A crowd gathered in Times Square recently for the removal of what the city promoted as New Yorks last public pay phone. End of an Era, declared the news release headline, even though the era when pay phones played any meaningful role in New Yorkers lives certainly ended long ago.

One might be forgiven for feeling a bit nostalgic. Pay phones are vestiges of the analog world, before the Ill be 15 minutes late text, when long-distance was a consideration and people on calls in public got their own private booths.

People miss a period of time when a call meant something, Mark Thomas of The Payphone Project told The Times. When you planned it and you thought about it, and you took a deep breath and you put your quarter in.

Ive been considering the familiar refrain about smartphones, that theyve made our lives easier to navigate at the expense of our manners, our attention, our safety while driving. We may be physically present, but were never really there.

Pay phones were stationary monotaskers. Before cellphones, if you wanted to talk to someone, you did it at home, at work or in a booth. Your telecommunications were contained to these discrete spaces, separate from the rest of your life. Pay phones may be nearly obsolete, but theres nothing stopping us from reinstituting some of their boundaries in a post-pay-phone world.

What might this look like for you? For me, it would mean pulling over to the side of the road to send a text rather than dictating my message to Siri. Id step out of the pedestrian flow and into the phone booth of the mind to listen to voice mail. I wouldnt check social media while waiting for a friend to arrive at a bar. Long phone calls would take place at home, not while Im on a walk or sitting on a park bench, ostensibly enjoying the outdoors.

My sentimental ideal of the phone booth Richard Dreyfuss calling Marsha Mason from outside her apartment in the rain at the end of The Goodbye Girl is a time capsule, a romantic vision of the past. But the phone booth as metaphor, as inspiration for creating boundaries between virtual and real life, still seems useful today.

Programming note: Starting this week, my colleague Gilbert Cruz, the Culture Editor at The Times, offers his recommendations for what to watch, read, listen to and more. Scroll down to the Culture Calendar to check them out. Melissa

The Tony Awards (Sunday): Even for someone like me, whose job it is to experience oodles of culture, its difficult to see all the Broadway shows. (And if you dont live in or near New York City, its impossible.) So Im thrilled that Ill get to see highlights from musicals like Six, Company and The Music Man. Thats thrilled with a capital T and that rhymes with you get what Im saying.

The Hotel Nantucket (Tuesday): It doesnt feel like summer unless I read an Elin Hilderbrand book, which Ive done every year for almost a decade. They mostly take place on Nantucket and theyre full of secrets and romantic drama and beaches. Ive read my fair share of novels involving magic and dragons, but fancy New England island living often feels more fantastical to me than anything from George R.R. Martin.

Spiderhead (Friday): Speaking of islands, this Netflix movie based on a George Saunders short story about futuristic drug experiments is set on one of those beautiful ones in the middle of nowhere where shady things happen. If you need a strong dose of Chris Hemsworth before this summers Thor: Love and Thunder, heres where to find it.

Who doesnt love a flexible recipe that can absorb all the odds and ends in the fridge and result in something truly delicious? This speedy pad kee mao recipe from the chef Hong Thaimee is a perfect example. The key is to throw in loads of garlic, fresh chiles and whole basil leaves, which make anything taste amazing. Just pick a protein and a quick-cooking vegetable or two I recently used shrimp, broccolini and chard and use the widest rice noodles you can get. Note that if you dont have thick dark soy sauce, adding brown sugar to regular soy makes up for the missing sweetness. Cook this once and its yours to play with forever, a zippy, spicy weeknight meal that you can make from what youve got.

A selection of New York Times recipes is available to all readers. Please consider a Cooking subscription for full access.

Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Formula 1: Were about a third of the way through the Formula 1 season, and its been thrilling. Redesigned cars have helped the Ferrari team climb near the top, while the seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton is struggling. If youre in the U.S. and dont want to wake up early to watch a race, check out Drive to Survive, a Netflix documentary series focused on the sports personalities. It has turned countless Americans into fans. 7 a.m. Eastern on Sunday, ESPN

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The Phone Booth of the Mind - The New York Times

The last time Lady Gaga attended the Met Gala, it was 2019 and the theme was camp a notion that explored the intersection of artifice, style, and exaggeration, first coined by writer Susan Sontag in 1964. Gaga and her glam squad had spent years building up her reputation for outlandish looks, so it was expected that they exemplify the sensibility in the most earnest way. At this point, its well-documented that Gaga made a splash when she walked the steps of the museum with five dancers for a live performance and swapped outfits four times before even entering the venue. All of her looks, from every photographed angle, were on-point, with each element from her glossy bob from hairstylist Frederic Aspiras to her gilded eyelashes by makeup artist Sarah Tanno strategically executed so as not to distract from the others.

