Daily Archives: June 18, 2021

David Byrnes American Utopia, the theatrical concert performance that played a limited engagement on Broadway to great acclaim and full houses for five months in 2019 and 2020, and months ago announced a 2021 return, has found its venue: Utopia will begin performances at Jujamcyns St. James Theatre on the previously announced Friday, Sept. 17.

Byrne will return to Broadway with his original American Utopia band fully intact: Jacquelene Acevedo, Gustavo Di Dalva, Daniel Freedman, Chris Giarmo, Tim Keiper, Tendayi Kuumba, Karl Mansfield, Mauro Refosco, Stphane San Juan, Angie Swan and Bobby Wooten III.

It is with great pleasure that finally, after a year+ like no other, I can announce that our show is coming back to Broadway, Byrne said. You who kept the faith, who held on to your tickets, well, you knew this would happen eventually! September 17 remount previews begin.

Related StoryBroadway Returns: A Complete Roster Of Opening Dates, Venues And How To Buy Tickets

Were moving to the St. James Theatre just down 44th Street from the Hudson, where we were before, continued the former Talking Heads frontman. The stage is a little wider and the capacity is a little bigger I guess we did alright! Seriously, New York is back, and given all weve witnessed, felt and experienced, it is obvious to me that no one wants to go back to a world with EVERYTHING the way it was we have an opportunity for a new world here. See you there.

The move from the Hudson to the St. James would also seem to reinforce Bruce Springsteens insistence regarding the strictly limited run of his own show, Springsteen on Broadway: The Boss has said that his return to Broadway will run from June 26 to Sept. 4, and the Fall booking of the St. James by Byrne signals that Springsteen is serious this time about leaving on time.

The Hudson, meanwhile, has long been planned as the venue for the revival of Neil Simons Plaza Suite starring Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker. That production, postponed from 2020 due to the pandemic shutdown, has not yet announced performance dates.

American Utopia tickets are on sale now, and all ticketholders with valid prior bookings have been emailed with their performance information. Ticketholders may contact their point of booking with any questions or requests.

In the gorgeously staged performance, Byrne and his 11 culturally diverse musicians present new takes on old Talking Heads classics and selections from Byrnes solo albums including his most recent American Utopia. With Moulin Rouge! director Alex Timbers serving as production consultant, Utopia also features choreography and musical staging iby Annie-B Parson that pays tribute to Byrnes distinctive moves in fresh ways.

The Broadway production at the Hudson was filmed by director Spike Lee for a 2020 HBO adaptation (currently on HBO Max).

The production is the latest in more than 30 Broadway productions, new or returning, to set Fall dates as the industry reopens from the Covid pandemic shutdown of 15 months and counting.

David Byrnes American Utopia is produced by Kristin Caskey, Mike Isaacson, Patrick Catullo and Todomundo with Hal Luftig, Jonathan Reinis, Shira Friedman, Annapurna Theatre, Elizabeth Armstrong, Thomas Laub, Steven Rosenthal, Erica Lynn Schwartz, Matt Picheny, Steve Traxler, Len Blavatnik, Nonesuch Records, Warner Chappell Music and Ambassador Theatre Group Productions. Allan Williams serves as Executive Producer.

Read the rest here:

David Byrnes American Utopia Finds Home On Broadway For September Return - Deadline

Looking for a design and coding tool for React? A new effort, Utopia, was released in alpha this week.

Facebook-sponsored React is the most popular JavaScript framework for building user interfaces the StackOverflow 2020 survey reported usage by 35.9 per cent of developers, ahead of Angular at 25.1 per cent and is also used by other projects such as React Native, for desktop and mobile applications, and as the basis for other frameworks such as the Next.js server-side rendering framework and the Gatsby static site generator.

The usual way to design with JavaScript and HTML/CSS is to write some code and then run it to see what it looks like. There are also visual designers but it is hard to get the flexibility and control of pure code combined with the speed of a graphical design tool. Utopia, just released in Alpha, claims "full two-way synchronisation," meaning that the design and the code update each other instantly.

Utopia: a new two-way code editor and designer for React.js

Developers with long memories will recall that Delphi did this (with great effect) for Windows applications, unlike the other rapid development tools at the time. There were also efforts to bring something similar to web development with tools like Macromedia's Dreamweaver, acquired by Adobe, or even Microsoft's FrontPage, easy to use but notorious for generating bad code and/or requiring server-side extensions.

"Utopia founder here. Yep, I loved the idea of FrontPage, and learnt so much, and yet - it sucked so much in practice," said Malte Nuhn in a discussion on Hacker News.

The idea of the project is that "it works with real code, in real projects", which enables prototypes built with actual React components rather than mocked up in Figma, and rapid visual design without compromising the code. "Whatever Utopia doesn't (yet) understand, it leaves as-is," claim the docs.

