Floral contrasts
Our Amaryllis has suddenly burst magnificently into flower. Photographed yesterday with Robert Mapplethorpe’s ‘Orchid’ (1989) in the background.
Quote of the Day
”He talked about those politicians who were always against everything new: “We used to have folks like that around the store in Johnson City,” he said. “We called them dispeptics. When they put the railroad through town for the first time, one old man stood there and looked at-‘ it and said, ‘They’ll never get the damn thing started.’ The girl came up with a great wine bottle and hit it across the snoot of the locomotive and it started going out about 15 or 20 miles an hour. And they went up to him and said, ‘What do you think now, Uncle Ezra?’ And he said, ‘They’ll never get the damn thing stopped.’”
- LBJ in a speech to Democratic Candidates for Congress in the White House*
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Ry Cooder & David Lindley | All Shook Up
Song title resonates with the current state of the (Western) world.
Long Read of the Day
Musk’s Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government
Nice satirical piece of satire by Garrett Graff prompted by an interesting thought. “I’ve long believed that the American media would be more clear-eyed about the rise and return of Donald Trump if it was happening overseas in a foreign country, where we’re used to foreign correspondents writing with more incisive authority. Having watched with growing alarm the developments of the last 24 and 36 hours in Washington, I thought I’d take a stab at just such a dispatch. Here’s a story that should be written this weekend.”
Here’s how it opens:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks.
With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk’s junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s constitutional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. Having secured themselves in key ministries and in a building adjacent to the presidential office complex, Musk’s forces have begun issuing directives to civil service workers and forcing the resignation of officials deemed insufficiently loyal, like the head of the country’s aviation authority…
Read on. It’s a hoot — except that when you get into it it begins to look like actual reporting of what’s going on.
Books, etc.
This arrived the other day. I welcomed it because I loved Margaret Heffernan’s earlier book, Wilful Blindness — about a condition that plagues our political and corporate world. Her new book is about the way that artists not only cope with uncertainty better than the rest of us, but how they positively embrace it.
My commonplace booklet
AI company says to job applicants: ‘Please don’t use AI’
When I first saw this in the FT, I immediately filed it away in the “You Couldn’t Make This Up” folder. Anthropic is the company that makes Claude, one of the LLMs that I use regularly.
Here’s what it tells job applicants:
While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate ‘Yes’ if you have read and agree.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- Pot calls the Data Centre black
From New Scientist
More than 60 per cent of the 24,000 tonnes of cannabis grown each year in the US is cultivated in indoor farms that rely on large arrays of lights as well as heating and cooling systems. Those controlled conditions enable the production of more potent flowers and for crops to be grown in more places with more security – or secrecy. But they come with a large environmental cost.
Mills used data on both the legal and illegal US cannabis industry to estimate the total energy use and emissions generated by these indoor plant factories. He found they use around 596 petajoules per year. That’s a “remarkable” amount of energy, equivalent to about a third of current energy demand from US data centres, says Mills.
Generating that electricity, as well as the carbon dioxide pumped into indoor operations to fertilise cannabis plants, produces emissions equivalent to 44 million tonnes of CO2 per year – about the same as 6 million homes. For the average daily cannabis user – more than 17 million of whom live in the US – that would mean cannabis accounts for half their personal CO2 footprint.
Jeez. And here am I, someone who has never smoked weed in his long life, fretting about the carbon footprint of data centres!
Thanks to Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) for spotting it.
Feedback
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John Seeley read my claim that LLMs, like libraries, “help humans to access and utilise the accumulated knowledge of previous generations” and was reminded of something that George Jackson wrote in Soledad Brother when referring to libraries : “We, the humble representatives of future generations, have all the accumulated knowledge and thinking of previous generations to build our thoughts. “
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A good friend who used to be a Blue Guide in Cambridge was struck by my piece on Wednesday about the statue of Henry VIII on Trinity’s Great Gate. “My stories about it,” she writes,
are that the original sceptre was removed by a student in May Week and a chair leg put in its place. The original sceptre (I understand) was never returned. Many years later, also in May Week, a student climbed up in the dark and replaced the chair leg with a bicycle pump. The following morning he telephoned the Porters’ Lodge anonymously and asked if ‘they had seen Henry this morning’. A reply in the negative prompted to ask the porter to go and look. A weary Porter returned to the telephone and said; “I’ve seen Henry” to which the student asked if he could go to the Master and tell him that the students thought a bicycle pump was more appropriate than a chair leg (Cambridge is after all a city for cyclists).
The Porter duly went to the Master who gathered a number of Fellows to discuss this problem. I was told by someone that it was discussed for 50 minutes and the conclusion was that the chair leg was to be replaced as their Great Gate with a chair leg had become an official sight in Cambridge and a photograph was in all the guide books. Not so many years ago I had a group with me at the Great Gate in May Week and found that Henry’s right hand was empty. I asked the porter what had happened to the chair leg. He drew himself up to a great height and said: “That’s what we all want to know”!
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