I looked in my home directory in my desktop Mac, which I don’t very often (I run a tidy operation here), and I found a file I didn’t recognise called out.html.

Here is out.html.

For the benefit of the tape: it is a half-baked GeoCities-style homepage complete with favourite poems, broken characters, and a "This page is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or higher!" message in the footer.

The creation date of the file is March of this year.

I don’t know how it got there.

Maybe my computer is haunted?

I have a vague memory of trying out local large language models for HTML generation, probably using the llm command-line tool.

out.html is pretty clearly made with AI (the HTML comments, if you View Source, are all very LLM-voice).

But it’s… bad. ChatGPT or Claude in 2025 would never make a fake GeoCities page this bad.

So what I suspect has happened is that I downloaded a model to run on my desktop Mac, prompted it to save its output into my home directory (lazily), then because the model was local it was really slow… then got distracted and forgot about it while it whirred away in a window in the background, only finding the output 6 months down the line.

UPDATE. This is exactly what happened! I just realised I can search my command history and here is what I typed:

llm -m gemma3:27b ‘Build a single page HTML+CSS+JavaScript UI which looks like an old school GeoCities page with poetry and fave books/celebs, and tons and tons of content. Use HTML+CSS really imaginatively because we do not have images. Respond with only the HTML so it can be run immediately’ > out.html

And that will have taken a whole bunch of time so I must have tabbed elsewhere and not even looked at the result.

Because I had forgotten all about it, it was as if I had discovered a file made by someone else. Other footprints on the deserted beach.

I love it.

I try to remain sensitive to New Feelings.

e.g…

The sense of height and scale in VR is a New Feeling: "What do we do now the gamut of interaction can include vertigo and awe? It’s like suddenly being given an extra colour."

And voice: way back I was asked to nominate for Designs of the Year 2016 and one my nominations was Amazon Echo – it was new! Here’s part of my nomination statement:

we’re now moving into a Post PC world: Our photos, social networks, and taxi services live not in physical devices but in the cloud. Computing surrounds us. But how will we interact with it?

So the New Feeling wasn’t voice per se, but that the location of computing/the internet had transitioned from being contained to containing us, and that felt new.

(That year I also nominated Moth Generator and Unmade, both detailed in dezeen.)

I got a New Feeling when I found out.html just now.

Stumbling across littered AI slop, randomly in my workspace!

I love it, I love it.

It’s like having a cat that leaves dead birds in the hall.

Going from living in a house in which nothing changes when nobody is in the house to a house which has a cat and you might walk back into… anything… is going from 0 to 1 with “aliveness.” It’s not much but it’s different.

Suddenly my computer feels more… inhabited??… haunted maybe, but in a good way.

Three references about computers being inhabited:

1. Every page on my blog has multiplayer cursors and cursor chat because every webpage deserves to be a place (2024) – and once you realise that a webpage can show passers-by then all other webpages feel obstinately lonely.
2. Little Computer People (1985), the Commodore 64 game that revealed that your computer was really a tiny inhabited house, and I was obsessed at the time. LCP has been excellently written up by Jay Springett (2024).
3. I wrote about Gordon Brander’s concept for Geists (2022). Geists are/were little bots that meander over your notes directory, "finding connections between notes, remixing notes, issuing oracular provocations and gnomic utterances."

And let’s not forget Steve Jobs’ unrealised vision for Mister Macintosh: "a mysterious little man who lives inside each Macintosh. He pops up every once in a while, when you least expect it, and then winks at you and disappears again."

After encountering out.html I realise that I have an Old Feeling which is totally unrecognised, and the old feeling, which has always been there it turns out, is that being in my personal computer is lonely.

I would love a little geist that runs a local LLM and wanders around my filesystem at night, perpetually out of sight.

I would know its presence only by the slop it left behind, slop as ectoplasm from where the ghost has been,

a collage of smiles cut out of photos from 2013 and dropped in a mysterious jpg,

some doggerel inspired by a note left in a text file in a rarely-visited dusty folder,

if I hit Back one to many times in my web browser it should start hallucinating whole new internets that have never been.

More posts tagged: ghosts (7).

1.

This video of a robot sorting system for a warehouse.

The dance of those little orange cushions charging from source to destination, giving each other room… lovely.

Packet switching. It used to be that the pipes were visible, and the packets were dumb but had addresses. The junctions were smart and did the work. We call them routers. Here there are no routers and there are no pipes. But instead, autonomous packets.

I wonder if the internet could work like this: not dumb packets with addresses, but each packet with a tiny bit of software to choose its own next destination. I’d be interested to hear of any work in this direction.

2.

Woffice, a property service company in Handan province, China, has a monthly relaxation day for its staff. One month it was “No Face” day.

Luckily for these employees in China, they’ve been given a day off to go “faceless”. [Staff] wore masks on Tuesday so they didn’t have to fake their facial expression throughout the day.

And:

Most workers chose to go with the “No Face” mask to relax their smiling muscles and remain anonymous in front of customers

Identity is work.

Great photos.

The caption to the bottom photo is brutal: "This way no one can see me cry."

3.

A robot monk in Longquan Temple, China. Named Xian’er.

Through a touch screen held on his tummy, he can answer voice commands and up to 100 questions on Buddhism.

A robotic priest in Wittenberg, Germany. Named BlessU-2.

The machine delivers various blessings in eight languages.

Does a benediction from a robot have an effect? Is sentience necessary to facilitate the presence of the divine?

4.

Rings that look like fingers. Earrings that look like ears.

More posts tagged: filtered-for (125), robots (11).

So I’m heading up this startup accelerator for IoT and connected hardware. Applications close 14 November. I’ve just been in the states seeing how previous programs have run. It’s all pretty excellent. More on that later.

Right now I’m in outreach mode. I’m meeting as many startups as possible in order to spread the word, and to get a better sense of what the current challenges and opportunities are.

In return, I’m happy to share my take on the business and product, make connections to potential partners and investors where I can, and answer questions about how this particular accelerator works.

All of this is usually quite ad hoc, but there are a few convenient times coming up:

• Amsterdam. I’ll be at Makerversity in Amsterdam on Friday 7 October. We’ll be hanging out and having coffee in the afternoon, sign up here. More focused meetings also possible.
• Berlin. I’m in Berlin for a few days, and will be running office hours at Betahaus on Friday 14 October. Got an Internet of Things or hardware startup? Sign up to meet.
• Skype. The problem with coffee meetings is you only spend time with startups who are nearby. So on Wednesday afternoons though October, I’ll be at my laptop ready to speak. Choose a time here.

Of course I’m always up for meeting over coffee. Drop me a line if you want to set something up: matt at interconnected dot org

Olivier Huez is a partner at C4 Ventures

I’m delighted about this news — C4 Ventures is one of my favourite VCs, focusing on hardware (like home robotics startup Anki and smart home company Netatmo), and cool deep tech like Graphcore (A.I. chips) and Unmade (custom manufacturing).

Needless to say, these companies have some great jobs going.

Olivier Huez is partner at C4, and he’s put their entire portfolio on Job Garden.

Check out openings at C4 startups on Olivier’s brand new job board.

As with all the other job boards, you can use the watchlist feature to receive new jobs by email.

Over 500 open roles, all automatically synced.

What I love about working with a new curator is that new challenges really snap into focus. 500 jobs! The new jobs alone spill onto page four!

So I really need to focus on slicing-and-dicing to make the jobs list really appropriate for every site visitor, in just the way they want. And, with Olivier’s job board, I’ve got a live use case to see what approaches work.

The other quality I look for in new curators, at this early stage, is what kind of feedback they can give me. Early users are super helpful for feature ideas and prioritisation. Olivier has already given me tons of useful pointers — as has everyone else with job boards, and also a few people who don’t (yet) have boards. So thank you all.

More posts tagged: job-garden (53).

Cryptocurrency is interesting, may precipitate the collapse of civilisation, and is extremely troubling re: carbon.

Interesting because: NFTs allow rights (such as ownership but not exclusively) to be attached to digital objects; crypto techniques underpin a newly centralised internet swept free of gatekeepers from identity, to payment, to data centres.

May precipitate collapse because: the centralisation of handling money has led to giant and powerful financial institutions, and the decentralisation of money smells like the shift from centralised bronze production (which led to captured trade routes and giant palace kingdoms) to decentralised iron, arguably leading to the Late Bronze Age collapse, as previously discussed. LOOK: I don’t honestly think we’ll see a collapse of civilisation, but the banks may well reconfigure to become smaller and more numerous. Besides I find a potential decentralisation of energy production more fundamental and intriguing.

Extremely troubling: cryptocurrency takes a lot of electricity to run. And that creates a lot of carbon. Really not good.

Crypto is underpinned by a technique called proof of work (PoW) and I understand that this is the troubling carbon bit that needs to be replaced?

Hand-waving alert, obv. I’m not close enough to crypto to understand, but if I give the broad outlines of what I mean then someone else may fill in the gaps…

Proof of work relies on some mathematical technique which is hard to figure out for the first time, but then easy to verify. For example:

• A hashing algorithm generates essentially a random number from a known starting number (it’s the same each time for a giving starting number). This is quick and cheap
• Some hashes will be rare, say ones that start with the number “99”. So finding a starting number that leads to a rare hash requires running the algorithm a bunch of times. This is slow and expensive (and produces a bunch of carbon because it uses electricity)
• So finding a rare hash is expensive to do but cheap to check.

I don’t entirely understand how this ladders up to consensus over an entire transaction history, as recorded in the shared blockchain, but a technique like this is key.

Because of the essentially wasted electricity and carbon cost, there are a couple of other replacement techniques being mooted, instead of crunching numbers.

• Transactions are verified by parties with authority – let’s say central banks. Well that seems counter to the decentralised nature of the beast.
• Transactions are verified by parties with skin in the game, ie wealthy people. This is called Proof of Stake and it sounds like it just puts the power in the hands of the rich.

Neither seems like a solution in the spirit of cryptocurrency. So what is to be done?

HOW ABOUT:

Replace the Proof of Work function with something which follows the exact same form (expensive to perform, cheap to verify: a zero-knowledge proof) but that outgasses socially useful work as a side-effect instead of carbon.

But what should it be?

Scientific conferences in pharma versus astronomy, the difference:

Pharma conferences are full of scientists playing their cards close to their chest. They don’t want to give even the tiniest hint about their research because somebody else, knowing what is being chased down, could get there first. So they don’t talk about their work or what they’re trying to figure out.

Astro conferences, on the other hand, are free and open. Seen a weird blob in the sky that might be a novel black hole or an alien superstructure? Show everyone the printout of the telescope image, it doesn’t matter! The night sky is so colossally huge that nobody will ever be able to find the same spot without you telling them the coordinates. And without knowing that, they can’t publish so your research is safe.

(I can’t remember who shared this anecdote with me, sorry.)

What I learn from this:

• Pointing a telescope at the night sky is a essentially hashing algorithm. Give the telescope coordinates, you get back a random but consistent constellation of stars.
• Hunting to discover a constellation that matches a particular, rare pattern (say: an equilateral triangle between the three brightest stars in the square) would be hard and slow.
• But verifying that given coordinates lead to a given constellation is easy (or at least, as easy as pointing a telescope).

Aha!

What if… looking at the night sky is a drop-in replacement Proof of Work function?

The side-effect of loads of crypto miners scraping the night sky with telescopes won’t be carbon, it will be a map of the stars.

That hyper-detailed and growing map of the stars becomes a public resource for scientists to better understand the cosmos, and also increases our chance of spotting aliens.

Currently crypto miners are incentivised to re-activate coal power stations to get electricity. Now they’ll be incentivised to fund new space telescopes instead.

Bonus: the current crypto PoW method has the concept of “difficulty” built in, and it is ramped up over time basically to account for computers getting faster. With telescopes you can increase difficulty by requiring that you look at smaller and smaller patches of sky. It takes longer to collect the photons to see fainter stars, or it requires building new and larger telescopes, both of which correspond to increasing difficulty parameters.

Caveat: I clearly don’t know what I’m talking about.

BUT

could we invent new underpinnings of cryptocurrency that pump out social good, rather than pumping out carbon? It would be good to assemble a committee of smart people to figure that out.

In the meantime we could just get started. NASA and SETI should create a coin. The James Webb Space Telescope (Hubble replacement) launches in December. Dedicate an hour a day of telescope time to this crypto project (for pay) and fund the development of the next telescope with the proceeds.

Let’s power the new global financial machine by searching for extra-terrestrials.

More posts tagged: speculative-in-2021 (16), web3 (7).

For the past month or so, as an experiment, I’ve been opening my calendar each week for video calls with whoever books a time. It’s been amazing. Wednesday is now my favourite day.

I’m calling it Unoffice Hours. (Everything that works needs a name.)

You can book 30 minutes in my calendar here. No agenda required, no need to mail first.

I set aside a couple hours each Wednesday Monday for Unoffice Hours. The 23 conversations I’ve had since the start of August run the gamut:

• feedback on early stage startups and design projects
• informal discussions about ways we might work together (here’s my old work site and my new one (2024), and I’m open to other patterns)
• spontaneously reaching out to chat about a blog post
• seeing old friends and colleagues for the first time in many years – and also people I’ve only ever spoken with using text.

