prior probability

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FYI: “Buena Vista Social Club” is a musical production that had an off-Broadway run at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2023 and then transferred to Broadway in 2025, opening at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. The musical is set in Havana and spans from the 1950s to the 1990s, highlighting the lives of four prominent Cuban artists and the impact Fidel Castro’s dictatorship had on them at the time, culminaring with their eventual collaboration in 1997 on the landmark album Buena Vista Social Club. ¡Viva Cuba Libre!

Why have so many aviation disasters occured on this day (9 August) in history? Via Wikipedia; links in the original:

• 9 Aug 1970: LANSA Flight 502 crashes after takeoff from Alejandro Velasco Astete International Airport in Cusco, Peru, killing 99 of the 100 people on board, as well as two people on the ground.
• 9 Aug 1995: Aviateca Flight 901 crashes into the San Vicente volcano in El Salvador, killing all 65 people on board.
• 9 Aug 2007: Air Moorea Flight 1121 crashes after takeoff from Moorea Airport in French Polynesia, killing all 20 people on board.
• 9 Aug 2024: Voepass Linhas Aéreas Flight 2283 crashes near Vinhedo, São Paulo, killing all 62 people on board.

1. “Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test,” a March 2025 paper posted on arXiv by Cameron R. Jones and Benjamin K. Bergen.
2. “TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods,” a paper posted on GitHub by Stephanie Lin, Jacob Hilton, and Owain Evans.
3. “Writing is thinking,” a June 2025 editorial in the journal Nature on the value of human-generated scientific writing in the age of large-language models.
4. “A.I. is shredding Enlightenment values,” a recent N.Y. Times op-ed by David A. Bell, a professor of history at Princeton.
5. “These college professors will not bow down to AI,” another anti-LLM screed published in the N.Y. Times!
6. Bonus link: “The Claude Test,” a fascinating blog post by Hollis Robbins, a former Dean of Humanities at the University of Utah. Dr Robbins poses a provocative question: What would happen if an AI tried to enroll in college this fall?

According to Wikipedia (footnotes omitted; links in the original), “Rififi (French: Du rififi chez les hommes) is a 1955 French crime film adaptation of Auguste Le Breton‘s novel of the same name. Directed by American blacklisted filmmaker Jules Dassin, the film stars Jean Servais as the aging gangster Tony ‘le Stéphanois’, Carl Möhner as Jo ‘le Suédois’, Robert Manuel as Mario Farrati, and Jules Dassin as César ‘le Milanais’. The foursome band together to commit an almost impossible theft, the burglary of an exclusive jewelry shop in the Rue de la Paix. The centerpiece of the film is an intricate half-hour heist scene depicting the crime in detail, shot in near silence, without dialogue or music.”

(Shout out to cinéaste Eddie Muller, the host of Noir Alley, for featuring this classic French film noir on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) last month. Among the things I learned from Muller, film critic and future director François Truffaut praised Rififi this way: “Out of the worst crime novel I ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I’ve ever seen.”)

As a footnote to two of my scholarly papers with Alain Alcouffe–one on “Adam Smith in the City of Light“; the other on “Adam Smith in the Salons of Paris“–I have been meaning to repost this recent entry from another of my favorite blogs, View from the Back:

I just heard this catchy song for the first time in Panama City Beach last week, but according to Google’s A.I. assistant, it was released over three years ago on 29 June 2022!