Five Bullets 3.31.23
This week: ChatGPT, Hart Island, Dead Nails & more
Hello and welcome back to Circles In Space for Five Bullet Friday, where each Friday I share some interesting stuff I collected during the week.
If you’re new to Circles In Space, I wrote a bit about myself and the process of creating this newsletter.
Good morning and happy Friday everyone! It’s a cool, cloudy morning here in New York City with some rain expected this weekend. Despite the cool temperature, plants and trees are in bloom and Spring is in full swing.
After reading about recent AI developments over the past few months and this article on using ChatGPT as an assistant, I decided to give ChatGPT a try. It definitely seems like a powerful ‘assistant’ and I can see myself using it as such in the future. I promise these newsletters will continue to be written by me, a real human! For fun, I asked the AI to write a script or novel - it had some trouble with plot. It’s worth taking a look at the limitations the programmers have placed on the site - for example, the AI will not give opinions or respond to ‘lewd’ questions. Here’s an interesting if unsettling read on Microsoft’s Bing.
On to this week’s topics.
This week’s bullets:
I've gone down the AI rabbit hole this week. I've been experimenting with ChatGPT feeding it prompts like write an X-Files meets Tanis podcast script or summarize this article. AI has been a hot-topic discussion as of late, particularly that many folks could lose their jobs in the short term (and in the long term create Terminators). We are, however, already using AI’s like Siri or speech-to-text (used to type this sentence) and so ChatGPT feels like the next evolution. It's an incredible tool and feels like what I've always wanted from search engines. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
You might not have heard of fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson and neither had I before this Wired article which received a lot of backlash from Sanderson’s fans on Reddit who called it a ‘hit piece’. It could be that but the article is also an interesting read, a gonzo-inspired rumination on writing which looks at Sanderson's quantity over quality approach and upends what writers think they know about writing.
Hart Island, New York City’s ‘potters field’ located in the Long Island Sound near the Bronx will soon be accepting visitors. Recently, administration of the island was transferred to the Parks Department from the Department of Corrections which managed the island for 150 years; inmates from Riker’s Island buried the city’s unclaimed dead. The island is still a functioning cemetery with burials now being handled by the Human Resources Administration. Public visits to the island will be limited to supervised programs with Park Rangers. Last year I had the opportunity to interview Melinda Hunt of the Hart Island Project for the Neighborhood Stories Project. Ms. Hunt (as quoted in the article) hopes more access to the island is granted in the future so people can visit this important part of New York City history, as well as visiting the graves of loved ones.
This next topic caught the attention of my inner Robert Langdon: at a necropolis near the Roman ruins of Sagalassos in Turkey, 41 broken nails were found in the grave of a man from the second century A.D. Broken and bent, or ‘dead nails’, were used as protective charms to keep the dead from rising and also to keep the living out of the grave, as well as a common ‘magical’ remedy for curing illnesses.
Check out this incredible video of a starling murmuration resembling the shape of a bird. Murmurations are a phenomenon in which thousands of starlings flock together possibly to attract other starlings to join their roost or to dissuade predators from attacking during the night; the exact cause is unknown. The birds are able to keep track of their neighbors and synchronize their movements (scientists once thought the birds used ESP to create the murmuration).