The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a fresh nature, and al...

“Artificial in- telligence”? “Machine learning”? I say: daikaiju.

I’ve said most of what I have to say about machine learning, and there are plenty of other people doing the heavy lifting on that topic. Mike Sacasas had a typically wise and incisive post the other day, and The New Atlantis is hosting a council on AI ethics. I’d prefer to make this site a cabinet of curiosities. And when I do comment on AI it will be in the form of haiku, or, as I prefer to style the word, haiku.

Marcin Wichary is absolutely correct: Paste And Match Style solves one problem whole creating others.

Austria v. Australia! HItler’s birthplace v. the country where he currently lives in peaceful retirement. ⚽️

Finished reading: Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape by Nicola Moorby. A wonderful book, especially fine on how each painter was moved by rivers: Turner the great Thames, Constable the humble Stour. Now I’m desperate to get back to London to see their paintings again with fresh eyes. 📚

And here is another short film, shot two years later, featuring Dorothy L. Sayers and the cast of her wonderful play The Zeal of Thy House — take a look at the wings on those angels. (At the end there is footage from her far less successful play The Devil to Play.) I don’t know that there is any other film of Sayers and Eliot from that era.

Here is an amateur film from 1935, shot at Canterbury Cathedral, featuring T. S. Eliot and some of the cast of Murder in the Cathedral (including Robert Speight, who played Becket — and then later voiced Jesus in the original production of Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King).

I wrote a grumpy, sardonic, and atypically patriotic post about soccer. ⚽️ 🇺🇸

One of the strangest figures of the first half of the 20th century was Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who began his life as an English prince, the grandson of Queen Victoria, but as an adolescent was plucked from his life at Eton and transported to Germany wh...

This piece of mine is half-essay and half-homily.

John Ruskin, from The Crown of Wild Olive (1866):

All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty. And I want you to think a little of the deep significance of this word 'taste;' for no statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener controverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. ‘No,’ say many of my antagonists, ‘taste is one thing, morality is another. Tell us what is pretty; we shall be glad to know that; but preach no sermons to us.’

Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality — it is the ONLY morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, ‘What do you like?’ Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are.

Also from Sara, Pattern Recognition - Comment Magazine: It can be hard to fully appreciate this kind of design for the astonishing, radical statement in its provision: that the babies of strangers carry the kind of dignity that is tantamount to those of close kin and tribe....

Sara Hendren: If you don’t accept the optimized project rubric for having children, then you should think all the way through what an alternative rubric might be, and how it might shift the very foundations undergirding family-making, period. But most people short-circuit w...

You know, I’ve seen the Uffington White Horse and it doesn’t really look like this.

Resting after running.

In which I explain why I’d like to be the first biographer of Bob Dylan.

(I also posted this to BlueSky because I want to see how long it will be before someone responds, “Actually, there are already several biographies of Bob Dylan.”)

Gary Saul Morson and Julio M. Ottino: Artificial intelligence can process vast datasets, identify patterns invisible to human perception, and generate explanations with remarkable coherence. Faced with such capabilities, it is tempting to believe that uncertainty can finall...

Texas’s newest state park.

Matteo Borrero

From Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer:

Shortly before the American Revolution … the Anglican Society for the Propagation of Gospel sent missionaries to Massachusetts for the conversion of the “heathen.” They built one of their missions not on the frontier but across the street from Harvard College and labored to convert the sons of Congregational New England. The head of this Anglican organization, Bishop Thomas Seeker, made no secret of his contempt for the colonists, whom he collectively characterized in 1741 as “wicked, and dissolute and brutal in every respect.”

An excellent idea whose time has come again.

Edward Mendelson:  Oxford reprinted the anthology in hard covers until the mid-1960s, then issued it in paperback in 1973, a few weeks before Auden's death, under the title W.H. Auden's Oxford Book of Light Verse, as if to signal that it was more of a personal selectio...

Currently reading: Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer 📚

I keep seeing these petulant-to-angry stories in the London sports pages about how vast North America is and how hot — as though ICE had expanded the continent and heated it up to make Europeans uncomfortable. Sorry, but it’s always been this way. North America is more than twice the size of Europe (excluding Russia) and most of it is further south: London’s latitude = that of Calgary, Alberta; Madrid = Chicago; Kansas City = Rome. Miami is at the same latitude as Luxor, Egypt and Dubai. And Calgary, Chicago, and Kansas City are in the midst of an enormous continent with no ocean to moderate temperatures. This is reality.

Incidentally: Waco, where I live, is at the same latitude as Jerusalem. The Lord knoweth His own.

Over at Cosmos Malick, a post on the autobiographical elements in some of Malick’s films.

Francis Young: I have been interested in Faustina Kowalska’s experiences ever since I first read about them when I was eighteen. I am not usually much of a fan of modern-day (or even early modern) devotions, and I was never sure what to make of things like Lourdes, Fatima, ...

The Economist:

It might seem surprising, in a world of global stars, that the 6m Danes, many of whom are fluent in English, listen mainly to homegrown music. And until fairly recently they did not. In 2019 only five songs in Denmark’s top 20 were in Danish. By last year the figure was 18.

A similar trend is under way in other countries — and in other forms of entertainment. From Asia to the Americas, music charts are increasingly dominated by local sounds. Hollywood television-streaming companies are commissioning more local productions in foreign markets, causing consumption of American shows to fall. Social networks are connecting the whole world, but so far people are mainly using them to consume local content. And as video gaming expands, it too is becoming increasingly tailored to local cultures.

Marcin Wichary is right: Apple keeps talking about making things faster, but users just want things to work reliably.

Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born in Oxford on this date in 1893. The cover of my forthcoming biography of her might look like this: