Matthew Royal > Recent Status Updates

The movie is making a lot more sense now. There's so much inner monologue and reflection and background information, it's clear to me that a direct movie adaption should never have been attempted.

Initially I was frustrated that Anu was diving so deeply into her own life and impressions of moving to the US from Finland, rather than taking about Finland and the metrics and the policy differences. Quickly, however, she starts sharing metrics and policy differences and surprising perspective differences by sharing her own life and impressions of moving to the US from Finland.

Would we recognize a fundamentally different form of intelligence if it were right in front of us?

Great observations about our chordate bias for big, monolithic brains which integrate sense data, as opposed to coordination among distributed ganglia. Simply because we don't understand their visual mechanisms, some people say cuttlefish can't see at all, despite having photorealistic camouflage. That seems ludicrous.

Really interesting look into the biology and behaviors of octopuses, cuttlefish, and other cephalopods. Hoping the rest of the book analyzes examples of "non-natural" behavior like opening jars, associates it to a neural structure, or otherwise synthesizes the information into something insightful.

Mostly covers portraits made of her, tracking them down, comparing them, and finding other art around the same time period that reused Leonardo da Vinci's sketch of her for Angel in Red and other women in the backgrounds of paintings. Very interesting the side discussion about techniques they'd use back then to copy drawings -- a destructive tool that caused tiny holes in the original called a spolvero.

Thubten makes enlightenment sound like a loss of executive brain functions -- no rational inquiry, no planning capacity: just sitting quietly and unthinkingly in the now. This perspective makes Buddhism sound like nihilism: rationality is pain and ultimately meaningless.

The first third of the book was about Trump. bleh.

"They like and admire you. They want to help you."

She shook her head and sighed. "I know, I know."

"But on condition: that they don't hear anything unpleasant. Aunt Welland put it in those various words when I tried.

"The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend."

Amazing how modern he sounds!

Wow, a lot of these chapters don't age well. I think this must have been written during the era of iGoogle. It's interesting that he mentions AWS, but doesn't (at least so far) recognize the impact of virtualization on further driving costs down to "free."