’A crowd, a host of…

“…Golden daffodils”. And I wasn’t even wandering, lonely as a cloud, just walking through a college garden.

Quote of the Day

”Some drink deeply from the river of knowledge. Others only gargle.

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

JJ Cale | Call Me Breeze

Link

Wow! I didn’t want it to end.

Long Read of the Day

Snookered

Rabbithole warning. I’ve just read this lovely essay by Kieran Setiya. Trouble is, it’s a meditation on a New York Review of Books essay by the Irish writer Sally Rooney. So if you embark on the first, you’re going to wind up reading the second. But here’s the thing: the journey is worth it.

Rooney is writing about the great snooker player Ronnie “The Rocket” O’Sullivan. Setiya starts with an admission — that he doesn’t have “Rooney’s verbal gifts, and a video is worth a million words, so if you want to know what he can do and you have five minutes to spare, watch this”.

It’s a video of O’Sullivan clearing a snooker table with a display of skill that is simply mind-blowing.

And of course you watch it, and you’re hooked.

Setiya concludes that

Rooney’s questions — “Why do we call O’Sullivan a savant?” and “How is what he does even possible?” — are, I think, related to one another. A picture holds us captive. We have an idea of how one would have to do what he does — by mathematical physics and physical translation — and that can’t be how he does it. So it can’t be done.

We’ve been snookered and our task is to escape the trap, a task that involves more than mere description: we have to uproot the sources of our puzzlement in misconceptions of mind and body, as Rooney indicates.

But my question at the end of all this was: ‘How on earth does Rooney do it?’ She’s a phenomenon in her own right.

Genetic data: another asset to be monetised – beware who has yours

Yesterday’s Observer column

Ever thought of having your genome sequenced? Me neither. But it seems that at least 15 million souls have gone in for it and are delighted to know that they have Viking ancestry, or discombobulated to find that they have siblings of whom they were hitherto unaware. The corporate vehicle that enabled these revelations is called 23andMe, which describes itself as a “genetics-led consumer healthcare and biotechnology company empowering a healthier future”.

Back in the day, 23andMe was one of those vaunted “unicorns” (privately held startups valued at more than $1bn), but is now facing harder times. Its share price had fallen precipitately following a data breach in October 2023 that harvested the profile and ethnicity data of 6.9 million users – including name, profile photo, birth year, location, family surnames, grandparents’ birthplaces, ethnicity estimates and mitochondrial DNA – and there have been internal disagreements between its board and the CEO and co-founder, Anne Wojcicki. So on 24 March it filed for so-called Chapter 11 proceedings in a US bankruptcy court in Missouri.

At which point the proverbial ordure hit the fan because the bankruptcy proceedings involve 23andMe seeking authorisation from the court to commence “a process to sell substantially all of its assets…

Read on

So many books, so little time

Long-term readers will remember how, during the pandemic lockdown, I was blown away by Zachary Carter’s biography of John Maynard Keynes. It’s really two biographies — one of the man himself, the other of his thinking and its impact on the world, and it’s enthralling. So imagine my delight in discovering a video of a long conversation between Paul Krugman and Carter about the book (and lots of other interesting stuff).

It’s long but (about an hour), if you’re interested in the history of ideas, unfailingly interesting.

Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) wrote a fine review of the Carter book, alongside Cheryl Misak’s biography of Frank Ramsey, one of the few humans Keynes regarded as a genius.

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Not quite a host, but…

Quote of the Day

”A machine learning algorithm walks into a bar. The bartender asks, ‘What’ll you have?’ The algorithm says, ‘What’s everyone else having?’ ”

• Chet Haase

This is a profound joke and it captures the essence of LLMs. In algorithmic culture, the right choice is always what the majority of other people have already chosen. So if you want the median view of what the Internet knows about anything, ask an LLM.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Divertimento No. 15 in B-Flat Major, K. 287: II. Andante grazioso con variazioni | Conducted by dear old Thomas Beecham

Link

Vintage recording, as you can tell from the audio quality. But lovely schmaltz all the same.

