Stairway to where, exactly?

West Cambridge Hub

Quote of the Day

“Almost every desire that a poor person has is a punishable offence”

• Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Regina Spektor | SugarMan

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Twilight of Neoliberalism

My friend Sean French and I have one thing upon we both agree. Whenever there’s an article in the New Yorker by Louis Menand we down tools and read it.

He rarely fails to deliver and this essay is no exception. It’s particularly fascinating if (like me) you’re seeking explanations of how democracies wound up in the mess they are currently in.

It’s really a review-essay triggered by the publication of The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.

In the book, Orestes and Conway tell

the intellectual story and the political story of neoliberalism, so their book is, in effect, three histories piled on top of one another. This makes for a very thick volume.

The lobbying story is good to know. Most voters are highly sensitive to the suggestion that someone might take away their personal freedom, and this is what pro-business propaganda has been warning them about for the past hundred years. The propaganda took many forms, from college textbooks funded by business groups to popular entertainments like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” books, which preach the lesson of self-sufficiency. (The books were promoted as autobiographical, but Oreskes and Conway say that Wilder, with the help of her daughter, completely misrepresented the facts of her family story.)

The endlessly iterated message of this lobbying, Oreskes and Conway say, is that economic and political freedoms are indivisible. Any restriction on the first is a threat to the second. This is the “big myth” of their title, and they show us, in somewhat fire-hose detail, how a lot of people spent a lot of time and money putting that idea into the mind of the American public.

Menand is very good on Hayek, and particularly good on Milton Friedman’s persuasiveness as a hawker of memorable untruths and simple slogans. And his essay left me with the sinking feeling that I’ve now got to read The Big Myth — and re-read Gary Gerstle’s book on The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, one of the best books I read last year.

Such a shame there are only 24 hours in a day.

My commonplace booklet

• 15.6 – concentration of nitrogen dioxide in micrograms per cubic metre of air in urban areas of the UK in 2022, above the World Health Organisation recommendation of 10 micrograms per cubic metre.

• From “What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing”, an interesting (long) essay in Noema by Laura Hartenberger.

”ChatGPT, in a sense, plagiarizes our voices as it parrots the writing it was trained on. It tends not to cite the specific sources it synthesizes to craft its phrases, and when it does, they are unreliable — the MLA Style Center website cautions writers to “vet” any secondary sources that appear in AI-generated text, as the programs have the occasional tendency to “hallucinate” false sources and provide information of questionable accuracy. Given the opacity of the AI’s sources, a student who tries to pass off AI-generated text as their own may be inadvertently performing a multi-dimensional transgression, plagiarizing an AI that itself is plagiarizing others.”

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

• Hanif Kureishi on life, death and dreaming of returning home. Truly extraordinary interview. Ten minutes on confronting the consequences of a catastrophe.

Weekend Viewing

John Oliver on AI Link. 27 minutes. Make some coffee.

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Books, etc.

A bookshop in rural France.

And the etc.?

Just this:

Interesting conjunction: tampons and faxes, eh?

Quote of the Day

”Even if you’re not interested in climate change, climate change is interested in you.”

• Andrew Curry, in his consistently perceptive Substack blog.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Cormac Begley | ‘To War’ | Traditional Irish Jig on a Bass Concertina

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Autism Surge: Lies, Conspiracies, and My Own Kids

Astonishing — and deeply troubling — essay by Jill Escher.

In the summer of 2001 we took our younger son, two-year-old Jonathan, to the neurologist. He hadn’t developed speech, never played with toys, and had a compulsion to stare at cracks in the pavement while flapping his hands. The diagnosis was almost instant: autism. “He has it in spades,” the doctor said.

Autism? We had hardly heard the term growing up, and we had nothing remotely like it up our family trees. My pregnancy was healthy and free from risk factors. Yet here we were, handed a devastating diagnosis, with our son sentenced, for no reason we could discern, to a lifetime of severe mental impairment. And it wasn’t just Jonny. All around us grew a rapidly rising tide of autism. The numbers were surging in the local school districts. The regional developmental disability agency had become overwhelmed with new autism intakes. Serious autism, hard autism—not a sort anyone would have missed before.

When I was pregnant five years later, doctors assured me it was unlikely lightning would strike twice, especially because Jonny’s autism was not caused by some familial genetic defect, but by the time adorable Sophie was 16 months old, the signs were clear. No pointing, no peekaboo, no playing with toys. Like her brother, she met none of her cognitive or language milestones, not even close. Autism, again. In spades.

