published in Nature Electronics, however, Carnegie Mellon University researchers Hassan Khan, David Hounshell, and Erica Fuchs argue that future advancement in microprocessors faces new and unprecedented challenges…
In the seven decades following the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs, warnings about impending limits to miniaturization and the corresponding slow down of Moore’s Law have come regularly from industry observers and academic researchers. Despite these warnings, semiconductor technology continually progressed along the Moore’s Law trajectory. Khan, Hounshell, and Fuchs’ archival work and oral histories, however, make clear that times are changing.
“The current technological and structural challenges facing the industry are unprecedented and undermine the incentives for continued collective action in research and development,” the authors state in the paper, “which has underpinned the last 50 years of transformational worldwide economic growth and social advance.”
As the authors explain in their paper, progress in semiconductor technology is undergoing a seismic shift driven by changes in the underlying technology and product-end markets…
To continue advancing general purpose computing capabilities at reduced cost with economy-wide benefits will likely require entirely new semiconductor process and device technology.” explains Engineering and Public Policy graduate Hassan Khan. “The underlying science for this technology is as of yet unknown, and will require significant research funds – an order of magnitude more than is being invested today.”
The authors conclude by arguing that the lack of private incentives creates a case for greatly increased public funding and the need for leadership beyond traditional stakeholders. They suggest that funding is needed of $600 million dollars per year with 90% of those funds from public research dollars, and the rest most likely from defense agencies…
Read the complete summary at “Moore’s law has ended. What comes next?“; read the complete Nature article here.
* a paraphrase of Gordon’s Moore’s assertion– known as “Moore’s law”– in the thirty-fifth anniversary issue of Electronics magazine, published on April 19, 1965
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As we pack ’em ever tighter, we might send carefully-computed birthday greetings to Thomas John Watson Sr.; he was born on this date in 1874. A mentee of from John Henry Patterson’s at NCR, where Watson began his career, Watson became the chairman and CEO of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), which, in 1924, he renamed International Business Machines– IBM. He began using his famous motto– THINK– while still at NCR, but carried it with him to IBM… where it became that corporation’s first trademark (in 1935). That motto was the inspiration for the naming of the Thinkpad– and Watson himself (along with Sherlock’s Holmes’ trusty companion), for the naming of IBM’s Artificial Intelligence product.
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