Another claim is that Utopia does not force developers or designers into any specific way of working. "Since Utopia is an editor - not a library, not a framework - you can use (and learn!) vanilla JavaScript and React," the team said.

The editor is based on Visual Studio Code and includes ESLint (static analysis for JavaScript) and Prettier (code formatter). The tool also includes a debug console, and presuming use of the Utopia web application, the ability to share a preview with external users. A canvas section updates as you type, or can be switched into edit mode whereupon it becomes a graphical editing tool. This is synchronised, so that selecting a visual element also moves the cursor to that point in the code editor.

Other features include the ability to work with dynamic data, dynamic CSS layouts, and user interfaces that change according to variables set by code. One of the factors that makes visual JavaScript and CSS design challenging is that it typically adapts itself to different screen sizes and form factors (responsive design) as well as morphing according to dynamically generated content. There is also a storyboard feature, letting developers set up designs with multiple scenes.

Utopia is open source and hosted on GitHub, under the MIT license. "The design tool is still quite early," according to the team. What about trying it out on your own PC? This is a matter of cloning the project and building it locally.

Your intrepid correspondent attempted to follow the somewhat incomplete instructions using Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, with partial success after some messing around with Webpack (JavaScript build tool) and NixOS (shell and package manager), and a couple of tweaks to TypeScript code that did not compile.

That said, the VS Code part of the resulting local web application is broken on our build. Our hunch is that some developers will be keen to get this working rather than coding entirely in the cloud.

The intention of the team, however, is that developers will use the hosted version and not have to worry about self-build.

What is the business model? "The idea is to keep this free for single player mode ("earn your time, trust, and usage, not lock you in") and charge for features that align with financial value creation. Initially those will very likely be team focused - but our priority for the remainder of the year is squarely on single-player mode," Nuhn told me on Discord.

Other common questions are whether it will work with React Native "Not at the moment, sadly" and whether it might work for HTML 5 web components and/or non-React JavaScript frameworks.

"Web standards are close to our heart it's something we'll start to seriously look into once the product is a bit more mature," said Nuhn. "The same is true for other JS frameworks like Vue."

The rest is here:

Utopia? Echoes of Delphi and Dreamweaver in new visual editor for React - The Register

Coventry is the UK City of Culture in 2021. There will be no finer tribute to the city this year than John Wyvers superb documentary, Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain (shown on BBC4 last week and still available on BBCiPlayer).

For more than thirty years Wyver has been one of the best writers on television and one of the most interesting arts TV producers. His journey from Channel 4s golden age in the 1980s to producing documentaries on Kenneth Clark and Peter Brook for BBC2 in the 1990s and now BBC4, collaboration with the RSC and researchers based at the University of Warwicks Centre for Television Histories to make this film is almost a perfect metaphor for whats happened to arts TV in this country. If I could make a wish for the future of BBC4 it would be to put John Wyver in charge of it and make it a truly creative channel for using archive and TV history.

Wyvers documentary on the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral, beautifully shot by Todd MacDonald, and produced together with Wyvers long-time collaborator, Linda Zuck, told the fascinating story of how the only Anglican cathedral to have been destroyed in the Blitz rose again from the ashes.

A number of things stand out from the film. First, the idea of architect Basil Spence to leave the ruins of the old cathedral beside the new cathedral, like the great Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedchtniskirche in central Berlin, also largely destroyed by enemy bombs. It wasnt just the juxtaposition of old and new. Spence was making a much bolder assertion: that we need to acknowledge the destruction caused by the war, at the same time as rebuilding for the future.

Sixty-five years ago, the Queen laid the foundation stone on 23 March 1956 and the building was consecrated on 25 May 1962, in her presence. The ruins remain hallowed ground and together the two create one living cathedral.

This vision was about faith. But the vision which fascinates Wyver more was clear from the programmes subtitle: Building for a New Britain. Much of the newsreel was infused with a kind of utopian faith in the future, not one about religious faith, but about Modernism. People love the old buildings, said Spence, but he wanted something new, which reflected the spirit of the Festival of Britain (for which he had designed the Sea and Ships Pavilions in 1951) and the optimism of post-war Britain. This was more than just about architecture. It was also about a new vision of urban planning.

It was not entirely clear how such major figures as Jacob Epstein, Graham Sutherland and John Piper became involved in the project or how Benjamin Britten came to compose his War Requiem for the consecration of the cathedral in 1962. What matters, though, is that today it is simply inconceivable that such major cultural figures would lend their genius to an equivalent project. Or, rather, it is inconceivable that such a project would take place in Coventry or in contemporary Britain at all. These are huge issues about the state of architecture and thinking about cities in present-day Britain. There is talk of a monument to the victims of coronavirus and of a hideous Holocaust Memorial near the Houses of Parliament. Neither remotely match the creative genius of the stained glass windows, Sutherlands tapestry or Epsteins sculpture, St Michael Overcoming the Devil.