Today, despite extensive therapies and specialized schooling, both Jonny, 24, and Sophie, 17, remain nonverbal and profoundly disabled by autism…

One of the most sobering pieces I’ve read all year.

How Hollywood’s strikes show that we can’t trust corporations with AI

This is an excerpt from the Observer’s Second Leader on Sunday.

The continuing dispute between the Hollywood studios and screenwriters’ and actors’ unions perfectly exemplifies the extent of the challenges posed by AI. Both groups are up in arms about the way online streaming has reduced their earnings. But the writers also fear their role will be reduced simply to rewriting AI-generated scripts; and actors are concerned that detailed digital scanning enabled by new movie contracts will allow studios to create persuasive deepfakes of them that studios will be able to own and use “for the rest of eternity, in any project they want, with no consent and no compensation”.

So this technology isn’t just a better mousetrap: it’s more like steam or electricity. Given that, the key question for democracies is: how can we ensure AI is used for human flourishing rather than corporate gain? On this question, the news from history is not good. A recent seminal study by two eminent economists, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, of 1,000 years of technological progress shows that although some benefits have usually trickled down to the masses, the rewards have – with one exception – invariably gone to those who own and control the technology…

By tradition, Leaders are always anonymous. But if you find the style oddly familiar, I couldn’t possibly comment.

Dr Oppenheimer, I presume?

Yesterday we went to see Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s biopic of the life and times of the great physicist who led the Manhattan Project which produced the atomic bomb. It’s a striking, troubling and sometimes puzzling film. Here are some thoughts I came away with.

• Memorable performances by Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss and Benny Safdie as Edward Teller.
• A renewed appreciation of the complexity of Oppenheimer as an individual — his cleverness, sensitivity, intellectual sophistication, internal confidence and integrity.
• A realisation that the Project would not have succeeded without the combination of Oppenheimer’s intellectual leadership and Groves’s determined cussedness and organisational muscle. The film captures the complexities of their relationship very well.
• I always thought that Lewis Strauss was a snake. The film confirms that.
• One comes away reflecting on the emotional and cognitive dissonances that plagued many of the scientists who worked on the project. They had a pretty good idea of what the bomb would mean for humanity. On the other hand, the prospect that the Nazis might get to it first was the thought that forced/allowed them to suppress their misgivings. Oppenheimer’s clear thinking about this was probably critical in persuading some of them. But whereas they could keep quiet about it in the aftermath, he was too public a figure, and too frank in expressing his concerns, not to become a target for Strauss and the political establishment in the post-war era. This is ultimately a film about power — a thought captured in a snatch of conversation between Oppenheimer and one of the scientists. Oppenheimer is saying that whatever the political establishment thinks of the scientific team “they need us”. “Yeah”, says the boffin, “until they don’t”. Spot on.

Coincidentally, the film comes out at a time when some of the geniuses behind ‘AI’ are loudly proclaiming that they are having their own ‘Oppenheimer moment’ — about the existential risks supposedly posed by the stuff on which they are energetically working. The hypocrisy and doublethink underpinning this faux angst is breathtaking.

Afterwards, physicist (and TV star) Brian Cox had an interesting conversation with the film’s Director. Worth watching. The official Trailer is here.

It’s long (180 minutes) but well worth seeing, IMO. If you do go, bring some earplugs. Nolan likes noise — lots of it.

Chart of the Day

AI corporate concentration in California

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak burbles about making the UK an “AI Powerhouse”.

Building self esteem

Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s speech on being awarded an Honorary Degree by the University of Sheffield.

“When I was asked if I could accept this honorary doctorate my first thought was, ‘no I don’t deserve it. Everyone will think who is she anyway? She never went to uni.’” Rebecca Lucy Taylor, aka Self-Esteem, Britain’s funniest, frankest and – when receiving her doctorate at Sheffield University – most moving and vulnerable pop star, told an assembled hall of the recently graduated. “I’m not Beyoncé or Stanley Tucci or Michelle Obama. This morning when I looked at myself in the mirror and didn’t know if I looked good enough, I realised the journey is never over. Everything I said about believing in myself doesn’t come easy. It’s a life-long practice. You all committed to something, whether it came easy or naturally, whether it was a struggle when it was boring or maybe really really hard. Now you’re at the bottom of the next mountain. And you and me are just going to be constantly going up.” Words to live by if only we could read them through tears.

