PicoBlog

Thanks are due yet again to Google DeepMind for having provided me with a topic for a quick and superficial post, leaving me time to reflect on genuinely deep questions, like what Kevin Buzzard meant when he wrote that, thanks to his “Formalizing Fermat” project, a computer will be able to understand some proofs from late 20th century mathematics… DeepMind’s AlphaGeometry doesn’t bother with the thorny issues around “understanding”; instead, it

Ben Shapiro is not stupid. Ben Shapiro is very smart.  Not just graduating from Yeshiva University High School in Los Angeles at 16 after skipping third AND ninth grade smart.  Not just graduating summa cum laude at age 20 from UCLA smart.  Not just graduating cum laude from Harvard Law School at 23 smart.  Ben Shapiro is one of those that has turned smart into an art, and now has the followers and the revenues to prove it.

I’m being a little playful; honestly, anything can be a vegetable. We eat fruits like tomatoes and eggplant and call them vegetables. Flowers, roots, stems, leaves, etc., can all be vegetables. From a botanist’s view, there is no such thing as a vegetable; that’s a cook's point of view. The definition of a vegetable is much looser; I think of it as any … ncG1vNJzZmimmaDAqa3Rpphnq6WXwLWtwqRlnKedZL1wtdJmmaunk5i8rbXNomSaZaKarq151Z6enqyRl7mm

CHICAGO – Greetings from the Windy City. I’m here this week to cover the NBA draft combine, which is more relevant this year because of a new rule requiring prospects to participate. The change was included in the most recent collective bargaining agreement, and it applies to everything except the five-on-five scrimmages which will take place today and tomorrow at Wintrust Arena. Forty-two players will be competing in those scrimmages across four teams.

Do you know where to find Italy’s—and by extension—the world’s best pizza? If you said Naples, you’re not far off. The birthplace of pizza may be Naples, but if you want to taste the best pizza in Italy, you’ll have to travel about 40 minutes north of the city to Caserta. Seven of the pizzerias ranked on the list of the Top 50 in Italy are located in Caserta and the surrounding towns.

Every draft cycle, a future lottery pick is pronounced “too skinny for the NBA” before they can legally buy a lottery ticket. When a hoops phenom shows proven ball-skills and awareness of how to use length effectively as a teenager, the talent and work ethic are clear. If anything, the one developable factor a player can control more than any other is managing their own body weight. The big question critics seem to skip past is this: how will changing body frames alter the subtle movements of a player’s game?

Whenever I explain the movie Duets to someone, they can’t believe it ever existed, but it did. Personally, I don’t know why we aren’t constantly talking about this mildly offensive quasi-musical about karaoke hustlers from the year 2000, which you’d think was a significant year when, in fact, it wasn’t. It was just this sort of loud sigh between 1999 and the next hundred years of misery. Duets was one of the last unironic Baby Boomer fantasies, a rock ‘n roll fable about fathers and daughters, free lovin’ ramblers, charming anti-heroes railing against the system, and one Black man who saves the life of a white middle-class worker drone on a journey of self-discovery.

Last month, Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast fame tossed this little nugget to the Twitter wolves: I love Zauner, but a few things here make me scratch my head. We’re not talking about The Beatles today, but Revolver is most certainly not a snob pick. It’s constantly ranked as the best pop album of all time, and if not the top spot, almost always in the top ten. I’m also genuinely curious about what album beats it amongst The Beatles fandom that gives a shit about this?

Yes, science as depicted by many great writers - Orwell, Huxley, C.S Lewis - becomes all too easily the 'lights of perverted science' to quote Churchill. The history of science is littered with wrong turns. To the modern mind, trained in science propaganda, it is inconceivable that the abstraction called 'science' could ever be wrong, or take a wrong turn. The expectation is that 'science' is always right, benign and positive if not perfect.