Its also worth noting that some of the best parts of the documentary were taken from a programme presented by Kenneth Clark for ATV in 1962. Who, today, would be the equivalent of Kenneth Clark sixty years ago? The answer is there is no one on British television with Clarks authority or erudition, just as there is no one in British art comparable to Epstein or Sutherland.

These are not points on which Wyver wished to dwell. He was too infused with the optimism of the newsreels and interviews from the 1950s. They spoke of a new vision of Britain. Clark was not exaggerating when he thanked Basil Spence for the greatest and most imaginative act of patronage for at least a century.

Spences cathedral was part of a new vision of culture in Coventry. In 1958 there was a new theatre, the Belgrade (early company members included Trevor Nunn, Ian McKellen, Joan Plowright, Frank Finlay and Leonard Rossiter). Then there was the Herbert Art Gallery (1960) and the new cathedral (1962), named after a local industrialist who had donated 100,000 to the city of Coventry to pay for the construction of an art gallery and museum.

The town of the future is how Coventry was described in Our Land in the Making, a popular Ladybird book from 1966. Not now it isnt. Wyver was less interested in the contrast between Coventry then and what became of Coventry over the past fifty years. The cathedral is beautiful, but the honeymoon was short-lived and the utopian vision of the newsreel commentaries rings terribly hollow. That pedestrianised shopping centre looks uncannily like scenes from Stephen Poliakoffs dystopian TV drama, Bloody Kids, filmed in 1979, less than twenty years after the new cathedral was consecrated. Two years later, in 1981, The Specials, a band from Coventry, released their hit single, Ghost Town, which brilliantly caught the mood of early Thatcher years.

There are plans to tear down the shopping centre. It cant compete with out-of-town retail parks or Amazon. And later this year, forty years after Ghost Town, The Specials will be going on a UK Tour, including Coventry on 11 September.

My only regret about Wyvers superb documentary is that he didnt play Ghost Town over what the shopping centre looks like now:

This town, is coming like a ghost town

All the clubs have been closed down

This place, is coming like a ghost town

Bands wont play no more

Too much fighting on the dance floor.

There are many reasons why Labour in the past ten years has ceased to speak for Middle Britain. Coventry, despite the beauty and boldness of Basil Spences cathedral, is one of them.

We are the only publication thats committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one thats needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.

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Coventry and its cathedral: the rise and fall of an urban utopia - TheArticle

Saya Woolfalks Encyclopedia of Cloud Divination (Plates 1-3) at Kimball Art Center. (Photo by Luke Jackson | The Daily Utah Chronicle)

Utopia in and of itself is an interesting concept. First written by Sir Thomas More, the word is essentially a combination of the Greek words for good place and no place. A utopia presents itself as a place of perfection and peace and, contradictorily, as a place that cant really exist.

But if a utopia is unachievable, what then is the point of describing and exploring it? The Kimball Art Center in Park City has dedicated their new exhibition When Evening Has Passed and Tomorrow Comes to not only answering this question, but further exploring the concept of utopia.

The exhibit brings together works from four artists Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze, Nicola Lpez, Cauleen Smithand Saya Woolfalk each of whom bring their own unique views on utopia. Their work explores their own personal utopian spaces and further inspires us to picture a more luminous future.

I made the drive up to Park City by myself on Sunday to explore the exhibition. As expected, Park City was bustling with couples and families taking in the sunshine and beauty afforded by the location. As I entered the Kimball Art Center, I was met with an unexpected silence. Afraid the exhibit was closed, I cautiously stepped forward. A very kind worker invited me in and encouraged me to take my time with each piece of art.

Being the only patron in the gallery allowed me to have an interesting and uniquely introspective experience with the pieces present. I moved slowly, trying to focus my energy on the art and what emotions it was evoking. I found myself touched and in awe by each artists individual take on utopia.

Amanze, with her wonderful use of blank space, caused me to consider finding utopia within the mundane.

Smith prompted me to reflect on my literary heroes and the authors who shaped my worldview, bringing my childhood inspirations to the forefront.

Lpez moved me to consider natures role in our societys future. Can utopia be reached only if we learn to move with the rapid changing of nature? Perhaps true joy comes from embracing natures whims instead of constantly trying to stay one step ahead.

While all the pieces brought beauty and inspiration, it was Woolfalks immersive piece Empathic Cloud Divination Room which touched me the most. It brought a silence to my overall experience which moved me to contemplate the role of religion and spirituality in utopia.

It transported me to a place of love, tolerance and learning where what mattered most was not my theology, but an environment of discussion and learning. No picture or description can do this room justice it is something that simply needs to be experienced.

