Consider the Lily

Cycling home the other day, I noticed an intriguing white spot that had suddenly appeared in the roadside hedge.

On closer inspection it turned out to be a glorious lily

We fell to wondering how it got there. It was certainly not planted by a human. A bird-dropping, perhaps? But what a glorious thing to see on one’s way home.

Quote of the Day

“History teaches, but has no pupils.”

• Antonio Gramsci

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fauré | Requiem | Introit et Kyrie | John Rutter | The Cambridge Singers and the City of London Sinfonia

Link

The only thing that came to mind after reading the SCOTUS judgment below.

What the Supremes decided

From a useful summary by the Jurist site…

Basically that there is no constitutional right to abortion, overturning the epochal decisions Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). The case that triggered the decision involved the state of Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act that had been passed in 2018 and outlaws abortions after 15 weeks with few exceptions (except when the mother’s life is threatened).

The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, upheld Mississippi’s law and found that the US Constitution does not protect a right to abortion:

We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” The right to abortion does not fall within this category.

The implication of the decision is that abortion law is up to individual states, which is deeply worrying since many of them are controlled by the Republicans, and some already have ‘trigger laws’ that could come into force soon or even immediately. Since some states (like California), permit abortion, anti-abortion states might try to make it illegal for women to cross state lines in search of an abortion. If they do, then I guess that that would get aggressive states into constitutional trouble.

But I’m no lawyer.

Alito’s point about the the Roe and Casey cases succeeding by relying on the Due Process Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is interesting. The Amendment (according to Wikipedia) addressed “citizenship rights and equal protection under the law and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War” and — says Alito — has been held to guarantee some rights not mentioned in the Constitution — but only rights that are “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” But then he asserts that “the right to abortion “does not fall within this category”.

Eh? Roe v. Wade was decided 50 years ago. So for half a century the idea that a woman had a constitutional right to abortion has been a fixed element in the US legal and jurisdictional system. If that doesn’t make it “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” what does?

Looming over this, though, is an even darker prospect. SCOTUS has decided that states are free to do whatever they want to in this area. But if the Republicans win control of both houses in November, then they may attempt to pass a Federal law outlawing abortion. In which case the Taliban will really be in control.

Postscript…

From the Economist, Sunday evening…

In 13 states (Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming) trigger bans now follow the court’s decision. This means laws are coming into force to ban abortion there. And other bans will surely follow soon, as America develops a patchwork of differing legal regimes around abortion. Expect schemes to get under way that help women to get abortions elsewhere if they live in abortion-hostile states, for example through special funding to pay for travel and medical expenses. After the fallout of the Supreme Court’s decision, America will be more dangerously divided.

Long Read of the Day

We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe v. Wade. We’re Going Somewhere Worse

We are now watching the disintegration of the American Republic in real time. The SCOTUS decision may ostensibly about abortion, but what it really highlights is the way a new kind of Taliban is in the process of taking over the society. This fine New Yorker piece by Jia Tolentino outlines a future in which a country that used to pride itself as being a beacon for democracy across the world morphs into something like an affluent version of Afghanistan.

“We won’t go back” — it’s an inadequate rallying cry, prompted only by events that belie its message. But it is true in at least one sense. The future that we now inhabit will not resemble the past before Roe, when women sought out illegal abortions and not infrequently found death. The principal danger now lies elsewhere, and arguably reaches further. We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and criminalization—of pregnant women, certainly, but also of doctors and pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy that does not end in a healthy birth. Those who argue that this decision won’t actually change things much—an instinct you’ll find on both sides of the political divide—are blind to the ways in which state-level anti-abortion crusades have already turned pregnancy into punishment, and the ways in which the situation is poised to become much worse.

In the states where abortion has been or will soon be banned, any pregnancy loss past an early cutoff can now potentially be investigated as a crime. Search histories, browsing histories, text messages, location data, payment data, information from period-tracking apps—prosecutors can examine all of it if they believe that the loss of a pregnancy may have been deliberate. Even if prosecutors fail to prove that an abortion took place, those who are investigated will be punished by the process, liable for whatever might be found…

How many weeks will elapse, one wonders before Google searches for information about abortion will start to be subpoenaed in Mississippi and elsewhere?

