My favorite things of 2023

Lisbon, Portugal - July 23’

2023 was interesting…

We saw the planet hit the hottest temperatures ever recorded, witnessed the rise of Generative AI models, and, for a few days, everyone became obsessed over a submarine that went missing near the Titanic. With all these negative headlines, I thought I would share some highlights.

Here are just a few:

Movie🍿

It’s hard to think back on this summer without skipping over the colossal event that was “Barbenheimer weekend.” An event where it seemed the whole world teamed up to show Hollywood that we still care about the quality of movies being made. 

I think the best thing I can say about the movie is that Nolan was smart making the story center around the person rather than the bomb. It would have been easy to make bomb go “boom” with special effects to try and impress everybody. And, don’t get me wrong, this movie does have that. But rather than the special effects being the whole gig, Nolan chooses to ground the movie around the man who created the weapon; depicting the deep psychological damage that haunted him after its creation. Brilliant film.

Thing I learned🍎

Alien Hand Syndrome

This disorder was in the corners of one of my neuroscience textbooks, and it’s pretty unreal. 

So apparently there is a tiny amount of people who suffer from severe damage to their Corpus Collosum (in the brain). And a small subset of them can, for whatever reason, find one of their hands to have a mind of its own!

A literal “alien hand” on their body that does whatever it feels like.

What’s most fascinating to me is the complexity of tasks that this hand can accomplish; there are numerous cases of the hand opening doors, writing things down, or even attempting to choke the person. 

Definitely raises a lot of questions about how large a role the unconscious plays in our decisions and also the concept of free will.

Crazy, right?

Song🎧

Sunset - Caroline Polachek

This was a fun one; all the Shakira vibes.

Tech📱

Stable Diffusion (SDXL)

2023 was the year of AI. And honestly, I think one of the most impressive things to come out of this tech is the image generation tools, specifically stable diffusion. I had some fun messing around with it over the summer creating all sorts of garbage, but when given good prompts the algorithm can be scarily good. 

The images above are just a few of the projects I was able to generate in July. The Future is scary (and exciting).

Essay✍️

“Coed living is a real-life sitcom” - Maddie McMurrough

3 months later, this article is still hilarious. Maddie offers a humorous, but also heartfelt, insight into her summer living in a coed dorm with her sister. It is also written by an A&M student so please read it and gig ‘em.

Sporting Event⚽️

I’m a little late to the F1 hype train. It’s been a few years since that legendary 2021 season, but I’ve started to come around to this sport.

And even though this season wasn’t the best, it did deliver one of the craziest races in Las Vegas last month.

This race had everything: terrible conditions, lots of crashes, and tight duels between Checo, Leclerc, and Russel.

Hopefully next year more of these duels will be for that top spot though (looking at you Verstappen).