As I concluded my time at the Kimball Art Center, I reflected again on the purpose of utopia. Regardless of the reality of a perfectly peaceful society, I was able to find inspiration in the notion. Who cares if we will never achieve literal perfection as a society? If we put aside our egos and come together with love and tolerance, wont the effort be worth it?

I know it sounds like a Hallmark card, but in a world full of division and hatred, When Evening Has Passed and Tomorrow Comes offers a reflective and rejuvenating safe haven where a better world doesnt seem so far away.

The exhibit is free of charge and running at the Kimball Art Center until June 13, 2021.

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'When Evening Has Passed and Tomorrow Comes' Exhibition Inspires and Reflects Utopia - Daily Utah Chronicle

When Ebony Turner was growing up, her favorite activity was baking.

"I was always in the kitchen with my grandmother," she said. "I've always been the baker in the family, and I've always loved it."

When Turner got to college, her initial studies focused on nursing, but those academic pursuits didn't last long.

"I had a change of heart," she said. "Instead, I thought, 'It seems like I would be happier if I went into the culinary arts.'"

She was especially after her coursework turned to baking and cake decorating and a cherished pastime evolved into a career. Turner started with a custom-cake operation out of her home kitchen, but by 2019 she had ramped up to a much roomier facility in a south Minneapolis church.

The connections she made there led to a catering job for a housing shelter. That 14-month gig, which ended a few weeks ago, kept her busy during the pandemic and allowed her to earn enough capital to jump-start her dream: a retail sweets shop that she's dubbed Dessertopia (20 W. 66th St., Richfield, dessertopia2021.com).

Leasing a storefront in the venerable Hub shopping center seemed preordained. Last year, Turner was running errands at the 67-year-old Richfield landmark when she spied a sign in a window that said, "This space is yours."

"And I thought, 'You're right, it's all mine,'" she said. "I'm really determined. There was a phone number on the sign, and I saved it in my phone under 'My New Store.'"

She eventually made it happen, signing a lease in March and devoting the next nine weeks to converting a grimy former Little Caesars franchise ("It was a complete horror story," she said) into her sparkling new brick-and-mortar enterprise.

The first customers walked through the doors on May 22, and Turner has already developed an enthusiastic clientele, proof once again that good bakeries make good neighbors.

"The response from the community has been overwhelming and humbling, to say the least," she said. "The enormous positive response has been just amazing. We've been ramping up production, and hiring more hands, to try to keep up with the demand."

The ever-expanding menu is anchored by cupcakes: chocolate cupcakes filled with caramel sauce and topped with whipped cream frosting and crushed Heath bars, vanilla cupcakes filled with cream cheese and strawberries and finished with vanilla buttercream icing, carrot cake filled with cream cheese and candied carrots and topped with cream cheese frosting and a drizzle of honey.

There are cinnamon rolls infused with maple and bacon, sticky pecan-caramel rolls, mini Bundt cakes and pretty single-serving cakes served in cups; think cake jars, minus the glass containers. Cannolis, too: peaches-and-cream, bananas Foster, caramel apple.

"They put you in mind of peach cobbler, banana pudding and apple pie," said Turner. "I'm doing different items that you won't see elsewhere."

Next up is ice cream, and Turner is continuing to produce the custom-order cakes that started her business.

The Dessertopia name is a nod to "The Giver," a favorite book.

"It's about a utopia, a perfect world," said Turner. "I like to play with words, and make them fun and whimsical. Pairing 'utopia' with 'dessert' seems perfect for a one-stop shop for your perfect dessert."

Dessertopia is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

More:

Cupcakes and cannoli at Richfield's newest bakery at the Hub - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Faith isnt faith if its based on evidence, so its wrong to say that I have faith in human progress. Unlike God, progress is objectively real, a demonstrable fact, as much so as evolution. Humanity has gotten wealthier, healthier, freer, more peaceful and smarter. We know more than our ancestors did, and were learning more all the time. These trends, any reasonable person must acknowledge, constitute progress. The question is, how long can this progress last?

Let me back up a moment. I recently concurred with megapundit Steven Pinker that over the last two centuries we have achieved material, moral and intellectual progress, which should give us hope that we can achieve still more. I expected, and have gotten, pushback. Pessimists argue that our progress will prove to be ephemeral; that we will inevitably succumb to our own nastiness and stupidity and destroy ourselves.

Maybe, maybe not. Just for the sake of argument, lets say that within the next century or two we solve our biggest problems, including tyranny, injustice, poverty, pandemics, climate change and war. Lets say we create a world in which we can do pretty much anything we choose. Many will pursue pleasure, finding ever more exciting ways to enjoy themselves. Others may seek spiritual enlightenment or devote themselves to artistic expression.