And what about those poor little frozen embryos?

An excerpt from the Editorial in the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, June 24, 2022, brings up a thought that may not have troubled the justices who reversed the precedent. This is how it goes:

New laws in a post-Roe America declaring that life begins at conception may have additional ramifications. In vitro fertilization (IVF) did not exist before Roe. Since its development in 1978, use of IVF has grown, and 2% of all U.S. births now result from assisted reproductive technology, IVF procedures usually result in numerous oocytes ovulated per cycle, and fertilization frequently creates numerous embryos. Because modern IVF practice favors single-embryo transfers whenever possible, to reduce risks of multiple gestation and attendant complications, unused embryos are generally frozen for potential future transfer. Nationwide, there are tens of thousands of human embryos cryopreserved in IVF laboratories. While “adoption” programs exist to allow persons to donate their unused embryos to others who would like to implant them, many people are uncomfortable with this option, and unused embryos are often destroyed. If these embryos are declared human lives by the stroke of a governor’s pen, their destruction may be outlawed. What will be the fate of abandoned embryos, of the people who “abandon” them, and more broadly of IVF centers in these jurisdictions?

The NJEM is, I guess, the premier medical journal in the US, and the Editorial is worth reading in full.

Thanks to Andrew Arends for alerting me to it.

Why Facebook et al are so worried by TikTok

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Over the last couple of years it’s been taking over the social media world, and all the other big platforms – and especially Facebook – seem hypnotised by it, much as rabbits are by the headlights of an oncoming lorry.

Why is this? It’s partly a matter of demographics: 57% of TikTok users are female; 43% are aged between 18 and 24; and only 3.4% are over 55 (and possibly wandered in to TikTok by mistake when they were looking for their true online home, which is now Facebook). You can tell that this hurts because in August 2020 Instagram (which is owned by Facebook/Meta) launched Reels, an editing tool that allowed users to create 15-second video clips and set them to music. Just like TikTok, in fact, only feebler.

The existential threat that TikTok poses to the social media giants, though, is not demographic: it’s about attention.

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve) proposed this nice metaphor for what’s happening to a US governed by people who think that a constitution written in the 1780s and ratified in 1788 is still a useful guide to governance of a complex industrial society.

The Constitution is like an operating system. The one we have was designed for slavery. But then a few decades after the Bill of Rights we changed our mind, and decided not to have slavery. It’s like going from character-based to GUI. but we never wrote a new OS.

On that metaphor, SCOTUS is still in the MS-DOS era. And just as the Constitution doesn’t mention abortion, MS-DOS didn’t mention TCP/IP, the Web or social-media.

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Ultimate Selfies – #1

Degas: self-portrait in a soft hat.

Quote of the Day

”Yet her conception of God was certainly not orthodox. She felt towards Him as she she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer; and in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Deity and the Drains.”

• Lytton Strachey on Florence Nightingale in his Eminent Victorians (one of my favourite books).

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jimmy Crowley | Salonika

Link

If you want an example of sardonic anti-militaristic mockery, then this is hard to beat. A Cork woman who’s married to an Irish soldier in the British army during WW1 is musing on her situation. ‘Salonika’ is the Greek city of Thessaloniki, home to a British military base at the time. Men in Cork who avoided joining the British army were known as ‘Slackers’.

The lyrics are a scream. For example:

They tax their pound o’ butter
They tax their ha’penny bun
But still with all their taxes
Thеy can’t beat the bloody Hun.

Or the (nationalist) moral of the story:

And never marry a soldier
A sailor or a Marine
But keep your eye in the Sinn Fein boy
With his yellow, white and green.

You need a strong Cork accent to do this properly, and Jimmy Crowley meets that requirement perfectly.

Long Read of the Day

Exorcising a New Machine

An interesting take by David Kordahl on the LaMDA controversy .

