Presidential doodles
Dwight Eisenhower (34th President of the US) seems to have been quite a good artist, as the nice detail in this doodle suggests.
Quote of the Day
“LLMs are quite good at reproducing culture, but not so good at introducing cultural variation.”
- Alison Gopnik
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bob Dylan | A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Seems prescient when listened to 62 years after it was first recorded.
Long Read of the Day
What comes after Moore’s Law? Why, Huang’s Law, of course…
…and why that might not be such good news.
Last Sunday’s Observer column:
Although Moore’s “law” was bound to run out of steam eventually, it shaped an entire industry and – more importantly – changed the way we thought about computing. In particular, it fostered a hubristic mindset: confidence that if a problem could be solved by computing, if today’s machines weren’t powerful enough, Moore’s law guaranteed that it would be soluble really soon.
As the ancient Greeks knew only too well, after hubris comes nemesis. In the computing world it came in the computational needs of machine learning, which were orders of magnitude greater than those of more conventional serial processing – computing in sequence, one thing at a time (albeit at astonishing speeds). In one of those happy accidents, there was a part of the computer industry – gaming, which needed processors that could do several calculations simultaneously, or “in parallel” – to ensure that fast-changing scenes could be rendered realistically. And one particular company, Nvidia, was a prominent caterer to this esoteric requirement by providing what became known as graphics processing units (GPUs).
At some point, Jensen Huang, a smart cookie who is the founder and chief executive of Nvidia, realised that his company had the technology that the burgeoning new field of machine learning (afterwards rebranded AI) needed, and he pivoted his entire company to focus on it. The rest, as they say, is history. Irrational exuberance about AI took over the tech industry, fuelling a gold rush in which Huang was the premier supplier of picks and shovels, and his company is now the second most valuable corporation on the planet, just behind Apple…
Books, etc.
On glutinous prose
Julian Barnes has a lovely review of Adam D. Zientek’s book, A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front, in the current edition of theLRB. His review contains the following passage:
Zientek is a professor of history with a strong sociological approach. His preface contains this forbidding statement of intent: ‘The model I propose to elaborate below is this: the alcohol supplied by the French army generated shared interoceptive and affective sensations that were then interpreted through culturally learned and contextually bound intoxication concepts, making for distinct and entraining emotional experience and group behaviours that tended to bolster the war effort.’ It’s tempting (if facetious) to rephrase this as: ‘French soldiers liked to get pissed with their mates, and it was good for morale.’
The book, says Barnes, “features tracts of prose as glutinous as Flanders mud”. And it makes one wonder why Humanities scholars write such constipated prose in a book ostensibly aimed at the general reader (what academics disdainfully call “trade books”).
Many years ago, I succeeded Julian as the Observer’s TV critic. Reading this review (or indeed anything he writes), you can see what a hard act he was to follow.
My commonplace booklet
Darwin and Dawkins: a tale of two biologists
The Economist has an informative review (probably paywalled) of Richard Dawkins’s intriguing new book — his 19th!
Its working hypothesis is that modern organisms are, indeed, like books, but of a particular, peculiar, variety. Dr Dawkins uses the analogy of palimpsests: the parchments scraped and reused by medieval scribes that accidentally preserved enough traces of their previous content for the older text to be discerned.
At the moment, only fragments of the overwritten messages of these biological palimpsests can be parsed. A human genome, for example, contains many “pseudogenes” that once encoded proteins related to the sense of smell, but which have now been disabled because, presumably, they are no longer needed in an animal whose dominant sense is vision. Similarly (and more familiarly), a human spine’s ancestral role as a suspension bridge from which the body hangs, rather than as a pillar that holds it upright, is clear from the compromises in its modern structure.
Dr Dawkins’s contention is that, by proper scrutiny of genetics and anatomy, a scientist armed with the tools of the future will be able to draw far more sophisticated and connected inferences than these. This will then illuminate parts of evolutionary history that are currently invisible.
As an analogy, describing organisms as palimpsests is a bit of a stretch. A palimpsest’s original text is unrelated to its new one, rather than being an earlier version of it, so it can tell you nothing about how the later text was composed. But that quibble aside, the tantalising idea is that reading genomes for their history is an endeavour that may form the basis of a new science.
What I like about Dawkins is his fearlessness, which I guess is why someone once described him as “Darwin’s Rottweiler”, and echo of the soubriquet given to TH Huxley of “Darwin’s Bulldog”.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
Rolls Royce has finally given up on internal combustion and gone electric. Its new ‘Sceptre’ EV will set you back $420,000 without extras, and on a good day you’ll get up to 266 miles from its 102kWh battery.
The Verge was granted an audience with the beast. Here’s a sample from the review.
It’s a rolling cocoon made inherently anti-acoustic thanks to the tireless work of some surely big-eared scientists. So, to inject a little more life into the driving experience, the Spectre plays a little digital tone when you accelerate.
Yes, nearly every modern EV emits some kind of synthetic whir or trill when you get on the accelerator — but nothing like the Spectre. This car makes the kind of sound that you would expect to hear when an omniscient, all-powerful alien force swoops through the clouds in a sci-fi movie, the gut-shaking tone backing the moment when everyone realizes that humanity is about to get served.
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