Long Read of the Day

Why are we mathematicians?

I’ve always thought that life is a Markov chain (or a random walk if you’re not a mathematician). I’ve never met anyone who had an interesting life that was planned — which is why I regard the term ‘planned career’ as an oxymoron.

Not surprisingly, then, I was much taken with this reflective essay by Keith Devlin, prompted in part by something I mentioned on March 24.

The fact is, life experiences can have a profound effect on our choice of career and how we pursue it, experiences that, on the face of it, have nothing to do with the work we choose to do and how we go about it. As instructors, we should be aware of the possible effects of the life-context that comes with every student we teach.

It was at Kings that I had an experience that completely changed my life and career as an academic mathematician; in particular, my approach to college-level mathematics teaching. But it was only when I was chasing down that philosophers and children puzzle that I became aware of that early influence. (That’s like a week ago!) In fact, it was more than “became aware”; it hit me like a thunderbolt.

What was that life-changing experience? I met a girl…

Do read it.

Books, etc.

A new novel is published amid a boom in dystopian fiction

Interesting review of The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami.

How do you concoct a plausible fictional near-future, in which people’s reliance on technology has gone too far? If you read “The Dream Hotel”, a gripping new novel, you can discern one recipe. First, take a big handful of “1984”, with Big Brother and the surveillance state reimagined with private-sector incentives. Sprinkle in the rational irrationality of Joseph Heller’s and Franz Kafka’s best works. Next mix in a dollop of “Minority Report” (2002), a film starring Tom Cruise in which law enforcement solves “pre-crimes” before people commit heinous acts.

So far, so Orwell. However, “The Dream Hotel” is intriguing and (mostly) satisfying, even if the ingredients feel familiar, for what the novel says about the creep of technology and the trade-offs people make for convenience.

Laila Lalami, a Moroccan-American novelist and former finalist for a Pulitzer prize and National Book Award, tells her dystopian tale by combining traditional storytelling with excerpts from a company’s terms of service, medical reports, meeting minutes and customer-service email chains from hell. The novel’s protagonist is Sara Hussein, an archivist at the Getty Museum who returns from a work trip to London and runs afoul of bureaucrats at immigration control, who say her “risk-assessment” score is too high and that she could pose a threat to her husband’s life. Sara becomes “Retainee M-7493002”, held at a facility for what is supposed to be 21 days of monitoring but stretches much longer.

What went so wrong? In retrospect it was a mistake to get the “Dreamsaver”, a small implant invented by a medical-tech firm in Silicon Valley that Sara agreed to have installed during a desperate period of sleep deprivation…

Brings Musk’s Neuralink to mind, does it not?

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Buying sunglasses in Brazil. Lovely essay by Christopher Sandmann on learning to bargain, which reminded me of how much I hate countries where haggling is a way of life.

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Gateway to Heaven?

Walking through Selwyn College the other day on my way to a conversation elsewhere with Audrey Tang (one of the most remarkable people I’ve met) I was struck by this framing of the college’s chapel as I went in through the gate.

Quote of the Day

”The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.”

• H.L. Mencken

Now of which prominent public figure(s) could this now be said?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

George Gershwin Prelude No. 2 | Matthias Lang

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Imperialism Has No Clothes

Historian Timothy Snyder had a nice essay which I heartily recommend about J.D. Vance’s ludicrous foray to Greenland, .

I particularly liked this bit:

As a parting shot, Vance told Greenlanders that life with the United States would be better than with Denmark. Danish officials have been too diplomatic to answer directly the insults directed at them from their own territory during an uninvited visit by imperialist hotheads. Let me though just note a few possible replies, off the top of my head. The comparison between life in the United States and life in Denmark is not just polemical. Musk-Trump treat Europe as though it were some decadent abyss, and propose that alliances with dictatorships would somehow be better. But Europe is not only home to our traditional allies; it is an enviable zone of democracy, wealth and prosperity with which it benefits us to have good relations, and from which we can sometimes learn.

