Quilts

The first one blew me away pic.twitter.com/1PLastuCR2

— Scott Wessman (@scottew) July 18, 2026

quite a few patriotic quilts this year in celebration of the semiquincentennial pic.twitter.com/jBrAB2gKTr

— Scott Wessman (@scottew) July 18, 2026

That is gorgeous. Here's one my mom did pic.twitter.com/OpzhijCSOX

— Karien (@jazzivalyn) July 19, 2026

This quilt was indeed inspired by the Chihuly, based on the artist's caption next to the quilt. Very impressive to notice this connection. https://t.co/qZgWXIET5S pic.twitter.com/NK9FRUlRqm

— Scott Wessman (@scottew) July 19, 2026

CitySim: Using LLMs to model 1M virtual residents in a virtual city

Japanese researchers created a system that simulates an entire city by generating up to 1 million virtual residents who behave like humans using LLMs.

And it predicted real-world with terrifying accuracy.

They created an urban simulator called "CitySim" that populates a digital… pic.twitter.com/yCBZFmWh3C

— Superman (@thesupermanmx) July 19, 2026

Paper: https://t.co/bznmcMfedg

— Superman (@thesupermanmx) July 19, 2026

Two irises and a bush

Soccer considered as a legacy of European colonialism

Akim Reinhardt, The Good, the Bad, and the Soccer, 3 Quarks Daily, July 19, 2026.

The fourth and fifth paragraphs:

Want proof that European colonialism is the real reason for, or at least the original factor in, soccer’s global popularity? Look at the nations that were not under European control during the late 19th or early 20th centuries, and you’ll mostly find countries where soccer is not the top spectator sport. The United States broke away from Great Britain long before the rise of soccer, and it has a bevy of its own sports that are far more popular (baseball, basketball, American football, and on a good day hockey). Canada, New Zealand, and Australia never rebelled, but rather faded away in time for their most popular sports to be, respectively: hockey, rugby, and cricket (summer) and Australian rules football (winter). Finland, up at the edge of the world, prefers hockey. Mongolia, at the center of the world, prefers wrestling. Ireland, forever looking to do whatever the English do not, very much prefers hurling and Gaelic football. China was never culturally colonized, and basketball is its most popular spectator team sport, with various individual sports also attracting huge fan bases. The United States is itself a massive colonial power, and wherever it held sway, soccer likewise takes a backseat: basketball in the Philippines; baseball and sumo in Japan; baseball in South Korea, Taiwan, and chunks of Latin America (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Panama, and even Venezuela to some degree). India and Pakistan are odd, and extremely populace [sic], outliers. Ruled by Great Britain until after World War II, the English upperclass seems to have had an undue influence there, and cricket, not soccer, is by far the most popular spectator sport in both nations, which collectively account for over a fifth of Earth’s humans.

Add it all up, and we find that soccer is not actually the world’s game, but more accurately about half the world’s game. It’s tops across Europe, Africa, and most of Latin America, but secondary (at best) in the most populated parts of Asia, Oceania, and North America.

There’s much more to the article.

The Boys [Media Notes 187]

David Colman, The Emmy Awards Are Afraid of This Vulgar, Gory, Brilliant Show, NYTimes, July 19, 2026.

Last week, a raft of intelligent, watchable, enjoyable shows were nominated for the Emmy Award for outstanding drama series, the TV version of the best picture Oscar. Each of these prestige TV shows made tart references to our current moment. “The Pitt” dealt with ICE in the E.R. “Slow Horses” and “The Diplomat” dramatized the dangers of cynical political expedience. “The Gilded Age” and “Paradise” produced two very different takes on oligarch-itecture. “Your Friends & Neighbors” wallowed in larcenous suburban finance dads in midlife crisis, while “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” jousted with how to transcend one’s “low birth.” The only show to truly depart from dramatic realism was “Pluribus,” a sci-fi show about a space virus that made virtually all humans highly agreeable zombies, making you wonder if this is what life will be like living in a world ruled by A.I. agents.

