Breaking (when it means dance, not news): Links

Years ago when I worked at Ballet Hispanico I saw a dancer rehearsing wearing a t-shirt that read "I'm not a tomboy, I'm an athlete". The phrase stuck with me. I remember thinking that a variation of the shirt could easily be "I’m an athlete because I’m a dancer."

Since Breaking was announced as the latest addition to the Olympics that phrase has been on my mind. I've been pleased to see so much conversation on my feeds with Breaking being about joyful, curious, exciting subjects instead of the latest in news mayhem.

• B-Girl Ami Yuasa wins first-ever breaking Olympic gold medal. (YouTube)

• B-Boy Phil Wizard claims inaugural men's breaking gold at Paris Olympics. (YouTube)

• How Breaking Went From a Street Dance to an Olympic Sport. This summer, 32 athletes will compete in what's commonly known as breakdancing, a dance sport that combines athleticism and artistry. (Smithsonian Magazine)

• Dance Leads the Way as Art Meets Sport at the Cultural Olympiad. A program of arts events shown in conjunction with the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games looks at the relationship between art and sport. (New York Times)

• Fantastic feature explaining Breaking: More than 50 years since its inception, BREAKING will debut as an Olympic sport in Paris, where B-boys and B-girls will vie for gold and glory. (New York Times)

• How Will Breaking Be Scored at the Olympics? A panel of nine judges will apply Olympic rules to the dance form that originated as a free-flowing expression of hip-hop culture. (New York Times)

• What if All Dance Forms Were Considered Equal? At the Palais Garnier, ballet met hip-hop and beyond in a glittering Cultural Olympiad presentation of Saïdo Lehlouh's ever-evolving "Apaches." (New York Times)

• Once Sidelined, Breaking's B-Girls Now Throw Down at Center Stage. Women are competing in breaking in greater numbers and, thanks to better training and more opportunities, with more dynamic moves. (New York Times)

• The Surprise of the Olympics: Breakers' Delight. Breaking was invented by Black and brown kids, mostly male, in the Bronx in the 1970s. That it made Olympic history by opening with B-girls was everything. The logic of introducing breaking as a new competitive event aside, these female competitors, with their B-girl spirit and ethos, pulled the Olympic Games into the global here and now. (New York Times)

• A Viewer's Guide to Breaking at the Olympics. (Dance Magazine)

• Judging Breaking at the Olympics Is an Art, Not a Science. Breaking debuts as an Olympic sport at the Paris Games. To get there, the breaking community had to figure a way to objectively judge the subjective, while letting the dance remain a dance. (Wired)

• Don't Think Breakdancing Is a 'Real' Olympic Sport? The World Champ Agrees (Kinda) Phil Wizard, the current favorite for Olympic Gold, says it's an art and culture first. But if you're gonna hate, he'd like you to at least learn the proper terminology. (Wired)

• Poetry Was an Official Olympic Event for Nearly 40 Years. What Happened? Pierre de Coubertin hoped the modern Games would encourage the ancient Greek notion of harmony between "muscle and mind." (Smithsonian Magazine)

Brains, Servers, Ships, Thinking: Links

In the BBC’s podcast The Digital Human Aleks Krotoski explores the digital world and how it affects humanity. Recently they launched a spin-off podcast, The Artificial Human, where Krotoski and Kevin Fong answer the questions we're all asking about AI. Their more recent episode Can we stop saying AI can think inspired this collection of links:

• What is thought and how does thinking manifest in the brain? - We can describe different kinds of thought and how they arise, to some extent, but the relationship between neural activity and the nature of what we are thinking isn't well understood. (Scientific American)

• Frozen human brain tissue was successfully revived for the first time - In a groundbreaking development, scientists have discovered a new technique that allows human brain tissue to be frozen and thawed while maintaining its normal function. (BGR)

• Scientists Imaged and Mapped a Tiny Piece of Human Brain. Here’s What They Found - With the help of an artificial intelligence algorithm, the researchers produced 1.4 million gigabytes of data from a cubic millimeter of brain tissue. (Smithsonian Magazine)

