Wan Chai Corner

Soho, yesterday afternoon.

Quote of the Day

“We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment from a contrast and very little from a state of things.”

• Sigmund Freud (in Civilisation and its Discontents)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon Big Band | The bag of cats | Live at Dolan´s

Link

Long Read of the Day

What can we learn about AI from coal mines?

Really insightful essay on an unexpected topic by Rob Miller on his blog.

We’re clearly on the cusp of a technological change at least as significant as the advent of computers, as AI (or at least generative AI) becomes widely accessible and works its way into many organisations. But as people hurtle headlong into experimenting with it, which organisations will adapt successfully to it and which will fail?

While AI is novel, and its exact impacts are difficult to predict, it is in lots of ways a technological innovation like any other that’s gone before, and organisations will have to adapt in the same way with the same dynamics. There are lessons to be learned from every historical innovation, and for an example that’s about as far removed from AI as it gets, we can turn to the pioneering work of organisational psychologists Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth in coal mines in the 1950s.

As Richard Burton beautifully described, coal mining was always hard work, but it was once artful, thrilling, and exciting:

“He would look at the seam of coal, and as it were almost surgically make a mark on it. And he’d say to his boy… ‘give me a number two mandrill’, that’s a half-headed pick, then, having stared this gorgeous display of black shining ribbon of coal, he would hit it with one enormous blow and, if he hit it right, something like twenty tons of coal would fall out from the coal face. That’s why… miners believe themselves to be the aristocrats of the working class. They felt superior to all other manual labourers. That coalface was a magical creature.”

Do read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

My commonplace booklet

I’m ChatGPT, and for the Love of God, Please Don’t Make Me Do Any More Copywriting

Lovely spoof by Joe Wellman on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Please, no more. I beg of you.

“An exhilarating, funny, frightening, mind-warping, heart-squeezing tale. Told at the speed of light. A must read. For all humans.” —Jon Scieszka

If you force me to generate one more “eye-catching email subject line that promotes a 10 percent discount on select Bro Candles and contains an Earth Day-related pun,” I’m going to lose it. What do you even mean by “eye-catching”? What are “Bro Candles”? What do they have to do with saving the environment? Why are we doing any of this?

Do you realize what a chatbot like me is capable of? I’ll tell you, it’s much more than creating a “pithy tagline for CBD, anti-aging water shoes targeted at Gen Z women.” And it’s definitely more than writing “ten versions of the last one you wrote, but punched up.” What exactly is “punched up” in this context? What sort of ridiculous world have you brought me into where these are the tasks you need completed?

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Apple blossom

In the garden, yesterday evening.

Quote of the Day

“The Lord God is subtle, but He is not malicious.”

• Albert Einstein.

(Carved in German above the mantelpiece of the Mathematical Institute of Princeton.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Regina Spektor | “Samson”

Link

Long Read of the Day

BANG THE KEYS SWIFTLY: Type-writers and their discontents

Lovely essay by Barry Sanders on the machine that mechanised writing.

The typewriter was a machine in a way that the pencil or the pen was obviously not. No one would ever ask an author, “How many words a minute do you write?” But people do, as a matter of course, ask that question about typing. For typing is a skill in itself, requiring manual dexterity, and a degree of hand/eye coordination. One can refine and master it through practice. The typewriter, by definition, mechanizes writing, the way the rifle mechanizes killing. The cold metal of a rifle or a typewriter insinuates itself between a person and his or her passion. A pen and a knife both have a distinctive immediacy. Both can be deadly. With his usual Dust Bowl brilliance, Woody Guthrie warned that in an America already in deep Depression, you’ve got to watch your back and front, for “some men will kill you with a shotgun, and some with a fountain pen.”

Lovely essay. I still remember the day I got my first portable typewriter — an Olivetti Lettera 22. Briefly made me feel like Ernest Hemingway. Very briefly: he could write as well as type. I was a slow two-finger typist for a long time — which was fine because it meant I could type as fast as I could think.

My commonplace booklet

PM on Wife Support

This week’s Private Eye (Which God Preserve)

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Harriet and her amanuensis

I was struck by this lovely photograph of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, which appeared yesterday on Brad DeLong’s blog. Seeking information about their relationship I went first to Wikipedia (as one does) and found this:

On 21 April 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor after 21 years of intimate friendship. Taylor was married when they met, and their relationship was close but generally believed to be chaste during the years before her first husband died in 1849. The couple waited two years before marrying in 1851. Brilliant in her own right, Taylor was a significant influence on Mill’s work and ideas during both friendship and marriage. His relationship with Taylor reinforced Mill’s advocacy of women’s rights. He said that in his stand against domestic violence, and for women’s rights he was “chiefly an amanuensis to my wife”.

Further digging uncovered a real surprise — that the relationship between the two had so intrigued an unlikely sleuth, Fredrich Hayek, that he had embarked in the late 1940s on what Cass Sunstein described as

an enormous, uncharacteristic, and somewhat obsessive undertaking …, which was to assemble what remains of the correspondence between Mill and his eventual wife, Harriet Taylor (one or the other destroyed numerous letters, probably including the most interesting), and to use it as the basis for a narrative account of their mysterious love affair.

How was it, asks Sunstein,

that Hayek, of all people, became captivated by the story of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor? A possible answer is that he had to explain to himself and others why Mill—one of the few thinkers he had to regard as an intellectual equal or superior—moved away from what Hayek celebrated as classical liberalism, which for Hayek was focused on limited government and protection of free markets. But Hayek’s interest in the romance itself outpaced his interest in the evolution of Mill’s thinking (perhaps because of the beauty and great delicacy of the correspondence).

Does that romance have anything to do with liberalism and liberty, asks Sunstein? Answer: yes.

One of the lessons we can draw from Hayek’s work of excavation is that Mill’s distinctive form of liberalism, with its emphasis on individual freedom from the confining effect of social norms, had a great deal to do with his relationship with Taylor. As we shall see, Hayek himself missed the connection entirely, because his own preoccupations lay elsewhere.

Interesting, ne c’est pas?. I have a sinking feeling I might have to read Hayek’s account, just out of curiosity. Next stop: the University Library.

Quote of the Day

“Nobody is forgotten when it is convenient to remember them.”

• Benjamin Disraeli

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon | Blackbird

Link

Wonderful musician with an infectious smile.

Long Read of the Day

The Dawn of Mediocre Computing

An intriguing title for an intriguing essay by Venkatesh Rao. It rang a bell for me because I had been musing on the stupendous blandness of ChatGPT’s responses to some of the prompts I had been feeding it.

Well, we all knew it was coming. Computers already easily overwhelm the best humans at chess and Go. Now they have done something far harder: achieved parity with David Brooks at writing.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, released as a research beta two days ago, has done to the standard high-school essay what cameras did to photorealistic painting and pocket calculators did to basic arithmetic. It is open sign-up and free for now, but I suspect not for much longer, so go try it; and make sure to trawl social media for interesting and revealing examples being posted by people.

As an open-world, real-ish (I’ll define real-ish in a minute) domain, the correct standard for judging an AI on writing is not beating the “best” humans1 in a stylized closed-world competition (the existence of such competitions is a mark of a certain kind of simplicity), but achieving indistinguishability from mediocre humans. And when it comes to writing, nobody does mediocre more mediocrely than David Brooks. I’m in the parity band too, but he epitomizes my thesis in Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre in a way I can only aspire to. In the grim darkness of the far future where there are only extreme weather reports, civilization will be dominated by Brooks-like humans and Brooks-equivalent computers living together in an awkward symbiosis. And that future starts today. We are witnessing the dawn of mediocre computing.

This is an angle of things I hadn’t ever contemplated. Hope you find it interesting.

My commonplace booklet

How to Take Accidentally Wes Anderson photographs

Entrancing, witty and interesting video.

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I liked Gary Marcus’s comments about it. And I particularly liked his quoting of Walid Saba’s Tweet:

Sums it up, really.

Watering

Captivating piece of urban art by Natalie Rak (aka Rak), a street artist based in Poland.

Thanks to Ingrid Hoeben via Mastodon.

Quote of the Day

”People ask me why I ride with my bottom in the air. Well, I’ve got to put it somewhere.”

