Long Reads - General Interest

MSU addict wrote:The Great College Loan Swindle

Dendrobates may have an opinion.

LooseGoose wrote:I highly, highly recommend this one.....very good story.

What the Arlee Warriors Were Playing For

LooseGoose wrote:Interesting Jake Locker article, SI.

Why Jake Locker Walked Away From Football—and Why He Doesn’t Miss It

DWags wrote:

LooseGoose wrote:Interesting Jake Locker article, SI.

Why Jake Locker Walked Away From Football—and Why He Doesn’t Miss It

Winning the Lottery isn’t always gaining money, sometimes it’s finding peace of mind and a purpose. The older I get, the more I understand those stories.

LooseGoose wrote:

DWags wrote:

Winning the Lottery isn’t always gaining money, sometimes it’s finding peace of mind and a purpose.  The older I get, the more I understand those stories.

You're so right Wags.   I'm not even fractionally as wealthy as I once dreamed but am happier than I thought I would be.   I can pay the bills, pretty much do what I want within limits and spend all the time on projects and grandkids I want.   Really you can't ask for much more from life.

It hardly seems likely that the life of an obscure Anglican clergyman should recommend itself to the attention of a modern biographer; the shelves of second-hand bookshops are the sepulchers of many an Essex parson's dutifully compiled Life and Letters. But Sabine Baring-Gould happens to have been the last man who knew everything.

One really does mean everything. The Victorian parson's interests included but were not limited to philology, anthropology, folklore, children's stories, hymnology, hagiography, geology, topography, painting, optics, metallurgy, ancient and modern history, musical theory, biblical archeology, the plausibility of miracles, the minutiae of the English salt mining industry, and the theater. Among the 130 books he published were an anthology of Old Testament apocrypha; biographies of Napoleon I and the Caesars; histories of Germany, Iceland, North and South Wales, Cornwall, Dartmoor, the Rhine, and the Pyrenees; a guide to surnames; a 16-volume collection of saints' lives and a compilation of medieval superstitions beloved by H.P. Lovecraft among others; numerous volumes of sermons and dozens of novels; a theological treatise on the problem of evil; numerous works on ghosts; a surprisingly scholarly Book of Were-wolves. He also composed some 200 short stories and thousands of essays, prefaces, and magazine articles; he produced two collections of original verse and two memoirs and left behind a vast correspondence, thousands of pages of diaries, and a remarkable quantity of half-digested research.

In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself.

WhiteBoyHatcher wrote:This is an awesome read about the Chairman of the Boards when he was running the world. The way it is written you can almost picture being there, witnessing it all.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold-gay-talese/

In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself.

Time as illusion
Time, Rovelli contends, is merely a perspective, rather than a universal truth. It’s a point of view that humans share as a result of our biology and evolution, our place on Earth, and the planet’s place in the universe.

“From our perspective, the perspective of creatures who make up a small part of the world—we see that world flowing in time,” the physicist writes. At the quantum level, however, durations are so short that they can’t be divided and there is no such thing as time.

In fact, Rovelli explains, there are actually no things at all. Instead, the universe is made up of countless events. Even what might seem like a thing—a stone, say—is really an event taking place at a rate we can’t register. The stone is in a continual state of transformation, and on a long enough timeline, even it is fleeting, destined to take on some other form.

In the “elementary grammar of the world, there is neither space nor time—only processes that transform physical quantities from one to another, from which it is possible to calculate possibilities and relations,” the scientist writes.

Here’s the problem. Between the “dumb” fixed algorithms and true AI lies the problematic halfway house we’ve already entered with scarcely a thought and almost no debate, much less agreement as to aims, ethics, safety, best practice. If the algorithms around us are not yet intelligent, meaning able to independently say “that calculation/course of action doesn’t look right: I’ll do it again”, they are nonetheless starting to learn from their environments. And once an algorithm is learning, we no longer know to any degree of certainty what its rules and parameters are. At which point we can’t be certain of how it will interact with other algorithms, the physical world, or us. Where the “dumb” fixed algorithms – complex, opaque and inured to real time monitoring as they can be – are in principle predictable and interrogable, these ones are not. After a time in the wild, we no longer know what they are: they have the potential to become erratic. We might be tempted to call these “frankenalgos” – though Mary Shelley couldn’t have made this up.

Kansas City Chiefs running backs coach Deland McCullough went searching for his biological parents. He found them where he never would have expected.

Rocinante wrote:This is disgusting: ProPublica story with details on children separated from their parents by our government.

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-zero-tolerance-separated-immigrant-children-chicago

A shocking story of police and lethal force. Just not the one you might expect.

THE DISPATCHER for the Weirton Police Department took the 911 call at 2:51 a.m. on May 6, 2016.

“Please send somebody to 119 Marie Ave., Weirton, West Virginia, right now,” a woman said. She sounded young and scared.

WhiteBoyHatcher wrote:This isn't particularly long. But it is pretty damn creepy.

https://thegingercollect.com/issueseven/groundskeeperchrispanatier/

LooseGoose wrote:Interesting read....though ultimately kind of empty for all.

“I DON’T WANT TO SHOOT YOU, BROTHER”

A shocking story of police and lethal force. Just not the one you might expect.

THE DISPATCHER for the Weirton Police Department took the 911 call at 2:51 a.m. on May 6, 2016.

“Please send somebody to 119 Marie Ave., Weirton, West Virginia, right now,” a woman said. She sounded young and scared.

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