• Designing a Workflow For Thinking - We’re living in a golden age of tools for thought. But with so many options, it’s important to carve out time every year or two for a “creative inventory” of how you discover and organize your ideas. (Steven Johnson’s Adjacent Possible Substack)

• Neuralink’s First User Is ‘Constantly Multitasking’ With His Brain Implant - Noland Arbaugh is the first to get Elon Musk’s brain device. The 30-year-old speaks to WIRED about what it’s like to use a computer with his mind—and gain a new sense of independence. (Wired)

• Single brain implant restores bilingual communication to paralyzed man - Bilingual AI brain implant helps stroke survivor communicate in Spanish and English. The implant uses a form of AI to turn the man's brain activity into sentences, allowing him to participate in a bilingual conversation and "switch between languages." (Are Technica)

• Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model - Anthropic announced a new research breakthrough in understanding the black box of how AI models work. This is the first ever detailed look inside a modern, production-grade large language model. This interpretability discovery could, in future, help us make AI models safer. (Anthropic)

• Google Eats Rocks, a Win for A.I. Interpretability and Safety Vibe Check - “Pass me the nontoxic glue and a couple of rocks, because it’s time to whip up a meal with Google’s new A.I. Overviews.” Josh Batson, a researcher at the A.I. startup Anthropic, joins the Hard Fork podcast to explain how an experiment that made the chatbot Claude obsessed with the Golden Gate Bridge represents a major breakthrough in understanding how large language models work. (Hard Fork)

• Google’s broken link to the web - With AI search results coming to the masses, the human-powered web recedes further into the background. (Platformer)

• Why ChatGPT feels more “intelligent” than Google Search - Artificial intelligence caught the public’s imagination when OpenAI released its GPT-4-powered chatbot in 2023. For many users, ChatGPT feels like a true AI compared to other tools such as Google Search. In this op-ed, Philip L, the creator of the AI Explained YouTube channel, explains why he thinks new video interfaces will give people a sense of AI as a “thing” rather than a “tool.” (Big Think)

• With spatial intelligence, AI will understand the real world - In the beginning of the universe, all was darkness — until the first organisms developed sight, which ushered in an explosion of life, learning and progress. AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li says a similar moment is about to happen for computers and robots. She shows how machines are gaining "spatial intelligence" — the ability to process visual data, make predictions and act upon those predictions — and shares how this could enable AI to interact with humans in the real world. (TED)

• AI is cracking a hard problem – giving computers a sense of smell - Research on machine olfaction faces a formidable challenge due to the complexity of the human sense of smell. Whereas human vision mainly relies on receptor cells in the retina – rods and three types of cones – smell is experienced through about 400 types of receptor cells in the nose. (The Conversation)

• The Cloud Under The Sea - The internet is carried around the world by hundreds of thousands of miles of slender cables that sit at the bottom of the ocean. These fragile wires are constantly breaking - a precarious system on which everything from banks to goverments to TikTok depends. But thanks to a secretive global network of ships on standby, every broken cable is quickly fixed. This is the story of the people who repair the world’s most important infrastructure. (The Verge)

• What ideas in computer science are universally considered good? - Programmers love arguing for their favorite technologies. C++ vs Rust. Mac vs PC. These arguments overshadow the victories of Computer Science — the ideas that we all agree on. (Daniel Hooper)

• The Ambling Mind - Meditations on the virtues of walking. Kierkegaard “walked himself into a state of well-being”; Nietzsche felt that “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking”. Travel writer Nick Hunt, reflecting on his walk from the Netherlands to Istanbul, noted that walking turned the world into a continuum. “One thing merges into the next: cultures are not separate things but points along a spectrum.” (The Convivial Society)

In Your Head: Links

• Innovative three-year-olds expose the limits of AI chatbots
New experiments show that very young children are better at solving creative puzzles than ChatGPT and other AI models. (Psyche)

• This Is What Your Brain Does When You’re Not Doing Anything
When your mind is wandering, your brain’s “default mode” network is active. Its discovery 20 years ago inspired a raft of research into networks of brain regions and how they interact with each other. (Wired)