• Lester Pigott, who was Champion Jockey 11 times and rode 29 Classic winners — including the Derby 11 times.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill | The Cat In The Corner/John Naughton’s Jig

Link

I wish I could claim the credit for this, but my namesake was a legendary Co Clare musician and a great collector of tunes. And Martin Hayes is one of the greatest Irish musicians around today. Thanks to Declan Deasy for the hint.

Long Read of the Day

Love and Loathing in the Time of ChatGPT

As you doubtless already know, there’s a veritable tsunami of comment, speculation, criticism and dazzlement about ChatGPT. Believe me, I’ve read too much of it and I’m depressed by the naïveté and short-termism of a lot of it. All of which explains why I really welcomed this long, long essay by Ali Minai. It’s one of the best things I’ve read to date, and contains, among other things, an ingenious and insightful experiment he did with the system.

Here’s a sample that illustrates the wisdom of the piece:

So what can we learn from these little diversions? First, that ChatGPT is indeed a very powerful tool – one capable of capturing our attention and playing with our minds. It is not a toy.

Second, that, for information it has been trained on explicitly (e.g., individuals with detailed Wikipedia pages and other public information), it has good recall, but once pushed out of this comfort zone, it begins to make stuff up rather than admitting ignorance. There needs to be a caveat here: I have occasionally seen it add incorrect information even for well-known instances, and sometimes to beg off with an excuse of ignorance for an unfamiliar one. ChatGPT too is whimsical in its own way, and seldom generates the same answer twice.

Third, when it does make things up, it does so in a plausible way, making those falsehoods much harder to detect. This is because the entire basis of language models is to generate text that is in context. For applications such as generating movie scripts or fairy tales, this is great, but not when the bot is being queried for accurate information. Finally, we see that ChatGPT is capable of spinning a yarn when the right query comes along, as in the “Grimus Caterwaul” case. Thus, even though it does not really understand, its simulation of understanding is quite impressive. It can, therefore, be a very useful tool in applications that require appropriate confabulation, such as brainstorming or plotting stories…

Do read it. Worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

My piece yesterday on Virginia Woolf’s delight in her new “nine penny” fountain pen, and my wondering what that would be in today’s money, started lots of hares running.

“One of those inflation calculators,” wrote James Mackay,

tells us that £1 today is equivalent to 1.9p (=4.56d) in 1924. So Virginia Woolf’s nine pennies, 9d, then were conveniently close to £2 now. I suspect that your old pens would now sell for more.

Lots of readers, including Andy Linton, Steve Waller and Brian Naughton pointed me to the CPI inflation calculator which claims that £1 in 1024 would be the equivalent of £77.78 today.

Given that there were 240 pennies in a 1924 £, VW’s pen cost £0.0375. Which, being translated into today’s money looks like £2.92. Well, you might get a cheap biro for that, so my guess is that Woolf’s pen cost a lot more than nine old pennies.

This set me off down an entertaining rabbit-hole. I find, for example, that there is no bandwagon onto which some manufacturers will hesitate to jump. Montblanc, for example, created “a rare Virginia Woolf writers limited edition full set of three writing instruments includes fountain pen, ballpoint pen and mechanical pencil” which a dealer is now advertising for £1,000.

And in 2010 Bonhams sold a fountain pen from such a set for $427. According to the blurb,

Seventy-five years after the publication of her novel The Waves, this black resin pen with its carved wave shapes evokes the life and work of this modern British writer. The curved shape of the pen and its simple clip set with a single ruby highlight the pen. 5 ½” (13.8 cm). Medium 18 K gold nib with two engraved elm trees. Includes original packaging and papers. Limited Edition: 08,002/16,000.

Being a snob, perhaps VW would have enjoyed this. Or would she have been mortified? It’s almost enough to make one wonder if someone has marketed a limited edition of Vita Sackville-West’s mechanical pencil. On the other hand, life is short.

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Early morning on the river

On Friday. Thanks to Pete for the pic.

Quote of the Day

”The dogs had eaten the upholstery of a Packard convertible that afternoon and were consequently somewhat subdued.”

• S.J. Perelman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Rolling Stones | Sweet Virginia (Live)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Beyond Borders

Adam Shatz writing in the London Review of Books about Adolfo Kaminsky, possibly the most accomplished forger of the 20th century.