While her appearance was widely covered by the press, there was a backstory to it that wasnt noted anywhere online. That is, the masterful look had at least one alternative (but equally riveting) iteration that didnt make the cut. Aspiras, a founding member of the proverbial Haus of Gaga, conceptualized and engineered a wig that could grow in real time with the press of a button.

The dress was being made and I said, What am I going to do? Maybe I can make the hair grow on her, Aspiras tells TZR. He spent a month devising a mechanical way to make her wigs hair grow out to a length that would cover her body and stop at the floor. While the steps of the Met never saw his invention it was ultimately decided that the stars outfit should remain front-and-center and even though years have passed, he still beams over the creative triumph.

I'm weird that way, he laughs. [Gaga] calls me a crazy, mad scientist in my corner of the room as I'm just quietly making something. And all of a sudden I turn around and she's like, Did you just do that in an hour? His sense of innovation has helped him carve a career in celebrity hairstyling and is the driving force behind Gagas sleek pixies, sky-high bouffants, and intricate braids. And, most recently, it garnered him an Oscars nomination for the 54 hairstyles he created to conjure the nefarious character of Patrizia Reggiani (played by Lady Gaga) in House of Gucci. Still, like all great success stories, Aspiras evolution has involved endless work, some serendipitous moments, and one major heartbreak.

Despite his knack for switching things up, Aspiras didnt stray far from his roots. His mother, Suzie, was a hair stylist in San Francisco, California after emigrating from Vietnam. From his early adolescence, Aspiras spent much of his time in her salon, doing chores to assist her and absorbing various styling techniques. She saw me work on my sister's hair one day and said, How did you learn how to do that? And I was just like, I just watched do you do it, he recalls.

As the years went on, Aspiras says he fell more and more in love with the craft. He worked in any way that he could with hair and makeup from the time he was in high school until he was 27 thats when he left a position at NARS Cosmetics and moved to Los Angeles to do some soul-searching. I knew that there was more for me in life than just what [my parents thought Id become]. That's what Asian parents do. They're like, this is what you're going to do. You're going to take over the business, he explains. I was like, I don't want to do that. I want to see what else life has to offer. Little did he know, itd be a few years yet until celebrity hairstyling became his full-time career.

Getting his name out there was difficult. The age was pre-social media, so he felt it necessary to do free testing and photo shoots to network while maintaining a job in retail to make ends meet. Though, one day, his agent called with big news: Aspiras landed a job with Paris Hilton, one that would last three years. And after that, he was invited to work with Lady Gaga in 2008.

In Aspiras mind, the beginning of his chapter with Gaga felt like just a few years ago, not a whole 15. While no longstanding collaboration is void of obstacles, he and Gaga have seemingly established a foundational creative process that is symbiotic and harmonious. We like to think about the concept and the meaning behind everything. And it flows throughout what she's trying to portray on stage and in her music, he says.

For this reason, both the process and the fruits of their labor have been oh so sweet. Their synergetic creativity, along with Aspiras wig-making talents, have allowed the duo to create looks that would have otherwise been impossible. An early example of this is Gagas black and yellow wig an idea that the singer and actor referenced at the Daily Front Rows annual Fashion Los Angeles Awards in 2019, where Aspiras won an award for hairstylist of the year.

As I was sitting in the glam chair, slowly his hand ripped out a page from Italian Vogue across the table with a model who had piss-yellow hair. I said, Freddie, what is that? He said, I know, I was just thinking. And then he stopped talking. I said, Freddie, with this hair and with this makeup, I would look like a live Lichtenstein. He said, Yes. I said, This is live pop art. Then he said, What if we added a root to give you an edge? I remember asking him to make the wig right away and I began wearing it in my show immediately. That was the beginning of me and Freddie, and I pray to God that there will never be an end, she said before presenting him with the accolade, according to Vanity Fair.