No matter what our descendants choose to do, some will surely keep investigating the universe and everything in it, including us. How long can the quest for knowledge continue? Not long, I argued 25 years ago this month in The End of Science, which contends that particle physics, cosmology, neuroscience and other fields are bumping into fundamental limits. I still think Im right, but I could be wrong. Below I describe the views of three physicistsFreeman Dyson, Roger Penrose and David Deutschwho hold that knowledge seeking can continue for a long, long time, and possibly forever, even in the face of the heat death of the universe.

If you are speculating about our long-term cosmic future, you must confront the second law of thermodynamics, sciences most depressing insight into nature. It decrees that closed systems, which dont get infusions of energy from an outside source, tend over time to become more disordered. Thats a euphemism for boring. The second law implies that the universe will inevitably lapse into heat death, in which everything, everywhere, is exactly the same temperature, near absolute zero, and nothing ever happens.

The discovery in the late 1990s that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate implies that we are approaching heat death, also known as the big chill, at an increasing rate. Not good. As the universe keeps ballooning, stars, including our own sun (after first becoming a red giant and incinerating the Earth), and even black holes will eventually radiate away all their energy, and the universe will go dark, forever. Cosmologists have calculated that we will reach this cosmic dead endin which time itself ceases, as physics writer George Musser points outin one googol years. A googol is 10 to the 100th power.

Yeah, thats a long time. (In contrast, the sun is expected to become a red giant and incinerate our planet in a mere five billion years, or five times 10 to the ninth power.) But this dreary prophecy makes all the progress weve achieved seem pathetically insignificant and meaningless, an infinitesimal backward eddy in the universes tsunamilike slide toward eternal night. All our knowledge-seeking will be for naught, because everything we have learned will be forgotten as the universe lapses into utter, irreversible mindlessness.

FREEMAN DYSONS SENTIENT GAS CLOUD

Disturbed by the prospect of cosmic oblivion, scientists have imagined ways in which we can avoid it. A pioneer in such speculation was Freeman Dyson, who died last year at the age of 96. Dyson was provoked into thinking about the long-term fate of the universe in the late 1970s by physicist Steven Weinbergs infamous remark that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

In a 1979 paper, Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe, Dyson asserts that the universe has a point, a purpose, as long as it harbors intelligence. Eons from now, he conjectures, our descendants may occupy other star systems and galaxies, perhaps after shedding their flesh-and-blood bodies and becoming clouds of sentient gas. Dyson presents mathematical arguments that these beings can, through shrewd conservation of energy, maintain the resources needed to survive, cogitate and communicate in an eternally expanding cosmos.

Our descendants will always have plenty to think about, Dyson insists. He takes heart from Kurt Gdels 1931 proof that any system of mathematical axioms is incomplete, posing questions that cannot be answered with those axioms. Gdels incompleteness theorem implies that both mathematics and physical reality will challenge us with inexhaustible problems. Dyson asserts that no matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.

After I mentioned Dysons paper in a 2018 column, he e-mailed me to point out that his paper is obsolete because it assumed a linearly expanding universe, which the cosmologists believed to be correct in 1979. We now have strong evidence that the universe is accelerating, and this makes a big difference to the future of life and intelligence. Dyson declined to speculate further about our fate in an accelerating cosmos until the observational evidence becomes clearer.

ROGER PENROSES ETERNAL CYCLIC COSMOS

Roger Penrose, who won a Nobel Prize last year, has carried on Dysons project of imagining our cosmic future. In 2005, Penrose was depressing himself by thinking of the wastes of time that stretch ahead of the universe according to the latest cosmological observations, which suggest an ever-accelerating expansion, according to an article in Physics World. Penrose wondered, Who will be around then to be bored by this apparent overpowering eventual tedium?

Penrose overcame his funk by inventing a new model of the universe, conformal cyclic cosmology, which he spells out in his 2010 book Cycles of Time. The theory holds that our increasingly vacuous cosmos will eventually produce a singularity, a rupture in spacetime similar to the big bang. In this way, an expanding universe can spawn new universes, one after the other, ad infinitum.

Better yet, according to Penrose and a collaborator, each new universe can pass on its accumulated information to the next in the form of the cosmic microwave radiation left over from its big bang. That means the microwave radiation pervading our universe might contain messages from previous universes. In the same way, the knowledge we accumulate may be passed on to inhabitants of future universes. Were not so insignificant after all!

Early in his career, moreover, Penrose made a mathematical discovery that lends support to Dysons claim that the universe will never cease to surprise us. Penrose showed that a class of polygons now called Penrose tiles can combine to form aperiodic patterns, which never repeat themselves. Like the incompleteness theorem of Gdel, and like the Game of Life, a cellular automaton invented by mathematician John Conway, Penrose tiles suggest that even a universe based on simple rules can generate infinite, unpredictable complexity. Nature will always present us with new riddles to solve, if we keep our eyes open.

