Sturm without drang

We're in the middle of another two-to-three day rain spree. It'll top off our reservoir, which is good. From the forecasts it seems likely to end the balmy period we've been having this week and make things more autumnal. 

It started last night, while I was asleep. I woke up sometime in the dark AM hours to thunder and lightning. Understand, the thunder and lightning aren't what woke me up. My bladder did that. But then I noticed the flashes and the rumble. 

It was actually kind of pleasant. Overall this was just a couple of minutes before I got back in bed and went back to sleep. But there was a certain emphasis. In hazy semiconsciousness, seeing things in a new light.

In the shade

In a lot of older movies and TV shows, you see people traveling around at night and it's odd. "Night doesn't look like that," you think. It's not really dark. The people are walking and driving in lower light, but the sky is still light. 

This is, of course, and effect of day for night filming. The film crew couldn't actually film at night and expect to get a clear image, unless they were filming in a place where there was already a lot of artificial light, like a theater lobby. The effect, especially in black and white, can be a little like ultraviolet photography. It's also reminiscent of walking around in the daytime during a solar eclipse. All an example of how every artform has its little artifices.

And leave show business?

Fredric Brown might best be remembered for "Arena", a man-vs-alien tale that's been adapted into an episode of Star Trek and a bunch of other things, officially and otherwise. He was prolific in both science fiction and mystery.

The Fabulous Clipjoint is one of his mystery novels, the first in a series. In it, young Ed Hunter's printer father is murdered in an alley. Ed teams up with his carney uncle Am (short for Ambrose) to bring the murderer to justice. Along the way, he drinks alcohol for the first time, fends off his sexually precocious younger stepsister, and falls in love with both a hard luck gold digger and the trombone.

So yeah, Brown basically invented Tom Waits.

Sweetness & light

The picture above is an advertisement for Banania, a French chocolate drink made with honey and banana flour. Wikipedia compares it to Nesquik. The picture is also the October illustration in my current wall calendar. 

It can be shocking to realize how visually rich the social environment was in the past. This ad is from sometime in the early 20th century. Again, it's an advertisement, and if you bought the product and forgot about the image that moved you to do so, it would be considered to have done its job. But it's such beautiful artwork, with such care attached to it, that it can hardly be forgotten.

Next something

While the complete death of the internet due to privatization and resource scarcity might still be another decade or two off, with some parts of it yet remaining for those working in the remains of tech sector businesses or living off corporate largess in gated communities with their own intranets and internet connections, enough of the internet already sucks so that we might as well start transitioning now into rebuilding an analog culture, an alternet form of communication. What I propose is that word I just used -the alternet.

This piece, by a regular commenter on Ecosophia, boasts a neat photo of a radioteletype setup. That certainly adds some flavor. 

Moore takes a look forward at things that might arise with the demise of the internet. Of course, if the internet is dying, it's doing so slowly. You have untold millions checking their favorite apps as they walk down the street. But it is true that the medium seems to run on habit now, and arguably addiction. That seems unsustainable to me.

So maybe we will see more growth in offline culture soon. I'd like to think so. As to what this reinvigorated real world would look like, I don't know. One hopes it will have more variety.

Who knows?

In a long and thoughtful essay inspired by his work as a teacher, Julian Waldner also touches on the Turing test and its limitations.

What is fascinating about Turing’s Test is not it’s astuteness as a test for machine intelligence; I am not alone in finding it unsatisfying. The philosopher John Searle famously threw down the gauntlet against Turing’s Test with his Chinese Room thought experiment. Searle imagines a room with a man locked away inside. The man is fed statements in Chinese through a small slot in the locked door. Although the man speaks only English and does not understand a word of Chinese, he has access to a giant book of rules. This book of rules allows the man to infallibly translate the Chinese statements and produce completely flaunt Chinese responses to be fed back out of the room. This procedure allows the man to produce Chinese statements, without understanding a word of Chinese. Searle’s point is that Artificial Intelligence produces the correct response through the mindless manipulation of symbols, without understanding what those symbols mean.

Turing’s test has left something out by design. The Turing Test, like the scientific project as a whole, has simply bracketed the question of understanding or consciousness to focus instead on what can be measured: We can’t touch consciousness or see understanding, but we can distinguish between something that looks like the product of intelligence and something that doesn’t. The fascinating thing about the Turing Test is that it still functions, even seven decades later, as a definition of what Artificial Intelligence is. Whether we are talking about Google Maps giving you a route that works, Claude generating text, a Tesla navigating through a busy street, your iPhone recognizing your face, or Spotify recommending songs—the goal is always to produce the kind of outputs that intelligent minds would.

Alan Turing himself was a distinctive intellect. Even aside from being gay and suicidal, he was one of those British eccentrics who enrich the world's cultural life now and again. But it's fair to say he had blind spots as well. Left brain types in a number of fields have a tendency to reduce all mental processes to a matter of processing power. Ted Chiang's short story "Understand" depicts a man who is treated for anoxia with a drug that regenerates his neurons, and it winds up turning him superhuman. Entertaining, but dubious. The engineers and investors who have brought us LLMs often insist that if they're not engaging in actual thought now equal to or greater than humans, it's only a matter of time and technological development. But it might just be that robots are one thing and people are another.

