Friday Linkblog, Poets-and-Whales Edition

And these are ones I found this week while I was clearing out the open tabs

To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare

As a fellow interdisciplinarian, Paul Ford’s views on “the humanities vs technology” are essentially identical to my own, but better written. This is the sort of essay where once you start quoting it, you end up copying the whole thing, so I’ll just stick to my favorite line:

At least art goes for the long game, you know? Poems are many things, and often lousy, but they are not meant to be disposable, nor do they require a particular operating system to work.

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Scientists had a 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale

This is very, very cool; an actual sort-of almost conversation with a whale. Clearly communication happened, even if neither side really understood it! The attitude was a little weird to me, though: all the amazing breakthroughs in communicating with whales were entirely processes through the lens of “this is valuable because it might help us talk to theoretical aliens”. Whatever it took to get the grant money, I guess, but: Whales! We’re talking to them! That is (or at least should be) way cooler and more valuable than maybe being able to talk to klingons later. Maybe they can tell us about that weird probe thing early.