anarbadalov

Thank you so much for sharing. I'd never heard of Derek or Pen Machine but needed to read exactly this.

"Although it sounds painful, you feel no pain." This is one of the more bizarre sleep-related disorders i've heard of. My kid (6 yrs old) has been having night terrors and what sleep experts call "confusional arousals" for about a year now, off and on, and i'm both frightened and fascinated by them. Apparently they're common in children and run in the family — my wife had them when she was a kid too. Anyway, not quite as startling as Exploding Head Syndrome but curious nonetheless.

The entire discussion, recorded in February 1977, is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNxzQSheCkc&ab_channel=Firin....

Sure! Although keep in mind this ("On a Terrace") was written in a 24-hour period, and it won't mean as much to you. Barry's sent me numerous longer and more sophisticated pieces, which he explicitly said i could share with anyone, so i'm including a couple of my favorites below as well. One of these ("Stonewall") he composed on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, the other ("Colin & Jen") is a beautiful little palindrome he wrote for a friend's wedding.

On a Terrace:

No silly din. A set, sated. I saw one

bro: Baltimore has it! Sit. Rapt, I

met. Is Anar B, ran a site (MITP).

Artist? Is a hero! MIT labor be now

aside. Tastes. An idyll is on!

Stonewall:

No, it's a bar. A ban? One position made

fast. It felt, lover, as an age began at – can I

say? – a gem. Ah, Stonewall! Its saga's still

awe, not shame. Gay, as in: Act! An age

began as a revolt, left it safe. Dam? No, it

is open on a bar, a bastion.

Colin & Jen:

Sun I'm in, eh?

We met: a Colin, one Jen.

On.

I locate me when I'm in us.

Didn't even occur to me that ChatGPT could achieve this. Isn't there a way to further refine the prompt? (I haven't used it and can't bring myself to finish any of the thousand articles on the subject popping up every day)

Edit: Some of these lines individually were interesting ("Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live") — but not a single one, it turns out, is original!

Had the pleasure of meeting Barry at a work retreat last year. Totally brilliant, and so sweet to boot. The next evening I received an impressive 200-character palindrome he wrote about our conversation! Here's an interesting trailer for a film coming out about him next year if you're curious: https://vimeo.com/29300425

Note that this is not yet available to the public but i assume will be eventually (although why someone would want to take something as rewarding as writing music and automate it is beyond me). Also, conspicuously omitted is any information on the training data which might be copyrighted?

Yeah, that's interesting and not something i would have thought of. But then again many of my favorite singers have especially low voices (Nick Cave, Richard Hawley, Leonard Cohen, Stuart Staples, etc.)

good advice to writers from Benjamin Dryer, whose book "Dreyer's English" is full of a lot more of it (and is funny as hell).

"Good writing, I think, ultimately exists between the twin goal posts of as-few-words-as-you-need and as-many-words-as-you-want. I, a natural natterer, lean toward the latterer.

But one must draw the line somewhere. I recommend striking out 'actually' at every opportunity, unless it’s in a discussion of the movie 'Love Actually,' in which case we might want to focus on the title’s confounding commalessness. Similarly, though I would never fault the supreme lyricist Johnny Mercer for the gorgeous 'You’re much too much / And just too very very,' I am on constant alert for 'very,' always looking for the chance to dispose of it. I’d encourage you to do the same."

Rachel Plotnick's book (Power Button, referenced in the article) is very good. Here's a much longer excerpt from it, on the button as it relates to carrying out life-and-death decisions (e.g., warfare and executions): https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/of-war-and-electric-death...

(Full disclosure: I work for the MIT Press, who published Power Button. But it really is one of my favorite history of tech titles we've published in the 10+ years i've been here)

H/T to the always-excellent The Browser for alerting me to this one. The summary from the email:

Our tech-obsessed society constantly produces glossy "dongles" designed to "fix" the world for disabled people, while mostly ignoring the needs expressed by this very group. Meanwhile, disabled people have always repurposed objects to make the world more accessible. Rubber bands, silicon trivets, the perfect tongs: all of these and more are constantly put to ingenious use.

