In last week’s podcast, we mentioned two Mr. Gerald Weston articles, and we just realized we forgot to post links! So, here they are, the first of which might already be in your home!
We hope you’ll consider clicking through. Both make for excellent pre-Spring Holy Days reading.
In Podcast 43—“A.I.—Friend or Foe?”—we talk about the ability artificial intelligence now gives people to images with just a simple textual prompt. So, we wanted to give you an example of that. We’ll have more realistic images in the April-May 2023 Tomorrow’s World magazine, but these are excellent examples of how someone with no artistic ability is able to generate completely original images using these AI tools.
Well, Mr. Ben Graham, our Graphics Designer does have artistic ability, and he’s the one who generated these—but the point is that he didn’t use those skills. He simply typed in a text prompt describing what he was looking for, and the AI did the rest. In this case, the AI was Midjourmey. I’d include his prompts, but I forgot to get them. However, they were not complicated! We’ll add them later if we can get them from him next week.
In the meantime, take a close look at each image. They look amazing, but each has one or more “tells” that help indicate it is not human-made. That is, while it looks like something an artist would make, it has elements in it that clearly no human being would add. See if you can find them!
Then, if you haven’t listened to the podcast, click here and have a listen.
Here is the July-August 2020 Tomorrow’s World article by Mr. Jonathan McNair that was referenced on this week’s podcast: “Should We Kiss Dating Hello?” Though it was written to parents, it is really instructive for anyone wanting to understand what we should be focusing on in different stages of our development, versus the priorities pressed on us by a world that sees us as “walking wallets” instead of growing human beings with an eternal future who are seeking to live a good life.
Just click here to go straight to it!
The podcast this week (posted below—click here if you haven’t heard it, yet!) focused on how God doesn’t want us to cuss and curse and use bad language. After we finished, we remembered a related, short article from back in mid-2019 by Mr. Dexter Wakefield, titled “Profanity!” Check it out at the link below if you haven’t read it. It’s a quick read!
And, by the way, be sure to come back and look for additional posts in addition to the weekly podcasts. We’re working harder to add helpful content, and if you scroll just a bit, you’ll see recent posts about not just the podcast, but also a related sermon Mr. Weston gave, but also a link to the Living Education–Charlotte blog, as well. Be sure to poke around, and we’ll continue working to add more content in the future! In the meantime, here’s the article:
* Note, it’s not “profanity by Mr. Wakefield,” but “Profanity!” which is the title of an article by Mr. Wakefield. Very important difference!
Some of us have noticed a lot of podcasts talking these days about dopamine—the neurotransmitter your brain uses to “reward” behavior—and how our current society is addicted to triggering it in so many unhelpful ways. (For example, social media is like a dopamine-triggering machine training you to keep on scrolling and scrolling and scrolling…) One neurologist said in a podcast recently that, in a way, the only real currency in the world is not the U.S. dollar, the British pound, the EU’s euro, or what-have-you. He suggests the only real currency in the world is dopamine, and that is what everyone in the world is “trading” in. And, in a similar sense, triggering our reward centers through dopamine hits is how many in the world—social media corporations, marketers, entertainment companies, etc.—are “reprogramming” our brains without our even realizing it.
All the talk reminds us of two articles by Mr. Gerald Weston that are very worth your time.
One that is very old but, ironically, increasingly relevant: “In Search of the Eternal Buzz,” from a 2006 TW magazine issue. It’s a short read—less than 10 minutes. Give it a shot.
The other is Mr. Weston’s article on the influence of social media, “Tame the Social Media Monster!”—the cover article of the 2018 March-April issue.* Of course, social media is not the only arena in which people are using our neurology against us (which Mr. Weston makes very apparent in the article, with comments from tech experts, themselves, who helped design it all), but reading about it—and equipping yourself—is a great place to start. It’s a longer read, but should still take most readers under 20 minutes.
Here are the two links again. Check them out!
* Unnecessary Behind-the-Scenes Comment™: We loved the cover on this issue. It was an early experiment more than four years ago in doing something a little different, and we were glad Mr. Weston let us play with it!
Here in the U.S., Thanksgiving Day is tomorrow, and while not all of our teen and young adult readers are in the U.S., many of you are—and even for those who are not, when does thankfulness go out of style?
In the spirit of that, consider enjoying this short read from Mr. John Robinson titled “Hacking Thankfulness,” initially published in our January 2021 Tomorrow’s World. Mr. Robinson highlights how secular science and “biohacking” advocates have come to understand the power of gratitude and how we improve our health and our lives, in general, and the benefit of actively cultivating a spirit of thankfulness—an attitude the Bible has recommended for centuries.
We refer to this article in the podcast we plan to publish later this week, and we wanted to make sure we gave you a link so you could read it for yourself! Just click below—it’s only a 4-minute read, and worth the time!
And for those who do observe Thanksgiving Day, we pray yours is a happy one that brings to mind the many, many things in your life for which you can thank your Creator!
We don’t want to distract anyone from reading Thomas White’s inspiring and thoughtful post “One Hundred Billion Eternities” by pushing it down further on the front page, so click here to open it up in a separate tab and read it later!
However, a nice email from our Regional Director in the Australasia region, Mr. Rob Tyler, has reminded us that they do a great job putting articles for youth on their regional website. After checking it out, we thought the recent short article from Mr. Paul Kearns, “Three Questions That Can Change Your Life!” was worth passing along. So, check it out, then follow up with a read of Mr. White’s brief but excellent essay. (And, God willing, now that the Feast is past us, podcasts should resume this week!)
Tomorrow’s World