The transformative nature of wigs and extensions just made sense when working with Gaga because she was evolving so much, and it was a great way of expressing myself when I wanted to show her something without having to do her own hair and damaging [it in the process,] he says. A stickler for synchrony, he factors in all of the elements, such as Gagas costuming, music, and dance routine, to create the best result. You have to know [how she moves]. You have to know how the lighting works, says Aspiras. So, little things like that I study.

His unquenchable thirst for originality also ensures that he wont linger on an aesthetic for long. For instance, Aspiras took a different approach to styling Gaga on each leg of her Vegas residency. When the singer tweaked her spring jazz show, which ran in April and May, to be more 40s-influenced, Aspiras pivoted her look as well. He ditched her big wigs to focus on coordinated pin curls, small buns, and tight updos with her 2022 awards looks having served as a precursor. For the upcoming Chromatica tour, the Haus of Gaga is still developing a catalog of looks.

His time with Gaga has made way for some impressive experiences and milestones, from working with the star on wildly popular shows like American Horror Story to traveling the world for every tour and event on Gagas dizzyingly busy calendar. Though, the most prestigious of them yet is undoubtedly his work on acclaimed films A Star Is Born and House Of Gucci the latter of which garnered him Oscar nomination. But as life goes, those experiences came with some challenges.

For House Of Gucci, Aspiras had to figure out the logistics of accurately narrating a real persons life through hair. With only a handful of visuals to aid him, Aspiras says he had to put himself in her shoes to imagine her life. I had to dig deep into the mind of a 25-year-old Italian woman that lived in Napoli, he says. His process involved researching music and movies that were popular and taking a deep dive into hair trends from the 70s. He found inspiration in an Italian actor named Gina Lollobrigida to be particularly helpful and channeled it into a 450-page lookbook, which he made to serve as a beauty directory for each scene and a tool to collaborate with the rest of the team on final looks. One thing [Gaga] did tell me is, I don't want to look on screen and see Lady Gaga at all, Aspiras says. So that was [what I did.]

From a personal perspective, working on the film was difficult for Aspiras because he was still coping with the loss of his mother, who died less than a year prior, in June 2020. The grief cut so deep that he contemplated quitting hair all together. After all, without her influence, Aspiras may not have ever entered the trade.

However, he ultimately decided to use the movie as a way to work through his grief. Knowing her, he muses, she would have been proud of his work on the film, for which he was required to make use of the methods she taught him growing up, like wet sets and backcombing. When I look at the movie now, I feel like almost every hairstyle reminds me of her, because it looks like her, he says. And given her impact, the stylist describes his Oscar nomination as a bittersweet gift. It was my love letter to her, my way to give back. And to be able to get nominated for that too, it's like, wow.

Aspiras accomplishments grow in number and scale with each passing year, but his advice to others who hope to pursue a similar path is rooted in humility: Don't be too hard on yourself. We are, especially people who are in creative field. There's so much now to compare yourself with online than before. And people's journeys are completely different from yours, he says. [I] failed until I was 35. I'm 45 now, and look at me.

After having reflected deeply upon his successes, he has identified the key to his professional fulfillment is the happiness he feels from doing hair and working with other thoughtful creative figures. As stressful as it is sometimes at least I go to bed saying at least I love this, Aspiras says. I am very fortunate to be able to work with one of the most amazing humans today, Lady Gaga, who inspires the generation of youth to be themselves and to accept who you are and love yourself and be kind to yourself, which is so important I always wanted to tell a younger version of myself that.

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Hairstylist Frederic Aspiras Is Behind All Of Lady Gaga's Best Looks - The Zoe Report

We are survival machines robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

Ancient Greeks imagined their gods to be capable of building robots. Hundreds of years have passed since the collapse of the greatest civilization, yet the human pursuit of developing something in their own image continues unabated. Thanks to the advances in AI, we now have the means to create human-like robots.

In his book, Human Natures: Genes Cultures and the Human Prospect, Paul Ehrlich said the concept of religion first appeared when humans developed brains large enough for abstract thought. On the other hand, artificial intelligence is brand new but pervasive.

Science and religion rarely see eye to eye, except for occasional outliers like the artificial intelligence church. Even though the church is closed now, it does pose a critical question, how will religion react to a sentient machine with free will?

