A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
Does Screen Time Help or Hinder Creativity?
One way to constructively daydream online is through digital pinboarding. This is how Rhode Island-based figurative painter Timothy Lai takes advantage of the digital landscape. “I actively use it to store and organise things I’m interested in. This is particularly helpful when I’m working on multiple running themes. It’s a great way to organise.” Although, he mentions that it’s changed in recent years. “Coming from the early days of online pinboarding, it was a little more interesting back then because the algorithm wasn’t as advanced. Now I feel like it’s so efficient that the recommendations I get can feel a little homogeneous sometimes.”
Extreme Botany: Paramotorists Soar Across Remote Peru Desert to Collect Threatened Plants
The study's authors demonstrate how paramotoring is a faster and more environmentally friendly alternative to 4x4 off-road vehicles (including motorbikes); able to reach outlying areas, reducing CO2 emissions of up two-thirds, and most importantly with negligible damage to the fragile desert fog habitats and unexplored biological crusts.
Planetary Alchemy, or, Learning to Read the Earth with “Zelda”
In Pinkus and Whitmarsh, the planet rises up as an archive in its own right—a record written in paper and stone, worked on by literary criticism and stratigraphy, and likely to outlast human civilization. These planetary critics offer tools to dig through cultural objects like Tears of the Kingdom, excavating their geological unconscious, the earthly and earthy presuppositions on which their artistic, formal narrative and stylistic pretensions rely. Zelda, Subsurface, and Writing Our Extinction teach us how to think and interpret on a planetary scale.
Where Will Games Be in 25 Years?
“In 25 years, video games will have been around for over 80 years, much like cinema had by the mid-20th century. When cinema reached that milestone, it had already become a widely-accepted artistic medium and the dominant form of entertainment. I believe video games are on a similar trajectory.
“By then, games will be recognized not just as games but as a powerful form of storytelling that shapes and reflects culture globally. How we experience interactive content may evolve dramatically, but the emotional depth and the ability to convey meaningful messages will only grow. Just as cinema became a mirror of society, video games will continue to expand their role as a rich, immersive medium that profoundly impacts our lives.”
Tennis Makes Big Bets On Its Future
The predominant system, Hawk-Eye, measures trajectory, using a set of 12 cameras positioned around the court, each tracking the ball at 70 frames per second. The cameras themselves are not that sophisticated and, in fact, aren’t even high-definition or in color. Instead, the power comes from the processing of that footage. Using image differencing, the multiple angles allow the system to identify the ball’s position in 3D space — truth by triangulation. But Hawk-Eye doesn’t just know where the ball is and instead predicts where it’s going by calculating the ball’s speed, spin, and skid. The system assumes where a ball will bounce before it arrives, a prophecy of the future made with the confidence of the combined might of physics, surveillance technology, and an algorithm trained on billions of data points. In that way, Hawk-Eye is more precog than cop.
AI Tool Cuts Unexpected Deaths in Hospital by 26%, Canadian Study Finds
Inside a bustling unit at St. Michael's Hospital in downtown Toronto, one of Shirley Bell's patients was suffering from a cat bite and a fever, but otherwise appeared fine — until an alert from an AI-based early warning system showed he was sicker than he seemed.
While the nursing team usually checked blood work around noon, the technology flagged incoming results several hours beforehand. That warning showed the patient's white blood cell count was "really, really high," recalled Bell, the clinical nurse educator for the hospital's general medicine program.
The cause turned out to be cellulitis, a bacterial skin infection. Without prompt treatment, it can lead to extensive tissue damage, amputations and even death. Bell said the patient was given antibiotics quickly to avoid those worst-case scenarios, in large part thanks to the team's in-house AI technology, dubbed Chartwatch.
Inside Mexico’s New Plan to Take On Cartel Violence
Sheinbaum also plans to focus on the industrial hub of Guanajuato, which has the highest rate of organized-crime killings of any Mexican state. Located in central Mexico, the state is a battleground for the lucrative black-market fuel controlled by the Jalisco cartel, one of Mexico’s most powerful organized crime groups, and the local Santa Rosa de Lima gang.
