Hot Empire in Decline Summer
The coneflowers, the monarda, and a multitude of pollinator friends have taken over the yard; the wildfire smoke has taken over the air; bizarre news continues to come out of DC every few hours.
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Culture & Language
Nazi Chatbots? ANOTHER Horseman of the Apocalypse?
Elon Musk appears to have ordered the reprogramming of the Grok chatbot on the Platform Formerly Known As Twitter to describe itself as MechaHitler, and to go after everyone ranging from Will Stancil to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the President of Turkey.
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A World Of Undiscovered Edible Plants
Corn and soybeans account for around 87% of US agricultural production. What if we shifted some of that to growing some weird vegetables you’ve never heard of?
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Scent Marketing: We Want Your Business– And Your Olfactory Receptors
Humans like smells that remind us of nature. Can corporate-led fragrance chemistry convince our primitive brains that we’re actually in nature when we’re in a hotel lobby?
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Four Years After January 6th: Did We Learn A Damn Thing?
Last night, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend kind of thing posted on Facebook about
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The Detroit Lions of Judah: An Esoteric Use Case for ChatGPT
Using ChatGPT, long accused of making stuff up, to, well, make some stuff up– namely, to synthesize a combination of real and made up stuff.
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Book Review: Scaling People, by Claire Hughes Johnson
A good manager needs to be able to hire, lead, inspire, and deliver. It’s a tricky balance of often disparate skills and deliverables, but this book sheds a lot of light on how to do it.
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Line Go Up: Book Review of “The Cold Start Problem,” by Andrew Chen
I was recently hanging out with a buddy who, responding to my standby joke about how we must all be
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Suffering For Sweetness: Why Arkansas Strawberries Are So Good
“The wine is no good, because the grapes haven’t suffered!” Is this just pedantry, or is there some biochemical truth in this statement?
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Semantics & Semitics: Why We Need Better Language To Discuss Israel.
The war in Gaza has been punctuated by atrocity after atrocity, but also by language on both sides of the conflict that attempts to delegitimize the other side, questioning the validity of an entire people to exist. Often, these attempts are rooted in intellectual misappropriations or misunderstandings of historical phrases or concepts.
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