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CBC Radio ran a bit yesterday or the day before lamenting the fact that people no longer go to movies, and it reminds me of this item lamenting the lack of people reading books. Why would we support these bad old commercial models? My reaction is similar to Steven Krause's: who cares? "In my view," he writes "the best movies and streaming media today are every bit as 'literary' as texts that happen to be printed on paper. And our postliterate world (which I think we entered long ago) has not resulted in the 'end of reading' at all." I read tons, most of it for fun. But books on paper? No. Today: Total: Steven D. Krause, 2026/07/17 [Direct Link]

Is our intelligence rooted in how living organisms are organized?

This is an excellent video (though tbh I read the transcript) suggesting "that the free energy principle falls short as a unifying framework for living systems and cognition, and instead finds promise in recent concepts in philosophy and theoretical biology—how living systems must be organized in order to survive." It's not clear what question this even answers ( i's something like, what's the difference between living and non-living things?) and they don't get to it until about half way through but it's worth the journey. Today: Total: Paul Middlebrooks, The Transmitter, 2026/07/17 [Direct Link]

A History of Large Language Models

Take your time and give this paper a nice slow read. As the author says, "No single idea is beyond the abilities of a smart teenager to understand. But what is beautiful and surprising and remarkable is that the phenomena we observe in LLMs is not magic but simply the emergence of a complex system from simple rules." Yes, it seems hard to imagine that these language models can really work. But clearly they do, and this paper describes the step-by-step process over the years as researchers discovered how the could. Via Data Science Weekly 660. Today: Total: Gregory Gunderson, 2026/07/17 [Direct Link]

Going Beyond Access to Democratizing Knowledge

The argument here is that "There is more to democratizing knowledge, however, than just access. OER is an opportunity to redress marginalization and erasure, and open pedagogy has a responsibility to confront social justice issues." I don't agree. The form is basically, "you've done a good thing but you haven't done enough." The problem is, it's never enough, and it means that no good deed ever goes uncriticized. I'll take the open access, thank you; you can keep on with your math or physics or whatever. Sharing your biochemical research does not create an obligation to address social justice issues. Today: Total: Kisha G. Tracy, OEGlobal, 2026/07/17 [Direct Link]

Evidence from Formal Logical Reasoning Reveals that the Language of Thought is not Natural Language

I don't trust fMRI analyses of human cognitive functions at all, so I'm not citing this paper as evidence of anything. But the question it asks is worth asking: do we need language in order to reason logically? On the surface it would seem we do: logic just is a symbol manipulation system (with semantics doing the work of connecting it to trust and meaning). But as Hume more, babies and animals can think logically. This paper concludes that language is not necessary, but again, I'd want better evidence. Today: Total: Hope Kean, et al., 2026/07/16 [Direct Link]

Introducing Claude for Teachers

Not being a verified K-12 educator in the U.S., I can't test Anthropic's brand new Claude for Teachers myself, but it looks clever. "Claude for Teachers connects to Learning Commons, giving Claude access to academic standards across all 50 states—and beneath each standard, the smaller learning competencies... Claude for Teachers also brings in trusted curricular resources like OpenSciEd and IM v.360 from Illustrative Mathematics." Via Marcus Green. See also Chalkbeat. Today: Total: Anthropic, 2026/07/15 [Direct Link]

Stephen Downes

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