7 entries from "Lisbon"

Things lost in translation

In Western contexts, "martyr" carries a heavy political or theological weight—the idea that someone made a conscious choice to die for a cause. But that isn't how shaheed functions for Palestinians.

Calling a child playing in a yard, a sleeping family, or an elderly patient in a hospital bed a shaheed isn't claiming agency or choice. None of them chose to be targeted. Instead, shaheed is an act of love, sanctity, and honor. It is a communal refusal to let a life stolen by Israeli military violence be reduced to a cold, clinical statistic.

This creates a constant struggle in translation: In English, saying someone was "killed" feels completely inadequate—it strips away the honor owed to the victim and flattens the active, systematic violence taking their life.

What you get, the cobbling together of hundreds of thousands of prior conversations, is a kind of conversational purée. Made of human parts, but less than a human sum. Users are, in effect, chatting with a kind of purée of real people-the ghosts of real people, at any rate: the echoes of conversations past.

We once thought humans were unique for having a language with syntactical rules, but this isn't so; we once thought humans were unique for using tools, but this isn't so; we once thought humans were unique for being able to do mathematics, and now we can barely imagine being able to do what our calculators can.

each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.

A Quirky Introduction To Number Systems

[Math is software for your brain: each concept is an app or approach with uses and limitations. Getting stuck on a problem often has more to do with our method than reality itself.]

How we grade presentation night

[I often explain informal series of 5-minute talks as "open mic" with slides.]

[We can grade them as "learned something new", "knew this but enjoyed it", or "unknown"; "unknown" is not bad and not a property of your talk: it has to do with the relationship between your talk and the receiver."]

Pongo: Bruxos

At COLORSxSTUDIOS (2021). Massive sound in this body-shaker, both in the powerful voice and in the beat. The synthy flute about halfway in is a timbre I don’t hear often.