Here’s a brief story about two friends of mine. Let’s call them A. Sociologist and A. Mathematician, pseudonyms that reflect both their professions and their roles in the story. A few years ago, A.S. and A.M. worked together on a research project. Naturally, A.S. developed the sociological theories for their project, and A.M. developed the mathematical models. Yet as the months passed, they found it difficult to agree on the basics. Each time A.M. showed A.S. his calculations, A.S. would immediately generate stories about them, spinning them as illustrations of social concepts he had just now developed. From A.S.’s point of view, of course, this was entirely justified, as the models existed to illustrate his sociological ideas. But from A.M.’s point of view, this pushed out far past science, into philosophy. Unable to agree on the meaning or purpose of their shared efforts, they eventually broke up.

This story was not newsworthy (it’d be more newsworthy if these emissaries of the “two cultures” had actually managed to get along), but I thought of it last week while I read another news story—that of the Google engineer who convinced himself a company chatbot was sentient…

I found this interesting because it was about an argument into which I had naively wandered in my Observer column.

I also liked Bill Benzon’s comment, just under the essay, especially his observation that LaMDA-type engines don’t just do what they’re programmed to do. In a way, that’s the key to understanding machine-learning systems.

In Bill’s terms:

I’m definitely with you on both sides of this: No, LaMDA is not sentient, but Yes, something very important is going on and Lemoine’s reaction is not as silly as some would have us believe. As I argue right in around the corner, in my current 3QD piece, Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted, our basic conceptual repertoire likely dates back to the late 19th century and fits that world rather well. That’s a world that had mechanical calculators and tabulators, and so those concepts could cope with much of what digital computers have been doing, like tabulating census figures or calculating artillery tables (early applications).

But these new engines, like LaMDA, aren’t like that. They aren’t even programmed as we’ve been told computers are programmed. They don’t do just what they’re programmed to do. They have a peculiar kind of semi-autonomy.

That leaves us with two conceptual problems. The experts need to figure out just what these things are doing. They’re working on that. I’ve been reading some interesting work. But then there’s the general understanding. Most of us are not going to work up the expertise needed to follow technical accounts of what these things do. But we still need to think about them. We need to do better than fall back on the now-outdated dichotomy between (elaborate albeit) inanimate contraptions and living minds.

Understanding the Disunited States

If you haven’t had time to follow the House investigation of the January 6 ‘insurrection’ in the Capitol by Trump followers, then this episode of the New York Times’s ‘The Daily’ podcast is worth a listen. It’s 40 minutes long, so make some coffee first.

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Across the Bay

The view from Ventry, one of my favourite beaches in Kerry.

Quote of the Day

”Police had enough officers on the scene of the Uvalde school massacre to have stopped the gunman three minutes after he entered the building, and they never checked a classroom door to see if it was locked, the head of the Texas state police testified Tuesday, pronouncing the law enforcement response an ‘abject failure.'”

The Texas Tribune goes deep on the story. Officers in Uvalde were ready with guns, shields and tools — but not clear orders. “During most of those 77 minutes, despite the urgent pleas from officers and parents amassed outside, officers stayed put outside rooms 111 and 112, stationed on either end of a wide hallway with sky blue and green walls and bulletin boards displaying children’s artwork. Ramos fired at least four sets of rounds — including the initial spray of fire that likely killed many of his victims instantaneously.” (What if this story is really about a group of police officers who were just plain afraid to enter a room where there was a person armed with a killing machine no sane society would make available for easy purchase? What if that’s really the abject failure?)”

• Dave Pell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Peter Maxwell Davies | Farewell to Stromness

Link

Long Read of the Day

Seamus Heaney, pseudonym ‘Incertus’

Roy Foster has this lovely essay about Seamus Heaney which I think is taken from his forthcoming book. This is how it opens:

When he first began to publish poems, Seamus Heaney’s chosen pseudonym was ‘Incertus’, meaning ‘not sure of himself’. Characteristically, this was a subtle irony. While he referred in later years to a ‘residual Incertus’ inside himself, his early prominence was based on a sure-footed sense of his own direction, an energetic ambition, and his own formidable poetic strengths. It was also based on a respect for his readers which won their trust. ‘Poetry’s special status among the literary arts’, he suggested in a celebrated lecture, ‘derives from the audience’s readiness to . . . credit the poet with a power to open unexpected and unedited communications between our nature and the nature of the reality we inhabit’. Like T. S. Eliot, a constant if oblique presence in his writing life, he prized gaining access to ‘the auditory imagination’ and what it opened up: ‘a feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the levels of conscious thought and feeling, invigorating every word’. His readers felt they shared in this.

