The lyrics part of the song is interesting, I think, for brain function research.

When I listen to music, I rarely parse the language of the lyrics - they're mostly just more music. I might be able to sing along with most of the chorus and still not really know what the song is about.

My daughter, on the other hand, always listens to the story of the lyrics.

I wonder if there are measurable differences in our brain response to the same song?

| The time to make a move on that has come and gone Zuck

I recently got an Oculus Quest 2 (using a custom FB account to minimize evil overlord stuff), and I have to say - it's pretty great. The difference between this and what the state of the art was 5y ago is really impressive. It feels like what I always imagined VR should feel like.

It's a solid gaming platform today, and I could imagine it becoming good enough for remote VR meetings before too long (assuming someone sorts out the avatar vs real face thing, which does seem kind of tricky). So maybe not as far off as at least I would have imagined before I tried the Quest 2.

Some interesting perspective from Matt Strassler, who's a particle physicist at Harvard.

He points out that this is still an *indirect* observation of gravitational waves (and not the first one) and that the results look sensibly in line with some predictions from inflation. And that while this is a tremendous experiment, it's not any kind of "smoking gun", and we really need to wait for replication to get properly excited.

> Can anyone find a free copy that we can examine?

Archive link

This.

It still seems like it's really hard to write maintainable, extendable code that does parallel execution in anything more than a trivial way (break up a calc into independent pieces with no interaction).

Does anyone know if there's been any interesting work on new language paradigms for this sort of thing? It feels like the community is waiting for some kind of change in semantics that'd make this easier for the bulk of developers who aren't parallel execution gurus. Like object oriented coding was for the ability to scale code by developing intelligible interfaces: not something you couldn't do with earlier paradigms, but it made it easier.

> makes an analogy with the (marginalized, demonized) economists who warned of a coming economic collapse in 2007.

Hrm... like Paul Krugman, the economic who warned of collapse and yet received a Nobel prize?