Source: Tortoise Media daily newsletter, Saturday 27 July.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

• Attn. recovering petrolheads… Caterham are building an EV! Yeah, really. Here’s the video.

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Le Penseur

Well, not quite what Rodin had in mind, but what the hell.

Quote of the Day

“What makes the war on terror different from other wars is that victory has never been based on achieving a positive outcome; the goal has been to prevent a negative one. In this war, victory doesn’t come when you destroy your adversary’s army or seize its capital. It occurs when something does not happen. How, then, do you declare victory? How do you prove a negative? “

• Eliot Ackerman, write in Foreign Affairs in his reflections on being a CIA agent.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

MonaLisa Twins | Mercedes Benz | (Janis Joplin Cover)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Demographics drive history

That, at any rate, is my reading of this absorbing essay by Yi Fuxian of Project Syndicate.

The deterioration in US-China relations is ultimately due to the bilateral trade imbalance and to US frustration with Chinese politics. Both can be traced back to China’s one-child policy, which was in place from 1980 to 2016.

When Western leaders welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, most assumed that they were creating the conditions for eventual democratization. A growing Chinese middle class, they assumed, would demand greater accountability from the government, ultimately creating so much pressure that the autocrats would step aside and allow for a democratic transition. This political fantasy underpinned the Sino-American relationship for decades.

But it wasn’t to be. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has been regressing on all fronts, reasserting more top-down control over the economy and tightening censorship and other forms of social and political control. It has been led down this path by the legacy of the one-child policy, which fundamentally reshaped the country’s demographics and economy…

I learned a lot from this, which is why I think it’s worth your attention. It also helps to explain why we in the West have so often been wrong about China.

The best and worst case scenarios for sea level rise

Bad news for future generations (and indeed some current ones too) in this Guardian ‘explainer’.

Part of the problem is the that even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases immediately – which it will not – sea levels would continue to rise. Even in the best-case scenario, it’s too late to hold back the ocean.

The reason for this is not widely known, outside the science community, but is crucial. The systems causing sea level rise – specifically, the thermal expansion of the ocean and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets due to global heating – have a centuries-long time lag.

My commonplace booklet

Musée des Beaux Arts

WH Auden, 1938.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I’ve always loved this poem. What brought it to mind today was the contrast between Western media’s obsession with the Titan submersible at the same time that they were paying little attention to the sinking of the migrant boat off the coast of Greece.

Errata

Contrary to my claim in Monday’s edition that Ed Fredkin, the great computer scientist, had died at the age of ’1988’, he was in fact a mere 88 years of age. Apologies to all, and thanks to the readers who tactfully pointed this out.

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On reflection…

…it’s rather nice being in Burgundy on a Summer evening

Quote of the Day

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

• Ben Franklin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young | Our House

Link

Long Read of the Day

’AI’ creates lots of jobs. But they’re not the kind of jobs you know about, or would want to do.

Terrific report by Josh Dzieza on the dark underbelly of the technology. . This a long, long essay, but worth your time, especially if you think that the tech industry is a uniquely ‘clean’ one.

Dzieza’s report starts with a Kenyan college graduate named Joe.

It was a job in a place where jobs were scarce (Nairobi), and Joe turned out hundreds of graduates. After boot camp, they went home to work alone in their bedrooms and kitchens, forbidden from telling anyone what they were working on, which wasn’t really a problem because they rarely knew themselves. Labeling objects for self-driving cars was obvious, but what about categorizing whether snippets of distorted dialogue were spoken by a robot or a human? Uploading photos of yourself staring into a webcam with a blank expression, then with a grin, then wearing a motorcycle helmet? Each project was such a small component of some larger process that it was difficult to say what they were actually training AI to do. Nor did the names of the projects offer any clues: Crab Generation, Whale Segment, Woodland Gyro, and Pillbox Bratwurst. They were non sequitur code names for non sequitur work.

As for the company employing them, most knew it only as Remotasks, a website offering work to anyone fluent in English. Like most of the annotators I spoke with, Joe was unaware until I told him that Remotasks is the worker-facing subsidiary of a company called Scale AI, a multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley data vendor that counts OpenAI and the U.S. military among its customers. Neither Remotasks’ or Scale’s website mentions the other.

Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping…

It’s much the same story as it was/is with social media: the way the technology’s output is kept clean for tender Western eyes, it provides thousands and thousands of variants of what the late David Graeber used to call “bullshit jobs” — often done by people of colour in the global South.

You think the internet is a clown show now? You ain’t seen nothing yet…

Yesterday’s Observer column.

Like most conspiracists, Junior was big on social media, but then in 2021 his Instagram account was removed for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines”, and in August last year his anti-vaccination Children’s Health Defense group was removed by Facebook and Instagram on the grounds that it had repeatedly violated Meta’s medical-misinformation policies.

But guess what? On 4 June, Instagram rescinded Junior’s suspension, enabling him to continue beaming his baloney, without let or hindrance, to his 867,000 followers. How come? Because he announced that he’s running against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination and Meta, Instagram’s parent, has a policy that users should be able to engage with posts from “political leaders”. “As he is now an active candidate for president of the United States,” it said, “we have restored access to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Instagram account.”

Which naturally is also why the company allowed Donald Trump back on to its platform.

Do read the whole thing.

Henry Petroski RIP

One of my favourite authors has passed away. The NYT has a nice obit:

Henry Petroski, who demystified engineering with literary examinations of the designs and failures of large structures like buildings and bridges, as well as everyday items like the pencil and the toothpick, died on June 14 in hospice care in Durham, N.C. He was 81.

He wrote a series of 20 lovely books about the art and craft (and science) of engineering. My favourites are:

• To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1985)
• The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990)
• Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design. (2006)

My favourite is his book on the pencil, which — according to the NYT obit — was

Spurred on partly by the inferior quality of the pencils he was given at Duke, he used engineering equations in a 1987 paper in the Journal of Applied Mechanics to describe why pencil points break.

“By asking why and how a pencil point breaks in the way it does,” he concluded, “we are not only led to a better understanding of the tools of stress analysis and their limitations, but we are also led to a fuller appreciation of the wonders of technology when we analyze the aptness of such a manufactured product as the common pencil.”

May he rest in peace.

My commonplace booklet

Content alert: for serious petrolheads only

A Jaguar Mk IX spotted in the car park of an hotel in Thiers the other day. When I was a kid a wealthy landowner who lived nearby (in some style) had one, and I remember thinking that if I ever got rich I would have one too. In the end, I only managed to get a 3.8-litre Mark II which I ran until the quadrupling of the oil price after the Yom Kippur war made it a grotesquely unaffordable luxury.

According to Wikipedia, the Mark IX was popular with governments and Heads of State.

The Mark IX was popular as a state car. When Charles de Gaulle paid a state visit to Canada in 1960, the official cars for the motorcade were Mark IX Jaguars. The British Queen Mother had a Jaguar Mark VII, which was progressively upgraded to be externally identical to the later Mark IX. The Nigerian government bought forty Mark IXs, painted in state colours of green and white. The large Jaguars of the 1950s were sufficiently popular in western Africa that “Jagwah” survives as a colloquialism for “smart man-about-town”.

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Street Art UK-style

The UK has, for some reason (possibly connected with Brexit) become the world capital of potholes. Some streets in Cambridge look as though they had been intensively bombed by small mortar rounds. Periodically, chaps from the local council come round with spray cans to mark the most dangerous holes and then a few days later a team arrives and fills it hastily. Often, though, it turns out to be only a temporary repair. Some in our village have been ‘repaired’ three times.

So you can perhaps understand why one is not entirely convinced by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak when he talks about making Britain “a world-leading tech power”. Fixing the country’s roads would be a good start on that ambitious journey.

Quote of the Day

“Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”

• Gustave Flaubert

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Holst | The Planets – II. Venus, The Bringer of Peace

Link

Eerie and beautiful.

Long Read of the Day

 The Casual Ignominy of the Book Tours of Yore

Wonderful memoir by John Banville.

Sample:

One day in 1990, I was flown first class from Dublin to Phoenix, Arizona, to read at the Irish Cultural Centre there. Five people turned up to listen to me. None of them had read my books, and it was clear that none of them had the slightest intention of doing so. They were the sons and daughter of Irish immigrants, and were there simply to see a real, live son the Oul Sod.