The external signs of Heaney’s inner certainty of direction, coupled with his charisma, style, and accessibility, could arouse resentment among grievance-burdened critics, or poets who met less success than they believed themselves to deserve. He overcame this, and other obstacles, with what has been called his ‘extemporaneous eloquence’ and by determinedly avoiding pretentiousness: he possessed what he called, referring to Robert Lowell, ‘the rooted normality of the major talent’. At the same time, he looked like nobody else, and he sounded like nobody else. A Heaney poem carried its maker’s name on the blade, and often it cut straight to the bone.

Foster is an extraordinarily graceful writer. Princeton has found the right man for the job of celebrating ‘Famous Seamus’.

Do read it.

How TikTok triggered a books revolution

Nice Guardian piece by Claire Armistead on the unlikely way TikTok has energised book publishing.

Verily, this is something nobody could have predicted.

It’s four o’clock on a sunny Saturday afternoon and the Krispy Kreme doughnut stall is doing a brisk trade at Lakeside shopping centre, a huge mall in Essex. But a few metres further along, young shoppers are salivating over a different sort of treat. A girl in a silky red dress runs her fingers along the spines of nine novels by bestselling YA author Colleen Hoover, while a couple of twentysomething men in biker jackets pore over shelves of manga comics. They’re in a Waterstones that has been laid out like a pick-and-mix stall, with brightly jacketed paperbacks piled on round tables, or grouped seductively in booths, under headings such as “Romance” or “LGBTQ+”. Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper – a graphic novel series about a love affair between two schoolboys that’s now a Netflix show – has a table to itself.

All this is down to #BookTok, a niche on the platform TikTok that became a social media sensation in the early months of Covid, and has been gathering momentum ever since. “We used to rely on millennials,” says the store’s 30-year-old manager, Peter. “But now the majority of our customers are teenagers, who have money and influence and want to find their own stories. A lot of black and Asian authors are coming through. I always wanted to have an LGBTQ section and now it wouldn’t make sense not to. It’s exciting. You can see publishing changing. It’s made it fun to come into work.”

My commonplace booklet

‘I’ll tell you what – there are no queues like this in England’

David Puttnam becomes an Irish citizen. Link

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Now we see you…

… now we don’t.

Discarded CCTV kit. Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”It’s impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.”

• Jerome K. Jerome

He’s right. I can testify to it.

Apologies to Sylvia Beach

When I used this photograph of James Joyce on the day of publication of Ulysses I mistakenly named the woman in the picture as Harriet Weaver, when in fact it was Sylvia Beach who, among other things, published the novel!

It was a really stupid error on my part, and many thanks to the readers who gently pointed it out.

My explanation is the same as the one Samuel Johnson famously gave to the woman who asked him how he could have made the error of wrongly defining ‘pastern’ as ‘the knee of a horse’. “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance”, he replied.

As Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes puts it, when in a hole, stop digging.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sinéad O’Connor | Raglan Road

Link

A version I’ve just discovered of a favourite song.

Long Read of the Day

Old, Not Other

Fine Aeon essay by Kate Kirkpatrick & Sonia Kurds asking why we neglect and disdain the one vulnerable group we all eventually will join? And arguing that Simone de Beauvoir had an answer.

On Beauvoir’s view, most societies prefer to shut their eyes rather than see ‘abuses, scandals, and tragedies’ – they opt for the ease of accepting what is, instead of the self-scrutiny and struggle that is required to envision and enact what life could be. Speaking of her own society, she claims that it cared no more about orphans, young offenders or the disabled than it did about the old. However, what she finds astonishing about the latter case is that ‘every single member of the community must know that his future is in question; and almost all of them have close personal relationships with some old people’. So what explains this failure to face our future, to see the humanity in all human life?

The answer to the question is what Beauvoir called “bad faith”.
Worth reading just to see how the authors sketch it out.

My commonplace booklet

Cats with jobs Link

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The Royalist Mail

Derbyshire, Saturday.