But in the end, none of them actually tried to capture the grand farce of a moment we’re in. They didn’t even come close. Each of them is too polite, too nuanced, too, in the end, moderate — centrist, even.

And then there’s The Boys, which captured our current moment, where it’s “as if we’re living in a burn-it-all-down age of greed, mayhem and corruption.”

There was one show, however, that hit this head-on — and it’s not “Industry,” HBO’s finance-and-cocaine drama that was also snubbed by the Emmys this year. It’s Amazon Prime’s “The Boys.” The superhero spoof, which ended its five-season run this May, received not a single Emmy nomination in a major award category. Despite the fact that it dared to land savage, serious and entertaining punches about everything warped in American culture — corporate greed, celebrity worship, moral hypocrisy and how they all fit together. [...]

For those unfamiliar, “The Boys” is set in an alt-present-day United States, where superheroes (“supes”) are real and abundant. But instead of renegades valiantly saving the world from doomsday plots, they’re more like substance-abusing superinfluencers: entitled, narcissistic pursuers of fame whose high-profile “saves” are frequently stage-managed photo ops. They often offhandedly end up killing bystanders. The supes — especially the elite supe group known as “The Seven,” a parody of DC’s Justice League — are controlled, weaponized and monetized by the company that came up with the chemical to create them: Vought International, a corporate octopus whose business interests range from Disney-style entertainment to pharmaceuticals to military contracts.

The gullible public laps up all the supe mythology — especially that of Homelander, the all-American, charismatic leader of the Seven whose authoritarian megalomania drives him to take over the Oval Office, having naysayers locked up in detention camps (or just laser-visioning them in half) along the way.

For what it’s worth, I was hooked from the first season in 2019, while the Trumposaurus was finishing off his first term.

This vulgar world of corporate-branded superheroes isn’t just an ironic conceit; it’s a brilliant, subversive lampooning of our politically divided, social-media-addicted, celebrity-hypnotized society — and, in the words of the “Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke, of the “powerful and selfish people using social media to intentionally tear people apart for their own selfish interests.”

It may not be subtle. But neither is the era we live in. The Shakespearean scramble of “House of Cards” or “Succession” (both repeat Emmy winners for outstanding drama series) seems quaint by comparison with what we get on newsfeeds every day. [...]

You might wonder why a show that focuses on the superheroes isn’t called “The Supes,” but that’s really the point here. The characters putting the plot into action aren’t the supes, but “the boys,” the four men, and eventually two women, who commit themselves to destroying the company and the supes who are making their world a living hell. Even if some have superpowers, they don’t know what they’re doing. They take insane chances. They fail over and over and keep getting outsmarted by Vought — until they don’t. The show’s real heroes, working outside the official system, pursue their impossible task no matter how the deck is stacked against them. And that is how they win.

There’s more at the link.

Blood, Sweat & Tears was bigger than I've remembered (what the hell happened to them?)

What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?

From the YouTube page:

A political thriller about the first American rock band to perform behind the Iron Curtain, whose members find themselves in the crosshairs between the Right and the Left of a polarized America with severe career repercussions.

I was certainly aware of Blood, Sweat & Tears back in the 1960s and 70s. After all, I played in a band that played a number of BS&T tunes. But I don’t remember them as being THAT big, perhaps because, as the Wikipedia entry notes, “by the mid-1970s the group’s popularity began a decline.” And if I was aware of their State Department-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe in 1970, which is the focus of this fascinating documentary, I’ve forgotten or repressed it.

Just around the corner

What do you do when you retire?

Brian J. O’Connor, You’re About to Retire. What Are You Doing for the Next 20 or 30 Years? NYTimes, July 18, 2026.

“Most people have never been retired, so they can’t connect their present reality with their future unknown reality,” said Michael Crews, author of the retirement book “Saturday Everyday” and chief executive of North Texas Wealth Management in Allen, Texas.