That was the beginning of a tour that would take me to ten cities in nine days. Here are some of the highlights, or lowlights, of that jaunt and others like it.

Chicago, the Windy City, was extremely windy that raw autumn evening as I walked from my hotel to the nearby branch of the now defunct Borders bookshops. I was greeted by the store’s beaming and breathtakingly beautiful Chinese-American manager. She led me to a far corner, past the Self-Help section and next to the Occult shelves, where there waited for me a brave little band of readers in overcoats and mufflers, shuffling their frozen feet and blowing into their fists. Twenty-odd, say, a few of whom were distinctly odd, as usual —every reading, as every writer will tell you, attracts at least a couple of maniacs.

Lovely stuff. Do read it all.

What is it with Trump and ‘his’ boxes?

Maureen Dowd’s column on Trump’s box-obsession:

During his presidency, The Times reported, “his aides began to refer to the boxes full of papers and odds and ends he carted around with him almost everywhere as the ‘beautiful mind’ material. It was a reference to the title of a book and movie depicting the life of John F. Nash Jr., the mathematician with schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian code he needed to crack.”

The aides used the phrase — which turned up in the indictment — as shorthand for Trump’s organized chaos, how he somehow kept track of what was in the boxes, which he held close as a security blanket. During the 2016 campaign, some reporters said, he traveled with cardboard boxes full of real estate contracts, newspaper clippings and schedules, as though he were carrying his world around with him.

The guy likes paper. And, like Louis XIV, he believes “L’État, c’est moi.” His favorite words are personal pronouns and possessive adjectives. Kevin McCarthy is “my Kevin.” Army officers were “my generals.” Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was “my favorite dictator.” In the indictment, a Trump lawyer quotes Trump as warning, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes.”

Is he so addled by narcissism that he sees no distinction between highly sensitive documents belonging to the government and papers he wants to keep? He treats classified maps and nuclear secrets and a Pentagon war plan for Iran like pelts, hunting trophies, or family scrapbook items.

Answer: Yes, he is addled by narcissism. Boris Johnson is the same.

En passant: one of the thoughts triggered by the photographs of the shower-room in which he stashed some of those state papers is how naff the decor of Mar-a-Lago is.

My commonplace booklet

 Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit

Wow! What a spreadsheet. Simple, yet powerful, tools.

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Le Miserablé

Cluny, France.

Quote of the Day

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”

• Dorothea Lange

(See also today’s Long Read)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tuba Skinny | Going Back Home

Link

Life-enhancing stuff for breakfast.

Long Read of the Day

You’re Pointing Your Camera the Wrong Way

Lovely essay by Margaret Renkl on the destructive impact of our self-facing cameraphones.

The greatest danger in flipping the camera toward ourselves isn’t miscalculated risk or the loss of self-esteem. The greatest danger is what happens when we make ourselves the center of the photograph, the center of the world itself. No wonder Portia believes that everything is boring. Solipsism is a closed system.

The first time a young couple posing for a selfie declined my offer to take their picture in a scenic spot, it dawned on me that something had changed about the world. People prefer to smile up at their own faces reflected in a lifted phone because taking a photograph is not primarily a way to commemorate an experience anymore. Nowadays many people are seeking experiences that will provide an enviable backdrop for a selfie. There are murals all over my town that exist for no reason but to attract the selfie takers. Maybe they’re in your town, too…

Very perceptive essay. It reminded me of a moment years ago when my wife and I were sitting on the bank of the Grand Canal in Venice, munching a baguette and watching the passing scene. It was a busy morning and the canal was full of those (very expensive) water-taxis. Most of the customers were Chinese, I’d guess, and they were all standing up and using selfie-sticks to capture, not the waterway immortalised by Canaletto, but themselves standing on a speeding boat with that as a background.

Later And while we’re on that subject, this video about the work of Vivian Maier is spot on.

My commonplace booklet

Errata

Re my question yesterday about the identity of the tree in the photograph…

Simon Boyle wrote:

I fear that I know even less about plants, but recently a local group was almost torn asunder over an argument as to whether a similar furry plant was a) hawthorn being consumed by the caterpillars of Spindle Ermine Moths, or b) the natural seeding of the Grey Willow

He also raised legitimate questions about the feasibility of fitting 95-pt Helvetica Bold onto a 71-pt tall stamp.

And Max Whitby wrote:

Yes this is the female Willows’ airborne seeds dispersal mechanism: Link

Same mechanism as the dandelion, then.

