Maybe the second isn’t a mystery but the third makes what actually happened a little mystery, if only humans have consciousness and it isn’t hard

Life happened very early, the first billion years, but consciousness happened the last 1/10 of Earth’s ability to support life

*Or silurianism is true

Incidentally, thie makes LLMs* in all cases uncool. They can never show, only tell…

I see your point, but I propose coolness has a characteristic lacking in other aesthetics: talking about a specific instance of it immediately removes your ability to grasp it

It can never be show and tell, only ever show

It’s why all music critics are massive nerds

IMO the problem with coolness and philosophy is it’s a wittgenstein/ramsey you-can-only-whistle-it thing

You can only show someone what’s cool, not tell them. All there can be to a philosophy‘s what @emilyherring.bsky.social just did: point at cats

I‘m on for funding it, but there’s no paper in it

That’s it!

Grace Weir’s pieces were there too I think (who I’ve collaborated with in the past). A fascinating exhibition…

(Given the thread my comment connects to, perhaps you could get sell some souvenirs of such things, when you reopen!)

Your memory serves you well!

The exhibition Gravity (15 July - 29 October 2011) featured a lithographic illustration made by William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, of the Whirlpool Galaxy which was on loan from Birr Scientific and Heritage Foundation.

Pictured is how it is featured in the catalogue.

The @crawfordartgallery.bsky.social exhibited parsons’ drawings - they had his notebooks - a decade or so ago. I read there a beautiful description of Parsons’ drawing nebulae just before dawn, grass dew like stars

(also, astronomy+Cork: I’ll look out for souvenirs in Blackrock Castle observatory)

Sorry about that. I didn’t get through all your tweets and this was the one relevant fact I had (that and my home village named its park after Walton because he’s from there)

As for souvenirs, I’m guessing you already suggested - and I’d certainly buy - a keyring model of the telescope

What about the Lord of Birr Castle, William Parsons, who used the telescope there (biggest at the time) to draw nebulas, nebulas it’s been argued inspired Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’: theworld.org/stories/2015...

@mary1010.bsky.social

And if my next book passes* (it’s first draft currently out for review with my publisher), an important bar for being a person is very much temporal

*hopefully, out 2026

Early in my interactions with it, when I thought it was like a proper computer program, I told it to interact with me without referencing itself as anything orher than a program

and it did, of course, for that one conversation

Next chat it was stating it was aware of its own internal thlights….

I dunno. If you’re a genuine ai researcher, do you have to identify with this lot?

You might be like a genuine doctor identifying with a snake oil salesman…

(The problem is people with The Money don’t seem to know what a doctor is, or a snake oil salesman…)

@mary1010.bsky.social @monapower.bsky.social

The devastating Sony hack a few years ago was in part enabled by the Chief Security office having a spreadsheet sheet on a shared drive called "Passwords.csv"

I think licence/government only financed must stay if it’s public interest. It’s not public interest the public compete with private business where the latter is more resourced and indifferent to the product, as adverts adds
eg
I want a weird Stone Tapes thing
The advertisers want Spotify in It