So consider. The US is 24th in the world in the happiness rankings. Not bad. But Denmark is number two (after Finland). On a scale of 1 to 100, Freedom House ranks Denmark 97 and the US 84 on freedom — and the US will drop a great deal this year. An American is about ten times more likely to be incarcerated than a Dane. Danes have access to universal and essentially free health care; Americans spend a huge amount of money to be sick more often and to be treated worse when they are. Danes on average live four years longer than Americans. In Denmark university education is free; the average balance owed by the tens of millions of Americans who hold student debt in the US is about $40,000. Danish parents share a year of paid parental leave. In the US, one parent might get twelve weeks of unpaid leave. Denmark has children’s story writer Hans Christian Andersen. The US has children’s story writer JD Vance. American children are about twice as likely as Danish children to die before the age of five…

My commonplace booklet

Screenshot

The heading on Monday’s edition caused a flurry of nice emails. Some pointed out that Monday was in fact March 31. All were too polite to voice their suspicion that it might be a sign that I was losing what might loosely be called my mind. More suspicious readers wondered if it might be some kind of weird April Fool’s joke.

John Seeley was one of the latter. “So this is the joke,” he wrote, “given that it is March 31?”

This could operate at various levels …

• It was your mistake but was funny anyway.
• It was your joke and it was amusing that people did not notice and thought that it was April 1 … in turn making April 1 jokes incorrectly so the joke was on them …

Since my lips were sealed on the matter, he had the good idea of asking Claude.ai, the LLM that I mostly use, about it.

He prompted the machine thus:

Someone writes that it is April the first when it is not, but indicates that they think it is April the first. In how many different ways is that funny? Please explain.

Claude replied:

This scenario is funny in several ways, each playing on the confusion and implications of someone incorrectly believing it’s April 1st (April Fools’ Day):

Dramatic irony – The humor comes from us knowing something the person doesn’t. They think they’re being clever by acknowledging April Fools’ Day, but they’re actually mistaken about the date itself.

Meta-prank – They’ve inadvertently pranked themselves. While attempting to participate in a day of pranks, they’ve become the victim of their own confusion.

Misplaced confidence – There’s humor in someone confidently declaring “it’s April Fools’ Day!” when it isn’t, especially if they’re using it as justification for pranks or skepticism.

Role reversal – On April 1st, people expect to be fooled by others. In this case, the calendar has “fooled” the person about what day it is.

Temporal displacement – They’re celebrating a holiday on the wrong day, similar to putting up Christmas decorations in July.

Social awkwardness – The person might perform April Fools’ behaviors (pranks, jokes, skepticism) that make no sense to others, creating uncomfortable but amusing situations.

Unintentional honesty – If they announce “This is an April Fools’ joke!” when it isn’t April 1st, they’re accidentally telling the truth about their statement being false, creating a paradoxical layer of humor.

Misaligned expectations – The person might be extra vigilant against being pranked on a day when no one else is trying to prank them.

Each of these perspectives offers a different lens on why such a mistaken belief creates comedy through the collision of expectations and reality.

I don’t know about you, but I’m impressed by this. Thanks to John for thinking of it.

Satire rules OK

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The Hepworth View

The grounds of Churchill College, Cambridge with Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture in the foreground. Photographes last Friday afternoon during a break from the unmissable annual conference of the Bennett Institute.

Quote of the Day

“I felt it myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons; it’s irresistible if you come to them as a scientist, to feel it’s there in your hands to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding, to perform these miracles, to lift one million tons of rock into the sky. It’s something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles I would say – this is what you might call technical arrogance that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

• Freeman Dyson in the film, The Day after Trinity.

I’ve been thinking about this after listening to the Sam Altmans of this world raving on about the hypnotic attractions that ‘AI’ has for them.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Low, Low, Northern Moon | from the Midnight Well album by Thom Moore, Janie Cribbs, Gerry O’Beirne and Mairtín O’Connor.