Thanks to both.

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Two years ago today we said our goodbyes to Zoombini, the most remarkable cat I’ve ever known. She was a deeply intelligent creature with a need for human contact which was always charming and sometimes almost eerie. When we sat down for breakfast every morning, for example, she would come from wherever she had been in the house and stand looking up at us in wide-eyed astonishment. In the end we caved in and set up a high stool between us on which she would sit or stand alertly watching proceedings. It was as if she felt she had a right to be in on all our deliberations, including the cryptic crossword we do most mornings.

When she died we had a proper family wake for her in the garden, complete with drinks and stories about her adventures. We miss her still.

Her sister lives on and is now 19 pushing 20, and in reasonably good shape. But she’s a completely different presence in the house.

Coffee-break, Piccadilly

Quote of the Day

”Mr Eliot is at times an excellent poet and has arrived at the supreme Eminence among English critics largely through disguising himself as a corpse.”

• Ezra Pound on T.S.E.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

FullSet | The Glen Road to Carrick

Link

I’ve been on that road a few times.

Long Read of the Day

About That Sonic Boom Over Washington

James Fallows is a distinguished American journalist whom I’ve followed for years. He’s also a keen aviator with his own plane who writes entertainingly about private flying in the US. Even though I’m not a pilot I’ve always found his flying notes interesting, so I sat up when I saw this post on this blog.

The context is that residents of Washington D.C. (where Fallows lives some of the time) heard a sonic boom the other day as two F-16 fighter jets broke the sound barrier as they accelerated to catch up with a private jet flying over the capital.

What happened: The big picture. The Citation business-jet airplane, with four people aboard, flew from Tennessee to its intended destination on Long Island. The four people were: the pilot, the daughter and the 2-year-old granddaughter of the plane’s owner, and a nanny. The takeoff site was Elizabethton, a small airport in eastern Tennessee, and the destination was Islip, near a family house in the Hamptons on Long Island.

The plane made its northward course without apparent problem, and then seemed to turn to line up for a landing at Islip. But it never descended below 34,000 feet—a jet’s cruising altitude, and very far above the approach altitude for a landing. It overflew Islip and headed straight back over hundreds of miles toward the DC area. Planes flying at this altitude are required to be in constant touch with air traffic controllers. Reportedly this plane was “NORDO”—no radio, and no contact with anyone else.

The Citation finally crashed in a wooded area some 150 miles southwest of DC, on the hilly border between Virginia and West Virginia. This is where it apparently ran out of gas…

Read on. The mystery deepens.

Sunak: ChatPM

John Crace, writing on the current UK Prime Minister:

Sunak is a mere shell of the man he once was. Or thought himself to be. Time and again he is left mouthing meaningless statements that not even he believes. That he has no idea who has been in power for the last 13 years. But when he finds out he will be sure to give them a good bollocking. Because they have screwed up big time. That things are getting so much better. The cost of living crisis has passed. The economy is booming. New hospitals are appearing by the day. That sort of nonsense. The stuff we all know is lies.

Worse still, he appears to have lost the use of language. Rish! was also meant to be one of the great communicators. Someone who could empathise. The tech bro multimillionaire who could feel our pain. Would suffer with us as the cost of heating his swimming pool soared. Except he can’t do any of this. Never could. His honeymoon period was just cognitive dissonance on our part. We were seeing what we had been told to see.

Now the wheels have well and truly come off. He can only speak in easily programmable sentences that can be used time and time again. In one 50-second soundbite after the disastrous local election results for the Tories, all he could manage was to repeat his five priorities a couple of times.

Somehow, he is achieving the seemingly impossible of making Theresa May sound like advanced AI…

Yep. And he’s now made the apparently unforgivable sin of wearing Timberland Boots with skinny jeans. Honestly!

Saudi reputation-laundering now extends to professional golf

From Sky News…

It’s a sensational sports truce with significance beyond sport – further asserting Saudi wealth, status and soft power.

When LIV Golf split the world of golf by launching a rebel series last year, the established PGA Tour of America’s moral outrage couldn’t have been clearer.

The PGA claimed the Saudi sovereign wealth fund was using the “sport of golf to ‘sports wash’ the Saudi government’s deplorable reputation for human rights abuses”.