And those are all good, so feel free. I’ll keep this going for a while.

Now office hours is an old idea. Here’s some history from a 2009 piece in the Harvard Business Review:

The concept of “office hours” for business goes back to a universal ritual from our college days. We’d take classes with professors who were busy, distracted from teaching with research in the lab or the library, and otherwise remote and unapproachable. But we knew that for a couple of hours, at least one day a week, we could stop by their office, ask for advice, try out an idea, and get the guidance we needed.

The article tracks the evolution of office hours into tech, with people opening their calendars for networking and mentoring. It’s pretty common now.

Office hours have become in a staple in startup support. Here’s how office hours worked for me when I was running the R/GA Ventures accelerators in London.

So why un-office hours?

Well, I’m not in an office, for one…

This all started because of lockdown and because I was missing the serendipity of grabbing coffee.

I loved those open conversations over coffee in the Before Times. There’s an ostensible reason to connect, so you talk about work, or compare notes about an idea, or whatever. But then the unexpected emerges. (Sometimes you have to hunt for it.) There are things in your head that you only know are there when you say them. And there are encounters with new ideas and new perspectives. 1:1 conversation is a vital part of my process in finding work, but also simply in thinking.

But with us all going remote in a giant forced experiment, I wasn’t getting that input. Could it work over Zoom? It turns out it can. And Calendly is a genius service to allow online booking and have the meeting appear automagically in your Google Calendar.

(One tip if you do this yourself: schedule the calls for 30 minutes, but add a 15 minute buffer after each. Otherwise you’ll have to end calls super abruptly.)

So I’m not in an office.

Secondly, the heritage of office hours is about professors and students. And it’s not about that hierarchy for me: grabbing coffee - my model for this - is an informal meeting of peers. The un- is there to signal that difference. The purpose, instead, is manufactured serendipity.

I know there are a few other folks doing this too. Call it Unoffice Hours, let’s make it a movement!

I’ve added a link to this post to the sidebar on my website. It’s there if you’d like to chat. See you on the zooms.

Update October 2024:

Four years on, I’m still doing these! To date I’ve had (checks Calendly) 383 bookings, probably ~340 actual calls.

Unoffice Hours has been a wildly successful experiment for me. I’ve reviewed pitch decks, given early product and go-to-market feedback, met monks, discussed work and careers with students, re-met old school friends from two decades ago, been dropped into surprise design crits, cracked complex technical architecture challenges, heard about pilgrimage in India and children’s playgrounds in Finland, compared notes with like-minded people who I never would have met otherwise – and also compared notes with people with vastly different life experience. I’ve learnt so much.

Sometimes I even feel like I’ve been able to help. By being a second pair of eyes on what the other person sees as ordinary, or even tangled and overwhelming, we can identify a way forward or point of focus for a project or artistic practice.

Although this started as a lockdown experiment, I found it became the highlight of my week. So I never stopped.

There was a recent thread on Hacker News (which is what prompted me adding this update).

There is an Unoffice Hours webring listing other people with open calendars – check it out and maybe even start doing this yourself. It has worked wonderfully well for me.

Perhaps there’s life on Venus. There’s phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus and it should break down pretty quickly, so there’s something replenishing it. The scientists can’t think of any abiotic processes that would create phosphine in that quantity, so maybe microbes it is?

I’m sceptical. There was similar excitement in 1996 about the Martian meteorite Allan Hills 84001 – microscopic fossils! Life! Well, pseudo-fossils.

More likely explanation: planetary geology is weird. (“Geo”-logy? I’m not sure what the appropriate word is.)

Going to check out Venus will be tough.

There was a great paper in JBIS in April: Conceptual Design of a Crewed Platform in the Venusian Atmosphere (abstract only). It summarises two comprehensive studies of how to float crewed scientific missions in the clouds of Venus. The mock-ups look like a cross between dirigibles and the space station. Alien.

Because Venus is fierce.

Here are the first colour photos from the surface of Venus, taken by the Soviet lander Venura 13 in 1982. It lasted 127 minutes. And: "Venera 14, a twin of Venera 13, launched five days later and also reached the surface. It lasted there for 57 minutes." A lander dropped by Vega 2 (1985) lasted 56 minutes. There have been no landings since.

Remote observation of the Venusian surface is not possible due to its thick clouds of sulphuric acid. It has a surface atmospheric pressure 90x that of Earth, and a surface temperature averaging 464C/867F.

In terms of size and gravity, Venus is Earth’s twin.

Venus is trying to kill you. It’s dense and impenetrable – there could be a whole civilisation a mile away, and you’d never know.

Venus is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the hidden Africa, unknown to Europeans – the novella that was translated to Vietnam for Apocalypse Now. A journey up the Congo River and into the psyche. Both book and film highly recommended.

Contrast with Mars.

Which is empty (at least in the imagination). Tabula rasa. It’s dangerous, sure, but in a character-building, life-at-the-frontier kind of way. It’s there, waiting for Will to be imposed on it.

And Mars is so explored in fiction, and I mean this modern conception of Mars, not the old one which was criss-crossed with canals and dotted with ancient civilisations. Mars, now, is a blank canvas for the imagination.

So no wonder Elon Musk has Mars as his goal. It’s a place for pure expansion.

A city on Mars will be like a city on Earth but with better AC.

And I think it has diminished us somehow to have Mars held up in the public imagination as the ultimate frontier. Because all other problems become versions of that grand yet simple model frontier, empty spaces that we pave over.

But Venus…

Venus is far from empty. Venus has its own agenda. It has an oppressive air and acid rain. Landers are destroyed in an hour. If humans go there, we’ll be the ones who have to change, not Venus.

Which is a very 2020s metaphor.

Climate change, inequality, pandemics – these problems won’t be resolved by paving over them, no matter how much Will we exert.

They will be negotiated, worked at; they’re obdurate and incredibly complex, and require an acceptance of ground truths that are bigger and stronger than us and can’t be ignored. We won’t fix them, we’ll have to learn about them and deal with them in a million different ways and sometimes we’ll have to appease them. We’re mortal in the face of them. Through the mist and the jungle that crowds the boat, eyes look back, eyes belonging to who-know-what staring out from an unknown land which goes back who-knows-how-deep, and so we push on, we adapt.

The solutions are not straightforward. They require something from us. A price must be paid.

I think we don’t think about Venus because it’s the part of us which is animal, it’s the part which we keep hidden, the un-modern, it scares us to know it’s there; because if we really were to live on Venus, we would have to become something Other, and we can’t tolerate what that might be. Not like Mars which is manageable, already mapped and all that’s left to argue about is the collection of property taxes.

I would like to imagine more stories about Venus and how we would live there.

Because the challenges of the 2020s are Venus problems, not Mars problems.

Update 24/9: It’s an odd experience seeing one of my back-of-the-notebook posts briefly hit the top spot on Hacker News. 5,000 views later… There’s a long discussion here. Currently 186 comments, wonderfully including this one that disagrees yet sums up this whole post better than I could: "The challenges of exploring Venus/searching for life are metaphorically similar to current issues here on Earth (climate change, SARS-Cov2, etc.), while Mars represents the endless expansion/frontier attitudes of 18th-20th century mercantilism/capitalism."

More posts tagged: 20-most-popular-in-2020 (20), 5-most-popular-in-2020 (5), space (10).

Somebody’s taken Childish Gambino’s music video This is America (original, YouTube) and used some AI face-swapper software called FaceFusion to sub in Nicolas Cage.

Here’s the result on X/Twitter. You don’t need to watch the whole thing – just the moment at 2m40s where Cage/Gambino turns his face sideways and the face swap glitches out, back, out again and sits on Gambino for a beat, then back to Cage looks unnatural, settings in, then lights up and walks off.

The timing is perfect. I’ve clipped the video here.

It seems to me like this is a visual trope we’re going to see more and more? It’s the paranoia and glitching in A Scanner Darkly (2006), the visual glitch when your trust in subjective reality is shaken loose. I’m looking forward to this being a commonplace shorthand for doubt; a quick glitch in a romcom when somebody is acting out of character, say.

ANYWAY:

It reminds me that AI face swaps are not (in 2023) much good at ears.

There is a rise in imposter scams (Washington Post):

The man calling Ruth Card sounded just like her grandson Brandon. So when he said he was in jail, with no wallet or cellphone, and needed cash for bail

…for which you need about 30 seconds of audio and under a hundred bucks.

And so, at least for video calls, as previously discussed when I posted about ears last year, the advice is this: "To Uncover a Deepfake Video Call, Ask the Caller to Turn Sideways."

As a family, we have a secret pass phrase to check identity between ourselves in the event of an unexpected video call.

It’s a sticking plaster solution. Long term I suspect we all need 2FA for humans.

In the meantime, maybe the most effective ward against deepfakes is simply to turn sideways?

We should build the habit now. At the beginning of every call, exchange a quick proof-of-humanity by showing our ears.

Warding against pretend people: some examples.

ONE!

The origin of tao po, apparently a common Filipino phrase:

According to historian Ambeth Ocampo, pre-colonial Filipinos used the phrase to declare themselves as humans, thus: “Tao po ako, hindi aswang!” (“I am human and not aswang“)

… evil spirits, aswang, and other dangers that lurked outside the home were incapable of saying “tao po” to trick you into letting them in your house.

… Today, “tao po” has a more mundane purpose. Depending on the usage, it can be loosely translated to “anybody home?” or “a person is at the gate.”

TWO!

Haint blue is: "a collection of pale shades of blue-green that are traditionally used to paint porch ceilings in the Southern United States."

Originally, haint blue was thought by the Gullah to ward haints, or ghosts, away from the home. The tactic was intended either to mimic the appearance of the sky, tricking the ghost into passing through, or to mimic the appearance of water, which ghosts traditionally could not cross. The Gullah would paint not only the porch, but also doors, window frames, and shutters. Blue glass bottles were also hung in trees to trap haints and boo hags.

For HTML fans, that’s hex #D1EAEB.

THREE!

Perhaps your baby has been stolen and an ancient fairy has taken its place – a changeling.

You can trick fey folk into breaking their silence by baffling them. Typically: cooking with eggshells.

A fairy doppelganger has posed as a human baby and successfully pulled the wool over its human hosts’ eyes. However, someone (typically the mother) realizes what’s happened. To trick the changeling, she uses empty eggshells as milk pans, stewpots, or brewing cauldrons. The fake infant is so surprised that he suddenly begins to speak. Sometimes he is startled, sometimes amused. “I have never seen the like of that before” is the most common exclamation, as he unthinkingly reveals his great age. Then, in a flash, all is set right and the real baby is returned.

What 21st century fake humans do I want to ward off? What should I carry with me?

Ok, taking turns to show our ears to watch for deepfake glitches. Like shaking hands from the old days, demonstrating that I’m not about to draw my sword.

What about if I suspect I’m speaking, in text or voiceswapped, with an AI? The best trick would be to challenge it to say something obscene. The AI changeling wouldn’t be able to help itself, blurting in response: "I’m sorry but as a large language model I cannot…"

If we’re emailing, and the first words I say to you are utterly beyond the pale, just like excessively and graphically disturbing, don’t worry, I’m just helpfully establishing my humanity.

Tao po.

I’m into wards that become unquestioned social habits.

I’m also thinking more about wards that are physical artefacts, and less about AI…

For instance: my car was stolen recently, evaporated from the street.

Apparently 50% of car thefts in the UK are from hijacking keyless entry.

So now I own a ward against malicious ghost RF: a handsome box, in which I store my keys.

And so does everyone else it turns out! If you type "far–" into search on amazon.co.uk, the top two suggestions are:

• faraday pouch for car keys
• faraday box for car keys

The third autocomplete:

• fart spray

Don’t get that one. It is unlikely to help.

More posts tagged: 20-most-popular-in-2023 (20).

1.

The Total Perspective Vortex.

… it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

Seeing it is horrific: "the Total Perspective Vortex can annihilate a man’s soul!"

Zaphod Beeblebox is put into the Vortex in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, the sequel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

He opened the door of the box and stepped in.

Inside the box he waited.

After five seconds there was a click, and the entire Universe was there in the box with him.

And… Zaphod survives.

IT TURNS OUT that Zaphod never actually went into the real Vortex.

Instead, earlier in the story, he had unwittingly stepped into a simulated universe, entirely identical to this one (almost).

[Zarniwoop] put the briefcase down and sat in another chair.

“I am glad you followed instructions,” he said, “I was a bit nervous that you might have left my office by the door rather than the window. Then you would have been in trouble.”

Zaphod shook his heads at him and burbled.

“When you entered the door of my office, you entered my electronically synthesized Universe,” he explained, “if you had left by the door you would have been back in the real one. The artificial one works from here.”

He patted the briefcase smugly.

Zaphod glared at him with resentment and loathing.

“What’s the difference?” he muttered.

“Nothing,” said Zarniwoop, “they are identical. Oh – except that I think the Frogstar Fighters are grey in the real Universe.”

The other difference is that Zaphod is able to survive the Total Perspective Vortex in Zarniwoop’s simulated universe.

(It’s quite the get-out-of-jail-free card to play. I’d be up for seeing more retconned synthesised universes in other stories. Maybe it will displace the “yet it was all just a dream” trope someday.)

2.