As for students and learning, schools have been engaged in a large-scale industrial production of young minds for long enough for Charles Dickens to have noticed. In some ways that seems to have intensified. The mass of students are trained to complete set tasks at best. And doing more than that is hard, no question. No education system is perfect, and arguments about ours will no doubt continue. But at this historical juncture it's crucial to at least preserve individual thought as an ideal.

Got the time

From Clocks, a brief and picture-heavy book by Simon Fleet:

Small water-clocks were used in the Athenian Courts to limit the time a lawyer was allowed to speak. This led to those who filled the water-clocks being bribed by lawyers to fill only partially the container when rivals were pleading, and so reduce their opponents' allotted time, and the same thing used to happen in Rome under Pompey. There is a story that a Roman prisoner's life was saved by a pebble falling into a water-clock, which made the water drip so slowly that it gave extra time for some delayed evidence to arrive, which acquitted him of murder.

As Fleet notes elsewhere in the book, the timing of things down to the minute wasn't considered a necessity until the rise of the railroads in the nineteenth century. Up until that point, clocks were mostly considered a luxury. But duration, at the very least, was important in some respects, as in the Greek and Roman court systems. Perhaps it's not too surprising that the clocks of the time were sometimes used and abused in corrupt ways. Of course if you were an innocent man on trial for your life, you wouldn't object to their being a bit fallible.

Norse intensity

I just watched The Night Visitor. It's a movie from 1971. Max von Sydow plays an erstwhile farmer whose sister and brother-in-law framed him for murder years earlier. Now he's locked away in an asylum but he figures out a way to get out and back in, and he's got no compunctions about killing people for real now. It's sort of a Vincent Price role, but more physical. If von Sydow did a fraction of his own stunts then wow. Trevor Howard is a police inspector looking into the new murders and the old one. The cast includes Swedish, Danish, and British actors, and there's no real attempt to hide that.

It's all filmed in Sweden, though. Sweden in what appears to be the depths of winter. At one point you can see a bevy of swans swimming off a snowy shore. Wintry Sweden is really quite picturesque. Although I don't think I'd recommend running around everywhere in your skivvies, as von Sydow's character does through most of the movie.

Dee plus

It's interesting to see in a couple of different sources the suggestion that William Shakespeare might have based Prospero on John Dee. Prospero is the protagonist of The Tempest, a powerful magician, and also an exile. That would sort of seem to fit. 

John Dee in life was an accomplished mathematician and scientist, who also had a serious interest in the occult. The same could be said of Isaac Newton. It was less of an anomaly in Elizabeth I's time than it is in ours, when scientists are expected to be materialists only. And it just so happens we remember Newton for one thing and Dee for another.

Of course it's just something to ponder. Even if the Bard were still alive I'm not sure he could or would elucidate things.

Cyberpunk all night and party every day

I just finished reading William Gibson's Neuromancer. Not the first Gibson I've read. I'd previously read The Difference Engine, which he wrote with Bruce Sterling and which formalized steampunk fiction. Also The Peripheral. But Neuromancer is the one that kicked things off from him.

It's definitely influential. The seedy Pacific Rim setting, for one thing. The girlfriend who has herself programmed with kickass martial arts moves. Something like The Matrix movies wouldn't be imaginable without this book. A lot of synth & samples musicians have paid tribute to Neuromancer as well. 

And Silicon Valley has done their best to make this world real. Well, the villains in the book live pretty high off the digital hog. No wonder someone wants to emulate them.

Here kitty

This is kind of a déjà vu. I was walking home from a grocery run and saw a cat nearby. To give you some context, I was walking up a street that's basically a bridge. The cat was just off and under, on a hill. I could tell it was a domestic cat from the collar. This is not a great place for a cat to be, because it's close to the highway. Nor could I get to the cat. The whole setup of the bridge discourages that, for obvious reasons. Plus, the cat was already retreating despite the separation between us, so it probably would have broken into an all out run otherwise. 

I did describe what I saw in an entry on the Providence subReddit. Someone who responded said they think they know where the cat lives. I'm hoping the owners or somebody can do something from the other side.

Words for snow

It's interesting to take a look at the Sámi people. For the most part, they live in Northern Scandinavia and Finland. Their language is Uralic rather than Indo-European. Uralic languages also abound in Siberia and a few other spots in Asia. Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian are all Uralic languages as well, and of course they're in Europe. But Sámi are different because many of them have maintained a nomadic lifestyle. In that way they have something in common with the Eurasian populations of thousands of years ago.

“Learning to read snow is crucial to proper reindeer migration,” says Frandy. Being able to identify and name skarta, for example, which means fallen rain has formed a hard layer of crust atop the snow, making wildlife grazing difficult, is an essential tool for herders. But reading snow can also tell you a bigger story about the season in general. “The way that snow packs, in particular, tells you a larger story about winter,” he says. "As the layers accumulate, it becomes a record of the season so far and you develop a relationship to it.”

That's led them to have a knowledge of and relationship to the natural environment, one which blows away those of us who live in more settled areas. 

Nice wheels

Yesterday, I was walking down the street and in the parking lot of the YMCA, there was a Dodge Challenger. Late 60s or early 70s model, I'd say offhand. A good Nixon Era sports car. It was painted sunshine yellow, which made it stand out even more. 

I wouldn't really call myself a car guy. In fact, both Eastern and (if you dig a little deeper) Western religions have apt warnings about getting too hung up on material possessions. Still, the owner of that car seems to have done an admirable job in keeping it nice-looking and roadworthy. Beauty comes in many forms.

Still time to make this your Halloween costume

There are a number of mythical creatures in the world. Well, there are a number of mythologies in the world. That doesn't necessarily mean the creatures stride the Earth. Although there could be some factual basis to some, if distorted.

The Kishi, stemming from Angolan folklore, is a distinctive one. In front, there's a human face, attractive and persuasive. In back, the face of a hyena, all ravenous appetite. It's sort of the Janus concept mixed with werewolves. Of course hyenas are more closely related to cats than wolves, and also scavengers. You wouldn't want to tangle with one, though.

This sounds like a natural boogeyman tale to frighten children with. It also nails something about how human behavior can be deceptive. Versatile that way.

2 tons of fun

Yes, I've seen it up close.

Nibbles Woodaway, the Big Blue Bug, is an engineering marvel of a sort, and apparently the world's largest bug. And on a smaller scale, he's a beloved costumed character, the costumes having less insectoid and more cartoony features. The Big Blue Bug is a mainstay here in Rhode Island.

Which is weird, when you think about it. Most of us wouldn't welcome an actual termite of that size, if such a thing were possible under the square-cube law. Or for that matter, the regular size ones. Nibbles is perched on top of an exterminator's business, after all. But a good monument unifies, sometimes to odd effect.

In flight

 

Looking for a feel-good story? This young woman doing a bat family reunification may do the trick. (A family of actual bats, not Batman and his cohorts.) I don't think I'd ever realized how shaky bats are when they're not in the air. The baby, especially, had a kind of Muppet way of moving.

"Mum" isn't standard American for mother, so I gather this is either the British Isles or the Antipodes. Doesn't look much like Australia, but it is nighttime in the city, so it's harder to tell.

Night chill

Today I went out wearing a purple camp shirt with nothing over it. That was fine. The sun was shining and the wind wasn't too strong, so I felt warm enough.

As the sun went down, things changed. It hasn't gotten cold enough for the heat to kick on, yet. But when day becomes night it's time to shut the windows, and there's still a little chill. Good thing there are sweaters, then.

View from the eatery

 

When I first started seeing the name "George Segal" in art books, I thought, "Wow, the actor did this? Must be a pretty busy guy." Well, I'm sure he was, at times. But they're too different guys. 

This sculpture is called "The Restaurant Window II". Strictly speaking I guess it's a little more than a sculpture, because there's the background, incorporating incandescent lights. But the figure in the foreground is the key part. While the plaster she and her clothing are made of are uncolored, you can pick things up. Those are thick boots on her feet, so it's probably winter. And she looks to be waiting. For what or whom, we don't know. But it's starting to strain her patience.

Halo effect

I recently borrowed a short book from the library: The Saint and the Templar Treasure by Leslie Charteris. Or rather, by "Leslie Charteris." What I've since found out is that Charteris, though busy writing novels and short stories with his most famous creation for a period of about 30 years, largely left things to ghostwriters from the mid-late 60s onwards. The book is a good crime adventure, but it's "in the school of"  rather than by the original master.

Reading the story, it's pretty easy to hear Roger Moore in both Simon Templar's dialogue and in some of the narration. Moore was ideally suited to playing the Saint. He was winning as a bon vivant who loved fine wine and fancy baubles, but was ultimately a knight in shining armor. 007 wasn't as good a role for him because Bond shouldn't have easy charm, but rather be a little blunt.

Hey what're the odds

The full title of Joseph Mazur's book Fluke is Fluke: The Math & Myth of Coincidence. The cover of the 2016 Basic Books edition shows a man in silhouette, walking his dog. A lightning bolt descends from the word "Fluke", aimed at the man's head. Wouldn't it be crazy if he had been hit by lightning before and was about to be so struck again?

An excerpt: 

By definition, coincidences are events that happen without apparent cause. Apparent to whom? It does not mean there is no cause. The world generally moves by cause and effect. I say generally, because there are acausal phenomena in physics, psychology, and religion. But the word apparent tells us that the moment we learn the cause of a coincidental phenomenon, its status diminishes to a simple time-space event. That must mean that coincidences are relative to the people affected by them. It also means that the unapparent cause is there, waiting to be discovered. If there is no cause at all, then it happens by chance. 

This is graspable in theory. It doesn't necessarily make this "unapparent cause" easy to pin down. There are probably some coincidences where the actual odds for and against remain a topic of hot debate.

One interesting thing I learned about in this book is the birthday problem, meaning that the probability of two people having the same birthday reaches 50% when there are 23 people in the group. This threw me at first. I would have guessed that this point came at 183, which is about half the number of days in the year. But the numbers check out when you look at it.