DAVID DEUTSCH AND THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY

David Deutsch opens his 2011 book The Beginning of Infinity by asking: Must progress come to an endeither in catastrophe or in some sort of completionor is it unbounded? Deutschs book is one long argument for unboundedness. (See my review of Deutschs book here and my conversations with him here and here.)

Deutsch asserts that all our progressmoral, political, technological, medical, artistic, scientificstems from our attempts to find good explanations. There will always be more to explain, Deutsch says, because our knowledge of reality will always be incomplete. Deutsch thus dismisses my claim in The End of Science that science might not yield any more insights into nature as profound as evolution, quantum mechanics and the big bang. The discovery of the acceleration of the cosmos, Deutsch argues, contradicts my thesis.

He suggests, moreover that our descendants might harness the dark energy thought to be fueling this cosmic acceleration so that knowledge-creation can continue forever. Heat death? No problem. Deutsch dislikes all human futures that smack of finality. He thus rejects the possibility of a utopia so perfect that we no longer have problems to solve. He told me in 2018 that the world will never be perfected, even when everything we think of as problematic today has been eliminated. We shall always be at the beginning of infinity. Never satisfied.

Deutsch is an adamant advocate of the many-worlds hypothesis, which seeks to explain why, when we observe an electron, we see only one of the many possible trajectories represented by the electrons wave function. The many-worlds hypothesis holds that all the possibilities embodied by the wave function are realized in other universes. When I interviewed him in 2018, Deutsch likened the evidence for alternate realities to the evidence for dinosaurs. Other universes are real, he said, get over it.

I recently asked Deutsch ask if he thought our descendants might be able to jump to other universes to continue knowledge-seeking. In his response, Deutsch showed that his optimism, like that of Dyson and Penrose, is tempered by hard-headed skepticism. Universe-jumping might be possible under certain exotic and highly speculative scenarios, Deutsch said.

But future generations might think it a little comical, he added, for us to be speculating about events 100-plus billon years in the future when our theories of basic cosmology are still changing on a timescale of decades. A bit like someone in 1400 speculating about the future domestication of fire-breathing dragons for steelmaking because their maps speculatively said here be dragons on unexplored regions.

Yes, the prophesies of Dyson, Penrose and Deutsch contradict my claim that science is finite. But we share convictions, too, namely that we will never entirely solve the riddle of reality, and that knowledge-seeking, more than any other endeavor, makes our existence meaningful. Moreover, the older I get, the more my hope that science is infinite outweighs my fear that its not. I guess I have faith in progress after all.

This is an opinion and analysis article.

Further Reading:

The End of Science (updated 2015 edition)

Was I Wrong about The End of Science?

Is Science Infinite?

A Pep Talk from Steven Pinker

Will the Universe Remember Us after Were Gone?

Is David Deutsch's Vision of Endless Understanding Delusional?

I admit to second thoughts about The End of Science in a recent chat on The Jolly Swagman podcast.

I also talk about the limits of knowledge in my online bookMind-Body Problems and my new bookPay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science.

Visit link:

Can Science Survive the Death of the Universe? - Scientific American

PEDESTRIAN.TV has partnered with Flatmates to help you find your next sharehouse MVP.

Lets get one thing straight sharehouse living can either be the communal utopia of your dreams or your little house of horror. And it depends, almost entirely, on your choice of humans to share said house with.

Now, Ive been sharing houses, bathrooms, fridge space and sometimes, to my absolute disgust towels for the better part of a decade now. Ive lived with everyone from the absolutely anal and downright dirty to the master chef, late-night partier and couch hog.

Ive lived with boyfriends and broken up with boyfriends. Ive lived with besties and made new ones for life. Sharehouse living can be a wild ride, but its also a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I wouldnt swap mine out for nada.

Im currently living in a sharehouse. All through lockdown, we were a peaceful abode comprised of three women, living and working together in zen-like tranquillity. But alas! Our Belgian housemate had to move back across the ocean and we were left to find a post-pandemic stranger to fill the empty room. Talk about daunting! Talk about needing to find the perfect roomie dynamic!

Heres what we did to make sure our new housie fit our vibe and wasnt a rubbish human:

Its one thing to chat online with potential housemates, but Im a firm believer in a face-to-face interview. Youre going to be LIVING with this person, you need to scope their energy, suss their vibe and ask them point-blank if they know how to scrub a bathtub.

We blocked off a week to hold house inspections and subsequently grill every person who walked in the door. Treat it like a job interview, ask the hard questions. Are they dating? Are they vegan? Are they off the booze wagon or on the booze wagon? Do they come with pets? What childhood trauma are they navigating? Whats their love language? Do they like Christmas movies? ASK IT ALL.