Quote of the Day

”It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.”

• A.N. Whitehead

A good example of how a distinguished philosopher can sometimes talk nonsense.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sony Terry and Brownie McGee | Bring it on home to me

Link

Who knew a harmonica could do stuff like this?

Long Read of the Day

 No Minds Without Other Minds

Longish, thoughtful essay by the philosopher Justin E.H. Smith triggered by the controversy over the question of whether Google’s LaMDA conversational system is ‘sentient’ — a controversy into which I seem to have inadvertently blundered with my Observer column on Sunday. It turned out that I was engaged in what Justin Smith calls “epistemic trespassing” — i.e. wandering into other people’s intellectual turf — a crime to which I plead guilty.

Anyway, I read his essay with interest and pleasure. This is how he begins:

I would like at least to begin here an argument that supports the following points. First, we have no strong evidence of any currently existing artificial system’s capacity for conscious experience, even if in principle it is not impossible that an artificial system could become conscious. Second, such a claim as to the uniqueness of conscious experience in evolved biological systems is fully compatible with naturalism, as it is based on the idea that consciousness is a higher-order capacity resulting from the gradual unification of several prior capacities —embodied sensation, notably— that for most of their existence did not involve consciousness. Any AI project that seeks to skip over these capacities and to rush straight to intellectual self-awareness on the part of the machine is, it seems, going to miss some crucial steps. However, finally, there is at least some evidence at present that AI is on the path to consciousness, even without having been endowed with anything like a body or a sensory apparatus that might give it the sort of phenomenal experience we human beings know and value. This path is, namely, the one that sees the bulk of the task of becoming conscious, whether one is an animal or a machine, as lying in the capacity to model other minds.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

Postscript to the above

In the Observer I had written what I hoped was an ironical piece, which ended with a hypothetical question:

“What would Google’s response be if it realised that it actually had a sentient machine on its hands? And to whom would it report, assuming it could be bothered to defer to a mere human?”

My esteemed editors, however, had given the column the headline “Why is Google so alarmed by the prospect of a sentient machine?” and added the lede “The tech giant seems to be running scared over an engineer’s claim that its language model has feelings.”

Since many readers are probably unaware that newspaper columnists never get to compose the headlines under which their work appears, I was (naturally) taken to task by some who thought that those two sentences represented my own views on the matter, or that I agreed with Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer whose conversations with LaMDA sparked off the controversy.

But that’s all by the way. I don’t have a dog in this fight, as we say in Ireland. What Justin Smith points out is that we shouldn’t confuse ‘sentience’ with ‘consciousness’ and I agree.

A (rare) victory for public interest journalism in the UK

The Observer’s Editorial on the victory of my colleague Carole Cadwalladr in a landmark libel case.

See also Nick Cohen’s fine piece in the Spectator.

The courts should not become a luxury product, like prime property in Mayfair or Beluga caviar, sold in the global marketplace, and with prices to match, rather than an affordable means of delivering justice to the people of this country. You have to be very rich or very brave not to back away.

Carole Cadwalladr was brave. Banks sued her personally. She had said as an aside in a TED talk entitled ‘Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy’ that: ‘I am not even going to get into the lies that Arron Banks has told about his covert relationship with the Russian Government,’ and repeated much the same in a follow-up tweet.

Rather than sue the owners of the immensely successful TED franchise, Banks, who has always strongly denied the allegations against him and has indicated he will likely appeal against the judgement this week, went for her. Most of us would have backed down and offered a grovelling apology in the face of the stupendous financial penalty if we fought and lost such a case. Thanks to her inner-strength and the generosity of her social media followers, Cadwalladr decided to fight…

Great stuff.

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Bloomsday reports

We had our Bloomsday lunch in Cambridge on Thursday — burgundy and gorgonzola sandwiches and numerous readings from the great book. But, in sartorial terms, I’m afraid that our little gathering wasn’t a patch on this assembly of Delhi Joyceans, of which Simon Roberts volunteered this splendid photograph.

JJ — himself a natty dresser when in funds (see picture below of him with Harriet Weaver) would have admired the chap in the splendid blue suit.

(from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.)