Interestingly, some cultures are more open to technology than others. For example, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, called Kodaji caught the public imagination last year when it announced a new clergy member, a robot priest that performs sermons. Called Mindar, the USD 1 million robot was designed to look like Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy. The idea behind the priest robot was to rekindle peoples faith. Meanwhile, SoftBanks humanoid robot Pepper is available for hire as a Buddhist priest for funerals.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2018, Pope Francis said AI, robotics, and other innovations should be used to serve humanity and protect our common home.

These are examples of religion leveraging modern-day technology. But, what happens when AI hits singularity, or we achieve AGI? What happens when we create something in our own image?

What happens when an AI robot with the same intellectual ability as a human makes its own decisions? Should this machine be considered a human? Does it have a soul?

Religion argues that God has a plan for everybody. Religion also tells people how they should lead their life. So, where does this AI robot fit in? Herein lies the rub: Technology has the power to shake the foundations of religion.

In his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing, the founding father of AI, said: Thinking is a function of mans immortal soul. God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or machines. Hence no animal or machine can think. Plato believed that the soul was both the source of life and the mind.

Different faiths react differently to technology. For example, last year, a top religious body in Indonesia forbade cryptocurrencies under Islamic law. Also, it can be argued that faith is very personal, so individuals will respond differently to AI.

AGI is the north star of companies like OpenAI, DeepMind and AI2. While OpenAIs mission is to be the first to build a machine with human-like reasoning abilities, DeepMinds motto is to solve intelligence.

DeepMinds AlphaGo is one of the biggest success stories in AI. In a six-day challenge in 2016, the computer programme defeated the worlds greatest Go player Lee Sedol. DeepMinds latest model, Gato, is a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist agent. Googles 2021 model, GLaM, can perform tasks like open domain question answering, common-sense reading, in-context reading comprehension, the SuperGLUE tasks and natural language inference.

OpenAIs DALL.E2 blew minds just a few months ago with imaginative renderings based on text inputs. Yet, all these achievements are pale compared to the intelligence of the human child.

However, people from the AI/ML community believe that AGI is achievable. Recently, Elon Musk, who has invested a lot in AI over the years, tweeted that he would be surprised if we do not achieve AGI by 2029.

Meanwhile, a popular critic of deep learning and AGI Gary Marcus said current AI is illiterate in an interview. It can fake its way through, but it doesnt understand what it reads. So the idea that all of those things will change on one day and on that magical day, machines will be smarter than peopleis a gross oversimplification, he said.

When Anthony Levandowski established the first church of artificial intelligence, called Way of the Future, it raised a few eyebrows.

If we achieve AGI in the coming years, it will change many things. When technology becomes far superior, and these artificial beings can do things beyond a human being, there are chances that people will associate them with a higher power. For example, AI in its current form is already aiding scientists in drug discovery. Humans are always on the lookout for God, even if on a personal level.

But one of the worst possible outcomes would be that AI emerges as a polarising factor. Hence, it warrants a greater discussion in this context. There is also an increasing need for the larger participation of religious groups in deliberating the ethical implications of AI development.

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The role of 'God' in the 'Matrix' - Analytics India Magazine

Author of From Fatigued to Fantastic Jacob Teitelbaum, M.D., defines conscious sleep as "the ability to be aware of the self, but not of our body or surroundings, during different stages of sleep."Western scientific studies have focused predominantly on this state during REM sleep and how a person can tap into their consciousness and experience lucid dreaming, Teitelbaum tells mbg.

However, conscious sleep is possible in non-REM sleep as well. In fact, in Eastern meditation traditions, conscious sleep is taught as a way to maintain self-awareness, but without being aware of the body or environment, during deep non-dream sleep, Teitelbaum explains over email.

According to a review published in the journal Progress in Brain Research, the concept of conscious sleep was highlighted by Elmer and Alyce Green of the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. The couple teamed up with the Indian master of yoga meditation Swm Rma at the time, to further explore how a person could find themselves in their deepest, non-REM sleep but still have a sharp awareness of their surroundings.

From the yogi's perspective, conscious sleep was (and still is) considered to be a form of deep meditation that teaches those who practice how to sustain their meditative state, regardless of what's happening in the world around them.

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How To Slip Into A Deep Meditation Every Night Using "Conscious Sleep" - mindbodygreen.com

For the last few years, Graphcore has primarily been focused on slinging its IPU chips for training and inference systems of varying sizes, but that is changing now as the six-year-old British chip designer is joining the conversation about the convergence of AI and high-performance computing.