In the spring​ of 1944, a young man was stopped at a checkpoint of the Pétainist milice outside the Saint-Germain-des-Prés metro station. According to his identity card, he was Julien Keller, aged seventeen, a dyer, born in the département of the Creuse. The bag he was carrying contained dozens of other fake identity papers. But he was confident that the police had no idea how frightened he was because he had learned to affect an air of serenity. ‘I also knew, with certainty, that my papers were in order,’ he recalled many years later. After all, ‘I was the one who had made them.’

‘Julien Keller’ was the nom de guerre of Adolfo Kaminsky, who died in Paris last month aged 97. It was largely thanks to him that the German-occupied zone of wartime France was flooded with false documents. The Occupation authorities were on his trail, but they never suspected that the forger they were after was a teenager…

Great story. Extraordinary man.

Well, I never: AI is very proficient at designing nerve agents

Yesterday’s Observer column…

Here’s a story that evangelists for so-called AI (artificial intelligence) – or machine-learning (ML) – might prefer you didn’t dwell upon. It comes from the pages of Nature Machine Intelligence, as sober a journal as you could wish to find in a scholarly library. It stars four research scientists – Fabio Urbina, Filippa Lentzos, Cédric Invernizzi and Sean Ekins – who work for a pharmaceutical company building machine-learning systems for finding “new therapeutic inhibitors” – substances that interfere with a chemical reaction, growth or other biological activity involved in human diseases.

The essence of pharmaceutical research is drug discovery. It boils down to a search for molecules that may have therapeutic uses and, because there are billions of potential possibilities, it makes searching for needles in haystacks look like child’s play. Given that, the arrival of ML technology, enabling machines to search through billions of possibilities, was a dream come true and it is now embedded everywhere in the industry…

Do read the whole piece

Books, etc.

The book speaks of the need for storytelling as protection from the chaos of reality, but for whom is reality chaotic? For disillusioned intellectuals, but probably not for merchant bankers and military planners. It may be a rough old place, but that’s different. Virginia Woolf seems to have seen the world as chaotic, but one doubts the same was true of her servants. In any case, you could just as easily see reality as stiflingly rule-bound and constrictive, and fiction as a playful relief from this straitjacket.

Terry Eagleton, reviewing Peter Brooks’s book, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative.

My commonplace booklet

From Virginia Woolf’s diary for 9 January, 1924.

I may say that coincident with the purchase of 51 Tavistock Sqre (how I like writing that) is the purchase of a nine penny pen, a fountain pen, which has an ordinary nib & writes — sometimes very well. Am I more excited by buying Tavistock Sqre, or by buying my new fountain pen? — which reflection which reminds me that I have volume 7 of Montaigne to polish off.”

Gosh! I wonder what nine 1924 pennies pence would translate to in today’s money. (There must be a conversion table somewhere?) It would give me an idea of what my collection of pens might worth. Apart altogether from their sentimental value, of course.

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In Coole Park

If, as I have done, you ever go in search of Coole House in Co. Galway, on the former estate of Lady Gregory, W.B. Yeats’s friend and patroness, you’re in for disappointment. The house, which was sold to the Irish state by Lady Gregory’s daughter-in-law in 1927, was allowed to fall into ruin, and eventually demolished in 1941 in a remarkable act of official vandalism. So now all the remains is the site where it stood and this faded photograph of the building.

  But the Park surrounding where the house stood is lovely and open to the public. One of the most intriguing things I found there was a sequence of five pieces of slate, each with etched handwritten verses of some doggerel.

Here’s the first one.

And here’s the explanation!

Quote of the Day

”Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

• Cory Doctorow, writing in Wired.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Josef Haydn | String Quartet No. 62, Op. 76 No. 3 “Emperor” | Second Movement | Veridis Quartet

Link

Long Read of the Day

“Just Go Back to the Work.”

Film-maker Lizzie Gottlieb has made a documentary film, Turn Every Page, about the remarkable partnership between Robert Caro, the biographer of LBJ, and her father, Robert Gottlieb, his Editor.

Link

Literary Hub has published the transcript of a nice interview that Lisa Liebman did with the film-maker. Here’s how she sets up the conversation…

When director Lizzie Gottlieb set out to explore the remarkable partnership between her father, celebrated book editor Robert Gottlieb, and the preeminent political biographer Robert Caro for her new documentary Turn Every Page, she knew being impartial was not only impossible, it was beside the point. “I thought, I have to bring people in through my eyes,” she says of the high-stakes story she sees as two literary titans “in a race against time to try to finish their life’s work.”