Hundreds of millions of pounds in signing on fees and prize money enticed stars, including former world No 1 Englishman Lee Westwood and six-time major winner Phil Mickelson, who were banished from the PGA for defecting.

Now it will be the PGA helping the Saudis launder their reputation through golf – announcing a merger by LIV that looks like a Saudi takeover.

It ends the acrimonious legal dispute to unite golf, three months before the Ryder Cup.

The European Tour – known as the DP World Tour through its Dubai title sponsor – is also part of the new commercial entity with the PGA and LIV.

Be in no doubt – the power in golf has shifted decisively to Riyadh.

The combined golfing behemoth will be chaired by Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi’s Public Investment Fund.

It is PIF that has also owned Newcastle United since 2021 with Al-Rumayyan at the helm – winning over fans by securing a return to the Champions League after two decades.

Oh, and by the way, “Human rights concerns are largely overlooked by fans just pleased to be back in the Champions League after two decades with ownership willing to invest.”

Apple’s vision of the future

Like most of the tech commentariat, I watched Apple’s presentation of its long-heralded Vision Pro augmented reality headset on Monday. Since I never write about stuff I haven’t tried (or owned) I am outsourcing the task of describing it to Ben Thompson, one of the smartest people around and for whose daily newsletter I pay a handsome subscription — because he has had a chance to play with the device. His report is here and it’s interesting throughout.

TL;DR version:

It’s far better than I expected, and I had high expectations. The high expectations came from the fact that not only was this product being built by Apple, the undisputed best hardware maker in the world, but also because I am, unlike many, relatively optimistic about VR. What surprised me is that Apple exceeded my expectations on both counts: the hardware and experience were better than I thought possible, and the potential for Vision is larger than I anticipated. The societal impacts, though, are much more complicated.

Worth reading in full. The headset will retail at $3,499 in the US early next year.

Alison Gopnik on ChatGPT as a cultural technology 

Terrific short (15-minute) lecture by Alison Gopnik, arguing that Large Language Models should be regarded as a new ‘cultural technology’ — like language, writing, print, libraries, Internet search and Wikipedia – I.e. technology that allows humans to access and summarise and use all the other knowledge that other humans have made over the generations.”

Comes like a breath of fresh air in the current cacophony over ‘AI’

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The road taken

With apologies to Robert Frost.

Quote of the Day

”I like Wagner’s music more than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage.”

• Oscar Wilde

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Stephen Foster | Beautiful Dreamer | Leslie Guinn, baritone, Gilbert Kalish, piano.

Link

Recorded on period instruments at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C

Long Read of the Day

The partisans beyond the filter bubble

Terrific Substack post by Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve) on some research which challenges some of the myths about online filter bubbles. The takeaway conclusion Charles draws is that

Small groups of: (i) ageing (ii) right-wingers (iii) on their desktop computers (because this study wasn’t — couldn’t – be carried out on mobile, only desktop) get their information from unreliable, partisan news sites. The study doesn’t say whether they then go on to share it on Facebook or on their Twitter account grumpyboomer032945231, but it’s not hard to imagine that’s what happens.

This isn’t to let the search algorithms off the hook either, but does go to show that the real problem, as ever, lies with the humans.

Worth reading the whole piece. It’s thought-provoking, not least because it challenges some conventional wisdom about the impact of social media.

Books, etc.

Kieran Setiya has a nice review of Florence Hazrat’s Brief History of the Exclamation Mark!.

Hazrat’s book is packed with wonderful factoids. Other names for the exclamation mark include “the screamer, the slammer, the bang, the gasper, and the shriek.” Not surprisingly, “!” is much-derided. F. Scott Fitzgerald compared the exclamation mark to laughing at one’s own joke, while the journalist Philip Cowell called it “the selfie of grammar.” Yet, writes Hazrat, “it exists in nearly every language from Persian to Mandarin.” We clearly need it!

Thanks are due, then, to Alpoleio da Urbisaglia, who first used a full stop with an apostrophe or raised comma to mark “exclamatory or admirative sentences,” an innovation formalized as “!” by Coluccio Salutati in 1399.

Among punctuation marks, “!” is unique in splicing syntax with sentiment:

The power of the exclamation mark to orchestrate tone and feeling makes us nervous, at least some of us. ! has a foot in both camps: grammar and rhetoric; cold hard rule and fuzzy emotion. It sits perched between syntactical exactness and blurry subjectivity, revelling in its double identity, a queer mark that defies binaries…

This helps to explain its massive overuse in email, especially by those, like me, who resist the emoticon.