Remember that bug in Xerox scanners that sometimes silently replaced numbers in PDF documents to make them compress better?

The wildly powerful - but, it turned out, dangerously inaccurate - compression format is called JBIG2.

The JBIG2 format is actually a primitive computer language and, from these basic parts, it is possible to implement a virtual computer which is then run while the PDF is being decompressed.

And, since you’re now running a full-blown computer inside the bit of your phone that is responsible for decompressing images, you can write a program that breaks its way out of that system and hacks your phone from the inside.

From Google’s Project Zero lab, this is an insane and detailed breakdown of how simply receiving an image as a text message could result in your phone being hacked.

JBIG2 doesn’t have scripting capabilities, but when combined with a vulnerability, it does have the ability to emulate circuits of arbitrary logic gates operating on arbitrary memory. So why not just use that to build your own computer architecture and script that!? That’s exactly what this exploit does. Using over 70,000 segment commands defining logical bit operations, they define a small computer architecture with features such as registers and a full 64-bit adder and comparator which they use to search memory and perform arithmetic operations. It’s not as fast as Javascript, but it’s fundamentally computationally equivalent.

The bootstrapping operations for the sandbox escape exploit are written to run on this logic circuit and the whole thing runs in this weird, emulated environment created out of a single decompression pass through a JBIG2 stream. It’s pretty incredible, and at the same time, pretty terrifying.

3.

Back in 2003, Nick Bostrom suggested that we may be living in a computer simulation.

He summarises his argument: looking into the future, we find that "there would be vastly many more such simulated minds than there would be non-simulated minds running on organic brains" – and, by weight of numbers, you and I are more likely to be simulated minds than actual ones.

Elon Musk is convinced (Vice):

“There’s a one in billions chance [we’re in] base reality,” he said. …

“I’ve had so many simulation discussions it’s crazy,” Musk said. “It got to the point where every discussion was the AI or simulation conversation and my brother and I finally agreed we would ban such conversations if we were ever in a hot tub because it really kills the magic.”

If we are in a simulation, could we get out? There are people working on it. This throwaway snippet…

Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer; two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.

…but that was 6 years ago and I haven’t heard of anything since.

It’s intriguing to imagine how breakout might occur.

There seem to be three main avenues:

• Observe an inconsistency that proves that we are in a simulation, e.g. a feature of the universe that should correspond with the laws of physics as understood, but manifests in a way that shows that the simulation machine is conserving resources. e.g. we get to Proxima Centauri and it turns out the star is just a big painting on cardboard, that kind of thing only more subtle. (How to use the observation to break out is left an exercise for the reader.)
• Do something so appealing or unusual that the Simulation Runners are motivated to intervene.
• Hack our way out – taking advantage of the fact that there is a computational substrate to our simulated universe, cause a buffer overflow or race condition or out of bounds error, or something, and break out to the containing machine. e.g. is it possible to construct some kind of in-memory data structure (being, perhaps: a structure in our physical universe) that somehow triggers a parse error and is read as code? Could we run our own programs on the simulator?

It’s odd, imagining that I might be a document, and further imagining that there might be a specific thought I may one day have (thoughts being physical structures, according to Hebb’s rule) that could prise open an escape hatch from the simulation sandbox.

RELATED:

It is possible to reprogram Super Mario from inside Super Mario. Like, it’s possible to glitch Super Mario to write data into system memory, and then glitch it again to execute that data as code. So here’s a video of using code injection to run Flappy Bird inside Super Mario (YouTube). They first inject a 26 byte bootloader, using that to write Mario’s x-coordinate to memory on a spinjump, and that allows reliably loading a much larger payload. The whole process is WILD. Um. So something like that but IRL?

Ref.

Bostrom, B. N. (2003). Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Philosophical Quarterly, 53(211), 243-255.

4.

The Aleph (Wikipedia), a short story by Borges (1945). PDF here.

The author meets someone who has found an Aleph.

He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all other points.

It’s downstairs.

“It’s in the cellar under the dining room,” he went on …

So they go and see it.

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America …

AND SO ON.

In April 2003 at a party in San Francisco, after a particularly lengthy run-up, we managed to manifest the Aleph, an actual centre of the universe, a single point in space and time in which all else is contained, infinity hanging in the air, there for the taking, right in the middle of our group.

Reader: I ate it.

More posts tagged: filtered-for (125), teeny-weeny-virtual-worlds (4).

It’s a miracle that we can feel togetherness over the internet. I thought it was a miracle when I got my first modem in 1994, and I think the same today.

This collection of machines is transparent to human presence! Like the air is transparent to light.

There’s no necessary reason why human presence transmits through electricity and silicon. Books carry thought and stories and they are incredible in their own way, and we give the written word its deserved credit. Radio broadcasts feel live but in only one direction.

The internet creates new architectures that the brain feels as space yet don’t exist. The nuances of phatic communication, presentation of self, shared emotions, and community are somehow translated, sent, and received in some mysterious social synaesthesia of digital impulses.

This electronic telepathy works so well that we barely notice it, let alone question it.

I include in this our non-human co-occupiers of the world (existing and new), and the varied ways of configuring individual and group identities.

I find the parameters and boundaries of togetherness endlessly fascinating.

And surprising.

Its huge variety through cultures and history; the way the internet continues and inflects it; how togetherness on the internet can (and should) be better.

I think that the exploration has been a thread through my whole career. This particular magic is not the most important thing ever, to everyone, but to me it seems like I’ve always been circling it. And it’s good to put a finger on that fact, even though it probably seems obvious to everyone else, because I can use togetherness (its exploration, boundaries, landscape, and potentialities) as a structuring principle for whatever I think about next.

More posts tagged: multiplayer (32).

I think about this Twitter thread from @kimbert in 2017 a bunch:

A thing from art school that helped my drawing/comics practice a lot is I took a ceramics course. It taught me a lot about disposability.

It’s about accepting that your pieces can break in the kiln, sometimes because somebody else’s creation shatters.

She says: "But your skill + practice + vision still stays in your hands and your mind and you just quietly make another one, faster and usually better than the one that broke."

There’s another bit of advice that’s been in my head recently:

When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness. I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?”

Which is a similar approach to risk, I think, in a way.

An absolute age ago, I was visiting San Francisco and - for some reason that now escapes me - I decided to get my Tarot cards read at one of the grotty tourist trap shops, just off Union Square.

I’m not a “believer” but, you know, open mind to new perspectives and all that.

It was a memorable experience. The psychic was texting on her phone a bunch. She asked if I had pets, and said it was good that I did because it was good for my energies. She was getting agitated about something in the texts so I suggested she get a pet too, but she snapped at me about the size of her apartment and that it wouldn’t be feasible, living in the city.

Anyway so the cards were read, my fortune told, and she gave me three pieces of advice.

One, I should phone my mum more.

Which is solid for most people, I feel. Smart for the cards to open with this.

Second: Take the easy road and not the hard road.

This was a surprise. I was expecting the cards to recommend I push on through, give me support and strength, etc. Everyone’s got some shit or another going on, and it would have been an easy win for the cards to focus their cosmic recommendations on surviving the challenge because it’ll all be worth it, and so on and so forth.

But like the recent advice, discussed here, about appreciating hedonism, this was counterintuitive. This is the Protestant work ethic in me speaking, drummed into me at school, but surely everything worthwhile is hard? The path the success and happiness is necessarily paved with struggle? Maybe not, say the cards.

Maybe taking the easy road is good because, yes, things break, but it’s fine, take it in your stride and remember the skill stays in your hands.

Dunno.

But I come back to this periodically, because at the time I dismissed it as ridiculous, and now I ask myself: ok, so what if taking the easy road is genuinely the life advice I need, and so how should I interpret that and what are the implications?

Third: I should move some things around.

At this point I was frustrated from the texting and all the rest and sarcastically said, “what, like the sofa,” and the psychic snapped “yes if you want,” and that was that.

As it happens I did move the sofa when I got back home. It opened up the sight lines between the rooms and caught the summer sun.

Anyway.

More posts tagged: functional-divination (6).

There’s a subtle interaction in Apple’s new “Live Text” feature which I think is clever (though I would like to know how deliberate it is). We could call it focus and perhaps it’s a tiny clue for how we’ll interact with future intelligent machines.

Text in photos is detected automatically in the new iOS 15 for iPhone, released this week. (I believe Android has had this functionality for some time, but I’m not sure exactly how it works as I’ve been iPhone-only for a couple years.)

Live Text (that’s the Apple support doc) lets you copy and paste text from saved photos or even the live camera and it’s pretty magical: phone numbers from billboards, paragraphs from pics of books, even handwriting on post-its.

Here’s the subtlety, using the built-in Photos app:

• An indicator icon appears when your phone sees text. Tap the icon to highlight the words
• Sometimes the icon doesn’t appear! No text has been automatically recognised. This seems to especially happen with handwriting
• Long press anyway on the text in the photograph - the phone will, if it can, select the text so you can copy/spell check/translate/etc.

I don’t know what to call this “long press and try again even though it didn’t work the first time” mechanic.

Perhaps: try harder?

It’s like the algorithm didn’t have enough confidence first time round to bring it your attention, but with some reassurance it can go ahead.

Tap to focus?

What is focus?

The brain has scarce realtime processing capacity. Attention is the feeling of it being directed.

I think of the attentional system as a pyramid. At the top is focus: it’s singular, you’re conscious, tuned it.

At the bottom is everything you’re not aware of. Your brain throws away background sounds, peripheral vision, the texture of clothes on your skin and the feel of the tongue in your mouth.

In the middle is what your brain is keeping tabs on. It’s unconscious, but if you hear your name spoken or a light flashes in the corner of your eye, the source of the perception will jump up to focus.

There is a catalogue of heuristics that your brain uses to move things up and the down the pyramid. An object growing from a point in your visual field will bring it to attention automatically, for example, but the same object fading in will not. But you can consciously choose to focus too.

So “attention” is this collaboration between the conscious mind and unconscious processes.

The analogy here is to centaurs, Garry Kasparov’s model for AI symbiosis: half intuitive human, guiding up top; half brute force machine providing the horsepower.

With Live Text there is a collaboration between the conscious human user who can step in and focus the show, and the algorithm which keeps tabs on absolutely everything but may need a confidence boost from time to time if it doesn’t automatically bring something to attention. The algorithm, always running, plays the role of the unconscious.

You need both working together.

Live Text without the ability to step in would feel frustrating and disempowering. You would have moments, as a user, where you could plainly read some text, but the computer wasn’t detecting it for whatever reason, and you would lack the ability to say – dammit right there!

But Live Text without automatic detection would be cumbersome, having to point and tap on every single photo to tell it to do something.

There’s a similar interaction in Apple’s new Cinematic Mode, which semi-automatically pulls focus as you shoot video. From this Engadget review: "You can tap on parts of your viewfinder to change focal points as you shoot or let the iPhone decide for you by analyzing who and what’s in the scene."

Centaur film director!

So I want to generalise: every always-running algorithm should have the ability to be steered. Even, sometimes, when it doesn’t think it ought to run, to try harder, focus where it’s told to, execute the next lines of code anyway and to just do its best.

And given our future with machines will be all about these always-running algorithms and processes, maybe this should be a standard user interface widget?

Like: we have tap, swipe, pull to refresh, toggles, lists, and all the rest… can we have a visual representation that says “this is where the algorithm is looking” and what’s more “this is where I want the algorithm to look next.”

Focus is the right underlying metaphor, given the connection to the attentional system and resource allocation, but it feels too abstract.

AN IDEA for that standard UI widget: the playhead.

This is a bit of a reach, so a tangent…

Azlen Elza’s project, Geological Phonograph:

Just like a needle of a phonograph moves along the grooves of a record, what would it sound like to move a needle along the grooves and topology of the Earth? Each mountain, valley, field, or ocean might have its own unique sound, a special timbre or series of harmonics never before heard but waiting to be discovered in the very land beneath our feet.

The project is unfinished, but there is a tantalising photograph of a tiny screen showing a topographical map, twisting contour lines, with neat circles drawn on it - playheads - and a breadboard with four rotary encoders by way of sonic control.

Music is generated and plays as the circles drift over the topography.

There’s something gorgeous here about the collision in scales: ridges on the earth that would take hours to traverse treated as the ridges on a vinyl record, microscopic.

BUT, to me, what’s most thought-provoking is the playhead.

A point of focus that says to the machine: hey, out of the entire surface of the planet, play this exact bit right here.

Go back to what computers are all about, deep down – the Turing machine is a strip of tape filled with data and symbols, and the tape is moved back and forth and executed by, well, a playhead.

All that code running on the phone is a thousand processes and a thousand playheads.

Sometimes the detection algorithm gatekeeps the interaction code, and if the text or face or object isn’t detected, then the playhead never reaches the code for the pop-up menu and the user never sees it.

So I’m imagining a visible playhead, somehow, which the user can can direct to anything on the screen and say, hey, run the code you would run if you detected a phone number right here (or a face, or a block of text, or whatever).

Maybe it’s a long press? And then every available detection algorithm runs in turn.

Maybe you pull down a shade over the screen, and everything that has been detected but at low confidence takes on a little shimmer somehow, like a side mission in a video game?

