PicoBlog

Happy New Year and Welcome to 2024! I was sick for New Year’s Eve festivities but enjoyed a quiet night at home watching Anderson and Andy dance around euphemisms and giggle with their guests. A highlight was John Mayer beaming in from a cat cafe in Tokyo, a moment that was truly weird and fun. I hope you all were able to take time off over the holiday season to relax and enjoy.

To learn how “Casey at the Bat” became America’s best-known baseball poem — maybe America’s best-known poem of any kind, rivaled only by “A Visit from St. Nicholas” — you have to begin with the fact that a young man named Ernest L. Thayer (1863–1940) went to Harvard. It’s there in Cambridge that he edited the Harvard Lampoon alongside such brilliant undergraduates as George Santayana (1863–1952). And when his classmate (and business manager of the Lampoon), William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951), took over the San Francisco Examiner in 1887 with his family’s gold-mining money, Thayer followed his friend to California, helping out the fledgling newspaper publisher.

Wordle is a delightful, low-lift time killer and I am as addicted as anyone. My family has an annoying habit of sharing scores on a WhatsApp group every day, and I have gotten used to getting alerts before 8am every morning. Just a week ago I was troubleshooting my Android phone and thought it would be fine to clear my cache and cookies, thereby ending a 48-day Wordle streak. I was heartbroken.

In April, paying subscribers of the Counterfactual voted for a post explaining how tokenization works in LLMs. As always, feel free to subscribe if you’d like to vote on future post topics; however, the posts themselves will always be made publicly available. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are often described as being trained to predict the next word. Indeed, that’s how I described them in my explainer with Timothy Lee.

Join Tom Hamilton, the guitarist for Joe Russo's Almost Dead, as he takes you on an exclusive rig tour. Discover his custom Lotto guitar and unique synth texture effects that make his sound truly one-of-a-kind. In this captivating video, Tom showcases his exceptional rig, starting with his prized possession—the custom Lotto guitar. Meticulously crafted to complement his distinctive playing style, this instrument offers an incredible tonal range and unparalleled playability.

Somewhere around 3,000 nautical miles separate Liverpool from the Eastern Seaboard. Nowadays, aboard a cruise ship, the journey is an uneventful week at sea. Back in the early 1940s, when the vessels making the crossing weren’t cruise ships packed with tourists (and COVID-19), but warships protecting merchant ships stuffed to the ceiling with supplies and troops that Allied forces in Europe so desperately needed to push back and eventually eradicate the Nazi war machine, the voyage was far less straightforward.

Hello Pizza Friends, Today we are talking about tomato pie, which, if you are unfamiliar, is the American version of the Neapolitan marinara pizza. I only just learned this. I had been flipping through Anthony Falco’s Pizza Czar when the recipe caught my attention. Anthony describes it as “something that lets great ingredients shine.” He was right. Topped solely with tomato sauce (and a good amount of it), oregano, Pecorino Romano, and olive oil, this pie relies on the quality of each of these elements being excellent — without a blanket of mozzarella, nothing can hide.

Catherine Christer Hennix is a Swedish composer, poet, philosopher, and mathematician who currently resides in Turkey. She primarily creates long-form drone music and has collaborated with artists such as Henry Flynt, La Monte Young, and Pandit Pran Nath. She has worked as a professor at both SUNY New Paltz and MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, led the just-intonation ensemble the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage, and is the author of various papers and books, including last year’s Poësy Matters and Other Matters.

Ekaterina Yuryevna Shilonosova is a Russian singer-songwriter and producer who’s had many lives: she’s the frontwoman of the post-punk band Glintshake, has spent time with the Moscow Scratch Orchestra performing compositions by Cornelius Cardew, and has a solo project called Kate NV. The albums under that moniker have resulted in some of the most ebullient art pop of the past decade. Her latest album WOW was made around the same time as her previous LP Room for the Moon, and features largely instrumental pieces that cull from a variety of influences, including one of her favorite artists: the Japanese producer Nobukazu Takemura.