Pelin Bicen

Marketing professor; climate change advocate; science advocate; loves mathematics and philosophy; R; Bogazici Alumni; Life is better with art and good friends

[Pelin Bicen @oge_day]

@Literariium Akhmatova wrote Requiem during the Stalinist terror, standing in prison lines for seventeen months while her son was imprisoned. Let’s have a context first.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The people in this photo aren't friendlier than you. Their apartments are just smaller. So small that Parisians basically gave up on living indoors and moved their living rooms onto the sidewalk. And that was the whole plan.

In the 1850s, a city planner named Baron Haussmann tore apart medieval Paris and rebuilt it. He widened streets into boulevards, capped every building at five stories, and added one rule that explains this entire photo: the ground floor of every building had to be a café, a bakery, or a shop. The apartments above were intentionally tiny. Some were single rooms carved out of old mansions. No garden. Barely any sunlight. A private balcony was something most Parisians would never have.

So the café became home. You ate breakfast there. Held meetings there. Received your mail there. By the late 1700s, Paris already had close to 2,000 of them. In 2002, there were still 1,907. Even now, after years of closures brought that number to about 1,410, the coverage is absurd: a 2020 city study found 94% of Parisians live within a five-minute walk of a bakery. When COVID shut indoor dining in 2020, Paris ripped out parking spaces, turned them into outdoor terraces, and let 9,800 cafés and restaurants keep them permanently.

An American sociologist named Ray Oldenburg wrote a book in 1989 called The Great Good Place. He had a name for spots like the Parisian café: "third places." Not your home, not your office, but the casual in-between spots where you actually get to know people. Cafés, pubs, barbershops, the corner store where the owner knows your name. His whole argument was that American suburbs were built with only two zones, your house and your job, connected by a car. No sidewalk café, no place to bump into a neighbor by accident.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national health epidemic in 2023. Being alone all the time is as bad for your body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Half of American adults say they feel lonely. Weekly socializing dropped from 5.5 hours in 2003 to just 4 hours in 2023, and it never bounced back after COVID. Americans between 15 and 29 now spend 45% more time alone than they did in 2010.

The scene in this tweet looks like a personality trait. It is a 170-year-old engineering project that works exactly as designed.

[Curiosity @CuriosityonX]

At the atomic level, nothing ever truly touches. What we feel as ‘touch’ is our brain interpreting electromagnetic repulsion.

The object is real, the sensation is a constructed illusion.

[Pelin Bicen @oge_day]

@philosophors There is no ‘me’ or ‘I’. It is all illusion. So what she says has no meaning attached.

[Saganism @Saganismm]

Richard Feynman on how physics differs from mathematics.

[Orman Mühendisi @0rmanmuhendisi]

Manisa’nın Kırkağaç ilçesi Bakır Mahallesi’ne yolunuz düşerse, orada bilge bir ağaçla karşılaşırsınız.

Bu anıt zeytin ağacı, dile kolay, tam 1664 yıldır hayatta. Düşünün ki bu ağaç toprağa ilk kök saldığında henüz İstanbul fethedilmemişti, Anadolu’nun kapıları Türklere açılmamıştı, hatta Roma İmparatorluğu hâlâ hüküm sürüyordu. O günden bugüne sayısız savaşa, göçe, medeniyetlerin doğuşuna ve batışına şahitlik etti ama o, inatla ve sabırla yerinde durmaya devam etti.

İşin en büyüleyici kısmı ise bu ağacın sadece yaşlı bir kütükten ibaret olmaması. Hala capcanlı, hala cömert. Üzerindeki aşılar sayesinde tek bir gövdede dört farklı lezzeti; Edremit, Gemlik, Uslu ve Memecik zeytinlerini aynı anda sunuyor bize.

Her yıl hiç küsmeden, yorulmadan yüzlerce kilo zeytin vermeye, o zeytinlerden şifa dolu yağlar sunmaya devam ediyor. Bilim insanları onun yaşını tescillediğinde aslında bize bir mucizeyi de kanıtlamış oldular; zeytin ağaçlarının doğru şartlarda ne kadar dirençli olabileceğinin yaşayan bir kanıtı gibi karşımızda duruyor.

6.84 metre boyunda olan ağacın gövde çapı 10.6 metre, tepe genişliği ise 13 metreyi bulur. Türkiyenin meyve veren en yaşlı ağacıdır aynı zamanda.

Zeytin ağacına kadim kültürlerde boşuna "ölmez ağaç" dememişler. O, sabrın, barışın ve direnişin sembolüdür. Kuraklığa, sert rüzgârlara, fakir topraklara direnir; gövdesi yarılsa, dalları kırılsa bile köklerinden yeniden hayat fışkırır. Fakir toprakların zengin ağacıdır zeytin.

