Dr. Vernor Vinge’s “seminal essay in 1993, The Coming Technological Singularity, which predicted that computers would be so powerful by 2030 that a new form of superintellligence would emerge. Dr. Vinge compared that point in history to the singularity at the edge of a black hole: a boundary beyond which the old rules no longer applied, because post-human intelligence and technology would be as unknowable to us as our civilization is to a goldfish.”
Tag: 08.25.08
Did Classical Music Die With Vaughan Williams?
“Vaughan Williams died 50 years ago tomorrow. He had a good innings – he died at 85 – but his death was symbolic of another death: that of contemporary classical music as a mainstream cultural activity.”
The Difference Between Censorship And Judgment
Random House declined to publish a book because it might be offensive to Muslims. “What Random House did was not censorship. (Some other press is perfectly free to publish Jones’s book, and one probably will.) It may have been cowardly or alarmist, or it may have been good business, or it may have been an attempt to avoid trouble that ended up buying trouble. But whatever it was, it doesn’t rise to the level of constitutional or philosophical concern.”
Chicago Collector Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman, 94
Newman, the doyenne of Chicago’s collectors of modern art and one of the most cosmopolitan figures on the scene, died Friday. “She had studied painting as a child at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later fulfilled several commissions for portraits, so the extraordinary collection Mrs. Newman began to build in the late 1940s was the great private one in Chicago formed with the eye of an artist.”
The Most Sung-About Body Part
“Visual artists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg analyzed over 10,000 songs to find out which parts of the human body were mentioned the most and broke down the resulting data by genre. The result: An interactive graphic work called “Listen” that correlates musical genres with the body parts they mention the most, as part of their ongoing Fleshmap project.”
A New Way To Think About Olympic Buildings?
“If hosting the Olympics was China’s way of shoring up its strength and visibility on the international stage, than the architecture was the look-at-me muscle flexing that brought together aesthetics and political will in a peculiar dance of neo-perestroika.” Future Olympic cities are taking a different approach. “The most promising approach looks at Olympics infrastructure as a reflection of what they really mean for a city: a splashy, but ultimately temporary event.”
A Visionary Architect Who Foretold The Future
Arcosanti is a settlement 70 miles from Phoenix, Arizona, and “a curious taste of what an environmentally friendly US town could look like, but probably never will. It was designed by Paolo Soleri, an Italian-born architect, who originally came to Arizona to work for Frank Lloyd Wright, but soon set off on his own idiosyncratic path… Today, as the world wakes up to the grim realities of climate change, peak oil and sustainability, Soleri’s path looks less idiosyncratic. In fact, he’s now something of a guru.”
David Hare: The The BBC Killed The Broadcast Play
“It is curious that there has been so little comment about how the BBC and Channel 4 have together quietly murdered one of the two forms which may be said to have been distinctively pioneered and championed in this country. The nature documentary survives, glorious as ever. But mention of the single play, in which one writer is given the opportunity to make his or her own fiction at will, seems to evoke the past more powerfully than Green Shield Stamps or Craven A.”
Sao Paulo Paints Over Grafitti, Then Realizes It’s Art
Now Sao Paulo is creating a registry of street art to be preserved, exempt from Mayor Gilberto Kassab’s drive to eliminate “visual pollution.” The episode is sparking a public discussion of what constitutes art.
Bayreuth Power Struggle – Not Over Yet
“Nike Wagner, the great-granddaughter of the composer Richard Wagner, has joined forces with Paris Opera chief Gerard Mortier to challenge her cousins Katharina and Eva for the leadership of the Bayreuth opera festival.”