Platforms like Flatmates genuinely take all the hard work out of finding new roomies. It works like a dating site, where you plug in all your preferences like age, length of stay and price point rather than tall, dark and handsome and then swipe till you find the one.

Flatmates will filter people into matches based on your preferences (pet-friendly, LGBTQ-friendly, smoking or non-smoking, etc) saving you the hassle of scrolling through a heap of duds who cant afford your room rate. You can even write a bio about yourself and chuck up photos of the pad. Its stress-free and Im very pro it. Plus, I just like matching with people. Call me a narcissist, I dont care!

Okay, so youve got a short list of housemate applicants. The next step you should consider is plugging them into FB / IG / LinkedIn and seeing if youve got any friends in common. You do? Thats good news. Now go ahead and contact these mutual friends and ask them for a discreet, but honest, rundown on the potential roomie.

Its always good to get another persons objective opinion. Think of it as a low-key background check.

This is a no-brainer in todays modern world. Stalk the hell out of them. I know you cant necessarily judge a person based solely on their social media presence, but golly itll give you at least a little bit of insight.

Are they partiers? How do they spend their downtime? Do they seem to be normal and have normal friends and do normal things? How spiritual are they? Do they practice any weird occult rituals? Do they seem to have a stable job? Dont forget to hit up their tagged photos for the juicy, unfiltered stuff.

What would you do in the face of a zombie apocalypse? This question will help you identify their levels of selflessness versus psychopathy. It can also give you insight into their go-to survival methods, which, you never know, could one day come in handy. We are in the midst of a pandemic, after all.

If youre on the hunt for a housemate, just stress less already and start swiping on Flatmates. You wont regret it.

Read more here:

How To Tell If Your New Flatmate Is A Menace To Society Before They Move In - Pedestrian TV

Step inside Superette's new nostalgia-fueled pot playhouse.

Learn how to get your business funded in the Cannabis economy!

June17, 20212 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

This week, Canadian cannabis super brand Suprette opened a store in the Glebe section of Ottowa, and honestly we've never seen anything like it.

Thedispensary is a technicolor, Willie Wonka-like stroll into a cannabis utopia. Part boardwalk carnival, part retro diner, and part cannabis store, the store is a joint venture between co-founders Mimi Lamand Drummond Munro.

The creative duo has opened three cannabis stores in the past two yearsandwon a Clio Award for their brand design. But the Glebe store takes their imagination to a whole new level. It even has a claw machine!

"This new store really shows the evolution of Superette as a brand and how we can continue to push the boundaries on our retail experience. From vintage diner to house of mirrors this customer journey will be unlike any other," saysMunro.

Let's take a stroll inside its trippy interior. All photos courtesy ofAlex Lysakowski.

Customers enter the store through aretro-inspired, diner-meets-candy shopand complete their ID check in a vintage custom photo booth. The Superette design team has inverted the traditional white tile/red grout color palette to create an eye-catching red-tiled wall that is anhomage to 1950s Americana and anod to capitalist consumerism with a contemporary twist.

The signature Flower Wallshowcasestheir extensive selection of fresh bud.

Superette Glebe is home to the world's largest cannabis menuso large that the manufacturer made them sign a liability waiver for the marquee.

An arcade-inspired claw machine wrapped in clouds is affectionately named Super Claw, where customers can try their best to snag unexpected prizes ranging from gifts from local designers and artisans and Superette merch to rare paraphernalia and big-ticket surprises.

Visitors can pass through a hidden door disguised behind a refurbished, old-fashioned soda machine and the diner then gives way to the surprise, middle dream space where three fairground-style funhouse mirrors distort reality as you move through the tunnel to reachsky-high ceilinged cannabis storebehind.

The merch shop offers a curated selection of gender-neutral clothing (including their newSuper Strains collection), products, and accessoriesfrom cult brands like Sundae School, Pure Beauty, and Yew Yew.

The rest is here:

This Dispenary Is Part Funhouse, Part Diner, and All Trippy - Green Entrepreneur

Here we go again. Another gang of neo-Nazi white supremacists thinks Maine is the next thing to heaven.

Id recommend anyone in Maine not interested in a white ethnostate to move out of Maine. Because theyre in one, Chris Pohlhaus, aka The Hammer, told me in a text.

Pohlhaus, a 34-year-old former Marine from San Antonio, Texas, is a man on a mission: Move to northern Maine with a band of like-minded misanthropes, buy up all the cheap real estate they can find, stock up on guns, set up their own schools and live nastily ever after.

And, oh yes, no people of color allowed.

It all began back in February, when Pohlhaus, whos cultivated a high profile in the world of rabid white supremacy by selling Nazi banners for banner drops on highway overpasses, opened a chat called Great Maine Migration on the instant messaging platform Telegram.

