Weirdness - Pete's Newsletter - Issue #33
Song of the Week
I came across this gem while listening to legendary Austin radio station KUTX. Chicago (by way of Gary, Indiana) group Baby Huey & The Baby Sitters cover the soul-gospel classic A Change is Going to Come. They add their twist by incorporating touches of 70s psychedelia and stringing the listener along for nearly 9 minutes, even incorporating a slightly non-sensical spoken word section (!)
Posts of the Week
For all of us dreaming of high speed rail in the U.S., there is real momentum in Texas and the Pacific Northwest building. I also linked to a recent study that measures that economic drag caused by our current system built around the automobile.
A new Kennedy School report reveals what car culture costs us all.
Tech of the Week
I am, or was.
Technologist Janelle Shan has been experimenting with Artificial Intelligence and trained a neural net on 10,000 ways to begin a novel. From there, the AI begin to write first sentences to novels, with compelling results.
Some my favorites below:
At the mid-day meal the sun began to set and the quiet dragged on.
“I am Eilie, and I am here to kill the world.”
The village of Pembrokeshire, in the county of Mersey, lies on a wide, happy plain, which, in a few years, was to become known as the “Land of the Endless Mountains.”
I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I was also playing with a dead man.
The moon was low in the sky, as though it had been shipped in from the farthest reaches of the solar system.
How many times have I had the misfortune to die?
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Prediction: we'll soon enter a period where AI is used throughout the creative process, much like instruments are used to create music today.
Photography of the Week
Aftermath by Norwegian photographer Øystein Sture Aspelund.