Maybe it’s a tiny bird that lives behind the notch, and you drag down a trail of seed.

How do we tell the computer where to look? (And then there’s sound.)

SEPARATELY:

Elza’s Geological Phonograph makes me imagine an equivalent Sky Phonograph that is a camera pointing up at the dome of the sky, playing what it sees as it sees it, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

It would do a 2D Fourier transform to pick out frequencies, radially, I think, and play according to that. So a clear or gently overcast sky would have a low hum, but with broken clouds you would hear an orchestra of higher frequency tones, whipping this way and that as the wind picked up.

At night, the stars would sound electronic – a mix of frequencies sure, but clear bright tones layered on one-another, evolving slowly, analogue sounds coming in as clouds appeared, satellites like sliding whistles.

The music of the firmament.

1.

This robot arm can do your tidying up.

TidyBot, a research “mobile manipulator” from Princeton, successfully puts away 85.0% of objects in real-world test scenarios.

It uses large language models to quickly learn preferences (e.g. shirts on the shelf vs in a drawer).

Instruction following used to be one of the great challenges for home robots. LLMs solved that problem at a stroke.

I have previously speculated about portable home robot arms…

From 2021:

it would pick up all the toys and tidy them away, shelve any books, and find the TV remote control and put it back in the regular place.

Or do the washing up. Or open my post.

From 2022:

Knead sourdough. Mix cocktails. Catch tiny house plant flies out of the air.

Or, having used my credit card to buy material, knowing that today’s AIs can already author web apps, build furniture: "hey siri make me a table."

Why not? What gives?

2.

Here’s a very fast robot.

This robot hand will beat you at rock-paper-scissors 100% of the time.

It can recognise a competing hand gesture in 1 millisecond and move its own hand to make the winning gesture to complete at the same time.

At a certain point in the future, it will be cheaper for me to purchase a superhumanly quick catching robot to follow me around in case I drop my iPhone versus buying AppleCare in case of a shattered screen.

I wonder when the cost crossover point will be. Sooner than we imagine, I bet.

3.

A robot bedside lamp that walks like a spider (YouTube).

With this, you don’t have to be afraid when you leave your room to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Except for the fact that you are following a lamp carried by a scuttling ROBOT SPIDER I guess.

The robot is made by user @lanius_movie who is an individual inventor in Japan.

See also their robot spider laundry basket controlled by ChatGPT:

I have started an experiment where housekeeping robots work autonomously based on the conditions inside the home. When the washing machine finishes drying, the walking laundry basket goes ahead and waits in the laundry area. I’m letting ChatGPT handle the decision-making process.

I want this now?

Observations:

1. That laundry basket video? 74 views. Their most popular vid, the spider bedside lamp: 5,130 views. That’s all. Frankly we deserve to live with domestic drudgery if we can’t pay attention to stuff like this.
2. I can’t think of any of my home furnishings that wouldn’t be improved with (a) legs and (b) autonomy.

4.

Here’s a very slow robot for yard work.

In April, Nat Friedman posted on X:

Instead of leaf blowers, I want a quiet little robot that picks leaves up one at a time and puts them in a bag, at night while I’m sleeping.

By August, a small team had made it: here’s a video clip.

And that feels ideal?

Instead of noisy and quick and energy intensive…

…why shouldn’t a robot bask in the sun during the to charge its batteries, and quietly move around picking up leaves one by one all night?

Look, you lazy trillionaires.

Give me a robot that can defrag my home.

Let me point at any object and say where it should be instead.

That toy should be upstairs. Those shoes should be in the tub. Move any used crockery to where the dishwasher is. All t-shirts older than X years should be gathered for recycling.

Overnight, and while we’re out, the domestic defrag robot moves all the things to other rooms, upstairs and downstairs, and stacks like objects neatly.

It doesn’t move at all if anyone is present.

It doesn’t matter how unhurried it is. It has all the time in the world.

More posts tagged: 20-most-popular-in-2024 (20), filtered-for (125), robots (11), speculative-in-2024 (14).

1.

The memetic history of medieval elephants:

After the fall of the Roman Empire, elephants virtually disappeared from Western Europe. Since there was no real knowledge of how this animal actually looked, illustrators had to rely on oral and written transmissions to morphologically reconstruct the elephant, thus reinventing an actual existing creature.

This is a tree diagram covering 700 years of imagined elephants.

I am in love.

2.

If cancer can strike any cell, then why don’t larger animals (with more cells) get cancer more than smaller ones? Peto’s paradox: "the incidence of cancer in humans is much higher than the incidence of cancer in whales. This is despite the fact that a whale has many more cells than a human."

Why? One possibility: hypertumors.

A novel hypothesis resolving Peto’s paradox: since cancer cells are predisposed to be aggressive, maybe mutant cancers appear in the cancers "that then grow as a tumor on their parent tumor, creating a hypertumor that damages or destroys the original."

And:

In larger organisms, tumors need more time to reach lethal size, so hypertumors have more time to evolve.

In smaller animals, hypertumors don’t have time to emerge, so cancer incidence is higher.

3.

News from 1929:

[Professor] Wever and [research assistant] Bray took an unconscious, but alive, cat and transformed it into a working telephone to test how sound is perceived by the auditory nerve.

The cat telephone.

Here’s how: "A telephone wire was attached to the nerve and the other end of the wire was connected to a telephone receiver." Bray spoke into the cat’s ears; Wever listened from a soundproofed room 60 feet away.

The original paper from 1930 states that "speech was transmitted with great fidelity." Alas no clue on the first words spoken over the cat telephone.

(Even more alas for the cat, who didn’t come through the procedure alive.)

The first words spoken over the Chappe telegraph system, which later covered Napoleonic France with over 500 stations, on March 2, 1791: "If you succeed, you will bask in glory."

4.

Trotify. A device that attaches to your bicycle and makes it sound like a horse.

More posts tagged: cat-facts (6), filtered-for (125).

I had some recommendations for more seminal texts in computing:

• Rod McLaren pointed me at Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, on the creation of a new computer at Data General in the 1970s. It appears to be a story of how objects are not invented but argued, cajoled and bullied into life. This very human account reminds me of Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America (Steve Joshua Heims) on the collaborative construction of cybernetics and what it influenced.
• robertogreco sent me Jason Kottke's review of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages (Alex Wright), in which he highlights Paul Otlet's 1934 description of the radiated library: "Over there, in an immense edifice, are all the books and information. From there, the page to be read, in order to know the answer to the question asked by telephone, is made to appear on the screen. The screen could be divided in half, by four, or even ten if multiple texts and documents had to be consulted simultaneously." Sounds like a good reference to chase down. And I don't know why I haven't read Glut yet.
• Andrew Otwell mentioned two books: ESR's The Art of Unix Programming ("1/2 programming and 1/2 cultural history") and The Pattern on the Stone by Danny Hillis. The latter I have been recommended so many times I need to go order it right now.
• Danny O'Brien said simply: HAKMEM? It's "a 1972 "memo" (technical report) of the MIT AI Lab that describes a wide variety of hacks, primarily useful and clever algorithms for mathematical computation. There are also some schematic diagrams for hardware." Aha! But it's odd--it feels like extracts from lab books and answers, and I don't know enough of its history to feel its exciting newness. More research required.
• Michael Dewar brought up Stafford Beer, inventor of the 1970s pre-internet socialist cybernetic economy system Cybersyn. Now I've previously looked at Cybersyn, but didn't realise (as Michael told me) that Beer's book Platform for Change has an essay on it. That's definitely one for the book pile.

Thanks all; loads of reading there. Now I can't find the email - maybe it was IM - but Tom Armitage mentioned The Essential Turing to me. Man, that looks like it's right to the heart of the matter. Maybe I should read it to warm up to Feynmann's Lectures on Physics.

1.

With less human noise to compete with, the birds are able to have ‘deeper conversations,’ says biologist (2020):

Researchers studying birdsong in the San Francisco Bay found the sparrows’ mating calls became quieter, more complex, and just generally “sexier” now that they don’t have to compete with the sounds of cars and cellphones, says study co-author Elizabeth Derryberry.

A side-effect of the pandemic:

Without cars, mating calls travel twice the distance, and also more information can be transmitted.

Does this analogy work? It’s the one they give: "As the party winds down and people go home, you get quieter again, right? You don’t keep yelling, and you maybe have your sort of deeper conversations at that point."

I would love to see a follow-up study? For a brief period, long-form discursive song was favoured. So was there a generation of famous sparrow rhetoricians, like the orators of Ancient Greece? Do they look back on the early 2020s as the golden age of sparrow Homer?

PREVIOUSLY:

Just pandemic things (2023).

2.

Parrots taught to video call each other become less lonely, finds research (The Guardian, 2023): "In total the birds made 147 deliberate calls to each other during the study."

Some would sing, some would play around and go upside down, others would want to show another bird their toys.

More at the FT: Scientists pioneer ‘animal internet’ with dog phones and touchscreens for parrots (paywall-busting link).

26 birds involved … would use the system up to three hours a day, with each call lasting up to five minutes.

Why? Because pet parrots:

typically live alone in their owners’ homes though their counterparts in the wild typically socialise within large flocks.

Flocks.

You know, although the 1:1 parrot-phone is interesting, I wonder whether a zoom conference call would be more appropriate? Or, better, an always-on smart speaker that is a window to a virtual forest, collapsing geography.

Another project, mentioned in that same article:

Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, who heads the university’s Animal-Computer Interaction Group, started by developing a DogPhone that enables animals to contact their owners when they are left alone.

Ref.

Birds of a Feather Video-Flock Together: Design and Evaluation of an Agency-Based Parrot-to-Parrot Video-Calling System for Interspecies Ethical Enrichment, CHI ‘23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

3.

Empty cities, virtual forests… this bird sings across time.

Lubman first became intrigued by reports of a curious echo from the Mayan pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza, in Mexico’s Yucatan region. The odd “chirped” echo resounds from the pyramid’s staircases in response to hand claps of people standing near its base. To hear for himself, Lubman packed up his recording gear and traveled to Chichen Itza last January.

After studying the staircases and analyzing his recordings and sonograms of the echoes, Lubman came back convinced that this was no architectural freak. In his paper, Lubman argued that the design of the staircases was deliberate and that the echo is an ancient recording, coded in stone, of the call of the Maya’s sacred bird, the quetzal.

omg too sublime, I am a sucker for avian archaeoacoustics

PREVIOUSLY:

Microdosing cathedrals and the synthetic acoustic environment of the ancient world (2022).

4.

You will NEVER GUESS what I found out about CATNIP this week.

You know when cats go crazy about catnip and start rubbing their faces all over it?

Yeah well catnip is a mosquito repellent. So it’s evolutionary behaviour to avoid mosquito-borne parasites.

Catnip, Nepeta cataria, contains nepetalactol:

Rubbing behavior transfers nepetalactol onto the faces and heads of respondents where it repels the mosquito, Aedes albopictus. Thus, self-anointing behavior helps to protect cats against mosquito bites.

Not quite the same but:

Tonic water contains quinine which is used to treat malaria and gin & tonic was invented by the East India Company to keep its colonising army safe in India.

Bet the covid vaccine would have been more popular if it also got you drunk. A lesson for next time around.

Ref.

Uenoyama, R., Miyazaki, T., Hurst, J. L., Beynon, R. J., Adachi, M., Murooka, T., Onoda, I., Miyazawa, Y., Katayama, R., Yamashita, T., Kaneko, S., Nishikawa, T., & Miyazaki, M. (2021). The characteristic response of domestic cats to plant iridoids allows them to gain chemical defense against mosquitoes. Science advances, 7(4), eabd9135.

More posts tagged: 20-most-popular-in-2025 (20), filtered-for (125).

Jakob Fricke’s new job board

First things first, please welcome Jakob Fricke to Job Garden! Jakob works with portfolio startups at Samsung NEXT, Samsung’s ventures and partnerships division.

Check out his job board. If you’re in Berlin, there’s a broad array of interesting roles there.

New “Problem with this page?” link

There’s a new feature this week!

It has an obvious purpose and an unobvious purpose.

The obvious purpose is that integrations might break, but there are too many company pages for me to keep an eye on them. So now there’s a way for site visitors to bring problems to my attention. At the bottom of every company page, there’s a “Problem with this page?” link. Follow that link…

Tapping that button will flag this page for manual review.

It appears in a new workflow in the admin system, where I can fix whatever needs fixing, then tap “reviewed to take it off the to-do list.

A company which is not hiring.

The unobvious purpose is due to a page like this: a company which is currently not hiring.

Some stats:

• there are 3 public job boards on Job Garden
• there are 1,274 open jobs
• the site is tracking 102 companies

Of these companies, 17 are not currently hiring. I still track them, because they might start hiring one day. Some of them use a known applicant tracking system, like Workable, so I can know definitively that they’re not hiring.

But 11… they don’t have any sort of careers page all.

What to do? Having zero jobs is important to know; that should be shown on Job Garden. But let’s say they suddenly start hiring — how will Job Garden be able to tell?

Here’s the answer: every so often, Auxy and other companies like it are automatically flagged for manual review. I can then double check that there’s still no careers page, using the same workflow that I’ve developed for dealing with reviews requested by regular site visitors.

And, of course, if the company is now hiring, I can quickly build an integration and get jobs onto the boards of people who endorse it.

