What does the “wrath of God” mean? It’s a phrase that those of raised in the church have heard often and that, in all likelihood, generated substantial fear in our childhood. Pete Enns has an interesting personal story about how he experienced what he came to understand as God’s wrath, and it makes a lot of sense to me. (Pete’s book Inspiration and Incarnation has affected my thinking in significant ways.)
Nick Cave, the Australian singer-songwriter who is the main force behind the goth-punk band (labels are only marginally helpful) The Bad Seeds, has a blog on which he regularly responds to fans (and others, I suspect) questions, some of which are quite weird. But he just passed 100,000 questions sent to him, and this response contains some real gems. (He has a new album, as of August 30th, entitled “Wild God”; is there any other kind?)
Earlier this year, there was a cultural moment when women were asking whether they’d rather go into or be in the woods with a man or a bear. A woman who has bike-packed and hiked solo a whole bunch of the time wrote a quite perceptive article on what she’s experienced and how it fits into a society that remains dominated by patriarchalism. (Link courtesy of James Spinti.)
There is a thing called corpus linguistics, which uses large amounts of published texts to analyze the history of languages, including English—surveying how language changes through time. However, that discipline is now threatened (if not actually killed) by AI and the systems used by AI. “Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing. Including this slop in the data skews the word frequencies.” Read the summary of the problem and weep over the (perhaps unintended) consequence of the roadmap to AI.
Elon Musk, perhaps the world’s most wealthy person—well, his effect on our world is more far-reaching than is good for us. This is especially true in the culture of our country; so says Charlie Warzel in this article in The Atlantic. (Link is to a PDF.)
“White-nose syndrome” has been devastating bats in North America for several years now. It appears to have come in, accidentally, from Europe, and our bats don’t have a resistance to this fungus that kills bats. Now, there is some hope that the disease can be limited, though the effort to do so appears to me to be substantial. We need bats, for quite a variety of things, but especially as insect-eaters.
An enormous amount of digital ink has been spilled on the development of and potential for Artificial Intelligence. However, there are costs, perhaps some that we may not see very clearly yet. In a long essay, Ed Zitron argues that a great deal of the tech world and our economy may be upset by the vast amounts of money that AI is consuming, among other problems with it. Allow yourself 30 minutes at a minimum to consume his write-up. I’ve been reliably informed by someone I know that “there is nothing false” in this essay.
And, in case you missed it, the AI universe requires vast amounts of electricity to run all of those computers and servers. Enough electricity that Microsoft is funding the restart of the Three Mile Island nuclear electricity-generating plant to provide electricity for some of its server farms.