Becoming Led Zeppelin is a great documentary which chronicles the band’s rise. It has some great quotes from Plant about the milieu that fathers around a famous band, supplying drugs and sex. The substances lead to abuse, addiction and sometimes overdoses. LZ’s drummer Bonham choked in his own vomit during sleep after taking 40 shots. Page became addicted to several substances. Many famous singers if they survive are recovering from some form of addiction. Bowie, for example. There’s a culture they enter with fame and travel that is hard to escape.
Read Geddy Lee's "My Effin' Life" autobio...the amount of coke Rush used for quite some time came as a big, big surprise to me! And Alex Lifeson has been a huge stoner since forever.
Are you asking if a drug and sex fueled lifestyle is still pursued today by musicians? The answer sadly is yes. There are lots of musicians that don’t go full throttle but most of the highly famous ones are running the red line. This is the OP’s point. Whether it’s the person amplified by the lifestyle that makes them famous or it’s the fame that enables the lifestyle that allows them to destroy themselves.
Speaking of roads, everyone points out lifestyle choices, but the lifestyle of popular bands/musicians is also countrywide or worldwide tours. It doesn't look like an easy life, so I wonder to what extend those excesses are related to being on the road maybe half of the year? I think this means no true social life for extended periods of time; not having people you value telling you that you're past that red line is one less safety.
Also, artists in general are a peculiar profile I think. It's not only famous singers that take drugs, commit suicide etc. One can easily find many writers and painters, some of them even only became famous postmortem.
The author is right to critique Cerquiglini. The French legacy is largely lexical. The syntax and the old, short words of English are Germanic. Its several influences drove the relatively large lexicon we have, and probably adapted English to be a globally adaptive language, borrowing words readily.
This is true. But it’s also hard to hold against many of them. Because they are often isolated, slow or immobile, and in cognitive decline. I saw this happen to my grandmother in an assisted living home.
Terence Tao is well known for being enthusiastic about Lean and AI and he regularly posts about his experiments.
He is also a serious research mathematician at the top of his game, considered by many one of the best mathematicians alive. This might be biased by the fact that he is such a good communicator, he is more visible than other similarly good mathematicians, but he is a Fields medallist all the same.
Kevin Buzzard has been the main mathematician involved with Lean
This is a recent talk where he discusses putting it together with LLMs (he's somewhat sceptical it'll be revolutionary for producing new mathematics any time soon)
I'm leaning a lot into AI + lean. It's a fantastic tool to find new proofs. The extremly rigid nature of lean means you can really check programs for correctness. So that part of AI is solved. The only thing that remains is generating proofs, and that is where there's nothing in AI space right now. As soon as we do get something, our mathematical knowledge is going to explode.
I found this to be a remarkably uninsightful work. He somehow negates the inherent drama of war with the milquetoast prose and myopia of an academic. Much of what he says is in fact false, presumably because he is far from the action and relies on Clausewitz as a crutch for thought.
The key nodes to control have to do with supply chain, energy and information; ie depots, road and rail, bridges, factories, substations and data centers or satellites.
Ukraine has severely weakened Russia by attacking those points, as Russia has Ukraine.
Beijing could well defeat Taiwan (and the US by proxy) by controlling its sea lanes, cutting its cables, and jamming its radio spectrum.
China might be able to blockade Taiwan for a while but China's own SLOC are far more vulnerable. They are dependent on critical food, energy, and mineral imports — most of which pass through a few choke points where they are still unable to project sustained naval power. The US and its allies could cut those off at any time and China lacks the internal reserves to survive a long blockade.
I really like this, and I think one way to make it even more clear would be to use other variable letters to represent breads and milks, because their x’s and y’s somehow morph into the x’s and y’s that represent carbs and protein in the graph.
more broadly, laptops and desktops have also degenerated as tools for thought, largely because they have been turned into vehicles of consumption. every screen has become the infinite push algorithm.
To the people who claim that we’re running out of data, I would just say: the world is largely undigitized. The Internet digitized a bunch of words but not even a tiny fraction of all that humans express every day. Same goes for sound in general. CCTV captures a lot of images, far more than social media, but it is poorly processed and also just a fraction of the photons bouncing off objects on earth. The data part of this equation has room to grow.
reply