• Is It Real or Imagined? How Your Brain Tells the Difference.
New experiments show that the brain distinguishes between perceived and imagined mental images by checking whether they cross a “reality threshold.” (Quanta)

Immersive Experiences: Links

• Tribeca Games and Immersive 2023: How are immersive technologies changing the way we tell, view, and perceive compelling stories? (Wunderman Thompson Intelligence)

•  Vision Pro: What has Apple built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500? Check back in 2025. (Benedict Evans)

• Early Stats from the General Social Survey: How Virtual Arts Participation Fared in 2022: The arts module of the 2022 GSS was designed to track various types of arts activity among adults in the U.S. Unlike previous surveys, the module includes many questions about virtual participation in arts events. The module also asked respondents whether, at the time of the survey, they were taking part in such activities more or less often than when the pandemic was in its first year. (Arts Journal Blogs)

• NASA Is Behind New York’s Newest Immersive Art Show: The federal space agency has a surprisingly long history of art collaborations. (Observer)

• Some quick notes on Apple’s Vision Pro by Andy Matuschak: The hardware seems faintly unbelievable—a computer as powerful as Apple’s current mid-tier laptops (M2), plus a dizzying sensor/camera array with dedicated co-processor, plus displays with 23M 6µm pixels (my phone: 3M 55µm pixels; the PSVR2 is 32µm) and associated optics, all in roughly a mobile phone envelope.
But that kind of vertical integration is classic Apple. I’m mainly interested in the user interface and the computing paradigm. What does Apple imagine we’ll be doing with these devices, and how will we do it? (Andy’s working notes)

• Olfactory Overload: How it feels to have hyperosmia, a heightened sensitivity to smells, which can accompany autism. (The Polyphony)

• How your brain stays focused on conversations in a noisy room: The brain processes voices differently depending on the volume of the speaker and if the listener is focused on them. (New Scientist)

• Why Being in Nature Makes You Smarter, According to Neuroscientists: The scientific evidence is overwhelmingly clear: spending time outdoors boosts your brain function. (Outside)

• Why VR Photography Could Be the Next Big Thing: Pictures that let you see more; Apple’s new Vision Pro headset lets you take immersive photos and video; Canon is showing off a camera that lets you take 360-degree shots; The new technologies could boost the popularity of virtual reality photography. (Lifewire)

AI's IQ: Links

Links on AI, from how it works to how intelligent it actually is:

• There is no AI: There are ways of controlling the new technology--but first we have to stop mythologizing it.
As a computer scientist, I don't like the term "A.I." In fact, I think it's misleading--maybe even a little dangerous. Everybody's already using the term, and it might seem a little late in the day to be arguing about it. But we're at the beginning of a new technological era--and the easiest way to mismanage a technology is to misunderstand it. (Jaron Lenier, The New Yorker)

• What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?: That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected. But how does it do it? And why does it work? My purpose here is to give a rough outline of what's going on inside ChatGPT--and then to explore why it is that it can do so well in producing what we might consider to be meaningful text. (Stephen Wolfram)

• AI for data storytelling: Artificial Intelligence in data journalism projects often showcases some of the most imaginative aspects of how to use new tools to perform analyses that just weren't possible before. (Simon Rogers)

• A.I. Pop Culture Is Already Here: We're living in a world in which every style, every idea, and every possible remix can be generated as fast and frictionlessly as possible. (Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker)

• What Kind of Mind Does ChatGPT Have?: Large language models seem startlingly intelligent. But what's really happening under the hood? (Cal Newport, The New Yorker)

• The Andy Warhol Copyright Case That Could Transform Generative AI: The US Supreme Court’s upcoming decision could shift the interpretation of fair use law—and all the people, and tools, that turn to it for protection. (Madeline Ashby, Wired)

• AI Desperately Needs Global Oversight: As ChatGPT and its ilk continue to spread, countries need an independent board to hold AI companies accountable and limit harms. (Rumman Chowdhury, Wired)

• The stupidity of AI: Artificial intelligence in its current form is based on the wholesale appropriation of existing culture, and the notion that it is actually intelligent could be actively dangerous. (James Bridle, The Guardian)

Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash.