J. Cϕϕper

“All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson There are three sides to the story: his-story, her-story, and their-story.

Eric took the stage at UNC Chapel Hill to deliver a commencement speech to the next generation of Tar Heels, sharing a message for the graduates as they step into what comes next. Watch the speech in its entirety here: youtube.com/watch?v=pSYEDc…

Thank you Lord for another beautiful day here on planet earth...

It was 1994 when Alan Jackson protested being forced to lip-sync at the ACM Awards by having his drummer play without drumsticks to expose the fake performance.

Sting dropped some real wisdom in his CBS Sunday Morning interview: He’s got the houses, the money, the rockstar life — but he’s telling his kids straight: none of it’s coming to you. “I think the worst thing you can do to a kid is say you don’t have to work,” he said. He sees it as a form of abuse. All his kids have that extraordinary work ethic, and he wants them to keep it. “I’m paying for your education, you’ve got shoes on your feet — now go to work.” Not cruel. Kind. A deep trust that they’ll make their own way. And when asked if they ever tell him to slow down and enjoy his wealth? “Not to my face,” he laughed. In a world obsessed with shortcuts, trust funds, and “passive income,” Sting reminds us that real confidence and character come from earning your keep. Handing everything over can quietly rob the next generation of the very fire that made you successful. I’ve seen this play out in my own life — watching how grinding through challenges built something no money could buy. The discipline and pride that comes from real work hits different. What about you — do you think parents should leave big inheritances to their kids, or is Sting right that making them earn it is the greater act of love?

@sivori I agree with your assessment 100% ~ but as a GenXer, I am concerned for my children & grandchildren’s generation(s). The ‘(para) social society’ that is being created for them (using Al tools) is eroding human emotion, instead of Al learning emotion. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dating…

The fact that so many people are having parasocial relationships with AI is less an indictment of technology and more an indictment of the shallowness of our own relationships and feelings. Furthermore, until AI is able to present the full spectrum of human emotion, especially the negative emotions, it will not even be a good simulation.

@ColObviousSir @StrongManGuide biblegateway.com/passage/?searc…

@StrongManGuide It’s simpler than that. 1. Choose a woman of high character. You can determine someone’s character fairly quickly after 6 months with them. 2. And shared values. That’s really about it. You can be 18 years old, and build a life together.

My father said this line when he met my wife: "Stop chasing butterflies when you don’t have a garden." After the divorce, I lost: A wife 2 kids $100,000 50% of the property It took me way too long to understand what he said to me. This is what that line really means:

@imr_wx The ‘hook of the heart’? 🤔🤷🏼

Put it in a textbook

τ = I(d²θ/dt²) + mgL sin(θ) John Anderson dropped this in 1974 and quietly broke physics for the rest of us. Two lucite spheres on three axes (one deliberately offset) and the simple pendulum equation turns into pure deterministic madness. Release it one way, you get elegant orbits. Shift by a micron, and it’s writing a completely different strange attractor in the air. No randomness. Just brutal sensitivity to initial conditions. The Butterfly Effect you can hold in your hands. This is why tuned-mass dampers sit at the top of skyscrapers fighting wind and earthquakes, and why aircraft controls stay sane in turbulence. Chaos isn’t disorder; it’s physics with memory.Mind officially blown every single time. Credit: physicsfun

@seanonolennon Sean! You have a wonderfully dystopian view of art. Please keep it up, it’s your superpower.

The older I get the less proud I am of being judgmental about art generally.

Helen Roseveare, a missionary who faced intense suffering and persecution during her 20 years of service in the Congo, shares one of the times that she saw God answer prayer in a most unexpected way: "I went to have prayers with our orphanage children as I did every day, and any of the children wanted gathered around me for prayer time, and I'd give them different things to pray about. And this particular day, I told the children of this tiny baby and asked them to pray for the nurses that they would stay awake all night to keep that baby warm. If the baby got cold, it would die. I mentioned that the baby had a 2-year-old sister who was crying because her mommy had died. I mentioned the burst hot water bottle. During prayer time, different children prayed for different things, and then one little 10-year-old girl, Ruth, she prayed in the usual blunt way of our African children, 'Please, God, send us a hot water bottle. Now, God, it'll be no good tomorrow. Send it this afternoon. Now, if it comes tomorrow, the baby will be dead.' I'm sort of swallowing hard, and she said, 'While you're about it, God, would you send a dolly for the little 2-year-old sister, so she'll know that Jesus really loves her?' And that afternoon, the parcel came. It was the first parcel I ever, I've been out there four years, I'd never had a parcel from home. And despite the fact I live on the equator, somebody packing that parcel had been prompted by God to put in a hot water bottle, and a child from my Bible class at home had put in a dolly for a little girl. And it came that afternoon in answer to a 10 year-old child's prayer, and the amazing thing was, you know, that parcel had been on the way five months to get to us. It had left England in July, and it came that afternoon, cause a child prayed."

@AmerSongwriter Stephen C Foster never saw the Suwannee River, nor visited Florida either. Florida chose it as their state song. songfacts.com/facts/stephen-…

Apparently, you can perform an entire hit song about a specific place without ever setting foot there. (Just ask Waylon Jennings.) On April 12, 1971, beloved country-folk singer John Denver released the song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” from his album Poems, Prayers and Promises. The song name-checks West Virginia and its famed Blue Ridge Mountains, leading the state to adopt it as an official song in 2014. In fact, none of the song’s writers had ever visited the Mountain State. Read More Below: americansongwriter.com/on-this-day-in…

@WGTD_Tracer music.apple.com/us/album/mcart…

This is COUNTRY Music Hardy could never write or perform anything as beautiful as this

The human brain is truly a marvel of nature. If you horribly reductive, and boiled it down to a language model, you'd be looking at roughly 100 trillon parameters running as a sparse MoE architecture Only about 1-5% of neurons fire at any given moment, meaning the brain "activates" maybe 1-5 trillion parameters per inference step. For context, the largest AI models we've built probably top out around 5 trillion parameters. The brain is roughly 100x larger. Even its active params at any given moment are larger than almost every model in existence today. Here's what melts my brain (pun intnended) though Your brain does all of this on about 20 watts of power, less than a dim light bulb. Training a frontier AI model consumes enough electricity to power small cities for months. Running inference across data centers pulls megawatts. Your brain runs 24/7 for 80+ years on the equivalent of a phone charger. We haven't come close to matching the brain's scale. And we're not even in the same universe when it comes to efficiency. Evolution spent 500 million yrs optimizing the most energy-efficient intelligence architecture ever known. we're trying to brute force our way there with compute and electricity. Nature is still the best engineer in the room.

@trajektoriePL wyss.harvard.edu/news/save-it-i… 1/2

Terence Tao proposes what he calls a "Copernican view of intelligence". Instead of buying into the common, one-dimensional narrative that artificial intelligence will simply evolve from "subhuman" to "superhuman" and ultimately make humanity entirely redundant, Tao urges us to look at the bigger picture. Much like the Copernican revolution proved the Earth is not the center of the universe, Tao suggests we need to realize that human intelligence isn't the only, or necessarily the highest, form of intellect. Historically, we have treated other forms of storing or creating knowledge—like animals, books, and computers—as secondary. However, we actually exist within a much richer universe of intelligence. Both human intelligence and computer intelligence possess their own distinct strengths and weaknesses. The true potential lies not in viewing them as direct competitors, but rather in focusing on collaboration. By working together, humans and computers can achieve additional things that neither could accomplish on their own, requiring us to think in much wider terms than just what humans or computers can do alone.

@trajektoriePL 2/2

Serendipity is a beautiful thing to admire...

When NASA was preparing for the Apollo project, they did some astronaut training on a Navajo Indian reservation... One day, a Navajo elder and his son were herding sheep and came across the space crew. The old man, who only spoke Navajo, asked a question, which the son translated, “What are the guys in the big suits doing?” A member of the crew said they were practicing for their trip to the moon. The old man got really excited and asked if he could send a message to the moon with the astronauts. Recognizing a promotional opportunity for the spin-doctors, the NASA folks found a tape recorder. After the old man recorded his message, they asked the son to translate. He refused. So the NASA reps brought the tape to the reservation, where the rest of the tribe listened and laughed, but refused to translate the elder’s message to the moon. Finally, NASA called in an official government translator. He reported that the moon message said, “Watch out for these guys; they’ve come to steal your land.”

@VeronikaTweets @GeorgeRoush youtu.be/nk2Sh9Xn5HU

@redclayJ @GeorgeRoush Sitting where? On a rocket going to space? On the planes they're flying? I guess these surgeons in the comments probably sat before or after their surgeries, too .... so, yeah. Oh, and I was sitting when I used the Bible to pass Anatomy & Physics. Just sitting there....

When I was building spacecraft, one of our engineers would stand behind us while we were laying wire harnesses and read from the Bible. We would sometimes pray before a large operation. He brought his Bible into the cleanroom and privately prayed over a vehicle before we sent it into test. I'm pretty sure he prayed over the Orion that is being flown on Artemis II as well. The Orion team was just as religious, if not more religious, than we were. We are "the science" and we're glad Astronaut Glover is as faithful as us.