“The depth camera has a field of vision that spans 120 by 120 degrees—far more than the original Kinect—so it can sense what your hands are doing even when they are nearly outstretched. Sensors flood the device with terabytes of data every second, all managed with an onboard CPU, GPU and first-of-its-kind HPU (holographic processing unit).”

“Tanner recognized that the real “danger” confronting him was American racism, which continued to categorize him—and now potentially his son—as second-class citizens, based on absurd “blood” distinctions that chafed against the artist’s Christian worldview. That worldview was selective in its own way, for it privileged a single religious tradition increasingly associated with colonial forms of intervention in Palestine. And yet, if Tanner shared with American Protestantism a fascination with the sacred geography of Christian belief, his interest in the hybridity of the Holy Land diverged from narrow forms of nationalism. The blood that flowed through his veins, like the paint on his canvases, had a more international character.”

“I’m not a nice person, and I don’t care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel—that’s what’s important to me.”

On the Tracy-Widom distribution: ‘The asymmetry of the statistical curve reflects the nature of the two phases. Because of mutual interactions between the components, the energy of the system in the strong-coupling phase on the left is proportional to N2. Meanwhile, in the weak-coupling phase on the right, the energy depends only on the number of individual components, N. “Whenever you have a strongly coupled phase and a weakly coupled phase, Tracy-Widom is the connecting crossover function between the two phases,” Majumdar said.’

“How many children do you have? might sound like the simplest question, until it brings a grieving parent to their knees. When is your anniversary? might create a moment of pause for someone who’s recently separated. Even What’s your hometown? or Where did you go on vacation as a child? might feel painful for kids who grew up without that kind of stability or privilege.”

“In some sense, Kelly’s theory suffers from the same problem that Marxist critics long ago identified in Jacques Ellul’s work on the autonomy of technology: it exonerates capitalism, and absolves powerful political and economic structures from the scrutiny they deserve. But there is also a crucial difference between Ellul and Kelly: the former was on a quest to recast the debate about the technological society in moral terms, while the latter is entirely satisfied with the technological vocabulary and seeks only to expand it with a few terms from biology.”