“The biggest question that people miss is the goal-setting and lifestyle for retirement,” he said. “In retirement, you still have to figure out what’s really important to you. And people just aren’t having those conversations.”

Like Mr. Crews, an increasing number of financial planners now say the most important retirement question to answer isn’t your net worth, your marginal tax rate, your gift-tax exclusions or expected longevity. Instead, it’s this: How do you plan to spend your time?

Unretiring:

Other retirees stop working entirely for a while and then return part-time or as consultants, aiming to balance the social and mental stimulation with shorter hours and less stress than in a full-time job. An AARP study published early this year found that of the 7 percent of retirees returning to work, 15 percent cited boredom as the reason, with 14 percent saying they were motivated to help others. Still, nearly half said they needed the money.

“People unretire, I think, largely because it was part of their plan to do that all along,” said Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, a research fellow at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, who said that academic literature finds that nearly a quarter of retirees unretire at some point. “They’re stressed, they’re done, they retire, and at some point they’re recharged and they come back to work, especially the more educated group, where there’s not a physical component to the job.”

Three phases of a long retirement:

A retirement of 20 years or longer can cover three phases: An active, healthy phase right after leaving work, followed by a period of less activity, and a final period when retirees settle in to a lifestyle with little activity near the end of life.

Phase One: If they have the resources, this is when retirees should travel, before illnesses or ailments show up. Conventional wisdom once held that spending dropped after you left work, but later, research found that spending actually increased as retirees took up new hobbies, traveled, relocated and pursued other long-delayed plans.

Phase Two: After 10 to 15 active years, physical reality catches up with 75- or 80-year-old retirees. Those who were working part time have typically finished but still have time for family, friends and social activities. Spending tapers off.

Phase Three: After an additional five to 10 years, retirees typically stay closer to home with less activity and may develop more serious health issues that can lead to large medical bills. As of 2025, the median cost for nonmedical caregiver services at home was $80,000 a year (assuming 44 hours a week), assisted living was just over $74,000 and a private nursing home room cost about $130,000.

There's more at the link.

Craziness in the Korean Stock Market [up and down at the same time!]

From the YouTube page:

South Korea has the best performing stock market in the world for the second year running — and it's also in the middle of one of the worst bear markets on earth. The KOSPI is down around 27% from its June peak, more than 1.2 million retail accounts have been hit with margin calls, and hundreds of thousands of Korean investors have been wiped out entirely. But this isn't a story about meme stocks or worthless companies. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are enormously profitable businesses at the center of the global AI boom, and the traders buying them were right about the trend. In this video I look at how a national stock index became a two-stock bet on artificial intelligence, how single-stock leveraged ETFs turned ordinary volatility into a mechanical feedback loop, why Korea's retail "ants" took on so much leverage in the first place, and what Victor Haghani's famous biased-coin experiment tells us about how you can be completely right about a market and still lose everything.

Some notes on AI and “fine art” imagery

A couple of weeks ago I had a post entitled “Friday Fotos: The Last Frontier of AI.” I was interested in whether or not a certain approach I’d been using to create images with ChatGPT could produce “fine art” images, as opposed to illustrations or popular art of various kinds. The particular images I developed for that post (there were five), while interesting, were not particularly compelling. So I went on to display eleven other images I’d created with ChatGPT, including some of the images which that had motivated the post in the first place. I then ranked the images among themselves and decided that the images I’d created specifically for the post ranked near the bottom.

So, while the approach that motivated that post cannot be called a success, the post as a whole has raised the question: Can ChatGPT (be used to) create “fine art” images? I put “fine art” in quotes because the term itself is problematic. It’s not as though there are identifiable characteristics such that any image exhibiting them is a fine art image. The notion of fine art as opposed to folk art or popular art or (mere) illustrations is a cultural convention, one that Marcel Duhamps exploded in 1917 when he entered a urinal into the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. He called it Fountain and attributed it to “R. Mutt.” Fine art is simply the art that society has decided deserves to be treated in a certain way, no more, no less. If you decided that a common urinal should be treated in that way, then it becomes fine art.