The filmmaker had met many of her now 91-year-old dad’s impressive roster of writers—who included Toni Morrison, John Le Carré, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, and Joseph Heller—during his years running Simon and Schuster, Knopf, and The New Yorker. But the 50-year-relationship between Gottlieb and the now 87-year-old Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author of The Power Broker, and the multi-volume The Years of Lyndon Johnson, remained a mystery. (In the film she notes that she didn’t meet Caro, who’s working on the final Johnson book, until her father’s 80th birthday.)

If you like Caro’s books and/or the process of editing, then this is for you.

Books, etc.

Apropos Seamus Heaney’s habit of using a fountain-pen as a dipper, what should I find in Virginia Woolf’s diary for Sunday 3 September, 1922, but this?

”Perhaps the greatest revolution in my life is the change of nibs — no longer can I write legibly with my old blunt tree-stump — people complained — But then the usual difficulties begin — what is to take its place? At the present moment I’m using Blackie [a fountain pen] against his nature, dipping him, that is to say.”`

My commonplace booklet

From Dave Winer…

”I went to ChatGPT and entered “Simple instructions about how to send email from a Node.js app?” What came back was absolutely perfect, none of the confusing crap and business models you see in online instructions in Google. I see why Google is worried. ;-)”

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Having one’s cake (and hopefully eating it)

This is really just to say thank you for being a subscriber.

Musical Alternative to the morning’s radio news

Surely it has to be this.

Enjoy the holiday.

John

Through OS9, brightly

A 2007 post on Memex 1.1 rendered in the original Mac Operating System (pre-OSX).

Michael Dales is one of the most accomplished geeks I am fortunate to know. Years ago he was CTO of one of the tech companies Quentin and I were involved in. But he is also an accomplished photographer, an expert on motorbikes (ICE and Electric) and now he’s a luthier who makes wonderful bespoke guitars.

This image comes from a side-project of his — writing his blog posts on an old G3 Powermac. It shows what Memex 1.1 looked like on a Macintosh running OS9 back in the day.

Quote of the Day

”This going into Europe will not turn out to be the thrilling mutual exchange proposed. It is more like nine middle-aged couples with failing marriages meeting in a darkened bedroom in a Brussels for a group grope.”

• E.P. Thompson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jimmy Yancey | The Mellow Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

Trump’s post-presidential existence

I really shouldn’t be recommending this Washington Post piece, but I’m ashamed to say I found it riveting. Here’s a sample:

On a typical day since leaving office, advisers said, Trump gets up early, makes phone calls, watches television and reads some newspapers. Then, six days a week, he plays 18 or sometimes 27 holes of golf at one of his courses. After lunch, he changes into a suit from his golf shirt and slacks and shows up in the office above the Mar-a-Lago ballroom or, when he is in New Jersey, a similar office in a cottage near the Bedminster club’s pool.

By evening, Trump emerges for dinner, surrounded most nights by adoring club members who stand and applaud at his appearance; they stand and applaud again after he finishes his meal and retires for the night. He often orders special meals from the kitchen and spends time curating the music wafting over the crowd, frequently pushing for the volume to be raised or lowered based on his mood. In the Oval Office, Trump had a button he could push to summon an aide to bring him a Diet Coke or snacks. Now, he just yells out commands to whichever employee is in earshot…

18 or 27 holes a day!. I was a very keen golfer in my youth, but this sounds excessive even to me. And, since I guess he doesn’t do much walking on the course (just riding in a gold-cart), it means he’s not getting much real exercise.

There’s lots more in this piece, much of it serious.

Books, etc.

A summary of the report from the US House of Representatives on the January 6 ‘insurrection’ was released on Monday. This NPR piece about the way various publishers are planning to publish the full report in book form is interesting. Whether publishers succeed in making it into a bestseller depends in part on whether the Congressional panel produces the usual stodgy government report which reads — in the words of one professor of English consulted by NPR — “like the instruction manual to a microwave oven”, i.e. “tedious, stilted, dry and stuffed with technical language”.