Vice News ran a story on the chat Monday after obtaining a transcript of the session from the Counter Extremism Project, which tracks extremist groups and, when possible, gums up their operations. The organization sent me a copy of the chat transcript Wednesday, along with Pohlhauss contact information.

Lets start with the transcript.

It reads like a bunch of teenage boys planning an adventure that in all likelihood will never happen. While some said theyre on the verge of pulling up stakes and buying a place in Aroostook or Piscataquis County this summer, others lamented that the only thing holding them back is their bad credit or lack of what one called provable income.

Either way, from where they sit, Maine is some kind of nirvana.

The sheer number of snowmobile/atv trails in Maine is huge. Itll be a good alternative to the regular roads, noted someone calling himself Nurmof. Im starting to map out trails that connect to other friends in the northeast.

Yes, replied Master Orwell. That will be so sick.

Back to Nurmof: A nazi home owners association would be cool too. Anybody can make one. Use the fees as a community safety net. Use the money to build a community center with a gym etc etc.

Find an abandoned house and squat, chimed in Awakened Saxon.

The only way you could do something like that is an abadoned cabin the woods. But even then if found out they will remove you, warned Jack Corke.

And on it went. They exchanged real estate listings. They discussed buying buildings that would make good schools. They went down rabbit holes such as how to protect your electronic equipment from a solar flare, or how former Gov. Paul LePage was great for Maine because he once warned that Black drug dealers were coming to Maine and impregnating white women.

Too bad he isnt still governor, mused Nurmof.

And punctuating it all were racial slurs and stereotypes too offensive to repeat here. If washing mouths out with soap was still an antidote to bad language, this bunch would be speaking in bubbles.

Over it all sat The Hammer. Alluding to Maines reputation as one of the whitest states in the nation, he speculated, Maybe with our efforts we can raise it higher than it is now.

Which brings us to my online conversation with Pohlhaus, the face behind The Hammer.

Over the course of 90 minutes, a portrait emerged of a young man motivated not so much by hatred and anger but by fear. A man who claims to have Black friends, even relatives, on the one hand, but sees people whose skin color doesnt match his as a threat to what I am.

I dont want to go extinct, he wrote after I asked how he feels about people of color. Anyone who is in the way of what I am is an existential threat.

Should he and his fellow neo-Nazis actually make it to Maine, I asked, what kind of reception do they expect?

I will not need a reception, Pohlhaus replied. I have my own people.

Doesnt sound too neighborly, I observed.

I wish I could be neighborly. But people want to destroy me and make me homeless.

He sent me an image of the groups flag. Filling the background are three yellow, orange and red stripes we picked autumn colors to represent maine. The centerpiece is a white swastika. In the upper left corner sits a triple Tyr rune, an ancient pagan German symbol that Pohlhaus said represents victory and it also represents the forest I have distributed maybe 50 of (the flags) so far.

So, what are we dealing with here? A man-child from Texas whos a legend in his own mind? A rerun of Tom Kawczynski, who in 2018 was fired as town manager in Jackman after selectmen learned that he was actually in Maine to establish an all-white community called New Albion?

Or, as white nationalism spreads like a brush fire all over the United States in the post-Trump era, does Pohlhaus represent something more nefarious?

Steve Gardiner is assistant research director at Political Research Associates, a Boston-based nonprofit committed to exposing movements, institutions and ideologies that threaten human rights. Hes watched Pohlhaus emerge over the past two years as a rising star in the neo-Nazi movement and, in an interview Thursday, offered a mix of realism and caution in dealing with uninvited, white nationalist newcomers.

These folks, as obnoxious as they are, are going to live somewhere, Gardiner said. And that means someone is going to be their neighbor, and (somewhere) is going to be their town.

But at the same time, he said, chatter like Great Maine Migration goes on all the time. Often, he said, its just that idle blather about a white separatist utopia that will never materialize.

If these guys did everything that they said they were going to do in a chat room, the country would have been in flames long ago, Gardiner said.

Still, he cautioned, its a mistake to ignore Pohlhaus and his ilk outright.

The point is to right-size the threat, to pay attention, he said. And when they start coming, you dont organize to get rid of them.

Rather, Gardiner continued, you demonstrate to them that your neck of the woods is not what they envisioned. You vocally support the most vulnerable in your midst, organize community fundraisers and activities that run blatantly counter to neo-Nazis toxic belief system. You make them feel unwelcome not with confrontation, but by simply holding fast to the way life should be.

Good advice. Time will tell whether well need it.

In our one-on-one conversation, Pohlhaus actually tried to convince me how lucky we Mainers are.

We must move somewhere and in my opinion maine is the perfect choice, he wrote. You should be flattered we think so highly of you to get so many people so excited on the move.

Flattered? Try repulsed.

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Bill Nemitz: Neo-Nazis moving to northern Maine? Say it ain't so - Press Herald