Polymathic Pizza

To know thyself, one must know what the self, in fact, is.

“The challenge for news readers was to sort through the morass of true and false news that surrounded them.”

--Lindsay O’Neill; from “Early Modern Friend Requests,” a 2016 USC Dornsife podcast

 

“[Bots] can sometimes be harmful, for example when they contribute to the spread of unverified information or rumors.”

--Emilio Ferrara; from “The Rise of Social Bots,” in Communications of the ACM, 2016

 

Two quotes, from two scholars, writing on a similar topic three centuries apart.  That is, the concern about...

Paper is a technology. And paper technology has endured from Renaissance Europe through the 2020 pandemic spring as a platform for making, holding and disseminating knowledge. Now we find ourselves in a moment of transition in which personal meetings are replaced by Zoom and paper gives way to PDFs. So are technologies of paper and the digital terminally incompatible? Applying a polymathic approach demonstrates quite the opposite, rather that the two technologies intertwined can produce knowledge heretofore unseen. 
 
Scalar Creative Director Erik Loyer and Professor of Art...

Even in dark times, we cannot relinquish the things that make us human.

– Khan, Metro 2033

I don’t need a weapon; my friends are my power!

– Sora, Kingdom Hearts

 

Isolation. Something we all have undoubtedly felt during the pandemic.  Inclusion, connection, and belonging.  Experiences that technology has facilitated during the pandemic.  COVID has created a window (literally for us, a zoom window) that we are all navigating together, and the space we are sharing in this navigation is technology.  Issues like exclusion, isolation,...

In March 2016, a quite milestone passed for humanity. AlphaGo, an AI system developed by Google’s DeepMind, defeated Lee Se-dol, the best GO player in the world.  After game two, Lee said he felt “speechless.” The ancient Chinese game is considered the most complex game ever devised by humans—it has more possible configurations than atoms in the universe. “I misjudged the capabilities of AlphaGo and felt powerless,” Lee confessed.  During the game, AlphaGo applied deep learning through neural networks—like the brain, it taught itself to play...