Locomotoring

Episode 2 of our newly minted podcast, Archy and I, is now available. It is titled “Melody is in the ears of the listener“.

DECEMBER 28
Happy Inspirations

"excuse me if my
writing is out of alignment i
fell into a bowl of
egg nog the other
day at the restaurant down
the street which the doctor
says he is glad to
hear you are keeping away
from and when i
emerged i was full of happy
inspirations alas they
vanished ere the break of 
day i am sure they
were the most brilliant and
witty things that ever
emanated from the mind of
man or cockroach or poet ..."

Page 61, The annotated Archy and Mehitabel, 
Don Marquis

Earlier this year, we heard the podcast, The 11th. It left an impact. You may remember, Dear Reader, that we took the concept of Exhausting a Place and applied to a photo in the blogpost “An attempt at exhausting a photo“. Another episode that blew our mind was the The Happiness Project, we heard it in March this year. That was the inspiration behind our second episode. We want to experience all conversations like Charles Spearin does in his Happiness Project. There, we said it. Charles says that all of the melodies from this project are the melodies of every day life. To listen to all of the songs from this 2009 album, visit Charles, founding member of Broken Social Scene and Do Make Say Think.

Have you seen the latest from Ottolenghi’s Test Kitchen, the Extra Good Things? Yes, Noor Murad is amazing and the extra good thing in this episode is Sam Burr, the Sam of Somalia. In this video, he explains why he started learning the Somali language. He describes the first group of Somalians he met as beautiful humans who looked like giraffes, long necked and elegant. He graduated from SOAS University of London where he graduated in Arabic language and where he was first exposed to the language. Sam Burr from Cornwall, UK, an ex-primary school teacher, is now a Somali language enthusiast. He describes his hometown of wild moorlands and sandy beaches, as a quaint, insular, “miles-from-anywhere” sort of place. And, he wants his children to love and value the Somali language, the country that their mother is from.

True today but not a timeless story is that of chatGPT from OpenAI. It has caused a stir amongst technologists. Like Dall-e (and its next iteration, e2) can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language, chatGPT interacts in a conversational way. The underlying AI technology is two years old. When I say, not-timeless, I refer to the year old announcement from Microsoft and Nvidia, they announced that Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model (MT-NLG) trained 530 billion parameters compared to GPT-3’s 175 billion. Experts peg the cost of training at millions of dollars. Microsoft has invested a billion dollars in OpenAI to become the exclusive cloud partner for OpenAI. New York Times reports that in 5 days since chatGPT launch announcement, a million people signed up to test it out. Also, of today, WHO reports that nearly 6.6 million people have died of coronavirus.The numbers boggle one’s mind.