Related (and mentioned in the piece): https://web.archive.org/web/20220509060200/https://www.nytim...

"Those young victims, most likely a girl and a boy roughly 4 to 8 years old, drank a liquid that may have lightened their moods and calmed their nerves in the days or weeks before they were ceremonially killed and buried on Peru’s Ampato mountain, a new study suggests."

"In most authors, Phaethon is the son of Helios, and out of desire to have his parentage confirmed, travels to the sun-god's palace in the east. There he is recognised by his father, and asks him for the privilege to drive his chariot for a single day. Despite Helios' fervent warnings and attempts to talk him out of it, counting the numerous dangers he would face in his celestial journey and reminding Phaethon that only he can control the horses, the boy is not dissuaded and does not change his mind. He is then allowed to take the chariot's reins; his ride is disastrous, as he cannot keep a firm grip on the horses. As a result, he drives the chariot too close to the earth, burning it, and too far from it, freezing it. In the end, after many complaints, from the stars in the sky to the earth itself, Zeus strikes Phaethon with one of his lightning bolts, killing him instantly. His dead body falls into the river Eridanus, and his sisters the Heliades are turned to black poplar trees as they mourn him.

Phaethon's tale was commonly used to explain why inhabitable lands on both sides of extremity (such as hot deserts and frozen wastelands) exist, and why certain peoples have darker complexions, while his sisters' amber tears accounted for the river's rich deposits of amber."

I find this fascinating and am now in a rabbit hole of Greek mythology. Would love recs on any good books on the subject.

This was written by the chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. He is, in fact, a person.

"This is the quiet miracle of repetition: its ability to not only make actions easier over time, but also change one’s desires, bringing the cravings of the flesh in line with the aspirations of the spirit (or as James puts it, making “our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy”). It is a miracle well known to the religious convert who comes to look forward to the once-dreaded rite of confession, or the new parent who becomes acclimated to a lack of sleep, or the Twitter addict who realizes a few months after deleting the app that he can no longer recall the enthralling drama of the feed."

Extraordinary essay on habits and routines. Hat tip to The Browser (https://thebrowser.com/) for alerting me to it.

This is an important piece adapted from MIT anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate's longer Case Study produced at MIT's Schwarzman College of Computing: https://mit-serc.pubpub.org/pub/the-cloud-is-material/releas....

Steven spent five years studying the Cloud’s ecological and cultural impacts. The focus here is on server farms/data centers — their staggering carbon footprint and their contribution to issues around water scarcity and noise pollution in particular. But the longer case study has an additional focus on the engineers running the centers. It's a fascinating on-the-ground study, carefully researched and beautifully told (in part, through vignettes based on the his fieldwork.) Part of the college's new SERC (Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing) program, which is freely accessible and full of resources that may be of interest to HN readers. More info here for anyone curious: https://mit-serc.pubpub.org/

Do people really believe that? A neuroscientist is (i hope) more knowledgeable about the brain than you or me. But I don't think people see them as omniscient. We all have a unique perspective. This particular piece could have been written by any thoughtful person diagnosed with a terminal illness. In fact, there is a whole genre of these stories. And each one of them gives me pause and helps me refocus, if not for just a little while.

A deeply moving and wise piece. Just what I needed to start the year.

"The deep truth of being human is that there is no objective experience. Our brains are not built to measure the absolute value of anything. All that we perceive and feel is colored by expectation, comparison, and circumstance. There is no pure sensation, only inference based on sensation."

I genuinely enjoy my work (most days), but good food for thought here and a reminder of the importance of having hobbies and finding meaning elsewhere too.