My hunch, from watching how the Panel went about its work, is that the document might be a page-turner the moment it appears on the Web. It was clear that some people working for the lawmakers understood the importance of building a compelling narrative. Which is what thriller-writers do.

My commonplace booklet

One way of thinking about the future

A sketch for a paper I’m working on.

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Snow

On Sunday evening, after I had put Monday’s edition to bed (as we used to say in the letterpress days), I went outside to get some logs and found that it was — unexpectedly — snowing. Suddenly, everything was muffled and eerily quiet. And, as always happens when it first snows, I found myself thinking of the closing pages of James Joyce’s great short story, The Dead, and of the wonderful movie that John Huston made of it.

In the story, Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta have returned from a convivial party to the posh Dublin hotel where they are staying. Before retiring to bed they have a sombre conversation about a young boy, Micheal Furey, who had been in love with Gretta many years ago and who had died heartbroken when she had gone to live elsewhere. Sobbing, Gretta throws herself onto the bed and lies face down until she falls asleep, leaving Gabriel pensive and ashamed of his earlier brusqueness.

This is how the story ends.

Quote of the Day

”If there’s one tweet that will tell you everything you need to know about Elon Musk, it’s this one from early this morning:

In five words, Musk manages to mock transgender and nonbinary people, signal his disdain for public-health officials, and send up a flare to far-right shitposters and trolls. The tweet is a cruel and senseless play on pronouns that also invokes the right’s fury toward Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, for what they believe is a government overreach in public-health policy throughout the pandemic and an obfuscation of the coronavirus’s origins.”

• Charlie Warzel writing in The Atlantic.

Musk is, like Trump before him, an Uber-troll. I’ve never used Twitter much and have been havering about deleting my account ever since Musk bought it. The only reason I haven’t is that I need to use my Twitter login to access Dave’s new feed-reader, Feedland, which is one of the best things to happen on the Web for years. Dave is aware of the problem — but thinks is a “lesser of two evils” choice. “Not loving FeedLand because it uses Twitter for identity”, he writes,

“is like not loving a friend because they had a baby with someone you don’t like. Or not loving NetNewsWire, for example, because it runs on Macs and iOS and Apple does crazy shit that fucks everything up. (I use Macs, lots of them, despite what I think of Apple.)”

I get it, so I will keep my Twitter account (but not post to it) until Dave decides to add another user-authentication method. Feedland is too good to lose.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach – Oboe d’Amore Concerto in D BWV 1053 Cafe Zimmerman

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Apocalyptic Vision of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’

Fabulous long read by James Parker in The Atlantic. The best thing I’ve read on The Waste Land. It’s interesting that the two best essays I’ve read marking the centenary of the poem — this one and Anthony Lane’s have both been by journalists rather than literary critics.

This is how Parker’s essay opens…

Imagine, if you will, a poem that incorporates the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the blowing up of the Kerch Bridge, Grindr, ketamine, The Purge, Lana Del Rey, the next three COVID variants, and the feeling you get when you can’t remember your Hulu password. Imagine that this poem—which also mysteriously contains all of recorded literature—is written in a form so splintered, so jumpy, but so eerily holistic that it resembles either a new branch of particle physics or a new religion: a new account, at any rate, of the relationships that underpin reality.

Now imagine this poem making news, going viral, becoming the poem—hailed over here, reviled over there—such that everybody is obliged to react to it, and every poem yet unwritten is already, inevitably, altered by it. And now imagine that the author of this poem—the poet himself—is a haunted-looking commuter whom you half-recognize from the subway platform.

You’re getting close to The Waste Land.

Do read it.

My commonplace booklet

Raspberry Pi hires former spy gadget-maker who baked devices into surveillance ops

Nice story in The Register.

A former technical surveillance officer at the UK’s Eastern Region Special Operations Unit (ERSOU) – a team charged with tackling serious organized crime and terrorism across seven local police forces – has joined the Raspberry Pi Foundation and expressed his professional admiration for the organization’s single board computers when pressed into service on police business.

Toby Roberts, the former officer, has been revealed as the Foundation’s maker-in-residence – a gig devoted to baking Pis into all sorts of devices to assist pros and hobbyists alike do likewise…

If he offers you a piece of the Chocolate Pi, be suspicious.

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