Piaf

FERNANDO KASKAIS Piaf, o “passarinho”, com o seu inseparável vestido preto marcou várias gerações com uma voz inconfundível, mas, mentiu-nos a todos, pois a vida não tem nada de cor-de-rosa, ou, quando tem, é mais água tingida com sangue do que outra coisa, e sangue foi algo que não faltou na vida de Édith. Mas, o mundo perdoa-lhe porque sabe que a arte exige acesso à imaginação, um lugar notoriamente difícil de visitar. Cantou os seus vícios, as suas paranoias, os seus sonhos e os seus pesadelos. Cantou para todos e cantou-nos a todos, já que, de certa maneira somos … Continue reading Piaf

How selfish are we?

Photo by Sanjay Kanojia/AFP/Getty Images An age-old debate about human nature is being energised with new findings on the tightrope of cooperation and competition By Jonathan R Goodman, is a social scientist based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World (2025). Reading classic works in evolutionary biology is unlikely to make you optimistic about human nature. From Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) onwards, there is a fundamental understanding among biologists that organisms, especially humans, evolved to maximise self-interest. We act to promote our own … Continue reading How selfish are we?

The Audacity of Iran To Park Its Country 500 Miles From a US Warship

by Jon Reynolds * Reprinted with permission from The Screeching Kettle at Substack. This week, Iran had the audacity to fly a drone near the USS Abraham Lincoln, an American aircraft carrier innocently parked 500 miles (or 434 nautical miles) off their coastline as part of a Trump naval “armada” deployed amid threats to bomb the country into oblivion over a nuclear weapons program that does not exist. Like clockwork, war-hungry American news networks went into overdrive beating the propagandistic war drums. One headline from The Washington Post, titled “US shoots down Iranian drone that approached aircraft carrier Lincoln”, cited anonymous “officials” who claimed the drone was “acting aggressively”. … Continue reading The Audacity of Iran To Park Its Country 500 Miles From a US Warship

Nipah Virus and the New Public Health Order

Brownstone Journal By David Bell Alarge outbreak of hysteria occurred in the media over the past week, regarding a small Nipah virus outbreak in eastern India. ‘Hysteria’ is the correct word in terms of proportionality. It is not, unfortunately, the right word in terms of intent. Ten years ago this episode of Nipah virus disease would barely have rated a mention internationally, and certainly not stimulated airport screening and travel warnings – there have been many larger outbreaks of Nipah virus than this one, which did not.  The change over recent years is not that people have lost their minds. It relates to the adoption of the … Continue reading Nipah Virus and the New Public Health Order

People Could Be ‘Resurrected’ in Robotic Bodies One Day, Futurist Believes. Now He’s Taken the First Step.

Getty Images People Could Be ‘Resurrected’ in Robotic Bodies One Day, Futurist Believes. Now He’s Taken the First Step. By Stav Dimitropoulos Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The “dead person” speaking these introspective lines is Roman Mazurenko—or rather, Roman 2.0, an AI persona reconstructed from his posthumous traces. Mazurenko was a charismatic Belarusian engineer who died in a traffic accident in 2015 at age 35. Russian transhumanist Alexey Turchin is now rebuilding him as an open-source, long-memory project designed, in theory, to persist indefinitely. This is not Mazurenko’s first resurrection. In 2016, his close partner, AI engineer Eugenia Kuyda, rebuilt him … Continue reading People Could Be ‘Resurrected’ in Robotic Bodies One Day, Futurist Believes. Now He’s Taken the First Step.

A Demon in a Box? Unspooling the Dark Mythology of AI

MIT Press Reader/Source images: Adobe Stock Tech titans keep imbuing AI with spiritual significance. The question is whether they’re building a savior — or a world-eating leviathan. By: Shira Chess   In June 2003, a strange listing popped up on eBay. A man named Kevin Mannis listed an antique wooden wine cabinet that he claimed to have purchased in 2001 at an estate sale. Mannis warned that the box contained the remnants of a dybbuk, a malicious dislocated spirit who was trapped in the container by the grandmother of the original seller — a Holocaust survivor. Mannis was told not to … Continue reading A Demon in a Box? Unspooling the Dark Mythology of AI

How a Japanese philosophy helped me improve my life

Vincent Romero / Big Think Kaizen taught me that tiny, consistent changes can be more powerful than dramatic overhauls. by Sarah Harvey Key Takeaways I first discovered the Japanese concept of kaizen during a sometimes stressful but ultimately wonderful time of my life. I had turned 30, quit my job in London, and moved to Tokyo with just a small pot of savings to survive on. I had only a rudimentary command of Japanese and knew just a handful of people in a city with a population of 14 million. To say I was a fish out of water would be an … Continue reading How a Japanese philosophy helped me improve my life

Remember Bacon

FERNANDO KASKAIS Uma humilde homenagem a um amigo arquitecto, com uma imagem que me lembra Francis Bacon e as contradições que compunham o seu caráter, brilhante e atormentado, repleto de idealismo disfarçado de niilismo, em constante oscilação entre o público e o privado, um homem que tinha a aparência de um estudante inglês, mas a alma de um sátiro. Segundo Bacon, os sentimentos de desespero e infelicidade são mais úteis a um artista do que o sentimento de contentamento, porque o desespero e a infelicidade expandem toda a sua sensibilidade. https://kaskaisphotos.wordpress.com/2026/01/31/remember-bacon/ F. Kaskais Web Guru Continue reading Remember Bacon