Content-ment 310: AI stereotyping and what makes a 'great' album
Plus, now you can see a real Totoro cat bus!
Hi. I’m back after a rare three-week gap between newsletters – because I’ve just returned from a break in Dubai. What a bonkers place! I spent most of the time there trying to get my head round how the place works.
I’m fairly well-travelled and, I can honestly say, it’s unlike anywhere else I’ve visited. I’ll likely write something longer later, but one of the reasons is that everything is done on such a BIG scale.
Here’s an example: below you’ll see a view of the Dubai Marina skyline. On the right, you’ll see a ‘wheel’, not dissimilar to the London Eye. That’s the Ain Dubai (“eye of Dubai”).
It opened in October 2021 and immediately became the world’s tallest Ferris wheel at, wait for it, 250m tall. For comparison, the London Eye is a ‘mere’ 135m and held the ‘tall wheel’ crown when it opened in 1999.1
To put the height disparity of the Ain Dubai into context, the current tallest pro-basketball player in the US is 7’4”. If Dubai could create their own basketball player, he would be 12’11”!
Bizarrely, though, the Ain Dubai only turned for customers until March 2022, when it closed for unspecified reasons after less than 6 months – it remains non-operational to this day. Because… Dubai 🤷🏻♂️
OK, I’ll leave the remainder of my thoughts on Dubai for another day – on with this month’s links.
Bring back private offices
With constant debate about whether companies should ‘return to the office’ full-time, it’s intriguing that those who are pushing for that are often C-suite members who have an office with a door they can close to section themselves off from the outside hubbub. The above link provides a different view – namely, recreate the old ‘private office’ world for the benefit of everyone.
No, you don’t ‘owe me one’
I’ve been a fan of Adam Grant for a decade now (Give & Take is excellent), and this piece about how reciprocity really works is bang on the money!
BOOK OF THE FORTNIGHT
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Buy from: Amazon | UK Bookshop *
A book written in 1962 would appear out-of-date over 60 years on, and yet Carson’s Silent Spring is possibly more relevant in 2024 than ever. Written to highlight the disastrous effects of DDT2 and pesticides on the landscape, she brought ecology to the mainstream. While the climate emergency is a different issue, you can draw a line from her work to that of the likes of Greta Thunberg today. It took the US, a decade years to ban DDT after the publication of Silent Spring 🤔
Fancy something else? My fiction bookshelf | My non-fiction bookshelf
I love the fact that Toyota has worked with Studio Ghibli to produce a functioning Totoro Cat Bus!
Behind F1’s velvet curtain
Whether or not you dislike Formula One as much as I do, this is still a fascinating read laying bare the money and culture associated with the ‘sport’. It was originally published on the Road and Track website, but has since been removed, hence why this is the ‘archived’ version.
(courtesy of Helen Lewis’ excellent Bluestocking Substack)
The art of the error message
When you end up on a web page that doesn’t work, the resulting message can tell you a lot about the brand you were attempting to reach.
Tangentially, the image below was taken in Dubai last week on an interactive cinema billboard, showing that 404 errors happen everywhere!
What makes an album great?
Excellent data visualisation work from The Pudding (as always), showing what you need to get your album into Rolling Stone’s Greatest Albums of All Time list.
More from The Pudding: Help draw the longest flipbook animation ever
How AI reduces the world to stereotypes
This is a remarkable piece of work – using various prompts, Rest Of The World demonstrates how ‘narrow-minded’ generative AI is. Anything from ‘Indonesian food’ through ‘a Mexican person’ to a ‘New Delhi street’ produces an almost-identical image that, in no way, reflects the diversity of the reality. Definitely worth a perusal.
A COUPLE OF ENTERTAINMENT-RELATED LINKS
How Ozempic ate the awards season
Great piece that lays bare the impact of obesity drugs on Hollywood over the past few months.
The exquisite agony of watching Bradley Cooper chasing an Oscar
Funny, but very knowing (even more so, given this was written before this year’s ceremony).
THE FINAL RANDOM LINKS
THANKS FOR READING
*As always my book recommendation links usually go to one of two places:
1) Bookshop.org (an online bookshop with a mission to financially support local, independent bookshops – it's an affiliate link, so I earn a tiny amount at no extra cost to you)
2) I also include an Amazon affiliate link, though, as I know lots of people still read via Kindle, even though they're taking over the world!
I'm always grateful when people send on recommendations for inclusion in here. If you ever see something you think I'd love to read, please let me know, or comment below. The internet is a big space and I only search a small part of it...
A FINAL, FINAL WORD
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There were 4 other record holders in between these two, in Russia, China, Singapore and USA. The Dubai Eye is over 80m taller than its nearest competitor. To put that into context, it would be like having a 7’4” basketball player (the current tallest play in the NBA) and casually
Music fans will recognise the reference to DDT from Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi: “Hey farmer, farmer / Put away that DDT now / Give me spots on my apples / But leave me the birds and the bees”