Guilty as charged, m’lud!

My commonplace booklet

Thank you for not answering

Remarkable, slightly eerie, short experimental film made entirely by ‘Generative AI’. Artist Paul Trillo was the Director.

It’s a claustrophobic film that could have taken oodles of time, money and special effects to shoot, but Trillo generated it in minutes using an experimental tool kit made by an artificial-intelligence company called Runway.

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Coffeehouse art

Quote of the Day

“Eternal truths are always hypothetical.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beniamino Gigli | O sole mio

Link

If you think this is corny then you ain’t heard nothing yet. Many years ago, I made my first trip to Venice. It was in November and I was on my own, and knew nothing about the city save what I had read in newspapers. (You know the old jokes — like the one about the Hearst correspondent who arrived and was taken aback by the place. He cables back to base: “STREETS FULL OF WATER STOP PLEASE ADVISE”. Alas, I can never remember the reply.)

Anyway, after I’d checked into my hotel, I went for a walk, and promptly got lost. And then, as I blundered down a narrow alleyway, I heard someone singing this in faux-Gigli style, vibrato and all. I turned a corner, came to a canal and saw one of those plush black gondolas, in which reclined an affluent couple while they were serenaded by the gondolier. And I remember thinking: you couldn’t make this up.

When I got home I told my kids about it. They refused to believe the gondolier was singing O sole mio. He was, they explained, singing “Just one Cornetto”, as sung by a gondolier in an ice-cream ad then popular on British TV.

Long Read of the Day

What neo-Luddites get right — and wrong — about Big Tech

Is AI the latest threat to livelihoods? That depends on society

Characteristically thoughtful column by Tim Harford in the Financial Times and hopefully outside the paywall.

If it’s not, the paragraphs below contain the gist.

Neo-Luddites can take inspiration from John Booth, a 19-year-old apprentice who joined a Luddite attack on a textile mill in April 1812. He was injured, detained and died after being allegedly tortured to give up the identity of his fellow Luddites. Booth’s last words became a legend: “Can you keep a secret?” he whispered to the local priest, who attested that he could. The dying Booth replied, “So can I.” But it was Booth’s earlier words which deserve our attention. The new machinery, he argued, “might be man’s chief blessing instead of his curse if society were differently constituted”.

In other words, whether new technology helps ordinary citizens depends not just on the nature of the technology but on the nature of the society in which that technology is developed and deployed. Acemoglu and Johnson argue that broad-based flourishing is currently eluding us, just as it eluded the workers of the early industrial revolution.

Worth reading in full if it’s available.

Books, etc.

I’ve been reading — and enjoying — Sarah Bakewell’s lovely book on existentialism and its adherents. I got it partly because my late wife Carol and I were fascinated by existentialist ideas when we were students (and she took it further by writing a M. Litt thesis on Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, and even interviewed the Grande Dame herself in her Paris apartment).

Years ago I had read (and also enjoyed) Bakewell’s book on Montaigne — from which I came away with the idea that he could be seen as the first blogger. She’s very good at untangling and explaining abstract philosophical ideas. Here she is, for example, early in the new book, on Husserl’s emphasis of the importance of intentionality — the fact that when we think, we are always thinking about something.

Just try it: if you attempt to sit for two minutes and think about nothing, you will probably get an inkling of why intentionality is so fundamental to human existence. The mind races around like a foraging squirrel in a park, grabbing in turn at a flashing phone–screen, a distant mark on the wall, a clink of cups, a cloud that resembles a whale, a memory of something a friend said yesterday, a twinge in the knee, a pressing deadline, a vague expectation of nice weather later, a tick of the clock. Some Eastern meditation techniques aim to still this scurrying creature, but the extreme difficulty of this shows how unnatural it is to be mentally inert. Left to itself, the mind reaches out in all directions as long as it is awake – and even carries on doing it in the dreaming phase of sleep.

Re her earlier book on Montaigne: in a nice coincidence, my friend and colleague David Runciman picked one of his essays — the longest and most puzzling one — as his subject for the first episode in his new ‘History of Ideas’ podcast series.

My commonplace booklet

AI-powered Photoshop

I don’t use Photoshop, or do fakery, but if I did I’d be interested in this.

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