Browsing through this 1976 edition of Grolier's
The New Book of Knowledge Annual, which I really do have to prune, along with a few other similar hefty-size tomes, I came across a few things worth sharing.
First up is an article about KIND, aka the Kindness Club. The Kindness Club, a humane organization, was founded in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1959. The Human Society of the United States took responsibility for the U.S. youth clubs and branded them KIND — Kindness In Nature's Defense.
"To carry out the club's program, members are encouraged to help fight against the abuse of animals. And members do more than speak out when they see evidence of cruelty to animals; they follow their words with actions," the Grolier's article states.
For an update, Wikipedia adds: "In 2009, the Kindness Club's 50th anniversary year, most of its members were in Canada. Continuing to base itself on [Albert] Schweitzer's reverence for life philosophy, the club promotes humane education for children and contributes to local initiatives including subsidized spay/neuter programs and donations of pet food to food banks."
Given that I took a break while putting this post together to take a bowl of food to a skunk on the back patio, I think I might qualify to be in the Kindness Club.
Meanwhile, another page in this book from a half-century ago touts the emergence of a computer's "artistic skills."
"This portrait is 'painted' by a computer," the caption states. "It is made up of about 200 separate squares, each in one of 16 shades of gray. The portrait is part of an experiment being carried out by Bell Laboratories 'to learn the least amount of visual information a picture may contain and still be recognizable.' Have someone hold the page about 15 feet (5 meters) away from you, and squint your eyes. Hint: the subject of the portrait was president of the United States during its most critical period."
Indeed, if you hold the computer portrait further away, you can imagine an extremely low-res Abraham Lincoln.
While the short caption doesn't mention it, the computer programmer for this Lincoln 'portrait' was
Leon Harmon. And the image inspired
Salvador Dalí to create
a famous lithograph (though that's not quite the right description) that has been much-counterfeited.
I couldn't help but think of how all of this relates to one of the most contentious ideas of our modern moment: generative AI taking the work of human writers and artists and creating "new" content that is just a facsimile of human originality. AI slop barreling toward
model collapse.
I saw
Backrooms with Ashar a couple days ago, and afterward I struck by
this insight about the horror movie from writer Bianca Michelle Parker on Bluesky: "Saw Backrooms. Pretty hard not to read it as an allegory for AI. The Backrooms seem massive and fascinating at a cursory glance, but ultimately just regurgitate stuff at random. They have no meaning, insight or significance and are only of continued interest to those who have no capacity for growth."
I think that's just one of many interesting angles to touch upon regarding Kane Parsons' well-done film. I'm fascinated and invigorated by how millennials view and try to recreate the 1980s and 1990s. Why they are nostalgic for an era they didn't live through. What they view from those decades as the beginnings of what's gone sideways in the 21st century. And it goes hand in hand with the love some millennials have for
"old" physical media, from the world before the internet and smartphones. There's a lot more I hope to dig into.
To end on a completely different note, here's a cool photograph of
Bobby Clarke of the 1975 Stanley Cup champion Philadelphia Flyers from the Grolier's book.
