James' World 2

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In your brain, neurons are arranged in networks big and small. With every action, with every thought, the networks change: neurons are included or excluded, and the connections between them strengthen or fade. This process goes on all the time—it’s happening now, as you read these words—and its scale is beyond imagining. You have some eighty billion neurons sharing a hundred trillion connections or more. Your skull contains a galaxy’s worth of constellations, always shifting.

Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist who is often called “the godfather of A.I.,” handed me a walking stick. “You’ll need one of these,” he said. Then he headed off along a path through the woods to the shore. It wound across a shaded clearing, past a pair of sheds, and then descended by stone steps to a small dock. “It’s slippery here,” Hinton warned, as we started down.

New knowledge incorporates itself into your existing networks in the form of subtle adjustments. Sometimes they’re temporary: if you meet a stranger at a party, his name might impress itself only briefly upon the networks in your memory. But they can also last a lifetime, if, say, that stranger becomes your spouse. Because new knowledge merges with old, what you know shapes what you learn. If someone at the party tells you about his trip to Amsterdam, the next day, at a museum, your networks may nudge you a little closer to the Vermeer. In this way, small changes create the possibility for profound transformations.

“We had a bonfire here,” Hinton said. We were on a ledge of rock jutting out into Ontario’s Georgian Bay, which stretches to the west into Lake Huron. Islands dotted the water; Hinton had bought this one in 2013, when he was sixty-five, after selling a three-person startup to Google for forty-four million dollars. Before that, he’d spent three decades as a computer-science professor at the University of Toronto—a leading figure in an unglamorous subfield known as neural networks, which was inspired by the way neurons are connected in the brain. Because artificial neural networks were only moderately successful at the tasks they undertook—image categorization, speech recognition, and so on—most researchers considered them to be at best mildly interesting, or at worst a waste of time. “Our neural nets just couldn’t do anything better than a child could,” Hinton recalled. In the nineteen-eighties, when he saw “The Terminator,” it didn’t bother him that Skynet, the movie’s world-destroying A.I., was a neural net; he was pleased to see the technology portrayed as promising.

From the small depression where the fire had been, cracks in the stone, created by the heat, radiated outward. Hinton, who is tall, slim, and English, poked the spot with his stick. A scientist through and through, he is always remarking on what is happening in the physical world: the lives of animals, the flow of currents in the bay, the geology of the island. “I put a mesh of rebar under the wood, so the air could get in, and it got hot enough that the metal actually went all soft,” he said, in a wondering tone. “That’s a real fire—something to be proud of!”

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When Bill Kowalcic first heard that his company Advanced RV was trying out a four-day workweek, he was filled with questions.

“All of us were a little nervous — like, are we going to be able to get our work done? Are we going to do OK? Is this going to hurt us?” says Kowalcic, a skilled craftsman who works in the finishing department.

A year and a half later, he has answers.

Not only has his team found shortcuts and time savers, he’s happier on the job.

“Gosh, it’s been great,” he says.

“I’ve never had a job where I’ve said this before, but at the end of the three-day weekend, I’m ready to come back in Monday morning.”

The trial has spread globally, but few manufacturers have taken part

Advanced RV builds custom, luxury motorhomes out of Mercedes-Benz cargo vans in Willoughby, Ohio. It is one of more than 200 companies and only a handful of manufacturers that have taken part in an ongoing global trial led by the organization 4 Day Week Global.

For six months, businesses agree to reduce working hours while maintaining the same pay. The goal is not to do less with less, but to maintain 100% productivity by bringing more energy and efficiency to the workplace while lessening fatigue and burnout.

The success stories coming out of the trial have offered a work-weary public hope that a better work-life balance is achievable. Of the 41 American and Canadian companies that began the trial in 2022, none has reported going back to working 40 hours a week.

A closer look at how Advanced RV has managed to significantly reduce its working hours while keeping up productivity reveals some essential elements: a tolerance for risk, and also trust, creativity, and open-mindedness

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“Katastrofa. Katastrofa.”

A man named Piotr repeats this like a mantra. On a warm fall evening in Tijuana, he’s the first in a long line to request asylum in the U.S.

“Katastrofa,” he says again, on the verge of tears. It’s the Russian word for catastrophe. Piotr, a middle-aged man who requested that his last name be withheld to protect relatives back home, left Moscow more than six months ago with his immediate family — his wife and two teenage sons.

He says the war with Ukraine had made their lives unlivable in Russia, and he fears for his sons — military conscription there is obligatory. “Russia is so difficult,” he says. “I can’t describe it. It’s so difficult for me. Katastrofa!“

Piotr says he and his family first went to Mexico City, where they lived working odd jobs until they were approved for an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. This is the big day. He showed up six hours ahead of time. Piotr plans to ask the U.S. for asylum for his family and himself.

So do dozens of others who have been camping out in this line all day, waiting for their interviews. It’s mostly families. There are several interview slots throughout the day. These people are camping out for the late evening round, in hopes that by morning, they’ll be on the other side, in San Diego.

In the past year, the southwest border has received historic numbers of migrants. More than 2.4 million people. It’s been record-breaking numbers for the past few years. San Diego alone has received more than 230,000 people this year. That’s a 30% increase from the year before.

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Keeping your finances organized doesn’t have to be as daunting as it can feel. To help make life a little easier, we’ve rounded up some of the best expert-advised tactics to help you better understand your spending and budget accordingly. Read on for simple ways you can feel in better control of your finances, even when it seems tough—plus, tips for improving everything from your home to your travel plans with a tighter budget in mind.

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Balance can be like the canary in the coal mine of overall health. Because it is such a complex skill involving the coordination of multiple musculoskeletal, nervous, and cognitive systems, good balance means your body is doing a lot of things right—which is why it’s a technique you might actively want to hone by doing a workout for balance.

“You’re really looking at the body’s overall ability to function and coordinate its activity,” family physician Danine Fruge, MD, medical director at Pritikin Longevity Center, previously told Well+Good about the link between balance and longevity.

Why is balance so complicated?

“Keeping your balance requires more complicated connections than a 60-person family,” internal medicine physician Michael Roizen, MD, author of The Great Age Reboot, previously told Well+Good about balance. “You have sensors throughout your limbs that interact with position sensors in your ears and others in your eyes, all of which are integrated in an area in the back of your brain called your cerebellum and in motor nerves that send messages to all your skeletal muscles to keep you upright.”

So when you do a workout for balance, you’re working to strengthen both your body and mind. Generally, repetition can build muscle memory and strengthen connections in your brain, including those responsible for coordinating balance. So expect a workout for balance to involve doing the same wobble-inducing moves multiple times.

What muscles does a balance workout work?

1. The core

In terms of muscles you can actively strengthen for balance, the core is key.

“Our balance comes from our core,” certified fitness trainer Katie Austin previously told Well+Good about ways to improve balance. “Your core entails the central part of your body, including your pelvis, lower back, hips, and stomach. When we train our core muscles, they help the other muscles work cohesively and in harmony, which leads to better balance and stability.”

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Photo: Getty Images/Fly View Productions

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