Kırkağaç’taki bu anıt ağaç gibi değerlerimize sahip çıkmak, ihmalkârlığın arasında yitip gitmekten kurtarmak, aslında kendi geçmişimize ve geleceğimize duyduğumuz saygının bir göstergesidir.

Çünkü zeytin ağacı insana ihanet etmez, yeter ki biz ona kıymet vermeyi, ona sevgiyle dokunmayı bilelim.

[BPT @bpthaber]

Mersin’de 1316 yaşında bir zeytin ağacı, her şeye rağmen zeytin vermeye devam ediyor.

[Min Choi @minchoi]

The wait is over.

OpenAI just dropped o1, also known as Project Strawberry/Q*

This is new level of AI that can "think" and "reason" before responding to you.

10 wild demos:

1. Coding Video Game from a prompt
https://t.co/f60r4Q0uvy

[Daron Acemoglu @DAcemogluMIT]

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. United States is a true blow to US democratic institutions. In fact, in my opinion this is far worse for US institutions than anything I would have thought possible a decade ago:
https://t.co/dmwDXEZYXC

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Short lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on the 'simple shapes of stories.'

Or storytelling + data visualization + data visualization about storytelling = mind blown.

[Tsarathustra @tsarnick]

Geoffrey Hinton says AI language models aren't just predicting the next symbol, they're actually reasoning and understanding in the same way we are and they'll continue improving as they get bigger

[Jan Leike @janleike]

Yesterday was my last day as head of alignment, superalignment lead, and executive @OpenAI.

[Pelin Bicen @oge_day]

@AdamMGrant @NAChristakis Easier said than being done

[Conflict @ConflictTR]

🔴 İnsan göçünün tarihini gösteren bir animasyon.

[Pelin Bicen @oge_day]

He is right in his response.

[Ranga.🇿🇼 @RangaMberi]

“Let me stop you right there…”

Caribbean nation Guyana is booming after discovering oil. BBC’s Stephen Sackur puts it to President @presidentaligy; lobbyists say oil is bad for the climate.

Dude wasn’t having it. Mans was ready!

[Richard H Thaler @R_Thaler]

I was so lucky to be able to have Danny Kahneman as a best friend and collaborator for decades. He usually ended our conversations with "to be continued..." but I now have to simulate his part which is impossible. My favorite image of us "working".

[NS Ramnath @rmnth]

He made it harder to ignore our own ignorance, and that is no mean achievement.

RIP, Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024)

[渡辺 大地｜暗号資産回収スペシャリスト @CocoReimagined]

Donner Pass in Northern California

[Prof. Eliot Jacobson @EliotJacobson]

Dear climate twitter --

Has there been a single article in any media about the recent crossing of 2°C on Feb. 8-11? Or is this now a non-event?

The first 2°C crossing was Nov. 17 & 18, 2023. There were lots of articles at the time.
https://t.co/s4vu4ZUvBN

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

Gemini 1.5 Pro - A highly capable multimodal model with a 10M token context length

Today we are releasing the first demonstrations of the capabilities of the Gemini 1.5 series, with the Gemini 1.5 Pro model. One of the key differentiators of this model is its incredibly long context capabilities, supporting millions of tokens of multimodal input. The multimodal capabilities of the model means you can interact in sophisticated ways with entire books, very long document collections, codebases of hundreds of thousands of lines across hundreds of files, full movies, entire podcast series, and more.

Gemini 1.5 was built by an amazing team of people from @GoogleDeepMind, @GoogleResearch, and elsewhere at @Google. @OriolVinyals (my co-technical lead for the project) and I are incredibly proud of the whole team, and we’re so excited to be sharing this work and what long context and in-context learning can mean for you today!

There’s lots of material about this, some of which are linked to below.

Main blog post:
https://t.co/QAsDKXBdao

Technical report:
“Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context”
https://t.co/CTzTHNDCdo

Videos of interactions with the model that highlight its long context abilities:
Understanding the three.js codebase: https://t.co/yq7d6OSD6c
Analyzing a 45 minute Buster Keaton movie: https://t.co/adyMgDYHoK
Apollo 11 transcript interaction: https://t.co/Pqvq3Eac1R

Starting today, we’re offering a limited preview of 1.5 Pro to developers and enterprise customers via AI Studio and Vertex AI. Read more about this on these blogs:
Google for Developers blog:
https://t.co/x73Vun0kVS
Google Cloud blog:
https://t.co/OlaTW6PYGn

We’ll also introduce 1.5 Pro with a standard 128,000 token context window when the model is ready for a wider release. Coming soon, we plan to introduce pricing tiers that start at the standard 128,000 context window and scale up to 1 million tokens, as we improve the model.

Early testers can try the 1 million token context window at no cost during the testing period. We’re excited to see what developer’s creativity unlocks with a very long context window.

Let me walk you through the capabilities of the model and what I’m excited about!