Monster of the deep?
Sadly, no. But when viewed from a distance it looked for a moment like a sinister predator surfacing in a placid lake!
Quote of the Day
“AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do without thinking …”
- Donald Knuth
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bach: Italian Concerto In F Major, BWV 971: I. Allegro | Rafał Blechacz
Long Read of the Day
The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project
Very nice essay by Scott Alexander as he wanders down the rabbit-hole of the strange preponderance of Hungarian geniuses in the mid 20th century.
A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, after which they decided the planet was unsuitable for their needs and disappeared. The only clue to their existence were the children they had with local women.
The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was led by a group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890 and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and legendary polymath John von Neumann, namesake of the List Of Things Named After John Von Neumann.
The coincidences actually pile up beyond this. Von Neumann, Wigner, and possibly Teller all went to the same central Budapest high school at about the same time, leading a friend to joke about the atomic bomb being basically a Hungarian high school science fair project.
But maybe we shouldn’t be joking about this so much. Suppose we learned that Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach all had the same childhood piano tutor. It sounds less like “ha ha, what a funny coincidence” and more like “wait, who was this guy, and how quickly can we make everyone else start doing what he did?”
In this case, the guy was Laszlo Ratz, legendary Budapest high school math teacher…
With Alexander, often the journey not the arrival matters most. And so it is here. But you need to read all the way to find that out. Personally, I couldn’t put it down.
And if you’re still intrigued, there’s also ”The Martian Gene” by David Friedman to keep you from doing real work!
So many books, so little time
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the World’s Most Coveted microchip
My Observer review of the book in last Sunday’s edition of the paper:
This is the latest confirmation that the “great man” theory of history continues to thrive in Silicon Valley. As such, it joins a genre that includes Walter Isaacson’s twin tomes on Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, Brad Stone’s book on Jeff Bezos, Michael Becraft’s on Bill Gates, Max Chafkin’s on Peter Thiel and Michael Lewis’s on Sam Bankman-Fried. Notable characteristics of the genre include a tendency towards founder worship, discreet hagiography and a Whiggish interpretation of the life under examination.
The great man under Witt’s microscope is the co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia, a chip design company that went from being a small but plucky purveyor of graphics processing units (GPUs) for computer gaming to its current position as the third most valuable company in the world.
Two things drove this astonishing transition. One was Jensen Huang’s intuitive appreciation that Moore’s law – the observation that computing power doubles every two years – was not going to apply for ever, and that a radically different kind of computing architecture would be needed. The other was his decision to bet the future of Nvidia on that proposition and turn the company on a dime, much as Bill Gates had done with Microsoft in the 1990s when he had realised the significance of the internet…
My commonplace booklet
And just in case you are in Trumpland and thinking to doing some research on misinformation, this note from the National Science Foundation might give you pause. The regime is not going to fund research on such timely and relevant subjects. This is real authoritarianism at work, with the cooperation of hitherto independent institutions.
This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!