Link

Long Read of the Day

When the physicists need burner phones, that’s when you know America’s changed

My column from yesterday’s Observer :

At international academic conferences recently, one sees an interesting trend. Some American participants are travelling with “burner” phones or have minimalist laptops running browsers and not much else. In other words, they are equipped with the same kind of kit that security-conscious people used to bring 15 years ago when travelling to China.

So what’s up? Well, these academics have a finger on the pulse of Trump’s America, and are concerned about what might happen when they return home. They’ve read on Robert Reich’s Substack about the French scientist who was prevented from entering the country because US Border Patrol agents had found messages from him in which he had expressed his “personal opinion” to colleagues and friends about Trump’s science policies.

Or they’ve heard about Dr Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University who was trying to return to the US after visiting relatives in Lebanon. She was deported, reports Reich, “despite having a valid visa and a court order” blocking her removal. “Federal authorities alleged that they found ‘sympathetic photos and videos of prominent Hezbollah figures’ in her phone and that she attended the funeral for the leader of Hezbollah in February.”

And they also know about Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, whom – though he is a legal permanent resident of the US and has not been charged with a crime – the government is trying to deport because he had participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia…

Read on

LATER Christina Pagel (a Professor at UCL who did great critical work during the Covid pandemic) has been casting a beady and informed eye on what the Trump regime is doing to universities. Her latest post provides a wider perspective on the topic of my column. Here’s how it opens:

A colleague and I would like to write an academic paper on the potential impact of US funding cuts to global health programmes. Our ideal co-author is an international expert newly based in the US, and they would like to do it. But we are all worried that doing so will expose them to the risk of having their academic visa cancelled, being detained and eventually deported – no matter how solid the science and how academic and dry our language. We are especially fearful because they are brown.

My colleagues who have been writing about the new administration, or the situation in Gaza, in academic journals, on substack or on social media are cancelling work trips to the US. I too would not feel safe to go now, given how openly I have criticised the administration. Even a 1% chance of being denied entry or shipped to a detention centre is too high.

When I said these words out loud to my husband today I had to stop for a moment to let it sink in. Foreign scientists in the US are scared to publish anything perceived as critical for fear of being bundled off the street to a detention centre. Foreign scientists abroad are scared to go to the US because they have voiced criticism of the state. The US is actively cracking down on perceived dissenters and foreigners are the most vulnerable to arbitrary detention and lack of due legal process. The vaunted first amendment guaranteeing free speech has become a bitter and twisted joke…

It has. Worth reading the whole thing.

Books, etc.

Reading stuff about how Generative AI systems sometimes regurgitate biases that’s implicit in the material on which they were trained reminded me of Safiya Noble’s pathbreaking book, which was published aeons ago (in 2018, to be precise) and yet remains pertinent. Time for a new edition, perhaps, this time with a different subtitle: “How Search Engines and AI reinforce racism and legitimise discrimination”?

Feedback

Tony Stevenson writes from Melbourne with a different interpretation of the ‘Signalgate’ affair.

I expect decisions were taken in person and orders executed over secure military channels.

The Frat Pack are running their own parallel channel that contains a subset of the Attack Orders. It wasn’t used for making decisions, just sharing them.

Info mainly relayed over Signal so that Hesgeth can pump up his own importance and relevance. Hardly necessary to include Secretary of the Treasury in Attack Plans. Even the poorest student of military planning would know that people are included on a need to know basis. Hesgeth to boost his own importance defies even that simple rule.

Joint Chiefs of Staff would have been across all details of the attack and in all relevant official top-secret comms.

Wisely these clowns didn’t invite him to their emoji laden insecure side-channel. I expect if the Admiral had been invited he would have refused due to OpSec.

I do wonder if the ‘desire’ for the Frat Pack to have this on their personal devices is due to the way we’re all ‘wired’ now; expecting real-time feeds of ‘everything’. Going to a secure location and logging into a secure terminal to maintain OpSec would be so much less convenient for Frat Pack and those who want to spy on them.

My interpretation of the Signal chat was that it provided evidence that — as I put it — “the monkeys were running the Zoo”. Tony’s view seems to be that they’re boasting that they’re running it. Either way, the Trump shitshow is still a Zoo.

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