Duchamp’s move was controversial, and that controversy has been reverberating ever since. I have no intention of reviewing and rehashing it here. Rather, I simply want to present a collection of images I’ve made with ChatGPT and view them with that issue reverberating in the background.

This image is one of my favorites among those I’ve created with ChatGPT:

I created it for illustrative purposes, to go on the cover of a working paper about Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but I think the image stands on its own. If you’re familiar with the book, then resonance is obvious. It tells about a voyage up the Congo River. As for the superimposed image of the Buddha, here’s first sentence of the last paragraph: “Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha.”

I should note, and this is important, I had ChatGPT create that image from within a chat devoted to that working paper, making the entire chat (up to that point) the context in which ChatGPT created the image. I have reason to believe that it wasn’t working simply from prompt that generated that image. For a discussion of that, see this post: High-level “vibe” – Creating Imaginary Bank Notes with ChatGPT: AI as cultural technology and collective creativity.

Here’s a somewhat different image that I also like very much. It’s almost, but not completely, abstract:

The book is obvious. The rest of it? But that’s not the first image ChatGPT offered to me. This came before (and there were others before this):

If it’s fine art we’re interested in, the black and white image seems (vastly) superior to me.

Here’s an utterly different image:

I don’t remember what prompt I used to create that. But I like the image, absurd as it is, a lot. THAT’s why I like it. It’s ridiculous, but fun. Fine art? Ask me if I care. 

What about this? 

The sun rises in the East [China & AI]

Steve Lohr, China’s Leader Pitches ‘Openness’ in Push to Shape A.I.’s Future, NYTimes, July 17, 2026.

China’s leader on Friday laid out his nation’s bid to shape the path of artificial intelligence, casting China as a champion of an open approach to the technology and a trusted ally of developing nations in advancing A.I.

The remarks by Xi Jinping highlighted the importance that China’s top political and governmental leadership place on artificial intelligence. Mr. Xi’s speech did not mention the United States by name, but the message was clear: China plans to compete as the world’s other A.I. superpower.

Speaking at an A.I. conference in Shanghai, Mr. Xi said that “A.I. development should not be a solo performance by a single country but a symphony of global collaboration.”

He described open-source A.I. technology, in which much of the software can be freely shared and modified, as a “rare and historical opportunity” to spread the benefits of A.I. globally. The technology, he said, must be shared by developing nations or raise the threat of “new historical injustices.”

Moonshot open-source:

On Friday, a Chinese company, Moonshot, introduced a new model that it claimed performed as well as American models from Anthropic and OpenAI. The announcement of the model, Kimi K3, helped roil financial markets.

The U.S. companies, which have spent many billions of dollars creating their frontier models, do not share their technology freely. They have also accused the Chinese of pilfering their technology. And China remains well behind in the most advanced A.I. chips, a market dominated by Nvidia. [...]

In his address, Mr. Xi also said China planned to offer its A.I. technology and training to developing countries that were friendly to China. “We must uphold openness and win-win cooperation,” he said.

But how open?

But A.I., depending on how far and fast it progresses, poses a dilemma for the ruling Communist Party. How should it manage the rise of a technology that could one day be so disruptive that it could threaten its interests — and its grip on power?

There's more at the link.

The language of thought is not natural language

Hope Kean, Alexander Fung, Paris Jaggers, +6 , and Evelina Fedorenko, Evidence from formal logical reasoning reveals that the language of thought is not natural language, PNAS, 123 (28) e2520095123 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2520095123, July 6, 2026.