Quote of the Day

”Olga Khmil, one of Molfar’s intelligence analysts, says Russia is now using group channels in messaging apps like Telegram to aim its artillery better. Russians pretending to be Ukrainians on these channels feign fear of shelling in order to elicit information about infrastructure that has and has not been hit. On May 24th the sbu revealed an even more devious approach to such espionage. The agency said it had discovered that Russian intelligence was using smartphone games to induce unwitting youngsters to snap and upload geotagged photos of critical infrastructure, military and civilian. In exchange, players receive virtual prizes of no value outside the video-game world. And Russia gets to wreck their country.”

• from an Economist report on the artillery battle in Donbas.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eels | Grace Kelly Blues

Link

Came to mind yesterday when “Grace Kelly” happened to be the answer to a crossword clue: “Devious clergy leak real name of princess (5,5).

Long Read of the Day

French Cigarettes and a Lot of Coffee

Lovely review essay by Rebecca Brenner Graham in the LA Review of Books on Skye Cleary’s forthcoming book, How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment.

As my Introduction to Philosophy professor, only half-joking, posited, “You can be an existentialist, but you have to dress in black and smoke French cigarettes and drink a lot of coffee and believe that life is pointless.” In Existential America, historian George Cotkin elaborates on how an image of black turtlenecks and black coffee and the celebrities of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus were imported from France to the United States in the mid-20th century.

Although existentialist philosophers rarely labeled themselves as such or agreed on a definition of what they were doing, existentialism is a coherent and sound philosophy. It begins with the claim that “existence precedes essence,” meaning that people enter the world (they exist) before they can be said to have a fixed definition (or essence). They are free to create their own essence, and with this freedom comes responsibility…

This rings a lot of bells for me. My late wife Carol wrote an MPhil dissertation in the early 1970s on Simone de Beauvoir, and indeed interviewed the great lady herself, so Sartre and de Beauvoir were much discussed round our breakfast table. I would love to have been able to wear a black turtleneck, but they were above my pay grade in those straitened student times.

Boris Johnson’s plan to break international law

Nice succinct analysis by Professor Mark Elliott. Nine minutes of informed sense. Thanks to [Quentin](https://statusq.org) for the link.

Why is Google so alarmed by the prospect of a sentient machine?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Some people regard GPT-3 as a genuine milestone in the evolution of artificial intelligence; it had passed the eponymous test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 to assess the ability of a machine to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Sceptics pointed out that training the machine had taken unconscionable amounts of computing power (with its attendant environmental footprint) to make a machine that had the communication capabilities of a youngish human. One group of critics memorably described these language machines as “stochastic parrots” (stochastic is a mathematical term for random processes).

All the tech giants have been building these parrots. Google has one called Bert – it stands for bidirectional encoder representations from transformers, since you ask. But it also has a conversational machine called LaMDA (from language model for dialog applications). And one of the company’s engineers, Blake Lemoine, has been having long conversations with it, from which he made some inferences that mightily pissed off his bosses…

Read on

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Our mysterious plantlet

The consensus is that it’s a field maple. The fact that the first leaf I photographed was asymmetrical seems to have been just a freak aberration.

I should have photographed it from the top — like this. In which case the mystery disappears.

Many thanks to everyone who joined in the hunt. And apologies for the misleading photograph.

Quote of the Day

“A revolution is an opinion backed by bayonets.”

• Napoleon

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven | Piano Sonata No. 15 in D Major, Op. 28 Pastorale | I. Allegro | Alfred Brendel

Link

I needed something restful after a frantically busy day. This was it.

Long Read of the Day

 Where does the wealth go when asset prices go down?

Nice down-to-earth essay by Noah Smith.

I’ve been writing a lot about the crashes in the stock and crypto markets. Sometimes I say stuff like “Over $2 TRILLION of notional value has now been wiped out compared to the peak in late 2021.” And some people have been asking me: Where did all that wealth go?

The short answer is: It didn’t “go” anywhere. It vanished. It stopped existing. That’s not a natural or intuitive idea — how can wealth just disappear? — so this post is an explainer of how that works. And as we’ll see, this has implications for policy, for how we think about inequality, and for how we plan our own financial futures…

Lots more, including some nice examples.