There are now 168 supercomputers in the Top500 and quite a few more outside of that list that use accelerators to power these increasingly converging workloads. Most of these systems are using Nvidias GPUs, but the appearance of seven new systems with AMDs fresh Instinct MI250X GPUs which includes Oak Ridge National Laboratorys Frontier, the United States first exascale system shows there is an appetite to consider alternative architectures when they can provide an advantage.

Graphcore hopes it can soon get a slice of this action with its massively parallel processors.

Phil Brown, a Cray veteran who returned to Graphcore in May as vice president of scaled systems after a four-month stint at chip startup NextSilicon, tells The Next Platform that the IPU maker has recently seen significant, sustained interest from organizations that are considering deploying Graphcores specialized silicon for these converged AI and HPC needs, and this includes large deployments.

I think were now at the point where there is going to be significant interest in doing large-scale deployments with the systems. The technology space and machine learning capability has evolved sufficiently that it can deliver significant value to the scientific organizations, and so Im expecting those to follow quite rapidly in the future, he says.

Graphcore views three key opportunities around the convergence of HPC and AI: using IPUs class-leading performance for 32-bit floating point math to tackle HPC applications, training large foundation models like DeepMinds 280-billion-parameter language model, and using AI to complement and accelerate traditional HPC workloads to create a feedback loop of sorts.

Its the latter area that Brown says is likely the largest opportunity for Graphcore in HPC.

This may be having surrogate models, elements of a traditional HPC simulation, replaced by a machine learning kernel parameterization in a weather forecast, for example, he says. Surrogate models are computationally expensive, he added, so replacing them with a machine learning models that are much cheaper but equally accurate can help reduce the overall cost of running simulations.

These opportunities are based on exploratory work Graphcore has conducted with partners that has yielded promising results. For instance, the company says its IPUs were used to train a gravity wave drag model for weather forecasting five times faster than Nvidias V100. In another example, Hewlett Packard Enterprise trained a deep learning model for protein folding using Graphcores IPU-M2000 system and found that the second-generation IPU was around three times faster than Nvidias A100.

To help more the conversation forward, several government labs are in different stages of trying out Graphcores IPUs to see if the processors hold promise for large systems in the future.

Most recently, this includes the US Department of Energys Sandia National Laboratories and Argonne National Laboratory. Both are adding Graphcores Bow IPU Pod systems to their AI hardware testbeds, and Argonne is doing so after reporting impressive results with Graphcores first-generation IPU systems. These Bow Pods will use the chip designers recently announced Bow IPU, which makes use of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Cos wafer-on-wafer 3D stacking technology to provide more performance while using less power compared to its second-generation IPU.

Michael Papka, director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, says the addition of Graphcores Bow IPU Pod supports the testbeds goal of understanding the role AI accelerators can play in advancing data-driven discoveries, and how these systems can be combined with supercomputers to scale to extremely large and complex science problems.

The University of Edinburghs EPCC supercomputing center is also installing a Bow IPU Pod system, which will use it for a broad range of use cases as part of the multi-industry-supporting Data Driven Innovation Programme that is funded by the governments of Scotland and the United Kingdom. EPCC has expressed interest in Graphcores in-development Good computer, which the company has promised will deliver more than 10 exaflops of AI floating point compute with next-generation IPUs.

If we were to travel 226 miles south of EPCC, wed find support for Graphcore from Englands Hartree Centre, which plans to access IPUs through cloud service provider G-Core Cloud to conduct research on fusion energy as part of a partnership with the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

While Graphcore is building its own exascale supercomputer for AI with the Good system, Brown saus he believes the companys IPUs will be well-suited for other exascale supercomputers in the future, ranging from those that are very AI-focused to those running traditional simulation software that could benefit from performing such calculations at a lower precision on IPUs.

This means that, in Browns mind, an exascale system could consist mostly of Graphcore IPUs or the processors could be a component of a larger heterogenous system, which he says is based on feedback hes heard from people in the HPC community.

The message that weve been getting from them is that theyre very interested in exploring exascale system architectures that include components of different types that give them a good balance of overall capability for their systems, because they recognize that the workloads are going to become more heterogeneous in terms of the space but also the performance and the value proposition you get from these heterogeneous processors is well worth the investment, he says.

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Graphcore Thinks It Can Get An AI Piece Of The HPC Exascale Pie - The Next Platform