What’s neat about Job Garden is that there are now all these little workflows to manage and grow it, with software to help. Because there’s no cash in this — it’s just my time — I’m highly incentivised to make all the workflow tools as efficient as possible.

And also as easy to comprehend as possible! I’d like to be able to perform this kind of maintenance during my downtime, without thinking very hard, maybe while watching TV or waiting for the bus.

So I guess what I’m aiming to do is to turn managing Job Garden into a series of almost context-free micro-tasks, with an easy interface that rewards even five minutes of attention, plus as much automation as possible.

That’s what will give me maximum time for the creative work of developing the site itself.

More posts tagged: job-garden (53).

I suggested last week that Claude Code needs elevator music…

Like, in the 3 minutes while you’re waiting for your coding agent to write your code, and meanwhile you’re gazing out the window and contemplating the mysteries of life, or your gas bill, maybe some gentle muzak could pass the time?

WELL.

Mike Davidson a.k.a. Mike Industries only went and built it.

Get Claude Muzak here (GitHub):

Elevator music for your Claude Code tasks! Automatically plays background music while Claude is working, because coding is better with a soundtrack.

Easy to install. Includes three pitch-perfect elevator music MP3s to get you started.

Wild. Wonderful.

Although:

Boris Smus adds a wrinkle: "I do my Claude codes at least two at a time. Is there polyphonic elevator music?"

YES PLEASE.

btw I’ve heard this a few times, Claude Code experts do indeed task up multiple claudes in parallel. Either working on different parts of the same app, or entirely different projects.

I would love to see what a custom UI to manage multiple claudes even looks like. Just, zero downtime, giving go-ahead permissions to one instance, pulling the throttle on another, instructing yet another…

I have a buddy who builds UI for traders at a global bank. The way he describes it, the traders are no longer doing individual stock trades. Instead they have a whole bunch of algorithms written by the quants running high-frequency trading on the market.

And the traders’ job is to sit there taking in the various signals and numbers, I imagine like Ozymandius bathing in the screens, "just me and the world," and instinctively steer the ship by ramping different HFT algorithms up and down.

The UI is to facilitate this fugue state crossed with a airplane pilot console situation.

One day driving our claude swarms will work like this.

So polyphonic Claude Codes?

Imagine that each claude instance plays just one track each and they come together…

I’m imagining Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Claudes.

Or to put it another way, something like video game music which is layered and looped and adaptive and I have discussed before (2020). In Red Dead Redemption,

the music reacts in real-time to the player’s actions … a more foreboding sound is required during moments of suspense. All of these loops have to segue into each other as events evolve on screen.

So the experience of playing RDR is that you’re galloping along at sunset in this beautiful American south-west landscape, and you notice the music quietly weave in an ominous new refrain… so you look out for what’s about to happen before it happens.

I want my polyphonic Claude Codes to intensify the minor key rhythms as the code tests fail and fail and fail again, before it is even escalated to me, drumbeats over the horizon, the distant rumble of thunder, approaching…

Also mentioned in that post:

Matthew Irvine Brown’s project Music for Shuffle (2011) which he composed for the wonderful belt-clip-mounted iPod Shuffle:

music specifically for shuffle mode – making use of randomness to make something more than the sum of its parts.

18 tracks sub 10 seconds each that can be played continuously in any order.

Like… Anthropic and OpenAI and Google, they must have arts programs, right? Are they commissioning for projects like this? Because they should.

There’s a movement called the circular economy which is about designing services that don’t include throwing things away. There is no “away.”

For example: CupClub (which we invested in during my time with R/GA Ventures).

CupClub provides closed-loop coffee-cups-as-a-service to cafes. For example, the cafe in an office block. Reusable cups are dropped, by customers, into special bins. The bins are collected, and the cups washed and recirculated.

And then there’s this other thing, another hint, the Engage:

It’s a fully operational Game Boy and can play any of the console’s titles, from Tetris to Super Mario Land. It harvests energy from five small rows of solar panels on its face and from button presses made by the user. In its present state, that’s enough to power the Engage for around 10 seconds, depending on the game.

That report on CNET is a pretty good long read. The Engage is a research prototype right now.

But you know… energy harvesting? I’ve talked before about putting voice control in everything, and with super low power embedded machine learning, and energy harvested from RF/solar/kinetics, maybe we could have voice control for even single purpose, intermittently powered devices?

Another datapoint:

In the news this week: Google is not just carbon neutral (that happened in 2007) but it has now offset its entire carbon debt back to when it was founded.

From that same article: "In January Microsoft revealed plans to become ‘carbon negative’ by 2030." (Which is a term I hope we hear more of. Corporations going carbon negative is a marketing battle I’d like to see.)

Net zero carbon is great. Better to produce less in the first place, of course.

And carbon is proxy measure to just one non-renewable: fossil fuels. There are many other materials that we extract from the earth, use once, then throw away.

A non-extractive economy is going to look very different to today’s economy. These points feel opposed somehow but they are part of the same movement:

• With CupClub, it’s all about infrastructure.
• With the battery-free Game Boy, it’s untethered from infrastructure: once manufactured, no nationwide electricity grid is required to play.

We’ll need better tools to track and measure. There will be new patterns for new types of services. New technologies to build new products. New language. So it’s fascinating seeing the pieces gradually come together.

But I wonder what the major enabling technologies will be? What are we still missing?

And if the totemic form of the internet economy has been the captured marketplace (Facebook, bringing together advertisers and audiences; Uber, bringing together riders and drivers), a model that somehow conceals the material itself – what will be the form of the non-extractive corporation?

References.

Jasper de Winkel, Vito Kortbeek, Josiah Hester, and Przemyslaw Pawelczak. 2020. Battery-Free Game Boy. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 4, 3, Article 111 (September 2020), 34 pages.

A bunch of texts about computing:

My friend David Smith has ferried to me a first edition of Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974). This is extremely good. Computer Lib established the computer as something with which people could be creative; something with which people could create art (oh, and make their lives better).

I also have Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos (1968) on DVD. He had it at a conference I was at, and was copying it for a friend... I was nearby and happened to have a DVD burner... I asked if I could snag a copy. It's pretty good quality; I'm very pleased.

Both Engelbart and Nelson read Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, As We May Think. Now that'd be an issue to own. Bush put the US scientists on a war footing, and in this article gave something back in the form of the memex: a kind of hypertext, knowledge-management device for linking and sharing articles and pictures, based on microfiche and cameras. Engelbart read this article as a radar technician in the Philippines, put the ideas together with the radar screen he used, and realised that computers didn't need to be used just as calculators to figure out ballistics--they could be used as personal helpers, in collaboration with people in an interactive way. The 1968 demo included co-working, hypertext, links, outlines, cursors, video conferencing, and the mouse.

Another book I have is Lion's Commentary on Unix 6th Edition (1996 reprint). It circulated illegally for some time, only being published 20 years after it was written. The whole operating system is short - less than 9,000 lines - and it rewards reading. Want to know what a process is? Here you go. And a file? It's in there. Magical.

And so three questions:

• What other seminal texts are there?
• What should I investigate further? I should take time to look into Lettvin's What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain (1959) with with Maturana, McCulloch, and Pitts. The latter two mathematically modelled the neuron, and fed substantially into cybernetics. Cybernetics was heavily influenced by anthropology, and also by the feedback mechanisms in anti-aircraft guns in World War II (itself modelled on brains, perhaps?). The theoretical structure of the brain inspired the earliest computer architectures. It's all tangled up.
• What is there, from the last 10 years or so, that will have this impact? Ben Russell's Headmap Manifesto (1999) is on my hard drive.

Recommendations?

1.

Hello, World!

From the Jargon File: "Traditionally, the first program a C coder is supposed to write in a new environment is one that just prints “hello, world” to standard output."

C is an ancient language. The first documented appearance of “Hello, World!” is in the 1972 training manual for C’s predecessor language B, written by Brian Kernighan (source).

I use it, whenever I’m writing a new program in any language. Perhaps you do too. It’s half habit, half being connected with the lineage, and half a proof that everything deeper in the stack is working as expected… the terminal is outputting text so I can see it; the language interpreter was compiled properly; the OS has enough memory; the electrons are still doing their electronic thing – all these things have to be tested once, they can’t be assumed.

2.

Ich bin ein Paradigm Shifter, "Karlheinz Brandenburg, the inventor of the MP3 and his muse: Suzanne Vega."

MP3 is remarkable not just because it makes music into a very small digital file format, but because that file format was the lynchpin of an entire industry. Files can be played, bought, and sold. A multiplayer economy! The power of the file!

"To create MP3, Brandenburg had to appreciate how the human ear perceives sound."

He heard Suzanne Vega’s wonderful acappella song Tom’s Diner playing down a corridor and adopted it.

Because the song depends on very subtle nuances of Vega’s inflection, the algorithm would have to be very, very good to select the most important parts of the sound file and discard the rest. So Brandenburg tested each refinement of his system with “Tom’s Diner.” He wound up listening to the song thousands of times, and the result was a code that was heard around the world. When an MP3 player compresses music by anyone from Courtney Love to Kenny G, it is replicating the way that Brandenburg heard Suzanne Vega.

3.

In 1974, Martin Newell made important contributions to the rendering of 3D graphics as part of his PhD at the University of Utah.

But he needed a sufficiently complex object for his demos.

One day over tea, Newell told his wife Sandra that he needed more interesting models. Sandra suggested that he digitize the shapes of the tea service they were using, a simple Melitta set from a local department store. It was an auspicious choice: The curves, handle, lid, and spout of the teapot all conspired to make it an ideal object for graphical experiment. Unlike other objects, the teapot could, for instance, cast a shadow on itself in several places. Newell grabbed some graph paper and a pencil, and sketched it.

The Utah teapot.

These days, the Utah teapot has achieved legendary status. It’s a built-in shape in many 3D graphics software packages used for testing, benchmarking, and demonstration. Graphics geeks like to sneak it into scenes and games as an in-joke, an homage to their countless hours of rendering teapots; hence its appearances in Windows, Toy Story, and The Simpsons.

The traditional test that you run through the pipeline to check everything’s working. I guess every specialism has something like this – testing, testing, 1, 2, 1, 2. I wonder if they have a generic name. It would be fun to collect them.

4.

The Forgotten ‘China Girls’ Hidden at the Beginning of Old Films (Atlas Obscura): "Used as quality control, these haunting images were never meant to be public."

Faces of people (typically women, almost always white) at the beginning of a film reel, to help the projectionist check that everything is functioning as expected.

The image carries bias with it. Colour film was terrible at depicting people of colour for years and years and years, with the issue being addressed only in the 1970s in response to advertisers: "wood furniture and chocolate makers began complaining that Kodak film wasn’t capturing the difference in wood grains and chocolate types." Shocking.

TANGENTIALLY:

Beagle 2 was the ESA lander dispatched to the surface of Mars in 2003… and lost. Cameras on landers have calibration images for colour correction etc, checking against a known image, and Beagle 2 used a custom Damien Hirst spot painting.

Here it is: “Beagle 2 Calibration Target”, 2002, natural pigments on aluminium, .35 x 3 x 3 in.

When we get people to Mars, if we settle the surface, they should go to where the lander was eventually found (it was found by satellite in 2015) and build a gallery around it. Leave the art in situ.

More posts tagged: filtered-for (125), kinda-about-colour (9), sound-and-music (17).

Right now there is a queue to observe the Queen’s lying-in-state at Westminster Hall.

The route runs along the south bank of the Thames, past Big Ben, past the big wheel, past Tate Modern, past Borough Market, past Tower Bridge. The queue is currently 4.9 miles (BBC News) and is touching Southwark Park, which is not a place I associate with the centre of town.

Right now the wait is 14 hours. It’s outdoors (the weather isn’t great). It moves 24 hours a day; there’s no camping out or sleeping on the ground. A continuous slow progress.

The front of the queue is being broadcast live by the BBC (the lying-in-state will last 4 days) and watching it has a meditative magic: "And the queue shuffles ever forward in quiet contemplation."

It’s easy to laugh or to be cynical but I want to note this moment. It’s special.

It is known as The Queue.

Ian of Ian Visits narrated his experience of The Queue on Twitter. Here’s the thread (unrolled). It took him 8 hours. He took photos along the way.

Reading around, people are making friends in The Queue. It’s well managed – you can stop off at one of the 500 loos along the way and get back in using your wristband. There’s a bag drop.

People are talking about The Queue as something wonderfully and uniquely British. Here’s a Twitter thread from @curiousiguana:

The Queue is a triumph of Britishness. It’s incredible. …

It is the motherlode of queues. It is art. It is poetry. It is the queue to end all queues. It opened earlier today and is already 2.2 miles long. They will close it if it gets to FIVE MILES. That’s a queue that would take TWO HOURS TO WALK at a brisk pace. …

The BBC has live coverage of The Queue on BBC One, and a Red Button service showing the front bit of The Queue.

NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD JOIN THE QUEUE AND YET STILL THEY COME. “Oh, it’ll only be until 6am on Thursday, we can take soup”.

Queues mean waiting for handouts and dole queues, yet also decency and fair play.