"The restoration we find in hobbies can make us better partners, better friends, better listeners and collaborators—just overall better people to be around. Hobbies help cultivate essential parts of us that have been suffocated by productivity obsessions and proliferating obligations. The hobby itself ultimately matters far less than what its existence provides: a means of tilting your identity away from 'person who is good at doing a lot of work.'"

nice! i love this poster for Final Fantasy Mystic Quest: https://www.etsy.com/listing/690646890/1992-final-fantasy-my...

edit: they also have Chuck Rock! https://www.etsy.com/listing/690598064/1992-chuck-rock-super.... This is bringing back good memories.

Wow. Never heard of Janusz Zajdel or Limes Inferior, but i'm intrigued after reading the wiki pages for both. The book's summary brings to mind Zamyatin's "We." Are you translating it into English, and is there a publisher lined up?

Fair warning, this story is about 9,000 words. But it's so rich and weird and dazzling. It's among my favorite Lem stories — although i admit i hadn't read anything of his until we (MIT Press, where i work) started reissuing his books last year, so i'm by no means an expert on him. Anyway, there was a lot of interest in an excerpt from Lem's memoir I submitted here a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25533405), so thought i'd share this as well.

I'm with you. I've been releasing records for almost two decades, happily selling through a hundred copies of a release and moving on to the next project. But I don't think the author is seeing that and assuming I'm trying to turn my hobby/passion into a side hustle because I'm putting out albums. And I think there are plenty of people doing exactly the same thing with their art — putting it out there, occasionally finding an audience but not counting on feedback or looking for recognition or extra income. It took me a while to be comfortable with this.

At the core of the issue the author is addressing, I think, is status anxiety, which he briefly mentions. I've certainly felt it. It's easy to envy someone with a similar hobby, who's making a living doing it. It does seem like a different kind of pressure these days, at least for those of us with anxiety, to succeed, so it can be hard to slow down and find meaning and joy in a hobby. And it must be especially difficult for someone younger who grew up in this noisy environment.

This is a fascinating and unfamiliar history of Nazi Berlin, viewed through the lens of its energy and water services. It’s adapted from a new book by scholar Tim Moss, the result of a career spent studying the infrastructure of the city. In part it’s a story — one documented before — about Hitler’s deranged idea to “restructure” Berlin into a world capital, to be called Germania; in part it’s one about his idiotic plan to cleanse the "degenerate" city by diverting water from mountain springs, and his unusual interest in the city’s water supply. It’s a rigorous but insightful piece, with some interesting images to boot.

Disclosure: I work on the MIT Press Reader. What I’ve read of Tim’s book is brilliant, but it’s a scholarly work and not the best introduction to Berlin for a “general reader” interested in learning more about its history. It’s a meticulous study of one city’s urban infrastructure, after all.

Sure, this is about race, not income inequality or underpaid teachers or overcrowded schools... At very least get your facts straight: According to Canada's 2016 census about 73% of Canadians are white. By now that percentage is probably lower.

Went down the rabbit hole and was surprised to learn that the U.S. spends more than any other country on education. Lots more interesting takeaways — from Canada, Singapore, Finland, South Korea, and Germany — here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education...

There are some good lessons and reminders here, not least to practice self care and mindfulness and to remember that "as much as you might love your work, work won’t love you back." Taking the focus off Osaka specifically though, ambition for some, including myself, isn't a dirty word. When I think of ambition i think of pursuing meaningful work, setting goals that force me to grow, etc. It's our society's emphasis on achieving success and earning more at all cost that's the real problem. Careerism is a trap and the pressure is real but it's not the same thing as ambition, even professional ambition.

This article keeps getting flagged, so I figured I should leave a comment as the OP (full disclosure: I work for MIT Press, who published the book from which the article is excerpted):

I should have recognized that this may be too contentious a topic for this forum (or any open online forum), but I urge you give it a read. I learned a lot from it. It offers important historical context and is a good reminder that science is always political. The piece is a deep dive that draws on years of academic research; it's not an opinion essay, but a rigorous study of Israeli population cartography, under the direction of renowned statistician and geographer Roberto Bachi.

Is this an intellectually challenging piece, or “deeply interesting”? Definitely not. But if you have a heart and feel like a good cry, this is what you need.