Eat your broccoli pills because AI gonna make you fear-barf
Also, get interested in things and you'll win a Nobel Prize
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Follow your weird obsessions
Clive Thompson has an article (post? are we still blogging?) about getting interested and staying interested. It starts with an anecdote about a microbiologist on vacation:
Back in 1964, the microbiologist Thomas Brock visited Yellowstone National Park to do some sightseeing. He was on a long car ride, and wanted to break up the monotony.
While peering into the hot springs, he noticed a curious blue-green tinge. When he asked a park ranger about it, he was told it was algae. That surprised Brock: Those pools are so hot that some of them reach a boiling temperature. At the time, scientists didn’t know of many lifeforms that could readily thrive such scalding environments.
But Brock couldn’t stop wondering about what exactly was going on in those boiling pools. He was dying to know: What was alive down there? How was it surviving?
Brock’s obsessive interest caught the obsessive interest of another scientist many years later and THAT led to a Nobel Prize. Which is cool.
Specifically:
1. It’s enormously valuable to simply follow your curiosity—and follow it for a really long time, even if it doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere in particular.
2. Surprisingly big breakthrough ideas come when you bridge two seemingly unconnected areas.
Not really related, I really love the dancing in this video:
Kristen Bell eats metaphoric pill broccoli
That’s not an obscure curse or my own delusion, it’s one of the takeaways from this article on the Today Show’s site.
She and her husband, Dax Shepard, have two daughters.
The mom of two also tells TODAY.com the way she explained her daily mental health medication to the girls.
"I think I described the pill that I take at night when they saw me take it as broccoli for my brain," she says. "I felt like that was a decent comparison. 'This is what keeps my brain healthy. Not everybody needs this.'"
The article doesn’t break any revolutionary ground in its approach to mental health treatment and it’s not really meant to. It’s a little like the articles I sometimes link to here about athletes speaking out about mental health: the positive outcome is in how ordinary it is to speak out. Being open about mental health, imploring people to get help, is like telling people not to drive drunk or stop smoking.
And that’s where we’ll win.
As a parent, Bell says she separates normal anxieties of parenting from her own personal anxiety by using one simple approach.
"My personal technique is if the anxiety is infiltrating every other area of my life, then I know it deserves some extra attention," she says. "For instance, if I can’t stop thinking about an issue with my kids while I’m at work, or I’m more anxious when I’m at work that’s how I know that it’s not acute and that it’s a more broad situation."
What’s a mental disorder and what’s a rational response to a societal disorder?
That’s the issue at the heart of an op-ed by a physician in The Guardian. Dr. Nathaniel P. Morris writes about homeless people being picked up for vague crimes like disorderly conduct and then receiving vague diagnoses like adjustment disorder.
If an older Black man living in poverty on the streets, surrounded by a society that provides him with little assistance and does not seem to care about him, becomes distressed when put in handcuffs, does he have a mental disorder? Should he “adjust” to this unjust reality, or does the disorder lie in the systems around him?
A great deal has been written about the dehumanizing nature of incarceration. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which health professionals, and the diagnoses we make, can compound the trauma experienced by people who have been incarcerated in jails and prisons. A woman locked in a cell for 23 or 24 hours a day might fall into such loneliness and despair that she cuts herself to get out of her cell and be sent to the hospital, whereupon physicians and nurses label her as “malingering” and promptly discharge her back to shackles and chains. When a man repeatedly acts out, yelling at staff or kicking his cell door, to protest against the conditions of his confinement, he will too often wind up with a medical chart filled with references to a “personality disorder” and notes on how challenging he is to deal with.
Microsoft AI can simulate (duplicate?) any voice based on three seconds of audio
I kind of feel like we need to talk about AI all the time or not at all. Many people can - and do - talk about it all the time because SHIT IS GETTING CREEPIER ALL THE TIME.
And now this. Microsoft’s VALL-E, which only needs three seconds to pretend to be you saying anything.
Its creators speculate that VALL-E could be used for high-quality text-to-speech applications, speech editing where a recording of a person could be edited and changed from a text transcript (making them say something they originally didn't), and audio content creation when combined with other generative AI models like GPT-3.
Check out Microsoft’s demo site to hear examples and then your blood will freeze in your veins.
Chris Walla coming to the podcast
I interviewed Chris this week. He’s a musician and became famous as the co-founder of the band Death Cab for Cutie.
It’s going to be a good episode. We talked about:
Dropping out of college
Flunking at another college
Giving up and moving to Bellingham to work at Starbucks
Starting a band that got huge
Deciding to leave that band at the height of its popularity
Moving to Norway
Leaving to Norway and moving to Montreal
Moving BACK to Norway!
Gdamnit, John, I can't get past the video. Even in ninth grade I thought it was cringey. What I didn't realize then was that it was cringe-aware and, really, how much fun they were having shooting it.
Also noticed the drummer with the traditional grip. In an 80's rock/pop band? The 80's were weird. Keep posting the weird!