How many fingers?

"AI Slop" went from a canny bit of slang to a real official-like term in the space of a few months. And no wonder. It really is everywhere. 

Lately I've been seeing ads for a new image creation/editing tool that uses AI. I hope I don't slip up and reveal that I'm talking about Adobe Firefly. Anyway, given the images used in the ad as an example of what you can do with the software, I have to ask, "Okay, but why would you want to?" But if nothing else, the tools with which slop can be created are growing?

Most people spend so much time on their phones nowadays that this becomes a major part of their visual environment, even if the image they're looking at is about the size of their knuckles. But for software-generated content that seems to deny the very existence of beauty, how much can you take? When do you step away from the machine?

If you sole it they will come

You're probably familiar with the Mother Goose rhyme about the old woman who lived in a shoe. She gave them broth with no bread, whipped them soundly, put them to bed. So it appears that in the short term she actually did know what to do. 

This little ditty was printed in 1784 but existed in some form long before that. And it's had influence through the years. For one in an Ellery Queen novel called There Was an Old Woman, which does at least have something to do with shoes.

But also, and more to the point, someone actually built a house meant to look like the big shoe the lady moved into. It's on Bear Lake, which is on the border of Idaho and Utah. It looks to be a nice destination for families with children, especially if they live in or are already traveling through the West. What seems best about it is that it can tickle their imagination, and not in the sensory overload way that the most advertised places do.

Public service

Ambrose Bierce may always be condemned to...if not complete obscurity, then a kind of renown limited to literary hipsters. Everyone knows about his mysterious late-in-life disappearance. His fiction, much less so. While his stories are brilliant and quite readable, they're most often out of print. And unlike Poe's tales they're not well-suited to being spun out into 90 minute fantasias, so if they're adapted into anything it will likely be short films. Lucky break that one of those shorts got  a second run as a Twilight Zone.

Anyway, his witticisms are still available to all. Here are a couple I like. 

“There’s no free will,” says the philosopher

”To hang is most unjust.”

”There is no free will,” assents the officer

”We hang because we must.”

Meeting Merit on a street-crossing, Success stood still. Merit stepped off into the mud and went around him, bowing his apologies, which Success had the grace to accept.

In memoriam to anonymous

Out walking today, I almost stepped on a small body. It could have been a rat, but could conceivably been an opossum as well. Which mammal it was, exactly, I couldn't tell because it had been dried out and thoroughly picked clean. Weird that it stayed out there so long, but this street doesn't seem to get as much foot traffic as it does merging cars.

Anyway, going on the idea that it might be an opossum, I started looking them up. This is a nice short video. I didn't realize that possums were a different animal, native to Australia. It's thought that marsupials first evolved in South America, and migrated to Australia when they were closer together. The opossum is the one marsupial that migrated north to N. America instead.

They eat ticks? That is handy, especially in Lyme country.

Vote early, vote often

I was at a bookstore recently and, while I was browsing, I figured I'd take a look at their mystery section. Two of the bylines I noticed were two-time Georgia Governor nominee Stacey Abrams and former FBI director James Comey.

This has made me wonder. When did it first happen that a political thriller was written by an actual politician? From the 80s I remember Double Man, by Senators Gary Hart and William S. Cohen, making it at least technically bipartisan. And while I read it, I couldn't really tell you what it's about without looking it up.

Most politicians can't really stop running, stop stumping, even when there are no more offices for them to seek. That's a fatal flaw with this kind of book. But they do likely keep a certain number of ghostwriters employed.

Whoosh

I was just looking at this list of onomatopoeias, which are of course words that sound like the sound they describe. It occurred to me that different languages must have their own varying lists of onomatopoeias. In fact I've seen accounts of different languages having different words for the noises made by, say, roosters. (They apparently don't say cock-a-doodle-do everywhere). So that would be a kind of language barrier, but if you have a little patience it would be a fun one to get over.

Makes sense that "murmur" is on the list. I've heard that REM chose it as an album title because it's the easiest word in the English language to speak.

Get on the good foot

On visits to my grandparents I used to notice that my grandfather had a shoehorn as well as something called a shoetree. The shoehorn was self-explanatory. I really didn't understand the shoetree, though. For one thing it didn't look like a tree. It just looked like a wooden foot you left in the shoe. And what was the purpose of that?

Well, I've learned. Something I've noticed is that a pair of shoes might be my size in theory while in practice they don't fit my feet. A good shoetree helps with that, especially providing more space in the toe area.

Hair splitters united

According to Wikipedia, Roko's basilisk is "a thought experiment which states that there could be an artificial superintelligence in the future that, while otherwise benevolent, would punish anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize said advancement." Whew. Of course the phrase "otherwise benevolent" is entirely vitiated by everything else in that sentence. Assume that instead of an "artificial superintelligence" this is just a guy and he would be considered a psychopath, but probably a stupid one. You wouldn't create ethical thought experiments over the ramifications of his potential existence. You'd just resolve to smack him in the head if you ever met him. Somehow, though, Roko's basilisk has become a topic of debate among untold thousands of nerds.

I myself have a longstanding taste for what-ifs and abstractions that most people aren't thinking about. But there's a difference between thinking about weird mutations for your own amusement and maybe to get somewhere on another personal front; and forming your intellectual quirks into an all-encompassing ethic you believe everyone should obey. It's why I've never gotten behind utilitarianism, extreme rationalism, and the other markers of the San Francisco elite. Sam Kriss says that these philosophies are not for us--humans, that is--and he's probably right.

Kriss also traces the development of modern rationalism from Eliezer Yudkowksy's extensive fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Which made me consider. There's another famed Harry Potter fanfiction from early in Web 2.0. My Immortal soaps up the Hogwarts gang in the context of the now semi-forgotten Hot Topic goth-emo scene of the time. It's bad to a legendary degree, but it doesn't pretend to be anything but silly. There's no philosophy based around it. The author isn't a major figure in tech culture or any other culture. We don't even really know who she is.

There's a lesson here somewhere.

Gossip column stuff

Few things are drearier than when a relatively high-profile actor makes the news for having opinions about Donald Trump.

Because first of all, it's not news. We're talking about someone who started running for President about a decade ago, after having made noise on other fronts for years before that. Nobody has really been holding their tongue about him up till now. And in all likelihood it's going to be someone else running for the Oval Office in three years.

Furthermore Trump is not substantially that different from other recent Presidents, or the political class in general. He's made some adjustments, to be sure. But the majority of big changes have been in style and presentation.

There are plenty of things to talk about in terms of what the government does and doesn't spend money on, and the kind of foreign policy we support and promote. And so on. But anyone trying to be serious about those topics winds up on page A23 of the newspaper, or whatever the internet equivalent is.

Needled

I have a friend who's drawn a line in the sand against tattoos. He's told his nieces, for one thing, that he'll disinherit them if they ever get tattoos. I don't know how much they stand to inherit from them. It's mostly about sending a message, although he doesn't think they're likely to get them anyway.

I'm not as fundamentalist about it, but I'm an ink-skeptic. You see a lot of young people getting them because they're bored and a lot of older people getting them to stay relevant. The latter is especially endemic among rock stars. And as you keep getting more and more you just wind up with an incoherent mass of images, most of which end up the same color as a blue ballpoint. And I just have to wonder, what was the intention here?

You say goodbye, and I say hello

Okay, I guess, for some, spoilers ahead. Again.

But you may know this already. After a number of adventures with his friend Dr. John Watson fought directly with his most formidable foe, Professor Moriarty. Both went over the Reichenbach Falls. This battle, depicted in "The Final Problem", meant the end of Sherlock Holmes.

Except! Years later, Holmes reentered Watson's life, alive and well, with an explanation of how he'd survived and what he'd been doing in the time since. See "The Empty House." It may have been the first retcon. While there were mythical figures with contradictory stories, it was almost unheard of for a single author to publicly change his depiction of what had happened.*

Arthur Conan Doyle hoped for an august literary career and he intended for Sherlock Holmes to be but a small part of it. That's why he attempted to kill his own creation to begin with. Obviously, he couldn't quite pull it off. Holmes was just too big. Although some speculate that he kept some ambiguity from the outset so that he'd still have his options open. It's a plausible idea.

*At the start of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck says that Twain "stretched some things" in Tom Sawyer, but as far as I can recall nothing in the later book specifically contradicts anything in the earlier one.

So long ago, not long ago at all

 

The pillars, at least 200 in total, were raised into sockets and linked by walls of rough stone. Each is a unique work of sculpture, carved with images from the world of dangerous carnivores and poisonous reptiles, as well as game species, waterfowl, and small scavengers. Animal forms project from the rock in varying depths of relief: some hover coyly on the surface, others emerge boldly into three dimensions. These often nightmarish creatures follow divergent orientations, some marching to the horizon, others working their way down into the earth. In places, the pillar itself becomes a sort of standing body, with human-like limbs and clothing.

The above passage is from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by the now-late David Graeber and the not-late David Wengrow. It's a thick book, with a lot going on in the endnotes as well. I'm not taking the book as gospel, but it's chock full of interesting stuff and brings up some interesting questions about how humanity's social organization came to be what it is. 

Göbekli Tepe really is an eye-opening site, as well. This is when people were still using flint tools, or something very like them. And they managed to erect a collection of pillars like this? It almost looks like a postmodern art installation, but the animal world must have been very immediate to its builders. Graeber and Wengrow note that the population around this site shows no signs of being agricultural. Whatever lifestyle they had, it didn't dim their imagination.

Defeated

I don't like to run up the white flag on reading a book, but sometimes it must be done.

I liked Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. It was spooky and about the right level of challenging.

But his next novel, Only Revolutions, I don't know. It's about two young lovers who take off in a car and after that you're guess is as good as mine. The book is two-sided, with each of the main characters starting their narrative at one end and finishing up at the other. That is, I guess, supposed to provide alternating perspectives on the same events. Unfortunately almost nothing either character says makes sense, so that's kind of a bust.

What happened here? Did Danielewski take a heavy dose of acid, ramble into a tape recorder, and then say, "Fuck it, that's my new book"? Was he told that he could be the next James Joyce, and interpret that as "Be less coherent"? Maybe the film rights negotiations for House of Leaves bored him so he responded by a book no sane film studio would want to adapt?

Still, I'm glad it was published. Better too much leeway than too little.