Queuing as part of British national character was forged in propaganda during the Second World War (BBC News):

“Propaganda at the time was all about doing your duty and taking your turn,” says Bradley. “It was a way the government tried to control a situation in uncertain times.”

We think of ourselves as good queuers, now. 80 years later and it’s a story we tell ourselves, though at the same time we take it for granted.

Perhaps, with a bit of distance, we’d see queuing for the ritual it is. We’d apply to add it to UNESCO’s lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage. We should!

Or perhaps it’s not so unique.

For queuing is pilgrimage. Reading the stories in the papers of the people in The Queue, or following them on Twitter, there are all these aspects bound up: respect, struggle, meditation, endurance, collectivism (yet also: people I know who are going individually because their friends don’t want to join them), journey, devotion, transformation. You can hear about all of these, behind the words.

The Queue = pilgrimage.

The filthy journey to and from Glasto = pilgrimage.

Hajj = pilgrimage.

I can’t help thinking how good it would be for our (a) mental health and (b) collective empathy if we had a proper shared cultural tradition and understanding of pilgrimage.

I barely have that understanding! Enough to recognise pilgrimage when it’s happening, but not enough to truly unpack it.

It’s such an alien term, at least for me. It seems funny to use it. And yet! I feel that aha response when I say it out loud!

I’ve undergone pilgrimage myself, I see now in retrospect. It’s not something I want to talk about here, it’s private, but it’s enough to say that what is happening with The Queue resonates strongly.

And there are personal pilgrimages! Tiny pilgrimages! Mundane pilgrimages! What is the Capital Ring Walk if not a pilgrimage to London? Why else make a spectacularly disproportionate trip to a certain gallery or spot on the coast or restaurant to have an experience that has deep meaning, a meaning that makes no sense to anyone else?

Imagine, in the midst of this Culture War, people from different backgrounds and beliefs suddenly able to make the connection between similar acts of devotion and journey and saying to one another: ah I get it now, we’re the same you and me.

Pilgrimage seems like a human universal. I wonder what it is, really; I wonder what it fulfils in us. Maybe it’s not important to answer that.

My takeaway is that I’m going to work harder to identify my own moments of pilgrimage, secular and spiritual, established and vernacular, big and small, and I’ll do my best to name each moment as such, and to give it the space and the weight they deserve.

Formula E (the electric version of Formula 1) has FANBOOST which is maybe the tech equivalent of some kind of distributed good fortune magick?

The five drivers who receive the highly-acclaimed FANBOOST – as voted for by you, the fans - are awarded a significant burst of power, which they can deploy in a five-second window during the second half of the race.

You vote on the website, or by invoking the drivers name on Twitter as a hashtag.

I am obsessed with this idea.

Because it is obviously bonkers. It’s action-at-a-distance, which is weird. Concretely, it breaks the rules of the game, because why can’t a car use its battery as it chooses.

And yet it makes intuitive sense?

Like of course if a million people WILL the car to go faster, it should go faster? Deep down, I think that’s what humans believe.

And then, in football: what is the home advantage except for fanboost by sheer weight of numbers?

It’s definitely to do with people. As discovered in lockdown, home advantage disappears in empty stadiums: "We have found that the considerable home advantage in football is on average almost entirely wiped out in closed doors matches."

I posted yesterday about isoprene in the breath as a person-to-person stress transmitter.

Monique van Dusseldorp on Twitter thought about conferences: " Having been in conference rooms for 30 years - on stage, backstage, in the room - I thought it was heartbeats falling into step that make you “feel” the audience. Matt Webb pulls together some info that is completely new to me and makes total sense. Breath."

And I know EXACTLY what she’s talking about. Speaking to an audience of 1,000 people, when I get in sync I disassociate – I feel like I lift up and my words are the exact right ones, the only ones for that moment.

So if you’re a speaker at a rally of thousands of people, all yelling and therefore projecting their breath right at you, and you pick up the mood and rile them right back, a positive feedback loop of accumulating isoprene – well, you can see how those rallies in the 1940s got so elevated.

And football matches: a stadium of 60,000 directing their isoprene right at the players?

What gets me still is FANBOOST.

Virtual isoprene.

I wonder if this kind of idea could help in group video calls?

Say, monitor the gaze of all participants, add it all up, and give everyone an individual, dynamic attention rank.

People with high rank should magically find it easier to get into the conversation; their noise cancelling threshold is set to let them speak a few milliseconds quicker, that kind of thing, or their volume is set slightly higher.

Dunno.

I’m sure I’ve got some friends who know about magick and have talked to me about this kind of stuff before. Anything I should read? Feels like some strong inspiration in this area.

Prayer.

I’m reminded of a paper I read way back in 2002 (that link is my blog post at the time). It was printed in a paranormal special edition of the British Medical Journal.

Let’s put replicability aside for a second. Here’s the punchline, from the abstract linked from that post.

Remote intercessory prayer said for a group of patients is associated with a shorter hospital stay and shorter duration of fever in patients with a bloodstream infection, even when the intervention is performed 4–10 years after the infection

Remote prayer. PRAYERBOOST.

Retroactive. Better outcomes, even 4–10 years after the patient leaves hospital. Wh-wh-what?

More posts tagged: taking-magic-seriously (15).

1.

How fast does time move in fiction?

Fascinating result:

I started to wonder how much time passes, on average, across a page of a novel. Literary-critical tradition suggested that there had been a pretty stable balance between “scene” (minute-by-minute description) and “summary” (which may cover weeks or years) until modernists started to leave out the summary and make every page breathlessly immediate. But when I sat down with two graduate students (Sabrina Lee and Jessica Mercado) to manually characterize a thousand passages from fiction, we found instead a long trend. The average length of time represented in 250 words of fiction had been getting steadily shorter since the early eighteenth century.

Measuring the "average length of time described in 250 words of narration" was:

• some days, in books written in the 1720s e.g. Gulliver’s Travels
• just under an hour, in the 1990s

The original research was done by hand (well, by grad students, same same). That article is about whether AI can be effective as a tool to make the same estimations…

…which makes me wonder, not having any grad students of my own, what other hidden numbers can be extracted from prose by GPT-4?

2.

I read the other day about the origin of flint, which is wild.

The geology of where I grew up was chalk. Meaning that, as previously discussed, my mental picture of a “stream” is actually a chalk stream, and it turns out this is globally peculiar.

Chalk was formed deep under the ancient oceans of the Earth, from vast quantities of compressed microscopic plankton.

There was also a lot of flint. Using flint for tools in the palaeolithic made sense to me because, well, flint litters the landscape. Not true! It is rare! But, for me, as a kid, you wonder at the colours of flint (and try to smack things with it), draw with chalk, and make things out of the clay you dig up.

Anyway, flint! It never really occurred to me to ask why chalk and flint are co-present.

Apparently the formation of flint was a mystery until the 1980s.

It’s also oceans, it turns out.

Now get this:

Flint was formed in soft, limy mud on the floor of the Chalk Sea some 80 million years ago. It is made of quartz, or silica, which came from the skeletons of tiny sponges that lived in this tropical sea. Their skeletons were dissolved in the seawater and therefore the mud on the sea floor contained silica in small amounts. … Some flint beds can be traced for hundreds of kilometres.

The bizarre shapes of flint nodules, with spiky protrusions and holes, are thought to be due to flint replacing the chalk in the burrows of marine animals such as arthropods that were living beneath the Chalk Sea floor, and it was this connection with burrows that proved to be the key to how flint was formed. The process of flint formation was originally the subject of much argument and was only finally worked out in the 1980s when it was established that flint formed preferentially in burrows due to the presence of decaying organic matter, and also at the ‘redox boundary’, below which anaerobic, sulphate-reducing bacteria predominate. The shape of a flint nodule is therefore often the shape of an animal’s burrow, with the surface often showing the burrowed fabric of the chalk it has replaced.

What?

WHAT??

Not only does flint represent 80 million year old sea sponges, but the shape of the rock is a cast of an arthropod burrow?

And then it was the key material for tool-making by humans for about 3 million years, driving trade routes, and allowing hunting, fabrication, and all the rest?

Deep time vertigo.

3.

Amelia Wattenberger, AI research engineer, has recently prototype a writing app thathighlights sentences according to how abstract or concrete they are.

Wattenberger quotes Robin Sloan, friend of this parish, about the ladder of abstraction:

Good writers move up and down a ladder of language. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like freedom and literacy. Beware of the middle, the rungs of the ladder where bureaucracy and technocracy lurk.

So… she can reveal that? Astounding.

Read: Getting creative with embeddings (2023) – and check out the screenshots.

This works because each sentence can be placed, using large language models, in “embedding space”, a 1,000-dimensional space where two sentences that mean roughly the same thing will be close together, even if they use different words. But also all the abstract sentences will be closer together versus the concrete ones, and so on.

LOOK:

I realised the other day that this is how I read long articles online:

• read the headline
• read the penultimate para
• scroll wildly up and down reading odd words
• if it’s good, read backwards for a couple sections
• if it’s still good, read forwards from ~1/4 of the way in
• ignore the beginning/end

I’m not saying this is right. I’m just saying that it turns out that this is what I do. It’s probably a symptom of some attentional dysfunction.

Secretly I think it’s because a lot of long-form is filler (including my own). I need to squeeze the fruit before taking it home.

But I wonder whether there are hidden patterns in the essays that I do like, that Wattenberger’s work could reveal:

• speed of ideas: per-sentence velocity through embedding space
• volatility in the abstract/concrete mix – could we Fourier transform Wattenberger’s visualisation and see what frequency mix I like?
• a new scale that shows semantic opposition/agreement vs my own corpus of notes.

Can’t wait to try some of these experiments myself. We are so early with this new technology. We’re imagination bottlenecked. There’s low-hanging fruit for the next decade.

4.

From Greg Egan’s 1997 novel Diaspora, this is the first chapter, about the birth of a machine intelligence - not quite an AI, but a human hosted on a computational substrate - from its own point of view.

Like a baby learning how to use its eyes and hands, and working towards establishing self-identity.

Don’t skip bits like I would, it’s well worth reading properly.

Orphanogenesis by Greg Egan.

More posts tagged: filtered-for (125), gpt-3 (32), the-ancient-world-is-now (16).

I hope libraries are figuring out how to archive today’s absolutely remarkable but potentially illicitly created AIs.

Large language models like GPT-3 are trained by hoovering up all the text on the internet. Image synthesis AIs are a language model plus another AI trained on all the images that are similarly hoovered up. It’s all pretty indiscriminate.

FOR EXAMPLE: Andy Baio and Simon Willison built an interactive explorer for some of the training images in Stable Diffusion (exploring 12 million of the 2.3 billion included) - unsurprisingly there’s a lot of commercial art there. And that’s why you can say “in the style of David Hockney” or whatever in an image prompt and it comes back looking like a previously-unknown Hockey print.

ASIDE:

Take a moment to visit Everest Pipkin’s project Lacework (2020) in which they viewed, personally, every single one of the one million 3 second videos in the MIT Moments In Time dataset._

Very slowly, over and over, my body learns the rules and edges of the dataset. I come to understand so much about it; how each source is structured, how the videos are found, the words that are caught in the algorithmic gathering.

I don’t think anyone, anywhere will have such an understanding of what constitutes an AI, and given the growth in datasets, I don’t think anyone could ever again.

"Repetition is devotional," says Pipkin.

It brings tears to my eyes. So good!

Who owns style?

When it comes to code the problem is even more pointed because code often explicitly has a license attached. GitHub Copilot is an amazing code autocompletion AI – it’s like pair programming. (I can see a near-term future where being a human engineer is more like being an engineering manager today, and you spend your days briefing and reviewing pull requests from your team of AI copilot juniors.)

But it’s trained on GPL code. When code is licensed with GPL, the authors say that it’s free to use, but any code based on it must also be licensed as GPL. Viral freedom. Now, if I learn how to code by reading GPL code and then go on to work on proprietary code, that’s fine. But used as AI training data?

Legally GitHub Copilot is probably in the clear but it’s also probably not what the authors of the open source, GPL code would have intended.

Simon Willison talks about vegan datasets: "I’m not qualified to speak to the legality of this. I’m personally more concerned with the morality." - It’s a useful distinction.

There’s a lot to figure out. Have I been trained? is a tool to bring some transparency: as an artist you can search for your own work in the image synthesis training data. It’s a first of a series of tools from a new organisation called Spawning, also including Source+:

… Dryhurst and Herndon are developing a standard they’re calling Source+, which is designed as a way of allowing artists to and opt into - or out of - allowing their work being used as training data for AI. (The standard will cover not just visual artists, but musicians and writers, too.)

Provenance, attribution, consent, and being compensated for one’s labour (and being able to opt in/out of the market) are all important values. But I can’t quite visualise the eventual shape of the accommodation. The trained AIs are just too valuable; the voices of artists, creatives, and coders are just too diffuse.

v buckingham calls this "copyright laundering," as previously discussed in this post about ownership, in which I also said:

Maybe there is a market for a future GPT-PD, where PD stands for public domain, and the AI model is guaranteed to be trained only on public domain and out-of-copyright works.

And litigiously cautious megacorporations like Apple will use GPT-PD for their AI needs, such as autocomplete and auto-composing emails and how Siri has conversations and so on.

The consequence will be that Gen Beta will communicate with the lilt and cadence of copyright-expired Victorian novels, and anyone older (like us) will carry textual tells marking us as born in the Pre Attribution Age.

Perhaps:

GPT-3 and the Laion-5b dataset, with their gotta-catch-em-all approaches to hoovering up training data, will in the future be seen as just a blip.

ALSO we’re poisoning the groundwater.

Attribution or not, GPT-3, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and the rest were trained on an internet where synthesised text and images were mostly absent.

DALL-E at least watermarks its output with a rainbow telltale in the bottom right, so these can be excluded from future sets of training data, but other synthesisers don’t.

What freaky feedback loops come about when models are being trained on data swept up monthly, but the data has a high proportion of output from previous models?

Long story short, today’s AIs are unique, trained as they are on pure, unethically harvested data.

Given all of the above, they are perhaps the most complete models we’ll ever get? Future datasets will be edited and will be muddied.

And given that: we have an obligation to save them, right? Troubling provenance or no.

In a funny way I’m reminded of the immortal cell line of Henrietta Lacks – the moral framework wasn’t in place in 1951 to see what we see clearly now: that it wasn’t ok to collect and appropriate Lacks’ cells. But the HeLa cancer cell line has been used in all kinds of advances over the years, and at the point where the moral framework was established, the choice was made to keep the cell line going. (I’d love to learn more about the moral philosophy of this one.)

Tricky.

Anyway.

How does a library save a snapshot of the current DALL-E, the current GPT-3, the current Stable Diffusion? Complete, usable, and frozen.

There’s going to be pressure to not retain these AIs, given the stolen words, art, and code inside them. If not that then the march of upgrades: version 1.1, version 2, a database migration, and at a certain point the mostly proprietary tooling to access the original version of the synthesis models will be gone too. It won’t seem important.

How can they be kept for future research? And for just, you know, history.

I hope there are librarians and archivists working on this, today. I hope that folks from the Internet Archive are already in conversation with OpenAI.

And:

What happens when we find, buried in the model weights, data that is as culturally sensitive as - say - some of the objects appropriated and kept in the British Museum? What arguments are there to be had about data, in centuries to come?

More posts tagged: speculative-in-2022 (20).

I wonder what gaseous social cues we’re missing, working remotely.

Like, there’s that paper from 2016 about isoprene emissions in human breath…

First, attach a mass spectrometer to the outflow vent of a movie theatre. (They used a theatre for this experiment because it’s a closed box with lots of people in it, amplifying the signal. A good controlled environment.) Then measure the gas quantities every 30 seconds. And:

In Hunger Games: Catching Fire, for example, during the “suspense” scenes–when Jennifer Lawrence was in particular danger–the carbon dioxide, acetone, and isoprene levels in the theater air predictably increased.

Check out the graphs in this other article, which continues: " Nearly identical peak-trough-peak patterns occurred during all four screenings of the film in December 2013, allowing the researchers to blindly identify the film just by looking at its unique, air-based fingerprint."

RELATED: you can also tell what someone’s watching by looking at the electricity consumption of the TV. Multimedia Content Identification Through Smart Meter Power Usage Profiles (2012, pdf) shows that if you measure power draw through a smart meter, twice a second, the fingerprint can identify the movie.

Now, it’s not clear whether isoprene changes are "signals to one another, or simply byproducts of emotion-based reactions."

But, given an available signal, it would be crazy of the human body to not take it into account.

And if isoprene, then what else? Oxytocin has an effect when delivered into the nose - is it also exhaled, and so passed from one person to another? And other gases in the breath?

Non-verbal, non-visual coordination of small groups, carried in the breath.

The “energy in the room” will be dominated by those who project their breath more – i.e. those who look up and speak the most.

(That’s assuming that gas exhalation levels are equal between people. Given my hunch that charisma is physiological, maybe naturally dominant, charismatic people are simply isoprene super-emitters?)

Does a room carry the emotional memory of the people who were last in it? For how long? Does a sofa absorb isoprene and outgas it slowly over a period of weeks?

Are consensus, compromising political decisions better made in person or over gas-shielding video calls?

Is it possible to carry these group-coordination signals over the internet? Perhaps not as gas… but how about a tiny mass spectrometer next to my laptop mic as an isoprene sensor and, at the other end, mixing tension-inducing infrasound into the audio channel?

I wonder how a gas-sensitive alien would see the world.

Would lying, or broaching a difficult topic, look like a person blowing up a balloon? Would they see a group as a struggle between different coloured gases, slowly coming to an agreement – or, in a different group, fluctuating between different modes?

Like fireflies synchronising. (Could we think of movies as artificial synchronisers, isoprene metronomes for the group? What is we had 45 minute isoprene metronomes for teams, programmable for different types of meetings?)

Perhaps, through the alien, we’d discover that dogs remove isoprene from the air, but don’t emit it, or something like that. The alien would call pets “isoprene sinks,” and they would see them as functioning like the control rods in nuclear reactors that soak up the neutrons.

More posts tagged: speculative-in-2020 (18).

I picked up some hot cross buns yesterday as a mid-afternoon snack. They were tasty but transgressive – hot cross buns are an Easter food and it’s September.

Lots of foods have an annual periodicity. Pumpkin in the autumn, summer is for Pimm’s.

There are longer periodicities.

Hamburgers seem to be renewed every decade or so. Fat gourmet ones in the early 2000s. Premium fast food style in the 2010s. Smashed from 2020.

Pizza is on a 20 year cycle, at least in the UK – Italian style in the 70s, deep pan American in the 90s, sourdough from the mid 2010s.

In economics, Kondratiev waves are long 40-60 year cycles – we’re ascending the 6th K-wave right now.

Like, are there K-waves for food?

Can we predict the next breakthrough food?

I have two hunches.

One is mustard.

So we all know about the hot sauce revival. There are some amazing small batch fermented hot sauces here in Peckham, south London. A local craft beer + hot sauce shop has shelves with incredible variety.

If you look at hot sauce on Google Trends you can just about trace hot sauce up from its last trough around 2008, to when I would suggest it peaked about 2 years ago – that’s our half period.

Which gives us a 28 year condiment periodicity, call it a C-wave.

Now, mustard last peaked in the 90s. At the time Grey Poupon brand dijon mustard was strongly associated with wealth. Wikipedia:

in 1992, Grey Poupon had the strongest correlation between a person’s income and whether or not they used the product.

32 years ago.

i.e. in accordance with condiment wave theory we’re overdue another mustard peak.

Mustard heat is incredible – there’s nothing like mustard so hot it clears your sinuses and makes your eyes water with English sausage or a ham sandwich on white bread. It’s in the family of horseradish and wasabi and the heat is so, so different from the chilli pepper heat of hot sauces.

But just like hot sauces, there’s huge variety.

Just downstairs we have: English hot mustard, powdered mustard, Dijon mustard (French, made with white wine), whole grain mustard, and American yellow mustard, not counting unsweetened French mayonnaise (containing mustard) and whole mustard seeds (a spice). We use all of them on the regular.

Yet.

When I look at the mustard labels, there’s nothing new there. No 2020s challenger brands.

There’s no small batch local mustard, despite mustard being a major crop just 100 miles away.

There’s no Scoville scale for mustard that we talk about and print on labels and dare friends to try.

No mustard nerds hanging out on some daunting subreddit gatekeeping Dijon sub-varieties; no direct-to-consumer mustard tasting monthly subscription box plaguing my social ads trying to cash in.

We are totally due a mustard C-wave peak. You heard it here first.

My second hunch is Kendal Mint Cake which is an energy bar for hikers originally from the 1880s, taken on Hillary’s 1953 ascent of Everest, and it is pure white sugar, nothing else except peppermint, and it used to be everywhere, like right next to the confectionery and in every shop back in the 1980s.

Think: a peppermint pattie without the chocolate enrobing.

Nowadays energy foods are either cereal bars (the health angle) or high calorie running gels (scientific efficiency) or drinks (functional).

I went looking for Kendal Mint Cake the other day in a local deli.

It’s the kind of thing they would stock, especially with the traditional packaging – but no.

Anyway, mint cake is due a comeback. I’d keep the old fashioned brand, but amplify the angle that there’s no grains or complex carbs or gluten or weird additives. Straight shot glucose and mint, bam.

28 year C-waves.

Are there periodicities that are even longer?

For instance: I bet we’ll see a resurgence of meat consumption, and that would be the reversal of a 100 year trend.

Meat 2.0 will be wrapped in something else, a counterculture omnivore diet, maybe a practice of gratitude or it’ll go alongside something like calorie counting but for climate impact, to de-fang one major meat downside.

CONCEPT: Carbon Counting?? Like calorie counting or 10,000 steps or closing your rings only for your personal daily CO2E budget. How about a group-based accountability system like Weight Watchers?

Although. Despite my best efforts I haven’t been able to revive Beef Fizz from the 1950s as carbonated gravy.

So maybe longer waves aren’t waves at all, just things permanently going out of fashion.

Longer still.

How far back can we go?

The last universal common ancestor of plants and animals was 1.6 billion years ago, when the lines split.

The ultimate super long C-wave would be photosynthesis revival.

I mean, to put it more practically:

When will we have the first adult human able to supplement their food with energy from chlorophyll in the skin? 2040? 2050? The year 3000?

They can make mice that glow green with DNA from bioluminescent jellyfish.

So imagine CRISPR or another genetic toolkit used to splice sunlight-powered energy producers into every cell.

Actually not absurd perhaps!

The genes exist and are available, some animals photosynthesise: "The Oriental hornet relies on a pigment in its exoskeleton, called xanthopterin, to turn sunlight into electrons."

Alas. We need more skin:

To produce roughly 60kg of ATP, a typical adult woman therefore requires around 700g of glucose per day. Given the maximum known rates of photosynthesis in higher plants and assuming that the surface area of an adult woman’s skin is around 1.6 m2, a woman with green skin could produce a highly disappointing 1% of her daily demand for glucose through photosynthesis. So to meet her energy demands, a photosynthesising woman would have to have a lot more skin. Indeed, roughly a tennis court’s worth.

Then the question is how you expose all that skin to sunlight.

The obvious answer is to flatten the skin expanse and use the surface area to sit on the air cushion itself, a future race of humans like manta rays basking above the clouds, lofting on thermals, naked post-humans, bright green, paper thin with gently billowing tennis court flaps of skin spread between delicately boned limbs, laughing and gossiping high in the atmosphere, sugar-drunk on sunlight.

An unlikely comeback.

You and I can stick with the mustard.

More posts tagged: food-and-so-on (12), speculative-in-2024 (14).

In the long run, is economics the mould that shapes society?

I’ve been learning about the Late Bronze Age collapse recently (that’s the Wikipedia page).

A period of a few decades "between c. 1200 and 1150 BCE saw the cultural collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms, of the Kassites in Babylonia, of the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and the Levant, and the New Kingdom of Egypt; the destruction of Ugarit and the Amorite states in the Levant, the fragmentation of the Luwian states of western Anatolia, and a period of chaos in Canaan."

These civilisations all interacted with one another, and had a carefully negotiated co-existence – "the first international diplomatic system known to us" – discovered via a cache of clay tablets found in Egypt called the Amarna letters.

After collapse: trade and diplomacy shrunk; literacy and quality of life decreased.

What caused it? Candidate explanations include:

• volcanos, droughts, etc
• invasions by the mysterious Sea Peoples
• new military tactics
• and more.

But those named ones feel like stressors not causes. And others candidates (political collapse; class struggle) sound again not like causes but consequences.

So my favourite candidate is the shift from bronze to iron.

Here’s an episode of In Our Time on The Bronze Age Collapse (June 2016). I learnt a bunch.

For example, about bronze itself:

• Bronze was vital for power: institutions and armies. It was used for chisels to cut stone for building programmes; it was used for weapons (in particular is allowed swords) to wield military power.
• But bronze is rare, being made from copper and tin which are not found everywhere: "It is plentiful enough that it’s widely available, and rare enough to have to capture those [trade] routes and so on." (Even the knowledge of how to create the bronze alloy is rare.)

Iron was emerging around the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse, although it wasn’t common until the 7th century BC (400 years later).

But iron undermines bronze-based power structures. Again from that episode:

One could argue that iron, which of course unlike copper and tin is almost everywhere, so is readily accessible - so you don’t need to build long-distance trade routes to find it and so on - you can take a broad view that that it undermines the ability to monopolise long-distance trade. Therefore smaller entities can get involved.

When states arose to replace those the collapse, they looked different: "new people organised politically in a different way." The new states were smaller and more numerous than the older, grander palace kingdoms.

Here’s the story I tell myself about bronze:

It sounds to me like bronze is intrinsically connected to the foundations of how power is established and maintained.

Over time, bronze requires and allows for great concentrations of wealth, and that’s why we see this small number of incredibly wealthy, grand palace kingdoms. Their prestige, after centuries, relies on highly efficient extraction of wealth from their networks.

But then comes iron. Iron is an evenly distributed technology (as a material, and knowledge of how to work with it). It can’t be monopolised.

Even in iron’s infancy, it allows for a kind of peer-to-peer trade and wealth to arise.

And that destabilises the status quo. Which is turns out has become brittle.

I think of stressor events on a system a bit like shaking up a box full of oddly-shaped rocks. During the shaking, the box “settles” towards its low energy state; the rocks end up more closely packed. In previous centuries, stressor events have shaken up these civilisations, and they’ve “settled” into palace kingdoms.

But now the status quo, the low energy state, has altered. Iron is present. So the stressor events (climate change, invasions) “settle” the system towards a new status quo, one which doesn’t involve the palace kingdoms.

And so they collapse.

We’ve seen this story before!

Around 13,000 BCE, Europe warmed out of its Ice Age, and mobile hunter-gatherers settled into villages. Long-distance trade routes emerged around seashell trade, used to display wealth – wealth disparity and elites emerged around that trade.

But a thousand years later, the Ice Age re-emerged (temporarily). The villages vanished… and the elites too:

Wealth and power had evidently been dependent on sedentary village life. This provided the elite with the opportunity to control the trade that brought seashells and other items to the villages. A return to mobile lifestyles swept away the power base and society became egalitarian once again.

I wrote this up last year: Some rambling thoughts about the stuttering end of the last ice age and what lockdown means (April 2020).

So these are two stories of economics providing the attractor to which the chaotic system of society gradually drifts.

The picture in my head is that certain kinds of material scarcity allow for the monopolisation of exchange, and that allows for the hoarding of wealth and the creation of elites, where the elite system becomes self-reinforcing… and increasingly efficiently but ultimately brittle – until the material scarcity itself changes. Then we see collapse.

HUGE CAVEAT: this is all a wild guess based on not-even-adequate reading about stuff that happened and a strong dose of systems thinking. I find all this fascinating.

If I could go back and do it all again, I would probably study history.

And if bronze is technology which can be monopolised, and iron is technology which is evenly distributed, does the story of the Late Bronze Age Collapse hold lessons for centralised versus decentralised technologies in modern times?

Directly: I’m thinking of finance, and data.

Indirectly: I’m thinking of social communication. Do bottlenecks in the “trade routes” of communication (that is, social media) necessarily lead to wealth disparities in the equivalent currency – which in this case would be social capital? That is, the more efficient our global broadcast systems, the more extreme celebrities we create?

More posts tagged: in-our-time-episode-mentions (10).

The following was first posted on the 3 Books Weekly email newsletter and has since been archived here.

Hey folks

First things first – 3 BOOKS WEEKLY is a little late this week because I’ve got a new gig and my goodness it is eating all my thoughts. Good place to be. Counter-intuitively, it’s also done wonders for my reading: Sitting with the Kindle is a great way to relax both eyes and mind, and I am chewing through some amazing Golden Age sci-fi in the evenings.

The main event: I am super pleased to bring you recommendations from GRAND MASTER OF MEMORY Ed Cooke today. Ed is founder of gorgeous learning startup Memrise, on Twitter as @tedcooke, and– Hang on, I hear you say, Grand Master of what now???

Yeah. This is somewhat weird. Read about it on Wikipedia. Being a Grand Master of Memory means Ed can memorise the order of 10 decks of cards in an hour. Also a 1,000 random digits. It’s insane, and it’s for this reason he pops up in odd places. I remember waking up in the middle of the night one night to Ed’s dulcet tones on the radio - I sleep with the radio on - and having that “um is this a dream” moment.

Ed tells me that one of his three picks, Ada (Nabokov), is the one he’d take to a desert island with him. Only he goes on: “Not for its first chapters, mind you, which are ludicrously turgid. Incidentally, I suspect that Nabokov, who was an awful snob, put them there to scare us ordinary readers off. Don’t be fooled.”

ALSO! This is the first time a Featured Recommender has picked a book that was previously picked. So if you like these, continue by checking out Daniel Fogg’s picks in edition #17.

Ok ok ok enough from me, on with the show.

Matt

#1. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes

It’s a story about the scientific revolution in late 18th century Britain – a moment in time when the nature of the world was wide-open and mysterious, the word scientist hadn’t yet been coined, and the divisions between disciplines that today chain our imaginations were entirely absent. Each chapter is a sketch of one of these proto-scientists: An adventurer, balloonist, telescope-maker, chemist, author… Take the chapter on Humphrey Davy, which reveals how his notebooks were filled with rhyming couplets, because poetry and science hadn’t yet separated; that after synthesising a chemical in the lab, he’d routinely inhale a load of it to see its effects on the mind (better for laughing gas than carbon monoxide); that he’s constantly in love. Holmes brings out the genius and fun and romance of this generation. It’s enough to help one fall in love with science again, and reconnect to a more general love for the world.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science: Amazon / Amazon UK

#2. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Penguin Modern Classics), by Vladimir Nabokov

I’ve read Ada five times, and each time I do, I feel like I must have been half asleep on the previous occasion to have missed quite so many moments of magic. There are people on web forums who say that it keeps delivering similarly after 20 or 30 readings. Its 700-odd pages recount the story of an 80-year-long love affair (between Ada and her lover, Van, the author) set in an alternate universe of impossible cultural, social, intellectual and sexual riches. All aspects of reality - space-time, geography, science, culture - are sensuously reimagined, every dimension of human experience is dialled to the max, and the prose, oh boy, the prose is just mind-bendingly awesome and painterly and fizzing with novelty and Beethovan-level emotion. It was reading Ada that made me realise that no form of future virtual reality will ever likely out-gun reading as a tool of imagination; that reading, said differently, is the first and best form of virtual reality.

Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Penguin Modern Classics): Amazon / Amazon UK

#3. Eastern Approaches (Penguin World War II Collection), by Fitzroy MaClean

The third section is the peak of Eastern Approaches: The tale of MacLean’s experiences in Yugoslavia, into which he was parachuted in late 1943 to investigate a resistance movement, or person, or something-or-other called Tito. Turns out to be the the future President Tito, at that point fighting an improbable guerrilla resistance to German occupation with his small band of Partisans from their piratical HQ in a ruined castle. For two years, MacLean fights alongside and helps out the amazingly impressive Tito and his band of Partisans till they successfully run the Germans out of the country. Tito, by this point a national hero, assumes power over a united Yugoslavia at the end of the war, masterfully plays the Russians off against the Americans, and creates a ‘Third Way’ between communism and capitalism, which, by all accounts, was pretty solid.

Eastern Approaches (Penguin World War II Collection): Amazon / Amazon UK

More posts tagged: 3-books (34).

Volition

When I was young my family included Indigo, a golden retriever with his own towel and a wide smile. I would sit and watch him as he lay sprawled with his chin on one leg, staring into the middle distance. Suddenly he would leap to his feet and trot, tail wagging, a few paces before hurling himself at the carpet, twisting as he did so to roll and throw himself around and generally have a good old time right there in the hall. What was it Indigo, hey? What did you see, did you see a ghost who said -Come play? Why that moment, hey boy? Just as quickly he would stand and shake himself down, and come back to his spot near the kitchen where I could see him and he could see me, and I'd be laughing. Where did it come from, that abrupt desire for play? How come that exact second for decanting some of the internal flywheel into rolling about with his belly in the air and legs waving? It reassured me that I couldn't see any cause, that it was something inside. It meant Indigo had his own internal life, and so I could love him more.

Newly single I sit at the table in my flat, shuffling papers, wondering how I'll know what to do next, and wishing I could be like Indigo. I drink water because I'm thirsty; I pack because tomorrow I fly to Oslo.

I was 10 years, 9 months, 3 weeks and 3 days old the day they activated the Large Hadron Collider. I was at college in a lecture the day I found out they'd found the Higgs boson, which gives particles mass. Mass gives momentum, and momentum is what keeps you moving. The Higgs is where it comes from:

the universe is a house, and you're a particle - let's say a proton - and the house is packed full of ghosts, from wall to wall like a carpet, and from foundations to rafters like roaches. You're dancing in the ballroom - there's a ballroom in this house - and as you dance the ghosts tap at your arm and tug at your collar and rest their hands on your shoulder. You turn for a second to see who it is, but the face of the ghost is hard to make out, and besides the ghosts are restless so it has already mixed back into the crowd, and perhaps there aren't any ghosts anyway - you've had a few glasses of wine after all, maybe you're imagining things - but that aside, it means that your otherwise smooth dance is slowed and shaped by the constant contact of a million touches.

The ghosts are Higgs bosons, which fill the universe so they slosh over the sides, and the contact they have with particles - like you and me - as they pass by is what we see as mass.

The lecture that day was one on particle physics, and Dr L-- came into the hall with a grin and bright eyes.

-Gentlemen! he said. He always called us gentlemen, whatever the mix.

-Gentlemen, your notes are out of date! My colleagues at Cern let me know this morning. On slide, uh, 20 from last week, where we declared the existence of the Higgs boson was unknown, well that's no longer the case. We have it.

It shouldn't have hit me so hard. We assumed the existence of the Higgs, or something like it, in most of our mathematical models. But to have it confirmed! It didn't need to have come out this way: there could have been a field that created mass, like an electromagnetic field, covering the universe. Or each particle could carry within itself mass, just like charge or spin.

But to have it confirmed... it wasn't right that mass was an external quality, I was thinking, it belonged inside. I felt violated, like someone had knocked me to the ground and emptied my pockets. I walked up the Banbury Road with my head in turmoil, each iron bar on each iron fence looked empty to me, each paving slab on the ground looked hollow, and I eyed the so-called empty air with suspicion for hoarding mass to itself, for withholding the Higgs from me.

It's funny how these things hit you.

The way you show the existence of just one of these ghosts is you stop dancing and you barrel across the dance floor as hard as you can, shouting and roaring, barging ghosts and dancers alike hither and thither, scattering them and knocking them flying. If you get it just right, you splash a clearing in the ghosts, and if you're luckier still there's a moment before they get to their feet where you can grab one, sit on his chest and hold him down by his neck and grab his chin so you can wrench his dirty face round to look straight at yours and lean in real, real close and, panting, whisper straight at him through your gritted teeth: you little fucker: gotcha.

Post-doc I studied the origins of volition.

It's not enough to know that Higgs makes things slow down. What makes 'em move to begin with? Okay, so this proton dances with that proton and that's why that one moves... but why was the one before that moving? And the one before that? And the one before that?

-You're obsessed with work, you said, the day my paper outlining the experimental procedure for isolating volition was published. -Why do we never do anything? (That was the first time. I was at my computer, watching comments and cross-linkings appear on arXiv as my ideas rippled across the community. Physics changes fast when it wants to.)

With hindsight I see you were right. I didn't know how to do anything but work, anything but respond to comments and questions. But it was also unfair: we were as active as any other couple, popular round the faculty and taking full enjoyment from the art and music that sticks to any town with a population of students. We scoured the event sheets for unusual plays and exhibitions in new gallery spaces.

Maybe that slipped. The questions to field more than filled the day, as the detector moved closer and closer to coming online.

The ghosts that fill my head can be scattered and isolated, briefly and with much effort, and I can hold one down and recognise his face: my father, say. My very own Higgs; these are the things that join me to the world.

Volition strings, if they exist, are the faintest of the faint to see. We have to look for the ragged ends of the superstrings that comprise the real substance of the universe. Most strings exist in knotted loops, which are particles. Some strings, after the Big Bang, had their loops severed and the ends of these thrash around like the end of a hose with the water turned full on. They whip, their ends moving at light speed and their middles faster still, although it's impossible to ever detect those except indirectly.

The open ends of volition strings, when they touch a particle - which is rare and fleeting - impart it some unpredictable shove. They push it into a new orbit. And so: movement.

Seeing this in action is what the detector is for. The detector is lined up such that the cut-off end of the volition string will pass through the distant star σ Octantis, which is dense and should slow it just a little, and then through the Earth, which should slow it just a little more and focus it, and then we have our detector placed flat, facing down, in the Arctic Circle of Norway looking through the rock and the mantle and through the core, and we use the entire planet as a kind of lens, and we look close, and we hope we see a twitch in the fabric of the cosmos. Volition.

-You're inert, you said, there's been a year of trying, and we agreed it was best if we parted, and as to whether this decision was right - it has to be said - I numbly say it was. That was three months back.

But you're going to be there in Tromsø, in the calibration and operations team, as the detector is activated, and in three days we'll see one another again.

I'm here because I first suggested a form of this experiment in a paper years ago, a kind of honoured guest except that the details have been refined and revised by hundreds of physicists and mathematicians since. We crowd round the screens, and although really there's no need for personal presence these days, it's a happy moment to be in, with my fellow hunters. I think of Indigo and my father and Dr L-- and you and I see my life as a careering country dance, passed from one hand to another, swung from person to person, kept moving in do-ci-dos up and down and round and round. Somehow I'm standing behind you and, as the lens cap comes off - the culmination of my work - I find myself unable to think of anything so much as the nape of your neck just ahead of me, and it would be the work of a second to rest two fingertips gently on its soft concave curve; and I fancy that the end of a volition string passes right through me, skewers me from my head through my soul itself, or maybe volition is inside me all along and I just need to grasp it, to fan its spark to life, and I understand that what I'm facing now is a decision: to connect or to not connect, that there is no default choice, there is no momentum or inertia or carrying on as you were before; that every millisecond is a choice, an opinion, an act, and it can't be avoided because volition fills us, floods us, drowns the ghosts: and I look at your neck, and my hand, and I have a choice to make.