My commonplace booklet

 How to Give Directions Like My Dad

Uncomfortable reading for (grand)parents by Charles Stayton.

Sample:

Ask whether your audience is getting regular oil changes.

Tell them about Donny from your high school who wrapped his Corvair around a huge oak over by the American Legion.

Mention the extra oil filters you have lying around that happen to be an exact fit for your audience’s vehicle.

Spot on, sadly.

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Happy Bloomsday!

Oil on canvas by Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1935 Now in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Today’s the day that admirers of James Joyce’s great modernist novel Ulysses celebrate every year. Why? Because all the action in the novel takes place on a single day, 16 June, 1904, in Dublin. The name comes from the fact that the novel tracks the progress of its hero, an ad-salesman named Leopold Bloom, as he navigates his way round the city on that particular day.

For many years (except for the Covid break) I’ve hosted a lunch on the day when some friends and fellow-Joyceans gather for Burgundy and Gorgonzola sandwiches (what Leopold Bloom had for his lunch in Davey Byrne’s pub) and readings from the book.

This is a special Bloomsday because the novel was published 100 years ago this year.

Quote of the Day

”Life is too short to read a bad book.”

• James Joyce

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Joan Sutherland | I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls | The Bohemian Girl

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Music plays a big part in Joyce’s work. He was himself a fine singer. This song crops up several times in Finnegans Wake and the opera itself plays a role in two of his short stories in Dubliners.

Long Read of the Day

Judge John Woolsey’s judgment on Ulysses.

An unlikely literary hero.

United States v. One Book Called Ulysses was a celebrated 1933 case in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. At issue was whether James Joyce’s novel was obscene. In deciding it was not, Judge John M. Woolsey opened the door to importation and publication of serious works of literature, even when they used coarse language or involved sexual subjects. The decision was affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, but it is Judge Woolsey’s trial court opinion which is the high point of the story.

Here it is, in all its glory.

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An early version of Habermas’s ‘public sphere’?

An illustration of an 18th-century coffee house from the British Library’s Breaking the News exhibition that I went to yesterday.

The mystery of our mysterious plant.

Many thanks to everyone who emailed with suggestions. Turns out it’s even more complicated that I thought, and I’m trying to assess the various suggestions. More later.

Quote of the Day

“When Boris Johnson has nowhere to go, the nowhere he goes to is Northern Ireland. It is, for him, an empty space, a vacuum he can fill with any old blather that is useful to him at the time.

What suits him right now is to try to reassemble the old Brexit band of 2019 – the ERG and the DUP – in the hope that the forces that brought him to power will help keep him there.

The needs and desires of the people of Northern Ireland are neither here nor there. NI stands for Not Interested.

• Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times, 14.06.2022*

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Boccherini | Sonata for Two Cellos in C Major, G74 | Amit Peled and Ismael Guerrero

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Long Read of the Day

Cory Doctorow on ‘regulatory capture’

First, some background if you’re new to this stuff…

Here’s a story about “regulatory capture”: Donald Trump appointed Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, to run the Federal Communications Commission, which is in charge of regulating companies like Verizon. Verizon — and the other big telcos and cable operators — wanted to kill Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality is the idea that your ISP should send you the bits you request as quickly and reliably as it can. That means when you click a link, your ISP does its level best to get that link for you.

Net Neutrality’s opposite is net discrimination. That’s when your ISP is allowed to slow down or otherwise degrade your connection. Why would ISPs do this? Because it represents a new revenue source: ISPs get to charge you for your internet connection, and then charge the companies that run the services you value for “priority” access to you. If they don’t pay, your ISP can slow down their services so they’re less useful to you, prompting you to switch to a rival who did pay for priority carriage.

Internet users really don’t like network discrimination. How do we know that? Well, the FCC had to ask them (all US federal administrative agencies have to accept public comments before changing policy).

It’s a great story and nobody tells it as well as Cory.

So worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

Fascinating Hacker News thread on “Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?” James Scott’s Seeing Like a State comes top, followed by Jane Jacobs’s The Life and Death of Great American Cities. I can vouch for both.

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