Significance: Which cognitive mechanisms allow humans to reason logically, to understand whether a conclusion follows from the premises? Are they the same ones that allow the assembly of words into structured representations? Scholars have debated for millennia whether logical reasoning is inextricably tied to natural language, or instead relies on a distinct “language of thought” (LOT). Using fMRI in healthy adults and evaluating logical ability in individuals with severe aphasia, we find that distinct neural systems support language processing vs. logical (inductive and deductive) reasoning. These results suggest that, at least in mature brains, language processing does not underpin logical inference, perhaps due to the distinct representational format of the logical LOT.

Abstract: Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans also arguably have the most sophisticated communication system in the animal kingdom: natural language allows us to express complex and structured meanings. Some have therefore argued for a tight relationship between complex thought and language, postulating that reasoning, including logical reasoning, relies on linguistic representations. We systematically investigated the relationship between logical reasoning and language using two complementary approaches. First, we used noninvasive brain imaging (fMRI) to examine neural activity as healthy adults engaged in logical reasoning tasks. And second, we behaviorally evaluated logical abilities in individuals with extensive lesions to the language brain areas and consequent severe linguistic impairment. Our findings reveal that the language brain network is not engaged during logical reasoning, and patients with severe aphasia exhibit intact performance on logic tasks. Instead, inductive reasoning recruits the domain-general multiple demand network implicated broadly in goal-directed behaviors, whereas deductive reasoning draws on brain regions that are distinct from both the language and the multiple demand networks. Together, these results indicate that linguistic representations are neither utilized nor required for inductive or deductive logical reasoning.

H/t Daniel Everett.

Friday Fotos: Yesterday's breakfast [pancakes]

Perceptions of probability

Very cool graph show what people really mean when they use vague terminology describing the probability of an event. Source: https://t.co/uQQCRohYtS pic.twitter.com/FRx4xAPAW5

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) July 17, 2026

The Mystic Jewels and Matrix Miriam @3QD

I’ve got a new piece out in 3 Quarks Daily:

The Mystic Jewels, the Vatican, and Matrix Miriam

From the introduction:

A bit over a year and a half ago I published “Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising,” a science fiction yarn set a decade later and half way around the world from Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. Robinson gave us a post-climate change world with pretty much the same institutional structure of the current world. Things were a bit looser in some ways, the very rich were, if anything, even richer, and finance made that world go round. Robinson developed a rich plot in which the financial crisis of 2008 was replayed, but to a different denouement. The banks weren’t bailed out; they were nationalized. Our heroes celebrated by going to Mezzrow’s where they danced “to the tightest West African pop any of them have ever heard.”

My world. As a musician who’s played RnB, rock, and jazz in many clubs and private parties, that world is more familiar to me than the world of financial derivatives and AI-driven trading, where Robinson centered his story. I decided to take Robinson’s world, move ahead a decade, and center it on the activities of Homo ludens rather than Homo economicus. That gives us Kisangani in the center of the Congo Basin and in 2150.

But this story is much earlier than that. It takes place just a few years from now and is about how the Mystic Jewels started Matrix Miriam, their first in a series of projects to create a new architecture for artificial intelligence. A somewhat revised version will be incorporated into Chapter 6 of my book in progress, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution, where it will be mated with a revised version of “Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising” and some more fictional material.

This is thus is a work of fiction, and science fiction at that. Though the science aspect is a bit light in this piece, I expect it to get more intense as the story unfolds. You can get a glimpse of that in the working paper I developed from that 3QD piece, Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, A Working Paper, in the section, “Discussion with Claude about digital doppelgangers,” pp. 10-14. The notion of a digital doppelganger is derived from Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, where the protagonist, Nell, is gifted with an interactive book, Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, when she is four years old. This primer then guides her education into early adulthood.

I am imagining that in the late 22nd century everyone is gifted with a similar resource which is available to and even accompanies them throughout their life. The relationship is so intimate that the doppelganger is in effect a person’s Mirror. But, what happens to the Mirror when the person dies? I haven’t worked that out, but I imagine that it persists for it is (effectively) immortal. I’ll be doing that in that book, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution.