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.