What I'm Reading (Nov. 14)

Could this be true?

“The microwave is a baffling contradiction: a universal, time-saving appliance that also seems trapped in time. You can now easily find plenty of sleek and technologically advanced dynamic precision cookers, stand mixers, and coffee machines, among many other appliances. But somehow, the microwave, a device used in nearly every American home, has responded with a resigned shrug.”

Of all the gadgets in the kitchen, the microwave seems to be the most utilitarian. It remains “unsmartened,” assuming that linking an appliance to my phone somehow imbues the appliance with intelligence. From The Atlantic, The Microwave Makes No Sense

As someone who writes daily, this immediately caught my eye.

“These two powerful opposing forces, the pervasive expectation of writing and the irreducible difficulty of doing it, create enormous pressure. This is why eminent professors often turn out to have resorted to plagiarism. The most striking thing to me about these cases is the pettiness of the thefts. The stuff they steal is usually the most mundane boilerplate — the sort of thing that anyone who was even halfway decent at writing could turn out with no effort at all. Which means they're not even halfway decent at writing.”

From Paul Graham,  Writes and Write-Nots

There is so much discussion of machine learning and AI, but do we really understand the nuts and bolts of how it is accomplished?

“The process begins with a task — say, “recognize cats in photos.” The goal is to find a mathematical function that can accomplish the task. This function, which is called the model, will take one kind of numbers as input — in this case, digitized photographs — and transform them into more numbers as output, which might represent labels saying “cat” or “not cat.” The model has a basic mathematical form, or shape, that provides some structure for the task, but it’s not likely to produce accurate results at first.”

An explanation from Quanta: What Is Machine Learning?

Writing about end-of-life and our mortality is difficult, creating unease in the writer and reader. But consider this from a surgeon I have long admired, Atul Gawande, who spoke about managing those issues.

“I thought my priority was your health and your independence. And then that means that I was always lost. What is my goal for people when they’re not healthy anymore, or they don’t get to be independent? And then what she opened up for me was the recognition that well-being was really about getting to — what made those people happy, and when they lost that happiness is when they no longer were having some control over their own story, that they were not getting to be the shapers of their own story. And that’s what you see in people who are in hospitals or in many nursing homes, not all, where our goal is safety, survival, and health. And that’s why you can gradually lose some functions and have some health issues along the way, and yet, have great satisfactions in life.”

From Kristin Tippett’s On Being, On Mortality and Meaning. The transcript and the audio